A CONVERSATION WITH: JOSÉ ALFREDO RAMIREZ CLARA OLÓRIZ PIERRE BÉLANGER José Alfredo Ramirez, director, and Clara Olóriz, project leader, are from Groundlab. A multi-disciplinary international practice that explores Landscape Urbanism and sees the cities and the landscapes in between as natural processes that constantly change and evolve, therefore requiring lexible and adaptable mechanisms and designs to emerge, conigure and reconigure the existing and future urban environments. Pierre Bélanger is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Co-Director of OPSYS, and Advisor to the US Army Corps of Engineers. He is author of the forthcoming book, Landscape Infrastructure: Urbanism beyond Engineering (MIT Press, 2014).
Urban landscapes are not traditionally known to evoke feelings of isolation and displacement. Rather, it is the landscape that lies beyond the urban boundary that typically evoke such sensibilities. Our fascination with historical conditions places limitations upon the evolution of our current urban identity, linking it to outdated modes of occupation. In ‘The Generic City’, Rem Koolhaas investigates the possibilities of independent cities brought about through the reconiguration of land and infrastructure processes as they are relieved of ties to already established territories.1 The discussion that follows interrogates landscape homogenisation as an intentional process, and how this in turn relates to the themes of reclamation of landscape processes and the subsequent development of new spatial typologies.
KERB 22
PG. 75
IN CONVERSATION
JAR Koolhaas identiies urban CO precincts as individual elements within a much wider urban constellation. While dense in their interior composition, they exist as independent entities when viewed from a distance.2 Despite this fact, rural townships that have taken on the basic typology of urban and suburban areas are still seen as remote settlements, lacking the vital public infrastructure that is otherwise capable of dismantling the boundaries that exist between regional and greater metropolitan regions.3
Remoteness coupled with distance is rapidly disappearing, new communication and infrastructure technologies ensure that distant landscapes can be integrated in a more eficient manner through our hyper-connected world. Either they are part of a gigantic chain of production and circulation of physical matter around the globe (as Jane Hutton describes in her essay on ‘reciprocal landscapes’) or they can be accessed by everyone from everywhere through remote digital tools, a click away from us. This is revealing to designers not because it is a given and imperative condition that we must work towards, and respond to rapidly in an eficient manner as skilful and smooth operators, but because such conditions provide us with the opportunity and capacity to position ourselves critically in relation to them and through our practice. Broader connectivity as a contemporary value and localised proximity as embedded within our scope of interest is to be questioned by designers before taking it for granted. In this sense, it is worth asking if the agency of the designer can be reduced to that of a service provider that ensures given values are inherently embedded in contemporary conditions. Or should they rather turn into a position of cultural producers to question and confront who, how and why this poses a beneit, if any, to anyone?
How can we ensure that broader connectivity remains valued when localised proximity continues to PB We have never been urban. capture and contain processes within a deinitive ield? Either we have to redeine the urban through the remote, or we have to extend the urban to encompass what is seen on the outside. That is one view, a sociological and a geographical one. The other view is to simply acknowledge that we have never been urban. We’re in a neo-industrial era that is of a larger magnitude, scope and kind than ever before. Corporations – the third entities and third spaces – have outgrown the industrial era as the economist John Kenneth Galbraith predicted in his The New Industrial State (1967), beyond the polarised spectrum of public and private, to become spatial conigurations that have become larger than the state space of countries themselves. (Revenues of Wal-Mart for example are larger than the GDP of South Africa or Greece, Exxon and Chevron are larger than Romania, Peru, or Ukraine). The cities that people claim or say that they live in, are incorporated entities, i.e. they not only work for corporations, but live inside them. Further to this, we are removed further and further, geographically and culturally, from the actual processes of production that are required to support urban life, and most patterns of life in the Western Industrial world depend precisely on the economies of scale that industrial economies are built on, whose burden is shouldered by emerging or under-developed countries. Seeing longitudinally, contemporary change like life itself is best understood across a range of scales: from the personal to the planetary, from the cellular to the systemic, from the depths of the ocean, to the outer atmosphere. From this dimension, decentralisation (and the spatial fragmentation and diffusion that accompanies) can be understood as the great force shaping and reorganising the planet today, ranging from the provision of personal communications (mobile phones) and personal mobility (cars), to personal cultures (clothing, housing). It is a process more akin to Vikramāditya Prakāsh’s idea of deruralisation, and Vijanyanthi Rhao’s notion of migration, which we spend very little time on in design schools. The notion of the urban ield, if there is to be one, could be rewritten as Lewis Mumford’s ‘The Non-City in History’: the non-city deies containment, enclosure and certainty. It abhors borders and walls. Instead, the urban ield relies and thrives on openness, porosities, variabilities, transgressions, uncertainties and indeterminacies. Like a landscape, it multiplies through surfaces, processes, and patterns across different environments, from oceans to atmospheres to undergrounds. Landscape is not merely a qualiier of urbanisation, it is urbanisation itself.
KERB 22
PG. 79
IN CONVERSATION
The rapid development and JAR One of the key questions that can be extracted from Koolhaas’ ‘Generic City’ is the expansion of territories continues CO following afirmation: ‘To the extent that identity is derived from physical substance, to accommodate an ever-growing, from the historical, from context, from the real, we somehow cannot imagine that interconnected population.10 anything contemporary – made by us – contributes to it.’ From here, we understand Global connectivity through two implicit consequences that we think are crucial to addressing the issue of identity both physical and technological and permanence: on the one hand, it challenges the assumption of the impossibility of means has led to the eradication contemporary contributions to identity and, consequentially, it leads to a re-deinition of localised goods and services, of what we consider the identity of a place often based on nostalgic and touristic values giving birth to the new itinerant of preservation from a static point of view. One of the projects that the AA Landscape citizen.11 Joys found through the Urbanism programme is working on questions this static approach to identity through the discovery of informal settlements exploration of sand dune territories across Europe. It is quite revealing, the fact that it and value of spontaneity are shows an inherent contradiction in current preservation policies in a territory intrinsically disappearing as we shift towards dynamic, in constant movement. So in our understanding, the contemporary conditions existing solely within one you describe sit within the tensions amid the rapid development of interconnected ubiquitous virtual territory. territories and the demands for local reafirmation, as the current political situation and the claims for independence and self-determination across Europe are showing. How are we able to maintain Paradoxically, the blurring of the boundaries of the European Union’s policies is being growth and establish the challenged by calls to declare new borders within the actual countries. In this case, the permanence of land processes if border, as an instrument of state control and territorial management, embodies the we are no longer concerned with strains between the borderless global networks and the pursuit of distinctive identities. establishing places for physical We have been discussing these issues as part of a research cluster we are conducting longevity? at the AA, co-directed by Douglas Spencer and Clara Olóriz, called ‘Urban Prototypes’. We have made references to Tafuri’s Venice and the Renaissance, where he identiies a tension between tradition and invention in Palladio’s type, and to Aureli’s ‘Geopolitics of the Ideal Villa’, where he refers to Palladio’s projects as the paradoxical combination of ‘formal abstraction and radical site speciicity’. As such, the struggle between the global or the generic and the speciic or identity is not new or alien to architecture, landscape or urbanism. One could even say that it is embedded in its modes of operation, and the tensions it produces are fundamental to the designers’ operative frameworks.
PB There is nothing informal about informality.
1. Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, ‘The Generic City’, in S,M,L,XL, New York: Monacelli Press, 1995. 2. ibid. 3. Mohsen Mostafavi, ‘Why Ecological Urbanism, Why Now?’, in Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty (eds.), Ecological Urbanism, Zurich: Lars Muller Publishers, 2010. 4. ibid. 5. Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, ‘The Generic City’. 6. James Corner, ‘Terra Fluxus’, in Charles Waldheim (ed.), The Landscape Urbanism Reader, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006. 7. Linda Pollak 2006, ‘Constructed Ground: Questions of Scale’, in Waldheim C (ed.), The
Landscape Urbanism Reader, Princeton Architectural Press, New York. 8. James Corner, ‘Terra Fluxus’. 9. ibid. 10. Elizabeth Mossop, ‘Landscapes of Infrastructure’, in Charles Waldheim (ed.),
The Landscape Urbanism Reader, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006. 11. Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, ‘The Generic City’.
We have inherited language, such as the ‘Third World’ from demographer Alfred Sauvy’s Tiers-Monde, that together have been internalized by the United Nations and the World Bank as forming the indicators, by which we consider conditions to be developed, under development, and under developed. For the most part, these thresholds are biases based on Western industrial modes of thought that privilege three different dimensions of formal development: institutionalization of income, knowledge, and health. These thresholds are used across the world to quantify levels of well-being, and potential for development, within another institutionalized coniguration: that of the nation state. But, this development index overlooks a vast array of other spatial and social indicators, from wage lexibility to inequality, that operate outside or beyond the enclosure of development indexes. As such, these extra-factors consist of non-institutional or extrainstitutional (as opposed to informal) factors that contribute to varying levels of economic intensity and cultural exchange. As Hernando de Soto has explained in The Mystery of Capital, these ‘extra-legal’ and ‘extra-spatial’ dynamics lie outside the container level of indicators, and therefore require entirely new spatial designations as emergent urban ecologies. Unabated accumulation can be replaced with cyclic distribution and diffusion, disciplinary education is swapped for exchange and experience, and reactive healthcare is substituted for pre-emptive, incremental behaviour. Inverting the western industrial model of development, the absence of regulatory controls, technocratic frameworks, or centralized infrastructures, may in fact yield value, produce beneits, transform space, and support life. Subtraction, substitution, and retraction of institutional frameworks may in fact redress the inequities, injustices, imbalances and externalities of western industrial models of spatial production as a pathway to the formation and multiplication of unknown landscape geographies. As a counter project, we may therefore have to look towards ecologies of underdevelopment as our shared future.
CONVERSATION
PG. 78
TRANSPOSITIONS
Just as cities and infrastructure JAR The use of ecological processes as an engine for territorial ones seems rather to reafirm operate as entities of processes and CO nature as the ‘natural and indisputable way forward’. To pose ecology as an imperative relationships, ecological processes within all our ways of proceeding, without questioning its beneits, places the designer that occur within vast and expansive inside a linear problem-solving scenario (as manager of given conditions) rather than ields can be seen to operate in a nearthe potential envision of novel ones (as designer of alternative future scenarios). In this continuous manner.8 However hard we sense, to generalise an even transposition of ecological processes as necessary to larger try to establish a diplomatic distribution territories and at different scales leaves out the potential nuances that glitches and of services for occupants of landed frictions between necessary conlicting systems could bring about and within which territories, they remain in relation to the designer’s agency could operate (as described in Douglas Spencer’s essay ‘Nature the broader boundaries that distinguish is the Dummy’). Dealing with territory as a conlictive arena entails a set of negotiations different ecologies.9 for which a decision-making process is paramount. These decisions, far from seamless integrations, are informed by priorities established in the deinition of intentions and Are we able to transpose and integrate territorial stances. In turn, they have the capacity to empower or affect the various multiple ecological processes evenly agencies and interests at stake. It is in this very regime and decision-making process, across different scales in the same way behind these intentions, where new territorial relationships are designed – where our we distribute new settlement nodes agency resides, as designers and not as managers. In the understanding of landscapes as across larger territories? territories in constant interaction and negotiation of forces, we aim to develop strategies that reconigure themselves through the aggregations of landform dynamics, social practices, cultural traditions and political visions vital for territorial articulations.
PB How do we design for the intangibility, imperfection, and unevenness of democracy? If the anonymous and banal presence of open space represents the last spatial expression and translation of democratic freedoms in urban environments, then the street is one of its most irm and expressive advocates. With a record of persistence that has risen out of social, economic, political, and geographical inequity, the street – la rue corridor – is one of achievement in the face of adversity. Cultivating a deep commitment to the latent relationship between equity, ecology and economy, the street – both in study and practice, in material and in history – traces a proile across the emerging social and political agencies that the design of open space-urbanisation holds in the translation of contemporary ideals of freedom and justice in the design of democratic public space and our built environments. Whether the street involves the redesign of peripheral spaces below highways (infrastructural thickening), the carpeting of exterior walls with political grafiti (infrastructural marooning), or the segregation of regional cultures by roads (infrastructural apartheid), the street’s profound and resounding engagement of marginalised subjects and invisible infrastructures of urbanisation reveals an alternative way of seeing. The road represents a visual, spatial and intellectual counter-culture. Not only does the street propose a different way of reading the urban environment – a very unique one, it is also profoundly inluential and infectious to other peripheral, marginal or overlooked spaces. By revealing undisclosed dimensions of urban policy and political natures and planned zoning, the street traces, draws, and delineates new contours of perception and casts its light on shadowed dimensions of space we often ignore and overlook through our western, industrial eyes. It is, in this augmented reality, that the view from the street (a view from the ground) is our sixth sense, and it offers critical direction for the ield. Along this critical horizon, the street – in all its permutations from highway, to pathway, to subway, to airway –proposes a ‘sense of enlarged freedom’ – one that Frederick Law Olmsted so adamantly advocated for in his designs and surveys of contemporary urbanisation at a period of tremendous turbulent transformation in nineteenth century America – as it grows in kind, to form a landscape democracy, and produces more designers of democratic landscapes for years and decades to come.
KERB 22
PG. 77
JAR Pulled, stretched and applied CO across multiple scales, the city grid is no longer limited to the central urban precinct. The urban grid as a tool has been used in translating programmatic techniques across vast expanses.6 The inluence of rigid spatial programming upon the ways in which roads, buildings and nature can coexist has now begun to encroach onto previously remote land situated just beyond the urban boundary.7
The grid is a fundamental concept and device that describes historically our relation to landscapes as territories through a technological and calculative grasp of it. In this sense, the idea of a recent expansion of its use to a non-urban precinct is not a recent phenomenon, as it goes hand in hand with the birth of territories, be it urban or rural, central or peripheral, close or remote, or a constellation of networked settlements with blurred boundaries. However, the exacerbation of physical and virtual connections that new technologies are bringing about, especially to remote landscapes, reasserts a general acceptance of concepts such as interconnectivity, continuity and eficiency as an imperative to harness resources and modes of production akin to the relentless dominant economical system. In this sense, a possible answer to this question should not gravitate around the apparent recent contradiction between gridded/rigid spatial organisations vs natural/ecological landscape processes, but in the power of designers to understand territories within their inherently and historically manufactured condition, and to envision alternative scenarios that strategically intersect and confront these processes as part, or not, of mega-territories.
How are we able to reassert landscape processes that were once naturally occurring, while newly deined mega-territories seek to simplify and regiment ecosystem services?
IN CONVERSATION
These potential intersections should not be seen as direct alternatives to simplify and regiment eficiently remote ecosystem services, since they will not match common ambitions, traditional targets or eficient bench marking schemes of corporate territorial management. Neither will they have the capacity to fulil every aspiration in a given territory. Rather, they aim to provide the means to envision unconventional (limited or continuous, linked or fragmented) scenarios that eficient and streamlined principles per se have undermined or restrained by the implementation of technocratic goals, especially in the last few decades.
PB We are not designing ecological systems, they are designing us. As urban ield, landscape is in and of itself megastructure. Like J. B. Jackson mentions nearly a half century ago in his The Public Landscape (1966), at the tail of end of the failure of the architectural movement of the megastructure (the world simply could not be contained inside a building): ‘The architectural concept of the megastructure, popular several years ago, was roughly that of a skeletal framework comprising the essential functions of the building, into which are inserted the individual, more or less temporary, installations ... The advantages of the megastructure are that the individual is provided with necessary facilities and also a greater freedom of choice. The megastructure is prior to the individual installation and presumably, more lasting ... Few of us realise that there is another kind of megastructure in terms of the whole environment; one of the oldest creations of man. This megastructure consisting of the environment organised by man can be called the public landscape.’ Patrick Geddes Valley Section of Civilisation (1923) provides a key representational strategy towards making this oceanic turn to and seeing urban conditions and urban economies more laterally, more temporally, and more altitudinally, from sea to sky. The section un-differentiates and frees us from the plan (and its aesthetic), and the sectional proile is blind to the planometric grid. In fact, the section weakens the power and control of the grid itself, because it no longer depends on continuity. Thus, the amalgam of webs, networks, systems and elements that make up the urban ield is contingent on the design of indirect relationships, overlaps and interconnections (both possible without direct continuity) across different altitudes and latitudes, designing thresholds. Designing in section and thinking topographically grants us the liberty of ‘le plan libre’.
CONVERSATION
Invisible forces are driving the emergence of settlements across broad geographic regions as the physicality of place no longer acts as the dominant mode of spatial interpretation. Proximity to land resources, coupled with distinct atmospheric conditions, has allowed for expansive landscapes to be traced back to the urban centres of different settlement typologies.4 These are such distinctly individual regions whereby a myriad of social, ecological and geographical processes ilter through established borders around otherwise undeined space.5 Rather than merely navigating between static nodes of human settlement across vast territories, are we able to harness the transitory condition that exists between isolated regions and promote a new settlement typology?
PG. 76
TRANSPOSITIONS
JAR Within these invisible forces, I think one should be able to propose certain forms of CO resistance that foster new types and the construction of identity and differentiation through them. For example, remoteness could be put forward as a mechanism within virtually and physically hyper-connected contexts, perhaps, to design spaces as oases or refuges within networked generic conditions. Remoteness as a conceptual framework can derive into novel alternatives to harness the possibilities of current conditions. Along these lines, we developed a project called Ground Ecologies in a post-industrial site at the outskirts of Shanghai. The site was inevitably becoming an in-between generic (residential, commercial, plus CBD) territory tightly interconnected and conveniently located next to a recently built metro line, thus highly networked to the Shanghai metropolitan area. As a post-industrial place, on-site pollution provided us with the excuse to design manufactured topographical grounds whereby generic programming was subdued to landscape processes of remediation. In turn, they created a different regime of space occupation, through different phases and building restrictions derived from capping issues that is not entirely subjected to market forces. In a way, landscape processes and techniques produced a sort of remoteness by an inaccessibility to given developmental conditions. Typical compartmentalisation and privatisation of these inbetween territories was opposed through the insertion of remote and undevelopable grounds, as well as the insertion of a slow time frame, with the capacity to choreograph emergent and novel conditions outside the current imperative briefs assigned to this generic development.
PB Pace is the new space. Movement, and processes of transition, are rendering the idea of the settlement obsolete, and putting it out of business. We are in an era of unabated and uninhibited migration. Pace has positively replaced the sociological notion of place and the architectural notion of space. Planners and architects are incapable of keeping up with the rapidity of this change, which justiies why we should be developing ontologies of change, designing transitions, spans, conveyors, cycles and processes of change, as opposed to their end terminus. The study of speed – dromology, as Paul Virilio proiles in his Vitesse et Politique (1977), is a fruitful avenue to pursue as his work engages the politics of supporting, suspending or sensing movement, and the geopolitical signiicance of different rates and morphologies of changes. Movement, mobility, circulation, and low deine contemporary urban environments, and historian Rosalind Williams substantiates this in her ‘Cultural Origins and Environmental of Large Technological Systems’ (1993): ‘The outstanding feature of modern cultural landscapes is the dominance of pathways over settlements ... the pathways of modern life are also corridors of power, with power being understood in both its technological and political senses. By channeling the circulation of people, goods, and messages, they have transformed spatial relations by establishing lines of force that are privileged over the places and people left outside those lines.’ Since engineers have understood this for quite some time, they design transitions and lows through infrastructure. We should pay attention to the scalability of their work, and develop both anthropology, and ethnography or different infrastructures to start thinking like Sanford Fleming and establish our longue durée, and plot out the design of new time zones.