micro-urbanism

Stephanie White

Our material future appears in many of these pages as responsive urban networks that are mapped, extended, made significant, for surely most of them right now are near-invisible. Micro-urbanism: the microdetails of living in the city. If the twentieth century was dominated by macro-urbanism, large plans, sweeping zoning and transport systems, perhaps the twenty-first, seeing where all that got us, will concentrate on a smaller scale. Burnham’s ‘Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood’ may be changed, legitimately, to ‘make no large plans; they will surely go wrong, and in spectacularly destructive ways’. We’ve done with magic and men (singular, heroic, blood up); more to the point might be standing with feet on the ground, in a specific climate, in a particular place, in a crowd, trying to survive. The starting point.

In this issue we have Murmur Wall by FORMWORKS, an LED skeleton into which one whispers wishes, hopes, desires, confessions which travel through an invisible infrastructure. Maya Prybylski maps this infrastructure as the networks that define a spatial community. Dom Cheng’s sheltering umbrellas hook together like colonies of algae the size of a city. Joseph Heathcott writes about Mexico City’s street markets, another linked-unit structure, that spread like mycelia across a diversity of urban patterns. Joanne Lam’s Hong Kong streets, resonant with memory, now resonate to water cannon and tear gas. Off the streets, protesters can be kettled, in buildings, in tunnels, the streets persist as public concourses. Maria Portnov looks more closely at streets, and finds them shambling and often unloved, certainly underdesigned. These case studies look for both the facilitators of, and the obstructions to, community, communication and the communal subsets of the city. This is micro-thinking at its finest grain, rather than macro-zoning according to broad demographics, market facilitation or traffic access. It is something finer, more particular, more intimate.

Micro-urbanism 1:

Metis, a research unit founded by Mark Dorrian and Adrian Hawker at the University of Edinburgh in 1997, focusses on the city and the complexity of its representation. In a lecture given by Dorrian at the University of Bristol, he describes the methods of Metis, and explains at some length his working processes. One of the early projects on the Metis website is Micro-Urbanism, a 2001 competition for a corner of Parliament Hill in Ottawa. The Bristol lecture is gripping; I am waiting to hear about the Ottawa project, which comes last, and he literally brushes the slides away and doesn’t say a word about it. However, the Ottawa project is the ground plane of the enormous carpet laid for Metis’ On The Surface exhibition in Aarhus and Edinburgh, so must be foundational.

Clearly too complex to describe in a website caption, the project description nonethless outlines this project’s intentions:

‘Seen from the air, Ottawa is a city marked by the co-existence of two urban/landscape phenomena: the abstract city grid that replicates equivalent spatial units, and the river whose edge produces a series of specific spatial conditions. The relationship between the three city blocks of the competition site and the highly figurative parliamentary buildings is grounded in this broader duality. Before the latter, the weave of the city grid spreads out like a textile.

This project, a hybrid programmatic proposal that incorporates cultural and governmental facilities, concerns the development of the large urban site forming the southern edge of Parliament Hill. The architectural strategy is developed from the notion that the city (and, by extension, the land beyond) might in some way be gathered up or folded onto the site, with all the density and compression that the metaphor implies. Through the topology of the folds, a new urban continuum would be established, one that draws together and rearticulates the space of the parliament and the space of the city.

In the project, the existing buildings on the site are edited in order to break down the cellular nature of the existing morphology and produce a notional texture of minor architectural elements, which are then re-inscribed within the new structure. The grain of the lot lines that extend beyond the site, striating the city fabric, is retained.’

Calvino is used to structure meta-texts which narrate certain channels through the city. With the maps and photographs that come in the competition package, Metis uses a set of mathematic operations based on the happenstance of geography and topography, so the starting point of a project is rooted in the materiality of place, which is then extrapolated into a series of registration lines that spin and fold into three-dimensional networks, out of which Metis recognises potential envelopes that could become potential volumes that might be read as potential architecture. Thisa project sets out a methodology that one can discern in subsequent projects: the projection, rotation and folding of planes, lines and dots that eventually return to the in situ ground plane. Points of intersection become charged, the starting point for design in a volumetric universe. And, subsequentially it is driven by narration as an obligation and an ordering factor.

In a recent essay by Dorrian on paper-making from hemp as described in ‘The Praise of Hemp-Seed’ by the Jacobean poet John Taylor, he discusses how paper was a fluid amalgam of the discarded materials of society from high to low, democratised by the mashing of these fibres, floating them in water which then drains away, leaving a sheet of the unrecognisable ‘Linnen of some Countesse or some Queen’, Mix’d with the rags of some baud, theefe, or whore’. Taylor thinks of the afterlife of such materials; ghosts that persist in the very sheets of paper used to write both revolutionary manifestos and biblical texts — subversion inherent in the very process of making. www.drawingmatter.org/sets/drawing-week/liquid-paper/

Knowing Ottawa as we do, Metis’s folding of the city’s patchwork of urban experiments throughout its 200-year built history subverts the hierarchies of State over City, Victorian Gothic over Bytown Indifferent, buildings as monuments over early twentieth century planning grids and late twentieth century zoning. Nothing is distinct anymore, rather it is indecipherably mixed. Remove hierarchies of importance and fabric loosens, tears, becomes shoddy and can be re-woven. It is the re-weaving of any city that is so difficult: every project we do is hemmed in by history and tradition, covenants, by-laws and restrictions, within which we produce architectural objects that struggle to wrest relevance from an implacable site plan.

Here, fragments – the edge of a building, Chateau Laurier perhaps, might occur in drawing next to a wall of a suburban Superstore, or a corner of an Edwardina apartment on Metcalfe, or a slice of Victoria Island, part of the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe people. I’m being overly literal here to make a point: Metis’s drawing processes mash everything into fibres, as happens with paper-making, which become fluid in their distress and settle in new configurations. Channels of this new material are let into the existing city, slicing through the competition site where they develop their materiality into program. A section is formed, a plan is made, spaces are found. How to give one ‘cultural and governmental’ complex an urban genealogy that means something? How to talk about this city, this place, this country, in one small, bureaucratically-chosen site and program? Micro-urbanism makes no large plans, rather it assembles fragmentary connections and folds them onto the site. Metis projects approach the mathematically-based complexity of Ottoman architecture. At the same time, the work articulates a desire for narratives as organising principles for a micro-urbanism that gives meaning to every site, every building, every street corner that sit in a larger, historic and physical context.

above, Ottawa, strips and texts; below, model of the resultant architecture

courtesy of Metis

Micro-urban democratisation, access and complexity are an antidote to the rigidity of macro-urban zoning. It is little wonder that Metis’s most seductive projects occur in ancient cities, already complex and historically accessible: Cabinet of the City starts by superimposing the Nolli Plan onto a satellite-scanned present slice of Rome. Ottawa was a much harder task. Calvino’s Invisible Cities had to come to the rescue.

micro-urbanism 2

The tianquis of Mexico City described by Joseph Heathcott – long straggling lines of tarps and aluminum poles, are not unlike the channels that Metis wishes to cut through a city: under each tarp is a rich, complex, colourful life of barter and trade, transaction and obligation, things to sell and things to buy. Each tarp sits in front of a formal storefront, or apartment building, or house, or a highway; people are local, rural, urban, honest, criminal; they have life histories that bring them to this particular tarped table to meet face to face another life history. What is the infrastructure that allows this? In the tanquis it is minimal – tradition and a prefactorial blind-eye. In Metis microurbanism it is notional – a way to find a social complexity where laws and tradition prevent it.

micro-urbanism 3

Hong Kong and the indistinct laws of the public realm in the acme of the latecapitalist city. For Joanne Lam’s Hong Kong, decolonised in 1997 and a minute later recolonised with a vague promise of a fifty-year transition to authoritarian rule, the breaking of this promise has been enacted in the public realm, under duress, fragile and contestable. Micro-urbanism, inherently subversive and anti-authoritarian, intimate and communal, at first appears to be absent. Yet, we have long known about the Sunday meetings of the city’s Filipina nannies and domestic workers on the shaded plazas of the banking disrict; this magazine itself has published photo-essays of tower roof informal housing, of night-time dice and card games set up on sidewalks under the flare of streetlights. There is an insistence on an informal street life that is carried, through emigration, to major cities of North America and Europe where there are still historic Chinese communities in the downtown cores. In Calgary, Canada’s possibly newest and most arid high rise city centre, there is an old and resident Chinese population that uses the city, inside and outside office hours, for everyday life — the kind of intergenerational population city planners strive, but fail, to introduce through downtown condo towers. There is a narrative here, not manufactured or borrowed, that is deeply cultural and deeply allied with the shape of the developed city. I would hazard that there is a strength to such a narrative that gives strength to the pro-democracy protest movement that is enacted in the streets of Hong Kong: the streets are theirs.

macro-urbanism 1

Calgary’s corporate PPOS-lined streets are not mine. This is the most extreme version of zoning, access and exclusion. ‘Who owns the public realm’ is a question that returns regularly to the pages of On Site review. Maria Portnov asks, ‘If we want women to feel safe walking in urban surroundings it does not suffice to add lighting, just as a pink laptop is not genderoriented, just lazy.’ It is the coarse grain of stereotypes that characterises macro-urbanism; boundaries are transgressed simply by being the wrong kind of citizen in the wrong place at the wrong time. One would hope that the future city will be more fluid, more forgiving of difference.

macro-urbanism 2

On May 21, 2019, the indefatigable Yann Ricordel-Healy suggested an essay for this issue: «I would be greatly interested to write on Nôtre-Dame’s destruction and the French debate after Emmanuel Macron’s urging to rebuild it ‘plus belle encore’ in only five years! It can be correlated to the recent reception of an advocacy for accelerationism, principally supported in France by philosopher Laurent de Sutter, and an ‘intelligentsia’ originated from what one could call a ‘scientist-leftist french tradition’.» Yann didn’t write this essay as a screenplay intervened and he was trying to find Laurent Sutter’s La petite bédéthèque des savoirs 10, Histoire de la prostitution: de Babylone a nos jours.

Macron’s accelerated building program has run into a very material set of issues. The 250 tonnes of melted lead roofing which ran between the cobbles, under the ground and produced lead dust blowing through Paris, has made the site toxic. Water blasted from firehoses saturated Nôtre-Dame’s stone columns which, on drying out, have become structurally compromised. The whole site is too dangerous to work in. One year in, the rebuilding has not yet begun. Les gilets jaunes are obstructing the transfer of budgetary funds, needed to advance transitions to automation, AI, unfettered technology and market forces, from the austerity that dismantles social programs, cuts pensions and raises taxes. A basic tenet of accelerationism is that one accelerates capitalist processes until either they explode, ushering in radical change, or they succeed, and world problems are solved.

With progress itself in question as an operative principle that allows rapid exploitation of underdeveloped theories, technologies and ideologies that bring us ultimately to the climate crisis, conservation emerges as a kind of resistance, parallel to George Monbiot’s ‘political rewilding as an antidote to demagoguery’. 4 The apartheids of macro-urbanism are a kind of demagoguery: something we feel powerless to even query.

Micro-urbanism, whether that proposed by Metis or the materially conservative nature of micro-urbanism – the ‘make no large plans’ aspect – is a deceleration, a fragmentary evaluation of place, a turning away from automatic growth, a folding-in on itself. We are, like it or not, in a world of accelerating speed; we are, as slow and fairly obdurate human bodies, mostly being swept out of the way and left behind. Material resistance might be our unwitting anchor.

Stephanie White is the editor of On Site review.