What makes: Havana?
Our round-up of Havana’s core ‘sense of place’ ingredients.
It’s been a colourful week here in Havana. When we chose to put this Cuban city on our travel list, we did so knowing that it would pose a challenge to our perspective of placemaking. A communist country with a very young private sector, many of Havana’s ‘placemakers’ are community members and grassroots project leaders. They are volunteers, with little commercial interest.
If there is one lesson to take away from Havana, it is that placemaking does not always require ample monetary investment. Indeed, some of Havana’s strongest places of belonging and identity haven’t arisen despite lack of funding; they’ve arisen because of lack of funding.
So how do we define the city’s ‘sense of place’? Naturally, in this loud city, it comes from the people and their culture:
Resourcefulness
There is a hardy resourcefulness about the people of Havana. This isn’t a wealthy city, and resources are treated with according respect.
The most famous and obvious signal of this is the abundance of vintage cars still in active use throughout the city. A symptom of the 50-year embargo on US goods, the continued use of these vehicles is not only an economic indicator, but an indicator of a people who are able to use, re-use, repair and repurpose.
The same is true of the well-used and -occupied Spanish colonial architecture in Havana. In any other city, such ornately detailed buildings might well be preserved and left as static city relics. In Havana, the buildings are homes; their steps adorned with neighbours; their wrought-iron balconies full of washing.
The effect is completely place-defining: the aesthetics of Havana are like nowhere else in the world.
Public life
In Havana, life is conducted in public. While this applies to the economy (the majority of working people in Havana work in the public sector), it also applies to the use of space.
Private homes are small and crowded in this city – often housing three generations at once, with limited access to private outdoor space. As a consequence, people spend much of their lives outside of the home, meeting in the streets, enjoying park benches, and queuing for services and products.
At the same time, there is an entrepreneurial spirit among Havanans that leads to homes being used as small businesses; selling small products and services from front rooms. This creates a casual intimacy in the way people experience the boundaries of public and private spaces. People live in the public, while keeping the private open.
The reciprocity network
Havana takes an informal approach to cash and currency. All prices are open to negotiation, and can be paid in any currency or with any service.
This informal relationship with money is coupled with the interesting impact of the advertising ban in Cuba. In the dearth of formal brand communication, business is conducted by word-of-mouth. Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody in Havana.
This has created a vast network of reciprocity in the city, devoted to making sure that friends, family and neighbours all benefit from opportunities as they arise. The people of Havana know each other, and they spend their days conversing, negotiating and doing business in the streets.
