Isolative Urbanism: an ecology of control

Friday 9th October 2009 saw the official book launch of Isolative Urbanism: an ecology of control, co-edited by Richard Brook and Nick Dunn. The book is the first published research output from the [Re_Map] unit and the essays collected together are concerned with the relationship between urban conditions and space, public and private. In particular, the book has a primary focus on how the ownership of space is demarcated, enclosed, implied and enforced. This situation is heightened and accentuated in the context of a town with a singular economic force, particularly when said force is the manufacturer of military hardware. As the essays establish a general view of their focus, they also make explicit the manner in which their area of study may be considered in the context of Barrow in Furness.

Increasingly the design of (public) space is concerned with the control of that space, its visual permeability, its surveillance and the capacity for crowd control. It is the proximity of digital and real space that is testing these realities and challenging the convention of behavioural patterns. The question of what constitutes community, networked and residual space is of concern here as are devices of appropriation, enclosure, severance, fragmentation, and cultural identification of space. With this in mind, the essays gathered here seek to address the various mechanisms of control within contemporary urban conditions in relation to three key areas of discourse: Policy, Utopia and Globalisation.

Reactive policy development, that attempts to define spatial configurations and legislate for functions within designated systems, is instrumental in the negotiation of boundaries between physical and socio-economic territories. The first section of this book therefore concerns itself with the future development of policy, typically establishing a framework within which the extremities of political governance can be tested in relation to various scenarios. The question of what may constitute the future of urbanism is often inseparable from the concept of utopia, against which the radical reorganisations of extant conditions are investigated and evaluated. This builds upon a basis of policy and as such the second section of this book relates to research wherein the focus is to apply idealised regulatory systems to analyse emergent or enhanced strategies for urban space. Beyond these immediate contextual relationships are the connections to a wider environment whether physical, economic or social. It is the identification of potentially lucrative integration with a globalised market, and the corresponding repositioning of Barrow-in-Furness in relation to this, that underpins the third and final section of the book. The generation and adaptation of new and existing industries that may assure the future of the town is developed through a range of research methods and synthesised to address the problems of isolative urbanism.

The City and the Control of Space

The authors were invited to present at the international conference, Metropolitan Desires: Cultural Reconfigurations of the European City Space, in Manchester, UK on 8th September. The paper, ‘The City and the Control of Space’, discusses the relationship between the city and space [public and private]. More specifically, it focuses on how the city and ownership of space is demarcated, enclosed and implied. The roles of governance and security upon civic, urban and personal space call into question the true nature of that which we consider public. Frequently the design of public space is concerned with the control of that space, rather than its appropriation, [de-re-mis]use and legitimate occupation. Increasingly it is the proximity of digital and real space that is testing these realities and challenging the convention of behavioural patterns established incrementally by the accumulation of policy and technological change during the last 20 years. The question of what constitutes community, networked and residual space is of concern here as are devices of appropriation, enclosure, severance, fragmentation, and cultural identification of space.

 

 

the everyday

Manchester bore witness to a procession of the everyday, and the not so, on Sunday 5th July 2009. Jeremy Deller’s Procession as part of the Manchester International Festival drew together specialist interest groups who represent parts of the diversity of this and any other city. The parade exposed networks of middle aged people in technical fabrics (ramblers) and young men perfumed by petrol and hair gel (boy racers), it celebrated the mundane (valerie’s cafe) and championed the ordinary (chipshops). 

interstice and residue

The C20 art and social theory concerning ‘the everyday’ precedes and overtly informs the architectural fascination with space now defined as ‘interstitial’ or ‘residual’. Lefebvre, Lyotard, Ruscha, Smithson and Baldessari all played their part in exposing the mundane and banal and subsequently the specifics of the spatial orders of capitalism.

Niche space, leftover space and blurred territory are all by-products of urban policy and processes; motorway junctions are particularly explicit providers of well defined residue, space without programme. Below is a copy of an article from CTRL_ALT_DELETE, a small fanzine out of Sheffield, by the author of Autotoxicity. The piece, M1 – part one (Hostile Environments) is about living in the space carved out by the motorway junction where the A1(M) meets the M18.

Business, science and office parks at the periphery have their own brand of broad delineating fields of thorny soft landscape gently interspersed by mesh fencing, vast tracts of this boundary condition consume our edge cities as a mediator between security and greenspace policy.

Recently, Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates project has been brought to the authors’ attention from a host of different sources. He bought up 15 plots that were remnants of land deals, the carving up of larger sites or slicing through sites with pieces of municipal infrastructure. These were usually pieces of land that would be considered useless in development terms, but clearly the process of their creation fascinated Matta-Clark. The City of New York auctioned them for apporximately $35.00 each. GM-C only had the opportunity to document the sites through assembly of the title deeds and a physical and photogrpahic survey, before moving on to alternative projects. This is said to be symptomatic of the man who lived out his art, acting as quickly as he was thinking and sometimes thinking and acting before he had concluded his thoughts! The work was uncovered by GM-C’s wife after his death and caused something of a stir amongst those who had already selectively categorised and packaged the artist as “the chap who cuts holes in buildings”. This work challenges the notion of the grid as organising device, indeed almost celebrates its ambivalence, it usurps the architectural ideal of the grid as a rationalisation of space and presents its irrationality upon its confluence with policy. Pamela Lee discusses this work, with others, in Chapter 2 of Object to be Destroyed. The work was re-investigated in 2003 by the Odd Lots project shown at the Queens Museum of Art and White Colmuns.

Video stills from a 1975 video by Jaime Davidovick with Gordon Matta-Clark shot on site during the project.

debranding the city

During a recent research trip to New York the authors were made aware of a project which sought to reclaim some of the visual public domain. On 25 April 2009, 30 participants whitewashed nearly 120 street level billboards in broad daylight. These were subsequently used as blank canvases for artists and members of the public to produce public rather than corporate messages. In total the advertisements covered approximately 29,450 square feet of the public environment.  The map below illustrates the  illegal or unpermitted NPA City Outdoor locations located in Lower Manhattan. The question of what constitutes spatial demarcation and legal activity is further raised by this type of intervention.

These are the results:
-Yellow locations were were not a part of this project
-Blue dots indicate locations that were painted white
-Red dots indicate locations that recieved artwork

More images of the individual works can be found here.

comparing utopias

The 49 Cities exhibithion at Storefront Gallery for Art and Architecture, New York, seeks to provide a comparitive datascape for unrealised urbanism. The proposal, born out of Work AC’s research seminar at Princeton University concerned with ‘eco-urbanism’, began as one that considered the contemporary city, but rapidly acknowledged the role of the unbuilt utopian models on modern urban form; the work of Ebeneezer Howard, le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright perhaps most influential in this regard.

Using a standardised method of representation, the exhibition and catalogue convey with great visual acuity and clarity the characteristics of each model city. The built area, density, greenspace and infrastructure are all considered in their component parts and presented in a tabular form alongside the diagrammed plans of the respective cities. The back of the publication holds bar charts wherein the values of these parameters are overtly comparable. An incredibly simple idea, very well controlled and executed with consistency.

The book may be purchased here. There is also a 20 page PDF sample for free at the same address.

Site plan for Noahbabel. Coastal Waters, 1969 (Paolo Soleri). Image from Storefront. Copyright Work AC

Site plan for Tokyo Bay. Tokyo, 1960 (Kenzo Tange). Image from Storefront. Copyright Work AC

mapping disease

Prior to an April 2009 research trip to the US, the authors were marginally concerned over the outbreak of swine flu in Queens, New York. The authors also have associates in Mexico.

The speed with which we can now record and share global data at simple and accessible level is historically unparalleled, and this recent possible pandemic has brought this fact into focus, perhaps more clearly than ever before.

Live update of swine flu cases across the globe. Image from google maps

freeway amour / motorway love

A recent visit to Seattle, Washington left the author with some serious early morning syndrome as he struggled to adjust to Pacific time. With internet access this time proved invaluable in terms of researching a days activity. A particular fascination with the interstitial space beneath freeways had emerged that week as the US has much more in the way of aerial roads. Trawling the internet for Seattle freeway information brought to light this amazing shot by Matt Finnish on Flickr.

It is part of a set, one of them has the intriguing tag line “offramp with no destination in Seattle’s Montlake area“. This statement brought to mind the ’stubs’ of junctions planned for Mancunian Way [A635(M)]  Photos here. A googlemaps search and subsequent examination of the satellite images revealed a most surprising piece of public intervention.

The date of available satellite imagery online is always questionable, just look at your own city and try and find buildings that you know have been recently constructed. The idea of making messages large enough to be seen from aircraft is not a new one either. Commercially, just near to Manchester Airport, the offices of the Renold Chain company bore their name from 1954. The building itself was an RIBA award winner by Cruickshank and Seward. There are undoubtedly numerous examples of the same commercial use globally. The idea has even perpetuated grafitti culture, Steve Powers, in his book The Art of Getting Over first brought to the author’s attention the 350 foot long piece by Saber at LAX. The story was further illuminated by Saber himself unpon the publication of Mad Society. This however appeared to be a different event, one of an appreciation of a surface and its visibility without regard for publicity or infamy, apparently an uncontrolled expression of deisre and a sound local knowlegde of available tarmac.

Renold Chain Company offices (1954) seen from above in the 1970s. Image from Cruickshank and Seward archive.

Saber, LA River, visible on approach to LAX. Image from Streetbombing.

A visit to the site was definitely in order to record this strange intervention and to see if time, or the authorities, had eroded the marks to the point they were no longer visible. The weather was typically Mancunian (that fine rain that soaks you through) and the exploration unusually rewarding.

Date stone of incomplete freeway works.

Access ramp with temporary (permanent) concrete barriers in place.

Words; you can make out ‘GINA’

Big heart

The walk back revealed a good piece of adaptation by the local skateboarders who had fashioned a ramp, using minimal material, to the rear of the concrete barrier.

Probably one for the Temporary Services crew.

Upon return an internet search revealed local press had picked up on the act of love and were asking the question ‘Who is Gina?” The comments make for an entertaining read, whilst not reaching a conclusion.

invader – NYC

Don’t need to say much here, as it has all been said. Celebrated urban infiltrator who not only invades, but also maps his moves. Here’s a few we spotted in New York.

The approach that Invader takes to the city is one that calculably measures space and aspect and responds with site specific intervention. The variables that determine scale and form are typical of the illegal artist; visibility (of piece and of artsit when installing), risk (of apprehension or injury), camouflage (contextual blending consistent with city branding), amongst others. Invader explains some of this in a FAQ type interview here.

The map is the only artefact that contains a permanent record of a point in space and time wherein the ‘connection’ between the individual pieces is visualised. Invader is not consistent in the manner of production of these cartographic records; the New York map is a pixelated version of Manhattan with the subway routes shown, Manchester, a Roman and medieval informed morphology, is described in terms of its rivers, major roads and railways. In each case the maps can describe a particular type of marginal or interstitial space in the city, be it an alcove or pediment, corner or capita.

Night ‘vader

Beige ‘vader

Displaced ‘vader?

Slump ‘vader

Low ‘vader

Blue ‘vader

Big ‘vader

Rubiks ‘vader

Negative ‘vader!?

Is this what it takes to remove a ‘vader?

nuclear fallout shelters – NYC

A recent research trip to New York revealed one particular area of city cartography that fascinates the authors and is seemingly without significant historical data with respect their record. The provision of nuclear fallout shelters for the public was a considerable undertaking in the United States during the Cold War era. Any such contingency in the UK was based upon the preservation of the few who would control governmental processes from secure underground bases with significant resources to sustain life for a determinate period.

A excerpt from mywebtimes article

In the fall of 1961, tension was ratcheting up between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Soviets were putting up the Berlin Wall and flexing their nuclear muscle with a flurry of bomb tests, the radioactive fallout from which was carried around the world by wind. In response to the warming up of the Cold War, the federal government launched the Community Fallout Shelter Program.

Under the program, a survey was done in cities across the country in which appropriate structures were designated as shelters, with the federal government providing food, sanitation, medical and radiological detection supplies. The food was to last two weeks. The shelters were not primarily intended to protect against the explosion of a nuclear bomb itself, but rather against the ensuing radioactivity, which would decrease with time.

Of interest here is the typological mapping of buildings that may subsequently ensue. The existing buildings selected were rarely modified and were chosen for their specific construction type and mass; a mapped record of these sites would presume a post-holocaust society and the new nodal points of this (thankfully non-existant) community. The author also found the same signs on the west coast of the US in a visit to Seattle, Washington.

Excerpt from wikipedia

Effective public shelters can be the middle floors of some tall buildings or parking structures, or below ground level in most buildings with more than 10 floors. The thickness of the upper floors must form an effective shield, and the windows of the sheltered area must not view fallout-covered ground that is closer than 1.5 km (1 mi).

Photographs from New York