What is already all too clear, however, is the fact that this impact will be the result of an even longer-term history of deliberate impoverishment and disempowerment. Haiti is routinely described as the “poorest country in the western hemisphere“. This poverty is the direct legacy of perhaps the most brutal system of colonial exploitation in world history, compounded by decades of systematic postcolonial oppression.
The noble “international community” which is currently scrambling to send its “humanitarian aid” to Haiti is largely responsible for the extent of the suffering it now aims to reduce. Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti’s people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s phrase) “from absolute misery to a dignified poverty” has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies.
Aristide’s own government (elected by some 75% of the electorate) was the latest victim of such interference, when it was overthrown by an internationally sponsored coup in 2004 that killed several thousand people and left much of the population smouldering in resentment. The UN has subsequently maintained a large and enormously expensive stabilisation and pacification force in the country.
Haiti is now a country where, according to the best available study, around 75% of the population “lives on less than $2 per day, and 56% – four and a half million people – live on less than $1 per day”. Decades of neoliberal “adjustment” and neo-imperial intervention have robbed its government of any significant capacity to invest in its people or to regulate its economy. Punitive international trade and financial arrangements ensure that such destitution and impotence will remain a structural fact of Haitian life for the foreseeable future.
It is this poverty and powerlessness that account for the full scale of the horror in Port-au-Prince today. Since the late 1970s, relentless neoliberal assault on Haiti’s agrarian economy has forced tens of thousands of small farmers into overcrowded urban slums. Although there are no reliable statistics, hundreds of thousands of Port-au-Prince residents now live in desperately sub-standard informal housing, often perched precariously on the side of deforested ravines. The selection of the people living in such places and conditions is itself no more “natural” or accidental than the extent of the injuries they have suffered.
The relationship between capital expansion and conflict is not just parasitic it is symbiotic. As Naomi Klein explains clearly in The Shock Doctrine, the phenomena of what she terms ‘disaster capitalism’ does more than respond to trauma or crisis – it actively seeks to create the conditions for it. In doing so it establishes a fertile environment for a massive transfers of wealth and privatisation under the auspices of reform. This link is entirely lost in this piece from the New York Times by David Brooks. Read it for yourself and you might imagine that the Israeli high tech economy is thriving despite the conflict not because of it. In other words Gaza forms a crucial component of the cluster in that it has become the ‘live’ laboratory in which these security technologies are tested.
“Israel now has a classic innovation cluster, a place where tech obsessives work in close proximity and feed off each other’s ideas… Tel Aviv has become one of the world’s foremost entrepreneurial hot spots. Israel has more high-tech start-ups per capita than any other nation on earth, by far. It leads the world in civilian research-and-development spending per capita.”
I wanted to thank mammoth for some thought provoking feedback regarding the relationship between the studios ambitions and the work, which are characterised as having a sort of tension where the rhetoric does not align with its imagined image. It made me wonder what this sort of rhetoric is ‘meant’ to look like, it’s a great question, one we spent incredible amounts of time thinking and talking about since it bears upon some rather touchy subjects (namely aesthetics) < see I even had to bracket it.
I guess that mammoth is surprised that some of the work evokes a particular strain of modern DNA (Constant) – well to be perfectly honest we were as well.
The first thing to discuss is the images; I should take the projects separately, the “Diversity Machine and Resilient System” takes a classical modernist diagram (the pin wheel) and uses it to create a gradient condition which grows out from around transport nodes. The second by Erik Escalante and Alina McConnochie uses parametric typological families (like Greg Lynn’s cutlery set but 8-15 storeys and inhabitable) that modulate climate and lean together to form collective clusters which are staged in discreet patches. The third project reproduced below takes the street/lane organisation of a souk and cross fertilises it with a campus style aggregation of buildings and park on top.
In each case the projects present some strategic argument about urbanism through the frame of the brief articulated as some concrete outcome which is imaged as finished or complete.
There are two ways to approach this sense of completeness; one is to say the completeness is not central to the project, i.e. the intelligence/value lies somewhere else (say in the argument about redundancy) and that the projects should just be read as codifications of design intent (this was the argument by Marcus Trimble and Brian Zulaikha on the crit), the other approach is to assert that yes they are actually proposals that are meant to look ‘exactly like this’ but then to understand that the proposal is only ever a provocation to others.
The fear of this last approach is usually entangled with a distrust of master-planning. The success or failure of master-planning is always understood as measured against the degree of implementation. But what if we understand a master-plan as only an incitement to conversation rather than the conclusion of one (a good friend had a much more eloquent way of putting this but his formulation escapes me)? In this case we acknowledge that our concrete proposals for projects that are meant to look ‘exactly-like-this’ exist in a highly contingent world whose outcome we do not control – but (and this is the important point) this does not stop us proposing them since we are fully aware that the actual project will emerge from a long drawn out process of negotiation with countless stakeholders..
The question of contingency and control that mammoth rightly brings up is critical here. I admit to having a slightly ambivalent attitude towards contingent phenomena given that my entire master’s research was on emergence. (Actually I recall Slavoj Zizek had the best example of autopoiesis, he said that Michael Hardt told him that the during the anti-globalisation protests at Porto Alegre there was a spontaneous emergence of VIP rooms. Excellent.). I won’t go into the details here but, over time, I find there something increasingly unsettling and self-reflexive about absorbing the ‘lack-of-control-to-come’ into design processes in advance as it were… as if there isn’t enough contingency in the world already. Actually I am all for autopoiesis, it just works better combined with ruthlessly tyrannical mastery.
The final thought: If the work evokes a certain moment in modernity, maybe it is because we want to resuscitate it. We are still modern and so the failed project of modernity must be repeated …one more time with feeling or as Beckett says, we must fail, fail again, fail better. Maybe what happens when modernity fails is that it develops a parasitic relationship to crisis, it feeds on it like some compulsion to repeat, a paranoid defence mechanism that must continually replay what it fears most (big plans and superblocks) while the certain future of failure gets pre-emptively absorbed into our calculations for the present.
All images showing work by TEAM DUTCH (Line Danielsen, Natalie Haydon, Gerwin Heidemann, Judith Verdult)
THE AMBIGUOUS POLITICS OF INFRASTRUCTURE
Forthcoming in the special issue on Politics in December in Architectural Review
Russia's Sudzha gas pumping station seen late Sunday, Jan. 11, 2009. Teams of EU monitors deployed Sunday at natural gas transit sites along Ukraine's vast pipeline network, but Russia appeared in no rush to restart sending gas to a freezing Europe. (AP Photo/Sergei Chuzavkov) (Sergei Chuzavkov - AP) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/13/AR2009011300285.html
On the night of December 31st 2005, hours before the New Year, negotiations between Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart over natural gas supply broke down. The next morning, 4°C and raining in Brussels, the European Union discovered what it means to be tethered to Russia via an umbilical cord of energy. At 10:00am, Russian gas giant Gazprom shut down its pipeline to the Ukraine and in the process threatened Europe’s entire supply, rendering a chronic energy dependency utterly exposed. This brazen act of infrastructural and energy warfare continues to reorganise the geopolitical landscape of the European continent to this day.
When we use the term infrastructure, we typically refer to those fixed structures that facilitate the operation of society. Bundles of cables, metro systems and energy grids form complex support networks for everything from communication and mass transit to power generation and freight. A functioning society and economy is highly dependent on its infrastructure, which is why military strategists describe infrastructure as a ‘control point’. A ‘control point’ is exactly what it sounds like; a highly prized part that allows one to dominate the whole.
As designers, our understanding of infrastructure is victim to two main mis-perceptions. Firstly, we focus on the physical artefacts – the architecturally spectacular stations, terminals and ports that glorify mobility in the era of mass tourism. In doing this, we forget the complex urban interdependencies that these systems share. Secondly, and this is not unrelated, we fail to come to terms with the political charge these objects draw from their context. After all, the political import of infrastructure does not reside in the thing itself – it is only political in so far as it is installed within a broader set of conditions.
This being the case, we need to expand our discussion beyond the confines of the individual asset and try to foreground the complex socio-technical assemblage of which the physical object forms only a single part. We might do this by re-framing the entire debate on infrastructure around the more general term – ‘access’. By extending our infrastructural remit beyond artefacts (roads, sewers, pipes) to take in all those support apparatus that sustain our life world (including biological systems) we are forced to draw the world and its natural resources into our calculations. Since, as Peter Sloterdijk suggests, when access to breathable air has entered into the realm of ‘all those things that can be put at risk’ by our technical interference, it is reasonable that we absorb the environment itself into an infrastructural category.
Second Battle of Passchendaele
Sloterdijk suggests that the 20th century began in a primal scene in Ypres, France on April 22nd 1915 when a “German gas regiment launched the first large scale operations using chlorine gas as their means of combat” (Terror from the Air, Semiotexte 2009) The ‘environment’ is invented in the trenches of the First World War. It can only be perceived when we move from a model of war that makes the enemies body a target towards a model of war that deprives them of their life world. The concept comes to life as its operation breaks down. Our idea of an environment, of a life-world that sustains us does not exist until it is jeopardised. While it is nothing but an invisible support apparatus it cannot even exist as a concept – it remains in the unperceivable realm of background phenomena.
The first attack was at 6pm. Soldiers lay on the ground, choking, frothing at the mouth, eyes bulging. By 7pm a 6 kilometre wide breach had been opened in the French Canadian front. This is the embryonic moment in the industrialisation of killing, when the direct objective of military operations shifts from targeting the body of the opponent towards the annihilation of the life bearing capacity of their world. If our atmosphere is infrastructural then perhaps one can no longer use the figure of the ‘point’ to denote the locus of control. If the location of our vulnerability is diffused, then both defence and security will be similarly distributed. The post 9-11 climate is humid with ambient anxiety.
Hiroshi Sujimoto
This raises the question as to what isn’t infrastructure. The answer to this would be to say that the property of something being infrastructural or not, does not properly belong to the object itself, it emerges through the relation said object has with other objects. If this relationship is a dependent one, in which one object relies on the other for its functioning, then we might say that the second object plays the role of infrastructure. However if the relation between the objects is characterised by autonomy – that is to say independence – then we could not say that the object operates infrastructurally.
If we take the European dependence on Russian natural gas as an example, we can see that there is nothing intrinsically infrastructural about the resource or even the pipelines. The dependencies do not belong to the objects in themselves but to a broader socio-technical assemblage. The components of this assemblage include the inertia of social practices and technologies that have developed around the use of natural gas. These historically sedimented processes secure the centrality of gas to a broad ensemble of energy driven demands such as heating, cooking, transportation and aviation. If these demands are satisfied in other ways, say through the use of alternative fuels, then the dependency is cut and the assemblage re-forms around another infrastructural support. These emergent constellations of dependency are historically conditioned, but this conditioning is open ended. There will developmental tendencies that constrain transformation – say the investment in certain technologies over long periods of time (internal combustion engines/coal power stations etc) but given the right sort of duration even these hardened durabilities begin to appear fluid. Witness the huge Chinese investment in solar power.
Beyond expansion of those things we count as infrastructure (or not), the conversation about infrastructure must be framed so as to highlight the feedback between different systems. Infrastructure always exists in an entangled web of changing relations; climate can affect mobility, mobility can affect exchange of information, exchange of information affects economies and creativity. Further, when technologies are upgraded and dependencies shift, the network’s optimisation, fragility, robustness or resilience to shock shifts too. This dynamic terrain contingently modulates mobility as well as access to it – herein resides the political ambiguity. For it is in the ‘structuring of access’ – that is, in either its affordance or withdrawal that we begin to feel the political consequences of making decisions that divide. Access ‘for all‘ is always a mystification, a soothing abstraction sung to assuage the anxiety caused by inequality.
Caracas_thanks to Eduardo Kairuz for pointing me to these images
Caracas_thanks to Eduardo Kairuz for pointing me to these images
Since the political economy of infrastructure is shaped by complex regulatory and financial structures and because its effect on socio-economic dynamics can be so profound, it necessitates a conversation across disciplinary boundaries. In order to get any traction on this dense matrix of issues, first we need to structure an opportunity for the right sort of conversation to take place. The tendency of academics to fan out into increasingly narrow and specialised cul-de-sacs of knowledge has leeched both the relevance and consequence of any research with ambition to transcend the limited confines of peer-review. This is the impetus behind the Master of Advanced Architecture; Urban Design at the University of Technology Sydney. The MAA UD was established to provide a forum for experimental research on complex urban environments. It is appropriate that this forum is hosted in a design school – architects and urban designers are uniquely placed to sponsor these conversations since they think spatially and understand how to work across different scales. This being the case, the MAA UD is organised around contemporary challenges posed by urbanisation. The particularity of these problems draws the specific expertise of different disciplines around them.
This year’s studio began with a seemingly innocent question: what if we could catch a train from Beirut to Tel Aviv? The simplicity of the questions belies its potential to refuse a certain debate, to move beyond the endless road maps, deadlocks and impotent initiatives that plague the region. Lebanon is a positive model of a failed state. Like a broken mirror, its capital Beirut reflects the seemingly permanent state of political impasse with a series of spatial ones. It is an unresolved city for an unresolved region. Its urban fabric is a patchwork of internally cohesive zones that meet in discontinuous seams where scarification and underdevelopment rub up against petrodollars and hedonism. The site for the project is the extension to the Beirut Central District. This piece of reclaimed land that juts out into the sea is filled with the exhumed remains of war, architecture as landfill for more architecture, like a closed metabolic loop at the scale of an entire city – the urban environment consumes itself.
The brief for the studio arrived from Paris on 13 July 2008 when French President Nicolas Sarkozy proposed an economic and political union of the littoral nations of the Mediterranean Sea along the lines of the EU – including the suggestion of a coastal high speed rail (HSR) line. This ambitious infrastructure network could link the Maghreb to the Levant and the Aegean coast while continuing through the Balkans to southern Europe and the Iberian Peninsula, thus forming a single continuous loop encircling the Mediterranean basin from the Bosporus to Gibraltar.
Even bearing in mind Sarkozy’s geopolitical ambition and nostalgia for empire – the idea of a Mediterranean Union is a startling one in that it could connect twenty one separate states, four time zones, seven major seas and integrate the economies of Asia, Africa and Europe. The combined population of the littoral states is half a billion people. We began by researching the distribution of various forms of infrastructure around the basin which confirmed the extreme unevenness of development.
A HSR line running along the Mediterranean littoral is a seemingly impossible idea based in visionary assumptions. After all, it would need to pass through a region mired by instability and fractured by impenetrable borders. Functioning like a conveyor at the scale of continents, it would redistribute flows of people, warping the space-time fabric of an entire region – linking long disputed territories and as yet unformed nations. It would string together a seemingly impossible series of names: Gaza, Barcelona, Beirut, Haifa, Tel Aviv, Cairo. In doing so it would open a conduit between the differential pressures of North Africa and Europe – all this in the context of EU policy that increasingly conceives of Southern Europe as a bulwark against refugees.
Photo: Olivier Jobard
The political question we asked ourselves is the following one: what are the emancipatory potentials of infrastructure?
This question takes place in the context of the extreme disparities between north and south, between developed and undeveloped. As head of urban development at Solidere, Angus Gavin recently noted in regards to the Middle East (though the comments are also applicable to the developing world) we face two possible scenarios. The optimistic scenario is that we begin to see more economic growth, a stabilisation of the birth rate, the development of a vibrant commercial and creative culture, better access to resources, a broader distribution of wealth, job creation and the formation of a dynamic yet cohesive civil society.
The pessimistic scenario is economic stagnation, accelerated population growth, lack of job creation, concentration of wealth and social stress leading to increased conflict, violence and finally extremism.
Critic Adam Jasper takes a more eschatological view. Why should western liberalism be understood as the only possible precursor to social prosperity? He asks; “What would a Saudi utopia look like, one that is not directed to a western audience? “ In the Occupied Territories, a rampant birth rate might suggest that the only weapons left are demographic ones. Similarly, the Israeli high-tech security economy suggests that an intimate relation between violence and prosperity is not only possible but desirable. Gaza as innovation environment? [see previous post]
Whether horrific to liberal sensitivity or otherwise, the city is the arena for the contest between all these possibilities -. In this contest, infrastructure forms an ambiguous weapon. It is ambiguous because both in its procurement and its effect it is highly dependent on the assemblage in which it is installed. If we are to understand infrastructure as the structuring of access, then some very simple questions immediately arise: access for whom, to what and by what means?
These general questions repeat themselves in countless specific forms: Can a private bus operator be sued for violating civil rights if it fails to service poorer neighbourhoods as happened in Los Angeles in 1996? How does a marketing company in Dubai make public transport appealing to middle class users and not just migrant workers? Why does an Israeli mobile phone company force Palestinians to switch to international roaming as they pass between villages? What sort of tax breaks and wage incentives lure offshore IT companies to business parks in Chennai? Why can Sydney motorist’s wormhole their way under the congestion for an additional four dollars each way?
Every time an entire regional economy in Spain is at the mercy of an easyjet route (or when a biometric scan speeds your movement through Heathrow) we are faced with proof that the physical infrastructure (buses, trains, airports, scanners) are only one component in a much larger and more complex set of conditions that works to regulate and reorganise access. These are the contemporary political realities that we must respond to. Infrastructure depends on innumerable registers. Innovation with infrastructure thus entails being familiar with everything from PPP formats, risk management structures, revenue models and design. For finally, it is in the design, that is to say in the layout, distribution, organisation and planning of infrastructure that the complex political challenges of uneven development rise unavoidably to the surface.
In response to this scenario, this year’s studio set out to propose a master plan for the Beirut terminal of this HSR line and its associated urban fabric as a way of provoking new discussions around the idea of access.
Martin Abbott, Georgia Herbert, Clare Johnston, Joshua Lynch, Alexandra Wright
Martin Abbott, Georgia Herbert, Clare Johnston, Joshua Lynch, Alexandra Wright
‘The Diversity Machine and Resilient Network’ by Martin Abbott, Clare Johnston, Joshua Lynch, Georgia Herbert and Alexandra Wright begins with the idea that Beirut’s existing urban fabric is highly decentralised because of the impact of conflict. The immobility imposed by a divided city and 15 years of civil war led to the development of a patchwork of small neighbourhoods that are relatively autonomous with regards to the provision of most of the social infrastructure necessary for daily life. Some of the neighbourhoods studied reflect (at least in their organisation) many of the basic principles of urban sustainability currently being promoted in highly centralised cities like Sydney such as provision of necessary services within a 10 minute pedestrian radius. The result of this organisation is an urban fabric that lacks consolidation and that (from the point of view of modernist planning) lacks optimisation or efficiency. Rather than see this as a weakness however, this project argues that it is precisely the ‘redundancy’ of the distributed social infrastructure and relative autonomy of the neighbourhoods that lends the city its resilience. This thinking is further backed up by mathematical research into the properties of distributed networks by people like Duncan Watts, Eugene Thacker and Alexander Galloway who suggest that robustness is related to decentralisation.
Martin Abbott, Georgia Herbert, Clare Johnston, Joshua Lynch, Alexandra Wright
Martin Abbott, Georgia Herbert, Clare Johnston, Joshua Lynch, Alexandra Wright
Careful mapping by the students suggests that the instability of war has led to the development of an urban fabric that is able to re-organise itself around disruptions – the city has absorbed the DNA of conflict into its material organisation. Their conclusion promises to move urban discourse about infrastructure away from a focus on efficiency and optimisation towards a broad conception of sustainability and resilience in which the redundancy or slack in an urban network is seen as a positive attribute – not something to be minimised.
Erik Escalante and Alina McConnochie
The second example from the studio is a project for a high-density extension to the city by Erik Escalante-Mendoza and Alina McConnochie. They argue that much of the recent development in the Middle East is caught between excessive difference and excessive repetition. The spectacle of emblematic towers jostling for attention in Dubai makes any individual variation entirely superficial and thus unrecognisable. When it becomes the motivating force behind design, ‘individuality’ destroys the possibility of difference as such. Conversely, in the mere repetition of traditional fabric we face the opposite problem, a system that is not pliable enough to cope with the demands of high-density living or modern public transport infrastructure. Is there something possible in the space between both these models?
Since the bearing capacity of current generation public transport infrastructure is understood to imply a bandwidth of urban density of between 8 – 15 storeys, this project sets out to develop sets of related mini-tower typologies that group and nest in collective clusters. These clusters are organised around larger tower types that are in turn arranged around transport nodes. These collective assemblages form a series of differentiated neighbourhoods based on the interdependence of mobility networks.
Erik Escalante and Alina McConnochie
If we take light rail as an example, the reservoir of potential users that a station can draw on increases exponentially if it is surrounded by a well-conditioned pedestrian environment (since the operation of any transport system is dependent on those factors that make it easier to access). The urban fabric and the network must therefore be considered as two intimately linked infrastructures that reciprocally determine each other. If in the context of the Middle East or any other hot dry climate, designing a cool and well-shaded space for pedestrians so affects the success or failure of transport infrastructure, then the urban fabric must be designed in terms of its potential to actualise the potential of the networks in which it is enmeshed.
Erik Escalante and Alina McConnochie
This project asks the following question: what if the manipulation of the climate in the public sphere was used to drive the formation of the building envelope from the outside in, as it were. Rather than understand the transfer of energy as it passes in and out of the interior and across the threshold of the envelope as the sole driver of design, this project proposes new forms of urban development that are designed around the passive conditioning of the pedestrian environment. If the principle of minimal negative impact currently frames issues of amenity with regards to envelope design, this project suggests that we can harness computational techniques and performance evaluation to move towards a model of maximum positive impact. In doing so we shift the debate about sustainability away from an idea of individual insulation towards one of a collective and distributed climatological infrastructure. Of course the idea of an envelope as public infrastructure is an old one – architectural elements like porticos and colonnades attest to this. What is new however is the ability to produce precise climatic effects through the collective manipulation of a high density urban fabric. In doing so, this project sets out to accomplish nothing less than a new vision for urban development organised around collective typologies and climatic manipulation.
As Alejandro Zaera-Polo points out in his essay, ‘The Politics of the Envelope’ (Volume, issue 17 – see also AR110, p44), the impact of these new technical possibilities is currently doing much more than reorganising architecture, it is reorganising politics. In order to directly drive the design of a building envelope from the point of view of its impact on the public sphere, we would firstly need to create a concrete model of collective benefit and then re-orient discourse towards it. The types of representational structures we traditionally associate with this sort of decision-making may no longer be the ones best able to deliver it. The bi-polar ideological logic of left and right is buckling under the pressure of issue-based politics; of interest groups and networks of lobbyists that temporarily assemble around what Bruno Latour describes as ‘forums’. These forums reshape parliamentary democracy around the particularity of specific events and not around general ideological categories such as labour/liberal or conservative/socialist. In leaving behind any pretence to universality these political shifts raise the question of who is allowed to participate in these forums and who is excluded. That is, they raise the question of access.
Russian gas monopoly Gazprom's employee seen in Gazprom's main control room in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2009. Russia and Ukraine hotly blamed each other Tuesday as Russia restarted natural gas supplies but little or no gas flowed toward Europe. EU officials watched in dismay and criticized both nations for their intransigence.(AP Photo/Mikhail Metzel) (Mikhail Metzel - AP) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/13/AR2009011300285.html
If politics means making decisions that divide, then nothing divides quite like the kilometres of concrete and steel that make up a freeway or rail line. By understanding infrastructure as the ‘structuring of access’ we foreground the way it unevenly redistributes opportunity (and cost) in accordance with power. As such it forms a crucible for political activity. If we take the Mediterranean Union HSR line as an example, it might just be another vector of colonial expansion into a resource rich region – a tendril of influence extending like the old ottoman rail lines or Roman viae.
The fight over infrastructural development and access to it is the fight for all the apparatus that sustain the functioning of urban life. In this power struggle, there can be no concept of innocence – least of all for architects and urban designers. If an earlier generation kept its hands clean, conscience clear and fingers crossed by casting a longing glance back to Venice, Rome and even later Las Vegas as exemplars of urbanism, a new generation is ditching nostalgic attachments and getting its hands dirty in places like Shenzhen, Johannesburg, Beirut, Caracas and Abu Dhabi. Contemporary cities throw into doubt romantic assumptions about ‘proper’ urban form; instead they become experimental sites and laboratories for the future of an increasingly urbanised planet. Like an early warning system, they emit signals about infrastructure and density – about crisis and citizenship.
Urban design must phase change, taking education with it, if it is to wrench back the agency it has lost and keep pace with the explosive urbanisation of the developing world. Unfortunately, when it comes to China or the Middle East for that matter, Australian architectural discourse seems to be dialectically constrained by blind disdain or feverish desire. If we are serious however, we need to suspend reflexive condemnation, retain our critical faculties, leave home and listen carefully The globalisation of the architectural profession has meant that architects often find themselves working in foreign and unfamiliar conditions that seem to lack the forms of social and political stability that we take for granted. The unprecedented amount of development taking place in Asia and the Middle East means that the largest growth market for architecture is also the most historically unstable. These new realities effect a mutation within the profession; it must become adept at operating in more uncertain climates and develop tactics for negotiating their complexities.
Adrian Lahoud
Course Director, Master of Advanced Architecture, Urban Design
University of Technology Sydney
Studio site visit Beirut - with thanks to Amira Solh
Final presentation University of Technology Sydney
If you live in Sydney, you are welcome to attend the student presentations for the Master of Architecture Studio run by my colleague Samantha Spurr and I at the University of Technology Sydney. This year we looked at Sarkozy’s plan for the Mediterranean Union and the impact of infrastructure on the city of Beirut. Detail are: Level 5, Faculty of Design, Architecture & Building 702-730 Harris Street, Ultimo, NSW 2007 Friday November 13th between 12pm and 5pm
Urban conflict and the spatial dynamics of innovation environments
Much of the rhetoric around creative economies in contemporary urban discourse focuses on the term ‘innovation’. The term is one of all those debased concepts that litter literature in any number of fields, not least of which in the education sector of which I am also a part. My point here is not to go into the myriad problems raised by this term such as the idea of ‘metrics’ that can quantify innovation (based on patents for example) or the spatial banality of much of what passes for its architectural or urban articulation in campus and research facilities, but to broach a more difficult and less comfortable aspect of the relation between an environment and creativity that centers on the notion of conflict. The notes that follow are just some initial thoughts prompted by a talk I gave at the Shenzhen University School of Urban Planning and Architecture last year and reading Jonathan Cook’s ‘Disappearing Palestine’ earlier this year. The presentation in Shenzhen tried to locate some of my work in regards to both conflict and creativity as such, and to make some claims for their often intimate relation in way that suspended both the moral condemnation of one and the blind enthusiasm for the other. Disappearing Palestine and some other related titles, began to account for these phenemona of conflict and creativity with regards to the ’situation in Gaza’ as they say and so some of this was also expanded on for the recent talk I gave at Red-R and ASF in London .
To start with, the categories we use to judge conflict are usually moral categories, it is good (we support it) or it is bad (we oppose it), but I want to argue that if we suspend the desire to produce immediate judgment, even if this judgment must and should return later, I think what we find is that conflict is central to the production of forms of creativity. Similarly, when I say creativity I don’t think creativity is inherently positive in any moral sense either – quite monstrous things occupy the most creative of minds. Moral categories of judgment cannot be applied to either term, more than this however, the terms cannot be separated. There is no creation of any sort without both force and resistance, which is to say that creativity emerges from conflict.
The claim I want to make – by way of an attempt at provocation – is to argue that we should not assume – as if by automatic reflex – that conflict is always be resolved. Besides being utopian, it means that we are actually misunderstandings the conditions that we find ourselves in which cooperation and not conflict is actually the exception to the rule. So my thought experiment is to try to see conflict as a mode of creative experimentation and feedback where we try to create the conditions for something to emerge, learn from the process and re-tune the conflict again in a sort of infinite experimental loop. This rather machinic view of conflict as a potentially creative condition in which the fundamental instability of the system in question must be modulated and where non-linear feedback simultaneously threatens to intensify productivity or else tear the system apart is really just a speculative attempt to re-frame some very old questions through a new set of lenses.
What we have today is a situation in Gaza in which Israel has undergone limited withdrawal. At present, Gaza is an urban prison of unprecedented proportions. The people in Gaza live in a ghetto in which Israel controls all borders, carefully limits the amount of food and medicine that is allowed in, permits no-one from Gaza the opportunity to leave, does not allow foreigners in etc.
The situation in Gaza is kept permanently on the borderline of mass starvation and disease – what Jonathan Cook has called the ‘industrialization of despair’, in which people are being subjected to a mass experiment in modulated deprivation.This experiment takes place in way so as to mainly occupy the bandwidth of conflict that I describe as ‘ambient’, as not spectacular enough to trigger the feedback loops of the world media.As an Israeli Professor has noted, “There has been no genocide here, no wholesale devastation of territory, no mass rapes, no concentration camps, no mass starvation and no systematic deportation of local residents. There has been no Kosovo or Rwanda here – the sort of situations that arouse the international community to act”, as Cook puts it again, as long as the Israeli occupation “does not too much look like the popular notion of genocide – concentration camps and butchery – Israel will be able to continue its policies unchecked.” (Jonathan Cook, Disappearing Palestine)
This careful tuning of misery is nothing more than a collective experiment on the subjugation and management of a population.
As Yossi Sarid, the former leader of the Meretz Political party in Israel said:
“Gaza is a dream laboratory for experiments on human beings, to discover the precise point when a dependent person transfers from one situation to another – when does he keep up the struggle and when does he become acclimated? Or when is the horse’s breaking point – when does it only continue to lose weight and when does it flop and breathe its last?”
Though it may well be a nightmare of gargantuan proportions for the inhabitants of Gaza, it truly is a dream for the Israeli high tech defense economy which has at its disposable, a well contained laboratory complete with live Arab population on which it can begin to test and rehearse a series of techniques, strategies and technologies which will be exported all over the world at enormous profit. To get a better sense of this industry I want to quickly note that Israeli security technologies, trialled and tested in the occupied territories are now exported across the world, this trade mainly flows to the United States in a post 9/11 security climate and in the form of knowledge and technology that helps fight the Iraqi insurgency, it has also flowed to Brazil to assist in the brutal zero-tolerance measures of the police force in Rio, they are used by the New York Police Department and of course by the home office in the United Kingdom because the British can’t get enough CCTV. All these security technologies are enabled only because of the live conditions under which they are trialled and tested.
But because these conditions consist of flexible spatial enclosures and shifting determinations of transfer and enclosure and of porosity that all seek to operate under the thresholds of western media feedback and thus international condemnation, it is critical that new skills are brought to bear on the analysis of these situations. These skills will not be the skills we associate with traditional warfare and conflict, they are the skills that can unpack the way an urban situation is used as a tactic to deprive a population of basic human dignity. They are design skills that demand spatial intelligence, but they also demand a cold heart, a cool analytical gaze and a suspension of outrage.
The post-traumatic urbanism research project is dedicated to thinking through urbanism in the aftermath of conflict via architectural practice. Architecture as a mode of spatial research works to redistribute a field of possibilities that is unique to other modes of inquiry. Certain questions can only be raised through the proposition of a design project. Architecture is a unique mode of provocation.
There is no significant development without cost, no social transformation without trauma. The problem of how to deal with urban trauma is an urgent one. The rapid transformation of cities, nations, economies and the attendant risks of political instability and environmental damage make demands on the profession that cannot be ignored. The complex question we face is how to mediate the demands of development with the fragility of the situations we find ourselves in. In this sense, the role of the architect with regards to trauma is not to prevent or heal but to assume complicity for its production, that is to act without innocence.
Through a series of workshops, starting with Berlin and Beirut in 2008, design projects will be used to test and rehearse a series of techniques and strategies in different post-traumatic urban conditions. The content of these studios will lie in their organisation as much as their object of study These workshops aim to replicate the conditions of contemporary architectural practice in the following ways: Simulating the speed of contemporary architectural production through short intensive workshops with project based outcomes, by developing urban design teams that momentarily coalesce around a project, by having team members in different cities collaborate on a single project across different time zones.
Shenzhen Studio
Ubiquitous City by Amanda Clarke
Shenzhen is a belt city stretched along the mouth of the great Pearl River. Across the region where this delta discharges into the South China Sea we find a constellation of industrial might and global finance, stretching from Guangzhou to Hong Kong. One of the busiest manufacturing and shipping areas in the world, the Pearl River Delta is a once-contained experiment in capitalism that long since migrated out of the laboratory and across the borders set out to restrain it.
“Ubiquitous city” by Amanda Clarke is an obsessive visual recording of Shenzhen. What appears at first to be a series of relatively banal yet discreet spatial scenarios reveals via its connective irrationality to be a hallucinatory panorama of fantastic proportions. Produced in obsessive detail – the cumulative effect of these carefully recorded spatial moments is to reveal something of the unrestrained explosive growth that we find in many contemporary cities from Shenzhen to Dubai. It reads more like a drug induced vision of Escher and Piranesi than a design proposal, continually distorting reality so that it can be revealed more clearly, the project demonstrates that we should never see fantasy and reality in opposition. Fantasy works to support reality, reality has fantasmatic aspects that can only be revealed by via complex distortions and subtle fabrications. Evoking the endless towers sheathed in scaffold that stretch into the haze and a sky coloured by unprecedented industrial output, this project refuses any nostalgia or sentimentality. In fact, the project almost refuses the possibility of ‘the project’ itself, by understanding quite clearly the fraught position in which UTS students in Shenzhen were placed, Clarke decides that the first project is less a projection of the architects will then a projection of the cities. This is Shenzhen left to its own considerable auto-poetic devices; the author of the project is the city itself.
Post-traumatic urbanism studio: Berlin|Beirut
Mark Wigley notes that between the twin poles of extreme formal possibility, and the crises of climate, conflict and under development, architects must ‘construct workable forms of optimism…even amongst the most pessimistic of scenarios’.
Given that there is no development or social transformation without some form of trauma, this studio sets out to question the relationship between trauma, conflict and the imperatives of development. The question of how to deal with urban trauma is urgent for all those who must begin to respond to rapid transformation of nations, economies and cities, while negotiating the ethical cost of this change. Urban trauma describes a condition where conflict has disrupted and damaged not only the physical environment and infrastructure, but also the social and cultural networks of a city. In the aftermath of instability one can try to restore and recover everything that has passed or otherwise see the post-traumatic city as a resilient space poised on the cusp on new potentialities: a strategy of critical optimism. Issues relating to conflict, trauma and its aftermath in urban areas will become increasingly pressing in the decades to come due to explosive population growth, uneven development and resource shortages. Further, these effects are felt globally, even in cities that have that have no history of political instability. Similarly, cities with long histories of urban conflict are now conceived as laboratories of spatial research, with the lessons being learnt in them now being exported across the world.
Beirut
Beirut suffered 15 long years of civil war during which the heart of the city was scraped empty by shelling, car bombs and sniper fire. The war engulfed the city until 1990 when the Taif accords brought an end to this period of hostilities. In 2006 Beirut once again shook with the sound of bombs as the Israeli Defence Force punished the city and its civilians for weeks.
This continual lack of stability produces some very interesting situations. Very little can be taken for granted; opportunism, resilience, exploitation, robustness, fragility- it is all here. It is clichéd to talk of scars in the case of Beirut, but the city is a visceral testament to the ambiguous relationship between conflict and development, more buildings were destroyed during the reconstruction then during the civil war. In this sense Beirut crystallises some very contemporary problems despite (or perhaps because of) its political uncertainty
The first stage of this student project was completed in September 2008 during a one week intensive design studio held in collaboration with students and staff from the American University of Beirut. The subject site for the project is Bachoura, a small area located on the border of the old green line that once divided east and west Beirut during the war. The site is now severed from its surrounding areas by infrastructure, the ring road and the road to Damascus, it is also located on the edge of the Beirut Central District that was redeveloped by Rafik Hariri and his construction company Solidere. The disparity between the low socioeconomic environment of Bachoura and the wealth in the Beirut Central District is marked. As such Bachoura is poised on the rim of a wave front of gentrification that is steadily expanding out from the BCD.
This project sets out to produce a diverse series of spatial typologies in the hope of better integrating the possibility of future development in Bachoura with the existing scale of development in the area. To do this, students have developed a typological matrix in which a broad ecology of spatial types is deployed to offer maximum opportunity for highly differentiated development and to lower the entry threshold into both inhabitation and business ownership.
Current Beirut typologies are taken as an already existing sedimented cultural material. This material is then subject to a series of typological manipulations in order to produce a set of variable spatial outcomes. These spatial types are then deployed according to knowledge gained during discussions with local students and site investigation to produce a range of public and semi-public open spaces that cater to the existing use patterns of the local community.
Berlin
Berlin is a city marked by its history of spatial discontinuity and by the large empty zones that lay vacant throughout the city. Without the development pressure that drives new work in other cities, the question of how to intervene begins to take on a different sense. Most of the projects produced by the studio focused on two site conditions on the edge of the Spree River. The first site was the area surrounding the O2 Arena with its expansive datum of blank paving and lack of a mediating or transitional scale between it and its neighbouring structures. The O2 Arena forecourt is also characterised by a recently removed fragment of the Berlin Wall (which it faces) in surprisingly ideological gesture that aims to assert an axial relation between the stadium and the river. The second site is a relatively well known allotment of land on the opposite bank of the river which has lay vacant for a number of years.
Berlin project by Jessica Patterson
In this project by Jessica Patterson, the wall condition that forms the only constructed edge of the vacant lot described above is thickened so as to produce a new zone within the cavity that can act as a potential site. This zone becomes occupied by a new rectilinear volume that generates a diagonal through the wall, simultaneously seeming to cross it out and enlarge it.
Apartments are arranged in elongated sequences of rooms that intertwine and overlap. The siting is rudimentary, the planning is crystalline but what at first appears as totally deadpan rewards closer inspection. It is in the multiplication of ‘other’ walls between these apartment containers where a cinematic procedure is deployed to edit and frame ones neighbour. Hands, shoes, shoulders intermingle in an endless montage shot played out between adjoining inhabitants. The wall is multiplied and folded internally until it forms a visual frame between fetishized partial objects. In this charged zone inhabited by body fragments, Patterson raises important questions about the insulating role of the interior and the extent of our tolerance for the strange proximity of the neighbour.
Berlin project by Andrew Willes
There is a minor lineage in the history of architecture that could be written about a particular conception of space as the pure potentiality of Cartesian extension. From the work of Constant Nieuwenhuys to Konrad Wachsmann and up to Superstudio and Cedric Price, the possibility of an infinitely pliable spatial armature extending to infinity in all three axes weds the determination of a space frame to the openness of the functions it might play host to. This is not so much architecture as a new foundation for subsequent action – the space frame doesn’t set out to replace the intervention – rather it sets out to replace the world in which it exists through an annihilating universality.
Andrew Willes project for Berlin imagines a type of nested 3 dimensional Penrose armature extending over a blank infrastructural zone near the O2 stadium. The product of a geometrical three way between Benoit Mandlebrot, Peter Sloterdijk, and ‘gap filler’, these fractal foams subdivide and multiply according to various readings of the site conditions. The self similarity of the structural component allows for scale to be explored through a highly recursive geometry that condenses and dissipates to produce and modulate the atmospheric conditions of the interior. This project is also unique in that though it posits a truly organic part to whole relation, the component geometries are still conceived as flexible units that can deform around the rectilinear context and adapt to its variation in scale.
Berlin project by Regina Chan, Natalie Condon, Jemma David Mcgirr
The condition of the contemporary metropolis is fundamentally discontinuous, this discontinuity operates in two registers. Firstly it marks the basic heterogeneity that pertains between nested scales of material and secondly it works to produce a series of gaps and interruptions on the horizontal plane of the city. It is to this second sense of discontinuity that this project for an island in the Spree turns to for its inspiration. Conceived as one part of an archipelago of exceptional spaces that are distributed through the city, this vacant lot of land floats free of the city and those processes that would reclaim and re-incorporate it into the cycle of urban use-value.
In producing a ruthlessly violent spatial amputation on the city, these students repeat – as design – an urban dialectic of deficit and excess that characterizes contemporary urban development. This lot has been decommissioned, extracted from the city proper so that it can be more completely delivered to the imagination.
Conclusion
What these projects all share is a clear comprehension of both the physical and intellectual terrain of an urban intervention. Rather than locate themselves in a critical space which would exist in advance of the project’s manifestation, these interventions produce a critical position by virtue of their production. In other words the projects assert a position whereby the act of intervention, the particularity of the project, its articulation and deployment create a critical space of their own. The value of the experimental project or proposition lies in its ability to redistribute those questions that are considered significant with regards to a context. ‘The project’ in its generic sense is able to articulate this redistribution in ways that are not possible through other modes of inquiry such as writing. This is the value of experimentation always operating through a concrete proposition, different types of questions will always be raised.
After an all too long interruption to transmission, caused by the combination of a technical problem and an impossible workload, we are back. The following is a text for AGENDA, the 2008 catalogue from the School of Architecture at the University of Technology Sydney.
Urbanism is a discipline in dire need of creativity and ambition. We live in the aftermath of the apparent failure of those projects that made claims for social transformation. We are told they present us with the only optimism left… the optimism of ruins. Thirty years of caution, of retreat into nostalgic notions of community, of hand wringing self effacement and false humility, thirty years of disavowed hope and inconsequential tinkering seems finally over. As urbanists new and old run home – humanist aspirations tucked between their legs –environmental crisis and explosive modernisation continue unabated. Urbanism plays perpetual catch up to Shenzhen or New Orleans (or maybe Gaza).
How do we make urbanism more intellectually robust and muscular? How can we inoculate it against sentimentality and brace it for crisis?
The contemporary urban environment is a complex mixture of many heterogeneous systems. Infrastructure for moving waste, water and telecommunications lie under the city in a knitted web of canals and pathways; overhead, a broad spectrum of electromagnetic radiation carries data on everything from traffic movement to financial transactions; populations of migrants carry forms of speech and behaviour that will mutate and replicate in the host population; fuels are spent, laws are passed, businesses open and close, all in all a staggeringly complicated and only minimally choreographed sequence of events.
Cities operate according to both physical and virtual dynamics, they are subject to moments of fragility, are able to demonstrate resilience or weakness, generating cohesive networks for communication, repair damaged fabric and accelerate economies. This infrastructure intensifies the flow of people and goods, of labour power lured by commerce or desperation or the promise of warm weather. These global movements seem to simultaneously present cities with both their greatest threat and opportunity.
[Image: David Maisel "Oblivion" Nazraeli Press 2006]
Premium brand ‘Logo Cities’ compete with each other for attention, all trying to bite into the great currents of capital and skilled work that stream across the surface of the earth whilst shielding themselves ever more ruthlessly from the accumulation of ‘human waste’. This production of desire, connectivity and flow means threats can also be shared as quickly as benefits. In this permanent state of anxiety, punctuated by emergencies – both real and imagined – the decoupling of transmission from its traditional pathways and barriers reorganises space. This mutating tissue of connectivity simply means that material is distributed much more easily in ways we are less sure of. Memetic replicators, slang, viral marketing and deadly viruses mutate, reproduce and propagate across material (and sometimes immaterial) transmission pathways. Blackberries and Ebola can go global, all it takes is one infected businessman travelling Caligula class on Qantas.
Just as viruses can start to link up host bodies along travel routes, global warming links up seemingly disconnected cities and starts to tie their fates together. Suddenly the fate of Cairo and London, Kolkata and New Orleans become enmeshed with the fates of all the other great river delta cities. Bound by their shared vulnerability to changes in sea level, these linkages are supra-territorial, they are not based in the commonalities of the nation state such as language and citizenship, nor are they the commonalities of national regions, or of ex-colonies. No, what we are seeing is something quite distinct and novel, that is the binding of fates along the lines of processes which are now increasingly out of control, a collective experiment with unknown ingredients. The single biggest paradigm of urban life is not its complexity but its entanglement. We are knotted together in a complex experiment of which we cannot know the outcome.
“The problem is that while we know how to conduct a scientific experiment in the narrow confines of a laboratory, we have no idea how to pursue collective experiments in the confusing atmosphere of a whole culture.”
”Atmosphére, Atmosphére” Bruno Latour, ‘The Weather Project’ New Tate Gallery
We live in an era of categorical promiscuity, on September 11 and during hurricane Katrina the third world penetrated the first. Amidst images of smoke clouds and debris, stagnant flood waters and bloated corpses we have learnt that cities repeat in miniature the divisions that once demarcated national boundaries.
How does a discipline adapt to a situation in which the catastrophic or the disastrous inform the general condition even if they have not yet become it, in turn, how does the exception retain its status as exception once it has been applied to the general? These insistent and paradoxical questions about the nature of the generic and the singular should form a backdrop to any speculation about the relationship between urbanism and politics.
Urbanism is a constellation of practices involved in the spatial determination of the city. These practices are in conflict and antagonistic like an unconscious pulling in different directions. Urbanism demands divergent modes of practice because the scales at which it operates demand registers of decision making that are irreconcilable to each other. Scale is not measure; rather, it names the incommensurability that pertains between qualitatively different problems. Conflict, in this sense, is central to urbanism.
Within this charged environment we can discern an infinite number of potential conceptual personae and their attendant strategies and tactics. Appropriating different conceptual personae means embracing the often schizophrenic nature of contemporary work practice. Urbanism, which cuts across so many different spatial, technical, political and cultural domains, necessitates an ability to morph between and integrate diverse registers of thinking and practice. The list of conceptual personae is potentially endless, a cast of characters that one must opportunistically appropriate. Combinations of masks, ruses and costumes that deploy any available means to effect change. Each personae articulates quite distinct approaches to the nature of spatial agency in the city. The following dialectical stage play will introduce only a few of the most common types:
The Seismographer
The seismographer compiles evidence for uncommitted acts in a trial that never arrives. A connoisseur of all things vibratory, for the seismographer no movement is too small to register, no nuance too subtle to record. Replete with modern day stethoscopes and sensors and other devices for listening in and accumulating information, the seismographer operates according to utterly non-discriminatory rules of engagement. Everything is equal-in-its-capacity-to-be-recorded. Information can be deterritorialized or dematerialized without consequence.
In what we might call an ‘emergent’ view of urbanism, the city is capable of auto(poetic)production. It is self organized, able to spontaneously generate patterns of stable behaviour without the intervention of directed authority. Authority, if there is any here, consists in tuning the already existing signals that cross the urban field. Authorship is more like a material collaboration where the city becomes a co-conspirator.
Manipulating flows of information, reservoirs of energy and material in what Gilles Deleuze and Manuel De Landa call ‘non-organic life’, this conception accords to the city the properly creative capacity of an open material system in which pattern formation or metastability is the consequence of the regular interaction of lower level components. The seismographer knows that no single author is responsible for the towers that ring Hong Kong Bay, they are yet another algorithmically tumescent consequence of capital mobility and real estate speculation, their authorship is semi-anonymous and collective and belongs to the city itself.
Similarly for the complex geometries of old towns and villages, morphogenetic development occurs through the interaction of local agents operating in a constrained environment with little overall sense or strategy. An anonymous materiality with intrinsic tendencies and extrinsic constraints, morphology is the creative resolution of a fundamental resistance or conflict. These urban forms grow from the bottom up; their baroque complexity is the emergent result of a natural material interplay.
Central to this understanding of the city is a naturalisation of capital such that certain tendencies in the urban field are understood via ecological or evolutionary metaphors. The prevalence of ecological or evolutionary metaphors in this emergent view of urban development is worth noting. Cities are beginning to be understood as having self-regulatory mechanisms, there is competition for limited resources and battles for territory, genetic material mingles, behaviours evolve and adapt and life seems to take on the appearance of a Darwinian competition for survival in which the role of the urbanist is to record and study the complex choreography of this depoliticised ecology… like a seismographer listening out for vibrations.
The emergent urbanist is only a minimally self-reflexive figure. One no longer designs the object directly, now one produces a world in which the object exists as a possibility. Wanting badly to believe in Darwin but really believing in a form of creationism. This disavowal of direct authorship seems a necessary complement to its ultimate (if obscured) reassertion. Therefore, it is highly recommended that emergent processes are best combined with ruthlessly tyrannical attempts at domination and mastery.
The insurgent
‘An IRA man in a balaclava is at the gates of heaven when St. Peter comes to him and says, “I’m afraid I can’t let you in.” “Who wants to get in?” the IRA man retorts, “You’ve got twenty minutes to get the fuck out.”
Urbanism is not reducible to data analysis or even its modulation. It is in an act, a decision that is projective. Architecture and urbanism must reserve the right to a register of decision making that is literally unjustifiable within current paradigms.
According to contemporary theorists raging from Slavoj Zizek to Alain Badiou, the post-political defines a situation in which logics of management and systems of administration replace the role of politics-proper. According to this new regime of control; consensus replaces dissent and particularity replaces universality with regards to political demands.
The realm of proper-political action is the realm of the scaffold and the guillotine. The insurgent disrupts the logical machinery of post-political thinking by demanding the impossible. Where the seismographer is highly localised and concerned with the nuance of a specific context, the insurgent demands universality. The insurgent does not provide options for the careful deviation or thoughtful modulation of an already existing state of affairs; they simply propose a new world, complete with a new heaven and a new earth. Intuition is here elevated to artful method, untroubled by inconsistencies and processual discontinuity design operates by leaps and hammer blows. The fundamental inscrutability of our decision making is retained and respected.
Whereas an emergent conception of urbanism privileges’ notions of continuity, the insurgent reserves the right to discontinuity and interruption. There are important political consequences to these different views of urbanism. An emergent conception of urban design understands that development is slow and occurs via the interaction of different agents; change rarely occurs suddenly and is usually only ever understood in retrospect. This would contrast with a winner takes all version of design where an entire politico-spatial conception of urban life is being proposed.
The insurgent takes on many varied forms, sometimes appearing as agitator sometimes appearing as court jester… but always appearing in opposition – power seems to dull revolutionary fervour.
The pragmatist
Pragmatism in urban design has come to represent nothing more than the abortion of those social ambitions described in the introduction. It is hard to think of a more debased concept. To adopt a pragmatic disposition, we are told, is to be concerned with that which is achievable to the exclusion of all else and to limit our thinking within commonly established parameters that clearly prescribe the extent of potential difference. A conservative profession imagines that the avant-garde needs more of it, the avant-garde assumes the profession has nothing else. Though both points of view use it to bludgeon the other, both positions are equally defeatist.
The definition of pragmatism says in part: “A concern for material or practical consequences”. No one is against material consequences, the question is rather; ‘what do we mean by consequence?’ For the conservative pragmatist, it is the reliability of the past as a model for the present that is consequential. For the avant-garde, it is the fantasy of the future that devalues the status of the present. One group is too obedient to tradition, the other is petrified that understanding tradition means being traditional and it goes without saying that no accusation could be worse.
Whether one chooses to unthinkingly lubricate the flow of capital or the flow of fantasy is irrelevant. Both positions are the same in that they are equally disentangled from the actual complications of the present, after all ‘the future’ is only the left wing version of the past. As with all such false ultimatums, the only response is to refuse both. The radicality of the insurgent position is haunted by the spectre of left wing political transformation that stretches all the way back to Karl Marx. It is a position that one could argue is diametrically constrained by totalitarian social mobilisation or embittered sideline commentary. Perhaps if the concept of pragmatism can be radicalised enough, it might just offer a mode of engagement that is always concerned with actualised outcomes without necessarily adhering to prefinished ideological categories.
How do we radicalise the notion of pragmatism?
…By staging the intersection of contemporary techniques and concrete realities.
The lab technician
Experimentation is a term taken from science. It is a procedure that sets out to explore a set of beliefs about the world. In science, experimentation is almost exclusively done in closed systems. Closed systems allow variables to be isolated from outside influence. This initial distinction establishes the framework within which certain materials will be admitted or not. By deciding on what is included in the experiment one makes a decision on what is important, what will be the subject focus of the experiment to the exclusion of other potential subjects? The methodology of the experiment then proceeds to produce a space in which only the minimum number of required variables are included. The experiment encloses these chosen variables in order to track their behaviour outside of the influence of that which is deemed unimportant to the experiment.
An open system is one in which the amount of material in a system is able to exchange with that systems environment. Whilst a closed system is contained with regards to its outside or environment, an open system is permeable, there is a flow or communication across the limits of the system through which material or energy may move.
As has been noted, it is the difference between swimming in a pool and swimming in an ocean.
Fundamental to thinking about any experiment in a closed space is the concept of repetition. In order for the results of an experiment in a closed system to be verifiable they must be able to be repeated. In order to transfer knowledge across different experimental domains, environmental and contextual information must be perfectly reproduced, only after the perfect repetition of the experimental space and the repetition of the results of the experiment can an outcome be considered to be verified.
The entire history of experimentation in closed system is a history of the exclusion of singularities in the name of discovering, identifying, and tracking regularities, that is repetitions.
Unfortunately for far too long we have confused the laboratory for the world. That is we have mistakenly thought that the closed laboratory can stand in for the open world. Closed laboratories operate as a buffer, preventing cascading effects outside of the experimental confines. Success was limited, but so was disaster.
Not so anymore. Globalisation means that the laboratory is now co-extensive with the planet. Just as there is no control to which we can refer or revert to, so there is no longer any outside to the experimental space, instead we are all located on the inside of the laboratory. (The messianic moment in contemporary architectural discourse would deploy the threat of impending catastrophe to simultaneously mobilize and legitimize action. One should instead propose a more sober disposition to hysterical rhetoric, simply that of experimental engagement.)
“In times past, a scientist or a philosopher of science worked in a closed site, the laboratory, where a small group of specialised experts scaled down (or scaled up) phenomena that they could repeat at will through simulations or modelling before presenting their results. Then, and only then, could they be diffused, applied, or tried out in the public sphere. We recognise here the ‘trickling down’ theory of scientific influence: from a confined centre of rational enlightenment, knowledge emerged and then slowly spread out to the rest of society. The public could choose to find out the results of the laboratory tests or remain indifferent to them, but it certainly could not add to them, dispute them, far less contribute to their elaboration. Science was an activity carried out inside the walls of the laboratory. Experiments were undergone by animals, materials, figures and software. Outside the laboratory was the realm of experience – not experiment.”
”Atmosphére, Atmosphére” Bruno Latour, ‘The Weather Project’ New Tate Gallery
When predictability is impossible and the very belief in predictability dangerous, then controlled experimentation is the only answer. To test, to propose, to study a response. Whether we like it or not we are all lab technicians, collectively experimenting on the conditions of contemporary life.
Urban Politics Now: Reimagining Democracy in the Neoliberal City.
Edited by BAVO (Gideon Boie and Matthias Pauwels),NAi Publishers, 2008
How does political change occur? Does it stutter along in a series of incremental developments, accidents and setbacks, creeping so slowly that we barely notice its happening? Or does it leap forward in a sudden rush, carrying everything along with it?
The construction of our cities and institutions can take years, decades, centuries – storming them can take hours. Urban politics might be said to operate at two speeds: the glacial and the revolutionary. Space is slow, it is built in sections over time, it accumulates and is used, it is worn, eroded and repaired -new spaces scraping into old . Events on the other hand are quick. A decade’s preparation in the contraction of an instant and though protests, riots and demonstrations all take place on a spatial stage, their appearance is fleeting and violent. After all, what are the years it took to construct the Bastille compared to the moment in which it fell?
There is an irreconcilable tension between these two types of politics. The slow activity of spatial development carries a micro-political force. It is barely detected. It is usually technical at first and only understood politically in hindsight. Evolving by accretion and the fortuitous linking up of circumstance, spatial change is intermittent. Innovation is always being filtered through the sieve of cultural expectation.
By contrast radical politics operates in time, its language is not spatial but event-based. It operates by interruption, not via continuity. But is the desire for a radical politics nothing more than a romantic longing carried in the breasts of those who harbour memories of 1968 and an under-developed reality principle? Is radical politics an impossibility? Is its impossibility precisely the point?
Urban Politics Now: Re-Imaging Democracy in the Neoliberal City is a collection of essays solicited by the Dutch urban theoretical office BAVO. The thirteen contributions from authors like Slavoj Zizek, Edward W.Soja, Neil Smith and Yannis Stavrakakis – though all taking different positions – gather round a shared sense of political impasse that they take to be characteristic of contemporary urban life. Each essay attempts to build a case against the suffocation of emancipatory urban politics under neoliberalism.
According to the editors, unless societies’ inherent antagonisms and structural conflicts can be made visible – even at the cost of the current social order – then we are no longer in the realm of politics. The post-political therefore describes a space of political operation structured by choices relating to micro-political procedures, administrative apparatuses and technocratic management. Operating wholly within the shrunken coordinates of neoliberalism, political agency is constrained to nothing more than a shadow play where decisions can only tinker with the edges of a system whose core ideological structure remains inviolable.
The ambitions of this volume are considerable: to explore the potential of an urban politics that might throw into doubt the very coordinates of the political space we have inherited. Signalled by a series of adjectives that precede the word politics, like: ‘radical’, ‘proper’, ‘true’, ‘genuine’, is an attempt to distinguish between the speed and localized effects of micro-political activity and the right to another register of political change that must hang like a guillotine over the entire system.
At the heart of this argument is an understanding of ‘genuine’ politics as discontinuous, as a fundamental rupture or interruption that works to shatter the slow movement of barely discernable political transformations as they occur via local intervention, negotiation and regulation. We can detect in the use of the adjectives described above more than a little longing or nostalgia for a winner-takes-it-all political era. Marx’s ghost hides everywhere between the lines and unfortunately any defined sense of what might actually constitute the ‘properly’ or ‘genuinely’ political remains somewhat spectral.
Despite the aspiration to produce counter strategies and get one’s hands dirty, there is little concrete evidence of either in the volume. For example, in the essay ‘False Freedom: The Construction of Space in Late Capitalism’ by Freidrich von Borries and Matthias Bottger, we find a description of the use of guerrilla marketing by Nike and Comme des Garcons. These techniques invert the traditional marketing strategies of mass visibility with stealth tactics that aim to secretly infiltrate social groups through key members and garner influential (because invisible) support.
The essay recites the – by now – well worn notion that capitalism can recuperate any resistant strategy. Given this reality, the authors present brand hacking as a potential counter strategy that is subversive (if still susceptible to recuperation by corporate marketing). If one ever needed a more telling symbol of the utter futility of the academic left one might find it here. From universal calls for mobilisation (Marxism), to particular support for specific groups (post-colonialism/feminism), to arguments over oppressive language (political correctness) and finally to replacing logos on trainers, the downgrading of ambition is staggering/funny/heartbreaking, depending on where you stand. If this is subversion – we’re screwed.
The essay falls victim to a pattern which is often repeated throughout the book, in which complex deadlocks and constraints are clearly presented for most of the essay until the need to present a counter strategy takes hold. At this point, usually a page from the end, we are left with clarion calls for justice, less consumption, better access to life’s necessities etc., as if this had never occurred to anyone. Surely getting ones hands dirty means more than hiding behind noble language. One is left hoping for some creative, lateral thinking, but by the conclusion all we find are well-meaning ambiguities.
These ‘what about the children?’ moments aim to mobilise evidence in an argument against which one can take no position. In politics this equals: fair distribution of resources, more justice, less poverty. Similarly, in the current language of urban design, who doesn’t wince at the sound of totally debased terms like creative city, competitive city, inclusive city, global city, connected city, sustainable city. But it is precisely the tacit agreement that these terms are inherently good and beyond question that makes them meaningless, let alone useful, as markers of a political position. Similarly in this volume, constant references to the late-capitalist-neoliberal-police-order become exhausting frustrations to thought and to careful decomposition of problems.
In an essay entitled: ‘Revanchist City, Revanchist Planet’, Neil Smith presents a characteristically comprehensive account of the impact of zero tolerance policing and its revanchist characteristics. Smith’s contribution is notable for exploring the global trade in techniques of control and security. One of Smith’s main examples is the revanchist tendencies in Brazil, where extremely brutal police retribution has led to the deaths of ‘as many as 9,898 people between 1999 and 2004′ (p. 35) in Brazil’s two largest cities. According to Smith, revanchism operates to define strict constraints on inclusion in the social order through both the externalisation of threat against a perceived other who must remain excluded and punished, and by a pervasive climate of anxiety directed towards those on the inside, where ‘the larger goal is a galvanisation of ontological fear and a form of social control that exceeds what the law actually allows’ (p. 37). The most compelling part of Smith’s argument is an attempt to universalise the problematics of revanchism by exploring the consistencies and regularities across different conflicts in different countries. Smith’s article is exceptional in this sense in that it is able to draw on careful research across a variety of contexts in order to link up Palestinian resistance in the occupied territories to the death squads of Rio de Janiero or the policing of Bombay. To connect the flow of security technologies between the New York Police Force, the Israeli Defence Force and the United Kingdom’s Office of Home Security is to work contrary to the demand that we only treat each case in its specificity. This careful researching and stitching together of diverse narratives indicates a promising avenue of research where much useful work remains to be done.
There are some other valuable contributions. Slavoj Zizek’s essay, ‘Some politically incorrect reflections on urban violence in Paris and New Orleans and related matters’ is an exploration of the problem of political recognition. Drawing on the work of Jacques Ranciere, Zizek’s essay accounts for the episodic examples of urban violence in modern cities by countering the standard leftist argument that these events are evidence of these communities’ lack of rights, poor employment opportunities etc. For Zizek, urban violence, as witnessed in Paris, has no content. It is not directed towards the fulfilment of a political program. It makes no demands except the demand to be recognised. By impressing itself into the minds of the broader community and entering into mass circulation via media outlets, these events make no declaration except to say ‘we exist’ – the meaning of these events lies precisely in their meaninglessness. Urban violence becomes a desperate (if impotent) acting out for awareness in the face of mechanisms whose blindness accords the people involved no recognition. In the words of Ranciere, they are the part with no part. ‘They were neither offering a solution nor constituting a movement for providing a solution; their aim was, on the contrary, to create a problem, to signal that they were a problem that cannot any longer be ignored. This is why violence was necessary’ (p. 14).
Erik Swyngedouw presents a clear and methodical case for the evaporation of dissent in contemporary urban governance. Though it falls prey to some vague clichés about in-between spaces and multiplicities in its conclusion, it works very well as a summary of thinking in the field. He argues that that whilst the city is ‘alive and thriving – at least in some of its space – the polis, conceived in the idealized Greek sense as the site for public political encounter and democratic negotiation, the spacing of (often radical) dissent and disagreement and the place where political subjectivation literally takes place, seems moribund’. The loss of this idealised possibility leaves us with a ‘neoliberal governmentality that has replaced debate, disagreement and dissensus with a series of technologies of governing that fuse around consensus, agreement and technocratic management.’
Swyngedouw clearly marks out the topography of the post-political landscape: the entrance of a managerial logic into all aspects of life, the reduction of government to administration where decision making is seen as a question of expertise and not of political position, the diffusion of governance into a host of non-state actors, the brand management of urban space, the predominance of consensual understandings of political action, the particularization of political demands, and the termination of social agendas in planning.
To what extent is this account describing strictly contemporary phenomena? Certainly the rise of technical matters of administration in contemporary governmentality have their precedents in the health and housing reforms of the nineteenth century, as does the influence of various non-state actors, foundations, lobby groups etc. Similarly, the prevalence of managerial or organisational logics can be traced back to a spatialisation of measures to do with regulation of population and mobility. What is recent however, is the conceptualisation of city governance as a practice of managing the aesthetics of investment space. In this fierce competition with other cities, city governments become curators of their own image as they coordinate aesthetic strategies in a desperate attempt to divert currents of global financial capital.
But what about the question of dissent? It is argued here that the space for genuine dissent is in some way excluded or outside our present system of government. Those who dissent are not treated as an opposition or competing claimant, they are just invisible or unnamed. In this condition the system operates internally according to a humanitarian ethics of negotiation and radicalizes its outside as evil – both gestures equally depoliticizing.
Genuine politics for Rancière would be the demand of these outsiders to be taken seriously as legitimate partners in discussion. Beyond the very specificity of their demands lies the more powerful event of being included and named as equal. By posing this struggle in aesthetic terms Rancière produces a sort of challenge to experiment with creative forms of resistance on the problem of visibility. Edward W. Soja offers us some brief clues as to what this might look like in his contribution entitled: ‘Postmetropolitan Psychasthenia: A Spatioanalysis’. In his conclusion Soja briefly describes the formation of a unique collective of previously disparate groups that were all in some way dependent on public transport in Los Angeles. “The BRU (Bus Riders Union) is not a formal labour union but rather an organisation of the ‘transport dependent’ working poor led by an innovative group of activists associated with the Labour/Community Strategy Center. In 1996, the BRU brought a lawsuit against the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) that linked civil rights to the geography of transit use in Los Angeles. It was argued that a particular class of transit-dependent bus riders were being discriminated against by the policies and investment patterns of the MTA… .” (p. 92)
The production of this coalition of transport users marshals legislation associated with discrimination to make a case for spatial justice in which questions of distribution, access and mobility are taken as evidence. The case was won and almost all of the demands of the BRU were granted, though the judgement was eventually amended to require future cases to demonstrate discriminatory intent. However, as an experiment in a new form of political representation that cuts across traditional divisions between workers and users, the BRU case is notable because it shows that producing an assembly of diverse groups – that can coalesce around a specific issue – new vectors for political affiliation can be drawn up.
As Slavoj Zizek has continually pointed out, contemporary cynicism is such that the old Marxist assumption that people will automatically act upon being presented with the truth of their predicament is wrong. We know, we just don’t care. Though one must sympathise with the ambitions of the editors in this volume – the time is ripe for ambitious urban agendas – any valuable contribution is going to have to go beyond another exhumation of capitalism’s road kill. Anything else only works to strengthen the deadlock and sense of incapacitation that the editors describe in the introduction:
By both criticising the ruling neoliberal urban order and formulating counter strategies or even a counter project, these essays subvert today’s division of labour – typical for today’s post-critical climate – between thinkers and doers, between theory and action, between those who ‘merely’ criticize from the sideline and those who make their hands dirty and ‘constructively’ work towards making a difference. The essays, on the contrary, show that now more than ever there is a need to do both, that is, to offer both a critical analysis of the ever cleverer ways in which the ruling neoliberal order instrumentalizes and domesticates the urban field and manipulates genuine values such as democracy to its own advantage, and use this analysis as the backdrop for suggesting a way out of the current deadlock. (intro)
Simply signposting the (countless) sins of neo-liberalism will do little to draw near the horizon of what the editors describe as a genuine political possibility. Lists and examples of urban injustices like uneven development, gentrification, and zero tolerance policing make for an appropriate corrective to the historical account of capitalist development but fall short of any transformational consequence.
There is no more purely political gesture than to state that something is beyond politics, and what is seemingly beyond politics at this moment is the hegemony of neoliberalism – global financial crisis notwithstanding. By constraining political agency to action within the confines of a given political landscape, we exclude the contours and limits of this landscape as a site for political action. The system itself must be up for grabs. As Frederic Jameson puts it in his essay ‘Is Space Political?’ with regards to these two conceptions of politics : “…two very different dimensions come into play here, neither of which can be sacrificed without serious damage to thought and experience, but which cannot be simply synthesised or unified either.”These two dimensions and their attendant difficulties must be retained, that is, to work pragmatically through the realities of the situations we find ourselves in and always to reserve the right to change the very conditions of possibility that structure our political choices. The relationship between micro-political activity and ‘radical politics’ is difficult but must form two different if not complementary parts of any political agenda.
However, the very idea that radical politics demands or even operates according to a single decisive act that transforms/shatters the coordinates of political space needs to be questioned. In this desire for ‘the event’ we potentially fall victim to a conception of political change that obscures the complex precursors to revolution. Very often the arrival of the event is a belated one that satisfies our need for explanatory clarity without ever illuminating the spatio-temporal opacity of its precedents or aftermath – the fall of the Bastille being the prime example.
The question of what might constitute ‘radical politics’ in spatio-temporal terms must therefore be attended to, Further it must be attended to in such a way as to draw out the differences between these two sets of belief in the speed of political change. While the first belief concludes that until a total systemic realignment occurs (such as a revolution, overthrow of capitalism) the only worthwhile position one can take vis-avis the urban is negative critique (of the sort we find in the work of Tafuri). The second belief – admitting of less fear in its adversary – involves a conception of political change that occurs through archipelagos of counter-hegemonic resistance, pockets of change that will spread like contagion through the city. It is this account of urban dynamics, in its variable propagations and contractions that seems to be missing here. Any volume that is presented as a conjunction of the political and the urban must be able to move beyond the notion of the idealised polis as its spatio-politcal exemplar. So while this volume effectively tracks many of the political deadlocks that gather under the name ‘neoliberalism’, it is less effective in understanding their spatial consequences for urban environments. So while many of the authors reiterate the importance of a ‘turn towards space’ as the subject of political investigation, space seems – in this volume at least – to resist most efforts of effective capture or successful analysis. The problematic that is repeated here was never more succinctly encapsulated than in that famous pronouncement of Le Corbusier; is it ‘Architecture or revolution’. Or revolution, and then architecture?
Adrian Lahoud
See also Frederic Jameson ‘Architecture and the critique of Ideology’ in Architectural Theory since 1968 Ed. K. Michael Hays MIT Press Cambridge Massachussets 1998
