Barcelona's Interstices - essay #3

#3

essay #3 interstice as shifting space

interstice as shifting space

essay #3

Moving from the strongly phenomenological interest so far represented, this essay works towards the unraveling of the diverse ontological conditions which affect the urban interstices of Barcelona. It does so weaving together a series of contributions which highlight different and contradictory positions: are these spaces abandoned? are they victims or emissaries of dominant power logics? are they spaces of resistance and opposition? It is argued here that such stances provide only partial insights, therefore a personal tentative contribution will be made in order to attach another hue to these highly layered spaces which demand a decisively open approach to research. introduction: from phenomenology to representations We are now ready to plunge into an analysis of the urban spaces showcased in the audiovisual work which weaves these texts together. In fact, exploring the city from an “on the ground� perspective, through a sensorial, participatory and feeling-oriented approach has given us the possibility to gather these spaces under one important phenomenological label: they seem abandoned but they are not, indeed they are populated by subtle forms of life which are displayed in diverse manners.

However correct, truthful and useful (as discussed in #2), we conceive phenomenology as both a starting point and a constant reminder, but not the only category guiding our work. If our aim is to scavenge into processes and mechanisms besides facts and episodes, we ought to grasp ontological conditions as well.

In order to do so, we start to move from our own perceptions to others’ representations, unraveling a quite ample debate which tries to cover such interstitial spaces in the urban environment. The leap we are going to make is actually a step, since our phenomenological condition of ambivalence reflects in this debate as well: some authors imagine these spaces as abandoned and in need of some form of intervention, while others underline the strong forms of life, activity and resistance which populate such interstices.

We will try to move carefully between these positions, aiming at weaving them together through a set of intermediate, multifaceted contributions, in order to demonstrate that these spaces are not simply neither black nor white, but a constantly changing melange of these two. dreaming a tabula rasa?

Empty spaces, especially the ones which can 71

Dissected terrain vagues: Lara Almarcegui, Spanish Pavilion at Venice Art Biennale 2013.

be located in an urban context (however stretched, liquid and uncertain such taxonomy might be), have gained a quite significant role in planning and architectural practice during the last thirty years. Today, despite the world urbanisation is constantly advancing (Véron, 2006), the front edge of urbanism and architectural design appears to lie in so-called urban renewal, meaning direct architectural intervention on the already built, existing urban fabric. Whole urban sections need to be reworked for varied reasons: they might be polluted due to former industrial activity; they might be abandoned, for the function that used to inhabit them has now disappeared; they might be decaying due to age or they simply contain undesired practices, populations or social groups. Basically, these areas of intervention present some kind of obsolescence. This trend clearly follows the change kickstarted by deindustrialisation phenomena in the Western world, which left behind vast built assets symbolising the disappearance of a function, together with a renewed interest on cities and with a genuinely post-modern fascination with industrial ruins and “post-s” in general terms.

To give an idea of the fascination with these abandoned landscapes, it is sufficient to note how successful Gilles Clement’s Manifeste pour le Tiers paysage (2004) has been, scattered here and there among discussions on urban renewal and project memories.

Being a fashionable motto it has been introduced in order to justify quite a number of designs which intend to operatively deal with (i.e. solve) situations of abandonment. essay #3

This has made it deeply misunderstood, as it implies notions indifference and abandonment itself for the survival of this specific landscape: it is a manifesto for this landscape as a biological resource, not towards it in a nostalgically poetic but operatively impossible fashion. It is a hymn to conservation and not to planning.

It seems in fact that, in absolute contrast with such fascination with the abandoned, architects cannot afford to resist a strange sort of horror vacui. Facing this landscape they immediately visualise a possibility, as they project their images over that seemingly blank surface. Surface that they will at best consider as a mere figurative reference, a texture or a feeble inspiration for their designs’ layout. I believe that this ambivalent position, divided between inspired contemplation of existing conditions and inevitable action towards their change, has led to a few misunderstandings towards these spaces. These are clearly exemplified

by Solà-Morales’s statements in his famous Terrain vague (1995): “They are, finally, external places, strange ones, that lay outside networks and production cycles”; “[they] have transformed themselves into areas where the city can’t be found anymore” and “They turned into simply uninhabited, unsafe, unproductive areas” (p. 127).

Apart from the oddity of considering any space as “dead”, aspect on which we will focus in the next paragraph, it is evident how the approach underlying the terrain vague conceptualisation is deeply instrumental.

Despite arguing for an “attentive listening to the flows, energies and rhythms” (p. 130), 73

harshly contrasting with the aforementioned theorisations of space, the author recognises the problem of architectural intervention in these spaces referring to the act of colonisation. This has been thoroughly developed by Van Dijk and Geuze (1996) as they argue the coincidence of the void and colonialist phenomena throughout history.

On a more conceptual level, this role of empty, or better emptied, space as a primer for colonisation is described by philosopher and post-colonial scholar Homi K. Bhabha: “For the emergence of modernity - as an ideology of beginning, modernity as the new - the template of this ‘non-place’ becomes the colonial space. It signifies this in a double way. The colonial space is the terra incognita or the terra nulla, the empty or wasted land whose history has to be begun” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 246).

Quite luckily, however, form does not always succeed in controlling space (Pope, 1997): these spaces sometimes escape formal conditions to which they are planned to be subjected: “As proposed many times, from Garden Cities of Tomorrow, to The New City, to Learning from Las Vegas, to S,M,L,XL, it is not built form which characterizes the contemporary city, but the immense spaces over which built form has little or no control. These spaces, which overwhelm the architectural gesture, ultimately dominate the contemporary environment” (Pope, 1997, pp. 3-4) 74

Space is primary over form, and this already casts some light (or shadow) over our practice as architects dealing with form in order to work with space; this issue will be however discussed later.

In a similar fashion, that is exploring different spatial dimensions rather than built form, Kociatkiewicz & Kostera (1999) shift the concept of emptiness to the realm of feelings through the practice of a rather perceptional, sentimental and moody anthropology directed towards such “empty” spaces. In their contribution, they ascribe emptiness to the lack of meaning associated with those examined spaces. Which meaning, anyway?

Attributed by whom? How expressed and when? Arguably, this shift towards the multiple spatial dimensions allows for a more attentive and wide gaze revealing a much more lively, complex and complicated panorama. discovering a lively ecology The qualitative fieldwork I have developed in Barcelona will be my main argument in challenging the vision that I have outlined in the previous paragraph: such audiovisual material clearly demonstrates the reason why expressions as “empty”, “derelict”, “blank” or “dead” have been so far expressed in inverted commas.

If the photographs, intentionally, do not directly portrait any evident or clearly visible form of life, still they communicate the elements that sustain them and the signs they come to mark on space through their action.

Nonetheless, as far as the auditive dimension

Barcelona’s interstices: opening up architectural practice

is concerned, the presence of life is evident even though subtle. Human dwellers, nesting birds, flowering plants, construction sites, temporary uses, artistic interventions: all of these activities constitute life portrayed in its diversity supported by or enacted in supposedly dead spaces.

Gil Doron (2000) seems to achieve similar conclusions through his investigations over the Dead Zone; notably, he employs expressions like “look” and “appear” in his tentative definition of this family of scattered places: “In short, places that look empty, and appear as ones which do not have any use” (p. 247). These two words specifically regard the domain of view intended as the ability to see, which is the main tool used, for example, by cartographers who build maps and, therefore are responsible for creating a supposed knowledge of space.

Already, such contributions underline and ground what has been argued in the previous essay: the way we look at (or even touch, listen to, feel) reality deeply influences our reading and understanding of space and its wider connections. Specific gains and losses correspond, as always, to every point of view: a distant and rather uncompromising position, iconically sketched in the previous section as the architects’ one, might lead to the bypassing of salient characteristics of space which come to escape traditional means of inquiry and knowledge. On the contrary, a point of view which we can consider as close does seem to offer the possibility of exploring and recognising the finely grained, often rarefied, quite and modest life that actually is strong in populating these spaces. essay #3

fragments in a global context Nonetheless, as the researcher navigates between these places and dives into space through a close gaze, he might literally overlook a contextual point of view. Evidently, these interstices not only make sense thanks to the practices enacted inside their boundaries, but they form a large relational network connected to other spaces, subjects and phenomena. Reason why a more aerial point of view is, both practically and theoretically, a necessary integration to our inquiry.

Neo-marxist scholars have explained their point of view on interstitial spaces analysing their role in the functioning of the capitalist machine. This structuralist approach has, in my opinion, increasingly become significant as dominant power has succeeded in transforming cities across the world in market products: on one side, they are investment sites from which investors expect an economic upturn, while on the other they are marketing products (Benach, 2010), self-advertising a consumerist urban experience based on the deliberate usage of iconic spaces, lifestyles, habits and objects.

Let’s get back to our interstices: if we zoom out and observe the whole city of Barcelona from this position, it is impossible not to notice how it has strived to gain this role in the last decades, continuously reinventing itself through the imagination of the ultimate urban attraction. The city has washed itself, put its make up on and communicated to the world its attractiveness for both foreign entrepreneurs and the touristic global class.

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So, which role might a derelict, abandoned and shoddy urban landscape have in the “glossy Barcelona” and its global parallel cases? From a general theoretical point of view, Harvey (2010) has portrayed as spaces of reserve those which compose this very landscape. In a context of capitalist urban growth in fact, they are the physical spaces used by capital both to impress new designs and to absorb the produced surplus. In this sense, the abandonment and un-planning of space is fundamental to the survival of this growth machine, since new investments are always required and surplus is always produced. In a parallel way, Neil Smith (1979) underlines the role of capital devaluation in the built environment, since “the physical deterioration and economic depreciation of inner-city neighbourhoods is a strictly logical, ‘rational’ outcome of the operation of the land and housing market” (p.543). This results in phenomena of decline, acting as a primer for a rather wellknown kind of colonisation of space which is gentrification, increasingly possible through the growth of the rent gap: when land is sufficiently devalued profits deriving from an investment on that land are maximised.

In this sense, it is clear how dereliction in the urban interstice is not only created but also “maintained for speculative reasons, therefore it cannot be conceived as waste” (Doron, 2008, p. 204). If we, as observers, increase the distance that separates us from these scattered interstices in order to gather them under a single glance, we understand that what we used to conceive as waste from a phenomenological point of view is kept 76

alike just to be transformed into a resource (Gretel Thomasz, 2008). Such capitalist approach to the built environment, devoted to extracting profit out of space, does not seem to be primarily focused on the wellbeing of urban dwellers and, actually, can have severe consequences over them: this subject will be consistently treated in the next essay. unstable Heterotopias In the meanwhile I might open a few spaces of hope (Harvey, 2000): it seems to me that reality is so complex, fluid and contradictory above all that we must resist at drawing conclusions exclusively considering the formerly exposed positions: are these spaces abandoned? Obviously not. Are such spaces markers and victims of an orchestrated obscure project of global speculation? Not only. Urban interstices certainly include the aforementioned mechanisms of formation and exploitation, but the much quoted Foucaldian belief that “there is no power without resistance” might enlighten the other side of the coin. Domination is not always univocal and efficient.

However, believing in opposing tendencies does not mean reading reality by oppositions: empty/full, abandoned/in use, mainstream/ alternative are extremely fixed categories which firstly don’t take into account the action of time and human agency and secondly deny any superposition between the two.

Not so surprisingly, the urban interstice is, by being informally used and non-regulated in practice, a space of continuous reinvention

Barcelona’s interstices: opening up architectural practice

Vincent J. Stoker, Hétérotopie #TAEPI, from the series La Chute Tragique.

and possibility: in their account over empty spaces in Barcelona, Nuria Benach and Rosa Tello (Benach & Tello, 2014) shows how spaces intentionally denied for speculative reasons simultaneously become spaces of resistance to this very same logic. Such spaces are in fact both spaces of reserve in the sense that Harvey and Smith have highlighted and spaces which are functional as fertile humus for renovation, being therefore subject to dominant power. Taking however as an example the Raval area, which had undergone progressive swells of urban renovation, they point out how these spaces have been appropriated by the population through both ephemeral and long-lasting actions, allowing it to reaffirm neighbourhood relationships and ties. The same interstices which were primed and ready for gentrification became, some briefly while other in a more durable fashion, spaces of communitarian action and meaning.

Simultaneity, intersection and superposition are probably much more valuable concepts in dealing with and understanding space, much more than fixed opposition that tend to simplify a reality which is not simple. This approach is probably what has led Michel Foucault to theorise his famous notion of Heterotopia, which has never been thoroughly developed by the author into an exact science, but has nonetheless gained quite a success among the most varied disciplines. In fact, in his introduction to a speech given to architects in 1967 published only seventeen years later (Foucault, 1984) he discusses the need to overcome dualisms as a central issue in our approach to space.

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He argues that if a theoretical advance had been pushed by Galileo’s discovery of an infinite space, nonetheless we are still captured by a so called medieval conception of such space, strongly hierarchical and based on formal and ideal oppositions: “we may still not have reached the point of a practical desanctification of space” (Foucault, 1984). Heterotopias are the spatial concept which challenges and tries to overcome this separation.

Since scholars have already examined the whole possible taxonomy and applicability of this notion (Sohn, 2008), and the complex relationship between the so-called Dead Zone (see Doron, 2000) and heterotopia has been established elsewhere (Doron, 2008), I might focus my analysis on the aspects that make the two collimate, lacking completeness but highlighting an instrumental use of this concept for a hopefully performing geographical description of the researched space.

The three aspects I am highlighting lay in Foucault’s very first paragraph introducing heterotopia: “There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places […] which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.

Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites

Barcelona’s interstices: opening up architectural practice

that they reflect and speak about, I shall call

one step back: spaces of recharge

them [‌] heterotopias� (Foucault, 1984, pp. 3-4)

Firstly: heterotopias represent all the other real sites. As has been argued before, these spaces can be interpreted as a key element for reading wider dynamics concerning the constitution, managing and transformation of urban space. Secondly: at the same time heterotopias contest and invert all the other real spaces. This means they are spaces of resistance, of reinvention, of diversity.

Avoiding any plan, they can be perceived as free spaces in legal or behavioural terms, as places where to act behind the dominant social boundaries, continuously challenging them. Artistic interventions, squatting, gathering for discussions but also growing plants are some the practical examples of these processes that I have found in Barcelona. Thirdly: they are characterised by these aspects simultaneously. This notion of simultaneity specifically underlines the contradictory and fluid nature of these spaces.

Focusing on these three congruences allows me to attempt a heterotopology of the urban interstice. This means, from my point of view, stressing the unstable nature of urban space in general, and especially of urban space without a planned programme: this key conception reinforces the interpretation of urban interstices as spaces of opportunity, meaning spaces that, being somehow interconnected, contradictory and shifting, allow for a practical re-imagination of the urban environment. essay #3

Despite agreeing with the debates unraveled so far, I believe it is necessary to make an effort to add my contribution to this extensive debate, as something seems to be missing at this point. Before heading to the conclusion of this essay, I want to highlight how some conditions encountered during my fieldwork in Barcelona actually seem to escape, at least partially or temporarily, all of the previously exposed cases. Such examples might ground empirically my personal hypothesis, that is the understanding of these interstices as, again partially or temporarily, spaces of recharge. Let it be clear: this characterisation is not meant to substitute the previous ones, but rather to add another hue, another layer to these complex and incredibly lively spaces.

Let’s consider as an example the frequently encountered populations of stray cats that inhabit, mark and cross the explored territories. Indeed they are there, so they invalidate the abandoned condition of the space they mark; however, they are not there for any political resistance, of course, neither do they act as emissaries of dominant power structures. They escape every one of the above frames. Quite simply, they are.

They live there, build their dens, reproduce themselves and constitute social groups.

Let me defend the idea that the example of these stray cats is not irrelevant: as Latour1 has so thoroughly taught us, we live in a complex mecanosphere, gathering together human beings, animals, plants and objects through an intimate and lively interconnection. On a more empirical level, it is sufficient to 79

observe the phenomenological conditions of their inhabitance to note how quite a number of human lives revolve around these cats, might it be to support them or to contrast their presence.

Returning to my personal hypothesis, it seems to me that these spaces simply allow life to take shape. If this is banal, that is exactly the point. Such practices are not enacted for any specific reason, with any specific aim (or at least one we cannot grasp) or intention: they simply happen, and they happen there because they can.

Anyway, I recognise this example to be quite unconventional and maybe slightly borderline, although these reflections become more evident when staring at so-called natural world. Let me however proceed with another one, this time related to the human realm which we are naturally more comfortable with.

While in Barcelona, I have spent some weeks helping some people who were running a squat garden where they would grow vegetables and ornamental plants on a formerly vacant lot. While my presence there was primarily due to this research but then became of personal interest and deep ethnographic inquiry on this space was not programmed nor practiced, one thing that intrigued me was the highly heterogeneity of the group composed by those who frequented the garden. Everybody would imagine these people as resolute activists practicing their droit à la ville, building alternatives to mainstream urbanism or acting for the neighbourhood’s community. However, I was quite surprised to acknowledge how some 80

of these people actually came there just to use their muscles for an hour or so, some others because they loved nature and plants.

Others again were there just to have a chat, may it be one afternoon long or just a few minutes. Basically, some people were there just to be, or at best to do. In such spaces of recharge, life appears to take shape, to flourish as it is and to pass away with the same speed. conclusion: highly layered spaces The above discussion is meant to unravel and underline the high degree of complexity of interstitial spaces in Barcelona, their heterogeneity across space and most of all their instability over time. For these reasons, dealing with it in an inquisitive intention in a schematic, dogmatic and orthodox way involves the risk of omitting quite a selection of hues, possibly resulting in constraining and paralysing interpretations. The multifaceted nature of the unraveled debate and the above reflections seem to validate our research method based on the assemblage of methodological hybrids.

Furthermore, we have called into question a few issues which can be glimpsed at across this text, such as the role of capitalist production in the formation of the built environment, the intentional use of dereliction, socially regressive issues, alternative urbanisms and unconscious practices. In fact, these spaces seem to have the power to recall quite general phenomena which come to affect not only such spaces but rather cities in general.

This will be the subject of the following essay,

Barcelona’s interstices: opening up architectural practice

forcing us to leave Barcelona in order to migrate to a more general, abstract however still urban level.

Endnotes 1

see Bruno Latour’s work Paris: Ville Invisible

available through his website.

essay #3

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This essay is part of a series of five, which together form the research work entitled: Barcelona’s interstices: opening up architectural practice. Essay #1 – Opens questions: observing design through geography works as an introduction; essay #2 – Dealing with the urban: theory, method, tools discusses the theoretical and methodological framework employed in this work; essay #3 – Interstice as shifting space unravels possible debates over complexity, instabilty and layering towards urban space; essay #4 – Challenges at every scale: from economics to politics explores key theoretical questions regarding the formation of contemporary urban space; essay #5 – Personal practice: immediate reflections on future paths concludes this work exploring directions for future architectural practice.

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Doron, G. M. (2000). The Dead Zone and the Architecture of Transgression. City, 4(2), 247–263.

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Smith, N. (1979). Toward a Theory of Gentrification A Back to the City Movement by Capital, not People. Journal of the American Planning Association, 45(4), 538–548.

Sohn, H. (2008). Heterotopia: anamnesis of a medical term. In Heterotopia and the city (pp.

41-50). London: Routledge.

Solà-Morales, I. de. (1995). Terrain Vague. In Anyplace (pp. 123–133). New York/ Cambridge: Anyone Corporation/The MIT Press. van Dijk, H., & Geuze, A. (1996). Colonizing the Void, The landscape as an ally. Rotterdam: NAI Publishers.

Véron, J. (2006). L’urbanisation du monde. Paris: La Découverte. webography www.bruno-latour.fr