Marco De Donno - Like a climbing plant

Like a climbing plant Essay about Urbanism and Contingency

Marc o D e D o n n o

Complexity and Contingency Our cities have, in general, a strong identity. They have a peculiar character with which they are distinguishable. Everything that contributes to give a character to a city is often also what makes the difference. We can find similarities in cities belonging to a same geographical region or with a shared history, but generally they manifest their own identity. It will be sufficient to consider, for example, three cities in Tuscany such as Florence, Pisa and Siena that shared a tradition in construction materials and techniques.

For several periods they have a common political history and for many aspects they have a similar geographical context. But it’s undeniable not to recognize to all of these cities a peculiar “united-character”.

A city is characterized by its dimensions and forms, its colours and climate, its activities well as the intangible choices made by its inhabitants. Everything can make a city “united”.

Walking through old neighbourhoods of Istanbul it is easily recognizable how the city is made by the coexistence of traces left by various people and several slices of time. Some corners seem to belong to the domain of chaos where everything is left to grow like a climbing plant. Here there is disorder, dirt, mess, I dare say life. Most of our cities are made by layers of different ages, memories and stories, and the geometric order and chaos lie down together in the urban structures. Design and other self-organising processes merge in the creation of the architectural space that is a continuous process of destruction and construction, adaptation and various changes of ownership. The accumulation of all these processes causes a spatial complexity that rarely corresponds to a conscious planning design but rather it acts as a storage of these free mutations and transformations. Yet, to our senses, cities keep a strong uniform identity. The urban fabric, with its growing and transformations, it must be necessarily associated with the social tissue living in it . So observing and understanding the physical structure of a city means to study also the purposes for which it was created: every physic element, be it a street or a building, must be associated to the activities for which it was initially designed and used and to the events that have concerned it through time. From this perspective, every place acts not only as a testimony and a documentation of its history but also of the history of everyone who lived it.

In the life-cycle of a community, activities, needs and desires are never static but they tend towards chan-

ges. These variations are reflected in the energy with which a city grows and transforms itself. Like any individual needs to change and redesign himself, so the city needs to be always redesigned and rebuilt. New forms arise to answer to new demands and bring the whole city to a new equilibrium. Through time this will reveal as a dynamic equilibrium that needs a continuous transformations and reconstructions.

The architectural product is now considered as an event that has a precise role both in space and in time and, as Jeremy Till advices, it belongs to the domain of contingency of which the architect cannot have the full control . If social relations take place in spatial relations, the interaction between us and our cities is the determinant for the spatial complexity of the urban fabric. To understand this complexity, it’s essential also to take account of the contingency factor, or the unpredictability of the events and their instability in the flow. The city is daily run over by perturbations that don’t affect the stability of the whole system. Changes in the territory management, economic reforms or popular events are examples of little perturbations that don’t disrupt the entire system. But there are some other strong perturbations that create instability and are often cause of break with the past, such as earthquakes or fires, long political and economical crises or revolutions. A city cannot be considered as unchanged and unchangeable, but it should be insert in the chronology of the events. It’s correct so consider the whole city system, with its structure and its inhabitants, as a process.

A process that had origins with the very origin of the city, that arrive to our days and continue in time through the future configuration that the city will get. Contemporary architectural language tends to be more and more homogeneous all-over the world, due to the fact that economic conditions and cultural situations push towards an architecture that is increasingly part of global trends. These interventions often attack and corrode the old urban fabric and local components disappear or survive after being transformed. This is after all the evolution where the strongest survive on the other components after a process of natural selection. In fact, walking through the new neighbourhoods of Istanbul that are rapidly changing, you realize how chaos gives way to a new technological order, often characterless. The image of the contemporary urban growth that we have show a propensity for gigantism, that is abrading the existing texture. The cities seem to have been overwhelmed by the lava of the contemporaneity and eroded by it rather than be improved. The order of the new infrastructure, the denial of historical layers, the irresponsible gentrification correspond to several conscious design planning that rarely communicate with the existing city-system. This is the United character which makes our cities unique and distinguishable from one another: the equilibrium

that the whole system has achieved and which must be continued despite the entry into play of new and different factors. A balance that includes coherent choices and contradictions, which is made up of fragments and epochs, memories and mistakes. A balance that is the sum of events, contexts and meanings and that results in the United character peculiar to each city system. Therefore, recognizing it and interpreting it become the starting actions for any urban planning. And even more fundamental is understanding and reading its identity in occasions of re-planning and re-construction, to avoid a collapse of the history of a city in its future without memories and where it would manifest the liquefaction of its uniqueness.

The built environment and the study of its evolution therefore plays an important role in the identification of the United character and in the design of the new. It is evident that in the case of Istanbul the evolution and the intangible choices of the community are legible through the built component of the city.

Studying the structure of the physical environment is a fundamental starting point to try to built an image of the processes that a city has lived. The built fabric is something that Karl Kropf defines as “tangible and persistent” . The uses and the activities in a building, or a street, change more rapidly than its physical structure. The urban tissue provides a very efficient base with which to study all the other social and cultural aspects related to it. Activities, in its diversification and intensity, are closely connected to the environment in which they take place and they interact with it modifying and giving it new forms.

The built space shapes and is shaped by the people living in it. Architecture is dependent on the external environment at each stage, from design to construction and beyond. Architecture receive many and continuous inputs and this might lead us to believe that a total-design project may be able to control all of these external forces. But many experiments and utopian projects, especially during the last century, give us evidence of how this approach is unsuccessful. Rowe and Koetter have amply demonstrated the fragility and contradictions of utopias in which the order and the monistic attitude lead the design process but they have not held up the comparison with the reality of things that change and become rapidly obsolete. Thus only considering architecture as an event, in space and time, we will be able to insert it into the domain of contingency. Contingency is an aspect that cannot be controlled by the people planning the urban tissue, but understand its role in the complexity of the city can help to manage all that other aspects that can be controlled.

Understand the contingency means to understand that the complexity has not only a negative connotation but it is a potential qualitative factor. Archi-

tecture as profession could then consistently meet the challenges of modern society starting from the understanding of reality. Recognize the heterogeneous origin of the built environment, understand which elements remain as traces in the time and which ones are modified, associate the geometrical analysis with the chronological analysis, is fundamental in order to try to understand what the identity of a city is, what its “united character” is.

Urban tissue, the case of Lisbon The geographical context is one of the first aspects to be considered in analysing the urban settlement of a city because it affects it since its origins and through all the following transformations. The land relief, the quality of the soil, its exposition to sun and wind, the presence of water and all that aspects of the natural context have an important role in the arrangement of the urban tissue. It is not possible, for example, to study Venice without taking into account its exceptional topographic context and the presence of water like an element that shapes and gives a peculiar characteristic. On the other hand, Lisbon’s fabric occupies a large area overlooking the mouth of the Tagus river, with little headlands and flat zones. The way in which this land was crossed gave origin to the first transport routes in which the city is formed. A system of street is arisen from the capacity of the population to adapt itself to the geographical context. But the hierarchy of those routes is to relate to the purpose for which they were used. Economical and cultural reasons give character to streets; the nature of the activities or the relations, their intensity and their distribution diversify the importance and the dimensions in the entire streets system. Morphologically, streets are also the most stable elements, generally, inside a city. They show a good resistance to the several changes of a city, giving a certain degree of stability when passing the time. Streets and voids as squares and parks are the most evident democratic spaces in a city where people meet and interact in social terms. The void must not be considered as the residual space between the buildings but as what can shape the buildings. Historically the open space has a high density of intangible relations, despite a contemporary trend in encompass these relations in closed containers. Traditionally most of our cities have open spaces that Colin Rowe had identified in the archetypal type of “foro” where the void gets a central role in shaping building and it is perceived not only as a crossing space but as a place to live. Voids became rooms to live. He opposed to this type that one of the “akropolis” where single volumes arise and with them their tensions in an empty space. Also here the void is protagonist because it’s the stage of the architectural drama of a city. Voids in Lisbon, as in the most part of our cities,

are to identify mostly in the first type and often they are elements that resist to transformations of the solid environment. The dialectical relation between solid and void that are often used as a reading tool of the urban fabric, it brings to another concept that must be considered: the buildings system. Despite it doesn’t have the same stability in the time as the open space system, it is effectively the most visible and recognisable of the physic elements that build a city. Not just for shape and dimensions, but the solid is important also for its position inside a plot, for the relation that it has with the open space, be it public or private, and for the relation that it has with the activities inside. The buildings, as a solid form in contrast with to the void, cannot be totally understood if they are not related to the outdoor environment with which they dialogue.

Solids and voids comprehend the built environment, that is something extremely physic. Their relation creates a base to describe different areas physically distinct within a city. The construction of each element has an historical character because it is the evidence of past activities: continuous constructions and destructions, changes and adaptations. This historical nature of the physical entities that comprise a city can help to understand that the history of that city could be read in the evolution of its urban

fabric. This is evident in the investigation of the Lisbon’s historical centre: a city with a strong stylistic and cultural identity. Like many other cities it grew up mostly without any real planning and its urban tissue is the product of how its inhabitants used to live that space. An original centre could be found in the Moorish castle then conquered by the Christians, around which the city has started to expand and englobe neighbouring villages until the creation of a continuous tissue in which several different patterns coexist. The resulting city was the reflection of the internal political and economic organisation and its heterogeneity reflects its characteristic cultural dynamism. There is the coexistence of patterns that follow a precise planning and others that have a self-organize origin. These transformations have given rise to a series of patterns that have shaped the urban space in its solids as in its voids. Patterns that have translated social relationships into relationships between materials and geometries. In fact, both the solids as buildings and the voids as squares and streets are inseparable from the social events that affected them. You can not analyse The life of a community takes place both in its solids and in its voids; the latter, places par excellence of sharing. a road if you do not study the activities that took place in it, not a building if you do not understand the reasons for which it was built and used, not a square if

you do not consider the history that the view as protagonist. In this Lisbon is not so different from many other European cities, but its uniqueness is always notable. Its golden age is in generally identifiable with the age of the geographical discoveries and the formation of its colonial empire. But Lisbon suffered under several traumas in its history, many fires and earthquakes. The last earthquake in 1755, that has also a tsunami, has levelled different historical districts. The reconstruction of those areas had different outputs: the creation of new patterns inside a complex city has increased the physics heterogeneity but it has also strengthened its peculiar identity: the imagine of Lisbon that gets us is that of a city united in its heterogeneity, under many aspects.

As we can observe in the cartography of Lisbon’s historic centre, each district has a distinct urban tissue.

Bairro Alto district is an urban expansion developed in different phases from the 16th century; Chiado district was rebuilt after the 1755 earthquake on the original organic street plan and renovated after the 1988 fire; Baixa district was rebuilt after the earthquake on a new grid pattern strongly different from the original settlement; Alfama district is the oldest Lisbon’s district and it resisted to the earthquake.

Marquis of Pombal was the Secretary of the State of

the Kingdom that led the reconstruction with a team of architects that design the world’s first earthquake-resistant buildings. New streets grid, new squares and new buildings that didn’t follow the original urban settlement have given new form to the central area of the city.

The character Analysing the example of the historical centre of Lisbon, I wanted to demonstrate how from the geometric reading of the build environment it’s possible understand its chronological character. The history of a city is not written and handed down only by the language that we commonly use to speak, but from another type of language that must be basic to know in the design of the new. Patterns that arrive to us continue to coexist one beside another one, often in a dialectical relation without any mediation elements. The language of patterns is the groundwork for any discipline. These patterns of human relationships are then codified into myths, religions, regional traditions or technical knowledge, in a process that is generally common all-over the world. Patterns, in any filed, are a powerful tool for controlling complex processes, as the reality, but they have not played a significant role in the architectural design where they look useful only in retrospective analysis.

Considering therefore the patterns as a synthesis of local situations much more complex and the system that connects patterns of different fields such as language, I think it is necessary to be a careful reader to be able to consciously write the new. It is even wrong to consider the pattern’s properties forever because society changes and the city changes with it and a process of repair and replacement between patterns is the result of that knowledge of tradition that generates progress. It is always a process that doesn’t stop with our age but the current imagine of Lisbon is just an event that is going to characterize the future Lisbon. This heterogeneous urban fabric contributes to create an “united character” of Lisbon: its multicultural and historically opened to the new identity is reflected in the dynamism of its physic structure. A heterogeneous physic character, the natural context, the activities inside, their intensity and their frequency, the symbolic character of the urban elements and so on …, they are all characters that build the peculiar identity of a city. There are characters related to a single individual, but the most part is shared and it’s not possible to avoid to study anyone to get a complete imagine of the city. A liquid easily adapts its own form with that of the container, but humans are not merely a passive spectator of their environment, they are consisting with it, they react and act on it. Contingency is not what makes the cities chaotic but what let them alive despite trauma and crisis. Every city has its own history, its tissue, its complexity, but everything cooperates to give it an “united character”.

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