Framework for development of viable neighbourhood in urban settings

Part I

When we think of settlement systems, we are confronted with the question of spatial organisation based on man’s intervention in the natural ecosystem through his provisioning of housing, its support utilities and infrastructure.

This generates three broad categories or typologies of rural, suburban and urban settlements framed in geography, climate, infrastructure and social conditioning.

The three typologies are difficult to investigate and analyse because of the many diverse variables involved.

Though much has been resolved and written on urban design, a lot remains outstanding with regard to application. The problems are further compounded in settlement systems by the fact that the subject is multidisciplinary.

Designers at micro level grapple with analytical questions on social and technical aspects of the urban settlements morphological texture.

Master plans are classified as “live” documents to justify continuous “adjustments”. Understanding the subject may require us to focus on housing systems’ delivery framework and adding content to it through examination of the concepts of homes and houses, then noting how their conflation affects urban neighbourhoods’ characterisation.

Housing systems are primary typological elements for provision of shelter, utilities and infrastructure to human communities. Their scale may vary from communities at neighbourhood to national level with the utilities and infrastructure varying depending on the quality of the housing system.

The systems are complex social products in their conceptualisation and production because of their dual utilitarian and artefactual nature. This duality creates a dialectical relationship accentuated by the diversity of opposing values of the stakeholders who frame the ordering systems relevant for generating public architecture’s design strategies.

The management of value systems of stakeholders and the symbiotic relationships of the housing procurement process and the user responsiveness to the system generates neighbourhoods and their characterisation. The relationship enables us to manipulate housing systems to improve morphological texture and housing supply.

The foregoing is significant considering that the world population is likely to be urbanised by 2050.

Furthermore, urban space constitutes 2 percent of the land, houses 60 percent of production systems, generates 70 percent of the energy consumption and produces 70 percent of the greenhouse gases.

Hence, we need to “ . . . systematise the alignment of urban settlement and national planning objectives . . . (for) economic and social development . . . ” (Habitat II). Our duty is to increase stakeholders’ awareness on concepts for the development of quality, sustainable and economically viable settlement systems.

This requires that we understand the housing system building blocks, that is, houses and their delivery framework which are transformed into homes of and ultimately, neighbourhoods.

Houses are physical structures from which homes are created to shelter us and provide infrastructure which connects us to neighbours and communities. They are functions of technology, socio-economic and climate. Houses are building block for housing systems.

Homes trigger placeness and identity of our roots, where life begins and ends. These are places of joy, sorrows, citadels where we control entry and exit, lounge our next move, places we feel that we are in charge. We build and assert our values and ideas from our homes.

Homes are not houses, they are social constructs — artefacts imbued in cultural settings such as “wakura, chivaka musha wako (“When you have come of age, build your own home/You should marry & build your own home)”. Homes are not just commodities which depreciates, they appreciate and only depreciate by virtue of loss of memory of past homely dramas.

They are the functional units for the formation of neighbourhoods. Homes imprint social and cultural aspects on houses, thus placing a premium on the meaning of a house and its contents as a system of signs for communication to stakeholders with diverse and dialectical values.

We note the reflexive, yet dialectical relationship of houses and homes built on stake holder value systems discussed below.

Stakeholders transcend national boundaries when considering global sustainability. However, they may be grouped by their value systems into construction teams (developers,) professionals, users, politicians and the bureaucrats (technocrats).

Where bracketed and non-bracketed stakeholders are independent, different neighbourhoods from those generated when they are a single entity occur. Stakeholders trigger the dialectics of socio-physical environmental setting from which the scale, time, activities and resources are manipulated to determine housing ordering systems.

The resultant negotiated values trickle down and affect the ordering systems contextualised within family meanings framed by the users.

The user preferences and particularisation of the selection of neighbourhood, site, house function and type suited to the cultural settings for society, philosophies and concepts in housing design is receptive to the user perceptions, concepts and economic constraints.

These impose hierarchical order of appreciation of the design ordering systems contextualised in the policies and legal codes, environmental and technical performances standards which affect the house design and the resultant neighbourhoods’ qualities. The variations in user preferences, requirements and macro conditions framing the design create relational differences in the neighbourhoods’ infrastructure, buildings and the inhabitants’ social actions.

Users respond to conditions set at intermediate and macro level by staying or moving out, acting on the attractions or repulsions of the neighbourhood conditions. By choosing to stay or being attracted to a neighbourhood, they accept its settings or change them. Hence, the integrative aspect of the ordering system places homeowners as active participants in the particularisation processes and passive actor in the neighbourhood formation processes.

Defining neighbourhood qualities through value system: Socio-cultural framework impose controls on user values system.

Professionals and developers operate at meso-level as the interpreters of the active ingredients of users into the legal and policy framework (macro level) which directs the design and construction process.

The public sway influences the direction in which neighbourhoods develop as exemplified by regularisation of illegal settlements.

Conditions which distort the value system amongst stakeholders and encourage higher turnover, lower sense of security, dissatisfaction in the quality of housing and general incomes for the inhabitants weakens the neighbourhoods.

How best should we stabilise stakeholders’ value systems to strengthen the sense of neighbourhood? We will investigate this in our next article.

This article was prepared by the Institute of Architects of Zimbabwe for Business Weekly