Neighborhood Harmony

The neighborhood is the fundamental component of urban physical and social organization. We will explore two troubled ones: West Woodlawn in Chicago and Shahidnagar in Narayanganj/Dhaka.  Working with local community organizations, we will unite these neighborhoods in a mutual design and implementation process to achieve the highest possible level of local autonomy in order to secure their independence from larger, dysfunctional, and out of reach, systems to collectively chart pathways to futures.  In a first initiative of its type, we will utilize a wide inventory of social and environmental technologies in this investigation and will employ digital technologies for analysis, design, networking and communications to facilitate direct and reliable interaction between the neighborhoods in the U.S. and Bangladesh. This will encourage sharing both problems and solutions, forming a first link in a scalable network that can invigorate and inform both rural and urban settings, not simply to satisfy local needs but to aggregate to address planetary crises.

We intend to solve global problems by addressing local conditions in two very different situations. The neighborhoods we have selected share problems of environmental, economic, and social neglect and are blighted by poverty, marginalization, and disempowerment. These deficits include lack of access to basic municipal services, to credit and financing, to educational pathways that will lead to good jobs and futures, as well as radical frustration in securing their desires and responsibilities.  

West Woodlawn and Shahidnagar – their dimensions and populations are closely comparable –  have similar problems but depart from very different baselines, which will make mutuality more expansive.  Both, however, are plagued by poverty, joblessness, insecure housing, social and physical immobility, ill-health, and inadequate education. We will bring collaborative resources to bear, including those of our two NGO’s, local educational institutions, local manufacturers of environmental technologies (including start-ups), IT expertise, for which we hope to collaborate with Tiger and South Side providers, as well as local municipal governments.  

Most important, however, is the collaboration with and between our target sites: community buy-in is critical to success and the mechanism we propose acknowledges the contingent relationship of these issues.  We will act as facilitators, encouraging solutions based on local wisdom and experience. 

Our aim is to help uplift poor, abused, and depressed communities by providing expertise, systems, models, and organization.  Any solutions we bring will be collaborative and, fortunately, we are not starting from zero. 

 Communities on the south side of Chicago have given birth to many self-help organizations of broad reach, including NGO’s, religious groups, and educational institutions. In a comparable commitment to self-empowerment, the people in Shahidnagar has taken the first step towards our common goal for an uplifted community, and utilizing digital services for that purpose.

Existing organizations are divided between the work of resistance and of community building.  In both neighborhoods urban agriculture is having a small but legible impact, there is a constituency for micro-finance, and there are efforts to bring the manufacture and installation of solar energy, and other sustainable systems to these localities. The neighborhoods Terreform is engaged with in Chicago are of color and they are pressed from two directions.  East Woodlawn is gentrifying, adding enormous pressure to the neighborhoods to its west. In the Shahidnagar neighborhood in Naryanganj, the community is prepared to upgrade their lives but is constrained by issues of land tenure, poor attention from the municipal corporation, and lack of access to vital services.

Our solution is not a silver bullet, rather the incremental realization of sustainable and secure means for transforming and connecting struggling communities and setting up of a demonstration project that shows palpable results.  Our project has three specific components:

•        We will organize the means of mutual communication and cooperation with a combination of virtual and physical, face to face, components.  The most visible of these will be two “Green Houses”, one in Chicago (where we have already secured a site) and one in Dhaka/Naryanganj.  These will use technology to allow groups and individuals in the two neighborhoods to have discussions in real time.  A dedicated organizer on each end of the system will facilitate scheduling and the sharing of issues and expertise.  This will be augmented by the creation of a community app in Naryanganj to take advantage of the nearly ubiquitous use of smart-phones in both communities.  This app will not simply facilitate individual connections but provide easy links to government and other resources for both information gathering and the streamlining of access to services, such as employment, entrepreneurial, health and educational matters.

•        Terreform and the Bengal Institute will collaborate on the preparation of physical plans for both communities that offer forms and strategies to move to higher levels of autonomy in metabolic, economic, spatial, and social spheres.  This will include consideration of energy, water, waste, mobility, public services and spaces, thermal management, employment, and housing.  We propose to combine our expertise with extensive community input to elaborate two parallel physical plans for community development.  In line with the work we have been doing for many years, there are not meant to be imposed but to raise expectations and impetuses, and to demonstrate possibilities for transformations that may have been beyond the horizons of people with diminished hopes.

•        The final element of this project will be the design net-zero housing prototypes for each community – “four flats” in Chicago and cluster housing in Naryanganj.  These will offer replicable models of broad relevance in and beyond the two neighborhoods, showing the economic, environmental, and architectural logics and parameters for their realization.  Given the economic and systemic disparities between the two neighborhoods, we aim to actually realize a housing development in Naryanganj as a habitable and sustainable demonstration project.  In Chicago, the existence of these plans will provide crucial leverage for market-based solutions taking advantage of the widespread availability of neglected, municipally-owned, lots throughout West Woodlawn.

Our innovation lies in the harmonization of a range of instrumentalities to create an unprecedented result: highly sustainable and self-reliant neighborhoods in two vastly different settings.  We believe that the most logical, tractable, and imperative site of transformation is the city and that, within the city, a disaggregated system of design, management, and accountancy at neighborhood scale can most effectively deploy appropriate technologies to address a range of technical, social and political questions. 

Politics is critical: It’s difficult to take responsibility for something you do not control. This does not entail “decontextualization” or secession from the city, state, or globe but, in the context of planetary emergency, it’s place where traction is most effectively gained.  We like the word “harmonization” and, for us, this implies both the coordination of efforts at the local level and plugging into larger scales and networks as is logical and necessary.  

Our parallel “Green Houses,” our App, our visionary neighborhood planning, and our design and implementation of a highly sustainable housing typology will create a unique “innovation chain” that will simultaneously empower neighborhoods and offer real solutions to their problems. We want to design and implement the first system at this scale and technological level yet to be built.  

The combination of “top-down” expertise based on our own special knowledge and experience and on the “bottom up” knowledge and expertise that can come only from lived life, will produce a synthesis that is singular, unexpected, and deeply humane.

Housing and community are at the crux of social change, especially if that involves the most vulnerable and depressed groups. Many studies have shown that increased economic growth does not necessarily assure welfare and well-being for many communities. To bring about new enthusiasm for change and transformation requires dedicated attention and direct involvement with the community. 

It is critical that we start from the home, addressing housing and engaging in its multitude of facets. Associates of Bengal Institute have worked with a particular community in Jhenaidah in Bangladesh where a very depressed economic group was able to mobilize collectively with the support of professionals and re-build their houses and compounds in record low budget. All these have brought about a significant positive change to the lives of the community. 

Jhenaidah may offer a solution to how a despondent community may mobilise to better their living conditions and acquire a sense of optimism in transforming their lives.

Results from Jhenaidah included 20 built houses for the disadvantaged where households collectively formed savings groups to repay construction loan. While results in Chicago include affordable housing design and prototypes, which we recently presented to the local community in West Woodlawn.

This is a difficult to answer.  As we operate as planners, architects, systems integrators, and community servants, the answer might be hundreds of millions.  Non-profit Terreform, for example, is affiliated with Michael Sorkin Studio, which provides the major portion of its economic support and seconds its cadre of architects and urbanists to it.  Sorkin Studio has now designed dozens of new cities, towns, and urban quarters, including a large number China, their population will eventually be millions.  We have used these projects to develop and refine highly sustainable forms and technologies, which are applied to all subsequent work.  

Terreform has undertaken planning and cooperation for community organizations in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere, with constituencies in the thousands.  Combined, the two branches conduct activities that range include research, advocacy, and design up and down the scales of intervention.  Which is to say, we’re prepared to act at every reasonable scale but realize that each has its own special demands and limitations.  Similarly, Bengal Institute is working in the context of metropolitan Dhaka and six other towns in different capacities with the potential to affect the lives of millions. The Institute has a research and design platform, an academic program, and a robust public advocacy program.  For this project, we have chosen two neighborhoods of comparable population – between 15,000 and 30,000 – to serve directly.  At the most intimate scale, we will provide housing for several dozen people.

In its size and scope, our proposal for Shahidnagar is ideal in envisioning an uplifted community in which the parameters of a novel cluster housing modelwith a large degree of food and energy self-sufficiency can be tested. 

What we also propose to test is how those goals can be achieved through innovative methods in mobilization involving community participation, national and international expertise, and digital networking. 

With the success at Shahidnagar, the model may be applied to other similar vulnerable communities across Bangladesh. A similar approach is suggested for West Woodlawn in Chicago such that the model may be adopted and amended for a global application in lifting the lives of millions.

If the project as conceived by Terreform and Bengal Institute takes off, with the fortunate funding from Tiger Foundation, the next barrier in aiming for a larger impact is to seek partnership with other communities. This will require the support of the next community itself as well as of the city and government agencies relevant to that site. The next level of operation will also require new lines of funding.

Terreform does not wish to give up one of its main assets: its independence.  Because our projects are largely self-initiated and generally without a client, we have relied on grants, donations, and Sorkin Studio to keep us going.  We have gotten too many grants that are too small to justify the energy we’ve devoted to getting them and we need to now concentrate of larger possibilities.  This application is part of that strategy.  

Bengal Institute is a non-governmental platform that works with cross-disciplinary expertise to research, design and build project from a neighborhood to city scale. They have conducted extensive public exhibitions to create awareness about growing cites and depleting environment. Bengal Institute advocates for contemporary, socially and environmentally responsive architecture and urbanism. 

Bengal Institute is already involved in developing urban plans for five towns in Bangladesh that involve reorganizing public and civic spaces, and developing better housing. Considering the tempo and scope of these projects, it is expected that Bengal Institute will be invited to collaborate with other towns in Bangladesh. 

Current reports focus on housing  — 8.5 million units are required to overcome the existing housing shortage (World Bank 2018) — and our solution tackles the much needed affordable housing market for which only 2% of newly constructed apartments have been built. We can see how our solution might also be applied to support the 100 special economic zones which are in various stages of construction and development. The 'market' we see will take advantage of leapfrogging historical urban housing processes, such as massive disjointed housing blocks, by planning a sense of neighborhood autonomy. 

Bengal Institute's team of 25 includes architects, planners, geographers, and IT personnel. The Institute is led by Kazi Khaleed Ashraf, an architect and formerly professor at the University of Hawaii and the University of Pennsylvania, and an alumni of MIT.

Terreform has a staff of a dozen in New York and can call on the pro bono services of Sorkin Studio with 10-12 people.  Michael Sorkin –President- is Distinguished Professor of Architecture at the City University of New York and Director of its Graduate Program in Urban Design.

Both organizations have a wide network of national and international expertise in various disciplines.

The collaboration between very experienced NGO’s in Bangladesh and New York, community organizations in Chicago and Dhaka/Naryanganj, and our planned use of a comparative methodology optimizes our capacity to deliver unique solutions and to push the boundaries of design and implementation in ways both predictable and unexpected. 

Bengal Institute is currently working with the World Food Program to create community, civic and green spaces in the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh; with Food Aid Organization (FAO) to study and upgrade city retail markets in four towns in Bangladesh; and, with the Swiss Architecture Museum in Basel to co-produce a major architectural exhibition on Bangladesh, currently touring Europe.

Jointly, we bring to bear a rich set of human resources including architects, planners, urban designers, ecologists, landscape architects, technologists, social scientists, environmental and structural engineers, community activists, IT specialists, and a large academic community give us a remarkably rich range of skills and approaches that we believe is unmatched.  Our independence as NGO’s frees us from many unnecessary constraints that might otherwise slow our rapid and energetic forward motion.

Terreform currently partners with both BIG (Blacks in Green) in Chicago and with the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development on the design of affordable housing.  We’ve worked with a number of New York community organizations on the preparation of site-specific studies and alternative plans.  Sorkin Studio is engaged with a number of national and local government agencies in China as well with a range of for-profit clients.

As a multifunctional organization working at various scales and scopes, Bengal Institute has formed numerous partnerships with both local and international organizations. Bengal Institute is also engaged by the following municipal corporations and private organizations in developing urbanscape plans, urban and civic nodes, and landscape plans: Narayanganj City Corporation, Nilphamari City Corporation, Sylhet City Corporation, Mongla City Corporation, Dohar-Nowabgonj Upazila Porishod, and BRAC University. Associates of Bengal Institute have been involved in developing successful housing programs for vulnerable communities in Jhenaidah.

Greenfill: House as Garden

Terreform and Bengal Institute are both mission-driven nonprofits. We raise funds through donations and grants, and collaborate with various institutions such as governments, community groups, and universities. We serve the general public by sharing knowledge through projects, publications, and exhibitions. We also provide design consultations to several NGOs, private companies, and governments. Income is cycled back to cover the costs of our operations, which include fundraising and applying from grants.

This project would benefit the depressed communities, where both organizations have worked for many years. The impact of this project will be gauged from the number of community members that we educate in our seminars in our respective Green Houses as well as in realization of our collective plans on “the ground.” Indeed, the Green Houses serve both as demonstration and community gathering place.

Working towards a Sustainable Neighborhood Systems Design, our expertise (along with that of community members) can be scaled to neighboring towns and cities. We intend to provide this collaborative approach as a knowledge service to NGO’s, as well as to municipal and city governments. In addition, the community app for Shahidnagar in Naryanganj can be licensed and expanded to other cities and neighborhoods, and networked into a system of global cooperation and education. 

Funding from Tiger will provide a vital foundation for this project. Leveraging this initial outlay, we intend to continue funding the work through a combination of sustained donations and grants, selling/sharing our expertise to other communities, and raising investment capital. Our intent is to use design as a physical platform and to work with a range of sectors, from finance to technology companies.

Starting with the employment model of social enterprise, we intend to employ community members as consultants and to provide overview and design support for other neighborhoods. As a team, we intend to commercialize our approach by charging fees on a sliding scale to NGO’s and municipal governments. We also intend to sell our Net Zero housing plans. In addition, a fully developed community app can expand to licensing and advertising.

The end goal is for each Green House and neighborhood to be self-sustaining.  

There are promises and challenges in the application of technology to better society and the environment. We commend Tiger IT Foundation’s and MIT’s call and look forward to working with its vast network and strategic operational support from entrepreneurs in Bangladesh. There are many instances of alignment. From Tiger IT’s support in the development, deployment, and maintenance of the community app to how its database technology can be used to measure emissions in our proposed Net-Zero greenhouse. In addition, Tiger’s IP support would be invaluable in linking the Green Houses together, a global physical link with neighborhood and individual endpoints. We look forward to setting up programs of exchange where Tiger IT Foundation joins us in mentoring our community members. 

Terreform and Bengal Institute look forward to an innovative community development model that is both local and specific, and reaches out across the globe. In addition to funding, we would require administrative support, professional and intellectual engagement, and community-based involvement.

For the community in Shahidnagar, the following entities are and will be involved: Narayanganj City Corporation, Ranada Prasad Saha University, Kumudini Welfare Trust, and community units in Shahidnagar.

In West Woodlawn, we intend to continue to support and involve community partners, including Experimental Station, University of Chicago, Chicago State University, Kennedy King College, Blacks in Green, SEIF, and Self-Help Federal Credit Union.