By Krishna K. Shrestha and Anna Rubbo

Introduction

Global Studio is an educational program located at the University of Sydney (with Columbia University and University of Rome) since it began in 2005. It is a teaching and action research project where students, academics, and professionals from around the world come together to collaborate on community-driven projects. This ‘think and do tank’ concept grew out of the work of the United Nations Millennium Project Task Force on Improving the Lives of (100 million) Slum Dwellers (2002-04), one of ten task forces set up to recommend policies and strategies by which the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) could be implemented. Over the years, as Global Studio organized visits to slums in various cities and meetings with the poor and their representatives, the following question emerged: “‘How can professionals become more responsive to the creation of inclusive development that addresses poverty alleviation?” Global Studio is one response to that question.

Global Studio adopts a paradigm of engaged bottom-up multidisciplinary, multi-institutional and international education. Its approach focuses on development driven by participation of communities as equal partners. Informed by the Millennium Development Goals, Global Studio promotes participatory development, planning and design that benefits under-served populations. Since its inception in 2005, about 500 students, academics and professionals from over 30 countries and 66 universities have participated in Global Studio’s intensive programs which have included conferences and symposia and community-based projects. Participants have been drawn almost equally from the global north and south to five programs.

Global Studio holds that the poor people should be subjects not objects of development, planning and design, and that decision-making should rest with communities. A key skill is learning to listen so as to be able to assist communities in their own development. Global Studio works with local universities, government,

Krishna K. Shrestha and Anna Rubbo are members of the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning,
The University of Sydney, NSW 2006, AUSTRALIA
Contact: krishna.shrestha@sydney.edu.au
Contact: Anna.rubbo@sydney.edu.au

NGOs and community groups and responds to community needs, helps build local capacity, provides access to the knowledge and tools of design and planning, and assists local income generating projects. An important focus has been the creation of an international network of citizen professionals. In this way Global Studio supports MDG 8, ‘ develop a global partnership for development’. The project website (www.theglobalstudio.com) has been designed to serve a double purpose: it is community-friendly, provides news, and disseminates the community, academic and professional outputs: publications, research papers, films, festivals, projects, exhibitions.

Case Study: Diepsloot, Johannesburg

Commencing in 2007, Global Studio worked over a period of three years in Johannesburg in the downtown and in the townships of Alexandra and Diepsloot. In 2008 and 2009, work focused entirely on Diepsloot, a township of approximately 160,000 people where some 70% are under or unemployed. Diepsloot is on the northern edge of Johannesburg, 24 kilometres from the city centre. Global Studio subsequently developed working relationships with Diepsloot Local Government, the Community Development Office and local community groups.

Community dialogues and research identified major issues with respect to information and communications, housing, the environment, and

the importance of arts and culture - in the form of visual arts, music, dance and theatre. In a communication-poor township strategically located community chalkboards provided messaging centres, and a meeting place. With advice from local communities, students developed a method of insulating people’s corrugated iron shacks, and passed on the skills needed to do this (photo 1 ).

Drainage and sanitation provided major environmental challenges. Throughout the most densely settled ‘reception’ area there are prefabricated concrete toilets, built in pairs, with a water standpipe and semicircular drain attached to one wall. Leaking drains, an ongoing problem through blockages caused by food wastes, were solved with an inexpensive and ingenious double sieve system made out of plastic paint buckets. (photo 2)