Periphery
I N T E R N A T I O N A L
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T H E
R E V I E W
O F
L A N D S C A P E
A R C H I T E C T U R E
A N D
U R B A N
D E S I G N
Periphery
UNITED STATES-MEXICO BORDER ANALYSIS AND VISIONS · UNITED STATES INDUSTRIAL PERIPHERIES IN CHELSE A · NEW ZEALAND REDESIGNING THE PERIPHERY AT ORONGO STATION · MOROCCO CONNEC TING THE RUR AL AND THE URBAN IN C A SABL ANC A · SWITZERLAND DE ALING WITH URBAN SPR AWL IN A ARG AU · GERMANY COMPAC TING THE URBAN PERIPHERY OF MANNHEIM · GERMANY CONCEPTS FOR A NEW URBAN DISTRIC T OF MUNICH · CHINA TR ANSFORMATIONS OF SUBURBIA · KOREA RESHAPING THE GREENBELT OF SEOUL
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As an industrial suburb of Boston, Chelsea is
Klaus Leidorf
Landing Studio
Jana VanderGoot
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In Chelsea, Massachusetts, Landing Studio has
At the interface of the city of Munich and the
created an area for recreational and industrial use,
surrounding cultural landscape, Freiham Nord will
the urban landscape has produced a walking tour
connecting an inner edge of the city to the urban fabric.
emerge. A step-by-step development and landscape
guiding to a discovery of the city’s bizarre beauty.
Lighting communicates the public space to residents.
architecture competitions are to secure quality.
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Fences at Friendship Park impart an impression
Luming Park in Quzhou City, China, recalls the
NBW
Turenscape
Mark Lovett
perceived as lacking an own identity. An analysis of
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At Orongo Station, New Zealand, the regenera-
of control and security at the U.S-Mexican border –
area’s agricultural history and its integration in a city
tion of an ecologically devastated landscape balances
in view of recent debates and decisions the park’s
park. Once situated on the periphery, it is now part of
agriculture with the preservation of wildlife, ecosystems
meaning as meeting point becomes more important.
the agglomeration.
and cultural traces – it could be a model to be followed.
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PERIPHERY
Cover: Border City, Mexico/U.S. Design: Fernando Romero (fr-ee)
ER IETA AT TAL I
TABLE
OF
CONTENTS
C H R IS TO P H K A S P E R, U NDI NE G I S EK E
14 Beyond the Horizon
70 Connecting Urban and Rural Spheres
A photo journey to the edges of the world
Research on urban agriculture in Casablanca
C HR I ST I A N H OL L
JUT TA K EH R ER
22 Diversity on the Inside
78 Transformation and Memory
Reinterpreting suburban concepts for Mannheim, Germany
How cities in China could integrate former agricultural outskirts
JA NA VA N DE R G OOT
S US A N N A H N, Y U N K Y E ONG HOH
26 Making a Picturesque Landscape
86 The Lost Periphery
Discovering the bizarre charme of a marginalized city
Looking for a concept to design the greenbelt of Seoul
DAN ADAMS, MARIE LAW ADAMS
T H OM AS WOLT Z
34 Industry at the Edge of the City
94 Redesigning the Periphery
Merging industry and recreation in Chelsea, USA
Shaping the landscape of Orongo Station, New Zealand
HU BE RT U S A DAM
44 Les Argovies – The Identity of the Intermediate Currents
Channeling urban sprawl in Aargau, Switzerland
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Projects, Obituaries, Competitions, Reviews
DANIEL CZECHOWSKI
50 The Urban Country Living of Tomorrow
Products
A new interface of city and cultural landscape in Munich
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A L E X A N D E R G UT Z ME R
110 Authors
Street Furniture
58 Borderscapes 111 Credits/Imprint
Claiming a utopian city for the U.S.-Mexican border DW G I BS ON
64 Line in the Sand Revelations of the American psyche at Friendship Park
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Erieta Attali
BEYOND THE HORIZON Photographer Erieta Attali is a permanent traveller. On her journeys she explores the peripheries of our world and captures them in fascinating pictures. Here she offers us an insight into her work and thoughts.
A lifetime of travelling in absence of a permanent residence has led me to a particular outlook on geography, and a fascination with the landscapes of the periphery, which have shaped my itinerary as a photographer. The word “periphery” originally meant “circumference” in Greek: the circumference of a spherical Earth, signifying a leap over the horizon, where the unknown dwells. By definition, the word itself with its connotations of a “boundary” and “transition” largely depends on one’s frame of reference. It is a relative mental structure. The constant reference, or put differently, the centre of the world for me, has always been the Mediterranean. Continually pulled back by the centripetal force of “earth enclosed” sea, I have been simultaneously attracted to the edges of the world; the limits of my mental geography where human presence gives way to outlandish landscapes, over and beyond the expanse of water. From within a maritime enclosure, the periphery takes the form of vanishing points: a centrifugal movement through narrow passages into larger
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expanses. Though the scale is different by magnitudes of size, this is not unlike the process of gazing outwards into the landscape from within architecture: trying to place oneself by seeking out the edge where the earth and sky briefly brush against each other. I spent almost a decade as an archaeological photographer documenting excavation sites, underground tombs and crumbling ruins melting back into the landscapes that produced them. What draws me there, in the end, is the pervasive sense of continuous change, not only through the harsh natural processes that shape those landscapes but also through my own movement within them, in search of the end of the realm of human geographies. I seek out the transitions both in a spatial and in a temporal sense. This quest takes the form of an adventure, imaginary during childhood but very real in my life as a landscape and architecture photographer. It turns into a continuous exploration that demands a physical engagement, eventually defining my lifestyle.
Paracas Museum, January 2016. After an extensive stay in Chile, I decided for the first time to move into Peruvian territory, further exploring the desert and the work of architects Barclay & Crousse. I was about to complete the photographic material for my forthcoming photography monograph Periphery/An Archeology of Contemporary Architecture, which led me to explore the Paracas National Reserve. The site visit entailed walking for miles against strong winds that sent sharp sand showers flying off the dunes in successive waves; a very arduous but necessary process. Personally exploring the architecture and its context is for me the only way to properly understand a building, and in this case the masterful way that Barclay & Crousse embedded it in such a harsh natural context. Not unlike a medieval castle built out of the same rock on which it is perched, the Paracas Museum blends into the terracotta-coloured desert like a piece of crumbling ancient infrastructure. 15
Alexander Gutzmer
BORDERSCAPES Donald Trump’s big Mexican wall might not stop migration. But as a sinister case of collective social therapy, it works.
One of the most remarkable films about the phenomenon of “the border” begins with a deconstruction of its subject. In the first five minutes of Get the Gringo (directed by Adrian Grunberg, USA, 2012), we accompany Mel Gibson on a car chase that ends with his (surprisingly simple) border crossing. Gibson, the gringo, has stolen money. To escape the cops and to enjoy his ill-gotten two million dollars, he simply crashes a flimsy border fence between Mexico and the U.S. with his pickup truck. Yet his turbulent break for Mexico does not yield a life of abundance. On the contrary: Gibson finds himself back behind bars again – as an inmate of the absurd prison town El Pueblito, a place with its own rules and laws, one of which is key: that of the porous boundary. El Pueblito is porous – for some people. Relatives may live with the inmates, as long as they can cope with the sheer brutality of the place. (By the way, the film plot is based on a real prison. El Pueblito existed until 2002, at which point the Mexican state ended this long out-ofcontrol social experiment.)
Utopian border city Sociologically and politically, Gibson’s car flight and the entire story that follows point to one indisputable fact: Borders today are fragile, highly complex, porous entities. It is interesting that in times when the new U.S. president puts forward
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the idea of a wall as the utmost expression of cross-country rigidity, architects are contemplating the notion of this very fragility, complexity, and porosity. One of them is the prominent Mexican architect Fernando Romero. During the recent London Design Biennale, he unveiled his plans for a bi-national city at the U.S.–Mexico border. This Border City is very much a utopian vision of a place with dual nationality, where people and goods can move more freely across the U.S.–Mexico border, a porous model city. An examination of the existing flows between the USA and Mexico indicates that Romero’s Border City is not as purely utopian as might seem at first glance. Effectively, the system of maquiladoras, production facilities of mainly U.S. multinationals in Mexico’s borderland, represents a transition from the purely nationally defined state. These maquiladoras are transnational spaces where U.S. capitalism is transgressing the border, establishing its own production codes and work ethics apart from but close by. At the same time, products assembled in these places from imported semi-products are transported back to the U.S. to be sold. This is the U.S. producing for itself elsewhere. Nevertheless, in a time of Trump’s demonstratively hard-line plans, Romero’s idea formulates an important political counter statement, even more since as a symbol it is not purely
At the London Design Biennale 2016, the Mexican architect Fernando Romero presented a new vision for a binational “Border City� between the U.S. and Mexico. Economic, social, cultural and environmental sustainability are urban assets and organizing principles for the proposal’s design.
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today: as a juxtaposition of symbolic activities that, above all, aim at staging government activities. Even the most simple-minded Trump voters know that a completely closed U.S. society is not a realistic perspective. Globalization cannot be simply turned off. But voters desire that decisionmakers act as if there was a way to bring this about. This means that although no wall will ever stop migration to the USA, there will be some kind of wall-erection activity – simply because voters want to see it happen. Effectively, all standards for efficient infrastructure programs will be turned upside down. A “good” wall is no longer one erected as quietly as possible, and quickly finished. On the contrary: Voters desire a building process that will be loud and time-consuming. They want to see Trump building a wall, and they might even want to actively participate in it. Wall construction as societal therapy. But what may appeal to voters is a problem for those who must deal with the consequences of such symbolic politics. This infrastructure symbolism is also perceived by potential illegal immigrants. Already, Trump’s campaign statements have had real effects: 46,195 illegal border crossings were recorded in October, the high phase of the campaign, an increase of 17 percent. This can be expected to continue. Any additional measure by the U.S. that harms Mexico economically will have further migration effects. Border politics is always also economic policy, and vice versa.
Borders and their social effects Geopolitics, and especially border politics, are complicated. The Trump government will have to learn this. Political science is some steps further in this respect. The reflection of the internal mechanisms of borders and their social effects implies a focus on social and cultural processes. Academics Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr discussed this in their book Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge. A
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central idea of the book (and of the concept of “borderscape” as a whole) is that boundaries are not stability factors but provoke many of the movements they aim to contain. The in-and-out dichotomy implied by much of the rhetoric about borders is obsolete, as is the clear distinction between norm and norm breaking. At the same time, the processes of cultural self-definition on the part of states – which themselves are highly fragile institutions today – are becoming more dynamic. This is proven by Trump’s border rhetoric, but just as much by many of the architectural-artistic processes it triggered. Fernando Romero’s project is a prominent example, but there are others. Think of the hysterical-dystopian idea proposed by architectural office Estudio 3.14 – a completely pink border megastructure, inspired by the architectural language of Mexican Pritzker Prize winner Luis Barragán. The proposed structure would contain malls, i.e., the structural icon of U.S. hypercapitalism – but also huge prisons, the latter a type of spatial institution that ultimately unites the USA and Mexico rather than separating them.
Generator of cultural identity What we see through these examples is that the idea of a wall, however devastating it might seem to us, creates processes of cultural identity production both in Mexico and the U.S., even if these definitional processes must employ the notion of a huge pink prison. Which also brings us back to Get the Gringo. The dystopian prison town in which Mel Gibson survives with American tenacity and Mexican improvisation skills would now be no longer on the border, but in the border, hosted by the monstrous pink neo-Barragán megastructure. In this way, the wall would become a macro border that contains further micro borders. Not a nice vision, perhaps; but also not an entirely absurd one. And one that counts among its (involuntary) creators the border fetishist Donald Trump.
Mexican firm Estudio 3.14 mocked the concept of Donald Trumps border between America and Mexico with a pinkcoloured barrier in homage to Pritzker Prize-winning Mexican architect, Luis Barragรกn. Besides its function as a border, they developed the original idea of Trump and gave the wall a second purpose: serving as a prison. They even added a viewpoint for U.S. citizens to walk up stairs and look down onto the other side.
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Jutta Kehrer
Transformation and Memory Two strategic landscape design approaches for the periphery of cities illustrate how productive landscapes can inform future city parks, anchoring the future in the legacy of the past and providing restorative environments, beneficial for urban ecologies and highly embraced by the new urbanites.
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he periphery forms the most active part in China’s urban development. Official numbers state a total amount of over 250,000 hectares of land designated for construction each year, including 188,000 hectares of cultivated land. Although China has taken measures to restrict the annual loss of arable land, the peripheries of cities are still rapidly spreading, leading to an urban sprawl which is more often than not accompanied by generic layouts, providing barely any distinction between the various cities nor identifiable destinations within the city itself. On the contrary, the periphery, as the part of the city where the urban fabric meets the countryside, has a high potential of consolidating China’s rural past with its emerging urban future, by creating places of significance where the vernacular landscape patterns can inform the urban fabric and help create new living environments of meaning and distinction. The noted Chinese landscape firm Turenscape has been a key player in promoting urban ecologies in China over the past decades, creating prototypes for inner-city rejuvenation as well as suburban ecologies. The following two projects stand exemplary of Turenscape’s approach to landscape design. Both parks not only succeed in delivering highly popular new urban leisure destinations, but at the same time illustrate a model design strategy for the transition from productive landscape at the urban fringe towards sustainable inner-city park. They offer environments composed of layers of the past as well as the present, nurturing the synergy of both experiences and providing a rich journey to the parks’ visitors. Yunhe Park is located at the periphery of the growing city of Yichang in China’s Hubei Province. Like most Chinese cities, Yichang is experiencing rapid urban growth that is encroaching upon the surrounding agricultural land. Here the 12-hectare site earmarked as future city park was occupied by a deserted fish farm comprised of twelve fishponds, situated in a low-lying basin and
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cut off from the surrounding urban fabric by urban infrastructure along its edges. Turenscape approached these challenges as an opportunity to design a park that provides a showcase example for an ecological approach to landscape remediation and water-sensitive urban design, as much as the restoration of the disrupted urban fabric. It represents a model regeneration method that can be replicated along the whole watershed, gradually preserving and reviving the existing water system and establishing the open space framework of the envisioned “sponge city” development. Four key minimal intervention strategies have been applied as guidelines for the transformation. As a base layer to the design, the existing fishponds were preserved and technically modified into a water purification system, to allow for filtration structures, controlled water flow and plant integration. The polluted river water is now diverted into the eastern-most pond and continues through the filtering ponds to an outlet in the river at the last, western-most pond. A series of interpretive signs accompanies the ponds and illustrates the process of water remediation to the visitors of the park. This provocative core design statement of not replacing the original fishpond landscape by a new park landscape, but instead altering and gradually transforming it into an ecological urban park, has proven to be highly successful, with visitors being able to recall the memory of the rural past as much as experiencing its progressive evolution into an urban park directly on site. In a second layer, a tailored planting layout of local species was introduced to the barren fishpond site, consisting of structural planting, decorative feature planting and wetland planting to support the park function as well as ecological function. The third and fourth layers of intervention address the urban function of the park. A network of paths and skywalks gives access to the park on various levels. Small paths along the existing dykes connect of ponds. Together with the bridges they provide a fine mesh of walkways
Multiple paths, platforms, pavilions and towers are scattered throughout Yunhe Park. These structures function to rectify the differences in elevation between the park and the urban street and provide gathering possibilities.
YICHANG YUNHE PARK, YICHANG CITY, HUBEI PROVINCE, CHINA Client: Yichang City Government Landscape architects: Turenscape; design principal: Kongjian Yu; design team: Liu Xinagjun, Jin Yuyuan, Jiang Kaixun, Lei Yin, Lv Ning, Cao Zhnegrong, Guo Rong, Wu Kezheng, Zhang Meng, Jia Shaojie, Chen Peng, Liu Dehua, Chu Yaoming, Jia Pai, Liu Yue, Li Wei Design phase: 2009 Completion: May 2013 Area: 12 hectares
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Like Yichang Yunhe Park, Luming Park in the West New District of Quzhou City has been formed on former farmed land that has been absorbed by the rapid urban development. The new urban riverfront park is located on the west bank of Shiliang River.
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