In conversation with dhk Candidate Architect Ismaeel Davids

5 September 2024

dhk Candidate Architect Ismaeel Davids is currently in Madrid pursuing a Master’s Degree programme at the Norman Foster Institute Programme on Sustainable Cities. We’ve been following his journey closely since he left eight months ago, despite the distance. Recently, dhk’s Head of Communications, Hilary Alexander, caught up with him to find out what he’s been up to.

The following is a snapshot of their discussion, which also addresses the challenges facing rapidly developing cities in Ismaeel’s part of the world that are grappling with conversations around the impact of short-term rentals on housing affordability. There is an interesting parallel with our own mother city, Cape Town, which is also faced with the need to strike a balance between the tourism economy and community interests.

Hilary Alexander (HA): We last heard from you in April when you were three months into your programme. What have you been up?
Ismaeel Davids (ID): I’ve just got back from a 10-day visit in Bilbao.

HA: I must say, I’m super envious of your trip. I’ve wanted to go to Bilbao for years. The Bilbao Guggenheim has been on my bucket list ever since it was built. I visited Valencia a few years later and absolutely loved the Calatrava complex there.
ID: You must visit Bilbao if you can. Many famous architects have worked there, including Norman Foster, who did the subway system, and Frank Gehry, who did the Guggenheim.

HA:  Tell me more about your 10-day visit in Bilbao. Previously, you mentioned that you’ve been exploring how to use qualitative research as a means to uncover the intricacies of people’s daily lives, their emotions, aspirations and struggles, which are often overlooked in traditional data-driven approaches. At the time, you were also pondering on the question of ‘how do we design with communities rather than simply for them?’.
ID: Bilbao has faced numerous historical challenges and undergone a significant transformation from an industrial hub to a global tourist destination, showcasing its resilience. However, this resilience has come at a cost, a disparity between the city centre and the periphery areas. Our quantitative analysis revealed friction between three social groups: the local youth, the elderly and the immigrant community. These frictions stem from competition for jobs, housing, access to amenities, land use diversity and mobility.

To gain a deeper understanding, we spent 10 days in the San Francisco neighbourhood, conducting qualitative research. We interviewed residents, met with various city council departments and held a workshop with district youth representatives. This workshop helped us map their daily routines and identify areas perceived as unsafe or underused. Our findings, which we corroborated through interviews and surveys, highlighted that Otxarkoaga and San Francisco are rarely visited due to a lack of amenities and safety concerns.

HA: Could you outline some of the concerns that residents expressed in a bit more detail. What do you mean by “lack of amenities.” What safety threats exist?
ID: We designed the workshop in three stages. We began by asking them to identify their priorities in the city and whether they have a desire to stay in Bilbao. We then gave them three tasks. First, we asked them to map their daily routes on weekdays and weekends. In the second one, we asked them to identify areas of the city they had not visited or that they perceived as unsafe. Finally, we conducted interviews based on the questions in the survey.

Our research revealed that San Francisco is the area most frequently identified as unsafe due to muggings and other antisocial behaviour like drug dealing. It’s a neighbourhood with a large immigrant population in the city centre, while Otxarkoaga, a periphery area, was the least visited due to a lack of amenities and was essentially a mass housing neighbourhood. In the area, there are little to no stores, pharmacies and community facilities.

HA: How are the three groups [local youth, elderly and immigrant community] affected? Do they have different experiences?
ID: What we found out is that the young would like to stay in Bilbao but are struggling with affordability of housing and job opportunities. The local youth and immigrant youth are in direct competition for jobs.  All three are in competition for housing.

We proposed improving the integration of these areas by fostering social cohesion via meaningful interactions at three scales: bonding, bridging and linking. Bonding refers to interactions at the building and street level, bridging at the neighbourhood level and linking across different neighbourhoods. While social cohesion is challenging to measure directly, we can create conditions facilitating interaction and meaningful exchange through public spaces and activities. This approach aims to foster a sense of community, place and ultimately social cohesion.

HA: It seems that the issues Bilbao is facing are along the same lines as the protests we saw recently in Barcelona, with residents spraying water guns at tourists, to curb mass tourism. So, there’s a double-edged sword in the resurgence of the city as a tourism destination, at the expense of affordable housing and other resources for locals.
ID: I agree, there are some similarities. Much like Barcelona, tourism is a major contributor to Bilbao’s GDP and a source of job creation. I am not too familiar with the strategies of the Barcelona city council, but in Bilbao, they have kept Airbnb to a minimum and want to drive it out of the city completely. The affordable and social housing department of Bilbao is also extremely “on top” of housing delivery with one of the best social housing ratios in Spain.

HA: Could you offer a little more on the three scales you mentioned.
ID: It refers to the scale of intervention posed on underperforming public spaces incorporating activities and programmed events. The hypothesis is that interaction is the key ingredient in creating the best conditions for social cohesion to happen. A bonding intervention is the smallest scale, followed by bridging, which is an intervention for neighbourhood scale, and linking, which is a type of intervention to bring other neighbourhoods together.

HA: I realise that architecture is your focus, but would the three scales you mentioned be the only three responses, or are there other structural/administrative issues that need to be addressed, to support the architectural/urban design response?
ID: We’re not doing three interventions, but rather giving the city a methodology to apply in their analysis to identify areas that have the potential for a bonding, bridging or linking opportunity. That’s all that’s in our scope given the time frame of the course. I would have liked to tackle the bigger issues like housing and residency administration, but it’s not possible in this time frame.

HA: Thank you, Ismaeel. We look forward to catching up with you again.
ID: Speak to you soon. Thank you.