With Learning from Las Vegas (1972), Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown and Steven Izenour defined a new canon in architectural theory: an evidence-based manifesto that combined writing, drawing, photography and design – what Rem Koolhaas would later call a “retroactive manifesto”. Equally original was the methodology and process involving studio teaching, fieldwork and interdisciplinary research. This workshop proposes to extend and reinterpret the “lessons” of Las Vegas and other manifesto cities as part of a transcultural genre for global urban studies in the 21st century. Similar to the literary genre of the Western, which has enabled culturally diverse interpretations and functioned critically in multiple contexts beyond the traditional American experience – notably in postcolonial literatures – we wish to consider how the recurring narrative of the “spontaneous city” – which Las Vegas and other American cities came to epitomise in the 1970s – may be reappropriated in the service of a critically expanded vision of contemporary urbanism or what geographer Jennifer Robinson has described as a “decolonisation” of urban studies.

More specifically, we will focus on a number of informal or “spontaneous” settlements also known as kampungs (villages) in the West Javanese capital of Bandung. Over 1 billion people live in informal settlements across the Global South with more than two thirds concentrated in Asia. Informal settlements – that is, urban environments traditionally known as “slums” that fall outside government control, regulation and protection – represent the fastest growing phenomenon of global urbanisation today. While informal settlements can be sites of poverty and need, they can also be places of human ingenuity, solidarity, and culture. Often exposed to risk, whether in terms of flooding or eviction due to their illegal status, kampung settlements and their inhabitants learn to live with instability and develop strategies of resilience and solidarity. On the basis of fieldwork observation, documentation, encounters, and interviews, as well as off-site research (archives, references and readings), we propose to develop – through drawing, photography and writing – a collection of “stories” which connect the everyday experience of the kampung – “on the ground”, so to speak – to larger narratives such as climate change, social justice or cultural heritage. Like the practices of experimental history in which fiction and reality merge as a literary genre, we propose to develop these kampung stories as a critical contribution to the narrative of the “spontaneous city” and the architectural genre of the “retroactive manifesto”.

Joint international research workshop organised by ENSA Paris-La Villette and Institut Teknologi Bandung

Organising team : Jim Njoo (co-coordinator), Perrine Belin, GERPHAU/ENSA Paris-La Villette / Widiyani (co-coordinator), Mai Joseph, Robert Koerner, Institut Teknologi Bandung / Wiryono Raharjo, Universitas Islam Indonesia / Christian Moniaga, Universitas Katolik Soegijapranata / Yandi Andri Yatmo and Paramita Atmodiwirjo, Universitas Indonesia / Christophe Dreyer and Ricky Arnold, Institut Français en Indonésie