Project Website: https://cuba.inteligenciascolectivas....



SEMINAR

Thursday 14.01.2021



30 min Welcome/introduction to urban disaster risk governance in the LAC region,

Vicente Sandoval
15 min: Emergent responses to disasters

Claudia González-Muzzio (Ambito Consultores & GRID, Chile)

15 min: Collective intelligences in Cuba

Nguyen Rodríguez Barrera (Cuban Art Factory & CUJAE, Cuba)

15 min: Collective intelligences project

Maé Durant Vidal (Pezstudio.org & ZooHaus, Spain)
25 min: Open conversation on proposed questions.



20 min: Open questions from audience

Moderator: Vicente Sandoval (FU Berlin)

Moderator: Christina Serifi (TiriLAb)





Description

This seminar explores the potential linkages between the governance of urban disaster risks and collective intelligences in building and designing cities in the Global South. This is done through an introduction to urban disaster risk governance in the Latin American and the Caribbean (LAC) region, and through the experiences of the ‘Inteligencias Colectivas’ (collective intelligences, in Spanish) social platform, with focus in the city of Havana, Cuba.

Around 80 percent of LAC people live in urban areas (about 500 million), while 21.1 percent of this urban population resides in precarious neighbourhoods, sometimes called informal settlements or slums (Sandoval & Sarmiento, 2020). According to UN-Habitat (2016), slums dwellers usually have no security of tenure vis-à-vis the land or dwellings they inhabit, with modalities ranging from squatting to informal rental housing. Likewise, these settlements generally lack, or are cut off from, basic services and city infrastructure. Moreover, the housing often not comply with current planning and building regulations and is often situated in geographically and environmentally hazardous areas. This is the reality for about 106 million people in the LAC region, where urban precariousness and exposure to natural hazards could be a dangerous cocktail for disaster: LAC is the second most disaster-prone region in the world with 152 million people affected by 1,205 disasters between 2000 and 2019 (UN-OCHA, 2020).

According to Tierney (2012), the concept of (disaster risk) governance recognises that functions that may formerly have been carried out by public entities are now frequently dispersed among a multiplicity of actors that include not only governmental institutions but also private-sector and civil society entities. In certain way, the governance of disaster risks is the ‘software’ that enables the urban ‘hardware’ to function in relation to safety from natural hazards, that is, the cultural, socio-economic, and political relationships that influence decision-making in relation to disaster: from its creation to its reduction. Thus, this seminar starts by several examples from the LAC region to explain how disaster risk governance works in urban contexts.

In the Global South, and in the LAC region un particular, rapid economic development and demographic changes are exerting pressure over cities, increasing dramatically the demand for housing and new buildings. Since potentially up to 3 billion people will live in slums by 2050 – over 160 million in Latin America and the Caribbean–, new, rapidly deployable solutions for do-it- yourself construction are urgently needed. These solutions must be socially acceptable and at the same time address the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in a meaningful way. Traditional craft and crossbreed techniques, modified machines and self-made devices but also tacit citizenship agreements for public togetherness are pure open-source collective intelligences, taught by imitation, developed over generations and perfected through appropriation, imitation and self- experimentation. This knowledge is becoming invisible and gradually being discarded under globalised standardisation of processes and a conception of progress. Through the experiences from the global platform ‘Inteligencias Colectivas’ (Collective Intelligences) and initial inputs to the INCI project that will take place in the Havana, Cuba, this seminar will explore some linkages between processes of collective intelligences and disaster risk governance in urban areas.

Some questions that will guide the conversation are:

Do collective intelligences have the power to transform upper, larger, or dominant societal structures? (i.e., in building and design, emergency housing, and in disaster risk reduction)

How (formal) urban governance may deal with collective intelligences? Are they reinforced or diminish by powerful actors?

How collective intelligences, urban development, and disaster governance could work together to achieve specific SDG targets (i.e., resilient cities, risk reduction, etc.).