Handmade urbanism

Handmade
Handmade describes something made by hand or by
a hand process, not by machine, especially with care
or craftsmanship, and typically therefore of superior
quality.
Handmade urbanism is the way of providing urban
change carried out by local residents in their own
neighborhoods or communities, with their own hands
and means. It starts with the residents recognizing a
problem, followed by the active realization of an idea
to solve that immediate issue. Community initiatives
evolve from those active gestures and support the citi-
zen’s active participation at the local scale. Their acts
recognize chances in challenges, make creative use of
existing resources, and forge partnerships and relation-
ships to achieve predefined goals that address their
daily needs and, eventually, ensure an improved quality
of life for communities.
The actions of handmade urbanism are unique, each
shaped by the individuals and the field of operations
that define them. They are carried out at the local scale,
as products of culture and environment, and deal as
much with soft infrastructure—physical and emotional
wellbeing, education, etc.—as with the reshaping of the
built environment.
The study of handmade urbanism acknowledges that
large parts of cities have been built by the residents
themselves, without help from governments, planners
or designers. It suggests alternative ways to approach
planning other than the traditional methods currently
employed.
At a global level, handmade urbanism reveals
overlaps in the characteristic ways of life of urban
societies, clarifying common threads and differences
among them. These provide us with opportunities to
learn from the ways needs and problems have been
addressed.
The operative modes of handmade urbanism con-
tribute to the discussion around participatory models.
Its creation and appreciation is transformative to indi-
viduals and communities.

Tom Unverzagt, who carefully conceived the graphic
design that structures all of these ideas.
Inez Templeton who greatly refined the text through
her review and proofreading.
We graciously thank all of the photographers who
contributed to our image archive, which has been
growing over the years.
Jochen Visscher and Philipp Sperrle have supported
the idea of this publication from the beginning and
have given us guidance throughout the production
process. We thank them for their constant support,
discussions, and critical input.
Most importantly, none of this would exist without
the courage and entrepreneurship of those individuals,
active in their own cities, who have shown other ways
to fight against shortages and urgencies of all kinds.
Their pioneerism transforms challenges into opportu-
nities making use of available resources, identifying
potentials, and employing them in proactive ways that
generate benefits to the built environment and, espe-
cially, to the users and residents.
Finally, we are grateful for those who have provided
guidance and for every partner in each city. We would
also like to thank all of the institutions, organizations,
and associations that took part in the initiative during
these five years.
Since 2007, the Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award has
been organized by the Alfred Herrhausen Society
as an outcome of the Urban Age conference series,
jointly organized with the London School of Econom-
ics, and initiated by Wolfgang Nowak (AHS) and Ricky
Burdett (LSE).
For five years, Ute E. Weiland has coordinated all of
the awards in five cities, organizing the content and
compilation with the local researchers chosen to carry
out the communication, organization, and fieldwork in
each city.
Jessica Barthel and Anja Fritzsch have also made
valuable contributions in the organization of the award.
We would like to acknowledge the work of our local
researchers, who have coordinated the DBUAA in each
of the cities: Priya Shankar in Mumbai (2007), Marcos
L. Rosa in São Paulo (2008), Demet Mutman in Istan-
bul (2009), Ana Alvarez in Mexico City (2010), and
Lindsay Bush in Cape Town (2012). They have worked
on the ground, rediscovering their own cities and
unveiling networks of local practices that have been
built throughout a year of fieldwork. To a great extent,
these are the researchers that kept in contact with
the local projects, giving continuity to the work that
started with our compilation, through the develop-
ment of their own research and work. And they have
collaborated on this publication, a project coordinated
by Marcos L. Rosa, by participating in a critical review
of the findings. In this review, we look back at the
developments and current status of the projects that
are showcased, conduct a comparative analysis, and
suggest common points among all of the five cities.
Specifically, we would like to acknowledge the critical
input of Priya Shankar, who organized the first award
in Mumbai and made a valuable contribution to this
book, and the constant support and discussions with
Lindsay Bush, who has influenced the format of this
publication, as well as the debates with Ana Alvarez
who reviewed our ideas and contributed with insight-
ful concepts.
This book compiles twenty-five interviews—or, five
for each one of the five cities—giving voice to different
stakeholders who have played an important role in the
rebuilding of these cities on a local scale. Each inter-
viewee generously shared their knowledge—unveiling
subjects that are key to understanding how the projects
are organized, the mechanisms behind them, as well as
providing arguments for the importance of small-scale
developments to face important challenges posed by
each one of these cities. All of the voices intertwine
and organize layers that allow a complex understand-
ing of the projects, highlighting their potential for the
city at large.
This publication has also benefited from the invalu-
able support of four people who had the chance to see
the projects in all five cities. Ricky Burdett, Olaf Jacobs,
Wolfgang Nowak, and Anthony Williams share their
point of view in interviews, helping us trace common
threads among the showcased community initiatives.
Olaf Jacobs produced the documentary Zukunft der
Städte (The Future of Cities), which brings us stories from
the community projects presented in this book, allowing
the general public to experience these projects closely.
Richard Sennett and his writings and lectures on
“cooperation” and “the open city,” as well as his re-
flections about some of the projects in São Paulo and
Istanbul, have strongly influenced the work on this
publication from the beginning.
His contribution serves as a theoretical background
for considering these projects. We also highly appreci-
ate his generous comments and advice in the process
of producing this book.
Paulo Ayres, who visualized each of the showcased
projects in illustrations created with Marcos L. Rosa
and Lindsay Bush and informed by all of the local
researchers. Working with him has been a delightful
experience. He has employed his expertise in graphic
drawings that illustrate the processes, mechanisms,
operational modes, as well as the impact and changes
in each one of them.
4 Acknowledgements

127 Mexico City
Ana Álvarez
Initiatives
136 Miravalle Community Council
140 Cultural Center Consejo Agrarista
144 Recovering Spaces for Life
Interviews
148 Weaving Efforts:
Working for the Common Good
Francisco Javier Conde González
150 Reality Surpasses Us:
We Need to Be More Flexible and Porous
Felipe Leal
152 Unfolding New Professional Profiles for
Bottom-up Urban Planning
Arturo Mier y Terán
154 Cultural Acupuncture over the City
Argel Gómez and Benjamín González
156 Braiding the Physical and the Social:
A New Social Contract for the City
Jose Castillo
161 Cape Town
Lindsay Bush
Initiatives
170 Mothers Unite
174 Rocklands Urban Abundance Center
178 Thrive
Interviews
182 Incidental Urban Acupuncture
Carol Jacobs
184 Breaking it Down to Build it Up
Michael Krause
186 Reimagining the City from a Different Viewpoint
Edgar Pieterse
188 Lighting the Fire within Us
Malika Ndlovu
190 Going Local: The Lavender Hill Area
Councilor Shaun August
Common Points
197 Four Interviews: Five Cities, One Gaze
198 The Significance of Space in Urban Society
Ricky Burdett
200 Reporting from Local Initiatives
Olaf Jacobs
202 Cities are an Expression of Human Needs
Wolfgang Nowak
204 Focus on Results: Attention to Real Needs
Anthony Williams
206 Project Categories, Programs and
Common Clouds
212 Final Considerations
Marcos L. Rosa and Ute E. Weiland
221 Credits
Introduction
10 Introductory Interview
Returning to the Roots
Wolfgang Nowak
12 Initial Thoughts
Make the Invisible Visible
Ute E. Weiland
14 Foreword
The Community
Richard Sennett
18 Editorial
An Urban Trend: Residents Taking Ownership
of their Environment
Marcos L. Rosa, Ute E. Weiland, with Ana Álvarez,
Lindsay Bush, Demet Mutman, Priya Shankar
Five Cities
23 Introduction to Five Cities
25 Mumbai
Priya Shankar
Initiatives
34 Mumbai Waterfronts Center
38 Triratna Prerana Mandal
42 Urban Design Research Institute
Interviews
46 Dreams, Dignity and Changing Realities:
The Story of a Community Toilet
Dilip Kadam, Dayanand Jadhav, Dayanand Mohite
48 Network, Intermediate, Integrate:
Reaching out to the Grassroots
Seema Redkar
50 Elastic Urbanism:
Sustainability and Informality in the City
Rahul Mehrotra
52 Making Voices Heard: Art and Activism
Shabama Azmi
54 Democratizing Public Space
P. K. Das
59 São Paulo
Marcos L. Rosa
Initiatives
68 Union Building
72 ACAIA Institute
76 Biourban
Interviews

80 Workshops as a Communication Facilitator:
Understanding Community Needs
Ana Cristina Cintra Camargo
82 Preexistence in Socially Vulnerable Areas
Elisabete França
84 Scaling Up Micro Actions
Fernando de Mello Franco
86 How to Live Together
Lisette Lagnado
88 The Challenge of Derelict and Residual Spaces.
Is Anyone Thinking on the Local Level?
Nevoral Alves Bucheroni
93 Istanbul
Demet Mutman
Initiatives
102 Music for Peace
106 Nurtepe First Step Cooperative
110 Children of Hope—Youth House
Interviews
114 Presence and Vision of a Grass Roots Initiative
Yeliz Yalın Baki
116 New Planning Approaches for Building Up Cities
Erhan Demirdizen
118 Action and Participation in Planning
Özlem Ünsal
120 Curating Artists and Cultural Practices
Behiç Ak
122 Advocating Sustainable and Participatory Models
Aslı Kıyak I˙ngin

8 INDEX

Why go to five cities to award best practices
such as the ones we can see in this book? What
can we do with what we found?
I think the most urgent problem we face is our cities—
it is a global problem. You cannot rethink cities without
acknowledging the experience of grassroots projects
that are designed by the people, not urban planners
and architects. The award allows us to compare all
these projects.
We found that there is a variety of creative initia-
tives indicating the different ways in which people
forge partnerships to create a better urban environ-
ment and, as a result, a better life for themselves and
their communities.
The Award looks for projects that bring together
partners and visions in the organization of a better
environment in some of the largest cities in the world.
Along with that, it is intended to serve as a platform
that organizes a network of urban initiatives at the
grass roots level.
I think we can encourage mayors and urban plan-
ners to look around their environment to see if there
is something happening. For me, it was interesting to
see that whenever we told mayors about these initia-
tives in their cities, they were surprised. They were
astonished about how many of these initiatives existed.
City leaders should link these initiatives together. Such
initiatives and those who manage them should be part
of urban planning and not excluded. If we want to re-
invent cities in the twenty-first century, this means re-
turning to the roots, linking urban planning with com-
munity initiatives in order to learn from each other. I
think we can learn a lot from the grassroots level.
What inspired the Deutsche Bank Urban Age
Award?
The idea for the award goes back to February 2006,
when we hosted an Urban Age conference in Mexico
City. I had an opportunity to visit a slum. Despite being
a really awful crime-ridden neighborhood, its inhab-
itants had nonetheless created a marketplace and a
school. They had tried to improve their own situation,
creating a new city inside a situation of hopelessness.
You find the same thing in Mumbai and São Paulo,
people resisting their environment by building some-
thing. This is what prompted us to create the Urban
Age Award. The aim of the award is to enable people
to find better solutions and become active citizens. I
am not one of these people, like a Florence Nightingale,
who stands and gives soup to the poor. What we want
is to enable the poor no longer to accept soup queues
and produce their own soup.
We encourage citizens to take forward their
projects, and sometimes we even enable mayors and
citizens to meet. We honor alliances that improve the
quality of life in cities and the prize celebrates the
shared responsibility between residents, companies,
NGOs, universities, public bodies, etc.
We remember that after coming back from Cape
Town earlier this year your first words were
“Déjà vu.” Can you tell us that story?
This is a fascinating story about Cape Town and about
all of the other cities. People start building their own
“city centers” inside big “deserts” of agglomerated
houses, they start building these oases based on the
same pattern: it is the tree in the center and around
this tree there are benches and gardens, and they plant
some crops and then there is the spiritual center, which
might be a library, or a school or some teaching or
health facility, and the kitchen, where one learns how
to prepare a good meal. They also have small places,
squares, playgrounds where there is entertainment.
These are safe environments where people can meet.
What fascinated me, if you start in Mumbai’s
Triratna Prerna Mandal, and then go to Mexico City’s
Miravalle, or even to the Sao Paulo’s Instituto Acaia, or
to any other of these five cities, you can find a “center”
with a facility, the square, an area that is somehow
protected, secured not by a fence, but by the common
will that collectively does something. Today, if you
travel from the center outside of the city, which does
not have clear borders, suddenly the city becomes just
an agglomeration of houses, there is nothing else of
what makes a city—there is nothing. And if you look
at a famous picture of Mexico City that depicts “the
endless city,” it looks like a horror vision of the city
that started to sprawl and is not a village but an ocean
of hopelessness where people live. My idea and what
fascinated me is that inside this ocean of dwellings,
people started to build what could be the beginning of a
new city. And you could see this, for instance, in India’s
slum of Khotwadi, inside of which a community project
started building a city. In Miravalle, another initiative
looks like the center of a village. We like Paris because
if you go away from the large boulevards you will find
little centers, with markets, trees and restaurants, and
these cities are cities with different centers. This is
also the charm of Berlin. In that sense, the vision of
that “endless city” is not a vision of horror. If you look
carefully, you see that people are starting to build their
own cities or centers. It is different from the faceless
cities being built by star architects and investors, with
the skyscrapers and shopping centers. These small
centers are surrounded by people who build their
own “city within the city,” one that is surrounded by
several others centers alike. They are the reinvention
of cities inside of areas that we call slums, favelas,
gecekondus, barrios, townships. Indeed, their efforts
make sense, because they do not destroy the existing,
but build on it.
Returning to the Roots
Wolfgang Nowak was the initiator of the Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award
10 Introductory Interview
Wolfgang Nowak
is Director of the Alfred Herrhausen Society, the International
Forum of Deutsche Bank. Wolfgang Nowak initiated the Urban
Age program, an international investigation into the future of the
world’s mega-cities in the twenty-first century jointly organized
with the London School of Economics. He has held various
senior positions in Germany’s state and federal governments,
France’s Centre national de la recherche scientifique (French
National Center for Scientific Research) in Paris, and UNESCO.
After unification, he was State Secretary of Education in Saxony
from 1990 to 1994. In addition, he was Director-General for
Political Analysis and Planning at the German Federal Chancel-
lery from 1999 to 2002. He lectures and publishes widely on
academic issues and is a regular commentator for German
television and newspapers. He is honorary Vice President of the
British think tank Policy Network, Senior Fellow of the Brookings
Institution in Washington, and Fellow at the NRW-School of
Governance at the University of Duisburg-Essen.
The Alfred Herrhausen Society
Named after Alfred Herrhausen, a German banker and former
chairman of Deutsche Bank who was assassinated in a roadside
bomb attack in 1989, the non-profit Alfred Herrhausen Society
(AHS) is a corporate social responsibility initiative of Deutsche
Bank. Founded in 1992, its work focuses on new forms of
governance as a response to the challenges of the 21st century.
The Urban Age conference series and award program is one of
three major initiatives supported by AHS. Broadly speaking,
the AHS seeks traces of the future in the present, and working
with partners in government, academia and business, aims to
conceptualize relevant themes for analysis and debate globally.

construction of the city, as well as to document and to
share it. These activities received considerable media
coverage, which informed the civil society about the
potential of those initiatives and about their impact on
citizen’s lives.
The mapping has taken place ever since. Even
though most of the projects are modest in size, the
procedure organizes a network that reveals innovative
modes of spatial organization and disseminates this
information to other stakeholders.
On a critical note, it is important to remember
that the award has been successfully communicated
through public relations activities and extensive
documentation; to reach and induce local authorities
to get involved, however, it requires a strong net-
work between decision-makers and active citizens, a
temporal alliance to make use of the dedication that
was experienced in desperate environments. In other
words, it needs urban planning that is willing to benefit
from the open spaces that the participating projects
have created despite adverse circumstances.
This was accomplished in Cape Town for the first
time, where a vigorous Governor, an interested mu-
nicipality, and the Cape Town Partnership were willing
to interlink the 250 applying projects not only with
each other, but also with the City of Cape Town and the
Provincial Government. The result was an alliance that
connects in a sustainable way what had not been con-
nected before.
The Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award is designed
to initiate such developments; it can make visible that
the borders between historical urban quarters and
slums do not symbolize walls between citizens and
slum dwellers. Active citizenship exists even where the
concept itself is unknown.
After five cities, five awards, and hundreds of pro-
jects documented during these years, the compiled ma-
terial allows us to critically reflect on commonalities
between the projects, about their exemplariness, their
potential, as well as about their impact and innovation.
“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never
have been seen.” (Robert Bresson, director)
Cities—and megacities in particular—have become way
too complex to be governed from a centrally located
city hall. Nowadays, successful urban politics are large-
ly based on temporary alliances, created for the solu-
tion of concrete challenges. With different stakeholders
partaking, they prevent the alienation of citizens from
one another. Alienation has already seized whole living
districts of this world’s megacities; suggesting they
form part of the city by labeling them “city districts”
would certainly be wrong. They are isolated from the
traditional quarters, not only geographically but also
through sordid living conditions, high crime rates, and
inadequate housing situations.
With the Urban Age conferences, organized jointly
with the London School of Economics, Alfred Herrhaus-
en Society has established a network of architects, ur-
ban planners, mayors, scientists, and NGOs, in order to
find solutions for the cities of the twenty-first century.
With the help of the Urban Age Award, this “network
from the top” is supposed to be complemented by a
“network from the bottom” to merge these to a better
overall picture of the respective urban region.
Starting in 2007, the Deutsche Bank Urban Age
Award distinguishes “partnerships of shared respon-
sibility” between citizens, politicians, the economy,
and NGOs, which contribute to an improved quality of
living in their cities. The award was designed to en-
courage people to assume responsibility for their living
environment. It is awarded annually, usually in the city
that hosts the Urban Age conference of that year. After
an open application process, an independent interna-
tional jury awards the prize, which is worth 100,000
USD, to the winning project.
The overall aim of the Deutsche Bank Urban Age
Award is to make the invisible visible, to show what
potential there is in the slums, townships, barrios,
gecekondus, or favelas of this world, and to constitute
a lobby for those who have never had one.
For the implementation of the project, a local Award
Manager (from the field of political science, architec-
ture, or urban planning) is assigned for the fieldwork
in each city. Their overall function has been to trace
projects in which people proactively improve their en-
vironment by forging partnerships and sharing respon-
sibilities. While coordinating the award, each Manager
has been in constant contact with those initiatives,
learning about their aims and methods, visiting their
sites, and documenting their work.
Their first task has always been to communicate the
award to a network of different stakeholders—local au-
thorities and administration, academia, journalists, art-
ists and designers, NGOs, community associations, etc.
In a second step, they created a platform for networks
of different societal parts that are active in shaping the
urban environment. These platforms were designed to
mobilize the civil society of the respective city as well
as to circulate the call for initiatives.
The Award Managers were sent on the ground in
order to be in direct contact with a network of local ac-
tors involved in collective practices. The whole process
of organizing the award provides an enormous poten-
tial for field research, as it allows exploring a number
of projects in the urban local sphere.
By the immediate observation of these initiatives,
the researcher no longer contemplates the world
passively; he or she rather starts to experience it
actively through the contact with people active in
their own environment. In every city, the fieldwork
continued with the search for local leadership im-
mersed in their realities, or in the scale of their own
neighborhoods.
In São Paulo in 2008, corresponding projects were
located by systemic mapping, and subsequently related
to the dimensions of the city as a whole for the first
time. Furthermore, the intensive investigation of the
local projects started to produce actual knowledge; the
amount of information gathered from there was un-
foreseen until that moment. It opened up opportunities
to reveal practices, to pinpoint fields of opportunity
for actions, and to highlight their importance to the
12 Initial Thoughts
Make the Invisible Visible
Ute E. Weiland has coordinated the award process in all five cities
Ute Elisabeth Weiland
has been the Deputy Director of the Alfred Herrhausen Society,
Deutsche Bank’s international forum since 2007, a member of
the Executive Board of the Urban Age conference series at the
London School of Economics since 2004, and since 1 January
2010 member of the Governing Board of LSE Cities.
In 1997, she co-founded the Erich Pommer Institute for Me-
dia Law and Media Management at the University of Potsdam
and was its deputy managing director until 2003. Born in the
former German Democratic Republic, she graduated from the
Academy of Music in Weimar. After unification, she became
chief of staff to the Secretary of State for education in Saxony.
Ute E. Weiland is a member of the German-Israeli Young Lead-
ers Exchange of the Bertelsmann Foundation and young leader
of the Atlantik Brücke.

the 1960s, those political gains didn’t figure so much
in their own thinking about their personal survival; if
a door opens, you do not automatically walk through
it. Yet when we got down to the grit of discussing our
own children’s adolescent angst, few people applied
Scripture to that perennial, particular hard case. So
too at work; rather than moralizing, people think
flexibly and adaptively about concrete behaviour.
On the job, for the first time, many of these young
African-Americans were working side by side with
whites, and they had to feel their way. Even twenty
years later they had to do so, as when my child-
hood next-door neighbour became the supervisor of
a group of mostly white subordinates in the motor
bureau of Chicago.
And then there was the matter of cooperation.
As children, the ‘fuck you’ version of cooperation
dominated our lives, since all gangs in the community
subscribed to it, and the gangs were powerful. In the
immediate post-Second World War era, gangs dealt in
petty theft rather than in drugs, as they would a gener-
ation later; small children were sent to ‘front’ shoplift-
ing, since, if these children were caught, they could not
be sent to jail. To avoid being sucked into gang life, kids
had to find other ways of associating with one another,
ways that flew under the radar-screen, as it were,
of the gang’s control. This meant hanging out in bus
shelters or other places than those marked out as gang
turf, or staying late at school, or heading directly to the
settlement house. A place of refuge meant somewhere
you could talk about parents, do homework together,
or play checkers, all intermissions from ‘fuck you’
aggression. These intermissions in retrospect seemed
enormously important, since the experiences planted
the seed for the kind of behaviour, open rather than
defensive, which had served people to make their way
outside the community.
Now some of those who had survived by leaving
wanted to ‘give something back’, in the words of a
childhood neighbour, a foreman in the city’s sanitation
department, but the youngsters in the project a gen-
eration later were hostile to people who offered them-
selves as helping hands, as ‘role models’. As always,
the message ‘If I can do it, so can you’ can be turned
around: ‘If I made good, why aren’t you succeeding?
What’s wrong with you?’ So the role model’s offer to
give something back to the community, to reach out,
was rejected by the young people in the community
who most needed help.
All three of these issues—the fragility of morale,
conviction, cooperation—were familiar to me, but for
me as a white boy they cut a different way. My mother
and I moved to the housing project when my father left
in my infancy and left us penniless, but we lived there
only about seven years; as soon as our family fortunes
returned, we moved out. The community posed dan-
gers for me but not mortal dangers. Perhaps thanks to
this distance, the reunion sparked in me the desire to
understand how the three pieces of unfinished busi-
ness among my childhood friends might be seen in a
larger context.
Vocation
Self-sacrificing, long-term, wilful and so fragile: these
measures of commitment make it an experience
inseparable from the ways we understand ourselves.
We might want to reframe these experiences by saying
that strong commitment entails a duty to oneself.
And then shift again the oppressive weight of that
word ‘duty’ by thinking of commitment as a road map,
the map of what you should do with your life.
Max Weber sought to explain this kind of sustaining
commitment by the single German word Beruf, which
roughly translates into English as a ‘vocation’ or a ‘call-
ing’. These English words are saturated with religious
overtones from the time of the Great Unsettling.
The medieval Catholic imagined a religious vocation
as the monk’s decision to withdraw from the world;
for others, remaining engaged in society, choice didn’t
enter the picture in the same way; faith was natural-
Practising Commitment
I would like to visit the scene of a settlement house in
Chicago where informal cooperation helped provide a
social anchor for poor children like myself. Coopera-
tion’s difficulties, pleasures and consequences appeared
among the people who passed through this dilapidated,
bustling building on the city’s Near West Side. Or so it
seemed to me, when decades later I returned to share
a weekend, sponsored by the settlement house, with
thirty or so African-American adults who had grown up
in this small corner of the Chicago ghetto.1
Memory played the same trick on my childhood
neighbours that it does on everyone; the experience of
years of change can be compressed in the memory of a
face or a room. The black children I grew up with had a
compelling reason to remember in this way. They were
survivors. Their childhoods disorganized by poverty,
doubting as adolescents that they had much of value
in themselves to offer the larger world, they puzzled
later in life about why they survived while so many
of their childhood mates had succumbed to addiction,
crime or lives lived on the margins. So they singled out
a person, place or event as a transforming experience
for themselves, as a talisman. The settlement house be-
came a talisman, as did the strict local Catholic school
and the sports club run by an organization called the
Police Athletic League.
My childhood companions were not heroic; they did
not rise from rags to riches, becoming racial exem-
plars of the American Dream. Only a few made it to
university; most steadied themselves enough to get
through secondary school, thereafter taking jobs as
secretaries, firemen, store-keepers or functionaries in
local government. Their gains, which might seem mod-
est to an outsider, were to them enormous. Over the
four days of our reunion, I went to visit some of their
homes, and recognized domestic signs of the journey
we had all taken: tidy backyards with well-tended
plants, unlike the broken-bottle-strewn play areas
surrounded by chain-link fences we had known as
children; domestic interiors stuffed with knick-knacks
and carefully brushed furniture, again a contrast to the
bare, scuffed interiors which before had counted for us
as ‘home’.
At the settlement-house reunion, people spoke with
wonder at what had happened to the neighbourhood
since we had all left. It had sunk further than any of us
could have imagined, and was now a vast archipelago
of abandoned houses, isolated apartment towers in
which the elevators stank of urine and shit, a place
where no policemen responded to telephone calls for
help and most adolescents carried knives or guns. The
magic talismans of a place or a face seemed even more
required to explain the luck of escape.
The administrators of the settlement house, like the
elderly cop representing the Police Athletic League,
were of course happy to hear these testimonials to
their saving presence, but too realistic to believe
entirely in their own transforming potency: many kids
who banged on instruments in the settlement house or
played basketball on a nearby paved court eventually
wound up in jail. And the past remained unfinished
business for the survivors; issues they faced as chil-
dren they continued to face as adults. That unfinished
business falls under three headings.
The first concerns morale, the matter of keeping
one’s spirits up in difficult circumstances. So simple
to state, morale was less clear to explain in practice,
since my neighbours had every rational reason to suc-
cumb to low spirits as children, and even now could
still wake up at night, when worried about an unpaid
bill or a problem at work, thinking the whole edifice of
their adult lives might suddenly collapse like a house
of cards.
The second issue concerns conviction. At our gath-
ering, people declared they had survived thanks to
strong, guiding convictions—all were devoted church-
goers, and all had faith in family writ large. Though
the African-American adults had passed through, and
benefited from, the American civil rights upheavals of
The Community
Richard Sennett is Professor of Sociology at LSE and New York University and author of ‘The Craftsman’
14 Foreword

This publication intends to make the mechanisms
of these projects legible, to draft their complexity
systematically and clarify their strategies and opera-
tional modes:
In response to what do projects start? Which partner-
ships were created? What are the main challenges in
implementing a collaborative project? Was there a desire
to improve the urban environment? How did these im-
provements take shape?
The Spirit of Entrepreneurship
With these questions in mind, this publication allows
one to dive into some of the projects showcased for
each city. Analysis of the projects is intended to reveal
the driving logics of problematic urban environments
as they are read by their residents and users.
What some may describe as naive gestures, simple
measures employed to fight serious problems prove
highly effective in using existing minimal resources
to catalyze social and economic gains. As Arturo Mier
y Terán says, referring to Mexico City, “In the places
where these projects are being carried out, one can
clearly see a change.” Without aiming to romanticize
the contexts where the projects take place, we under-
stand that, as modest as some of these initiatives may
be, they are successfully improving residents’ lives and
transforming collective space in cities.
This book consists of a collection of photographs, the
documentation of these initiatives, an action protocol
depicted through illustrations, and a set of interviews
drawing out different perspectives on the subject.
The mode of enquiry was systematically repeated in
each city, from Mumbai to Cape Town.
It showcases fifteen projects, three from each of the
five cities. This gives us a wider perspective that allows
us to compare these cities.
Detailed illustrations made individually for each
project depict their operational modes, reveal the ac-
tors involved, and the organizational steps that were
taken. These drawings extract commonalities through
the reoccurrence of similar programs, organized dif-
ferently according to local challenges and overlapping
each other in interesting schemes. The situations aris-
ing out of these actions are resourceful experiments in
city-shaping that demonstrate the power of our shared
“humanness” and its capacity to cut across physical,
cultural, and geographical differences.
The Capacity of Negotiating and Building
Alliances
More than just narrating the stories of these projects,
this book intends to organize a platform for discussion
that engages different stakeholders in conceptualizing
the impact of local initiatives at various levels:
What is the importance of “bottom-up” urbanism and
what are its operational mechanisms at this scale? What
is the attitude of municipalities towards urban improve-
ment and the redressing of inequality? Can grassroots
complement the efforts of the public sector to integrate
the city and improve livability in all areas? Is there a
move towards integrating bottom-up with top-down
planning initiatives? What are the long-term prospects
for bottom-up practices? What future scenarios might be
envisaged?
Having started responding to urgent needs, these
community initiatives had become evident in the
nineteen-eighties and nineties and later evolved from
independent to negotiating and demanding co-respon-
sibility to institutions and the government.
A series of interviews deepens the discussion,
inviting representatives in each city to reflect on these
practices and bringing different perspectives to the
table: grassroots projects and local leaderships, the
government, academia and researchers, artists and
cultural figures, and individuals connected to the local
challenges of each city.
Increasingly, people across the globe are engaging in
improving the urban environments they live in. They
act in response to urgent issues and compelling needs
such as shelter, security, employment, health, and edu-
cation. Community-based initiatives indicate the ability
of citizens to present solutions to challenges posed
by everyday life, and use creativity to transform and
multiply existing resources.
Inadvertently political by nature, these initiatives
are a response to the incapability of today’s cities to
cope with urban challenges via traditional planning
culture and its instruments. They invite different ac-
tors to cooperate towards a new urban scheme driven
by participation and a proactive attitude. They build
collective space, collectively. They reveal a shared layer
of the city that is complex, incremental and difficult to
articulate, as it does not organize systems, but rather
operates on a local level, fulfilling micro-agendas
through direct action.
Community Initiatives
This book investigates a series of grassroots initiatives
that provide social infrastructures to neighborhoods
with shortages of all kinds. It is the product of a five-
year program (2007 to 2012) that used the platform of
the Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award to compile and
map out community projects in five cities in emerging
countries: Mumbai, São Paulo, Istanbul, Mexico City,
and Cape Town. In each one of the five cities, the award
called for existing projects that:
• were already implemented and functioning, and
demonstrated engagement and innovation
• shared responsibility for building collective space
• proved their ability to forge partnerships with dif-
ferent stakeholders: local and cultural associations,
community leaders, residents, users, NGOs, artists,
architects, activists, government, planning insti-
tutes, businesses, academia, etc.
• benefited communities, improving quality of life and the
urban environment in their neighborhoods and cities.
The 741 initiatives that applied for consideration
cross every sector. Projects deal with collective built
space, the recovery of public space, communal clean-
ing of garbage dumps, sanitation programs, slum
upgrade, and housing retrofit. A large proportion
relates to the environment, through waste manage-
ment programs, recycling, greening, and urban ag-
riculture practices that make available high-quality,
fresh, affordable produce in disadvantaged neighbor-
hoods. Some are of an economic nature, through
shared entrepreneurial activities that work to reduce
unemployment.
Many projects activate public or collective space by
promoting leisure activities such as sports, recre-
ational, and cultural events—sometimes leading to
the improvement of these spaces and the construc-
tion of new facilities. By creating local startups,
services, and infrastructures, these initiatives have
a positive impact on their neighborhoods, enhanc-
ing social cohesion. Local organization often gives
rise to a community center, a collective kitchen, or
a social enterprise—structures that work as focal
points within existing social networks. They offer
classes, courses, skills training, child care, and health
programs that address the symptoms of poor urban
environments (poverty, substance abuse, violence,
and crime), and support and empower individuals to
study, find work, and become active and enterprising
in their daily lives.
Not all of these categories, programs and mecha-
nisms are necessarily obvious at first glance. For
example, a peaceful meeting space with a tree and
a bench can hide a great complexity. This simple
arrangement of objects can host a number of overlap-
ping programs, actions that change and adapt accord-
ing to local demands, populating an open framework.
An Urban Trend: Residents Taking Ownership
of their Environment
Marcos L. Rosa, Ute E. Weiland, with Ana Álvarez, Lindsay Bush, Demet Mutman, Priya Shankar
18 Editorial

Five Cities
20 Editorial
Embedded Productive Capacities
“We are recognizing what an immense natural resource
is right there to help the transformation, to generate
income and shared entrepreneurship.” (Malika)
Despite their geographic and temporal distinctions,
all of these actions rely on a collaborative process
that is, in each case, dominant and fundamental. They
explore the capacity for production within urban
settlements, contesting the model of urban vs. rural, or
agricultural vs. industrial vs. service economies. These
projects demonstrate how the agricultural, industrial,
and service economies that historically divide the evo-
lution of our cities, nowadays coexist in urban areas.
Incorporating these initiatives into mainstream
planning would require a drastic change in the concep-
tion of city. In this new form of planning, metropolitan
systems would need to not only support the service
economy, but also allow for production: urban farming,
small-scale manufacturing, social enterprises, creative
practices, informal economies, and so on.
How can we make efficient use of what we have?
How do we engineer a future based on the productive
capacities of our cities? How can we build a framework
accessible enough to enable and encourage people to take
part? How might a developed scenario look?
Are these temporary projects, and how might they
develop over time? Can they impact upon the urban fabric
in the future? What is their collective productive capacity
to generate change?
Participatory Modes for Future Scenarios
The book outlines existing operations, identifies in-
novative tools and planning instruments, and seeks
to shape grammars of action. Based on this, it aims to
explore possible future scenarios that could emerge
from these localized practices. Could they be scaled up?
Might they make a larger and more systemic impact?
Investigating small-scale and sometimes invisible
urban processes can reveal not only opportunities for
action, but methods of operation that could be relevant
to others. This approach suggests a transversal way of
thinking about planning, one that acknowledges the
equal importance of all the different voices compiled
here. It drafts arguments that might lead to partici-
patory models, and envisages a scenario where the
knowledge and findings compiled from these real world
experiences can begin to feed back into planning and
policy. It is not a finished work, but rather an open pro-
cess of investigation that gives rise to further inquiry.

Mumbai
5 x 3 Initiatives
Three projects from each city are presented here
through photography, a text-based portrait, and an
illustration. We explain why these projects began and
what inspired them, illustrate where they are located,
what they do (programs and activities), and what
situations they generate, how they developed and how
their outcomes have impacted upon the community.
These snapshots aim to make visible the mechanisms
through which these projects operate: how they mo-
bilize the community to contribute, how they create
partnerships and leverage support, how they built on
existing capacity to sustain themselves, and how they
benefit—both directly and indirectly—the users, resi-
dents, and the urban environment itself.
The illustration organizes a systematic comparison
among different initiatives in different cities, making
use of common elements through which civil society
improves the living conditions and upgrades spaces. In
the drawings, one can find these elements be rearticu-
lated differently in every project, thus generating
diverse urban situations, making use of local potential.
5 x 5 Voices | Interviews
A set of interviews intends to unveil key aspects in the
process of implementing the initiatives and to draft
common threads among them. The interviews reveal
different perspectives on the same topics for every
city, not only organizing local voices around a common
platform, but also prompting for similarities in the
ways our cities—and citizens—are evolving to address
urban challenges. The five voices are:
Community: insiders, local activists and leaderships,
local residents, non-governmental and non-profit organi-
zations, cultural agents, and activators
Government: governmental agencies, public offices,
official secretaries, municipal representatives and their
agents
Academia: teachers, theorists, architects, planners,
and researchers who investigate and plan cities
Arts and culture: curators, artists, and cultural
agents involved with local projects.
Intermediaries: those operating at the middle level
(between top-down and bottom-up interventions),
intermediating scales and different layers of knowledge
and action
Compilation
The last part of each city’s chapter is a photo essay
that showcases some of the other initiatives compiled
in that city. These images illustrate a much broader
range of projects of similar nature, suggesting further
commonalities between community initiatives in the
five metropolitan regions.
24 Five Cities Introduction
Priya Shankar

26 Mumbai Profile Population [metro/city]
20.75million
12.4million
Area occupied [metro/city]
1,176km2
438km2
Gross domestic product (GDP)
209[$bn at PPPs]
Average density [metro/city]
17,637Inhabitants/km2
Diversity
Maharashtrians, North Indians,
South Indians, Hindus, Muslims,
Buddhists, Christians, Jains,
Sikhs, Parsis

30 Mumbai Overview
Projects compiled in Mumbai demonstrate the remark-
able initiative, creativity, and tenacity of citizens from
different walks of life to address the challenges in their
city. These initiatives respond to the nature of the city—
in particular, to the large degree of informality and the
constraints of space due to its specific geography.
The seventy-four submissions are concentrated
primarily in the city of Mumbai rather than in the
wider metropolitan region, although they are spread
across different parts of the city. They reflect a variety
of concerns, but the most prevalent are public space,
housing, education, and sanitation. They demonstrate
the involvement of multiple stakeholders—from local
communities to the city government to private actors.
Much of the city has grown informally; and it shows
a mixed geography with rich and poor settlements
existing side by side in various parts of the city. The
nature of both the growth and governance of the city
has made even basic public service delivery difficult
in many areas. Therefore, a number of projects are
concerned with cleaning, waste management, and
recycling. At the same time, the geography of the city
has prevented outward expansion, leading to incredible
levels of density and limited open space. As a result,
several initiatives are concerned with public and com-
munity spaces.
1
Triratna Prerana Mandal is a community toilet that
evolved into a comprehensive community center, pro-
viding educational and entrepreneurial activities.
2
Mumbai Waterfronts Center reclaims the city’s wa-
terfronts by constructing promenades and improving
beaches, making them usable as open, public spaces
for all.
3
Urban Design Research Institute has worked to pre-
serve and improve the city’s historic downtown core as
a quality urban space and cultural hub.
Participatory Developments in Mumbai
1
2
3
3 km

38 Mumbai INITIATIVES
In the Khotwadi informal settlement in Mumbai’s Santa
Cruz district, an area not far from the airport, Triratna
Prerana Mandal (TPM) began as just a group of boys
hanging out together and playing cricket. In 2002, it
transformed into a “community-body organization,”
which in Mumbai parlance means a residents’ asso-
ciation of slum-dwellers that partners with the local
government in civic activities.
Community toilets were constructed in the area as
part of the Slum Sanitation Program, which was funded
by the World Bank, led by the Municipal Corporation of
Greater Mumbai (MCGM), and implemented by SPARC
(a major NGO). TPM was meant to maintain the toilets
constructed for the residents in its local shantytown.
But TPM didn’t just maintain toilets. The group utilized
the toilet premises to set up its office, from where it
started a range of activities. The first floor of the toilet
complex was made into a space for a computer lab,
where computer classes were run and English lan-
guage instruction provided. The space is also used as a
kitchen where women cook for schoolchildren as part
of a government-related employment program.
TPM has now “adopted” a local derelict building in
the area, where it has established a gym, yoga classes,
dance classes, and expanded its women’s self-help and
skill groups. It has installed solar panels on its commu-
nity toilet building, generating its own electricity, and
has also set aside space for rainwater harvesting. It is
involved in a number of recycling, waste sorting, and
gardening activities, improving the environment in its
neighborhood.
In an area that many would dismiss as a “slum,”
the project demonstrates the ingenuity, capacities,
and capability of the local community to improve its
environment and circumstances through partnerships
and alliances. It shows how even basic infrastructure
and limited space (the community toilet building) can
provide an impetus for much wider community activ-
ism and urban change.
Triratna Prerana Mandal

to their needs and demands rather than designing
abstract projects. But this is only the start and we have
to go ahead and do many more things.
How has the project changed or grown? What
are the next goals? Where do you envision the
project five years from now?
The award was vital in helping us achieve recogni-
tion and visibility, and in helping us reach out to other
new partners and figures to support our activities. We
have expanded our work a lot since then. We now have
solar energy panels and a stronger rainwater harvest-
ing system, making our project more sustainable. Our
waste segregation center has expanded so that we can
help with much more recycling and waste manage-
ment. Partly due to the recognition from the award,
the BMC agreed to let us “adopt” the neighboring park
and derelict building there. We have revitalized this
building and set up a gym, yoga classes, dance classes,
tailoring classes, and a table tennis and sports center
in the space. Our women’s self-help group has also
increased its activities, which now include tailoring
and grinding flour, in addition to its earlier cooking for
schools project. We have a better-equipped computer
lab now and are working on setting up a library. Since
the refurbishment, the toilets are also better. We would
like to improve the park and building to become a re-
ally nice community area. Although we have done some
work on it, there’s still much to be done—both in terms
of gardening and renovating the building. We would
also like to use our experience to help create successful
community toilets in other areas, especially near the
railway lands. We’ve been thinking about a biogas plant
but need to explore the technology and get support.
We’ve also been thinking about collaborating more with
the local municipal school on educational activities.
It was the space that provided us the inspiration to start
this work (the women’s self-help group). In our homes
in the slum, in this neighborhood, there was no space to
start any work. We have this space above the toilet so we
thought we need to utilize it. We women had so many
problems—going to bad toilets or having no access to toi-
lets. And not having any finances, always struggling. We
thought we women could get together and do something,
so we founded our women’s organization. We help each
other and have more confidence now. And dignity. People
respect our work and they respect us. We have made our
own society, our own community.
Deepa Mohite is part of the Triratna Mahila Kalyan Sarva Seva
Sanstha, a women’s self-help group affiliated with Triratna Pre-
rana Mandal
46 Mumbai INTERVIEW Community
How did the project start? What motivated you
to become engaged?
We started out as a cricket club. Later, we began other
activities such as cleaning the area. This slum is our
neighborhood. We are living in it and we found it
wrong to be in such a dirty environment. We real-
ized that illnesses and diseases spread through filth,
so we started to work on it ourselves. After a while,
it became a habit to keep things clean. We wanted to
improve the area and take pride in it. When the slum
sanitation program started in Mumbai, people from
large NGOs and the municipal corporation (BMC) came
to visit us and we got involved in providing a commu-
nity toilet for the area because this matched well with
our aims.
Which partnerships were created to strengthen
your project? What needs did they fulfill and
when were they formed?
Although we had existed as an informal group for a
while, the community toilet project started as a result
of partnerships. The World Bank provided funding for
the slum sanitation program and the BMC implemented
it on a citywide basis. Major NGOs such as SPARC were
involved. For us, the most significant partnerships have
been with the local community and the BMC. They have
made the project feasible. As we have progressed, we
have also sought out new partners for specific needs,
such as for our computer lab or for women’s training
activities.
Was community support important to the setup
and continuation of the project and how was it
mobilized? What challenges did you face and
how were they overcome?
Even when we were just a cricket club, people would
help us, and community support was significant for our
work in cleaning the area. When we started the toilet
project, community support became essential because
all of the maintenance would be through contributions
from the local community. We needed to make the
project sustainable and we needed to convince people
that it would be beneficial for them. Ten to fifteen of us
worked on it at the start. Everyday, after our daily jobs,
we would each visit five to six households to talk to
people. We would explain the impacts of bad sanitation
on health and what the benefits of the project would
be. Through this outreach, we usually managed to
convince three to four families each on a regular basis.
But many were opposed to this. They had seen too
many projects fail and were also used to getting things
for free. But once the toilet was built and they saw how
clean it was, even those who had earlier resisted began
to use it and realized what a difference it made.
Did the desire to improve the urban environ-
ment play a role from the outset? How do you
assess this achievement?
From the start, we thought about improving our living
environment but we weren’t able to focus on it. This
only became concrete later on. We would clean aspects
of the area; we began planting some trees and plants.
We tried to remove garbage. The support of our part-
ners has been vital in what we’ve achieved. But there
were also frustrations along the way. For example,
when we first started using the space above the toilet
for other activities, this was considered illegal. The
idea came to us because we never had space for our
meetings and an office atop the toilet was symbolically
important in demonstrating its cleanliness. We faced
difficulties with this but now the use of the top room
has been legalized and even been turned into a policy
for other areas. What we’ve realized is that what is
more important than the person who builds the toilet
is the person who maintains the toilet. And it’s also
important to find out what people want and respond
Dreams, Dignity, and Changing Realities:
The Story of a Community Toilet
Dilip Kadam and Dayanand Jadhav and Dayanand Mohite are involved in Triratna Prerana Mandal, a community-
based organization

Marcos L. Rosa
São Paulo
58 Mumbai biographies
Dilip Kadam is President of Triratna Prerna Mandal (TPM),
Dayanand Jadhav is Executive President of TPM, and
Dayanand Mohite is Secretary of TPM. Dilip Kadam studied
until the tenth grade and does occasional work in the certifi-
cate office of Mumbai University. Dayanand Jadhav also studied
until the tenth grade and now works as an electrical contractor.
Dayanand Mohite graduated from high school and works with
Jet Airways at the Mumbai airport. They all grew up and live
in the Khotwadi informal settlement in Mumbai and together,
along with other members of the local community, founded
Triratna Prerna Mandal.
Seema Redkar
is an Officer on Special Duty, Municipal Corporation of Greater
Mumbai (MCGM.) She is working with the Solid Waste Man-
agement department, in charge of a program called Advance
Locality Management (ALM), which focuses on good gover-
nance and increased citizen participation. She has worked with
the slum upgradation program and slum sanitation program,
funded by the World Bank for MCGM. She has been involved in
community development work with a focus on education and
urban poverty alleviation and is also committed to voluntary
work, mentoring several local community organizations.
Rahul Mehrotra
is a practicing architect and his firm, RMA Architects, which
was founded in 1990 in Mumbai, has executed many archi-
tectural projects in India. He has also written extensively on
issues to do with architecture, conservation, and urbanism in
India. His latest book is Architecture in India Since 1990 (2011).
He has taught at the University of Michigan and at the School
of Architecture and Urban Planning at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. Currently, Rahul Mehrotra is Professor
and Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at
the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He was
a member of the jury for the Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award
in 2007.
Shabana Azmi
is a renowned actress and social activist committed to
women’s rights, housing rights, and inter-religious dialogue.
Nivarra Hakk in Mumbai and the Mijwan Welfare Society in
rural Northern India are two major social initiatives that she
has been involved in. She was a member of the Rajya Sabha,
the upper house of the Indian parliament and has also been
a Goodwill Ambassador for UNFPA. Her latest films are Ka-
lvpriksh, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Midnight’s Children.
She was on the jury for the Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award
in 2007.
P. K. Das
is an architect and activist. He has aimed to establish connec-
tions between architecture and people by involving them in a
participatory planning process. His work includes organizing
slum dwellers for better living and evolving affordable hous-
ing models, engaging in policy framework for mass housing,
reclaiming public space in Mumbai by developing the wa-
terfronts, urban planning, architectural and interior design
projects. He is Chairperson of the Mumbai Waterfronts Center
and founder of P.K. Das & Associates architectural practice. He
has written and lectured widely and recently curated the Open
Mumbai exhibition.
Chapter author and interviewer
Priya Shankar
is a sociopolitical researcher, writer, and commentator. She
is currently Senior Researcher and Project Developer at the
Alfred Herrhausen Society. She helped conceptualize, frame,
and initiate the Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award as well as the
Foresight project on the rise of the BRICS. Her research inter-
ests are centered on issues of governance, globalization, and
development. She has edited a series of Foresight readers and
contributed to other publications. Her writings have appeared
in New Statesman, Global Policy, Internationale Politik, Estadao
São Paulo, Times of India, India Today and others. She worked at
the think tank, Policy Network and with the Urban Age project
at the London School of Economics. She previously worked
with educational projects in informal settlements and youth
NGOs in Delhi. She holds an undergraduate degree from Delhi
University and a postgraduate degree from Oxford University,
both in history.
Members of the Jury for the Award in Mumbai
Richard Burdett
Director, Urban Age & Centennial Professor in Architecture and
Urbanism, London School of Economics
Shabana Azmi
Actor and social activist
Rahul Mehrotra
Architect and Professor of Urban Planning and Design, Harvard
University
Suketu Mehta
Author and Associate Professor, New York University
Enrique Norten
Founder, TEN Arquitectos, New York and Mexico City & Miler
Chair of Architecture, University of Pennsylvania
Anthony Williams
Former Mayor of Washington, DC and is the Executive Director
of the Global Government

60 SÃo Paulo Profile Population [metro/city]
19.9million
10.8million
8,000km2
1,500km2
388[$bn at PPPs]
Diversity
Indigenous, Portuguese,
Spanish, Italians, Japanese,
African,Lebanese, Syria,
Korean, South Americans,
Brazilian

64 SÃo Paulo Overview
Projects compiled in São Paulo show how self-organi-
zation responds to urgent needs, generating quality col-
lective spaces that encourage community participation.
We found 133 initiatives concentrated primarily in
the central area, but spread over the whole metropoli-
tan area. They test the collective use of space through
cultural, arts, and education production, as well as the
creation of recreational opportunities, recycling alter-
natives, social housing, etc.
The rapid urbanization process, experienced the late
twentieth century, faced major problems related to the
lack of infrastructure—from electricity and water to
education and culture. This is still an ongoing process,
which has fragmented the city, producing urban waste-
lands and residual spaces of different natures; it has
also polarized wealth. This urbanization process has
created both a verifiable lack of quality spaces for hu-
man coexistence, and unused space with the potential
to host urban creative practices. In São Paulo, these are
drivers to a restructuring of the urban environment
committed to the level of the user.
1
Edificio União (Union Building) is a formerly occu-
pied high-rise in the center of the city, which has been
successfully converted into residences for forty-two
families, including a communal space.
2
Instituto Acaia is a cultural facility, with a nursery
and a workshop, which has carved a common space
within the dense slum tissue.
3
Biourban transformed the pathways of the Mauro
slum, stimulating inhabitants to activate unused spaces
and upgrade them.
Urban Creative Practices in São Paulo
1
2
3
5 km

76 SÃo Paulo INITIATIVES
Pioneered by the young sociology student Jeff Ander-
son, the initiative intended to improve life in slums,
through social action and do-it-yourself measures,
in which he and members of the community were
involved.
The project engaged in a series of aesthetic meas-
ures that have transformed the spatial quality of the
neighborhood within a short period of time. They
include the cleaning up of small spaces and areas in
front of peoples’ homes, creating flower beds in place
of concrete curbs, using color and recycled materials to
humanize the façades of buildings and exposed infra-
structures, creating public artworks, and the staging of
collective activities such as painting sessions. All mate-
rials used in the project come from waste and garbage
found in the neighborhood.
The project spread throughout the entire Mauro
favela—a compact and dense slum in an inner-city area
of São Paulo—with mixed use and typologies, suffering
from socioenvironmental degradation and violence.
Hailing from a nearby neighborhood, Jeff Anderson
moved to a small house in the slum to carry out a resi-
dency research project. The collective activity began
with the installation of a library open to the residents,
and followed with the organization of workshops that
transformed waste into objects that supported daily
activities and beautified the paths and alleys.
The activities have led to a stronger sense of com-
munity and to an intense use of the open space (street
and alleys), which gave rise to new situations created
by the articulation of the created objects and daily
activities. The use of open space and the collective
contacts has had a positive impact on the built environ-
ment and its safety.
Biourban

in a similar manner: there was a demand, particularly
for drying clothes, since there is a shortage of space
to do this.
How has the project changed or grown? What
are the next goals? Where do you envision the
project five years from now?
Realizing the unpreparedness of older youth—aged
fourteen and older—to face the world, we decided to
increase the educational classes after the workshops.
We also increased the cultural repertoire on Fridays,
offering pocket cinema and concerts open to the com-
munity, in an effort to get people to mix. In addition,
the Santa Cruz School (a private school) developed a
partnership, in which the ethics and citizenship class
happens here; however, they do not come to offer
something for students, but come learn by working
side by side with students—one loses the fear of the
other.
Is there a dialogue with other stakeholders
(municipality, for instance)? What impact does
this dialogue have on the project?
The Secretary of Social Housing maintains the policy
of removing these slums. We are aware of how this
happens. In the case of the slum “da Linha,” there were
improvements, but the city intends to remove them,
not to urbanize the existing settlement. The architect
responsible visited to understand what works, to get
acquainted with the laundries, the local atelier, so that
work remains if the slum is removed or redeveloped in
a new settlement. The idea of the laundry was very good. It generates
movement, people are closer to each other … you know,
for me it makes my body shake, I like to work and I am
busy then. I do the laundry, run the daily errands at home
and come back to dry them. It helped to organize my life.
Soraia Alves de Oliveira, 33, lives at Favela da Linha and runs the
new laundry, which is part of the initiative.
80 SÃo Paulo INTERVIEW community
How did the project start? What motivated you
to become engaged?
The project began with the sculptor Elisa Bracher, who
had her workshop in Vila Leopoldina, which was on the
way of children who lived in wooden shacks near the
CEAGESP. The project began in response to the great
sociocultural and economic discrepancy that exists in
São Paulo. In 1997, Elisa opened the gates of her studio,
offering a carpentry workshop for these children.
Which partnerships were created to strengthen
your project? What needs did these partner-
ships fulfill and how/when were they formed?
You can only propose a project to a municipal secretary
or to a major funder after you’ve struggled about four
to five years for the work to gain consistency, and get
the numbers to present the project. In our case, the
first five years were financed by Elisa’s family, which
gave us ample freedom to work. And then came the
partnership with the Secretary of Participation and
Partnership and later with the Secretary of Education,
for example. Another important thing is that the pro-
jects themselves define what to do, and are not created
to fit the interests of a sponsor. We are not flexible in
that, since it could jeopardize the work.
Was community support important to the setup
and continuation of the project, and how was
this mobilized? Which challenges did you face
and how were they overcome?
In the early years, we had little support from the
community and many years later, having lunch with a
community agent, she explained something important
to me: it is believed that when people go to the com-
munities, they think they know what the community
needs. I think we have a very respectful relationship
with the community. We do not know, and we are al-
ways learning. Action is always caused by observation
and a demand that does not come from us, but from the
process. That’s what we learned and continue learning
here. Their support is crucial, since the work only exists
if it is aligned with community interests, with their
desire, and that makes sense.
Your project creates a small plaza in the middle
of a dense slum in São Paulo, offering diverse
activities, such as playground, tree shadow,
benches, etc. Did the desire to improve the
urban environment play a role from the outset?
How do you assess this achievement?
The work was born here at the Institute, with the chil-
dren coming to the atelier, where we received them. In
2004, a boy arrived with a message from the commu-
nity saying that from that moment on we could enter
the favela (slum). In 2005, the work began weekly in a
small area in the favela. We spread a cloth on the floor
and took a basket with graphic material.
This happened where the atelier shack is located
today. That was the only space where the narrow alleys
widened, allowing the activity to take place without
disturbing their routine. In the first contact, some chil-
dren and mothers joined and eventually those meetings
started to take place three times a week. Back then,
that space was not built, but was full of garbage. We
started cleaning it very slowly, until one day we organ-
ized the population in a collective effort, which filled
two garbage containers. Twice a week we also offered
nursing, a different approach to the atelier, because
there are many people who do not have access or who
are not authorized to the use of the public health sys-
tem. The improvements followed with the purchase
and renovation of the shack—expanding with permis-
sion from whoever owned the plaza. The playground
came when they wanted a space for children, and dis-
appeared when it no longer made sense. Today, there
is a big bench where they sit. The laundry appeared
Workshops as a Communication Facilitator:
Understanding Community Needs
Ana Cristina Cintra Camargo, Director of the ACAIA Institute

How can the impact of grassroots projects be
maximized? How might artists and cultural
practitioners contribute to this?
For me, the best “cooperation” should take place in
the educational field. I’ll explain: the artist can teach
workshops, give lectures, present their work, and
expose themselves as subject and participative citizen.
He must know his place at the wheel. I imagine their
ideas fertilizing projects like the CEU (Unified Educa-
tional Centers), with creative workshops linked to the
municipal education program, making regular visits to
museums.
We urgently need to learn how to work with conflict and
to keep these tensions in the public space, to learn how
to make them agencies, update them and incorporate
them into theories, urban practices; and critical art—the
sensitive experience as micro-resistance on or in public
space—might indeed be a big help. Perhaps artists, who
already work critically with these “hotspots,” can ef-
fectively help us to invent … to arrive at a more incorpo-
rated, dissenting and vivacious urbanism.
Paola Berenstein Jacques, architect and urbanist, is a professor at
the Architecture Faculty of the UFBA, coordinator of the Urban
Laboratory (http://www.laboratoriourbano.ufba.br) and co-
organizer of the platform Corpocidade (http://www.corpocidade.
dan.ufba.br).
86 SÃo Paulo INTERVIEW Arts & culture
Do you think it is possible that art and culture
(artistic & cultural production), in some form,
provide the “spark” for beginning a grassroots
initiative? In which form?
Yes, but only as a “kickoff,” because once it config-
ures a daily and repetitive practice, we are leaving
the sphere of the investigative art and entering the
field of the crystallization of forms, a phenomena that
has other names such as tradition, folklore, etc. What
I understand as culture is an amalgam of different
practices.
How does the artist/cultural activist play a role
as a communicator, bridging different parts and
intermediating conversations and negotiations
that would otherwise rarely take place?
It is desirable that the artist does not let himself be
“domesticated” by the institutional rules. Grassroots,
for me, makes more sense when I think of musical
manifestations (such as samba and rap), than the artist
who express himself through images. This is the differ-
ence between the street graffiti, which effectively has
political and social connotations, and does not allow
itself to become institutionalized, and the other graf-
fiti, which today has became a product as any other, to
serve the frivolous and aestheticizing embellishment.
My generation did not use the word “negotiation,”
but an institutional critique that marked my formation
was done in the dead of night because they were times
of military regime. The group 3Nós3 covered public
monuments without negotiating anything with those in
power! Other artists that influenced me when I started
working were Julio Plaza and José Resende, whose ideo-
logical statement has always been anti-communicative.
To show, to point out, and to comment are ways to
intervene. One must understand that there is artwork
of more direct intervention—such as Jamac on the
outskirts of São Paulo, presented at the 27th Biennial of
São Paulo in 2006)—but also films and cartoons play a
role in addressing urban problems.
Many projects count on artists to identify ur-
ban challenges and present creative responses
to them. What is your personal experience of
how arts and culture can improve urban life?
“How to Live Together,” title of the 27th São Paulo Art
Biennale, involved artists dealing with urban problems
and challenges.
The work of Renata Lucas (Matemática Rápida),
though almost imperceptible because it mimicked
existing elements of the urban situation, was the one
closest to urban intervention. She shed light on local
problems (the uneven pavement, poor lighting, lack
of green), and managed simultaneously with much
simplicity to also bring a solution, albeit on a mi-
croscale. In the case of artists in residence, I think the
gain was of another kind: artists like Marjetica Potrc
(Acre), Francesco Iodice and Shimabuku (in São Paulo)
produced works inspired so strongly in the context,
that when exposed abroad contribute to the dissemina-
tion of symbolic content. They operate outside of their
places of origin. This is also part of an economy that
reverberates about reality.
Do you think there is something particular
about the culture of São Paulo that contributes
to the nature of the projects?
Only later, I was in contact with practices outside São
Paulo, where it seems that the formalist Greenbergian
tradition have dominated the scene for too long. In
cities such as Vienna, Berlin, and New York, I learned
about artistic practices aimed at local communities.
Characteristically, São Paulo is overly market-oriented.
That’s changing, although it is still a city that has the
most powerful galleries, which nowadays excessively
participate in art fairs, formatting the “back to the
object,” for the collector.
“How to Live Together”
Lisette Lagnado is an independent curator, professor at Santa Marcelina Faculty

Demet Mutman
Istanbul
92 SÃo Paulo Biographies
Ana Cristina Cintra Camargo
is currently one of the directors of the Ateliê ACAIA. She has
been in the atelier since the beginning of its activities in 1997,
when the artist Elisa Bracher decided to open her workshop
space to some children from surrounding poor communities.
Initially working as a psychologist, she engaged in thinking
forms of therapeutic work out of the traditional settings, and in
the organization of the physical and psychical space of ACAIA,
aiming to listen to and train the group of educators from the
beginning
Elisabete França
is an architect and urbanist, and has twenty-five years of expe-
rience in urban planning, social housing, slum upgrading, and
management of participatory projects. Her PhD thesis is on the
slums of São Paulo (1980–2008). She was the Social Housing
Superintendent and Deputy Secretary of the Municipality of
São Paulo until 2012, where she coordinated the activities of
the Slum Upgrading programs, Water Source Program, Cortiço
(Slum Tenement) Requalification Program, Social Renting,
among others, assisting more than 160, 000 families. França is
author and editor of several publications on architecture and
urbanism.
is an architect and PhD at Facudade de Arquitetura e Urbanis-
mo da Universidade de São Paulo. He was professor at USP São
Carlos, USJT, Mackenzie, and Harvard. He is founding partner
at MMBB Architects in São Paulo. Currently, he is Curator at
URBEM—Instituto de Estudos e Urbanismo para a Metrópole,
based in São Paulo.
Lisette Lagnado
has her PhD in philosophy from the University of São Paulo.
She was the general curator of the 27a São Paulo Biennale
(2006) and of “Drifts and Derivations” at the Museo Nacional
Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madri (2010). She coordinated
the Leonilson Project (1993–96) and the Hélio Oiticica Project
(1999–2002), initiatives that systematize the artists’ archives.
She has written several articles and essays. In 2013, she will
present the curatory of the 33a edition at the Panorama of the
Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo.
Nevoral Alves Bucheroni
is the Deputy mayor (Subprefeito) of the Sé district, one of
São Paulo’s thirty-one administrative districts, subordinate to
the Secretary of coordination of Subprefeituras. He worked on
the Coordination of Urban Safety City Hall (Coordenadoria de
Segurança Urbana da Prefeitura, 2005–08). He is colonel in the
Reserve Military Police and formerly served in diverse units
of the Military Police. He graduated with a degree in electric
engineering and business administration, with extra training in
the Police Academy, with extensions in technical, operational,
and community police.
Marcos L. Rosa
received his diploma in architecture and urban planning from
the University of São Paulo. He received a scholarship from
the European Union for his PhD thesis at the TU Munich. He
has been a guest lecturer and researcher at the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology in Zurich, Department of Architecture
and Urban Planning. Marcos organized the DBUA Award in São
Paulo, in 2008, when he set up a research platform based on
the 133 compiled projects. He is the author of a publication of
that research entitled Microplanning, Urban Creative Practices
(São Paulo, 2011). He exhibited worldwide, among which, in the
Rotterdam International Architecture Biennale 2010 and in the
International Biennale in São Paulo 2011. He wrote and contrib-
uted to several international publications. He was awarded the
Young Architects Award from the Brazilian Architects Institute
for Microplanning. He works as an independent designer and
won the first prize for “Collective Retrofit” at the 2009 Alcoa
Design Prize and the Prestes Maia Award for “Urban Paran-
golé,” among others. Both his practical work and research
studies stand for an interdisciplinary and integrative approach
in the fields of architecture, urban design, and urban planning.
His current research focuses on the operational mechanisms
embedded in these projects and their scaling potential within
existing and proposed urban infrastructural networks.
Members of the Jury for the Award in São Paulo:
Richard Burdett
Director, Urban Age & Centennial Professor in Architecture and
Tata Amaral
Brazilian filmmaker
Lisette Lagnado
Art critic and professor at Faculdade Santa Marcelina
Founder MMBB Architects
Raí Souza Vieira de Oliveira
Former soccer player, co-founder and director of the “Foun-
dation Gol de Letra”, a UNESCO model for supporting at-risk
children worldwide
Anthony Williams

94 Istanbul Profile Population [city]
12.5million
Area occupied [city]
5,343km2
182[$bn at PPPs]
Diversity
Romans, Greeks, Armenians,
Jews, Arabs, Gypsies,
Caucasian, Balkans, Turks

108 Navigation X
Headline
AUThOR’s Name
Author’s position in the project etc.
Functions / program: women’s capacity building
and community center, skills training, income
generation, workshop activities, child care, recre-
ational activities, and leisure.
Benefits to the Community: offers a cultural
facility with workshops, child care space, a small
backyard, garden, and mural; fosters interaction in
a learning environment and increases solidarity
Positive impact on the built environment:
visibility of the community and attachment to
the neighborhood via the physical presence of the
center; users feel safer in their neighborhood.
People involved: cooperative is run by a group
of community women and the neighborhood’s
families.
Nurtepe First Step Cooperative 2004 ≥ 2012108 Istanbul INITIATIVES

How do you see these projects impacting on the
urban fabric in the next five to ten years? Do
they have the capacity to make a difference?
I am drawn to pessimism based on a dark scenario,
where the city is shaped by the persistent, oppres-
sive methods that eventually destroy all civil initia-
tives. On the other hand, I would base my optimistic
prediction on non-government initiatives, which are
realized through encouraging local projects, learning
from various accomplishments, and strengthened by
international connections. Small initiatives, which act
for their own rights, can do more consciously regard-
ing their communal needs, eventually leading the way
to healthier cities. Ten years ahead, I would wish to
see that these small initiatives, which are born today,
are still alive, with their motivational resources
strengthened, their strategies sharpened, and having
secured a firm and well-defined place inside the gov-
ernmental frame.
In Turkey, a mayor’s use of authority is not always trans-
parent. Meanwhile, the demands on behalf of civic groups
for increased municipal authority in the name of national
decentralization and participatory democracy have at
times exacerbated this misuse of discretionary powers.
This is because Turkey’s city administrations have not
been completely democratized yet, and strong municipal
authority has created, in most cases, local fiefdoms rather
than widespread civic engagement.
Ilhan Tekeli, city and regional planner at the Middle East Techni-
cal University and member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences
118 Istanbul INTERVIEW Academia
What trends dis you recognize in the grassroots
projects in Istanbul? Do you think they unveil
fields of opportunity for urban design?
Grassroots initiatives tend to differ as resistance and
local (working with women and children) organiza-
tions, and their impact differs depending on their
objectives. Their biggest problems are raising funds
and having their statements heard by the ruling
mechanisms. Despite that, various civil organizations
focus and embrace the city’s current needs. I believe
that this approach has potential, however, the criti-
cal missing ingredient is the reliable legal base, which
would enable the realization of such formations. The
needs and requirements of a participatory community,
which is formed by diverse crowds and actors, have to
be brought to life through an implementable project.
“Negotiation” in fact, embodies all these concepts.
Some of the projects are directly having an
impact on the built environment and create
new spatial qualities. Would you identify these
as potential planning tools? How do you think
they could inspire or give feedback into archi-
tectural/ urban planning practices? And policy?
Of course it is possible to enable the local initiatives’
impact on the built environment; however, rather
than seeing them as a “tool,” local initiatives should
become a “subject” and “actor,” within a well-defined
system. Mixing these actors in the planning process
and making their needs a part of the urban planning
might guarantee and improve the quality of life and the
environment in the city.
Small-scale interventions indeed have potential,
however, in order to achieve sustainable interventions,
we need two things: a revolution in the governmental
system, and a civil community that is determined and
persistent regarding its demands. Even though its tools
might not necessarily be equally strong as the govern-
mental mechanisms, urban community has to develop
pressure mechanisms, which are as strong as possible.
The urban community, the governmental mechanisms,
and the cities of today are trying to catch up with
new strategies. Interventionist decisions are being
made, new tools and units are brought to life, and the
power difference among the actors during this process
increases rapidly. The increasing pressure creates even
more fragments, which in turn breaks down the “resis-
tance,” inevitably diminishing the collective movement.
Do solutions germinating in the communities
contribute to livability in some areas? To which
pressing issues do they respond? If so, how?
It is important to emphasize that their action responds
to the lack of participation in planning. If these kinds
of initiatives start to become a compulsory element
of the urban planning process, and if such a transfor-
mation indeed happens, then, the “citizen” not only
embraces a key element to improve his/her life quality,
but also takes on responsibility to achieve quality of
life. When the fulfilling of “citizen” demands is guar-
anteed, the form of his/her existence in the city will
inevitably improve as well.
Which projects would you say have good poten-
tial for replicability? What features should they
exhibit in order to be replicable?
In order for the local projects to be replicable, their
success has to be proven. This does not only rely
on civil initiative. The goals have to be realized. An
initiative can feed on another initiative’s experience—
successful or not—and reshape itself. This, in turn, can
create some sort of database. This kind of experience
transfer is actually a type of mobility, a state of experi-
ence transforming itself for repetition; something that
should be able to make the governmental mechanisms
content. This kind of exchange requires the existence
of a platform where different actors can put forward
their diverse experiences on diverse grounds. For that
to happen, the problems in the system’s methodology
must be fixed in the context of “governmental culture.”
Action and Participation in Planning
Özlem Ünsal works closely with Istanbul-based civil initiatives and neighborhood organizations

nity to its system. Yet, it is highly critical for the “local
statement” and micro-visions to increase, unite, and
transform into a powerful and single voice.
What is your role in combining the missing
links of top to down or bottom up? How do you
proceed?
There are many missing links. Primarily, there is a
communication gap and unawareness between the
institutions. At this point, our mission is to closely
monitor the processes in order to inform the institu-
tions. More importantly, I spend time with the commu-
nity, in order to better understand the spatial, social,
and economic infrastructures, and to cooperate with
them in order to achieve participatory resolution to the
existing problems.
My intention is to make the “existing” visible; to
conduct participatory meetings; to cultivate new vi-
sions through these meetings; to support and even
improve the participation of diverse social fragments;
and to reach to a larger audience through these newly
cultivated visions.
How would you define a good planning model
for the city of Istanbul? What is the difference
from today’s practice?
When considering urban practices, it is not only the
plans that come to mind, but also field management,
heritage zoning plans, hierarchy, and inter-institutional
relationships. These, in turn, transform into a more
intricate and sophisticated system. Most of the time,
the community cannot understand nor perceive the
patterns in-between these non-transparent and sophis-
ticated relationships; thus, decisions are made under
ambiguity. The mechanisms have to be simplified and
made transparent so that the local communities can
understand these patterns, decisions, and their impli-
cations. At this very point, my role is, in fact to expose
these gaps and disconnections. New steps should be
taken in light of the feedback and lessons learned from
existing actions. In other words, the subject, objective
and method of a project should be created and under-
lined through participative action.
How do we gain participation? We do try to get attention
through press releases and Hasanpasa Gaswork festivals.
Through these small-scale interventions, the initiation
would possibly develop however there are absolute facts
that are cutting the sustainability of the process. If there
is a political issue, such as strategic planning included
among the process, then an obstacle appears on the road.
We aim to work with the politicians, however, we are
seen as competitors for a plot of the city.
Nesrin Uçar, volunteer for the Revitalization of Hasanpasa Gas-
works Neighborhood Initiative, private interview by D. Mutman,
April, 2010.
122 Istanbul INTERVIEW mediation
What is the role of culture, art, economy, poli-
tics, politicians, stakeholders, and citizens for
rebuilding a city?
Politicians must transform this debate into a broad
participatory public platform. An open system would
enable culture and arts to provide an integrationist
impact, shaped by both the environment and the com-
munity. The community, on the other hand, must come
out of its passive position to generate its own state-
ment and put forward its own vision on the reconstruc-
tion of their city. Rather than the generic solutions
imposed and executed by the authorities, original and
local approaches developed by civil initiatives must be
supported.
The existence of a sustainable economy must be
composed of a system that has close relationships with
the local dynamics inside the city and supports the
existence of smaller production units. There is also the
need for an economic vision, which takes into consid-
eration the micro-dynamics and relates and supports
them with the macro-dynamics.
You are one of the main actors causing an
impact on the built environment, what is your
role?
Basically, my duty is to actively stand against the
ongoing transformation in the city and try to show
the decision-maker mechanisms alternative solutions.
In other words, I try to make the “invisible,” “vis-
ible,” or to reveal that the cities own dynamics can
suggest alternatives to the current transformation.
From an architect’s perspective, I try to expose the
architectural identity and the economic, social, and
physical life forms that exist during the urbanization
process. I also concentrate on how existing macro and
micro settlements can be supported by those existing
dynamics.
How do you think civil initiatives could feed
back into the planning process?
Civil initiatives and the meetings/workshops we take
part in as individual participants progress too slowly.
The community still does not perceive its own value;
and the people are not aware that they have the power
to make a statement. Thus, at this point, it is still not
easy for “urban awareness” to take shape. While the
top-down systems progress rapidly with the impact
of the decisions that are being taken, the impact of
bottom-up systems is unfortunately not as efficient.
Even though micro-scale approaches are more imple-
mentable and sustainable, a participatory planning is
still not possible regardless of many strategies that
have been tried to clear the way for such an action. In
order for the participatory action to have an impact on
urban and strategic planning, administrative traditions
have to change and the administrative mechanisms
have to be redesigned for enabling it.
In that sense, are there any policies being
developed to merge top-down and bottom-up
practices to any extent?
Unfortunately, there is no such merging or reconcil-
ing political moves at the moment. However, at the
Sulukule Platform, we worked very hard to create such
reconciliation during the Sulukule demolition pro-
cess. We did our best to ensure the solution would be
achieved through the participation of the residents, but
unfortunately, it did not happen.
There is a very powerful vertical relationship be-
tween the higher authorities and the local authority
during the process, where the decisions are executed
from the top down. While the local authority is ex-
pected to represent a diverse and multifaceted com-
munity, it inevitably becomes a mere reflection of the
ruling party. The ruling party, in turn, cannot incorpo-
rate and mix the dynamism coming from the commu-
Advocating Sustainable and
Participatory Models
Aslı Kıyak I˙ngin is architect, designer, and activist

Mexico CityAna Álvarez
126 Istanbul biographies
Yeliz Yalın Baki
is co-founder of Barıs¸ I˙çin Müzik (Music for Peace), which is
a privately financed social project of Mehmet Selim Baki. As
a devoted volunteer and an academician, she supported the
initiative from 2004 to 2011. In 2012, the initiative became the
Barıs¸ I˙çin Müzik Foundation, and she has been its manager
since then.
Erhan Demirdizen
is an urban planner and lecturer, with a Masters degree in
urban policy planning and local governments. He has worked at
several sections of the Ministry of Public Works and Settle-
ment, as well as at several local authorities. Besides being a
board member of the Chamber of Urban Planners in Ankara,
he was respectively a member, general secretary and head of
the Chamber of Urban Planners, I˙stanbul branch. He was also a
member of a publishing board for several urban, planning and
city related journals.
Özlem Ünsal
is a PhD candidate at City University of London, Department
of Sociology. Among her main research interests are neoliberal
urban policies, grassroots resistance movements, and rights
to the city. Her thesis focuses on neighborhood movements,
originating from the inner-city poverty and conservation zones
of Istanbul. As part of her doctoral research, she works closely
with the volunteers for Istanbul-based civil initiatives and
neighborhood organizations, critical of current urban change.
Behiç Ak
is a cartoon artist, playwright, children’s book author, director,
and architect. His children’s books and cartoons have been
published in Turkey, Germany, Japan, Korea, and China, and
featured in several exhibitions worldwide. His documentary
film, The History of Banning in Turkish Cinema—The Black Cur-
tain, won the best documentary film award in Ankara in 1994.
He also received an honorary award in 2012 for “Contribution
to Architecture,” from the Chamber of Architects for his car-
toons, writings, plays, and his position on environmental and
architectural issues.
Aslı Kıyak I˙ngin
architect, designer, and activist. She works in various fields—
such as design, architecture, city, production and art—with
a focus on social, cultural, and economic aspects. She is also
active in the city where urban regeneration or gentrification
developments take place, by advocating sustainable and partic-
ipatory models for the alternative visions. She is the president
of the NGO, Human Settlement Association; and also developed
the concept of the Made in S¸ is¸hane project and initiative, as
well as participatory and sustainable practices in order to stop
the demolishment of Sulukule.
Demet Mutman
is an architect who focuses on cities, urban development strat-
egies, and possibilities of alternative spatial transformations
by using short-term activities. She has a PhD from Istanbul
Technical University, where she researched alternative models
of urban transformation by examining short-term activities
and designs as spatial catalysts. In 2009, she was responsible
for the management of the Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award
Istanbul. She is part of the Archis Interventions Divided Cities
Network, which concentrates on the politics of space within
divided regions that do not necessarily have visible borderlines.
Mutman currently works at T.C. Maltepe University Faculty of
Architecture in Istanbul and focuses on architectural and urban
design, alternative readings of the city, and public spaces.
Members of the Jury for the Award in Istanbul:
Richard Burdett
Director, Urban Age Centennial Professor in Architecture and
Arzuhan Dog˘an Yalçindag˘
Chair, Turkish Industrialists and Businessmen’s Association
(TUSIAD)
Çag˘lar Keyder
Professor of Sociology, Bosphorus University
Behiç Ak
Cartoonist, author, architect
Enrique Norten
Founder, TEN Arquitectos, New York and Mexico City Miler
Chair of Architecture, University of Pennsylvania
Anthony Williams
Han Tümertekin
Architect, Mimarlar Design, Visiting Professor, Harvard
Graduate School of Design

128 Mexico City Profile Average density [metro/city]
Diversity
Indigenous, Spanish, British,
Irish, Italian,German, French,
Dutch, Syria, Lebanon, Chinese,
Korean, South and Central
American, Mexican
Population [metro/city]
20.4million
11.2million
7,854km2
1,495km2
390[$bn at PPPs]

144 Mexico City INITIATIVES
Santa Fe is a neighborhood on the west side of Mexico
City characterized by extreme socioeconomic contrasts:
one can find an “edge city” with office towers that em-
body Mexico’s participation in the global economy and
shanty towns over ravines existing side by side.
In 2005, Iberoamericana University—a private insti-
tution located in Santa Fe—created the Coordination of
Social Responsibility to build a bridge of cooperation
between the different university departments and the
marginalized areas of the surroundings. Among other
initiatives, they fostered the project Recovering Spaces
for Life, which focuses on the recovery of public spaces
in the neighboring ravines, through different activities
that create a sense of belonging in dwellers and pro-
motes the leadership of community members.
Under the guidance of the university, different lo-
cal groups worked together to recover the riverbank,
which was previously used as a sewer. They fixed the
façades of houses along one kilometer of the river
and built a green pedestrian corridor that goes from
the riverbank to a formerly abandoned alley uphill,
now accessible to disabled people and featuring a
playground. They also built a greenhouse for grow-
ing tomatoes in what used to be a garbage dump, and
transformed a residual space in a corner street with
stairs into an open cultural forum. They also run pro-
grams for psychosocial risks prevention, technological
literacy, job training; and they created a network that
allows the people from those marginalized neighbor-
hoods to find jobs at the business area of Santa Fe.
Recovering Spaces for Life shows how in highly seg-
regated societies, such as Mexico City, bridges among
apparently untouchable sectors can be built and used
to transform reality.
Recovering Spaces for Life

Handmade urbanism

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