Urban Stream - LIMINAL INFRASTRUCTURE

Urban Stream

LIMINAL INFRASTRUCTURE ESSAY BY FRANCOIS BLANCIAK

While the complex relationship between infrastructure and architecture has become a major theme of investigation in architectural and urban theory over the last decade, 1 the idea that the city might be considered as a piece of architecture that can be designed, whether from scratch or incrementally through a system of architectural particles, has also recently resurfaced. 2 These two seemingly opposed themes have been experimentally combined and investigated as part of the Hezlet Bequest travelling studio in Tokyo during Semester 2, 2015, through a research and design exercise that requested students to consider Tokyo’s Yamanote Line (the railroad that integrates all the city’s major train stations into a circular pattern) as architecture. To do so required to accept the line as a formal object whose physicality deliberately distinguishes an interiority from an exteriority, just as architecture does, and therefore embraces the parasitic dimension of any architectural intervention along this line. This radical stance calls into question the interplay between the notions of limits, centres, and infrastructure, not only at the local level of Tokyo — too often thought of as an urban exception — but at a global one. This essay will attempt to show how these three notions rely upon each other in urban structure, and how one of them can morph into the other over the course of time in urban settings, digging into phenomena that became perceptible during the course of the 1990s, but which in fact took their root in the mindset of the 1960s, and through which the city has become obliterated as a delimited spatial entity.

The tendency toward an abstract and deterritorialised conception of the city is not a recent phenomenon: In 1903, the German philosopher Georg Simmel wrote: “Man does not end with the limits of his body or the area comprising his immediate activity. Rather is the range of the person constituted by the sum of effects emanating from him temporally

and spatially. In the same way, a city consists of its total effects which extend beyond its immediate confines. Only this range is the city’s actual extent in which its existence is expressed.” 3 Keeping in mind this vast definition, we will try to concentrate on this notion of urban limit. In the age of deterritorialisation, where are the limits of the city? Of which nature are those limits? And if one accepts the idea that a mental city exists distinctively from a physical city: what are the relations between these two aspects?

The traditional European city formerly presented itself as a relatively simple diagram: a center protected by fortifications, behind which a canal (such as in 16th-century Bruges for example) circled the city and stressed the morphological coincidence between the urban center, its limits and infrastructure. The etymological roots of the terms at stake indicated an indissociable union between the urbs (the physical territory of the city) and the civitas (the community of citizens who live in it). The ancient notion of physical, peripheral limit of the city, the surrounding wall, separated clearly the urbs from the rus (the countryside), and the urbs constituted directly the enclosure — or reservoir — of urbanity. In this traditional scheme, the opposition between town and country coincides with the opposition urbanity/ rurality. The suburbanisation of the city that followed the industrial revolution did expand the territory of the city outside of its former boundaries, but did not fundamentally affect the bond between the traditional city and its civitas. On the contrary, it strengthened this bond without delocalising urbanity from its primary physical territory. A new order was created, “according to the traditional process of adaptation of the city to the society that lives in it. This process of bursting out of the ancient structures,” as Francoise Choay explained, “exists all through history, in proportion to the economic transformations of the societies.” 4 With

the crowding of the middle and working classes in the suburbs, a suburbanity 5 is simply established, a form of subordinate urbanity characterised by its physical dependence on the centre.

Early on in the development of the internet, in a much-debated article 6 which followed Henri Lefebvre’s concept of “explosion of the city,” 7 Choay noted that the advent of new modes of telecommunication undid the ancient solidarity between the territory of the city and its inhabitants, enforcing a “divorce” between urbs and civitas. Immersed in the urban, the city disappears as a delimited entity. This radical process of separation between the two notions of the city as a place on one hand, and the city as a system of communications on the other, had been predicated much earlier, in 1964, in a seminal essay called: “The Urban Place and the NonPlace Urban Realm.” Its author, Melvin Webber, an American sociologist and economist, described the revolutionary consequences of our now current technologies of telecommunication upon urban forms. Refuting the physical, local and institutional order of the city, his research culminated in the assertion that “the history of city growth, in essence, is the story of man’s eager search for ease of human interaction ... for it is interaction, not place, that is the essence of the city and of city life.” 8

By revoking the necessity of face-toface interaction as a sine qua non for urban life, Webber predicted more than thirty years in advance what the dramatic consequences of widespread internet use would be for the distortion of our collective mental map, within which cities can no longer exist as secluded centers of urbanity, but almost necessarily participate to the homogenisation of the urban world beyond its former boundaries, in many ways implementing what the Russian Constructivist deurbanists (such as Miliutin, Okhitovich or Leonidov) envisioned before political