Implementing Advanced Knowledge
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6.2.1 Opening Closed Cities Katya Larina
Opening Closed Cities
Soviet Closed cities were built during the cold war as a network of high security centres of research and production. One of its main characteristics was that they were typically enclosed by concrete walls and barbed wire, and named by the code number that followed their ‘ZATO’ (Closed Territorial Formation’) designation. From the beginning, closed cities embodied the idea of total isolation from the entire world for all their inhabitants and could not be found on any map or in any official records during at least five decades. For this reason, ZATOs had to represent the utopian ideal of a place to live and work. ZATOs were privileged places for few privileged people, especially when compared to other Soviet cities. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, all of the closed cities remained in a particularly difficult position. Due to the new and more volatile economic and political circumstances, many ZATOs were left without sufficient central control and without funding. This resulted in a significant loss of population and a period of stagnation in the ZATOs that had flourished (though secretly) throughout the years of the Cold War. Today, forty closed cities remain scattered over the russian territory, counting on an overall population of more than one million. Given that I was involved in several multidisciplinary projects of urban social economic strategies for these cities I had the chance of learning a lot about the phenomenon of the Soviet ZATOs. Even today boundary walls delimit the ZATO’s cities, and access to them is highly restricted. The threshold between the ZATO and the territory beyond is governmental and legislative, defined by distinct economic, social and psychological characteristics. One of the key elements that is necessary to understand the idea of a ‘closed’ city is the notion of the ‘perimeter’. ‘Perimeter’ is the official term for the ZATO’s security infrastructure - the city border. In Closed cities I was working with a perimeter constituted of a three to six-metre concrete wall that includes within its boundary a military Cover - Sverdlovsk#44 Figure 1 - Sverdlovsk#44 Figure 2 - Sverdlovsk#44 2
base and several checkpoints. The ZATO’s perimeter usually surrounds the city and the secret industry of the ZATO (with its own even more tightly secured perimeter), as well as adjacent villages, forests, lakes and agricultural land. The majority of the ZATO residents are afraid of losing their wall as a symbol of self-exclusiveness and as a kind of illusion of protection. Chosen to work for highly strategic state projects and goals, and given access to the artificially comfortable conditions of life within, the ZATO residents could be understood as a kind of “voluntary prisoners”1. ZATO Sverdlovsk #44, now known as Novouralsk2, one of the ten ‘atomic’ zone cities built to further the Soviet nuclear program that brought elite scientists and technicians together in one place so as to work and live in total dedication to this singular cause. Sverdlovsk #44 build in the 1950s straight after becaming a city where high-enriched uranium for the first Russian nuclear bomb was produced3. Today Sverdlovsk #44 is a city of 120 sq. km territory, with a population of about 100,000 civilians, the majority of them are involved in the civilian -use nuclear research and production at the Electrochemical Plant. Sverdlovsk #44 as other Closed cities has been created as a political project and even today still totally depends on the state subsidies. The state is experiencing high expenses by maintaining the city infrastructure together with the secret industry , the annual budget of the typical Closed city exceeds the budget of an ordinary Russian city of the same size, threefold. Caused by many reasons including a significant loss of the young population, Sverdlovsk #44 as other “Closed cities” is missing any social-economic potentials to
Figure 2 - MIT Live Singapore 4
self-sustain it in case it looses its privileged status. Together with my colleagues we organised a set of events to address this ‘problem’ including conferences, series of public lectures and an architectural workshop organised at Institute Strelka in Moscow and entitled “Closed/Open city”, that took the example ZATO Sverdlovsk #44 for a case study. Sverdlovsk #44 research and production industry still operates in an old paradigm of a centralised economy where the research and its resources are programmed by the state order, blocking the emergence of any local initiative. Isolation and secrecy are affecting negatively the internal and external communication, not allowing the collaboration between researchers and interested actors from outside. Today the state which controls and supports Closed cities is interested in totally or partially “opening” the ZATO and making them more self-sufficient and not so dependent on external support. It is obvious that once the city becomes ‘open’, the development of commercial projects such ‘technology parks’ formed on the basis of the existing industry would benefit both the city and the industry, generating new ideas and innovative products, thereby bringing an alternative source of support to the city. However, the liberation from the ZATO restrictions is not going to be enough in sparking innovation. It will be necessary to create a fertile milieu for the development of creativity before innovation can take hold. In reference to Richard Florida studies of “knowledge economy”, Antoine Picon writes that “ there can be no lasting intelligent growth without a stimulating urban environment.. art galleries, performance venues,
gastronomic restaurants and fashion boutiques all pertain to the ecology that knowledge economy requires , just as much as sensors, fiber optics and ambiguous computing.”4 Sverdlovsk #44 constitutes an overdetermined environment, where not only the urban system operates in a particular fixed and controlled way, but also individuals are active in a restricted manner, being controlled in a topdown way, what makes the process of opening the city very complex. This is also reflected in the urban fabric itself , the spectrum of beautiful and wellmaintained squares, boulevards, pocket parks and city parks built in Soviet times doesn’t suggest any flexibility or freedom of use of these spaces and all functions allows only the predefined patterns of behaviour. Thus, urban landscape of the Closed city is perceived by their users as a passive service, but not as an agency capable of making a change. To survive the process of slow liberation from total state control of the city economy, the ZATO needs to create a new environment both social and physical and an “active environment where indeterminate processes happen and drive the evolution of the system,” 5or an environment where actors absorb, participate and adapt to change.
“... the liberation from the ZATO restrictions is not going to be enough in sparking innovation.” 6
The City has to understand that uncertainty, open-endness and informality, are intrinsic notions of the market economy that have been excluded by the protocol of the Secret city. These concepts are the key elements of the physical and strategic environment for potential commercial projects - the spin-offs from the existing main industry of the Closed city. By understanding the specificity of the “closed city” it is important to introduce new open-ended social-economic processes into the city and reintroduce the simulated environment of the normal “open”city . Addressing questions of the relationships and tensions between ‘closed’ and ‘open’ systems and the strategies and design decisions that may drive ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ operations, it is also concerned with the notion of how the ‘public’ as an ideal may be redefined and transformed in relation to the environment and design of the urban landscape.
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Richard Sennett in his essay “The Open city” blames an overdetermined urban environment of contemporary planned cities. He calls this the “closed system“ or the “Brittle city”.6 He proposes the idea of an “Open city” which is “derived from open systems in mathematics and computation” Sennett suggests to translate the concept of the “Open city” into the “visual and planning tool”.7 The idea of the open and closed systems are very abstract. Open systems exist under the dynamic of constant exchanges with its environment and are hard to predict but capable for self-adjustment. The Closed system is efficient and stable, but not capable of finding internal forces to change or respond to modified conditions. Both top-down driven strategies and potential emergence processes within a city have to form the equilibrium, where local bottom-up initiatives will be able to support the process of recapitalisation of the closed city economy. Manuel Delanda describes a duality and coexistence of unplanned and planned and he opposes “self-organised meshworks of diverse elements, versus the hierarchies of uniform elements.”8 He claims “meshworks and hierarchies not only coexist and intermingle, they constantly give rise to one another. For instance, as markets grow in size they tend to form commercial hierarchies.”9 The main question we stated at the workshop at Strelka that I have mentioned earlier is how to achieve this equilibrium of Closed and Open in the passive environment of Sverdlovsk #44. We were interested in discovering what would be the agency capable of starting the local processes able to cooperate with the existing “closed” context of the city and at the same time gradually reduce the total dependence of ZATO on external control. To do so what is needed is a combination of the social-economic and spatial strategy for the ZATO, thereby creating what Steve Johnson calls a “controlled emergency”10 of a new independent economy of the city, combining potentials of existing research industry and external interest. Also, we were interested in knowing which one would the “visual and planning tool” of the Open City. Antoine Picon in his book on Smart cities is pointing out “two types of the political projects that are emerging today”. The first political project focuses on controlling the urban organism, in an outlook not dissimilar to the cybernetic research of the period from 1950 to 1970 into the running of complex systems. .. the other major political project which features in debate today - cities that call more upon the initiative of and cooperation between individuals than on coordination driven from above - seeks to prevent.” He believes, that it is possible “ to envisage both of these Figure 3 - Sverdlovsk#44 Figure 4 - Simulation of the combinations of online trade and service offers Students: Olesya Ababkova, Liza Korshunova, Lisa Dorrer, Misha Sinuhin, Srezha Lubashin Figure 5 - Application of“movable cellular automaton” in modelling the growth of local green economy. Students: Pavel Ermachenko, Elena Hasyanova, Ruslan Timashev, Alan Gibilov
orientations mutually supporting one another instead of being in conflict.”11 The synergy between both as design orientations became an aspiration for our workshop. As the first one - the modelling and control mechanism, we proposed a computational simulation of the hypothetical behaviour of the bottomup processes within a Closed city. This mechanism of the modelling of emergence became a multi-agent code, which has been developed in collaboration with Rob Stuart Smith. The code simulates behavior and patterns of interaction amongst different types of agents and also lay out rules of evolution of types of agents within the next generations. This code represents a prototypical model of urban development of the territory, where agents may perform as social groups, potential initiatives, financial groups etc. which are responding to the local resources of the territory. In relation to Sverdlovsk #44, this modeling mechanism allowed us to test in dynamics a complicated structure of interrelations within high numbers of actors of a social economic strategy in the physical context of the spatial development of its territory. Also, this multi-agent prototypical model was visualising the evolution of agents within several generations and their vitality in the context of fluctuating resources, which in turn depend on the speed of implementation of the initiatives and the amount of energy within the closed system of ZATO. As a second design orientation, Picon defines a “neocybernetic inspiration with technological overtones or new perspectives of democratisation linked to the spread of information and communications technology.” 12 To reflect that we proposed the material and informational infrastructures related to the “controlled emergence”. This infrastructure in the form of intertwining media and urban landscape had to heat up an inactive environment of the closed system of ZATO#44 by initiating internal and external communication and maintaining bottom-up processes within social and production realm. As an example, one of the groups in our workshop was dealing with the specific socio-economic conditions of the Closed city Sverdlovsk #44, such as deficit of local business projects caused by the bureaucracy of the secret status of ZATO and low self-motivation of the local community. The intention of the project was to support local bottom-up business initiatives, by means of constructing the virtual and physical infrastructure of local business incubators. This infrastructure meant to become the informational, educational and networking space. Students analysed data of the online offers of Sverdlovsk#44 related to the local business initiatives. Then they composed a list of vital combination 10
“The main question we stated is how to achieve the equilibrium of Closed and Open in the passive environment of Sverdlovsk 44” of the existing offers and added missing initiatives which would be able to receive private, federal government and city government funds. The multi agent algorithm meant to select vital combinations of online trade and service offers, taking into consideration accessibility and resources of the territory. As an “infrastructure of emergence” students developed the prototype of the webpage which was visualising the promising projects within a suitable context of the city, using some sort of google street view interface. This web page would guide and educate the local business community, where they can see the most perspective business initiatives and also can see the visualisation of potential future projects, what is continuously updating according to new upcoming local businesses and new online offers. In this case, web page with embedded strategy for local businesses became a powerful feedback
instrument , capable to collect the data, visualise the potentials, influence the local entrepreneurs and in the same time guide the city authorities. It is impossible to predict and control the development of an open system and thereby it is impossible to find the most effective solution for it. An open system requires a different approach - an experimental. This is why we were focused a lot on using digital simulations in motion. Dealing with open systems we need to understand its behaviour and the complexity of its interrelations with the context. In this case, we will be able to influence it by introducing new components or modifying its conditions. One of the main challenges in relation to ZATO phenomenon is whether we can construct an emergence in an inactive context and how to design a context that could not only implement, but also launch hidden resources of the bottom-up processes. However, the idea of Open and Closed city is very general, this notion is missing in the urban redevelopment strategies of ZATOs. Often proposals of urban strategies of the ZATO are aiming to import the successful experience of engineering and innovation clusters of ordinary cities, ignoring the fact that operating mechanism of the Closed city is very different. The ZATO are cities of a fragmented character: isolated ideal cities preserving an image of former prosperity; isolated local communities without means and motivation to communicate internally and externally. Today the prospect of opening the ZATO “perimeter” remains fragile. Even if Sverdlovsk #44 were to continue to be surrounded by a concrete wall, it is still important to introduce elements of the “open” environment - more vulnerable, but at the same time more flexible and adaptable in order to shape the global structure of the ‘open city’ from inside.
Figure 6 - Open City system 12
Notes:
1. Here I refer to Rem Koolhaas (1972) Architectural Association thesis (together with Madelon Vreisendorp, Elia Zenghelis, and Zoe Zenghelis) 2. The origin of the code name №44 is unknown. In Soviet times all ZATOs were listed under a combination of codes and numbers and sometimes given the name of the closest administrative center. In 1994 during the early days of the new postSoviet Russia, by order of the Council of Ministers, the presence of “coded” cities were declared non secrete and Sverdlovsk №44 gained its old informal name Novouralsk. 3. United kingdom –Russia Closed Nuclear Cities Partnership, Overwiew [online] Available at: http://www.cncp.ru/eng/cities/novouralsk/ 4. Antoine Picon (2015) Smart Cities. A Spatialised Intelligence, (Wiley 2015) p. 45 5. Richard Sennett “The open city” (Newspaper essay, Berlin 2006) 6. Lbid 7. Lbid 8. Manuel De Landa (1997), A thousand years of nonlinear history , (Swerve 2005), p. 32 9. Lbid 10. Steven Johnson (2001) Emergence 11. Antoine Picon (2015) Smart Cities. A Spatialised Intelligence, (Wiley 2015) p. 11 12. Lbid
Figure 7 - Interrelations within an Open City system, Students: Vladimir Voronich, Katya Zaechkova, Artem Gilmanov, Petrosyan Averik, Yura Ismailov
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