Topology of a Phantom City

Abstract

As the global slum population swells to over one billion people, impoverished rural migrants moving to urban centres are increasingly turning to landfills and garbage dumps as their habitat and source of livelihood. These populations scavenge sites under toxic conditions, looking for discarded items to eat, wear, use, sell or trade. Cultural compositions are in a constant state of dynamic flux, continually redefined as new migrant groups arrive representing different age groups, languages, religions, and needs – leading to tensions within the slum communities. Political engagement with these issues has become stagnant, as the slums are regarded as complex burdens on the state.

These immigrants survive within a dynamic physical environment, as the landfill continually changes configuration and composition. Waste is gathered and removed by the scavengers in one place while it is brought in anew by the city at another. The result is a habitat that is fluid in form and content, changing repeatedly over time – sometimes forming mounds, other times depressions, sometimes toxic, other times of meagre value. Both space and time for these migrants are in a continual state of flux. Their dwellings constructed from scavenged materials – and their waste, sanitation, water, income, and community-gathering areas – all must respond to this fluid context. Architecture itself must evolve to respond to this fluid state.

A new boldness, bravura even, has returned to architectural design and its depiction. Ideas and proposals for unbuilt, indeed often unbuildable, structures are being produced not just by architects but by many others working in different visual media – film designers, creative advertising, music video producers, fine artists and computer game programmers – reflecting both the general cultural climate and a visceral appetite for politically motivated architecture. Topology of a Phantom City asks the question: how can the realm of socially motivated unbuilt architecture draw public attention to pressing global issues?

Using Alain Robbe-Grillet’s 1976 nouveau romain Topology of a Phantom City as a provocateur, an experimental architectural design for the inhabitants of Baruni Dump in Papua, New Guinea recognises that yesterday’s future has indeed become today’s present. And for us to survive, it is now the role of architecture to provide for today’s tomorrow.