Picture a very small space containing a very large dragon-like thing, spinning and shooting flames. Then picture a lot of people in that space, and a lot of explosives – real explosives – inside that dragon. And, as a clincher, onlookers eager to minimize the gap between them and the deafening, munitions-like eruptions that launch the innards of the 8-meter beast into the laughing crowd.

It’s a unique take on ‘Happy Easter’.  But from the small community of Santa Rosa Xochiac, tucked into the sprawl of along the hilly outskirts of Mexico City, it’s a loud and lively one.

As the first giant beast began to detonate, my senses begged for cover from the audiotechnic battery. Standing with a few photographer friends atop a rock cornice of the plaza, there was nowhere to hide. And so came the laughter – if only at the disbelief that these explosions were legal, and the crowd so close to the bangs. With our Celebration issue set to ship just a couple days later, such raucous festivities seemed appropriate.

Behind the carnage though, thoughtful craftsman who take great pride in building the explosive beasts.  Hours earlier, one of the teams put the final touches on their 2013 installment. The giant alebrije lay in two parts on the dirt driveway serving as the team’s workshop.  The parental generation sipped warm cups of atole and ponche, joking about the impending destruction of their creation. But Ernesto and a crew of other teens and twenty-somethings continued to work fastidiously on last-minute minutiae.

“These,” he explains, pointing at what look like a series of bottle rockets strapped around the creature’s midriff, “make the top spin around, once we light them.”  He and a friend are making sure they are affixed properly, tightly affixing them with twine and exacto knives. “The real explosives are inside.”

Ernesto points inside the belly of the beast. Amidst the carefully designed latticework of bamboo, a few black pouches are linked by a network of flammable cords. “Perfectly timed,” Ernesto boasts, “to explode in a series.”

Construction of the bamboo innards began just after New Year’s, a few months ago.  Shaped, molded and dried, they serve as the the outline for the beast. Volunteers gather on Sunday afternoons to slowly add to the décor: paper maché, carefully molded, dried and painted. Glue, scissors, paint, cords, and other tools lie everywhere. Then – tens of thousands of pesos later, raised by the working-class community – the explosives get added with care by self-taught hands.

About 30 years ago, it was decided that the town would start this annual festival, allowing teams to show off their interpretation of an exploding beast – the link to Semana Santa or Easter, however, seemed a bit unclear.

Today marks the 13th year of creation for this family-based team; with pride, they keep trying to perfect the art of decoratable explodables. The dozens of families and friends raise the giant structures with affixed metal poles and begin to ease them out of the workshop. They navigate the narrow alleys down to the town square to join the other teams – and their similarly explodable creations – for the night. Families follow in tow, smiling and waving noisemakers in support.

After months of community craftsmanship, the smiles suggest it is time to do what they have deemed is best for the community on Easter: invite everyone to the square in the middle of the night, and blow shit to smithereens!

[Since words don’t do it justice, you should take it to the next step. No, really, you should watch the short video. It’s hilarious, and special thanks to Julia Galiano-Rios for shooting and editing.]

Considering a subscription for yourself or a friend? Let us sweeten the deal. We’re running a subscription sale with our friends over at Fab, meaning that you get the best damn stories about creativity, innovation, and the informal economy shipped right to your door for up to 40% less!

One year standard subscription – four quarterly issues of inspiring narrative, guaranteed to make your coffee table the envy of the neighborhood: $28

One year premium subscription – the four quarterly issues, plus four 5×7 prints from the magazine and some excellent fair trade products like bangles made from bomb metal in Laos or wallets created from upcycled Indian newsprint: $69

But act soon–the sale ends Monday morning!

For our Celebratory first annual issue, we rode Cape Town’s church trains, trailed Tijuana’s biker toy runs, and followed 80 million pilgrims to the largest festival in the world. The Celebration Issue is now available for purchase online and en route to subscribers and over 50 stores around the world. Premium Subscribers will receive photo prints and Frank notebooks, which fund school supplies for low-income schools.

Preview the Celebration Issue here and pick up a copy or subscription in the Makeshift Store. Premium Subscribers will also enjoy a set of photo prints from the magazine and unique Frank notebooks, which fund supplies for low-income schools. Thanks to our wonderful contributors and partners for crafting another beautiful pulse on informal economies.

The Celebration Issue is proudly supported by Engineering and Humanity Week.

Hey Makeshifters, wanted to let you know about some upcoming chances to hang with the Makeshift staff. Editors Steve Daniels and Myles Estey will making the rounds at the following conferences:

Clinton Global Initiative U
April 5-7 — St. Louis, MO
Myles Estey

Engineering and Humanity Week
April 6-12 — Dallas, TX
Myles Estey

E&H Week was featured in the Celebration Issue. Pictured, the Plastiki sailboat on display.

New York Forum Africa
June 14-16 — Libreville, Gabon
Steve Daniels

It’s 17:45 at Bellville station in the eastern suburbs of Cape Town. I stand waiting for a train, the same one I’ve been taking three days a week. I’m waiting for a church train.

The locomotive rushes into the platform, and gospel hits my ear from one of its carriages. I jog alongside as the music escapes through missing windows. Four men stand in the entrance, jamming the doors open with their feet to let fresh air into the packed car. I have a minute to squeeze in, finding space in front of today’s song leader. She holds a homemade steel bell that she rings in harmony with the singing, clapping, and drumming of hands against the train walls.

The song stops, and the preaching begins. The word of the day tells us to put our faith in God. Meanwhile, a lady guides a blind man with string through a small door between carriages. The man plays a keyboard strapped around his body, and the lady jingles a few coins in a metal cup. They sing in unison: “Thank you Jesus, amen.”

They plead for spare change, but the passengers stare back hard, annoyed at the interruption. Still, some donate a few rand while the rest continue to fix their attention on the “pastor”, who continues the service. The duo shuffle on to the next carriage.

Among the congregated are gardeners, maids, office cleaners, and the unemployed; they fill these trains in search of a better life. Mobile churches have chugged along since the Apartheid era, as long as black South Africans have trekked from their dusty and isolated township homes to their more central, urban places of employment. Many leave home early and return late, seven days a week; there’s no time to attend church and no choice but to take God with them on their long rides.

Church trains fill this void across heavily religious South Africa. No formal structure guides their existence: there is no scheduled mass, no fixed location. Friendships forged in mobile worship keep the tradition alive.

Luphumzo Sokoyi is a 35-yearold receiving clerk from Delft Township, outside of Cape Town. She’s also the car’s preacher. She started in 2011, when she and a colleague decided to bring their bibles along on their hour-long train rides from work. “We saw how people around us were sad and hopeless, and we thought public transport is a great place to use the word of God to empower and give hope to the otherwise hopeless poor of South Africa,” says Sokoyi.

There are now about 50 regulars in her church—those who take the same train five days or more a week. The rest just pass by or find themselves in the wrong carriage.

The train reaches its final destination, Cape Town station. Patrons call each other by name, bidding goodbye. Most hop onto new trains to share in other services with other trainchurch friends. And tomorrow, it will start over again.

It is the largest gathering on earth. Most Westerners understand the Maha Kumbh Mela, if they understand it at all, to be about spectacle and tradition— the naked priests and sacred baths, the ash and fire and splashing. Most of the 80 million pilgrims—yes, 80 million—experience the Kumbh Mela as a spiritual journey, a respectful quest for learning and the cleansing of sins. Me, I’m incongruous at best and maybe misguided: I experience the Kumbh Mela as a Harvard finance professor. So my gaze follows not so much the religious undertones but the roads, bridges, electricity, and water that underpin this amazing combination of religion, salesmanship, urban design, crowd control, and focused investment.

It’s hard to be an objective, passive observer here. The Mela is loud and blinding. Acreage is divided up based on Akharas—Hindu sects who carved out their position at the Mela during centuries-old battles—each one projecting its modern message from its temporary home base. Recordings, music, prayers, and advertisements blast from competing Akharas at all hours.

Organizers erected 22,000 temporary electric poles, most beaming around the clock (imagine a parking lot between a Walmart and a Safeway at 3am). Millions of pilgrims are poor, and it’s cold and wet; firewood, trash, and the hand-dried and -carried cow chips sold everywhere leave a thick smoke hanging. I expected sanctuary and reflection, but this is all frenetic, all the time. Earplugs help.

The Kumbh Mela occurs every three years, but only every 12 in Allahabad, when Jupiter and the moon make a rare alignment. This year, however, marks the Maha Kumbh Mela—an event that happens here just once every 144 years. It is, by most counts, the largest celebration on earth. An explosion of humanity, culture, and economic opportunity that will disintegrate and lie dormant for another 12 years. And it happens here on a piece of sandy, silty land, one-third the size of Manhattan; land that lay beneath water in September and will do so again when the rains return next July.

There’s a lot to learn in this blitzkrieg of humanity. An analog, human- based SimCity plays out as a microcosm of the world’s street trade. Sellers, vendors, builders, cooks and other temporary occupants descend here once a decade to make business decisions based on a scale of months. This is not the slow growth of permanent street economies: this city arrives with drastic force and recedes with equal quickness.

It’s simultaneously a compressed history and accelerated future of the many massive informal cities that have sprung up over decades to house tens of millions of workers in South Asia’s informal economy—though not nearly as well equipped as the hyper-organized Mela. It is also a vision. With its focus on effectively designed roads, properly allocated water and electricity, a purpose-driven community, and city administrators who earn authority through effective provision of these services, the Mela is a potential learning tool. Its success serves as a conceivable model for more attractive, competitive cities that better provide resources to millions of economic pilgrims seeking prosperity in the way the Mela offers millions of Kumbh pilgrims space to seek salvation.

Groundwork

I attract quite a crowd. I appear obviously American or European and move in the company of a videographer, translator, and a researcher. Yet I don’t seem to be camped out with the other journalists and academics on the Sangam—the place beside the multi-colored convergence of the Ganges, Yamuna, and the mythical underground Saraswati rivers that draws the pilgrims to this precise location. I’m not getting to know the religious and historical significance of the Akharas, like my colleagues from the Harvard Divinity School. I’m not measuring bacteria counts in the river or interviewing first responders in the medical tents, as tasked to my colleagues from Harvard’s Global Health Initiative. I just want to know what supports this massive congregation.

I take off down a road, pacing my steps to gauge width. Under the sand roadways, hundreds of kilometers of thin steel plates keep thousands of tires from sinking into sand and mud. The roadways are wide—maybe 15 or 20 meters, or a six-lane interstate in the paved world. Along the edge, split-rail wood fence posts pound into the sand, doubling as crowd control.

Wide roads with good fences also keep the rival Akharas apart. A good idea, perhaps, since within recorded history competing Akharas arrived at the Kumbh site with elephants, lions, weapons, and warriors to battle fiercely for the best spots close to the Sangam.

Nowadays the Akharas follow a hierarchy of location, an order of bathing, and a negotiation of acreage. Things are not so testy as in the days of the 150 kingdoms. I expected perpetual battles over land allocation, problems with roads, issues with informal settlements, and convoluted street scenes found in Mumbai and Kolkata. What did I find? On non-bathing days, order and even a little resignation. Note to self: roads matter.

With the opportunity to build a new layout on a blank slate, the location, width, and demarcation of roads—even when made of sand and delineated by sticks—offer great help. Roads mark zones designated for activities and passageways for tens of millions of pilgrims on main bathing days. I briefly drift back to sandbox city-building at eight years old—rake to clear some land, fingerpaint the roads, repeat.

From a nice dry bluff above the Kumbh Mela floodplain, the tents look regular as can be. An evocative, multi-layered Hindu temple below forbids pictures inside. But the real image lies 20 meters lower, as more than eight kilometers of tent city stretch out.

The Akharas each have a big façade or storefront in the center of their block—some five or six stories high, made of brightly colored canvas or nylon spread over an immense bamboo scaffold. We walk down a little lower.

My curiosity tilts from roads to the holding ponds. Here, waste water filters down into the sand allowing residual “solids” to be extracted and removed. (Each day, groundwater for drinking is pumped up from below that same sand; one hopes 12 years of natural filtration is enough time.)

From here, the tents take on a disorderly resemblance to a blue tarp stretched along a rope. My translator, well-dressed and proper, is openly hesitant as we walk down the bank, trying to wave at children while side-stepping through the slippery muck. We ask a resident, “Who are you and what are you doing here?”—the essence of a lengthier, more delicate set of questions.

They are families of migrant sanitation workers and have traveled here for work, shoveling other people’s poop. After figuring out that our entourage is sympathetic, they ask the videographer for help with a commercial issue (they figure the person with the big camera might advocate for their plea). They want to set up small roadside stands to sell things—something the informal market rules evidently dictate you can’t do here in Sector Four. Out of nowhere, some official types appear and shoo us away. The squatters stay put.

Downtown

Mela’s chaos could not exist without formal systems. But the street layout and infrastructure is inevitably an unspoken compromise between what the government will do, what the organized economy will provide, and where the street economy will fill in. I think about roads, bridges, electricity, buildings and buses; I look at objects more that individuals.

This pop-up city comes with a civic headquarters. Organizers, police, and health centers all set up shop. This zone regulates the Mela grounds, while some more permanent offices assist from nearby (after all, just above the plain, more than three million people live permanently in Allahabad). The main Akharas have land allocated based on number of members and a variety of complicated protocols.

Sporting fancy storefronts, this section feels like a formal downtown, defined by its built environment. To the north, on the other side of the elevated permanent-highway bridge, the grid continues, but the height and density fall off. Fancy storefronts yield to more ramshackle tea shops, cow chip sellers, small goods and supplies vendors. Organizer tents space out amidst this ephemeral iteration of suburbs, becoming fewer and fewer as the waves of tents reverberate away from the central hub. Here, people and their activities define the space around them.

Compared to most cities, the width and forethought of the street layout has inspired a version of control. The Mela found an opportunity to design an intentional institutional zone, while purposefully allowing a casual, entrepreneurial zone to evolve on its own. There is more attention to land allocation, roads, and electricity though—in fact, these seem to be overwhelmingly the largest investments in Kumbh infrastructure.

I can’t resist revisiting basic tenets of finance.Who invests? Who benefits? In most urban areas, the answer to that question is difficult to track since the many stakeholders have contradictory goals. Goals in a legacy city tend towards catchphrases: Clean air. Clean water. Jobs. GDP growth. More corporations. Fewer corporations. Better transit. Better schools. Cheaper electricity. Lower carbon emissions. But the Kumbh Mela is not an ordinary city. The sole objective is easy to articulate: everyone wants a successful, temporary event. The objective is a rewarding pilgrimage for tens of millions. The role of government here is to allocate land, put down roads, provide a lot of electricity, and secondarily to help with water and food. The organizers focus on three things, not on fifty.

Who invests? At the Kumbh, the administrators (funded by the Indian federal government and the Uttar Pradesh state government) lease the land, put down roads, provide electricity, and work (a lot) on security. The Akharas finance and take on physical construction and “content programming” for their devotees. Often, they feed them too.

In the end, it’s a mutually beneficial win. Governments show rare competence and generate economic activity. The Akharas and other religious organizations have a chance to reach their members and to court new ones. And the pilgrims get to walk away from this emotional, sensual, and chaotic experience knowing that they touched something greater than just the largest convergence of human beings.

Convergence

You can see the line in the river today; the Yamuna is black, the Ganga is white. I’m standing up to my hips in the Mother Ganga, dipping and indeed praying with countless others. It’s powerful. There are no thoughts of roads, and there is no financial rubric with which to watch this moment. I’m not sure I was in the water long enough to wash away my five decades of sins—if that indeed is the goal.

This is the essence of the central goal: a successful Mela. We can prioritize spending because the benefit flows to all. Focusing on a few components of a larger opportunity, investing in non-government buildings and services, and, most importantly, declaring a common goal causes everyone to pull together much more than in the usual city.

This temporary metropolis, this pop-up megacity, this dusty, intermittent, messy gathering of humanity, is a success. Compared to what? Compared to any city of a lakh (100,000) or of a crore (10,000,000) of souls with divergent goals and no ability to prioritize spending. Compared to the racial, ethnic, cultural, infrastructural, and economic progress of most cities across India. I kick the sand between my shoes as I walk down the temporary roads and ponder if this noisy, bright, and smelly incarnation of a city is perhaps the most realistic blank slate of a modern day laboratory for an increasingly urbanized humanity.

Photo by Gary Zaremba

Video by Rebecca Byerly for Harvard Business School. Produced by Joanie Tobin/Harvard Business School. © 2013

Set off some fireworks, don a costume, prepare the feast. From revisiting the past to welcoming new beginnings, celebrations are ingrained in every culture. Some remain fixed in traditions centuries-old, while others shift as they spread to new audiences and environments. But the biggest jamborees aren’t spontaneous; it takes serious planning to support large-scale, often unpredictable, carousal. Here, we pull back the curtains, past the revelers and spectators, to reveal the infrastructure that supports a celebratory swell, the boon it brings to a local economy, and the waste it leaves behind.

This time around, we’ve asked for some visual representations of Celebration in the key of Makeshift. We watched Shanghai residents defy orders to blast off fireworks, heard homemade instruments ring in Lent in rural Haiti, and attended the eclectic jazz funerals of New Orleans. We found ourselves blasted by Brazil’s pyrotechnic sound machines and—like many of you—couldn’t help but click on the wide array of impromptu street performances known as the Harlem Shake. So gaze on, and enjoy this celebratory round of Observed!

Belem, Brazil
Vincent Rosenblatt/Agencia Olhares

The “fire eagle” graciously takes off in the middle of the night thanks to its hydraulic system, pyrotechnics, and lasers. Belem’s tecnobrega shows push the limit of sound system technology and host as many as 15,000 revelers.

Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso
Phyllis Galembo

Young Muslim performers don crafty costumes for Dodo, a playful masquerade in Burkina Faso during Ramadan. Phyllis Galembo has been documenting these diverse celebrations for over 25 years.

Shanghai, China
Michele Travierso

Owners and patrons of a wine bar in Shanghai’s former French Concession set off firecrackers on the eve of Chinese New Year. The owner stocked up on 120 kilograms of ordnance following a citywide ban earlier in the year.

Leogane, Haiti
Felipe Jacome

Toting handmade drums and bamboo horns, rara bands come to life during Lent. On foot, the music pulls people into their march for hours, sometimes even days, of walking from party to party with music to share.

Mumbai, India
Shana Dressler

An artist prepares a statue of Ganesh for procession at Ganesh Chaturthi, an elaborate and colorful festival celebrated throughout India. Ganesh is one of the most widely worshipped Hindu deities.

Lagos, Nigeria
Glenna Gordon

Nigerian families offer gifts to guests at weddings, completing the cycle of exchange. In this case, the couple glued their faces to a gallon of Proclean, a dishwashing liquid.

New Orleans, USA
Jerry Moran

At New Orleans jazz funerals, the band is followed by the second line, an open parade. Here, Baby Doll dancers honor musician Uncle Lionel Batiste, keeping the tradition of street events kicking for over a century.

Christmas is always around the corner for the residents of San Fernando. Recognized as the yule capital of the Philippines, the city harbors a cadre of craftsmen whose lineage dates back over a century, to 1908, when Francisco Estanislao first made a giant lantern 10 feet in diameter.

Today, visitors lose themselves in a babel of color emanating from 20-foot Christmas lanterns, called parols, whose lights swirl, wriggle, and twirl, as if buoyed by the jubilant mood of the season. Thousands make the yearly trek 64 kilometers north of the capital city, Manila, to delight in the show of lights. And behind the glow: the impressive craftsmanship of analog light shows.

A giant parol is much like the human body. Like bones and sinew, a steel frame dictates its structure. The spaces within the frame form honeycomblike compartments, which are lined with cardboard and foil.

Within these cavities, as many as ten bulbs of various colors jostle for space, adding up to a minimum of 3,000 in every parol. All bulbs must be cleaned and tested—a seven-week task. Once the bulbs are positioned in their designated compartments, each is wired—another two weeks.

A tangle of electric lines snake from each bulb to converge at the rotor, ending in metal tines that connect to a generator. The parol’s face conceals the wiring, dotted with colorful pieces of paper cut in a mosaic pattern inspired by the traditional batik motif prevalent in southern Philippines.

The rotor is the brain of the parol. Invented by Rodolfo David in 1957, it’s what allows the lantern to dance in endless combinations of light and color. Rotors are large metal cylinders, similar to those found in music boxes. But instead of embossed pinpoints, these rotors have a smooth surface covered in careful patterns of masking tape.

“When they first started using rotors, they just used the gallonsized can of paint for rotors,” said Ernesto Quiwa, a descendant of the pioneer maker, Estanislao; he’s the fourth generation to enter into the family trade. Nowadays, rotors have more in common with 55-gallon metal cans—and the caliber of the show has grown with it.

The magic begins when the finished rotor is cranked. As the tines at the end of each bulb hit strategically cut sections of tape, the circuit is closed. Electricity flows to the bulbs, lighting as many as 50 different patterns that dance to the beat of live music. Different rotors mean new beats and ever-changing patterns.

“The longest a parol operates is 10 minutes,” explains Arnel Flores, a relatively young lantern maker at 41 years old. “Think about it. Each light is 50 watts, and there are 10,000 bulbs on average. That’s a lot of volts, and soon, the parol gets too hot.” As many as ten different rotors are switched out for each performance to ensure cooling.

A parol’s soul undoubtedly lies in the lantern maker. Construction takes about two months and a team of ten. But months before, the concept forms in the mind of the maker. Without computers, he sketches out a complex symmetrical design that takes into account thousands of bulbs.

“While I design, I’m like a crazy person singing,” says Efren Tiodin, a lanky 53-year-old lantern maker who started out building small, commercial lanterns at age 13. “I try to get the light patterns synched to the beat of the music.”

Such single-minded dedication is why San Fernando has become the hotbed of the craft. Each lantern is the pride of one of the nine barrios participating in the city’s yearly Giant Lantern Festival.

“When you say ‘San Fernando’, you immediately think ‘parol’,” says Tiodin. Quiwa adds that giant parols can sometimes be found in other provinces, but the lantern maker inevitably hails from San Fernando.

Like many things in the Philippines, the now-secular festival has its roots in the Spanish-era Catholic practice of lubenas during the when humble two-foot lanterns were then held aloft during street processions the nine straight nights before Christmas. As time went on and electricity was introduced, the lanterns became larger and more grandiose.

The festival is now a more secular affair. The provincial government offers as much as USD 3,000 in subsidies to each barrio, though costs to create a truly magnificent piece can run up to USD 20,000, says Flores. A competition determines the top three entries, which could win up to USD 3,000. The winnings are quickly funneled into the next year’s entry.

The cost is secondary, says Flores. What is more important is the chance to win honor for the barrio. But more pragmatically, the ostentatious display of engineering genius cements San Fernando’s position in the Christmas-lantern-making industry. Lantern makers frequently design large-scale in-store displays for supermarket chains in the Philippines. Orders for smaller lanterns come in from countries like the United States and the United Kingdom.

The skills of lantern makers are so prized that they are often called upon to design similar displays for exhibition abroad. Quiwa has showcased his work at the 1992 world’s fair in Seville, Spain and on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. With so much pride embroiled in the craft, it’s no wonder that competitive spirits run high each year.

As I toured each workshop, the finished parols were shrouded under heavy tarpaulin away from prying eyes. Each lantern maker oh-so-casually peppered me with questions of his own. How far along were the other barrios? What did I think of the other entries? Did they plan to use any new materials?

But after all that, Quiwa dismisses his pointed questions, chalking it up to friendly competition. “Among us lantern makers, who finally wins doesn’t really matter. As long as we all get to participate, it’s like our Christmas is finally complete.”

Photos by Raphael Kalaw