Friday, April 10, 2015
Wood Auditorium
In recent decades, debates on slums and the future of urban life have raged. Novelists, filmmakers, academics, cultural institutions, NGOs, foundations, and think tanks from across the political spectrum have offered ways to alternately upgrade, reinforce, preserve, integrate, and learn from these precarious landscapes, highlighting their many complex socio-spatial questions.
In Housing the Majority, scholars, architects, urban planners, artists, and activists gather from global cities with soaring rates of inequality—Cairo, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, New York City, Mumbai, Istanbul, and London—to define the terms of the debate. Moving beyond traditional and quantifiable definitions of informality, the panels focus on politics, representation, governance, and form as entry points to the difficult humanitarian challenges to “housing the majority.”
Organized by Dean Amale Andraos and Studio-X Amman, Istanbul, Johannesburg, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro, with support from the Columbia Global Centers
Session 3: Governance, 3:45–5:15pm
What is at stake in formalizing the informal, or, when people are given rights and incentives to build? How do forces of real estate development and the law spur change, and who protects the public good within shifting social and political frameworks?
Yaşar Adnan Adanalı, activist, Reclaim Istanbul
Guilherme Boulos, MTST, Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem-Teto
Myriam Ababsa, Institut Français du Proche-Orient
Response by Clara Irazábal, Columbia University GSAPP, and Selva Gürdoğan and Gregers Thomsen, Studio-X Istanbul
Session 4: Form, 5:15–6:45pm
How does the form of unplanned areas produce or inform social relations? What can official planning procedures learn from urban informality?
Tatiana Bilbao, architect
Rohan Shivkumar, KRIVA, Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, Mumbai
Rainer Hehl, ETH Zurich
Omar Nagati and Beth Stryker, CLUSTER, Cairo Lab for Urban Studies
Response by Geeta Mehta, Columbia University GSAPP, and Pedro Rivera, Studio-X Rio de Janeiro
Keynote Address, 7pm
David Sims, political economist and author of Understanding Cairo: The Logic of a City Out of Control
