Streets in the Sky: Can We Ever Get it Right?

Listening to Jeanne Gang's TED talk was challenging. Although I agreed with her views, certain design solutions she proposed sparked skepticism in me, especially the high-rise building in Chicago. The 'balconies for social interaction' idea was too reminiscent of Peter and Allison Smithson's 'streets in the sky' concept, a typology that has been and continues to be demolished in most places it is built. Clearly, outdoor spaces don't work on the fifteenth floor the same way as they do at grade level, and our continued efforts to introduce socialization into high rises have, for the most part, led to no real change in the unsocial, introverted ways in which high-rises function.

What is interesting to me is that while Peter and Allison Smithson's vision for streets in the sky has largely not come to fruition the way they'd hoped, a somewhat similar typology in India has endured many attempts at demolition and obsolecsence. The chawls of Mumbai have 'streets in the sky' in the form of long corridors used both to access individual housing units (single room accommodations, usually) as well as for social purposes. Don't be fooled by the shabby exteriors of the building, an expected issue faced by working class housing. These streets work! In this blog post, I try to analyze some reasons for how the two types of 'streets in the sky' differ and how well they serve their intended purpose.

First, there is a matter of scale. Chawls rarely go over four stories. That seems to be the maximum height at which a human being can situate themselves in without losing connection with their immediate street-level surroundings. Higher buildings provide its occupants with a wider view, but at the cost of an intimate relationship with the immediate neighborhood. 

Chawls are often located in neighborhoods full of other chawls. In these neighborhoods, drying clothes in the corridors is not a matter of shame. Neither are many other semi-personal activities that occupants perform without judgment. The regulation of what can and cannot be done in the corridors just for the sake of preserving the looks of a building has long-term negative consequences. It invites fewer people into the corridors and they become reserved for activities like smoking, drinking, and littering. Isn't that worse than a few clothes hanging off of clotheslines?

Peter and Allison Smithson's "streets in the sky" had rigid ideas about what would happen in the streets. They pictured a utopia with kids playing in the streets, bingo nights on the weekends, and so on. I find it hard to imagine kids throwing around a ball at a height of fifty feet or more. It would be so unsafe! I also don't think the streets had the right enclosure for public gatherings. The "streets in the sky" concept attempted to impose functions onto the "streets" in ways that felt unnatural. In chawls, no functions are imposed. Occupants make the corridors their own in any way they want.

Chawls are not perfect. They are congested and poorly maintained, with common toilets and narrow staircases. However, there are some things they do right. The "streets in the sky" concept is definitely one of them.

The High Costs of Healthcare

 "Low-Cost Hospital Design" simply does not yield the same search results as "Low-Cost Housing Design." I could go into the details for why that happens, but one can verify this for themselves. What I will say is that if health care is as much of a basic right as housing, then this does not make sense. The issue is that we are, for the most part, ready to make compromises in housing. We are okay with choosing lower cost materials, using more efficient means of production, reducing the programmatic requirements, and so on. With healthcare, we are reluctant to do the same. With healthcare, everything must be state-of-the-art and high-tech, or else we are scared we'll be in danger. This attitude is now prevalent everywhere. In India, where private hospitals with higher standards of. well, everything have come up in very large numbers in the past two decades, this "nothing but the best" attitude has started to foster distrust towards low-cost public health initiatives like government hospitals and vaccination drives. Needless to say, this distrust isn't helping anybody. The reality is that not everyone can afford "state-of-the-art" and "nothing-but-the-best," and truth be told, not everyone always needs "state-of-the-art" and "nothing-but-the-best." There are many health issues that can be treated with minimal infrastructure as long as people have access to basic services, and hospital design doesn't need to be laborate to provide these services.

What we need are small-scale, easily replicable building designs that can be deployed over diverse territories with ease. These buildings need only to cater to common, easily treatable or routine illnesses and conditions. It must be kept in mind that in many poorer countries, death or prolonged illness are not the result of a lack of the best care but the lack of access to basic care. One would be shocked to know how often children die from diarrhea which can easily be treated if one just has access to basic healthcare. Waiting for hospitals--and the innovations and budgets needed to build hospitals everywhere--is killing people when small clinics can do so much. Using cheap but durable materials and easy methods of construction, clinics need to be built everywhere so that hospitals are needed only in case of more serious illnesses. Lowering high standards of health care infrastructure can ironically be the key to improving public health, and it is high time we embrace this irony.

Third Places

"This week, a study module on 'Third Places' took me back to my college days. I went to Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. The university had a small urban campus with tree-lined streets, and a central open field enclosed by department buildings. We had ample places to socialize, starting from several 'canteens' on campus to in-campus ponds and bookstores. However, the 'third place' I remember most vividly is the gaachtola. Literally, the word translates to 'under tree,' or something close enough, but for many of us Jadavpurians, it was packed with much more meaning. As I mentioned, our campus had innumerable trees, and sitting on a platform under them was a common tradition unless except on particularly rainy days. However, the word gaachhtola almost always referred to a particular landscape element outside of a particular canteen consisting of a circular wall filled with earth and planted with colorful shrubs. It's so strange to look back now only to see that our gaachhtola did not have a tree at all!

There were certain characteristics that helped this particular spot stand out. It was conveniently located at a nexus of the academic buildings and the canteen and field, thus occupying a 'middle ground' for the campus' consciousness. It provided good visibility; one could easily sit there alone and be able to watch the ongoing matches on the field or spot a friend walking down the street. The campus mostly had mid-rise buildings upto five storeys high, so the surrounding enclosure was tuned to a human scale. The gaachhtola also had certain characteristics that a trained architect's eyes would look at with scorn. It had a convex shape, radiating outwards in a circle in a way we were taught should have pushed people out instead of pulling them in. But that did not happen in practice. Instead, the convex shape helped people divide it up in parcels to serve their groups, the planting in the center serving to create some privacy from the groups interacting on the other side.

The photograph below is the only photo I have which gives a glimpse of the gaachhtola. It shows me and my friends playing Holi at the gaachhtola. If you look closely you see the canteen in the background as well as the shrubs I mentioned. For this blog post, I asked my friends if they had any pictures and most of them echoed my sentiment which is that this was a place we so took for granted, it never even occurred to us to document it. Our post class tête-à-tête , the sharing of plates full of chilli chicken and samosas, the street plays performed by the university drama groups, the campus politicians' calls to protest, the awkward encounters with faculty--they all live in our memory and nowhere else.

Fortunately, my architecture professor's seemed to be better clued into the value of the gaachhtola as a place of note. My first design assignment ever was to design to design a pavilion around it. This week's reading, however, got me thinking--does the gaachhtola really need more built forms to support it? From the reading, I somehow started picturing the 'third' place' as an indoor space with a specific primary purpose, such as a pub or club. The gaachhtola was obviously much simpler. In essence, it was just some planting amidst buildings that were going to be erected anyways! Examples like this show that the 'third place' often doesn't need to be 'designed' in the rather complicated architect sense of the word. Instead, it can exist without 'buildings' and be the result of the adoption of a spot with accidental merit as a 'place.' Today, the call to action for architects may just be to NOT BUILD. We should therefore study the accidental 'third places' of the contemporary world and trust the users of our designs to make their own meanings out of what we give them.