Patricia Green | Downtown architecture inspires uptown Kingston

Citizens’ associations are coming together in an organised manner and clamouring for planning considerations to protect low-rise dwellings. This extends the development debate heightened during the Gleaner Editors’ Forum held on June 24 to make a distinction between this type and ‘single family’ housing.

“… Tell them that from I was a little boy, every house, big and small, with their yards were multifamily dwelling s… ” echoes 91-year-old Lennie Green, undoubtedly my biggest readership. Lennie insists that billing ‘single family’ is incorrect in the urban setting across Jamaica because even if the front entrance to a house was on a wide street, many times, it had a small lane at the back with a yard, where other families lived, entering from its other gate on the lane.

Weighing in, historian Marguerite Curtin penned a letter to The Gleaner on July 13 - “Kingston was once a ‘hog crawle’ and not a family city – to say that from its inception, Kingston was a ‘single-family city’ would be most inaccurate as the word ‘family’ does not relate to Kingston …”.

Damian Edmond, in a July 13 Gleaner article, “Dilemma of defining low-income housing” remarked that for Phyllis, resident of a tenement yard, “.. .the source of major discomfort in these tenement communities are often shared sanitary conveniences, such as showers and toilets, due to differences in individual hygienic practices ... .”

Colin Clarke in Decolonizing the Colonial City: Urbanization and Stratification in Kingston, Jamaica, states that the 1943 census shows that tenements with individual rooms let to a single household represented the most characteristic urban form of housing and provided 28.5 per cent of the accommodation in Kingston and 15 percent in St Andrew. Imagine that 62 percent of dwellings in Kingston and 80 percent in St Andrew comprised single-storey dwellings, without a separate bedroom, and the kitchen and toilet facilities were located outside. By 1960 in Kingston, the largest type of residential tenure was 70 percent rental, 28 percent ownership, and two percent squatting. Types of property rented included rooms in single-storey tenements, one-room sheds on rental ground spots, and apartments. Apartments were a middle-class housing variant.

SINGLE-FAMILY HOUSES

The concept of ‘single-family houses’ is tied legally to covenants, and this is absent from the Jamaica Town and Country Act or the Building Act. In wider planning discourse, ‘single-family house’ is designed for one family to occupy as home with one ‘dwelling unit’ or as a residential space dedicated for the use of one person or one family, preventing any other type of development in its neighbourhood except a detached single-family house.

Elizabeth Pigou-Dennis in a Gleaner article of July 16 - “From neighbourhoods to fortified settlements -where is Kingston heading” elaborates: “… in spatial terms, the early to mid-20th century suburbs tended to be subdivisions of existing large landholdings – pens or estates. Uniform lots, ranging from a quarter acre to one acre … for the upper middle class of business owners and professionals, the high end was Seymour Lands [Golden Triangle], with large two-storey villas on one-acre lots …”.

Avoid confusion over zoning laws versus issuing of Jamaica ‘building permits’ as the formal approval to construct, modify, extend, or renovate any structure, or change of use that must be granted by the Municipal Corporations [Parish Councils] for all ‘single-family dwelling house’, ‘multifamily dwelling house’, ‘apartment building’, and ‘commercial structures’. All permits other than a ‘single-family dwelling house’ must receive comments from other agencies such as the Ministry of Health, the National Works Agency (NWA), the National Environmental and Planning Authority, (NEPA), etc, before the Municipal Corporation is able to issue a permit [approval]. The Municipal Corporation is empowered to issue singlehandedly only permits for ‘single-family dwelling houses’.

Critically, permit and approval are exempted for solutions over dwellings for the poor.

SOCIO-ECONOMIC RESIDENTIAL MIX

Are the issues around development in neighbourhoods across Jamaica racial, or class-centred? Do many neighbourhoods want to keep out certain types of persons? Could it be that the arguments on ‘single-family houses’ is trying to create a divide? Are the arguments missing the essential issues of good governance that all neighbourhoods are clamouring for?

Jamaica statistics show that today, race is no longer a determinant in the spatial divide of the built environment. Colin Clarke concludes that clear additional pointers to decolonization have been the emergence of blacks at all levels of the society, particularly in the elite; the decline in class and race segregation for the most important social groups; and the darkening of such elite clubs.

DOWNTOWN POOR INTRODUCED MODERN RESIDENTIAL ARCHITECTURE

In the formalisation of multifamily housing solutions, the first architectural examples of high-density residential planning emerged for informal and squatting communities in West Kingston from the 1930s.

Government developed and rented these units, a practice that continues today.

After the 1951 Hurricane Charlie came revolutionary mass-housing solutions with bedrooms for the poor. The Government Yard in Trench Town is a formal, modern architecture housing designed timber nog-buildings framed with Jamaican ‘bullet-wood’ so tough that not even a bullet could pass through it and termites would not eat it. This was mixed with single-storey duplexes having an external shared kitchen and toilet facilities along with two-storey apartment buildings with inside toilets and kitchens.

Next, the colonial government awarded contractors from Rhodesia, now renamed Zimbabwe, Africa, for the ‘REMA’ technique concrete system for four-storey high-rise apartments in Trench Town. Later came the concrete four-storey ‘Horizon Buildings’ in Tawes Pen, St Catherine. By the 1960s, other concrete construction went to Tivoli Gardens, then Cooreville Gardens, etc. Innovations included balconies, jalousie/louvre windows allowing maximum breezes, and decorative breather blocks as ‘brise-soleil’ for privacy and shading.

By the 1970s, ‘townhouses’ as another modern residential type to address density solutions for the poor first appeared in the Trench Town.

Thereafter, these modern residential architecture apartments and townhouses migrated uptown as the first three-storey “Seymour Apartments” in the Golden Triangle, then the first townhouses “Ten-Ambassadors” at the corner of West Kings House Road and Waterloo Avenue opposite the former cholera cemetery.

Today, uptown has proliferating residential concrete buildings, four-storeys high and climbing.

Patricia Green, PhD, is a registered architect, former head of the Caribbean School of Architecture in the Faculty of the Built Environment at the University of Technology, Jamaica. Send feedback to patgreen2008@gmail.com.