Implementing Advanced Knowledge
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6.1.1 IaaC Lecture Series Reinier de Graaf
IaaC Lecture Series:
Works and projects / Reinier de Graaf
(IaaC Lecture Series 1st March 2016; synopsis by Jordi Vivaldi)
In our discipline, the city used to be one of our key subjects, but lately other disciplines have become crucial actors in this field. In this sense it is important that we reclaim the city as our subject again. It is interesting that OMA did not start with a building, but with a book. It was about the modern condition of the metropolis, and overall, about the effect that the metropolis had in architecture. There was indeed a strong fascination with the city, but more than 50 years later the city is spoken with a certain panic and urgency, and specially it is spoken less and less by architects. Today, people that speak about cities, speak mainly about smart cities. In a certain manner, it is a way to consider that what is not a smart city is a stupid city. It seems that in general there is not a precise idea of what exactly a smart city is, and actually, that’s why everyone can easily speak about it. If we search in google the word city, landscape images appear. If we search for the word smart, it appears a car, and if we search for the word future, it appears a big label. Through this search, using the words city, future and smart, you can easily end up with the Volkswagen diesel scandal. Is the Volkswagen’s way of being smart the act of cheating the software? Therefore, from the Smart City expression we will mainly deal with the part “City”, the only one that can be treated with a certain amount of history knowledge and seriousness. Because actually, the city plan of the 21 century is an IBM plan, an enterprise that holds a unique ability that architects do not have. That ability, that used to be related to Vitruvius, now is developed by companies like an oracle. Urbanists used to make the city, but today, city’s authors are tech companies. They do what urbanist used to do, like planning, writing manifestos, drawing… If we look carefully to the urban activity of the three main companies, Siemens, Cisco and IBM, we will realise that most of their key words are related to climate change, dwindling resources, ageing populations, population growth, rapid urbanisation… Firstly they predict an extreme apocalypses, and secondly the offer redemption through the technology that they sell. This logics has a precedent: the Bible. Cover - OMA project, IaaC Archive. Figure 1 - European Grid, IaaC Archive. Figure 2 - Control Room in Rio de Janeiro, IaaC Archive. 2
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Figure 1 - Energy map, 6
This comparation is funny, but in a certain manner it is slightly sinister as well. When we examine their urban competences, we don’t find in their vocabulary these terms: buildings, open spaces, health care, public transport, public administration… Generally speaking, you don’t find what used to be public tasks, elected by public people. Now there are mainly private tasks, developed by private and not elected enterprises. And for it, the notion of Control Room is essential. The Centre of Operations of Rio is the IBM centre, modelled as the NASA control room. What do they do? They analyse and observe the city of Rio, with a mix of GPS, data and computers, and they see that Rio is poor and has favelas. In this sense, any inclination that pretends to deal with causes is replaced by an intention of dealing with its symptoms. For example: when there is crime, police can be quicker. In general: when X, Y is quicker. It is about symptoms, and it is highly not sustainable because it is just trying to reduce the panic and not resolving its causes. How appropriate is the smart city in terms of urban issues? Even if the term smart city is a product of western companies, from the largest 10 cities of the world none is western and none of them is rich (except Tokyo). Today, big metropolis are asian, and they are growing extremely fast. A demographic explosion that curiously started to occur in a condition where Fukuyama was claiming the end of history for the western world. By 90s, the world is ideologically united in the liberal western values. No more need for ideology, because everything is the same. In 1978, China started its open door policy. The Chinese economy exploited, and as a consequence, the PIB exploited. That growth co-exists with urbanisation. But what is more relevant, even if Fukuyama talks about liberal democracy making a link between it and financial well being, the truth is that financial success is inverse to democracy. Lot of buildings are built without an authentic demand. They mainly build to create a need. And in a certain manner, planning becomes the activity of managing a control room: its main task is to be sure that whatever happens is not coinciding with something else. Singapore is probably one of the clearest examples. Today, Singapore is a form of knowledge: the one you need to make something like Singapore: Singaporelogy. People go there to learn this concept, a kind of “savoire faire”. But this is a model with limited validity for cities that do not have huge resources or vast territories. What is interesting is to understand that the fastest growing cities in the world are happening under low levels of democracy. It happens in two kind of cities: informal settlements like favelas and big massive urban scales like Moscow. In the case of the russian capital, Figure 3 - Moscow Grid, IaaC Archive. Figure 4 - Control Room, IaaC Archive. Figure 5 - Moscow Landscape, IaaC Archive.
its estimated size is, officially, 11 million people, but 15-20 million people in unofficial terms. This amount of people exist and are there, but they are illegal and do not pay taxes. If the black market would be a sovereign nation, it would be the highest economy of the world: the 65% of world’s population work in the shadow economy. Those illegal economies are the ones that are giving rise to the new generation of megacities. They are not the biggest cities, but the most rapidly growing in the world. It is a very strange circumstance that the engine for growth is not an economical opportunity but violence and war. Some sort of oppressive war that creates more harm than good. Probably the situation in the countryside in Mexico does not differ that much. If you superimpose the most rapidly increasing cities in the map, the city grows where the national state is weak.
Figure 3 -A line made by walking 1967. Photograph by Richard Long. Property of Tate Modern Figure 4 -Marcel and Alexia Duchamp and John Cage in Reunion. Toronto, 1968. image credit: musicworkds magazine. 8
And in this sense, Benjamin Barber is putting on the table a very valid question: some cities are becoming bigger than countries, and if power is a product of numbers, there is a clear political shift towards the city. But if you complete the picture, you will see that some companies are even bigger than states and cities. Following the argument of Benjamin Barber, this would lead us to conclude that companies rule the world. Cisco is larger than Lebanon, and 4 times larger that Marroc. Mayors at the end have a very limited power: they are not in the situation of ruling the world, even if it is true that there is a certain return to the concept of small urban territories. A circumstance that suggests the notion of megapolitics: If polis drive politics, megapolis would lead us to megapolitics, a hybrid in between urbanism and politics.
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