URBAN 2016 Spring - (dis)Location by Columbia University - Historic Preservation & Urban Planning

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BEHIND THE SCENES

CONTENT EDITOR Jack Darcey

URBAN Magazine PUBLISHING EDITOR Logan Clark GRAPHIC EDITOR Mehak Sachdeva

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(dis)Location

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

The year 2016 has so far been one of surprises, disappointments, and a series of bewilderments. The unabated flow of forced migrants throughout the world, seen most palpably in the case of Syrian refugees, continues to demonstrate the fragility of our political creations, as does the impending end of Europe and the new-found congeniality between the United States and Iran and Cuba. The ongoing destruction of Aleppo, on the heels of the leveling of Palmyra, demonstrates the fragility of our urban and cultural creations. The upheaval in Dilma Roussef ’s cabinet speak to a new conception of (ir)-responsibility toward those we know, while the Rohingya people adrift in the Bay of Bengal signal a renegotiation of our (ir)responsibility toward a humanity which we may not. The rhetoric emanating from the discourse of the current presidential campaign appeals, it seems, to an amalgamation of all of these. The current issue, (dis)Location, attempts to locate some of these changes and uncertainties in the space of concern for planners: the city. Drawing on the multitude of realities of living in the city, (dis)Location seeks to present experiences, histories, and provocations of those awkward, uncomfortable, or secret spaces and actions that, perhaps more than anything else, define the city. At the same time, it tries to examine the roles that such concepts as power, materiality, and positionality play in planning practice and thought.

Vicente Arellano introduces the notion of (dis)Location by exploring his reactions to the New York around him and the uncertainties and distrusts that invade his imagination in the process. Michael A. Phillips then explores a similar uncertainty through the lens of parking and the effects that the physicality of parking has on our cities. Liz Marcello then discusses with theorists Laura Lieto and Robert Beauregard their latest ideas and publications about the ways in which things and materiality interface with humans and our experiences in the city. Laura Cipriani and Leonardo Zuccaro Marchi follow this with an examination of some of these very things and materiality, exploring the idea of “error” and how it, often quite deliberately, shapes how we move and live. In a similar vein, Abdulla al Shehhi presents the imposition of a grid in Abu Dhabi and the social upheaval that such a seemingly straightforward planning choice can cause. John Robert Darcey reflects on what it means to practice, or even think about, planning from a context wholly different from that of the community in question, drawing on his recent experiences carrying out research into the Liberian refugee community in Staten Island. Finally, musings on gentrification strike again. Gabrielle Peterson questions whether efforts at neighborhood improvement have to mean the implementation of gentrification and displacement; Lance Freeman, in reviewing Sylvie Tissot’s recent book on the matter, offers a response.

The urban world is an ever-changing one. Perhaps, in fact, change is the defining characteristic of urbanity. (dis)Location looks at these changes and the new spaces they produce, in both a physical-temporal sense and a psychological-experiential sense, as a way of presenting different urban realities and calling for greater reflectivity and sensitivity in planning. We humbly offer these pages with this in mind.

Love, URBAN

TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

SNEAK PEEK

2 The Alchemy of the City: Locating the Imagination as Urban Planning Activity Essay

Vicente Arellano

6 Park-itecture, Planning and Preservation Essay

Michael A. Phillips

8 Planners, Pigeons and Cellphone Towers: An Interview Book Discussion

Elizabeth Marcello with Robert Beauregard and Laura Lieto

12 In Praise of Errors: Erroneous Landscapes of Passages Essay

Laura Cipriani and Leonardo Zuccaro Marchi

TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

SNEAK PEEK

22 Dislocating the Masses: The Social Aspects of Abu Dhabi’s Divisive Grid Essay

Abdulla al Shehhi

26 Reflections on Practice: Positionality and Research on the Park Hill Liberians Essay

John Robert Darcey

29 Is “Better” Synonymous with “Gentrification”? Essay

Gabrielle Peterson

33 Book Review: Good Neighbors: Gentrifying diversity in Boston’s South End Book Review

Lance Freeman

A dispersed photo essay, Lines and Voids in Old Shanghai by Jack Darcey, accompanies these contributions. The photos depict an old abbatoir, build in Scotland and transported to Shanghai at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was designed such that cows could easily move mong different levels and different stages of processing. It is now a shopping mall.

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ESSAY

THE ALCHEMY OF THE CITY:

Locating the Imagination as Urban Planning Activity BY VICENTE ARELLANO

In the city’s material forms and fits of natural expression, there is latent knowledge to uncover: I am reading the language of the birds, portals, and systems into altars and into the region of ideas; I seek to find where city and fable dissolve, where the region we imagine teases the region we map. I The aerial tramway, like the hand of an urban god, scoops me up from the East Side of Midtown and cradles me in my ascent over the East River to Roosevelt Island. Rising, I am floating through spaces between buildings, oversized sculptures, monuments to commerce, life. On Roosevelt Island, the glimpses of the Manhattan skyline command the real estate entities to unmake ruin and erect future archaeologies: $4,000 each month for a picture frame. Suitably-placed pieces of nature wind around the Small Pox Hospital, intertwining with paths and walls and the great Instagrammable centerpiece itself. Stark white slabs and an arboreal axis lead to the south. Here, barges and traffic horns and skylines and mini-skylines and the teetering box of the United Nations headquarters is Emanation: the very material of the earth arranged to house a particular form of consciousness, an agglomeration of the impulse for peace on Earth. Black-glass river heads to the sea. Out there, perhaps a hundred miles, New York City dumps the collected municipal feces of millions for reclamation by the primordial depths. The city tells us that Discordia reigns over a devastated elsewhere and we are fortunate, huddled together in civic achievement. The fear is that this is not so. Demiurge means “public or skilled worker” in Greek, leading one to argue that the city and its planning is the work of the material, less-thanperfect aspect of creation. When I see the skyline I exclaim with Joy: “Look what we have made!” I bask in our majesty. Just a short while later: grief. In doubt of this achievement, I remark that the buildings are merely the material container for the human bio-house of a darker emanation. Here, activity is the work of breaching from the center. II Further lamentation. Is it simply enough to have “Knowledge of Higher Worlds”? What is it I do with this knowledge? What about Action Guided By Knowledge?

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Bridge Entity, Central Park; photo by Author, 2016

Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin were guided by their faith in a grand narrative and by the impulse of right action. Add to that any modernist, universalist, visionary, actualizer, manifester: Doxiadis, Bucky Fuller, Hundertwasser, Beuys, Rothko. What do I do? What do I do? I must insist that, being located in time later than the names before me, I am made to feel less secure in my belief in a right and a good that is as clear from wrong and bad as day and night are from each other. Socrates is said to have remarked: “By far the greatest and most admirable form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities and human communities.” Delving into the field of urban planning, I’d like to think my work in the world will be more meaningful than one would imagine the activities of city planning could be. Emerson’s essay, “Civilization,” mentions that a civilized person utilizes evil to produce benefits. Civilization is generally understood to mean cities and city-makers and city-inhabitants, in primordial opposition to our rural and agrarian cousins. Neil Brenner and Henri Lefebvre, among others, suggest – insist – that, in fact, the entirety of Earth is urban, and that urban is an activity rather than any material state of being. The city is the physical manifestation of the accumulation of utilizing evil to produce benefits. The treasures of the world’s past, plundered and presented in the museums for our consideration and enlightenment, are this: Impulses and entities made material, frozen, and displayed in exhibitions. They are records of a moment in time.

Pierre Huyghe @ The Met; photo by the Author, 2015

III In the January/February 2016 issue of Foreign Affairs, Pierre Rosanvallon argues that a society of equals would be founded on three principles of equality as embedded in the structure of society: 1) recognition of people’s singularity 2) organization of reciprocity 3) constitution of commonality1 He is not telling us anything new. In fact, he is describing what is largely extant from Modernist thoughts and Classical Grand Narratives and meta-narratives. With gains in the LGBT and other marginalized communities’ rights, is the United States not already expanding its recognition of people’s singularity? Is social security not an embodiment of Rosanvallon’s second principle, and any nation’s constitution indicative of his third? He tells us what we’ve already done over centuries to attempt a society of equals. And yet this issue of Foreign Affairs was dedicated to precisely the increasing inequality in the world. Plato writes in The Republic, “The society we have described can never grow into a reality or see the light of day, and there will be no end to the troubles of states, or indeed, my dear Glaucon, of humanity itself, till philosophers become rulers in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.”2 In the wake of disasters, graffiti emerges on walls: “Hope is not a plan,” it says in bitterness. I agree, but I would modify the message to say: “Hope is prerequisite to a plan.” Rosanvallon, Pierre. “How to Create a Society of Equals: Overcoming Today’s Crisis of Inequality.” Foreign Affairs Vol. 95 (No. 1). (Jan./Feb. 2016.) 2 Plato. Republic. Book 7. 1

Peter Lamborn Wilson’s Driftmap of Aleister Crowley’s Hudson Valley Camp; Photo by the Author, 2015

Central Park from Columbus Circle; photo by Author, 2015

----------------------------------------------------------------------Vicente Arellano is a first year urban planning student originally from Los Angeles. His interests include the cultural life of cities and psychogeography. dis(Location) | URBAN | 3

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ESSAY

PARK-ITECTURE, PLANNING AND PRESERVATION

BY MICHAEL A. PHILLIPS

Urban parking and modern culture interact in a perplexing relationship. We often think about parking only when we are in pursuit of it, not when we have commenced our day in the workplace, unless we are counting down the minutes to when we need to move our car. Seinfeld’s George Costanza described his “system” for finding the perfect spot as first looking for the dream spot right in front of the door, then slowly expanding out in “concentric circles.” Dr. Tobias Fünke of Arrested Development, in his quest for a spot at the airport, simply gave up his search for parking and drove the Bluth Family Stair-Car onto the tarmac itself, finding a spot close to his gate. Paul McCartney was so moved by a “meter maid” who gave him a parking ticket outside Abbey Road studios in 1967 that he immortalized her in his work “Lovely Rita.” Joni Mitchell, of course, has been the most explicit, lamenting the state of a society that “paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” Whether we are conscious of it or not, parking plays, without a doubt, a significant role in our nation’s culture. Today, there are about 315 million Americans in these United States and approximately 500 million parking spaces for them, a figure, which increases every year. In many places, people see a lack of parking as a “problem.” However, the creation of more parking to accommodate visitors to a location often works to destroy the very urban form and fabric that first enticed such visitors to begin with. William Whyte in City: Rediscovering the Center wrote “in some American cities, so much of the center has been cleared to make way for parking that there is more parking than there is city.” Topeka, Buffalo, and Houston have each cleared away so much of their urban fabric they have lost the appeal that originally people there in the first place. The problems are palpable: a local Buffalo newspaper opined, half in jest, that “if our master plan is to demolish all of downtown, then we’re only halfway there! There will be lots of places to park – there just won’t be a whole lot to do there!” When communities simply add parking to fit a perceived demand, it often changes places into foreboding spaces, detracting from urban character and desirability of the area. Planners, communities and elected officials must work together to explore alternatives to haphazardly adding “more parking” to their downtowns. Parking Therapy and Parking Surgery If you have a back problem, the chiropractor usually recommends physical therapy before signing off on surgery. If physical therapy doesn’t work, then you can begin a more

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serious course of treatment. In planning, and particularly transportation planning, the first solution is “parking surgery,” a desire to build something to make the problem go away. This means to make physical changes: to build freeways, widen roads, and construct parking structures and surface lots, often requiring large amounts of money to be spent and large parts of our cities and towns to be forever altered in pursuit of what will turn out to be an undesirable outcome. It is time, instead, for cities to consider “parking therapy.” Perhaps sharing the existing parking supply to fulfill parking needs and using dynamic pricing strategies to manipulate supply and demand could somewhat alleviate “parking problems” in many communities. Only after a community has exhausted all of potential alternatives for parking efficiency, should it consider the more drastic action of building more parking. If communities ultimately choose to construct additional parking, new structures should neither diminish nor destroy community character nor facilitate the formation of dislocations. Rather, they should contribute positively to the urban design, drawing from and adding to existing urban form and serving as a collective benefit for a community. There are a number of innovative design concepts around the world that negotiate the tension between the inherently functional use of a parking structure and the positive contribution architecture can make to the city’s value. Some of these concepts include façades that provide artistic value to the community: Herzog and de Meuron’s Miami parking block is only the most high profile of these. Other successful examples can be seen in the Veranda Park House in Rotterdam (with perforated aluminum and glass façades); the Charles Street Park House in Sheffield, England (with an angular façade constructed from identical elements oriented at different angles that give rise to amazing light reflexes); Miami’s Ballet Valet Parking (which is completely covered in vegetation, with a shopping mall on the first floor); and 15th and Pearl in Boulder, CO (which hides the parking structure behind the façades of what looks like mixed-use buildings). In addition, future-oriented parking garages often employ innovative car storage or circulation concepts. In Eureka Tower Park House, in Melbourne Australia, the garage is bright, friendly and comfortable with large “graphical pointers” in the form of oversized words to help orientation within the entire complex. Another circulation concept comes in Park House Plaza in Cajnovas Spain, where the architect used an assemblage of colors, letters, and

low-powered lighting to contribute to improved vehicular navigation while, a the same time, prioritizing pedestrian movement. Some structures attempt to take the vagaries of human navigation out of the parking process altogether, as in Lyon’s Parc des Celestines, where a machine arm raises and lowers vehicles into their spaces or at Volkswagen’s Car Towers, two 48-meter tall, class-encased robotic vehicle lifts. Light, especially, is important: Len Tsupros, the president of Carl Walker Construction, a design firm specializing in parking garages, writes that “people tend to feel vulnerable in parking garages so an effort to incorporate light and open space (into the structure) is ideal.” The Parkhaus Engelenschanze in Stuttgart features an all-glass exterior, glass curtains, and an inner courtyard with a waterfall and creek in an effort to foster something akin to joy. Obsolescence and Opportunity Not only are parking structures becoming “changing places” in their physical and architectural manifestations; they are undergoing changes in their very uses as well, particularly with a view towards a less car-dependent future. Tom Fisher, Dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota, proclaims that “if we’re going to build these [parking garages], let’s design them in way that they can have alternative uses in the future. With just a few tweaks, that’s really possible.” If a community does make the choice to build more parking supply, it should be possible for that structure’s long term use to be changed in phases in accordance with a decrease in parking demand. The key elements for an adaptable garage, according to Fisher, are “flat floors, comfortable [11-12 foot] floor-to-ceiling heights, and enough loading capacity [in other words, strength] to support another structural use” and have exterior openings for future windows. Cities can mandate these minimal adaptability requirements in their zoning codes to compel developers to meet these phased obsolescence requirements.

Our challenge as planners is to adapt to the present, be mindful of the future, and avoid the often irrevocable errors of prematurely committing to damaging structural changes. In the process, we must strive to create locations that are unique, full of local character, and worthwhile to create and maintain. People don’t choose to visit places because of the parking; they are drawn to locations because they have been made places by something else. If a place is sacrificed for a space to park, it undermines the very essence of that location’s existence. Parking lots and garages will continue to be an omnipresent part of the American built environment as long we are still driving (and parking) our own cars, yet sensitive, future-oriented design and planning can help steer our cities away from a congregation of dislocations and towards something more cohesive. For much of the past century, it appears that planners have adhered to a convenient iteration of Descartes’ maxim, cogito ergo sum: I park, therefore I am. It is time now to disentangle the primacy of parking from the conception of place and enable Descartes, and all of us, to experience and enjoy the city beyond the parking lot. -----------------------------------------------------------------------Michael A. Phillips is a second-year student of urban planning whose interest in planning stems from early proposals to transform Manhattan’s grid into concentric and interlocking traffic circles. Recent research has been on the present and future of parking.

A few examples of former garages that are already being adaptively reused in phases are St. Anthony Falls Parking garage in Minneapolis (77 low-rent apartments), the Rayette Building in St. Paul (88 apartments), and Herzon and de Meuron’s above-mentioned 1111 Lincoln Road in Miami Beach (office space, apartments, a rooftop restaurant, and glassed-walled cosmetics, coffee, and fashion boutiques). More systematically, students in the Savannah College of Art & Design recently attempted to “explore concepts for urban ‘micro-house’ living by constructing a tiny pop-up village inside on of their campus’ central parking garages. This can be a way to intelligently plan for the future, without the costs of a speculative, singular-purpose piece of parking infrastructure. Such design standards can both accommodate a perceived higher parking demand in the short term while entertaining a future in which the existing structure can be repurposed. In other words, parking structures should be designed with a view towards their eventual adaption and reuse. (dis)Location | URBAN | 7

INTERVIEW

PLANNERS, PIGEONS, AND CELLPHONE TOWERS: An Interview on the New Materiality

ELIZABETH MARCELLO WITH ROBERT BEAUREGARD AND LAURA LIETO

In early April 2016, Elizabeth Marcello, a first-year doctoral student in Urban Planning at GSAPP, interviewed Robert Beauregard (Professor, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation) and Laura Lieto (Professor, Federico II University of Naples) about their recent books, one of which they coedited. Their books consider the objects that planners encounter, along with the people and places for whom they plan. The interview that follows is a condensed version of a longer conversation. ............................................... Elizabeth Marcello: Can you tell us a bit about the books you just published? Laura Lieto: Planning for a Material World (Routledge, 2016), the book that we co-edited, and ‘Does Actor-Network theory help planners to think about change?,’ a chapter we co-authored, are both about our common effort to rethink planning from a new perspective, inspired by actornetwork theory and assemblage thinking. They both can be considered a theoretical as well as practical endeavor, that is, one that delves deeply into cases and examples. Planning for a Material World grew out of an agreement between the School of Architecture at Federico II University in Naples and GSAPP. The first project of this agreement was a conference held in Naples in the summer of 2013. The book was an offshoot of that. Robert Beauregard: In addition to the co-edited book, I just published a set of essays on planning practice and planning theory. The essays were written from a perspective that recognizes how planners are embedded in a world of things from cell phones to railroad viaducts and wetlands. The intent was to reflect on planning as a material activity that involves not just humans but non-humans as well. These themes are part of the co-edited book also. My book is titled Planning Matter (Chicago, 2015) with the subtitle “Acting with Things.” EM: The titles of your books both refer to the “material world.” This suggests that you are drawing on some of the same ideas. Could you comment on that? RB: There is a good deal of conceptual overlap between the two books. Both books recognize the error of assuming

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that what matters in planning is only what humans do. Humans never act alone; they always act with technologies and tools and nature. This is a central tenet of the new materialism that pervades both books. Focusing on individuals (whether humans or not) as the sole agents in bringing about change or stabilizing the world is also wrong. Humans are always a part of networks of other humans and non-human things. A planner hoping to increase the supply of affordable housing has to be willing to join forces with census data, methodologies for calculating affordability, vacant lots (and the rodents that live there), financial statements, and government regulations as well as elected officials, developers, public housing tenants, and community boards. The planner is one of many actors who must become entangled for the city to change. LL: I would say, also, that the new materialism offers the possibility of returning to the physical city with which planning has been historically concerned. The idea is to open a new perspective on how cities and regions work. Given my architectural background, this is quite attractive to me. EM: What would you say are the key ideas of the books? LL: Three ideas were critical. One is that humans and things always act in concert in the city. The second concerns the formal/informal divide on which planning normativity has been traditionally based; it has to be rejected in favor of a mutual relationship of the two spheres. And, the third is that things – both as material objects and, more abstractedly, as matters of social concern – are always the effect of complex assemblages within which they make sense and through which they affect change. RB: Equally as important, we see planning as a political activity, rather than a strictly technical one, infused with the values of the various groups (including planners) who contend for resources and attempt to imprint themselves on the city. In Planning Matter, I also focus on how planners think about the city and about themselves and their interactions with others. My interest is in how a collective imagining of the world leads to acting together.

EM: To this extent, how have you influenced each other? LL: Well, this a very small, mutual admiration society. Bob has influenced me with his Latourian writings about planning and helped me explore neglected or unacknowledged sides of planning. He has encouraged me to think of my ‘practical skills’ as valuable in my work as a theorist. RB: Laura has given me a greater appreciation for the way in which formal and informal entities and activities intersect and overlap. She also introduced me to trading zone theory and the notion of traveling myths (an issue directly connected to “best practices”). EM: Who else has had an influence on your work? Whom do you read? LL: Bruno Latour, of course, the main proponent of actor-network theory, but also John Law and Jane Bennett, from different perspectives. Law, for his ethnographical explorations of assemblages as well as his work on translation; Bennett, for her striking analysis of the ontology of vibrant matter. And, in the background, Michel Foucault, whose work on power and knowledge has deeply influenced me. RB: Like Laura, I would list Bruno Latour first. Many of the ideas I work with in the book – the falsity of the human/culture divide, non-human actors, assemblages, stabilization – come from his writings. On issues of social justice, I always return to the work of Iris Young, have never abandoned my interest in neo-Marxism, and continue to grapple with American pragmatism. In addition, I [continue to] read in the science and technology literature (for example, Anique Hommels’s writing on obduracy and the built environment). EM: How do these books speak to planning practice? RB: I wrote Planning Matter mainly for graduate students to help them think about planning. Specifically, I want them to see planning as a political and normative activity that entails collaborations with nature, built forms, and technologies and thus places them in the material world. The most important skill a planner can have is the ability to understand a planning situation. Acting without such reflection is simply a waste of good planning time. LL: Both books are fully committed to planning practice. They try to be in tune with the ‘real world’ and thus draw upon cases and examples to raise more general issues about planning as a practical and political endeavor. They speak to practitioners with their experimental tone, and their open-ended mode of inquiry, sensitive to the concrete (and (dis)Location | URBAN | 9

sometimes surprising) possibilities of planning. EM: What about planning theory and planning education? LL: As for planning theory, we tried to overcome the idea that planning matters most as a ‘word affair,’ as a communicative practice. We thus included non-human things in the big picture and acknowledged their theoretical role. As for planning education, these works can contribute to integrating courses within a program. RB: Again, it’s all about perspective, a way of seeing oneself in the world. As regards planning theory, almost all of it is either non-materialist (assuming that humans rule the world, alone) or materialist in a Marxist sense, maintaining the divide between humans and techno-nature. As for planning education, what one learns in planning school, whether as a Masters student or a doctoral student, is how to think. All that GIS, regression, zoning, and environmental knowledge is secondary. Of course, without the latter one doesn’t have anything to think about or say. EM: What comes next? What are your next projects? RB: I am just finishing a book on the contemporary U.S. city which argues that what defines the city is its capacity to nurture the contradictions of social life: the simultaneous presence of wealth and poverty and the juxtaposition of tolerance and intolerance being just two. It’s tentatively titled Ambiguous Achievement. I also continue to write in the new materialist vein: Laura and I are writing a paper on the idea of an object-oriented (rather than human-oriented) case methodology and I am working on the next iteration of a piece on the decay of buildings and decline of cities as a form of material disentanglement. LL: I’m working on deepening my practical understanding of assemblages and things in urban research. I’m mainly involved in informal urban practices, and working on different cases as the empirical basis for my theoretical research. One is about the canners in New York City, emerging figures of the informal economy of waste; I just recently joined an inter-disciplinary mapping project about discarded goods’ trajectories using digital technologies. The other is about illegal/irregular settlements in Napoli urban region, with a particular focus on the assemblages of humans, things, natural elements, building technologies, and the norms underpinning them. This fieldwork will contribute to a book project about planning normativity and urban informality using a new materialistic interpretation. EM: Thank you both for taking the time to speak with me about your new books and about the neo-

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materialist approach to planning. I suspect that students did not think that they would be encouraged to consider pigeons and light standards, in addition to people, in their work as planners.

Planning for a Material World. Laura Lieto and Robert A. Beauregard, editors. Routledge. 180 pages. $160. Planning Matter: Acting with Things. Robert A. Beauregard. University of Chicago Press. 264 pages. $30-$90. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Elizabeth Marcello is a first-year Ph.D student at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University. Laura Lieto teaches urban planning theories at Federico II University in Naples, Italy. Robert Beauregard teaches urban planning at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, where he also directs the Ph.D program.

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ESSAY

IN PRAISE OF ERRORS: Erroneous Landscapes of Passages

BY LAURA CIPRIANI AND LEONARDO ZUCCARO MARCHI

There is no art which has not had its beginnings in things full of errors. Nothing is at the same time both new and perfect. Leon Battista Alberti To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful. Victor Hugo History has seen plenty of erroneous spaces and – more rarely – anomalous discoveries: from architects to engineers, from navigators to cartographers, multiple passages and routes were found by unplanned oversights. Since contemporary cities are made up of socially and physically disjointed parts, the passage occupies a crucial role in connecting the urban fragments and making a significant impact on the quality of movement and social life in the urban space (Smets, 2014). Facing the existing urban landscape condition, we intend to speculatively reinterpret the idea of passage as a product of error. We are interested in both re-conceptualizing error as a potential catalyst for passage and in reconsidering the different possible types of errors in the city landscape and their relationship with spaces of physical connection. From structural to administrative, functional to material, design to digital/technological, we are particularly interested in investigating case studies wherein error is the force behind relevant spatial transformations, either in the urban landscape or in the social structure, and, even more, when it is reinterpreted with a new and positive purpose. The word ‘error’ comes etymologically from the Latin error, the verb form of which, errare, translates into ‘wandering.’ Error is thus both explicitly and implicitly connected with the idea of a path, a route, a passage with neither boundaries nor endings nor directions. In Italian errare still retains its double meaning: on the one hand, it refers to a mistaken route; on the other, to walking about, roaming, and wandering. The error itself can therefore be re-conceptualized as a kind of undefined promenade: an ambiguous, dynamic passage that does not conform to any set of rules. Error is therefore understood as a creative act. Looking for new roads, risking creative responses, taking the road “less traveled,” making mistakes in order to create something

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Bartolomeo and Christopher Colombus, ‘Christopher Colombus map,’ Lisbon, c.1490 Bibliothèque Nationale de France (CPL GE AA 562 RES)

‘Claude Shannon and experimental mouse maze constructed of relays demonstrated machine learning,’ 1952

that breaks the routine of daily life: such negotiations are the main intent of this short essay on erroneous landscapes of passages. Error potentially hides an opportunity to see the birth of a new story, but nothing would exist if it were not for the novelty of arriving at an unexpected and unpredictable

result, occasionally following an unprecedented and seemingly absurd path. In times of economic, political, environmental and imaginational crisis we believe that there is a need for design that recalls the desire to imagine a new way of life behind the apparent absurdity, that we need a vision to imagine a world that knows how to create through the elaboration of the error. All types of errors – whether grammatical, structural, functional, or physical – are considered for their potential, even though these different perspectives are usually categorized as being ‘wrong.’ For example, Cristopher Columbus’ arrival in the so-called New World was the result of a series of geographical misconceptions. His notion of reaching the East Indies by sailing westward and therefore establishing a new westward spice trade route was fundamentally correct as an idea, yet he mistakenly believed that Europe and Asia were separated by less than 3,000 miles and had no knowledge of the hulking landmass and its inhabitants that lay in the way. Nonetheless, instead of reaching Japan as he intended, Columbus landed in a New, and unexpected, World. Contemporary cities, like Columbus’ world, are made up of fragmented parts that often do not communicate with each other. Planned passages or corridors can patch up disjointed pieces but, occasionally, unintentional routes allow for a different method of joining parts. The grammatical error in the urban plan is an important aspect of our contemporary urban condition, affecting the text of the city as well as our reading of it (De Certeau, 1980). In cities, even ecological corridors were mostly unplanned for a long time; today, only open spaces from the leftovers, from errors of some kind, take on ecological value. In urban semiology (Barthes, 1967), the grammatical error of the city goes beyond the prefixed ideas of our reality. Error establishes new relationships inside the physical and representative fragmentation of the twentieth and twenty-first century city, where each singular fragment or part is juxtaposed or reinterpreted in new laws, similarly to Schönberg’s contemporary classical music (Viganò, 2000). Error is also a method of latent learning, as explored, for instance, by Edward Tolman since the 1930s. Our living in the city is similar to that of hungry rats in a labyrinth or maze where, through test and error, they learn and memorize the right route. Paying full attention to the subjective experience of the city, the cognitive maps from the 1950s and later (Kevin Lynch, the Situationists, etc.) derive from behaviorist and cognitive psychology based on experiments on the errors of animals as well as those of men (see ‘Cognitive maps in rats and men’, Tolman 1948). Tolman’s maze is therefore one of the most important early prototypes of passages of error in the city and calls for a comprehensive reconsideration.

Etymology PASSAGE / PASSUM ERROR PASSAGE / ERRARE

PSYCHO-GEOGRAPHIC

PSYCHO-GEOGRAPHIC LYNCH

COGNITIVE

ADMINISTRATIVE Above: LAURA CIPRIANI AND LEONARDO ZUCCARO MARCHI

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Among the different types of errors in the city, the administrative error became an important source of inspiration for many, including the well-known artist Gordon Matta-Clark. In the 1970s, Matta-Clark acquired fifteen small lots of land in New York which were the result of errors of zoning, measuring, and lazily supervised development of the city. These very tiny residuals of land were anomalies and glitches in-between two or more administratively correct lots. These weird micro-zones were of different dimensions and proportions: they could be many meters long but narrower than 30 centimeters, similar to long narrow corridors. They were the administrative and physical gutter passages of error, the forgotten voids of errors, separating one property from another. Their odd and nonsensical presence was hidden from and in contradiction to the rationality and rigidity of the urban grid’s rules. These liminal and sometimes inaccessible landscapes of error became potentially astonishing sources of inspiration as well as physical supports for the artistic ideas of Matta-Clark. His Fake Estates, put together in 1973, turned administrative and zoning error into an intriguing source of artistic expression and a sharp critique of the ways in which urban space is conceived and used.

‘Reality Properties: Fake Estates,’ Gordon Matta-Clark, 1973.

‘Nail houses in China,’ Wenling, Zhejiang Province, REUTERS/China Daily, 2015.

‘The Friendship Bridge,’ Hiyoshi Springs Resort in Nantan, Japan, 2009.

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In other cases, passages are affected by the refusal to make room for real estate development. In China the so-called 钉子户, or ‘nail houses,’ are homes whose residents refuse to leave in order to make way for new construction. Photos show how these houses intersect multiple infrastructures, such as highways and public plazas, representing a physical symbol of protest and condemnation of the administrative appropriation error. The result is an anomaly of both the passage whose flow is interrupted by the house and the private living space, which is absorbed into the new infrastructure’s unnatural context. What is interesting is that the route, the passage, is not completely affected; instead, the presence of the obstacle generates the possibility of going around it. Error can also be the product of a deliberate design decision. Multiple bridges and passages have been planned as twisted, distorted, and broken paths meandering between two points. Error, in such contexts, is the result of the architect’s design will. Japan’s Friendship Bridge, located over a spring near Kyoto, draws a suspended circular route between the water’s banks. If a line usually represents the shortest direction between two points, this ‘erratic’ path allows for a rounded wandering above the river. The ringshaped structure of the Laguna Garzon Bridge, designed by Rafael Viñoly in Uruguay, is not justified by any regular vehicular reasons. Neither crossings nor rotatories are needed since the street is suspended over the lagoon without any interactions or interruptions. The error is designed on purpose in order to reduce the speed of cars and give the driver, as she meanders, the opportunity to visually enjoy the landscape.

DESIGN

STRUCTURAL

LANDSCAPE

DECEPTIVE

TECHNOLOGICAL-DIGITAL

Above: LAURA CIPRIANI AND LEONARDO ZUCCARO MARCHI

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The Tianjin Eye in Tianjin, China, is a passage over the Haihe River that encompasses the idea of the erratic circular wandering. The bridge, which carries six lanes of traffic across the river, incorporates a Ferris wheel with passenger capsules.

Tetsuo Kondo, ‘A path in the forest,’ Tallin, Estonia, 2011

Rafael Viñoly, Laguna Garzòn, Uruguay, 2015

‘Tianjin Eye,’ Hai River in Tianjin, China, 2008

‘The Half-Bridge of Hope,’ Russia, 2007

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As such, it is not so much an error as it is a destination in itself. The Atelier Bow-Wow, has recently reinterpreted and juxtaposed the wandering and chaotic experiences of Piranesi’s Carceri and the Circus. Their experimental project, presented at the inaugural Chicago Biennial in 2015, is a public artwork which enhances social interaction through different kinds of paths, passages and promenades in a narrow courtyard. In the Russian countryside, the HalfBridge of Hope forces the idea of a missing, endless passage with no practical purpose. This abortive connection with its intentional error assumes a symbolic connotation of hope, constructing, and forcing, a brand new point of view and relationship with its surrounding landscape. In 1980s Russia, a group of young architects founded an informal movement called ‘Paper Architecture’ which took elements of broken passage to further extremes. The Minotaur Bridge, designed by Mikhail Belov in 1987, pursued a reinterpretation of the ancient Greek myth by transforming the direct and linear passage of the bridge into an impossible labyrinth. In this case, the error is both the wandering experience on the bridge itself as well as the closed passages which inside the Minotaur’s mythical maze itself. Similarly, Belov’s 1987 proposal for the Bridge over the River Rubicon was a radical expression of error as wandering, indecision and ambiguity: only by turning back toward the starting place, negating the first action toward the other side, can the end of the passage be reached. Error sits at the center of countless other design proposals, too. Peter Eisenman, with the project Moving arrows, Eros and other Errors (1986), interprets the story of Romeo and Juliet in architectural form, intersecting the oppositional Capulet and Montague castles in an erotic error of juxtaposition and interpenetration. Defensive walls, necessary to protect the two feuding families from one another, here become passages from one property to the other in an homage to the doomed lovers’ commitment to one another. In Eisenman’s hands, Shakespeare’s manuscript collapses itself into a synchronic error of its physical reinterpretation.

‘Plate from Box 3 – Moving Arrows, Eros and other Errors - An Architecture of Absence,’ Peter Eisenman, Published by Architectural Association in London, 1986

‘The Bridge over the river Rubicon,’ Mikhail Belov, 1987 (Top)

‘Walk On,’ Zalewski Architecture Group, Gliwice, Poland, 2014 (Right)

‘The Infinite bridge,’ Gjøde & Povlsgaard Arkitekter, Aarhus, Denmark, 2015

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In the world of landscape, error passages often endeavor to involve nature in the erratic experience of movement. The poetic Infinite Bridge in Aarhus, Denmark, designed by Gjøde & Povlsgaard Arkitekter in 2015, seeks to establish a relationship between the city and the endless landscape of the bay through its perfect circular form. Error in this case is the act of walking in circles, a physical and spiritual revolution which allows people to meet and emotionally connect in contemplation of the natural panorama, free of the decisions of navigation as well as from the definitiveness of arrival. Similarly, architect Tetsuo Kondo’s floating footpath, entitled A Path in the Forest, preserves the natural integrity of the forest while also incorporating certain woodsy elements, such as ivy, into itself. Installed in Kadriorg Park in celebration of Tallinn, Estonia’s designation as the 2011 European Capital of Culture, the erratic passage enables people to gain different experiences and perspectives of the natural environment. At the opposite extreme, the Zalewski Architecture Group imagines a green, tortuous, suspended pathway above the courtyard of a building in Gliwice, Poland. The concept was conceived on a summer’s day when the architects, looking out their office window, were desperately longing ‘to go for a walk’. The grass and gravel covered path leaps out from a window and ends up, after a few twists and turns, in the next window over, reminding us that the error, the creative evasion, has lead you back to reality.

Piranesian disorder is imbued with physical and theoretical paradigms which flustered the entire twentieth century. The physical and perfect geometric composition is upset by the presence of multiple gravitational forces. These latter allow mannequins to wander in any direction, folding reality and the physical rules into a distortion, an error of the normal physical rules and of common sense.

‘Relativity,’ Maurits Cornelis Escher, 1953

The historical list of failures of infrastructural passage is very long and often descriptive of epochal shifts in the paradigm of passage. The collapse of the first Tacoma Narrows Bridge, a suspension bridge south of Seattle, is an example of how error can facilitate new construction and engineering knowledge. On November 7, 1940, four months’ after its inauguration, the passage dramatically collapsed as a result of self-propelling vibrations, called aeroelastic flutter, caused by the wind. The event is an example of what, in physics, is known as elementary forced resonance: the wind provided a periodic frequency that matched the natural structural frequency of the bridge, encouraging the further rotation of the bridge’s span. This construction failure boosted research into the fields of bridge aerodynamics and aeroelastics, research that has greatly influenced the designs of all the world’s great longspan passages built since 1940. The error passage can also be extreme, endless and imaginative. In the afore-mentioned Carceri (1745-1761) of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the space has neither centrality nor order in its mix of anguish, the irrational, and the sublime. Piranesi’s destruction of the center and the lack of rules or directions transform the total disorder into an infinite wandering. In contradiction to the later conceptions by Bentham or Foucault, the complete freedom of movement in any direction without any limits or destinations turns the structure into the most anguishing prison. In Escher’s Relativity (1953), the total ‘Security,’ John Quentin Hejduk, Oslo, 1989

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Extreme error passages have also been sagaciously envisioned in John Hejduk’s moving masques. Some of his movable staircases are interrupted architectures: these iron passages, trying to resemble engineering construction errors, surprisingly allow unusual viewpoints, thereby becoming destinations themselves.

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapsing, November 7, 1940

In the book ‘Mask of Medusa’ Hejduk writes: ‘The wall... [is] the moment of greatest repose, and at the same time the greatest tension. It is a moment of passage. The wall heightens that sense of passage, and by the same token, its thinness heightens the sense of it being just a momentary condition... what I call the moment of the present’ (Hejduk, Shkapich, 1985). This is why, in Hejduk’s sketches, these transportable staircases transform incessantly into something else, mutating into erroneous and incongruous architectural metamorphoses, assemblages of passages confronted with stasis and obstruction. In the present age of media in which we live, errors can also be the product of a technological and digital distortion. The artist Clement Valla started collecting Google Earth images in which he discovered odd and misrepresented passages of the Earth’s surface. The distorted bridges and passages are the absolute logical result of the system revealing how Google Earth software works. Images are represented through automated data collection from a myriad of different sources that are constantly updated and endlessly combined to create a unified illusion. ‘Google Earth is a database disguised as a photographic representation. These uncanny images focus our attention on that process itself, and the network of algorithms, computers, storage systems, automated cameras, maps, pilots, engineers, photographers, surveyors and map-makers that generate them’ (Valla, 2014). As such, that piece of the internet that we have all become accustomed to trusting as the farthest-reaching representation of our reality is yet another manifestation of error, requiring the mind, in its transmigration from screen to understanding, to negotiate the distorted passages of technology. It thus stands that the notion of error is allencompassing, definitive of all experiences of the urban, natural, and digital world. We believe that we need a new vision to imagine a world that knows how to create and compose through the elaboration of error.

‘Postcards From Google Earth,’ Clement Valla, 2012

The visual passages of Piranesi and Escher materialize in the apparently endless spiral of the Dutch architects NEXT. This passage brings you to nowhere in particular: it is a sculpture in a green landscape, a folly of impossibility which recalls Richard Serra’s large-scale assemblies of sheet metal. The path is walkable only in one direction, transforming the endless error passage into an impossible visual illusion. Right: LAURA CIPRIANI AND LEONARDO ZUCCARO MARCHI

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The Micro-Manifesto of the Erroneous/Erratic Passage

References:

1.The passage of error allows us to wander (‘errare’) and to explore.

Barthes, R., ‘Semiology and the Urban.’ in The City and the Sign: an introduction to Urban Semiotics. Gottdiener M., Lagopoulo A. (eds), New York, p. 87-98.

2. The passage of error is a creative act. The opportunity to see the birth of a new story potentially inhabits every error. 3. The passage of error sometimes brings you to an absurd path. Without foolishness we do not have a new vision. 4. The passage of error can be explorative, cognitive, administrative, design-based, structural, and technologicaldigital. 5. The explorative passage of error leads to new routes. 6. The cognitive passage of error leads to new learning. 7. The administrative passage of error establishes new social and spatial relationships between art and the city and between the living space and infrastructure in the city. 8. The designed-based passage of error is a fake error and it is the product of the architect`s will. 9. The landscape passage of error allows us to connect emotionally to nature. 10. The structural passage of error improves our scientific knowledge. 11. The extreme passage of error makes us reflect on reality and on illusion. 12. The technological-digital passage of error leads us to not trust maps, cartography and digital media.

Harvey D. (1990). The condition of Postmodernity. Blackwell, London. Lefebvre H. (1974). La production de l’espace. Ed. Anthropos, Paris. Lynch K. (1959). The Image of the City. MIT Press, Cambridge. Piranesi G.B. (1973). The Prisons (Le Carceri ): the Complete First and Second States. Dover Pubns, New York. Sadler S. (1998). The Situationist City. MIT Press, Cambridge. Shkapich K. (ed.) (1989). John Hejduk: Mask of Medusa - Works 1947-1983. Rizzoli International Publications, New York. Tolman E.C. (1948). “Cognitive maps in rats and men.” The Psychological Review, 55(4), 189-208. Viganò P. (1999). La città elementare. Skira, Milano. Smets M. (2014). “Passages. Transitional spaces for the 21stcentury city”, 1-20 (http://passages-ivm.com/sites/default/ files/smets-passages-thematic-text_2.pdf)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------Laura Cipriani is a visiting Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism at IUAV University of Venice and the Politecnico di Milano. Having received her M.Des from Harvard’s GSD and her Ph.D from IUAV, Laura cofounded the research firm Superlandscape. Leonardo Zuccaro Marchi is visiting Lecturer at TU Delft and a Postdoctoral Fellow at KTH School of Architecture in Stockholm. With a Ph.D from both TU Delft and IUAV, Leonardo was named one of the “Best 40 under 40 European Architects” in 2010.

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ESSAY

DISLOCATING THE MASSES:

The Social Aspects of Abu Dhabi’s Divisive Grid BY ABDULLA AL SHEHHI This article is adapted from an earlier work entitled A Socio-Spatial Comparison Between the Grids Regulating Abu Dhabi and New York City.

Of all of the booming cities in the non-white world, Abu Dhabi stands today as a unique conflagration of traditional centers of commerce, fishing, and pearl diving with a series of imperial efforts and the world’s present frenzy for oil. A product of British colonialism, the capital of the United Arab Emirates grew out of exclusive treaties that variously conceived of the island as a British protectorate and sought to capitalize on the 1958 discovery of petroleum. These treaties would later prove to be the foundation of the geographical and political stratification of the future nation, especially given that the treaties applied to the sheikhs who signed them and their descendants. The effects of the treaties were two-fold: the first was to draw and formalize the geographic boundaries between the different emirates, which previously lay along the lines of intricate tribal politics. The second effect was to legitimize the tribal leaders whom the British colonials selected as the hereditary rulers of these emirates (Elsheshtawy, 2004). In the aftermath of the formation of the UAE, a newly forged national identity began to surface. Responding, at different moments to Portuguese trade, British interventionism, and regional (largely Iranian) power projections, Abu Dhabi’s ruling class sought to legitimize their rule through patronage of the local culture and heritage. By sponsoring events linked to local culture, such as camel races, and fastidiously broadcasting such patronage in local media, the city’s rulers crafted an image of benevolent patriarchy that continues to this very day. Simultaneously linking such events to a semi-imagined “past” while also drawing sharp distinctions between present-day comfort and the strife and hardship by which they defined their city’s history, the ruling class pushed a new-found pastime of leisure made possible by the oil trade. In light of this, Abu Dhabi has undergone two major transformations in its recent history: the first was prompted by the discovery of oil in the late 1960s; the second was in the wake of Sheikh Zayed’s death in 2004. Prior to the discovery of oil, Abu Dhabi was merely a small fishing village, composed of some mud huts and bungalows, with a fort built in the early 1760s to defend the precious water supplies of the island. Oil facilitated a massive transformation into the future’s gleaming metropolis. Guided by Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahayan, who ruled

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Abu Dhabi from 1966 to 2004, the city grew out of the idea that the past, and anything associated with it, represented suffering, toil, and misery and had to be planned away and built over. Sheikh Zayed’s plan for Abu Dhabi ranged from statues of the material symbols of heritage to the construction of excessively wide highways and boulevards, suitable for the political capital of a young and rich nation. (See also Naypyidaw, Brasília, Abuja, and Washington, DC.) What Sheikh Zayed endeavored to achieve was to flee the crowded and huddled city of the past toward an oasis spread out in the desert with light, air, and distance from the struggles of the past. Far from being mere collections of structures and spaces, cities are living, breathing organisms that thrive on the oxymoronic juxtaposition of order and chaos. New York City, where the rigid order imposed by the grid undergirds a sense of crazed chaos unceasing in its tumult, stands as the common example of this intertwined dichotomy. Abu Dhabi, on the contrary, relied almost exclusively on the overwhelming reign of order, constructed according to rationalist ideals that sought cures for the urban “disease” and spared no room for necessary, natural urban chaos (Dempsey, 2014). Pushed by the example posed by its desert cousin, Dubai, Abu Dhabi embarked on a path towards development that necessarily relied upon outside suggestions. Given the postcolonial monomania of blindly following models deemed ‘global best practices’ that the region favors, examples from all over the world were copied and pasted onto the blank slate set out in the desert. In particular, Abu Dhabi latched on the Singaporean example, adopting the efforts of a tiny nation lacking natural resources yet nevertheless governing itself with the same rationalist rigidity that Abu Dhabi favors. Not only has this rigidity created a spatially, architecturally, and socially divided city, it has also imprinted this division into the psyches of the indigenous people. For centuries, the towns and villages dotting the southern coast of the Persian Gulf followed the same vernacular as other old Arabic villages, with houses clustered together amidst winding alleyways and situated according to tribal connections and loyalties. In today’s Abu Dhabi, only one of these neighborhoods survives, serving to house a group of powerful Emiratis in a contemporary mimicry of historical housing. The new, and imported, system of housing is largely due to the influence of Aramco

developments built in Saudi Arabia in the 1950s, defined by American-style villas imprinted onto the Saudi Arabian desert landscape (Citino, 2006). Rather than learn from the shortcomings of the Aramco compounds, the UAE quickly adopted the same villa-style of housing, the emirate’s vernacular architecture swallowed by oversized compounds of sand and scrub, presenting an obvious display of wealth that contradicted the humble ideals of generations past (Dempsey, 2014). Also adopted was that most rational of planning apparatuses: the urban grid.

Abu Dhabi’s corniche in 2014. Note the large boulevard, overt greenery, and many glassfacades. Source: almrsal.com

The proliferation of such housing compounds ingrained a certain expectation into the Emirati psyche: every Emirati deserved a private villa, and the public housing program should be their provider. This expectation, in becoming reality, certainly yielded larger houses, yet also worked to disintegrate Abu Dhabi’s long-ingrained social mores. The cohesion of the old Emirati community was partially based on the proximity between houses; in an environment where people live in structures separated by hundreds of feet of emptiness, this proximity – and the society it engendered – was no more. Moreover, given the large construction booms and the rapid development of the young nation, coupled with the rapid influx of foreigners, the artificial identity carefully constructed for the Emiratis began to buckle. Whispers of anger began to surface: the royal class was blamed for this cultural erosion as members of the polis acknowledged the simulacra upon which their society was based. Of course, such dissidents, as they were branded, were quickly relegated to an ever-expanding prison system (HRW, 2013). The translation of the grid’s foreign ideology into an otherwise conservative, socially cohesive urban fabric served to cement the government’s complete control of Abu Dhabi’s built environment, wherein physical change remained, under penalty, the remit solely of the state.

Abu Dhabi’s corniche in the 1960s. Note the old fort in the center (c. 1760) and the clusters of huts and bungalows amidst a newly appearing asphalt road. Source: St. Josephs Cathedral, Abu Dhabi.

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The grid came to serve, also, as an effective tool of segregation. With no program of low-cost housing or provision for multi-family housing complexes in place, the poor and the rich tend to live at opposite ends of the city, kept apart by the spatial rules imparted by the logic of the grid. Further exacerbating Abu Dhabi’s extreme segregation is its long history of racial homogeneity: what once may have been the consequence of sitting in the middle of a vast desert is now due to laws reserving certain areas for Emirati citizens, with other spaces dedicated to foreigners. (Finance-based segregation, of course, is reproduced, perhaps even amplified, in the spatial situation of foreigner districts.) The citizen/non-citizen divide is so strong, in fact, that, in 2014, the government launched a campaign to evict non-Emiratis from Emirati-only neighborhoods (Sankar, 2014). The mechanism was novel: certain areas were decreed single-family-unit districts: bachelors and other living situations not conforming to the government’s traditional ideal were almost exclusively non-Emirati.

References:

In a climate of such rigidity and control, that attempts at environmental modification and adapting public space into individualized social space causes great wonder. Yasser Elsheshtawy, an associate professor of architecture at the United Arab Emirates University, shines a bright light on phenomena of this kind, having undertaken a study of informal public spaces under the title Little Bangladesh – Mapping Abu Dhabi. Evoking William Whyte’s The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, Elsheshtawy documented Abu Dhabi’s Bangladeshi community and its informal (unsanctioned) use of a small urban space as a public gathering area. Notably, the use of the space by the Bangladeshi community – a group largely consisting of adult males – fundamentally altered its usefulness to other segments of the population while also laying bare the city’s ever-present social divides: women and children would only leave their homes and utilize the space when the Bangladeshi social gathering was cleared, with no interaction between the two groups. The complicity of the grid in creating scarce spaces of gathering in an extremely segregated society only serves to bolster divides while also taking away opportunities to meaningfully enjoy the Abu Dhabi’s public spaces.

“Modern Architecture in Abu Dhabi, 1968-1992.” https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=tjbbPZlWzbk

Today, Abu Dhabi remains conflicted about how best to pursue planning for its future. In an effort, perhaps to bring back the social life of the past, the Abu Dhabi Urban Planning Council (UPC) has recently released a neighborhood planning brochure, which calls for the construction of courtyard housing and the planning of neighborhoods to evoke the vernacular of the past. Interestingly, the UPC also published a brochure named Emirati Housing promoting the same villa-style form of housing that they seemingly combat with the first brochure. With such confusion, the social situation in Abu Dhabi may continue to worsen unless these two extremes are brought together.

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Ballon, H. (2012). The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011. New York: Columbia University Press. Clune, M. (2015,). “Little Bangladesh – Mapping Abu Dhabi exhibition opens in New York City.” The National. Retrieved from http://www.thenational.ae/uae/heritage/little-bangladesh-mapping-abu-dhabi-exhibition-opens-in-new-york-city Dempsey, M. (2014). Castles in the Sand: a City Planner in Abu Dhabi. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company,. (2011). “Al Hosn Palace: Abu Dhabi’s Beating Heart and Her Living Heritage.” Al Ittihad. Retrieved December 16, 2015, from http:// www.alittihad.ae/details.php?id=100862&y=2011&article=full Jacobs, J. (1961). The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House. Khalaf, S (1999). “Camel Racing in the Gulf. Notes on the Evolution of a Traditional Cultural Sport.” Anthropos, Bd. 94, H. 1. /3. Pp. 85 – 106.

Muhaissen, E. (2015). “The Simplicity and Difficulty of Life in the Emirates in the Past.” Emarat Al Youm. Retrieved December 16, 2015, from http://www.emaratalyoum.com/life/foursides/2015-05-17-1.784576 Whyte, W. (2001). “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.” New York: Project for Public Spaces. https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2010/04/08/slums-ofnew-york/ Elsheshtawy, Y. “Redrawing Boundaries: Dubai, an Emerging Global City.” in Elsheshtawy, Y, ed.(2004) Planning Middle Eastern Cities: An Urban Kaleidoscope in a Globalizing World. CIA World Fact Book Sankar, A. (2014, August 20). Say no to bachelors’ campaign in Abu Dhabi. Retrieved December 18, 2015, from http://gulfnews. com/news/uae/general/say-no-to-bachelors-campaign-in-abudhabi-1.1374351 Human Rights Watch reports on the UAE

----------------------------------------------------------------------Abdulla Al Shehhi is a second year urban planning student. His interests include urban and economic development, and the mobility of sexual minorities.

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ESSAY

REFLECTIONS ON PRACTICE:

Positionality and Research on the Park Hill Liberians BY JOHN ROBERT DARCEY

We think about what interests us and we try to understand what we do not know about. That is how we learn new things and create new ideas. What is unknown, what is apart from our own experiences, what is “other” is precisely what we should strive to become familiar with and informed about. That which intrigues does so because it offers, behind a veil of ignorance and inaccessibility, something to learn. At least, these are the things that I told myself as I ventured to Park Hill Avenue. I do not know if what I am doing is really “urban planning.” Certainly, it is “urban.” It looks at people and things in the city. It tries (I think) to ponder how this assemblage of people and things connects to the physicality of the city at large and, maybe more importantly, to the idea of “city.” Talking to people, listening to people. Trying to say the right things, to walk the right way or to wait until a quiet moment to snap a photograph, in order to convince the neighborhood that there was a point to my presence, that I was not just some type of voyeur of despair. And yet that was exactly what I was. And that is exactly what the whole premise of this project was based upon, was it not? My plan was to learn about this place called Park Hill, this supposed bastion of refugees perched on Staten Island’s North Shore, but I had already decided what it should be like. And I had already come up with the emotions that the Liberians should feel. I did not want to be surprised. Here is what a typical research outing was like for me: The 1 train, the 2 or 3 train, the 1 train again. I would wait in the ferry hall with hundreds of other passengers, wondering what they all could be doing out and about on a winter’s day. I would see people wearing West African cloth and speaking in inflected English. Until I learned that West Africans from many different countries lived in all of New York’s corners, I simply assumed that the people I saw must be Liberians, must be part a part of “my story.” But not everything is what I think, and not everything has to be the story that I tell. The ferry. I would find a seat upstairs, and glue my eyes to the window. I would look at the churches and gantries of South Brooklyn, marvel at the barges and container ships lounging in the harbor, gaze at the creative immensity of

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Manhattan’s skyline. And then the Lady would appear, hundreds of yards to the west and yet somehow right above our heads. Hoisting high her lantern of welcome, holding in her hand the very best of America’s promises of opportunity, the lady would hold me in her green gaze. Her eyes were fixed upon the far horizon, but I began to think that they might be peering toward the heights of northern Staten Island, toward a place where it seemed like the newest huddling masses, the crowds banished from their Liberian homes for a new kind of life on Park Hill Avenue, were still yearning, ever yearning, to breathe free. The bus, S74 or S76. Crowded and raucous, the bus led me away from the brief stateliness of St. George, through the bustle of small-town Stapleton, and into the more desolate roads of Clifton and Park Hill, where I would get off and walk across the street to Park Hill Avenue, always with a host of six or seven others. It seemed like everyone on the bus had a friend, someone they were bumping into, someone with whom to chat about the latest gossip on the block, someone they knew from work or school or church or family. I had no one. I felt out of place, sitting quietly and wondering if anyone was going to ask me what I was doing there. They never did, of course, but I always made sure that some questionnaires or some sketched-out maps were accessible from my bag, ready to be shared and explained as a way to justify my journey. I felt the same way on Park Hill Avenue its housing blocks, waiting to be questioned on my presence and always aware that I was an outsider. Was it my whiteness? Park Hill Avenue is overwhelmingly black, both African and AfricanAmerican, and this reality is palpable as soon as one steps onto the street. This is not a place of diversity, where people who look different live together and interact. This is not a place that offers its culture as a commodity, either, to be consumed by all types of people from all types of places. This place, with its succession of brick blocks and its assortment of parking lot bleakness and its smattering of shuttered storefronts, is one where you are if you have nowhere else to go. My body, I was aware, sent a message: I was there to get something. My pads of paper and my two green clipboards and my digital camera slung across my shoulder only offered further confirmation of this.

Deleuze, in conversation with Foucault, says of the latter, “... you became aware of the necessity for confined individuals to speak for themselves, to create a relay...”1 This project and the way in which my findings are presented is informed by that idea: I have attempted, as much as possible, to use direct quotations from the refugees I spoke with and then to organize the ideas contained within those quotations around a certain collective narrative. I conceived of the project as a way to use my pages to place the voice of the Park Hill Liberians within the realm of planning as a discipline. At the same time, however, this process places me – white, male, educated, non-poor, American – in the role of arbiter of the message, as the regulator of information coming from people very different from me in many respects: black, often female, less educated, poor, refugee. I have allowed myself to become of the owner of these words, even as I have tried to give over the page fully to the words as I recorded them. But I am the one who decided how to use them, on which pages to place them and in support of which of my arguments to employ them. As much as I can try to use paragraphs like these to reflect upon the legitimacy of myself as a sensitive planner and present my work as activist scholarship, I cannot fully escape the reality of my location within the hegemon. The inescapability of being who I am goes beyond my ownership of a downtrodden population’s words, of course, and extends to the process of carrying out research as the very obvious outsider that I am. Speaking to people on Park Hill Avenue meant saying, “I am a student at Columbia University and I am doing research.” It also meant asking people who I did not know to open up to me, to tell me about their concerns and experiences and emotions, most of which were not easy or comfortable. I have never been to Liberia, and I have never studied the history or sociology of its conflict in any great detail. I have never known war. I have lived (briefly) as an outsider in another culture, but always with access to choice and opportunity and the chance to change my existence. I fall, quite admittedly, into that group about which Spivak says the “Other as Subject is inaccessible...”2 Negotiation, psychological and otherwise, was inevitable; the “truth” that I present is what they felt comfortable sharing with a stranger largely unfamiliar with the local and personal dynamics at play who was carrying out a research endeavor with no likely practical outcomes. So why would anyone on Park Hill Avenue open up to me? Why should I be the one to tell this story? What I learned cannot be definitive or even suggestive of “a refugee experience.” It cannot be definitive or even suggestive of “a Liberian experience.” What I learned is a

photograph of a particular community in a particular place experience some very real problems and largely ignored by decision-makers and power-brokers. As with any photograph, I am the one who pointed the lens, controlled the exposure, set the aperture. And as with any photograph that is also a portrait, a degree of posing is bound to have occurred: simplification, omission, and distortion – resulting, certainly, from the distance between my subjects’ experiences and my own and the very real differences in our potential futures – color what I write and (re)present. I would like to make a claim to exhaustiveness and to universality, but I cannot. The role of planners in working toward meeting the needs of the future demands a firm understanding of the realities of today. If planning is to face real challenges and attempt to redress inequities, then it needs to know, first, what those challenges are and who is affected by those inequities. Often, this means drawing underserved and downtrodden populations into planning as active participants aware of their agency and confident in their voices. My aim is to begin that process for a group of New York’s refugees who have very much been left out of planning efforts that affect their lives; at the very least, I attempt to raise this population to greater visibility and offer a first step toward comprehending societal problems that too often elude the realm of planning. This attempt stands, admittedly, upon my positionality as a white, male, educated, non-poor American privileged enough to pursue an education in this field: I hope, through the words on these pages, to provoke the field of planning to engage more fully with the refugee population.

Deleuze, Gilles and Michel Foucault. “Intellectuals and Power.” in Bouchard, Donald F., ed. Bouchard, Donald F. and Sherry Simon, trans. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault. (Ithaca, NY: 1977). p. 206. 1

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Nelson, Cary and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. (Urbana and Chicago, IL: 1988). p. 282. 2

-----------------------------------------------------------------------John Robert Darcey is an urban planning student and writer in New York City. He is particularly interested in exploring the culturalphysical-social urban interface, particularly as it relates to migration and movement both spatial and psychological.

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ESSAY

IS “BETTER” SYNONYMOUS WITH “GENTRIFICATION”? BY GABRIELLE PETERSON

Gentrification has become a (too) popular word. From aptly describing the process by which a particular (disadvantaged) demographic is displaced to colloquially referring to any sort of aesthetic improvement, this phenomenon, at least nominally, seems almost universally applicable. Indeed, gentrification has become a pervasive praxis over the last half-century, riding the coat-tails of post- war American consumerism and the neo-liberal ideology that followed. As Americans turned their expectations of resource infrastructure away from the government and towards private entities (read: for-profit companies without the collective good in mind), a more narrowed path of opportunity and accessibility was created. The term “collective good” soon became “individual responsibility”: the disintegration of the Keynesian model paved the way for the reality of extreme private profit and concentrated wealth. This economic trend found it could thrive in an urban context pending some reconfiguring: big box stores and major corporations could downsize, setting up shop in smaller city quarters; companies could alter their advertising strategies, catering their marketing campaigns toward city dwellers. This process continues today, with ever-predictable results: small, locally grown businesses are being driven out, be it by the large corporate migrants or trendy artisanal shops, both infiltrating forces either seeing the potential profits to be made in disinvested or bluecollar neighborhoods or jumping on the bandwagon after efforts have already been made to “clean up” a somehow deficient neighborhood. Gentrification, society is finding, is stimulated by the urban environment’s promotive stance on infilling rather than expanding. Although gentrification can begin with a number of factors (among them: the cultivation of an artistic community, the influx of young professionals), the presumed perpetrators (that is, those who actively seek to transform a neighborhood and destabilize its identity) are generally developers and real-estate mongers, builders and sellers of the expensive and larger-than-life residential and commercial complexes that often announce their presence with an architecture at once out-of-scale and unimaginative. They set the stage: the wealthy are invited to play.

What, however, of those who are hired by the city to simply improve community spaces or redesign streets and sidewalks? If you are an agent for aesthetic improvement and tasked to “revitalize” a downtown area or district, are you just as complicit as the usual suspects in facilitating gentrification? By making a community better, are we necessarily readying it for gentrification? These questions introduce a conceptual distinction between improvement as an aesthetic exercise and improvement as a socioeconomic exercise. Can improvement exist in a purely cosmetic realm, without an evaluation of the multi-tiered implications that have been known to follow? Can visual “improvement” (with all the subjectivity that the term implies) still be considered such if it has adverse social effects on the very community it initially aimed to serve? Kevin Clark, Associate Principal of Chicago-based urban planning firm The Lakota Group, believes in the specificity of improvement. He explains that the goals of revitalizing a community, although manifested and most easily identified as physical alterations, seek more than just to better the physical nature of the neighborhood. In fact, design speculations can possess great value in pondering ways in which the environment might more efficiently serve community members, considering everything from the local economy to cultural and social restoration. By nature of a design being specific to the individual community’s context and in many ways driven from a grassroots level, community improvements can be accomplished for the people and, in many cases, by the people. In addition to this more inclusive model of design, market studies are often conducted during the course of such projects, analyzing the demographics, spending potential, and development capacity of the designated community in order to determine the optimal and most realistic future land use and development type. Though these measures are robust and designed so as to specifically avoid neighborhood detriments like gentrification, it is nearly impossible to predict market forces with complete accuracy: regardless of intent and research, any plan to improve a neighborhood may ultimately be no match for the power of the dollarholder.

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Community improvement, of course, is not limited to simply streetscape or signage modifications or an investment in new or restored architecture. An engagement process between planners, community organizers, social advocates, and residents is a tool that many communities utilize in an effort to achieve positive change. As the story of gentrification that in Boston’s South End tells us, however, the simple creation of a discursive community forum does not always lead to an inclusive transformation. Sylvie Tissot, in her Good Neighbors: Gentrifying Diversity in Boston’s South End, recalls that the titular neighborhood’s identity is strongly rooted in community activism, brought about initially during the 1960s when different ethnic groups banded together to protest plans that would have cast aside their homes in favor of an urban renewal scheme. Beginning with a flurry of community organization efforts, this activism initiated “the establishment of neighborhood advisory offices that gave neighborhoods a means of voicing their concerns on planning issues.” (See Lance Freeman’s review of Tissot’s book on page 21). Many of these offices were established by the City of Boston itself, allowing for a direct channel of communication to flourish between the neighborhood and the city. Consequently, and after years of rich influx, wealthier community members amassed far greater influence over the direction of the neighborhood than poorer long-time residents. Gentrification and improvement are not one in the same: improvement to a neighborhood, regardless of whether made cosmetically or through community building, does not on its own cause gentrification. Of course, it does not prevent gentrification either. With the unpredictability of market forces, in addition to the increasing appeal of “disinvested” communities to corporations and middleclass individuals and families seeking a less expensive lifestyle, gentrification seems to embody an unavoidable byproduct of urban growth. With revitalization plans seeking to maximize neighborhood efficiency, and community engagement processes aiming to unite and strengthen residents’ grasp on neighborhood politics, it is time, perhaps, to consider new models of neighborhood growth and development that work for the existing residents themselves. -----------------------------------------------------------------------Gabrielle M. Peterson is a Chicago-based writer and urban-space enthusiast. She received her B.A. in studio art and creative writing from Carleton College.

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BOOK REVIEW

SYLVIE TISSOT

Good Neighbors: Gentrifying Diversity in Boston’s South End BY LANCE FREEMAN

Central to the concerns one hears about gentrification are long term residents’ feelings of being “pushed out.” This fear goes beyond a fear of physical displacement from their neighborhood to also include long time residents’ feelings of loss of belonging in and loss of control of their own neighborhoods. This loss would appear to motivate much of the cynicism long term residents often voice about neighborhood change. It is common to hear of long term residents complaining about new bars, restaurants, and the ubiquitous locally-roasted coffee shop opening; when changes occur in their neighborhood, it often feels that such changes are not for them. There is a palpable sense that gentrification brings about improvements that are intended not for long term residents but, rather, to entice newcomers with money. Sylvie Tissot’s recently published book, Good Neighbors: Gentrifying Diversity in Boston’s South End (Verso) shines a bright light on how one neighborhood experienced gentrification in such a way that low income minority residents and even the early gentrifiers of the neighborhood came to be marginalized in their own neighborhood – that is, “pushed out” even while physically remaining in the neighborhood. A sociologist and Professor of Political Science at University of Paris-8, Tissot spent several years gathering material to form the basis of this wellresearched book. She conducted seventy-seven interviews with neighborhood residents, engaged in several years of participant observation, and studied archival documents to paint a picture of how later and more elite gentrifiers came to take control of the neighborhood. Tissot’s is not a story of greedy self-absorbed property buyers taking over the neighborhood for themselves and foisting their mores and perspectives on hapless old timers. In many ways, the context in which gentrification occurred in the South End portended an example of “good” gentrification. First, the South End neighborhood had a rich history of activism dating back to the 1960s when blacks, Puerto Ricans and whites banded together to stop urban renewal plans in their neighborhood. These activists helped usher in the new era of community engagement in Boston with the establishment of neighborhood advisory offices that gave neighborhoods a means of voicing their concerns

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on a great number of planning issues. Such activism and community engagement is sometimes held forth as a means to stop gentrification. In the case of South End, however, the institutions put in place by the City of Boston to better engage with neighborhood activists in the 1960s and 1970s paved the way for more affluent gentrifiers to shape, in ensuing decades, the redevelopment of the neighborhood according to their tastes. Second, the South End neighborhood has a long history of diversity, being a haven for gays, people of varying races and ethnicities, and low-income residents of rooming houses. Indeed, the diversity of the neighborhood is what drew many affluent and educated residents to the neighborhood in the first place.

Over time, this diversity tended to wither as the neighborhood became more homogenous in terms of race and class: the gentrifiers, it turns out, valued diversity, but only to a certain extent and in a form they could control.

Good Neighbors: Gentrifying Diversity in Boston’s South End by Sylvie Tissot, translated by David broder and Catherine Romatowski. Verso Books. 288 pages. $26.95

Finally, the early activists of the 1960s and 1970s were successful in having affordable housing a requirement for any new construction. As Boston’s economy increasingly drew white collar professionals to the city, the South End became steadily more exclusive. As with their tolerance for a certain level of ethnic diversity, the new residents of the South End allowed for the maintenance and development of lower-rent housing, provided that the number of units was kept relatively small.

References:

Thus, the South End neighborhood would become the playground of affluent whites. Tissot seems to disapprove of these changes and often writes mockingly of the gentrifiers and their habits. For example, she found the gentrifiers’ penchant for having dogs as pets and treating them as family members “slightly ridiculous” in a neighborhood with very real human needs. In the end, the changes brought about by the gentrifiers are interpreted by Tissot as a “conquest” of the South End, whereby the gentry have achieved “hegemonic” status. As she puts it, this conquest was accomplished subtly and not violently, but her use of these terms to describe the change make clear her interpretation of the gentrification process is tinged with a critical perspective.

Gardner, Ann Marie. 2006. “36 Hours in the South End of Boston.” New York Times, June 30, 2006. http://www.nytimes. com/2006/06/30/travel/escapes/30hours.html?_r=0. Tissot, Sylvie. 2015. Good Neighbors: Gentrifying Diversity in Boston’s South End. London: Verso.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------Lance Freeman is a scholar of gentrification and neighborhood change and author of the book There Goes the Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up. He is the current director of the urban planning program at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University.

In a book about how the gentrifiers exerted their will to reshape the neighborhood, the voices of long term and remaining working class residents are, for the most part, absent. She notes that except for a blog that “railed against the yuppies’ arrogance…and a few newspaper articles, hostility to gentrification had little collective expression.” Protests or any other type of community activism intended to blunt the forces of gentrification seem not to have arisen. The reader would be correct to question the extent to which long-time residents would have shared Tissot’s interpretation of the changes occurring around them. That question, unfortunately, is left unanswered by Good Neighbors. Good Neighbors: Gentrifying Diversity in Boston’s South End does, however, answer the question of how a neighborhood experienced a transformation from a relatively poor one with flop houses, seedy bars, and frequent scenes of public drunkenness in the 1960s and 1970s into a place described by the New York Times in 2006 as a “…vital neighborhood that has officially emerged with engaging new restaurants, bars, shops and condominiums, and brownstones” (Gardner 2006). Tissott’s critical history therefore makes Good Neighbors an engaging new book well worth a read by planners, urbanists, and students of neighborhood change. (dis)Location | URBAN | 33

Cover : Dislocating, Ahmedabad, India (Mehak Sachdeva 2015) Inside Cover : Dislocated Shanghai, China (Jack Darcey 2013)