Introduction
“One
of the central characteristics of architectural form is the way it acts as a
symbol or signifier of function, human culture, political power, or any kind of
meaning that can be inferred by the person that experiences form.” That’s how Kent Jay Stein in 1999 began
introducing Geoffrey Broadbent theory about forms and meanings, where a slight
change in the signifier can present a whole different meaning; not only in
architecture, but also in all elements our eyes can see.
All
elements surrounding us are codes to ease communication: arrangement of letters
forming a certain word is a code, street signs and what differs one another are
codes, traffic lights, architectural form…etc.
In
the 16th century, Leonardo Da Vinci drew the MonaLisa, and he took
in consideration presenting it in very precise and calculated proportions and
relationships between elements to state a notion of aesthetics, but about 400
years later, an artist influenced by Van Gogh drew the same Monalisa, but by
stressing on brush strokes, he gave a whole different notion of impressionism.
In 1919, Marcel Duchamp drew an exact replica to the Monalisa and just added
two lines on her face to form a moustache, where these two simple black lines
added to the piece, gave a different notion of Dadaism. Then in 1934, Frida
Kahlo drew the Monalisa once again and placed the Monalisa’s face by Frida’s
face herself, where that again gave a whole different meaning, as Frida has an
accident that affected her spiral chord causing her a kind of paralyze and by
placing her face on the Monalisa, she showed a symbolism approach. Dali also
placed his face on the Monalisa again in 1954, which was so surrealistic to
have a male face on a female body. Several contemporary artists imposed their
own lines on the Monalisa to give different statements, Roy
Lichtenstein turning her to a comic art, Andy Warhol by repetition and giving
different colors, Fernando Botero by making her look fat, Claudia Williams by
turning her into a totally ugly woman, till in 2001, Banksy, a Graffiti artist,
drew the Monalisa on a wall in London and he added a weapon and headphones, to
state a notion of contemporary culture of war and globalization.
The
example of the Monalisa shows how the codes - added to the painting by
different artists through different time spans - empowered the theory of
transformation, where each element added to the painting gives a whole
different meaning and can reflect a political or social state of the time. This
study is using both theories (Change and transformation, and semiotics) to
investigate reasons and reflection of additive structures extensions on
low-income public housing buildings.
Brief History on
Housing in Cairo
Since 1970, researchers and professionals had
special interest to investigate the pattern of change in the structure of Cairo.
The changes, which took place during this period, were faster and more
important than those, which took place since the beginning of the nineteenth
century, where the Egyptian social order, political approaches and economic
aspects has changed drastically causing transformation of urban patterns in
Egyptian cities stems from different reasons. These reasons were: a rapid
increase in population not matched by additional new housing units, internal
migration from rural to urban centers, deterioration of old parts of the cities
without upgrading or equivalent replacement, accumulation of housing shortage
over the years, and finally, the increasing gap between the cost of housing and
income levels.
With
an average density of
35,000 inhabitants per km², Cairo today has one of the highest population
densities in the world, with certain areas reaching over 100,000 inhabitants per
km² (David Sims, 2004).
Cairo’s expansion has
become necessary because of the major housing crisis
the city is currently experiencing, which hits the poorest the hardest. In
spite of the saturation of the downtown area, disadvantaged families still want
to live there to be able to take advantage of its benefits. The housing
shortage is forcing these families to settle in precarious and sometimes unusual dwellings:
unstable floors are added to old buildings, temporary homes are built directly
on building roofs and even in the tombs. In fact, although there are few actual
slums in Cairo, this verticalization
of the city’s living space represents a variation on the same
theme and is equally unsound.
Another
example of housing on the city boarders are the informal settlements The phenomenon
has its roots in the 1960s, when small agricultural areas on the fringes of
"formal" Cairo began to be subdivided by farmers and middlemen and
sold to individual owner-builders. It accelerated dramatically after the 1974 open
door policy was proclaimed,
fuelled by ever increasing flows of remittances
from the hundreds of thousands of Egyptians working mostly as
laborers in the Gulf
and in other oil economies. It
was at first totally ignored by the authorities, even
though the very act of
subdividing land for building
purposes without a permit was illegal, as was building without
a permit. The
process was completely informal in the sense that land was bought and
transferred and buildings were erected with no legal paper work and a total
reliance on personal trust, mediated when necessary by the existing community.
Attempts to
increase the development of low-income housing by government were held, to
accommodate zounds of immigrants, instead of dwelling informal units inside
Cairo in addition to the natural demographic growth. The government has attempted to deal with the
housing shortages by construction of public housing projects. Most of these are
blocks of apartments in five-storey walk-ups. Since 1960, when the program was
greatly expanded, annual production has fluctuated between 10,000 and 20,000
units, dropping to less than 6,000 in years when national priorities led to
budget reductions. In order to make this housing affordable to low-income
people, rents were lowered to nominal levels. The government's inability to
properly maintain the buildings eventually prompted their conversion to
ownership. The heavy subsidies, which this approach entailed, have placed an
enormous financial burden on the government, preventing it from even coming
close to meeting the demand for housing through new construction. Therefore, in
the late 1970s the government adopted a policy of up-grading existing areas to
capitalize on the standing housing stock (AKPIA, 1984. Sited in Ali, Emad el Deen, 2003).
Change
and Transformation Structure
Change and Transformation, is a
structure where time is a very essential aspect to crystallize the system. “Time
and change appear to be increasingly important dimensions in the study of any
artifact domain”. (Hillier & Leaman, 1973), but a great difference
between Change and Transformation must be studied well, where change is making
over a radical difference and time here is immediate and not through sequence
and process, as Transformation, where the conversion is not drastic as in
Change, but it is development of a system through time. “Process can be well
perceived in increasing the complexity of the content by adding a new element
to the system through time, which leads to an improvement and development for
the benefit of the system itself in situation, of not loosing its structure.”
(El Feki, 2009)
“The concept of transformation, which
is the heart of the theory evolution… in evolution theory, transformation is
the mean by which time and variety are bought into an inextricable
relationship. Similarly, in structuralism it is through transformation that
variety is to be explained and the dimension of time recovered.” (Hillier & Leaman, 1973)
Transformation in Public housing Policies
The
systematic involvement of the Egyptian government in the terms of public
housing started with the 1952 revolution and the rise to power of Gamal Abdel
Nasser. The new government’s interest in housing manifested itself in two main
ways.
The first was a series of laws passed at
five-year intervals to reduce and control the rents of housing units
constructed after 1944. The second was the state’s involvement in the
construction of low-cost public housing built on the outskirts of Cairo and in
cleared informal areas in the centre of the city. From 1965 to 1975, there was
a sharp drop in the production of public housing due in part to the priority
given to military expenses as a result of a quasi-permanent state of war. As
the population continued to increase and urbanization followed, the gap between
demand and supply, both private and public, greatly widened. (El-Batran & Arandel, 1998).
“After 1975, President
Sadat engaged the country in a new direction, namely the Open Door Economic
Policy (Infitah), marked by a greater political and economic opening to the west and a
move away from a state controlled economy towards a market economy.” (Waterbury, 1983) With regard to housing, the government announced that
it would only be responsible for the construction of low-income housing, and
the private sector would have the primary responsibility for providing housing
units to the middle and upper-classes. In addition, the state disengaged from
the production of rental housing and maintained the policy of rent control with
only minor modifications.
The increasing demand for affordable housing in
Egypt has urged governments, during the last decades, to commit themselves to
provide completely finished housing units for medium and low-income families.
In an exaggerated concern over physical features and standards, government
officials have forwarded their systematic approach, underestimating its
socioeconomic and cultural shortcomings and excluding the low-income group from
participating in the formal housing production. The decision makers assumed it
in the 1970s that households were evolving towards a “modern way of life” which
would be appropriately catered for in prefabricated mass housing dwellings. It
was also assumed that households would quickly adapt themselves to the
dwellings they were provided with. Such a deterministic approach, combined with
the urgency to meet the housing needs resulted in the wide spread use of almost
the same version of five-storey walk-up dwellings in various geographical areas
without any consideration neither to different climatic conditions nor to
households’ different social backgrounds and lifestyles. An average household
size being estimated at 6 to 7 people (Behloul, 2002).
Government construction of
subsidized housing has proved prohibitively expensive, and has thus been unable
to meet the demand, while rent control has discouraged private investment in
housing. Private sector construction shifted to condominiums, and transfers
of rental units, involved increasingly larger "key money" charges.
Attempts to control the key money system only depressed turnover rates, while
attempts to limit condominiums in order to promote rental construction further
stifled the market. Consequently, informal sector housing has become
widespread, accounting for an estimated 70% of all new construction in Cairo
(AKPIA, 1984 sited in Ali, Emad
el Deen, 2003). Informal and illegal housing continued in the 1980s and 1990s.
It is estimated that in 1994 more than 4 million people were living in illegal
settlements in the Greater Cairo Region. The efforts of the government to
control the growth of the city have not been sufficient and it kept growing in
most directions, particularly to the west and north, to reach an estimated
population of over 12 million in 1994 (UN.1993).
The Egyptian government has applied several actions
and policies in an attempt to resolve the housing problem, including rent
control, providing public housing, and subsidizing building materials. Most plans
have had limited success because governmental administrators view the problem
from a different perspective than that of the public. However, urban areas in
most
Egyptian cities are currently confronted with a
number of problems that have emerged because of the ever-increasing gap between
the rapid urban population growths on the one hand, and the limited supply of
land, infrastructure, utilities, services, and government funding on the other
(El-Batran & Arandal, 1998).
The housing problem in Egypt has a social
dimension, which cannot be underestimated. The impact has been felt in the
changing structure of the Egyptian urban family. The traditional extended
family has become of the nuclear type. Urban conditions are restoring the
traditional form of residence, which is resulting in a trend back to the
extended family. Since newly married young couples cannot afford the high cost
of a flat, they continue to live with their parents, thus combining more than
one nuclear family. They may be of different generations, as in the case of the
parents and their offspring living together, each with his own family; or they
may constitute only one generation after the parents die and the household is
occupied by the siblings, each with his own nuclear family (El-Safty, 1984).
Additive Structures and Extensions
As a result of the inappropriateness of public
housing and its failure to respond to users’ needs, many families decided to
engage in informal building activities inside the formal sector. For instance,
a variety of modifications and extensions were carried out in public houses
without formal permissions. Given the scale of “illegal” building activities,
local authorities had difficulty in maintaining a firm attitude towards
transformers and usually ended by ignoring them. Transformations have resulted
not only in an increase of the actual housing stock, but in changing entire
housing environments into dynamic, mixed-use developments where daily
activities overlap and maximum use of the available space and resources is
made. The new environments could be described as a combination of formal and
informal housing, since they assimilate characteristics of both types.
The researches stated the development of
transformations in public housing projects in Cairo where there have
been evidence of informal user transformations. The factors that affect the
extent of transformation developing in different public housing projects were classified
under two categories: factors related to housing environments and others
related to housing units. The case of “Imbaba”, a housing estate of 5000
dwellings built in the late 1950s in Cairo illustrates clearly how the distress
brought about by overcrowded conditions has provoked uncontrolled extensions
and construction activities by the inhabitants (Salama, 1994).
In a survey of 208 flats in this estate, it was
found that almost half the sample had built extensions. The total average area
gained depended on the flat location. Larger extensions were observed in the
ground floor flats, which gained an average of 67 sq m compared to an average
of 30 sq m for flats on other floors. However, there was also evidence that
some parts of the estate remained unchanged (Salama, 1994).
The socio-economic homogeneity of the households
living in the same block of flats was another factor found to influence the
occurrence and type of transformations. This was particularly important in the
case of vertical stack extension where households are expected to co-operate
and contribute financially to the building of the initial structure.
In Imbaba, extensions and additions were the norm, not the
exception. In fact, there were so many additions; it was very often difficult
to tell where the original building was. The interesting thing about all these
public housing areas is that while the individual units are generally small and
not very accommodating, the spaces in between the buildings are quite generous.
Consequently, people have figured out many ways to use this space. And while
many of the additions certainly serve to support only one family, many of them
have to work together when families on the upper floors want to add on as well.
It seemed that almost everyone in
Imbaba had made some alteration or addition to their space, but the most
significant ones were on the ground floor. One had turned his bedroom into an
internet café. And inside, most people had invested in new tile, new furniture,
refrigerators, etc.
Activities Transformations appeared in adding curtains
to balconies for privacy or adding light structure for a window to convert it
into a small terrace. While in the built environment, transformation took a
more important place, where those additive structures transformed the cubic
pure form of public housing building, into a more complicated form, where
smaller cubes were attached to the building in different places, and even in
some cases, the building is transformed once more into another pure cube but a
larger one.
Decoding
Additive Structures to Meanings
“He
analyzes this concept by showing how shifts in the architectural language can
mask, enhance, or confuse meaning in built form, but fundamental symbols that
are read across time and history remain constant.” That’s how Kent started his article in 1997, talking
about Broadbent. All previous transformations have certain code, which is the
additive structures and extensions. Community unintentionally gave very precise
meanings by building these extensions, where each element that has been added
could reflect a certain problem in public housing buildings.
Different background for people may result different
decoding for the problem, as the same building with its additions may be seen
as a great shame to the modern city and an
eyesore to governments as a constant reminder of their weakness and
inefficiency. Or in another view it may
be seen as a true manifestation of the inhabitants'
real needs and requirements but in an unorganized and unplanned fashion. Or in
a more harsh view it would be seen as a criminal act that deserves punishment.
But in either views, there is a stronger notion these
additions are telling, as Proff. Dina Shehayeb stated in the book (Cairo’s Informal Areas Between Urban
Challenges and Hidden Potentials): “Mass housing projects follow an
industrial approach, with standardization as the main objective. For example,
the latest target of 85 000 dwelling units annually are all 63m2 two bedroom
apartments. Filling entire neighborhoods and districts with thousands of
apartments, all of which have the same design, is not realistic. Even if it
suits some, it will not suit all, especially given that the largest portion of
the demand (56%) is for three enclosed rooms.” (Shehayeb, 2009). Needs are not
fulfilled… this is the exact meaning these codes are saying, from the simplest
action, which is the curtain in the balcony to the most complicated ones as a whole
rooms added to the building.
Conclusion
The key issue here is that
communities perceive forms by looking to elements in a surface and deep
structure, denotative and connotative approaches to reach a meaning, because
“Meanings are in people, not in objects and forms” (Amos Rapaport), and Umberto
Eco gave a guideline for architects and designers in 1932 by saying: “All the ingenuity of an architect or
designer cannot make a new form functional (and cannot give a form to a new
function) without the support of existing processes of codification”.
Da
Vinci’s Monalisa is the original, and then several artists added elements on it
to give new intentional meanings. The connection here to what happened in the
public housing buildings in adding structures was again to give a new meaning,
but unintentionally, and a reason and reflection to the political, social and
economical transformations in Egypt
References
-
Ali, Emad
el Deen, 2003. Visual Design Guidelines: For Medium-Sized Cities. El Minya
University. Chapter 2, Change and Transformation of Current Egyptin Cities.
-
Amin, Galal, 1996. Whatever Happened to Egyptians. Chapter
I.
-
Aref, Hisham, 2004. Housing Generated By (Re) generation Egyptian experience.
ENHR conference, Cambridge University, UK.
-
Behloul,
Magda, 2002. Informl transformation of Formal Housing Estates in Algiers and
Cairo. Department of Architecture, University of Liverpool, Uk.
-
Bill Hillier & Adrian Leaman, 1973, Structure System,
Transformation, Sciences of organization and Sciences of Artificial. Bartlet
Society Transaction, vol. 9
David
Sims, 2004.The case of Cairo: Informal Settlements on Former Agricultural land
- El Batran , M & Arandle, Ch, 1998. A shelter of
their own: informal settlement expansion in Greater Cairo and government
responses. Environment and Urbanization, Vol. 10, No. 1, April
1998
-
El Feki, Sameh, 2009. Presentation for a masters course’s
lecture in AAST.
-
Hassan, Nawal, 1984, Social Aspects of Urban Housing in Cairo,
Article based on a presentation made in an Agha Khan Award for Architecture
Seminar on “The Expanding Metropolis”.
-
Jay Stein, Kent F.
Sprecklmayer, eds, Classic Readings in Architecture, WCB/ Mc Graw-hill, 1999
-
Neil Leach, ed.
Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, London and New York:
Routledge, Chapter 2, Roland Barthe, 1997.
-
Neil Leach, ed.
Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, London and New York:
Routledge, Chapter 3, Umberto Eco, 1997.
Sack, R., 2003, A
geographical Guide to The Real and The Good, Routledge
-
Salama, R,
(1994). “The Phenomenon of User Transformation of Public Housing in Egypt”. In
Awotona Editor. Proceedings of an International Symposium on People, Place and
Development. CARDO (Center for Architectural Research and Development Overseas)
University of Newcastle. UK.
-
Shehayeb, Dina , 2009. Cairo’s Informal Areas Between Urban Challenges
and Hidden Potentials - Facts. Voices. Visions. GTZ
-
Turner and Fichter, 1972. Freedom to build.
Waterbury, J. (1983), The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat: The Political
Economy of Two Regimes, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
