Where the water fows Text by Jack Bradwell, illustrations by Guy Field 30

streets, slowed by its viscosity. I was out of my usual habitat but immersed in it. Not merely an observer to the city’s activity, I was the city itself. I don’t know how much time had passed but at one point I found myself back at my block’s door. When I entered my fat I slumped down on the heated foor. Buzzing and spent I drifted into a sleep. When I awoke I immediately grabbed a pen and a scrap of paper and began trying to draw the journey out, which now felt like a dream, the scraps of which were collected in my puffy eyes. It was useless.

However hard I tried I could only represent the journey as different lines from one place to another. Distortions of the image that I was so used to seeing on the dashboards of the AVRs. A loading bar of travel. How could I possibly depict this experience? Perhaps there were others that had left their commutes behind for this rich, gritty view of the city. How would I fnd them? I began looking online for others but I found nothing. If they were to be found anywhere it was surely the street itself. The presence that I experienced was not split between realities I was there in my totality his could not be achieved while in two places at once.

The Flood The next morning I woke up at 4am to leave the house with enough time to try and get to work using only my feet. I packed my bag with supplies for a longer journey than usual and a piece of paper as totry and take better note of the journey. I turned on the tap and splashed my face with the cold water pulling it through my hair and cooling the back of my neck. A golden light caught the drops as they fell into the sink. I felt a rush of adrenaline and tried to steady myself with a deep breath, my hands now clasped behind my neck covered with goosebumps. I reached out and plugged the sink, I I slammed the door and I imagined at that precise moment the surface tension holding the water at the edge of the sink breaking. Like a golden balloon popping in slow-motion the water released once again, fowing out across the counter over the edge and onto the foor. As it seeped into the foor boards it would begin to fnd its way around the cables. The cables which were relentlessly transporting the information of the city. Unlike us, the data was invisible to the eye but omnipresent in its effect. The new decision makers shaping our cities. The two fows meet. One free in its movement the other restrained in its path, sure of its destination. Along one of the cables a sparkle of optic and copper was visible, a break in the cable’s insulation. Perhaps from an rodent intruder or a mistake in the laying of the cables, a distant memory of human error uncorrected. Whatever the cause, it was there. It was the opportunity for this digital fow to escape and join the other on its uncertain journey to be free. The water touched the copper with an electrifying buzz and a bright light spread out across the surface. Causing the whole block to short circuit. No one was awake yet, but devices started beeping. Alarms, switching to their battery, stayed poised, ready to wake their bedside companions. Their lights, however would not gradually fade up and the heating that was triggered by this would no longer turn on. The signal for the kettle to activate with the heating would never arrive.

This in turn would not trigger the ordering of the breakfast car to leave the depot to the housing block. The AVRs, not getting the signal that the block had woken up would only prepare to take one passenger that morning, the only one that had woken up according to its message at 4am. It was now 8am and the whole block was waiting on the corner for their ride. A single seated pod arrived but its passenger was nowhere to be found. Each curbside commuter tried to squeeze into the vehicle but every attempt was met with a clunk and a red light. For a moment they were gathered together, confused, the crowd swelled as more and more people left their block fnding no form of transport.

As I walked through the city, the morning sun lifting the dew from the asphalt, I imagined the moment when the swelling crowd fnally broke out into the street and had to walk to work too.

Gerjan Streng is an architect and researcher. He co-founded Bright / The Cloud Collective, which explores urban challenges caused by changes in climate, mobility, economy and energy. Data analyses, spatial scenarios and prototypes are used to get a grip on uncertainties. Recently, this has been done with Ministry of Food, a research into the future of food, and several projects showing possible outcomes of the energy transition.

You are one of the partners of The Cloud Collective. What are the advantages to work as a collective? How do the different departments within the collective complement each other? The Cloud Collective was set up while I was studying Architecture at Eindhoven University of Technology, about ten years ago, and collaborating on competitions with some fellow students. After graduation we started our professional career at different companies but we soon fgured out that it is much more fun to work for ourselves. So we put all our individual projects together to give the impression to the outside world that we had a big offce, as the economic crisis just started and there was not much work. We took part in competitions and realized some small public sculptures, like the ‘Section House’: a 1:2 scale fctional house with a freplace, all made of concrete. We made everything ourselves, it took a lot of time, but it was just an excuse to work on a project. Especially at the start of your career, it is diffcult to build up a portfolio that convinces clients whom would like to see some realized buildings. Besides, there is a tendency to give assignments to companies instead of individuals. To start an offce with others has a lot of advantages. In 2013 we were with ten people and realized that some of us were more interested in designing public buildings, others in exhibition design and me, together with Thijs van Spaandonk, liked to work on an urban scale. We decided to split up and establish different companies: Bright, Civic and Matters, the last one located in Paris. We are all members of the cooperation The Cloud Collective but we run our own company and sometimes we collaborate to combine different expertise.

The projects you work on are usually related to urban conditions like energy and mobility, systems that nowadays are constantly changing. How do you respond to these changes and plan new design strategies? This studio about Corrupted Space and Utopia is closely related to the projects we deal with in Bright, my department within The Cloud Collective. A lot of research needs to be done and mostly there is not a single design solution. At the same time, you can use design to expand your horizon to think about possible futures. In our profession it is a valuable skill if you are