Housing the Majority
Organized by Studio-X
Amman, Istanbul, Johannesburg,
Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro
arch.columbia.edu
With support from
the Columbia Global Centers
Friday, April 10, 2015, 12pm
Wood Auditorium, Avery Hall
Columbia University GSAPP
In recent decades, debates on slums
and the future of urban life have raged.
Novelists, filmmakers, academics,
cultural institutions, NGOs, foundations,
and think tanks from across the political
spectrum have offered ways
to alternately upgrade, reinforce,
preserve, integrate, and learn from
these precarious landscapes,
highlighting their many complex
socio-spatial questions.
Introduction, 12–12:30pm
In Housing the Majority, scholars,
architects, urban planners, artists,
and activists gather from global cities
with soaring rates of inequality—Cairo,
Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, New York
City, Mumbai, Istanbul, and London—to
define the terms of the debate. Moving
beyond traditional and quantifiable
definitions of informality, the panels
focus on politics, representation,
governance, and form as entry points
to the difficult humanitarian challenges
to “housing the majority.” Maria Alice Rezende Carvalho,
Sociology, PUC-Rio, Pontifical Catholic
University of Rio de Janeiro
D avid Madden,
London School of Economics
Claudia Gastrow,
University of the Witwatersrand
Amale Andraos, Dean,
Columbia University GSAPP
Safwan Masri, Executive Vice President
for Global Centers and Global Development,
Columbia University
I. Politics, 12:30–2pm
What are slums? Is the term slums self-evident?
How can it be understood historically, legally,
and politically?
Response by Amale Andraos, Dean,
Columbia University GSAPP, and
Mpho Matsipa, Studio-X Johannesburg
II. Representation, 2–3:30pm
How does representation of informal places
and their constituents affect political voice and
agency? How does visibility create opportunities
for political change?
Alfredo Brillembourg,
Urban-Think Tank, ETH Zurich
Ramin Bahrani,
Columbia University School of the Arts
Jaílson de Silva Souza,
Ashoka Innovators for the Public;
Observatorio de Favelas
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
University Professor, English and
Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Response by
Hilary Sample, Columbia University GSAPP,
Nora Akawi, Studio-X Amman, and
Rajeev Thakker, Studio-X Mumbai
3 Housing of Majority
4 Schedule
Break, 3:30–3:45pm
I. Politics
III. Governance, 3:45–5:15pm
What is at stake in formalizing the informal, when
people are given rights and incentives to build?
How do forces of real estate development and the
law spur change, and who protects the public good
within shifting social and political frameworks?
Yaşar Adnan Adanalı, Reclaim Istanbul
Guilherme Boulos, MTST,
Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem-Teto
Myriam Ababsa,
Institut Français du Proche-Orient
Response by Clara Irazábal, Columbia University
GSAPP, and Selva Gürdoğan and
Gregers Thomsen, Studio-X Istanbul
IV. Form, 5:15–6:45pm
How does the form of unplanned areas produce or
inform social relations? What can official planning
procedures learn from urban informality?
Tatiana Bilbao, Yale School of Architecture
Rohan Shivkumar, KRIVA,
Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for
Architecture and Urban Studies, Mumbai
Rainer Hehl, ETH Zurich
O mar Nagati and Beth Stryker, CLUSTER,
Cairo Lab for Urban Studies
Response by Geeta Mehta, Columbia
University GSAPP, and Pedro Rivera, Studio-X
Rio de Janeiro
V. Keynote Address, 7pm
Housing the Majority?
Or Leaving the Majority to House Themselves?
D avid Sims, political economist
and author of Understanding Cairo:
The Logic of a City Out of Control
5 Schedule
Maria Alice Rezende Carvalho
My presentation will introduce three points.
The first concerns the difficulty of comparing
different realities under the term favela. The term
holds deep differences. The slums of Brazil are
very different, and even in Rio they are diverse.
I intend to analytically rebuild this concept,
because, from my point of view, slum does not
refer to a type of housing or urban morphology
exclusively, but primarily to the absence of
institutionality. The second point is strongly linked
to the first. I suggest that because of this absence
of institutionality, part of the population does not
become society. Finally, my third point affirms
that the demand of the term population is not for
economic recognition, but for recognition that is
synonymous with love and respect.
Claudia Gastrow
What is the role of the slum in imagining urban
futures? A number of African countries are
engaged in planning satellite cities for their largest
urban conglomerations. These projects reiterate
previous imaginaries of modernist urban planning
that sought to separate the present from the past
by building a landscape that projected a radically
different future to the ones congealed in the
cities of the recently decolonized world. However,
these constructions appear to be aimed at creating
boundaries, rather than serving the citizenry.
They index the attempt to either escape or destroy
the slum, historically cast as a negative urban
figure both as an analytic and actual place. This
negativity pervades academic thinking as well
as quotidian experiences of the city. However,
the avoidance of the term and the unwillingness
to tackle the negative connotations it provokes—
witnessed in the flight into the technocratic
languages of informal and peri-urban settlement—
has prevented the slum from becoming the
centerpiece of innovative urban imaginations.
This presentation interrogates some of the recent
oppositions to the use of the term slum. It might
be more productive to engage the term rather
than flee from it. Turning to the example of Luanda,
Angola, it shows that by working through the
history, politics, and imaginations of what are
locally referred to as musseques or bairros,
6 Abstracts
a more productive conversation about the
challenges facing the city can emerge: a
conversation which begins with politics rather
than planning interventions.
II. Representation
David Madden
Alfredo Brillembourg
The slum is once again a major urbanist trope.
Drawing on an analysis of so-called slums ranging
from nineteenth-century London and New York
to contemporary cases, this paper argues that
slum should be regarded as an ideological artifact
rather than a category of analysis. Slum is a
distorted representation of very real processes of
dispossession. It is a product of the inequality and
social distance that separates epistemological
subjects from the objects of their gaze. All slums,
to their middle-class outside observers, appear
to be characterized by social disorganization,
material-moral decay, and what is often cast
as pathetic cosmopolitanism. This process of
ideological misrepresentation has numerous
effects: territorial stigmatization; the naturalization
of inequality; legitimation of displacement; and
the erasure of important differences across
spaces and times. Ultimately, the category of slum
should be jettisoned in favor of a critical analysis
of urban dispossession attuned both to its
specificity and generality.
As the world becomes increasingly urban, the
demand for decent housing is greater than the
supply. Those who can afford to live in city centers
take advantage of better access to economic
opportunities and public amenities. Low-income
households are increasingly forced to exit the
city to find cheaper housing on the city’s fringes
or in suburban agglomerations. In South America,
Asia, and Africa, the long-term consequences of
urban expulsion are manifested in the expansive
informal settlements located on the fringes
of every large city. At the same time, informal
settlements such as the urban villages in Shenzhen
and Torre David in Caracas represent surprising
examples of vertical communities with a great
sense of solidarity and spatial inventiveness. With
examples like these in mind, architects should be
exploring alternative models of housing, looking
for spatial and socio-economic systems that can
address the diverse and expanding needs of urban
dwellers. Can housing be built at different scales
and timeframes? Can it be multi-programmed and
economical while promoting social cohesion?
Urban-Think Tank is currently exploring the
notion of an Open Village. Open building concepts
have been present in architectural discourse since
Le Corbusier’s famous depiction of the Maison
Domino construction principle. Combining the
notion of an adaptable structure together with
the multi-use dynamics of a neighborhood, Open
Villages provide a novel rubric for designing on
architectural and urban levels.
Ramin Bahrani
How does representation of informal places
and their constituents affect political voice and
agency? How does visibility create opportunities
for political change? The presentation will discuss
invisible spaces and their inhabitants, and the
fictionalization of reality in conjunction with clips
from my films Man Push Cart (2005), Chop Shop
(2007), and 99 Homes (2014).
7 Abstracts
8 Abstracts
Jaílson de Silva e Souza
Favela is city. This affirmation is not a truism:
in fact, the overwhelming representations of favelas
are centered in the “paradigm of absence.” By
this judgment, favelas would be a problem space
in the city, marked by the provisional, precarious,
and improvised. As such, its only meaning
should be to disappear as a territory, taking on
the form, logic, structure, and functions of the
formal neighborhoods in the city. The residents
of favelas are seen as useless beings, potential
criminals, or lacking subjective complexity. Since
the symbolic lays down the real, these stigmatizing
representations have generated public and
market policies that produce and reproduce
great urban inequalities. In the counter-flow
of this hegemonic judgment, we propose to think
of favelas as spaces of potency and invention,
capable of contributing to new forms of urbanity,
regulation of public spaces, and cultural
manifestations to allow for innovative solutions to
the central demands of contemporary urban life.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
I am not an architect. My idea of “majority” is the
largest sector of the electorate in places like
continental Africa and India. As such, I am not
directly involved with sub-proletarian urban
housing, but rather with the landless illiterate rural
population of India—and the urban-rural interface
in Nigeria. In the Indian context, the subaltern
build clay houses, the government provides
cheap latrines, not much in demand. My task is to
rearrange desires so that a desire to use latrines
may be produced rather than uselessly imposed.
Is this “housing?” In some ways, it is, because
large projects of giving brick habitats to randomly
selected villagers seem not to have anything to do
with a sense of place. As for the corner of Africa
that I “know,” the work by those with whom I am
allied is to rearrange desires so that a return to
land becomes once more viable. I have accepted
this invitation in order to learn how you think this is
in your discipline. I will share some pictures of the
three houses that have grown up around my work in
rural India and an architect’s comment.
9 Abstracts
III. Governance
Yaşar Adnan Adanalı
Gecekondu, translated as “built overnight,”
is the Turkish term that signifies the universal
phenomenon of informal settlements. Today,
informally developed yet partially regularized
and mostly consolidated neighborhoods
lie at the center of Istanbul’s restless urban
transformation process. In the making of the
“global city,” the actors of public-private
partnership development models target these
areas for the value of urban land upon which they
have developed for decades. In order to resist,
gecekondu communities from different ethnic,
cultural, and social backgrounds have organized
under existing or newly established neighborhood
associations in their respective locales.
The initial neighborhood mobilizations
around community-based organizations
were need-based and self-interested survival
strategies made in reaction to the risk of “creative
destruction” posed by the urban transformation.
However, the process of coming together with
other neighborhoods—forming larger districtand city-wide alliances with other social
movements over time—have paved the way into
further politicization and empowerment for these
communities. Can we argue that the initial limited,
self-interested claim for the right to housing
has grown into a broader, public claim for
spatial democracy? Can re-envisioning urban
informality as Istanbul’s new commons allow us
to overcome rising urban crises?
Guilherme Castro Boulos
This presentation focuses on dynamics of urban
exclusion in great Brazilian metropolitan areas—
mostly, São Paulo—and resistance to it through
social movements. In the last ten years, Brazil
has achieved economic growth based on civil
construction and public credits. Construction
companies have received financial support from
the state without specific regulation or a social
counterpart. This has produced urban real estate
speculation. As the price of land in large cities has
significantly increased, the poorest populations
have been evicted to the periphery, where social
services and infrastructure are scarce. The
situation has been exacerbated by mega-events
10 Abstracts
such as the 2014 FIFA World Cup. As witnessed in
June 2013, great social movements have catalyzed
in Brazil around issues of housing, including the
occupation of idle land in demand for better public
service and transportation.
Myriam Ababsa
From 1980 to 1997, Jordan became the first Arab
country to implement the new developmentalist
ideology promoted by the World Bank in Latin
America and Asia, which aimed to involve the
inhabitants of informal areas during every stage
of the renovation of their homes and to allow them
access to homeownership through long-term
loans guaranteed by the state. Following the Oslo
Accords of September 1993 and the Wadi Araba
Treaty of January 1994, however, the Jordanian
government, through the Housing and Urban
Development Corporation (HUDC), changed its
methods of intervention in the country’s Palestinian
refugee camps and informal areas. The focus
was solely on the provision of services, giving
clear priority to security issues. Until 2008,
upgrading policies and site with services
programs were developed. But in that year,
HUDC embarked on the King Initiative, A Decent
Housing for a Decent Living, aiming to build
100,000 units for low-income citizens. The
program was stopped in 2011 for corruption and
marketing reasons, while at the same time, citizens
self-built units for the new wave of Syrian refugees.
Substandard housing developed quickly to be
rented to this new population of 620,000 refugees.
Housing became the major source of tensions
between refugees and Jordanians—pushing the
government to engage in a new Integrated
National Housing Strategy.
11 Abstracts
IV. Form
Tatiana Bilbao
Mexico City, a city of 22 million, can learn a lot
from Neza—an informal settlement with 3.5 million
people that looks more formal than most planned
parts of the city. The capital experienced an
explosive growth between 1960 and 1980. Hoping
to solve problems related to informal housing,
the government established a federal institution
called INFONAVIT in the 1970s. Unable to fulfill
the demands for housing, they transformed
this platform into a private business, handing
the construction of massive housing to private
developers who—far from understanding the
culture and society of those who would inhabit
the houses they were to produce—created a
business that moved the economy but did little
to solve housing problems nationwide. Today, 14
million people live in these spaces, and the social
problems that have risen outpace those that
the housing was intended to solve. With that in
mind, the government is trying to find emergency
solutions—looking to Neza once again.
Rainer Hehl
Minha Casa, Minha Vida, the social housing
program introduced by the Brazilian government
in 2009, has produced 2 million housing units for
low-income populations based on the logic of
the market economy and the interests of largescale construction industries. The realization of
massive mono-functional commuter-settlements
allowed access to housing for many low-income
dwellers. But, the creation of diverse public
space was neglected. My presentation questions
modalities of current programs for mass housing
by addressing the need for commons—shared
resources that enable ecological development and
create a sense of collectivity and self-provision
for local communities. At the beginning of the
Anthropocene, the new man-made epoch that will
be determined by a scarcity of natural resources,
reframing the value production of mass housing
would significantly contribute to a new paradigm
for urban and natural development.
12 Abstracts
Omar Nagati and Beth Stryker
In Cairo, 70% of housing stock is informal: rather
than existing as a marginal practice, informal
building is a main motor for urbanization. What
role can architects and planners play in this
process? CLUSTER will present examples from
their research, mapping, and design projects: from
documentation of informal practices that emerged
following the 2011 Revolution, when individuals and
communities “reclaimed” their streets and public
spaces during a momentary political vacuum, to
recent pilots exploring design as a tool to negotiate
informal and formal boundaries.
What would individuals and communities
do if left to organize their own spaces? What are
the competing interests contested and negotiated
in public space? What are the organizing structures
underlying these seemingly chaotic phenomena?
And what are the frames of reference informing
these codes? CLUSTER’s design approach
seeks to learn from informality: focusing on small,
manageable pilots to put to test and validate
larger hypotheses regarding public space in
post-revolution Cairo.
Rohan Shivkumar
Speculating on the future of the slum in Mumbai
has been an area of intellectual labor among policy
makers, planners, and architects. Suggestions
concerning the form of the future communities
are deeply embedded in the particular contexts
of the practices from which they emerge. There
is perhaps no other location that has seen more
speculation than the slum of Dharavi, where state
interventions, private developers, academic
institutions and non-governmental organizations
have generated ideas for its future—especially
since 2006, when the state introduced a plan
for redevelopment. Along with community
organizations from Dharavi, the Kamla Raheja
Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture (KRVIA) was
instrumental in resisting this plan, since it did
not incorporate local needs and aspirations. My
presentation will sketch the role played by KRVIA
and the “form” of practice it deployed.
13 Abstracts
V. Keynote
Address
David Sims
Housing the Majority?
Or Leaving the Majority to House Themselves?
This is an enquiry into the production of housing,
especially what is called “affordable housing”, in
developing countries. It looks at the long saga of
attempts to set national housing policies, to devise
housing programs, to subsidize them, and to carry
them out. Among these efforts are governmentproduced social housing programs, mortgagebacked finance schemes, and demand-side rental
subsidies. Other approaches include sites and
services schemes and neighborhood upgrading.
All of these pretend to be aiding those of “limited
income” to acquire decent housing or to improve
their living conditions. Most have been tried in
Egypt and other Arab countries, and with rare
exceptions all have proven to be empty failures or
have been captured by middle class and special
interests.
This enquiry involves a voyage into the belly
of the technocratic world of bureaucrats and
experts, where national governments are assisted
by foreign donors and their legions of specialists,
do-gooders, and cheerleaders to tackle the
housing issue, and where inherent contradictions
in these East-West relations can be teased out.
In parallel, this enquiry looks at the real universe
of informal or self-build housing production and
the impossibility of “formalizing” or “capturing”
the informal dynamic without killing it. It posits an
increasingly dichotomous and hardly just urban
future, at least in Egypt.
14 Abstracts
Speakers
Myriam Ababsa
Myriam Ababsa is Associate
Research Fellow in Social Geography at the Institut Français du
Proche-Orient in Amman. Her
work focuses on the impact of
public policies on regional and
urban development in Jordan and
Syria, questioning governance
and public participation in housing
policies and service delivery. She
is author of Amman de pierre et de
paix; Raqqa, territoires et pratiques
sociales d’une ville syrienne; and
Atlas of Jordan. History, Territories,
Society. With Dr. Rami Daher, she
co-edited Cities, Urban Practices
and Nation Building in Jordan, and
with Baudouin Dupret and Eric
Denis, Popular Housing and Urban
Land Tenure in the Middle East.
Ababsa is also a consultant and
holds a PhD in geography from
the University of Tours.
Yaşar Adnan Adanalı
Yaşar Adnan Adanalı is an
Istanbul-based urbanist,
researcher, and lecturer. His
research and writings focus
on the social (re)production of
space, spatial justice, and relations of urban transformation and
democratization processes. He
teaches participatory planning
and design in Germany and works
with urban communities living in
informally developed neighborhoods in Istanbul, supporting
efforts to enhance security of
tenure and to improve living conditions. He is a member of the
solidarity network of urban
planners, architects, lawyers,
and activists in Istanbul, Bir Umut
Derneği (One Hope Association).
The group’s Düzce Hope Studio
works with a post-earthquake
community in the city of Düzce to
design an affordable co-housing
project for 389 families via participatory process. Adanalı maintains the blogs Reclaim Istanbul,
reclaimistanbul.com, and Happy
City, mutlukent.wordpress.com.
Nora Akawi
Nora Akawi is Director of StudioX Amman at Columbia University
GSAPP. She holds a B.Arch from
the Bezalel Academy of Art and
Design in Jerusalem and a MS
in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture
from Columbia University GSAPP,
where her research focused
on the role of the archive in
15 Speakers
the visualization of collective
spatial narratives and in imagining
alternative spatial and political
organization. With Nina Kolowratnik, she co-directs the research
and mapping initiative Echoing
Borders, which proposes alternative visualizations of borders and
territories through questions
on mobility, access, and human
rights and the representation of
migration and time across territories.
Amale Andraos
Bahrani has won numerous
awards including the critic’s prize
for best film in Venice (Goodbye
Solo) and a Guggenheim Fellowship among many others. In
2010, legendary film critic Roger
Ebert proclaimed Bahrani as “the
director of the decade.” His latest
film, 99 Homes, stars Andrew
Garfield, Michael Shannon and
Laura Dern and premiered at the
Venice, Telluride, Toronto and
Sundance Film Festivals and will
be released later this year.
Tatiana Bilbao
Through the work of her multicultural and multidisciplinary
office, Tatiana Bilbao tries to
understand the places that
surround us, regenerating and
humanizing them in reaction to
global capitalism and opening up
niches for cultural and economic
development. Her work includes
a botanical garden, a master plan
and open chapel for a pilgrimage
route, a biotechnological center
for a tech institution, and a funeral
home. Bilbao was the recipient of
the Kunstpries Berlin in 2012 and
the Global Award for Sustainable
Architecture Prize in 2013, and
named an Emerging Voice by the
Architecture League of New York
in 2009. Her work is included
in the collection of the Centre
George Pompidou in Paris and
the Heinz Architectural Center
Carnegie Museum of Art, and has
been published in A+U, Domus
and the New York Times. She is
currently a Visiting Professor at
Yale School of Architecture.
Amale Andraos is Dean of the
Columbia University Graduate
School of Architecture, Planning
and Preservation. Andraos has
taught at numerous universities
including the Princeton University
School of Architecture, the
Harvard Graduate School of
Design, the University of Pennsylvania Design School and the
American University in Beirut.
Her recent design studios and
seminars have focused on the
Arab City, which has become the
subject of a series of symposia entitled “Architecture and
Representation” held at Studio-X
Amman in 2013 and on campus in
New York in the fall of 2014. Her
publications include the recent
49 Cities, a re-reading of 49 visionary plans through an ecological lens, Above the Pavement, the
Farm!, and the forthcoming
Architecture and Representation:
The Arab City.
Andraos is a co-founder of
WORKac, a 25-person architectural firm based in New York that
focuses on architectural projects
that re-invent the relationship
between urban and natural
environments. WORKac has
achieved international recognition for projects such as the
Edible Schoolyard at PS216 and
PS7, the Centre de Conferences
in Libreville, Gabon, and the
Beijing Horticultural Exposition
Masterplan and Pavilions.
Andraos received her
Masters Degree from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard
University and her B.Arch from
McGill University in Montreal.
Guilherme Castro Boulos is
Director and National Coordiantor of Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto – MTST
(Homeless Workers’ Movement)
and the Frente de Resistência
Urbana (Urban Resistance Front)
in Brazil. A professor of philosophy, he has been a social activist
for over twelve years and writes
in a weekly column on urban
and national politics for Brazil’s
largest newspaper, Folha de São
Paulo. Boulos holds a graduate degree in philosophy from
Universidade de São Paulo with a
specialization in psychoanalysis
and is currently enrolled in postgraduate courses in psychiatry,
where he focuses on the relationship between depression and
collective organization.
Ramin Bahrani
Alfredo Brillembourg
Writer and director Ramin
Bahrani’s five feature films have
all premiered at the Venice or
Cannes Film Festivals and also
screened at the Sundance, Berlin
and Toronto Film Festivals.
In 1998, Alfredo Brillembourg and
Hubert Klumpner founded UrbanThink Tank (U-TT) in Caracas. A
member of the Venezuelan Architects and Engineers Association,
he has been a guest professor at
Guilherme Castro Boulos
16 Speakers
the University Jose Maria Vargas,
University Simon Bolivar, Central
University of Venezuela, and
Columbia University GSAPP,
where he and Klumpner
co-founded the Sustainable
Living Urban Model Laboratory
(S.L.U.M. Lab). Since 2010, they
have held the Chair for Architecture and Urban Design at ETH
Zurich. Brillembourg has received the 2010 Ralph Erskine
Award, the 2011 Holcim Gold
Award for Latin America, the
2012 Holcim Global Silver Award
for innovative contributions to
ecological and social design
practices, and the 2012 Venice
Biennale of Architecture Golden
Lion. He holds a M.Arch from
Columbia University GSAPP and
a second architecture degree
from the Central University of
Venezuela.
Maria Alice Rezende
de Carvalho
Historian and sociologist Maria
Alice Rezende de Carvalho is
Professor in the Department
of Social Sciences at Pontifical
Catholic University of Rio de
Janeiro (PUC-Rio). She is the
author and co-author of nine
books, two of them awarded by
the National Library Foundation
and the Association of Brazilian
Magistrates. In 2009, she was
elected President of the National
Association for Research and
Graduate Studies in Social
Sciences, for the biennium
2009–2010. Since 1994, she has
been working as a consultant
or evaluator of urban programs
implemented by the Municipal
Secretary of Housing. Today,
she coordinates the Center of
Studies and Projects of the City,
a laboratory for research and
debate on Rio de Janeiro.
Claudia Gastrow
Claudia Gastrow is a Mellon
Postdoctoral Fellow in the
Department of Anthropology
at the University of the Witwatersrand. She received her
PhD in Anthropology from the
University of Chicago in June
2014. Her dissertation, entitled
Negotiated Settlements: Housing
and the Aesthetics of Citizenship
in Luanda, Angola, investigated
the reshaping of citizenship
during the post-conflict building
boom in Angola’s capital, Luanda.
She is currently working on a
book manuscript based on her
dissertation project, as well as
a second project that investigates the history and politics of
unofficial economies in Luanda.
Gastrow’s work engages with
urban studies, political anthropology, aesthetic theory, and
studies in material culture.
Selva Gürdoğan
David Madden
Geeta Mehta
Selva Gürdoğan is Director of
Studio-X Istanbul at Columbia
University GSAPP. She is
co-founder with Gregers Tang
Thomsen of Superpool, an
architecture practice in Istanbul,
where she led the design of the
exhibitions Open City: Istanbul,
Becoming Istanbul, and Park for
the Audi Urban Future Award
2012, as well as the firm’s
contribution to the exhibition
Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms in Expanding Megacities
at the Museum of Modern Art.
Gürdoğan has worked at the
Office for Metropolitan
Architecture (OMA) in Rotterdam
and New York City on such projects as the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, the Beijing
Books Building, and the Dee and
Charles Wyly Theatre in Dallas.
She holds a B.Arch from the
Southern California Institute
for Architecture.
David Madden is Assistant
Professor in the Department
of Sociology at the London
School of Economics, and teaches in the LSE’s Cities Program.
His work is focused on urban
studies, political sociology and
social theory. He has conducted
ethnographic and historical
research in New York, London,
and elsewhere, addressing
topics including public housing,
public space, the politics of urban
development, gentrification and
planetary urbanization. Madden
has previously taught at
Columbia University, New York
University, and Bard College. He
holds a PhD in Sociology from
Columbia University and is a
member of the editorial board
of the journal CITY.
Geeta Mehta is Adjunct Professor of Urban Design at Columbia
University GSAPP. She has
taught and practiced urban
design in Japan, India, China,
Vietnam, Indonesia, and the US.
Her work includes the master
plan for QTSC software technology park in Vietnam, JICA projects in Japan and Indonesia, and
slum redevelopment projects in
India and Ghana. She has served
as the President of the American
Institute of Architects in Japan,
and currently serves on the advisory boards of the Friends of University of Tokyo in USA, Millennium Cities Initiative, and Women
Strong International. Mehta is
the co-founder of URBZ: User
Generated Cities, a think tank
committed to empowering people
at the community level to improve
their own neighborhoods. She
holds a PhD from the University
of Tokyo, a MS in Architecture
and Urban Design from Columbia
University GSAPP, and B.Arch
from the School of Planning and
Architecture in New Delhi.
Rainer Hehl
An architect and urban planner,
Rainer Hehl is Professor in the
Architecture Design Innovation
Program at the TU Berlin. From
2010 and 2014, he directed the
Master of Advanced Studies in
Urban Design at the ETH Zurich,
conducting research and design
projects on urban developments
in emerging territories with a
focus on Brazil. Hehl has lectured
widely on urban informality,
popular architecture, and hybrid
urbanities and holds a PhD from
the ETH Zurich. He is founder
of the architecture and urban
design office b-a-u.co.
Clara Irazábal
Clara Irazábal is Assistant
Professor of Urban Planning at
Columbia University GSAPP,
where she is Director of the Latin
Lab. She has taught for thirteen
years. Her research and teaching
explores the interactions of culture, politics, and placemaking,
and their impact on community
development and socio-spatial
justice in Latin American cities
and Latino communities in the
US. Published in English,
Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian,
Irazábal is author of Urban
Governance and City Making in
the Americas: Curitiba and
Portland and editor of Transbordering Latin Americas: Liminal
Places, Cultures, and Powers
(T)Here and Ordinary Places,
Extraordinary Events: Citizenship,
Democracy, and Public Space
in Latin America. Irazábal holds
a PhD in Architecture from the
University of California, Berkeley,
as well as two master degrees.
17 Speakers
Safwan Masri
Safwan Masri is Executive Vice
President for Global Centers and
Global Development at Columbia
University. He is responsible for
the development of an expanding network of Columbia Global
Centers. As an ambassador
for Columbia, he cultivates
relationships with Columbia
alumni and with international
leaders essential to the continued development of a global
Columbia. He joined the faculty
of Columbia Business School
in 1988 where he also served
as vice dean. He has taught at
INSEAD and Stanford, and is
founding chairman emeritus
of King’s Academy and of the
Queen Rania Teacher Academy.
His scholarly pursuits focus on
education reform in the
Middle East.
Mpho Matsipa
Mpho Matsipa is the Director
of Studio-X Johannesburg at
Columbia University GSAPP,
where she is also currently
Visiting Scholar. She holds a
PhD in Architecture from the
University of California, Berkeley,
where her scholarship explored
the relationship between diverse
regimes of representation—from
public art to synthetic hair practices—and the spatial politics
of globalization in the inner city
of Johannesburg. Matsipa curated the South Africa Pavilion
at the 11th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice
Biennale and has received a
Fulbright Scholarship and a
Carnegie Grant. Her research
interests include developing an
interdisciplinary research
approach in architecture, with
focus on Southern African
cities, race, and representation.
Omar Nagati
CLUSTER co-founder and principal Omar Nagati is a practicing
architect and urban planner
with over 25 years’ experience
working in Cairo. He has been the
recipient of a number of honors
and awards, including representing Egypt in the 6th International
Architecture Exhibition of the
Venice Biennale. A graduate of
Cairo University, he studied
and taught at the University of
British Columbia and University
of California, Berkeley, with a
specific focus on informal urbanism. Nagati adopts an interdisciplinary approach to questions
of urban history and design, and
engages in a comparative analysis of urbanization processes in
developing countries. His practice spans projects in housing,
institutional, and interior design
within Egypt and regionally,
with particular emphasis on
urban planning and community
development. He has lectured
widely on Cairo both locally
and internationally, and in Cairo
he has taught architecture and
urban design studios at the
Modern Sciences and Arts
University and Cairo University.
Pedro Rivera
Pedro Rivera is Director of Studio-X Rio de Janeiro at Columbia
University GSAPP. Founder and
Partner of RUA Arquitetos, he has
taught architectural and urban
design at PUC-Rio and Estácio de Sá, and participated as
speaker or guest critic at Princ18 Speakers
eton University and ETH Zurich.
Among his projects are the
Rio 2016 Olympic Golf Course
Clubhouse and the 1500 Art
Gallery at favela Morro da
Bobilônia. Hi work is included
within the exhibition Uneven
Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for
Expanding Megacities at the
Museum of Modern Art.
Hilary Sample
Hilary Sample is an architect
and co-founder with Michael
Meredith of MOS, an internationally recognized architecture
practice based in New York City.
MOS has been the recipient
of a Holcim Award, named an
Emerging Voice from the Architectural League of New York,
and an Architecture Award from
the American Academy of Arts
& Letters. Their work is held in
the collection of the Museum of
Modern Art, The Art Institute of
Chicago, and Yale Art Gallery.
She is currently an Associate Professor, Director of the Core, and
Coordinator of the Housing Core
III Studios at Columbia University
GSAPP, where she engages students on issues of housing in New
York City and Rio de Janeiro.
Jaílson de Souza e Silva
Jaílson de Souza e Silva, geographer and associate professor at
Fluminense Federal University,
is the founder and director of the
Favelas Observatory, an NGO
located at Favela da Maré, the
largest slum in Rio de Janeiro.
He is former secretary of education for the municipality of Nova
Iguaçu in the state of Rio de
Janeiro, former sub-secretary for
the state cabinet on human rights
and social assistance, and member of the Council of the City and
of the City Information Council at
the Pereira Passos Institute. He is
the author of numerous books, including Why Some But Not Others
and Favela: Pain and Happiness in
the City. Jaílson holds a masters
and doctoral degree in Sociology
of Education at PUC/RJ.
David Sims
David Sims grew up in Beirut and
holds degrees from Yale College
in Economics and Harvard
Graduate School of Design in
City Planning. He began working
as a consultant in 1972 and for
over four decades has been
engaged in a wide number of
assignments in the Middle East,
Africa, and Asia, mainly for
bilateral and international donors.
Affordable housing and informal
urban development have increasingly been his focus. He has
lead or participated in preparing
national housing strategies and
reviews in Nepal, Jordan, Tunisia,
Vietnam, Yemen, South Sudan,
and Egypt, and he has also been
closely engaged with urban
upgrading and sites and services
projects in several countries.
Currently, he is preparing the
Egypt Housing Sector Profile for
UN-Habitat. He is the author of
Understanding Cairo: The Logic of
a City Out of Control and Egypt’s
Desert Dreams: Development or
Disaster. He has been based in
Cairo and Luxor since 1977.
Rohan Shivkumar
of awards and grants from the
Graham Foundation, the New
York Foundation for the Arts, and
the Ford Foundation, and has
curated exhibitions and programs
for the Downtown Contemporary
Arts Festival in Cairo, Beirut
Art Center, Leslie Tonkonow
Artworks + Projects, the
American Institute of Architects/
Center for Architecture in New
York (where she was Director of
Programs), and the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Chicago.
Her works have been exhibited
widely, including shows at the
Wexner Center for the Arts,
the Walker Art Center, and the
Whitney Museum of American Art.
Stryker holds B.A from Columbia
University and a M.Arch from
Princeton University.
Rohan Shivkumar is an architect,
urban designer, and Deputy
Director of the Kamla Raheja
Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture and Environmental Studies
in Mumbai, where he leads
the Research and Design Cell,
the practicing arm of the school.
He has worked on projects
concerning housing, public
space, environmental issues,
and infrastructure. He also was
the project coordinator Cinema
City, a multi-disciplinary research
and art project exploring the
relationship between cinema
and the city of Mumbai, and is
co-editor of the accompanying
compendium Project Cinema City.
He is currently working on a film
project, Nostalgia for the Future,
which examines the legacy of
modernism in India on the architecture of the home. Shivkumar
is co-curator of film programs
for the monthly Movies at the
Museum screening series at the
Bhau Daji Lad Museum, and the
Geographies of Consumption
research and art project by the
Mohile Parekh Foundation.
Gregers Tang Thomsen is
co-founder with Selva Gürdoğan
of Superpool, an architecture
practice in Istanbul, where he led
projects such as Open Library,
Dragos Residential Towers, and
exhibition design
for the UAE National Pavilion
at the 54th Venice Biennial and
2nd Istanbul Design Biennial.
Previously, he worked for
four years at he Office for
Metropolitan Architecture (OMA)
in Rotterdam and New York City
on such projects as the Cordoba
Congress Center, the Beijing
Books Building, and the Dee
and Charles Wyly Theatre in
Dallas. He has led the EU FP7
funded TailorCrete research
project since 2009 and holds
a MA from the Aarhus School
of Architecture.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Rajeev Thakker
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
is University Professor at
Columbia University. Her
institutional interest is to create
communication lines between
the Humanities, professional
schools such as Architecture
and Law, Area Studies, and
the Social Sciences. Her
publications touching the
crossing of architecture and
identity theory are “Excelsior
Hotel Coffee Shop,” Assemblage
20, “City, Country, Agency,”
in Vikramaditya Prakash, Ed.
Theatres of Decolonization,
and “Megacity,” in the first issue
of Grey Room. She has been
cogitating upon an essay on
temples and rural adobe for ten
years now.
Rajeev Thakker is Director of
Studio X Mumbai at Columbia
University GSAPP. He holds
a B.Arch from Syracuse
University and a MS in Advanced
Architectural Design from
Columbia University GSAPP. He
has worked for Skidmore, Owings
& Merrill and the Arnell Group,
and taught design and theory at
KRVIA and BSSA in Mumbai. He
has served as guest critic and
lecturer at Parsons The New
School of Design, Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute, and the
A.B.A.C. School of Architecture
in Bangkok. In 2003, he started
his own practice, a-RT, which
documents the city and various
spatial conditions through
cartographic, architectural, and
other creative processes.
Gregers Tang Thomsen
On Display
GSAPP Housing Studios, 1974–2014
a retrospective exhibition
of 40 years of the housing studio
at Columbia University GSAPP
4th Floor, Avery Hall
9am–5pm
through the end of the Spring 2015 semester
In response to student requests and to the
coordinated interests of new faculty a series of
experiments that took housing as a theme began
at GSAPP in 1974, as the school was shifting
from a four year undergraduate program to its
current three year graduate program. By 1976
the housing studio had emerged as a permanent
feature of the school’s studio sequences, with its
position as the required fall studio of the second
year and its student team approach stabilized.
Drawing on school publications, university
archives, course bulletin depositories and
interviews with faculty and students the exhibition
tracks the emergence and transformation of
housing at GSAPP, as a pedagogical device, and
as a topic that reflects the evolution of collective
habitation as a social, formal, technical and
political site of inquiry for the school.
Beth Stryker
CLUSTER co-founder and
principal Beth Stryker works
between Cairo and New York
City. She has been the recipient
19 Speakers
20 On Display