Building For Hope
When I go on holiday, I like to read books related to the destination. This August I failed, but I have a tenuous link as I did fly over Syria while reading Marwa Al-Sabouni’s engaging and enlightening book “Building for Hope: Towards and Architecture of belonging”. Marwa lives and works in Homs although her writing has catapulted her onto the international speaking circuit with her first book “The Battle for Home” centred around her experience of living through the civil war and how architecture impacted the conflict.
Building for hope focusses its narrative around five fears humans face and how architecture and design can respond to these, they are the fear of death, need, treachery, loneliness and boredom. While I found this structure distracting, the book itself is enthralling and gives a real insight into how changes in how we look at and design communities has a wider impact. In doing this Marwa doesn’t let anyone off the hook taking huge swipes at both capitalist and socialist reforms which have broken the link between communities and design. Both these approaches leading to housing solutions imposed either by the market or the state, both of which, in her analysis, break the relationship between people and the land. In one chapter her explanation of how reforms and markets are directly causing the desertification of large parts of Syria is fascinating and deeply worrying. Across the world people are moving from the countryside to the cities and I was taken by this observation “In travelling from the ploughed womb of the rural towards the stretched horizons of the urban, people are no longer at the mercy of nature – instead they find themselves at the mercy of money”. Beyond this people moving from marginal agricultural land in search of financial security leaves the land unloved, untended and ultimately decaying and unproductive.
The book is deeply culturally rooted and I learned a lot about Islamic approaches to land ownership and the design of buildings and the way in which design can foster a sense of community. While the book strongly argues for family and community ownership and stewardship of assets it also advocates that professions, such as architecture (unsurprisingly) are retained to avoid community housing becoming dangerous shanty towns or favelas.
Mawra’s vision of the future appears to be a return to the past. In that sense the book left me depressed rather than hopeful. It seems inconceivable that cities will develop organically as the pressures on them to meet rising populations grows and land values rocket. In my summer journey I visited Busan in South Korea, this futuristic landscape of enormous gleaming towers and gigantic shopping malls seems likely to brush aside the human scale development which Marwa advocates.
That said I would recommend anyone to read “Building for Hope” and use it to challenge your own views about the importance and cultural framing of planning, architecture and design.
Also, if the community led housing sector is seeking some further inspiration, then they would do worse than to read about an “Architecture of Belonging”.
