POLITICS OF INFINITY

No-Stop City, Archizoom Associati, 1968-1972

In the past weeks readings, I was struck by the counter intuitive idea that the presence of conflict is essential for the establishment of both true democracy and public spaces.

Pier Aureli starts his book “The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture” by claiming that architecture has been very popular in recent years. However, at the same time, architects have the increasing sense of political powerlessness with their built work. I believe this is related to the fact introduced by Deutsche that in the realm of public art, public space is highly neglected and simply taken as “real”. “To be democratic, one must acknowledge what exists”, says Deutsche, and when people accept the existence of something as naturally being real, the sense that they can change anything is taken for granted. In this scenario, authoritarian ideas are easily infiltrated in society’s believes. 

The precondition of conflict and political engagement is the acknowledgment of differences and the uncertainty about our social order, so it becomes an open question to contestation and debate. However, when did we detach ourselves from social debate and political consciousness? According to Aureli, this took place by the very idea and implementation of urbanization. 

The greek polis had politics incarnated in its existence and thus, embraced the possibility of conflict and the need for its resolution when people coexist. Differently, the roman urbs addresses only the materiality of a city: the agglomeration of houses without any initial political qualification of its inhabitants. As such, urbs describes a generic condition of cohabitation and the infrastructure needed for its function, which was aligned with the expansionist logic of the roman territory. 

The term urbanization was first introduced by Cerda in Barcelona under the paradigm of limitlessness and the complete integration of movement and communication. This condition could not take place in any kind of finite city and therefore cities were to be substituted by urbanization. The endless homogeneous grid implies the avoidance of conflict by balancing class differences through a scientific, technological and economic system.  

“The essence of urbanization is therefore the destruction of any limit, boundary, or form that is not infinite, compulsive repetition of its own reproduction and the consequent totalizing mechanism of control that guarantees this process of infinity”. And in a society where there’s no ultimate goal rather than replication - consumption - people accept their condition as naturally real. 

A good example of project that illustrates the infinity of urbanization is Archizoom’s No- Stop City. Here, the city is imagined with no spacial attribute that represents a traditional city such as landmarks or enclaves. Instead, the homogeneity of  technological integration and infrastructure overtakes any necessity for differentiation, and as a consequence, any social or  political awareness.  

Again, I see myself praising difference. However, I have never realized that one of its main contributions to the evolution of human kind is that of being a conflict generator and therefore a precondition for true democracy.  

GRIDS AND GLOBAL CITIES

We have just returned from our field trip to London. When talking to my friend in London, he told me a joke: “say one sentence to convince people that you have been to London” “what’s that?”, I was curious. “Mind the Gap between the train and the platform”.

Traveling from Manhattan to London makes you realize that you never see a half-meter width gap there. Thinking about it made me realize that it’s partly due to the irregular urban planning. From the maps above, one can see that Manhattan is precisely gridded according to a rectangular coordinate system (pic 2). The underground overlaps with the ground via linear subway trails, revealing the greater efficiency of the grid as a planning system.

Grids are not a contemporary phenomenon. As shown in Pic 1 above, ancient Chinese capital used the grid as a major element in its master plan. It simplified the circulation of people flows, making the centralization system running more efficiently. This urban planing principle in the Forbidden city is called ‘JIUZHOU QINGYAN’, which is based on the ancient eastern philosophy.

Pic 3 and Pic 4 is a comparation of maps of London and Beijing. It is apparent that the urban plan of Beijing nowadays is based on the ancient plan, with the Forbidden city remaining as its center, and expanding outwards in concentric rings. It’s easier for building infrastructures and easier for people who are not familiar with the city to navigate through the streets. 

Grahame Shane mentioned that Manhattan was built to be a metropolitan and a global city in the very beginning. I believe it when I walk its grid.

THE NEW HAPPY MIXED USE NEIGHBORHOOD POTENTIAL ZONE

West Kowloon Cultural District Proposal, Foster + Partners, 2010

Crowded streets, effervescent market, mixed use properties. The general image of a vibrant city is what architects have been pursuing with street-centered designs. Is this the new generic solution?

From the moment planners define "potential areas" on a map, they are assuming that these spaces have no value — or at least a minimum one. So, in this way, abandoned spaces, large public areas, "not yet developed zones" have no meaning for a city?

Usually these parts of the city are used by socially deprived people (prostitutes, homeless people, drug users, rebellious teenagers, gay cruising), but these are also the spaces people go when they just want to have a break from the city, to liberate their minds from the super overwhelming urban environment.

What is the value of these spaces then? Are they economically important for a city the way they are or they'll always be "potential areas" until the first developer comes to set the cornerstone in the site?

THE STREETS BELONG TO THE PEOPLE

Morningside Heights, A Saturday

''In our ever-urbanizing world it is essential to be both idealistic and pragmatic about how we choose to live. If we’re to make our cities healthy, happy and resource-efficient then we must recalibrate the measures used by practitioners to focus more on quality of life: we should invert the space given to  cars for people.'' 

Gehl Architects 

According to research evidence, 80% of the public space in towns consists of roads for vehicles. In the early 90s, a worldwide movement was founded in London called "Re-claim the streets" where people occupied the streets organizing dance festivals or street parties. In that way they made them a free public space available for citizens. They also wished to promote through interaction the neighborhood ­values that are arguably lost in modern mega-cities.  As Henri Lefebvre claimed, public space is a space that everyone has the right to be. Nowadays, this has the form of street markets or other events like the one in Manhattan last Saturday where an inflatable construction for kids, designed to promote playing in the streets, could possibly change the way we represent in our mind the icon of a mega-city. What will be the future of the street? Is it going to remain just a medium for transportation? Or, is it going to be a void in the city occupied by people?

STOP DESIGNING PUBLIC SPACES

Philippe Petit between the WTC, 1974

Please, let's stop designing public spaces.

Space is rare and scarce, it should not be wasted by frivolities.

Public space is an excuse for a good-intended architect to aspire for grandiosity. It is often a space for an artist (Serra?) to promote his (good) will. For a rock and roll band to promote a phone company (you too?). For a hot dog stand to promote the delicacies of local cuisine.

All and all, every public space is dominated by the market. As Freedman said, there's no such a thing as a free lunch. When trying to create a gathering place, a collective-contestation space, we are not designing for riots to have a home, but are forming another location to be occupied by the shopping mall and its variants. 

I suggest we focus on building interfaces. On building walls that are permeable. Fences that allow to be climbed. Windows that could easily break in case of discontentment. By engaging in the discourse of "space-for-all" we are reducing architecture to a marketing campaign. Let's make buildings that support people by it's opposite.
Instead of the void, let's give people the boundaries where they can do what they do best. They will find a way.

THE UN-PUBLIC SPACE

The word “public” is usually attributed to all spaces publicly accessible. No matter its physical conditions, accessibility, freedom of activity, degree of surveillance or even its psychological value, the word “public” is used in a widespread and sometimes irritating manner.  It seems that any further specification between private and public space, any more specific cataloguing is eluded;  it would unveil certain realities that are masked behind the word “public space”.

Today, when reading Richard Sennett on the Lever House I came across with this sentence: “ the street level itself is dead space” . I started thinking in how many “public” spaces in our trip to Moscow and London where in reality “dead” spaces.  Walking along Mokhovaya Street imprisoned by cars in a deserted pathway was not a public space or at least definitely not a public experience. The concourse of the Brunswick Center, just two minutes away from our hostel in London, was equally empty. “Dead” seems a much convenient adjective than “public”. These spaces have lost any independent experiential meaning in themselves; they have become just a function of motion. They are a no man’s land; un-public space indeed.

One realizes how deep architecture and urbanism are interconnected. Richard Rogers Lloyd’s of London is coherent in concept and undoubtedly significant for the architectural discourse, but its radicalism lays on a much precious sacrifice: the killing of the public space. The cores and technical devices concentrated on the lateral façade condemn the street. The unavoidable “bad” façade is not the problem, but the residual space, the left-overs it generates. The Barbican brutalist urban development forgot the disastrous consequences on the street level that implies moving the pedestrian flow in an upper level. Back to New York, the vertiginous real-estate market of the skyscrapers resulted in private-owned –public spaces whose surveillance and even accessibility casts serious doubts about their “public” character. All these spaces (and this is just the beginning of an endless list) are usually and unfairly called “public spaces”.

Design public space in the interface between building and street is one of the most difficult issues that architects, obsessed with the building design, often forget. A cataloguing of the different kind of public spaces would help to draw the attention on which kind of public space any building really generates. Adding a suffix might be enough: dis- for spaces which are not accessible to disabled people, un- for spaces lacking of experiential meaning, over- where one’s over-visibility to others leads to isolation, etc…Under the mask of “public space” we might be surprised on how many acclaimed projects are surrounded by mis/dis/over/un-public spaces.

IDENTITY IN THE GLOBAL WORLD

JR Inside Out Project in London, 2013

In the panel discussion (in)Fluence at Strelka, Markus Dochantschi pointed out a possible scenario where people would have their identity build upon the cities they choose to live instead of the places where they are born. An identity one chooses for him/herself. No matter where your were born and what are your beliefs, culture and values, you can still be a new yorker, a londoner, a moscovite.   

This dialogs with what Ricky Burdett answered when asked about the topic: the multiplicities of cultures existing in London transforms the identity of the city, and therefore architecture and urban planning should contribute to the establishment of a british culture that absorbs all other references, not as something apart from them (which would be the generator of social exclusion and ghettos).   

Global cities are about an addition of identities rather than a generalization or homogenization of them. 

THE QUESTION OF PUBLIC SPACE AND IDENTITY

Russian Pavilion 2014 Venice Biennale

In 1958 Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition wrote “what makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people […] but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them.”

The last two weeks in Moscow and London, talks of designing spaces reflecting identity and generating interaction had been a recurring theme. In Moscow, architects voiced their concern on lacking or losing a once prominent architectural language that marked Russian Identity whether it was during the Soviet Era or Post Soviet Era specifically before Putin’s rise to power. In London, developers strove to build spaces that are inclusive to all the diverse ethnic communities, and local architectural firms were so keen on showing their proposals of public spaces (David Adjaye’s Idea Store in London, and Amanda Levete’s EDP Foundation in Lisbon). Interestingly, the Russian Pavilion for this year’s Venice Biennale replicating an international trade fair is an ideal model that reflects the struggles of today’s architectural world. With globalization and the influx of people migrating to all corners of the world, how do you define an individual’s identity, let alone a country’s architectural identity? And how do you design a space that is ‘inclusive’ for ‘everyone’? When claiming it is for ‘everyone’ who is within this scope? The British, the Bengalis, the Hasidic Jews and many other communities have very specific notions of public space. Is architecture capable of addressing these perceptions? Hannah Arendt called for the revival of the public realm which according to her is synonymous with political discourse, a space of contestation that eventually leads to an understanding. Interestingly, blogs, forums and other forms of online networks in virtual space have been more successful in providing a platform for political discourse than public spaces. Perhaps as architects we should strive to design spaces that generate friction to spark discourse rather than smooth spaces that pacify an existing system. 

ARCHITECTURE FOR THE MASSES

George Steinmetz, Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn

While departing New York's JFK Airport, the anxiety to see Moscow from the airplane window grew. I was curious to see those massive residential areas all covered with very similar buildings — a supposed materialization of the communist system where everyone would have the same living conditions.

It was a moment of distraction of what was just in front of me in the plane's window: Brooklyn's massive residential areas all covered with identical buildings. Despite the political/social system, both cities where the materialization of the same treatment towards people seen as masses. The individuality plays a very little role, sometimes even insignificant, in the middle of the repetition of typologies.

This issue resembles Rem Koolhaas' Generic City, but applied in a local scale: among suburbs, they are all suburbs, not much different from each other. And as most parts of contemporary metropolises today are covered with suburbs, maybe it's important to keep this issue in today's architecture agenda. However, to know what architects can do and how far they can go, we first have to address another question: Is the city really a living organism where, in an ideal "state of anarchy", people would appropriate space and transform it according to their own needs?

HOW POLITICAL IS A TYPE?

Torre David - Caracas, Venezuela. Photo: Iwan Baan

How political can a typology be? Can typology of cities or buildings, their strictly formal attributes have an impact on the politics of space? I question myself that, trying to understand on a deeper level if architecture has (allegedly) the power to change society. The tower type is a socialist model: concentration, standardization and the free-space around were made possible by the increase of density. It is socialist by means of the idea of sharing (functions, spaces) but it has been translated literally to the capitalist realm (why do architects rely on copy-pasting of images!?).

Is it working? Is the tower-type successful in its capitalist state? Or is it possible to come to an adaptation that transforms the capitalist aspects of society in assets for the architecture? The same can be seen in the urban morphologies. Linear city, grid city, green belt, de-urbanization.  We often discuss those terms but we are not really going deep into the political/economical aspects of them as formal-entities. How can a linear-city type behave? Is it as straightforward as a Ford-production-line? 

I feel that when copying types we tend to forget their implications, or to question their validities. Today's post is not about answers, but about questions. Architecture should do the same, to question.

THE PROPHYLAXIS OF THE CITY

Konstantin Melnikov, ‘Green City’, 1930

In [SA] n.1/2, 1930, Barsch and Ginzburg wrote:
 “When a man becomes sick, he can be cured with adequate medicines. It would however be more productive and less expensive to avoid illness manifesting itself. Just in this consists the socialist medicine: prophylaxis. When the city is ugly, when namely it is what it is, with all its attributes: noise, dust, lack of light, air sun, etc., we draw on medicines: homes and villas in the country, health resorts, rest homes, green cities. All this is medicine, a medicine which is necessary when a city exists, which we cannot avoid. But we cannot close our eyes in front of this double system of poison and antidote, which is the classical capitalist system of contradictions.  This system must be contrasted by the socialist system of prophylaxis, the system of the elimination of the city, with all its specific attributes, promoting a settlement sodality of man able to solve the problems of work, of rest, of his culture, as a whole and uninterrupted process of socialist being.” 

During the socialism in the Soviet Union many utopian ideas for the city planning had been proposed. These ideas were to reproduce the revolutionary society of Soviet Union which was totally different from the capitalism city planning.

One of these proposals was the idea of ‘disurbanism’, the design of a dispersed city  between urban and rural life. The architects designed modular buildings distributed along infrastructural viability axes determined by the location of productive facilities.  Mikhail Barsch and Moisei Ginzburg on 1930 proposed the transfer of public enterprises into external locations, the transformation of the freed-up spaces into parks and the dispersion of Moscow citizens along the roads, linking the city with the rural population. Along the different proposals for Moscow another one was Konstantin Melnikov’. He designed a new radical system for Moscow where electric trains could distribute the workers along the city. He also designed a laboratory of sleep where workers could rest from their daily labor. According to his beliefs sleep was the most important part of regeneration of workers and he proposed to redesign the city according to that idea.

How would the center of Moscow look if the above Utopia would become a reality? As the years pass political and socioeconomic changes occur. However, the major problem associated with the residence of the growing number of citizens remain. How are we going rebuild our cities in order to create a better place for living? How are we going to decongest the city centers from millions of people that reside in them?