Auto Poiesis

D O CUM ENT O DA I NV EST I GAÇÃO

AUTO POIESIS MIGU EL S A NTA NA

S OS +S M S

D C V

FA C U LD A D E D E BEL A S­­­­­­- A R T ES

U NI VER S I D A D E D E L I S B O A

2011

‘Lisboa Capital do Nada: Marvila, 2001’. ]extra[muros.

MAKEHAM, Paul. ‘Performing the City’ in Theatre Research International, vol. 30. Reino Unido: 2005.

Constant Nieuwenhuis: http://www.notbored.org/constant.html ‘Century City. Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis’. 2001; http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/centurycity/ KOOLHAAS, Rem. ‘Três Textos Sobre a Cidade’. Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2010; ‘Mutations’. Actar Publisher, 2001.

MANOVICH, Lev. ‘Abstraction and Complexity’. 2004.

LYNCH, Kevin. ‘A Imagem da Cidade.’ Edições 70, 2008.

NOVAK, Marcos. ‘Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace’. 1991; http://www.surfacenoise.info/367/readings/novak.pdf CHURCHILL, Henry. ‘The City is the People.’ Nova Iorque: Reynal & Hitchcock,1945.

Este documento reúne matérias teóricas investigadas para o projecto ‘Auto Poiesis’ e aborda os contextos de complexidade e globalidade da cidade actual; performatividade da vida urbana; propostas de interpretação do espaço urbano; e exemplos de valorização e recuperação do espaço público para, a seguir, intervir sobre a cidade de um ponto de vista crítico e revitalizador da polis democrata.

Em continuidade com os trabalhos de pesquisa ‘Dupla Exposição’ e ‘MA.NI.FES.TO-ME’, respectivamente acerca do plano urbanístico de ‘59 dos Olivais Sul e acerca do manifesto ‘Delirious New York’ de Rem Koolhaas, o presente trabalho faz um novo enfoque sobre a cidade e o território urbano. Desta vez, o ponto de vista concentra‑se na cidade social que habita o espaço arquitectural e que dele usufrui e constrói.

As nossas cidades, ou futuras metrópoles, são, da mesma forma, instáveis. Hoje vivemos num diálogo constante entre diferentes culturas, etnias, religiões, estratos financeiros, etc., mais do que antigamente (há 4 décadas atrás em Portugal). A Manhattan ‘as the capital of perpetual crisis’ de Koolhaas existe também na cidade onde vivemos, ou pelo menos tem o potencial de vir a existir. A ideia da arquitectura ‘ever-changing’ de Marcos Novak é a que se adapta de sobremaneira à nossa realidade, uma cidade maleável, para sempre por definir e que se transforma segundo confrontos culturais intermitentes.

A arquitectura é importante, claro, como expressão identitária, funcionalista ou icónica, e como próprio quadro de referências culturais, mas ‘the city is the people’ e the people are ‘performing the city’. A partir destas premissas o presente trabalho pretende fazer um reapropriamento do espaço público, roubá-lo do conceito de espaço vazio e revalorizá-lo como palco de discussão e interacção suburbana.

According to the scientists working on complexity, the new paradigm is as important as the classical physics of Newton, Laplace, and Descartes, with their assumption of the ‘clockwork universe.’ But the significance of the new approach is not limited to its potential to describe and explain the phenomena of the natural world that were ignored by classical science. Just as the classical physics and mathematics fitted perfectly the notion of a highly rational and orderly universe controlled by God, the sciences of complexity are appropriate for the world which on all levels – political, social, economic, technical – appears to us to be, more dynamic, more complex, and more interconnected than ever before.

(As Rem Koolhaas has put it recently: “Globalization is growth not by proliferation but by integration.

Globalization is based on connectivity – through transport, agreements, standards, consumer

goods and cultures, information and media.” about connecting everything to everything else.”) So at the end it does not matter if frequent invocations of the ideas of complexity in relation to just about any contemporary phenomenon – from financial markets to social movements – are appropriate or not. What is important is that having realized the limits of linear top-down models and reductionism, we are prepared to embrace a very different approach, one which looks at complexity not as a nuisance which needs to be quickly reduced to simple elements and rules, but instead as the source of life – something which is essential for a healthy existence and evolution of natural, biological, and social systems. »

3. Bearing in mind the extent to which future recreational pursuits and the new situations that we are beginning to build must profoundly affect the basic idea of any urbanistic study, we can already expand our understanding of the problem through experimentation with certain phenomena linked to the urban environment: activity in a certain street, the psychological effect of different surfaces and constructions, the rapidly changing appearance of space produced by ephemeral elements, the speed with which ambiance changes and the potential variations in the overall ambiance of different neighborhoods. The derive, as practiced by the Situationists, is an effective means of studying this phenomena in existing cities and arriving at preliminary conclusions. The psychogeographical notions gathered in this way have already led to the creation of plans and models of a highly imaginative sort that could be called architectural science fiction.

4. The technical inventions that humanity has at its disposal today will play a major role in the construction of the ambiance-cities of the future.

It is worth noting that significantly, to date, these inventions have in no way contributed to existing cultural activities and that creative artists have not known what to do with them. The potential offered by cinema, television, radio and high-speed travel and communication has not been exploited, and their effect on cultural life has been deplorable. The investigation of technology and its exploitation for recreational ends on a higher plane is one of the most pressing tasks required to facilitate creation of a unitary urbanism on the scale demanded by the society of the future. »

Começo. A Grandeza destrói, mas também é um novo começo. Pode restituir o que quebra.

sua interdependência dentro de uma entidade maior, numa simbiose que exacerba em vez de comprometer a especificidade.

INT R O D UÇÃ O O título ‘Auto Poiesis’ deriva do mesmo termo lançado pelos biólogos Humberto Maturana e Francisco Varela, segundo os quais “an autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components which: through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network.”

Pegando no ponto de vista de Koolhaas sobre a cidade de Nova Iorque, a ‘instabilidade’ do território pode ser tomado como uma mais-valia.

L EV M A NO V I CH ‘ A BS T RACTIO N AND CO MPL EXIT Y’ 2004 « Beginning in the 1960s, scientists in different fields gradually realize that the classical science which aims to explain the world through simple universally applicable rules (such as the three laws of Newtonian physics) cannot account for a variety of physical and biological phenomena. Soon after, artificial intelligence research that tried to reduce human mind to symbols and rules, also run out of steam.

The new paradigm begins to emerge across a number of scientific and technical fields, eventually reaching popular culture as well. It includes a number of distinct areas, approaches, and subjects: chaos theory, complex systems, self-organization, autopoiesis, emergence, artificial life, the use of the models and metaphors borrowed from evolutionary biology (genetic algorithms, “memes”), neural networks. While distinct from each other, most of

them share certain basic assumptions. They all look at complex dynamic and non-linear systems and they model the development and/or behavior of these systems as the interaction of a population of simple elements. This interaction typically leads to emergent properties – a priori unpredictable global behavior. In other words, the order that can be observed in such systems emerges spontaneously; it can’t be deduced from the properties of elements that make up the system. Here are the same ideas as expressed in somewhat different terms: “orderly ensemble properties can and do arise in the absence of blueprints, plans, or discrete organizers; interesting wholes can arise simply from interacting parts; enumeration of parts cannot account for wholes; change does not necessarily indicate the existence of an outside agent or force; interesting wholes can arise from chaos or randomness.”

C O NS TA NT NI EUW ENHUI S THE GREAT GAME TO CO ME 1959 « 1. The need to build a large number of cities quickly, a need brought about as a result of the industrialization of underdeveloped countries and the acute housing shortage after the war, has made urbanism into one of today’s key cultural problems. We would even go so far as to consider that no cultural development is possible without new conditions in our everyday surroundings.

It must first be pointed out that the initial experiments undertaken by teams of architects and sociologists were thwarted by a lack of collective imagination, which accounts for the arbitrary and limited approach followed in those experiments. Urbanism, as it is understood by today’s professional planners, is reduced to the practical study of housing and traffic as isolated problems. The total lack of alternatives involving play in the organization of social life prevents urbanism from attaining the level of creation, and the gloomy and sterile appearance of most modern neighborhoods is a shameful reminder of this.

2. The Situationists, explorers specializing in play and recreation, understand that the appearance of cities is of importance only as regards the psychological effects that it can produce, which should be taken into account along with all of the other factors. Our conception of urbanism is not limited to construction and its functions, but rather takes in all of the uses that can be found, or even imagined, for it. It is obvious that these uses must change along with the underlying social conditions and that our conception of urbanism is therefore first and foremost a dynamic one. We also reject the placement of buildings in static surroundings – which passes at present for new architecture. On the contrary, we believe that all static, unchanging elements must be avoided and that the variable or changing character of architectural elements is the precondition for a flexible relationship with the events that will take place within them.

R EM KO O L HA A S G RA NDEZ A , O U O PRO BL EMA DO GRANDE 1 994 « Maximum. Paradoxalmente, o Todo e o Real deixaram de existir como possíveis empreendimentos para o arquitecto, exactamente no momento em que o fim do segundo milénio que se aproxima detectou uma corrida desenfreada no sentido da reorganização, consolidação, expansão, um clamor pela mega-escala. Empenhada noutro sentido, toda uma profissão foi finalmente incapaz de explorar os dramáticos eventos sociais e económicos que, se confrontados, poderiam recuperar a sua credibilidade.

Mas apesar do seu nome mudo, a Grandeza é um domínio teórico neste fin de siècle: numa paisagem de desordem, desmontagem, dissociação,

desresponsabilização, a atracção da Grandeza está no seu potencial de reconstruir o Todo, ressuscitar o Real, reinventar o colectivo, reinvidicar a possibilidade máxima.

O Paradoxo da Grandeza é que apesar dos cálculos necessários ao seu planeamento – de facto, através da sua própria rigidez – é a única arquitectura que programa o imprevisível. Em vez de reforçar a coexistência, a Grandeza depende de regimes de liberdades, a agregação da máxima diferença.

A Grandeza reconhece que a arquitectura como a conhecemos está em dificuldades, mas não pode ser sobrecompensada através de regurgitações de ainda mais arquitectura. ela propõe uma nova economia na qual já não “é tudo arquitectura”, mas na qual uma posição estratégica é reconquistada através de uma retirada e concentração, cedendo às forças inimigas o resto de um território disputado.

Apenas a Grandeza pode sustentar uma proliferação promíscua de eventos num único contentor. Ela desenvolve estratégias para organizar tanto a sua independência como a

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Através da contaminação em vez de pureza e de quantidade em vez de qualidade, apenas a Grandeza pode sustentar genuinamente relações entre entidades funcionais que expandem ao invés de limitar as suas identidades. A artificialidade e complexidade da Grandeza libertam a função da sua armadura defensiva para permitir uma espécie de liquefacção; os elementos programáticos reagem entre si para criarem novos eventos – a Grandeza retorna a um modelo de alquimia programática. >

Embora a Grandeza seja um modelo para a intensidade perpétua, também oferece graus de serenidade ou mesmo de suavidade. É simplesmente impossível animar intencionalmente a sua massa total. A sua vastidão esgota a necessidade compulsiva da arquitectura para decidir e determinar.

Algumas zonas ficarão de fora, livres de arquitectura Bastião. A Grandeza já não precisa da cidade; ela representa a cidade; ou melhor ainda, ela é a cidade.

Se o urbanismo gera potencial e a arquitectura o explora, a Grandeza garante a generosidade do urbanismo contra a mediocridade da arquitectura.

de significado; gravita oportunisticamente para localizações de máxima promessa infra-estrutural; é, definitivamente, a sua própria raison d’être.

A Grandeza, através da sua verdadeira independência em relação ao contexto, é a única arquitectura que pode sobreviver, mesmo explorar a agora global condição da tabula rasa: ela não retira a sua inspiração do existente, tantas vezes espremido para se obter uma última gota

Nem toda a arquitectura, nem todo o programa, nem todos os eventos serão engolidos pela Grandeza.

Existem muitas “necessidades” demasiado desfocadas, demasiado fracas, demasiado desrespeitadas, demasiado provocadoras, demasiado secretas, demasiado subversivas,

humano ser exponencial implica que o passado se tornará em dado momento demasiado “pequeno” para ser habitado e partilhado por aqueles que estão vivos. Nós mesmo o esgotamos. Na medida em que a história encontra o seu depósito na arquitectura, as cifras actuais da população vão inevitavelmente disparar e dizimar a substância existente. A identidade concebida como forma de partilhar o passado é uma proposta perdedora: não só existe – num modelo estável de expansão contínua da população – proporcionalmente cada vez menos o que partilhar, mas a história tem uma ingrata meia-vida – quanto mais se abusa dela, menos significativa de torna – até chegar o momento em que as suas decrescentes dávidas se tornam insultuosas. 1.3. A identidade é como uma ratoeira, onde cada vez mais ratos têm de partilhar o isco original, e que, examinada mais de perto, pode estar vazia há séculos. Quanto mais poderosa for a identidade, mais nos aprisiona, mais resiste à expansão, à interpretação, à renovação, à contradição. 1.4. A identidade centraliza; insiste

numa essência, num ponto. A sua tragédia é dada em termos geométricos simples. À medida que se expande a esfera de influência, a área caracterizada pelo centro torna-se cada vez maior, diluindo irremediavelmente tanto a força como a autoridade do núcleo; inevitavelmente, a distância entre o centro e a circunferência aumenta até ao ponto de ruptura. Nesta perspectiva, a descoberta recente e tardia da periferia como zona de valor potencial é apenas uma insistência dissimulada na prioridade e na dependência do centro: sem centro não há periferia; o interesse do primeiro compensa presumivelmente a vacuidade do segundo. Conceptualmente órfã, a condição de periferia é agravada pelo facto da sua mãe continuar viva, roubando o espectáculo, enfatizando as insuficiências da sua descendência. As últimas vibrações que emanam do centro esgotado impedem a leitura da periferia como uma massa crítica. Não só o centro é por definição demasiado pequeno para cumprir as obrigações que lhe estão consignadas, como também não é já o centro real,

demasiado fracas, demasiado “nada” para serem parte das constelações da Grandeza. A Grandeza é o último bastião da arquitectura – uma contracção, uma hiper-arquitectura. Os contentores da Grandeza serão marcos na paisagem pós-arquitectónica – um mundo raspado de arquitectura da mesma forma que as pinturas de Richter são raspadas de tinta: inflexível, imutável, definitivo, para sempre aí, gerado através de um esforço sobre-humano. A Grandeza prepara o terreno para um depois-da-arquitectura. »

R EM KO O L HA A S A CI DA DE GENÉRICA 1 994 « 1. Introdução 1.1. Será a cidade contemporânea como o aeroporto contemporâneo “igual a todos os outros”? Será possível teorizar essa convergência?

E em caso afirmativo, a que configuração definitiva aspirar? A convergência é possível apenas à custa do despojamento da identidade. Isso é geralmente visto como uma perda. Mas à escala em que isso acontece, tem de significar algo.

Quais são as desvantagens da identidade e, inversamente, quais as vantagens da vacuidade?

E se esta homogeneização aparentemente acidental – e geralmente deplorada – fosse um processo intencional, um movimento consciente de distanciamento da diferença e aproximação da semelhança? E se estivermos a assistir a um movimento de libertação global: “abaixo o carácter!” O que resta se removermos a identidade?

O Genérico? 1.2. Na medida em que a identidade deriva da substância física, do histórico, do contexto e do real, de certo modo não conseguimos imaginar que algo contemporâneo – feito por nós – contribua para ela. Mas o facto do crescimento

antes uma miragem empolada em vias de implosão; contudo, a sua presença ilusória nega legitimidade ao resto da cidade (Manhattan denigra como “gente das pontes e túneis” aqueles que precisam do apoio das infra-estruturas para entrar na cidade e fá-los pagar por isso). A persistência da actual obsessão concêntrica faz que todos nós sejamos gente das pontes e túneis, cidadãos de segunda classe da nossa própria civilização, provados dos nossos direitos por essa tonta coincidência do nosso exílio colectivo do centro. 1.6. A Cidade Genérica é a cidade libertada da clausura do centro, do espartilho da identidade. A Cidade Genérica rompe com o circuito destrutivo da dependência, não é mais do que um reflexo da necessidade actual e da capacidade actual. É a cidade sem história. É suficientemente grande para toda a gente. É fácil. Não necessita de manutenção. Se se tornar demasiado velha, simplesmente autodestrói-se e renova-se. É igualmente emocionante – ou pouco emocionante – em toda a parte. »

G I O VA NNI L A VA RRA P OST-IT CIT Y: THE O THER EU RO PEAN P U BLI C S PA C ES « “Around two or three in the morning, heading toward the valley and short on gas, we stopped at a selfservice. You’d say Deadsville! Up in the mountains, not a bar in sight, no one on the horizon. I’d have said the same. In fact this place was as lively as an American drive-in: people were eating, drinking Chianti, talking, asking for change or a cigarette. A pastoral frolic for young people, guys and girls, on their way back from a discotheque in Modena or Bologna. … Every passing car stopped there. It was fun to see how the desire to communicate and stay up late, mixed with the somewhat anxious cordiality you find in the people from Modena and Emilia Romagna in general, produced such an effect: the metamorphosis of a dingy gas station into an open-air dance floor. Suddenly I came to love this province of Emilia.”

Pier Vittorio Tondelli, ‘Un Weekend Postmoderno’.

The landscape of public life in the European city is changing. The great projects of Berlin, Lille, London, Strasbourg, Vienna, Lyon, Lisbon, Leipzig, Bilbao, Rotterdam, and Barcelona have crystallized an idea of public space which is sufficiently identifiable to guarantee the formation of a “genre.” The public space of contemporary Europe has its own icons: it is ample, sharply defined, with raw, precious, sparkling materials, fashioned in diverse ways, with a sophisticated composition of green spaces and trees, “hard” and “soft” spaces. The successful articulation of this genre is found in the great, hyperdefined open spaces of the new European plazas, where distinct first-class businesses move in.

Alongside such spaces are other “public spaces” that punctuate the urban territory. In the city center or on the edges, at the heart of the nineteenthe-century tissue or in the great external zones, they compose an infinite catalogue of informal spaces, with innumerable articulations: street vendors, veritable bars on wheels that bring together young people and prostitutes, policemen and bums, at night in Milan, specially equipped vans serving as discotheques in the streets of London suburbs, the vacant lots of Berlin described by Wenders; improvised raves bringing thousands of party-goers together in the industrial wastelands of small and mid-sized cities in the heart of Europe, scattered, spontaneous shops on the streets and squares of Belgrade during the embargo, literally occupying the urban public space whose meaning and value they transfigure.

The Post-It metaphor actually concerns a rather narrow spectrum of urban phenomena. But traditional public space, as its representational use value changes, is obliged to take the complexity and heterogeneity of the cultural and social mutations conveyed by these phenomena into account. New collective spaces are joining the network of public places that connote the historical city, and the network of public places that punctuate the density of the contemporary city, which is characterized by a planned diffusion, an extension of relations, an attachment to communication networks. This new reality shifts the traditional dynamics of public life into new conditions. What emerges from these temporary spaces is above all non-codification. Unlike the simulated public spaces whose mechanisms of “controlled reaction” offer inhabitants, tourists and suburbanites very specific chances to meet and exchange, the Post-It spaces have no predominant codification: they are vacant lots, residual spaces around the communications systems, kinds of dikes around urbanized zones-spaces the planner’s gaze has left untouched. Their residual character, their indifference to the traditional network, their tangential position to the major flows leaves them at the fringes: on the fringes of the complex stratification of images produced by architecture and urbanism, on the fringes of the tradition of these disciplines, whose projects are closed, limited in time, precisely shaped according to contingent needs.

These dynamics carry out a temporary rewriting of the urban space they fill – traditional but also provisional spaces, which are mobilized as a function of events, of the evolution of the city, of the specific individual or group initiatives, constituting a fragile and fragmentary network which filters into the tightly woven structures of urban public space. Post-It City is a functional apparatus of the contemporary city. It is particularly involved with the dynamics of public life, with the behavior of individuals, their modes of encounter, of gathering, of bonding, of recognition, and of distinction, which all leave the traditional paths behind.

Equally and more radically, Post-It City is a form of resistance against virtual modes of encounter and the normalization of “public behavior” in the contemporary city – where as Ed Soja reminds us, “even if you don’t want to, you have to respect the role assigned to you.”

The second characteristic of the Post-It phenomena is that they are temporary. They unfold in a particular time-span with the presence of temporary participants. During the day, for example, it is quite impossible to recognize any sign of the night-time uses of a shopping-center parking lot. The Post-It spaces occupy a short slice of time in the sequence of a city-dweller’s day. In almost every case, it is a narrow interval of space and time that slips in between a series of hypercodified environments.

Inserted between the family framework of the home and the mega-interior of the discotheque or multiplex, the teenager’s night-time meeting-place is a typical example. It is an individual reappropriation of the modes and times of collective exchange, freeing them from the particular rules of the family framework and from the invasive, normalizing rules of the “architecture of entertainment,” to rediscover individualized and intimate interpersonal relations.

“In Berlin there is an incredible number of such places, which spring up spontaneously. The quality of life in a city, in my opinion, is also directly proportional to the lack of planning” Wim Wenders, ‘The Act of Seeing’.

Intensification is the third characteristic of Post-It City – the intensification of anonymous, unsuspected spaces and places, “no-man’s lands” which are astonishingly available for collective practices. But it is also an intensification of the signifiers fixed in the materiality of the space. Intimate, emotional places for sharing the practices of encounter, which allow themselves neither to be modeled or obstructed. Or personal and collective activities, desires, projections, which occupy spaces without any ambition to lay foundations, to root their presence, and without promoting any antagonism over the use of the space.

The “unpolitical” nature of such collective practices cannot be measured by absolute demands or perspectives of radical transformation. In this respect what predominates is above all the disarming effect of Post-It City. Architectural reflection has a hard time translating the nature of these phenomena into its own terms, in order to incorporate them into a project. But Post-It City, if we broaden the meaning of the expression, definitely is the bearer of a distinct and singular project. With Post-It City we want to make an un-predetermined, temporary use of a space which is open like a public space, and subject to perpetual resignification.

Post-It City is like a thread or an invisible watermark that runs through the contemporary city. Invisible at first, the phenomena of Post-It City are not ostensible, even if their nature greatly depends on the dimensions of the territory. It is often a matter of “exposed” places where it is possible to see the city, the landscape, and the territory crossed by the flows of mobility. These places are characterized by what Stefano Boeri has called a “territorial intimacy,” which continually brings their residual nature, their marginality into a state of tension. PostIt City is also an implicit critique of the strategies and instruments that preside over the practices of architectural and urban design. The critique is “implicit” because it does not give rise to specific demands. Occupying a space which belongs to no one, doing so temporarily but repeatedly, giving it another meaning inside a small group without modifying its spatial and material nature, is not an attitude which prefigures any particular demand: for example the demand for “inhabitable space,” or any other environmental condition, or any new services.

Post-It City rediscovers the dimension of “do it yourself,” as Colin Ward says, a dimension which is above all creative and abounds in its own proposals

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and reflection. This “do it yourself” denounces the hidden, spasmodic will to impose a practice of collective space, it is foreign to the preordained and preconstituted models of habitat.

But Post-It City is obviously not an anarchic phenomenon. On the contrary, it is progressive and exploratory in its adaptation to a new framework. It is an innovative form of sociality that takes place in specific places and develops partial, temporary, fleeting emotions. There is only the slightest of links between its places of aggregation and their appearances. And these links cannot be interpreted in a single way. Sometimes a tie is made between totally marginal places, constructed by superimposition, intermittence, and gradual accumulations of objects without reciprocal relations, these places can be used for encounters and exchanges of a particular “population.” A vacant lot, a strip along the edges of transportation infrastructures, a void that opens up temporarily in a zone of dense construction: chance will define it, by the sum total of stratifications (or subtractions) which, in the course of time, have produced an uncertain, undefinable result, at least in the technical terminology that habitually characterizes the city.

But at the other extreme, Post-It City also extends to places whose formal definition is completely univocal and strongly determined: this is the case of the shopping center-parking lots evoked above, which at night or on holidays become gathering points. The proximity of the major road infrastructures makes them a possible interval, a stopover on a car trip. You suddenly leave the flow, but remain in direct visual communication with it. The automobile becomes a complementary element of this temporary occupation: it marks off a space and signals a momentary presence.

Post-It City seems to stress the extremes of what formally characterizes the city today. It is above all under the conditions of maximum uncertainty and ultimate reduction that it is easiest to reveal the depth of the phenomenon. In this constellation of spaces, which continually “light up” and “go dark,” the public life of the European city seems to find the energy of regeneration. »

C O NS TA NT NI EUW ENHUI S NEW BABYLO N 1 974 « For many a year the gypsies who stopped awhile in the little Piedmontese town of Alba were in the habit of camping beneath the roof that, once a week, on Saturday, housed the livestock market. There they lit their fires, hung their tents from the pillars to protect or isolate themselves, improvised shelters with the aid of boxes and planks left behind by the traders. The need to clean up the market place every time the Zingari passed through had led the town council to forbid them access. In compensation, they were assigned a bit of grassland on the banks of the Tamaro, the little river that goes through the town: the most miserable of patches! It’s there that in December 1956 I went to see them in the company of the painter [Guiseppe] Pinot Gallizio, the owner of this uneven, muddy, desolate terrain, who’d given it to them. They’d closed off the space between some caravans with planks and petrol cans, they’d made an enclosure, a ‘Gypsy Town.’

That was the day I conceived the scheme for a permanent encampment for the gypsies of Alba and that project is the origin of the series of maquettes of New Babylon. Of a New Babylon where, under one roof, with the aid of moveable elements, a shared residence is built; a temporary, constantly remodeled living area; a camp for nomads on a planetary scale.

Definitions Utilitarian Society The term designates all known forms of society, including the modern capitalist and socialist State. It asserts a fundamental reality, the same for all these forms of community life, old and new, namely the exploitation of the human being’s capacity for work.

‘Utility’ is the principle criterion in appreciating man and his activity. The creative man, Homo Ludens, can only claim his rights on rare occasions.

town, a more rigorous organization on the macro level, and at the same time a greater flexibility at the micro level, which is that of an infinite complexity.

Freedom of creation demands in any case that we depend as little as possible on material contingency.

It presupposes, then, a vast network of collective services, more necessary to the population in movement than to the stable population of functional towns. On the other hand, automation leads to a massive concentration of production in gigantic centers, situated outside the space of daily life.

The opposite of utilitarian society is ludic society, where the human being, freed by automation from productive work, is at least in a position to develop his creativity. The terms ‘class society’ or ‘classless society’ do not express, or imperfectly so, this conflict. But it is clear that a ludic society can only be a classless society. Social justice is no guarantee of freedom, or creativity, which is the realization of freedom. Freedom depends not only on the social structure, but also on productivity; and the increase in productivity depends on technology. ‘Ludic society’ is in this sense a new concept.

Homo Ludens Term used for the first time by Johann Huizinga in a book of that title, subtitled: ‘A Study of the Element of Play in Culture.’ In his foreword, Huizinga speaks of the man who plays in still-measured terms: ‘In the course of time we have come to realize that, after all, we are not as reasonable as the eighteenth century, with its worship of reason and its naive optimism, assumed; hence, modern fashion inclines to designate our species as Homo Farber: Man the Maker. But though faber may not be quite so dubious as sapiens, it is, as a name specific to the human being, even less appropriate, seeing that many animals, too, are makers. There is a third function, however, applicable to both human and animal life, and just as important as reasoning and making – namely, playing. It seems to me that next to Homo Faber, and perhaps on the same level as Homo Sapiens, Homo Ludens, Man the Player, deserves a place in our nomenclature.’

This discretion in the use of the term can perhaps be explained by the slight importance utilitarian society gives to play. Homo Ludens has only ever been a rarely manifested modality of Homo Sapiens, a condition that, unlike [the condition of] Homo Faber, largely goes unnoticed. Huizinga, for whom playing is a flight from ‘real’ life, does not distance himself in his interpretation from the norms of utilitarian society. And, in his historical analysis of the theme, he quite rightly situates Homo Ludens in the upper echelons of society, more precisely within the propertied leisure class, and not in the laboring masses. However, by separating capacity for work and production, automation has opened the way to a massive increase in the number of Homo Ludens.

Huizinga nevertheless had the merit of pointing to the Homo Ludens dormant within each of us. The liberation of man’s ludic potential is directly linked to his liberation as a social being.

Social Space Sociologists extend this concept to the aggregate of social relations and ties that define man’s freedom of movement in society, and also, and above all, its limits. This symbolic interpretation of space is not one we share. For us, social space is truly the concrete space of meetings, of the contacts between beings. Spatiality is social.

In New Babylon, social space is social spatiality.

Space as a psychic dimension (abstract space) cannot be separated from the space of action (concrete space). Their divorce is only justified in a utilitarian society with arrested social relations, where concrete space necessarily has an anti-social character.

New Babylon: Outline of a Culture The Social Model The question of knowing how one would live in a society that knows neither famine nor exploitation nor work, in a society in which, without exception, anyone could give free rein to his creativity – this troubling, fundamental question awakens in us the image of an environment radically different from any that has hitherto been known, from any that has been realized in the field of architecture or urbanism.

The history of humanity has no precedent to offer as an example, because the masses have never been free, that is, freely creative. As for creativity, what has it ever meant but the output of a human being?

Yet let us suppose that all nonproductive work can be completely automated; that productivity increases until the world no longer knows scarcity; that the land and the means of production are socialized and as a result global production rationalized; that, as a consequence of this, the minority ceases to exercise its power over the majority; let us suppose, in other words, that the Marxist kingdom of freedom is realizable. Were it to be, we could no longer ask the same question without instantly attempting to reply to it and to imagine, albeit in the most schematic manner, a social model in which the idea of freedom would become the real practice of freedom – of a ‘freedom’ that for us is not the choice between many alternatives but the optimum development of the creative faculties of every human being; because there cannot be true freedom without creativity.

The centers of production outside this space and the collective facilities inside it determine the general lines of the macro-structure in which, under the influence of indeterminate movements, there will be defined a more differentiated and necessarily more flexible micro-structure.

From these two preconditions – the optimum organization of material conditions and the maximum development of each person’s sense of initiative — we can deduce the essentials of a structure that is no longer composed of nuclei, as in the traditional settlement, but is organized according to the individual and collective covering of distance, of errancy: a network of units, linked one to the other, and so forming chains that can develop, be extended in every direction. Within these chains are found the services and everything pertaining to the organization of social life, in the “links” of the network, the entirely automated units of production, from which man is absent.

If we situate all known forms of society under a single common denominator, ‘utilitarianism,’ the model to be invented will be that of a ‘ludic’ society – this term designating the activities that, relieved of all utility as well as all function, are pure products of the creative imagination. Now, it is as a creator, and only as a creator, that the human being can fulfill and attain his highest existential level.

The Network It is obvious that a person free to use his time for the whole of his life, free to go where he wants, when he wants, cannot make the greatest use of his freedom in a world ruled by the clock and the imperative of a fixed abode. As a way of life Homo Ludens will demand, firstly, that he responds to his need for playing, for adventure, for mobility, as well as all the conditions that facilitate the free creation of his own life. Until then, the principle activity of man had been the exploration of his natural surroundings. Homo Ludens himself will seek to transform, to recreate, those surroundings, that world, according to his new needs. The exploration and creation of the environment will them happen to coincide because, in creating his domain to explore, Homo Ludens will apply himself to exploring his own creation. Thus we will be present at an uninterrupted process of creation and re-creation, sustained by a generalized creativity that is manifested in all domains of activity.

The basic elements of the network, the SECTORS, are autonomous units of construction, which nevertheless intercommunicate. The sector network is perceived from within as a continuous space.

New Babylon ends nowhere (since the earth is round); it knows no frontiers (since there are no more national economies) or collectivities (since humanity is fluctuating). Every place is accessible to one and all. The whole earth becomes home to its owners.

Life is an endless journey across a world that is changing so rapidly that it seems forever other.

Topography Given their huge size, the sector interiors depend on the system of distribution of energy needed for lighting, ventilation and air conditioning, but this ‘dependency’ implies a certain freedom: freedom from the monotonous alteration of day and night, which humanity has sought since the dawn of time.

Starting from this freedom in time and space, we would arrive at a new kind of urbanization. Mobility, the incessant fluctuation of the population – a logical consequence of this new freedom – creates a different relation between town and settlement.

With no timetable to respect, with no fixed abode, the human being will of necessity become acquainted with a nomadic way of life in an artificial, wholly ‘constructed’ environment. Let us call this environment New Babylon and add that it has nothing, or almost nothing, about it of a ‘town,’ in the traditional sense of the term. The town is a form of urbanization characteristic of utilitarian society: a fortified place for protection against a hostile external world, it becomes, as a mercantile center, an ‘open town’; then, with the advent of mechanization, a center of production – and at all these different stages it is the place where a stable population resides, rooted there by a particular way of life.

Taken as a whole, New Babylon presents itself as a network of huge links, the greater part of which are raised above the ground. On the ground, a second network, traffic. The ‘links’ are areas generally devoid of building, though with the exception of centers of production and the installations that have no place in the sector social space, like, for instance, transmitter antennae, and perhaps drilling rigs, historic monuments, observatories and other facilities for scientific research. Part of these vacant areas is given over to different working of the ground itself and to rearing livestock; another part to nature reserves, wooded parks. The network structure facilitates acess to these, the intervening distances being each time relatively small.

The topographical surveying of New Babylon poses problems that cannot be resolved by using the tradition means of cartography. Given, on the one hand, its organization on many levels (ground, inside the sectorial volume, terrace roofs), the connections between levels, the nature of communications and the solutions of continuity created between the levels can only emerge in maquette form. On the other hand, the structures are anything but permanent. In effect it is more a question of a micro-structure in continuous transformation, in which the time factor, the fourth dimension, plays a considerable part. Consequently, any three-dimensional representation would, in itself, only have the value of a snapshot, since even admitting that the model of each sector may be reduced to several planes and sections of the different levels, and that one manages thereby to constitute a sort of detailed atlas of the sectors, it would still be necessary, from one instant to the next, to record, using symbolic notations as in a ship’s log, all the topographical modifications that are produced.

The culture of New Babylon does not result from isolated activities, from exceptional situations, but from the global activity of the whole world population, every human being being engaged in a dynamic relation with his surroundings. There are no a priori links between anyone. The frequency of each man’s movements and the distances he will cover depend on decisions he will make spontaneously, and which he will be able to renounce just as simultaneously. Under these conditions social mobility suggests the image of a kaleidoscopic whole, accentuating sudden unexpected changes – an image that no longer bears any similarity to the structures of a community life ruled by the principle of utility, whose models of behavior are always the same. In our case, the urban must respond to social mobility, which implies, in relation to the stable

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Recourse to a computer will doubtless be necessary to resolve such a complex problem.

The Sector The sector is the smallest element, the basic unit of the New Babylonian network, one of the ‘links’ in the chains that make it up. As one might expect, its dimensions are markedly greater than the dimensions of the elements (buildings) that make up the towns, such as they are known. The scale of these elements depends on the system of social relations. In rural communities where human relations and family ties are tightly enmeshed, the basic element is the independent family residence. In industrial towns, given the social character of production work, relationships are established at school, in the place of work or leisure, in political and other meetings – which supplement family ties. Thus each member of a family creates personal ties outside of it. Under these conditions, larger residential units are seen to appear, blocks for many families, sometimes equipped with communal services. But there, as in rural communities, one is dealing with a sedentary population, a regular way of life.

The sector is a basic construction (macro-structure) in which an environment is constructed. Qua support, the macro-structure must allow the greatest freedom in the permanent construction (microstructure) of the interior space. In its simplest form, the sector incorporates a number of superimposed horizontal spaces linked to each other and to the ground by vertical elements, and one or more fixed nuclei for services. This space could be taken up by a more complex structure resulting from the articulation of variable smaller spaces. As an alternative to the support structure, one can also imagine a ‘floating’ structure, a suspended sector secured to one or more masts. Another possible alternative, the self-bearing structure, requires a limited number of points of support, which is an advantage, but, since the module and the dimensions of the micro-structure depend more directly on the macro-structure, the organization of interior space is no longer as free. The choice of one or the other solution – a sector on pilotis, or a suspended or self-bearing sector – also depends in certain measure on the geographical position.

The macro-structure, then, houses a moveable interior structure. Since the dimensions of the sector are important, any demolition or transformation of the basic structure is of necessity an ambitious undertaking. However, the ludic life of the inhabitants of New Babylon presupposes frequent transformation of the interior of the sectors. For this to take place without problems, the containing structure would have to be as neutral as possible, and, from the construction point of view, the variable contained structure [would have to be] completely independent of the former.

The variable structure grows out of the moveable assembly systems (walls, floors, terminals, bridges, etc.) light and therefore easy to transport, which can be as easily mounted as dismounted, thus [making them] re-usable. Any assembly project requires both the normalization of the module and the standardization of production. The dimensions of the macro-structure are determined by the module of standard elements. But this does not mean, of course, limiting the possible combinations or simplifying the forms, since a great number of standard assembly types and systems can be combined in a multiplicity of ways.

The nuclei occupy a part of the sector; the rest, the most important part of New Babylon, is a social space with moveable articulations: the playground of Homo Ludens.

A volume with the span of a New Babylon sector is more independent of the external world than a construction built on a smaller scale. Daylight, for instance, only penetrates a few meters there, a large part of the interior being artificially lit. The accumulation of solar heat and the loss of heat in cold weather occur so slowly that the changes in ambient temperature barely influence the temperature inside. The climatic conditions (the intensity of lighting, temperature, the hygrometric >

state, ventiliation) are all under technical control.

Inside, a variable range of climates can be created and modified at will. Climate becomes an important element in the play of ambiance, all the more so since the technical apparatus is accessible to everybody and the decentralization (of distribution) encourages a certain autonomy of the sector or group of sectors. Smaller centers are preferred to a single center, which facilitates reproducing the most diverse climates and, why not, inventing new ones as a contrast, changing the seasons, transforming them according to an infinitely varied synchronization accorded to the metamorphosis of space.

The audiovisual media will be used in the same spirit. The fluctuating world of the sectors calls on facilities (a transmitting and receiving network) that are both decentralized and public. Given the participation of a large number of people in the transmission and reception of images and sounds, perfected telecommunications become an important factor in ludic social behavior.

The New Babylonians Creativity and Agressivity They wander through the sectors of New Babylon seeking new experiences, as yet unknown ambiances. Without the passivity of tourists, but fully aware of the power they have to act upon the world, to transform it, recreate it. They dispose of a whole arsenal of technical implements for doing this, thanks to which they can make the desired changes without delay. Just like the painter, who with a mere handful of colors creates an infinite variety of forms, contrasts and styles, the New Babylonians can endlessly vary their environment, renew and vary it by using their technical implements. This comparison reveals a fundamental difference between the two ways of creating. The painter is a solitary creator who is only confronted by another person’s reactions once the creative act is over. Among the New Babylonians, on the other hand, the creative act is also a social act: as a direct intervention in the social world, it elicits an immediate response.

The artist’s individual creation seems, to other’s eyes, to escape all constraint and ripen in isolation.

And it is only much later, when the work acquires an undeniable reality, that it will have to confront society. At any given moment in his creative activity, the New Babylonian is himself in direct contact with his peers. Each one of his acts is public, each one acts on a milieu which is also that of the others and elicits spontaneous reactions. All action, then, loses its individual character. On the other hand, each reaction can provoke others in turn. In this way interventions form chain reactions that only come to an end when a situation that has become critical ‘explodes’ and is transformed into another situation. The process escapes one person’s control, but it matters little knowing who set it off and by whom it will be inflected in turn. In this sense the critical moment (the climax) is an authentic collective creation. The yardstick, the space-time framework, of the New Babylonian world is the rhythm in which each moment suceeds the last.

Aggressivity is a manifestation of the will to power, which is the attribute of a highly developed being (man) capable of foresight and who, in a world in where his existence is threatened, can organize in time, that is to say, according to a plan, a safe place for himself. For that reason, man’s aggressivity does not disappear with the satisfaction of his immediate needs. It is, apparently, in the most industrialized, ‘rich’ countries that aggressive behavior regresses the least, above all among the propertied class. To shed light on this apparent contradiction between material security and the persistence of aggressivity, it would perhaps be necessary to admit the existence of an ‘instinct’ other than that of self-defense: the creative instinct, which appears with the sublimation of primordial instinct whenever material conditions are sufficiently favorable for self-defense to be transformed into open spontaneity.

The objective impossibility of realizing a creative life within utilitarian society, based on the suppression of creativity but nevertheless containing all the conditions favorable to its development, permits us to understand why aggressivity finds itself apart from the struggle for existence. In contemporary society, the propertied class itself cannot act in a creative manner, and it is easy to understand that it feels more frustrated than the masses, who own nothing yet struggle for their future freedom. The goal of these struggles being the transformation of existing society, conflict itself is creation.

The Creative Instinct In speculating on the possible advent of a ludic society, one presupposes from the beginning that every human being feels the latent need to manifest his creativity, and that it appears in the sublimation of primary instinctual forms. This need is not satisfied in our static society, where its accomplishment through creation can only be potential. All education that prepares the future adult for the ‘useful’ role he will play in society tends to repress the creative instinct. However, it often comes about that ‘utility’ disappears with the development of technology, even before the child arrives at the end of his studies. Under these conditions ‘education’ can only play a negative role in the repression of all spontaneous creativity. If this were not the case, the adult would be more creative than the child, while in reality the opposite is true.

turn undergoes their influence. In any event, the effect of his intervention does not last long, since being a provocation each intervention cannot remain without response.

An objection could be raised, creativity not being the same for all, that the influence of the most active and gifted will be stronger than that of the less energetic and inventive. This objection, however, is characteristic of a utilitarian mentality, which sees in the superiority of intelligence and energy the surest means of acceding to power. In a collective culture, the individual act intermingles with general social activity. It cannot be isolated and the result bears no trace of this. Collective culture is a composite culture, a product of the close and organic interdependence of all creative activity. It is the contrary of the competitive culture we know, which takes the absolute superiority of the strongest, of ‘genius,’ as the unit by which to measure all activity – which results in an unparalleled waste of creative energies.

But can one conceive of an education aiming at the development of creativity? It is permissible to doubt it and to ask oneself if all education, or what is designated by that term, is not extremely limited, if its principle function is not to restrain freedom, which is the fundamental condition of creativity. The only education favorable to creation is that which unfetters the development of creativity. But Homo Ludens dispenses with education. He learns by playing.

Let’s imagine, then, that at a given moment x number of individuals find themselves inside one of the sectors. That the sector is divided into many spaces of different size, form and atmosphere.

That each of these spaces is at the point of being transformed: being built, destroyed, mounted, dismounted ... That all the individuals present actively participate in this incessant activity. That each person can circulate freely from one space to another. That the sector is being crossed incessantly from one part to another by new people and by those who, after having stayed there awhile, leave. Such mobile complexity of both the spatial conditions and the composition of the ‘population’ determines New Babylonian culture.

Those who cannot adapt to the structures of utilitarian society condemn themselves to isolation. These are the ‘asocial’ types, a term often synonymous with ‘criminal.’ ‘Criminality’ presupposes transgression of constituted social relations, which explains the different interpretations of which it has been the object. Crime, ‘the criminal act,’ disturbs the order of these relations and society reacts by eliminating the guilty person. When, from a totally different perspective, ‘the criminal act’ is considered as an expression of a frustrated will to power, and in admitting that, sublimated, the will to power is transformed into creativity, the ‘crime’ becomes no more than an abortive attempt at creation. The attitude of the criminal vis-avis reality is no more passive than the artist’s, since he too intervenes in a given situation. But while the creative act brings together destruction and construction, lending them balance, the criminal privileges destruction. Yet the artist’s intervention displays, at least as regards utilitarian society, an ‘asocial’ attitude whose effect is barely distinguishable from that of the crime.

The sectors constantly change form and atmosphere according to the activities that are taking place there. Nobody can return to what was before, rediscover the place as he left it, the image he’d retained in his memory. Nobody now falls into the trap of habit.

Habits, the totality of which constitute a social ‘model of behavior,’ are what, in utilitarian society, privilege a static way of life. However, the dynamism of a life of permanent creation excludes all automatism. Just as an artist cannot and does not want to repeat one of his works, so the New Babylonian who creates his life cannot exhibit repetitive behavior.

In New Babylon, where no ‘order’ is respected, community life takes shape within the dynamic of permanently changing situations. This dynamic activates forces that in utilitarian are repressed or at best tolerated. That is why it is unthinkable that a life like that in New babylon could be imposed on contemporary society, even for the briefest length of time. When social conventions are no longer respected, as during carnival, it is not creativity that increases but aggressivity: an aggressivity directly proportional to the pressure exerted on creativity by the society.

The Dynamic Labyrinth While in utilitarian society one strives by every means towards an optimal orientation in space, the guarantee of temporal efficiency and economy, in New Babylon the disorientation that furthers adventure, play and creative change is privileged. The space of New Babylon has all the characteristics of a labyrinthine space, within which movement no longer submits to the constraints of given spatial or temporal organization. The labyrinth in form of New Babylonian social space is the direct expression of social independence.

The New Babylonian The struggle for subsistence has divided humanity into interest groups that are often competing but always opposed to the idea of joining together in large groups, harder to defend. The prolonged division into races, tribes, nations, social classes is also explained by the historical conditions of this struggle. In a society that no longer knows the struggle for subsistence, competition disappears at both the individual and group level. Barriers and frontiers also disappear. The way is open to the intermixing of populations, which results in both the disappearance of racial differences and the fusion of populations into a new race, the world-wide race of New babylonians.

The ambiance of an environment possessing certain specific plastic and acoustic characteristics depends on the individuals who find themselves there. A single individual can passively submit to this ambiance or change it according to his mood at the time. But with the entrance of a second person, a new presence is felt and the interaction of the two presences excludes any passivity. The quality of the environment and its ambiance no longer depends on material factors alone, but on the manner in which they will have been perceived, appreciated and used, on the ‘new way of looking’ at them. And when a third or fourth person comes to take his place alongside the others, the situation – being more complex – escapes the control of any of the people present. As the number of visitors gradually increases and the composition of the group alters, complexity also increases, while the individual control of space decreases.

Forms of Behavior It is well known that behavior is strongly influenced by environmental elements. In psychiatry the manipulation of these elements is called ‘brainwashing.’ In New Babylon, where each person can freely use the technical apparatus and actively participate in the collective organization of space, these elements cannot be chosen according to a pre-established goal. Any initiative in one direction or another can, at any moment, be detourned by different, even opposed initiatives.

The collective use of space entails qualitative change since it tends to reduce passivity. The activity of the occupants of a space is an integral part of the ambiance that, being static, becomes dynamic. In a social space where the number of individuals is ceaselessly changing, along with the relations between them, each and every person is prompted to change his personal ambiance.

All these impulses, brought together, represent a force that manifestly acts on the ordering of space, and in New Babylon, where space is public, it

If the New Babylonian can transform the environment and the ambiance by using the available technical material, if in so doing he can temporarily influence the behavior of others, he in

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acts continuously. Space in its entirety will thus submit to the most unexpected influences, and one can imagine that a similar process unfolds simultaneously in infinitely diverse ways in a multitude of spaces, whose number is as variable as the links created between them. One arrives, then, at the image of an immense social space that is forever other: a dynamic labyrinth in the widest sense of the term.

Technology Technology is the indispensable tool for realizing an experimental collectivism. To seek to dominate nature without the help of technique is pure fiction.

As is collective creation without the appropriate means of communication. A renewed, reinvented audiovisual media is an indispensable aid. In a fluctuating community, without a fixed base, contacts can only be maintained by intensive telecommunications. Each sector will be provided with the latest equipment, accessible to everyone, whose use, we should note, is never strictly functional. In New Babylon air conditioning does not only serve to recreate, as in utilitarian society, an ‘ideal’ climate, but to vary ambiance to the greatest possible degree. As for telecommunications, it does not only, or principally, serve interests of a practical kind. It is at the service of ludic activity, it is a form of play.

In order to grasp this, let us take the example of a local cafe, a very quiet cafe whose atmosphere would suddenly become animated when some new arrival puts money in the jukebox. In New Babylon, each person can at any moment, in any place, alter the ambiance by adjusting the sound volume, the brightness of the light, the olfactive ambiance or the temperature. Should a small group enter a space, then the ordering of that space can become something else. By articulating many small spaces, one can create a space of more ample dimensions, or vice versa. One can also change the form of a space with new entrances, or by blocking the old ones; by adding or removing stairs, bridges, ladders, ramps, etc. With a minimum of effort, one can arrive at any desired modification. Moreover, one has at hand a varied range of partitions of different materials, textures and colors; different too in their thermo-acoustic qualities.

The stairs, bridges and pipes are themselves of varied construction and form. Through the combination of irregular, barely practicable surfaces, of smooth ramps, narrow passages, acute angles, etc., certain spaces become selective. This would be the case with those one gets to by a rope ladder or pole, and which will be the favorite places of children and young people.

The marginal sectors, which perch on the side of a mountain or along the coastline and which are, given their situation, less frequented, will be the preferred choice of retired or sick people.

The Intensification of Space In New Babylon, where the nature and structure of space changes frequently, one will make much more intensive use of global space. The volume of social space and of social activity in space has two consequences: the space available for individual use is greater than in a society with a sedentary population; yet there is no more empty space, space unused even for a brief time, and, as one makes creative use of it, its aspect changes so much and so often that a relatively small surface offers as many variations as a trip around the world. Distance covered, speed, are no longer the yardsticks of movement; and space, lived more intensely, seem to dilate. But this intensification of space is only possible due to the creative use of technical means – a use that we, who live in a society where use has a finality, can hardly imagine.

To succeed in life is to create and re-create it incessantly. Man can only have a life worthy of himself if he himself creates. When the struggle for existence is no more than a memory, he will be able, for the first time in history, to freely dispose of the whole of his life. He will be able, in complete freedom, to give his existence the form of his desires. Far from remaining passive toward a world in which he is content to adapt himself, for better or worse, to external circumstances, he would aspire to creating another one in which his liberty is realized. In order that he may create his life, it is incumbent on him to create that world.

And that creation, like the other, entails the same uninterrupted succession of re-creations.

New Babylon is the work of the New Babylonians alone, the product of their culture. For us, it is only a model of reflection and play. »

in ‘Lisboa Capital do Nada’.

PA U L M A K EHA M P ERF ORMING THE CIT Y 2005 « Lewis Mumford, one of the champions of progressive urban planning in the twentieth century, understood the city as ‘a theater of social action’: “The city fosters art and is art; the city creates the theater and is the theater. It is in the city, the city as theater, that man’s more purposive activities are focused ... The physical organization of the city may ... through the deliberate efforts of art, politics, and education, make the drama more richly significant, as a stage-set, well-designed, intensifies and underlines the gestures of the actors and the action of the play.”

Writing in 1937, Mumford concluded that: “To embody these new possibilities in city life, which come to us not merely through better technical organization but through acuter sociological understanding, and to dramatize the activities themselves in appropriate individual and urban structures, forms the task of the coming generation.”

This paper outlines some of the ways in which cities and city life might be apprehended through reference to theatre and performance. Since 1937, of course, our understandings of what theatre and performance are have changed considerably, so Mumford’s exhortations resonate differently in the contemporary context. In particular, the perspectives enabled by Performance Studies provide an interpretive frame for analyzing the urban drama, encompassing not only formally designated artworks, but an almost infinite range of other phenomena as well. A key consideration now, for instance, is the role of so-called ‘cultural economies’ and ‘experience economies’ in urban life.

Commentators such as Charles Landry, Richard Florida and Alan Blum have made valuable insights recently into how such economies function in contemporary cities. While much of their commentary is interdisciplinary, crossing discursive borders between urban planning and architecture, economics, sociology and cultural studies, underpinning all of it is a recognition that cities around the world are in various stages of social, spatial and economic transformation.

Where it was once dependent upon its capacity for economic production and distribution, the post-war, post-industrial city is being radically re-structured towards residential accommodation and cultural consumption. Working against the modernist, instrumentalist legacies of their predecessors, contemporary urban planners increasingly are attuned to culture and creativity as drivers of urban design and redevelopment.

Central components of such cultural activity are theatre and performance. As Charles Landry argues:

“the so-called ‘experience economy’ cannot be ignored – a rapprochement between everyday living, consumption and spectacle shaping what cities look and feel like ... This process is turning retailing into a part of the entertainment industry, often blurring the boundaries between shopping, learning and the experience of culture. In this process design, multimedia applications, theatrics and soundscapes move centre stage.”

inherent in the adoption of theatre discourse by urban planners warrant scrutiny. In particular, metaphors of performance and spectatorship may be explored through reference to contemporary performance theory, which tells us that performers and spectators exist always in a complex power relation, not only to one another but to the place of performance, and indeed to the entire production apparatus (in this case, the city administration). Whilst performers might appear to be ‘in control’, in many cases they are substantially disempowered. So if urban planners are to function ethically, in democratic partnership with the populace, it is incumbent upon them not simply to proffer an extended metaphor of ‘urban drama’, but to consider fully its socio-political implications: Who owns and controls the performance space? What is the dominant discourse of performance? And whose interests are furthered by the performance? As Alison Richards observes:

Of course, the theatrical and performative dimensions of cities are, in one sense at least, most easily recognizable in plays and other designated performance events, including street theatre; the agit-prop enactments associated with rallies and demonstrations; festivals; site-specific works; installations; multimedia events; and so on. Increasingly, city planners and administrators recognize the value of, and demand for, such overtly theatrical activities. In other accounts though, the theatrical is abstracted, such that the city itself is figured metaphorically through terms such as ‘stage’, ‘scene’, ‘set’, and ‘drama’.

“The culturally complex city requires a farsighted set of cultural strategies which can support diversity, while working to ensure that the boundaries which mark difference remain ‘in play’, rather than solidifying as defended borders. A good cultural plan becomes an expression of the way which the city conceives of itself, the way it remembers its past, lives its present, and wants to greet its future.”

As instructive as these tropes can be, the role of theatre and performance in urban life is more than merely metaphoric, and the manifestation of them in cities is complex and varied. For the urban stage – in all its material and social dimensions – is shot through with performative elements. While many of these are recognizable in the designated, intentional or ‘aesthetic’ performances such as those outlined above, ‘the performative’ is not reducible to those qualities associated with designated performance such as mimesis, intentionality and rehearsal.

Sporting events, for instance, figure prominently in a city’s performed life, but occupy an ambiguous space between ‘the performative’ and performance proper, depending upon definition and point of view. ‘Cultural performance’ as well (variously defined) denotes a kind of ‘hyper-theatricality and self performance’ discernible in a variety of public events such as marches, parades, commemorations and celebrations, occasions in which ‘culture complexly enunciates itself’. In a broader sense the physical spaces, architecture and design of cities comprise myriad performative qualities including tension, irony, intertextuality and self-reflexivity; as Edmund Bacon observes, one of the ‘prime purposes of architecture is to heighten the drama of living’. Indeed, cities as a whole can be understood as sites upon which an urban citizenry, in the ‘practice of everyday life’, performs its collective memory, imagination and aspiration, performing its sense of self both to itself and beyond.

Performance and performativity are intrinsic to urban life and design. A mobile billboard; an illuminated building at night; a park fountain; an episode of road rage; a store window display; a queue – all of these comprise performative elements. ‘In the modern world of the city, theatricality and performance are what people turn to to create the appearance of a meaningful life’.

So if it is true that we always find something to give us the impression we exist, then one of the places we find that something is on the urban stage.

In ‘Soft City’ (1974), Jonathan Raban describes the ‘intrinsic theatricality of city life’, arguing that public spaces in the city ‘often resemble lit stages awaiting a scenario’. Raban goes on to characterize clothing, buildings, thoroughfares and skylines all in theatrical/semiotic terms, suggesting that ‘this kind of signification, communication, meaning-making, identity-forming, city-making is the “grammar of the city”, and “the art of urban living”’. David Nentwick, paraphrasing Raban, says: “The city is soft, shapeable, moldable, like clay.

It ‘awaits the imprint of an identity’. It invites the individual to remake it, and the ‘self’ too; this process, of the formation of identity and the shaping/remaking of the city, is a dialogic process [ . . . ] in which the formation of identity is simultaneously the shaping of the city.”

Good city planning, then, promotes the full participation of citizens, both as performers in the urban drama and as spectators of it, and the most innovative planners embrace this principle willingly. However, certain assumptions

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This question of identity-formation is a key ethical consideration here, since one of the abiding challenges for urban planners is to facilitate the public good – access, security, civic services – whilst also allowing for the assertion (the performance, in other words) of individual identity, transgression and difference. The interaction of the citizenry with public space and infrastructure is a process of self-identification, of performing the self. Richard Sennett, however, also writing in the early 1970s, cautions against the authoritarian or doctrinaire planning regime which may impede the formation of individual identity and the performance of difference. In The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity in City Life , Sennett argues that ‘disorder threatens personal identity by exposing a person to experiences and information which may call the beliefs and assumptions of that identity into question. Planning is an attempt to control this exposure to disorder, and in so doing create a “purified” identity’. So in order to avoid a bland aesthetics of authoritarian uniformity, urban planners must be alert to, and willing to accommodate, civic dramas of difference and transgression. Citizens must have opportunities to devise the narrative.

One of the principal metaphors upon which discursive constructions of the city often rely is that of ‘the scene’. In The Imaginative Structure of the City , Alan Blum examines this notion of the ‘urban scene’, suggesting that ‘if a scene is being played there must be both actors and audience’. Blum’s study draws upon his ‘Culture of Cities’ project, a five-year examination of urban culture commencing in 2000, led by Blum at York University in Canada.

(The project takes its name, incidentally, from Lewis Mumford’s book of 1938). Culture of Cities is an interdisciplinary research project focussing on four cities: Berlin, Montréal, Dublin and Toronto. Over a five-year period, it is planned that the project will produce a series of comparative studies on a range of topics, including ‘building and rebuilding, the circulation of artefacts, the arts, the organization of streets, public sites and localities, and citizenship’.

One of the outcomes of the Culture of Cities project thus far has been a special issue of Public magazine (titled ‘Cities | Scene’) which is: “devoted to the study of scenes; treating these as phenomenal elements in the cultural life of cities.

Both memorable and ephemeral, scenes conjugate a history of urban places by enacting a dramatic visibility. They are a measure of the decline, vitality and distinctness of a city.”

As Ray Conlogue observes: ‘Scenes are essential to creating the local identity of a city ... It is the alchemy of people, not architecture, which keeps a scene alive. Scenes do need to be transgressive ... Eventually clever elites recognize the value of scenes and surreptitiously support them’. >

Conlogue’s point here about the appropriation of resistance is useful. However, his claim that it is the alchemy of people rather than architecture which keeps scenes alive is questionable, for as Raban points out, it is ‘the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living’.

city and on ‘urbanity’ in the broadest sense of the word. It incorporates an ongoing theatre project, and in 2001, the Bauhaus Theatre examined ‘the relationships between people and space; the relationship between space provided for theatre and urban space; and the concept of the theatricality of the city’:

Scenes are part of what has otherwise been characterized as the soft infrastructure of the city, namely ‘the system of associative structures and social networks, connections and human interactions that underpins and encourages the flow of ideas between individuals and institutions’. These forms of social exchange can be encouraged through performative activities and milieux. The idea of ‘soft infrastructure’ echoes Raban’s image of the ‘soft city’:

“People have changed the way they live and work.

Hence there is a need to think about whether the stage is still adequate as a venue for theatrical work in modern society. What roles do new and different venues play? The concept of the theatricality of the city incorporates the effect of the media and advertising. The question arises of a new role for theatre. An earnest search in this respect will be accompanied by the conscious interlinking of the performing arts with the new media.”

“The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps, in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.”

The second project is worth mentioning in this context partly because it foregrounds some of the socio-political dimensions of performing the city.

CIVICCentre: Reclaiming the Right to Performance, a research symposium held in London in 2003, sought to explore ‘the relationship between contemporary performance, civic dialogue and political involvement’:

There is a great lineage here. The theatrical city extends back in time to the historical traditions of classical architecture and civic participation. For the ancient Greeks, the idea of the city (the ‘polis’) was cognate with that of the citizen (or ‘polites’), the polis being the institution in which people normally lived their lives. To be ‘political’, then, meant be ‘of the city’, to be a human living in complex social structure with others. Aristotle argued that the individual was ‘born to live in complex organization with his or her fellow creatures, in community and harmony, through compromise, but united through a common purpose, which is to live a shared life’.

The Athenian Agora epitomizes in physical form these social ideals. In reference to classical art and design, Michael Greenhalgh describes the ‘theatricality of Hellenistic art, architecture and town planning’, observing that ‘theatricality is indeed a hallmark of Hellenistic architecture and urbanism’: “It is to be seen in all ‘levels’ ... of architectural design, from the first calculating placement of a building or group of buildings to attain the greatest effect ... to a predilection for abundant sculptural decoration.”

A particular point of interest here is Greenhalgh’s observation that: “The Gymnasium at Sardis has a splendidly festive façade – but it would not have escaped the attention of the ancient visitor that the large columns (some 15 meters in height) are actually monoliths. Not to appreciate the sheer effort involved in turning such monsters on a horizontal lathe is to fail to understand part of the effect the architects were intent on creating.”

What Greenhalgh is describing here in effect is selfreflexivity: the columns theatricalize themselves by drawing the visitor’s attention not only to themselves, but also to the process by which they came into being.

Urban designers and architects have traditionally had the almost exclusive mandate to fashion public spaces. In the main, their craft has been conducted with an acute awareness of the need and potential for theatricality of built form, perhaps most notably the ancients, and those associated with the renaissance and beaux arts periods.

More recently, key urban designers and design schools have advocated a re-energized approach to urbanism, a conscious making and re-making of the city according to the pre-industrial conventions of civicness, civic form and space, pedestrianism (walking), and habitation. Notable amongst such planners are the between-war modernist utopianists emanating from the Bauhaus; and the postmodernist polemicists who emerged so forcefully in the 1980s, including the Krier brothers, Aldo Rossi and Robert Venturi. Their influence has been profound in countering the statutory planning systems that have been so destructive to American and post-war reconstructed European cities.

More recently, many practitioners have sought new ways to address contemporary urban design challenges through reference to theatre and performance. Two projects worth mentioning in particular are Bauhaus’ EVENTCITY and Alan Read’s CIVICCentre. EVENTCITY was the key theme in 2001 at the Bauhaus Kolleg in Dessau, and it animated a number of Bauhaus projects that year. The contemporary Bauhaus is involved in design, teaching and research, focusing on the

own functions, both aesthetically and socially.

Similarly, Jane Jacobs emphasizes social process in urban design. Bemoaning the ‘great blight of dullness’ afflicting American cities, Jacobs argues that processes are of the essence, and that it is upon the social processes of interaction that urban planners need to focus. Like Mumford’s, Jacobs’ work is essentially interdisciplinary. She has no formal training either in architecture or city planning, but her ideas cross such diverse frameworks as urban design and history, economics, and ethics. Her key text, ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities’ (1961) is one of the most influential books in the history of city planning. Opposing the post-war urban renewal and garden-city movements, Jacobs was ‘critical of a planning style that destroyed communities, separated land uses, and rebuilt sterile areas. She argued and fought for an alternative view in which planners aimed to protect neighbourhoods, mixed land uses, and paid attention to design details that matter to people’.

Contemporary urban planning encompasses not only physical design, but ‘cultural animation’ as well, and one way for urban planners to achieve this is through reference to performance and performativity. The kinds of insight enabled by Performance Studies confirm, as Marvin Carlson argues, that ‘human culture is in large measure performative, that is, activity consciously carried out and presented to others in order to have some effect on them’. At the same time, cities face new kinds of problems and opportunities, and many city administrations have adopted lateral, dynamic, creative solutions to contemporary urban challenges. Population density in cities is increasing, and while on the one hand we are global and networked, there is also a human need – a bio-social and economic need – for individuals physically to interact, to create and inhabit ‘scenes’, as Blum and others have recognized. In other words, people are making fundamentally different demands upon the city, many of which occur as embodied cultural practices taking place in real time and space. Intrinsic to that physical exchange are elements of theatre, drama and performance.

“It is timely to consider the relationship between civic intervention and contemporary performance ... An impulse to reclaim gestures shorn of their democratic resonance, stripped of their political impact and evacuated from their everyday contexts would invite us to consider how we might identify such gestures, how we might recognize them anew, how we might wish to reclaim our right to them, and to the performance they stand for ...

Making a gesture might then not appear such a hollow refrain nor one wholly disassociated from the realm of theatre.”

In recent years, then, the broad set of concepts associated with performing the city has spawned a diverse research and training agenda. Applied performance theory, particularly in relation to notions of urban performativity, informs Urban Studies curricula at a variety of institutions. An example is the Urban Studies programme at Vassar College, which is a multidisciplinary concentration in the study of cities and urbanization. In recent years, it has included a unit on Aesthetics and Urban Social Movements, exploring ‘the political practices of social movements as forms of theatricality that display, dramatize, elaborate, and symbolically resolve the social tensions that have brought them into being’. There are many other examples of research and teaching based on concepts of urban performance and performativity.

An understanding of these elements is evident in the work of a number of architects, urban planners and designers who have turned to performance to inform their practice: “The exceptional body of work of [architects] Elin and Carmen Corneil ... resonates with the theatrical and dynamic. They have experimented with scripted design games in real-time and choreographed construction processes ... Their imperative towards the theatrical has led them to orchestrate the inclusion of a variety of podia, stages and arenas within their works which serve to enhance the activities of day-to-day life and imbue the ordinary life of buildings and people with the theatrical ... [Their] large- scale urban works also seek to dramatize the urban experience by bringing one through the mediation of reassuring objects, into memorable juxtapositions and immediacies with extraordinary places.”

For most of the twentieth century, however, training programmes in architecture, engineering, urban design and built environment were dominated by a modernist and utilitarian approach to urban planning: ‘The dominant intellectual traditions which have shaped urban policies have been profoundly rooted in a belief in the virtues of instrumental, rational and analytic thinking’.

Twentieth-century planners typically adopted functional strategies, attending primarily to the physical dimension: zoning, corridors, traffic grids, height restrictions, and so on. David Harvey describes the post-war European and American embrace of utilitarianism in which, he says: ‘the modernists [saw] space as something to be shaped for social purposes and therefore always subservient to the construction of a social project’.

But modernist architecture – though often daring – was also constrained by this functionalism:

In one sense, cities have a materiality and permanence which performance does not. To cite Mumford once more: ‘Cities are a product of time.

They are the molds in which men’s lifetimes have cooled and congealed ... In the city, time becomes visible: buildings and monuments and public ways ... leave an imprint upon the minds even of the ignorant or the indifferent’. In another sense, though, the city is as imaginary and ephemeral as performance, because it is a performance – of individual and collective values, desires, memories and aspirations. In Memories of Las Vegas , Michael Peterson argues that an imagined history of Vegas is enacted by its architecture, which invokes historical fantasies with its colonial kitsch, its simulated skylines of Paris and New York, and its stereotypical cultural experiences such as Venetian gondola rides.

More than that, Vegas conjures a ‘nostalgia for histories that never were’:

“Under the watchful eye and sometimes strong hand of the state, procedures were devised to eliminate slums, build modular housing, schools, hospitals, factories etc. through the adoption of the industrialized construction systems and rational planning procedures that modernist architects had long proposed.”

Increasingly, urban planners have understood the importance of creativity, performativity and spectacle in cities and city-making. Drawing on the legacy of figures such as Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs, planners recognize that social processes of interaction are critical considerations for city-making. Mumford, for example, always emphasized the social imperative in urban planning. He viewed the city as the ‘prime location of human intercourse, and its siting, plan and architecture, and its institutions, were the framework of civilization’. Mumford insisted on the importance not only of buildings, but equally, of the spaces in between buildings, which have their

“Tourists use these cultural-historic references to make their own memories. More than spectatorship at formal performances – more even, perhaps, than gambling – visitors follow in the footsteps of earlier Vegas visitors to plan memories, document them, and move on. Not just to see, but to have seen; not just to gamble, but to have gambled. These goals shape spectators’ performance itineraries – the routes that connect street, casino, restaurant and theatre – and thus ‘sights’, games meals and formal performances.”

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And of formal performances, Peterson makes the point that Vegas shows ‘strive to construct themselves as memories-to-be’, producing memories ‘even in the performance of cultural memory’.

Urban performativity, then, enables citizens to invent – through memory, imagination and desire – new ideas about themselves and their relationships with the urban landscape. Landry and Bianchini argue that the most creative approaches to city planning recognize and value the subjective and the unquantifiable: ‘memory, emotions, passions, senses, desires, all of which engender motivations and loyalties’. Creative cities now are careful to create positive, high quality images of themselves, and have sought architectural forms that reflect this sense of self. This often involves the concerted organization of spectacle and theatricality, a kind of urban planning which endorses not realism, but façade; which models itself not on utilitarian ideas of traffic flow and pedestrian efficiency, but the stage set, the carnival, and the forum – spaces which engage the real and transform it.

Instances of such transformation, as Scott McQuire has discussed, include large-scale electronic projection onto city buildings and other public surfaces; large screen TVs in public squares; ‘smart’ buildings skinned with interactive surfaces; as well as new forms of public art involving complex systems of projection and light. McQuire discusses these contemporary developments in electrification, spectacle and urban space, and considers the theatrical impact of electric light on the appearances of the modern city.

Other kinds of performative engagement with the urban fabric, however, occur when individuals perform their own meanings and experiences within the larger urban context. Pedestrianism is an example of this. In ‘Semiology and the Urban’, Roland Barthes argues that all participants in the urban drama write landscape poetry as they wend their own particular paths through the city streets’. Experienced from below, the city becomes a negotiable and scriptible text, rather than a dominating system of power structures. Similarly, in his influential essay ‘Walking in the City’, Michel de Certeau contends that pedestrianism is empowering for the individual, since the ‘rhetoric’ of walking offers a means – a postmodern means – of resisting the large metropolitan power structures, the towers and skyscrapers so characteristic of modernism’s erectile fantasy. Beginning with an assertion of an inherent ‘texturology’ in cities, de Certeau suggests that seeing the city from above has the effect of totalizing it; such a view satisfies the scopic drive to make ‘the complexity of the city readable’. This seeing the whole produces a ‘voluptuous pleasure’.

Walkers (Wandersmänner), however, can resist the city’s spatial power structures by writing as they walk, choosing pathways in a text they cannot read all at once.

Performing the city, therefore, demands an ethics of performance, a measure by which to foster and value partnerships between the polis and its people.

In order for the performative to be embedded and activated beyond the formal theatre building, the citizenry needs access to shared civic space.

Performing the city becomes an assertion then of the political values of access, participation and cultural democracy. In claiming this right to public space, of course, it is important to avoid a naïve kind of populism. Rowe and Koetter point out that by surrendering to ‘an abstract entity called “the people” [the populists] cannot recognize how manifold “the people” happens to be, and consequently, whatever “its” will, how much in need of protection from each other its components happen to stand’.

Nonetheless, the theatre of the city is animated through the collective actions of individuals, exchanging signs and meanings, in dialogue and conflict with one another, seeing and being seen, telling stories, enacting the core rituals of performance. In so doing citizens become fully engaged as co-performers and spectators in a theatre of social action. For this theatre to function in practice rather than as a fanciful metaphor, the city administration must accommodate not only set and props but the performance in its entirety, including the dramas of transgression and disharmony which impel social narratives, and lend substance to shared existence. As Mumford consistently argued, physical organization should always be subservient to social need; accordingly the city becomes a ‘special framework directed toward the creation of differentiated opportunities for a common life and a significant collective drama’. »

L I S B O A CA P I TA L DO NA DA 2001 « Lisboa Capital do Nada foi um evento cultural transdisciplinar que decorreu em Lisboa, entre 1 e 30 de Outubro de 2001. Trinta dias de eventos diários incluiram Projectos Estruturantes, Arte, Fotografia, Edição e Debate, Intersecções e Outras Actividades, coordenadas por uma equipa responsável por mais de quarenta colaboradores.

Houve pessoas que entenderam o evento como um “festival”, outras olharam-no como uma oportunidade para empreender um “workshop” colectivo, que para além disso revelou ainda características de “arte urbana”. Todas estas formas adquiridas foram no fundo maneiras de exercitar um campo de conhecimento na área do desenho urbano, que se poderia descrever como um “auscultar” do corpo citadino através de um conjunto alargado de ferramentas, umas estritamente académicas, outras culturais.

Cinco histórias em Marvila Francisco Silva Dias

Passo a citar Teresa Alves: “Entre as diversas formas de organização do espaço que emergem dos novos contextos globais, salientam-se formas territoriais que se caracterizam pelo vazio, pelo nada, mais material do que simbólico, mas que podem encerrar potencialidades e oportunidades únicas como a criação de um sentimento de comunidade através da mobilização das populações de forma a que estas reivindiquem o espaço público como um bem colectivo de promoção de qualidade de vida.”

Por tudo isto, o lugar ofereceu-se-nos como espaço ideal para levar à prática, nem que apenas por um mês, uma utopia transdisciplinar, um “acontecimento urbano” tal como foi apresentado à opinião pública. É a partir destas vertentes e situações de expressão territorial que Lisboa Capital do Nada se estruturou. Perante uma realidade não democrática dos espaços do quotidiano, com problemas de acessibilidade, identidade, autovalorização, propôsse durante um mês um reforço do querer do espaço público. Levar as pessoas a olhar. A ouvir. Ou ainda a criar, a intervir, a debater...

Se Marvila é este descontínuo entremeado de presentes incertos e futuros expectantes, o imediato é um lugar de fortes traços multiculturais, onde o futuro poderia oferecer espaço para construção da metrópole que Lisboa – por timidez ou falta de ousadia – ainda não é. Marvila tem esta dimensão de potência, e esta é uma possibilidade física, como em poucas grandes cidades contemporâneas.

Nos folhetos distribuídos localmente, todas estas ideias eram sintetizadas da seguinte forma:

A terceira “LE CHEMIN des ECOLIERS”

A quarta PASSARINHOS NA ZONA N2

preâmbulo

Quem for à Zona N2 de Chelas pode ver que ao longo da Rua Cristino da Silva os espaços livres são tratados pelos vizinhos. O que é chocante para qualquer espírito beauxartiano. Porque não há uma ideia conjunto. Porque cada um cerca e mobila o seu tahão como entende e lá cultiva o que lhe dá na gana. uns rabanetes, outros batatas, uns couves galegas, outros couves tronchudas, uns dálias, outros lírios...

Lê-se na memória descritiva do Plano de Urbanização de Chelas (1966): “... em lugar de uma distribuição pontual dos pólos de vivicação urbana (como nos Olivais), um distribuição linear e contínua que penetra em todas as áreas da nova expansão... ... reabilitar a rua de peões como acompanhamento edificado da vida urbana (espaço comunitário de convívio dentro da tradição mediterrânea do habitat), servida claramente pelas vis de trânsito motorizado mas sem nunca se fundirem...”

Porquê Marvila Capital do Nada?

– Porque é uma zona da cidade quase sempre esquecida e mal amada.

– Porque é um conjunto de bairros com muita história mas também muito futuro.

– Porque é um território rico e variado, onde há pessoas e colectividades de grande dinamismo.

Para quê um evento assim?

– Para dar a conhecer a importância de bairros que, com os seus problemas e potencialidades, são dos mais interessantes de Lisboa.

– Para, através da arte e de intervenções várias, mudar a imagem negativa que as pessoas em geral têm da Freguesia e dos seus moradores.

– Para ajudar a construir uma cidade mais activa, na qual os habitantes possam participar.

Até que a D. Eliza entusiasmou todos a construírem uma grande gaiola, enchê-la de passarinhos e colocá-la onde se visse da rua entre cebolas, pés de lucia-lima e ervilhas-de-cheiro. Dito e feito e a gaiola encheu-se de bico de lacre, tentilhões e pintassilgos.

Cobiça para o olhar frio dos gatos, atracção para a histeria dos cães ou para a malvadez dos marginais ou para a tonteira dos ébrios.

Cabia ao jovem arquitecto camarário ir ao Liceu D. Diniz explicar aos alunos da cadeira de Geografia o planeamento do espaço da cidade onde viviam ou estudavam. Tarefa que muito lhe agradava. Embora visse com desgosto que os alunos corressem pelas ruas que ele e os colegas tinham destinado aos automóveis e não pelas alamedas de peões que tinham idealizado – arborizadas, com belos pavimentos, com comércio, seguras e cómodas.

Penava D. Eliza e todos os vizinhos.

E daí resolveram montar guarda à gaiola. Instalar um alarme e escalonar atenta vigília. E assim, quando soa a campainha, a qualquer hora da noite, a D. Eliza salta da cama, de inverno ou de verão, de roupão ou camisa de noite, espanta os gatos, afasta os cães, ameaça os marginais ou ralha com os bêbedos. Ela, ou qualquer dos vizinhos “de serviço.”

E porque o complexo de demiurgo ataca forte e especialmente os jovens arquitectos, este ousou lamentar perante os alunos que eles não fossem mais ‘disciplinados’.

Diz um aluno: “Nós agora vamos sempre pelo caminho dos peões...”

Diz outro, de alcunha o Ketchup (ruivo, sardento, reguila): “Porque há lá uma fábrica de bolos – bons e baratos...”

definição: É património todo o objecto sobre o qual recai um sentimento amoroso de propriedade colectiva.

moral da história Sem fábricas de bolos não há planeamento capaz.

Toda a razão para Kevin Lynch, Jane Jacobs e também Cesário Verde ou Alexandre O’Neill.

[e] vazão

paisagem combinada

palanque

Esta proposta transfigurou o sítio onde resistem duas palmeiras isoladas, através de uma matriz que, no terreno, se ofereceu como potencialidade para a humanização. Durante Outubro, membros de Extra]muros[, com o apoio da Câmara municipal e de uma empresa de construção local plantaram um carvalho, substituindo um dos postes que fisicamente definiam a oportunidade de uma cidadania imediata.

‘Paisagem Combinada’ consistiu num movimento de pessoas na paisagem do Vale de Chelas.

O projecto articula um amplo gesto espacial – paisagístico – com a disponibilidade de um conjunto de jovens do Clube Recreativo e Cultural Marvila Jovem, que se viram transformados em actores dos percursos que o artista desenhou. Nos dias de apresentação, uma bancada com quarenta lugares era mais do que indício de que havia ali um espectáculo, ela era símbolo da espectacularidade própria de todo aquele momento urbano.

Durante uma fase de estudos, esta peça esteve para ser colocada em diferentes locais, tendo sido no bairro da Prodac que se encontrou uma relação impactante em termos de escala, assim como um ambiente propício à sua preservação.

Integrada durante um mês e meio numa atmosfera idílica de aldeia, a peça funcionou simultaneamente como palco e coreto, à espera de quem se apropriasse dela para ali se exprimir. ficarão como memória do evento os idosos do Centro de Apoio Social de Lisboa e crianças em cima do estrado entoando canções populares. »

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“Os elementos móveis de uma cidade, especialmente as pessoas e as suas actividades, sao tão importantes como as suas partes físicas e imóveis. Não somos apenas observadores deste espectáculo, mas sim uma parte activa dele, participando com os outros num mesmo palco.”

Kevin Lynch, ‘A Imagem da Cidade.’

in ‘Mutations’.

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