Trabajos Publicos :: Public Works

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A pedagogical paper authored by Marti Gottsch & Brian T. Rex. Project peer-reviewed & published in the 2007 ACSA Central Regional Conference proceedings & presented at Waterloo University.

Through this urban writing we want to raise questions about the conceptualization of the city, the rights of its citizens and articulation of time, space, and the everyday. 1 But the real challenge facing studies of publicity now entails finding ways to analyze the temporal flow of structure, action, and agency within multiple, intersecting , and dynamic public networks. 2

Fig 1. Analysis of a Tire Repair Stall – M. Long (Sp. ’07)

To us, the form of an urban situation is defined by its Public and vice versa in a symbiotic cycle of influence. A critique of urbanity suggests the study of an aggregate of structures and physical space typically larger than a single building - enough of the city to be public. The public sphere is transparent, temporal, and open in its process. Spatially it seems horizontal and broad, general and accommodating.

Public is egalitarian. It is civic. How do we analyze Public? Where is the voice

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in Public design? Jürgen Habermas writes that the public sphere is a space in the city of negotiation between the state and the citizenry.3 Spatially it seems horizontal and broad, general and accommodating. Public is egalitarian, collective, and civic. Out of the din of discourse that public space promotes comes a shared voice - a will. How do we analyze the Public? Where is the voice in urban design?

The study highlights methods of a performative based design process to diagnose as well as prognosticate on the urban scale, then allow for more intimate associations to develop on the surfaces between vectors and paths that shape the city. Cultivated familiarity forms a relationship not only to the physical place but to the social space in which it forms and forms it. We work empirically in the Public rather than composing inductively for the Public.

Our practice, Public Works, defines a way of working that encompasses a humanistic philosophy defined by model based diagnosis (formal analysis) and situation based diagnosis (performative analysis). The paper will

Fig 1. Mile Square Block Analysis – T. Solcher (Sp. ‘07)

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conclude with how the analysis and time spent on location works to construct a patronage and / or viewership for their observation and projections.

We study Lubbock because it is a simple and concise example of new kind of city. Lubbock is defined and built out of roads. In the 16th through 19th centuries public space was organized and shaped by buildings. Buildings arranged in a figure-ground relationship were the dominant bounding device in the figural city. From the Nolli Plan of Rome to Hausmann’s Paris, buildings and the figural space between them more than anything else shaped our environment best. In the last 100 years we’ve witnessed a radical shift from the figural city to the vectorial city of the automobile. The car has become the dominant resident and basic metier of the city. Lubbock is a prototype for this new sort of city. According to J.B. Jackson in Lubbock, TX “...the roads have replaced the buildings as the basic building block of the city.”4 This evolving urbanism is built on a fluid event space of traffic in passage, situation, vector, and switch.

Nothing exemplifies this vehicular and non-figural city more than the simple gridiron. The first consideration in the gridiron is to homogenize the shape the road and subsume buildings into the lot and block of the addition and subdivision. For better or worse this reduces the city to an open matrix of vehicular flows into which the buildings are plugged. (see fig.1.) The creation of heterogeneous spaces like the neighborhood street is homogenized as we find ourselves building subdivisions on the laminar space of the arterial road. How this affects the Public in the city drives our praxis. As part of urban design practice all aspects of the social structure of the Public should be clearly defined and diagnosed in the specific and general conditions of the physical form and space of the urban. We repeat: the form of an urban situation is defined by its Public and vice versa in a symbiotic cycle of influence. In a road based city like Lubbock how do we locate and nurture the public sphere with public space?

Where is the Public voice in this new city form? How are Public Works in this new city advocated?

In light of these questions we founded Public Works, a Texas Tech urban design workshop / advocacy for physical public Fig 2. Cladistical Analysis – E. Barton (Sp. ‘07)

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infrastructures in Lubbock and immerse this practice in the public- to open dialog in situ, to record everyday experiences, and to condense public opinion out of extensive records of interaction. In this practice we’re trying to, “relate to the [city] like a surfer to the waves.” We project public works through design that is fully immersed in the fluid public; in it but not of it, working with expertise and craft. In the project at hand, La Pulga (a Latino flea market in an inner city precinct), we found a unique opportunity to link the two sides of our practice: making Public Works and Works made in Public.

Public Works are places of a certain urban scale with an infrastructural and civic nature. Often they anchor a precinct or neighborhood of the city. These places are larger than a building yet are commonly made up of arrangements of components that are in themselves less than a building (sheds, pads, fields, paths, fences, even ditches). Design studies about these places bring attention from the community at large to the issues that shape and support Public Works. Design studies such as this one harness the surrounding city as content for our urban design teaching. Cities need Public Works.

City Scale Public Works uses heuristic techniques of observation. The first observations occur on the city scale. We study the varying levels that exist in and on the city. This analysis leads us to familiarize ourselves with not only the rhythm of the city, but the dialectical relations as well. Our praxis does not heed to the analysis of figural relationships. Rather we analyze vector, surface, and event. Vectors vary with changes of event and surface. In Lubbock it is the 40mph speed space that defines the formal conditions of the city. Its roads act as a parading trace of the city blocks.

What events occur inside these blocks and how the public integrates or meets in the road is an essential question to our practice.

Henri Lefebvre wrote about the urbanism of carefully measured space. In the Lubbock model the case is the opposite, our praxis is performed within an endless flat mile by mile grid. This grid superimposes itself onto the fabric as roads and infrastructure framing city blocks. Through first physical modeling then cataloging and diagramming at the city scale, the vectorial patterns emerge as the public sphere.

Upon magnification to the neighborhood (surface) scale there is evidence of shifts in the grid, this led to further analysis of vector speeds through the area. There is a 40 mph speed space that consumes and defines La Pulga.

Surface Scale When our praxis zooms into the two square blocks that contains Burns Park (an ill and floundering city park) and La Pulga (a robust unsanctioned weekend marketplace that developed in happenstance over the last 25 years) we find a hierarchy of vector levels which control and compose these two neighborhood blocks. Through traffic models and diagrams we inscribe the urban project. La Pulga has always been the vibrant core of this overlooked inner city Latino neighborhood. Burns Park on the other hand is misused because its borders are defined by a 40 mph speed space. These two blocks, separated by traffic, are representative of the divide that exists between two publics, the car and the flea market (both are temporal public spheres). Thus, the design workshop asks its first physical problem: to diagnose the traffic situation that controls the specific area of interest and then to prognosticate as a result of analysis. This model-based diagnosis involves cataloging, narrating, translating, diagramming, and then projecting. The analysis reveals the varying vectors that control and contain the spectacle. (fig.3.)

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Fig 3. Circuit Map – M. Long (Sp. ’07)

The traffic that inscribes La Pulga is broken. There are several shifts in different grids meeting at this one site (industrial, residential, and downtown) as well as ill-fated roads. (see fig.4.) Texas Avenue, which once existed as a parade street and the main thoroughfare for the city, was now bombarded by an Interstate that was built in the 90’s. The built fabric that once framed this avenue is dissolving, leaving this 100 foot wide linear space as a ghost of a parade. The Public uses neighborhood roads as through streets, leaving the old arteries alone.  The urban has an ephemeral life that changes and fluxes with the everyday. Public Works takes this notion of time and space and relates it back to its base, vectors. This urban situation is first observed and then represented as a datascape of vectors. We take these situation of speeds and follow a series of techniques that integrate traffic into the existing event. The problems here exists on the surface scale and is defined by evental moments. On the weekend it is a successful market, but on the weekdays it remains a programmed storage garage as well as a transient parking lot. Because of this constant change the levels of traffic and the public strata respond. During market activity the streets which inscribe La Pulga are filled with parading cars that are continually ingraining vectorial loops into the surface. It is an event for the cars and the Public as much it is a constructed congregation for an active flea market. The second program of importance is the park. The park is a large field of destitution filled with grass that cannot survive the summer months. The car remains the defining temporal situation overall. As a result Public Works follows a concept that would weave these different surface situations together while performing dialectical analyses through first controlled and then live experiments.

Fig 4. Public Overlays – J. Nesbitt (Sp. ’07)

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Model based diagnosis (the controlled) as well as situation based diagnosis (stalling, reading, painting, and projecting) are important tools to make a complete record of the site (a complete diagnosis before prognosis). Each student spends 48 hours at the flea market measuring, mapping, and engaging the site and it’s participants directly. The student along with their developing records, also make a mark in La Pulga’s everyday. Public Works has a stall and participates with the flea markets events. The stall consists of a large neighborhood model, drawings, traffic models, developing diagnostics and students answering questions and noting concerns of market shoppers. (fig.5.) Interacting with the vendors as well as the clientele elucidates the event to the praxis. The work develops a temporal record of the site while students familiarize themselves with the physical and the social space. Public Works works within the Public Strata to promote and enliven the public sphere while using its data as a design tool.

Employing a cultural dimension to the city requires an appreciation of space as a system of symbols incorporating common values, artefacts and customs which

Fig 5. Precinct Model – ARCH3373 Group Model (F. ’06)

are enshrined in the urban landscape (Leitner, 1992). The urban landscape can, therefore, be ‘read’ as a text which communicates a series of meanings (Duncan and Duncan, 1988).5 The performance of Public Works also attracts attention to serious issues of the city as well as fashion the place an architectural mirror of the existing situation, thus heightening the sense of the public for the community. Hannah Arendt quantified the public sphere as the giving and receiving of appearances.6 The reality of the public realm relies on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects in which the common world presents itself. . . . Being seen and being heard by others derive their significance from the fact that everybody sees and hears from a different position. This is the meaning of public life.7

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Material Studies Along with constructing a place for urban impact, Public Works works simultaneously on the model based diagnostics, integrating park with market and then ultimately blending the park market with the evental traffic vectors.

Because the situational dynamics point at the flexibility of program, material studies remain essential to Public Works.

The world “build” sticks straight up out of the water where other possible words besides Fig 6. Possible Routes – M. Long (Sp. ’07) building float on the urban surface.8 Situational surface studies encompass all modes of vector, surface, and event. Material investigations into the temporal surface of the city allow Public Works to experiment with the notion of urban fabric and how to integrate the ephemeral programs with the Lubbock Model of traffic.

Experimentation of surface modeling aids the students in seeing spatial relationships that may not be present apparent in diagramming and not formally contextualized in the field. Students experimented with pneumatics, as well as forming and heating rubber, plexi glass, and plaster. (see fig.6.) The flexibility and molding of these materials allows for conformity and shaping around the traffic models. Readings of these models mark time, space, and surface.

La Pulga as Parade The program and the material studies emphasize and dictate a temporal urbanism, the concept of parading and looping work simultaneously into our conception of La Pulga as a Park Market. The road may be a stage on which to socialize, but integrating this idea into La Pulga would bring parading and cruising (a subset of parade) into its true form as a spectator event. Spectators presently watch the parade of cars and people from within the flea market. But by using certain event infrastructures and placing them into La Pulga, this manipulation would allow for more events to happen during times the flea market is not active, as well as the moving of the spectacle outside of the flea market while the event inside remains.

The vectors of La Pulga work as a series of loops that are switched everyday. The traffic changes as the events change. The loops thus work as transparent plugs.

Figure 6 delineates this change in vector with one single line. Each model allows for the switching of events as the vectors change. This transformable infrastructure unites how Public Works operates: to bind its public to the streets. (see fig.7.)  Service By learning stewardship of the civic in the city and plugging themselves into the everyday event structures of La Pulga by working in the public eye, the students build

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the respect of patrons instead of the demand of clients. They each find a voice and an audience for viewership to service with their ideas across the time and surface of the site. At the end of the semester each student has learned that in knowledgeable diagnostic urban design THE PUBLIC has less to do with the stakeholders and clients and more with the confident voice of a knowledgeable professional who can, as Wilde explains it, “...tell beautiful untrue things...”, because they are immersed in the everyday of the place and are fully aware of its full record.

Public Works is a design tool, not an ideology. It works as a filter for the hyper-inclusive constant of open dialog in a delineated space. Urban design performance in public entices people into thinking about the city and eventually reacting in response. Working in public is to be unscripted, inductive, and tapped into the exchange of ideas and criticism. The public sphere is a continuous place, open and absent of coercion in public dialog.9 Public Works advocates the study of culture, activity, productivity, adaptation, and inhabitation. The public sphere suggests a whole, a totality. Urban planning is presently fragmented and Public Works produces and performs as a response to this break.

Fig 7. Parade Projection – M. Long (Sp. ’07)

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Notes 1 Lebas, Elizabeth, Henri Lefebvre and Eleonore Kofman. Writings on Cities. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1996. p.6.

2 Emirbayer, Mustafa and Mimi Sheller. “Publics in History.” Theory and Society, Vol. 28, No. 1, 1999. p. 164.

3 Habermas, Jürgen. “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964)” New German Critique, No. 3. (Autumn, 1974).

4 Jackson, J.B. “The Vernacular City.” Places, Vol. 1, No. 1, University of Texas Press: Austin, 1984.

5 Jones, Gareth A. “The Latin American City as Contested Space: A Manifesto.” Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 13, No. 1, 1994. p. 6.

6 Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. p. 57.

7 Bickford, Susan. “Constructing Inequality: CIty Spaces and the Architecture of Citizenship.” Political Theory, V. 38, No. 3. p. 357.

8 Vaneigem, Raoul. “Comments Against Urbanism.” October, Vol. 79, 1961. p. 125.

9 p.49 Habermas, Jürgen. “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964)” New German Critique, No. 3. (Autumn, 1974).

MULTIPLE SOURCE LUBBOCK INFLUENCE

downtown

industrial/commercial

residential

PROGRAMMATIC GRID DEVELOPMENT

Fig 8. Fleamarket Projections for the City – J. Nesbitt (Sp. ’07)

south-downtown lubbock

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