What If - The Political Issue

what if magazine about thought and space

the political issue issue #01

february 2012

MASTER DEGREE PROGRAMME IN

BUILDING ENGINEERING/ARCHITECTURE ITALIAN CHINESE CURRICULUM

General Agreement between University of Pavia, IUSS - Institute for Advanced Study Pavia, and Tongji University of Shanghai, March 2009

Supervisor:

Prof. TIZIANO CATTANEO Candidate:

MARIO GENOVESI a.y. 2010/2011

index

editor’s note

city as a political space

occupy wall street

italy & the 70s

capitalism, democracy & the suburbs

bibliography & references

on criticism and crisis (reality)n analogy

2-3

analogous city 46-51

34-41

4-5 42-45

52-65

66-69

mapping

96-107

12-19

70-77 6-11

78-81 shrinking cities

20-27 108-117 28-33

82-87 88-95

derelict architecture

what’s with the neighbourhood? visioning

depressed production

What If is a magazine, a product, within the market, and it advertises the consumption of space

What If reflects upon contemporary reality What If is an accumulation of thoughts

What If aims at generating dissensus and provoking conflict What if wonders about the role of the architect within society

What If raises doubts, doesn’t give answers What If questions the system

What If speaks about public What If stimulates a shared architectural knowledge

What If is voluntarily ambitious and structurally limited

What If refuses moralism What If has the arrogance of making statements

What If investigates crises, conflicts and antagonisms as constructive paradigms

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What If shakes ivory towers What If exploits images and makes fun of them

What If claims for spatial activism What If is analytical outburst

What If conveys visceral projections of fragmented intensity

What If crashes objects and disrupts processes

editor’s note editor’s note Space and politics. Two words that are not often written close together, that at a first glance do not share much. Yet they are both concerned – or at least should be – with the concept of public. Politics may represent a key for interpreting the so-called public space in contemporary cities, as politics relates with society, economics, image and representation. And so does space.

Reality is engaged from a lateral perspective, highlighting how crises and conflicts acting on the space of the city may lead to disruption of the political status quo, while the paradigms of the market economy alienate the meaning of both democracy and architecture.

Dissecting reality becomes a means of questioning it within the present. Future therewith is not something that has to be found outside of reality, but by experimenting alternative practices within a given situation.

Architecture needs to reclaim its agency, its ability of pro-actively investigating urban structures and dynamics, using the project as a tool to challenge reality. Hence, making things public.

“The Apollo of the ancients was an aristocrat, a cultural assistant for princes and for the privileged class. The figure of the patron developed following that example. 20th century democracy needs to replace the patron with the cultural willingness of the citizen. In it Apollo becomes a new cultural symbol, he becomes the compensating factor for technique’s materialistic power. We are all called upon to contribute to this image” Walter Gropius

city as city as a political space Manifestations of the so-called Arab Spring, upheavals and riots within the peripheries of Western European capitals, global phenomena of discontent against the financial system, claims for equality, democracy and human rights. This is what we get to read about daily in the news.

Different people. Different places. Different issues. For multiple reasons, whether peacefully or violently, it looks like people are rising up. And they’re taking to the streets.

Far from seeking an overall understanding of these complex historical events, it is my concern to select them as strong and meaningful symptoms of the critical relationship between communities, ideas and spaces.

Though looking for a common terrain among them all would be quite a daring task to undertake, it is hard to deny that these situations do share two main features: the multitude and diversity of the participating subjects and agents and the spatial categories where such actions find their setting.

At a first glance, it is possible to acknowledge the plurality of the subjects involved in these contemporary phenomena. It’s not just about a handful of workers striking for higher wages or students protesting for the right to get an education or migrants striving for asylum.

People of different age, education, ethnicity, profession, and religion are all

standing shoulder to shoulder, struggling for a common cause. It clearly looks like a manifestation of the collective – merely intended as groups of people – not necessarily sharing belonging to the same social structure; remarkably, these cohesive phenomena appear to reach beyond the acknowledged script of society, they challenge the status quo in their the basic motives, whether them being political dictatorship, social inequity, economic immorality or informational censorship. These endeavours cling onto a sort of natural force, driving citizens to gather and draw attention towards their common issues.

We learnt that humans are social animals, after all.

Moreover it seems likely that the space for collective stances acquires a political dimension: I am referring here to an etymological meaning of the word ‘politics’, as in groups of people making collective decisions, regardless of the actual form of instituted government. It is therefore the open-endedness of the public space that allows for the exertion of a variety of participatory practices, as expression of the collective will.

What I am trying to suggest here is that – almost in a primordial way, as if it was the most natural response to the most natural of needs – humans choose the space of the city to give strength to their collective voice. Thus, the physical space of the city hasn’t ceased to respond to the elemen-

Ebitisint, officiate de quuntot atioria quis a quia quiatentiis asperor empore

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tal instinct for the collective. As far as space is involved, cities cannot help but be the common scenery for these diverse episodes of the Human Comedy.

More precisely cities provide public space: roads, squares and parks are the stage for people to raise their voices, logically identifying the collective space as the space for public life. These sites are engaged as the selected spaces for practices of social dissent.

As a consequence public space becomes the stage for conflict, claiming, coming together, activating the city as a potential field for extended democratic paradigms. In a nutshell we could claim that crisis activates public space politically, shaking the space of the city from its political and institutional standoff.

Pier Vittorio Aureli, Italian architect and theorist, claims that ‘the city is a political space even before being a physical space’, which in other words asserts the primacy of the political stance within the space of the city over the materiality of the city itself.

Cities were founded in order to respond to the need of settling, and people have increasingly been attracted to urban centres to fulfil their basic needs, from food supplies to work, from education to facilities.

Historically, we couldn’t deny that the configuration of human settlements had always somehow been means to express political content. Yet this content is unavoidably double-sided: the ideology of the established system of institutions on the one hand, and the micro-political, bottom-up collective flows, on the other.

We can therefore address this intricate relationship between politics and the city dialectically, referring to the classical dichotomy between urbs and civitas.

An infinite set of examples, drawn from the history of the Western cities and civilizations, could be provided, with the aim of showing that the historical process of the city has been cyclically determined by endless oppositions between the architecture of the civitas and the architecture of the urbs.

Buildings on the agora, as a matter of example, – in the

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1

1. The Ideal City 2. Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin, 1995 Christo, Jeanne-Claude

restrictive meaning given to the concept of ancient Greek democracy – is a stance of civic belonging and representation, as well as the technique of central perspective dominating representations of ideal cities in the Renaissance stands for the construction of a city revolving around the centrality of the civic space as utmost realm of human intellect, reaching sublimation in its adhesion to the public. That is ideal representation of the civitas, in the complete identity between citizenship and forma urbis.

On the contrary, throughout history power and authority have been exerted by governments of all sorts in order to inform the citizen with structure and rule. In different centuries and according to different fashions, architectures of absolute power have regulated the hierarchical structure of the city, imposing a scaling process to the figures in the public space: the large dimension represents the authority and its emanations, in the shape of the buildings devoted to the public. They specifically define the notion of public, and to a large extent this is a mere expression of the power itself.

A rather insightful point of view on the issue of the political space in the city, torn between the civic and institutional, is offered by Louis Kahn’s drawings representing the Civic Forum: he interestingly hybridises in the architecture of the institutional buildings perfect shapes, namely the circle, with their formal arrangement as open, growing building, determining an inner open civic space.

As Michel Foucault highlighted, “from the eighteenth century on, every discussion of politics as the art of government of man necessarily includes a chapter or several chapters on urbanism, on collective facilities, on

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hygiene, and on private architecture�.

Along with the development of democracy as the principal political form in Western countries, institutions engaged a renovated tool for exerting some sort of absolute power on their territories. Structuring, determining, controlling and managing the space are amongst the key points of the overdeveloped discipline of urban and spatial planning. Though often animated by the best of intentions, in the course of the last century spatial realization of power and political stances has frequently been reached, in accordance with tools of intensive and comprehensive planning and social rhetoric.

The western-type of Welfare State model continues to expand, despite the clear cracks that have emerged, and is accompanied by the illusion of good city form, largely alienated from the strive for construing a civic space for the sake of organizing a technically flawless urban space.

The repression of the political content from the space within the late capitalist city has taken several forms, from the domestication of alterity to the belief that technocratic solutions are able to calm every crisis, resolve in an impartial manner every antagonism, satisfy all social grievances and abort political explosions, paradigms of exclusion and urban outburst of violence and aggressive acting-outs, post-political antagonism as opposed to a possible political adversarial agonism.

If it’s then true that thinking about politics cannot be easily disentangled from representing space, the last decades have increasingly performed a spatial reductionism in political reasoning and imagination.

Christo wrapped Berlin’s Reichstag in 1995: this image still looks very appropriate for describing the disconnection,

1

2

1-2. Civic Forum, Louis I. Kahn

both symbolic and physical, between institutions and cities.

In his book ‘On Politics’ the sociologist Zigmunt Bauman refers to the global citizen as a solitary entity, living in a world institutionally dominated by the concern for general safety; what remains left out, though, is the fact that citizens stand completely alone, feeling thoroughly unsafe, cast out from any possibility of actual representation by or dialogue with political institutions, especially in the lack of real space for pursuing political goals.

The common denominator in this large amount of factors characterizing the current historical process can be recognized in the concept of a permanent and insurmountable crisis of the very assumptions holding together urbs and civitas, resulting in a social, economic and political rebellion of the citizenship to the structures of the city itself.

The consolidated instruments of territorial planning and spatial organization merely forget to acknowledge such a crisis as a permanent and constructive condition, an asymptotic sequence of unstable equilibriums, yet they strive to freeze the urban space into a state in which nothing is allowed to happen if not foreseen, and they sacrifice to the über-design idol, from the fork to the metropolis, producing a ridiculous parody of the Modern dystopia (once utopia).

Though it doesn’t sound new that the political power has always been involved in the design of space, I think that the political potential of masses in the construction of the public space is still somewhat unexploited, being so far expression of radical acts. Yet space unarguably constitutes a site of dislocation, rupture, contradiction and contingency. Space is not just a tool for social control, on the contrary spatial practices can contribute to transformative politics.

But is it somehow so imaginable to suggest an hybridisation between political theory, social activism, and the architecture of the city?

occupy occupy wall street

: a psycho-analytical approach

Anarchichal occupation of the space, and the city

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y wall str There is a new system additional to or as an accumulation of all the smaller potentials citizens collectively have that, supported by the systems of communication on the internet, can equal or exceed the power of those who are in a privileged position today: the Occupy Wall Street Movement is based on this very concept of the power of a critical mass.

Social media played a largely relevant role: at first virtual space replaced the real space, which was, even if not formally but ideologically, restricted to people, as the ruling paradigm in the contemporary city discourages the public use of public space. The web as democratic realm that reduces social distance, and the urban space as the supposed and seized outline for that.

The Occupy Wall Street Movement spreads internationally: it appears to affirm an extremely humane principle of settlement, on the one hand almost primordial, on the other hand extremely globalised and contemporary. And it is global because it battles a global problem at a global

scale, the market. This shows how global can gain power as an addition of local phenomena.

According to his theory about collective intelligence, the French philosopher Pierre LĂŠvy, supports the idea that the virtual network represents an instrument prone to enhance the capacity for cooperation among people, as the Web puts in place a potential synergy that manages to maximize this form of shared intelligence. Stemming from this basis, the Belgian sociologist Derrick de Kerchove develops the concept of connective intelligence, stressing the importance of connections and links to achieve a widely intertwined plural intelligence. Thus, moving from virtual connectivity to spatial connectivity sounds like bringing the plural to a whole new level, the realm of real space.

It’s then logically agreeable that this phenomenon goes along with the concept of collective and connective: people sharing a common stance about the System, and organizing their intelligence to upgrade it to an actual, widespread and common

political act.

Precisely at this point, allow me to introduce an audacious metaphor. The Occupy Movement as an expression of a global collective unconscious. Borrowed from philosopher and psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, collective unconscious represents a universal psychic container, as in that part of human unconscious that is common to all human beings. It contains the archetypes, the forms and the symbols that appear in all people across every culture.

Archetypes exist before experience, therefore they are instinctual.

On the whole, the Movement can then be seen as a paradigm for the re-definition of the space as a universal psychic container, as collective unconscious manifests itself through a common will to inhabit that space. The Movement therefore represents a struggle to give a new, humane meaning to those archetypes, denied from experience by contemporary structures. The re-appropriation of forms and symbols goes through re-seizing the urban space as human habitat, by all means in

its collective sense.

Public space becomes the space for actual political conflict and for experimenting new forms of democracy, of inhabiting and of producing. And it is the street as symbolic place, historically the theatre for civil and political commitment, that needs to gain a new collective significance.

What was once the Agora, the public space with political meaning par excellence is now is Zuccotti Park: Zuccotti Park as self-made sensitive

public space – mirror of an open source city –, confirming the networking idea and the affirming role of the street and the square as enhanced social space, entrenched with digital culture, a Street 2.0.

The Occupy Movement is configured as a sort of neo-Situationist gesture, as the informal occupation of the space becomes a struggle to connect with the lost identity of the space itself, of the sense of place. It is a stance against abstract market forces that detach people from social institutions and have overpowered the specific for-

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ces of attachment identified with place.

We therefore witness a crucial switch in the globalised doom of the city: the Occupy Movement represents, perhaps unconsciously, the citizen-driven reaction to the contemporary phenomenon of erosion of place aimed at regaining the space in the most physical and real sense, that is by settling on it. In principle, what’s happening in Zuccotti Park hardly differs from the actual foundation of a city. One of the basic political principle is clearly the self-governance, based on a horizontal network more than on a hierarchical structure.

In this atmosphere of social guerrilla, architecture as a discipline is challenge in engaging the streets to achieve more with less than ever: form will not only follow function, but also friction.

Architects must turn into multifaceted cultural producers and everyday programmers of the city. They must incorporate the human claim for re-inventing the public space, and they have to do that becoming truly streetwise.

“My thesis then, is as follows: in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche, there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals.

This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.�

C. G. Jung

italy and t italy and the seventies re-foundation and avant-gardism

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The late Sixties and the early Seventies are a period of intense critical discourse in the field of Italian architecture and urbanism.

Within this specific historical framework, I would like to highlight the distinct endeavours, of Aldo Rossi, Archizoom Associates and Superstudio, in the sense of their precious contributions to the political approach regarding the discourse on the city.

In the multi-faceted work of these diverse cultural actors a partaking can be seen in the radical critique towards some compromised theoretical positions, apologetic to the status quo, that were animating the debate on the city. These intellectuals addressed a critique towards the notions of mobility and network as fundamental diagrams of the city (in the celebration of the city-territory model), and the Arcadian proposals for socially regressive models such as neighbourhoods, villages or communities, meanwhile sharing the disbelief towards the positivistic utopia of envisaging urban megastructures, regarded as technologically advanced but politically regressive models of designing the city.

Aldo Rossi poses the fundamental thesis that urban development, in terms of its physical contribution, that is

the seventies 1

1. Supersurface, Superstudio

indeed architecture, should be understood according to political development. Architecture is therefore affirmed as

an integral part and a morphogenetic cause of the evolution of urban phenomena: the legacy of the Modern Movement brought across the issue that architecture could no longer be seen merely as a product of masters, but rather as the fundamental act of defining a rule for the city’s dynamics, and therewith affirming itself as the primary means of constituting the politics of the modern city. In his process of reinterpreting the Modern through a renewed historical sensitivity, Rossi elaborates his theory on the city within the realm of the bourgeois city, claiming that its appropriation and reinvention should construct the basis in order for the ‘socialist city’ to set roots in the political process of History. An easy Marxist reference might come to hand here: it is hardly deniable that Rossi’s contribution to urban studies is subject to a certain fascination for the concept of history as a stage for class fight, and herein the construction of the city as both an analytical record of this process and a powerful instrument to enhance political fractures.

What is striking in Rossi’s cultural approach is the intriguing concept of

battling the enemy from within its own structures, mentioning, “appropriation of the city as it was, as the taking over of already established working-class typologies”: it is indeed a matter of raising architecture to the level of achieving autonomy in criticizing reality, not just representing it, as it ignites the discourse on the city back to its political paradigm and to its supremacy over the nonsensical accelerated urban development for its own sake.

But Rossi does not convey a delusional message: he is well aware of the capitalist exploitation of urban design – blameful of persevering in the process of dismantling the compact city –, in favour of regressive settling forms, such as garden cities, satellite cities and city-territory. By all means he surrenders to the idea of the built environment as unavoidable expression of the dominant class. And from within this conflicting scenario, he refreshes the cultural and political role of architecture and its most powerful tool, the project. The project of architecture has to claim back the role of critical statement confronting the established script, striving to stimulate the possibility of alternative political choices, being an exem-

1 1. Project for Business Centre, Turin, 1973, Rossi, Polesello, Meda

22|23 plum for the collective.

According to him, it’s all about designing states of exception, geographical singularities; there he sets the framework for his analysis of the city revolving around the concept of urban geography – or locus, city as a built environment of conflicting parts –, based upon the notions of typology (as a means of constitution and evolution of urban forms) and the formal individuality of the urban artefact, as architecture, in its material and visible manifestation, contributes to the development of the urban narrative by means of circumscribed, closed and intelligible forms. It is only the possibility of a closed, defined form that permits other forms to emerge, as urban space is composed of finite juxtaposed parts.

The prominence in Rossi’s theoretical and architectural work resides therefore in this achieved notion of locus; in this specific context it is my urgency to denounce this major concept as a basic category to describe and interpret, both aesthetically and politically, the architecture of the contemporary city. For this purpose, however, what is interesting about the subtle definition of locus provided by Rossi is how it represents

the possibility of looking at the

city as the political manifestation of a collective urban memory, overpowering

the mere empirical visibility of the city itself and grasping the dialectical conflict between constitutive and constituted forces, thus highlighting the notion of form as principal character on the stage of architecture.

Aldo Rossi states a fundamental point about the relationship between politics and the form of the city, battling against the hybrid and technologically heteronomous forms proposed by neo-capitalist urbanism. Without doubt, his research proves extremely valid nowadays, yet a further question cannot be easily avoided: more than thirty years have passed since the formulation of his theory and the realm of politics and architecture have proceeded on very distinct paths, seldom finding, if ever, any points of tangency. Still, they share a fundamental common concern. It is indeed the obsession for image, claimed as the only valuable horizon of understanding in contemporary culture. Might then Rossi’s concern find a rephrasing, and possibly grasp the present anew, in terms of relationship between image of the city and image of the politics? If the city is supposed to represent a primary site for political choices, how can that be positively affected by the image culture?

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1. Continuous Monument, Superstudio

The avant-gardist groups Archizoom and Superstudio engage the contradictory task of envisioning alternatives to the capitalist city, intended as potential alternative use of the city from its own productive class.

Critical to technocracy and to the positivistic myth of industrial production and mass consumption, the manifesto of the joint exhibition Superarchitettura, developed between 1966 and 1968, makes use of irony as a strategy of subversion through appropriation.

Consumption is greeted along with the objects, images and spaces associated with it: it calls for both a subversion of advertising and an embrace of the images used in it, which combined form the visual experience of the urban space. The representation yields to the absurd, concocted through scenarios of wild realities, stemming from maximal exaggeration of capitalism itself. It’s an approach of exquisite and deliberate cynical realism, where the juxtaposition between real and imagined – challenging the very concept of reality as it is found – results in a constructed image that may be seen as both material and imagined.

Buildings and cities are both considered receptacles for ideas and fan-

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“Superachitecture is the architecture of superproduction, of superconsumption, of superpersuasion to costume, of the supermarket, the superman, of superoctane gasoline. Superarchitecture accepts the logic of production and consumption, and works for its demystification.”

“Superarchitecture admits the logic of production and consumption and exerts on that an action of demystification. It is an architecture of images with a strong content of evocativeness, able of inducing the same in the consumer. It is an architecture bearing the subversive might of advertising, yet even more effective due to the insertion of images loaded with great intentionality in a grand design and in the reality of the city, with all its permanencies and history”.

Superarchitecture 1966-1968

1. No-Stop City, Archizoom

1

2. Supersurface, Superstudio 2

tasies, as well as constructions structuring imagination and a type of free thinking. Evocative buildings can set off a series of associations in the recipient, in an act similar to dreaming, and allow for a creative rethinking of the given environment and its architectural objects. The visions they provide are somewhere between the existent, that is taken as inspiration, and a call for imaginary interventions in the lived environment.

Superstudio’s Monumento Continuo and Archizoom’s No Stop City realize the critical possibilities of the complex and intermediate space of architecture. The potential of imagined objects moves past the built form, and challenges the recipient to rethink his or her position in regard to the constructed environment. Living space is presented as tran-

sfigured representation, intended as an image loaded with associations and meanings.

No-Stop City critically develops the concept of spatial isotropy as a tool for liberating space from bourgeois ideals and questioning hierarchy in architecture. A non-hierarchical grid that opens movement in all direc-

tions is displayed over an indefinite and infinite territory, emphasizing repeatable homogeneous forms and continuous built worlds, while dialectically giving space to unplanned activities; an endless space that is represented with abundant evocative objects punctuating it.

Archizoom’s architectural stances, especially driven by the figure of Andrea Branzi, move along with social and political activism: in April 1967 the city of Milan became a sort of real experimental field for these theories, when the creation of an urban tent camp and the squatting of an unoccupied hotel in the city centre were events built in order to reflect the city as an open space to be occupied for communal living, as a space of choice and imagination.

The theme of homogeneity and isotropy is developed in Superstudio’s Istograms of architecture and Supersurface: forcing the positivistic concept of quantity as the only horizon of architecture, space is made potential as a mental action, in a realm of pure potentiality and total lack of architectural language. These works pave the way for the broader effort of Monumento Continuo, as they abrogate the finitely built form in favour of open expanses of a free play of thought, fuelled by the overload of stimuli of the metropolis and those possibilities opened by a subversion of consumer culture. It is a spatialization of the relation,

that is ignited by the object and that provokes the dissolution of the object itself: it isn’t the object itself that is of significance, but the spatial relationship it prompts. Performing a radical dissolution of the object, the city as a

result is no longer a collection of individual architectural objects, whose materiality is thereby destroyed. Moreover they install a critical architectural dialogue with the superlative objects of mass culture, realizing the radical value of media representation(s) in their ability to destabilize the fixedness of total design and the material urban space.

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capitalism,

& the

democracy,

suburbs

Exploring the deep intertwinement, both in terms of 28|29

representation and actuality, of the sprawling urban paradigm of the American suburbs with the so-called late-capitalism market democracy - a celebration of individuality coupling an erosion of the social.

The rhetoric of the ‘networked city’ (or ‘city territory’) in a globalized world only enhances the actual disentanglement of the suburban dweller from the city: suburbs have given up on the city, crystallized in a cloud of atomized monads, doomed with the equal potential of the absence of place. Globalization paradigms strongly rely on the concept of a highly structured network system, an efficient management of flows, of mainly people, goods and information, streaming along the tentacular net of infrastructure. There’s no question here about the overall fact that infrastructural systems, though aiming at the superior goal of achieving connectivity and minimizing the outdated idea of distance, physically and spatially determines severe situations of radical exclusion. Infrastructural axes install fractures along the territory: they represent the geographical hindrances of contemporary times, but not in terms of spatial distance, which they battle, rather in terms of existential gap between the city and the suburbs.

Therefore, suburban life is characterised by an isolation from urban activities and external forces: it is disconnected from the city, no matter how

many roads and railway links are provided. To some extent it is impossible to deny that the suburban development of cities, and specifically of American cities, was born from the very infrastructural logic: sturdily reliant on the individual transportation mode, life in the suburbs programmatically chose to be detached from the urban experience.

However this does not seem to present an issue. Suburban dwellers have mainly chosen to indulge in the well-advertised ‘American Dream’. They have voluntarily given up their role in the urban sphere to pursue the highest goal in contemporary democracy: the front lawn with a driveway.

Someone may also have defined it as the American apartheid. They declared themselves satisfied, as voluntary captives – borrowing Rem Koolhaas’ words – of sameness, safety, shopping.

Unsurprisingly, suburban everyday life is firmly standing on a tripod of long-established, well-manicured institutions: the house, the workplace and the mall. And rather fastly isolation paves the way to a system centred on the self: the overall result becomes devastatingly significant

for a highly structured paradigm of mass individualism, where family is identified as the highest horizon of collective behaviour. Although it may sound as an oxymoron, it is a mass-based phenomenon, resulting in the complete social atomization. As a logical outcome, individuals, deprived of their social genes, find refuge in the holy pursuit of property as a form of solace. And the very celebration of the property translates into an hypertrophy of the suburban ego occupying the space.

Eventually, suburbs provide a spatial pattern for life that erodes the interactive social foundations of everyday existence, thereby leading to a decay of democratic forms of living. It is the spatial representation of the liberal political and cultural utopia: to be able to separate public and private according to individual judgement and be able to live unencumbered by the various obligations of public and social life. In the end, the suburbs give actual physical display to the whole utopian idea of liberal democracy: the single house in the suburbs is not just a house, it delivers a strong political stance.

Borrowing a very common word from the financial crisis in 2008, we might as well talk about “subprime� in architecture. In the identification with

From graphic novel

Tales From Outer Suburbia,

by Shaun Tan

the fulfilment of the ‘American Dream’, suburbs have proven to be a crucial space of speculation for the real-estate market, advertising the right for property as the ideological base for making people own more.

And suburbs is where the housing bubble exploded, following that same unsocial and unsustainable pattern that created it.

Clearly, aside representing an objectionable way of living, the suburban life deeply affects the political culture: mass individualism leads inevitably to the pursuit of self-conservation, refusing any kind of cultural difference or conflict, stigmatising the options for change.

Yet, to simply define the whole suburban phenomenon as a wrong and undesirable urban practice would be an unreasonably biased operation. As Robert Venturi and Denis Scott Brown teach us in their “Learning from Lewittown” experiment, suburbia bears a great deal of ambivalence within its white fences and neo-colonial facades. It is evidently the environment representing the sphere of the everyday, numbed by the massive intrusion of global economy, and haunted by the paranoid concern of stigmatizing the strange and of calculating the risk. Suburbia

is somewhere suspended between the secured, fully materialised utopia of the perfect life and the alienation of anything possibly stirring its fixity.

At the same time though, it represents a potential incubator for vitality, veiled under the driveways and hidden behind the real-estate ads.

In order to possibly activate liberating revolutions and radical creativity hidden under the sterilized condition of the suburban taken-for-granted alienation -, the everyday life must shake off its sense of ineluctable necessity and predictability, and be re-politicised: let the fantasy and absurdity of the suburban arise, in the strive to reinvent its deserted roads as a new local place, a space for poetics, politics, and mythology.

on criticism an

on criticism and crisis

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Architectural practice has always been accompanied by architectural thinking. The forms and folds all the theories, manifestoes and discourses on architecture and urbanism have engaged in are by all means not a matter of interest in this context.

What, on the contrary, is of interest here is the way they have been interpreted as an advancement of thought, thanks to a copious set of enthusiastic confirmations or harsh negations provided by architects and theorists, which we could file in the archive of architectural critique. And it is exactly around the speculation on the notion of critique, this mysterious and mistreated category of modern thinking, where I would like here to place here some constructive considerations.

In the attempt of gaining a deeper understanding of the contemporary urban phenomena, it has been shown how the discourse on architecture during the Post-Modernity has critically assumed fascinating positions regarding the institutional, economic and social models influencing the contemporary era, and the potential power of the architecture of the city as tool for confirming or disrupting the state of things. Although the urban, capitalist, and modern every day is pushing towards increased homogeneity in daily life, the irreconcilable disjunctions born in a post-industrial city full of anachronistic interstices make it impossible to think of modernization as only negative. To this regard, a certain insight is offered by the work of the French philosopher and sociologist Michel de Certeau: in his ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’ he outlines an analysis of the produc-

nd crisis

Utopia, Thomas More

tion and consumption mechanism – crucial categories in my process of understanding –, stating the impossibility of a full colonization of everyday life by these induced paradigms. Therefore individuals and collective entities, in their unconscious navigation through life, bear the capacity for potential alternatives, since they arrange resources and choose methods according to continuously creative arrangements.

At this point the role of the critical intellectuals

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gets to be questioned, as they frequently bury themselves in the ivory tower of Thought, foreclosing themselves from looking at everyday life from an inside perspective. Evasion is a common approach of critical stances, as distancing philosophical speculations from the corruption of the real world feels compelling to those who regard themselves the Guardians of Thought – every so often, critical practices reject the reality of things as a whole, unsubtly forgetful of the multiplicity of shades achieved in contemporary society.

Refuge into utopia represents a common outcome for them, whether openly advocated or fearfully disguised. Unfortunately, utopian discourse often dries out into sterility, driven by such an unrealistic bias. Betraying the potential of disclosing a fresh perspective on what is there, utopists, especially within the field of architectural thinking, often indulge in a moralistic and self-consolatory attitude, delusional of the fact that dreaming about alternatives to the present reality should have nothing to do with the present itself and envisioning dreams of a lost paradise. Utopias feed illusions, and generate disenchantment along with it, inevitably producing negative political outcomes.

In correction to that, Immanuel Wallerstein, American sociologist and social scientist, puts forward the concept of Utopistics: “Utopistics is the scrupulous evaluation of historical alternatives, the exercise of our judgement on the rational materiality of alternative possible historical systems. It is the balanced evaluation, rational and realistic, of human social

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systems, of their precluded possibilities, and of spaces open to human creativity. It is not the face of a perfect future (and inevitable), but that of an alternative future, likely better, and historically possible (yet far from being certain). Thus, it is an exercise of science, politics and ethics, all at once”.

Acknowledging this difference, it’s likely to affirm that Utopistics determines political categories, whereas utopia, yet driven by a political demand, conjectures spatial configurations that repress politics, defining a model of suspension of everything that is political.

Playing with the subtle, yet founding, semantics between utopia and Utopistics, another plausible similitude comes to mind: critique and crisis. Etymologically kindred spirits, the concepts of critique and crisis partake in the duplicity of their meaning, originally deriving from the Greek verb krino, conveying a sense of separating and discerning. The two words share the meaning of rupture point, both positively and negatively intended, a ritual of passage from a specific situation to another.

That’s the focal point of this exercise of the thought: the construction of a kaleidoscopic image –built allegedly by weighing up the schizophrenic particles of contemporary reality, remoulding and exaggerating them, displaying them in a catastrophic scenario – provocatively aims at fracturing common sense on reality, making unprincipled use of the germs of contradiction and criticality present and readable in the contemporary space. It stands for an action of outdoing critique with crisis, and contemporaneously downsizing the unrealistic grandeur of utopia to the effective communicability of utopistics.

Theodor Adorno

“Beauty today can have no other measure except the depth to which a work resolves contradictions. A work must cut through the contradictions and overcome them, not by covering them up, but by pursuing them�

The Analogous City is the caricature representation of the real city, or - better said - of real cities. Of them, it is an anamorphic projection. it sees Sin City as a documentary, not a fictional movie

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[reality]n

conceptualizing Context

enhancing Reality

When we are kids, we are taught to tell real from imaginary. We are taught to stay in the world according to spatial and temporal categories, “here” or “there”, “now” or “next week”. We are taught that we should spend some time with other kids, instead of just hanging out with our imaginary friends.

Yet it is a fairly tricky concept, reality, and leaves us no choice but to inquire into the delicate balance of elements that help to define it. Ultimately every thinking being questions the very concept of reality, in terms of objectiveness and subjectivity. Performing a slight diversion from this existential loop, I will try to investigate a different possible way to look at ‘what is supposed to be real’, by incorporating objects and subjects, perceptions and ideas.

As it has already been said it is not just a matter of representing reality. It is about interpreting it. In the realm of architecture and urban design, the notion of context arises as the ultimate horizon for confronting reality. Yet its definition is rather peculiar, since on the one hand it shows a deep strive for objectivity (context as physical and actual presence of objects and events on a real, geographical territory, context as a unstable equilibrium between natural and built environment, etc.), and on the other hand it is clearly advocated as a design tool, therefore bowed to the willingness of the Ego. But what if we engaged in the heretical attempt of blurring those stiff, common sense driven barriers between object

and subject, what if we acknowledged the possibility of mixing things up?

It looks like Bernard Tschumi, in the third instalment of his book series ‘Event Cities’, provides a remarkable analysis of the relation between contexts, concepts and contents. He provides a series of statements, provocatively intended to stir the hierarchy amongst these three overly used architectural words.

Contexts are framed and defined by concepts, just as the reverse is true Context is not a fact; it is always a matter of interpretation Context is often ideological and hence may be qualified or disqualified by concepts Hence, a relevant liberation of context - from its supposed coincidence with actuality and objectivity – is performed, becoming inextricably intertwined with the very act of the project.

Moreover he states that “conflicts, confrontations and contaminations between concept, context and content are part of the definition of contemporary urban culture, and therefore of architecture”. According to him, “conceptualizing the context means turning the idiosyncrasies and constraints of a context into the driving force behind the development of an architectural idea”: architecture therefore seems to flourish when exposed to crises and conflicts, bearing the potential of transforming human stances into spatial practices, shifting the focus of the discipline from an

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activity of problem solving to one of problem finding.

At this point, it comes as no surprise that I am here advocating the conscious and proactive perturbation of the three notions, concept, context and content. As a consequence, the ad hoc creation of a context is not necessarily an ideal or de-materializing action. In fact I preach it to be an act of hyper-realism, as the analogical context becomes a hyperreal avatar of the actual, real context. It is a sort of enhanced reality, it is an emphasis of the expression of realism.

At the same time, the construction of an analogical context is an extreme synthesis of the present time, stemming from the belief that nostalgia of our past and utopian dreams about our future prevent us from looking at our present; that said, the question doesn’t move away from considering the present as a mere contribution to the historical process, and aims at stressing the idea that through the dissection of our current condition we can yield evolution, cherishing our legacy more brightly.

Despite showing a commitment to a spatial and temporal extreme realism, the analogical context possesses no local specificity, as the look on reality is intended to show theoretical and political mediation. As a matter of fact, in the re-definition of the discourse on the context, I can’t help but consider its adjustment to the scenario of a globalised world.

As outlined by Saskia Sassen, in her wide work on the sociology of globalisation, the materiality of the global processes, in terms of economic, social and institutional issues, is thoroughly embodied in cities: the political discourse, at a point in which the world witnesses disintegrated national borders, is downsized to the urban level. Cities which, according to Sassen, are arranged in a network of ‘world cities’ and ‘capital cities’, become the political horizon in the globalised era.

Though they represent geopolitical symbolic forms, these global urban entities lack in strongly identified places, as a result of political and geographical complexity in terms of

Is the contemporary image of the city representing the contemporary image - and substance - of the citizenship?

regional and transnational cooperation.

Furthermore, Sassen states the urgency of a reaffirmation of centrality of the cities, both as gravitational points for the economic system and as institutional and symbolic fulcrum in the apparent space-endlessness of the contemporary city. Almost paradoxically, the paradigms of globalisation re-produce the conflict, once internationally based, on the local level of the space of the city, inducing actual urban conflict: it is in those cities where critical mass has accumulated and significant actions have been enacted that the political issue manifests triumphantly and is displayed.

Thus, it comes as no surprise that the choice for an analogous context falls in the realm of the urban, indeed aiming at defining plausible readings capable of completing a project in the mundane context of the everyday.

In conclusion, I would like to quote the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben,: “the only interesting way, or anyhow possible, of thinking of something as a sort of biography, or as a relationship with places, between life and places, is cartography. Usually biographies are linked to time, yet time is way too intimate and relies on memory‌ for a forgetful person like me, I prefer space, and places. Then it is better to project life on a big imaginary city.â€?

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analogy analogy

“In the correspondence between Freud and Jung, the latter defines the concept of analogy in the following way: I have explained that ‘logical’ thought is what is expressed in words directed to the outside world in the form of discourse, ‘analogical’ thought is sensed yet unreal, imagined yet silent; it is not a discourse but rather a meditation on themes of the past, an interior monologue.

Logical thought is ‘thinking in words’. Analogical thought is archaic, unexpressed, and practically inexpressible in words. I believe I have found in this definition a different sense of history conceived of not simply as fact, but rather as a series of things, of effective objects to be used by the memory or in a design…”

Aldo Rossi. An analogical architecture (1976)

>The Analogous City is an analytical instrume composed of elements that are real, ideal,

question of method and interpretation

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1. Campus Martius, G.B. Piranesi 2. La CittĂ Analoga, A.Rossi 3. Via Appia, G.B. Piranesi 4. Roma Interrotta, J. Stirling 5. Gotham City 6. Exodus, R. Koolhaas

ent, it is the construction of a global context, , symbolic, iconic, immaterial, immanent<

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1. L. Fontana 2.-3. Merzbau, K. Schwitters 4. A. Rossi 5-6. G. Matta Clarke

parat parataxis

>The Analogous City is glorification of the waste. It is at once the Waste Land and its nemesis. It is autopsy of a living corpse<

>The Analogous city is demonstration by absurdity, made up to achieve an image of new relationships, not just of opposition but of hybridization and alliance<

compenetration

taxis glorification of waste

“It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our sceptre, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing.

Only in Marco Polo’s accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites’ gnawing.”

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1972

>The Analogous City is a diagnostic operation, exercise of suspicion, suspension of judgement<

city of order The city that we are examining apparently doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have anything strange, it has streets, squares, gardens, old and new houses, indeed itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a city like any other, it could seem like your own city; the only thing is that has been governed by the same mayor for 45 years.

Superstudio, Twelve Ideal Cities, 1971

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.generalities From the UNHABITAT ‘State of the World’s Cities: 2010/2011’ report: “The United Nations predicts that by the year 2030, more people in every region of the world will live in urban than in rural areas, even in Asia and Africa, which are now the least urbanized parts of the globe. Our shared future will largely come about through the social, political, economic, and cultural dynamic that is urbanization – the convergence of human activity and aspiration in all cities, regardless of size”.

.identity

.identity

No real identity defines the analogous city, identity is a fake.

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eye-lifted, liposuctioned, designerclothed.

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a corpse in disguise.

Its only true nature is waste, garbage, by-product.

The city no longer expresses a place, but a behavioural model, a condition that is transmitted by merchandise.

.urbanism .urbanism

In the Analogous City it is all about urbanism, and it relies upon the paradox of smoothness and complexity. Market smoothness takes shape within the city in clustered urban complexes, radically disconnected from the city and highly connected to global infrastructure; formal complexity mimics the real complexities enhancing them. It is merely a tool to numb peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s minds from what complexity really means and truly entails. A visual complexity is a rhetorical stance of the status quo, complexity as the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;New Unknownâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;.

.politics It was once the agora, now itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the market.

Find out the seven small differences between the pictures.

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.farewell to the program The Mother Board is the perfect masterplan, deterministically organized, efficient, neat. The Analogous City is a Planning Temple, where, in praise of technocracy, the only program is financial.

technocracy + financial program = perfect masterplan

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.marble cctv

.marble cctv Space in the Analogous City is strictly monitored: nothing escapes from the everywhere present security cameras.

Urban space is shaped to allow only what is expectable and what is safe.

powered by

.public spa .public space

The Analogous City has forgotten public life. Nevertheless, it is keen on having Public Space©.

As a city council, you can order Public Space© online, choosing among several features and finishes. And you are guaranteed a winning team of professionals to set it up for you, and they deliver anywhere in the world. A team of artists, publicists, marketing experts and engineers will take care of every minute detail, from lighting to plumbing to advertising. They’re lifeproof formula has acquired wide esteem among city governments all over the globe. It is clean, it is safe, it is energy efficient and self-maintained, it is paved, it is covered, it is sunny, it is anything you ask for. And it is highly customizable too, with optional Public Art©, you can choose from the American Pop Art Style, including reproductions of Oldenburg, Calder, Koons, or you can opt for murals and guerrilla-style installations, original copies from Basquiat, Banksy, Space Invader and many others. You can even have your own wrappedup, Christo-like monument.

You also get to choose the Public Green©, ranging from centuries-old Mediterranean Olive trees, to cedars of Lebanon, to red maples from Japan.

>

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown once told us the story of ducks and decorated sheds. We can now identify a further category, the apotheosis of duck and decorated shed all in one: the brand. In branded architecture the brand gives form to the actual building, it doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t simply cover it.

.architectu

.architecture .architecture

mapping the a

mapping the analogous ci aesthetical epoché Contemporary culture no longer keeps track of its history in texts or words, as much as it does in images. Along with it, the late-capitalist

city is obsessed with the image delivered through its architecture: buildings and spaces can’t help but be victims of this para-

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digm perpetrated by the dictatorship of the market. Yet image culture bears a huge potential: images are an infinite source of meanings and possibilities and it would be pointless to diminish their constructive might.

On the whole they store a capacity of stimulating vision, when interpreted as a starting point or instrument, not as an aim to achieve.

Moreover history itself is contradicting the paradigm of planning as an outdated tool of grasping reality in its multiple forms, and the overall idea of the possibility to structurally determine the space of the city as an image of completeness and efficiency: it is impossible in these days and age to create a city in the old modernist planning tradition of a static, hierarchically organized, top-down approach, where the focus is on the final image.

As engaged with the responsibility of determining the urban space, architects will have to bring across a political stance, a positioning, or a constant becoming, within a project that goes beyond the agenda of global capitalism. They can’t just map the existing dynamic programs found within the milieu of the multitude, resample and give them a spatial and temporal expressivity. They will first have to invent new nonlinear programs on top of, within and by it, second to renew from within, and third dare to have a say – a project in the literal meaning of “throwing something forward” – in relation to it, in order to create other options to choose from besides the ones the market provides.

In the Eclectic Atlases, Stefano Boeri suggests that in order to stimulate a debate and to achieve a re-foundation of the “themes of the discourse” (intended as the general categories of judgement within the common culture), it is necessary to firstly act on the “themes of the sight”. The “variety” of the contemporary urban condition, nourished by distanced associations of the relationship between individuals and urban space, asks for strategies of observation – and consequently of vision, not of mere planning – different from the ones experimented in the European city. Strategies that cannot rely on the restitutions of an aesthetic chaos perceived from a zenithal perspective, in fact they propose a variation of the point of view, a sort of oblique perspective towards reality.

As a consequence, it is necessary to trigger the process of “city being” – which goes beyond the deterministic creation of images within the city - according to a double level, in the motto of “think big and act small”.

Envisioning from within reality enhances the possibility of questioning it, of

analogous city

ity

experimenting its potentials and drawbacks, of politically implementing alternatives and liberations. In such a way, visions overcome spatial dimensions, engaging reality as a whole, yet at the same time they maintain focus on addressing it as a sum of micro-decisions, an ensamble of potential conditions to be activated.

Envisioning results in an aesthetic epoché - an amoral suspension of the judgement -, based a priori on a pre-contemporary image of the city: the notions of “what should be” and “how it should be like” are refused, as the action within existing reality aims to disrupt its consolidated structures.

As the artist Max Ernst once said, Beauty is the chance meeting upon a dissecting table of a sewing-machine with an umbrella.

merry man A merr merry mani A Amerry m merry A m erry mani merry man A merry ma A merr A merry rryA manife merry merry man The City will be open.

Come on in, go anywhere!

Live where you will!

The City will house everyone well.

The income gap will narrow to nothing: The City will be just in distributing its assets.

The City understands, nevertheless, that peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s desires differ.

The City knows that its resources are finite.

The City will do its best to reconcile all of this.

The City will be both diverse and mutable.

The City will be under the control of its citizens.

All of them, on the basis of free choice.

Anything may be anywhere in the City as long as it has no obnoxious effects on other creatures.

This is sure to generate much debate.

Fine!

The City will be dense and compact.

Not every City, of courseâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;too late for that.

The City will prefer its citizens to move about on foot, horizontally and vertically.

Many buildings will, therefore, be low-ish.

The City will be beautiful, although there are likely to be disagreements about this.

Every City will be different, which should help.

The City will be quiet and noisy.

The City will be hospitable and encourage gatherings of all kinds.

The City will offer lots of privacy.

The City will acknowledge and support its many publics, if they want it.

The City will be safe, but confusing.

The City will grow old and be constantly refreshed.

The City will be based in its neighborhoods, The City will have special places. Many of these will be incomprehensible to many.

The City will have secrets.

The City will confer the right to change.

This right will belong to every citizen.

The City will not restrict any authentically private act.

The City will be a place to speak freely and act freely.

The City will employ all its citizens.

The City will strive to replace all imports. Within reason.

The City will love the sun, and the sun will energize the City.

The right to insolation shall not be infringed.

nifesto ry manife ifesto manifesto ymerry manifest man ifesto nifesto anifesto ry manife y manifest esto y manifes nifesto The City will not export its waste or import its water.

The City will grow its food.

The City will not emit carbon—it will be green.

Literally: The equivalent of 100% of the City’s surface area will be green.

The City’s buildings will be cross-ventilated.

There will be balconies, terraces, and gardens for all who want them.

It will be easy to get to the City’s many sports fields and parks.

There will be sufficient mature trees for every citizen to sit under one alone.

The City will not interrupt the flow of the countryside through it.

The City’s contiguous territory will coincide with its ecological footprint.

The City will embrace biodiversity.

There may be foxes, certainly worms.

Certain microbes may be disfavored.

The City will be healthy.

The City will love its children, who will play well with others.

The City will love its old.

The City will love its strivers and its indolent.

The City will love its others and its differentlyabled.

The City will love everyone, for Chrissakes.

The City will get over any unrequited love. It’s none of the City’s business.

All languages will be spoken in the City.

This will not necessarily affect official documents.

The City will have a special jones for cookery and there will be many restaurants.

Quite a few of them will deliver.

The City will respect the views of its citizens— political and scopic.

There will be laughter in the streets.

The City will revere its great accomplishments and its tiny accomplishments.

The City will have a long memory.

Michael Sorkin

For two centuries global urbanization has progressed at a rapid pace. Around 1800, 2% of a billion people worldwide lived in cities. In 2000 it was about 50%of approximately 6.5 billion people. It is estimated that by 2050 it will be about 75% of some 8.5 billion people. However, not all cities are growing. Between 1950 and 2000 more than 350 large cities experienced, at least temporarily, significant declines in population. In the 1990s more than a quarter of large cities worldwide shrank. The number of shrinking cities is continuously increasing, even though urban growth will continue to dominate in coming decades. An end is in sight, however: around 2070-2100, the world population will reach its zenith and the process of urbanization will largely reach a balance, and urban shrinkage will be a process as common as it was before industrialization began.

from shrinking cities, exhibition at the Venice Biennale, 2006

shrinking cities

and subprime suburbs Over the last century, the phenomenon of sprawling cities has widely infested the majority of Western countries as a common and wide-spread settlement system, fed by economic growth and celebrated as the modern paradigm of freedom and well-being. The discourse on the city has long ago started to raise questions regarding the limit confronting the delirious infinite urban expansion, identifying the necessity of finding a new reading for the unprecedented quantity of objects punctuating the landscape and irrationally devouring the territory.

The theme of the edge of the city and of the undistinguishable boundary between urban and rural has filled decades of architectural literature, resulting in the stigmatization of suburbs and peripheral urban areas. For sure, they represent a sort of anti-city, a negation of the spatial relationships of density and proximity typical of the compact city, as they are somehow considered failed architectural examples, suspended in an undefined spatial and temporal in-between.

It is interesting to note, however, that suburbs and peripheries are the actual living space of a great deal of urban dwellers, places that they call home. Herein lies, without doubt, the potential for a certain type of urban identity, a sense of belon-

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foreclosure architecture ging to this space. The empty space represents the seat of this potential.Ranging from the vacant lots to the dismissed buildings, from neglected parks to the wasteland of the infrastructure, void should be addressed by strategies aiming to affirm its meaning of being public. Public space more than a space that is of collective property just because it is left out from the real-estate market.

Moreover the phenomenon of the shrinking population of former industrial-based cities and their consequent pervasive condition of dereliction and vacancy shows how the theme of the urban (and suburban) void needs attention and rethinking.

Through the reconversion of the existing construction trauma, it is necessary to de-mythicise Modern and Post-Modern fetishes, acknowledging the possibility of the different scales against the ruling paradigm of the extra-large scale, allowing for codes of exclusion, definition of enclaves, and schizophrenic consumption of the territory.

Acknowledging this failure of formal and highly structured urban design strategies,

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CONSUMPTION AND PRODUCTION SPACE as a possibiliy for for public quality and intensity to arise.

take me out to the mall

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1. Multi-functional platform defining diversity within the retail space 2. Alternative shopping (from Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York)

it is interesting to look at the problem from a different perspective, considering the possibility of learning from informal practices. Informality represents the need for over-organised and affluent societies to find conflicting, if not literally free, modes of practice. These forms of occasional urbanities are a constructive operation of appropriation and re-interpretation of the left-behind space and of the wasted architecture, sharing Gilles ClĂŠment idea of a residual landscape of space with high biological vitality.

Informal and occasional architectures are often triggered by crises, either social or economic, andthey bear a political scope, as these are eloquent situations of a rebellious subjectivity. Mostly they stem from practices of dissent and practices of survival, and they are mainly based on a collective and intense understanding of the public space. Public space becomes a source of equity and freedom at the same time, revealing the micro-political nature of the poetic deeds performed in the urban space, through the abolishment of the communal illusion as final objective for society. The reflection on public space will focus on the mechanism through which subjectivity aspires to a full life beyond the private perimeter of romantic intimacy.

What needs to be put forward through bottom-up strategies is political consciousness. The apolitical, senseless, unattended public space in the contemporary city needs to be stirred, transformed into

Strip-Tease something undetermined again, full of surprise and adventure.

It needs to be politicised again in the sense that it has to become a necessary space for people to live in, to make it part of their everyday life. In order to stir the numbed public realm, random programs and unexpected objects become narratives of a social landscape. Dreams at the turn of a corner.

3 1. Installation by Diller-Scofidio, NYC 1 2

2. Picture by Mark Jenkins 3. Built and open space ratio

The Analogous City is the caricature representation of the real city, or - better said - of real cities. Of them, it is an anamorphic projection. it sees Sin City as a documentary, not a fictional movie

THE STRIP AS A CONNECTING TRAIL...

The street as source of possibilities for connecting heterotopias, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a synaptic space.

Acting spaces that become spaces to question everyday life, its potential, its barriers, its imposed temporalities, turning to the fantastical and absurd that utter normality can offer.

dereli derelict arc

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ict arc chitecture

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whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s with the Traditionally, we think about public space in terms of streets, squares and parks. In the contemporary city, the capability of giving a public content to the urban space has been lost, as to some extent urban design practices have triggered a privatization of public space and a multiplication of gated communities. Regardless the property of it, urban space has increasingly become a capitalistic space. At a micro scale, the capitalistic space is bombarded under promotional pressure, continuously carried out through all communication means and media, transforming the home into an absolute centre of a consumerist culture of the ephemeral.

In his The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch identified the housing unit as

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e neighbourhood? the stable and durable element in the urban fabric: by means of that, the urge arises for reinterpreting the spaces and the figures of the open space of the urban neighbourhood, questioning the role and the potential of the streets connecting housing blocks, of the small neglected squares along them, and of the neighbourhood parks of the semiprivate inner courtyards.

Given their features of proximity and in-between-ness, the spaces abovementioned represent a valuable resource, yet it cannot be expected from the public to simply be there, waiting passively for the arrival of cultural commodities. The public is a provisional construction in permanent mobility that can be described in terms of its evolving

relations to a space in permanent mobility, not only physically but also socially and politically. Therefore, a renewed approach to architecture and urban planning cannot merely be initiated by centralised structures, and governmental bodies. It must, rather, include â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;microscopic attemptsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; at the collective and individual level, reflecting their desires within the micro-social segments of public space: neighbourhood associations, informal teams, self-managed organisations, small institutions, alternative spaces, and from individuals themselves. Urban development policies need to learn how to make provisions for such attempts.

The micro-dimension of public worksâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; interventions (i.e. manufactured

objects, improvised urban furniture, cleaning and gleaning, etc.), brings precision, detail, and localisation within the public space. Additionally these activities are effective in their attempts to change and transform spaces. The scale of proximity, the small-scale devices and the walking distances that demarcate the area of intervention, brings another quality to the networks and the relationships between participants. They increase the intensity of living, aiming to define pro-active spaces so individuals may find a way of sublimating their subjectivities into the collective, inviting them to rediscover possibilities of being social, outside of enclaves,.

Struggling against the concept of public space as a container for people and ordering agent of conflict, but rather an affirmation of the 84|85

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elements of inconstancy and inconsistency that the city itself generates, still spatial proximity isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t enough to grant the definition of acting spaces: the project of space in transition has to acknowledge crisis as a state of productive emergency, as a specific awareness of temporality, refusing a final and completely determined image of architecture and urban space.

Raymond Williams says that â&#x20AC;&#x153;however dominant a social system may be, the very meaning of its domination involves a limitation or selection of

the activities it covers, so that by definition it cannot exhaust all social experience, which therefore always potentially contains space for alternative intentions which are not yet articulated as a social institution or even project.â&#x20AC;? So freedom is not something that has to be established outside reality â&#x20AC;&#x201C; by being critical towards society â&#x20AC;&#x201C; but only by and through alternative practice experiments within a given situation.

depressed

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production For decades, industrial buildings were the symbol of economic development of the Western countries, as well as the confirmation of the capitalist model of production.

Several urban organisms have developed around this model, facing a sudden growth in their extension and an increase in their wealth. It was the years of a certain positivistic faith in production, and Modern architecture and planning represented its spatial counterpart: activity zoning was a ruling paradigm in the urban design strategies, determining as a result huge industrial enclaves along urban boundaries as long as mono-functional housing districts to host the growing working classes.

Gradually over the last forty years, facing the information technology revolution, Western countries have decided to alienate a great deal of their productive force, concentrating on realms based on creative and innovative production as well as on financial speculation. Contemporary Western cities live almost completely disentangled from the physical production of goods, both agricultural and industrial, and rely on a service-oriented society fuelled by retail commerce.

As a result, European and American cities found themselves with previously extended industrial compounds whose production and employment capacity was dramatically shrinking, and facing the reality of repairing these wounds in the urban fabric. The discourse around dismissed industrial areas dominated, and still

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1. Traditional industrial production model 2. “Exploded” production model, based upon public space, at the scale of the city

dominates, the debate on urban renewal, often resulting in gentrification processes producing fashionable neighbourhoods and enclaves. In his book devoted to the production of space, Henri Lefebvre underlines the abstract character of capitalistic space “which acts as a tool or domination”. The methods and scenarios which try to be “creative” and “attractive” (by offering Theme Parks, Urban Renewal Zones, “City Branding” operations etc.) are often a failure because space is above all considered in terms of financial yield and its subjects are manipulated to accomplish just that. Capitalist economy continues to create de-subjectivated, consumerist, and abstract urban spaces.

The early capitalist model of production was characterized by a strict hierarchy and the need for wide working surfaces, and it represented a social model: industrial enclaves were gravitational centres, spatial attractors in terms of flows of people, goods, and money, set in strategic territorial nodes of a larger productive net, and concentrated within their guarded perimeter of technological and logistic facilities able to grant productivity and

efficiency.

Nowadays it would be absolutely anachronistic to consider the possibility of re-installing such intruding mechanisms in the structure of Western cities, yet itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s also true that, given the current economic and financial climate, agricultural manufacture and industrial production have proven able to grant a certain stability in times of crisis. Therefore it is to some extent necessary to re-develop productive paradigms within the space of the city: one could bend the production model by exploding it, micronizing its program in order to activate the numbed public space of Western cities, and intensify it by means of a productive network.

As a result of a widely spread productive program, engaging the scale of the city and settling on public space, the possibility of determining bio-political production arises, intended as the stimulation of cooperative subjectivities and the enhancement of micro-economic cycles. According to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their work Commonwealth, â&#x20AC;&#x153;making the commonsâ&#x20AC;? is a synonym for enhancing productivity of social cooperation, by providing the infrastructures necessary for

1 2

1. Squatted Building in Amsterdam 2. Re-functionalised industrial space for new productive use

public amenity lane

glasshouse

studio living

workshop lab

THE STRIP AS A CONNECTING TRAIL... the street as sourc ting heterotopias. acting spaces that become spaces to question every barriers, its imposed temporalities synaptic space

bio-political production; making the commons has to be understood, then, not as the creation of marginal communities that share resources producing alternative subcultural forms of life, but rather as a process in the centre of the contemporary metropolis, with the potential of becoming a radical process of de-territorialisation that could take society, through capitalism, beyond capitalism. The commons would therefore be those milieus of shared resources that are generated by the participation of the many and

ce of passibilities, connec-

yday life, its potential, its

open air library / shelter / performing space multiple, which may constitute the essential productive fabric of the 21st century metropolis.

visionin visioning In his The Anti-City, Stefano Boeri suggests that, in order to produce innovation in the governance of a city, it is crucial to unhinge bureaucratic structures and rhetoric, introducing atypical and lateral logics of people coming from realms outside of politics.

He acknowledges the possibility that the spaces of our cities can become actual laboratories of a new fashion of making politics. It is an implicit, but very powerful act of delegating: this new political mode asks architecture to be able to do what serious politics should always be able to do: building visions for the future, set on the daily present.

Moreover, as Saskia Sassen remarks in her work, globalization has triggered processes that make cities, as part of a global network, as the only possible horizon for a development of political discourse, given that states and nations have somehow alienated their sovereignty for the sake of globalised interests.

On this basis, projects for the city canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t help but stem from a political approach, embodied in the idea of the city as an habitable space: the architectural project has to posit itself as an instrument of political reproducibility,

battling the idea of architecture as a neutral, smooth, descriptive and merely communicative instrument. This means subtracting the discourse on architecture from the aesthetical milieu and fro-accessory role, and re-introducing it in the political milieu as urban ideology, a vision of the city founded on use and not on mere consumption.

Architecture should be politically involved in exploiting the folds and the criticalities of the status quo in order to pursue the questioning of the consolidated structures, and the proposal for plausible and localized alternatives, as hybridization of theory, activism and real practices in the construction of the space for the citizenship.

Stanford Kwinter, in its Requiem: For The City At The End Of The Millennium, interestingly quotes the concept of plane of immanence proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, suggesting the necessity for architecture to engage

ng

actual visions, instead of deterministic planning, as a plane of immanence “endowed thought itself with a new role: its task now would be to disengage structures from the real material world and to set them in promiscuous motion, tracking their trajectories and migrations from one state of contact and reengagement to another. The “abstract” and the “concrete” from now on would have lives of their own, participating in a perpetual ballroom dance where partners are exchanged promiscuously, according to design”.

The public dimension of architecture doesn’t only reside in its function it is also determined on a symbolic level, by its ability of transferring – through its mere presence – a message of attention and a cure towards local commu-

nities. Public space as the backbone of society in the bi-directional relationship with civitas, which eventually brings identification, as construction of the public space can only arise according to the development of civitas: as Plato would put it, there is the law, and then there is the ineffable. Civitas is the category to nourish in order to grant democracy and social liberty, expressed in the paradigms of production and agonism, as the idea of a city form and city order is the existential and foundational horizon in the representation of the civitas through public space: it seeks a sort of overall result obtained by hybridizing Genius Loci (spirit of the place), Zeitgeist (spirit of the time) and collective unconsciousness.

dissident ironing diller & scofidio

To some extent, an architectural concern should then be to transform the space of political representation into an actual civil and habitable space; according to Guattari and Deleuze, micropolitics and macropolitics are no separable things, they continuously intertwine, and the problem is not about taking the side of one or the other, as much as finding a way of articulating their relationship.

Supporting that there is the concept of heterotopia, proposed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, as that type of counter-site capable of juxtaposing elements that are in themselves incompatible, and establishing a break in ordinary time. Foucault makes use of a metaphor to explain the meaning of heterotopia: “The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates”.

Architecturally and spatially speaking, alienating and confusing programs becomes a trajectory beyond clichés with the possibility for radical options to emerge, re-activating political and historical discourse through crisis. It’s an actual coup d’état, put into practice on a spatial level, driven by the powerful tools of architecture: institutional space becomes porous to the public and the political, acquiring the features of an architectural collective incubator, where the intertwinement of interests and activities takes into account the productive paradox of confrontation, where opposition always implies the acknowledgement of the adversary.

This becomes the claim for a renewed representation of public space within the city, as a reaction to the existing liberal forces that today pattern the city as an agglomeration of individualities.

architectural coup d’ état

1 2

3 1 Coliseum Elevation, Superstudio 2. Facade Patchwork 3. Michigan Theatre, Detroit

chimeras Architecture becomes a matter of dissensus, making aesthetics become a form of politics, making action become form. It strives against the conception of the city as an unknown entity, theatre of uncontrollable and unintelligible social and economic forces, a boundless, sprawling and self-organizing organism in a seemingly biological state of flux, deprived of any political intention. The city is re-affirmed as an intelligible point of gravity for the human needs of sociality and representation, the city as a real, tangible and dense form is ever-present and still constitutes a crucial demand of research for architects. The city must be rediscovered as a strongly identifiable place, a crucial laboratory for urban consciousness and as a constructible and intelligible physical form: this has

to inevitably result in the investigation of the relationship between the individual and the process of history.

Architectures acquire the form of chimeras, machines of production of subjects, resulting from relationships of power and relationships of knowledge, as citizenship finds a way of practicing the right to participate in collective rituals and to gain access to public spaces, as political spaces.

Architecture becomes the embodiment of what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as singularities: â&#x20AC;&#x153;singularities signal and constitute a phase mutation and are set at the points where intensity shifts take place, where chains and machines exceed consistency threshold and assume new features of expressionâ&#x20AC;?.

bibliography and references

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The City (2011) I. Calvino, Le città invisibili, (Einaudi, Tornino, 1972) Chora, R. Bunschoten, Urban Flotsam. Stirring The City (2001) G. Clément, Manifesto of the Third Landscape (2005) G. Clément, The Planetary Garden (1999) P. Ciorra, Recycle. Strategie Per L’Architettura, La Città, Il Pianeta (2011) M. De Certeau, The Practice Of Everyday Life (1984) G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism And Schizophrenia (1987) G. Deleuze, Post-Script (1990) G. Dorfles. Horror Pleni. La (In)Civiltà Del Rumore (2008) L. Falconi Di Francesco, La città analoga (article, 2007) M. Foucault, Of Other Spaces (1967) M. Foucault, The History Of Sexuality (1976) A. Franke, B-Zone: Becoming Europe And Beyond (2006) F. Garofalo, Learning from Cities (Venice Biennale Workshop) (2008) W. Gropius, Apollo Nella Democrazia (1967) K. M. Hays, Architecture. Theory Since 1968 (1998) M. Hajer, A. Reijndorp, In Search Of The New Public Domain (2001) M. Hardt, A. Negri, Commonwealth (2009) D. Haslam et al., Shrinking Cities (Voll.1-2) (2006) S. Holl, Intertwining (1996) S. Holl; Urbanisms: Working with Doubt (2010) R. Ingersoll, Sprawltown, Looking For The City On Its Edges (2006) J. Jacobs, The Death And Life Of Great American Cities (1961)

C. Jenks, Theories And Manifestoes Of Contemporary Architecture (2006) R. Klanten, L. Feireiss, Beyond Architecture: Imaginative Buildings And Fictional Cities (2009) R. Klanten, L. Feireiss, Utopia Forever: Visions of Architecture and Urbanism (2011) R. Koolhaas, Delirious New York. Un Manifesto Retroattivo Per Manhattan (1978) R. Koolhaas, H.U. Obrist, Project Japan, Metabolist Talks (2011) R. Koolhaas, Singapore Songlines (1994) S. Kr채tke, The Creative Capital Of Cities: Interactive Knowledge Creation And The Urbanization Economies Of Innovation (2011) S. Kwinter, Requiem: For The City At The End Of The Millennium (2010) B. Latour, From Realpolitik To Dingpolitik Or How To Make Things Public (2005) G. La Varra et al., Post-It Cities. Occasional Urbanities (2008) H. Lefebvre, The Production Of Space (1974) K. Lynch, The Image Of The City (1960) K. Lynch, Good City Form (1984) MVRDV, Metacity Datatown (1994) P. Noever, K. Meyer, Urban Future Manifestos (2011) OMA, Content (2003) OMA, S, M, L, XL (1995) E. Panofski, Idea: A Concept For Art History (1924) L. Pignatti, Mind The Map. Mappe, Diagrammi E Dispositivi Cartografici (2011) C. Price, Re:CP (2011)

J. Rancière, The Politics Of Aesthetics (2000) A. Rossi, L’Architettura Della Città (1978) E. Sanguineti, Cultura E Realtà (2010) S. Sassen, Elements For A Sociology Of Globalization (2007) F. D. Scott, Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics after Modernism (2007) B. Secchi, Antwerp: Territory Of A New Modernity (2009) M. J. Thompson, Democracy, Public Reason, And Suburban Life (2009) B. Tschumi, Event Cities (Voll. 1, 2, 3) S. Veca, Cittadinanza. Riflessioni Filosofiche Sull’idea Di Emancipazione (1990) S. Veca, L’idea Di Incompletezza. Quattro Lezioni (2011) A. Vidler, La Deformazione Dello Spazio. Arte, Architettura E Disagio Nella Cultura Moderna (2000) I. Wallerstein, Utopistics. Or, Historical Choices of the Twenty-First Century (1998) R. Williams, Marxism and Literature (1976)

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C. Petcou, D. Petrescu, Acting Spaces. Transversal Notes, On-The-Ground Observations And Concrete Questions For Us All (2007) R. Sennet, Democratic Spaces, (In Hunch N. 9, 2005) R. Sennet, The Open City (2006)

MASTER DEGREE PROGRAMME IN

BUILDING ENGINEERING/ARCHITECTURE ITALIAN CHINESE CURRICULUM

General Agreement between University of Pavia, IUSS - Institute for Advanced Study Pavia, and Tongji University of Shanghai, March 2009

Supervisor: Prof. TIZIANO CATTANEO Candidate: MARIO GENOVESI