“Fragmented Urban Development 201_”
was finished in July 2015. As the author, Stefan Frischauf, who had started to write that immediately after his return from Afghanistan in summer 2010 couldn’t find a “Doctoral advisor” for this research, he then tried to edit it as a book. But no editor was found as much.
Case studies and their approach and evaluation therein combine amongst others architecture, urban development, environmental and social policy. The book and its approach is motivated by the deep conviction, that crises can only be taken as chances by combining and pooling resources and efforts. From people with different backgrounds, joining their experiences for arriving at better performances for getting over the fragile bridge of crisis and its abysses.
The book’s title itself describes the fragmentary of current urban and regional planning in singular “case studies”.
This fragmented character of “being and becoming of space in that time” endangers us to cause an increased splintering of cities and their built and their immaterial structures. But it shall also be taken as a chance for finding better performances for managing their “social” and within that their “community spaces”. Simultaneously the term describes the tendency of rebuilding these fragments as “fractals” and that way finding ways of joining them together again.
This process of abrasing sharp edges for enabling fittings and joints again shall counteract the splintering of human habitations
as much as of societies. Not falling into naïve “idyllic world- phantasmagoria” or other -isms.
Thus hard, but “meaningful” and target-oriented labor”. Filled with tough negotiations for enabling balances between
multiple options and needs.
“Doing good labor means being curious, researching and learning from ambiguities”
-
as a US-sociologist - Richard Sennett describes the “good Craftsman’s work”.
On the German site here you find three online-brochures / *.pdf-files with excerpts (just in German):
- Table of contents and three subordinated chapters from the first of four big chapters:
“0. Preliminary notes regarding strategies towards the “Renaissance of the social city” in Central Europe and towards “Composition and Rebuilding of the Global City” and two sub chapters from “1. Strategies towards the “Renaissance of the Social City” 201_ in (North-) Western Realms – focus Central Europe – Germany”. - Three and a half sub chapters from the third of four big chapters:
“2. Strategies towards “Composition and Rebuilding of the Global City” 201_ in (South-) Eastern Realms – focus Central Asia – Afghanistan”. - One and a half sub chapters from the last of four big chapters:
“3. Synopsis – “Social and Global City” 201_ - further developments – perspectives between Europe, South Asia (India, Bangladesh) and East Asia (China)”.
On the left: The Paradoxon of City and Countryside with some other opposing facets to balance in the process of planning and building.
On the right: The map of Murad Khane, that part of Kabul’s Od town North of Kabul River, where the British NGO Turquoise Mountain was working since 2006. For enabling a Low-Tech-Stormwater Management and Sanitation Project
following the design of Berlin based engineer Harald Kraft in 2009 / 10 a highly accurate survey of the almost 4 hectares / 10 acres war torn Old Town quarter was required.
Partly reconstructed alleys are dark grey with pipes running there marked with thick red lines.
Plots with unclear ownership are marked and hatched in yellow to brown tones.
The treatment plant with the red main pipe then leading to the riverbed was located on the plot of an informal bazar, where land acquisition and integration of the craftsmen selling their rubber tyre products there were essential.
The fact though, that in December 2009 the project leader was the first employee of an international NGO to ask Kabul Fire Police for collaboration within a regeneration project says a lot about the integration of locals, their authorities and their executive boards and forces into building and planning in Afghanistan since the Western invasion 2001. The chief of Kabul Fire Police though was very grateful and meetings with him and his staff were highly productive.
Multiple other reasons led to the project not being built despite of more than one year of intense planning.
Some impressions from Murad Khane and its neighborhood and the craftman’s work, fostered by Turquoise Mountain and the Aga Khan Foundation in other parts of Kabul’s Old Town. But a second closer look also shows its fragile exposition to many other threats.
All photos © Stefan Frischauf
UFO – the “Urbanism Facsimiles Series” edited by faculty members of the departments of architecture at Universities Leuven in Belgium and Eindhoven in the Netherlands offers another deep insight and broad picture of urbanism and insofar of case studies and fieldwork far off the daily glamour of investment numbers. Ranging from “Water Urbanisms”, edited in 2008, via “Human Settlements” (2010) to “Water Urbanisms East” (2013) towards “Village in the City” (2014) these papers document a lot of the essentials of architectural fieldwork and planning practice at the intersection of the landscape as integrative part vs. being a counterpart of urbanism and the challenges of climate change. And many other things to balance and challenges to tackle on open fields.
Mainly the editors are
Kelly Shannon and
Bruno de Meulder, both teaching at KU Leuven.
On Kelly Shannon’s page the UFO Facsimiles and many other papers can be downloaded.
Amongst those also a nice general outlook out of “My Livable City”:
Restart 2020: Silver Linings for re-Urbanization in the post-Covid-19 era.