2019/20 STUDIO A: HOUSING FUTURES The Paradox of the Specious City

U N I V E R S I T Y O F D U N D E E / TO N G J I U N I V E R S I T Y, S H A N G H A I A RC H I T E C T U R E 2 019 / 2 0 | H O N O U R S S T U D I O B R I E F

‘ O T H E R W I S E ’ Studio A | HOUSING FUTURES : The Paradox of the Specious City

Contents

“Young architects need to realise that this is a profession that has long contained untapped potential to promote radical forms of social change. As Henri Lefebvre recognized, unless you transform spatial organization, no revolution can ever be possible . . . Surely architects and designers can and must contribute to envisioning a very different form of the built environment, at every spatial scale, based on social needs, democratic empowerment and social justice rather than the unfettered rule of the commodity form.�

N. Brenner, Designing out of the Crisis, Fulcrum Issue 65, 2013: Neoliberalisation, London, Bedford Press, 2013.

1

1

Photo: Mike Hedge. From onebigphoto.com / pinterest.co.uk

Studio Introduction 2 Studio Contexts 3 Studio Questions

4 Studio Fields 6 Studio Research 8 Studio Assignments 26 Studio Lectures & Texts 38 Contexts: Housing 40 Contexts: Piketty 42 Contexts: Arendt 43 Contexts: London 44 Timetable 46

STUDIO INTRODUCTION

The collaborative studio forms part of the Year 4 M.Arch programmes of University of Dundee, Scotland, UK, and Tongji University, Shanghai, China. Its basis as design research allows students in both cohorts to collaborate on a set of crucial issues which bring to the surface fundamental questions of global housing inequalities, conflicts and crises.

In this age, the disciplinary role of architecture is continually questioned, tested and contested.

Does architecture still hold any socially transformative potential, or is its role one of market conciliation? In the late 1960s, the critic and historian Manfredo Tafuri said: “when the role of a discipline seeks to exist, to try to stop the course of things is only regressive Utopia, and of the worst kind.”1.

This studio seizes the opportunity to recognise the role of architectural design as a key part of the process of advancing social change and finding social justice. The collaboration will allow shared perspectives between East and West on what is now unquestionably an urgent and common crisis. Using Shanghai’s Old Town as its field, the studio’s operational method will be framed by global questions, while providing a real-world test of the tensions faced in urban renewal and the contemporary housing landscape.

Photo: Andy Stoane

1 Manfredo Tafuri, Barbera Luigia La Penta (Translator), Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1976), Preface, ix-x.

2

STUDIO

CONTEXTS

Such discourse must of course engage issues far broader than the design of buildings.

Through research into housing areas into one of the biggest and fastest growing cities in the world, the studio will illuminate, in a specific field, the perennial challenges of mass housing in the twenty-first century. More specifically, through design projects, it will tackle directly the difficulty of operating within established orders of cities - of urban renewal. While of course always architectural in nature, the operational studio work will be contained within three broad contexts: economic, politico-economic, and socio-tectonic. Each one is brought into focus through recommended texts or case / field studies (upon which students will expand).

Summaries of these contexts are included in this document.

Economics through Thomas Piketty’s 2014 book, Capital, which discusses how the rise of the importance of housing markets to national wealth is part of an economic thesis bringing about exponentially increasing global inequalities.

Polito-economics through Hannah Arendt’s 1958 classic book, The Human Condition, where she discusses the introspection of modernity and how it promotes conditions antithetical to the collective life of the city – what she sees as the field of ‘action’.

Socio-tectonic through the simultaneous study of two distinct housing types - the housing ‘mat’, which allows a continuity of a social field through architecture and space, and seminal modernist housing projects from an age where public housing provision - and innovation in type and form - were an important tool in transforming our politico-economic landscape.

Operating across disciplinary boundaries in this way, the unit aims to glean critical intelligence which can be used to make realistic propositions built around speculations on more equitable social futures.

3

STUDIO QUESTIONS “What makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people involved, . . . but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them together.”1 In the sixty years since Hannah Arendt discussed ideas of societal introspection in The Human Condition, her “mass society” has more than doubled in population. As we find ourselves living in ever-closer proximity, the conditions she prophesised as antithetical to collective life appear very familiar.

These conditions are acutely recognisable in Shanghai, its extreme and exponential growth continually displacing and dispersing long established communities bound together socially over centuries. With this process, the very idea of a collective city life begins to disappear.

Set against an exponentially growing world population and its continued gravitation to urban areas, through examining London, as a historic model of extreme growth, and Shanghai, as a current growth pre-eminent, the studio aims to question two things: the possibility of equitable solutions to housing inequalities in our global cities; and the possibility of radical architectural solutions which might mediate such a change and promote conditions for collective life.

The remaining fabric of the Old Town, visible amidst the towers.

Photo: Andy Stoane

1

H. Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1958.

4

In his book Capital, Thomas Piketty illuminates the rising inequalities over the past fifty years within western economies. He identifies the even more rapidly rising inequalities experienced in China since the liberalisation of the economy in the late 1980s. The upper centile’s share of national income, he tells us, is now almost equivalent to that of the UK. The hegemony of neoliberal economics now sets social challenges to which we must react on a global scale, not least in attitudes to housing our population. In the UK we have been warned of “increasing problems of homelessness, affordability and social division, decline in standards of public service delivery”1 and “indefensible economic distortions.”2 Our inability to effectively and equitably house our population is one of the biggest issues of our time and is recognised as a global crisis - yet questions of mass housing seem to have fallen off the radar for the discipline of architecture.

Must architecture’s position be one of complete capitulation to the market or can we regain a critical perspective?

Might there be alternate modes of engagement, where new solutions can promote ideas for collective life - for housing all of our population - and for helping avoid both social failure and economic distortion?

In thirty years Shanghai’s population has grown from 13 million to over 26 million. Housing unaffordability is reaching the level of global cities such as London and New York and established communities within its historic centre are continually under threat as escalating land values attract capital investment projects on their sites.

Arendt’s social introspection is continually played out in this cycle of socio-economic displacement.

Life in Shanghai’s Old Town.

Photos: Andy Stoane.

The studio will question how new architectures might intervene, avoiding erasure and displacement, yet enabling the densities and qualities necessary to deal with levels of current and future growth. The studio will seek to imagine outputs that are future-orientated, nonconciliatory and which specifically address the potential for the discipline of architecture to rediscover socio-political efficacy. We will propose radical solutions to new forms of urban housing and its associated programmes. Solutions which are socially equitable and environmentally 2 3

The Barker Review of Housing Supply. (2006) HMSO. Barker, Kate. (2014) Housing: Where’s the Plan?, London Publishing Partnership.

5

F I E L D S

S T U D I O The Mutative City: Readings,Totality and Fragments

Cities are continually mutating, necessarily adjusting to the political and economic processes that absorb themselves into their morphology. Growth tends to be absorbed in two ways: horizontal spread (inc satellite towns) or densification of centres, while any retrenchment tends to involve catastrophic processes of abandonment and neglect.

Our field city, Shanghai, has experienced the most extreme change in the past thirty years. Processes of globalisation and market liberalisation have caused it to grow at a rate inconceivable in Europe. First, its population has doubled from 13 million to 26 million. This has caused Shanghai to absorb growth in numerous ways. Geographically, it has expanded horizontally to now cover over 6000sqkm, with travel from outer edge to centre often approaching two hours, even by metro. Since 2001, a comprehensive plan involving several simultaneous expansion strategies has been in operation to deal with the planned growth. Broadly, this has involved: the creation of 9 satellite cities; the urbanisation of suburbs; the urban renewal of the centre; the waterfront redevelopment plan.

The Paradox of Horizontal Spread There is a paradox in the pattern of the staggering growth of hypercities such as Shanghai. As they spread outward and become more populous, there is an exponentially growing inverse relationship between the temporal duration represented by each ring of growth and the area that these rings cover.

Growth rings of increasing area and decreasing temporal duration. From University of Dundee Year 5 Project: Cube.: Wang Lei, Qiaoyi Wu, Chao Wei, Changda Guo, Shuo Cheng, Jinghui Chen

6

From the study opposite, carried out by Year 5 University of Dundee students in 2018, the Old Town core (red) represents approximately 500 years of time. The outermost ring (pale yellow) represents only around 30 years of time, yet its area is hundreds of times greater than the core. While the continued trajectory of this is clearly unsustainable in terms of land mass, it also creates a second effect … the disintigration of city life. This pattern means that over time cities become less and less like cities, gradually losing everything that makes urban life so compelling - layer upon layer of history compressed into a compact environmental realm of intense human interaction - what Arendt calls the field of political “action.”. This is replaced by autonomous rings of growth, or separate satellite towns, separated from each other by vast temporal distances. This new temporal order brings with it two consequences. First, the idea of the city as a totality is eroded. Just as the idea of any perception of the present is specious and must be constructed, so too must any idea of the city - and such mental reconstruction becomes increasingly arduous. The second, more real, consequence is an economic reshuffling. The middle becomes intolerably over-valued, and new, wealthier populations displace established ones. In its truest sense of body politic (polis), the city ceases to be a city. The city has become a ‘post-urban metropolis’.

Densification of Centres As part of the strategic operations in the centre, densification can serve as a means of increasing population without horizontal spread. Although this model leads to a more compact city, it has a tendency to involve the destruction of historic areas. While densely populated, these areas do not have the height necessary to support profitable small-footprint development. This model usually goes hand in hand with various modes of gentrification – the displacement of one socio-economic group by another - which clear areas for new development typologies but, at the same time, bring about inevitable extreme social distortions.

Figure ground plan of Shanghai’s Old Town, clearly showing areas of erosion. [from report into ‘Urban Design Research of Shanghai Old Town’, 20/04/2019, CAUP, Tongji University]

This studio will look specifically at part of this operation in the centre - the historic residential enclave of the Old Town. Typically, housing areas such as this tend to be dense, but low - not supporting enough population and without decent facilities. As currently occupied, these areas represent negligible financial value to the city, occupying prime land and returning little in property rental or return on investment. On the one hand they are overcrowded, insanitary and accretive, yet, on the other they represent a way of life that is selforganising, self-sustaining, vibrant, inclusive and promoting of humanist values. A collective way of life that is soon to disappear.

7

S T U D I O

R E S E A RC H

Totalities and Fragments While the studio’s focus will be the Old Town, we do not want you to consider it in isolation. It’s issues are intrinsically connected to and operate symbiotically with the processes operating at the scale of the city as a totality, and arguably beyond. It is this means of attacking an urban project from two scales which is of interest to studio A: The scale of URBANISATION, which leads us to think about TOTALITY: urban form, processes of strategic organisation, and political economy; and the scale of INHABITATION, where we look closely at everyday life within FRAGMENTS. As a first step, before the field trip, we will ask you to research examples of seminal urban manifestos and plans which operate in this way. Two are outlined below as examples.

1. Berlin: A Green Archipelago In 1977 Oswald Mathias Ungers, along with a group of young architects and students from Cornell University (Rem Koolhaas, Peter Riemann, Hans Kollhoff, and Arthur Ovaska) spent a summer in Berlin, devising the project “Berlin: A Green Archipelago”. The resulting presentation, renamed Die Stadt in der Stadt (The City in the City), saw Berlin as a test bed for an alternative urban model, consisting of around sixty urban islands, forming what they called “an archipelago of architectures in a green lagoon of natures.”

Their method was interesting - they endlessly mapped the city as a series of layers - independent ‘readings’ - which could be reassembled, reorganised, and reinvigorated by implanting new fragments within it, often analogous urban fragments from elsewhere. As Peter Riemann put it: “[we drew] the whole West Berlin map, as a figure-ground plan, which we then deconstructed, layer after layer, starting with streets only, then water only, objects, axes, and so on. The “philosophical” approach was first to decompose the city in order to reassemble it later. If you don’t know how a clock works, you disassemble it, and then you put it together again; sometimes you’ll have three pieces left over, and it works, and sometimes it will not work, which stirs your imagination and creativity.”1 Peter Riemann in conversation with Florian Hertweck and Sébastien Marot, June 2012. From Florian Hertweck and Sébastien Marot, The City in the City, Berlin: A Green Archipelago (UAA Ungers Archives for Architectural Research / Lars Müller Publishers).

1

8

“IF YOU DON’T KNOW HOW A CLOCK WORKS, YOU DISASSEMBLE IT, AND THEN YOU PUT IT TOGETHER AGAIN”

9

This re-mapping was a form of inventory - a way of making decisions about connections, what to keep, what to remove. They then considered the remaining pieces as a series of island fragments, which would be “completed” by a series of architectural “interventions” devised to respond to the social needs of the specific fragment. Finally, they drafted in analogous projects from elsewhere - international, or generic, projects which would “intensify rather than diminish the sense of a Metropolis, whose essence is to be : an environment completely invented by man.”1 The Green Archipelago’s manifesto was predicated on something very different - in fact opposite - to the motivation that takes our studio to Shanghai - what they called “retrenchment” - the shrinking of cities. This prediction of urban retrenchment was not without substance in the post peak-oil, rapidly de-industrialising 1970s. Urban centres were emptying out - often plagued by crime, poverty, lack of facilities and voids left by the exodus of industry. The idea that a model for a shrinking city with a fixed surface area could be considered an urban scale project - a ‘totality’ - sat in opposition to the conservative ‘urban renewal’ mode of urbanism of that age. It was indeed radical, but also had a certain plausibility. Ungers, in fact, intended the project to be a realistic proposition - to be presented to the political establishment of Berlin, not simply an intellectual exercise.

2. Mélun Senart: Surrender The premise upon which Green Archipelago project was predicated proved to be incorrect. European cities (especially capitals) did not experience the zero-growth upon which it relied. Berlin’s population declined a little until around 1980, but then began to increase again in line with most cities as the world experienced significant population growth and urbanisation absorbed the swell. Yet the ambition for control of this growth through a project of ‘totality’ had gone. Neoliberal economic imperatives growing through the 1980s understood urbanisation as the packaging of development into investment opportunities. The main outcomes were Central Business Districts (CBDs) and rapidly growing outer suburbs.

One response to the growth was the creation of a second wave of ‘New Towns’. The first wave were planned to relocate populations from poverty or destruction after the Second World War. The population growth and urbanisation of the 1980s brought a new imperative to counteract growth of major cities. France in particular embraced this strategy around its capital, Paris, with plans for five new towns around its perimeter.

Ten years after the Green Archepelago project, one of its key protagonists, Rem Koolhaas, dealt with this change through his competition entry for one of these new towns, Mélun Senart. In this project, Koolhaas revisited the idea of islands, but this time there was a reversal - the island became voids in a city, not in a landscape, No longer “an archipelago of architectures in a green lagoon of natures”2, but now “an archipelago of residue”3 in between “bands - linear voids” of special protected “empty” programme. These carefully orchestrated bands - from which the “average-contemporary-everyday ugliness of current European-AmericanJapanese architecture”4 is banished, - “irrigate the city with potentials”, to stimulate different programmes and patterns of growth. Here, Koolhaas recognises the morphological and formal growth of the city as beyond the control of a single organisational force, yet is still able to exercise influence over not just isolated, discreet parts, but its totality, through the overall organisational logic of the void pattern.

Although dealing, in one way with opposite issues, retrenchment and growth, both projects share an ambition to see the city as a totality ... with the ability to control either growth or degrowth.

If Koolhaas’ unbuilt project was a response to the new unfettered developer-led urban growth of the neoliberal city of the late 1980s, what is the response to the urbanisation of a world population which has almost doubled since the Green Archipelago project - particularly to the Chinese urban demographics, which have exceeded all expectations, with Shanghai at the forefront.

Peter Riemann in conversation with Florian Hertweck and Sébastien Marot, June 2012. From Florian Hertweck and Sébastien Marot, The City in the City, Berlin: A Green Archipelago (UAA Ungers Archives for Architectural Research / Lars Müller Publishers).

2 Ibid.

3 See: Rem Koolhaas / Bruce Mau; Surrender, Ville Nouvelle Mélun-Senart, France, 1987 – in SMLXL, 010 Publishers, page 9724 Ibid.

1

10

The beginning of Rem Koolhaas’ narrative for the project.

From Florian Hertweck and Sébastien Marot, The City in the City, Berlin: A Green Archipelago (UAA Ungers Archives for Architectural Research / Lars Müller Publishers).

11

If the Green Archipelago project is a manifesto for controlling Urban Retrenchment and Mélun Senart is a manifesto for controlling Urban Growth, what they share is the will to do this from a position of ‘totality’.

Can there be a manifesto for Urban Excess? Can there be a position of totality for a city the scale of Shanghai, or is the contemporary hypercity beyond control?

“All in all, the archipelago is today one of the central possible tropes for the hypercity or the post-urban metropolis” Sébastien Marot, Florian Hertweck and Sébastien Marot, The City in the City, Berlin: A Green Archipelago (UAA Ungers Archives for Architectural Research / Lars Müller Publishers).

Your challenge is to devise housing systems which can maintain the unique collective life of the alleys in the Old Town while supporting the extreme population demographics of a hypercity.

This will involve operating at at least two different scales in all areas of research, analysis and design between INHABITATION SCALE [Daily Life] and URBANISATION SCALE [The Housing Crisis].

Let us not forget that there are scales in-between - the scale of the enclave, the village, or the town.

Your initial field task will be to carry out thorough research and analysis into the social field and fabric of the Old Town. However, this work should be undertaken in tandem with a broader analysis of city scale phenomena. You should observe and record graphically how the inhabitation scale analytics of the Old Town correlate with and resonate with bigger urban patterns of development and change across the city. You should examine closely the cycles of erasure of traditional housing areas and what they are replaced with, questioning qualities lost and gained through the process of change.

Operating across these two scales, within groups, you will address the housing question as a totality.

1. The scale of repair and/or intervention to the existing fabric – the INHABITATION scale.

2. The scale of mass housing in the city – the URBANISATION scale.

The core question is how can these two operational scales work symbiotically, sustaining the life of the traditional collective communities but providing enough density to support environmentally responsible and socially dynamic urban living for populations on the scale of contemporary Shanghai?

Above: Example of survey information from Meta:Hutongs project, Beijing

by Wang Shuo and Andrew Bryant. From A&U #064 Below: Examples of urban analytical work, Chora / Raoul Bunchonten, Dynamic Masterplan for the City of Berlin

12

“ALL IN ALL, THE ARCHIPELAGO IS TODAY ONE OF THE CENTRAL POSSIBLE TROPES FOR THE HYPERCITY OR THE POST-URBAN METROPOLIS” Sébastien Marot, Florian Hertweck and Sébastien Marot, The City in the City, Berlin: A Green Archipelago (UAA Ungers Archives for Architectural Research / Lars Müller Publishers).

13

Case Studies and Research INHABITATION SCALE 1 As a starting point, it is worth looking at the work of contemporary Chinese architects working within traditional small scale housing areas. For example, Zhang Ke working in Beijing, specifically with the historic Hutongs (alleys). Zhang Ke’s work examines and promotes new operational strategies for traditional Hutongs and Siheyuan courtyard areas. It sensitively sustains the way their unique life operates, while introducing new facilities and stimuli for future generations.

In the words of Joanna Bayndrian from the journal Assemble Papers, issue #9: “ZAO/standardarchitecture’s commitment to creating methodologies for upgrading courtyards in a way that acknowledges, rather than erases, recent history is critical. But the courtyard’s accessibility to its whole community, both old and new, is even more powerful; there exists a willingness for the courtyard to be changed and reclaimed by its many residents and users. At the core of Zhang’s thinking is a deep respect for the complexities of the neighbourhood that ZAO/standardarchitecture is helping to shape: “[Dashilar] is attractive because of its chaos and co-existence of everything that you can read about the city.””

Zhang Ke / ZAO / standardarchitecture, Co-living Courtyard, Beijing:

“This project further explores a sustainable renewal strategy for the urban fabric in the Baitasi historical area in an extremely subtle way.

The 3.5 sqm service core, facilitated with kitchen, bathroom, laundry and storage, and the prefabricated “Mini House”, a completely independent fully equipped living unit, provide amenities largely lacking in hutongs. Once propagating throughout the old city, the cores and the “Mini Houses” may solve urgent infrastructure problems and dramatically improve the quality of life among hutong residents, against both the "tabula rasa" approach and the possible gentrification phenomenon that is common in the old city renewal practices.”

From http://www.standardarchitecture.cn/v2news/7887

14

Zhang Ke / ZAO / standardarchitecture, Micro-Yuan’er, Xicheng District, Beijing.

Text by Joanna Bayndrian Big Messy Courtyard: Micro Yuan’er.

Walking down a Beijing hutong (‘narrow street’) can feel like you’ve stumbled into a big, slightly chaotic, family home.

There are always people hanging around, street furniture arranged for conversations, washing hanging out to dry, bikes scattered about.

Beijing’s old low-rise neighbourhoods, made up of narrow alleyways and courtyard houses, bring a vital human scale to the capital’s cityscape, otherwise dominated by dense apartment blocks, imposing government buildings and ‘starchitecture’. But there are serious challenges to bringing ageing housing infrastructure into the 21st century, especially in a city fast approaching 22 million people, where whole neighbourhoods are transitioning from public to semi-public, semi-private to private, sometimes at breakneck speed.

The personality and energy of Beijing’s hutong areas is deeply embedded in how they have evolved over centuries, and continue to be reinvented. They are living organisms, experiments in multi-layered histories and informal architectures.

Many of the changes to traditional courtyard dwellings, such as subdivisions and add-ons, can be traced back to the post-1949 collectivisation of Beijing’s housing stock, giving siheyuan, or ‘courtyard house’, another name in Beijing vernacular: dazayuan, which literally translates to ‘big messy courtyard’. The city’s culture of flux has changed hutong streetscapes irreversibly, yet the emphasis on social interactivity is, in a way, sympathetic to the character of the original structures, which were built for multi-generational living.

From http://www.standardarchitecture.cn/v2news/8352

From http://www.iarch.cn/thread-30568-1-1.html

15

Through a combination of empirical survey, urban analysis, mapping and case study analysis, you will build up a picture of the losses and gains in the cycles of change occurring across Shanghai’s housing landscape.

Bringing the two operational scales together, you will need to consider and strategise different methods of engagement with the historic fabric, depending on how your specific interests and preoccupations develop.

Non-exhaustively, some examples could be as follows. They may of course also be combined.

- Intervention, where you will find sites within which to intervene. They are likely to be networked through the existing fabric of the Old Town, with the combination of typologies significantly increasing the overall density.

- Repetition, where the logic of the town is re-interpreted and repeated as part of as bigger system of increased density.

- Protection, where another system of increased density protects the historic core.

- Subterranean inhabiting the city.

Expansion, where strategies of excavation can relinquish a new means of

- Elevated Grounds, where air rights and minimal footprint projects provide new collective spaces in the air, escaping the over-commodified ground.

When in Shanghai on our field trip, you will find sites for activating these principles. Remember, Dundee students should collaborate with Tongji students on an ongoing basis, who will be able to provide crucial information from the field.

Case Studies and Research INHABITATION SCALE 2 | Urban Continuity and Repeating Textures.

The second step in understanding the micro scale is to consider the Old Town as a multiplicity of individual architectures forming a complete system. The town was originally an enclave, and can still, to some extent, be read as such. Its system forms a dense ‘mat’ – a morphological pattern which offers continuity of texture and a continuous matrix of interconnected public and private spaces.

It is important to consider ideas of the urban continuity and repeating morphological patterns within this system. To do this, it will be useful to research into the historical evolution and contemporary use of such systems. A very brief summary is included below, upon which you should expand.

16

The streets and lanes of the old town in 1948. [from report into ‘Urban Design Research of Shanghai Old Town’, 20/04/2019, CAUP, Tongji University]

17

Case Studies and Research INHABITATION SCALE 2 | Understanding ‘Mat’ Projects.

In both Eastern and Western cultures there is a tradition of morphological ‘mat’ patterns, their origin lying within the necessity of containment or self-sufficiency. Ancient Chinese city plans, Roman towns, Arabic medinas, European medieval towns … all can be considered as forms of continuous mats within enclaves.

The Ancient city of Chang’An, Tang Dynasty

Beijing Old Town

Medina, Casablanca

The Roman city of Timgad, AD 100

18

More recently, this type of continuity of fabric within an enclave has been reinterpreted as both a means of increasing social cohesion and building up urban density. Revitalised in Europe in the late twentieth century, named ‘mat’ planning by Alison Smithson, many ambitious projects from the 1950s onward saw the mat as a means of promoting collective behaviour, removing the street (and thus the car) and developing efficient, compact social, human-orientated environments.

Early experiments in mat typology: Analysis for ‘Mat’ plan of the Free University of Berlin, Candilis, Josic, Woods and Schiedhelm, 1963

Early experiments in mat typology, Michel Ecochard in Casablanca. The mat reinterprets the ancient medina (top right) From: http://socks-studio.com/2016/12/07/understanding-the-grid-1-michel-ecochards-planning-and-building-framework-in-casablanca/

19

Contemporary mat housing: Peter Barber Architects, Donnybrooke Quarter Housing, London, 2006

Case Studies and Research URBANISATION SCALE In researching possibilities for urbanisation-scale solutions, it will be necessary to examine radical conditions capable of confronting the extreme demographics. Some non-exhaustive examples are illustrated on the following pages. You should research these and other examples in detail.

Hybridisation Hybridisation is a means of bringing together multiple programmes and multiple registers of public and private into, usually, but not always, one total form. It challenges conventional ownership, stakeholding and compartmentalisation of architectures into territorial components.

“The history of hybrids begins at the end of the 19th century, when the dense city started to accept the overlapping of functions as inevitable. It is inside the metropolises where these mixed organisms arise, helped mainly by centrality’s power as a catalyst.”

A+T, Issue 32, Autumn 2008, Hybrids II, Low-rise mixed-use buildings

Hybrid examples: Barbican, London, 1969-, Cross section (left) and OMA, Bryghusprojektet, Copenhagen, 2008-2013.

20

Continuous Hybrids:

Alsterzentrum, Konwiartz for Neue Heimat, St. Georg, 1967

Projects forming new elevated grounds:

Yona Friedman, Spatial City, 1964 (above); Habitat ’67, Moshie Safdie, 1967 (middle); and ; Vanke Centre, Steven Holl Architects, Shenzhen, 2006-09 (bottom).

21

Today, as the mapping of Hong Kong below illustrates, reliance on urban artificial grounds in the contemporary compact city is commonplace, pedways, bridges and entangled towers now forming a crutial part of the navigational systems of our cities.

Lindsay Bremner, The Urban Hyperproject, Hong Kong, City with No Ground. Source: http://randomwire.com/hong-kong-citywithout-ground/

Elevated walkways Hong Kong

22

‘Entangling’ towers: https://www.designboom.com/art/clemens-gritl-a-future-city-from-the-past-05-24-2017/(left); OMA, Rotterdam (right).

Complete three-dimensional matrices: The following project is an example which compresses a city for 160,000 people into a 600m hybridised cube. It can be considered as a three-dimensional porous mat, with no prioritisation of horizontal or vertical, where public and private space, dwellings, social, institutional and civic facilities all operate in one non-stop three dimensional matrix.

A form of three-dimensional mat: From University of Dundee Year 5 Project: Cube.: Wang Lei, Qiaoyi Wu, Chao Wei, Changda Guo, Shuo Cheng, Jinghui Chen

23

Subterranean Projects In the early twentieth century, subterranean existence had a tendency to be seen as either part of a science-fiction fantasy or a more dystopian narrative of subjugation. Popular science fiction frequently used the metropolis to illustrate advanced human civilisation through its occupation of the planet, while much filmic and literary work used the city as a metaphor for control and social division.

Right: Cover from Popular Science, August 1925 Below: Still from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, 1926. Subterranean workers’ city.

Both images from Think Deep: Planning, development and use of underground spaces in cities, ITA AITES, itacus, ISOCARP, 2015

Today’s city has seamlessely slipped into these past imaginations, daily metripolitan life continually occupying subterranean spaces which now connect together multiple infrastructures and programmes. London’s Crossrail project, for example, massively expands the city’s ageing ‘tube’ system into a spatialised underground world. Even new buildings begin to respond to extreme land costs and height restrictions by burying as much accommodation as possible into the ground.

The subterranean world of London Underground / Crossrail

Proposed new hotel section, Leicester Square, London.

Around 50% of the proposal is subterranean. Image from from Think Deep: Planning, development and use of underground spaces in cities, ITA AITES, itacus, ISOCARP, 2015

In Hong Kong, one can navigate much of the city through a series of seemingly endless subterranean spaces which include malls, cinemas, transport interchanges, hospitality and leisure facilities, even ice rinks.

24

Over: Subterranean hybrid spaces in Hong Kong.

25

STUDIO ASSIGNMENTS Semester 1 Stage 1: Research: The Urban Social Field and its Contexts. Weeks 1,2,3.

Through a combination of theoretical investigation, empirical survey, mapping and case study analysis, you will build up a picture of various phenomena affecting cities and their social fields. By operating across disciplinary boundaries and gradually bringing analytical methods and operational scales together, you will be able to consider different methods of engagement with the fabric of your city, in accordance with your emerging interests and preoccupations. Through such analysis, you will slowly but surely glean critical intelligence which can be used to make realistic hypotheses built on intellectually rigorous speculations on futures for your chosen environments.

In groups of 3-4 (Groups should liaise continually so different angles and perspectives might be covered).

Overview: This is the start of your research. You will read, question, investigate, collect data, discuss, debate, test, write, draw and model.

You will read Arendt, Piketty and many other relevant contextualising texts, and, through discussion with your tutor and peers, you will begin to formulate critical views on the global housing crisis, how the crisis plays out in the urban field, and the position of the discipline of architecture within the crisis.

You will research the idea of mutations, totality and fragments by elaborating on the information on page 6-13.

You will research the different scales of operation through reading and analysing case studies, using the information of page 14-25 as your base-line guide.

This is your opportunity to gather as much relevant information as possible and to distil a set of questions to ask of the field you will discover in Shanghai in week 4. These questions must be presented graphically.

Outputs: Before we leave for Shanghai, you will present a body of research which will have yielded a set of clear questions which can be asked of our field.

The stage will conclude with Review 1.

26

ESALA M.Arch 2018, examples of analytical model.

Para-Situation [Calcutta / Kolkata]: The Drawing Room of Dryness: Blottings and Ancestry, Adam Brown, Findlay McFarlane, Sabrina Syed.

Unit Leader: Dorian Wiszniewski

Example of city analytical work, Chora / Raoul Bunchonten, A Dynamic Masterplan for the City of Berlin

27

Stage 2: Field Work [Shanghai / London] + Analysis of Shanghai Old Town / Discovering operational sites. Weeks 4,5,6 Overview: During the field trip to Shanghai, you will visit, and comprehensively study, Shanghai’s Old Town.You will attempt to understand its history, their morphology, and social operations.You will then visit seminal housing projects in London (see page44-45). Those offer a mix of low rise / high density and high rise / high density projects.

In both cases, using a combination of empirical research from direct observation and desk research, you will unravel how these housing areas / projects work. It should be stressed that this should not be a subjective account, nor a historical overview, but a detailed analysis of how the projects operate spatially and tectonically relative to their models of dwelling.

You are trying to understand key parameters of type, density, mix, programme, facilities, thresholds, building a picture of how housing type and morphology relates to the relationships between individuals and the society of which they form part.

During both field trips you will take part in intense design charrettes. The charrette is an opportunity to flesh out ideas, through brainstorming, building on all your work so far to pull together clear strategies.

These strategies should engage the scale of urbanisation and the scale in inhabitation (see Totalities and fragments, page 8-25). They must consider how you will intervene through the (non-exhaustive) processes of Intervention, Repetition, Protection, Subterranean Expansion, Elevated Grounds.

The strategies would be built on (and will involve a presentation of): Charrette #1: Shanghai. a.Your desktop research of the housing issues in global cities and the politics and economics that lie behind the problems, b.Your analysis of seminal urban projects (eg Berlin: A Green Archipelago, MĂŠlun Senart). b. Detailed desktop and field analysis from Shanghai.

Charrette #2: Dundee. c. Study of historic type from London, d. Study of the morphological, typological and social resonances between the issues discovered and the two cities.

By the end of the field trips, you will consolidate your research on the global housing crisis and its impact on cities, tested in a real field.You will present your views on issues and challenges, critiques of current development scenarios, and strategies for bringing together the different scales of investigation in Shanghai.

These might be universally applicable strategies for development but with a view toward the development of detailed demonstration projects in the Old Town of Shanghai.You must use the opportunity of being in the field to gather all the information you are likely to need to develop the demonstration project.You must work with Tongji students at achieving this.

Outputs: Theoretical and empirical research information from stages 1 and 2. City-scale drawings; city-scale models (inc large sectional models showing urban relationships and disparities); Graphical, modeled and textual information which reflects and builds on an analysis of all your synthesised research and field work; Information on how you propose to analyse the work further through a transect in stage 3; Draft Journal, which begins to reflect on and curate all your group work.

28

ESALA M.Arch 2018, examples of analytical model.

Island Territories V: Havana, Re-Making Islands, Dismantling Insularity. [Adrian Hawker and Victoria Clare Bernie] Scoring the Malecรณn, Sheryl Lam, Ezmira Peraj, Alecsandra Trofin, Leo Xian.

ESALA M.Arch 2018, examples of analytical model.

Island Territories V: Havana, Re-Making Islands, Dismantling Insularity. [Adrian Hawker and Victoria Clare Bernie] Scoring the Malecรณn, Sheryl Lam, Ezmira Peraj, Alecsandra Trofin, Leo Xian.

29

Stage 3: Constructing the Hypothesis [Transect] Weeks 7, 8, 9, (10).

In groups of 3-4.

You will now make detailed spatial propositions at city scale (Recommended scale 1:1250 - 1:500 maximum).

All your strategic work from stages 1 and 2 will now be hypothesised through real sites in your urban field.

You will hopefully have built up a good understanding of the losses and gains in the cycles of change occurring across Shanghai. You will hopefully understand the history, morphology, and social operations of specific territories, including key architectures forming part of the urban complexions. You will have developed operational strategies for engagement and intervention and, when on your field trip, you will have found sites for activating them. You will now action different methods of engagement in the city and its cycles, processes and social operations.

Dundee students should collaborate with Tongji students on an ongoing basis. Tongji students will be able to provide crucial information from the field.

To do this you will focus your enquiry in two ways: 1. Use all your gathered intelligence to hypothesise on a future for Shanghai (an Otherwise). What is happening to it? What are its processes of change and how will you intervene? This must be presented as a set of drawings and models which can be understood spatially and temporally.

2. Take a transect through your city. The transect is a line which cuts through your area(s) of activation, along with other contiguous areas of the city, allowing you to focus on occurrences and relationships along its path. You will work with your tutor on deciding the best position, geometry and length of the transect.

The transect may be an orthogonal line which samples everything in its path, or it may follow the logic of some established (or proposed) morphological and topographical feature. It may also be vertical if appropriate. Its presentation should not be a single drawing or model, but a series of investigatory pieces of work, using the transect as an analytical method.

City-scale thinking, through models and drawings of a transect.

Right and below: City-scale thinking, through models and drawings of a transect. Dundee Year 5: Cube, Wang Lei, Qiaoyi Wu, Chao Wei, Changda Guo, Shuo Cheng, Jinghui Chen Photo: Neil Verow.

Outputs: Edited research and analysis information from stages 1 and 2.

City-scale drawings; city-scale models (inc large sectional models showing relationships and disparities); Detailed graphical and modelled information showing the location and logic of the transect.

Detailed graphical and modelled representations of the transect itself, showing your analysis of the city and how group members propose to intervene.

A clear graphical and textual account of your urban hypothesis or hypotheses.

Draft Journal (containing final group stage work)

30

Linear studies: Right:: Nolli v Piranese, Bryan Maddock. https://thecitythecitythecity.tumblr.com/ post/67554157062/nolli-vs-piranesi-bryanmaddock; Far right: from Venturi and Scott-Brown, Learning from Las Vegas.

The transect should sample the pluralism of the city, cutting through different architecture, spaces and programmes. Your enquiries are very likely to lead you to stray from the line, however, remote pieces must always connect morphologically back to the line, which will be a constant reference in your work. Its presentation should clearly demonstrate through models, drawings and other means, your analysis of the city and how you propose to connect to it and/or intervene in it.

ESALA M.Arch 2018, photos of student degree show models.

Island Territories V: Havana, Re-Making Islands, Dismantling Insularity. Tutors: Adrian Hawker and Victoria Clare Bernie.

ESALA M.Arch 2018, photos of student degree show models.

Para-Situation [Calcutta / Kolkata]. Tutor: Dorian Wiszniewski.

31

Stage 4: Testing the Hypothesis [Architectural Scale].

Weeks (10), 11, 12, 13, 14 [+ semester 2 Integrated Design] This stage is the first step toward developing detailed spatial propositions at architecture-scale. Building on previous stages, you will begin to make detailed elaboration of a portion of the city-scale proposition. This scale should demonstrate understanding of how daily life might operate in and around your propositions, making a clear argument for reciprocities between architectural space, form and social organisation.

Through your transect, you have already effectively examined a longitudinal section of the city. Now you will cut transverse sections through the transect at key points, devised to show how daily life is mediated through its thickness. You will explore this through the perspectival section. Notable references for these type of drawings are Paul Rudolph’s examples from the late 20th Century, and Atelier BowWow’s contemporary examples.

For more information and examples of perspictival sections, see page 22-23 of the Course Book.

Atelier BowWow tell us their version of these drawings are inspired by Leonardo’s drawings of dissections, drawn to assist his understanding of the internal structure of the human body and its relationship to human form. They also reference one of Year 4’s key philosophical protagonists, Henri Lefebvre, who talks of the space of representation and the space of occupation. BowWow explain that the perspectival section can be used to communicate form, structure, organisation and technical information, but also the temporal orders of everyday life. In this way we ask that your perspectival sections are simultaneously technical, anatomical, temporal and social.

Outputs: Edited research and analysis information from stages 1 and 2.

Edited transect and hypothesis information from stage 3.

Perspectival section(s) showing tectonic, spatial and social information.

Other graphical and modelled information capable of demonstrating very clearly the lineage of the project and how you are testing the hypothesis through architectural design, A final presentation-standard carefully curated exhibition.

FInal Journal Volume 1 (excerpts to be used in exhibition) This stage will conclude with the Final Review and Exhibition.

32

33

Semester 2 Stage 5: Testing the Hypothesis [Architectural Scale] Weeks 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 Operating within the intellectual armature you have developed through semester 1, you will now increase resolution, directly engaging the architectural and tectonic scales.

This stage continues your work from semester 1 in developing detailed spatial propositions. It will make detailed elaboration of a fragment of your city-scale transect. You will draw and model the fragment in detail and will simultaneously continue to develop your perspectival section(s) as a key drawing.

Everything you do will be contextualised within the socio-urban ambition of your work. Successful schemes will always demonstrate complete reciprocity between the different scales of the semesters. You must begin to understand how a single drawn line in the city can be charged with socio-spatial content, but when scaled up, that same line contains multiple layers of tectonic information which serve to not only mediate that sociospatial content in the best way, but also to instantiate architectural form.

How can your work at the scale of architectural space, form and tectonics resonate with your work at the scale of the city and beyond? How can all this work form a consistent and robust design argument? How can it constitute an Otherwise?

In asking these questions you must simultaneously operate at all scales - never losing sight of the city, your hypothesis, and the intellectual armature you have set up to hold your design - even when operating at the scale of nuts and bolts. In this way, you will create a piece of architecture that has a cosmogonic place in the city, derived from a detailed understanding of the place and time of its human collective life.

Outputs: Edited information from stages 1, 2, 3 and 4.

Completed perspectival sections showing tectonic, spatial and social information.

Other graphical and modelled information – city-scale, community-scale and architectural-scale.

Draft Journal.

Detailed graphical and modelled information of architectural-scale fragment, contextualised within escalating scales of complete project enquiry: Research (theoretical) Research (empirical) Analysis Transect Hypothesis

34

Top left:: Vertical chunk of city: ESALA M.Arch 2018.

Island Territories V: Havana, Re-Making Islands, Dismantling Insularity. [Adrian Hawker and Victoria Clare Bernie] The Tower of Decanted Citizens and the office of the City Historian, Alex Faulkner.

Bottom left:: Horizontal chunk of city: Building Tomorrow Exhibition. https://archinect.com/news/ article/97199699 Top right - sectional chunks: ESALA M.Arch 2018, photos of student degree show models.

The Revanchist City and the Urbanisation of Suburbia [Tutors: Tahl Kaminer and Alex MacLaren].

Middle right: Grafton Architects

35

Stage 6: Testing the Hypothesis [Tectonic Scale] Weeks 21, 22, 23, 24, 25.

In this stage you will further develop sectional modelled and drawn information, through a series of sectional pieces elaborating structural and tectonic ideas.

The pieces should be drawn and modelled as abstracted representations of conditions that may be encountered in the city – technical pieces, but also beautiful artefacts, removed from the city and used to explore the tectonics of space and social life.

Outputs: Large scale tectonic drawings and sectional models.

Final Journal.

These stages will conclude with the Final Review and Exhibition.

36

Top: Locust Harvesting Chamber, Ehren Trzebiatowski. https://conceptmodel.tumblr.com/ post/96479325840/locust-harvestingchambers-section Bottom: Unknown

37

STUDIO LECTURES & TEXTS Lectures For information on lectures, see the main course book.

Texts Sociological / Politico-economic Kofman, E., Lebas, E. (Eds.), Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, Oxford, Blackwell, 1996.

Arendt, H., The Human Condition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1958.

Lefebvre, H., The Production of Space, Oxford, Blackwell, 1991, Adorno, T., Horkheimer, H., Dialectic of Enlightenment, London, Verso, 1997.

Certeau, Michel de., The Practice of Everyday Life, Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1984.

Harvey, D., Social Justice and the City, London, Edward Arnold, 1973.

Gentrification Smith, N., The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, Abingdon, Routledge, 1996.

Lees, L., Slater, T., Wyly, E., Gentrification, Abingdon, Routledge, 2013.

Architecture and urban theory Kaminer, T., The Efficacy of Architecture: Political Contestation and Agency, Abingdon, Routledge, 2017.

Brenner, N., New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question, New York, OUP USA, 2019.

Brenner, N., Marcuse, P., Mayer, M. (eds), Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City, Abingdon, Routledge, 2011.

Brenner, N., Critique of Urbanization, Basel, (Bauwelt Fundamente) Birkhäuser (21 Nov. 2016) Brenner, N., New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood, Oxford, Oxford University Press (18 Nov. 2004) Leach, N. (ed.), Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, Abingdon, Routledge, 1997. (particularly Jameson’s Is Space Political? and Leach’s Architecture or Revolution).

Marcuse , P., Connolly, J., Novy, J., Olivo, I., Potter, C., Steil, J., (Eds.), Searching for the Just City: Debates in Urban Theory and Practice, Abingdon, Routledge, 2011.

MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism, Scaling Infrastructure, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2016.

Koolhaas, R., Mau, B., S,M,L,XL, Rotterdam, 010 Publishers, 1995. Essays: Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture; Bigness, or the Problem of the Large; What Ever Happened to Urbanism?. Project: Surrender, Ville Melun-Sénart, France, 1987.

Aureli, P. V., The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2011.

38

Economic Piketty, T., Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014.

Miscellaneous Simmel, G., The Metropolis and Mental Life, 1903, http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/content/BPL_Images/ Content_store/Sample_chapter/0631225137/Bridge.pdf Benjamin, W., The Arcades Project, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2002.

A+T, Issue 32, Autumn 2008, Hybrids II, Low-rise mixed-use buildings Koolhaas, R., Obrist, H-U., Project Japan: Metabolism Talks, Cologne, Taschen GmbH, 2011.

Michał Murawski & Jane Rendell, The Social Condenser: A Century of Revolution Through Architecture, 1917–2017, The Journal of Architecture, 22:3, 369-371, DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2017.1326680, 2017.

Housing Marcuse, P., Madden, D., In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis, London, Verso, 2016.

Swenarton, M., Cook’s Camden: The Making of Modern Housing, London, Lund Humphries, 2017.

Orazi, S., Rudquist, C., The Barbican Estate, London, Batsford Ltd, 2018.

Housing (technical) Schneider, F and Heckmann, O (2011). Floor Plan Manual: Housing, Birkhäuser GmbH. Leupen, Bernard and Mooij, Harald, Housing Design Manual, NAI, 2012.

French, Hilary, Key Urban Housing of the Twentieth Century: Plans, Sections and Elevations, Laurence King, 2008.

Graphical Bunschoten, Raoul., Urban Flotsam: Stirring the City, Rotterdam, 010 Uitgeverij, 2000.

Desimini, J., Waldheim, C., Cartographic Grounds: Projecting the Landscape Imaginary, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2016.

Atelier Bow-Wow (Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima). (2014). Atelier Bow-Wow - Graphic Anatomy 2. Toto. (and/or Graphic Anatomy 1).

Manifestos and Surveys Koolhaas, R., Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhatten, New York, Monacelli Press, 1994.

Hertweck, F., Marot, S., The City in the City, Berlin: A Green Archipelago, Zurich, Lars Müller, 2013.

Venturi, R., Scott Brown, D., Izenour, S., Learning from Las Vegas, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1972.

Shanghai Tongji University Survey Document (to be provided).

39

CONTEXTS: HOUSING Housing in the Fields: A Brief Historical Overview Our two field cities have experienced unprecedented physical and economic growth at different periods in history. Both have histories of global commercial prowess, rapid internationalisation through trade, and new intensities of urban life. Yet the trajectories of how these histories relate to housing is quite different. The following provides a very brief summary: Shanghai The housing construction in Shanghai has gone through four stages in the past180 years.

1. 1840~1949 In this period, Shanghai evolved from a traditional Chinese City driven by commerce and trade to a modern metropolis. After the first Opium War in 1840, Shanghai’s urban pattern changed into a peculiar urban pattern of the old Chinese town, public concessions, French concessions and Japanese concessions, all adjacent and each with its own management system. Only after the victory of the Second World War, when all the unequal treaties were abolished, did the Government of the Republic of China unify its management.

Before World War II, about 60% of the residences were Lilong housing. This is a mixed British-style layout, with courtyard characteristics of Chinese mode. These houses were mostly designed by foreign architects, contracted by local, privately owned, construction companies. Many of them were brick and wood structures with poor, cheap waterproofing and insulation, and a lack of sanitation and other public facilities. As a result of the continuous wars, especially the Japanese invasion, a large number of rural and urban residents around Shanghai flooded into the Shanghai Concessions to take refuge. As a result, the housing supply in the central area of Shanghai became very tight. At worst, the average household could only rent one room, and the living standard dropped dramatically. However, at around 60% of the city’s housing, the large number of Lilong houses also formed a major part of the texture of Shanghai, and shaped the psychological traits of Shanghai people, who considered to be inclusive, open, indifferent and self-restrained. This formed the Collective Character of Shanghai People, which has been both loved and hated by people in the rest of China.

2. 1950~1978 After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, a unified planned economy was implemented.

The industrial structure of Shanghai was defined as the national light industry center. The basic resources materials were transported from the whole country to Shanghai. The large number of trained workers in Shanghai returned to the state-owned factory for production, and their products were sold all over the country. At this time, the social status and happiness of the factory workers was very high. In conjunction with state-owned enterprises, the Shanghai municipal government, learning from the Soviet mode, began to build a large number of new worker villages in the suburbs and used the welfare housing distribution policy in order to ensure that each worker couple and their children had at least one room to live in with public toilets and kitchens. The planning of these houses was carefully considered, with sunshine, spacing, minimum space requirements, and public complementary facilities. These houses were far from the city center and uniform in quality. They replaced the Lilong houses as the main source of residential accommodation. Private housing in the former city centre gradually became public through public-private partnership in 1953. In the middle of 1970s, the generation born in the post-war baby boom reached the age of marriage and childbearing. The exponential population growth was in sharp contradiction with the 20-year lag in housing supply. After the end of the Cultural Revolution, the national economy was on the verge of collapse and the government and most state-owned enterprises were too poor to provide housing. The supply and demand of housing became a very serious social problem.

40

3. 1979~1999 Reform and opening-up broke through the shackles of the planned economy and brought China’s economy onto the world stage. The government encouraged private enterprises to invest in real estate, and worked with them to solve the huge housing gap in that year. Financial policy and land policies were all inclined to the development of real estate. A new term ‘commercial housing’ was coined to distinguish private housing from public housing provided by the government. The big difference was that if you owned commercial housing you had 70 years right to use the house and its land. Around 1990, a large number of state-owned cotton textile mills, steel mills and chemical factories along the Suzhou River became unable to compete globally because of outdated production, poor marketing, and great damage to the urban environment. They had to apply for bankruptcy and made millions of workers unemployed. Because of their excellent site location in the city centre - prime sites for high-rise commercial / residential areas - the real estate businesses profited massively from the sales, and financial interests and speculation stimulated the amount of housing supply. To a certain extent, it also alleviated the shortage of housing in Shanghai. In addition, Shanghai’s urban infrastructure construction had also made rapid progress in this period, as the municipal government eliminated a large number of slums to build the broad new roads which brought a completely new look to the city. The huge ambitions prompted the simple and crude demolition on the old residential areas, and the old Lilong houses in Shanghai were almost completely erased. However, because the compensation for demolition was not enough to enable the people used to living in the city centre to return after the renewal, they were displaced to the suburbs, separating all the connections with urban life including education opportunities , medical care, social circles and so on. Essentially, these very disciplined people sacrificed themselves to the great change of Shanghai.

4. 2000~2019 In 1999, the Shanghai Municipal Government decided to abolish the welfare distribution policy of housing. All public houses were sold into private property rights. As a result, most Shanghai legally registered households could own at least one apartment in a very cheap price and enter a completely market-oriented housing system. With the rapid increase in incomes, most Shanghai people were interested in this new financial function of housing, which could preserve and increase the value of their assets. When the demands for value-added assets exceeded the residential demands of the house itself, the real estate market became a financial product. By the end of 2017, the average residential price in Shanghai was 15 times higher than in 2000. After 2010, the economic structure relying on the real estate model began to become unsustainable.

There was no more residential land available in urban areas. The city was full of urban congestion and air pollution. The low-cost welfare housing had been displaced to the outskirts, creating great pressure on the life of the immigrants who were constantly pouring into Shanghai. Therefore, it seems that the only way out was to renew old residential areas.

These plots were located in the city centre with high land prices, but their low level of construction did not meet the needs of modern life. They looked like abandoned areas, causing the government to receive a lot of criticism and complaint. This made the government commit to rebuilding these plots as a whole, in collaboration with some large private investment companies. However, with increase of the economic level, the improvement of people’s living standards, the awareness of rights protection, and the consensus on the value of the old city, the crude demolition used in the past could no longer meet the requirements of all walks of life. The controversy was endless. The old town was one of the most historically valuable sites, involving a large population, rich historical layers and great difficulty in reconstruction. This collaborative course is designed to find proposals that would benefit the project from a wider, more diversified perspective and more in-depth thinking.

41

CONTEXTS: PIKETTY Context 1: Economic [Piketty] “All social scientists [] should take a serious interest in money, its measurement, the facts surrounding it, and its history.

Those who have a lot of it never fail to defend their interests. Refusing to deal with numbers rarely serves the interests of the least well-off ”.x In his book Capital 1, Thomas Piketty illuminates the rising inequalities over the past fifty years within western economies. He identifies the even more rapidly rising inequalities experienced in China since the liberalisation of the economy in the 1980s. The upper centile’s share of national income, he tells us, is now almost equivalent to that of the UK. A product of the hegemony of neoliberal market economics, this new global equivalence sets social challenges to which the built environment must respond on a global scale. Perhaps the most important response of all will be in how we house the global population.

In the UK Piketty identifies housing as constituting roughly 50% of the value of national capital. In 1900 the value was around 20%. In 1700, 15%. The UK example reveals a trend clearly indicating that under capitalist modernity housing has risen exponentially in its importance to economic development. Now, in the globalised economies of the twenty-first century, one of mankind’s most fundamental needs is entirely bound to the performance imperatives and volatile cycles of global markets, and for these markets to perform successfully, the rate of return on investment in them must maintain an upward trajectory. Long-run, through private accumulation of housing stock, alongside ever-rising demand for houses and ever-diminishing supply of land, the fallout of this asset structure is unaffordability and homelessness for large proportions of the world’s population. What for decades has been described as an escalating crisis is now widely recognised as one of civilisation’s deepest and most pervasive concerns.

The unit’s enquiry aims to position architecture at the centre of this discourse. Its most primordial product, the house, is the prime currency, yet architecture’s complete absence from any detailed narrative appears to suggest a tacit acceptance of the re-calibration of architecture’s disciplinary capacity from something critical – where it plays an active role in societal transformation - into something conciliatory – a complete capitulation to the market. Again, in Manfredo Tafuri’s prescient words, today’s discipline faces either the “capitalist science” of developer-led commercial practice, or a retreat into the “sublime uselessness” of practice which engages itself in phenomenological concern only.4 The course considers the housing question as something beyond the jurisdiction of independent nation states, corporate factions or NGOs, instead positioning it as part of a non-competitive humanist critical discourse within the irreversible trajectory toward globality, and with an ultimate aim of social justice. The ambition is to develop important new ideas on the global housing crisis, its politics, its stake-holding and its relationship to money.

42

CONTEXTS: ARENDT Context 2: Politico-economic [Arendt] “What makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people involved, . . . but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them together” In the sixty years since Hannah Arendt discussed ideas of societal introspection in The Human Condition, her “mass society” has more than doubled in population. As we find ourselves living in ever-closer proximity, the conditions she prophesised as antithetical to collective life appear very familiar. Perhaps it is in the most private of domains - housing - where these conditions are most acutely felt.

Set against an exponentially growing world population and its continued gravitation to urban areas, the studio will seek new models for equitable housing provision and collective life.

It understands architecture not as a means of serving the market to which housing finds itself attached – quantitative optimisation and formal novelty with an end-game of sales – but as a means of research into new housing systems which can resonate with societal ideas and test new economic alignments. Whether resolute alternatives to a market-based system of provision, or alternative methods of engaging existing markets, the research projects will consider the disciplinary objective of architectural design as part of a process of social transformation. They will address what for decades has been described as an escalating crisis and is now widely recognised as one of civilisation’s deepest and most pervasive concerns.

Using two field-cities of extraordinary social and economic importance, the programme will seek to imagine outputs that are design-based, future-orientated, non-conciliatory and which will specifically address the potential for the discipline of architecture to reclaim the social efficacy it appears to have relinquished.

43

CONTEXTS: LONDON London’s pre-eminence during the industrial revolution and the zenith of the British empire, led to population growth of 1 million to 7 million between 1800 and 1900. Such unprecedented growth shed new light on the need for architecture to adopt a critical position on housing provision through the twentieth century – with solutions as far reaching as the first example of council housing at Arnold Circus / Boundary Estate (1890), the garden city movement (1898), and innovations in low-rise, high density schemes such as Alexandra Road (1968-78) conceived as part of a new egalitarian societal vision. In the UK, such experiments have been long-forgotten – architecture’s socio-political mission abandoned in favour of a market-driven conciliation in housing provision, leading to today’s crisis of unaffordability which now threatens London’s position socially and economically. In the UK Government’s 2005 Review of Housing Supply, conducted by economist Kate Barker, we were warned of “. . . increasing problems of homelessness, affordability and social division, decline in standards of public service delivery and increase in the costs of doing business in the UK - hampering our economic success.”1 Our inability to provide housing is cited by Barker as “the UK’s biggest policy failure”, with resulting “indefensible economic distortions”2 leading potentially to complete social failure.

London will be used as a field city to discover, view and analyse now historic seminal examples of housing typology responding to a previous age of population growth – an age which spawned an architecture recognised as part of a mechanism for social change.

Much of the housing of that era was provided by the state, known in the UK as ‘Council Housing’. Private acquisition this housing now means houses constructed in the post-WW2 years for lower-income families sells for millions of pounds on the open market. UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’3 programme from the 1980s (which incentivised private home ownership as part of a political manifesto) meant public housing assets transferred to the market without replacement, representing a continual escalation of the importance of housing to economic growth.

Private accumulation of housing stock has entirely conflated ideas of home and asset - in a society of everrising demand for houses and ever-diminishing availability of land. This has delivered asset structures in which the housing market plays a central macroeconomic role. Its performance imperatives serve to escalate continual under-supply, bringing about ever increasing cost.

In such a system there is little space for contributions to discourse on new forms of social organisation. What is the role of the discipline of architecture in this crisis? Must it be one of capitulation to the market or can it have a critical view? Might there be alternate modes of engagement, where new solutions, market-led and otherwise, can promote ideas for collective life - for housing all of our population and for helping avoid both social failure and economic distortion?

Alongside illuminating socio-political ideas, the study of London’s seminal twentieth century housing projects aims to develop your understanding of essential parameters in the design of apartment buildings, particularly scale, spatial organisation, access arrangements, relationship between apartments and their common areas, and morphological relationships with the surrounding city.

Within these parameters, the key studio themes are embedded. The spatial articulation of a dwelling connects its inhabitants with each other and with their neighbours. The building envelope expands that interaction into the full public realm of the city. It is there that architectural design has the capacity for social amelioration.

The housing projects are mainly from an age where public housing provision was an important part of our political and economic landscape and where experimentation in housing typology was seen as a vehicle through which a political commitment to provide low and mid-income families with high quality environments could be instantiated.

We will study two different categories of housing. 1. Low to mid-rise, high density structures and 2. Larger, higher density structures. All are all located in London, many around Camden, whose council had an extraordinarily ambitious and prolific housing programme between the mid 1960s and late 1970s.

The Barker Review of Housing Supply. (2006) HMSO. Barker, Kate. (2014) Housing: Where’s the Plan?, London Publishing Partnership.

Margaret Thatcher’s Government introduced a scheme in 1980 called “right to buy”, under the Housing Act 1980, which offered council tenants the opportunity to purchase their homes at discounted prices, thus transferring housing stock from public to private ownership.

1 2 3

44

Base Camp: Barbican, Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, 1965-

High rise / high density list:

Low rise / high density list:

Golden Lane Estate, Chamberlin, Powell & Bon, 1952-62 Izokon Building, Lawn Road, Wells Coates, 1934 Keeling House, Bethnel Green, Denys Lasdun, 1957 Highcliffe Drive blocks in the Alton West estate, Roehampton, LCC, 1959 Hallfield Estate, Bayswater, Berthold Lubetkin, Denys Lasdun and Lindsay Drake, 1951-58

Willow Road, Erno Goldfinger, 1939

Winscombe Street, Neave Brown, 1963-66

Alexandra Road, Neave Brown, 1968-78

Trellick Tower, Erno Goldfinger, 1966-72

Fleet Road / Dunboyne Road Estate, Neave Brown, 1971-75

Brunswick Centre, Patrick Hodgkinson, 1967-7 Robin Hood Gardens, Alison and Peter Smithson, 1970 (now demolished)

Raydon Street, Peter Tabori, Camden Borough Council, 1978 Branch Hill Estate, Gordon Benson and Alan Forsyth, Hampstead, 1978 Maiden Lane Estate, Gordon Benson and Alan Forsyth, 1979

45

T

I

M

E

T

A

B

L

A general timetable is included in the main course book.

The following is a specific timetable relating to this studio’s field and collaborative activities.

TONGJI / DUNDEE Joint-Studio Part I: SHANGHAI Day 1，Wednesday，Oct.9th : Arrive Shanghai.

Day 2，Thursday, Oct.10th: Visit: Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center; Tianzi Fang, Xintiandi, Sanlin,Zhongyuanliangwancheng Ruihong new town.

Day 3，Friday, Oct.1th: 8:00-9:10 Warming up research review, discussion and grouping，15min for each side.

9:30~11:00 Lecture and discussion , Prof. Andy Stoane.

12:00-17:00 Site Visit.

19:00-21:00 Site analysis, brain storm and concept design as a group.

Day 4，Saturday, Oct.12th: 8:00-11:00 Review 01 concept design proposal.

12:30-20:00 Intensive Sketch Design as a group.

Day 5，Sunday, Oct.13th: City tour.

Day 6，Monday, Oct.14th: 8:00-11:00 Review 02.

12:30-20:00 Intensive Sketch Design as a group.

Day 7，Tuesday, Oct.15th: Preparation of presentation.

13:30 Final Review.

15:30 Round-table Seminar.

Day 8，Wednesday, Oct.16th: Departure

46

E

Architecture and Urban Planning Andy Stoane, Year 4 Leader e: azstoane@dundee.ac.uk

YEAR 4 COLLABORATIVE STUDIO – UNIVERSITY OF DUNDEE, TONGJI UNIVERSITY FIELD TRIP LONDON / DUNDEE, OCTOBER 2019 ITINERARY London 19 October 20 October

Day Evening Morning Afternoon Early Evening Late Evening

21 October

Morning

Afternoon Evening 22 October

Morning Afternoon Evening

Suggested walks for free time:

Arrive London.

Meet Barbican Lakeside (Welcome Drinks).

Familiarity Day Tour: Barbican Estate, City of London (Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, 1969-).

Tour: Golden Lane Estate, City of London (Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, 1952-).

Walk: City to South Bank Arts Complex [then Westminster].

Mercato Metropolitano, Elephant and Castle [Food and Drinks].

Free Low-rise Morning Visit: Alexandra Road Estate, Camden, (Neave Brown, 1968-).

Visit: Dumboyne Road Estate, Hampstead (Neave Brown, 1971-). + adjacent Isokon Flats, Hampsted (Wells Coates, 1934).

Visit: Branch Hill Estate, Hampstead (Benson and Forsyth, 1978).

Free Free High-rise Morning Visit: Spa Green Estate, Islington (Lubetkin / Tecton, 1938-).

Visit: Hallfield Estate, Bayswater (Lubetkin, Lasdun, Drake, 1951-).

Visit: Trellick Tower, North Kensington (Erno Goldfinger, 1966-).

Free Free / Travel to Dundee 1.

2.

3.

Dundee 23 October

Day Evening

24 October

25 October

RIBA, Portland Place - Oxford Circus / Oxford Street – Marble Arch Hyde Park - Albert Hall - Exhibition Road - Knightsbridge – Chelsea.

Westminster – Whitehall – Trafalgar Square - Piccadilly Circus - Regent Street - Soho.

Borough Market – Shard / London Bridge – City of London – Spitalfields Markets - Shoreditch.

Welcome, Head of Architecture, University of Dundee.

Lecture: Introduction, Andy Stoane.

Intense Design Charrette.

Lecture: Andy Stoane, Political Economy and the UK’s Housing Crisis.

Drinks and discussion.

Day

Lecture: Husam Alwaer, Questioning Density.

Intense Design Charrette and Review.

Evening

Travel to Edinburgh.

Day Evening

TBC Edinburgh walking tour (Andy Stoane).

Departure.

47 University of Dundee • Dundee, DD1 4HN • Scotland, UK Registered Scottish Charity No: SC015096

t: +44 (0)1382 386472

w: dundee.ac.uk

48