Harry Smith

Co-production in urban shaping can future-proof emergent neighbourhoods against disasters and help them adapt to climate change. But to be effective, co-production processes need to understand and work with the complexities on the ground, drawing on a “ dialogue of knowledges ” among civil society, the state and academia. This paper reflects on 10 years of work in Comuna 8, Medellín, where disaster risk management (DRM) has become a key driver of community mobilization. It traces the evolution of a uniquely continuous sequence of participatory action-research projects around DRM in self-built neighbourhoods involving all these actors, linking community activism, scientific knowledge and policymaking. It highlights the diversity and capacities of community organizations and other actors that support them and how their interactions with state actors have evolved. It also demonstrates the emergence of an integrated approach to DRM and climate change adaptation from a bottom-up understanding of the complexities of place.

Industrial buildings play vital roles in a society, from shaping the economic, technological, cultural, and social fabric of society to contributing to its growth, development, and resilience. Hence, often at the end of their lifespans, they are “preserved” for their historical value through renovation. Considerations for renovation often include their historical significance, structural integrity, adaptive reuse, social sustainability, financial viability, and environmental impacts. Among these considerations, the carbon emissions associated with a project are increasingly becoming a factor of relevance when a historical building is to be sensitively renovated so that it can continue to contribute to local sustainability. However, embodied carbon is often overshadowed by operational carbon and overlooked in the development of renovation options. This paper argues for the need to include embodied carbon in the consideration of any renovation process and for guidelines for doing so. The argument is built upon a systematic review of current practices in the renovation of industrial heritage buildings across selected representative countries from the Global South and the Global North, in the belief that the former could learn valuable lessons from the latter, which has more extensive experience in considering embodied carbon in such processes. The argument also shows the difference in policy between different countries and articulates how the inclusion of embodied carbon might support environmental targets in the Global South. Based on a quantitative comparison, this review explains why embodied carbon (EC) is missing in renovations of industrial heritage buildings in the Global South. This study estimates the proportion and value of EC within the total life cycle in renovations of industrial buildings to support the argument. Above all, a calculation using a standard life cycle assessment (LCA) tool (ISO14040 & 14044) applied to four successful examples and a quantitative comparison highlight the benefits of including embodied carbon in renovations of industrial buildings and the carbon savings in the Global South and further supports our argument.

Industrial buildings play vital roles in a society, from shaping the economic, technological, cultural, and social fabric of society, to contributing to its growth, development, and resilience. Hence often at the end of their lifespans, they are “preserved” for their historical value through renovation. In consideration for renovation, often included are their historical significance, structural integrity, adaptive reuse, social sustainability, financial viability and environmental impacts. Among them, the carbon emissions associated with a project are becoming increasingly a factor when a historical building is to be sensitively renovated so that it can continue to contribute to local sustainability. However, embodied carbon is often shadowed by operational carbon and overlooked in the development of renovation options. This paper aims to argue for the need to include embodied carbon in the consideration and for guidelines for doing so in a renovation process. The argument is through a systematic review of current practices in the renovations of industrial heritage buildings between selected presentative countries, the developing ones and developed ones, on the belief that the former could learn valuable lessons from the latter who has gone through the process already. The argument also shows the difference in policy between different countries and articulates how the inclusion of this might support environmental targets in developing countries. Based on quantitative comparison, the review explains why embodied carbon (EC) is missing in developing countries. The study estimates the proportion and value of EC with the total life cycle in renovations of industrial buildings to support the argument. Above all, a calculation using a standard LCA tool (ISO14040 & 14044) applied to four successful examples and quantitative comparison highlights the benefits of including embodied carbon in renovations of industrial buildings and the carbon savings in developing countries and further supports the argument.

This chapter examines how neoclassical urban design concepts of physical order which developed during the Enlightenment period in Europe were adopted in late 18th- and early 19th-century Brazil. We will focus on a case study of Rio de Janeiro, the plans for which were produced or influenced principally by the emerging French planning profession. The chapter illustrates how the deep embedding of concepts of urban order and disorder within the foundations of the emerging disciplines and professions of architecture, urban design and planning came to spread these ideas worldwide in the colonial and neocolonial periods of the 19th century. In tracing the formulation and partial implementation of plans for Rio, the chapter charts the growing rejection by the national elites of early ‘organic’ urban development as disorderly. The chapter shows that the effects of these plans were often to the contrary of what was intended, and that by promoting a particular notion of physical and thus social order, they contributed to the growth of what was seen as physical disorder in practice.

This chapter notes that sub-Saharan Africa will be the location for a large proportion of projected urban growth during the rest of this century and questions the relevance of past and current approaches to urban order and disorder by political and economic elites and urban professionals in this context. The chapter sets out the case for seeing so-called ‘slums’ and ‘informality’ differently and for recognising that both top-down and bottom-up regulation always co-exist and both have socio-cultural bases for their regulation, as is demonstrated by how the incremental self-provision of housing and urban space follow deep socio-cultural norms. The chapter revisits similar arguments made by key urban scholars such as Sennett and Lefebvre. From this analysis, the chapter calls for new approaches to understanding the ‘urban’, which entail widening the areas of knowledge that form part of the training of urban professionals to include both knowledge from other disciplines and non-professional and non-academic knowledge; training ‘para-professionals’ who can provide a ‘bridge’ between social understanding and praxis by professionals; and widening access to training in urban development beyond the predominantly middle class. This, it is argued, will be essential to support the rapid urbanisation in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere in the world.

While the preceding chapters in the book have traced the transfer of ideas and praxis in relation to urban space and form from the Global North to the Global South during the 19th and 20th centuries using the case of Brazil, this chapter focuses on more recent North-South and South-South transfer using the example of Angola, which has a shared colonial history with Brazil. The chapter first describes the introduction of notions of physical and social order by Portuguese colonial urban development practice, which perceived indigenous built forms as disordered, and their continuation in modernist interventions both pre- and post-independence. The chapter then explores urban development proposals over the last three decades – involving firms from Brazil, Europe, Lebanon, Israel and increasingly China – which range from large housing developments to waterfront developments and gated communities. The chapter concludes with a reflection on how the socio-political circumstances and balance of power in Angola have negated any traction gained by ideas and practices that could have been imported from Brazil such as ‘slum upgrading’ and participatory planning based on the ‘right to the city’, instead favouring the creation of ‘islands of order’ intended mainly for middle- and higher-income sectors of the population.

This chapter looks at urban ordering initiatives directed towards middle-class consolidation, and how these are manifested in somewhat similar ways in space and form compared to earlier interventions driven by the political and elite interests seen in previous chapters. It examines the contemporary emergence in the 1960s and 1970s of new towns and neighbourhoods that preceded New Urbanism in the USA and also the emergence of gated communities in Brazil. Both phenomena arose as a reaction to perceived key failings of predominant urban development patterns in the respective countries: dense, congested and unsafe urban areas in Brazil and sprawling suburbs in the USA, both seen as forms of social disorder. The chapter describes the evolution of Brazil’s most commercially successful brand of gated community – Alphaville in São Paulo – and its influence elsewhere as a product that provides a safe and ‘orderly’ place to live for those who can afford it. The chapter compares the features of this locally developed Brazilian urban form with those of the USA’s New Urbanism, finding that although there are differences in terms of physical order, both share an intention to provide a certain social order based on differentiation and isolation from the predominant urban form.

This chapter first explains the model of urban physical order that was developed in Curitiba, which added to key functionalist urban design and the planning principles examined in the previous chapter both environmental and (what later came to be termed) sustainability concerns, as well as an incremental development approach. It then explores the socio-economic context in which this adjusted model of physical order was developed, characterised by a politically powerful planning technocracy, due to political and institutional circumstances and to strong economic development based on industry and real estate development; it also discusses some of the social outcomes. Against this background, the chapter also briefly describes the socio-economic conditions of two very different geographical contexts to which notions of order, as developed in Curitiba, were re-exported and analyses the versions of physical order that were proposed in these contexts and the mismatch with their respective social orders. These are the Metropolitan Spatial Development Framework for the City of Cape Town and the master plans for ‘new centralities’ in Angola. In each case, the outcome turned out quite different from the ostensible social aspirations.