European architects of the 1950s, who were members of the CIAM congresses, declared the North African bidonville a full-fledged study object and investigated the self-built environment from an anthropological perspective. They looked at the dwellers of the bidonville and focused on how everyday practices enabled an urban neighborhood through self-organization. The dwelling practices that were discovered in the improvised urban environment gave rise to new architectual concepts such as the 'habitat'. The notion of habitat, which clearly differed from modernist notions such as the ‘Machine for Living,’ indicated that new dwellings were adjusted to accommodate culturally defined dwelling practices. Distinctions were made between the ‘population of European origin requiring a European-style habitat’ and the ‘Arab population’ that was accustomed to ‘a habitat of special layout and construction’.
Commenting on the specific approach that emerged in North Africa, Alison and Peter Smithson, wrote that “this work had allowed a new architectural language to develop that had initially been created by the structures of inhabitation.” (Smithson 1968) At the same time, insights in Morocco were possible against a background of a growing military presence in the streets of Casablanca, as well as in Tunis, and Algiers, where resistance to the French administration had long since assumed an organized form. The national strike of 1952 in Morocco marked the beginning of independence from French colonial rule. Bombings and demonstrations became daily occurrences, also on the construction sites in Casablanca. The dwellers of the bidonvilles of the Carrieres Centrales were the main actors in organized anti-colonial activities.

Even that he new town of Chandigarh was built according to the modernist approach of development and tabula rasa, “(…) the site chosen is free from the existing encumbrances of old towns and old traditions,” in fact, about 20,000 people where already living in villages located where Chandigarh was to be built (Sharma 1999: 22). The local farmers immediately protested in 1948. (Kalia 1999: 15) The resistance was formalized in the Anti-Rajdhani (anti-capital) Committee, which promised to rally more than 30,000 people to stop the construction. The result was a series of protests by the local people. (Sharma 1999: 26) The protests were “completely devoid of violence though…sometimes the leaders of the agitators used horses to move around threatening officers in the same way that the police used its horses for crowd control activities.” (Sharma 1999: 28) The protests were neither reported by the regional newspaper, nor by the government. Even though 1,000 people participated in a demonstration and people were arrested, the publicity for the protestors was incredibly sparse. (Sharma 1999: 29) Nevertheless, in order to control the protest the government offered ‘alternative land’ to the farmers. In 1952 the villagers from the Chandigarh site had moved to the new sites. Only one village still exists, the Burail village in Sector 45, which was integrated into the Chandigarh plan as a previously existing village. Thousands of workers entered the site when Chandigarh was constructed, but the government didn’t provide housing for them. The self-built huts were found throughout the emerging city. “Chandigarh needed labor and the laborers needed huts. (…) In 1959 Candilis, Georges (1978): Bauen ist Leben. Ein Architekten-Report. Stuttgart.they issued the first notice to remove the huts at their own cost within such and such time: ‘If you don’t, we will do it and we will forcibly remove and we will recover the cost from you.’” (Sarin 2011, Interview)

Resistance to modernist housing projects and new town planning can also be found in other places, like in the cases of the Israeli development town planning in the 1950s and 60s, during which Arab villages as well as oasis and trade points for the Bedouin tribes were destroyed. The discrimination of Jews from North Africa and the Middle East, who were often placed in the newly built desert cities far away from the coastal towns, also caused protest and civil unrest.
In China, what is known as the People’s Communes Movement, an enormous program to centralize and regulate agricultural production and life in rural areas, aimed to “achieve a deeper modernity” (Lu 2006: 120) through a rational restructuring of existing villages and farms. While architects and planners presented “proposals that represented a complete negation of traditional rural life in many aspects,” (Lu 2006:118) in practice “decisions were often made at local level with necessary modifications,” ignoring the expert’s opinion and denying the central government’s plans. Though many commune-turned villages took part in the project of modernization, many of them also rejected the idea that decisions about their work and housing were made from above and thus took these decisions into their own hands. For example, some chose to keep settlements in their original locations in the form of traditional villages, while others chose to centralize their scattered settlements. (Zhao 2007:154f) But in the urban work units numerous alternatives were also developed to bypass the over-regulated life within the Socialist Plan-Economy.

Different bodies, impairments, injuries, and deviations—as well as appropriations and resistances—have consistently acted as a countercurrent to dominant normative orders. The history of embodied difference is, as Homi Bhabha conceptualized it, not a story of unilateral domination but of uncertainty, hybridity, and ongoing conflict and negotiation. (Bhabha 1994:19) Part of this assemblage of post/colonial worlds are human and non-human actors, whose contributions were often underrepresented in associated accounts: workers, whose labor made architecture and urban planning materially possible (e.g. migratory laborers and beasts-of-burden like pack-donkeys), figurations and living beings, whose form production and supposed way of life became productive ideals in certain contexts (e.g. vernacular aesthetics and the beehive), and city-makers in their own right, who – usually not very welcomed by the authorities – adapted modernist urban spaces to their needs through dwelling, working, or straying practices. Stray cattle enjoying the greenery of Chandigarh and cooling off from the heat at the roadsides posed a constant problem for the responsible landscaping committee: destroying expensive plants, attracting mosquitoes, polluting the city with their manure, and slowing traffic. The "companion species" (Haraway 2007) of small farmers, illegally settling on the outskirts of Chandigarh, became nonhuman criminals in the postcolonial polis. In 1959, when penalty fees for the farmers and the construction of a "cattle pond" did not solve the problem, the government officials resorted to capturing the animals from the streets and transporting them to distant forests, only to realize shortly after that the resisting cows would find their way back home to the city. (Protocols of the Landscaping Committee of Chandigarh, Union Territory, 1952-1967) The diverse practices of the different dwellers bear witness to the performed reality that the post/colonial city is, against all odds, a space of transcultural "commons." (Hardt/Negri 2009)
(MvO+ FA +JK +MH+CL+EE)


Sources:
Baghdadi, Mustafa (1999): “Changing Ideals in Architecture: From CIAM to Team X.” In: O'Reilly , William (Ed.): Architectural Knowledge and Cultural Diversity. Lausanne: Comportements. 22-56.
Candilis, Georges (1978): Bauen ist Leben. Ein Architekten-Report. Stuttgart: K. Krämer.
Haraway, Donna (2007): When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hardt, Michael / Antonio Negri (2009): Commonwealth. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Kalia, Ravi (1999): Chandigarh: the making of an Indian city. New Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press.
Protocols of the Landscaping Committee of Chandigarh, Union Territory, 1952-1967.
Sarin, Madhu (1982): Urban Planning in the Third World: The Chandigarh Experience. London: Mansell Pub.
Hille, Moira (2011): Interview with Madhu Sarin. 03/14/2011.Chandigarh.
Sharma, Kavita /Sethi, Chitleen K /Meeta/ Rajivlochan (1999): Chandigarh Lifescape. Brief Social History of a Planned City. Chandigarh: Government Press.