PRENDRE LA PAROLE: New Alternatives
Triptych of the New Town of Tema, for The Banality of Good, at the 2012 Venice Biennale of Architecture
Anna Kamyshan, 2013
by Crimson Architectural Historians
0. Interview with Rem Koolhaas “Cities of Opportunity”, 2011
When you talk about a new city [...] it is simply impossible to talk about its character. Therefore, a new city in fact only called cities, while it can be argued that the main features by which we define city as it is, [...] are becoming less relevant and appropriate in order to understand what is really a city now. Yet, when we look at Dubai, Beijing and cities in the Pearl River Delta, only one thing which we can see it is an infinite freedom which is used here as a concept of the city. 0
Introduction
1. Никитин В. А. “Принцип города: организационное представление”, 2000
Cities have been building since the beginning of the civilization as a way for common coexistence. It is a multiplicity of social and cultural forms, organized by development process of the properties and the ideas of the place in a specific historical situation. Thus, the city is a kind of marked place, material, a tool and a product of its own work on formation of the world the real embodiment of which ensues of the ideal prototypes. 1
Referring to Aristotle, Рier Vittorio Aureli explains the unity of economic and political practices in the city. As soon as political vertical appears, urban planning became a tool to settle people, and doing so, to guide, organize and control their life. Utopian thinking, playing a central role in the literature on urban planning, has being used by state as a form for its ideological goals.
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2. Saskia Sassen, “Ephemeral Kingdoms, Eternal Cities”, 2013
From the end of 80-es the economical development of asian and some southern countries (South Korea, Taiwan, China, Singapur, India, Brazil and others) changed the western leadership in economics and started to push forward their politics. The UN report on human development from 2013 states: “The Rise of the South - a phenomenon unprecedented in its speed and scale. For the first 150 years of aggregate output of Brazil, India and China is almost equal to the sum of GDP countries, has long been a leader among the industrialized nations of the North - Germany, Italy, Canada, United Kingdom, United States and France.“ Apart from rapid population growth, China, India and Brazil put unexpected records in many areas, including science and high technology. This unique situation of development was the background for the emergence of other unique phenomena: the New Towns in Asia and South, the global cities as strategic to the corporate and financial global economy. 2
3. Simone Pekelsma, “In new towns everything is possible”, 2009
4. Michelle Provoost “Why build a New Town?”, Volume #34 City in a Box, 2013
New towns aren’t suburbs becoming independent. They also aren’t villages or settlements growing into cities. New towns are cities that were planned as an independent whole. They all originate from a certain political or policy development, after which an architect or planner draws them up. 3 The New Towns of Asia and South are absolute new type of cities. The nature of those cities is unlike both: planned cities designed under the auspices of modernist idea, and industrial, military, science or tourist towns of the period of the Cold War. In contrast with the Soviet Union and the United States which took the lead in the creation of modernist New Towns as a way of making political statements and spreading influence in the colonial states 4, the New Towns in Asia and South are the product of the management and created for global business.
An all Inclusive offer One of the new typy cities is a Songdo, in South Korea. New Songdo is a city designed, built and maintained by private real estate and development company led by Stanley Gale. New city of Songdo located in southwest of Seoul, in Incheon Free Economic Zone and in 12.3 km from Incheon International Airport. Being a part of South Korea, Songdo became an absolute “other place”, cut out from the physical space of locality. Special policy of Free Economic Zone and stratigic location in the middle of Asian business area, makes Songdo a city with a direct exit to the global city-network and to the global economic as a result. Furthermore, the social segregation by high income creates artificial socio-cultural ambiance of international business elite, looking forward to have luxury time-spending. New City of Songdo is a Chronotop of business, a city which exist out of phisical space of the locality, in a global space of business
Yet, how does a real estate company attracts people to buy housing in their city? Besides all the economic benefits it uses new trends of eco and high-tech ideas and easily recognizable visualization of Westernism. Jean-Louis Massaut, director of worldwide Cisco company, which serves
5. Ole Bouman, Director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute
Songdo, assures :“Korenas do rent their traditional houses to expats in order to move to a modern skyscraper”. Buying a piece of paradise new dwellers got 5 in 1: benefits from free economic zone, ecological environment, usually in artificially created picturesque area, integrated in a day routine world’s best technologies, new composition of international and beneficial community and a modern and sometimes even exciting design of public space and buildings.
The better the management, the better the city 5
James von Klemperer, one of the leaders of KPF (design group of Songdo city) raises the question of the approach to the cities from the scratch: “There is nothing on the spot before we enter; in case of Songdo there was even no land, it was water that had to be filled. So how to start design a
6. Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture
city from a scratch? When there is no historical plan, no tendency of certain geometry or any kind of marker to begin with. You have to understand the soul of the city, reason for it’s being, economical, cultural, architectural, spatial reason. [‌.] The question of identity and brand-image of the towns is a big issue for the designing companies. Westernism and glass-surface modernity could be the most expressive words for those cities. The new town in Asia the Great City 6 represents this approach in its design. It was designed and envisioned as a prototype or model city to be replicated in other locations throughout the country. Taking into account urbanistic ideas of the Garden City, the design solution didn’t show up any new ideas of the modernity. These exporting modernist spatial models from the past became an
avant-garde approach to the new towns and an icon-images of modernity on East and South. In contrast, new City Masdar, designed by Foster & Partners, a uses “the most advanced principles of settlement put forward by the Arab tradition, to create a community in the desert�. Being a zero carbon city, Masdar obtained great features of the smart city also in a phisical way: a mixed low-rise housing formed high density, completely walkable city-space under natural shading in the narrow streets.
The stray birds of the future
However, long and substantial critic of large scale and top-down approach to the city planning left no chances for the new asian and southern towns enter the architectural discourse. Bitter aftertaste of modernist cities created from a scratch is still felt by professional urban planners. We are taught not to believe in building New Towns and it prevents us from seeing these cities as the new phenomenona of a different kind, with its pros and cons. Thus, even though the above examples of the new towns are not very positive or inspiring, those new types of cities opens new horizons of future settlement and gives freedom for the thoughts about the future urbanism. Learning from them the policy governance, management and maintenance, their design and architecture, we might create a new form of life, like an alternate to the old organic cities. Cann’t we think of new cities of Asia and South as are the stray birds of the future, together with diversity of different kinds of cities which may appear? What if we return to the idea of polis, to the sustainable archetype of the ancient, the form of political, economical and social integration? Can it show us new perspectives of the city identity, offer new kinds of life and refill our daily routine with new significance of modernity? Thinking of the special opportunities and conditions for any kind of activity and practice, any new artificially created geniuses of a space and programmed the leisure time and lifestyles embodied of the buildings and city-space. Existing next to the old city, new towns can be filled out and developed with revolutionary new technologies, amid pristine self-reproducing green living conditions, which is often complicated or even impossible to implement in old cities. Therefore, to improvise with city organisation and its design, we have to get rid of the prejudices of the past and face the future with open minds and eyes.