DESIGN IN THE
BORDERLANDS
Edited by Eleni Kalantidou and Tony Fry
Routledge
Taylor and Francis Group
London and New York, 2014
Paul James, ‘Urban Design for the Global South’
5
URBAN DESIGN FOR THE
GLOBAL SOUTH
Ontological Design in Practice
Paul James
Global South cities, like all contemporary cities, tend to be designed around a
core modern configuration of asphalt, glass, concrete, cars and mobile citizens.
Postcolonial modernization has brought with it a mandatory system of major
thoroughfares, often including a freeway, cutting through the cityscape from an
international airport to a downtown area of concentrated semi-rise corporate
buildings. It has ushered in traffic lights, roundabouts, and private-property
markets. It has re-ordered nature, determining the run-off directions of rainwater,
the gradients of rising ground, and the courses of creeks. In summary, for all of
the political gestures to social heritage, local nature and indigenous colour, and
whatever the aesthetic content of the ensuing built-environment, the dominant
design regime is predominantly abstract modern in its form.
Urban design tends to remake nature with the modern neatness and cultural
flatness of a computer-generated verge pattern. However sensitive to cultural
difference, various individual designers may be, urban planning as a regime tends
to be technically and economically oriented, increasingly globalized and
ontologically modern. Processes of globalization, now most often enacted through
local-national decisions and desires, have systematized the dominant layer of
design outcomes, from the whole spatial configuration of the city down to the
smallest, most taken-for-granted processes. Across the world, red-amber-green
light-sequences and flashing lights screwed to the top of metal poles, increasingly
guide vehicle movement. Car-use dominates the urban landscape. Privateproperty boundaries determine land-use. And the capitalist market decides what is
important.
Globalized urban design is Janus-faced. It overwhelmingly works within a
modernizing paradigm of regularization, risk-management and monitored
efficiency, but it faces two directions at once. It looks out upon both new
freedoms and new oppressions. Just as modern ideologies of liberal freedom and
subjective autonomy are associated with objective figures of oppression,
exclusion and displacement, so it is with modernizing urban change. To the
91
Paul James, ‘Urban Design for the Global South’
outskirts of many Global South cities come once-rural denizens, autonomously,
freely, seeking work, only to find themselves squatting in the junk-filled
interstices of the expanding built-environment. From within the bloating urban
precinct, indigenous populations are given the freedom to assimilate or be pushed
aside—at best into cultural reserves. In the city of Curitiba a Bus Rapid Transit
system has become a global beacon of positive sustainability, but during the same
period most of the indigenous population have been pushed out to live in zones
well beyond BRT access. Three tribal groups, once living along the airport road
have since 2008 been relocated to Campo Santana, 25 kilometres from the city.
Here they live in a forlorn camp of basic cement-rendered bungalows. Be’er
Sheva provides an even-more stark example. In the early part of the twentieth
century the town was predominantly Arab Bedouin. In the 1950s a murky
amalgam of Jewish Zionism and the celestial ‘Garden City’ concept—associated
with Ebenezer Howard and his book Garden Cities of Tomorrow—became the
basis for planning. Now the population of the city is 98 per cent Jewish or other
non-Arab residents. The Bedouin market has been reduced to a quaint reminder of
the past, relegated to a car park on the outskirts of the city (James 2010).
Despite its dark side, there are positive rationalities to modern globalization.
Moreover, for all of their problems, and despite their built-in structural violence,
some Global South cities offer rich possibilities for ontological redesign that most
Northern cities have largely lost. As Eleni Kalantidou describes in her essay in
this volume such borderland possibilities are not just confined to the Global South,
but it tends to be the case. This essay examines the ontological layers of the
human communities who inhabit three illustrative Global South cities, and argues
for a reconfiguration of urban form that reinvigorates the ways of life that tend to
be marginalized or submerged beneath an increasingly dominant modern overlay.
This re-imagining involves not a dismissal of modern ontologies per se, but rather
a critique of the dominance of the modern—even with all its postmodern
qualifications—and an argument for a different balance. A revolution is needed in
how we consider cities, and this revolution will need to include but go deeper
than advocating active street-frontage.
A number of writers have argued that contemporary cities—rather than
becoming just ‘spaces of abstract freedom’—need to be built in such a way as to
encourage enriching forms of embodied friction. They argue that social life needs
to return to the streets as more than simulated or commodified authenticity.
Locals and strangers should rub shoulders, sometimes painfully, as they move
through in locally defined places (Jacobs 1961; Sennett 1994; Zukin 2010). This
essay goes further in the same direction to argue for the deepening of reflexively
understood ontological friction—that is, for the creative facilitation of positive
and painful intersections of engagement, allowing for different ontological
orientations to be present in the same place. This includes in our relation to others
and our relation to nature. The modern town-square—Tahrir Square in Egypt,
Taksim Square in Turkey, Tiananmen Square in Beijing, or Shahbagh Square in
Dhakar—might allow for strangers and locals to rub shoulders, and it might
92
Paul James, ‘Urban Design for the Global South’
provide the setting for short-lived political revolutions, but the politics of the
town-square remains dominantly one-dimensional.
Designing for creative ontological friction entails building cities in a way that
explicitly and reflexively recognizes ontological difference across different social
formations—such as between relations of customary tribalism, cosmological
traditionalism, constructivist modernism and relativizing postmodernism—as well
as ontological friction across the social/natural divide. It is not just, for example,
that urban spaces should facilitate people rubbing shoulders. It is also that design
should explicitly take into account the different ontological meanings that rubbing
shoulders have for different people. Here Tony Fry’s concept of ontological
design comes to the fore (2012 and in this volume). It is the organizing concept of
the present essay, though it is developed here with a different but complement
inflection from the original conception. As the concept is used here, engaging in
ontological design is defined as working explicitly in terms of what it has meant
and still means to be human with all our frailties and limitations: that is, human in
relation to other humans, to objects, to nature and to categories of social being,
including time, space, embodiment, epistemology and performativity.
To take this argument a step further we need first to acknowledge the
distinction between ontological design and designing with ontological
consequences. All design has ontological consequences. All cities have been in
different senses made by design, including through design that is ontologically
framed. Specifically in the cases that are discussed in this essay and other cities
discussed in this volume, Global South cities were made by modern colonial and
postcolonial design, overlaying and tending to relegate customary and traditional
ways of being to the margins (Mignolo 2000 and in this volume). However,
reflexively taking up ontological design is different from having one’s design
practices either framed by ontological considerations or having unintended
ontological consequences. Ontological design is by definition active and reflexive.
It requires changing the way in which a designer approaches social and natural
life.
Practitioners who work with ontological design sensitivities and principles,
self-consciously begin from where they are now—with ‘the modern’ as the
ontologically dominant paradigm for practice on this planet—and slowly begin
qualify, question and challenge those dominant sensibilities. This involves
ranging across different ontological orientations. Here, difference is not drawn
upon as pastiche, but as deeply constraining. The spatial orientation of a building
can be designated for postmodern reasons: orientated in such a way that it draws
attention to is orientation aesthetically, playfully. It can be aligned for modern
reasons: oriented in relation to the movement of the sun for rational and
ecologically sensitive sustainability reasons. It can be traditionally designed—
oriented to the sun as homage to a cosmological truth about solar movement—or
it can be customarily designed: oriented to the sun because all human
constructions are an expression of the natural-social world, of which the sun is
crucial.
93
Paul James, ‘Urban Design for the Global South’
In understanding these differences, ontological design does not treat nature as
‘given’. It does not plunder difference for mere design motifs. Rather it works by
negotiating meaning across different ontological formations. When the designers
of the still-unbuilt city of Dongtan near Shanghai proposed an alignment of the
city’s canals with the movement of the wind and sun, they properly brought
together both modern sustainability principles and the local-traditional principles
of fengshui, literally translated as ‘wind and water’. The fact that this design is yet
to be constructed may be due to the exigencies of current modern strictures
around the relation between cost and design. Ontological design can be more
expensive. Ontological design that is more than gestural is bound to be difficult,
slow and takes considerable consultation—all expensive considerations.
By comparison when one designs within an ontological frame, it is usually
because that frame is taken for granted and dominant. Such design allows
dominant relations of power to do their ‘own’ work. When Frank Gehry designed
the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao he was working off the current dominant
intersection in architecture of modern engineering requirements and postmodern
sensibilities. His building came into architectural contention as representative of
an emerging cultural dominance, and therefore famously was economically
successful. When, in the early-nineteenth century, Edward Gibbon Wakefield
designed a system for parcelling and measuring land across the British Empire, he
was working within the singular modern frame of rationalized spatiality and
commodified settlement that was remaking the globe. His system raged across the
world as the new way of doing things. Similarly, when, in the first century BCE,
the Roman designer Vitruvius translated the figure of the human body into the
architecture of a temple he was linking the human and the cosmos within a broad
traditional ontological frame. This approach reached across the Roman empire
carried by intellectuals and soldiers. Each of these design modes had their own
consequences—some good, many oppressive.
Ontological design, by comparison, is aware of the power of these different
frames and considers their inter-relation when planning and enacting future places.
As Brendan Gleeson writes: ‘This is to oppose the naturalistic roots of
determinism, accepting that homo urbanis has not fortified itself beyond nature or
achieved a law-bound compact with its evolutionary possibilities’ (2012, p. 8).
This is more than can be said for the latest wave of urban theory. The latest gurus
of urban development remain in the enthral of market-based ‘progress’ as the
ever-upward facilitator of cultural vibrancy and ecological sustainability. Even
our dominant metaphor of sustainability—the almost always-used phrase
‘economic, environmental and social sustainability’—carries a hidden weight
beneath its triple-bottom-line obviousness. Ontological design asks why, since the
beginning of the nineteenth century has economics escaped its grounding in the
social domain. Why is it that environment is an externality of economics, rather
than a domain of social life—ecology—that is both constraining and enabling of
human activity?
Ontological design is a nascent practice that implies a paradigm shift in the
theory and practice of architecture, urban design and design in general; it cannot
94
Paul James, ‘Urban Design for the Global South’
be appealed to as if it were an independent agency or off-the-shelf method. It
requires the ontological transformation of us as designers. This essay proceeds by
first outlining an approach to ontological difference. It goes onto to paint some
rough pictures of the various ontological intersections in three Global Cities—
Port Moresby, Dili and Johannesburg. This is done in ways that intentionally
emphasizes problems and contradictions. This is done to set the scene for the last
section of the essay: a discussion of how, using Port Moresby as an example, the
city might be configured differently and more positively.
Different valences across different ontological formations
Establishing the foundations of ontological design requires attention to basic
ontological categories—that is, fundamental categories of existence and how they
are lived across human history. For the purposes of establishing a starting point,
we use the terms of the ‘constitutive abstraction’ approach, a form of ‘engaged
theory’ that begins with the ontological categories of space, time, embodiment,
knowing and performing as foundational to being human (James 2006). Each of
these terms summarizes the very different ways in which we live spatially and
temporally as embodied persons, performing sociality in relation to others and
nature, and knowing in different ways what it means to do so. The concept of
‘ontological formations’, or ‘ways or being’, is intended to name different
formations in which a particular set of orientations or valences to basic categories
of being, such as temporality and spatiality, frame the dominant practices and
meanings of social life. Ontological formations are not treated as ideal types.
Neither are they understood as standalone formations, at least not across the
period since humans first encountered each other as culturally bounded groups
and began to interconnect their mythological explanations. Ontological
formations are treated as formations-in-dominance. In the contemporary world
they are co-existent and therefore co-temporal. The present engaged-theory
approach works with four such formations: the customary (including the tribal),
the traditional, the modern and the postmodern.
A customary formation is defined by the way that analogical, genealogical and
mythological valences come to constitute different social practices—production,
exchange, communication, organization and enquiry—in relation to basic
categories of existence: time, space, embodiment, performance and knowledge.
Here the term ‘valence’ comes from the Latin valentia meaning strength or
capacity. The concept comes to social theory via the field of chemistry, in which
from the nineteenth it has been used to refer to the ‘combining power of an
element’. More recently it has been used in psychology to express an orientation.
In this essay, the concept of ‘valence’ is used to suggest a social orientation. The
three defining valences of customary relations—analogy, genealogy and
mythology—have been chosen because they arguably give a minimal sense of the
complexity of customary formations. They have overlapping consequences, but
they can be analytically distinguished. Speaking broadly, these valences are
95
Paul James, ‘Urban Design for the Global South’
foundational for the human condition, even today—albeit overlaid, reconstituted
and subordinated by more abstracted valences.
Analogical relations, one characteristic of a customary formation, an
orientation, has its primary embedding in the relation between the natural and the
social, or what is more poetically known in the literature as the ‘nature-culture’
contradiction. Here the social and the natural are treated as analogical to each
other. With this valence there is no sense in which the natural has been lifted out
as a separate sphere of life. Here the sun is a natural/social being. It is not just an
object that emits electromagnetic radiation and requires that buildings are oriented
this way or that in order to maximize winter light. Nature as lived through this
valence is confronting, animated, palpable, and part of every human activity.
Nature is not just the context for a shadow map on to which the late-afternoon
light-effects of a building are projected. It is more than a green-space allocation
that provide space for a Sunday picnic, or even a bush track that affords a wellconsidered nature walk.
The second customary valence, genealogy, is primarily grounded in the
relation between birth, becoming and mortality. It emphasizes embodied relations
and their consequences for ongoing connection even after death. In terms of this
valence, birth is not confined to maternity wards and dead bodies are not shuffled
off to distant or separated zones of the city surrounded by evergreen trees. A third
customary valence, the mythological, is primarily expressed in the relation
between social practice and oral expressions of what that practice means—stories
and images. Stories become mythologies that create and reproduce meaning.
Mythologies are told and retold, including through the fabric of the buildings and
paths. As Victoria Stead describes the relationship to land with the intersecting
dominance of these valences:
land is approached through the relationships, histories and migrations of
past, present and future kin. Far from a fixed, bounded and enclosed area,
land is itself an assemblage of features, objects, marks, stories, materials,
spirits, pathways, sites and meanings that are both (to employ a modernist
language) ‘social’ and ‘natural’.
(Stead 2013 p. 160)
By comparison, a traditional formation is defined by the way in which analogical,
genealogical and mythological valences are drawn into a cosmological and
metaphorical reframing of different social practices—production, exchange,
communication, organization and enquiry. As always and to the extent that we
remain human, this occurs in relation to the basic categories of existence: time,
space, and so on. In societies dominated by traditional ways of life, the secondary
valences of the cosmological and metaphorical tended (and tend) to be lived in
conjunction with each other. It is only possible philosophically to separate out or
define the terms of these valences of social life; and it is to this end that
traditional and early modern philosophers have been devoted for centuries.
Across the history of designing cities through traditional valences, the
96
Paul James, ‘Urban Design for the Global South’
social/natural analogy has been abstracted into principles (even mathematical
translations) for making natural spaces into crucibles for embodied social life,
unifying the city and the countryside (Hall 1998). Richard Sennett beautifully
describes the relation between flesh and stone in the imperial Roman city:
To start a city, or refound an existing city wrecked in the process of
conquest, the Romans tried to establish the point they called the umbilicus,
a centre of the city approximating the human navel; from this urban belly
button the planners drew all measurements for spaces in the city ... The
planners also pinpointed the umbilicus of a city by studying the sky. The
passage of the sun seemed to divide the sky into two; other measurements
of stars at night seemed to cut this division at right angles, so that the
heavens were composed of four parts. To found a town, one sought on the
ground a spot that reflected directly below the point where the four parts of
the sky met, as if the map of the sky were mirrored on the earth. Knowing
its centre, the planners could define the town’s edge; here they tilled a
furrow in the earth called the pomerium, which was the sacred boundary.
(Sennett 1994, pp. 107–8).
However, this is design with ontological consequences rather than ontological
design. It does not have a positive and reflexively understood place to stand and
qualify its own power as it projects itself onto the built environment. What
traditional design achieved in many ways was magnificent. As a person walked
the street, the stones cried out the natural/social meaning of all being, even the
direction in which they walked. However, in many circumstances it also had
horrific consequences for the oppressed. Roman design depended on hubris,
based on the belief that before a space was conquered and redesigned, little
existed of cultural-political value in that original landscape. Roman imperial
design was far from design ex nihlio—Nature, God(s) and human embodiment
limited the terms of sacred geometry—but it did foreshadow the doctrine of terra
nullius that modern colonizing settlement was to bring to the fore.
A partial break with the dominance of traditional valences came with the sense
that designers could construct an urban landscape out of their own sense of what
was right and good. In the constitutive abstraction approach, the modern is
defined by the way in which prior valences of social life—analogical,
genealogical, mythological, cosmological and metaphorical relations—came to be
reconstituted through a constructivist reframing of social practices in relation to
basic categories of existence common to all humans: including temporality and
performativity.
In constructivist terms, these basic categories of human existence become the
terrain of different projects to be made and remade. Activities become projects to
be thought and rethought anew. Bodies, landscapes, buildings, cities, genome
systems, aesthetic principles, and political systems, all become projects for
construction and reconstruction. Although, for a time, designing towns was
developed with long-term utopian commitments, more recently urban design has
97
Paul James, ‘Urban Design for the Global South’
become increasing reduced to making one’s mark on a zone marked by a
thousand competing projects. Similarly, for a time, economics was seen as social
domain of life, but it increasingly became lifted out as the dominant domain of
progress and development, including urban development.
A further ‘break’—within often-unacknowledged but strong continuities—
came with the subjectivity and practice of relativizing the meaning of all things,
including the meaning of relatively stable ontological categories such as time and
space. This sense of the postmodern is defined by the way in which prior valences
of social life—analogical, genealogical, mythological, cosmological,
metaphorical and constructivist valences—are reconstituted through a relativist
reframing of social practices in relation to basic categories of existence common
to all humans. In these terms, basic categories of the human are all open for
deconstruction. In postmodern politics, for example, projections of alternatives
are constantly relativized and displaced. Constant deconstruction is considered a
virtue. The built-environment becomes a place for disrupting taken-for-granted
assumptions and patterns of doing things.
Pictures of some Global South cities
Dominant formations notwithstanding, designing all cities, formally and
informally, historically and now, is in practice fused with slow increment and
unintended consequences. This happens in ways that makes it difficult to separate
out the intended and the contingent, let alone the layers of ontological difference
that lie beneath the now dominant modern urban configurations we call ‘global
cities’. The designers, planners, architects and builders who have contributed to
the prevailing urban form we have today, knew what they were trying to do with
the patches of ground upon which they worked. They wanted to bring elements of
clarity and usefulness into what was previously limited, undeveloped, backward
and messy. The designers of Port Moresby, Dili, and Johannesburg may not have
had the grand modern planning pretensions of Georges-Eugène Hausman in Paris
or Robert Moses in New York, but they were building for a certain kind of future:
nationally directed, globally connected, oriented to capitalist productivity, and
keen on enhancing spatial mobility. The year 1975 provides a point of historical
comparison.
Port Moresby
In 1975, Port Moresby became capital of an independent Papua New Guinea.
Originally the low-rise administrative centre for an Australian colonial
government, it was not until after independence with the departure of most of the
Australians that Melanesians became the majority of the city’s population. One
planning commentator romantically described Port Moresby as ‘an Australian
town frayed at the edges’ changing into a postcolonial Melanesian city (Nigel
Oram, cited in Goddard 2010, p. 2). In design terms, the reality was that the
Melanesian customary layer of the city was slowly being relegated to the informal
settlements and tribal urban villages, while the overt face of the city was being cut
98
Paul James, ‘Urban Design for the Global South’
through by new modern developments framed by national plans, modern roads,
concrete buildings and modern regimes of power (Lattas and Rio 2011, UNHabitat 2010). Across the mid-to-late 1970s, traffic accidents accounted for over
half of all traumatic fatalities in Port Moresby General Hospital. The most
obvious visual signify of the modern overlay came two decades later with the
1995 Poreporena Freeway project. Amid allegations of abuse about government
contracts, it bisected the city, cutting through a mountain from Waigani to the
downtown area saving 20 minutes on the road trip between two centres of
power—political and commercial. In modern geological terms, the freeway cut
through an accretionary prism above a late Eocene–Oligocene NE-dipping
subduction system. And it also cut through the customary land of the Motu
Koitabu people. Today, nearly three decades after independence, the city is going
through a new stage of frantic building, based on a natural-gas mining boom.
Five-star hotels are being constructed, roads are being resurfaced, and local urban
villages are being modernized.
Dili
In the 1975, the same year that Port Moresby became the capital of an
independent Papua New Guinea, the Indonesian navy began a bombardment of
Dili in East Timor. One colonial oppressor, the Portuguese, gave way to another
in the name of ‘anti-colonialism’. New settlements were constructed around the
old colonial town, small concrete houses, set close together amidst banana trees
and bougainvillea, built for the transmigrants who had been brought to East
Timor from Java and Sulawesi. Some suburbs were named as if they were
Vietnam War hamlets—Delta 1, Delta 2, Delta 3 and Delta 4. The transmigrasi
program was intended to shift the ethic composition of the city and make an
Indonesian centre in a peripheral imperial outpost. Two decades on, and three
years after independence and the departure of the Indonesian, those same suburbs
became the site for a new stage of ethic cleansing. This time a political culture of
modern economic rights drew upon and distorted an older distinction between the
Loromonu and Lorosae—those who came from where the sun sets and those
whose home come from where the sun rises.
The crisis was triggered in January 2006 by a petition of 600 soldiers (out
of a total force of 1,600), led by Lieutenant Gastão Salsinha. The men
claimed discrimination because of their roots in the western part of the
country. Indeed, a long-standing distinction continues between populations
in western Timor-Leste (Kaladi/Loromonu) and those hailing from the
eastern part of the country (Firaku/Lorosae), although it is neither ethnic
nor linguistic, and neither clearly defined nor clearly delineated in
geographic terms. It was mainly forged during the colonial period between
people from the west, close to Dili, who were considered more
‘assimilated’, and those hailing from the east, who were deemed more
‘rustic’. It was reinforced during the Indonesian occupation from 1975 to
99
Paul James, ‘Urban Design for the Global South’
1999, when most of the armed resistance (linked to FRETILIN) was based
in the east. The phenomenon was central to the petitioners’ claims
(Durand 2011, p. 16).
Now, three decades on, with an oil-based boom, the city is reorienting in a
different way. The emphasis is on infrastructure development. In the planning
documents, such the Timor-Leste Strategic Development Plan 2011–2031, older
tensions have been left behind as if they were never present, and questions of
cultural difference has been turned into concerns to protect and display cultural
artefacts as museum heritage.
Johannesburg
In 1975, Johannesburg was under apartheid. Ponte City, a cylindrical skyscraper
of 54 storeys, had just been built in the white’s only area of Hillbrow, making it
the highest residential tower in Africa. In the same year, the Western Bypass
section of the N1 was completed as a route around the city centre to access
Witwatersrand. Construction began in 1975 on the M1 De Villiers Graaff freeway
connecting the south including Soweto to the city centre and extending to Sandton,
the wealthy northern commercial centre of Johannesburg. All of these
developments confirmed the post-Apartheid spatial heritage of a poor south of
concrete shacks and no work, and a wealthy north of commercial buildings, green
leafy suburbs and service jobs—available to those in the south who could bear the
two-hour peak travelling times.
This spatial configuration is still the case. Between Soweto and the downtown
area of Johannesburg, linked by a freeway that has just been massively upgraded,
is a nether zone of continuing mining operations, slag heaps and undermined
waste-lands where building will require considerable engineering care. A new
Bus Rapid Transit system called Rea Vaya has been constructed linking the South
and the North, with a significant shift in 2013 towards calling the project
‘Corridors of Freedom’. However, the images that are being used to promote this
shift are of ultra-slim African women with young children, strolling along a
modern street flanked by banks and health clinics. They are the gentle images of
gentrification with the emphasis on ‘increased freedom of movement as well as
economic freedom’. In a city with the highest Gini co-efficient in the world, it
makes sense to concentrate on overcoming economic inequality, but so much
more could be done.
Reconfiguring a Global South city: Port Moresby
Cities in the Global South offer profound opportunities for ontological design—if
only because they face a series of crises that open the door, just a fraction, to
alternative ways of thinking and doing. Port Moresby is a baneful city with
bountiful possibilities. From one perspective, Port Moresby exists as a grey
shadow in the global imagination as a city under internal siege. It is a city with
one of the world’s worst street-crime rates. It regularly appears in The
100
Paul James, ‘Urban Design for the Global South’
Economist’s annual list of the world’s ‘worst cities’. Occasionally a Western
photographer will venture into Port Moresby to ‘humanize the raskols, to give
them a face’. However, with the exception of mining executives and property
developers, the movement of the world’s business people, tourists, and media,
tends to bypass the city. Violence and insecurity seem to be inextricably
associated with the growth of the city, and sadly this is intensifying as Moresby is
flooded with property investment linked to the anticipated windfall from the new
natural gas refinery. This violence is the focus of serious collective concern from
local community-based and international organizations, just as it is headlined by
sensationalizing coverage in local newspapers.
The demands of rapid uncontrolled migration, and the lack of affordable
housing and other infrastructure, has seen the growth and overcrowding of the
city’s informal settlements (Connell 2003). According to the 2000 census, 53,000
of Port Moresby’s residents lived in the settlements, a number which is likely to
have drastically increased since then (Chand and Yala 2008). UN-Habitat
estimates that 45 per cent of the city’s residents live in settlements. Of the city’s
settlements, twenty are planned and seventy-nine are unplanned, forty-two are
located on state land, and thirty-seven are on customary land. The settlements
often lack even the most basic amenities and infrastructure such as sanitation,
water, and electricity. Inadequate government responsiveness to these problems is
in part due to the absence of any ministry devoted to dealing with settlement
issues, an arrangement dating back to a policy change in 1986 that deregulated
housing development (UN-Habitat 2010).
From a more positive perspective, Port Moresby is a city of small urban
communities. It is a city of villages, a meeting place of cultures, a tropical capital
located on the eastern coast of the beautiful Port Moresby Harbour. Overall, the
complexity of Port Moresby is attributable to myriad factors including the
Australian colonial legacy, vast wealth inequalities, intense movements of people,
high rates of formal unemployment and a variably sustaining informal sector,
ongoing destabilization of cultural values and ways of life, and rising tensions
between ethnic groups.
Port Moresby was established on the traditional lands of two inter-related
peoples now known collectively as the Motu-Koita. The growth of housing
settlements, infrastructure and industry in the city has led the Motu-Koita to feel
acute social marginalization and deep anxiety about losing their cultural identity
and land. This provides a point of entry for ontological design. The indigenous
villages and the urban settlements of Port Moresby could become the focus of a
revitalization of the city. This will require a cultural and political reinvigoration
of social engagement in those settlements, and it will be much more than just an
infrastructure exercise. Nevertheless, some planning steps can be laid out, all of
which presume considerable community discussion using deliberative democracy
processes.
If we begin with basic questions of the relationship between the natural and
the social, then paradoxically modern planning with all its legislated restrictions
and exclusions is necessary to bring settlement patterns back into more integral
101
Paul James, ‘Urban Design for the Global South’
relationship with nature. This would require restraints, once in place, that have
not been carried forward from indigenous customary cultures in the region
concerning, for example, where houses can be built. Regulations to stop any
further building on the hills above the city or into the littoral zone along the
coastline would be part of this process. The Poreporena-Napa Local Development
Plan, 2011, mentions the possibility of not building above the 90-metre contour as
‘an identifying element for the city’, but an ontological design proposal would
something much more radical than an aesthetic design element and it would be
less tokenistic.
Except in the immediate downtown area, the sloping hills above say 50 metres
would need to be returned to a mixture of urban vegetable gardening and open
eucalypt woodland forests, with green fingers stretching down into the valleys in
ways that allow walking and limited vehicle access. In the valleys, some land
should ideally be zoned for food growing, integrated with urban housing estates.
Land-use would need to be negotiated with the Motu-Koita, the original
custodians of the land, and it would require considerable care about how plots of
agricultural land were allocated and woodlands were set aside.
Filling in the Fairfax harbour with land-fill projects for yacht clubs and
refineries is not ontologically sensitive design. The limits of natural boundaries,
including coastlines are important. Indigenous urban villages on the coast such as
Hanubada, presently built stretching out over the harbour, would need to be
spatially limited so that they do not consume any more waterfront space, but more
importantly industrial waterfront developments would need to be restricted to
allow substantial green ribbons along the foreshore, crossed with public walking
paths. Re-establishing mangroves ecosystems along the coastline needs to be a
priority, both for practical reasons of responding to possible storm surges with
climate change and for re-establishing a deep sense of nature as more than a
standing reserve for human exploitation. Achieving even the beginnings of this
will require amongst other initiatives, extensive community engagement and
support in nurturing the new plantations, policing of the use of mangroves and
trees for firewood, and the installation of appropriately scaled and distributed
sewerage and waste-water systems to stop the massive outflow that currently goes
into the bay. Turning to the genealogical valence, the importance of cultural
identity of family, language, tribe and region come to the fore, and what needs to
be done is far from easy. The city of villages is associated with tension and
violence. Paul Jones sets out the quandary very well:
The escalating growth of settlements in Port Moresby has been recognised
for some time as ‘cosmopolitan networks of tribal groupings or anarchical
sub-cultures, which have been defined by ethnicity and regionalism within
an urban context’. In certain informal settlements in Port Moresby, kinship
and wantok systems play a crucial support role for people and households
experiencing hardship and poverty. This system is more pronounced where
settlements grow along ethnic connections and allegiances, such as in the
case of Four Mile Settlement, where settlements represent enclaves, or a
102
Paul James, ‘Urban Design for the Global South’
series of enclaves of kinship supporting squatter settlers primarily from the
Southern Highlands region. However, it has been argued that applying the
communal sharing cultures common to Pacific islanders in ‘ghetto’-type
situations, for example, can constrain the use of existing economic
development opportunities by settlers to improve their lifestyles. ‘In the
ghettos, the home cultural values predominate and Pacific peoples behave
as they do in their home villages’. In the PNG context, norms and values
including notions of egalitarianism and sharing, can be argued as
entrenching key aspects of PNG urban form, such as squatter and informal
settlements, thus reinforcing Port Moresby image as predominantly a ‘city
of villages’ (Jones 2012, pp. 11-12).
While it has not always been the case, it has become increasingly recognized that
Port Moresby is tied by lines of deep genealogical connection back to the rural
villages as far away as the Kerema, Mount Hagen or Alatou districts. However,
what is to be done about this remains completely perplexing for mainstream
planning. The importance such relations could be brought into the centre of Port
Moresby public life by instituting a calendar of events that recognize urbanvillage ties. Exchange and trading relations between such places could be brought
to the fore, including through negotiating spaces in designated open-air, sheltered
food markets. There are some important examples currently such as Koki Market,
but the construction of modern malls and supermarkets is increasing (with all the
increased prices for basic goods that this entails). Across the city, land needs to be
set aside near major transport nodes for farmers’ markets that are built into the
urban fabric, designed with open stalls, but sheltered under two-to-four storey
buildings, offering increased residential density. The mix of street-accessibility,
open-air ground-floor spaces, and increased residential density in otherwise
commercial or dead zones, would enhance both the vitality and street security of
the city.
Handled badly this has potentially dangerous consequences for ethnic conflict.
Thus the negotiation of the use of space would need to be linked at the highest
level to the symbolic politics of negotiation between different customary groups
currently at odds with each other. While urban villages will tend to remain more
culturally homogenous, contestation over these public spaces could be source of
positive diversity. This brings us the question of the mythological valence—the
relation between social practice and oral expressions of what that practice means,
expressed through stories, art, images, building design, festivals, public rituals,
and street symbolism.
Redesigning Port Moresby ontologically cannot be so much about retrieving
lost cultural heritage as about negotiating ongoing times and spaces for
continuing customary ways of life. Much of the Motu-Koita’s precolonial culture
was fragmented during the colonial years. Missionaries viewed tribal dancing as
immodest and banned it, replacing it with Polynesian-derived dances and later
European dances. Some feasts connected with customary dances have also
disappeared (Goddard 2010, Crowdy 2010). In bringing back festivals it becomes
103
Paul James, ‘Urban Design for the Global South’
important not to treat them as simply moments in time, but as peak expressions of
ongoing practices that require ongoing support. However, if supported properly,
and not just a tourist attraction, then the cultural effects are manifold. As Peter
Phipps argues, ‘cultural festivals provide a potent space for intercultural
accommodations to be negotiated on largely indigenous terrain, strengthening
indigenous agency, and resetting the terms of cross-cultural engagement for at
least the terms of these staged encounters’ (2010, pp. 217–18).
Conclusion
Engaged theory of the kind that I have been drawing upon, suggests a parting of
the ways with current dominant methodological trends in urban social theory and
practice, including some aspects of the newest trends. In a special edition of the
European Journal of Cultural Studies devoted to the theme of urban modernity,
Pedram Dibazar, Christoph Lindner, Miriam Meissner and Judith Naeff write that
one new direction in conceptualising and theorising cities might be the
appreciation of a flat ontology reminiscent of other recent approaches to
cities, such as actor–network theory, non-representational theory, rhythm
analysis and mobilities. What all these approaches engage with is the vast
array of living conditions that are involved in what we call cities. Robinson
writes: ‘Ordinary cities invite us to an appreciation of all cities as sites of
the production and circulation of modernity’. Thus, modernity entails a
vision that is disseminated globally and diverse in its implications. The
notion of ordinary cities advocates an urbanism of the here and now, that
incorporates within its present the times gone and the times to come, and
tends to reflect the conditions of globalisation by investigating the
particularities of each locality.
This proposed flattening is precisely what I am arguing against, theoretically and
practically. Modernity might pluralize, but it tends to flatten social difference into
liberal pluralism. The notion of ‘ordinary cities’ sounds good, but cities are not
ordinary. Urban settlements have a range of ordinary, banal, symbolically intense
and sacred spaces within them. They are formed through culturally diverse,
syncretic and inclusive cultural meanings and practices, momentarily fixed at the
intersection of cross-cutting movements. But they also develop spaces of
differentiated meanings and practices; places filled with ontologically grounded
meaning that require some degree of closure, slowness and exclusion. They are
cut through by ideologically contested corridors, but they also include places of
relatively closed mythological and cosmological meaning.
Reconfiguring cities while taking into account these complexities is a massive
and slow process. It will take years and generations—just as unplanned urban
accretion works over generations. It will mean (paradoxically) planning for
discomfort, encounter, tension and serendipity. Ontological design, in this
argument, should always be part of the urban planning process. Getting rid of
104
Paul James, ‘Urban Design for the Global South’
triple-bottom-line rationalism and using a four-domain model of the social that
treats economics, ecology, politics and culture as fundamental domains of the
human condition with their own principles, it is possible to show how ontological
design can be built into the mainstream of what it means to make a city. This can
be done while still keeping the process recognizably practical. The following list
of propositions is informed by ontological design precepts, but it is presented with
a very practical edge applicable to all urban settlements across the globe. These
propositions are my preferences, but they are only indicative. To propose them as
universal guidelines would go against the spirit of what ontological design is
arguing for—that is, social engagement and debate at a city level across the
various domains of social life that leads to each city developing and enacting its
own priorities and actions. Nevertheless, they provide points of contention.
A manifesto for urban development
Ecological propositions
Urban settlements should have a deeper and more integrated relationship with
nature:
1. With urban settlements organized around locally distributed renewable
energy, planned on a precinct-wide basis, and with all existing buildings
retrofitted for resource-use efficiency;
2. With waterways returned to their pre-settlement condition, flanked, where
possible, by indigenous natural green-spaces re-established along their
edges;
3. With green parklands—including areas which provide habitat for
indigenous animals and birds— increased or consolidated within the
urban area, connected by further linear green ribbons;
4. With urban settlements organized into regional clusters around natural
limits and fixed urban-growth boundaries to contain sprawl and renew an
urban-rural divide; and with growth zones of increased urban density
within those urban settlements focussed on public transport nodes;
5. With paths for walking, lanes for non-motorized vehicles, and corridors for
sustainable public transport, given spatial priority over roads for cars; and
with those dedicated paths networked throughout the city;
6. With food production invigorated in the urban precinct, including through
dedicated spaces being set aside for commercial and community food
gardens; and
7. With waste management directed fundamentally towards green
composting, hard-waste recycling and hard-waste mining.
Economic Propositions
Urban settlements should be based on an economy organized around social needs
rather than growth:
105
Paul James, ‘Urban Design for the Global South’
1. With production and exchange shifted from an emphasis on production-forglobal-consumption to an economics-for-local-living, including
ontologically different forms of exchange;
2. With urban financial governance moved towards participatory budgeting
on a significant proportion of the city’s annual infrastructure and services
spending;
3. With regulation negotiated publicly through extensive consultation and
deliberative programs—including an emphasis on regulation for resourceuse reduction;
4. With consumption substantially reduced and shifted away from those goods
that are not produced regionally or for the reproduction of basic living—
food, housing, clothing, music and so on;
5. With workplaces brought back into closer spatial relation to residential
areas, while taking into account dangers and noise hazards through
sustainable and appropriate building;
6. With technology used primarily as a tool for good living, rather than a
means of transcending the limits of nature and embodiment; and
7. With the institution of re-distributive processes that break radically with
current cycles of inter-class and inter-generational inequality.
Political Propositions
Urban settlements should have an enhanced emphasis on engaged and negotiated
civic involvement:
1. With governance conducted through a deep deliberative democratic process
that brings together comprehensive community engagement, expert
knowledge, and extended public debate about all aspects of development;
2. With legislation enacted for socially just land-tenure, including, where
necessary, through municipal and state acquisition of ecologically,
economically and culturally sensitive areas;
3. With public non-profit communication services and media outlets
materially supported and subsidized where necessary;
4. With political participation and representation going deeper than electoral
engagement;
5. With basic security afforded to all people through a shift to human security
considerations;
6. With reconciliation with Indigenous peoples becoming an active and
ongoing focus of all urban politics; and
7. With ethical debates concerning how we are to live becoming a mainstream
requirement at all levels of education and in all disciplines from the
humanities to medicine and engineering.
106
Paul James, ‘Urban Design for the Global South’
Cultural Propositions
Urban settlements should come to terms with the uncomfortable intersections of
identity and difference:
1. With recognition and celebration of the complex layers of communitybased identity that have made the urban region, including cross-cutting
customary, traditional, modern and postmodern identities.
2. With the development of consolidated cultural activity zones, emphasizing
active street-frontage and public spaces for face-to-face engagement,
festivals and events—for example, all new commercial and residential
apartment buildings should have an active ground floor, with part of that
space zoned for rent-subsidized cultural use such as studios, theatres, and
workshops;
3. With museums, cultural centres and other public spaces dedicated to the
urban region’s own cross-cutting cultural histories—public spaces which
at the same time actively seek to represent visually alternative trajectories
of urban development from the present into the future;
4. With locally relevant fundamental beliefs from across the globe—except
those that vilify and degrade—woven into the fabric of the built
environment: symbolically, artistically and practically;
5. With conditions for gender equality pursued in all aspects of social life,
while negotiating relations of cultural inclusion and exclusion that allow
for gendered differences;
6. With the possibilities for facilitated enquiry and learning available to all
from birth to old age across people’s lives; and not just through formal
education structures, but also through well-supported libraries and
community learning centres; and
7. With public spaces and buildings aesthetically designed and curated to
enhance the emotional wellbeing of people, including by involving local
people in that curation.
Within those propositions are cadences implied by ontological design. Borderland
cities provide crucibles where arguably much more radical rethinking of urban
development can occur than in the core cities of global circulation. These cities
are located on the borderlands between the global and the local, between the
urban and the rural, and between capitalism and other forms of economy and
culture. They might be even be a source of a new reciprocity in the currently oneway global movement of design ideas. Cities in the Global South such as Port
Moresby could become places through which ideas, informed by non-modern
practices, come to qualify fundamentally our emphasis on making the builtenvironment in the image of current dominant ideologies: freedom, autonomy,
interconnectivity and movement.
107
Paul James, ‘Urban Design for the Global South’
References
Chand, Satish and Yala, Charles, 2008, ‘Informal Land Systems within Urban Settlements
in Honiara and Port Moresby’, Making Land Work (Volume Two): Case Studies on
Customary Land and Development in the Pacific, AusAID, Canberra.
Connell, John, 2003, ‘Regulation of Space in the Contemporary Postcolonial Pacific City’,
Asia Pacific Viewpoint, vol. 44, no. 3, pp. 243–57.
Crowdy, Denis, 2010, ‘Live Music and Living as a Musician in Moresby,’ in Michael
Goddard, ed., Villagers and the City, SK Publishing, Wantage.
Durand, Frédéric, 2011, ‘Three Centuries of Violence and Struggle in East Timor (17262008)’ www.massviolence.org/Article?id_article=567, last accessed 18 August 2013.
Fry, Tony, 2012, Becoming Human by Design, Berg, London.
Gleeson, Brendan, 2012, ‘The Urban Age: Paradox and Prospect’, Urban Studies, vol. 49,
no. 5, pp. 931–43.
Goddard, Michael, 2010a ‘About Moresby’, in Michael Goddard, ed., Villagers and the
City: Melanesian Experiences of Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, SK Publishing,
Wantage.
Goddard, Michael, 2010b ‘Heat and History: Moresby and the Motu-Koita’, in Michael
Goddard, ed., Villagers and the City, SK Publishing, Wantage.
Hall, Peter, 1998, Cities in Civilization, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London
Jacobs, Jane M., 1961,The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Random House, New
York.
James, Paul, 2010, ‘Displacement: In Cities of the Unrecognized’, in Christopher Wise
and Paul James, eds, Being Arab: Arabism and the Politics of Recognition, Arena
Publications, Melbourne.
James, Paul, 2006, Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism: Bringing Theory Back In, Sage
Publications, London.
Jones, Paul, 2012, Managing Urbanization in Papua New Guinea: Planning for
Planning’s Sake?, Alfred Deakin Research Institute, Geelong.
Lattas, Andrew, and Rio, Knut M., 2011, ‘Securing Modernity: Towards an Ethnography
of Power in Contemporary Melanesia’, Oceania, vol. 81, no. 1, pp. 1–21.
Mignolio, Walter D., 2000, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern
Knowledges and Border Thinking, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Phipps, Peter, 2010, ‘Performances of Power: Indigenous Cultural Festivals as Globally
Engaged Cultural Strategy’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, vol. 35, no. 3, pp.
217–40.
Sennett, Richard, 1994 Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization,
Faber and Faber, London.
Sinha, Sankar N. and Sengupta, S.K., 1989, ‘Road Traffic Accident Fatalities in Port
Moresby: A Ten-Year Survey’, Accident Analysis & Prevention, vol. 21, no. 3, pp.
297–301
Stead, Victoria, Land, Power, Change: Entanglements of Custom and Modernity in Papua
New Guinea and Timor-Leste, PhD, RMIT University, 2013.
UN-Habitat, 2010, Papua New Guinea: Port Moresby Urban Profile, UN-Habitat,
Nairobi.
Willis, Anne-Marie, 2007, ‘Ontological Designing: Laying the Ground’, Design
Philosophy Papers Collection Three, Team D/E/S Publications, Ravensbourne.
Zukin, Sharon, 2010, Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places, Oxford
University Press, Oxford.
108