• #Éthiopie, inventer la #ville de demain

    Expédition en Éthiopie sur le chantier d’un nouveau type de ville, qui répond au défi démographique du pays. Conçu par l’urbaniste suisse #Franz_Oswald, l’idée est de construire des #micro-villes à la #campagne, autosuffisantes et durables. Pays à forte croissance démographique, l’Éthiopie, où plus de 80% de la population travaille dans le domaine de l’agriculture, est aussi caractérisée par un exode rural massif. Chaque année, des millions de jeunes en recherche d’emploi émigrent vers les villes, dont Addis-Abeba, la capitale, et y vivent dans la promiscuité et le dénuement des bidonvilles. Face à cette tendance préoccupante, une équipe composée d’architectes internationaux et d’agriculteurs locaux entreprend de réaliser un projet visionnaire, conçu par l’urbaniste suisse Franz Oswald. Leur idée : construire des micro-villes à la campagne, autosuffisantes et durables. Sur le chantier de la cité pilote de Buranest, ce documentaire part à la rencontre des participants, dont le paysan Tilahun Ayelew et l’architecte éthiopien reconnu Fasil Giorghis. Malgré les obstacles culturels et administratifs, une petite zone urbaine autonome en milieu rural voit progressivement le jour, avec un accès à l’eau, à l’électricité, à Internet et à l’école : une expérience source d’espoir pour désengorger les villes.

    https://www.les-docus.com/ethiopie-inventer-la-ville-de-demain
    #film #film_documentaire
    #Ethiopie #urbanisation #exode_rural #BuraNEST #Rainwater-unit #Zegeye_Cherenet #Fasil_Giorghis #architecture

    #TRUST #Master_TRUST

    • #Nestown

      Ethiopia’s present population of more than 90 million people is growing rapidly. In spite of the outstanding economic growth the multi-ethnic state on the Horn of Africa seems to be reaching its limits. It is confronted with inefficient cultivation of land and harmful migration to city centres. It lacks the experience to respond to the growth of its population with a sustainable settlement development approach. In order to develop a model town, the authorities in the Amhara region are working closely since 2007 with NESTown Group, including experts from ETH Zurich. It has been officially decided to implement this urban development proposal.

      The region aims to offer its mostly farming inhabitants a town and house type designed according to local conditions which they can build and manage themselves. The buildings are used to harvest rainwater and are built from local materials such as eucalyptus wood. The developed and tested construction is estimated to cost no more than the equivalent of 2000 - 3000 Swiss francs.

      To realize a sustainable town, other capacities have to be developed: cooperative communal living serving both the public good and the individual households, efficient water management, a productive and ecologically diverse agriculture for food security, continuous education, including appropriate technology transfer.

      By its nature, the implementation of a town is an open ended process emerging at various speeds and scales

      http://www.nestown.org

    • Ethiopia’s Plans to Bridge the Urban-Rural Divide

      Ethiopia’s population has tripled over the past few decades. Millions of farmers are leaving the fields only to end up living in the slums of huge cities. City planners believe they have found a solution — in the remote countryside.

      Stories about people embarking on their future usually start with a departure. But the story of farmer Birhan Abegaz is different. He plans to stay put right where he is in his quest for happiness — a treeless wasteland in northern Ethiopia.

      The crooked huts of his village, Bura, are surrounded by solitary thorn bushes and acacias. Birhan is cultivating rice on a patch of leased land behind his hut, at least during the rainy season. A few months have passed since the harvest. The dry season is here, and the earth is dusty. The Shine River, Bura’s lifeblood, is nothing but a trickle.

      Married with three children, Birhan is only 28 years old, but the hardness of rural life has taken its toll on him and he looks much older. He fetches the family’s water for drinking, cooking and washing from about a kilometer away. The nearest well is on the other side of the highway leading to the provincial capital of Bahir Dar, a two-hour drive away. In the past, many people from Bura and the nearby villages took this road, turning their backs on the countryside in search of a better life in the city.

      What Can Keep the Farmers in the Countryside?

      Since the 1970s, Ethiopia’s population has more than tripled, going from 30 million to over 100 million. In the countryside, overpopulation is leading to the overuse and overgrazing of fields and deforestation. More and more people are moving to the big cities, which are growing faster than the rest of the country. The provincial capital of Bahir Dar had about 60,000 inhabitants 30 years ago, but today it has 350,000. “Apartment buildings, streets, the drinking-water supply and the entire infrastructure can’t keep up with this tempo,” says Ethiopian city planner and architect Zegeye Cherenet.

      As a result, new arrivals end up living on the streets or in slums. In the early mornings in Bahir Dar, dozens of ragged young men stand at the intersections in the hope of picking up work as day laborers. In the evenings, their sisters and mothers go to the square and wait for johns.

      That’s supposed to change now, and the starting point is to be the barren wasteland next to the village of Bura. Birhan points to a construction site next to the highway. His new house is being built there, constructed out of eucalyptus wood and clay bricks. It’s supposed to be the first of many. An entire town is to be built here — with a school and a training center where the farmers from the surrounding area can learn new skills, which they can then put to use to earn money. The newly founded municipality, which is to gradually grow to around 15,000 residents, is called Buranest. The idea behind the project is that the city must come to the farmers in order to keep the rural population from flooding into the cities.

      The project is called Nestown, short for New Sustainable Town. The plan was primarily devised by Franz Oswald, a former professor at ETH in Zurich, and sociologist Dieter Läpple, the doctoral supervisor of Ethiopian city planner Cherenet at Hafencity University in Hamburg.

      Urbanization without Rural Depopulation

      An entire network of this new type of settlement is to be built as part of Ethiopia’s Nestown project — half village, half town. The inhabitants are to form cooperatives to build and run their towns themselves, as well as to make and sell agricultural and handcrafted wares. “The residents can remain farmers, which is familiar to them, but also simultaneously learn urban skills,” says Cherenet. Rural towns like Buranest are meant to keep the people in the countryside by offering them local opportunities like the ones they are moving to overpopulated cities to search for in vain.

      Work on the project began five years ago. First, model houses were built to show the skeptical farmers how useful it can be to have stable foundation walls, cisterns and toilets. The region’s usual dwellings are huts made of twigs, mud and cow dung — crooked housing often described as “dancing houses.”

      Birhan proudly opens the hatch of his cistern. He dug the pit for it together with his new neighbors. His home is also almost complete, a kind of row house that shares a large corrugated iron roof with the adjacent buildings. During the rainy season, the rainwater will drain into the cisterns using constructions called Rain Water Units (RWU). “With the water I can have not just one harvest per year, but several,” he says. A garden is being planted behind the house and his five cows “will even get their own shed.” Earlier, the animals lived in the old hut, under the same roof as the family.

      The construction style is unconventional for the region: The houses are two stories high, with a family housed on each floor in order to take up as little land as possible. Fertile land is valuable. One-half of a row house costs 75,000 Ethiopian birr, or about 2,200 euros, which is being financed partly through loans and partly with donations.

      The River Flows All Year Round

      The training center has been built on the village square — a building with cheerful red and green walls. The farmers will learn how to process food here, as well as household management and the basics of accounting. Their children are to take computer courses. Like his neighbors, however, Birhan has never been to school and doesn’t know how to read or write.

      A school, health center and church are to be built in the next construction phases — all largely by the new inhabitants. Swiss aid organization Green Ethiopia has planted a large vegetable garden as well as trees on the streets and along the banks of the Shine. For the first time in decades, the river is now flowing all year round.

      The rapid population growth has also left scars on the area surrounding Birhan’s village, Bura. The source region of the Shine River, 20 kilometers away, had been deforested, the fertile soil carried away by wind and storms. Since 2012, Green Ethiopia has planted almost 3 million trees on the hills of Lobokemkem. The organization also pays the local farmers to stop grazing their animals there.

      After five years, the successes are visible: The trees reach up to 5 meters high and a thin layer of topsoil has formed, with grass growing on top of it. Tree and grass roots hold down the soil. At several spots, the groundwater trickles out even in the dry season, which hasn’t been the case in two generations. Downriver, in Bunarest, there is enough water for the new gardens despite the drought. They are one of the most important foundations for the further development of the town. “What must I do to build a city? First, I plant a forest,” says Franz Oswald, summing up the seemingly paradoxical principle.
      The tree nursery is also part of the project. People from the region work here and raise the trees that are to be planted in Buranest.

      The Biggest Obstacle: Neighbors’ Skepticism

      Birhan Abegaz is already planning his transition away from farming to a life as an urban dweller. If one day he manages to get more land, he wants to plant more vegetables “and then open a restaurant,” he says. His family could work there. He hopes that his kids “can learn and have better career options. They shouldn’t remain farmers like me.”

      But his patience is repeatedly being put to the test. As a future urban dweller, he is dependent on the developments taking place around him. He is reliant on his neighbors. His house, as well as the first general construction phase, was supposed to be finished last year. The date has been pushed back repeatedly.

      It should be ready soon, but it’s hard to make predictions in Ethiopia. The cooperative of carpenters and stone masons, which was founded and trained specifically for the construction of the residential buildings, had to be dissolved again because as soon as they had their diploma, many of the trained tradespeople disappeared to find their luck in Bahir Dar or elsewhere. As a result, the construction site remained quiet for a year. The training center with the red-green exterior wall may be finished, but it remains empty because the local authorities are unable to agree on who will pay the instructors.

      Growth is nevertheless happening in Buranest, though not along the banks of the Shine where the planners had initially intended. The actual new town center has developed to the left and right sides of the highway. A kiosk has opened there, as well as a bar. About 300 people have built their traditional “dancing houses” there out of mud and twigs. Buranest, a city under construction, has attracted them from the surrounding villages, but most are still hesitating to sign onto the project. They shun the 40-euro fee for joining the cooperative, and an urban life with electricity and toilets in little sheds in front of the houses still seems alien and unfamiliar.

      The Government Wants to Build Thousands of New Towns

      Although the new settlement isn’t growing according to the Buranest planners’ intentions, they aren’t too bothered by it. The fact that so much is being built informally, says Dieter Läpple, is a sign that the people believe in the settlement’s future. He now hopes for what the founders call the “propaganda of the good deed” — that once families have moved into their new homes with water and gardens, neighbors will also soon recognize the advantages. The decisive factor, Läpple says, will be whether “the population makes the project theirs.”

      The government in Addis Ababa is already on board. In the city of 5 million, up to 80 percent of residents live in slums, according to UN estimates. And although migration into cities and urbanization used to be considered taboo, that’s no longer the case. By 2020, the Ethiopian Ministry of Urban Development and Housing wants to turn 8,000 rural settlements into “urban centers.” The government already has a concrete role model for their plans: Buranest.

      https://www.spiegel.de/international/tomorrow/ethiopia-plans-to-build-8000-new-cities-in-countryside-a-1197153.html

  • Budgeting Justice. Cities must empower historically marginalized communities to shape how public funds are spent

    During the summer of 2020, protestors demanded that George Floyd’s, Breonna Taylor’s, and too many others’ murderers be charged and convicted. They also demanded that cities nationwide defund the police. The Black Lives Matter uprisings provoked intense conversations regarding systemic racism in U.S. policing and foregrounded the need for institutional reforms.

    In the year since, responses have been woefully inadequate. Though Derek Chauvin was found guilty of killing Floyd, the prosecution’s case hardly mentioned race. Beyond his conviction, cities around the country issued apology statements for institutionalized racism—acknowledging the role of urban planners in redlining and the disinvestment of Black communities—and formed commissions for racial justice. But the results have been disappointing. The Philadelphia commission on Pathways to Reform, Transformation, and Reconciliation, for instance, only launched economic programs aimed at Black small business owners, not wage workers, freelancers, and the unemployed.

    These top-down moves give companies and governments a semblance of righteous action, even as they leave intact the histories and structures that enable police violence. They fail to redistribute funds away from police departments and toward new visions of community safety, freedom, and spaces where all individuals can thrive.

    To address police brutality, cities need budget justice: public budgets that give historically marginalized communities resources to address their needs. Budget justice requires a new sort of democracy that emphasizes three points of practice: first, budgets are moral documents that make explicit what communities choose to divest from and invest in; two, direct democracy must engage everyday constituents, rather than elected representatives, in a range of decision-making conversations and actions about collective needs; three, micropolitics must reshape the rules and expectations regarding whose knowledge, expertise, and lived experience shapes state policy and collective action.

    Policymakers usually make budget decisions behind closed doors. When elected officials do make public budgets transparent, they often present them as neutral documents and claim that “numbers don’t lie.” Budget numbers do, however, often obfuscate our everyday circumstances and needs. For example, without a sense of historical data or where exactly money is going, it would be difficult to discern whether additional funds for a particular school benefit all of the students, barely make up for the prior year’s budget cuts, or add amenities for a small selection of honors students. While public budgets are often portrayed as technical and impersonal, they are moral documents that reflect specific public values and theories of government.

    Taking cues from the platform articulated by the Movement 4 Black Lives, focusing on the budget part of budget justice prompts communities to articulate divest-invest strategies that redirect money away from expenditures the community doesn’t value and toward those it does. For instance, in the summer of 2020, protestors camped out in front of City Hall for more than a month, asking the New York Mayor and the City Council to cut the police budget by $1 billion and instead invest in community care: healthcare and social services, child and elderly care, and well-maintained streets, gardens, parks, and public spaces. Although the police eventually cleared the encampment, the monthlong Occupy City Hall protests significantly shaped the 2021 fiscal year budget, with more than $865 million in cuts to the police department’s operating expenses compared to the 2020 budget. (DeBlasio explicitly acknowledged the protests’ impact by including lower fringe benefits in his calculations, so that he could claim $1 billion in cuts.) The defund the police aspect of budget justice has received attention and deservingly so, but we also need new tools to meaningfully redistribute and invest money. In my work with activists, I have heard laments on how communities must articulate a vision of the different worlds we should work toward. Demands would then concern not just community safety and violence prevention, but all policy domains shaped by racial and class inequalities.

    We cannot expect such ideas to come from policymakers and those in power. Those most impacted by over-policing, carceral capitalism, unaffordable housing, and underfunded schools must make budget decisions. Likewise, many of the participants in the current uprisings against police brutality argue that voting is not enough; they claim that demographic or descriptive representation and placing “Black faces in high places,” as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes, have not addressed racial inequalities nor stopped the killing of Black Americans. Empowerment entails more than fighting voter suppression and fixing the electoral college. The road to budget justice emphasizes new modes of democracy—such as citizens’ assemblies and mini publics—that give participants opportunities for deliberation, not just picking from ready-made menus of policies or ballots.

    Our greatest challenge is breaking out of the confines of our popular imagination in radical ways and creating new social, economic, and political relations. As public policy is currently governed by racial hierarchies and neoliberal logics of competition, deservingness, respectability politics, and individual responsibility, struggling communities are too busy competing against one another to build a better world. Logics of competition undergird means-tested services for unhoused people, for instance, and expanding opportunities for bootstrapped hard work (through “uplift” and entrepreneurial mindsets, education, cultural competence, or plain hustle and “grit”). These are all formulated inside the box of austerity and mainstream liberal inclusion.

    We need new models altogether for grants and urban planning. We must demand substantively different models for affordable housing, schools, and public space. This asks cities to not just improve the numbers (of Black enterprises) in the current system, but to change the relationships between real estate developers, residents, and urban planners. In other words, this requires each of us to engage our communities’ experiences with racial capitalism and then change the criteria that determines the beneficiaries of current public policies and budgets.

    Changing these relationships begins with micropolitics, or what others have called prefigurative politics, which occurs outside official voting and formal advocacy. It involves mutual aid collectives, neighbors helping neighbors without asking for their résumés or histories of suffering, and constituents allocating funds to policies and projects that address community needs. It involves paying attention to community members’ local knowledges and lived experiences. The work of micropolitics reshapes participants’ class and racial subjectivities—the stories we tell ourselves about the positions we hold in social hierarchies and the roles we play vis-à-vis the government and one another. Realizing budget justice requires that community members themselves articulate the criteria we wish to live by, forwarding new logics of collective care and community control.

    The contemporary goal of budget justice attempts to pay tribute to the idea of abolition democracy W. E. B. Du Bois examined in Black Reconstruction in America (1935) almost ninety years ago. In recent decades, Black feminist, intersectional, queer, indigenous, critical race, and anticolonial scholarship have pinpointed just how systemic hierarchies persist in the afterlives of slavery and empire. As Harsha Walia writes, abolition democracy also demands the “imagining and generating of alternative institutions . . . prefiguring societies based on equity, mutual aid, and self-determination.” This project of world-building must be rooted in on-the-ground community organizing and participatory democratic experiments.

    Attempts to realize budget justice already exist. A number of cities, such as Los Angeles, Nashville, and Seattle, have articulated new funding priorities in lieu of policing. This has occurred against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the U.S. government has failed to coordinate adequate testing, protective equipment, and epidemiologically sound guidance, as well as offer support during remote schooling, job loss, and massive loss of life.

    Integral to such efforts is participatory budgeting (PB), a process by which residents, rather than elected officials, allocate public funds. Since it first began in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1989, PB has spread to over 3,000 cities worldwide. In past cases of PB, diversity in participation by gender, income, and racial background contributed to the legitimacy, continuity, and redistributive potential of the processes. In the United States, PB has spread from a single local process in 2010 to over 500 currently active district, city, or institutional processes. PB attempts to give stakeholders an opportunity to draw upon their knowledge of local needs, articulate proposals, interact with neighbors, deliberate over priorities, and select—not just consult on—which proposals receive funding. In so doing, it lays out budget questions in tractable ways and helps individuals understand how city bureaucracies work. But some researchers have argued that PB has morphed from an empowering and democratizing process into a politically malleable, innocuous set of procedures that reflect subtle domination by elites or legitimize pro forma decisions by policymakers. Indeed, PB can be misused to reinforce existing racial hierarchies.

    New York City has the country’s largest PB process by far; since 2012, New Yorkers have decided how to spend more than $250 million on almost 1,000 projects through PBNYC. I draw on a decade of fieldwork on PBNYC to ground my ideals of budget justice, the limits and uses of the groundwork laid thus far, and how communities might build upon PB processes for budget justice.

    I conducted fieldwork in East Harlem, where residents gathered at PB assemblies and met in school cafeterias and auditoriums to discuss what they wanted to spend public funds on. A middle-aged white man from the Upper West Side had walked across town to come to a neighborhood assembly and pitch new amenities for his daughter’s school. As he listened to mostly Asian American, Latinx, and Black neighbors, especially elderly ones, talk about the need for laundry in their buildings and the neighborhood’s largest concentration of public housing in the country, he changed his mind. He decided to withdraw his proposal for his daughter’s school and instead help his neighbors advance their proposals.

    Through exchanges such as these, communities around New York have used PB to articulate and reprioritize funding allocations. An analysis by Carolin Hagelskamp, Rebecca Silliman, Erin Godfrey, and David Schleifer shows that from 2009 to 2018, capital spending in districts with PB were markedly different from those without. Schools and public housing, for instance, received more funding, while parks and housing preservation received less.

    Whereas electoral politics typically engage the “usual suspects”—higher-income, older constituents—PB engages traditionally marginalized constituents, including youth, formerly incarcerated constituents, and undocumented immigrants. The first citywide rulebook dictated that anyone over sixteen who lives, works, attends school, or is the parent of a student in a district could participate in neighborhood assemblies and project-vetting, and residents over eighteen, including undocumented immigrants, could vote on the allocations. Enthusiastic and strikingly fruitful youth participation in neighborhood assemblies then convinced adults to lower the PB voting age to sixteen and the participation age to fourteen in 2012. The voting age has been lowered almost every subsequent year, now standing at age eleven.

    Research coordinated by the Community Development Project shows that nearly one-quarter of people who voted in NYC’s PB process were not eligible to do so in typical elections. Carolina Johnson, H. Jacob Carlson, and Sonya Reynolds found that PB participants were 8.4 percent more likely to vote than those who had not participated in the process; the effects are even greater for those who have lower probabilities of voting, such as low-income and Black voters.

    Indeed, participants repeatedly stated that the PB process allowed them to engage in discussions with neighbors they otherwise wouldn’t have met, the proverbial “other” in deliberations. They emphasized PB’s deliberative nature, its encouragement to exchange ideas and compromise. This differs from electoral politics, even for those already politically active. For one participant, the combination of working with others unlike herself and working toward binding budgetary decisions gave the PB process a sense of impact lacking in her usual civic engagement.

    My interviews with PB participants revealed the potential for alliances between groups of residents and organizations who might usually lobby for funds independently. They spoke to how the PB deliberations allowed them to emphasize more than one aspect of their lives and identities—for example, as African Americans, Harlemites, parents, public housing residents, or sports fans—and emphasize issues of intersectionality, rather than a single identity of race, gender, or other social axes. More than one interviewee stated that, like the Upper West Side resident, they ended up backing projects they would not have otherwise thought of or supported.

    PB thus serves as a necessary, though incomplete, node in a larger ecosystem of participation and mobilization for budget justice. I highlight three takeaways:

    First, PB must be expanded and deepened beyond its current design. The East Harlem exchange previously described could not have transpired even two years later, after City Council lines were redrawn in New York (East Harlem was zoned to be in the same district as lower-income South Bronx neighborhoods, rather than higher-income Upper West Side ones). That district’s PB process thus lost much of its redistributive potential. Unless the funds and scopes of projects are substantially expanded, PB remains the exception to how municipal budgeting usually works: a way for constituents to voice concerns, let off steam, and see some of their ideas come to fruition while most of the budget remains opaque and predetermined. (In the 2019-2020 cycle, New York City Councilmembers devoted over $35 million to the PB process. That year, the city’s budget totaled $96 billion dollars.)

    Second, by focusing exclusively on the invest side of the equation, PB will remain incomplete. It thus risks propagating the myth that the problem is a scarcity of funds, rather than austerity as a policy. PB in the United States is not consistently tied to explicit questions of funds’ origins; eligible funds are often those deemed easy, limited, regressive, or discretionary. In Vallejo, California, the citywide PB process allocates proceeds from a sales tax. Other PB funds have come from Community Development Block Grants. In other places, community groups have campaigned for PB processes to allocate the proceeds of court cases where firms had to pay hefty damages. In New York current PB funds come from City Councilmembers’ discretionary budgets; when the pandemic hit, all but a few paused their PB processes. In 2018 a referendum to change the City Charter and establish a mayor coordinated PB process was approved by a landslide, but Mayor de Blasio failed to adequately fund it. PB must be tied to larger policy campaigns, individual projects (as with Seattle’s Solidarity Budget), progressive tax policies, and divestments and investments.

    Third, PB deliberations were profoundly shaped by micropolitics, namely how participants related to each other and to civil servants and city bureaucrats, as well as whose arguments and proposals were deemed credible. PB deliberations could perpetuate existing inequalities without attention to epistemic justice—actively questioning what bodies of knowledge are counted as rational, true, and valuable and who is seen as an expert. In PB this concerns how city bureaucrats sideline local knowledge in favor of technical knowledge. In issues related to budget justice, someone with lived experience should be considered an expert on their own environments as much as someone who has crunched quantitative policy analyses or studied the law. Without attention to epistemic justice, technical experts can reject project ideas with significant community support.

    These are not simply quibbles about institutional design, but about power. On whose terms and to what ends is PB carried out? These are questions of quality as well as size and scope.

    Even if the entire New York City budget were subject to a participatory process, to what extent does the process enable constituents to forward project proposals that combat dominant discourses on what New York needs? To be sure, the city government’s budgeting becoming more transparent does not render it liberatory. In particular, the prevalence of surveillance cameras among New York City PB projects, especially in public housing, highlights PB’s limited power in contesting racist logics of austerity. Thus far, these surveillance camera projects have won funding every year.

    These PB projects prompted debates in neighborhoods with changing demographics, deep inequalities, and new real estate developments—in other words, vulnerability to hyper-gentrification and displacement. Long-term residents felt that the surveillance cameras were yet another sign that they were being pushed out and local budgets were being used to make newer, wealthier residents feel safe and welcome. Many residents believe that new residents—less likely to be Black or Brown—voted for these surveillance cameras operated by the New York Police Department.

    But participants of color also advocated for surveillance cameras. These proponents reported that they did so because their visions of community safety included greater police accountability and economic support as well as surveillance. In their proposals, it was crucial to include both bottom-up accountability and access to the video footage captured by cameras. PB should allow constituents to shape both what programs are administered and how. Interviews suggested that the more robust, nuanced proposals had been dismissed, whittled down, abandoned, or improperly implemented during the PB process.

    By contrast, when implemented well, PB can help communities articulate proposals that tend to everyone’s safety. In one Brooklyn district, local participants reached out to members of historically sidelined communities and translated proposals into formal, technical language deemed “proper” by city bureaucrats. They also convinced their local Councilmember to make more creative proposals—with no current precedent in the existing city budgets—eligible to receive PB funds. When hate crimes rose after the 2016 election, innovative projects funded through PB in this district included bystander/ “upstander” training for residents to safely intervene when they witness harassment or violence. Residents also voted to fund self-defense workshops by and for Bangladeshi and Muslim women.

    This stands in contrast to the national and ostensibly progressive responses to anti-Asian violence. The March 2021 shootings in Atlanta spas prompted Congress to pass the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act with rare, bipartisan support. However, the Act solely serves to allot more grant money to law enforcement agencies nationwide. In May President Biden signed it into law and deemed it a triumph against hate. This differs greatly from how members of affected communities would go about implementing change.

    PB entails tough conversations on the intersection between policing and gentrification, the availability of health and employment services, and how community safety policies should be executed and implemented. In this case of rising anti-Asian violence, it also entails conversations on whether additional policing would actually prevent individual acts of hate or address the white supremacy and austerity that sow systemic violence. The sorts of conversations that yielded the Muslim women’s self-defense workshops in Brooklyn, for example, also touched on histories of anti-Black urban policies, the War on Terror and anti-Asian xenophobia, and contradictions in popular discourse about Asian Americans as both model minorities and “foreigners.” Face-to-face dialogue and brainstorming help neighbors assist one another in concrete ways and articulate new roles based on solidarity, without fomenting racial resentments or hierarchies of oppression.

    The questions raised in PB deliberations prompt fraught conversations on race and class. Native-born, white residents report higher incomes than other residents. Moreover, higher-income, higher-educated residents may have the social networks and legal skills to navigate bureaucratic regulations more easily in municipal budgeting. Race continues to serve, as Stuart Hall put it, as a fundamental “modality in which class is lived. It is also the medium in which class relations are experienced.”

    Despite significant limitations, we know that PB is doing something in New York—if only because some city officials work so hard to contain it. Indeed, the most impressive and important impacts of New York’s PB process have not been the winning projects themselves. Rather, they lie in PB’s spillover effects and the changes prompted by the process itself.

    For example, from 2011 to 2013, parents and students were upset about putting PB discretionary funds toward school bathroom stalls, which felt like a basic need. The PB process mobilized them around this issue; in 2014, the Department of Education doubled its allocation for school bathrooms explicitly because of PB. By 2018 PBNYC had also sparked over $180 million in additional spending on specific, community-articulated priorities, such as air conditioning and bathroom repairs in schools. In another example, a former parent-teaching association (PTA) president angered by her wealthy school’s aggressive campaign in the local PB process led her to create a new organization explicitly aimed at helping PTAs at lower-income schools access funding.

    PB helps set new precedents for both spending priorities and how city agencies operate, and it helps to change residents’ expectations for city policymaking. For example, in addition to spending its budget differently, the Parks Department’s experiences with PB led it to design new websites to make it easier for residents to track its expenditures, including not-yet-implemented ones.

    When—as in the school bathrooms and PTA cases above—PB’s limits leave participants frustrated, indignant, and angry, the process has also trained constituents to want, demand, and fight for more. PB can hence serve as site for politicization. One participant, for instance, had never worked on a community issue before; she built upon her PB experiences to become a member of her public housing tenants’ union and then a tenant organizer, winning significant concessions for her housing project.

    PB can thus contribute to budget justice when it is tied to mobilization and ecologies of care. Indeed, many of the New Yorkers now active in mutual aid efforts during the pandemic became adept at non-hierarchical organizing and decision-making through PB, and several of the more recent PB projects funded during the pandemic, such as diaper distribution centers throughout Brooklyn, build upon mutual aid networks. Communities can only achieve budget justice if we combine seemingly disparate forms of resistance and care in strategic ways with a clear eye to the future. In so doing, we conceptualize democracy not as a set of institutions, but a set of practices and situated solidarities.

    https://bostonreview.net/articles/budgeting-justice/#

    #villes #budget #justice #budget_participatif #démocratie #TRUST #Master_TRUST #budget_public #aménagement_urbain #urbanisme #justice_budgétaire

  • Treize Minutes Marseille - Frédéric Audard Transport : et si la solution venait des Suds ? - YouTube
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXijWG62YyE

    Treize Minutes Marseille⏱️ Découvrez ces conférences pluridisciplinaires nerveuses, et sympathiques qui donnent treize minutes à six chercheurs pour raconter leurs recherches et entraîner le public dans un butinage intellectuel et convivial. Allant des sciences humaines et sociales aux sciences expérimentales et dans un décor créé pour l’occasion, ces petites conférences s’adressent à tous.

  • MORTAL CITIES. Forgotten Monuments

    A revealing study of the effect of war damage on inhabitants of a city and on the potential of architecture and urban design to reconcile people with the loss of urban structure and cultural symbols.

    As a child, architect #Arna_Mačkić experienced firsthand the Bosnian civil war, and with her family she fled her native country for the Netherlands. In 1999, she was able to visit Bosnia and the city of #Mostar again for the first time to witness the utter devastation - the war had left seventy percent of the buildings destroyed. This experience inspired Mačkić’s research to explore the emotional effects of war damage on a city’s inhabitants and the possibilities for rebuilding collective and inclusive identities through architecture.

    The book Mortal Cities and Forgotten Monuments tells a moving story of architecture and history. The first two parts of the book provide historical background on the war in Bosnia and its relationship to the built environment of the region. The final section demonstrates Mačkić’s ideas for architectural interventions, applying a new design language that goes beyond political, religious, or cultural interpretations - an openness that allows it avoid tensions and claims of truth without ignoring or denying the past. Using this as a foundation, she proposes designs for urban and public space that are simultaneously rooted in ancient traditions while looking toward the future.

    https://www.naibooksellers.nl/mortal-cities-and-forgotten-monuments-arna-mackic.html

    #livre #ruines #villes #urban_matter #géographie_urbaine #mémoire #guerre #Arna_Mackic #Mackic #Bosnie #architecture #identité #histoire

    via @cede

  • Les enjeux de l’alimentation en eau potable des villes

    Mathilde Resch et Émilie Lavie
    Les enjeux de l’alimentation en eau potable des villes
    Introduction
    Issues associated with drinking water supply in cities
    Introduction
    –-
    Sandrine Petit, Marie-Hélène Vergote et Emmanuel Dumont
    #Dijon, « ville sur la Saône ». Frontières urbaines, #réseaux_d’eau_potable et territoires de la #ressource en eau

    –-

    Sébastien Hardy et Jérémy Robert
    Entre grand système et #alternatives d’#approvisionnement en eau à #Lima et  #La_Paz
    –-

    Ismaël Maazaz
    Hydraulic bricolages : coexisting water supply and access regimes in #N’Djamena, #Chad
    –-

    Xavier May, Pauline Bacquaert, Jean-Michel Decroly, Léa de Guiran, Chloé Deligne, Pierre Lannoy et Valentina Marziali
    Formes, facteurs et importance de la #vulnérabilité_hydrique dans une métropole européenne. Le cas de #Bruxelles

    –-

    Angela Osorio
    La #gestion_communautaire de l’eau dans les #páramos de #Bogota (#Colombie). Le cas du réseau #Piedra_Parada y #Cerrito_blanco

    –-

    Audrey Vincent et Philippe Fleury
    Reconquérir la #qualité de l’eau potable par le développement de l’#agriculture_biologique et de systèmes alimentaires dédiés. Le cas de la #vallée_de_la_Vanne et de la ville de #Paris

    https://journals.openedition.org/echogeo/22090
    #revue #eau #eau_potable #villes #alimentation #urban_matter #géographie_urbaine #TRUST #master_TRUST

  • Manifeste pour une ville accueillante
    https://metropolitiques.eu/Manifeste-pour-une-ville-accueillante.html

    En plaçant l’hospitalité au centre de sa réflexion, l’architecte Chantal Deckmyn propose un riche manuel sur l’espace public contemporain. L’auteure interroge les conditions d’un réenchantement de l’urbain, s’inscrivant ainsi dans une longue généalogie de manifestes pour la ville. Avec Lire la ville, l’architecte Chantal Deckmyn entend aborder de front la manière dont l’urbain contemporain se rend hostile aux populations les plus fragiles : « Pour ceux qui n’ont pas de maison et sont de fait enfermés #Commentaires

    / #espace_public, hospitalité, #sans-abri, urbanité, #rue

    #hospitalité #urbanité
    https://metropolitiques.eu/IMG/pdf/met-fe_riel4.pdf

  • #Jardins_ouvriers d’#Aubervilliers : quelle place pour la #nature_en_ville ?

    Une partie des jardins ouvriers des #Vertus à Aubervilliers doit être sacrifiée à des projets d’#aménagement_urbain en vue des JO de 2024. Comment l’expliquer, alors que les pouvoirs publics disent par ailleurs lutter contre la #bétonisation et l’#artificialisation_des_sols ?

    https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/sous-les-radars/jardins-ouvriers-d-aubervilliers-quelle-place-pour-la-nature-en-ville


    #JAD #nature #villes #urban_matter #Grand_Paris #JO #jeux_olympiques
    #podcast #audio
    #TRUST #master_trust

  • Barcelona Will Supersize its Car-Free ‘#Superblocks’

    Since the Spanish city of Barcelona introduced its first “superblock” in 2016, the concept of carving out islands of car-free space by routing traffic around multi-block areas has been influential in cities around the world. Now the Catalan capital plans a major super-sizing of the idea: Over the next decade, Barcelona will convert its entire central grid into a greener, pedestrian-friendly area almost totally cleared of cars.

    At a press conference Wednesday, Mayor Ada Colau announced that 21 streets in Barcelona’s Eixample district will become a kind of super-superblock — vehicle traffic will only be permitted around the perimeter, leaving streets within the district only accessible by motor vehicle to residents, essential services or deliveries. By all-but-barring cars, Barcelona will free up space for 21 new pedestrian plazas at intersections.

    These squares and streets will be planted with trees that will shade 6.6 hectares (16 acres) of new green space when mature, in a zone that will contain an extra 33.4 hectares of pedestrian space. With work beginning in 2022 to a budget of 38 million euros ($45 million), the plan represents one of the most thorough revamps of a major European city so far this century. It is an attempt, Mayor Colau said in a statement, to “think of the new city for the present and the future — with less pollution, new mobility and new public space.”

    The new district is an order of magnitude larger than the first Superilla (“Super-island” in Catalan) in the district of Poblenou. Taking over nine city blocks, the 2016 redesign banished through-traffic to streets on its border. Within the block, car lanes were narrowed, and vehicles that still made it inside were required to give way to pedestrians and restricted to a maximum speed of 10 kilometers per hour. A further six superblocks have since been introduced. The city has long expressed an aspiration (albeit without a fixed end date) to ultimately transform its entire surface area with superblocks — this week’s announcement is the largest step towards that goal to date.

    In a city of few parks and extreme population density, the superblocks have proved to be an effective way to free up street space for other uses, including new squares, public seating areas and tree-lined green avenues. But they have also faced resistance from motorists, who in the past have organized demonstrations to protest the car restrictions.

    Those objections may re-emerge given the scale of the new superblock announced Wednesday, which covers one of the densest sections of the city. So large the city is referring to it as the “Barcelona superblock,” the project will probably prove more difficult to implement than those installed in quieter areas. While bustling parts of the city have been given the superblock treatment before — the current plan will extend from a smaller existing superblock around the Sant Antoni covered market — they have never extended for as great a distance as the new zone. The city is thus proposing a staggered introduction, one that starts by redesigning intersections along a single east-west axis and extends gradually across the neighborhood.

    The plan kicks off with a public competition to create four new plazas along a main artery in the area — the Carrer del Consell de Cent — which is being revamped, along with three intersecting streets. From these four streets, the superblock will gradually march across the district until all 21 streets have been remodeled by 2030.

    This is a process made somewhat easier by the connecting street in question having already been partly redesigned to permit more social distancing during the pandemic. Indeed, while the superblock expansion is not being framed by the city as a response provoked by Covid-19, the widespread adoption of remote work during the pandemic and the partial emptying of business districts has provided an opportunity to call for a reset to the ways urban space is used, and by whom, when the crowds return.

    The exact design of these streets will be chosen from a public competition in May 2021, but the city has already created some tight specifications: At least 80% of the street should be shaded by trees in summer, while at least 20% of surfacing should be permeable, and half of this total planted with grass, to allow the ground to soak up rainwater and improve flood resilience. Priority should be given to creating safe spaces for children and older people, while all public areas need to be equipped with drinking fountains.

    While the upheaval involved in the project — and the ultimate extension of the superblock model across all Barcelona — could be considerable, so is the public health payoff. The city believes it could free up 70% of its current road space for active travel and recreation space if it reaches its aspiration of covering its whole surface area in superblocks, slashing air pollution, carbon emissions and noise pollution in the process. Expanded tree cover could also reduce summer temperatures. According to a 2019 study published in the journal Environment International, a full realization of the city’s 503-block plan could prevent 667 premature deaths per year.

    That transformation is still years off, but the announcement of the new super-superblock suggests that the city is well on its way.

    The Catalan capital’s celebrated pedestrian-first zones are expanding to cover most of the city center, Mayor Ada Colau announced.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-11/barcelona-s-new-car-free-superblock-will-be-big
    #piétons #Barcelone #urbanisme #trafic #villes #urban_matter #car-free #Eixample #Superilla #îlots
    #TRUST #master_TRUST

  • From Form‑Trans‑Inform to Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée. A Discussion with Doina Petrescu and Constantin Petcou
    Zeppelin
    https://e-zeppelin.ro/en/from-form%e2%80%91trans%e2%80%91inform-to-atelier-darchitecture-autogeree

    Summer 2021

    Interview: Alex Axinte

    Co-founded by Constan­tin Petcou and Doina Petrescu, atelier d’architecture autogérée (aaa) is “a collective platform of research and action around urban change and emerging cultural, social and political practices in the contemporary city. aaa initiates and supports strategies of ecological transition involving citizen locally and internationally. aaa acts against global crisis (ecological, economic, political, social, etc) by creating the conditions for citizen to participate in the ecological transition and adopting resilient ways of living. aaa functions within an open interdisciplinary network, where different viewpoints cross each other: architects, artists, students, researchers, pensioners, politicians, activists, residents, etc.

    aaa is an international reference in the field of participative architecture and urban resilience, aaa’s projects have been exhibited at Venise Biennale 2012 and 2016, MoMA New York, Berlin Biennale, Pavilion d’Arsenal Paris, Untied Nation Pavilion Geneva, etc. For its activity, aaa has received international recogni­tion and numerous awards across the years including the International Resilient Award Building for Humanity (2018), The Innovation in Politics Award for Ecology (2017) being one of the “100 projects for the climate” selected by the public at COP21 (2015). (Alex Axinte)

    The passages bellow are extracted from a series of conversations I had during several days with Doina Petrescu and Constantin Petcou. At their studio, at home, in cafes and metros or visiting their projects located in different Paris suburbs, we spoke about their beginnings in Romania, about their current practice atelier d’architecture autogérée (aaa) and about future plans. While still in school, within the social and political context of 1980’s Romania, they were involved in initiating groups and networks, they engaged in experiment and innovation, building after graduation an alternative practice through a critically approach of architecture.

    Visiting aaa. Drawing by Alex Axinte

    Alex Axinte: Let’s start from the time when you were professionally and humanly trained in Romania within the socialist education system of that time. Has this contributed to what your practice became?

    Doina Petrescu: Certainly it was a seed there, which wasn’t enough by itself, but it was important because this prepared us to face practical situations, knowing everything that a traditional architect should know. And this thing was a solid base, for knowing how to build, knowing about materials, knowing about structure, knowing history, you can see now that this is not taught in schools anymore, that these became specializations, you specialize in such things. We learned them all. And somehow this general formation counted a solid base, as a foundation. On top of this you can add other more sophisticated things, you may try to position yourself, you can take a stand, and you can develop certain interests. So this was one of the good things. Other good thing from the school, not necessarily different from the school, but one that we took or created in the school, was some sort of parallel school, of which Constantin can say more because he initiated it, adding the fact that the school allowed us the freedom to do other things.

    Constantin Petcou: I did two interesting things in school: first is that I walked a lot through Bucharest and I took the street as a teacher. I had also good teachers, but I studied a lot vernacular architecture. And second is that I initiated a group, a sort of school in school, which was called Form-Trans-Inform and which was based on knowledge theory, and other theories as well. [Stratford H, Petrescu D & Petcou C (2008) Form-Trans-Inform: the ‘poetic’ resistance in architecture. arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, 12(02)] Basically it was a transdisciplinary group: there were students from scenography, we had interactions with others too, we also organized some events in Club A, we invited philosophes, art critiques, until they spotted me and wanted me to enrol in the party…

    “Inner Gesture“ – happening, Baneasa 1982, team: Constantin Petcou, Constantin Gorcea, Florin Neagoe, Lavinia Marșu, Doru Deacu, Sorin Vatamaniuc, Constantin Fagețean ©Form-Trans-Inform

    AA: What vernacular Bucharest meant?

    CP: It meant some fabulous neighbourhoods, because many they were self-constructed, this being usual in mahalas (ie. popular neighbourhoods). The inhabitants were partly self-sufficient: they were already controlling the household climate, having a lot of courtyards covered with vine, they were trying to produce energy, and there were quite a lot of wind mills, they were trying to produce food by raising pigeons in big cages , which were flying all around… It was like in Garcia Marquez. If you were really sensitive to space and wind and light, you were blown away by how much you could see and feel…

    AA: Is this something that you were looking for also in Paris, or you rather came with this type of looking from Bucharest?

    CP: In Paris you don’t have such a thing. I think it was a root that we came from there.

    DP: Yes, and we applied this later in projects like R-Urban and other projects which we developed later. It was a lesson we have learned, we have understood from those conditions. Also, we still kept having this sensibility to “read” spaces’ potentiality. For example you see a square and some trees: you realise that there is a place there with a certain urban quality and in Bucharest there were many such places with very special qualities due to the urban typologies and ways of living. This mahala type of living was actually a sensitive urban typology.

    Constantin rises on his tops and waters the plants hanging from the studio’s ceiling. We flip through black and white magazines in which there were published some of their projects receiving prizes in paper architecture competitions. They tell me about how they became involved in organizing exhibitions, about working with clothing, about publications which didn’t make it past the 1st issue and where many articles finished with ‘to be continued’. Than, they continued with their architect’s life in Romania before ’89: Doina working in sistematizare (state planning) and Constantin as ‘mister Design’ in a factory of clothing and shoes. Here, with found materials, they worked together for redesigning an office space as a sort of ‘participative deconstructivist’ manifesto, quite provocative at the time. Doina goes out in the courtyard and ransacks bended over some compost containers. Here are their pets, some big earthworms which just received banana peels as their favourite meal. After ’90 they left for Paris guided by the idea to continue their postgraduate studies and than to come back.

    “Catarg towards Ithaca“ –“Honorable mention“ at Shinkenchiku Residential Competition, Japan, 1986. Echipa de proiect/Project team: Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu, Mircea Stefan, Victor Badea

    *The Design section atelier – Valceana Leather Factory, 1988. Project team : Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu ©ConstantinPetcou

    AA: It is a fairly quite spread perception, that architecture is architecture and politics is politics. We are doing our job, we design, we build. If this supports an ideology or not, this is not architecture’s business. How architecture became for you a political acting?

    DP: I think that in a way it was the context that forced us when we started. We started from scratch. And we had to invent ways of negotiating to gain access to space, to gain access to ways of practicing architecture, and we quickly realized that such a negotiation is political and that actually you need to learn to speak with people caring political responsibilities. But at the same time, we realized that the very fact of asking, of doing the practice differently is a political act. There were some things we refused to do, such as the conventional capitalist practice. We wanted to facilitate the inhabitants’ access to space, for any city inhabitant, we wanted to open urban spaces that are closed and that are controlled either by the municipalities or other institutions, and this is already a political act. We managed to ensure access to space, and afterwards, slowly, the self-management of the space, which was also a process, by persuading people that they have to become responsible if they want to use the space, that they need to learn how to manage it, to get along, to organize. This is in fact what Deleuze and Guatarri are calling micro-politics, meaning politics at the level of the subject, transformations at the subjective level. [Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (2004), Anti-Oedipus, London: Continuum] We always worked with people. Our architecture always included this subjective and social architecture into the project. The fact that we formed a social group around the project, that people have changed, that they changed their interest, all these are for us part of architecture.

    AA: Do you tend towards consensus in your projects?

    CP: We don’t really use the word consensus. It is about temporary equilibrium. In any such a project, as there are many people involved, and here we speak about governance, co-management and self-management, there are various interests, there are people with different cultural backgrounds – some are employed, others not -­ and people with more or less time. So they cannot have the same vision over the use of space, over the type of activities, and then you need to reach some agreements, some temporary, partial deals, which should not suffocate the others and allow others to emerge. What we do is to give the inhabitants the opportunity to appropriate a space, an equipment, a way of organising time together, of organising the neighbourhood’s life, which are ecological, solidary, all this obviously with some guidance. Because the majority of inhabitants of the banlieue are very much excluded. And we are offering them an emancipatory space, or, in Guatarri’s language, a re-subjectivation capacity, very useful in today’s society which excludes many. [F. Guattari (1977), La révolution Moléculaire, Paris: ed. Recherches] In such spaces they gain new qualities; someone is a gardener, someone else takes care of the chickens, somebody else of the compost, one of the kitchen…

    DP: This is actualy the micro-politics.

    CP: Including until the kids’ level. I remember when we were at the Ecobox I had a lot of keys and a kid asked me, mais Constantin, you have keys from every space in the neighbourhood?! Can you open any space? And obviously that I answered yes, because, for his imaginary it was very important to know that you can open spaces, that you can make this urban space to evolve, which has become now more and more expensive, inaccessible and segregated. Such imaginary is fundamental for the “right to the city”, it is to know that, even for a kid, space could be negotiable, accessible and welcoming, that there are no barriers and walls. Actually, we don’t make walls: we make doors, windows, bridges… this is the kind of things we are building.

    Steering to the passers-by, Doina recollects her diploma project for which she collaborated with an ethnologist to design something which today could be called an ethnological cultural hub. Once arrived in Paris, after a master, they began teaching, being among others the co-founders of Paris-Malaquais architecture school. Step by step, they began to act as citizens, teachers and architects in the neighbourhood where they were living: La Chapelle. This is how aaa started. In the same time, they kept on teaching and initiating projects also in Romania, in Brezoi, but which got stuck. Constantin starts the fire in a small godin in the Agrocite, located in southern Paris, at Bagneux, which is a sort of ecological prototype spatializing aaa’s concepts: short circuits, popular ecology, urban resilience.

    Mobile modules – EcoBox project, 2003. Project team: Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu, Denis Favret, Giovanni Piovene ©aaa

    *Eco interstice “Passage 56“ – street view, 2007, Project team: Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu, Raimund Binder, Sandra Pauquet, Nolwenn Marchand ©aaa

    AA: 100 years after Bauhaus, 50 years after the May ’68 revolt and 30 years after the fall of the Berlin wall, within the current global capitalism crisis, all Bauhaus’ principles of how to live and work together are becoming again relevant. In this context, how legitimate is still Bauhaus’s questions if design can change society, and what it means to be modern today?

    DP: So all these ideas are reaching some sort of anniversary and one needs to take them together, one cannot take only Bauhaus ideas, but also other ideas which came after in order to understand what can design do today: participation, global democracy, ecology. Design need to remain open, as Ezio Manzini was saying: ‘design when everybody designs’. There is an acknowledgement of the fact that we are all designing, in our own way, we design our life, we design our decisions. How can you put all those things together in a strategic way, at a moment when the society and the humanity need to take some decisions, need to be prepared for a civilizational change, otherwise we become extinct? I think design has a role in this, by helping, by mediating, by formulating questions, decisions, or solutions together. And how to do design together is the big question, and there is not only one way of doing it, there are many ways. We also need to imagine what are these places where ways of designing together are possible. Which are the new institutions, the new mediating agents? – all these seem to me to be the questions of our times.

    Constantin confesses that Bauhaus changed his life, when, after an exhibition, improbable for that time, where 1:1 modernist furniture was exhibited, he quits the arts high school in Iași and joined the architecture school.

    CP: I am sure that design has an immense capacity to change society until even distorting it (see the tablet, the iPhone…). As architects, we are working a lot in a broader sense of design, and that’s why we are trying to launch not just projects, but also movements like One Planet Site or R-Urban which can be adopted also by others, because we have the capacity and the responsibility, so you have the capacity, but you have also the responsibility to act. It’s like a doctor. If you are in a plane and someone is sick, you have the capacity and responsibility to act. This is the case for us architects: we acted here in the neighbourhood we are living because there were many difficulties. The planet is now in great difficulty and you need to act. We know how to design, to project into the future, to find money, to create a horizon of hope, a model which becomes interesting for others too, so we have this capacity to design, in a broader sense, complex, temporal and functional. All these including re-balancing how much technology, how many resources, how much mutualisation, how much governance, all these are in fact design.

    DP: For example, with R-Urban we proposed a resilience strategy as designers. We have used design and the organization and shaping of space, of making visible specific practices, as a catalyst. We succeed in a way to organize a social group around the project, by giving it also a political dimension, again, by using architecture’s capacity to make visible, to make real the idea of short circuits for example. People could finally see what happens if you collect rain water, where it goes, that you have to think differently about space to make passive heating, and that you need to think differently about the heating system if you want to reduce the fuel consumption. That by using space in a certain way, in 1 year time you will have this amount of reduction of carbon emissions, which is much better than the national rate. So, all these things can be made visible through the way you design their experience. We didn’t just design a building, or a site, but we designed a usage and a way of creating an activity there.

    “ R-Urban “ – Diagrams on the ecological transition principles 2008. Echipa de proiect/Project team: Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu cu Nolwenn Marchand, Sara Carlini, Clémence Kempnich ©aaa

    ““Agrocité”—micro-farm for urban agriculture and ecological training, Colombes, 2013-2014

    “Recyclab”—social economy hub, urban waste recycling and eco-design, Colombes, 2013. Project team: Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu, Clémence Kempnich

    “Agrocité”—micro-farm for urban agriculture and ecological training, Bagneux, 2019. Project team: Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu, Anna Laura Bourguignon, Alex Gaiser, Rémi Buscot, Juliette Hennequin

    AA: So you could say that this means modernity now?

    DP: The concept of modernity is very much contested in fact, but in a way you could say that this means a hope for the future.

    CP: Modernity I think it had the quality of promoting progress, a democratic progress for all, through small prices, standardization, through in fact what they knew back then. And I think that these ideals remain somehow valid. Such as fablabs are in a way a continuity of this progressive modernist ideal of making accessible and democratic the use to technology. And it’s good. But the problem is the excess. When standardization becomes excessive and exploitative. I think modernity needs to be revisited, keeping what is good, like democracy, ethics, progress and others, and readapting it. Because modernity couldn’t address at that time the problems of limited resources issues, climate change, extractive capitalism, or extinction of species; those problems weren’t visible back than.

    AA: What is the relation with technology in your projects?

    DP: We document and present all our technological devices with an interface accessible to the users and we make them with means that makes them transferable and reproducible. I think we need to take into account the democratization of technology and the fact that the reproduction is not made by the industry, but by the masses, everyone being able to take part. What is important is to keep a degree of creativity, of appropriateness, of participative innovation possible at all levels. All these technological devices were conceived together with experts. The grey water filtration system was made together with a specialist in phyto-remediation. What we brought new is that we designed the first prototype used in urban contexts. This approach is also situated, is specific for a certain situation, you work with the specialist to find the solution there, and afterwards you integrate also local and traditional knowledge. For example, for the phyto-remediation device it was very cool that we built it with a team of Romanians having a construction company in France. Due to the fact we were in a flooding area, we needed to raise the device above the ground by 1 meter and we didn’t know how to build it. And then, the team of Romanians which knew how to make… barrels, manage with what we had, with found boards that were boarded like for barrels… and this is how we made the phyto-remediation device. This shows that all skills and ways of knowledge are useful in a certain situation.

    They choose together the tomatoes, than Doina the aubergines and Constantin the potatoes from a temporary market installed in the Paris former mortuary house. This is now a cultural centre, open to everyone and full of life. Recently they participated in the biggest architectural competition organized by the city of Paris which offered some difficult sites for development – “Reinventer Pars”. The brief was very close to the R-Urban model. They haven’t officially won, but their proposal was very good and this is how they were able to develop it in a different location. The project is called Wiki Village Factory (VWF) and is a cluster of technological and social innovation of 7000 sqm which aims to become a sort of central node in the R-Urban network towards developing the city 2.0 (ecological and collaborative).

    “Wiki-Village-Factory” – cluster of social and ecological innovation, Paris, 2016. Project team: Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu, Benjamin Poignon, Pierre Marie Cornin, Grégoire Beaumont © aaa-REI-Deswarte

    AA: With WVF for example, how important is for you the materiality and the aesthetics? Or is the program more important?

    CP: Aesthetics for as is a result. You need to take care for the building to be well integrated in the context, you need to express well what’s going on. For example, the coop spaces are trying to make you to wish to collaborate with others; it’s not just like any other office. The ground floor, we try to have it open towards the neighbourhood, despite it is a difficult neighbourhood.

    DP: I would say that aesthetics are trying to express not necessary the programme, but what is important in the program and beyond the program. We are using architecture tactically if you want, as a way of exposing and communicating principles of functioning, of governance, of construction and the ethics of using a building today.

    CP: We are exposing the ecology of the building in fact, and this is beyond function. In order to become more ecologic. This is to make you use fewer materials, less insulation, but count on the passive insulation of the building’ skin. We also succeeded in convincing them to have dry toilets. This will be the largest building with dry toilets in Europe. We will build a special device, like a large scale prototype, which doesn’t exist right now. In fact, although they are on a tight budget, they will put more money into this than into usual toilets, because also the developer and everybody want this aspect to be exemplary. And it will be quite vegetal, with urban agriculture; we will try to remediate the grey waters. All the principles that we are using in R-Urban hubs will be implementing as much as we can also here.

    AA: So, the city 2.0 should look differently because it values and creates hierarchies in a different way?

    DP: Yes, it is important to create a new discourse, but also governance is important, social and ecological governance, that is what we try to express through architecture. There are many layers which add up to the modernist functional layer. And there is also the idea of being reversible, the fact that a building needs to evolve, to adapt, to disappear if necessary after a while, so it is not built to last hundreds of years. Because we need to leave room for future generations to build the architecture they need, don’t we?

    #ville #écologie #participation #auto_gestion #urban_planning

  • L’urbanisme écologique : un nouvel impératif ?
    https://metropolitiques.eu/L-urbanisme-ecologique-un-nouvel-imperatif.html

    L’extension rapide des surfaces urbanisées affecte la biodiversité, homogénéise les paysages et transforme les modes de vie en raréfiant les expériences sensibles des milieux naturels. Ce dossier explore les réponses que les concepteurs d’espaces urbains peuvent apporter aux urgences écologiques et politiques. ▼ Voir le sommaire du dossier ▼ À l’échelle mondiale et depuis trois décennies, les surfaces urbanisées gagnent en moyenne 110 km² par jour, soit environ la superficie de la ville de Paris. D’ici #Dossiers

    / #écologie, #urbanisme, biodiversité, #environnement, #architecture

    #biodiversité
    https://metropolitiques.eu/IMG/pdf/introduction_dossierurbanisme-ecologique.pdf

  • Data et nouvelles technologies, la face cachée du contrôle des mobilités

    Dans un rapport de juillet 2020, l’#Agence_européenne_pour_la_gestion_opérationnelle_des_systèmes_d’information_à_grande_échelle (#EU-Lisa) présente l’#intelligence_artificielle (#IA) comme l’une des « #technologies prioritaires » à développer. Le rapport souligne les avantages de l’IA en matière migratoire et aux frontières, grâce, entre autres, à la technologie de #reconnaissance_faciale.

    L’intelligence artificielle est de plus en plus privilégiée par les acteurs publics, les institutions de l’UE et les acteurs privés, mais aussi par le #HCR et l’#OIM. Les agences de l’UE, comme #Frontex ou EU-Lisa, ont été particulièrement actives dans l’expérimentation des nouvelles technologies, brouillant parfois la distinction entre essais et mise en oeuvre. En plus des outils traditionnels de #surveillance, une panoplie de technologies est désormais déployée aux frontières de l’Europe et au-delà, qu’il s’agisse de l’ajout de nouvelles #bases_de_données, de technologies financières innovantes, ou plus simplement de la récupération par les #GAFAM des données laissées volontairement ou pas par les migrant·e·s et réfugié∙e∙s durant le parcours migratoire.

    La pandémie #Covid-19 est arrivée à point nommé pour dynamiser les orientations déjà prises, en permettant de tester ou de généraliser des technologies utilisées pour le contrôle des mobilités sans que l’ensemble des droits des exilé·e·s ne soit pris en considération. L’OIM, par exemple, a mis à disposition des Etats sa #Matrice_de_suivi_des_déplacements (#DTM) durant cette période afin de contrôler les « flux migratoires ». De nouvelles technologies au service de vieilles obsessions…

    http://migreurop.org/article3021.html

    Pour télécharger la note :
    migreurop.org/IMG/pdf/note_12_fr.pdf

    #migrations #réfugiés #asile #frontières #mobilité #mobilités #données #technologie #nouvelles_technologies #coronavirus #covid #IOM
    #migreurop

    ping @etraces

    voir aussi :
    Migreurop | Data : la face cachée du contrôle des mobilités
    https://seenthis.net/messages/900232

    • European funds for African IDs: migration regulation tool or privacy risk?

      The first person you meet after you land at Blaise Diagne Airport in Dakar is a border guard with a digital scanner.

      The official will scan your travel document and photograph and take a digital print of your index fingers.

      It’s the most visible sign of the new state-of-the-art digital biometrics system that is being deployed in the airport with the help of EU funding.

      The aim is to combat the increasingly sophisticated fake passports sold by traffickers to refugees.

      But it also helps Senegal’s government learn more about its own citizens.

      And it’s not just here: countries across West Africa are adopting travel documentation that has long been familiar to Europeans.

      Passports, ID cards and visas are all becoming biometric, and a national enrolment scheme is underway.

      In Europe too, there are proposals to create a biometric database of over 400 million foreign nationals, including fingerprints and photographs of their faces.

      The new systems are part of efforts to battle illegal migration from West Africa to the EU.

      ‘Fool-proof’ EU passport online

      Many are still plying the dangerous route across the Sahara and the Mediterranean to reach Europe, but a growing number are turning to the criminal gangs selling forged passports to avoid the treacherous journey over desert and sea.

      There’s a burgeoning market in travel documents advertised as ‘fake but real”.

      Prices vary according to the paperwork: an EU Schengen transit visa costs €5,000, while a longer-stay visa can be twice as high.

      Some forgers have even mastered the ability to incorporate holograms and hack the biometric chips.

      “Morphing” is an image processing technique that merges two people’s photographs into a single new face that appears to contain entirely new biometric data.

      Frontex, the EU’s border guard agency, says 7,000 people were caught trying to enter the Schengen area in 2019 carrying such documents — but it admits the true figure could be much higher.

      Sending migrants back

      Last year, the largest number of travellers with fake documents arrived via Turkish and Moroccan international airports.

      Many were caught in Italy, having arrived via Casablanca from sub-Saharan countries like Ghana, Mali, Nigeria and Senegal.

      A Frontex team responsible for deporting migrants without the correct paperwork was deployed this year at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport.

      It’s the first sign of a new European Commission regulation expanding the agency’s role, which includes access to biometric data held by member states, according to Jane Kilpatrick, a researcher at the civil liberties think-tank Statewatch.

      “The agency’s growing role in the collection of data, it links overtly to the agency’s role in deporting individuals from the EU,” she said.

      Over 490,000 return decisions were issued by member states last year, but only a third were actually sent back to a country outside the EU.

      There are multiple reasons why: some countries, for example, refuse to accept responsibility for people whose identity documents were lost, destroyed or stolen.

      Legally binding readmission agreements are now in place between the EU and 18 other countries to make that process easier.
      There are no records

      But a bigger problem is the fact that many African countries know very little about their own citizens.

      The World Bank estimates the continent is home to roughly half of the estimated one billion people on the planet who are unable to prove their identities.

      An absence of digitisation means that dusty registers are piling up in storage rooms.

      The same goes for many borders: unlike the scene at Dakar’s airport, many are still without internet access, servers, scanners and cameras.

      That, the Commission says, is why EU aid funds are being used to develop biometric identity systems in West African countries.

      The EU Trust Fund for Africa has allotted €60 million to support governments in Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire in modernising their registry systems and creating a national biometric identity database.

      Much of the funding comes through Civipol, a consulting firm attached to France’s interior ministry and part-owned by Milipol, one of the most important arms trade fairs in the world.

      It describes the objective of the programme in Côte d’Ivoire as identifying “people genuinely of Ivorian nationality and organising their return more easily”.
      Data security concerns

      European sources told Euronews that the EU-funded projects in West Africa were not designed to identify potential migrants or deport existing ones.

      A Commission spokesperson insisted no European entity — neither Frontex, nor member states, nor their partners — had access to the databases set up by West African countries.

      But the systems they are funding are intimately connected to anti-migration initiatives.

      One is the Migrant Information and Data Analysis System (MIDAS), a migration database that can send automatic queries to Interpol watchlists to detect travel documents and people possibly linked to organised crime, including human trafficking.

      Connections like these, and the role of French arms giants like Thales in the growing biometric market, has led data protection experts to become worried about possible abuses of privacy.
      World’s newest biometric market

      As Africa becomes the coveted market for biometric identification providers, the watchdog Privacy International has warned it risks becoming a mere testing ground for technologies later deployed elsewhere.

      So far 24 countries on the continent out of 53 have adopted laws and regulations to protect personal data.

      A letter by Privacy International, seen by Euronews, says EU must “ensure they are protecting rights before proceeding with allocating resources and technologies which, in absence of proper oversight, will likely result in fundamental rights abuses.”

      It has published internal documents tracking the development of Senegal’s system that suggest no privacy or data protection impact assessments have been carried out.

      Civipol, the French partner, denies this: it told Euronews that the Senegalese Personal Data Commission took part in the programme and Senegalese law was respected at every stage.

      Yet members of Senegal’s independent Commission of Personal Data (CDP), which is responsible for ensuring personal data is processed correctly, admit implementation and enforcement remained a challenge — even though they are proud of their country’s pioneering role in data governance in Africa.

      For the Senegalese cyber activist Cheick Fall, the charge is more serious: “Senegal has sinned by entrusting the processing of these data to foreign companies.”

      https://www.euronews.com/2021/07/30/european-funds-for-african-ids-migration-regulation-tool-or-privacy-risk

      #biométrie #aéroport #Afrique #étrangers #base_de_données_biométrique #empreintes_digitales #passeports #visas #hologramme #Morphing #image #photographie #Frontex #EU_Trust_Fund_for_Africa #Trust_Fund #Civipol #Milipol #armes #commerce_d'armes #Côte_d’Ivoire #Afrique_de_l'Ouest #Migrant_Information_and_Data_Analysis_System (#MIDAS) #Interpol #Thales #Sénégal #Senegalese_Personal_Data_Commission #Commission_of_Personal_Data (#CDP)

    • EU Watchdog Finds Commission Failed to Protect Human Rights From its Surveillance Aid to African Countries

      The European #Ombudsman has found that the European Commission failed to take necessary measures to ensure the protection of human rights in the transfers of technology with potential surveillance capacity supported by its multi-billion #Emergency_Trust_Fund_for_Africa

      The decision by the EU’s oversight body follows a year-long inquiry prompted by complaints outlining how EU bodies and agencies are cooperating with governments around the world to increase their surveillance powers filed by Privacy International, Access Now, the Border Violence Monitoring Network, Homo Digitalis, International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), and Sea-Watch.

      The complainants welcome the decision by the European Ombudsman and call on the Commission to urgently review its support for surveillance in non-EU countries and to immediately implement the Ombudsman’s recommendations in their entirety. 

      The inquiry, which investigated the support of projects across Africa aimed at bolstering surveillance and tracking powers and involved extensive evidence-gathering from the Commission and complainants, found that “the Commission was not able to demonstrate that the measures in place ensured a coherent and structured approach to assessing the human rights impacts”.

      It recommends that the Commission now require that an “assessment of the potential human rights impact of projects be presented together with corresponding mitigation measures.” The lack of such protections, which the Ombudsman called a “serious shortcoming”, poses a clear risk that these surveillance transfer might cause serious violations of or interferences with other fundamental rights. 

       

      Ioannis Kouvakas, Senior Legal Officer at Privacy International, commenting on the decision:

      “This landmark decision in response to our complaint marks a turning point for the European Union’s external policy and sets a precedent that will hopefully protect the rights of communities in some of the most vulnerable situations for the years to come.”

      An FIDH Spokesperson said:

      “Indeed, this decision warns once again the European Commission about its failure to comply with its human rights obligations. The decision makes clear that the EU has to better develop its processes to effectively put the protection of human rights at core of the design and the implementation of its policies and external activities. All human rights and all activities are at stake.”

      Marwa Fatafta from Access Now said:

      “We welcome the Ombudsman’s decision which scrutinises the EU’s failure to protect and respect the human rights of people living off its shores. The EU’s ongoing surveillance transfers to authoritarian regimes in Africa and elsewhere cannot continue business as usual. We hope this decision will help hold the EU accountable to its values overseas, and protect the rights and freedoms of vulnerable communities from intrusive tracking and government surveillance.”

      Homo Digitalis said:

      “The shortcomings that the Ombudsman has identified prove that the Commission is not able to demonstrate that the measures in place ensure a coherent and structured approach to assessing the human rights impacts of #EUTFA projects. This is an important first step, but we need specific accountability mechanisms in place to address violations of rights and freedoms in EUTFA projects. This cannot be ensured via just some revised templates.”

      https://privacyinternational.org/press-release/4992/eu-watchdog-finds-commission-failed-protect-human-rights-its-s
      #EUTF_for_Africa

  • Mediterranean carcerality and acts of escape

    In recent years, migrants seeking refuge in Europe have faced capture and containment in the Mediterranean – the result of experimentation by EU institutions and member states.

    About two years ago, in June 2019, a group of 75 people found themselves stranded in the central Mediterranean Sea. The migrant group had tried to escape from Libya in order to reach Europe but was adrift at sea after running out of fuel. Monitored by European aerial assets, they saw a vessel on the horizon slowly moving toward them. When they were eventually rescued by the Maridive 601, an offshore supply vessel, they did not know that it would become their floating prison for nearly three weeks. Malta and Italy refused to allocate a port of safety in Europe, and, at first, the Tunisian authorities were equally unwilling to allow them to land.

    Over 19 days, the supply vessel turned from a floating refuge into an offshore carceral space in which the situation for the rescued deteriorated over time. Food and water were scarce, untreated injuries worsened, scabies spread, as did the desperation on board. The 75 people, among them 64 Bangladeshi migrants and dozens of minors, staged a protest on board, chanting: “We don’t need food, we don’t want to stay here, we want to go to Europe.”

    Reaching Europe, however, seemed increasingly unlikely, with Italy and Malta rejecting any responsibility for their disembarkation. Instead, the Tunisian authorities, the Bangladeshi embassy, and the #International_Organisation_for_Migration (#IOM) arranged not only their landing in Tunisia, but also the removal of most of them to their countries of origin. Shortly after disembarkation in the harbour of Zarzis, dozens of the migrants were taken to the runways of Tunis airport and flown out.

    In a recently published article in the journal Political Geography, I have traced the story of this particular migrant group and their zig-zagging trajectories that led many from remote Bangladeshi villages, via Dubai, Istanbul or Alexandria, to Libya, and eventually onto a supply vessel off the Tunisian coast. Although their situation was certainly unique, it also exemplified the ways in which the Mediterranean has turned into a ‘carceral seascape’, a space where people precariously on the move are to be captured and contained in order to prevent them from reaching European shores.

    While forms of migrant capture and containment have, of course, a much longer history in the European context, the past ten years have seen particularly dramatic transformations in the central Mediterranean Sea. When the Arab Uprisings ‘re-opened’ this maritime corridor in and after 2011, crossings started to increase significantly – about 156,000 people crossed to Europe on average every year between 2014 and 2017. Since then, crossings have dropped sharply. The annual average between 2018 and 2020 was around 25,000 people – a figure resembling annual arrivals in the period before the Arab Uprisings.

    One significant reason for this steep decrease in arrivals is the refoulement industry that EU institutions and member states have created, together with third-country allies. The capture of people seeking to escape to Europe has become a cruel trade, of which a range of actors profit. Although ‘refouling’ people on the move – thus returning them to places where they are at risk of facing torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment – violates international human rights laws and refugee conventions, these practices have become systemic and largely normalised, not least as the COVID pandemic has come to serve as a suitable justification to deter potential ‘Corona-spreaders’ and keep them contained elsewhere.

    That migrants face capture and containment in the Mediterranean is the result of years of experimentation on part of EU institutions and member states. Especially since 2018, Europe has largely withdrawn maritime assets from the deadliest areas but reinforced its aerial presence instead, including through the recent deployment of drones. In this way, European assets do not face the ‘risk’ of being forced into rescue operations any longer but can still monitor the sea from above and guide North African, in particular Libyan, speed boats to chase after escaping migrant boats. In consequence, tens of thousands have faced violent returns to places they sought to flee from.

    Just in 2021 alone, about 16,000 people have been caught at sea and forcibly returned to Libya in this way, already more than in the whole of 2020. In mid-June, a ‘push-back by proxy’ occurred, when the merchant vessel Vos Triton handed over 170 migrants to a Libyan coastguard vessel that then returned them to Tripoli, where they were imprisoned in a camp known for its horrendous conditions.

    The refoulment industry, and Mediterranean carcerality more generally, are underpinned by a constant flow of finances, technologies, equipment, discourses, and know-how, which entangles European and Libyan actors to a degree that it might make more sense to think of them as a collective Euro-Libyan border force.

    To legitimise war-torn and politically divided Libya as a ‘competent’ sovereign actor, able to govern the maritime expanse outside its territorial waters, the European Commission funded, and the Italian coastguard implemented, a feasibility study in 2017 to assess “the Libyan capacity in the area of Search and Rescue” (SAR). Shortly after, the Libyan ‘unity government’ declared its extensive Libyan SAR zone, a zone over which it would hold ‘geographical competence’. When the Libyan authorities briefly suspended the establishment of its SAR zone, given its inability to operate a Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre (MRCC), an Italian navy vessel was stationed within Tripoli harbour, carrying out the functions of the Libyan MRCC.

    Since 2017, €57.2m from the EU Trust Fund for Africa has funded Libya’s ‘integrated border management’, on top of which hundreds of millions of euros were transferred by EU member states to Libyan authorities through bilateral agreements. Besides such financial support, EU member states have donated speed boats and surveillance technologies to control the Libyan SAR zone while officers from EU military project Operation Sophia and from European Border Agency Frontex have repeatedly provided training to the Libyan coastguards. When out to search for escaping migrants, the Libyan speed boats have relied on Europe’s ‘eyes in the sky’, the aerial assets of Frontex and EU member states. Migrant sightings from the sky would then be relayed to the Libyan assets at sea, also via WhatsApp chats in which Frontex personnel and Libyan officers exchange.

    Thinking of the Mediterranean as a carceral space highlights these myriad Euro-Libyan entanglements that often take place with impunity and little public scrutiny. It also shows how maritime carcerality is “often underscored by mobilities”. Indeed, systematic forms of migrant capture depend on the collaboration of a range of mobile actors at sea, on land, and in the sky. Despite their incessant movements and the fact that surveillance and interception operations are predominantly characterised as rescue operations, thousands of people have lost their lives at sea over recent years. Many have been left abandoned even in situations where their whereabouts were long known to European and North African authorities, often in cases when migrant boats were already adrift and thus unable to reach Europe on their own accord.

    At the same time, even in the violent and carceral Mediterranean Sea, a range of interventions have occurred that have prevented both deaths at sea and the smooth operation of the refoulment industry. NGO rescuers, activists, fishermen and, at times, merchant vessel crews have conducted mass rescues over recent years, despite being harassed, threatened and criminalised by Euro-Libyan authorities at every turn. Through their presence, they have documented and repeatedly ruptured the operations of the Euro-Libyan border force, shedding light on what is meant to remain hidden.

    Maybe most importantly, the Mediterranean’s carceral condition has not erased the possibility of migratory acts of escape. Indeed, tactics of border subversion adapt to changing carceral techniques, with many migrant boats seeking to cross the sea without being detected and to reach European coasts autonomously. As the UNHCR notes in reference to the maritime arrival of 34,000 people in Italy and Malta in 2020: “Only approximately 4,500 of those arriving by sea in 2020 had been rescued by authorities or NGOs on the high seas: the others were intercepted by the authorities close to shore or arrived undetected.”

    While most of those stuck on the Maridive supply vessel off Tunisia’s coast in 2019 were returned to countries of origin, some tried to cross again and eventually escaped Mediterranean carcerality. Despite Euro-North African attempts to capture and contain them, they moved on stubbornly, and landed their boats in Lampedusa.

    https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/mediterranean-carcerality-and-acts-escape

    #enfermement #Méditerranée #mer_Méditerranée #migrations #asile #réfugiés #frontières #expérimentation #OIM #Tunisie #Zarzis #externalisation #migrerrance #carcéralité #refoulement #push-backs #Libye #Vos_Triton #EU_Trust_Fund_for_Africa #Trust_Fund #carceral_space

    via @isskein

  • Decolonizzare la città. Dialoghi Visuali a Padova -
    Decolonizing the city. Visual Dialogues in Padova

    Il video partecipativo, realizzato con studenti e studentesse del laboratorio Visual Research Methods (prof.ssa Annalisa Frisina) del corso LM Culture, Formazione e Società Globale, esplora l’eredità coloniale inscritta nelle vie e piazza di Padova. I sei protagonisti/e del video, artist* e attivit* afrodiscendenti, dialogano con questi luoghi, mettendo in atto contronarrazioni intime e familiari che sfidano la storia ufficiale, lasciando tracce del loro passaggio.

    –—

    The participatory video made by the students of Visual Research Methods laboratory (prof. Annalisa Frisina), Master’s degree in Cultures, Education and Global Society, explores the colonial legacy of Padova’s roads and squares. Six afro-descendent artists and activists interact with these places, giving life to intimate counter-narratives that challenge the official history, leaving their personal traces.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6CtMsORajE

    Quelques images tirées du film :


    –-

    –-

    Où on apprend que les enfants « métissés » étaient appelés « #figli_di_due_bandiere » (fils de deux drapeaux)

    #villes #décolonial #décoloniser_la_ville #Italie #Padoue #Padova #héritage_colonial #colonialisme #toponymie #toponymie_politique #géographie_urbaine #historicisation #histoire #traces #mariage_mixte #Corne_de_l'Afrique #colonialisme_italien #Antenore #fascisme #histoire_coloniale #impérialisme #piazza_Antenore #citoyenneté #néo-colonialisme #pouvoir #Amba_Aradam #blessure
    #TRUST #Master_TRUST
    #film #film_documentaire

    ping @cede @karine4 @isskein

    –—

    Ajouté à la métaliste sur le #colonialisme_italien :
    https://seenthis.net/messages/871953

  • Les transitions socio-écologiques peuvent-elles changer l’agriculture ?

    Les transitions peuvent-elles changer l’agriculture ? L’article se propose d’analyser le « #plan_français_de_transition_agroécologique » lancé en 2012 et la circulation internationale des modèles en matière d’#agroécologie. Il souligne en particulier en quoi le plan de transition agroécologique français a pu réutiliser des savoirs issus originellement de pays du Sud, originellement critiques à l’égard du modèle agro-productiviste dominant, pour en tirer certains enseignements. Dans la première partie, nous présentons le plan français, ses partis pris et influences, avant de souligner dans la deuxième partie de l’article les échanges Nord-Sud et certaines réinterprétations dont l’agroécologie a pu faire l’objet depuis le début des années 2000.

    https://www.revues.scienceafrique.org/naaj/texte/arrignon2021

    #TRUST #Master_TRUST #transitions #transition #agriculture #circulation_des_savoirs

    –----

    Article paru dans :
    Volume 2, numéro 1 – 2021 : T ransitions environnementales et écologie politique des savoirs en Afrique : de la commotion coloniale et néo-libérale à la « co-motion » sociale et écologique
    https://www.revues.scienceafrique.org/naaj/numero/2-2021

  • A Bagnolet, la bergerie qui ne voulait pas transhumer | L’Humanité
    https://www.humanite.fr/bagnolet-la-bergerie-qui-ne-voulait-pas-transhumer-711859

    Rien n’y fait : entre refus de se laisser apprivoiser et crainte de donner du ressort à la gentrification qui pèse sur la ville, les protagonistes s’accrochent à leur carré de ferme. « En dix ans notre sens critique sur la rénovation urbaine s’est aiguisé », reprend Gilles Amar. « Les projets de jardins partagés tels que les voient les villes visent tous le même modèle, productif, propret, squatté par quelques-uns », poursuit le jardinier. « Nous n’avons pas voulu de cela, mais d’un bordel constructif. Ici, c’est le jardin des habitants. Ici, c’est la branche jardinage du hip-hop. »

    Surtout, les plans de la nouvelle école, un bâtiment tout en verre et béton prévu sur trois étages, ne siéent ni au berger, ni aux parents d’élèves. « Rien n’est à la dimension d’une école maternelle », assure Sabrina, leur représentante. « L’infrastructure va coûter cher à entretenir et l’encadrement va manquer pour couvrir une telle surface. »

    Épaulée d’une architecte, Sors de Terre avance aujourd’hui un projet alternatif. Moins lourd et tout en bois, il serait plus ouvert sur la rue et jouerait avec l’existant plutôt que contre lui.

  • Research: Transforming Cities - Pathways to Sustainability
    University of Utrecht
    https://www.uu.nl/en/research/transforming-cities/research/inclusive-cities-and-global-urban-transformation

    Inclusive cities and global urban transformation

    In the face of current events such as the pandemic, climate crises, Black Lives Matter, and continually widespread urban evictions, how to envision cities to become more inclusive is increasingly an urgent question. International agendas such as the United Nations’ New Urban Agenda and 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development push forward the ideal of ‘making cities inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable (SDG11)’. However, they tend to result in more top-down physical infrastructural development, which create new dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. We need a set of alternative global urban strategies that address various forms of urban exclusion and survival and bottom-up experiences of sustainable development in order to establish how sustainable cities that prioritize social inclusion of vulnerable and excluded groups will look like. We propose here that the kind of sustainable urban development towards social inclusions is conceptually underpinned by agencies of urban dwellers in various urban settlements and neighborhoods, which scholars and activists are increasingly observing and analysing as everyday urban forms of socio-cultural practices and heterogeneous infrastructural constellations.
    Andheri West, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
    Andheri West, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India, photo by Alfarnas Solkar on Unsplash

    With this platform of Global Urban Transformation and Inclusive Cities, where the critical urban scholarship and activities unpack the relationship between urban and social transformations and address questions of power relationships and political equality that underlie existing vulnerability, exclusion and marginalization of urban dwellers. The platform hopefully becomes a network where we can discuss urban social justice and inclusion, not just within the academic circles, but more specifically in city planning, policy development and public debates that shape our common urban futures.

    Planned activities:

    Call for chapter proposals for a book: Inclusive cities in times of global urban transformations: Intersectionalities, infrastructures and sustainable development.

    Workshop for sharing case studies of global urban transformation and inclusive cities for an edited book (August 2021)

    Book launch (November 2021)

    #Trust #critical_urbanism

  • Territoires des #déchets. Agir en régime de proximité

    Du #compostage_collectif urbain aux ressourceries de #ville, les initiatives pour ancrer le traitement des déchets dans la ville se multiplient en s’appuyant sur l’investissement des usagers.
    Mais si la réglementation communautaire et nationale promeut la #proximité et l’#autosuffisance comme principes directeurs de la #gestion_des_déchets ménagers pour optimiser le #bilan_carbone, cet ouvrage montre que paradoxalement trop de proximité peut remettre en cause l’autosuffisance des territoires pourtant visée.
    En confrontant les politiques menées en #France et dans divers projets européens (#Suède, #Catalogne, #Belgique), ce livre propose d’analyser en profondeur les expériences de la proximité dans le traitement des déchets : expériences des gestionnaires, des usagers, des militants écologistes.


    https://pufr-editions.fr/produit/territoires-des-dechets
    #géographie #livre #ressources_pédagogiques #urban_matter #géographie_urbaine #urbanisme #TRUST #master_TRUST #déchets_ménagers

  • How Vienna built a gender equal city

    In the Austrian capital, all aspects of public life, including transportation and language, are impacted by Vienna’s aim of being an inclusive and gender-neutral destination.

    Walk through the Reumannplatz, one of the best-known squares in Austria’s capital city, Vienna, and you will probably spot an outdoor platform, prominently labelled Mädchenbühne (girls’ stage). The large podium, which can be used by everyone, was requested as a performance space by the girls of the nearby school when asked what they would like from the urban area.

    The girls’ stage joins workout stations, a playground and more than 50 new trees as new additions to the square, which reopened last year following a gender-sensitive redesign. But in Vienna, it’s not only the urban spaces that are developed with gender in mind. All aspects of public life, including transportation and language, are impacted by the capital’s aim of being an inclusive and gender-neutral destination.

    The strategy Vienna uses to achieve this aim is called “gender mainstreaming”. The head of the Department for Gender Mainstreaming, Ursula Bauer, describes it as a tool to achieve gender equality in society based on equal structures, settings and conditions for both women and men.

    She says that it differs from women’s policy in that it makes sure regulations and procedures take into account that there is a structural difference between women and men, mainly stemming from traditional gender roles. “Women’s policy is repair work, whereas gender mainstreaming is prevention,” Bauer said.

    She explained that the department looks at gender-differentiated data and provides guidelines as well as training to make sure government services are gender-sensitive and accessible. Over the years, a network of gender experts in key areas has also been set up. Bauer likens the department’s cross-sectional role to that of a watchdog making sure all areas of the city’s government take gender inequalities into account. “No-one can escape,” she said jokingly. “We are like a spiderweb.”

    In practice, gender mainstreaming takes many forms, such as ensuring government bodies use gender-sensitive language to communicate, or that public transportation includes illustrations of men with children to signal seats reserved for parents. A visitor to the capital might also notice the wide pavements for mothers navigating the city with prams or children, or the fact that a large proportion of the city, including the whole public transportation network, is wheelchair accessible.

    Another key area is urban planning. Gender planning expert, Eva Kail, was central to making sure Vienna was one of the first cities to look to gender to shape its public spaces. Inspired by feminist planning literature, Kail began exploring the topic 30 years ago and received the budget and political backing to make it a priority. “It was time to look at the whole city from the female perspective,” she said.

    Kail began collecting data on how and by whom Vienna’s public spaces were being used and discovered that the female perspective had often been missing. She explained that the predominantly male urban planners had been basing their designs on male interests and their everyday life experiences, meaning they tended to neglect the perspectives of other population groups.

    Kail noticed that the perspective of teenage girls in particular was missing from the city’s parks, and, together with her team, worked with them to understand how to make these urban spaces more appealing. The result was larger areas dedicated to soccer being divided into smaller spaces so that multiple groups could play; and creating additional seating areas, such as hammocks, to retreat to. “It may sound trivial but having public toilets in parks is also important for many park users,” she said.

    The new park designs, which were tested in six pilot projects in 1999 and 2000, also addressed the safety fears held by many females. “We made sure the main path was well lit, as straight as possible, and that bushes weren’t too close,” she said.

    Observations showed that the pilots were a success. “They worked really well,” said Kail. “More girls were using the parks and they were taking up a larger amount of space in them.” Now visitors to the city will see that every new or refurbished park in Vienna follows the same principles.

    The planning pioneer says she is often asked how to spot gender mainstreamed urban design around the city. “When it is done well, it is invisible,” she said. “A well-functioning public space, where no group is missing or struggling to use it, doesn’t stand out.”

    But sometimes Vienna’s public spaces are purposefully used to make females more visible. For example, in the city’s urban development project Seestadt Aspern, the majority of the streets, squares and parks have been named after women, such as Janis Joplin, as a small counter to the historically predominant male naming. And there’s the symbolic identification of the podium in the Reumannplatz as the girls’ stage.

    While Vienna’s gender mainstreaming approach helps it to position highly in quality-of-life rankings, political science professor at the University of Vienna, Birgit Sauer, says the rest of Austria hasn’t yet implemented it to the same extent. “We have a gap between Vienna and the country’s more rural areas and smaller cities,” she said.

    Sometimes Vienna’s public spaces are purposefully used to make females more visible

    Sauer says that while there is a tradition of gender equality in Austria, including public housing projects dating back to the 1920s, women in Vienna have more access to support, such as free childcare, which tends to be costly and have limited opening hours elsewhere in the country. “This means that mothers can work if they want to,” she said, but adds that gender pay gaps are still common.

    Many travellers will think of Vienna, which is known for its formal balls, as a very traditional society, but the professor says that multiple factors have resulted in the capital being ahead of the gender equality curve in Central and Western Europe. Sauer explains that already in the 1970s, the city was home to many active women’s groups and that Vienna has a history of having Social Democratic governments that invested in creating social equality.

    And this does not just stop with gender. According to Sauer, there has also been a lot of activism and political support for the LGBTQ community.

    Berni Ledinski, who is the Vienna coordinator for QueerCityPass, a tourist ticket for lesbian, gay and trans visitors highlighting queer-friendly institutions, agrees. Ledinski, who also performs as the drag queen Candy Licious, says that “Vienna as a city is a really safe space for queer people.” He says that it not only offers a good range of queer-friendly cafes, bars, shops and museums, but also has a division within the city administration focused on combating LGBTQ discrimination.

    For Ledinski, a central moment for the capital’s queer community was when Thomas Neuwirth won the 2014 Eurovision song contest, performing in drag as Conchita Wurst. “It definitely had a really big impact, and marketing campaigns started to include same-sex couples,” he said.

    The event also inspired the City of Vienna to make the queer community more visible in public spaces, for example, by including illustrations of same-sex couples in traffic lights. But while much progress has been made for the queer community, Ledinski says there is a potential to do more. “There is always room for improvement, especially when it comes to the recognition of inter and trans people,” he said.

    And it appears that important steps in that direction are taking place. Vienna recently unveiled its first transgender crosswalk, located close to the Vienna General Hospital, which is home to the nation’s only transgender healthcare centre. “Due to Covid-19, there have been a lot of problems with trans healthcare, and we thought it would be a great sign of solidarity,” said Dominique Mras who came up with the idea.

    Mras, who is the member of parliament in Vienna’s 9th district responsible for diversity, says it is important to note that the pink, blue and white crossing received support from all political parties, including the conservative one. And while it is the only such crosswalk planned for now, Mras believes that it is an important symbol to help open up the conversation around gender diversity and make trans people more visible in Vienna.

    “It’s a first step,” she said.

    https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210524-how-vienna-built-a-gender-equal-city?ocid=ww.social.link.email

    #genre #ville #Vienne #ressources_pédagogiques #TRUST #master_trust #villes #urban_matter #espace_public #femmes #visibilité #in/visibilité #Mädchenbühne #urbanisme #féminisme

  • #Bamako. De la ville à l’agglomération

    Longtemps perçue comme un gros village, réceptacle des migrations rurales, la capitale du Mali est devenue une métropole illustrant remarquablement la #croissance_démographique et l’#étalement spatial des grandes agglomérations ouest-africaines. Avec trois décennies de recul, ce livre-atlas met en lumière ces enjeux et les processus de renouvellement de la population bamakoise : le poids désormais décisif des #jeunes ; l’impact de #flux_résidentiels redistribuant familles et demandes de #logement au-delà du district urbain ; le déplacement des fortes #inégalités d’accès au #sol vers les #périphéries de l’agglomération.

    S’appuyant sur une combinaison de données censitaires, d’enquêtes quantitatives et d’observations recueillies jusqu’à la fin des années 2010, l’ouvrage montre comment les pratiques des habitants en matière de #logement, de migration et de #mobilité_urbaine impriment des #discriminations croissantes dans ce cadre expansif. La trajectoire de la ville se lit au fil de plusieurs générations qui ont marqué l’histoire des quartiers, densifié les lignées de propriétaires, forgé de nouveaux besoins dans les plus récents fronts de peuplement.

    Prendre le pouls de la #transition_urbaine oblige à déconstruire les visions simplistes, opposant émigration et immigration, #croissance_spontanée et #urbanisme_réglementaire, une ville « prédatrice » et une campagne « spoliée », sans pour autant négliger leurs échos dans les représentations locales et les modèles globalisés de #gouvernance_urbaine. Véritable manuel d’investigation, ce livre rappelle donc la nécessité d’une connaissance précise des cycles d’expansion urbaine et des acteurs de cette double fabrique, sociale et territoriale. Il donne à voir l’agglomération de Bamako à la fois dans sa dimension régionale et dans l’intimité de ses #quartiers.

    https://www.editions.ird.fr/produit/632/9782709928908/bamako
    #ville #géographie_urbaine #TRUST #master_TRUST #urban_matter #livre #villes #Mali #ressources_pédagogiques

  • RENCONTRE 4 BENEDICTE GROSJEAN : 17 MAI 2021

    QUESTIONS
    Comment définir aujourd’hui les liens possibles entre
    recherche-action et urbanisme ?
    Comment les resituer dans le cadre de la recherche
    par le projet ?
    Quelles peuvent être les relations entre recherche-action et pédagogie ?

    PARCOURS
    Professeure, ENSA de Lille, Ville et territoire ; Chercheure au laboratoire LACTH, ENSAP de Lille
    Chercheure associée au laboratoire IPRAUS (UMR
    AUSser) ; chargée de cours à la Faculté d’Architecture
    de l’Université de Louvain (LOCI), site de Tournai.
    Formations : 1995, Ingénieur civil architecte (Ecole
    Polytechnique de Louvain) ; 2000, DEA « projet urbain :
    théories et dispositifs » (ENSA Paris-Belleville) ; 2007,
    Docteur en architecture, urbanisme et aménagement
    du territoire (UCLouvain / Université de Paris VIII) ; 2008,
    Grand Prix de la Thèse sur la Ville ; 2019, Habilitation à
    diriger les Recherches
    Thèmes de recherches : les formes territoriales alternatives à la métropolisation (entre-deux, transfrontaliers, ville diffuse, etc.) et les modes de projet « dans un
    monde incertain » (urbanisme descriptif, stratégique,
    bottom-up).

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXPuaJstvMQ

    #Bénédicte_Grosjean #recherche #recherche-action #urbanisme #TRUST #master_TRUST #conférence #research_by_design #pédagogie #constructivisme #positionnement #immersion #méthodologie #émancipation #empowerment #rationalisme_scientifique #RAP #recherche-action_participative #ressources_pédagogiques

  • #Marseille privatopia : les #enclaves_résidentielles à Marseille : logiques spatiales, formes et représentations

    Marseille : privatopia ?

    La forte multiplication des « #résidences_fermées_sécurisées » est une tendance observée dans les #villes européennes et françaises, après celles d’Amérique latine, des USA, d’Afrique du sud etc. En #France, elle a surtout été repérée et analysée en contextes péri-urbains (Ile de France, Côte d’Azur, banlieues de Toulouse et Montpellier). Partout où elle se développe, cette tendance est souvent attribuée aux inquiétudes des habitants pour la #sûreté, ou leur #qualité_de_vie, ainsi qu’à des #replis_sociaux, thèmes récurrents dans les médias et discours politiques. Elle est aussi liée au rôle d’une « offre » portée par les majors de l’immobilier. Mais elle est aussi soutenue indirectement, dans le contexte néolibéral, par des pouvoirs publics qui se déchargent ainsi de l’aménagement et de la gestion d’#espaces_de_proximité.

    Nous observons et analysons depuis 2007 cette prolifération des #fermetures à Marseille. Après un premier état des lieux (Dorier et al, 2010), nous avons mené une second #inventaire exhaustif en 2013-2014. Et depuis lors, nous menons une veille ciblée sur certains secteurs. Démarrée au début des années 90, la diffusion des #enclosures atteint des sommets à Marseille où elle n’a quasiment pas été régulée : des #marges et des #enclaves se construisent ainsi dès qu’on s’éloigne du centre historique (Dorier, Dario, 2016). Au point que la #fermeture des #espaces_résidentiels, de leurs #rues et espaces de plein air semble en train de devenir la norme (Dorier, Dario, 2018)

    Depuis 25 ans, Marseille n’a cessé de se cloisonner de plus en plus et ce processus est venu aggraver les #inégalités d’#accès_aux_équipements et aux « #aménités » urbaines. Le #parc bâti du centre ville paupérisé s’est dégradé jusqu’à l’effondrement et au risque de péril imminent de centaines d’immeubles, qui ont du être évacués en urgence depuis novembre 2018, comme on le voit sur la carte de droite (voir aussi page dédiée). Pendant ce temps, les quartiers du sud et de l’est, ainsi que les zones en rénovation, se sont transformées en mosaïques résidentielles clôturées, sous le double effet de la #promotion_immobilière et de ré-aménagements voulus par les associations de #copropriétaires. Ils dessinent des espaces pour classes moyennes à aisées, sous forme de #lotissements et d’#ensembles_immobiliers majoritairement fermés et sécurisés, chacun doté de ses propres espaces « communs » privés : parkings, voirie privée, jardins.

    Cette « #Privatopia » tourne d’abord le dos au centre historique, à ses ilots anciens décrépis où l’action publique s’est illustrée par son inefficience pendant des décennies. La fermeture se diffuse d’abord dans les zones favorisées, puis dans les périphéries ouvertes à l’urbanisation, enfin dans les zones de rénovation urbaine : la création de nouvelles résidences fermées est devenue un moyen pour valoriser des opérations immobilières et y attirer des classes moyennes, face aux copropriétés dégradées et aux ensembles HLM appauvris. Lorqu’un bailleur rénove un ensemble de logements sociaux, celui-ci est également « résidentialisé », même si, avec des années de recul sur cette pratique, on sait désormais que clôturer ne résoud pas les problèmes socio-économiques des quartiers, ni même les problèmes de sécurité. Au contraire, la fragmentation physique pourrait bien alimenter les tendances aux séparatismes sociaux en tous genres.

    D’après nos enquêtes, en dehors des formes d’entresoi spécifique de quartiers particulièrement aisés, comme la colline Périer, et ses « gated communities » surplombant la mer, la fermeture est d’abord fortement associée au « tout voiture » qui caractérise encore Marseille et à la concurrence pour le stationnement résidentiel : les premiers espaces à être clôturés sont les parkings. Elle est également liée à 25 années de désengagement croissant de la municipalité dans la gestion de proximité (propreté, entretien des espaces verts, sécurisation publique des rues) ainsi qu’un encouragement de l’urbanisation privée par des ventes de parcelles publiques ou des zones d’aménagement favorisant la promotion immobilière. La fermeture résidentielle traduit l’affirmation d’une économie résidentielle, le rôle des promoteurs, syndics, copropriétés étant crucial : la « sécurisation » (privée) est supposée faire augmenter la valeur marchande des biens immobiliers… Enfin, la fermeture traduit une accentuation des replis sociaux : à Marseille la clôture « a posteriori » de rues qui étaient auparavant ouvertes au passage représente 55% des cas observés.

    Certains espaces du 8ème, 9ème, 12ème , nord du 13ème arrondissements (Les Olives), caractéristiques de cette urbanisation privée, deviennent un assemblage désordonné de copropriétés et d’enclaves de moins en moins accessibles et traversantes. La fermeture se diffuse par mimétisme, les ensembles résidentiels forment des « agrégats », qui bloquent les circulations : une véritable situation de thrombose dans certains quartiers, anciens comme récents (les Olives, Ste Marthe). Le comble, c’est que dans ces quartiers, les plus favorisés, au cadre de vie « a priori » le plus agréable, les déplacements à pied ou en vélo tiennent désormais de l’exploit. Les détours imposés par les barrières qui enserrent chaque rue ou jardin privé de résidence obligent à prendre la voiture pour accompagner un enfant à l’école du coin, acheter le pain… La ville perd de plus en plus en cohérence, et, avec cette juxtaposition de résidences sécurisées certains quartier ressemblent plus à une mosaïque de co-propriétés qu’à… une ville. Cela a été mis en évidence et modélisé par la toute récente thèse de Julien Dario (2019), réalisée dans le cadre de ce projet.

    A Marseille, depuis 2007, nous avons opté pour une étude empirique, directe, sur le terrain. Nous pu ainsi vérifier l’hypothèse qu’aux initiatives spontanées de fermeture de rues et de lotissements a posteriori, longtemps après leur construction, s’ajoutent des stratégies nouvelles. Elles associent promotion privée et action publique, et sont destinées à faire évoluer le peuplement de quartiers de la ville, à travers la production de logement « de qualité » attirant des classes moyennes et supérieures. Promoteurs et décideurs semblent juger utile de les rassurer à travers la livraison d’ensembles qui sont quasiment tous fermés dès la construction … En 12 ans, de 2008 à 2020 une série d’études, de masters et thèses ont permis de décrire et quantifier ce processus, d’observer la progression d’une fragmentation urbaine qui s’accroît aux échelles fines et d’évaluer ses impacts.

    Nos études se sont focalisées sur les fermetures massives des aires privilégiées (Colline Périer, Littoral Sud, Nord-Est avec la technopole de Chateau Gombert), et la transformation résidentielle de certains territoires périphériques en zones d’investissements immobiliers rentables, attirant des classes moyennes et supérieures (Littoral Nord, Sainte Marthe, grand centre ville/Euromed, franges du parc National des Calanques comme la ZAC de la Jarre). les résidences fermées deviennent ainsi un outil de plus value foncière… et de recompositions urbaines, valorisant toutes les zones ayant un attrait environnemental, tout en en restreignant l’accès.

    La diffusion d’un modèle

    Notre méthodologie a permis de prendre la mesure du phénomène à l’échelle d’une ville entière, et sur la durée, ce qui n’a pas été réalisé ailleurs en France. A deux reprises (2008-2009 et 2013-2014), la commune entière a été arpentée, chaque ensemble résidentiel fermé a été géolocalisé dans un SIG, inventorié, décrit, photographié, afin d’établir un corpus exhaustif : 1001 résidences ou lotissements étaient enclos en 2009, plus de 1550 en 2014. L’ensemble des clôtures ont été datées à partir d’enquête directe ou par photo-interprétation. Cette démarche est relatée dans deux rapports de recherche (Dorier et al., 2010 et 2014), 13 masters et une thèse (Dario, 2019).

    Le recours au SIG (Système d’information géographique) a permis de tracer leur histoire, en croisant les localisations avec des images aériennes anciennes, le cadastre, la chronologie des programmes immobiliers. En 2011 et 2012, la première étude du LPED est actualisée à travers plusieurs mémoires d’étudiants sous la direction d’E.Dorier et S.Bridier. Ceux-ci observent une accélération des dynamiques d’enclosures dans les quartiers sud (Dario J. 2010, Toth P.2012), leur multiplication et leur diffusion dans les quartiers nord (Balasc et Dolo 2011, Dolo 2012, Robillard 2012). La propagation se fait beaucoup par mimétisme : plus de la moitié des ensembles fermés sont collés les uns aux autres, par grappes, transformant la physionomie et les usages possibles de l’espace urbain et développant des « marges » urbaines cloisonnées. On peut le vérifier, à travers l’exemple d’une marge Nord-Est de Marseille, sur les franges ville-espaces péri-urbains Les Olives : une juxtaposition désordonnée de lotissements fermés.

    Nous avons aussi beaucoup observé, recueilli de nombreux témoignages auprès de résidents, de riverains, de syndics, d’agences, de techniciens de l’urbanisme… Nous avons séjourné dans plusieurs de ces résidences. Nous poursuivons la veille sur certains contextes sensibles à haut potentiel spéculatif immobilier, comme la frange du massif des calanques ou sainte Marthe, ou encore des espaces où les fermetures sont conflictuelles. Par des analyses d’archives, des enquêtes fines sur des contextes urbains, des entretiens avec acteurs et habitants, des analyses de périmètres de la politique de la ville, le suivi de conflits de voisinages nous avons ensuite analysé les facteurs historiques et les impacts associés à cette dynamique d’enclosures, les inégalités sociales, les impacts sur la circulation, les inégalités environnementale (D.Rouquier 2013, J.Dario, 2019 et la thèse en cours de P. Toth, consacrée aux 8ème et 9ème arrondissements).

    Au final, on met à jour une dynamique de transition libérale, individualiste et sécuritaire, associée au règne de la voiture dans la ville (beaucoup de clôtures ont au départ pour justification le seul parking), qui freine d’autres évolutions souhaitables (transition écologique, inclusion sociale). Si le phénomène se banalise, on constate aussi une complexité territoriale du processus et son épaisseur historique. Dans des contextes de fortes recompositions urbaines (spatiales, foncières, sociales, démographiques), et dans les périmètres de nouvellement urbain, la fermeture d’espaces résidentiels est utilisée comme outil de diversification de l’habitat et de mixité sociale. Le processus n’a pas partout les mêmes motifs ni les mêmes impacts socio-environnementaux. D’où l’intérêt d’approches qualitatives par observations sensibles, entretiens avec des acteurs et habitants, dépouillements d’archives historiques (histoires de rues).

    Les quartiers sud

    En observant le facteur de proximité dans la diffusion, ainsi que le potentiel de valorisation immobilière des terrains vacants ou susceptibles de l’être, plusieurs scénarios de prospective ont été mis au point par Julien Dario pour anticiper l’évolution des espaces susceptibles d’être fermés, transmis à la Ville dans le cadre d’un contrat, comme aide à la décision (Dario 2011, 2014 et 2019). Dans les quartiers sud, on est frappé par la perspective de 53% de taux d’évolution spontané probable de la fermeture dans les 8ème et 9ème arrondissements, si aucune intervention publique ne vient réguler la tendance. Les surfaces touchées par les enclosures (résidences et périmètres d’entreprises) déjà localement très importantes pourraient y atteindre le tiers de la surface totale urbanisée. Des études de cas à échelle fine ont permis d’anticiper plusieurs conflits liés à ces processus (progressifs ou brutaux) en lien avec des dynamiques sociale locales.

    Les cas des lotissements « Coin Joli » et « Barry » (analysés ici par J.Dario entre 2011 et 2019) montrent comment certains dispositifs informels préfigurant l’enclosure sont mis en place progressivement, informellement, parfois subrepticement : enrochements, systèmes physiques fixes contraignants (plots métalliques) permettant encore le passage prudent de deux roues et piétons ; panneaux de sens interdit « privés » et informels apposés à l’extrémité de certaines rues. On passe d’une délimitation par panneautage à une fermeture symbolique et partielle, avant d’évoluer vers l’enclosure, qui peut être conflictuelle en privant de passage les riverains, en réduisant les perméabilités urbaines.

    Les quartiers nord : diffusion des ensembles résidentiels fermés dans les contextes de rénovation urbaine

    Un fait remarquable est la diffusion des enclaves résidentielles fermées au cœur et en bordure des zones urbaines sensibles (ZUS) telles qu’elles ont été définies par l’Agence Nationale de la Rénovation Urbaine (ANRU). Bénéficiant de la TVA réduite, les promoteurs sont incités à y produire une nouvelle offre de logement privée, afin de permettre une diversification et l’installation de classes moyennes. Mais les enclosures, supposées rassurer les candidats à l’accession à la propriété, et maintenir un niveau de prix élevé ne favorisent pas les relations sociales … et nos études montrent qu’en fait de « mixité », apparaissent de nouvelles formes de fragmentations et même de tensions résidentielles (Dorier et al, 2010, 2012), qui s’accompagnent, par ailleurs de formes d’évitement fonctionnel (Audren, 2015, Audren Baby-Collin, Dorier 2016 , Audren, Dorier, Rouquier, 2019). Le secteur du Plan d’Aou dans le 15ème arrondissement de Marseille, où la restructuration résidentielle est achevée a été analysé à l’aide d’étudiants (Balasc et Dolo 2011). Dans ce secteur cohabitent des zones de logements HLM en fin de réhabilitation, des lotissements anciens qui se sont fermés ou sont en cours de fermeture, des projets immobiliers récents, conçus sécurisés. La juxtaposition de ces différents types d’habitats aux profils sociaux différenciés engendre plus une fragmentation qu’une mixité Fonctionnelle, malgré la proximité. Les interrelations sont faibles entre les ensembles et les espaces. (Dorier, Berry-Chikahoui et Bridier, 2012)

    une crise des urbanités

    Tandis que cette transformation des espaces de copropriétés et rues privées de Marseille se poursuit, des pans entiers de vieux quartiers populaires se délabrent. En 2019, notre cartographie de ces ensembles résidentiels privés fermés ainsi que des HLM « résidentialisés » et enclos (dans les projets de rénovation urbaine) tranche avec la géographie des constructions déclarées en péril et brutalement évacuées de leurs habitants, suite à l’effondrement de deux immeubles vétustes du quartier Noailles, près du Vieux port de Marseille. Notre carte révèle des politiques de l’habitat à plusieurs vitesses, où des décennies de laisser-faire public face à la ville privée s’expriment d’un côté par la dégradation du bâti, et de l’autre par la multiplication de formes de repli et d’entre soi urbain ayant des impacts sur les circulations et sur l’accès aux équipements. A ce stade, des rééquilibrages publics sont indispensables. Quelques initiatives publiques pour maintenir des traverses piétonnières ont été lancées dans certains quartiers très touchés, elles sont compliques par les évolutions législatives (qui facilitent la clôture des espaces privés) ainsi que par la dévolution de la compétence en matière de voirie à la Métropole. Rétablir des accès et servitudes de passage pour les piétons est compliqué dans les espaces privés : il faut passer par une DUP, puis par l’achat d’une bande de terrain par la collectivité pour tracer un cheminement piétonnier. Des interventions seraient possibles dans certains cas où les clôtures ont été posées sur des rues non privées, ou hors de la légalité. Mais la collectovité ne s’auto-saisit pas des cas d’infraction. Les actions au cas par cas risquent de ne pas suffire à endiguer cette véritable crise d’urbanité.

    (observations menées conjointement à nos études sur le mal logement et des évacuations à Marseille).

    le projet ci-dessous a fait l’objet d’une exposition art-science, présentée à l’Espace Pouillon, campus centre Saint Charles de l’Université Marseille Privatopia 8-24 octobre 2020.

    Depuis 2014, une collaboration avec l’artiste peintre Anke Doberauer (photos et tableaux) a été rendue possible grâce à une résidence commune à la Fondation Camargo (2014). La jeune cinéaste Marie Noëlle Battaglia a également réalisé en 2020 un documentaire « En remontant les murs » inspiré par nos recherches, et en lien avec l’équipe (avant première le 18 octobre 2020, dans le cadre du festival Image de ville). Ces collaborations ont déjà donné lieu à des présentations croisées, comme celle du 3 avril 2019 organisée par le Goethe Institut à la Friche de la belle de mai, et pourraient déboucher sur une exposition et un ouvrage commun.

    Rapports de recherche-action :

    Dorier E. Dario J. Rouquier D. Bridier S. , (2014), Bilan scientifique de l’étude « Marseille, ville passante », Contrat de collaboration de recherche : « Développement urbain durable à Marseille » n°12/00718, 13 cartes, 18 croquis, 24 tableaux. juin 2014, 90 p.

    Dorier E. (dir), BERRY-CHIKHAOUI I., BRIDIER S., BABY-COLLIN V., AUDREN G., GARNIAUX J. (2010), La diffusion des ensembles résidentiels fermés à Marseille. Les urbanités d’une ville fragmentée, rapport de recherche au PUCA, Contrat de recherche D 0721 ( E.J. 07 00 905), 202 p, 35 cartes et croquis, 30 graphiques, 68 illustrations photographiques.

    Ces rapports ont donné lieu à de nombreuses restitutions publiques auprès des services de l’Urbanisme de la Ville, la Communauté urbaine, l’Agence d’Urbanisme (Agam), le département.

    Articles scientifiques :

    Dorier E. Dario J., 2018, « Gated communities in Marseille, urban fragmentation becoming the norm ? », L’Espace géographique, 2018/4 (Volume 47), p. 323-345. URL : https://www.cairn.info/journal-espace-geographique-2018-4-page-323.htm (traduction texte intégral ) texte intégral (ENG.) DORIER DARIO Espace geo anglais EG_474_0323

    Dorier E. Dario J., 2018, « Les espaces résidentiels fermés à Marseille, la fragmentation urbaine devient-elle une norme ? » l’Espace géographique, 2018-4 pp. 323-345.

    Dorier E., Dario J., 2016, « Des marges choisies et construites : les résidences fermées », in Grésillon E., Alexandre B., Sajaloli B. (cord.), 2016. La France des marges, Armand Colin, Paris, p. 213-224.

    Audren, G., Baby-Collin V. et Dorier, É. (2016) « Quelles mixités dans une ville fragmentée ? Dynamiques locales de l’espace scolaire marseillais. » in Lien social et politiques, n°77, Transformation sociale des quartiers urbains : mixité et nouveaux voisinages, p. 38-61 http://www.erudit.org/revue/lsp/2016/v/n77/1037901ar.pdf

    Audren, G., Dorier, É. et Rouquier, D., 2015, « Géographie de la fragmentation urbaine et territoire scolaire : effets des contextes locaux sur les pratiques scolaires à Marseille », Actes de colloque. Rennes, ESO, CREAD, Université de Rennes 2. Actes en ligne.

    Dorier E, Berry-Chickhaoui I, Bridier S ., 2012, Fermeture résidentielle et politiques urbaines, le cas marseillais. In Articulo– – Journal of Urban Research, n°8 (juillet 2012).

    Thèses

    Audren Gwenaelle (2015), Géographie de la fragmentation urbaine et territoires scolaires à Marseille, Université d’Aix Marseille, LPED. Sous la dir. d’Elisabeth Dorier et de V.Baby-Collin

    Dario Julien (2019) Géographie d’une ville fragmentée : morphogenèse, gouvernance des voies et impacts de la fermeture résidentielle à Marseille, Sous la dir. d’Elisabeth Dorier et de Sébastien Bridier. Telecharger ici la version complète. Cette thèse est lauréate du Grand prix de thèse sur la Ville 2020 PUCA/ APERAU/ Institut CDC pour la Recherche, Caisse des Dépôts

    Toth Palma (soutenance prévue 2021), Fragmentations versus urbanité(s) : vivre dans l’archipel des quartiers sud de Marseille Université d’Aix Marseille, LPED , Sous la direction de Elisabeth Dorier

    Posters scientifiques :

    Dario J. Rouquier D. et Dorier E., 2014, Les Ensembles résidentiels fermés à Marseille, in SIG 2014, Conférence francophone ESRI, 1-2 octobre 2014 – http://www.esrifrance.fr/iso_album/15_marseille.pdf

    Dario J. Rouquier D. et Dorier E, 2014, Marseille, fragmentation spatiale, fermeture résidentielle, LPED – Aix-Marseille Université, poster scientifique, Festival international de géographie de Saint Dié, oct 2014. https://www.reseau-canope.fr/fig-st-die/fileadmin/contenus/2014/conference_Elisabeth_Dorier_poster_LPED_1_Marseille.pdf

    Dario J. Rouquier D. et Dorier E., 2014, Marseille, Voies fermées, Ville passante, LPED – Aix-Marseille Université, poster. http://www.reseau-canope.fr/fig-st-die/fileadmin/contenus/2014/conference_Elisabeth_Dorier_poster_LPED_2_Marseille.pdf

    Contributions presse et médias

    Dorier E. Dario J. Audren G. aout 2017, collaboration avec le journal MARSACTU. 5 contributions à la série « Petites histoires de résidences fermées », collaboration journal MARSACTU / LPED, aout 2017. https://marsactu.fr/dossier/serie-petites-histoires-de-residences-fermees

    Dorier E. et Dario J. 23 aout 2017, interview par B.Gilles, [Petites histoires de résidences fermées] Les beaux quartiers fermés de la colline Périer, interview pr B.Gilles, MARSACTU, https://marsactu.fr/residences-fermees-dorier

    Dorier E. Dario J. 30 janv. 2017, interview par L.Castelly, MARSACTU : https://marsactu.fr/discussion-ouverte-residences-fermees

    Dorier E. , et Dario.J. 20 mars 2014, interview in MARSACTU , société : 29% de logements sont situes en residences fermees à Marseille

    Dorier E. Dario J., 4 oct 2013, « Hautes clôtures à Marseille », in Libération, le libé des géographes. (1 p, 1 carte) http://www.liberation.fr/societe/2013/10/03/hautes-clotures-a-marseille_936834
    Dorier E. , 7 avril 2013, « Le phénomène des résidences fermées est plus important à Marseille qu’ailleurs », Marsactu, talk quartiers, archi et urbanisme, http://www.marsactu.fr/archi-et-urbanisme/le-phenomene-des-residences-fermees-est-plus-important-a-marseille-quailleu

    Dorier E. Dario J., 10 fev 2013, « Fermetures éclair » in revue Esprit de Babel, Fermetures éclair

    télévision

    M6, Résidences fermées à Marseille – étude du LPED. Journal national, octobre 2013 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDM

    FR3, 19/20, Résidences fermées à Marseille – étude du LPED, 24 mai 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-O

    FR 5 (minutes 38 à 50) : « En toute sécurité », documentaire de B.Evenou, http://www.france5.fr/emission/en-t

    podcast radio

    Collaboration entre chercheurs et cinéaste, janvier 2021 : https://ecoleanthropocene.universite-lyon.fr/documenter-la-geographie-sociale-grand-entretien-a

    Collaboration entre chercheurs et artiste peintre, octobre 2020 : Sonographies marseillaises – Radio Grenouille et Manifesta 13 « Ce monde qui nous inspire #4 Marseille ville privée ? »

    https://urbanicites.hypotheses.org/688

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    #cartographie #visualisation