GIOVANNA BORASI

In the Journeys exhibition with the great title, How Travelling Fruits, Ideas and Buildings Rearrange our Environment, you approach the topic of migration as something inherent to our nature. Migration is, after all, a constant in human history. My question would be, how do you perceive the current situation regarding migration in the Mediterranean Sea?

 

I curated this show in 2010, and I think the context was very different then. This sense of emergency was maybe already present, especially in the Mediterranean area, but it was years before we came to have a kind of critical flow at this pace. The idea was to look at migration as an inherent part of human history. When I decided to work on this topic, I realized there have been many exhibitions and research projects that dealt with the flow of people: how people move from one place to another, how many immigrants a country has and so on. Beyond the basic fact that people move, I was more interested in what the tangible consequences of these displacements would be with respect to architecture and the built environment. What are the traces and the inevitable cultural changes that this movement implies? More than responding to the question, “How do we deal with this emergency?” the exhibition addressed some key aspects of what migration means and, more specifically, the idea of people moving with cultural baggage like techniques of building that a community brings from one culture to another. How do these techniques influence the new place and what is the impact in the long term? I think it is also important to mention that this show took place in the context of Canada, where migration has a certain meaning. It is very different from the European situation. And it is very different from the United States, where there is the idea of the melting pot, where, in the end, everybody becomes American and the previous culture is set aside. In Canada, the idea is that your own culture stays with you. Even if you enter into a set of Canadian values, your own culture and identity are still very much respected.

Today we realize that Europe is the destination for many migrants. The amount of people arriving is critical. How then are these people integrated and helped? How do we deal with all of these questions? So the show—and the title alludes to this—tried not to be specific to a certain time or certain flows of migrations, but to tackle the more general and universal issues caused by these flows. Quite deliberately, a human body was not represented in the exhibition. I was always referring, in a metaphorical way or in an abstract way, to ideas moving through building techniques, ideas of architecture, or even fruits and vegetables. Basically the intention was to address these topics, referring always to our human history, but never really to relate directly to a certain group of people or to a specific set of cultures. For me, it was very much about, for example, people moving from Italy to Vermont because they were particularly skilled in working with granite. And they changed the culture in the area around Barre, Vermont: many of the migrants were anarchists, and in Vermont today there are still many institutions that are very much left leaning. This development can be traced to this period of migration. So it was not just about these Italians coming to Vermont with their expertise in carving; they also brought their political ideas that had an influence in certain communities.

So if I return to your question about what is happening today, I think the conditions are very different. I feel we are facing an emergency. We have to deal with a situation that we perhaps aren’t prepared for and do not have good answers for. It’s tempting to propose an immediate answer to respond to what is happening today. In addition, we have a Europe that doesn’t have a unified idea of how to deal with issues of migration. In the Mediterranean, historically populations coexist with flows and continuous cultural exchanges. For example, the story I wrote for the book that accompanies the exhibition—which is not a series of essays or academic case studies but rather fictional writings—I focused on Mazara del Vallo, a small town in Sicily where the language is mixed with Arabic due to centuries of exchange with Tunisia. Italians fished in Tunisian waters, and vice versa. This has changed the town’s culture and has also left traces in the built environment and structure of the town, where the main core has distinct Arab characteristics. I think there is a very different approach in countries that are at the edge of the Mediterranean. I would say that in Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, there is an understanding of migration that is different from the understanding of the issue elsewhere in Europe. I think the emergency now is happening in a Europe that is certainly not unified in its approach; each country deals with local policies in a distinct way.

 

I would like to go back to what you referred before, to these anarchists who moved to Vermont, that they somehow brought with them their culture. This refers to the concept of making Heimat – it’s not a one-way road, it has to be a two-way, so the country somehow accommodates the people, but the people also implicitly have an influence over the country. How do you think building and urban development can be beneficial to refugees and migrants at their arrival cities? Is this two-way event at all possible or is it an utopia?

 

As I said I think now we are treating situations like this as emergencies. For immigrants, there is a city where they first arrive, where they are helped at the first level. But then there is no clear vision of a future and how they can be integrated into society. There are also many people who arrive in a country but actually want to reach another European country. Can we say these people are choosing to migrate to this first country as if they wanted to stay, or are they just escaping? This is just the first place they land; any safe place is fine from this perspective.

At the CCA last year, we had a show on two projects by Álvaro Siza from the 1980s that address this question of the integration of migrants, in the context of Berlin and The Hague. Siza remarked that the Dutch government asked him to design two different types of housing: one for Dutch people and one for Turkish migrants. But he refused to comply with this, as he thought it was a sign of a double segregation. The immigrants would never really be integrated if the attitude is, “You are Turkish, so you live in an apartment that is tailored—supposedly—to your culture.” The migrants will always be different because they will never have the opportunity to understand what living in the Netherlands is really like. I have to say that I find this idea of defining a specific architecture or a specific part of the city as dedicated to an incoming population extremely problematic in the long term. I understand there is an emergency—all these people have to live somewhere—but I don’t think is the way to solve the problem.

In the Journeys exhibition we also had an example that focused on a Dutch urban context: the Bijlmermeer, a modern neighbourhood of Amsterdam that promised a very pleasant life. But when in the 1970s the people of Suriname (a former colony of the Netherlands) were offered Dutch passports and the possibility to move to the Netherlands, there was a sudden migration to Amsterdam. As the government didn’t really know where to put all these people, the Bijlmermeer became an immediate answer: it transformed very quickly from a modern, white, middle-class neighbourhood to a Surinamese ghetto. It is interesting to see how this community used Bloemenoord—a modern building in the Bijlmermeer with a structure similar to l’Unité. The immigrants immediately started to densely occupy and use the building’s corridors for markets and other public functions. So it became an animated city. The government, preoccupied with how to deal with this kind of new ghetto, decided to impose a very precise percentage of the kind of people admitted. A maximum of 30 percent of the residents could be of foreign origin. This became a very racial program, concerning what was considered the “healthiest” percentages of different communities possible to maintain a kind of Dutch livability. It’s interesting to see how the migrants used the Bloemenoord megastructure in a very creative way (maybe even in a way that was nearer to the project’s initial intentions), but also to see how this structure transformed itself quickly into an arrival city for the migrants, pushing out the previous inhabitants.

 

And this dealing with the percentage of people from each countries, did it work in some positive way? What were the outcomes of this?

 

I think it was just a bureaucratic strategy to regulate an “acceptable mix,” but I don’t think it really worked. The Bijlmermeer is now a more elitist neighbourhood again because of the quality of the apartments and so on, but there were a lot of discussions about this solution. It was in fact a very top–down experiment.

 

In Europe, I think there’s no parallel. There’s no model for it. But, if we compare it to the volume of migration, for instance, in South America, in Brazil, with internal migrations of rural exodus, that people just escaped to São Paulo and Rio, there was this huge governmental programme of housing on the  cities’s outskirts. For instance, the famous City of God, that still exists today. This structure, that was supposed to be temporary, became something completely permanent, altered and appropriated by the communities that moved in. If the German government is imposing this kind of limit, it might seem safe to say the this will not happen there.

 

If we look at the problem from a social perspective, we could say that there is always a sort of “good intention” that covers all of these housing programs. So then the responses are similar to what the Red Cross or other similar organizations do after an earthquake. What are the immediate priorities? Giving these people a roof over their heads, for example. And so any answer is fine as long as shelter is provided. But if you start to look at this from a different perspective, if you consider the city as your problem and not just the people (let’s forget about the people for a moment), then you might find other answers and other strategies. If you look from the point of view of the city, you might ask, “What is right for the city?” The new condition is that many migrants are arriving, so most probably we have to expand city structures and we have to develop our urban system. What is the right way to do this? In the past, cities dealt with this question by adding to the existing texture, augmenting the density. I think it is important to challenge the current mindset that tends to create a set of different conditions for the newcomers; the understanding is they will stay in a temporary way. We must take the city’s point of view and imagine how to deal with this. What should be the answer? A denser urban tissue, more building, more satellite communities, or new cities? I’m not aware of any discussion of this sort these days. For me, the real question is: if this is the current situation and Europe gets these additional millions of people, how will you face this, beyond the social emergency, focusing on how the model of the city might adapt to such rapid growth? That, for me, is the interesting discussion, to take this crisis as an opportunity to change urban settlements and their structure.

 

But somehow, the justification offered by the German pavilion take on the situation, was contradictory to this. According to the “Arrival cities” conclusions, precisely because there are no other people that came to these areas previously from these countries where these people are coming from, they will not move there, they will not want to go there. Rem Koolhaas did a comment on this. he said exactly what you just said now; “why not direct or indicate these people that are migrating into Germany that they should go to these areas where they would have these opportunities, housing, etc.” This is connected to the next point I would like to introduce; We pretty much talk about cities as the only situation influenced by migration. In the Journeys exhibition, some of the essays also went into the influence of migrations on the countryside. How do you see these two realities?

 

First of all, I would like to draw attention to the character of the countryside nowadays, especially in Europe where it is a very urbanized place. Often it’s the place where there is a lot of work to be done and where many workers end up finding jobs. Some years ago there was an advertisement from the Minister of Internal Affairs in Italy, which tried to counteract a kind of racist, right-wing attitude. These ads showed all the things that you, as an Italian, would not have if migrants were not there to produce them. So forget about Parmesan cheese; that is produced by immigrant Sikh communities who take care of the cows. Forget about tomatoes and oranges. You would think, “This is my culture,” but in fact it’s all managed by migrants. I agree with you: we focus a lot on this very old idea that everybody moves to cities because that is where the jobs are and where there is a concentration of everything. But I think the countryside is an interesting place to look at in terms of how these immigrant communities can be integrated, how they find opportunities for work and a different kind of integration with the local communities. In this sense, there is a very interesting situation in Canada now, and I think the government has a problem with it. Many small Canadian communities have decided to invite Syrian refugees to live. So these small communities in the middle of nowhere, in the Canadian prairies, raised money to, let’s say, adopt these families. It’s a very different attitude; people, as a community, decide to welcome immigrants and confront the need to think about how to handle these people once they arrive. I gather that in the countryside, this would very much be possible. I think this could be the topic for one of the next shows at the CCA: the idea of the countryside as a place where a lot of new technologies have been developed, and where social experiments have been carried out. AMO/OMA is working on this, and in Japan there is a new tendency to consider going back to the countryside because of the growth of the aging population. It is very specific—there is virtually no migration in Japan—but the country is facing the issue of an aging population in areas that are completely abandoned because the young population wants to live in big cities and to be connected to a completely different condition. Therefore there are very interesting projects being developed now to try to understand how to bring communities and work back to the countryside. I think that, in Europe, this is not happening at the level of policy but it is happening simply because of the fact that a lot of people find jobs in the countryside. But in these cases housing and living conditions are not really addressed.