The Berlage Smart, Smarter, Smartest
Author Pavel Bouse Tutors Sanne van den Breemer, Alessandra Cianchetta, Flavio Janches Coordinator Salomon Frausto (salomon@theberlage.nl)
The Berlage Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Urban Design
Smart, Smarter, Smartest Smart Donkey Path
Author: Pavel Bouse Tutors: Sanne van den Breemer, Alessandra Cianchetta, Flavio Janches
Smart, Smarter, Smartest Between Buenos Aires & London
Introduction To believe that cities have not always been smart is to deny any evolution of the city. “The city” has since its inception existed as an intelligent microcosm allowing for shelter, trade, shared services and waste management of human civilization. The Smart City’s promise of technology as the solution to all our problems is not a first, close similarities can be drawn with the political and economical leverage the motor and oil industry had at the middle of the 20th century which dramatically affected our urban environments. While early 20th century visions for the city were concerned with mobility, leisure, air, light, amenities, and work, the ‘Smart City’ outlines its primary mission on improving infrastructures and services. The automobile was one of the driving forces of these new visions for the city a hundred years ago, it is now the autonomous self-driving car that again appears as the solution. Could the current tech boom prove to be yet another history lesson in the negative effects of a misguided technological advancement? The “Smart” City presents a superficial diagnosis of the contemporary city upon which it suggests the means for its redemption—an all encompassing promise of the solutions to the problems of tomorrow. But smart city planning is often propelled
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by private interests of tech industrialists. What the smart city aims for is a complex technological understanding of the multiple agencies acting on the urban environment, advocating complex data analysis as the sole answer to the city’s efficient performance. Architecture’s previous love affair with form and function has been overthrown by an attempt at form and function to follow data collection and feedback loops. If digital information and communication technology provides new knowledge about cities and their users, then the Smart City architect assumes the role as mediator, spatially ordering sets of objects and their relations in a manner that best reacts to a rapidly evolving urban environment. The endless loop of data collection, analysis, and feedback allows for a more comprehensive and continuous understanding of the city’s complexities. It exists as connective tissue, establishing links between relations of its objects, activities, dispositions, and unusual programmatic overlaps. Here, smart technology becomes both informant and advisor—a new tool for the architect to employ. While cities as intelligent microcosms have always evolved in response to ever-changing needs and knowledge, the Smart City promises an all-encompassing solution to the city’s ills with intelligent use of data and technology as its driving force.
Its primary mission is improving infrastructures and services, in order to arrive in an urban environment of convenience, well-being, safety and efficiency. Architecture’s previous love affair with form and function has been overthrown by an attempt at form and function to follow data collection and feedback loops. As such the Smart City contests the relationships between the latest advancements in technology, inherited culture, human life, and the natural world. If the “smart� is the latest tool of the architect, how are we to employ it in order to reconcile these categories? Aspiring to dissolve urban functions such as shelter, trade, shared services and waste management in the name of efficient performance, the Smart City has presented itself as an overarching diagnosis of the contemporary city.
between objects, activities, dispositions, and unusual programmatic overlaps in a manner that best respond to a rapidly evolving urban environment. Environment informed by data (analysis) which can never be neutral, deriving either directly or indirectly from the involved agents. How can architects process these newfound complexities and potentials? How is the macroscale (city) to adapt, in order to keep up with the rapid changes on microscale? What data and what knowledge should we focus on in order not to lose sight of the human (f )actor? And how do we not fall in the trap of technocracy and privatisation that the Smart City has laid out for us?
Operating on the verge of the physical and the digital, the endless loop of data collection, analysis, and feedback loops exist as the connective tissue between the Smart and the City. Simultaneously an informer and advisor, this extensive and real-time data offers unprecedented potential to deal with the current complexities of the city. The architect is then confronted with the crucial role of a mediator, spatially ordering complex relations
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Le Corbusier and The Smart City
“The motor has killed the great city. The motor must save the great city.”
ing set of complex relations and potentials between its objects, activities and dispositions in organization. The Smart seems to be both its -Le Corbusier, 1924. informant and adviser at the same time; an endless loop of data collection, analysis, and feedback, In 1925, Corbusier introduced his project for the allowing for a more comprehensive and continuVille Contemporaine, that aimed to eliminate the ous understanding of the city’s complexities and infrastructure of the Parisian street and replace it potentials in organization and design. with spaces in function of the latest technological Here, perhaps naturally the role and the authoriadvancement—car. Financed by the car company ty of the architect has shifted: the architect is no Voisin, the plan was founded on the belief that the longer the supreme creator in the forefront, but centre of Paris was congested, dirty, and unable to merely a translator and mediator between data support the deluge of motor cars of the early twen- streams and the apparent needs of the user. tieth century. Despite its controversy, it has soon established a prominent position among the grand If the Corb’s Plan Voisin represents one of the narratives of the city, giving way to the modernist grand narratives for the city of the 20th centudoctrine of urban planning. ry, the idea of the Smart City is the emerging narrative of the 21st. In its rhetoric, the Smart As the early 20th century’s visions of the city deCity seems to be no different from the one of fined their priorities in air, light, mobility, amenCorb. It too seems to offer a malignant diagnosis ity, leisure, and work, the Smart City outlines its of the contemporary city upon which it suggest own mission in addressing the issues of connecthe means for its redemption. Equally, the smart tivity, security, affordability,..., and mobility with solutions are too often propelled forward by prithe help of smart tech. Interestingly, where the vate interests of tech industrialists in alliance with automobile became one of the main driving forces urbanists. of new visions for the city hundred years ago, Unlike the Corb’s vision of the city which takes the Smart City finds one of its own prophets in a form of an architectural project, cemented in self-driving car. drawings and models, the Smart City, however, Yet, the concept of the Smart City no longer finds remains both confused and confusing in its poor its articulation in the physical domain of the city. articulation. Where the former aims to reconfigure The Smart City can be described as an ever-chang- the interface of the city through specific urban
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Figure 1. Le Corbusier (1887 - 1965) Ville Contemporaine, Paris, France, 1922
solutions, the latter promises to do so from within the virtual realm of cryptic algorithms. So far, the Smart City has not been able to offer anything Le Corbusier, La ville contemporaine, 1922 (left); Ed van Elsken, Love in St. Germain-des-PrĂŠs, 1956 but standard urban practices with simply software layered over. But if the car, as one of the technological wonders of its time finds its counter form in the Ville Contemporaine, we have the right to ask ourselves how can the currently deployed technology, vehemently propelled by the Smart City, inform new urban solutions and practices? How are we to rethink the city in pace with the emerging technology and its bearings? And perhaps more importantly, how are we to do so without repeating the failures of the modern city? The proposal for London responds to a specific boundary condition, trying to improve the integration of two otherwise secluded domains: the servicing and the serviced parts in one of the major developments in London. Aimed at activation of the borders, the proposal presents a strategy to distribute different urban densities along and on top of the railway. Through this innovative and reality-based approach, the proposal reevaluates and (re)appropriates the “Smartâ€? not as a futuristic notion applicable to any city, but as an additional tool of technology and knowledge to improve (future) responses to existing and specific situations.
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OPDC Masterplan
In his lectures series, Reinier de Graaf often coins the term “Megalopolis” - cities and agglomerations which, along with their adamant political will and gargantuan economies, outperform the ones of whole countries. Arguably, these cities merely want to be perceived as smart. Rather, these cities want and need to be powerful, with the motive, opportunity, and the means to manage their own affairs and ambitions. Historically speaking, this is not at all a new situation for a city. Nor is the concept of a city state. The “smart” (as a way of urban governance) here becomes merely a means to these well-established ends. London is one of the cities where the concept of the “smart city” has been already introduced, and over the time become a common subject to a broad and often heated political discussion. It is also one of the fine examples where the smartness clearly manifests itself merely in digitizing the city rather than introduction of new (“smarter”) urban solutions to its (often long-standing) problems. So, if the grand old London is smart, with its empty skyscrapers, ever growing housing bubble, and sewers clogged with fat, we have a reason to ask ourselves what does the future of the city have to offer other than standard urban practices with simply software layered over. The ontology of the “smart city”, in that sense, is still a little bit tricky as it is not really defined by anyone.
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Nevertheless, suffering from having become more a political label used by the alliance of authorities and tech industries, it is clear that a “smart” solution does not always imply a good solution, or let alone the best solution possible. Irrespective of current smart visions for London (whatever they might be), the integration of still vastly industrial sites to London city is an interesting discussion in itself, with many precedents to be found across the city too. The masterplan for the Old Oak (Old Oak & Park Royal Development Corporation) is in many ways an epitome of today’s urbanism and development of contemporary city, primarily conditioned by infrastructure and connectivity. In other words, it is the development of appropriate infrastructure that increases the land value and becomes a prerequisite of the future development of the city. The connectivity and infrastructure is that which ultimately makes the location attractive. The geography, as a driver for urbanism, seems to have lost its relevance. OPDC presents a comprehensive masterplan that deals with the presence of vast physical infrastructure and complex issues of land ownership. Several studies have been conducted, at Cambridge and UC Berkeley, scrutinizing the proposed densities, exploring different land swaps, or enhancing the proposed transit hub..
None of the studies, however, investigates the potential of the infrastructure as such and its possible roles with respect to the proposed urban fabric. The infrastructure is presented as something that delineates and separates the development from other parts of the city rather than something over which the city could continue. It serves to generate the back of the developments, and nowhere does it form a front. Nowhere does it investigate the infrastructure as a possible amenity to the newly proposed densities. Where possible, the counter proposal, developed in a group of six students, tries to look at the infrastructure as an active urban element, that mediates the relationship between the homogeneously programmed sites of Old Oak and Park Royal. Phasing of individual steps (syntax) within the long term development is certainly a crucial part of any convincing proposal. Equally so, however, developing “smart� architectural solutions (spatial vocabularies) will play a role in defining an adequate response to conditions that are ever more dictated by large infrastructural projects and their inevitable (physical) presence in the city. Hence, some of the questions that arise with respect to this site are:
What are the assumptions for building over the HS2 tunnels? Is there a minimum distance from the infrastructure (ventilation shafts, jet fans, attenuation tanks, etc.) to accessible public spaces, to carriageways, to privately used yards, to building facades? How will this affect the floor area ratio in the ever growing economic pressures? How flexible will GLA have to become in order to mediate between these and many other pressures? How does one optimize that? And why, how, and where does the information and communication technology come in order to deliver the best outcome possible? The following interview with Dan Epstein—director of Sustainability at OPDC, was conducted among others during fieldwork of the group of Berlage students in London, Frebruary 2019, and served as one of the main pillars of the research on the Smart City.
How well can be such infrastructure integrated in the future development?
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Expert Interview Dan Epstein, Director of Sustainability, Useful Projects and Sustainability Lead for Old Oak Park Royal Development Corporation and former Head of Sustainable Development and Regeneration at the Olympic Delivery Authority for the London 2012 Olympic Games. As a recognized leader in this arena he regularly speaks on major platforms around the world and is highly regarded for the way in which he manages to develop and deliver imaginative and practical propositions.
Prior to the OPDC’s masterplan you have been involved in the issue of sustainability for the Olympic Park in London, is that right? I was delivering the sustainability rather than planning, that is working on its actual implementation. Can we ask you about the public engagement during the processes of planning. The project itself is very interesting in a sense it’s one of the biggest projects. It’s actually the biggest project that would be built in London. It’s a really big piece of city. I would argue, in my personal opinion, in Britain we have a very prescribed approach to public engagement. We have to go through a series of processes where we talk to people. We publish our local plan, we publish consultations, we publish other documents we want to make formal, and public is supposed to have the opportunity to respond, and we should then respond back to them. We’ve been through the whole process. That whole process is called Regulation 80, Regulation 90. We produce a plan, publish it, we get responses, we respond to the responses, then we get the agreement to the responses, we closes down the responses, and then we move on. Then we have this process two or three time, and we are about to go through a formal inspection with a planning inspector who will now look at the local plan in public and question us about it. How does the planning reflect the idea of the Smart City in your opinion? In relation to smart technology, or Smart City approach in general, I think it’s a very dumb system that we’ve used. It’s a very old fashioned system, a very paper-based system. We publish it in a very formal way, we use language, which I don’t think it’s very easy for the general public to understand. We use two dimensional drawings, which I don’t think show very much. I don’t think we offer a very high level of information, which I think is today’s world is quite surprising. We really should be doing three dimensional plans. We should be much more collaborative. We should be talking to people before we
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publish plans about what we’re trying to produce. And we should take them along, take them with us on the whole process of plan making. We really only present them once we have something quite formal, and it’s very difficult in that process to do any meaningful changes. But that’s my opinion. Other people in OPDC would argue it’s necessary to tick all the boxes, go through the process to engage them, but I don’t think we get many people responding. We don’t get huge interest in the scheme and in the public engagement. When we do get engagement, we get to speak to two or three active groups who have quite a few of representatives rather than larger number of people. In that sense, I would disagree that everything in the city works smartly. I think actually there is massive opportunity to adopt new tools and new ways which would really be smart. On that note, has there been any effort from the side of OPDC, AECOM, or other parties involved to investigate the possibilities of using new tools or ways of implementing smart technology in the masterplan? There is a 3D masterplan. AECOM have developed quite a lot of tools, but none of them have been shared with the public. It is a rather closed system. We’re not really transparent, which is very strange for public organisation. I think it’s really worth investigating though. I think it’s because there’s a kind of presumption that the professional people and the government knows best, and the people don’t know. So, we end up with a process which is not transparent, conflicting in a sense we always put forward a plan that other people object to. It’ very confrontational. And it’s very confrontational from the very beginning as we assume that people don’t really want development, so we start in a very defensive way. We have a very formal way of presenting which perpetuates that. The big government sits on one side of the table and the opposition is on the other side. That’s how we do public consultations. So, we don’t release a lot of information and when we do it’s very controlled. To give an example, there are going to be many tall buildings in the area. We know in a way how many tall buildings and we know what they will
be like, but we don’t show people this. You can argue that’s okay, you don’t want anything set in stone. The organisation is highly professional, it does exactly what it needs to be doing, it does it well, very efficiently. Bureaucratically, it’s a very strong organisation, but it does not represent a different way of making city. It doesn’t introduce ideas that are new. We have published a document on circular economy, but we haven’t embraced it in our planning. There are other things which are much more radical and which we might be looking at, but we haven’t really built into the way we’re doing development. There’s a separation of the planning policy and actual design. It doesn’t quite add up yet. Do you have any case studies or examples where you look at London or even outside of London, where you think this process you’re describing and especially in relation to smart technologies has been implemented successfully? In terms of public engagement, it is worth speaking to a friend of mine from ‘Commonplace’, which is an online tool that allows communities to have a say about developments quite early on using social media and phone based apps. He’s got a lot of experience and might tell you off the record which of the local authorities and which projects are open to public consultation, which ones go to the motion, but it’s not really encouraging people to you know to work with proper engagement. There are some unsuccessful project in that sense like Elephant&Castle, and some semi-successful. I think generally when we have an adversarial kind of approach to development, people are being very suspicious of any new development and we approach these things in quite a negative way. How do you deal with, engaging groups in industrial areas as opposed to residential areas and neighborhoods? It’s not completely different. In the Park Royal, where HS2 is building a new station there are lots of business, or business communities that are very upset. Their businesses are being bought and
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they feel they’re not being compensated properly. There’s a lot of people who think they haven’t been properly engaged in a proper way, and have been forced to close their business. And that’s just saying it might be more difficult than having your home bought. In the Olympic Park we moved around seven hundred businesses. Lot of business got offered money or new premises. The LSE did quite a big survey on what happened to all of them and asked how they felt about it, whether they were happy with the deal they got or not. Generally, it was quite positive. With the HS2 in Park Royal it is much more political. How much would you say then that, the Old Oak & Park Royal actually depends on these vast infrastructural projects and their like financial viability? Would you see it happening even in the case when the HS2, the station, or the construction of the station is delayed or even put on hold indefinitely? That’s a different question. Big projects like this one tend to be very expensive and they’re very expensive. If they weren’t expensive they would have been developed already. Usually they have massive infrastructural issues. In Park Royal, the issues have to do with contamination, poor connectivity, not enough bridges, not enough roads. It’s very much like the Olympic Park. And if you want to turn these areas into good mixed use neighbourhoods you have to spend two or three billion pound to make these developments viable. The way we measure viability is really limited approach, it’s very short-term, it’s very much based on land value and how much the land costs, how much it costs to build a new development, including infrastructure, the houses, the gas, electricity supply , the roads the water the sewage etc. We don’t’ really look at the long term value you create when you build community. When you look at the rents it generates, the uplift in housing value, the uplift in productivity through better workspace, or the community value. We don’t really value these things in terms of the value they bring in the next twenty, thirty, or forty years. If you look at the success of Paris or London, it has really to do with the investment in Paris in the
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Haussmann era, in London in the Victorian era or the Georgian era. All these were massive investments, and we’re still getting the rewards from that now. But that’s not built into the economic model. The economic model is a model that tries to prioritize the private value. Instead, what it needs to do is to share the values between public and private sector, but we don’t have very good mechanisms to do this at the moment. That’s why the mayor is now trying to get money from the ministry of housing, which is meant to enable the housing to be developed. This would get, I think something around 280 mil pounds, but actually in the end, we need 2 billion pounds to make this work, on top of the 1 billion invested into the HS2 project. These numbers sound big, but they are not really big, if you think how much community is worth, or in terms of social or environmental value. How do you see then the possible effect of Brexit negotiations on the process of developing such a large project? Or the next mayor election in two years time? I don’t think the election cycle has a big impact on the project. The really big impact is the macroeconomics. There is two big impacts. There natural economic cycle. We are now in a down cycle in term of development. The developers do not want to invest a lot. A lot of it has to do with austerity in 2000s, when the government made cut backs in public investment, in public good; schools, hospitals, etc. Somehow the London got through that over time because of international money being invested in the city. It’s like New York and other major cities. That inflated the cost of construction but also the cost of property, which has forced people to move to further out of the city. Brexit has discouraged big investors from Russia, Far East, that’s killed the top of the mountain in private investments, and that impacts everything else. So, one cycle is the public sector cycle and the kind of lack of investment in the public arena. That’s the authorities who’s got much less money that they had. They had their budgets cut by forty percent. At the same time you’ve got the private
sector now being impacted by Brexit, so it’s a kind of double whammy in a way. The OPDC is lucky because of the investment in HS2 which creates the imperatives to invest. If you happened to be Car Giant who own a very large piece of land next to the HS2, your land value increases, so you’re incentivised to wait and capitalise on that public investment. The planning now is how can you make the most of that investment.If you look at what actually happened where the Crossrail had a station there and it put its depo and taking out of the best piece of commercial land for a station to manage trains whereas actually that area should be vital for high density commercial development right by the station. The strategy over twenty years has been very weak. Over the last three years when OPDC and GLA got involved it got much stronger, so now you can’t really build these stations without capitalising on the opportunity to build new housing. The government needs to come in then as a public to clean up the land and to provide the infrastructure, but because of the austerity the money is not flowing as quickly as it could be. Would you regard the Smart City plans as a way of selling the site rather than being a holistic way of development of the area? I don’t believe in Britain we really embrace Smart City. It really depends on how you define it, but if you really want a bit of Smart City you have to go to the Far East. Smart City is not just a sustainable city, it’s many other things, but it’s just using technology in a much more sophisticated way to enable collaboration, construction, management, operations, transport, a whole load of different things to happen. In the Far East and in India, it’s really embracing the role of technology and smart as the future; robotics and AI. Whereas in Britain we are quite slow, we don’t really integrate it. It’s not really influencing. We add it as a fifth dimension; we don’t engrain it and embed it thoroughly. We kind of see it as a starting something from a different angle, whereas elsewhere in Asia, they look at from more economic perspective. They see the Smart as a technology and other drivers that they build into their approach.
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Figure 2. Alison & Peter Smithson, Golden Lane Estate proposal, London, United Kingdom, 1952
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A Smart Donkey Path London, United Kingdom
“Man walks in a straight line because he has a goal and knows where he is going; he has made up his mind to reach some particular place and he goes straight to it. The pack-donkey meanders along, meditates a little in his scatter-brained and distracted fashion, he zigzags in order to avoid larger stones, or to ease the climb or to gain a little shade; he takes the line of the least resistance. But man governs his feelings with reason; he keeps his feelings and his instincts in check, subordinating them to the view he has in mind... But the pack-donkey thinks of nothing at all, except what will save him trouble...” In Le Corbusier’s The City of Tomorrow and its Planning, the donkey takes the line of least resistance, while the modern man walks in straight lines because he has set his goal and knows where he is going. The modern man indeed knew where he was going, but what about the contemporary ‘smart’ man. Does he necessarily? Quite literally, he knows his way only in so far as his smart device is able to tell him. The technology on hands of the contemporary man might allow him to access knowledge faster than ever, but not only it does not always mean that he knows or is able to do more, it suggests a reality where any kind of reason ceases to be required. ... And yet, despite the smart tech still remains a dull instrument rather than driving force of large urban transformations, it is “changing” the city
after all. Following the footsteps of contemporary man, technology is that which helps to “straighten” even the most crooked of lines today, reducing any urban fabric into the binaries of departures and destinations. The GPS navigation helps to define one’s goal with disturbing precision and turns even the most complex of geometries into the most comfortable, the shortest, and ultimately the “smartest” of routes. Any piece of the city can thus be abstracted into the Champs-Elysees of Paris - clear, monumental, stemming its authority just from the shear act of ignoring everything else around it. The virtual reality of the Smart Man seems to have more to do with the Corb’s orderly and abstract aesthetic politics of the straight line, rather than with its desultorynemesis embodied in the famous animal figuration. ... The Smart City is a place of no aberrations. For Le Corbusier, the metaphorical donkey was the true architect complicit in creation of cities such as Paris or London, against which he proposed the modern city of rational planning and orthogonal aesthetics. One that dismisses the meandering paths of the city of leisure in favor of the rational performance and destination-oriented planning. In its essence, the proposed reality of the Smart City comes into play to deal with the same question of urban circulation; that of a balance between efficiency of a modern man on one hand, and idleness of the donkey on the other. Perhaps
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with less pomp and charisma than of its predecessor, but as a pervasively universal concept with space for no “dumb” alternatives nonetheless. ... As the rapid accelerations of the forces at play in the Smart City foretell a colossal and potentially chaotic period of growth and transformation, the technological advancements still remain an instrument rather than an impetus of the cities’ development. The tabula rasa is no longer an option and as the cities continue to evolve on an unprecedented scale and level of complexity, the current disarray between the inventions and achievements of modern technology, our human condition, culture, and the natural world might want us to further contemplate the Smart City and its semantic limits. This project follows the path of the donkey. Both literally and figuratively. It challenges the idea of a “smart” route and its technological underpinnings, while revisiting the idea of promenade as a space of commerce and leisure, making it contemporary and cosmopolitan. ... If the “smart” is supposed to provide us with the means that help us to understand and navigate ourselves in the increasing complexity of the city then a smartroute needs to be clear. As a system, it sets the rules of the game that links and activates its constituents. Perhaps,asmarter one does so only
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when necessary. Surely, the smarter route requires a different kind of authority if any. It does rely on indeterminacy and latency more so than on clear spatial declarations such as a traditional bus stop or a sign post. As such it activates its individual components as much as it is itself activated by them. It is one that integrates rather than polarizes, and thence has the capacity to offer much more information. The smartest route, however, does not just connect seemingly discrete points in the right way. It needs to do more than just spatially validate the relationships and dependencies between two points. As cliché as it may sound, it needs to become a destination in itself. ... The efficiency of the modern man and the mindless drifting of the donkey come together in a single piece of infrastructure, fusing two different modes of urban circulation, that of the determinacy of a strong will and the incessant need for procrastination, a tight schedule and wasted battery of a brand new Tesla or flat tire, the latest model of IPhone and sparse data connections, necessary surveillance of public space and a biting difference of opinion. The ‘smart route’ here is a latent system of various components that only together may speak to the idea of a pathway, as a reckless collection of various, yet somehow consistent arguments. It is not any closer to a repository of unresolved ideas than it is to a sophisticated design of intricate
subliminal signs. The banter of the components is sporadic and the outcome patchy, if not mostly enjoyable. (fig. 3) ... If the donkey of Le Corbusier with his supposed inertia, laziness, and stubbornness was resistant to modernism and modernity, then the ‘smart’ donkey comes forward with certain reluctance to the Smart City. (fig. 8) As it is currently understood an attempt to chalk out a big, forward-looking picture of what digital technology means for the city, it is in this polemic that the donkey stubbornly walks in the opposite direction to the technological vectors of smart developments, trying to find and employ alternative modes of navigation in the urban environment. (fig. 9) The donkey embarks on a pathway in a literal sense of the word. It is one that does not rely on the authority of clearly defined components within a hierarchical structure, but instead, through openness and indeterminacy, invites him to meander along, meditate a little in his scatter-brained and distracted fashion. As a dilatory creature, the donkey comes to challenge the mode of circulation facilitated by the existing and proposed train lines, in many ways still preoccupied with efficiency and destination oriented understanding of the city. ... But the smart donkey is no longer a saboteur. Where the Le Corb’s donkey becomes merely an
antithesis to the modern city, the smart donkey, well, tries to be a bit smarter. He knows well that there is no resistance without tolerance, and so he sometimes uses the latest inventions of the smart city to his own benefits. (fig. 10) Much in the same way, the resulting pathway should be understood only as subsidiary to the existing and intended infrastructure, not as its exclusive counter solution. As antagonist as it may be seen, the prolific animal figuration of Le Corb reminds us that the purity of the conscious will to plan cannot be separated from the reality which includes things like incompatible software, long meetings, wasted batteries, lack of reception, endless queues, or just simply having to deal with idiots. ... ‘The demon of speed is often associated with forgetting, with avoidance... and slowness with memory and confronting,’ observes Milan Kundera in his novel Slowness. If nothing else, let the smart donkey be an advocate in the search for slowness and tranquility in time when we are often over stimulated by technology and sometimes simply try to do too much... Let him be an advocate for architecture where looseness and lack of concentration are no longer flaws of the weak spirit, but can become merits of a different kind of ‘smart’ instead.
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Figure 1. Site plan Building on the idea of future development of both Old Oak and Park Royal, the proposal brings together the existing railway as an infrastructure that once foreshadowed the obsession with speed and efficiency, a series of proposed programs and other elements that together constitute a pathway between the Wilesden Junction and Old Oak Common Lane Station, designating a public space out of previously inaccessible areas. 18.
Wilesden Junction
pop-up gallery space
transit center
social club
workspace storage center
shipping facility
sports center
urban gym market
train station Wormwood Scrubs 1
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Figure 2. Program diagram The idea of a pathway rests on negotiation between different elements; some of them are charged with program, other ones have a more functional purpose. Some of them are rather smart, some of them, well, merely intelligent. Some of them are more permanent, others temporary. It uses the existing infrastructure of the railway as a central spine on and along which these devices or programs are situated. 19.
Figure 3. A Smart Donkey Path, cutaway section Firstly, the pathway offers a alternative connection between the Wilesden Junction and the Old Oak Common Station, designated for pedestrians and cyclists. Secondly, as a programmed piece of infrastructure, the proposal aims to mediate the relationship between otherwise two separated parts of the city. And least but not last, the individual programs suggested along the railway create a universe in their own right, including workplaces in the center, and a handful leisure facilities in between. So, as one goes from work he or she can choose between a pint of a London Ale or a few sets of tennis before deciding to hop on a train and continue to the next destination.
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Figure 4. Old Oak Common Lane Station
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Figure 5. Shipping facility.
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Figure 6. Railway Yards social club and transit center.
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Figure 7. Pop-up gallery space.
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Figure 8. A Smart Donkey Path, Pop-up gallery space As a dilatory creature, the famous animal figuration returns to the Smart City to challenge the mode of urban circulation facilitated by the existing and proposed train lines, preoccupied with efficiency and destination oriented understanding of the city.
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Figure 9. A Smart Donkey Path, worm-eye perspective In addition, the project forms an alternative connection for pedestrians and cyclists along the existing train line. Challenging the idea of a ‘smart route’ and its technological underpinnings, it revisits the idea of a promenade as a space of commerce and leisure, making it contemporary and cosmopolitan.
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Figure 10. A Smart Donkey Path, hop scotch generating energy Trying to find and employ alternative modes of navigation in our urban environment, the smart donkey embarks on a pathway, that does not rely on the authority of clearly defined components, but instead, through openness and indeterminacy, invites him to meander along, meditate a little in his scattered-brained and distracted fashion.
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Figure 11. Smart Donkey Path, section
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Images: Figure 1. Le Corbusier (1887 - 1965)Ville Contemporaine, Paris, France, 1925 Figure 2 . Alison & Peter Smithson, Golden Lane Estate proposal, London, United Kingdom, 1952 All other drawings were made by the author.
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