life in the margins

The social peripheries of urban life and the resultant connections and networks of individuals and groups through various cultural proximities suggests a complexity of spatio-temporal relationships woven through the urban fabric of cities. This notion formed the basis for the research paper ‘Living on the edge: cultural proximities, social peripheries and spatial margins’ presented by the authors at the recent Architectural Humanities Research Association Annual Conference 2011: Peripheries, held at Queen’s University, Belfast, 27-29 October.  The paper expanded on the use of films as mapping devices to provide legibility or disclosure of the contemporary urban landscape, complementary to the ‘imageability’ that Kevin Lynch sought to identify in his early research on understanding cities, by contributing to our knowledge of cultural proximities interwoven with the appropriation of residual urban space. Furthermore, films were positioned to have the capacity to render the city as a narrative in a reflexive relationship concerned with spatial sequence, editing, revelation and event. Of particular significance here was the value of films as diagnostic instruments that afford us the opportunity to describe and understand urban conditions and spatio-temporal relations through the experience of them. Indeed, the ability of the camera to move through space and place facilitates the articulation of these architectures, allowing us to perceive the lived experience of the films in a visually rich manner, compressing the complexity and density of information into an understandable sequence.

Gated communities, surveillance culture and spatial tensions, La Zona, Rodrigo Plá, 2007

the image of the urban landscape

The imaging and imagined urban landscape, its processing and representation is fundamental to geographies of the city. From Bill Bundy to Kevin Lynch, from Otto Neurath to James Corner, reimagined and processed versions of urbanity are used by geographers, architects, urbanists, statisticians and artists to interpret and afford legibility to the complex edifice that is ‘the city’. It was with notions such as these in mind that the authors recently chaired a session ‘[Re_Map]: the image of the urban landscape’ at the Royal Geographical Society Annual International Conference 2011: The Geographical Imagination, held at the Royal Geographical Society, London, 31 August – 2 September.  The session sought to expose the theory, the practice and the methodologies of mapping and representation techniques across a range of disciplines to explore the inherent proximities and tensions in relation to vocabulary, terminology and realisation. The cross-disciplinary session covered a considerable breadth of topics and depth of issues and commonalities in relation to: urbanism, mapping, representation, narrative and notation. Crucially, the session enabled the perceptible gap in the research and practice of geography, architecture, art and computational design to be discussed and further explored in relation to urban space. Commencing the session with their paper, ‘Data Mining: Abstract Urban Topographies’, the authors opened up the territory and debate by questioning the role of data mapping as part of architectural and urban design strategies and offering insights into its application as a means to develop instrumentality within the increasingly complex scenarios of contemporary urbanism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Space Intelligence Agency – Automatic Urbanism, 2009.

urban maps

Ashgate have just published ‘Urban Maps: Instruments of Narrative and Interpretation in the City’ by Richard Brook and Nick Dunn. Their book concerns the city and the ‘devices’ that define the urban environment by their presence, representation or interpretation. The texts offer an interdisciplinary discourse and critique of the complex systems, artifacts, interventions and evidences that can inform our understanding of urban territories; on surfaces, in the margins or within voids. The diverse media of arts practices as well as commercial branding are used to explore narratives that reveal latent characteristics of urban situations that conventional architectural inquiry is unable to do.

The subjects covered are presented within a wider framework of urban theory into which are embedded case study examples that outline the practices, processes and interpretations of each theme. The chapters provide a contemporary reading of urban socio-cultural conditions using ‘mapping’ as a lens to explore and communicate the social phenomena and lived experiences of the dynamic and temporal city. Mapping is developed as a form of critical instrumentality to expose, record and contribute to the understanding of the singular essences of space, place and networks by thematic, cognitive and experiential modes of investigation.

‘Urban Maps provides an interesting new way of “minding the gap” between the contemporary urban condition and architectural design. Calling on familiar and well-loved theoretical friends like Walter Benjamin, but also bringing in exciting new contenders such Thomas de Quincey, the narrators interrogate an interdisciplinary array of projects from graffiti to branded environments. The map is posited as a central element of design behaviour, and Brook and Dunn argue convincingly that to address today’s pressing urban issues architecture must move outside its normal frames of reference, and engage with a new vocabulary and conceptual framework comprising images, networks, films, marks and objects.’

– Jane Rendell, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, UK, author of The Pursuit of Pleasure (2001), Art and Architecture (2006), Site-Writing (2010)

 

‘Fifty years ago, Kevin Lynch offered us a classical reading of “the image of the city” based on a waning ideal of clear built landmarks and distinct urban signs. Now, through inspired insights and an in-depth inquiry into a vast array of contemporary urban practices, the authors of Urban Maps reveal us how the complex narratives currently converging in the appropriation and redefinition of an eroded urban space require a totally revamped cognitive mapping… From the readings of cinema to the interventions of street art, from the markings of graffiti to the identities of brandscapes, and from the wanderings of contemporary art to the fictional drives of theory, architecture is confronted with the need to review the cartography of its references when facing the ascendancy of the urban condition – and the prominence of new networked, information augmented realities – as substituting for previous conceptions of the city.’

– Pedro Gadanho, architect, curator and writer, Lisbon, Portugal

Infrastructural Urbanism

The question of the future of urban landscapes with regard to their transformation as the physical basis of sociability is currently frequently illustrated as declining in favour of dematerialized, delocalised, ever-present digital systems and networks is timely. However, this may not actually be as recent a phenomenon as it may first seem, as Melvin Webber described in his highly influential article. ‘The Urban Place and the Nonplace Urban Realm’ of 1964, urban life and urban experience were always synonymous with a partial dissociation from the constraints of reality. This forms the basis for the recent research paper the authors presented at Spaces and Flows: An International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies, held  at the University of California, Los Angeles, 4-5 December. The paper, ‘Infrastructural Urbanism: Ecologies and Technologies of Multi-layered Landscapes’ proposed the development of ‘digital ecologies’ through their use of digital infrastructures to afford meaningful relationships with respect to urban transformation. A key aspect of the position presented was in the use of such technology to develop instrumentality with which to facilitate ‘thick’ descriptions of digital networks and communities and contribute to our understanding of their spatiality. This research therefore sought to describe and explain this transformation and propose theoretical material to address some of the attendant issues.

Mapping Interstices

The authors were recently invited to present a special preview of material from their forthcoming book, ‘Urban Maps: instruments of narrative and interpretation in the city’ (Ashgate, 2011) at the inaugural Once Upon A Place: Haunted Houses & Imaginary Cities, 1st International Conference on Architecture and Fiction, in Lisbon, 12-14 October. The paper, ‘Mapping Interstices: understanding urban conditions through the lived experience of societal margins in contemporary film’, explores the friction between the city planned and the city as a living superorganism. Whilst contemporary cityscapes may often be presented from above, the spatial organization and fragments are actually consumed from below i.e. the lived experience of urban conditions. This contrast between the relatively static order of the system and the high degree of mobility and temporality of life on the streets reminds us of the duality of cities and their ability to shift between the objective and the subjective. It is here that we may identify the narrative nature of these conditions with particular reference to moving images that afford exploration and understanding of urban space and event as filmic mappings. In this context films are interpretative tools that are typically concerned with spatial sequence, editing and revelation within the city. They use allegory, narrative and structural patterns to unfold ideas and tell a story. Space can even be used as a character, acting independently within the narrative itself and as such films may map a version of the city that is manifest of networks, urban subtexts and occasional nodal collision. The contribution to our understanding of the physical and time-based characteristics of the urban landscape that films offer was discussed to further equip and enhance our strategies for responding to it.

navigating data/cityscapes

The authors were invited to present at the international conference, Royal Geographical Society Annual International Conference 2010: Confronting the Challenges of the Post-Crisis Global Economy and Environment, in London, UK on 3rd September. The paper, ‘Digital Networks: between open source mobility and closed loop assemblages’, responds to what a number authors have referred to as the ‘network city’ via an increasing abstraction of space coupled with the continual erosion of place. This has precipitated a number of effects on social and cultural activity and respective communities, most significantly, the original nature of the public realm within the built environment as both a receptive and reflexive domain appears to now be located in digital networks that permeate contemporary life rather than physical conditions. The ubiquity of technology across our daily communication and other exchanges as a correlation of increased growth of broadband in the developed world and the global continuum facilitated by mobile phones, has become manifest in readily accessible, ever-present networks that not only challenge our ideas and experience of place but have precipitated an evolution in relationships of time and distance. In addition, these digital infrastructures afford the connectivity and mobility of communities with niche interests to be networked in an unprecedented manner. Who operates across this territory, how and why? The schism between the high degree of connectivity that permeates the digital networks versus the increasingly fragmentary nature of the physical urban condition has provided a rich geography for exploitation for artists, communities and sub-cultures who are involved in navigating this ‘inbetween landscape.’ A range of case studies were used to illustrate such negotiations and subversions of urban space and their implications for an increasingly hybridised public domain that seeks to explore digital and physical boundaries.

What is heritage? Was ist Denkmal?

This year students from Re_Map and Emergent Urbanism units participated in an international workshop in Hannover with European counterparts from TU Braunschweig, lauded by Peter Cook as producing some of the freshest new architectural talent. 10 years after Expo 2000, the students were asked to examine the state of the former Expo site and suggest possibilities for its regeneration, re-use or redistribution and examining the current state or location of the array of buildings. The site currently is vastly under occupied and many of the pavilions lie empty or derelict, though some of the more generic building types have become offices and education institutes. Many of the built objects were relocated almost immediately as the Expo concluded, though some were too permanent in their structural make-up to consider removal and too specific in their programme to provide obvious re-use scenarios. Perhaps the most renowned building of the event was the Dutch Pavilion, a vertical park, designed by MVRDV at the height of their post-FARMAX fame; it is exemplar of both permanence and specificity as the precursors to ruin.

The Dutch Pavilion was the architectural draw of the festival and the figure 2,800,000, applied at the end of the Expo, signals the number of visitors that encountered the weirdly stacked world. Perversely, the conceptual thinking behind the scheme was one concerning ‘man, nature, technology’ (the themes of the Expo and the vocal hook of Kraftwerk’s Expo2000 audio track) and symbiotic and cyclical systems; an ecology using vapour cooling, passive heating, biomass and wind generated power. The environmental contingency did not stretch to consider the post-expo landscape and the pavilion, devoid of windmills has been left to rot and vandalism since passing into private hands some years ago. The actual ownership of the site is now uncertain. The Dutch government are reported to mildly embarrassed at the scar they have inadvertently deposited on the outskirts of the city and are entering into negotiations to find a satisfactory reconfiguration of the existing condition. The rooftop restaurant shows signs of recent inhabitation by person or persons unknown – quite some address!

Working in teams in extreme weather conditions, the students spent three days analysing, recording and researching the cultural, social and political context of the site and its buildings. Fighting frostbite and visa delays the groups valiantly dedicated hours of work at the on site media-lab and developed and presented propositions based on their studies. The topic, unbeknownst to the organising parties at its inception, is a hot one in Hannover, sufficient to attract the attention of the local media and to warrant a representation of the ideas in a lecture at the Expo Plaza Festival in June 2010.

EXPO_GARDENS. A reappropriation of the international cultural flavour of the festival by the propagation and cultivation of plants indigenous to the countries that once occupied the vacant sites of the lower section of the expo site. Rather than offer a built solution, the group felt that an alternative draw to visit the relatively isolated and peripheral location would be met by the provision of botanical gardens paralleled with a commercial nursery.

GLAUBE[al]. Building on the success of The Whale as a church, this proposal assumes the global characteristics of the festival and the potential of reinstating the mothballed high speed rail link, by the development of a multi-faith park. A egalitarian landscape based on algorithmic projections of visitors, their faith, nationality would provide neutral meditation and encounter chambers for the cross pollination of faiths and ideas.

EXPO_EXPO. A gathering of all of the decaying and unloved monuments to World Expos and the kitsch replication of some that are treasured. A montage construction of assembled icons with a plethora of meaning. Are they monuments to an optimism of which we are now cynical? Are they demonstrative of a technology we now deride? Are they a spectacle or a dying dream?

DISPERSING CULTURE. After examining the array of pavilions that had been relocated either as originally intended, bought after the event or gifted, the students proposed the continued and accelerated removal and relocation of disused pavilions. The scheme was underpinned by a social agenda and the buildings were to be put to use within the city of Hannover as children’s nurseries, clinics and social centres at the expense of the authority and in the most deprived wards. The aim: to bring the world-class architecture of the expo from its desolate position on the edge of the city and give it to the people.

HYBRID CONSUMPTIVE LEISURE STRIP. Pursuing MVRDV’s formative agenda, this team examined the compression of disused pavilions and their deconstruction to provide a unique leisure landscape for a multitude of urban pastimes. Implicit in the scheme was the collision of programme and an anticipated migration between disciplines and the ‘consumption’ of leisure in an intensified experiential zone of motion and action. The area to be converted and host this amalgamation of activity was effectively the service strip of the festival site and plugs directly into the vast car parking provision that serves the adjacent, functioning, Hannover-Messe trade show centre.

CONTINENTAL TEST TRACK. Inspired by ideas floated in the WPA 2.0 competition earlier in the academic year, this team saw the reignition of an invigorated industry with specialist facilities as the key to unlocking the potential of the Expo site. Drawing on the history of Continental in Hannover and imagining the integrated growth of the German motor industry in consumer and sports arenas, a new test track with a rebranded Dutch Pavilion as its HQ would provide for all manufacturers to work with Continental in research and development at the new centre.

The full results of the workshop may be viewed online at: http://futurexpo.wordpress.com/

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

090511 goto run

This is the blog based archive of events, objects and spaces that are pertinent or of concern to the Re_Map B[Arch] at the Manchester School of Architecture. It represents the interests of Dr. Nick Dunn and Richard Brook, their travels and working diary.