Elaboration of Themes

from 2020_21 DUNDEE YEAR 5 EARTH STUDIO BRIEF

Structure and Staging

SPACE CRUMBLES, IS EXCHANGED (SOLD) IN BITS AND PIECES, INVESTIGATED PIECEMEAL BY THE FRAGMENTED SCIENCES, WHEREAS IT IS FORMED AS A WORLDWIDE AND, EVEN, INTERPLANETARY TOTALITY.”

Henri Lefebvre

“The urban” is a global condition. Statistical data such as 55% of the global population living in cities and the prediction of its continued rise to 75% by 2050 is well know and has been discussed for decades, as has the rise of the hypercity. Thise so called “urban age,” with its trope of continued urban growth - where the city is an engine of economic growth - reveals deep and concerning implications for our inhabitation of the planet.

Manuel Catells opens his book Local & Global with the thought that “ . . . if urbanization is the usual form of spatial settlement for the human species, does it make any sense to contnue to speak of cities? If the trend is for everything to be urban, should we not then shift our mental categories and our management policies towards an approach that differentiates between the various forms of relationship between space and society?”

In The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt examined spatial changes in modern “society,” from her referent of classical Greece arguing that the rise of “mass society” had brought about a loss of distinction between the realms of public (political) and private that so defined the Athenian polis. It had folded them together into a single bureaucratic, organisational “social” realm, of which the modern city was the economic engine. For Arendt, the potency of the polis as a political community was in its limit. The law, she tells us, was “quite literally a wall, without which there might have been an agglomoration of houses, a town (asty), but not a city, a political community.”(63-64) We are reminded that the Greek city-state, “. . . could only achieve freedom in the polis by restricting its numbers. Large numbers of people, on the other hand, “develop an almost irresistible inclination toward despotism . . .” (43)

This idea of limits – of control of a now hegemonic and irreversable urbanisation process – is instantiated in the architectural office Dogma’s projects Stop City and A Simple Heart, both of which delimit space precisely to protect it from the system. In contrast, Archizoom’s No-Stop City (1969), exposes the values of the capitalist city by pushing them to extremes. An “assembly line of social issues, ideology and theory of the metropolis,” in which lies “the idea of the disappearance of architecture within the metropolis.”

“To qualitative utopias, we answer with the only possible utopia: the one of Quantity” Andrea Branzi

Another retranslated Arendtian idea is the consideration of the world as a fabricated human entity. Arendt conceptualises the planet as “the human artifice”:

“The work of our hands, as distisnguished from the labor of our bodies . . . fabricates the sheer unending variety of things whose sum total constitutes the human artifice.”

This argument is echoed by Beatriz Colomina in her book Are We Human?, along with much contemporary “New Materialsist” thinking. Colomina asserts that “[t] archeology of design is not simply about the history of the human animal as revealed in all the layers of artefacts. It uncovers the sedemented ways of reinventing the human.”(10)

“Humans no longer move across a small part of a very thin layer on the skin of the Earth, nomadically foraging for resources as if acting lightly on a vast stage. They now encircle the planet with layer upon layer of technocultural nets, posing an ever-greater threat to their own survival.”(12)

The Politics of Earth

Castells’ doctoral teacher, Henri Lefebvre, wrote his seminal The Production of Space in 1974, arguing that space is “produced.” “Social space” is effectively a “representation of the relations of production” - a subsumation of power, quite literally “planted” in our social field as buildings. This realises a contradiction:

“the principal contradiction is found between globally produced space, on a worldwide scale, and the fragmentation and pulverization that result from capitalist relations of production (private ownership of the means of production and the earth, that is, of space itself). Space crumbles, is exchanged (sold) in bits and pieces, investigated piecemeal by the fragmented sciences, whereas it is formed as a worldwide and, even, interplanetary totality.”(148)

This idea of a “unitary theory” of space as Lefebvre puts it - has been long forgotten in our age of specialisations and disciplinary compartmentalisation. In Douglas Spencer’s words, as architecture has ”sutured itself more securely to the means and methods of the market,” it has retreated into its own box, on its own piece of ground. In his writing on Lefebvre, Nathaniel Coleman describes architecture as “paralysed by its capture.” It can do little more than “reinscribe alienation into the built environment as something of a repetition compulsion. In doing this, architecture largely elaborates on its own cultural irrelevance: characterised by social emptiness, or a general lack of ethical purpose beyond technocratic proficiency, economic reductionism or novel extravagence.”(5) 7

As Cary Siress and Mark Angélil observe in their book Terrestrial Tales, Bruno Latour has raised the urgency of the need for “new stories to make the Earth public, that is to make the state of our planet a matter of concern for all.” (21) Siress and Angélil also cite the work of environmental historian Jason W. Moore in talking of “environment-making” as something that “can no longer be framed by the strictly opposing terms of ‘man’ versus ‘nature’.” They go on to expand Lefebvre’s thesis on the capitalist “production of space”:

“. . . environment-making must be reconsidered as the prime channel for capital in leveling everywhere to the bottom line of a cheap resource to be exploited.” As it stands from this perspective, capitalism does not operate outside of and on nature but through nature to steer the development of socio-technical- ecological systems in accordance with vested interests, implying that the production of space encompasses “the production of nature.”(35)

The eco-capitalist order, as Manuel Castells calls it specialises and instrumentalises broader spatial concerns, especially those which may impede its progress or challenge its interests - the co-option of ‘placemaking’ into renewal and gentrification, for example. “Earth- thinking” now connotes ideas of “environmentalism,” a practice subsumed into ever more sophisticated ways of commodifying, fragmenting and selling the surface of the planet, the air above it and the ground below it.

The “Trap of Localism”

This century, urbanisation has exploded exponentially with the rapid rise of the global economy. Shenzhen, for example, has grown from a small town of 30,000 to a global city 13,000,000 in only thirty years. The global presence of a new super-scale of city has brought contemporary urban theorists such as Neil Smith, Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid to research the sociospatial ramifications of such accelerating globalisation and the now accepted metanarrative of “city as machine for economic growth.” Such research has revealed, perhaps counter-intuitively, that globalisation and its associated cultural imperialism have far from homogenised “the landscapes of everyday life around the world.” 13 Brenner states that “[m]ost critical geographers have stridently rejected such claims, arguing that late modern capitalism has in fact been premised upon an intensification of differences among places, regions, and territories, even as the mobility of capital, commodities, and populations is enhanced.” 14 These global differences - “uneven spatial developments” as they are often referred to - are supported by the tendency toward “localism” in urban research. Such a focus assumes a certain naturalisation of the local scale, often prompted by local activism which stood in opposition to urbanisation, such as that of Jane Jacobs and her followers. Now co-opted into processes of redevelopment under the hegemony of neoliberal economic growth and now often branded as “placemaking”, many contemporary critics now see the promotion of such a local agenda as a tool of the development process. Localism, while often well intentioned, can often lead to a further relinquishing of criticality, ignoring as it does the importance (and history) of multi-scalar and supraurban processes in not only supporting cities, but in realising their potential for social transformation. This has brought about a resurgence of interest in the Lefebvrian idea of urbanisation as a planetary phenomenon, where boundaries are arbitrary; where the “urban” is more of a theoretical category than an empirical object; and where the urban is a condition with no “outside.”

Aims and Key Questions

The studio aims to address Lefebvre’s “contradiction,” daring to imagine a different world in which the now commonly maligned idea of utopia is central. We will imagine a world in which the place of architecture is closer to a planetary-scale social condenser than the instrumentalised role that contemporary architecture performs in the world today. We will not consider architecture as the system wants us to - as fully bound “’objects’ on isolated building plots,” which relate to fragmented “ownership.” This, in fact, compounds the contradiction - as Nathanial Coleman puts it in his writings on Lefebvre, while seeming to “liberate each individual work of architecture and its architect to the significant pleasures of his or her own apparent creativity, . . . barely veils the complicity of such buildings in the fragmentation of the urban environment . . . “ - a fragmentation concomitant with the ongoing, and seemingly unstoppable, atomisation of society.

Can the understanding of spatial imagination as non-specialised - as not respecting the boundaries of interior design, architecture design, urban design, and politics as they have been imposed upon us - allow us to consider “the city” as a political entity, and “the urban” as a theoretical register that allows us to discover new social form? If “the urban” is a whole-earth condition, then surely we must consider it as a totality. Through thinking about the urban on a planetary scale can the conceptualisation of a non city-centric planetary urbanisation offer scope for the design of an equitable habitat without expropriation or enforced consensus?

Can urbanisism contribute to a the idea of a public planet. Can it unite rather than fragment?

“. . . TO TAKE ON EARTH IN MORE RESPONSIVE WAYS IS TO TAKE ON OURSELVES AS STAKEHOLDERS RESPONSIBLE FOR CREATING NEW WAYS OF THINKING AND WORKING THROUGH THE ‘INSIDE’ BY PUTTING THE PRODUCTION OF SPACE AND THE PRODUCTION OF NATURE ON PAR AS EQUALLY POLITICAL AGENDAS.”

Cary Siress and Mark Angélil

Researching ‘Critical’ Projects URBAN SCALE | ‘Critique,’ statement, contestation, affirmation.

In the endeavour to find new social space and form - in researching the relationship between architecture, its grounds, and socio-spatial, socio-political, and socio-economic ideas - it will be vital to analyse urban projects whose intention is one of critique, statement, contestation or the disrupted affirmation of established ideas. Some notable examples are listed opposite. In their own way, all these projects oppose, expose or affirm power structures.