Events

Fall 2024 Sciame Lecture Series: Sabine Malebranche

Cultural + Urban Landscapes: Designing for Local Communities in Haiti

This lecture will be in person and is part of the Fall 2024 Sciame Lecture Series, titled "Design Matters: The Housing Question Revisited."

Sabine Malebranche is a Haitian architect, urban planner, and professor. She studied architecture at Faculté des Sciences (Haiti, 1980) and holds a Master of City and Regional Planning from Rutgers University (USA, 1984), as a Fulbright scholar. She has taught for 25 years urban planning in Haiti. As a national expert in urbanism, she has produced master plans for medium-sized towns commissioned by offices of the Haitian State including mayoral offices. She has developed design of urban landscapes through community planning. Currently, she is leading research on cultural resilience to promote lakou system in public policies for sustainable urban planning.

"Cultural + Urban Landscapes: Designing for Local Communities in Haiti": Haiti is characterized by environmental, economic and social vulnerability. The Global Climate Risk Index 2021 ranks Haiti among the three most vulnerable countries in the world between 2000 and 2019, after Puerto Rico and Myanmar. In the recurring history of natural disasters, the January 12, 2010, earthquake in Port-au-Prince remains a landmark event in Haitians’ collective memory. This event prompted the Haitian government to implement post-disaster plans, as well as new urban planning and construction standards. This proposal highlights good participatory practices of community planning and design of inclusive local development in the island of Ile à Vache and the Chardonnières city in Haiti's southern peninsula. Anticipatory urban planning tools in response to the risks, such as legal urbanism plans (PAEEV) have made it possible to promote local development, control urban growth, and improve the living environment of Haitian communities. A paradigm shift is needed to address the issue of urban planning. New urbanism must integrate cultural components, which are tools to control vulnerability. We must provide planning perspectives for sustainable, resilient spaces and design better community living spaces. Ile-à - Vache and Chardonnières, local development plan is conceived with communities and life experiences linked to cultural and ancestral heritage.

"Design Matters: The Housing Question Revisited" examines innovative solutions to the global housing crisis. It situates our contemporary dilemma in the powerful arguments made by Friedrich Engels in the 1870s and 1880s. In his revolutionary text, The Housing Question, Engels argued that the dearth of adequate shelter was an inevitable consequence of the Industrial Revolution. As a result of working-class exploitation endemic to capitalist modernity, the housing crisis was resolvable only by a revolutionary reconstruction of workers’ power that would result in the collective ownership of land and the means of production. “Design Matters” inverts Engels’s argument, putting design, architecture, and planning first. It expands his geographic, cultural, and temporal frame to include cities outside of Western Europe, and it probes places damaged by the devastating consequences of war, the climate emergency, and other catastrophes. A bevy of on-the-ground examples, conceived at multiple scales and aimed at reconstruction, are changing policy, politics, practice, and design. In the face of extraordinary challenges, architects, planners, and providers are collaborating to produce humane affordable solutions to the housing crisis, and suggesting that architecture is needed to provoke political change.

All lectures are free, open to the public, and held in the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture Sciame Auditorium. For live captioning, ASL interpretation, or access requests, please contact ssadean@ccny.cuny.edu.

This lecture series is made possible by the Spitzer Architecture Fund and the generous support of Frank Sciame ’74, CEO of Sciame Construction.