I’ve always been interested in how technology, systems and process affect real life, real people, our everyday existance. Capitalism, without a doubt the most dominant economic system, affects pretty much everything we do and most of us are surrounded examples of capitalism working. Poverty, homelessness and squatter camps are start reminders of what happens when you’re on the wrong end of capitalism in action.

Archinet has a great feature on Wes Janz and his book One Small Project

The notion of “leftover space” has always been of great interest to architects, but in the context of global urbanization it conjures a particularly visceral response. Leftover space—in the sense of being ghettoized and depicting a sort of bare essentiality of being in architecture—is not always easy to look at much less understand, especially for a profession whose responsibility is designing the structures that people will inhabit. For the most part, the issue of global poverty is translated through viral images of shanties infecting the landscape, peripheral slums leaching off the urban core, and pictures that instill fear of an assailant rise of diseased squatter cities. This not only demonizes the third world, it painfully reminds us of our own failures to address the infrastructural necessities of millions. However, these images narrate only part of the story for those who go on sifting through the remains of an urban evolution which has long since abandoned them.

Wes Janz, an architect teaching at Ball State University in Indiana, wants to show how these scavenged places are also claimed by incredible human spirit. His forthcoming book, One Small Project, is a powerful portrait of the millions of people who have used their own architectural ingenuity and unrelenting pride to construct for themselves a place to call home, despite some of the worst living conditions on the planet today. I spoke with Wes about his work as an architect and an educator, his book project, and what we have to learn from these informal pioneers of global urbanism.

The interview is fantastic but for me it’s the personal insites that really stand out, like this one…

The absence of this sensibility was striking in driving through southern Mississippi with Olon Dotson, post-Katrina. I’m sure this will upset some people and I’m sure I don’t have anything close to the full story. But still, I was struck by how little had been done . . . four months after the hurricane and the storm surge, almost nothing was happening on the ground. I saw hundreds of sites in southern Mississippi where houses had been flattened. Throughout this landscape are sprinkled white FEMA trailers, grains of salt in this great open wound. These are wired and plumbed, but the landscape remains completely disheveled. I did not see one place where a land/house owner had piled bricks, or sorted out wood framing members, or stacked exterior siding, or raked up debris, or any such engagement. Not one.

When I look at my own life, I see similarities. I model creativity and I’m a creative guy. Yet, I’ve lost the need to create in order to survive and with that I’ve lost a kind of energy, intensity, and relevance. It’s very heavy, all this sameness.

And this one…

The fact is we intended to start and complete a demonstration house at Kalametiya, one that would guide the construction of the other 29 houses. But we had to let go of this intention. We were fighting to “instigate” but found another sort of response was needed.

Too often, this is the problem: architects being instigators.

I’m less and less interested in affecting someone else’s life, in being an agent of change. More and more, I’m interested in being changed and in preparing myself to be an effective respondent.

As much as technology and systems affect lives, lives and everyday people can chart the course of systems and technology. People like these are the ones making the difference…

via: squattercity