Caracas: Dry Toilet
The Dry Toilet project was the result of a six-month stay in Caracas, during which time the Israeli architect Liyat Esakov and I researched the informal city under the auspices of the Caracas Case Project. A dry, ecologically safe toilet was built on the upper part of La Vega barrio, a district in the city without access to the municipal water grid. The project attempts to rethink the relationship between infrastructure and architecture in real-life urban practice in a city where about half the population receives water from municipal authorities no more than two days a week.

As it often is with the best things that happen in life, I never expected that I would one day be building a dry toilet in a Caracas barrio. In our collaboration for the Caracas Case Project, the Israeli architect Liyat Esakov and I knew only that we wanted to work inside the informal city and not merely analyze it from a safe distance.

It was some time before we could actually walk through the alleys of the barrio. You always had to have an escort when you went there; it was too dangerous to visit alone. With the aid of Raul Zelik, another participant in the Caracas Case Project, we made contact with community leaders and were eventually shown around. Most importantly, we were able to discuss living conditions with barrio residents. What was most obvious, and most shocking, was the breakdown of the energy infrastructure and the lack of public utilities in the informal city. This was not what we had anticipated, since we were all focused on the fascinating and seemingly precarious architecture of the barrios. But we soon realized that the failure of the municipal infrastructure in the barrios was a logical outcome of the houses' construction process. In a planned city, the various forms of public infrastructure are set in place before construction starts. In the barrios, the houses are built first with infrastructure problems being dealt with later.

Liyat and I asked a group of barrio residents what they thought about self-sustainable energy solutions such as solar panels for bringing additional electricity to their homes. They could not care less. They were happy to steal electricity from the municipal power grid. They saw self-sustainable alternative energy technologies as something only rich people would be interested in. But drinking water was another matter, since it was provided by the city for only a few hours twice a week-if you were lucky. The upper part of La Vega barrio, where we eventually built the Dry Toilet, had no access at all to running water. This was a place ruled by necessity. Could barrio residents perhaps apply their survival strategies to utility infrastructures in a more focused way? Instead of shooting bullets into the municipal water pipes in order to get more water through an illegal water connection, they could take a different approach. Perhaps they could reduce their consumption of water. They would use less water if they had a toilet that did not need it. In this way, they would solve the infrastructure problem themselves, independent of municipal authorities. Our idea caught the attention of the community. The Dry Toilet made sense, after all. And so it was built by a team of construction workers from the community in La Fila, the upper section of La Vega barrio, on Raquel's property (if you can speak in this way about occupied public land); her house had never had a toilet before.

Barrio buildings are self-initiated and self-upgrading structures that function on a small scale. I still wonder why no one had previously thought to apply their strategies- their tropicalism, their nonlinear logic-on a city-wide scale. For Liyat and me, it was extremely important that Hidrocapital, the municipal water company, supported our Dry Toilet project. It made sense in a city where reservoirs were quickly losing water. For the La Vega community, the project provided a long-term sustainable solution for the problem of waste water, radically reducing the community's water consumption. Houses collapse in the barrios not only because of the torrential tropical rains, but also because of leaking sewage. At one point Hidrocapital envisioned building full-scale models of the Dry Toilet in every municipality as an educational endeavor. Remember the urban farm in the middle of the formal city? This same cooperative considered erecting a Dry Toilet on its premises, but eventually decided against it out of a fear of controversy; the Dry Toilet might be seen as another invasion in the formal city simply because it can function on its own, without any connection to the municipal utility grid of the modernist city.

Looking back, I remember that Liyat and I both felt at home in La Vega barrio. Liyat eventually rented a room there and had to learn to bathe with only one cup of water. In a way, the Dry Toilet happened to us because we could see potential in an informal solution. I cannot speak for Liyat, but my heart is instinctually drawn to individually initiated small-scale strategies, perhaps because I was raised in a socialist society. I have learned to have particular respect for the voices of individuals. Have Liyat and I romanticized the informal city? I do not think so. I am proud that we were able to draw attention to the shift from the power of institutions to the empowerment of individuals. In the context of Caracas, where the social state never really materialized, individual initiative is a natural route to take.

There is a certain humor in the fact that my project about informal Caracas ended up being the Dry Toilet. Or was it, perhaps, intuition that had made me build, way back in 1997, the Core Unit-a structure with a similar volume and content as the Dry Toilet-in the Landesmuseum Munster? This was the first case study I presented in a museum, and it proved to be a strategy I have followed ever since. I discovered the information behind the Core Unit in a National Geographic magazine. In Honduras, such units were part of the suburban housing program. A small building provided by municipal authorities was equipped with electricity, running water, and a toilet; residents would then add on rooms as their finances and building skills permitted.

Raquel pursued a similar strategy. When we stood on the ground between the Dry Toilet and the house she had built with her own hands-first collecting wood, then using mud to fill in the cracks in the wooden structure-we were in fact standing right in the middle of an additional room she had planned. Raquel's house was a growing house in the midst of a growing city.