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. 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