Humanitarian Space

Crowdsourcing the End of War to Rebuild Cities in Conflict

noreply@blogger.com (Mitchell Sutika Sipus) — Wed, 22 May 2013 09:54:00 +0000

Gunfire and bomb blasts have a way of wearing one's nerves. But sometimes the silence afterwards is more ominous. And after the dust has settled and the guns are silenced, someone needs to walk into the street and lead the cleanup. Someone needs to fill the craters, sweep up the rubble, glue the pieces back together, and build something new. But glue costs money. And people with money tend tend to avoid bomb craters. When I first moved to Afghanistan, a suicide bomber attacked a police checkpoint about 50 meters from my house. The explosion destroyed cars, shattered the windows of nearby houses, and left a massive hole in the road. The hole in the road, where the man ignited his vest, is still there.

I no longer live in the same house, but I do occasionally drive down that road and I always look at the gaping pot hole. I also tend to stare bleakly at all the other massive potholes in the city and wonder how many are a result of bad construction and severe weather, and how many were a person. Problems such as these are too small and decentralized to be fixed by the big contracting agencies that lead most reconstruction efforts today, but solving them is critical to moving the city forward from a phase of conflict, into a phase of healing and eventual renewal. Small and widely distributed problems need parallel solutions, but community mobilizing is limited if there isn't sufficient capital to actually do something. The problem has weighed on my mind for years.

Then today I stumbled across Fundrise, a site that crowdsources real estate development by allowing thousands of investors to purchase a small share of the property and make a profit on its resale a few years later. I immediately wondered if this tool for crowdsourcing real estate investment could be useful in development and conflict. Of course I have immediate concerns about a bunch of people with expendable income using it to advance gentrification in low-income neighborhoods in Washington DC, and and am furthermore weary of applying the tool within fragile states because it would exacerbate the same problems. But it could potentially offset my biggest obstacle in post-war reconstruction.

My biggest obstacle working in conflict is to procure sufficient levels of private sector investment. The high risk can yield a high return, but the high probability of watching your investment explode is too much of a deterrent for the typical speculator. Had I grown up in a wealthy family like Michael Stock, I admittedly would use a similar model as his company Bancroft International. To function both as the security contractor and as a developer allows one to maximize profits and also hedge the risks of conflict. But such organizations are not void of complications. Personally I'm not too interested in the traditional methods of training soldiers for security, but it could be ideal too personally invest in the territories where my urban planning work is facilitating security and improving the local economy.

So what if I create a channel for anyone in the world to invest in real estate in Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Iraq or S. Sudan? The small level of investment would be attractive because most investors would not be deterred by possibly losing 100 USD when the potential return could be 1000%. No reason Bancroft needs to make all the money right? The potholes get filled, the buildings rebuild, locals have access to new capital, and external investors make a profit. The winnings are smaller but everyone gets a piece of it.

As a strategy to side-step the complex power relations that are incurred with such an investment strategy, the projects could be structured to function within a broader humanitarian initiative. Efforts could be coordinated with other strategies and planning efforts to rebuild a city affected by war. Something would need to be done to contend with the tenure issues for local and IDP populations, as my greatest fear is that the land would be developed at a faster rate than the community can access and participate in the economic growth, thus further marginalizing an already vulnerable population. Ideally these investments are directed in a manner to facilitate not only the physical rebuilding, but also the engage a greater variety of stakeholders in the reconstruction process, effectively reducing the role of massive international mega-corporations that tend to pop up in such places.

Clearly this proposal is a minefield of problems. But it also just might clear a minefield. Maybe I'll try it this summer. Would you use it?

Crafting Cities Truly Responsive to Climate Change

noreply@blogger.com (Mitchell Sutika Sipus) — Tue, 21 May 2013 08:12:00 +0000

The Original Green Roof. Kabul, Afghanistan. Sutika Sipus 2013.

I know very little about climate change. I understand the basic arguments, and having worked at the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences a few years ago, I am familiar with some of the recent research. But as an urban planner, I admit that I know very little about the role of climate change in urban development. I often feel like I'm woefully ignorant on the subject because I do not know how to measure emissions from traffic densities or how to determine the carbon offsets from an infrastructure project. It turns out I'm not alone, most planners can't do this, including many who label themselves as sustainability experts. Whats the deal?

Yesterday during a Skype meeting with a US nonprofit about an urban violence project, climate change was mentioned and it made me wonder, why do so many of us urban professionals know so little about this subject? It is a significant variable in the health and function of cities, it has tremendous long-term implications, and it is particularly relavent for coastal settlements. It is also frequently discussed in terms of conflict, sustainability and the debate over environmental refugees, although that case is something of a misnomer. Food production and national security are frequently mentioned in the conversation. From the quantity of channels in which climate change is discussed, we can evaluate it as a significant variable, but then I must ask myself, after all these years of school and work, why isn't it a standard part of every conversation, plan, and most projects?

Why climate change is ignored or under utilized in urban planning and development

1. Part of the answer has to do with the nature of the variable. Climate is a huge phenomenon that cannot, as a whole, be directly observed. Consequently, it is unwieldy. Climate science tends to rely upon large quantities of data, collected and combed by climate experts. The data and the outcomes are also designed for use by climatologists, not necessarily for urbanists or social scientists, and consequently there is a disconnect between the data and the populations that could create solutions from it. Greater partnership between policy makers, specialists, and climate researchers could lead to more directly useful information.

2. Previous social science research concerning climate change has been poorly defined and messy. I'm sure there are plenty exceptions, but looking through google scholar, I found that so many projects pursue participatory or perception-based methods that also mix climate change with other issues such as public health risks.

Take for example this page for community health concerning soil and food. This project advocates a community based research process in Malawi among farmers to develop response strategies to climate change. That sounds good, except it also manages to include HIV awareness/prevention, and the methodology "focusses on gender/age inequalities." I can only imagine that the research designer was trying to diversify the project in order to acquire funding, because such a schizophrenic research design will prompt a blurred mess of outcomes. I appreciate the complexity intended in the study, but keeping specific to goal (adaption strategies for climate change among farmers in Malawi) provides a higher probability of success for those farmers. Aids education, gender, and age, do not need to be a part of the project and only creates distractions.

3. Social science research and development projects that take a strategically proactive approach to climate change tend to have a rural focus (such as this project with farmers in Ethiopia). It makes perfect sense to work with farmers to experiment with strategies to contend with climate change in coming seasons. Excellent. But how does this translate to urban environments?

There are plenty of examples of climate change and poor urban planning causing problems (such as flooding in Argentina), but what about the successes? Current "best practices" tend to focus on novel solutions such as green rooftops and house boats. Seriously? This sort of approach to problem solving perfectly exemplifies everything that is wrong with the field of urban planning. May I ask, how many square meters of roof-top gardens in a city/state/nation/world will be required to reduce carbon emissions by 2% in a year? How many liters of water collected in rain gardens will produce the same impact? This is not a legitimate approach. It is ad-hoc and based more in good will than good thinking.

Also, many of the messages propagated among urban-dwellers is to conserve - recycle, turn off lights, use public transit - or to rely upon technology (such as sustainable architecture and infrastructure) rather than to individually experiment with livelihood strategies to produce environmentally advantageous outcomes. I'm not a big believer in social programming for baseline behavior change, and the notion of experimentation has more pro-active connotations than the emphasis on reduction. While there are likely some urban projects that take the proactive, experimental, and strategic approach, these are in an extreme minority. In the meanwhile the public sphere is dominated by media messages constructing conservation as long-term responsibility, not messages of environmentally-positive production because of urgent necessity.

4. There is a lack of concise research methods for urbanists and social science researchers. I've spent the last 24 hours searching for published, quality research concerning urban settlements and climate change at the individual, human scale (not the sort of research pursued by climatologists). There are many papers concerned with participatory action research methods with farmers to research the affects of climate change on their livelihood and to develop solutions to contend with this. Where is the same kind of for cities? It must be out there somewhere, but its not omnipresent, and that is a problem since cities generate the greatest quantity of carbon emissions. It seems feasible to use the same strategy for cities, but we can assume that the impact will be more difficult for urban residents to discern.

The Outcome

If climate change is to become a valid concern for urban populations, it must be removed from the abstract and exposed among the lived day-to-day reality of the population. We must first ask ourselves what sort of clear and tangible evidence for climate change exists within our cities and neighborhoods. The best social research and work today seems focussed on developing coping strategies for the victims of climate change, such as rural African villages and farmers. But this social research needs to happen in our cities and suburbs as well, not because urban dwellers are to be positioned as the evil propagators of climate change, but because without a proactive approach, they will be the future victims.

We also must drop the fantasy assumptions about the so-called solutions on land use and green space to which we presently adhere. Upon identifying the specific incidents of climate change, we can create relavent methods within our communities to internalize the evidence to then develop strategic, pro-active responses to contend with the harsh reality of climate change. Furthermore our responses must contain a series of relavent tactics that can a) quantitively reduce carbon emissions in our cities and b) develop coping strategies for the negative impact of climate change.

While we strive to do our part to mitigate or even reverse the trend of global temperature increase, we must also accept that temperature change has a longstanding history and will continue, although at a slower pace. Our cities need not be prepared for climate change, but accept the responsibility in the present tense and thus become responsive. Whereas preparation implies a coming event, response suggests a current and ongoing engagement.

Seeking Urban Planning 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Mitchell Sutika Sipus) — Fri, 17 May 2013 21:28:00 +0000

I love watching movies about the future. I'm not exactly a major science fiction fan, but I love to see other people's visions of what the future of cities could be like. As a boy, I had a Back to the Future poster on my closet door and I lusted for a hovering skateboard. I knew from an early age that I was to graduate high school in the year 2000, which even in the mid-90s tempted my mind with thoughts of glass sidewalks and gravity-defying cars.

So now, where is my floating car?

I can't blame urban planners for our lack of aerospace transit options, but when I look at the evolution of tools for urban planning and development in comparison to the rate of growth in other technical fields, I'm struck with pangs of jealousy. Within a matter of years, telecommunications have undergone a revolution. Sustainable architectural technologies have leaped forward. We can travel further, faster, and quieter than ever before and to any part of the world. All I need is a laptop and a decent web connection to receive an education, start a business, market it, manage it, and sell it. But regarding the decisions we make to improve our cities, the change has been slow moving. Our modern cities very much resemble cities of 100 years ago. Certainly they are cleaner and more efficient, but if you remove all the sleek products, they are more or less the same in organization.

Today the major obsession is big data for urban management. We all want maps and data on everything in the city so we can cut down traffic, reduce taxes, improve utilities, and target infrastructure projects. Excellent. To obtain this data we relay upon a variety of digital tools, which means we have to rely on computer scientists to produce the tools, manage them, and conduct much of the analysis to explain the data. Consequently many of the best GIS users today are programmers not geographers.

The better urban designers are also often trained as architects. They have a more specific knowledge of materials, spatial form and the construction process. Engineers remain essential to make certain that everything has the structural capacity to function.

So with the influx of computer/data scientists and the strong role of architecture, what is today's urban planner left to do? Mobilizing community engagement and employment within local legislative powers tend to be the two primary areas where urban planners work. But why such a limited scope of work?

Most urban planners I know work in one of the above positions. I recall once meeting a planner who went on to get a JD and then worked doing rule of law in Afghanistan. He said he would "never go back to urban planning" but I was shocked! Building governance and law in Afghanistan is an excellent task as urban planner.

I suspect that one reason for the lack of vision and the slow growth of the profession is because the lack of imagination within urban planning education. Many schools train their students to be mid-level bureaucrats, GIS technicians, and community workers. They are not trained to be creators. They are trained to be strategic. The strategy is based upon a directed, assumed, or commonly determined vision. Within the pursuit of the strategy, many of the tactics are antiquated. In graduate school I was taught how to measure the quantitive impact of industrial job creation in a community, a rarity in today's economy. Classes covered business incubators, industrial clusters, zoning laws, city accounting and historic preservation law. But there were no classes that explained how a business functions, how to be an entrepreneurs, how to craft a vision for the city, how to write a computer program, or how to build a database. There were also no specific classes on urban security, immigration, or food production or similar pressing issues.

When I left grad school I began targeting the world's hardest problems of refugee camps, urban violence, and war. Fortunately, before pursuing planning, I started my career as an artist where I learned to create. In graduate school, I then acquired the ability to be strategic. Yet it was clear that I didn't have the tools I needed. I then went back to school for an additional year in Egypt to study international law and migration. That helped... but only made it more clear that more work needed to be done. In the last couple years I've spent countless nights reading books about business, working on business plans, and conducting exercises on codeacademy.com until the early morning hours. Unfortunately, while I have some tools now that are more relevant to the problems at hand to create markets and work with information, I still have much work to do and these tools are far from sufficient.

If we are to make our dreams into a reality, we need to start training our urban problem-solvers and change-makers with more relevant tools. It doesn't all need to be digital. They could be simple and organic tools too. What matters most is that our tools evolve to reflect not only the demands of the present, but to better identify and pursue the opportunities of the future. Until then, our cities will remain far removed from the possibilities of our dreams.

City. Text. Laboratory

noreply@blogger.com (Mitchell Sutika Sipus) — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 20:29:00 +0000

A small sample from my research on graffiti for social analysis in conflict zones. Sutika Sipus 2013.

Any casual reader of this blog is familiar with my obsession over social research methods. Not only am I fascinated by the idea of measuring and quantifying the intangible, but I also question the general viability of most social research instruments. In the areas that I work, it is not practical to conduct standard surveys or the usual data collection procedures do to security threats, so consequently I'm somewhat critical of the information that does surface.

For the last two years I've used Kabul as an urban laboratory to experiment with alternative methods of social analysis, and one project has been the cataloguing of graffiti and social imagery throughout the city. Almost one year ago I wrote about initial explorations in this area of critical cartography.

More recently I've been able to break newer ground by merging this technique with other methods. I will be presenting my work this weekend at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I can't divulge much on the details till the finished publication comes out next fall but anyone in the Boston area is welcome to attend the conference MIT8: Public Media, Private Media.

For anyone that can't make it, I do have a semi-related book chapter coming out in August (just submitted final draft yesterday!) and hope to publish on this particular project in the late fall. Its been a busy last couple weeks, and the year is just getting started!

Scaling Tools and Hacking Methods for Urban Development and Reconstruction

noreply@blogger.com (Mitchell Sutika Sipus) — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 07:49:00 +0000

Case 1:

Last year an organization analyzing tribal conflicts in the Pashtun belt hired an outside consultant. He had never been to Afghanistan before, had no familiarity with the issues, but had instead spent a lifetime studying patterns of gang violence in South and Central America. I was optimistic about his role in the project as I hoped he would bring some keen insight and a new point of view that would revolutionize everyone's understanding of systematic violence in Afghanistan, creating a pathway toward viable solutions. In contrast, the consultant made a series of irrelevant observations but charged a hefty sum, and left behind only a drained budget and a frustrated research staff.

Case 2:

In the latter years of Albert Einstein, he became obsessed with discovering GUT, the "grand unified theory" that will provide a scientific basis to create a total explanation for everything. He approached the problem by trying to fuse theories on electromagnetism with relativity. Not only did he fail in this endeavor, but his pursuit of it made him removed from the newer discoveries of his discipline, in particular the new field of quantum physics.

The Pursuit of Universal Solutions

I mention these two examples as a consequence of a conversation I had last week with a professor from Columbia University. At this moment I'm loaded down with some deadlines over the next few days so I have little time to spare, but with a new project on the horizon, I called her hoping to find the cliffs-notes version on relevant industry toolkits and best-practices to save time and ensure success. Surprisingly, she didn't really have any answers for me.

Initially I was annoyed, as I'm one forever interested in particular issues rather than specific geographies, and thus have a compulsion to study broad trends to glean useful cross-disciplinary and cross-geographic kernels of knowledge. I too would likely have hired the Latin American violence expert for the project in Afghanistan. In my own practice, I make a point to not be geographically specific in my abilities. Yet over the last few days, my ideology has begun to shift. Universality is a myth.

Institutions are forever trying to build toolkits to bolster resilience, establish sustainability, or ensure economic development. Development interventions, such as technology and business incubators for economic growth are often formulaic. Certainly these projects can succeed, but how often and under what conditions? While these are valuable tools, one of the first rules of carpentry is to use the right tool for the job, so we must ask, are these the best tools available? If they are the only tools, then we need to modify the tools we have to better fit the tasks at hand.

When I was a graduate student, I spent years examining the viability of Sphere Humanitarian Standards for shelter creation within protracted refugee settlements. Sphere outlines methods for disaster relief and reconstruction, making it a fairly useful tool for cross-coordination among stakeholders and relief organizations in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. At the time, I questioned if it was well suited for upgrading in displacement camps that had been in place for decades since the tool is also used in that manner by some ngos. After conducting extensive field work in Dadaab Camps of eastern Kenya, I learned that Sphere failed to fully account or accomodate the complex socio-economic mechanisms that developed overtime within the camps. Consequently interventions crafted with Sphere, when applied to long-term settlements, were foreign and arbitrary to the matured local systems.

Nowadays I question if the very essence of Sphere, as a framework designed for widespread and global application is perhaps entirely flawed upon conception. While a tsunami will wreak the same kind of damage anywhere in the world, the levels of preparedness, the available social capital, and the legal structures in place will differ dramatically. Within the current Sphere guidelines, it informs actors to examine and utilize local laws and customs but it does not explain how to do so. How does this guidance, which is painstakingly obvious, actually helpful? Rather than construct a universal Sphere, why not begin crafting Sphere guidelines at the country-level, so that all laws and mechanisms can be accounted and introduced in greater detail? This will not work perfectly and an iterative process is also necessary on the ground, yet it will likely work better than the Sphere guidelines we have at the present.

Rather than focusing on the universality of our outcomes, we can better ensure our outcomes by refining the precision of our tools. Are all intervention and research methods applicable anywhere? One might initially think so, given that these methods are empirically designed. Yet I would say otherwise. Hence one cannot effectively conduct standard social research in hostile landscapes. Due to the limitations imposed, the tools can become diluted to the point of uselessness. For example, In Afghanistan, I would go so far as to say that all social research is flawed on account that it is "perception-based," which is nothing but a delicate phrase to describe indeterminable validity.

Researchers working in Kandahar and other regions cannot carry any mobile technology to assist in data collection. Nor can they probe deeply in local issues (at risk of becoming part of the problem) or maintain strict oversight of the data-collection staff. Individuals who are paid to provide responses have no incentive to be accurate or tell the truth. Notably, people are often questioned on issues to which they have no direct knowledge or experience, so they can only provide assumptions or guesses as answers.

Conflict is not the only variable that shapes the effectiveness of our research tools and methodologies. Language, social conventions, and insider-outsider relations all shape our abilities to do our jobs as researchers, planners, or policy-makers. This isn't new information. These are typically the concerns discussed with an "Intro to Anthropology Class," but it is essential to question the foundations of our disciplines so as to avoid the pitfalls of chasing after a grand unified theory when the data itself is evident of something entirely different.

Should We Paint the Sandbags Pink? Redesigning The End of War

noreply@blogger.com (Mitchell Sutika Sipus) — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 12:54:00 +0000

A fundamental lesson within the major literature about counterinsurgency, such as Nagel's How to Eat Soup with a Knife or Galula's Counterinsurgency Warfare, is the lack of institutional memory regarding the end of conflicts. For whatever reason - social, organizational, cultural or otherwise - popular conceptions of history describe wars as having a messing beginning and a tidy ending. Images of helicopters hovering over Saigon or masses of WWII soldiers boarding ships homeward bound resonate in the global social conscious. But it is unlikely that any war in history concluded with the simplicity of closing the cover on a book.

Historical battles were heavily shaped by the seasons, as the winter obstructed movement and in the spring many soldiers would need to leave the front lines to plant seed. Wars would be resumed once the seed began to sprout, postponed for harvest, then returned to again until winter. A quick look at the wars of the 19th century on wikipedia reveals that most wars lasted 4-5 years, but the wrong impression is given by this list as it provides a nice simple year for the conclusion of every conflict. In contrast, many of the wars featured ongoing skirmishes, small attacks, and a trickle of minor incidents for months or years after each battle.

Today's conflicts are no different. Low-intensity, protracted conflicts stretch onward into the future. Major international conflicts and localized internal conflicts seem to never end. Yet a significant difference between these conflicts and those of the past is the role of advanced communication technologies and access to simple yet powerful weapons that put small groups on par with massive military forces.

So if wars have messy endings but the mess is bigger these days, do we defend our cities with the same methods as in the past? At present we rely upon militant checkpoints, guard towers, road blocks and a whole array of methods intended to restrict movement, obstruct attackers, and provide tactical advantage to one force while negating abilities of the other. This is all well and good in terms of security, but it does nothing to add finality to the ever-steady trickle of attack incidents.

When fortifying a point of interest, the goal is to focus on utility, with the broad assumption that the newly installed elements are temporary. Consequently security architecture is stark and simple, an element that becomes threatening when contextualized by armed guards and interrogations. The greater problem is that these features are rarely temporary. Because the hostilities continue, the security infrastructure remains, detracting from the quality of the urban experience and reinforcing the sense of danger. One could even argue that such infrastructure promotes ongoing militarization and escalates conflict.

To instill finality into contemporary conflict, we must create defensive infrastructure to facilitate a post-conflict urban condition. We must create security mechanisms that not only satisfy their primary objective, but can contribute to the health and wellbeing of urban living. Imagine if one day someone in Kabul or Baghdad or Cairo could wake up in the morning and say "remember that police checkpoint that used to be around the corner? I really miss having it there, it really made walking down the street a little more pleasant." People make such statements about art, fountains, gardens and landscaping. They do not say this about barbed wire fences, blast walls, or security installations.

So what should we do? Should we paint the sandbags pink? Maybe. It seems absurd, but why not? Perhaps global society could benefit to emasculate the battlefield. Discard the drab olive green and replace it with a mural of clouds. Many could argue that such acts beautify war and devalue its significance, but this is only partly true. Such acts beautify our environment and celebrate our common humanity, thus giving an opportunity for peace, otherwise lost, by devaluing the the significance of violence. It is time to design a new battlefield, not to fight war, but to end it.

Resurrecting Ancient Cities from the Dead

noreply@blogger.com (Mitchell Sutika Sipus) — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 09:01:00 +0000

Ankor Wat Temple Complex, Cambodia. Photo by Mitch Sutika Sipus 2013.

Yesterday I read the recent National Geographic article on the new possibilities to re-introduce extinct species of animals into the world via genetic engineering. The idea is to utilize DNA from animals that have died as a consequence of human intervention, such as the passenger pigeon, to repopulate the planet. Some researchers felt an ethical obligation to pursue the de-extinction of these animals, others note that due to environmental change, the native habitats of these species no longer exists and that repopulating the species might only lead to its eventual disappearance, again.

I found the article compelling, but it immediately made me question the ability to regenerate ancient cities from the dust. Rather than continually build new towns on the outskirts of today's cities or struggle with creating a sense of place in newly constructed environments, could we resurrect old settlements to connect the old with the new? Do archaeological sites of vast cities such as Pakistan's Mohen Darjo or Cambodia's Angkor Wat need to remain isolated like museum specimens?

I recall last year on a visit to Istanbul, Turkey the amazement that the historic fabric of the urban landscape was so neatly woven into contemporary living. There was little distinction between old and new, tourist zone and local habitation, business and residential. Unlike other ancient cities, such as Amman Jordan where the architectural heritage of the Roman Empire sits isolated from the urban core, Istanbul neatly integrated the past and the present. By resurrecting ancient cities from the dust, we could potentially create more urban environments as harmonious as Istanbul.

Human settlements rarely pop up by accident. So often they arise when one form of transportation intersects with another - such as a road and a river - and their lifespan is interconnected with the regional economic geography. By resurrecting a settlement, we could theoretically guarantee a particular type of economic and social success and likewise project a lifespan for the settlement based on our understanding of that settlement's history.

In this manner, we would have the choice to utilize or negate previous assets and obstacles to the settlement based on archaeological evidence and historical research. In settlements that consist of multiple layers of archaeological evidence, diligent mapping of the spatial allocation of artifacts and digital reconstructions might facilitate the conceptual rebuilding of historical events so as to better understand the spatial failures and advantages of previous civilizations. With a rough map of resource allocation and planning from multiple civilizations, we could better engineer a new city from the old.

Is this feasible? No idea. But if we can resurrect extinct animals, as far back as Mammoths, then why not resurrect civilizations?

Fake Pirates, War Journalists and Old White Men

noreply@blogger.com (Mitchell Sutika Sipus) — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 09:02:00 +0000

A couple guys on break or a dynamic security force? Depends on who you ask. Afghanistan, Sutika-Sipus 2012.

I typically prefer to keep this blog limited to subjects of post-war reconstruction, but over the last few days I've been thinking a great deal about all the weirdos I've encountered along the way.

Since 2003 I've been travelling or working in some fringe locations in the world, some of which are fairly dangerous, so its only natural that I've crossed paths with a lot of unusual personalities. For example, Southeast Asia is full of old British men who all tout stories about their days at Oxford University, their years as a music producer touring the world, and their decision to return to the outskirts of Cambodia 15 years ago... but outside of potentially being wanted in 48 countries for arms and human trafficking, these guys seem relatively harmless over a beer. Just don't make any future plans with them. But people that I encounter more often are the pseudo-journalists who have managed to change my perception of journalism, war, and Earnest Hemingway - and not for the better.

Today I stumbled across the article "The Somali Pirate Who Never Was," which exposes an ongoing

ruse of Kenyan-Somalis posing as Somali pirates for journalists. The article cites Time Magazine and BBC documentaries as victims of this scam, and I find it completely believable. Not because I have faith that the pirates to be such amazing actors, but rather because I have such little faith in war journalists.

To be fair, there are some exceptional war journalists out there. I have massive admiration for people like Sebastian Junger who not only embed with combat units, but develop personal relationships with the subject matter and the people around them to tell the story. But such individuals are rare. So often when I read an article, I find it has more to do with presenting the writer as a badass than actually giving context or content. How many articles start open with a sequence like the following:

"Driving down a dark, unpaved road in (insert conflict city here), my driver pointed at a mud brick house and said 'we must be careful, because of the warlord (insert multi-syllabic Islamic name here) lives in that house.' We barreled around the corner and stopped at a nondescript door when the driver nervously whispered 'we are here. I stepped out of the car to discover an AK-47 only inches from my face."

Just one week ago a friend shared a German publication with me about the Gandamak Lodge, a bar and restaurant in central Kabul. The article read nearly identical to what I just wrote. Of course Gandamak, like most businesses in Kabul, has security guards, but its location is not a secret and travelling there is not an adventure. I've also read articles exactly like this about countless African nations, refugee camps, border areas and innercity slums. So what kind of journalist writes such over-sensationalized copy?

Every war zone or fringe location usually has one or two coffeeshops or hotels with wifi connections and decent espresso. Inside are men and women with nice haircuts and stylish jeans, obsessing over twitter and talking about how awesome their lives are. Most the time these individuals grew up in privileged conditions, attended reputable schools for international relations or political science, and without the burdens of student loans and lots of family support, set off to be tourists of the underdeveloped world, and occasionally publishing something between expat parties.

Thanks to the benefits of their upbringing they have a social network that facilitates access to top-tier publications and in the end, all they need to do is be somewhere to become journalists. As for the coverage, it often doesn't stray to far from the coffeeshop, and that is the part that kills me. Again, not all war journalists are like this, but there are plenty of the kind I describe to make your head spin.

Then there are of course the kind of journalists who "parachute" into town to swoop up a story. I'd say this sort of coverage is often even worse because every small thing takes on exaggerated significance. The child asking for money on the street becomes a symbol for the regional economy, the woman wearing a burka is suddenly representative of national women's rights, and the sleeping security guard at the corner store becomes a metaphor for lackluster national defense. An entertaining story so often becomes more important than an accurate story.

I'll never forget when a friend in Juba Sudan told me that on the official day of constitutional independence, a large crowd of old white photojournalists trailed behind the central parade, documenting only the costumed dancers, but likewise looking like a parade feature themselves. Of course they weren't there for very long, as they arrived in the morning and were on another plane that night. I've witnessed similar reporters, often looking like he or she walked straight out of Williamsburg Brooklyn and into an IDP camp to photograph some kids pumping water from the ground and then leaving again, having contributed nothing to improve conditions but simply having been a voyeur. Is raising awareness truly enough? Could that person presence have contributed more to lessening the problems?

As for Earnest Hemingway, I always loved his writing and he was a childhood hero. I also wanted to move around the globe, go on adventures, and be a good writer. But today, I suspect I wouldn't have cared for his company. When I read his work I sense that it is about him, its about looking like a badass and doing things specifically to have the story to tell others, not because the moment happened by chance. What a shame.

Development Makes A Strange Bedfellow

noreply@blogger.com (Mitchell Sutika Sipus) — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 07:07:00 +0000

"Bengali Friends" in Bangladesh by David Lazar.

Guest Post by Thomas Lasseau

There is an old Bangladeshi saying that goes, "you can't take out the trash without getting your hands dirty." On a previous visit to Bangladesh to work in microfinance in 2009, my fellow interns and I found ourselves staring into the twin barrels of a sawed-off shotgun, wielded by a man with a police badge, blue jeans and flip flops. We had rented ATVs to explore Cox's Bazar, the longest beach in the world, and this man was claiming, in screamed Bengali, that for this infraction we owed him a "fine."

After paying him off and returning from our adventure, an argument ensued with the owners of the ATVs about who should internalize the cost of the bribe. After much haggling, it was divided between our cost of rental and the owner's cost of doing business, but we still left suspicious of an even bigger con. Needless to say, on a national level, the World Bank recently declined to loan Bangladesh $2 billion to build a bridge on account of a $17 million dollar "fine" required to grease the gears of construction.

Although it's dangerous to generalize about poverty, conflict zones and authoritarian regimes, a delicately stated common theme appears to be the mismanagement and misappropriation of national assets. Counterproductive resource allocations are visible in the global struggles between squatters, landowners and developers, in the violent seizing and reseizing of Africa's diamond territories, and in the pilfering of aid money by corrupt bureaucracies.

I believe the Bangladeshi proverb rings true insofar as we have to make the initial assumption that the governance of communal resources in extreme economic and political conditions has "fallen into the wrong hands." The tragic result of this grand misallocation of capital is that the majority stakeholders on the other side of the table (or the sawed-off shotgun as the case may be) have every reason to hold on fast, unless we can change their incentives.

The success of any process of disarmament, reconstruction, regime change or wealth redistribution hinges on the incentives of its participants who have the most to lose (whether inherited or acquired). Consequently, unless forcing new incentives through revolution or armed intervention (neither the province of the planner), the war criminals and corrupt officials of the world are our necessary allies in the philanthropic cause. The obvious risk of this acknowledgement is that in forging these alliances we become partners in corruption and crime.

So if successful development work is necessarily transactional, this means that we, as development workers, must learn to trade in trade-offs. How can we structure the deal to keep our hands as clean as possible while still actually helping people? The collateral damage can be measured by the degree of opportunity for taking back what's being given away. The trick is to somehow work against, while working with, but not working for the kleptocrat or militia on the other side of the deal. The sensitivity of this balance is why so many development projects merely perpetuate the crippling inequities they set out to fix.

Extreme conditions are tough on the stomach in more ways than one. Working in them is fundamentally a question of amplitude. In my legal training, I'm being taught to represent my client's interests against hostile forces with friendly professionalism. This training in civility has been invaluable. Cultivating the level of clarity and compassion necessary to negotiate amiably, no matter the stakes, is a lofty goal. I'm still a long way away, but I approach it like a kind of yoga. It may take years to finally touch your toes, but every inch counts.

In building the multidisciplinary toolkit required for improving urban living, I've studied and worked in architectural design, green building, development economics, finance, governance, real estate and contract law. While I believe that each of these is an essential piece of the puzzle, the secret sauce that ultimately coheres these ingredients is the human element that isn't taught in school.

Good analogies for trying to improve the distribution of resources are at worst piratical parleys, and are at best legal representation in settlement negotiations. At best, your clients get damages and injunctions and the guilty party gets off the hook. At worst, you have to somehow pay the dictator more to go away than they can make by staying and oppressing (e.g. fire sale privatizations only benefitting the former regime and multinational capital).

The practical balance lies somewhere between these poles. The necessary alliances must be built on common ground. Building the common ground is where our work begins. The most violent and oppressive people in the world, whether acting from greed, hate, fear or desperation, are also human. We should start there, no matter how reluctant we may be to do so. We need to be able to make friends with the warlord before we can convince him to build sewers and hospitals instead of buying more guns.

Thomas Lasseau is currently a law student at the UCLA School of Law. He previously worked with Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and studied economics and art at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Update from Cambodia

noreply@blogger.com (Mitchell Sutika Sipus) — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 16:09:00 +0000

Angkor Wat Temple in Siam Reap Cambodia. Sutika Sipus 2013.

I'm presently on the road in SE Asia doing some research on the longterm implications for conflicted landscapes. However just wanted to give a shout-out to two brief articles that I wrote and were recently published online. Enjoy.

Slow and Steady in Kabul
An overview of the history and role of urban planning in Kabul and its impact on the future development prospects for the city. It is part of the Cities in Conflict series at opendemocracy.net.

The Story of a New Mogadishu
Posted at Engaging Cities, which focuses primarily on methods of community engagement in urban planning, this article describes how community participation may have a broader role in governance of Somalia. Furthermore, it describes the tool created with my partners at Urban Interactive Studio, rebirthofmogadishu.com.

A Simple Solution to Mogadishu's IDP Problem

noreply@blogger.com (Mitchell Sutika Sipus) — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 20:51:00 +0000

A Pathway to Ownership for IDPs can Change Mogadishu Forever. Image: Sutika Sipus 2013.

After every war, cities are burdened by many of the same problems. The infrastructure is destroyed, there is a lack of money, a culture of violence, and a fear that war will return. But another major obstacle is the heavy numbers of internally displaced persons who left their homeland elsewhere in the country and sought refugee in the city. They sought safety, employment, and a chance at a better life. They also frequently have little to offer, having abandoned everything with the move, and frequently coming from rural villages, lack the skills necessary to compete in the urban marketplace.

Internally displaced persons (IDPs) are typically seen as a burden, and city officials want them to go home. With no money, IDPs frequently seek shelter in abandoned buildings or in impoverished, make-shift camps. The UNHCR also encourages they return to their place of origin as UNHCR tends to advocate return as the only durable solution. But at other times UNHCR will recognize that many IDPs cannot return home, as their homes have been destroyed and all that was abandoned is now completely lost. In these instances, UNHCR and UN-Habitat will construct IDP displacement camps.

In Mogadishu, IDP camps are scattered throughout the city. They are renown for being dangerous and unhygienic. Murder, rape, and disease are common. IDPs also inhabit many buildings throughout the city with no right to ownership. When the original owners return to reclaim their property, conflicts frequently ensue. As the city has no surviving property records from before the war, arguments over property rights are common and the courts get clogged as people fight for rightful ownership rights. This problem is expensive and slow. To make the changes in Somalia sustainable, it is necessary that change also takes place quickly. I wrote about this before in a previous article on the importance of speed for land use rights in post-war reconstruction.

Think Different - Live Different in Mogadishu. Image: Sutika Sipus 2013.

Solving the IDP Crisis in MogadishuSomalia

To solve the IDP situation in Mogadishu, the issue must no longer be seen as zero/sum. Many want the IDPs to leave or to suddenly have money to purchase housing. But this is clearly unrealistic. Rather, the problem must be considered in relation to time, space, resources, and the greater good of the city.

The best solution would be a "right to ownership" policy. The Right to Ownership Policy could work very quickly and effectively if the following steps were pursued.

1. IDPs are provided a temporary identification number for the property they currently inhabit. A record is made containing a description and possibly a photo of the space.

2. Each year the IDP/Occupant must invest a particular amount of money and time into the upkeep of the property. This could consist of digging better quality latrines, constructing more permanent housing, painting walls, repairing concrete, clearing debris, installing doors and so on. Notice that many improvements can initially be done at no cost.

3. If no one returns to make claim on the property in 5 years, the temporary identification number becomes a permanent record of ownership for the occupant.

4. If another person returns to the site and claims the property as his own, and can provide at least 5 articles or witnesses as evidence, the returnee will acquire the property IF compensation is provided to the IDP resident for each year of invested ownership.

Why this IDP Solution can work.

1. Extensive research has shown that formal ownership of property provides economic leverage to residents.

2. The IDP acts as a caretaker for the property until full ownership is approved. Thus streets are rebuilt which also reduces crime.

3. This policy is consistent with the principals of xeer, the traditional/informal legal system that is still used among many nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes in Somalia. Consequently such a policy would be innate to those who would be affected by it.

4. IDPs who do not achieve full ownership leave the property with a sum of money reimbursed by the legal owner and are thus in a better position to acquire housing or even return to point of origin.

Why this solution to Mogadishu's IDP problem will not happen.

I have promoted this solution to several members of the Somali government, but it has gained no support. Certainly, it is not perfect, but with tweaking, a right to ownership is far better than court cases which may go on for decades. Many officials claim a desire for innovation and radical change, but are not willing to take the dramatic steps necessary to be truly innovative. Rather, all politicians continue to see the problem in the same manner of the UN, even if they are not happy with the UN approach to solving the problem.

Unfortunately this policy means that many returnees will lose ownership of their property. But five years is a long time and many Somalis have no interest to return anyway. The bigger problem is among government officials who cannot presently prove ownership of their own family estates, and thus refuse to pursue policies for the common good because of their own selfish interest.

Another reason that the policy will not happen is because it will require that the city lose ownership some some property to IDPs and that vacant lots currently inhabited by turkels will need to be considered property of the IDPs. What officials do not realize, is that letting informal settlements become formal is an advantage - not a loss - as these settlements will quickly transform to have permanent buildings, lower crime, and create new market opportunities. It would actually expand the city!

Lastly, from a planning perspective, formalizing a pathway to ownership for IDPs would reinforce the power of the government and provide an opportunity to build necessary infrastructure in the currently existing squatter camps. Providing roads, sewers, communication and water to these sites will encourage the construction of permanent housing and improved living among residents.

Final Thoughts

I have travelled all over the world, and Somali people are perhaps more resourceful than any other group of people I have encountered. If a clear policy is made which can provide an opportunity for property ownership among IDPs, while current land/housing owners will need to make a decision among reclaiming property, then people will jump to the opportunity. The right to ownership should not be reserved for only the diaspora. Public policy needs to be made for the interest of everyone, not just those who have power, and more than anywhere else, Mogadishu's leadership needs the vision to pursue the right path.

Change is Possible in Mogadishu. Image: Sutika Sipus 2013.

What ever happened to the Russian Culture Center in Kabul?

noreply@blogger.com (Mitchell Sutika Sipus) — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 15:01:00 +0000

Russian Culture Center in Kabul 1982 - 2012 (Source)

For the first year I lived in Afghanistan, I would often drive past a massive bombed-out concrete structure of juxtaposing angles and bullet-riddled walls. Everyday I thought about how I would like to explore this monstrous building, but put it off for another time. Then last summer I passed by the building on Darulaman Road and saw it being raised to the ground. I ran up to the entrance and asked the construction workers if I could take some photos and they looked at me with suspicion and told me to leave. I expected to see an article in the New York Times or elsewhere about the loss of this iconic building, but no one wrote anything. Nine months later, it is about time someone wrote an obituary for the Russian Culture Center of Kabul.

Destruction of Russian Culture Center, Kabul Afghanistan. Photo: Sutika Sipus 2012.

Russian Culture Center, Source Unknown

Sadly I did not know the center very well. The old one was torn down with the intention to build a new Russian Culture Center. The original was greatly scarred by bullets and bombings from the 1990s. It was also famous as a place for opium addicts to convene.

Often when driving past, I had the same taxi driver who grew up in Kabul then spent much of his adult life abroad in Russia. I asked him if it was safe to explore the premises, and he told me that there are many drug addicts in the building but they are probably harmless. I then asked him if there were any risks from landmines or other unexploded ordinance and he paused, smiled, then laughed. After catching his breath he said "you have no need to worry about landmines, all the drug addicts would have cleared them!" It took me a moment to realize that he meant all the landmines were gone because of the addicts who walked on them.

I also heard that one could find pieces of old film in the rubbles from the film library previously housed in the building. Blown to bits, none of the film survives, but fragments are scattered about.

At present there is nothing to replace the Russian Culture Center. There are plans to construct a new version of the building on the same site, and the plans were to be completed by 2013, but at present there is only some modest construction on site. If anything does get finished there, I expect it will be about two more years. Of course who knows what will happen in Afghanistan, in two years, anything could happen.

Proposed Design for Future Russian Culture Center, Kabul Afghanistan.

Reinventing the Urban Interface: Service Design for Post-Conflict Cities and Landscapes

noreply@blogger.com (Mitchell Sutika Sipus) — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 11:06:00 +0000

Police Checkpoint on Ashura Holiday in Kabul, Afghanistan
Sutika-Sipus 2012

Wars have never had simple, neat, clean endings. We like to envision that they have, but after the signature of nearly every historical treaty there remain scattered battles and acts of aggression by those who refuse to accept defeat or had yet to hear the news. Today, the lingering aftermath of war is more obvious, as it is a given that wars never end but continue to trickle onward indefinitely. Cities such as Kabul, Juba, Mogadishu, and Bagdad are rebuilding, but are not safe or stable.

There are many reasons for their continued instability and lots of research out there to understand why contemporary wars have no ending. Current research as investigated the problem from diverse perspectives such as psychology, natural resources, epidemiology, or even the notion that conflict simply creates more conflict. But amidst all the efforts there has been little to no examination of the physical city and its role in promoting or reducing conflict.

Unfortunately traditional methods of security greatly undermine the health and function of cities. Giant blast walls, police and military checkpoints, and steel guard shacks hinder processes socio-economic and cultural production by disrupting the spatial pathways and linkages necessary for their distribution and replication.

Here are some examples of how contemporary security will hinder post-conflict urban reconstruction:

Detours caused by road blocks force the redistribution and retarded delivery of capital causing unnecessary losses and social inequities. For example, the guy who collects and sells firewood must pull his heavy cart an excessive extra distance before getting to his customer base, or because he cannot access his customers, he must compete against another firewood salesman in a more accessible neighborhood, reducing profits and potentially causing territorial conflict.

Lack of identification among citizens and the frequency of police checkpoints disrupts the flow of goods and people, and further causes new touchpoints for conflict occur. In developing countries, most people do not have a birth certificate let alone a license or photo identification. Just as often the police are illiterate and after long work hours are impatient and tired. While checkpoints are important for security, they also create points of friction in the community and can inspire new conflicts.

Most neighborhoods were founded and grew around tightly defined tribal identities. Over time these tribal concepts began to deconstruct, yet the emergence of social conflict will re-inspire tribal allegiances When communities are heavily segregated by tribe, cross-tribal interaction is more likely to motivate suspicion and hostility than friendship and commerce. When physical barricades disrupt the movement of people, it prevents opportunities to again break down tribal allegiances.

Blast walls dictate all movement and transport cooridors in Kabul
Sutika-Sipus 2013

As you see, point of security are also points of disruption and thus obfuscate healthy social interaction. The question then becomes, how can governments and institutions create a viable security infrastructure while also promoting the advancement of the city?

To solve this problem, we must imagine some future possibilities:

What if police checkpoints could be design and operated in such a way that 10 years from now, citizens would say "remember when we had that checkpoint? I rather miss it, that really added something to our community."

What if security infrastructure, such as blast walls or Jersey-walls, were created in such a way that their identity could become absorbed into the the landscape over time?

What if urban security was approached as a process of customer service, and thus techniques successful in retail could be infused within security operations? To extent we already have this, but does a visit to the police station feel like a visit to the genius bar? Do customers have a way to provide feedback into the service experience for improvement? Most people are afraid of security providers, how can this be changed?

Unfortunately those with the power to initiate and conduct war continue to forget the lessons forged by existing conflicts. Take for example the swift path to victory by the French forces in Mali. Achieving the military victory was possible, but before the militants moved in, Northern Mali was a poor and desperate landscape. Will it return to the same sad state of affairs? Likely, or even more likely, it will be worse as France appears to have no viable plan for the reconstruction process. And if they rely upon the methods currently embraced by the aid/development community of the world, they wil only partly succeed, as evidenced by the lackluster reconstruction in Afghanistan.

Certainly the communities are resilient to certain issues and people will manage to survive, but resilience does nothing to prompt the radical transformation for a sustained peace and enriched development. It is clear that a new approach is necessary, one that transforms the landscape so as to negate the conditions which facilitate conflict. For years my company Sutika Sipus has been developing strategies and solutions to facilitate this change, but one company is not enough, others must take part in the process as well. We need to reinvent the interface between security and society in our cities, and to do so, it is essential that we redesign the relationship between security methods and the city itself.

Karte-Seh. Kabul Afghanistan. Sutika-Sipus 2013

After the Robot Wars: Drones, Interface Design, and Urban Reconstruction

noreply@blogger.com (Mitchell Sutika Sipus) — Sun, 13 Jan 2013 20:56:00 +0000

I use Urban Planning methods for conflict stabilization and post-war reconstruction. This focus demands that I also maintain an ongoing understanding of trends in contemporary warfare, whereas I seek to create an urban environment goes beyond physical reconstruction, but also facilitates the psychological healing of afflicted populations.

Lately I have been investigating how to apply concepts from service and interface design to conflict and post-conflict environments. Service and UI design both are rooted in understanding user approaches and psychological impulses to craft a satisfying user experience in retail or online. If we can craft a retail experience to facilitate greater customer satisfaction, such as how Apple uses of free-floating associates who can provide sell you an iphone at the display table, then we can apply the same steps and research methods to shape urban environments to maximize the urban experience of the citizens. Likewise I believe we can use these steps to create opportunities for pacification, identity construction, and community healing.

But today while researching concepts in service and UI design from Carnegie Mellon University (famous for robotics), a new concept came to mind. As drone warfare continues to escalate in use and force, the conflict cities of the future may have little evidence of human destruction. Those initiating the war may be thousands of miles away, yet the perpetrators of war in the eyes of the local community, will become more abstract.

I'm not claiming the future will look like the battlefields of Terminator 2 or The Matrix, but rather I have a few new questions:

Can we facilitate community healing after destruction waged by technology?

Does the identity of the perpetrator matter when reshaping a conflicted landscape to manage memory?

Does the use of high-tech, non-human weapons of war negate our ability to learn from war or overcome the resulting trauma?

The Demand for Urban Planners to Heal the Trauma of War

noreply@blogger.com (Mitchell Sutika Sipus) — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 11:09:00 +0000

Residential Road in Kabul, Afghanistan. Photo Sutika Sipus 2012.

Contemporary warfare psychologically traumatizes millions of innocent people every year. Since the industrialization of warfare at the end of the 19th century, the wreckage inflicted upon humanity has torn communities apart, crushed families, and rendered vast swathes of land throughout the world useless. In contemporary war, the range of actors consists of independent militants, private armies, gangs and criminal elements, and thus the issue of trauma and land use have become additionally problematic as there is no clear end to the conflict.

Today, the world is dotted by low-intensity protracted conflicts, stretching onward by scattered acts of terrorism and insurgency, thus continually threatening civil society and undermining the development of state sponsored institutions. The elongation of war not only drains state resources, but reinforces a cyclical condition of violence, as the population subjected to war must continue to live and die in a constant state of fear and aggression. While contemporary psychology may have individual methods of therapy, tied to the personal history of the victim, how can we move forward at an urban scale?

In contemporary wars and post-war landscapes, the triggers for trauma do not go away. The also risk remains constant. On the most peaceful days, the threat of terrorism lurks around the corner and the random loss of a loved one haunts every family. How can one overcome trauma when threatened by the possibility of bombings in cafes or the return of insurgents at night to abduct family? Particularly for those populations who were a major part of the conflict, such as in Rwanda or Somalia, how can psychological change take place, to shift the normative mindset of the community from a culture of war into one of peace, when the environment and the people are always the same?

Not only does the constant stress drive conflict by twisting normative social patterns, but can induce increased rates of risk in other areas of our lives. A victim of PTSD may struggle to focus at work, or may become more likely to become subject to physical illness. A population under stress is less likely to be physically healthy and also less economically productive. If trauma can have a negative impact in the US alone at $42 Billion a year, imagine how it must affect entire populations under threat of war.

In the post-conflict environment, there is a necessity to rely on traditional security methods, such as the imposition of military installations and checkpoints, but the ability for complete transformation and thus also reduces the level of security over time.. If we drop the traditional security mechanisms then the fear of returning instability dominates the society and the stressful feeling of risk becomes more oppressive. Solutions must be multifaceted to maintain security and to facilitate healing.

The problem of maintaining military security alongside psycho-social healing clearly demands the attention of urban professionals. At present, security infrastructure is generally handled by engineers, architects, and planners as technical problems with little regard for the broader impact on society. Among those who are working to provide social counseling and trauma workshops there is negligible ability to modify the physical environment. While these conditions are demanding and maintain risks, it would seem that more Community Planners and likeminded individuals would be drawn to this problem, considering the problems of post-conflict transition are not exactly new. Yet where are they?

A Simple Solution to Kabul's Massive Traffic Problem

noreply@blogger.com (Mitchell Sutika Sipus) — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 22:37:00 +0000

Working Traffic Light in Karte-Seh, Kabul Afghanistan. Photo: Sutika Sipus 2012.

The thing about complex social systems is that they cannot be controlled. They may organically self organize or self destruct, but the moment someone attempts to manage the system, everything will freeze up and fail. Traffic is a perfect example. Admittedly, I've spent far less time on the issue of automobile traffic than most urban planners, but during the last two years that I've daily wrestled with car sickness from the stop-and-go struggle of driving across the city, I've thought a great deal about simple solutions to the Kabul traffic problem. For those interested, I've also found a great research dissertation on this particular subject. My analysis and proposal here is far simpler, as I have no fancy data or maps on hand, but lets just say it is based on 2 years of ethnography while living in three different parts of the city.

Kabul, Afghanistan 1960s. Source Unknown.

Kabul then, now, and gridlock

Everyone in Kabul agrees that the traffic problem could have been easily prevented. In the 1960s and 70s the city didn't have any traffic problems, and in 2001 the city population was at less than half capacity and the city was leveled from decades of war. Had reconstruction efforts actually began in 2002, the city infrastructure could have been quickly constructed for a population around 9 million people at little cost or inconvenience. But this did not happen, and so today the city wrestles with around 6 million inhabitants and an infrastructure designed to handle only half of the that. It is laden with power plays and corruption. Cheap Chinese imports are jammed into every market and luxury products are more available than ever, although there is not a proportionate distribution of jobs or income to garner wide access to these goods.

Various USAID and World Bank initiatives have done much in the last couple years to improve the quality of streets by paving dirt roads, repaving much of the downtown, and creating drainage systems. Of course this creates other problems as the construction causes extensive delays and the local population, with limited or nonexistent access to sufficient waste collection, use use the drainage for rubbish and sewage - causing massive backups and new public health risks.

Small modular T-Walls around Kabul. Source Unknown.

Unlike first world cities, other special variables exist. The city streets are also dominated by defensive infrastructure in the form of T-Walls, mobile partitians used to fortify security installations. Major intersections are also blocked by police checkpoints. Kabul is additionally bisected by a massive mountain, providing only two primary routes to relay traffic around the mountain, and a single-lane road that partially goes over the top. Lastly the city has one working traffic light (sometimes) which seems to be acknowledged when reinforced by police presence.

Previous Solutions

I've read several proposed solutions. Some planners have proposed bans on car imports, the creation of new roads, the repair of street signs, and increased activity by police to enforce traffic codes. Other solutions involve the development of expensive traffic management systems and facilities. All of these ideas sound nice, but are more or less quite terrible. These ideas all cost a lot of money, require a lot of time, will cause more delays, and require a higher level of discipline amont local authorities than available. I've seen local police enforce traffic violations, and I've also twice witnessed extreme police brutality on citizens who ignored a simple law. We shouldn't really give these guys additional work to do.

So with all these problems, what can be done?

A Systems Approach

My proposal is very simple. We create an incentive for alternative methods of transit and a disincentive for the current method of transportation. We also use a very low-tech monitoring system so that police do not require any special training and corruption is offset.

To succeed we must acknowledge that the chaos of Kabul's traffic is a self organized system determined by many variables. We cannot control all those variables, nor can we expect that their management would prompt positive outcomes. We can however provide simple incentives to nudge this system, but these simple incentives can only work if we can manage one or two of the variables that are the most interconnected to all the problems. To do this, we can start with a trial approach in two particular locations.

First there are really only two ways to bypass the mountain. One has a police checkpoint nearby, the other has checkpoints on either side. Everyday between 3 and 6:30 pm, these roads are barely at a crawl, with nauseous drivers and passengers city in a fog of carbon monoxide. It is not pleasant.

Two major corridors for traffic around the central TV Mountain of Kabul circled in blue. Google Earth 2012.

My 4-Step Solution to Fix Kabul Traffic:

1. Shift the police check points to the center of the corridors connecting the two sides of Kabul.

2. Make each side one-way, so that traffic is circulated around the mountain (though uncertain if this is necessary, needs to be tested).

3. Charge those driving a car 20 Afghani to pass through and provide a simple dated and numbered receipt (like something used at a raffle would may possibly suffice) specific to the car license plate (as we do have those). Drivers will be charged a maximum of 100 Afghani per day.

4. Those using bicycles will be paid 20 Afghani as they pass through, and will receive up to 100 Afghani per day.

The cost/benefit of 100 Afghani is not excessive, about the cost of 2 USD, but it is significant enough to deter drivers and encourage bicycling. A variation of this approach was used in Stockholm, wherein the city charged 2 Euro for automobiles to cross bridges into the city. Notably it created immediate results, and while drivers initially complained, the same population described the project in positive terms after a matter of months. In this Tedtalk, Jonas Elisson describes the success of this project.

Benefits

My proposal does not require any special funding. It does not alter the existing infrastructure. It is environmentally sustainable and can be easily expanded into other major congestion nodes in the city. Furthermore, the increased use of bicycles over automobiles will increase safety as traffic accidents are the number one cause of accidents in Afghanistan. It will improve security because car bombs are far more destructive and harder to catch than body-born explosives. An insurgent on a bicycle will pose far less threat. Additionally this activity will spur the development of locally produced bicycle manufacturing, sales, and repair - an existing market in Kabul but nowhere near a state of maturity while car sales are otherwise fairly saturated.

Risks

This proposal is not flawless. What is to be done if more people ride bikes than drive cars? I'm not sure it would ever get to that point, and if it did, would phasing out the program invert the trend? I cannot know for certain, but one thing is definite - the only way we can succeed is if we try.

Navigating the Interface between Global Problems and Design Solutions

noreply@blogger.com (Mitchell Sutika Sipus) — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 19:07:00 +0000

BodyPrint. Graphite on Rice Paper. On exhibit at Current Residence in 2004. Drawing by Mitch Sipus.

I finished art school in 2004 with a bachelors of fine arts in art and design and a desire to use my skills to drive major changes in the world's most difficult environments. Over the next few years I learned that the biggest challenges were not the issues of underdevelopment, or necessarily learning about the problems, but rather the disciplinary mindset of other professionals. As many design schools are now training designers to be social problem-solvers, not just product producers, I wonder how many others have encountered this problem.

As a designer working with issues of poverty and conflict, my greatest asset is the ability to look at problems from multiple perspectives and to utilize alternative methods to develop ideas and solutions. When it comes to understanding the issues, this problem is easily addressed as it is a matter of self education and direct experience. A trip to the library, a web connection, a plane ticket, and a thorough grasp of social research methods is generally sufficient for one to get a fundamental grasp on a particular problem. But I found that as a designer with a direct and competent understanding of social policies, environmental challenges, economic concepts, and international law the biggest challenge was and remains working among professionals from those fields.

No matter how articulate would communicate my expertise on a topic, when asked about my background and hearing the words "art and design," suddenly the conversation would fall apart. Multiple times I had job interviews in which the HR recruiter kept asking questions about my art and architecture degrees, failing to see the next 5 years of work experience in development. The words "art school" somehow undermined my credibility time and again.

Over a few years, I needed to make a departure from working as an artist and designer, to gain traction in a discipline dominated by analysts, lawyers, and regional specialists. I had to work in institutions and gain a direct grasp of their experiences to understand the context in which many solutions to global problems are crafted. This experience was valuable because I could also see the flaws within those systems.

Today I am well-accepted among professional circles concerned with global conflict, poverty, and economic development. The challenge has in some ways begun to reverse, as I continue to pull the problems into the studio, and other designers see my background as a strange departure.

Personally I find the question of background completely irrelevant. My work succeeds because it successfully connects disparate methods and concerns, creating opportunities where no one else sees them. I do not worry about the interface between design, planning, conflict stabilization and development. As far as I'm concerned, the interface doesn't exist at all.

Stories of Change in Mogadishu Somalia

noreply@blogger.com (Mitchell Sutika Sipus) — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 12:34:00 +0000

When you hear the word Mogadishu, what do you think? Probably nothing positive. Perhaps violence, pirates, child soldiers, and a desolate wasteland. But is this accurate? Does your idea of Mogadishu match the reality of the city today? I am pleased to launch the site, rebirthofmogadishu.com, a collaborative effort between myself, Urban Interactive Studio, and the Benadiir Regional Administration.

Through this site, those who have been to Mogadishu, plan to visit, currently live there, or simply maintain an interest in the city have an opportunity to participate in reshaping its perception. Journalists are not always accurate, nor are governments, so this is a way for anybody and everybody to contribute to redefining the city.

So visit Rebirth of Mogadishu and spread the word! You can also find us on twitter or on facebook.

High Impact Development via Product Design

noreply@blogger.com (Mitchell Sutika Sipus) — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 11:59:00 +0000

Satellites and Donkey Carts in Mogadishu Somalia. Sutika Sipus 2012.

My goal as an Urban Planner and entrepreneur is to create opportunities for radical urban social transformation according to the interests of the immediate population and stakeholders. This is no easy task, but urban planners tend to have quite a few tools to affect this kind of change, such as the use of urban design, infrastructure creation, and the creation of new transportation options. Urban planning in this fashion,tends to focus on modifying the environment in which we live, thereby transforming the context of our actions. By transforming the context, urban planners hope to inform our daily activities with new levels of meaning, or perhaps to even inspire behavior change.

This is all well and good. Yet transforming the context of social activity is limited. There are just as many urbanists, artists, and community organizers who want to create new activities directly, and thus stage community activities in the form of sporting events, street fairs, and public theatre. But these activities are exceptions to the daily, mundane actions of urban life. Most of the day people are going to and from work, eating, walking the dog, socializing, kids play games in the street, and perhaps someone is reading a book on a bench. In these situations, the context is only partially relavent. As long as the environment is safe enough and clean enough to not intervene in daily life, it doesn't really matter what it looks like, or how it is constructed.

From another perspective, the most radical changes in human settlements over the last few centuries are driven by architectural or environmental. Cars, flushing toilets, airplane, telephones, and mobile phones have dramatically redesigned the urban lanscape. Modern houses have indoor bathrooms and attached garages. Cities are now dotted with wifi-hotspots and carved by multi-lane highways. It appears that for one to really change behavior, the solution is not to create modifications to the environment, but to create the right product.

Hassani's Wind-Blown Mine Clearance Device. Source: BBC

One recent product to shift the patterns of human settlements is a wind blown device for mine clearance. With over 110 million landmines distributed across approximately 70 countries in the world, there is a clear demand for mine clearance. But the process is slow and costly. Individuals must scour the ground with detection equipement, square inch by square inch. The mines must then be delicately disassembled by hand. With the design by Massoud Hassani, however, mines could be quickly removed by exploding them using a windblown device. Eventually to feature an integrated GPS chip, clearance can be mapped to facilitate effective coverage.

Hassani's product will make unusable land suitable for farming and habitation. Wherever applied, it will dramatically change the lives of those nearby as well as the economic productivity of the host nation. In this circumstance, his solution will also create new problem relating to land ownership and division. After all, he did not create a big elaborate policy reform or need to develop the product through complex social processes. Rather it was a matter of fitting a need with a solution, and while that solution creates new problems, it is generally agreeable that the new problems of legal battles are significantly better than the old problem of human endangerment.

Can we conclude that visionary product design is the most effective way to yield the greatest results for urban development? I suppose there are conditions in which this will not apply, but the more I look at the factors that have shaped the world around me, the less I'm convinced it is based on the action of architects. Global change is the result of those equipped with the vision to supply an unknown or unrecognized demand. Historic change is the result of those products that invent new markets by solving many of our current problems and effectively create new ones.

Yellow Mogadishu

noreply@blogger.com (Mitchell Sutika Sipus) — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 11:07:00 +0000

Central Mogadishu. Image by Sutika Sipus 2012.

While still struggling to balance time and return to writing more posts, I have taken a moment today to compile a few photos from Mogadishu, Somalia. This particular set consists entirely of images in which the yellow color is a dominant element. The photos are in no particular order but taken from the last year of working in Mogadishu, Somalia. You can see the images below or use the link to Flickr.

Back from Mogadishu - The Fastest Changing City in the World

noreply@blogger.com (Mitchell Sutika Sipus) — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 09:49:00 +0000

New Construction Underway in Mogadishu, Somalia. Sutika Sipus 2012.

I always intend to write at least twice a week, but lately there has been a delay as I've been on the road. I recently returned from Mogadishu and am amazed by how quickly the city is changing. Although journalists continue to tout it as the worlds most dangerous city, I believe it is time to shift the title into something about how the city of Mogadishu has undergone the most radical transformation in the world. It hasn't even been one year since my first visit, and yet many parts of the city are unrecognizable today. And new construction is everywhere! Hotels, travel agents, import/export businesses and even a new petrol station are up and operating.

In the past, the only way to secure fuel for automobiles was through sharing containers of poor quality fuel, now today a modern petrol station is under construction with modern functioning pumps. A mall constructed in the 1970s was recently renovated, and the Somali National Theatre, the site of a violent suicide bombing last spring has been restored again into a magnificent state. Certainly problems within the city remain however if the pace continues and can expand throughout the region, the problems have a limited future of influence.

Somali National Theatre. Sutika Sipus. March 2012

Somali National Theatre. Sutika Sipus. November 2012.

International Development Consultants: Divide The Good from the Bad

noreply@blogger.com (Mitchell Sutika Sipus) — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 19:31:00 +0000

Map of Afghan Sheep Distribution 1998 using AIMS data, available at UC Davis.

Ultimately a good international development consultant should give more than he/she takes away. But does this always happen? No. I would say it is even uncommon. International Development Consultants are frequently detested by company staff and equally unliked by communities.

In fact, just the other day, I heard a great Afghan joke on this topic:

A western man walks up to an old shepherd in rural Afghanistan and says "If I can tell you exactly how many sheep you have, will you give me one?"

The old man said yes, and the westerner walked back to his car, pulled out a laptop, turned on Google Earth and some fancy GIS software then after a few minutes said "You have exactly 872 sheep." The old man agreed this to be the correct number, so the westerner walked into the pasture, picked one up and loaded it into the back of his car.

The old man then said "Now, if I tell you the name of your profession, can I have that back?" The foreigner agreed and the old man said "you are an International Development Consultant."

Surprised, the foreigner said "Yes! I am. How did you know?"

The old man replied, "Well...You showed up when no one asked for you to be here. Then you told me something I already know. And lastly, that creature in the back of your car is my dog."

While hilarious, there is unfortunately a lot of truth to this.

International development consultants were held as the great answer by institutions such as the World Bank in the 1980s and after a couple decades of actions, are today often regarded with absolute disdain by those who work the daily-grind. Yet big organizations constantly hire them.

I can tell you from my own work experience, nothing is worse than the expert who parachutes in, gives a bunch of irrelevant advice, then disappears leaving behind a busted budget (for the cost of services), empty wallets (from the bar tab), and a frustrated community who is still wanting something to change. Sometimes the company is lucky and the consultant is insightful and genuine, but to be honest, I've met more bad ones than good. Too often its a combination of irrelevant information, a poor understanding of local issues, and an oversized ego. Ugh.

Yet consultants can be great because they can supply detailed technical knowledge, an outside perspective to help improve the robustness of current projects, and they can supply a demand for innovative solutions that is not being met by the local market. If a consultant is simply providing the same quality of insight, than can be locally obtained, then they are not worth the high price. But if they provide something more, its worth considering.

But the work of an international development consultant can be priceless.

A good international development consultant will do the following:

a) spend time with the local community to get in touch with local values and knowledge

b understands the legal and political framework which dictates the viability of solutions

c) listen to locals experts on the problem (not explain the problem to them)

d) introduce concepts that are uncomfortable because the combination of accuracy and honesty

e) infuse new energies, resources, and opportunities into a given scenario

A good consultant, no matter the price, will provide concrete changes to a situation so that any observer will note that the situation is remarkably different and in a positive manner.

A good consultant will not arrive with "the answers" but will arrive with enough knowledge so as to ask the best questions.

As an International Development consultant with Sutika Sipus LLC, I also provide a service that is different from among all other practitioners in the field. I believe that to be a excellent international development consultant, it is my job to become unnecessary to the client and the community. If I am tasked with a problem and 5 years later am still working in the same place on the same problem, then I must be doing it wrong.

It is my job to create the conditions so that my work is no longer needed. I don't charge as much money as my competitors, but I also know that I am not the lowest bidder. I am however able to consistently provide viable solutions for radical change in a given project on behalf of multiple stakeholder interests. That takes a lot of work and sacrifice. It also isn't something you can just find anywhere.

An Integrated Process For Better Urban Planning

noreply@blogger.com (Mitchell Sutika Sipus) — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 12:44:00 +0000

Urban planners frequently believe their projects maintain the most efficient balance between demand, costs, and utility. A project may be result of community discourse, technical analysis, review by the local business community, and a fusion with the most cutting-edge theories. Yet when the proposal sits before a local planning commission or city council, too often it is torn to shreds. Heavily debated and politicized, if the proposal ever emerges from the other side of the gauntlet, the final outcome is a shadow of it former self, too weak to do anything effective. There is a pressing demand for an Integrated Planning Process that accounts for the organizational machine of local government and decision makers.

I once heard a story about an urban planner who taught at the University of Cincinnati. The story goes that the planner spent everyday of 30 years studying a particular neighborhood, Over The Rhine, which has historically been a concentration of poverty and crime. Everyday he walked the streets, spoke with residents, befriended local businesses, studied the history, conducted economic research and over 3 decades acquired a thorough understanding of the internal and external forces that shape the neighborhood. But when members of the local government asked for his input to create jobs, reduce crime, or improve the quality of the streets, he was incapable of providing realistic solutions.

Certainly he had ideas. Many of them were brilliant. But the problem was that his sophisticated understanding of OTR also resulted in highly sophisticated proposals. Many of these solutions were outside the interests of some decision makers, beyond the means of the local government, or required the overhaul of dominant frameworks such as state laws or county budgets. The proposals that were acceptable were then diluted through tedious meetings, city council debates, local commissions, and ongoing budget cuts. By the time his solutions actually hit the pavement, they lacked the means to create actual change. Does this sound familiar?

Urban Planning has become increasingly complex with the rise of big data, inflating costs, diverging politics, and the advent of new technologies. Given the historic challenges to balance all the demands of planning and development, it is a wonder that anyone can integrate all the new elements at all. The process becomes unwieldy, and it is therefore no surprise when the final outcome fails. It doesn't necessarily take decades for many of us to find ourselves faced with a scenario similar to the one described above.

But perhaps we can learn from the field of Product Design, an industry that has also become increasingly complex. Imagine creating a new mobile phone. Multiple departments must work together to compile a functioning design, some departments have to create new technologies to meet the demands of the co-workers across the hallway, and once everything is assembled it must also be mass produced, marketed, and sold. But the process is not strictly linear. There are limitations for mass production and supply-chain challenges to acquire the necessary parts. There is often a need to create the tools and technologies to assemble the product and then to sort out the logistics of packaging, shipping, and retail. All these variables have a cost, all these variables entail the energies of thousands of people, and all of these variables must be delicately balanced to result in a working final product for mass consumption. And if the item doesn't work as well as a competitor product, then no one will buy it.

To ensure that the product can meet an array of expectations and capacities, every variable is recorded and investigated from initial ideation to the point of consumer use. In the samer manner, the Integrated Planning Process maps the array of variables to create, design, modify, and implement a solution. This procedure can reveal to stakeholders and participants what is essential, what is not, impose more clarity, and save time by providing alternatives for individual components.

This process allows decision makers the ability to look beyond what needs to be stripped down, there is a means to prioritize what is essential, non-essential, and what adds value. The project will of course change, but the planner is taking responsibility for the forces that impose change, and therefore holding more control over the outcome. This improved capacity to understand and measure flexibility, will result in higher-value outcomes.

There are several ways to utilize an Integrated Planning Process. Here are just a few possibilities:

1. Simple info-graphics to articulate the processes of decision making reveal the degrees of flexibility in the planning process. These can be shared publicly (suggested) or for internal use only.

2. Presenting a comparative "teardown" of similar projects in other municipalities can provide a platform for critical engagement to document costs for optimization. If you identify teardown components in relation to the outcome, you can better isolate the variables that matter most.

3. In addition to itemized costs, planners can provide details for alternative options with the clear cost/benefit of each alternative. Instead of letting city council decide what works and what doesn't, or too demand more research, simply provide 2 or 3 options for each element of the plan that will have a similar outcome but with a clear cost/benefit. These variables can then be reconfigured like Lego Blocks. In this manner it is possible to find ways to quickly reduce cost while maintaining performance.

4. Planners can submit a list of prioritized alternatives or suggestions for modification to the entire proposal, to better control the outcome of political committees. I do suggest you have this ready and waiting, but do not offer it up in the beginning. Expect that your proposal will be changed according to the whims of dominant power systems. There is nothing you can do about this so it is best to factor it into your planning process to create a more viable solution.

5. Planners must recognize that the organization implementing the project (doing the construction work for example), maintain their own level of influence upon the success of the project, such as their ability to finish work on time and under budget. Map it.

The Integrated Planning Process maps the variables informing project design, the influence of those who hold authority, and the influence of those who implement the work, and will provide planners the means to propose solutions that are resilient to the political machine. An Integrated Planning Process results in flexible proposals designed to contend with external demands and will always create a more robust outcome. If a development scheme consists of the insights of stakeholders, but has the ability to fluidly accommodate the organization structure of government and implementing partners, the final result will be more value-laden for the target population and for the neighborhood.

Will such an integrated process always work? Absolutely not. There are too many variables, and it is incredibly difficult to measure how much influence each variable will impose upon the outcome. To borrow from Nate Silver's book, it is a challenge to separate the signal from the noise. But product design is no different. There are always glitches, a necessity to release updates, and to release a next generation product based on the precursor. The Integrated Planning Process does not result in a single one-off solution to later abandon. Rather it sets the foundation for sequential upgrading.

There are many planners who already work in a similar fashion, but do so intuitively. Integrated Planning thus becomes a skill acquired through experience and therefore is not universally upheld. But if Integrated Planning can be can be more directly implemented by practitioners (and not just in their minds), or utilized in university curriculums, the benefits will soon become obvious. Planners will typically be more satisfied in the outcomes of their work, but ultimately it is cities who will benefit the most with better projects conducted amid less debate, in shorter time, and for less money.

Mali is Not the New Somalia

noreply@blogger.com (Mitchell Sutika Sipus) — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 13:10:00 +0000

When Northern Mali was overtaken by a couple months back, I assumed at the very outset that Somalia had something to offer. After all, Somalia had just crawled out of 21 years of war, 6 of which were under the domination of extremist militant group al-Shabaab. As the UN, EU, and US look toward military intervention in Mali, their reliance upon Somalia as a model is not a good idea.

The Taureg Rebels of Northern Mali

Why Mali is Not the New Somalia

1. The Rise to Power

Al-Shabaab was the police force of the widely supported Union of Islamic Courts that quickly rose to power upon the collapse of the UIC. Consequently it was already an organized force for governance, recruitment, and community support. As an organizational structure embedded in the community, it had a distinct advantage.

The Taureg rebels are local, however they maintain an evolving organizational structure and are imposing a rule of law and social conventions upon an unwilling population.

2. The Message

Al-Shabaab maintained a message of Nationalism supported by Sharia to overcome tribal strife. To support al-Shabaab was to support the emergence of a new Somali state, not a direct means to support their extremist ideology.

In Mali the rebels seek an independent state. Separatism and religious fundamentalism are a potent mix and do more to arouse support from the fringes of society than from the center.

3. The End of Shabaab

The collapse of al-Shabaab was influenced by military action, but military action was not the cause for their undoing. Rather the collapse of al-Shabaab was the consequence of multiple variables occurring at the same time. Environmental drought forcing widespread famine and thus undermining Shabaab's financial tax-based infrastructure was a critical element in their demise. Furthermore, conflict in Mogadishu between Shabaab and AMISOM had become embedded into protracted trench warfare with minimal gains to either side. Shabaab is stronger when more mobile, and the collapse of the the environment and financial assets hurt their supply lines. It was to their economic and tactical advantage to resort to loosely-distributed hit and run tactics.

Comparatively, reliance upon outside military intervention in Mali is only part of the formula to remove the Taureg rebels from power. Already there is an emphasis on targeting leadership, an unfortunate decision, given its poor history of success with other organizations.

4. To militarize or to pacify?

EU is moving toward training fighters in Mali. Haven't we learned from Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, or Mexico? Injecting weapons into a conflict zone, no matter how how much attention is paid to specifying the recipients, simply results in more weapons in the conflict zone. It escalates the conflict and in an era where protracted ad-hoc terrorism is always the endpoint, why facilitate the market of war? It was long known that in Somalia, AMISOM soldiers would frequently sell their ammunition for cash, which of course ended up in the hands Shabaab fighters.

Perhaps a potent strategy would be to demilitarize the region more than strengthen it. HUMINT becomes an essential element in the mix, to understand how the rebels get their resources, and to map the structural underpinnings of their operation. But getting these answers is not rocket science. As I learned from doing similar work regarding the economics of al-Shabaab, it simply is a matter of asking the right questions to the right people.

Designing a non-military solution to Mali

Of course I don't want to give away all the answers, but there are some obvious opportunities within the Mali conflict for widespread stabilization and transformation. But I can say that Regional Science contains a few relavant ideas, and a good starting point is regarding gravity analysis. But beyond that, utilizing market interventions among rebels isn't a new idea. In fact, al-Shabaab applied a similar tactic against the Somali Transitional Federal Government. I'm not advocating embargoes on Mali, as those never work, but rather, we to analyse and manipulate market forces. If there is anything to learn from Somalia to use in Mali, perhaps we should look not at how Shabaab was defeated, but rather, we should ask how did they stay in power for so long?

Urban Planning Trends are Bad Medicine

noreply@blogger.com (Mitchell Sutika Sipus) — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 11:44:00 +0000

Smokestack chasing. Garden cities. Tactical Urbanism. New Urbanism. Creative cities. What do all these have in common? They all reveal the greatest weakness of urban planning as a discipline. The reliance upon urban development trends, which shift every few years, has ruined neighborhoods, devastated communities, and undermined economies. Yet we keep doing it.

When I was a graduate student, sustainability was the utmost priority. And for the last few years, every planning and design firm advocates bolstering resilience as the prescriptive cure for cities ensnared by poverty, conflict, or natural disaster. But how do any of these concepts actually make a difference in the field of urban planning? While they may posit some degree of merit by creating philosophical or operational frameworks for positive action, they do far more to impend weakness upon a community.

Anyone can read a book about the creative class and push for their city to open more coffee shops and tattoo parlors. But an urban planner is trained to measure problems so as to determine solutions, not just impose preconceived ideologies upon a space or population. Measurement is the core of urban planning. The ability to fuse social, economic, spatial, environmental, and cultural data into an observable model provides planners the ability to determine structural weaknesses in a community. These structural weaknesses may be offset through direct internal realignment, manipulation of broader legal frameworks, or offset by outside interventions. But the application of broad concepts as a cure-all is not a solution, it simply is a waste of resources, or at worst, an act of imperialism.

Certainly urban planning trends are drawn from observable social processes. And many of the ideas, such as sustainability, are not bad things on first review. But when New York city planner Robert Moses proposed putting a highway through East Village, he was simply subscribing to the values of the day. He believed that cars and highways were positive tools of progress. He believed that the old communities were dirty and backward. He was doing the residents of the East Village a favor by installing this highway, to connect them to all of New York and the rest of America. It never occurred to him that they would want, or deserve, something different.

One of my first projects as an urban planner was to conduct an impact analysis for a wind turbine farm in rural West Virginia. Thousands of acres of virgin forest were to be destroyed to install wind turbines which would route the power to New Jersey. The residents of the local community were outraged. Yet entrapped by poverty, these residents did not own the land around them. It was the property of coal companies and the US government. They could no nothing but watch their lands be destroyed. New Jersey of course didn't mind ruining one community to facilitate its own energy needs. After all, wind energy is sustainable.

What we as urban planners believe to be true and good in ideology can just as likely wield a terribly destructive power. In that regard, is it not better to forgo all ideologies? Perhaps it is better to attend the intricacies of measuring complex systems. We must recognize that every method of measurement imposes a value upon the outcome, and so we must place greater attention and selectivity upon this primary step in the planning process. If a given system of measurement works in one location, it will not necessarily work in another. So how then can we presume that outputs are transferable?

Good urban planners will not invent the wheel every time they approach a settlement. They will aslo not limit themselves to particular methods or ideology. In the same way a good musician will not say simply "I am a jazz guitarist" or "I am a rock guitarist," rather, a good musician will study all forms of music so at the moment of performance he may play freely, not thinking about "I must infuse a minor third on the next note to get a given result." When trapped by conventions such as style or planning trends, the intentional application of convention will undermine the effectiveness of the final product. Urban planners trained to measure and respond will forever create better solutions for community problems than those who apply preconceived notions of community or development.