Ecologies of Inequality
Urban Valves by Michael Chen and Jason Lee is published in Unspoken Borders, Ecologies of Inequality, published by the University of Pennsylvania.
Incremental Infrastructures
Mumbai Final Presentation (30mb file)
Mumbai Allison Hoffman | John Seward
An analysis of informal water delivery and distribution networks that emerge within slums in Mumbai. The city is characterized by an incomplete municipal water infrastructure that requires the physical collection of water, as well as a demand that vastly exceeds the supply for drinking water. The maps document conditions that lead to the advent of water cartels, middlemen, hawkers, and illegal taps that constitute a protocological distribution network whose complexity and conditional logics resists conventional mapping. Data sets are developed that tabulate travel distance, carrying capacity, and available volume and mapped within a recursive node and line network organization in order to predict a set of social factors that include satisfaction and effort, and monetization and commodification, that suggest a context for a series of aid-based water management infrastructures, collection systems, and market systems, as well as a more ad hoc network of other municipally or civically minded informal infrastructures such as informal schools, pharm trading, and temporary clinics.
Mumbai: Pre-Final
Mumbai Allison Hoffman | John Seward
Our thesis posits a reflexive assembly system developed as an incrementally built structural framework and integrated component system. The normative framework enhances the structural integrity of informal settlements and allows for self-guided spatial transformation, both horizontally and vertically, of the local environment while also harnessing the extreme appropriation characteristics found within such urban contexts. The embedded components augment the capacity of informal settlements to collect their own resources in a massively distributed fashion and utilizing the fundamental cooperative strategies already employed, share them communally for the benefit of all involved. Operating globally as a continually reconfigurable framework constituted by these simple yet intelligent parts, the systems local growths and alterations over time result in new global organizations that, through their spatial form, begin to expose the social organization and individual agenda which is traditionally invisible in more formal architecture. The overall form of the framework is always in flux and never predetermined, however, it is guided at all times by purpose and necessity, and the flexibility of human cognition.
Mumbai: Midterm
Mumbai Allison Hoffman | John Seward
Our thesis project is an autonomously guided, incrementally developed resource manipulation infrastructure focused on water, space, and the materials needed to continue growing the system. Operating spatially and socially, this framework generates self-transformation of informal settlements like slums over time, promoting self-agency in existing urban contexts. The thesis at large explores issues of design-by-architect -vs- autonomous-design, the synthesis of top-down coherence and bottom-up flexibility, and challenging the way urban areas currently exist by retuning the balance of power through control of resources.
MUM_Cogmaps updated
The pattern of intensity dampening is now brought into excel and we’re beginning to diagram ontop of it. The site mapping now also reveals overlapping durations of effects with the green circles. There is an excel image to go along with this, but it hasnt yet been integrated into the pattern diagramming.
MUM_Cogmaps part deux
The results of our cogmaps began by exploring cognitive growth stategies that negotiate a site of varying intensities. The next version explores a slightly more nuanced growth strategie, but more importantly, begins implementing the idea of duration where the growth has a stationary phase at specific locations which causes effects over time within the intensity mapping. Once certain conditions have been meet within the system and in the local area, the stationary phase ends and growth resumes. In this case, there are both internal and external effects embedded in the relationships between the system and the environment.
Mumbai rocked by deadly shootings…
MUMBAI, India – Police with loudspeakers are declaring a curfew around Mumbai’s Taj Mahal hotel, as fresh gunshots ring out from the area, in what could signal the start of an assault on gunmen who have taken hostages in the hotel.
Ambulances are driving up to the entrance to the hotel and journalists have been moved even further back from the area.
Teams of gunmen stormed luxury hotels, a popular restaurant, hospitals and a crowded train station late Wednesday in coordinated attacks across India’s financial capital, killing at least 82 people, taking Westerners hostage, police said.
Associated Press writers Erika Kinetz in Mumbai and Raphael G. Satter in London contributed to this report.
thesis-research-v5_smallSlum Tourism
I was listening recently to an interview with Danny Boyle (Trainspotting) on his new film Slumdog Millionaire, which takes place in Mumbai and was reminded of some stories in the news recently on slum tourism.
A bit from the Times archives:
“Slum tourism, or “poorism,” as some call it, is catching on. From the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the townships of Johannesburg to the garbage dumps of Mexico, tourists are forsaking, at least for a while, beaches and museums for crowded, dirty — and in many ways surprising — slums. When a British man named Chris Way founded Reality Tours and Travel in Mumbai two years ago, he could barely muster enough customers for one tour a day. Now, he’s running two or three a day and recently expanded to rural areas.”
This is certainly one form of economic model (and a conventional one at that) but obviously loaded as well.
Mumbai Videos
Despite some parts that smack of municipal propaganda, these 3 videos have been very informative local information within the slums of mumbai. They’ve helped give us more specific, existing, information, corroborate our previous research, and bring up a few surprises.
Mumbai: Information/Cognition/Exchange Distributions
Patterns of Goal Oriented Cognition and Distance/Fatigue Conditions:
Updates of previous research work showing two-way flow of currency and water in Mumbai & workings of distributive, pattern oriented cognitive model. Expanded results of cognitive mapping. Indepth research applied to the micro scale of personal aqua-devices & to the multi-scale delivery exchange and information broadcast systems:
week5 research (pdf)
Mumbai: Aqua-Delivery Networks
In the pdf:
Diagram of entities, relationships, and conditions of the formal and informal water delivery networks of Mumbai. Water flows down through system while currency, in one for or another, flows upwards.
Initial cognitive map script of the above system in its simplest form then gaining complexity. Question for Gil and Ronnie: we need to know how to have rhinoscript generate new excel columns on the fly since we don’t know beforehand, how many steps the latest script will run since the whole thing operates on a Do_Loop While conditional.
Ok, figures that out. Next question: is it possible to concatonate variables into the string name for each excel file. Something like:
oSheet.Cells(1,intStepCount*3+3).Value = “Step” + intStepCount + ” Z”
which unfortunately doesn’t work.
-