cities of dispersal edited by rafi segal els verbakel

44 Cities ofDispersalCities ofDispersal

Guest-edited by Rafi Segal and Els VerbakelGuest-edited by Rafi Segal and Els Verbakel

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July/August 2008, Profile No 194

Proto Architecture: Analogue and Digital Hybrids Guest-edited by Bob Sheil

The illusive and uncertain world of translating ideas into matter is a negotiation between the ideal andthe real and a central preoccupation of architectural production. By invading the toolbox of digital fabri-cation, design has transgressed into protocols of manufacturing previously the domain of other disci-plines and skills sets. Craft, assembly and installation, once the realm of trades, are qualities that arenow dependent upon design information and its status as an instruction to make. The ensuing loopbetween the physical and tactile, the imaginary and speculative, has defined a new expectation in mak-ing architecture as a construct that is part real, part ideal.

With contributions from Lebbeus Woods, Evan Douglis, Theo Jansen, Shin Egashira and many more,Proto-Architecture presents an explicitly diverse collection of works from leading and emerging practition-ers, educators, researchers and visionaries from all corners of the innovative field.

May/June 2008, Profile No 193

Interior Atmospheres Guest-edited by Julieanna Preston

What does one mean when describing a room as atmospheric? Does it allude to a space that has beendesigned, stylised or even thematised? Is it a spatial quality conditioned by one’s perception? Doesatmosphere originate from material attributes inherent to interior finishes and décor? Is it simply thedramatic effect resulting from skilful use of lighting and colour? Is atmosphere an immersive ambience?How is atmosphere crafted? Does it have a critical edge, literally and theoretically?

Visually exciting and provocative, Interior Atmospheres combines contemporary projects and inter-views alongside analytical essays. Authors such as Rachel Carley, Ted Krueger, Malte Wagenfeld andHélène Frichot explore the distinctions between visible and invisible realms within architectural design.The technological interface between design and atmosphere is tested through digital and creative mate-rial works by Petra Blaisse, Kevin Klinger, Gregory Luhan, Andrew Kudless, Walter Niedermayr, KazuoSejima and Ryue Nizhisawa, LaMonte Young and Marian Zazeela, Joel Sanders and Karen Van Legnen,Scott Gowans and Steve Wright and Lewis Tsurumaki Lewis Architects. Paul James, Mary Anne Beecherand Lois Weinthal probe the physical limits of atmosphere in regard to site, 'the outside' and interiority.Contributors and projects straddle the boundaries of design, art and architecture in order to gain a fullerunderstanding of atmosphere’s elusive and pervasive presence.

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Versatility and Vicissitude: Performance in Morpho-Ecological DesignGuest-edited by Michael Hensel and Achim Menges

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Cities of Dispersal

Guest-edited byRafi Segal and Els Verbakel

Architectural DesignJanuary/February 2008

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C O N T E N T S

44EditorialHelen Castle

6IntroductionUrbanism Without DensityRafi Segal and Els Verbakel

12The Public and the V2Bruce Robbins

16Terminal DistributionAlbert Pope

22Public Lifestyle in the Low-Density CityAlex Wall

28Old Dispersions and Scenes forthe Production of Public SpaceThe Constructive Margins ofSecondarityBruno De Meulder

34Water and AsphaltThe Project of Isotropy in theMetropolitan Region of VenicePaola Viganò

40Intermittent CitiesOn Waiting Spaces and How toInhabit Transforming CitiesClaudia Faraone and Andrea Sarti

46String Block Vs SuperblockPatterns of Dispersal in ChinaKjersti Monson

54In the Our Beautiful FutureMartha Rosler

58Archipelago of the Negev DesertA Temporal/Collective Plan forBeer Sheva, IsraelRafi Segal

64Peripheral Landscapes, ElCaracol, Mexico CityJose Castillo

68Urban Voids: Grounds forChangeReimagining Philadelphia’sVacant LandsDeenah Loeb

74Urban [IM]plantsTactics for RecombiningLandscape and Collective Spacein Bonheiden, BelgiumEls Verbakel and Elie Derman

80User-Focused Public Space(M)UTOPIA in DenmarkSerban Cornea

84Royal Dutch Military PoliceCampusZvi Hecker’s LandscapeUrbanismRafi Segal

88Ville-Port, Saint-NazaireThe Historic PeripheryManuel de Solà-Morales

94Nam Van Square, MacauManuel Vicente

100Mur Island, Graz, AustriaVito Acconci

102DiscussionArchitecture and DispersalRafi Segal and Els Verbakelwith Stan Allen, Marcel Smets,Sarah Whiting and MargaretCrawford

110+Interior EyeReinvigorating ChildhoodHoward Watson

114+Practice ProfileKieranTimberlake AssociatesJayne Merkel

120+UserscapeNatural Methods of InteractionOr Natural Interaction in theEveryday Digital WorldValentina Croci

124+Spiller’s BitsPutting the ‘I’ back intoArchitectureNeil Spiller

126+Unit FactorRadical InterfaceAA New Media ResearchInitiativeJoel Newman, TheodoreSpyropoulos and VasilisStroumpakos

130+Yeang’s Eco-Files On Green Design (Part 3)The Basic Premises for GreenDesignKen Yeang

134+McLean’s NuggetsWill McLean

4+

5

When most people are asked where they would like to live, they will answer quite categorically the

town or the country. Yet fewer and fewer people worldwide actually inhabit city centres or truly rural

surroundings. Home for most of us is somewhere in between, whether it be outer- or inner-city

suburbia, urban sprawl or a makeshift shanty town. This is a trend that is set to intensify with the

growth of the world’s population from 5 billion in 1987 to 6.7 billion in 2007. According to the UN

Habitat 2006 Annual Report, for the first time in history half of the people worldwide are now living in

towns or cities; this shift towards urbanisation is only set to continue with 60 per cent of the world’s

population living in or around cities by 2030. Whereas growth and diffusion of urbanity has been

most famously associated with the ‘edge city’ of Los Angeles or the unharnessed development of

illegal housing in India and South America, it is a situation that affects us all. It is most apparent in

some of the small wealthiest nations of northwestern Europe, such as Belgium, the Netherlands and

the UK, where space is scarce and, despite falling birth rates, their buoyant economies continue to

attract migrant workers, boosting their ageing populations. This is epitomised by the Dutch

conurbation of the Randstad, made up of the four major cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht and

The Hague, and their respective satellite towns, which form a continuous rim around a green

heartland. One also only has to drive along the M4 corridor to wonder where London begins or ends.

Rafi Segal and Els Verbakel’s title of AD represents an important shift in mindset and aspirations. It

squarely positions the dispersed city as a fertile territory for architectural intervention. Whereas outer

urban areas have conventionally been the stronghold of the house builder or commercial developer, it

places architects and urban designers’ sights on exurbia. Segal and Verbakel regard ‘dispersal as an

opportunity to reinvent urbanity’, and specifically to question the notion of public space, which was

traditionally positioned in the centre of cities. Featured projects range across the world from Macau

in southern China to Copenhagen and Mexico City. Sometimes the investigations are theoretical, but

always the focus is on application. Both guest-editors have undertaken projects in this field; Segal

here publishes his own project for Beer Sheva in the Negev Desert of Israel, and Verbakel her

scheme for the town of Bonheiden in Flemish Belgium. What all the contributors share is an

understanding of the possibilities of reinventing and re-editing the given built environment.

Abandoned is the notion of Modernist control; to have a place in this setting one has to be deft and

flexible, content to engage with the world as it is rather than to recast it as one would like it to be. 4

Helen Castle

Guy Saggee, Digital print, 2007In a response to the theme of this issue and in collaboration with its guest-editors, graphic artist Guy Saggeeexplored images of dispersed cities. Similar to the production of collective space in dispersed urban conditions, hisgraphic technique of dithering produces a blurred image interspersed with emerging patterns.

Text © 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Image © Guy Saggee

Editorial

6

Our built environment is in the process of reorganising itself,redistributing densities of buildings, population and activities.Cities are expanding, growing and sprawling, while at thesame time their centres and downtowns are shrinking,disappearing, voiding out.

By mid-century, the populations of 39 countries areprojected to be smaller than they are today: for example,Japan and Germany 14% smaller, Italy and Hungary 25%smaller, and the Russian Federation, Georgia and Ukrainebetween 28 and 40% smaller.

Statistics from World Population Prospects: The 2000Revision, Department of Economic and Social Affairs,

United Nations, 2000

This process of growth and redistribution has been partiallydescribed by terms such as ‘sprawl’, ‘suburbs’ (with roots in

the American context),1 ‘wild living’ and the ‘diffused city’(‘citta diffusa’ – mostly referring to the European context).2

Dispersal functions as an umbrella term for thesephenomena, by zooming out and describing them as part of alarger global tendency. In this context, Cities of Dispersal canbe recognised as emerging types of low-density environments:decentralised, heterogeneous, and radically different fromtraditional definitions of the city in their spatial organisationand patterns of growth.3

Between 1960 and 1990, the population in more than 200American cities increased by 47%, while urbanised landincreased by 107%, resulting in a density decrease of 28%.

Statistics from David Rusk, Cities Without Suburbs,Woodrow Wilson Center Press (Washington), 1995

Throughout these physical transformations of the urbanenvironment, the notion of public space has not remainedunaltered. Public space has long been a decisive factor in ourunderstanding of the city. Furthermore, we can say that thenotion of the public itself, even if by virtue of imagination,has been essential for any act of urban design or planning.4 Itis therefore inevitable to ask: What is the place and role ofpublic space in new dispersed urban environments? How havedispersed urban conditions changed the notion of public? Andwhat are the current notions of the public that influence theway we conceive cities?

Veneto, Italy Philadelphia, US

Introduction

UrbanismWithout

Density

UrbanismWithout

DensityThe predominance of sprawling, low-densityurban environments throughout the worldbegs the question: What constitutes a city?Such environments also require us to rethinkpublic space, traditionally at the core of citycentres. Rafi Segal and Els Verbakel outlinethe challenges and opportunities that citiesof dispersal raise.

7

Macau, China Saint-Nazaire, France

50% of US housing is suburban, 20% of US housing isnon-metropolitan.

From American Housing Survey for the United States:2001, US Census Bureau, 2002

The traditional distinction between the urban and the non-urban relied on a hierarchical organisation of density. Citiesat the centre were the densest, most concentrated, moving toless dense areas towards the suburbs, the countryside, and yetfurther to the wilderness. These different types ofenvironments not only presented different degrees of humanintervention and habitation, they also developed differentways of living. The opposition between negative and positiveattributes of city and countryside has long been supported byclear boundaries between one and the other, be it throughwalls, ring roads, green belts and the like. Yet over the courseof the 20th century, whether due to economic, industrial,military or technological developments, the distinctionsbetween city, suburb, countryside and wilderness havebecome blurred.

In their currently advanced state of dispersal, cities havelost their traditional boundaries.5 Due to a redistribution ofurban activities and intensities, we can no longer recognise aclear pattern of high density in the centre and lower densitiesat the periphery. In this process, programmes that werepreviously associated with the city centre, such as commerce,office work, leisure and entertainment, have been transplantedto suburbia and have taken on a different shape. Suburbs,new towns and satellite cities, initially designated for housing,have gradually become multifunctional environments,independent of the city. The distinction between the city as acentre and suburbia as its subordinate kin has become, inmany cases, neither accurate nor appropriate. Low-densityenvironments have ceased to be sub-urban, no longer relyingon the city as their centre, or raison d’ê tre.

Many of these low-density environments (also outside theEuropean and American context), despite their increasing

integration within urban systems, are generally not viewed asurban or as cities. This is mainly due to their lack of densityand centrality, the absence of a coherent urban fabric ordistinguishable boundaries, and a ‘damaged’ relationshipbetween the pedestrian and urban space.6 More importantly,they are seen to lack the conventional forms and uses ofurban public spaces to which we have become accustomed.Current attempts to qualify dispersal usually refer to the lossof these characteristics.7 Yet when we look at examples ofsprawling cities such as Los Angeles and Mexico City, orlarger, spread-out areas such as the Veneto region in Italy orthe state of New Jersey, we find different urbanities that haveemerged from such apparent losses. Dispersal has led many topaint a sombre picture of an irresponsible ‘non-urbanity’,from which the only escape is a move back into the city.However, if we are to accept Rem Koolhaas’ claim that the cityis dead, or Mark Wigley’s statement that the city has ceased tobe a useful idea in planning, we are left in confusion, withlosses on both sides.8

This issue of AD treats dispersal as an opportunity toreinvent urbanity. It questions whether the urban shouldremain reserved solely for the dense physical environment.Can not the notion of the city be established throughcombined degrees of interaction, access and communicationthat do not necessarily require high densities? High degrees ofexchange, interconnectivity, the overlapping of networks,juxtapositions and proximities of diverse programmes – allcan create an intensity that generates an urban condition,urban in its function, notions and experiences (chance,anonymity, conflict, and so on). Moreover, in the process ofseeking new opportunities for alternative urbanities, thenotion of public space itself needs to be questioned. Recentstudies of contemporary urbanities have suggested thattraditional definitions of public space are no longer accurateto describe chance encounters, temporary spaces of gathering,partially accessible meeting places, commercialised andthemed entertainment. Can we, then, replace the more

8

demanding term ‘public space’ with the somewhat moreadaptable option of ‘collective space’? And how does thisimpact our understanding of the city?

Within the field of urban design and planning, theshaping of public space has been considered the primary taskof the architect or urbanist.9 Its role and place in the city as aspace of gathering and exchange has been treated as a kindof ‘glue’ that holds together the city and promises togenerate urban coherence and active use. Yet this notion hasundergone substantial changes. Rather than a singular,continuous sphere or space, the public today is betterunderstood as a fragmentary interplay of multiple publicsand multiple groups. The idea of a public sphere, as identifiedby J Habermas as having emerged from 18th-centurybourgeois society,10 no longer functions for the reasons thatbrought it about – as the place where opinions and ideasabout society and state were formed and discussed. With therise of consumption culture, the public sphere has become an‘arena for advertising’ channelled at pleasing various tastesand personal preferences. With this understanding, criticalreason is seen to have shifted to other groups (lawyers,doctors, academics, and so on) who engage in it un-publicly,while mass consumers might have a public receptiveness butremain non-critical.11 This shift of rationalism and criticismhas left the public sphere prone to stronger forces such asmarketisation and privatisation, processes that have beenconsidered by some a threat to democracy. Public space,according to this conception, is essential to the preservationof democracy since it provides the space for freedom ofspeech and public assembly, enables the publicising ofdissent, maintains awareness of the needs of others, andallows the organisation of grassroots campaigns.12

Mechanisms that have contributed to the privatisation ofpublic space (at least within the American context), such asthe reorganisation of collective space towards consumption,the extension of undemocratic governance systems such ashome-owners associations and development districts, and

jurisprudence13 – preoccupied with locating the boundarybetween public and private – can be seen as thosemechanisms that also propagated urban sprawl.

Our changing notion of the public has thus allowedcertain forms of urbanity to evolve, but on the other handchanges in the urban realm have contributed to creating newnotions of public space. The problem lies in the fact thatthere is not always a clear or direct correlation betweensocial, political and cultural notions – in this case the notionof the public – and their architectural or urban expression.While the public is an abstract, highly dynamic, at timesvague and unpredictable notion, urban space by its naturerefers to concrete places that undergo slower processes ofchange in appropriating new conceptions and conditions.This inertia of the urban environment is enhanced by thegeneral tendency (also of architects and urbanists) to preserveold models and expressions even though they may no longerserve current necessities.14

Many previous approaches to public space in sprawledconditions have attempted to impose traditional urbanmodels rather than seek new types of spaces, forms andprogrammes. They have seldom led to innovative work andhave often contradicted contemporary notions of scale,diversity and flexibility.

The Congress for the New Urbanism, for example, proposesthe reintegration of traditional forms of public space such asurban plazas, commercial main streets and other componentsof a townscape tradition within contemporary sprawledenvironments. Its approach operates within a new urbancondition that assumes a notion of an old public – mimickingtraditional architecture (and a historic way of life), enforcingpedestrian movement, limiting social diversity, anddiscouraging long-distance commuting even when these arealien to the way we live today.

Other approaches to urban dispersal understand and thusaddress contemporary notions of the public and public spacebut without projecting new urban configurations, and

Ørestad, Denmark Mexico City, Mexico

9

Schiphol, The Netherlands Veneto, Italy

without considering the need for a new urban/architecturalexpression. Reinterpreting Foucault, Grahame Shane andmany others explain how the concept of heterotopia providesopportunities for hosting contemporary spaces of gathering orcollectivity within the city.15 Yet a primary trait of heterotopiais its ‘mirror-function’. It mirrors an existing reality, meaningit does not carry a form or shape of itself. It is not particularto any specific physical-spatial setting, but rather capable oftaking on several forms/shapes/arrangements present in theexisting environment. Identifying heterotopia as a type ofpublic space does not therefore require a new urban-architectural setting.16

While these approaches have contributed considerably tothe discourse on dispersal and the role of architects/urbanistswithin this type of environment, the relationship betweennew publics and new urban spaces has yet to be explored,potentially leading to more innovative models and approachesof design and intervention.

Cities of Dispersal is an attempt in this direction. It callsfor an investigation of the public and/or collectivedimensions of dispersed urban conditions, presenting bothresearch essays and design examples from different scales,cultures and geographies.

Two framing essays open the issue, offering new ways oflooking at the relationship between collective spaces andurban dispersal. Bruce Robbins, in ‘The Public and the V2’,describes how certain literary ideas of public space canpossibly inform urban thinking. In parallel, Albert Popeexamines the morphological and structural processes thatcharacterise the development of low-density urbanisms. Theessays, research and design projects that follow present aninterpretation, understanding and/or critique of how newforms of collective space can be imagined.

The research presented in this issue includes parts of theextensive studies and mappings of European urbandispersal by Bruno De Meulder (on Flanders) and PaolaViganó (on the Veneto region).

Alex Wall outlines the emerging typology of lifestylecentres, large-scale commercial complexes situated in low-density urban areas, as a possible prototype for a new kindof public space. The dominance of bigness within urbansprawl is also examined by Kjersti Monson in a criticalinvestigation of the Chinese superblock, one of the mostrapid modes of urban expansion worldwide.

These critical observations are further explored by a seriesof much more speculative projects. Martha Rosler’s ‘utopiancommunity’ challenges existing structures of interaction andadvances the potential of the art project as space for socialchange. The notion of utopia also characterises the Beer Sheva(Israel) proposal by Rafi Segal, which imagines the desertlandscape as a site of shared, temporal programmes thatfunction as urban voids, separating different community-based neighbourhood islands.

The use of landscape, agriculture, ecological tourism and other forms of programmed open spaces becomealternatives to redensifying former city centres such as the urban voids of Philadelphia (the ‘Grounds for Change’competition proposals) featured in Deenah Loeb’s article. In other projects such as Jose Castillo’s El Caracol in Mexico City, landscape becomes a strategy for urbanperipheries. Both cases present the transformation of a‘negative’ useless space to a positive attractor, whileestablishing a new balance of built and open space forecological and infrastructural functions, and the betterment of urban living,

The last section of the issue pulls together a series of builtwork, or projects under construction, some of whichemphasise a method for urban growth and renewal ratherthan offer one solution. Els Verbakel and Elie Derman presenta ‘toolbox of interventions’ – a method for combining greenand collective spaces – for the suburban town of Bonheiden inBelgium. Danish group MUTOPIA propose an interactiveapproach that utilises user-based computer software to aid inappropriating collective spaces.

10

From a more direct architectural point of view, the meetingof dispersal and the notion of collective space producesintriguing projects such as Zvi Hecker’s KMar campus inAmsterdam or Manuel de Solà-Morales’ mixed-use project inSaint-Nazaire, France, where the conventional distinctionbetween city, building and landscape is questioned. Theseprojects manage to overcome a restricted and problematicsite, reproducing their own context and creating a sequenceof inner voids/open spaces that are integral to thearchitecture.

The potential of public space as an island can be seen inthe Nam Van Square project in Macau (Manuel CM Vicente,Carlotta Bruni and Rui Leão) and in Vito Acconci’s Mur Island,a temporary floating bridge/gathering space. Both of thesesuggest, on different scales, that infrastructure can generatemulti-use spaces, rather than monofunctional structuresintended only for movement from one place to the other.

This collection of research essays, projects and built workraises questions on how to approach the ‘emptiness’ of thedispersed city, how to use, appropriate and inhabit the spacein between spread-out buildings, and how to redefine thisspace as part of the public realm. 17

These questions provide a major challenge for architectsand urbanists, who have tended to ‘look down’ on dispersal,conveniently avoiding it, claiming no responsibility for itsoutcome.

The projects and explorations presented here point out theopportunities of what are commonly seen as negativecharacteristics of sprawl, low density, suburbs and thediffused city. Fragments become islands, voids becomelandscapes, lack of context becomes an opportunity to createan artificial context, large distances and building plotsprovoke super-size design approaches, and the non 24/7lifespan of programmes opens up a redefinition of accidentalplaces of gathering. The unbearable fluidity of dispersal hasthe potential to be transformed into a more groundedcondition whereby new collective spaces take a prominentrole: whether ecological, utopian, social. Whether in the form

of super-size islands, piecemeal implants or ad hoc and user-based events, they are spatialised not by streets and piazzasbut by infrastructure and landscape.

In addition to the potential of the void, the question alsoarises whether the notion of public space may be replaced byspaces of collectivity, less dependent on designations ofdemocracy and freedom. Here there is room for broaderdiscussions concerning the place of collective spaces insociopolitical processes, and the role of the architect/urbanistin these processes through the shaping and programming ofspace – whether by offering new imaginations of collectivelife, or by repeating conventional forms associated with pastnotions of the city. The selected essays, projects and buildingsthat appear in this issue of AD aspire to address the formerrather than the latter, thereby unfolding a spectrum of criticaland self-conscious approaches that contribute to a new field ofresearch and design yet to be further defined and explored. 4

Notes1. In the American context, and consequently other regions in the world,sprawl has largely been initiated by the post-Second World War housingcrisis, the democratisation of ‘the good life’, and the encouragement ofconsumption: a growing demand and supply of choice, privacy and mobility.Also in Europe, suburban communities gained importance after the SecondWorld War with massive reconstruction efforts and the creation of new townsas satellite settlements around existing cities. 2. ‘Diffused city’, a term invented during the 1990s to describe the spread-outurban fabric of Italy’s northern Veneto region, has been adopted to identifymultiple regions in Europe such as the Dutch Randstad, the FlemishDiamond, the German Ruhr area and others. These areas have grown from anetwork of medium- to small-size cities interspersed with former agriculturalterritories and rural villages, transformed into a mixture of industrial parks,commercial complexes and suburban housing. Similarly, the term ‘wild living’refers to the massive inhabitation of the dispersed European territory.Originally introduced in reaction to Dutch government-controlled standardisedhousing, it came to describe the process of modernising the rural landscapeas a means to prevent city growth. 3. Even though much attention has recently been drawn to cities being builtfrom scratch, whether in China or the Middle East, the phenomenon of urbandispersal – the spreading out of existing metropolitan areas – is much greaterin scope. 4. ‘If we did not have a practical sense of what publics are, if we could notunself-consciously take them for granted as really existing and addressable

Shanghai, China Bonheiden, Belgium

11

Beer Sheva, Israel Venice, Italy

social entities, we could not produce most of the books or films orbroadcasts or journals that make up so much of our culture; we could notconduct elections or indeed imagine ourselves as members of nations ormovements. Yet publics exist only by virtue of their imagining.’ Michael Warner,Publics and Counterpublics, Zone Books (New York), 2005, p 8. 5. One of the forefathers of urban design (town planning), Patrick Geddespointed out a hundred years ago that the antagonism between city andcountry, wilderness or suburbia is no longer sustainable. Even contemporaryurban historians and theorists such as Marcel Smets and Manfred Kühn stillraise the need to overcome this dichotomy.6. In current urban design practices, what most people (including architectsand urban planners) would consider ‘good urban form’ is largely a conventionbased on the spatial and architectural qualities of historical models such asmedieval town squares, Renaissance piazzas, 19th-century city boulevardsand others. A common belief is that we have not created any good citiessince the 19th century. The fact is that new forms of settlements have beencreated, or re-created, since, from the garden cities to new towns, suburbs,edge cities, sprawled cities, diffused cities and so on. These forms ofdispersed settlements have now begun to be transformed into a new type ofurbanism.7. Many theorists and practitioners have studied the losses that have occurredduring processes of dispersal, thereby offering new descriptive models thatstress the lack of coherence, definition, limits. See, for example, RichardIngersoll’s Sprawltown: Looking for the City on its Edges, PrincetonArchitectural Press (New York), 2006, and the ‘Shrinking Cities’ project – anongoing exhibition and publications (2002–05) of the Federal CulturalFoundation, under the direction of Philipp Oswalt (Berlin) in cooperation withthe Leipzig Gallery of Contemporary Art, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation andthe magazine archplus.8. Mark Wigley, ‘Resisting the city’, in Joke Brouwer, Arjen Mulder and LauraMartz, TransUrbanism, NAI Publishers (Rotterdam), 2002, p 103.9. ‘Shaping public space is considered the first order of urbanism by thearchitect/urbanist. Thus the primary role of urban design is to developmethods of doing so.’ Alex Krieger, ‘Territories of urban design’, in MalcolmMoor and Jon Rowland (eds), Urban Design Futures, Routledge (London andNew York), 2006, p 22. 10. See Craig Calhoun (ed), Habermas and the Public Sphere, MIT Press(Cambridge, MA, and London), 1992, pp 1–48. See also Catherine Zuromskis,‘Introduction’ in Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture,Issue 6, ‘Visual Publics, Visible Publics’, 2003(www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_6/issue6title.html): ‘Ourtheoretical understanding of the public has changed since Jürgen Habermasintroduced the high bourgeois public sphere (1962), the more recent work ofBruce Robbins, Nancy Fraser, Rosalyn Deutsche and Michael Warner present aless definable singular public sphere but rather a fragmentary interplay ofmultiple publics and counter publics.’

11. From Craig Calhoun, op cit, p 26.12. The main argument presented by Margaret Kohn in Brave NewNeighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space, Routledge (New York andLondon), 2004.13. From Margaret Kohn, op cit.14.The layout of the parliament house, for example, as it emerged during theEnlightenment (discussed by Bruno Latour in Making Things Public),established an architectural expression to that period’s conception of politicalassembly. The parliament’s architecture, space and setting, made manifest acertain public-political activity. This same setting is still used today torepresent the public (as a political body), even though the structure, functionand spaces of political activity/debate have changed drastically. Latour’sexamination of past notions of the public as a political body suggests that inour world, beyond the political, there are many other kinds of assemblies thatgather a public around things: church, supermarket, disputes involving naturalresources, and so on. Bruno Latour, ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitick or Howto make things Public’, in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds), Making ThingsPublic: Atmospheres of Democracy, ZKM (Center for Art and Media),Karlsruhe, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA, and London), 2005, pp 14–44. 15. Graham Shane, Recombinant Urbanism: Conceptual Modeling inArchitecture, Urban Design and City Theory, Wiley-Academy (Chichester),2005. In Chapter 4, Shane extensively discusses definitions of heterotopiasand their potential use in city modelling and urban design. 16. Supported by recent discussions held during the conference ‘VisionaryPower: Producing the Contemporary City’ at the 3rd International RotterdamBiennale. The concept of heterotopia, as understood by Lieven De Cauter andMichiel Dehaene, leads to a reading of the environment as made up of binarypoles, centre and periphery, leaving no middle ground. From this point of view,existing spaces are reinterpreted as ‘heterotopian’, either belonging toconditions of ‘hyperarchitecture’ (of the sanctuary) or in opposition ‘infra-architecture’ (of slums, camps, etc).17. What is called empty should be understood in relative terms, specifyingthat of which it is vacant: vacant of buildings, vacant of activities, vacant ofhuman presence. It is a search for the materialisation of this emptiness, orwhat Willem-Jan Neutelings calls the ‘density of the void’. Willem-JanNeutelings, De Ringcultuur, Vlees en Beton Publishers (Ghent), 1988.

Text © 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 6(l) © Paolo Viganò; p 6(r) ©Van Alen Institute, photo Jonathan Cohen Litant; p 7(l) © Macau InformationBureau; p 7(r) © Dominique Macel, Service du Communication de SaintNazaire; p 8(l) © MUTOPIA ApS; p 8(r) © Jose Castillo Ólea, arquitectura911sc; p 9(l) © Zvi Hecker; p 9(r) © Claudia Faraone and Andrea Sarti; p 10(l)© Kjersti Monson; p 10(r) © Els Verbakel, Elie Derman of Derman VerbakelArchitecture and Ward Verbakel Architect; p 11(l) © Rafi Segal; p 11(r) ©Martha Rosler

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The Public and the V2The London Blitz has come to epitomise the golden age of urban togetherness andbonhomie when the public was bound by a common enemy threat. Through his reading ofThomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, literary critic Bruce Robbins questions the archetypalview of the Second World War as a watershed after which the ideal intact city and itscommunity were ultimately destroyed.

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Listing agents of what he calls ‘the implosion of the urbancore’, Albert Pope begins with Allied bombers and aggressivefreeway engineers, and ends with ‘celebrated architects andthe precise trajectory of the V2 rocket’.1 To a literary critic likemyself, this pairing of architects and V2s as agents of radicaltransformation, and of both with the fate of the modern city,seems reasonable enough. What we literary critics tend to beless sure of is whether the urban core has indeed imploded –whether we have definitively lost the centrality and publicnessthat we have come to associate, rightly or wrongly, with thepre-implosion city.

The V2 rocket is at the heart of Thomas Pynchon’s vision ofthe city in Gravity’s Rainbow, the greatest American novel ofthe past half-century. The tale begins with the sound of the V2(‘A screaming comes across the sky’) and with two V2-relatedscenes.2 The first is a dream-like scene of Evacuation (the wordis capitalised) that turns out to be, indeed, a dream. It throwsthe dreamer into a sudden intimacy with the poor, sharingwith them both their vulnerability and their experience ofLondon’s grimy, neglected infrastructure, the suddenly revealedurban space that the would-be evacuees must traverse. Thesecond is a morning scene, also in London, in which a Britishofficer wakes up after a wild party – it is he, apparently, whohas been dreaming. He goes up to his roof garden to gatherbananas for one of his famous Banana Breakfasts, and in thesky he sees, far off, the trail of another V2 on its way down.

These are scenes of dispersal. As you begin to prepare yourbreakfast, the city in which you live is already the target ofviolence launched from overseas. The public is usuallydescribed, roughly speaking, as a sphere in which there can becommon conversation, undisturbed by power differentialsbetween the participants, about matters important to theircommon welfare. Violence, especially violence from adistance, thus seems its very antithesis.3 A public that wouldinclude those who launch the V2s as well as those on whomthey come down is hard to imagine. By definition, the city atwhich the rockets are aimed cannot encompass so much; itwill not qualify. Under the V2s city and publicness have comeapart. And the city reacts, one might say, by emptying itselfout. The Evacuation anticipates the rush to the suburbs afterthe Second World War during the precise years when Pynchonwas writing. It is as if ordinary citizens felt that the publicdecisions arrived at in the metropolis had failed them, andhad responded by fleeing towards suburban privacy. Theexplosions of the rockets and the ‘implosion of the urbancore’ belong to the same story of what the novel will call‘scattering’, a story we are accustomed to think of as the lossof community, the loss of centred public space.

For a vigilant reader, however, these two scenes alsocontain clues that Pynchon may be trying to tell a verydifferent kind of story. The miraculous bananas, for example:could they really grow in London, at least before global

warming? Bananas, like V2s, usually come from far away. Ifthey are staples of the urban breakfast, then the city wasalready causally linked to faraway places before the rocketsstarted falling. And if you inspect those faraway places, don’tyou detect violence behind the process of production by whichthe bananas so reliably arrived? (Consider the massacre ofstriking banana plantation workers in Garcia Marquez’s OneHundred Years of Solitude.) Isn’t it a good thing, in the dreamsequence, that the dreaming evacuee encounters the truth ofLondon’s infrastructure, its ‘secret entrances of rottedconcrete’ and ‘trestles of blackened wood’, its places ‘whosenames he has never heard …’?4 And his emphatic rubbing-of-elbows with the poor in the Evacuation: doesn’t this seem lesslike a loss of the public and more like a move in the directionof a more strenuously inclusive, more properly democraticpublic? At the end of the novel, when the protagonist is‘scattered’,5 no longer visible ‘as any sort of integralcreature’,6 the reader is left wondering how much this oughtto count as a failure and how much it might on the contrarysatisfy a desire. Perhaps the disappearance of the privilegedAmerican individual he once was makes it possible for him torepresent a threateningly dispersed but nonetheless ethicallydesirable inclusiveness.

From one perspective, Gravity’s Rainbow might be describedas an attempt to model the public – a radically andnecessarily more comprehensive public – under stressfulcontemporary circumstances. The novel will reveal that thesite of each V2 explosion, marked with a pin on a London citymap and dated, corresponds in time as well as space with amap of the protagonist’s sexual encounters (hence the phallicrhyme between rocket and banana). A pattern can be detectedbehind what would otherwise appear to be randomdispersiveness – the dispersiveness of rocketry, of desire, andof the city-destroying force we have come to call globalisation.In pursuit of this pattern, the novel will send its protagonistabroad, seeking the mysterious connection between therockets and his sexuality. Indeed, it will devote many of itspages to those who develop and launch the rocket, therebydrawing together figures who did not seem capable ofinhabiting one single story, one single conversation. This newstory occupies a different, transnational geography – whatPynchon names ‘the Zone’. And the interrelations of itsmultinational cast continue uninterrupted after the SecondWorld War is over. If this is something less than a fullblueprint of a transnational public sphere, it is certainly acritique of the earlier notion of the public, whichcomplacently or nostalgically assumed that the public wassomething that did its job and was ours to lose – in otherwords, that before the era of rockets, bananas and suburbs wewere already firmly in possession of it.

The phrase ‘dispersed urbanism’ has a no doubt calculatedambiguity. Has urbanism been dispersed, hence destroyed,

Defusing a Nazi bomb, London, 1940.

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leaving behind something that is not urban? Or is there aversion of urbanism that persists, however paradoxically, asurbanism, an urbanism that somehow takes a dispersed form?These are questions that Pynchon also addresses. And they arequestions that are inherent in the very definition of thepublic. If the public is what pertains to the social whole, as wesometimes say, what exactly do we mean by ‘pertain’? Somevery diverse things. We might say something public is‘potentially accessible’ to the community. Or we might say itis ‘already visible to’ and ‘viewed by’ the community. Or wemight say it is that which ‘belongs to’ and/or ‘is controlled by’the community. Or we might say it is that which ‘affects’ or is‘of significance to’ the community. Or that which is‘authorised by’ the community. Or that which is done ‘in theservice or on behalf of’ the community. Each option overlapsto some degree with the others, but each also leads to adifferent moral appeal and a different mode of action.

Some of the term’s power lies in the confusions it makespossible between these different options. By switching, forexample, between 1) the public as what is owned, decidedupon, and managed by the community, and 2) the public aswhat is merely observed by and relevant to the community –that is, between the public as active participant (modelled onthe organised political group) and the public as passivespectator (modelled on theatrical audience and reading public)– the word can imply that the active, participatory aspects of

politics are present within the more passive, aestheticisedcontext of spectatorship. This switch encourages a tendency toinflate the degree and significance of agency available in theact of cultural consumption – the suggestion, say, thatshopping and striking are comparable practices. Yet thisambiguity also raises such productive questions as howdistinct the two sorts of publicness are and what roletheatricality and symbolism can play within politics. The sameambiguity drives media research into how, when and whetherwhat is public in the minimal sense of ‘visibility’ (celebrity,publicity) translates into what is public in a weightier senselike ‘sociability’ or ‘organised political will’. For urbanplanners, the key question is perhaps whether the urban hasbeen superseded by the digital; in the words of ManuelCastells, whether ‘public space’ has come to be defined as ‘thespace of communication’.7 Or must successful political actioneventually move out of the digital and back into physicalspace, where access to infrastructure, commuting time andthe cost of fossil fuels matter?

This is related to the ever more interesting issue of thepublic’s ‘scale’. The word public has been most frequentlyused about collectivities, like the city, up to but notexceeding the scale of the nation. This fits its associationwith zones of actual conversation and self-consciously shareddestiny, which have historically been limited. On the otherhand, the concept of the public as a zone of causal

An aerial view of an area of London that suffered heavy bombing, c 1940.

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connectedness – those actions relevant to, or significant for,the welfare of a given group, whether or not the group is inconversation with itself or with the begetters of the actions –is much vaster. In the era of the world market, not to speakof official and unofficial violence across borders, this zonehas become increasingly international. Thus the restrictivelynational scale of the public (in the sense of conversation andcontrol) is seen to be stretching, and/or to need stretching.Enlarging the scale of international attention, conversationand opinion so as to match the scale of international causalconnectedness – that is, bringing these two senses of thepublic into congruence with each other – means resetting theboundaries of the relevant moral community so that thoselikely to be affected by a course of action, wherever they live,are included in those invited to debate it.

Among other things, this is a question, to quote anarticle in Latour and Weibel’s Making Things Public, of ‘thespatial grammar of the politics of who votes where’.8

‘Where you vote counts unequally in its effects. AnAmerican vote counts for far more than votes in other partsof the world because it comes backed up by structures ofenforcement that can project it into the world … Rememberthat the course of a large part of the world hung on a smallnumber of hanging chads and on the fact that only 51percent of the American electorate voted in the 2000presidential election. Perhaps we should all be able to vote

in the US elections! We should certainly consider thepossibility of allowing residents in one part of the world toexercise their citizenship rights in another part of the worldover common planetary issues, through some form ofcoupon democracy or world parliament.’9 Or, to put thisdifferently: ‘The notion of an unbound site prompts designersto consider not simply the territory under their directcontrol, but the more expansive physical, social andtemporal arenas impacted by their actions.’10

As a literary critic, I will not presume to say what it mightmean to architects and urban designers to think of the publicless as a default setting or an inheritance, already functionaland always in danger of being lost, than as a sort of miracle,always in need of enlargement, always needing to be re-imagined creatively. What criteria would have to be satisfied?The city’s degree of openness to strangers is somethingplanners are already thinking about, and necessarily so. Itseems to me that the city’s vulnerability to rockets must beadded, but only if there is some way of alludingarchitecturally to the city not just as victim, but also as sourceof violence, including the rockets it sends out, so to speak, aswell as the everyday violence of imported fruit. The novel hashad to stretch to find a way to make these distant relations offorce part of its form, a form that is much more comfortablefollowing the fate of a handful of private individuals. Mostnovels don’t manage to be public in the strongest sense. It’salways a stretch. 4

Notes1. Albert Pope, Ladders, Rice University School of Architecture (Houston),1996, p 102.2. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, Penguin (New York), 1973.3. Mike Hill and Warren Montag, ‘What was, what is, the public sphere? Post-Cold War reflections’, Masses, Classes, and the Public Sphere, Verso (London),2000. ‘Absolutely central to the notion of the public sphere in all its versions,’Hill and Montag write, ‘is the opposition between reason and force’ (p 6). Theytrace the logic by which this conceptual suppression of force leads JürgenHabermas, for example, to identify the enemies of the public sphere as thosewho use force, mainly outside the NATO countries, and thus to support‘defending them with force’ (p 7), including ‘the massive prolonged war againstIraq’ (p 7) – at that time still merely a reference to the violence of sanctions. 4. Pynchon, op cit, p 3.5. Pynchon, op cit, p 738.6. Pynchon, op cit, p 740.7. Manuel Castells, ‘Communication, power and counter-power in the networksociety’, International Journal of Communication 1, 2007, pp 238–66. Thanks toNoah Brick for the reference.8. Ash Amin, Nigel Thrift, Helen Baker and Doreen Massey, ‘Centers don’thave to be points: Political influence of US Republican Party overseas’, inBruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds), Making Things Public: Atmospheres ofDemocracy, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA) and ZKM (Center for Art and Media),Karlsruhe, 2005, p 811.9. Ibid.10. Andrea Kahn, ‘The project of urban design’, in Andrea Kahn, CharlieCannon, Phu Duong and Els Verbakel (eds), Constellations: ConstructingUrban Design Practices, Columbia University Urban Design Program (NewYork), 2007.

Text © 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 12 & 13 © Hulton-DeutschCollection/CORBIS ca. September 1940, London, England, UK; p 15 ©CORBIS ca. 1941, London, England

London’s Smithfield Market damaged by enemy action, c 1941.

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Terminal DistributionCould the late 20th-century rejection of Modernist planning, and along with it the notion of a‘universal subject’, mean that urban designers and architects might have lost sight of whothey are designing cities for? Albert Pope sets out on a search to define the contemporary‘who’ and finds some answers in Michel Foucault’s notion of the historically grounded subject.

SubjectivityIt has long been argued that society constructs individuals.Simply stated, we construct the world and the worldconstructs us. The study of ‘subjectivity’ attempts tounderstand how society constructs individuals by analysingthe individual itself. In the language of the human sciences,this individual is referred to as the social ‘subject’. When thestudy of the subject is extended to the study of cities, itbecomes clear that the unique environment of citiesconstructs unique individuals. From this perspective we caneasily see how individuals in medieval cities would beconstructed in an entirely different way than the individualsin industrial cities. Moving forward, we can apply the analysisof subjectivity to modern urbanism, specifically the RadiantCity urbanism that emerged in the 1920s and was codified inthe 1930s and exported worldwide following the SecondWorld War. Like all cities before it, the Radiant City wasimagined to create a unique subject. This subject – the‘universal’ subject of Modern architecture and urbanism – wasa subject like no other.

In the 1920s, the advocates of Modern urbanism sawtechnical, economic and political change of such magnitudeas to require the reorganisation of the city at an existentiallevel. Out of this reorganisation, it was imagined that anentirely new mode of subjectivity would emerge. This led tothe notion that the urban subject could be both anticipatedand designed for. In other words, the constituent of themodern city did not yet exist, but it would be the ultimateresult of its construction. This anticipation of a trulyuniversal subject was hardly defensible, and the early 1970scritique of it was definitive. Such a subject did not, and couldnot, exist but as a figment of a utopian imagination. With 50years’ hindsight, the universal subject was seen as an agentfor the emergence of a brutal and oppressive mode ofurbanisation.1 It is safe to argue that the universal subject ofmodern urbanism was a naive attempt to establish anunknown and unrecognisable subject against allsubjectivities that came before.

This naivety regarding an urban subject was largelyovercome through the writing of French historian MichelFoucault. In the mid-1970s, Foucault redefined subjectivityaround two key innovations: that the subject was bothhistorically grounded and socially individuated.2 The

implication of a historical, individuated subject on thediscourse of architecture and urbanism should have beensignificant, for it answered much of the critique that modernurbanism was undergoing at virtually the same time. ThePostmodern critique, however, became a polemic,condemning not only the universal subject, but the notion ofprojecting subjectivity altogether. It can be argued that theproblem of Radiant City urbanism was not that it projectedsubjectivity, but that it projected subjectivity devoid ofrecognisable features. Over the past 30 years, this outrightrejection of subjectivity has had drastic consequences that canbe summed up in a few simple questions that are rarely askedand almost never answered, even today. Who, exactly, is thesubject of contemporary architectural and urban design? Whoare our discourses (such as this one) targeting? For whom dowe presume to speak? Given that subjectivities are theinevitable outcome of historical forces, what is the role ofurban form in their construction? Ever since Foucault’s cogentargument, the prospect of a modern universal subject hasbeen substantially diminished, but the question of ‘who’nonetheless remains.

It is clear that Foucault’s conception of a historicallygrounded subject could help answer the contemporaryquestion of ‘who?’. His conception of an individuated subject,on the other hand, was far more problematic. If architectsand theoreticians conceive of the subject at all, they usuallyconceive of it in collectivist terms. This devotion to thecollective subject is nearly second nature, and it has all buteliminated any obvious alternatives. It is generallyunderstood that urban spaces such as the agora, the parvis,the royal square and the village green all created theconstituencies they contained. These constituencies andothers continue to exist in enduring urban form to this day.And while more recent examples of collective subjectivityexist – ‘the people’, the working class or mass society, tobegin the list – they are rarely associated with contemporaryurban form. For a whole host of reasons we are unable toaccount for a collective subject in the practice and discourseof contemporary urbanism leading us to further discount theprojection of subjectivity. This begs the question of whetherFoucault’s analysis of an individuated subject might point theway to an alternative subject position. It will be thecontention here that individuated subjectivity is more

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relevant to contemporary urban form – specificallyinfrastructural form – than its collective counterpart. Thesubstitution of the universal subject for a historical,individuated subject and the encoding of that subject in theconcrete form of the city will be the primary objective of thetext that follows. This development animates the evolution ofrecent urban history as the emphasis of forms has shiftedfrom a validation of the collective to a validation of anindividuated subject.

Infrastructure Subjectivities are found encoded at all levels of the builtenvironment. Foucault found them encoded in variousinstitutions such as prisons, asylums, schools and factories.And while he rarely speculated on an urban scale, it isnevertheless true that powerful subjectivities are encoded,not only at the level of individual building, but also at thebase level of urban organisation. I am referring to thesubjectivities constructed by street infrastructure. By streetinfrastructure I mean the layout of water and sewage lines,electrical and communications grids, pedestrian walks,

drainage capacity, along with unpaved or paved roadbeds.While largely a matter of civil engineering, the significance ofstreet infrastructure goes far beyond its technicalspecification. I would like to argue here that streetinfrastructure – both historical and contemporary – embedssocial organisation at the deepest levels of urban existence.Infrastructure provides the baseline to the elaboratechoreography of social organisation, whether it be theconvergence, for example, of a large group of people upon astadium or the retreat of a far-flung commuter. There is, inother words, a fundamental relation between infrastructuralform and the construction of urban subjectivities.

It is, at first, counterintuitive to imagine that streetinfrastructure would have an equal or greater impact onsubjectivities than those buildings that take socialorganisation as their aim (prisons, factories, schools). Thisdifficulty in understanding, however, demonstrates what isperhaps infrastructure’s greatest strength, its ‘subliminalubiquity’. Infrastructure is literally everywhere. It exists allaround us, even where you are right now. You can see it whenyou sit at your desk, look out of your window and when youwatch television. You feel it when you go to work, or go tochurch, or go to school. Urban infrastructure is there everytime you walk out of the door. It operates, without effort, 24hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Infrastructurecannot be put down like a newspaper or a book, shut off like acomputer or radio, or walked out of like a film or a building.It determines whether you walk fast or slow, left or right, upor down. It determines, actually, whether you walk at all.Infrastructure is a more potent means of encoding socialorganisation precisely because it operates subliminally. Asopposed to a work of architecture, infrastructure leaves uslargely unaware of the mechanisms of social organisation thatsurround and define it. It allows us the very necessary fictionof unfettered agency that most modern societies require.

Because infrastructure is everywhere, we take it forgranted, and because we take it for granted we fail toacknowledge its importance in the constitution of the livedworld. This is unfortunate because urban infrastructure hasundergone a dramatic transformation over the past half-century. A major shift from open, gridiron cities to closed,cul-de-sac cities has irreversibly changed the course ofurbanisation.3 Because this change is so recent, and soprofound, it is especially illuminating with regard to therelation between infrastructural form and socialorganisation. This radical shift in form begs the question ofwhether social imperatives gave rise to form, or whetherformal transformation brought about profound socialchange. In either case, we are situated at the nexus of asocial and formal negotiation.

Three Stages What follows are the diagrammatic descriptions of the threeinfrastructural configurations that marked thetransformation of infrastructure in the 20th-century city (see

Diagram 1The first pattern is that of the urban gridiron. Up until the 1950s, the gridironstreet structured a century and a half of American and European urbanism.Through its many variations, the gridiron form supported multiplesubjectivities, both individual and collective. In this regard, its negotiation ofthe social is extremely clear, especially in the case of the early 20th-centurymetropolis. This diagram shows, in basic geometry, how collectivesubjectivities are supported by the gridiron infrastructure. The large circlessuggest social groupings of various sorts and sizes. What is unique about thegridiron infrastructure is that the social groupings can be moved and sizedindependent of the forms that support them. The circles can indicate ethnicenclaves such as a Chinatown or a Little Italy, or indicate a district identifiedwith a distinctive urban feature such as Marquette Park, a district in Chicago,or the Flatiron district in Manhattan. They can also indicate areas ofdevelopment distinguished by density, such as Midtown Manhattan or theMid-Wiltshire district of Los Angeles, or be a direct reflection of class such asthe colloquial expression ‘uptown’. The circles can also recognise fluidpolitical constituencies such as the old ward system or today’s narrowlyfocused special interest groups. With the gridiron, all of these subjectivitiesare negotiated and renegotiated unhindered by an open and continuousurban matrix. It is important to note that in the gridiron city, as in the masssociety, there is no hierarchy, or there is only a simple two-level hierarchy ofSTREET/DESTINATION.

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Diagrams 1–3). The three stages – gridiron, superblock andcul-de-sac – reveal a change in the interaction betweeninfrastructural form and social organisation. The diagramsare arranged in a split-screen format that directly juxtaposesthe formal and the social. The line patterns on the left-handside represent the planimetric base form of theinfrastructure. The diagrams on the right-hand side representthe familiar icons of statistical analysis. Such figures oftendepict the quantities of a statistical sampling representing1X, 10X, 100X and so on. This is the case here. But it is alsothe case that the figures suggest a specific place, as if it werea literal image of a large number of people occupying a spaceand time such as Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

What this three-stage transformation reveals is aprogressive fragmentation that continues to the point atwhich the part is isolated from the whole and the whole islost to cognitive awareness. One of the most importantcharacteristics of gridiron urbanism was that it allowed

various subgroupings to be taken as a single,undifferentiated, non-hierarchical mass. It is not acoincidence that the gridiron underlies the most celebratedform of 20th-century urbanism – the metropolis. The abilityfor the gridiron to encompass the whole is what allows it tosupport the metropolis’ most characteristic subjectivity: anindustrialised mass society. This subjectivity was encodeddirectly in the urban infrastructure, specifically in the openand infinitely extensible gridiron street. In other words, amass society was as open and infinitely extensible as thestreet infrastructure that supported it.4 The systematicdisassembly of a mass society by the consumer economy isnowhere more evident than in the recent transformations ofinfrastructural form. These transformations will be referredto as a process of ‘individuation’.

ItinerariesIt is apparent from the first three diagrams that the relationbetween the social and the formal is far more than utilitarian,especially in a time of dramatic urban change. The correlationbetween social organisation and infrastructure is apparent in

Diagram 3The third and terminal stage in the transformation of 20th-century urbaninfrastructure can be seen in the emergence of a cul-de-sac organisation. Thisstage can be seen as an important refinement of the superblock from anisolated gridded organisation into what can be more strictly defined as aspine. This spine emerges through two important transformations in streetorganisation: the elimination of the cross-axial field of gridiron organisationand the emergence of a ‘terminal node’, or dead-end street. The principalexample of cul-de-sac organisation comes from the large planning projects ofMies van der Rohe and Ludwig Hilberseimer. Lafayette Park in Detroit standsout as the primary example among many similar unrealised schemes. Cul-de-sac organisation is also characteristic of the majority of contemporary NorthAmerican subdivisions as well as European and Asian New Towns. Theelimination of the cross-axial field brings additional levels of hierarchy tostreet infrastructure. With the introduction of urban motorways into areas ofnew urban construction, subdivision and classification come into their own.The advent of the freeway and feeder road bring a fifth and sixth level ofhierarchy into play, as follows:FREEWAY/FEEDER/BOULEVARD/SPINE/STREET/DESTINATION. Throughthese levels of hierarchy, the broad range of social grouping allowed by theflexible infrastructure of the previous diagrams is diminished. For the firsttime, a completely individuated subjectivity comes into view.

Diagram 2The second, intermediate pattern is that of the superblock. Gridironconstruction effectively came to an end in the period following the SecondWorld War. What succeeded the gridiron was the superblock. A superblock isan increase in the unit of urban aggregation beyond the characteristic of aconventional city block. This significant increase in economic, demographic orterritorial dimension represents not only a change in size, but also a changein kind. This change in kind dramatically affects the subjectivities of thegridiron. The exact same circles representing social groupings can be drawnas they were in the previous diagram, but unlike the gridiron infrastructure,the groupings cannot be moved or resized independent of the superblockinfrastructure that creates them. The circles still indicate a number ofcollective subjectivities such as formed by political or ethnic identities, andthey can still indicate a district identified with a distinctive urban or naturalfeature. The subjectivities of the superblock correspond precisely to theinfrastructural form so that a ‘lock’ between programmme and structure iscreated. Besides being locked into the infrastructure, these subjectivities canalso be more easily isolated as a result of a defined perimeter and thereduced number of entrances and exits that typically occur in superblockdevelopment. In other words, the same groups can be formed, but thedynamic between them is utterly changed. Superblocks are the organisationalunit of such well-known projects as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City andLlewelyn-Davies’ Milton Keynes. They are also characteristic of the immediatepostwar subdivision in North America. The superblock encodes another levelof hierarchy within the urban infrastructure. With the addition of the accessroad, the superblock shows a third level of hierarchy non-existent in thegridiron. This three-level hierarchy can be expressed asBOULEVARD/STREET/DESTINATION.

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the historically specific subjectivities that rose and fellthroughout the 20th century. It is clear that changes in formaffected the dynamics between these subjectivities, includingthe ability to isolate and control them as well as the ability tounderstand them as a whole. These observations inthemselves may be sufficient to theorise a relation betweensocial life and urban form, yet there is something banal (readbehavioural) in the equation of social organisation to a circle.Planimetric circles limit us to mapping the social as a group.Furthermore, they privilege collective subjectivities asopposed to individuated subjectivities that are morecharacteristic of contemporary cities.

It is important to remember that the organisational logicof any given urban system is not identical to the logic of form.What this means is that the analysis of form alone does notyield the decisive characteristics of urban organisation. This ismade clear in the next pair of diagrams that trace habitualpaths of movement, or ‘itineraries’. Itineraries are sketchedon top of the infrastructure diagrams and are often atvariance with the forms that support them. We can proceedwith a mapping of itineraries by locating six destinationsmarked by the small circles on the diagram (see Diagram 4).These small circles represent individual destinations ratherthan the large circles that represented social groups. Withregard to gridiron urbanism there exists a near-infinitenumber of paths that connect any of the six destinations. Ifeach destination represents home, office, school, market, thenthe daily routines that connect them are almost infinitelyvariable. This diagram of gridiron itineraries is meant tocontrast with the itineraries generated by the cul-de-sac. Tothis end, the same six destinations are drawn on top of thecul-de-sac infrastructure. As opposed to the infinite number ofroutes or circuits created between the six locations on thegrid, the cul-de-sac drastically reduces the connectionsbetween the six centres. Any connecting path must moveseveral levels back up the hierarchy, often returning to aprimary axis (such as an urban freeway) of organisationbefore descending again to one of the specific locations.Unlike the infinite number of itineraries between all possiblepoints on the grid, the points on the closed system allow onlya single connection between any two points. This drasticreduction of choice from near infinity to one is not revealedby the direct juxtaposition of the circle and the grid. As adiagramming technique, the itinerary is interesting becauseit lies between the social entities and the formalinfrastructure, eliminating the direct (deterministic)correspondence and potentially tying the two together.

Once again it is clear that the relation of socialorganisation to urban infrastructure far surpasses functionalconsiderations. The increasing isolation of the cul-de-sacdestination due to the systematic elimination of connectingpaths is clearly revealed by the itinerary. Here the drasticelimination of choice is so severe that it is in danger ofcutting the analysis short. Putting judgement aside,temporarily, and focusing on the analysis at hand, we realise

that the difference being marked is between urban systemsthat are open and urban systems that are closed. Open urbansystems are made up of networks characterised by circuits,loops and nodes of continuation. Closed urban systems, onthe other hand, are made up of networks characterised byhubs, spokes and nodes of termination. The differencebetween the nodes of continuation that characterise openurban systems, and nodes of termination that characteriseclosed urban systems, cannot be overstated. What isimportant to remember is that these network nodes formutterly opposed subject positions. Nodes of termination forgea highly individuated subject position encoded at theubiquitous level of urban infrastructure.

IndividuationWhile the integration or separation of social entities isimportant to the working of a city, it is not the only effect ofinfrastructure. It is possible to take the analysis of itinerariesone step further in order to understand these patterns ofmovement beyond their already significant implications. It ispossible to push this analysis into the existential realities thatare the result of the ubiquitous nature of urbaninfrastructure. In other words, the impact of urban form

Diagram 4This pair of diagrams traces the paths of individual movement on top of theinfrastructure diagrams. The patterns generated by these paths are often atvariance with the forms that support them. In this diagram, six locations aremarked by the small circles. These circles represent individual destinationsrather than the large circles in the preceding diagrams that represented socialgroups. The left-hand diagram shows that in gridiron urbanism there exists anear-infinite number of paths that connect any of the six destinations. If eachdestination represents home, office, school, market, then the daily routinesthat connect them are almost infinitely variable. The diagram of gridironitineraries on the left is meant to contrast with the itineraries generated bythe cul-de-sac shown on the right. On the right-hand side, the same sixdestinations are drawn on top of the cul-de-sac infrastructure. As opposed tothe infinite number of routes or circuits created between the six locations onthe grid, the cul-de-sac drastically reduces the connections between the sixdestinations. Any connecting path must move several levels back up thehierarchy, often returning to a primary axis of organisation before descendingagain to one of the specific locations. Unlike the infinite number of itinerariesbetween all possible points on the grid, the points on the closed system allowonly a single connection between any two points. This drastic reduction ofchoice from near infinity to one, more accurately depicts the contrast betweenthe open, gridiron and closed cul-de-sac organisation.

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extends beyond the issue of interconnected parts to theconstruction of subjectivity at an existential level.

In order to extend the analysis, it is important tounderstand how discrete locations are established in theextended urban field of the cul-de-sac city. As mentioned, cul-de-sac cities are made up of networks characterised by nodesof termination. Terminal nodes are unlike the nodes ofcontinuation that characterise gridiron urbanism. The path toa specific place in the cul-de-sac city will always terminate inan exclusive destination or endpoint (see Diagram 5), The pathon the open grid, on the other hand, will never terminatebecause the gridiron is infinite in all directions. As opposed tothe cul-de-sac’s termination of movement, the grid offers onlya series of arbitrary stopping points often described ascoordinates in space: for example, 239 East 339th Street. Theorganisational logic of a grid produces points that areconnected by an infinite number of circuits or loops. Theorganisational logic of a cul-de-sac produces, on the contrary,a distribution of terminals or terminal distribution.

The ability of the cul-de-sac city to establish fixed endpointshas significant implications for urban subjectivity. This is bestrevealed in another itinerary diagram. In the cul-de-sac city,the pattern of movement through urban space traces thefigure of a discrete SPIRAL through a succession of theoverlaid structural hierarchies described above. This pathmight begin on a primary urban freeway and from there turninwards towards a singularly defined place. This in-turningspiralling path – from freeway to feeder to collector todevelopment spine to driveway – forms the trajectory of aclosed urban system. Turning inwards on itself, the pathconfigures a series of discrete segments each more exclusivethan the last. Everyone now lives not on an anonymous gridcoordinate, but at the end of a particular path, on the lastdriveway, on the last cul-de-sac, in a city whose overall form isunknowable. In the cul-de-sac city we are right where we havealways wanted to be, at the very origin of the spiral, each ofour delicate egos seated at the base of a terminal destination.This spiralling inwards constitutes the mechanism ofindividuation that creates the existential reality that liesbehind the nodes of termination.

The manner in which the cul-de-sac city defines adestination speaks volumes for the magnitude of change seenin urban infrastructure over the past century. This is not,however, so much a change in urban form as it is a change inurban subjectivity. Viewed from this perspective, there can beno greater contrast between the collective subjects thegridiron street produces and the individuated subjects the cul-de-sac produces. I would argue that the gridiron didultimately sustain a collective subject even if that subject wasdefined as an undifferentiated mass society. In the cul-de-saccity, this mode of subjectivity is no longer possible. The cul-de-sac city privileges individuated subjects at the expense of anymassification or incorporation. This is its historicaluniqueness as it is the historical uniqueness of the city in ourtime. Whatever characteristics of gridiron urbanism we may

admire, or even prefer, we are not able to ignore the fact thatgridiron urbanism cannot support the individuatedsubjectivities that are prevalent today. More important,perhaps, is the need to update the Modernist conception ofthe ‘universal subject’, bringing to modern urbanism aworkable alternative. This is to say, finally and withoutequivocation, that urban form is historically unique as are thesubjects it produces.

At this juncture it is possible to provide a tentative answerto the question of ‘who’. Who, exactly, is the subject ofarchitectural and urban design? For whom do we presume tospeak? A first, tentative answer to that question is that wespeak for the highly individuated subject of the contemporarycity. While such an answer is certainly not definitive, nor doesit suggest that individuation is an inevitable or even adesirable outcome, it does provide a less-than-arbitrarystarting point for continued analysis.

Diagram 5This diagram maps the logic of the terminal node in cul-de-sac urbanism. Thepath to a specific place in the cul-de-sac city will always terminate in anexclusive destination or endpoint. The path on the open grid, on the otherhand, will never terminate because the gridiron is infinite in all directions. Asopposed to the cul-de-sac’s termination of movement, the grid offers only aseries of arbitrary stopping points often described as coordinates in space:for example, 239 East 339th Street. The organisational logic of a gridproduces points that are connected by an infinite number of circuits or loops.The organisational logic of a cul-de-sac produces, on the contrary, adistribution of terminals or terminal distribution. In the cul-de-sac city, thepattern of movement through urban space traces the figure of a discreteSPIRAL through a succession of the overlaid structural hierarchies describedabove. This path might begin on a primary urban freeway and from there turninwards towards a singularly defined place. This in-turning spiralling path —from freeway to feeder to collector to development spine to driveway — formsthe trajectory of a closed urban system. Turning inwards on itself, the pathconfigures a series of discrete segments each more exclusive than the last.Everyone now lives not on an anonymous grid coordinate, but at the end of aparticular path, on the last driveway, on the last cul-de-sac, in a city whoseoverall form is unknowable. In the cul-de-sac city we are right where we havealways wanted to be, at the very origin of the spiral, each of our delicate egosseated at the base of a terminal destination. This spiralling inwardsconstitutes the existential reality of terminal nodes.

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In a short text dating from 1972, Foucault made thefollowing remark about the construction of an individuatedsubjectivity. He wrote: ‘Do not demand of politics that itrestore the “rights” of the individual, as philosophy hasdefined them. The individual is the product of power. What isneeded is to “deindividualize” by means of multiplication anddisplacement, diverse combinations. The group must not bethe organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but aconstant generator of de-individualization.’ (author’s italics).5

Seldom do we question the fundamental value of theindividual. It is as if our liberal heritage safeguarded theexistence of our humanity in a world defined by theencroachment of mass society. It has been suggested that theliberal conception of the individual is as dated as theconception of mass society itself and that, today, it may be thecase that individuality or ‘difference’ constitutes as much athreat to our humanity as it does to its safeguard.6 This uniqueunderstanding comes to us as designers who recognise theconcealed logic of urban infrastructures and how it mayunwittingly block or accelerate the development of the social.4

Notes1. On the critique of the universal subject, Manfredo Tafuri argued that theeffect of modern urbanism was not to reinvent the subject, but to eliminate it.He wrote that: ‘The problem was to plan the disappearance of the subject, tocancel the anguish caused by the pathetic (or ridiculous) resistance of theindividual to the structures of domination that close in upon him, to indicatethe voluntary and docile submission to those structures of domination as thepromised land of universal planning.’ Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia,MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1976, p 73.2. Foucault’s reinvention of the subject can be broken down into two distinctfeatures – historicising the subject and individuating it. The first pursued anunderstanding of subjectivity as a historical phenomenon. Before Foucault,the social was defined in ‘essentialist’ terms. What this means is that thesocial had been interpreted as the ‘essence’ of community or the ‘essence’ ofhumanity that was distilled down through the ages into an idealised subjectposition that transcended its many historical manifestations. In architecture,this essentialist subject was most often referred to as a modern, ‘universal’subject, a position that is still promoted (however unwittingly) today. Foucaultundermined all such essential positions through a detailed study of thehistoric record, and put into its place a subject that was historically defined.The second way in which Foucault reinterpreted the social was to shift theemphasis from an incorporated or collective subject to an individual one.Traditionally, the historical study of an individual subject was limited to thereign of a king or another such significant person and would ultimatelyconstitute the ‘great man’ theory of history. Like these historians, Foucaultfocused on an individual subject. Instead of writing the history of kings andgenerals, however, he studied the factory worker, lunatic, the schoolchild, orthe prisoner and the so-called ‘disciplinary regimes’ that made them exactlywhat they were. In other words, these subjectivities were socially constructedby specific disciplinary regimes that constituted and regulated society (bytargeting individuals) on a one-by-one basis. His celebrated study of thepenitent criminal in Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon is the premier example ofFoucault’s focus on these individuated disciplinary regimes.3. Street infrastructure is one of the oldest and best demonstrations of theautonomous evolution of urban form. By autonomous form is meant form thatfollows prior form in succession over time, ultimately creating a stabletypology. The grid form typical of street infrastructure has existed sinceantiquity. It has evolved since that time through numerous variations inpattern including regular and irregular syncopation, larger- and smaller-scaledspacings, orthogonal and curvilinear geometries, but the logic of the grid formhas endured. This autonomous evolution was abruptly terminated followingthe Second World War when the gridiron form of the Western city waseclipsed by a new pattern of organisation. Since the late 1940s, no gridiron

street infrastructures have been produced in the American city. Instead,closed, cul-de-sac organisation has dominated urban development, creating adecisive transformation in what we understand to be street infrastructure. Ihave argued elsewhere that the cul-de-sac is not a further evolution of theancient grid typology, but a rupture of that typology that brings entirely newqualities into the urban environment, positive and negative. And while thetypology is ruptured, it is not the case that the infrastructure has become,again, merely a technical or functional matter. 4. In the 19th century, collective subjectivity was not established by the urbanplaza or square, for the mass would always exceed its fixed boundaries.Collective subjectivity (political identity) was constructed by the open street. Itthen follows that the gridiron infrastructure was characterised by a distinctivefeature of mass society: the ability to grow without boundary. 5. Foucault, preface to Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism andSchizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis), 1983, p xiv. Thisquotation does a lot in four sentences. It offers two opposing types of‘individuals’. The first type is one that Foucault claims to be the product ofpower. The implication is that power produces a ‘hierarchised’ individual thatis ‘organically’ bonded into the unity of a larger group. The six-level hierarchy– FREEWAY/FEEDER/BOULEVARD/SPINE/STREET/DESTINATION –revealed in Diagram 3 allows us to readily identify this type of individual.Against this hierarchised, or ranked, individual, a second type of unranked,non-hierarchised individual is offered by Foucault. This second type ofindividual is ‘deindividualised’ by a process that actively undermines theorganic bond that traditionally ties it to a larger group dynamic. This processis accomplished ‘by means of multiplication and displacement’ and byreplacing the organic unity of assimilated individuals with ‘diversecombinations’. The individual is therefore not seen as something that is‘restored’ with reference to a series of ‘essential’ (philosophically defined)rights. It is instead seen to be constructed by the multiplication anddisplacement of itself. Such specific procedures suggest not the shoring upof an essential integrity, but an individuation that is accomplished by amultiplication of individuality – a hyper-individuation. In this regard, the groupbecomes not a hierarchical encoding of individuals, but a ‘constant generator’of multiplicity, and this multiplicity produces a kind of unranked individual thatis not subject to the type of disciplinary technologies that Foucault’s workreveals. Following Foucault, we can thus identify a process called‘deindividuation’ that is the means by which an individual that is ranked into aunitary hierarchy is unranked into a form of organisation that can bedescribed not as a group or a mass, but as a multiplicity. This multiplicityshares a striking resemblance to a new form of global political subjectivitythat has been defined by a number of political philosophers as the ‘multitude’.6. The individuation of urban infrastructure follows the decline of the welfarestate and global embrace of neo-liberal economic policies. While the linkbetween neo-liberalism and individuated subjectivity seems reasonably clear,what is less clear is the specific constitution of a global subjectivity that mayultimately emerge from this condition. This situation raises the stakes on thequestion of ‘who’ our discourses presume. Recently, political theorists haveinvented a placeholder for the emerging global subject called ‘multitude’. Byall accounts, and there are many, the multitude is highly individuated.

Text © 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Albert Pope

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The Idea of Centre in Low-Density UrbanismFor some decades now, the low-density city has been thepredominant urban form in North America and westernEurope. Sometimes it replicates or reinterprets aspects of thetraditional city; otherwise it develops new forms of cityscapeand landscape to suit the needs and desires of its builders,developers and inhabitants. Its spaces are a function ofmobility and access. The low-density city is best understood asa process of urbanisation, yet the expressions ‘urban’ and‘urbanism’ seem inappropriate. This is not because it is noturban, but rather because it has not yet found its own urbandesign practice. For traditional urbanists, the diffuse nature ofthe low-density city is a threat to the specificity of the historicurban cores. There are three additional irritants: the low-density city does not seem to have a proper centre; it is amilieu served primarily by the private automobile; and itseems to represent a lifestyle devoted to consumption.

The regional shopping centre epitomises all of thesequestions, yet it was the first postwar building type toeffectively manage the flows of cars and trucks, thus creatingthe basis for comfortable, safe and clean outdoor pedestrianspaces that attracted many thousands of people. In its latestmanifestation as a ‘lifestyle shopping centre’, the samequestions asked 50 years ago still apply: What is the role ofthe public spaces of shopping centres, and what kind ofurbanity do they represent? Can retail, in combination withother functions, create a central place in the low-density city?

This articles seeks to address these issues by focusing onthe role and potential of the shopping centre in theconsolidation of the low-density city. It starts by looking backat the nascent American suburbs where the regional shoppingcentre first made its claims for centrality, then moves tomiddle Europe where two current projects in Switzerland areusing a synthesis of ‘branded urban district’ and intensively

Much maligned, shopping centres have come to represent many of thenegative aspects of low-density areas. They are all too often associatedwith high car dependency and a paucity of cultural and public amenities.Alex Wall questions this preconception. Could the well-conceived anddesigned shopping centre actually prove to be urban sprawl’s redemption?

Public Lifestyle in theLow-Density CityPublic Lifestyle in theLow-Density City

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choreographed urban public space as a mechanism forrestructuring the city region. Finally, it assesses the potentialof a specific phenomenon in the Southeast Asian city ofJakarta: shopping centre clusters as initiators of public space,as agents of reurbanisation and as the starting point for thelong and difficult negotiation towards a sustainable megacity.

Who Builds the City? The phenomenon of low-density urbanism raises the questionof who builds the city. In post-Second World War NorthAmerica, the build out of the suburbs required the formationof a formidable cartel of bankers, merchant builders,shopping centre developers and the ‘road lobby’.1 As citiesspread out, often beyond statutory boundaries, the newlyformed real-estate industry came to dominate questions ofwhere, how and what to build. Developers came to do whatpublic authorities could or would not do; thus the private notthe public hand would build the city. Yet the balance between

public and private initiative and responsibility may bechanging again. In the European and Southeast Asianexamples illustrated below, there are indications that a newmodel of participation between private, public andcommunity actors is emerging. It is an optimistic thesis yet anecessary question: Can private development takeresponsibility for the public realm, and can it bring to marketan equitable balance of housing?

Commerce as the Generator of New Urban Space, New Urban ImagesThe shopping centre, originally a product of the regionalmarketing strategies of downtown department stores, wasone of the agents that transformed the area outside Americancities into a low-density urban cityscape-landscape. Its impacton the development of the suburbs, the renewal of thedowntowns, and the spatial and programmatic order of thenew metropolitan regions can be traced in the built work ofVictor Gruen.2 In his early centres, for example Northland(1954) outside Detroit, Gruen argued that the attractor wasthe public spaces with their sculpture, landscaping andmodest community rooms. Southdale (1956), the nation’s firstindoor mall, was planned to function as the centrepiece of aplanned community, but its significance was in the extent towhich the public space became a stage for events, and a placeto both see and to be seen.

Gruen’s fusion of retail with the idea of a social andcultural centre was a first step leading from the postwarsuburban shopping centre to the ‘branded’ urban districts oftoday. This evolution was picked up by the developer JamesRouse and architect and planner Jon Jerde. Rouse’s particularinnovation was to link retail, historic structures and tourism,a strategy that led to his trademark Festival Marketplaces.Boston’s Quincey Market (1976) and Baltimore’s Harborplace(1984) were exemplary public-private projects of their timeand required close cooperation between innovative citymayors, the developer and his architects. CityWalk (1993), inLos Angeles’ Universal City, was Jerde’s breakthrough projectand amounted to a new development type – the urbanentertainment centre. Even more explicitly than Rouse’sFestival Marketplaces, CityWalk posed questions for urbanists:for example, what is urban and what is city? Overturningprivate/public and real/artificial, CityWalk is both private andartificial, while being popular and urban. Jerde’s project showedthat the retail component could be scaled back and replaced byentertainment functions and narrative urban space.

Lifestyle Centres: ‘Mix’ The shopping centre, having conquered the city, hasreturned to the suburbs, recast as a ‘lifestyle centre’. Thisbewildering designation describes what is basically anupmarket shopping village with multiple buildings, a streetgrid with sidewalks allowing some drive-up access, well-furnished outdoor spaces and a broad variety ofconsumption activities. Often described as ‘town centres’,they are built near upper-middle-class residential areas and

Architekt Daniel Libeskind AG, Masterplan, Westside,Berne, Switzerland, due for completion 2008Superposition of regional centre and highway space. Viewfrom the highway showing the fractal public spacespiercing the shopping centre envelope.

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include offices and some accommodation. In the low-densitycity, their theme is a ‘relaxed’ urbanity.3

In Europe, more distinctive hybrids of the lifestyle centreare ‘Brandhubs’, or branded urban districts. They are definedby Kerstin Hoeger as developments at an urban scale,undertaken within a framework of public-private partnership,and strategically implemented at a planning and governmentlevel to foster urban development. They use architecture andurban space to create an ambience for a brand. The complexinterweaving of social and economic goals requires thecooperation of many stakeholders besides developer, propertyowner and investor. From the beginning, Brandhubs haverequired the equal partnership of the public sector, includingthe surrounding communities.4

Westside, BerneA project near the Swiss capital of Berne, scheduled to open in2008, revisits in European terms the postwar restructuring ofthe American city-region by the regional marketing strategiesof the great downtown department stores. Westside,5 alifestyle shopping centre complex sponsored by the Swissdepartment store group Migros, will form a new regionalsubcentre and provide an anchor and identity to the disparatesettlements on either side of the A1 highway west of the city.

The initial gesture is a major civil engineering work,bridging over the A1 to provide a landlink for the existing andplanned communities. A new interchange will make the

complex accessible to one million people within half an hour,and a regional railway station will link Westside to the Swissrail network. The core of the project is the shopping centreand a series of public spaces designed by Daniel Libeskind.

Every large-scale multifunctional urban development hasan impact on its city and region, yet in the case of Westside,what is new is that Migros, the developer, the city and cantonof Berne, and the surrounding communities have beeninvolved in negotiations from the start of the project. The goalwas to build consensus and support for the project on the partof all stakeholders. For the Migros brand, and by extension allof the other participating retailers, the goal is to develop arobust long-term relationship with their client communities.6

Berne is a city of civil servants with stagnating populationand growth, while the suburbs to the west have above averagenumbers of unemployed and foreign born. The Westsidecomplex should not merely physically link the fragmentedwestern suburbs, but provide a thematic focus: contemporarylifestyle shopping in an architectural setting. We will soon beable to see whether this fusion of infrastructural planningwith consumption and leisure activities anchored by signaturearchitectural spaces will be the starting point for a new modelof centrality and Swiss identity.7

Ebisquare, Ebikon, LucerneA traditionally contested aspect of shopping centres is their‘public’ spaces; who owns them, who has the right to usethem and who is excluded? Social space in the low-density cityis an endless variation of semipublic, semiprivate, mobile andvirtual. However vague the term ‘lifestyle centre’ may be, thecredibility of these places as centres depends on theprogrammatic mix and the nature of the public spaces. Asecond project by the same developer located on an industrialstrip intends to provide answers to these questions.

Where Westside is dependent on the architecture,Ebisquare, set to open in 2011 in Ebikon near Lucerne,focuses not on the building but on the performance of theinternal public space. As the project is currently out to bid,we will focus briefly on the intentions of the designers,Holzer Kobler Architekturen of Zurich. The lifestyle shoppingcentre, with a programme similar to Westside, will beanimated by a public space that is intended to be inpermanent transition. The different spaces of the mall,conceived as a Möbius strip, juxtapose virtual landscapesand interactive functions with the adjoining consumptionspaces. At this point we cannot judge to what extent thepublic space at Ebisquare will be an instrument or merelyspectacle. But what is certain is that the architects seek tooffer space that is informed and restless besides beingarchitecturally or urbanistically distinctive.

At Westside the larger urban organism is what isimportant, with the architecture as the selling point, while atEbisquare the selling point will be the ‘wild’ interior space.8 IfWestside reflects the complex participatory synergies thatmust be in play in order to equip the low-density city, Ebisquare

Architekt Daniel Libeskind AG, Masterplan, Westside, Berne, Switzerland,due for completion 2008The masterplan in 2006. On the land bridge over the A1 are the lifestyleshopping centre complex to the left, and housing plots to the right. Theshopping centre is flanked by a cineplex, hotel and conference centre, poolcomplex with a spa and fitness centre, and a garden centre. The housing willconsist of 80 flats for the elderly, and 800 apartments for some 2,700 peopleto be built over the next 10 years. The regional rail line runs along the loweredge of the site. Regional bus lines stop at the two plazas in light blue.

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Holzer Kobler Architekturen, Ebisquare, Ebikon, Lucerne, Switzerland,due for completion 2011Water + Meadows: continuous curated space. For the developer, thestarting point for the spatial concept should celebrate science, media,communications and culture. Holzer Kobler’s goal is that the linear spaceof the mall, formed into a continuous strip, will be a series of landscapes,using sound and light to create both a real and virtual experience. Thechain of associations should extend to the product displays resulting in afusion of communications, atmosphere and stage design.

may demonstrate the continued vitality of public space evenin the medialised, automobile-oriented low-density city.

Jakarta: Shopping Centre Clusters as the Beginning of Public Space?The meaning and function of the large shopping centres inJakarta is slightly different from that in North America andwestern Europe.9 They are practically the only place for ‘out-of-home leisure’, thus they become an essential social meetingplace. For the middle classes, other than the shopping centresthere is no public space in which to meet. At the moment,‘lifestyle’ is best expressed in the proliferation of restaurantsand cafés where people come to eat, and indeed on Sunday therestaurants are crowded with families having sit-down meals.

Since the 1970s, a large number of shopping centres havebeen built, yet what is significant in terms of urban typology,urban structure and public space is that many of them arelocated adjacent to each other in ‘clusters’.10 Below I proposethe reurbanisation of such clusters as the basis for creating aspatial and programmatic network of public places across thebroad cityscape of a megacity.

Shopping Centre Clusters as New Central PlacesThe shopping centre industry in Jakarta would like tocompete in the arena of shopping tourism with Singapore,Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok. Yet merely continuing typicalreal-estate development practices of the last decades, in whichthe agenda of private development has overtaken the role ofpublic planning, will lead the city into an economic, ecologicaland social cul-de-sac. The retail market is already saturated,and the problems of traffic, air and water quality,consumption of energy, and social segregation togetherpresent difficult challenges.11 Neither government, privateenterprise nor community pressure can resolve theseproblems on their own. Only a new synthesis of cooperativeand collective action can begin to roll back the metastasisingconsequences of runaway development, governmentalweakness and the neglect of physical and socialinfrastructure.12

Similar to the emergence of the North American edge citiesdescribed by Joel Garreau, the shopping centre clusters inJakarta have become de facto subcentres in an expanding city-region.13 To contribute to a new Jakarta identity and reframetheir potential as social, cultural and commercial magnets,

Section through lifestyle centre complex. Through an act of spatial surgery,Holzer Kobler have inserted a Möbius strip of interactive mallspace thatincorporates the roof of the building. The space will be ‘curated’ to ensure theeffect and meaning of real and virtual elements. Top: a typical sectionshowing a central internal mall. Below: the mall incorporates the roofscape.The buildings on the right are the Senior Living Center.

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developers need to innovate by adding non-retail functions,such as education and training, thus supporting social equity.A concept needs to be developed for the spaces between thebuildings, and legible connections to the surroundingneighbourhoods must be established. The potential for Jakartais that, at the scale of the city, a network of public places canbe created consisting of the shopping centre clusters, thehistoric colonial centre (Kota), the monumental publicbuildings and spaces commemorating independence (Monas),and the historic seafront (Ancol). All of these need to be linkedby coordinated public transport.

Two Shopping Centre Clusters: Kelapa Gading and Mangga DuaKelapa Gading Mall (1987–) is a multi-use cluster with a‘mixed market segment lifestyle mall’ selling everyday articlesat one end, while the other end is anchored by the spaces andproducts that can be found in a good-quality shopping centrein the West. By 2010, all of these fragments will be united by acentral pedestrian boulevard, which will require new facadesand entrances to the existing buildings.

The decision to reorient all of the functions to a new publicspace is more easily undertaken when the whole complex isunder single ownership, yet this is the spatial developmentthat all of the other clusters must follow if these complexesare to have any greater urban value than as mere shoppingprecincts. Closely surrounded by compact middle-classneighbourhoods, the management at Kelapa Gading contributesto the security and maintenance of the nearby streets. By

reinforcing both its external and internal accessibility, KelapaGading is near to being an integrated district centre.

The trade centre cluster of Mangga Dua (1988–) is knownthroughout Southeast Asia as a destination for wholesalebuyers and retail shoppers for textiles and electronics.14 Lyingjust east of the historic centre of Jakarta, the Mangga Duadistrict is larger and more complex than Kelapa Gading.Rather than an internal pedestrian concourse as at KelapaGading, the urban value of the Mangga Dua district should begiven by the spatial quality of the boulevards. Not merelytraffic arteries, they should be extensively planted with trees,equipped with pedestrian amenities and be well served byvarious forms of public transport. ‘Living boulevards’ wouldbind the different trade and shopping centres into a singlecityscape. If the adjacent freight railyards could be developedinto a new mixed-use residential quarter served by the twotrain lines, then Mangga Dua could develop into a self-supporting urban district.

Reimagining the Relationship Between Mall and City While global entertainment and media corporations aredeveloping ‘branded’ urban spaces and even ‘branded’ urbandistricts, more and more people have come to expect urbanspace that is not only multifunctional and urban, but also safeand convenient. Yet these new large-scale commercialensembles raise many of the same problems and questionsthat were levelled against suburban and urban shoppingcentres. Can the design of the marketplace lead to urban and

Cadiz International, Manila and Anggara, and PT Perentjana Djaja, KelapaGading Mall, Jakarta, Indonesia, 1987–Google Earth view of shopping centre cluster. Under constant expansion since1987, the cluster consists of La Piazza Entertainment Center and Gading FoodCity (village), both of which are open-air and have their own public spaces,shopping centres 1, 2 and 3 with parking (forming an L-shape), a site forfuture shopping centre 4 with a hotel, the Summit Apartments, a traditionalbazaar, shop houses and La Piazza parking. The planned central pedestrianboulevard will require the building of new entrances to all the adjoiningbuildings. To what extent will the facades to the street be opened, and howwill the complex contribute to the liveliness of the surrounding boulevards?

Envirotech Indonesia, Mangga Dua district, Jakarta, 1988– Google Earth view of Mangga Dua district. Straddling its central boulevard,the Mangga Dua cluster consists of four trade centres interconnected bybridges, with adjoining hotels and parking garages. The surrounding district isstructured by a T-junction array of boulevards, with four trade centres andhotels straddling the long arm of the T (left). Nearby two train lines serve apassenger station at the edge of a large, now disused, freight railway yard.Along the shorter arm of the T is a new trade centre and a large shoppingcentre (both to the right). Due to market saturation, both of these newcomplexes are having difficulties. Enhancing accessibility and diversifying thefunctional mix of the different centres can prevent duplication andredundancy. Cannibalistic retail development is an unsustainable practice.

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social renewal? Under what conditions do corporations wantto play a more positive social, cultural and environmentalrole? And how are the goals of private development to bebalanced with the needs of local communities?

Our thesis is that current and future environmentalproblems can only be met by a cooperative effort between thestakeholders.15 In the context of Berne, existing planningstructures were modified to enable the creation of theensemble at Westside. Commerce is being used to rebalanceregional settlement, to create centrality, and hopefully tocreate opportunity across the social spectrum. In contrast to

the consensus building and planned regional restructuring ofthe Swiss examples, in Jakarta where questions ofsustainability and the effects of climate change are creatingpressure, such district management, communication andparticipation structures need to be developed. Can thecollective ownership of the shopping centre clusters, workingin partnership with city government and the localcommunities, frame and initiate long-term transformationtowards a legible and equitable city? At the heart of thisquestion is mediating the discrepancy between the new rich,the middle classes and the working poor. 4

Notes1. See, for example, D Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and UrbanGrowth 1820–2000, Pantheon (New York), 2003, pp 165–8. 2. Three examples of the first generation of regional shopping centres,diverse in their location and form, were John Graham’s Northgate for BonMarché of Seattle, KGS for Jordan Marsh in Framingham, Massachusetts, andVictor Gruen for the JL Hudson Co of Detroit, and again at Southdale for theDayton Co department store in Minneapolis. These arguments and the pivotalrole of Victor Gruen are further developed in my Victor Gruen: From UrbanShop to New City, ACTAR (Barcelona), 2005.3. See two recent articles posted on the internet: Andrew Blum, ‘The MallGoes Undercover, It Now Looks Like A City Street’, culturebox(http://www.slate.com/id/2116246/), posted 6 April 2005, copyrightWashington Post 2007; and, Parija Bhatnagar, CNN (http://money.cnn.com/2005/01/11/news/fortune 500), posted January 12, 2005. 4. Kees Christiaanse and Kerstin Hoeger, ‘Corporate urbanism andsustainability’, in Built Identity: Swiss Re’s Corporate Architecture, Birkhauser(Basel, Boston, Berlin), 2006, pp 134–7.5. Westside is owned by Migros Aare, managed by Neue Brünnen AG, wasconceived by Nuesch Development AG, and masterplanned by DanielLibeskind. Project partners are the city and canton of Berne. The idea tocreate a regional centre to the west of Berne originated in the 1960s but wasshelved because of the oil crisis of the 1970s. Westside is the largest privateconstruction project in Switzerland. Direct precedents for our discussion ofbranded urban districts are CityWalk, Universal City, Los Angeles; Disney’sTimes Square Development, New York; and the Sony Centers in SanFransisco, Berlin and Tokyo.6. As Christoph Rossetti of the City Planning Department of Berne explainedin his email answer to my questionnaire, the participation takes place atdifferent levels: local landowners could register their ideas as the basicprogramme was being developed; the masterplanning model and urbandesign concept were developed by professionals of course, yet any citizen, orcitizen group, could take part; affected merchants or citizens could raiseobjections; before permission was given to changes in the lifestyle shoppingcentre, alterations were presented at hearings attended by cantonal civilservants as well as local citizens’ groups; and finally the client, Migros,asserted its claims during the planning and especially with respect to theinfrastructure contract.7. The building of the Westside complex has had to overcome a number ofdifficulties, including the decking over of the A1. Professionals and critics maydebate the merits of the architecture, but ultimately the skill of themerchandising concept and the variety of the functional mix will be importantto engage visitors with the public spaces. 8. Conversations with Klaus-Peter Nuesch, Nuesch AG, St Gallen; KerstinHoeger ETH, Zurich; and Barbara Holzer of Holzer Kobler Architekturen, Zurich.Christoph Rossetti, city planner in Berne, kindly answered a questionnaire. 9. Shopping centre clusters are agglomerations comprising two or moreshopping centres of different generations, one or more trade centres, hotels,apartment buildings and offices. Shopping centres in Jakarta are social-economic entities providing one job per 10 square metres (108 square feet)of net retail space. For example, at the Taman Anggrek Mall, the number ofstaff needed to run the complex is 200 administration, 400 security, 300housekeeping, 100 parking and 200 building maintenance engineers. Thesefigures do not include sales staff for the shops and restaurants. In the trade

centres, for example at Pasar Pagi, there are 4,000 staff and sales personnel. 10. The study of the role of urban shopping centres for the futuredevelopment of Jakarta is a joint project, PRUDEV (The Role of the PrivateSector in Urban Development), between Real Estate Indonesia, thedepartment of City Planning and Urban Development at the University ofTarumanagara, Jakarta, and the Chair of Urban Design at the University ofKarlsruhe. I thank Eduard Tjiahadi, Jo Santoso, Kemal Taruc, Liong,Herlambang, and everyone who gave me their advice and time. Also, from theshopping centres I thank Soegianto Nagaria of Kelapa Gading and AndreasKartawinata, Director, Lippo Group.11. These problems are exacerbated by the effects of the Asian financial crisisof 1990–2, which precipitated civil strife between ethnic Chinese andIndonesians; the real-estate crisis of 1997, which left the city littered with‘rotten buildings’; and the devastating floods of 2002 and 2007. 12. Current problems include the city’s concern that the explosion of retailspace represents a bubble economy. Shopping centre owner-operators andtheir investors face market saturation: with a further 1.5 million square metres(16.1 million square feet) in the pipeline, there will be an increasing number ofdead malls. Shopping centres pay extra taxes, and because of their relianceon air conditioning incur high energy costs. There is a lack of political will andinadequate tools to mediate spatial segregation and social inequality. Cityland consistently falls to big investors. For local communities there is a lackof purchasing power, housing, health and education. There is no supply ofaffordable housing, and the resulting demand is exacerbated by immigrationfrom the rural hinterland. The programme of integrating small and medium-sized enterprises, and allotting 20 per cent of retail space to street vendors,has proved difficult to implement. 13. In November 2006, Real Estate Indonesia sponsored a conference ontrends in real-estate and shopping centre development that was attended byshopping centre developers, real-estate investors, academics and membersof local and national government. Here the City Governor, Fauzi Bowo,exhorted the real-estate industry to work with all stakeholders to engage theproblems of the city. 14. Trade centres are large multistorey buildings housing up to severalhundred ‘mom and pop stores’, primarily offering textiles and/or electronicgoods; they have open floors for a large number of small shops. Based onthe practice in Taiwan, stall- or shopholders buy outright or lease their spacelong term. The largest trade centres have several hundred shopholders. 15. Government must provide vision, guidance and regulation; in practice thismeans balancing regulatory and tax conditions, creating incentives foraffordable housing, and supporting increased public transit. Public and privateconsultant organisations must provide critical inputs, new cooperative andparticipation models and equitable development strategies. Localcommunities need to lobby support for housing, education and smallbusinesses. Finally, the strategic and economic power of private developersmust be harnessed for implementation. Given the forecast of growth over thenext three to five years, now is the time for stakeholders to begin thesetransformative processes.

Text © 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 22-3 & 24 © Architekt DanielLibeskind AG, Renderings Edit-Bilder für Architektur; p 25 © Holzer KoblerArchitekturen, General planning Burckhardt und Partner; Architecture andFacade Peter Völki, Renderings Art Tools; p 26 © Adapted from Google Earth

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Urbanisation of rural networksThe general urbanisation of the territory is to a large extent a parasite of the pre-existing network of rural roadswhich undergoes no restructuring during urbanisation. Instead the urbanisation leads to an incremental infill ofplots along rural roads unequipped for urban use. In a second phase dendrite-like structures are grafted on tothe existing network in order to disclose the second order behind the ribbon development.

The density of development in Belgium is such that the entire country hasbecome an open city, with little sense of where one metropolitan area beginsand another ends. Bruno De Meulder describes the underlying logic of thisunbroken urbanscape, and the opportunity it affords for re-editing andreinserting informal social spaces in areas of wasted land.

The Constructive Margins of Secondarity

Old Dispersions andScenes for the Productionof Public Space

Old Dispersions andScenes for the Productionof Public Space

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The nearly total urbanisation of the territory of Belgiumsurely makes it an emblematic case in discussions about‘dispersed urbanism’, sprawl, ‘citta diffusa’, and so many otherterms that attempt without too much success to grasp thereality of the contemporary urban condition. Belgium hassince unremembered time been a country of laissez faire,where the cacophonic juxtaposition of built fragmentsdelivers surprise after surprise, where an intense poetry – thisis Magritte territory – lurks side by side with a nauseatingbanality of everyday habitation. This at the same timeincredibly chaotic and urban landscape seems at first sight tolack any coherence whatsoever. Nevertheless, a closer lookallows at least an insight into the ordering logics thatdetermine the continuous production and reproduction of theseemingly chaotic territory, and eventually the developmentof urban strategies to deal with it.

Factors1 that explain the unusual situation of the Belgianterritory include: the extraordinary fertility of the soil, whichgave rise to the very dense occupation of the countryside sincethe early Middle Ages; a multitude of small-scale provincialcities, usually only 20 kilometres (12.4 miles) apart; and theintensive division of land property. The territory isadministered by a multitude of municipalities which, sincethe municipal law of 1838, all have the same rights andpowers – from hamlet to village to the larger city.2 Thisextremely decentralised administration turned the territoryinto an archipelago of municipalities which themselves are amosaic of the small land properties that underwent acontinuous process of further division through inheritancelaw. Given the general laissez faire attitude, and consequentlythe absence of any centrally imposed town-planningregulations, the bulk of development takes the form ofincremental, piecemeal additions or transformations.Development equals incremental mutation.

This general and uncoordinated urbanisation of theterritory was fuelled by two main ‘Belgian’ characteristics: aprevalent and persistent anti-urban catholic ideology (whichalso implied a resistance to any centralisation of power), andthe implementation, step by step, of incredibly dense,nationwide networks of different complementaryinfrastructures (canals, national roads, railways, tramwaysand, after the Second World War, express roads and highways).3

While the catholic ideology promoted home ownership in themunicipality of origin, the density, completeness andaccumulation of this different nationwide network created ina certain way a ‘universal’ accessibility for each spot of theterritory. The ‘unification’ of the national territory resulted ina unified national land, housing and labour market. Each spotembodied the same accessibility and, consequently, in thelong run an equal development potential that ultimately ledto an isotropic condition (which might be considered as a zerodegree of redistributive democracy). Everywhere – on theperiphery of the capital city or in remote hamlets – anemerging, permanent type of urbanity was generated,juxtaposing housing, industry and commerce, which spread

over the whole territory. This urbanity has generally neverconsolidated – it is permanently emerging – given themismatch between the disclosed development potential andthe effective development capacity required.

This process of unification and equalisation distorted thetraditional settlement pattern, and broke the monopoly of thecity as the centre of production and consumption,concentration of labour, population, economical and politicalpower, as a forum of public debate, and so on. Put simply, iteroded the notion of centrality. In terms of developmentpotential, any crossroads of two national roads, a trainstation, tramway stop or a highway exit acquired the samecompetitive advantage as the traditional city. Both centre andperiphery vanished and were replaced by an almostomnipresent ‘secondarity’.4 Historic cities became merelyinsignificant relicts in the isotropic territorial continuumwhere industry (dense networks of flexible small- andmedium-sized enterprises), commerce, residence andagriculture negligently cohabitate.

Conventional wisdom condemns this ‘secondarity’ as aburden, as it does not allow economies of scale, and nor doesit generate the synergies that concentration and accumulationallow. Because it remains dispersed, incremental andunconsolidated, it does not create any significant publicspace, nor an established (hegemonic) order. On the otherhand, this absence of rules and norms, this generalisedcondition of ‘secondarity’5 in opposition to ‘primarity’6 –generates an ambiguous space. It creates an ‘open city’, anembryonic territorial constellation that always remainsreceptive. Its continuously reproduced undefinedness renderspermanent its character of wasteland, a terrain whosepotentiality is unconsumed.

In concrete terms, the combination of a sustainedgeneralised dispersion and a permanently emerging urbanitygave rise to the formation of recurrent tissue figures in theterritory: the isolated terraced house in the middle ofnowhere; the notorious corner with (by now closed/shutdown) pubs at the tramway stop; the commercial ribbondevelopment along national roads;7 the ribbon fragmentalong whatever road; the oversized and only half-developedperimeter block8 that results from urbanisation without anyurbanistic restructuring of former rural road networks, and soon. Over the last decade, plots varying in size, quality andcharacter (residential, industrial, commercial) have beenfilling in the remaining open meshes of the multitude ofurbanised nets that cover the territory.

As a result, most of the spatial patterns are endlessrecombinations of the aforementioned figures, creating sucha redundant variety that the territory becomes isotropic,undefined by over-definition.

Since practically no sites have consolidated and become‘primary’ land, they remain permanently emerging. Thelandscape by definition becomes the defective interplay ofsimultaneous and contradictory landscape forms: urban andrural, yet, due to the negligent/secondary urbanisation

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OSA, Atlas Southwest Flanders, 2002: Ferraris1777 map of Ypres, West Flanders, and thesurrounding area The late medieval territory here is intensivelyoccupied. The countryside is characterised by adense network of evenly distributed farms ofrelatively small scale, with a very fine division ofthe land and a large number of cities, often lessthen 20 kilometres (12.4 miles) apart. The cities– often with crossroads between river and road– create centralities that appear as anarchipelago of cities in a sea of intensivelyexploited and very fine-mazed rural territory.

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Territory of West and East Flanders: from archipelago to rhizome (1770–2000)From the 18th century onwards, a dense network of national roads, railways, tramways, highways andexpressways is superimposed on this territory. The proliferation of crossroads, stations, tramway stops,exits on highways and so on distorts the spatial structure of the territory, as each of the crossroads createsan equal accessibility and is hence a potential point of centrality. The archipelago of cities mutates in aheavily infrastructured rhizome of secondary centres, and a territory of secondarity is generated.

Oversized perimeter blocks,Wevelgem, West FlandersOver time, this parasitic incrementalurbanisation process leads to theformation of redundant figures in thelandscape, such as the well-knownribbon development and oversizedperimeter blocks with their everexpanding dimensions. In a secondphase the second order behind theribbons is sometimes filled in withadditions, garages, warehouses,industrial buildings or, in recentdecades, with allotments thatconsume the last of the open space.This leads to an urban landscape inwhich conglomerate and templatecoexist as morphological principles.

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process, a lot of residual landscape fragments. These areneither urban nor rural, waste(d) lands that hopelessly try tomediate between different scales, conflicting functions,contradictory qualities and spatial paradigms: ribbondevelopment versus allotment, traditional building blockversus Modernist composition, urban versus rural,conglomerate versus template, and so on.

In this territory, with its zero degree of spatial quality,wave after wave of development deposited a layer of urbanmaterial to the point where the whole territory wascovered/urbanised in one way or another.

The urbanistic project consequently becomes an inter-textual work of re-editing (a weak embryonic) text. Theprojects presented here, by OSA (the University of Leuven’sResearch Group for Urbanity and Architecture), attempt sucha re-editing exercise in Southwest Flanders.9 They attempt touse new development to insert minimal spatial qualities,necessary structures and missing public spaces, while at thesame time avoiding an overdose of structuring and definition,which would eventually destroy the fundamental quality ofthe open city Belgium has become, including the proto-democratic character of its spatial constellation. By no meansdo they aim for a comprehensive requalification of theterritory. However, they do focus on potential sites ofcondensation (in the sense of subconcentration andprecipitation – the fallout of new material) that allowarticulation, relief and contrast, and are, in one way or

OSA: Atlas Southwest Flanders, 2004: Buda intimacy/exposure–public/privateThe urban fabric that is generated by rather ad hoc and unconsidered infill, construction, demolition, reconstruction, and soon leads to a large variety of open spaces with very different relationships to the private constructions. This unordered,chaotic juxtaposition of open spaces offers on the one hand all conceivable gradients between public and private space, andon the other opens up a register of spaces ranging from extremely exposed to intimate. A re-editing allows the articulationand exploitation of this richness of open-space qualities as what is conventionally only seen as residual space.

Buda block/elementThe urban fabric is generated by ad hoc infill along ribbons and theunconsidered induction of freestanding, large-scale buildings often in a firstorder/second order relation.

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Buda secret gardenThe Buda Island project exploits and articulates the coincidence of opposingmorphological logics (oversized perimeter block versus freestandingbuildings, both zero-degree versions of traditional building blocks and theModernist paradigm) to create a variety of open and closed spaces that aredifferent in character and nature, as a support for an open city, an invitingspace that can accommodate a variety of different uses and atmospheresside by side.

Simultaneous landscapes/canalscape projectThe existing infrastructure of canals, railway lines and national roadsgenerated the mutation of the countryside into a rhizomatic urban landscapecomposed of simultaneously present landscapes (industry, urban, rural). Theproject requalifies this infrastructure in a canalscape, a network of quays,gardens, fields and forests that inscribe themselves in the netcity and indoing so restructure the netcity and introduce spaces for public appropriation.

another, intended to substructure the open city mainly via theintroduction of public spaces of a new kind. They are notprogrammatic – programmes are usually interchangeableanyway – but try to use the interstices between productionand reproduction to re-create ambiguous spaces (public in thiscase) that invite – given their reaffirmed ‘secondarity’ – newsocial practices. In the end, social practices are the solecreators of public life, and hence public spaces.

What all of OSA’s projects have in common is the searchfor new types of scenes – ‘secret gardens’, ‘platforms’, ‘quays’,‘fields’ and ‘parks’ – that without too much emphasis inviteand facilitate new types of social interaction. They are farfrom neutral, but at the same time everything but over-defined and deterministic. These open ‘signifiers’ have theambition to unlock the latent potentiality of waste(d) land, thelatent urbanity of the open city.

In short, instead of following the mainstream discourseon the ‘loss of public space’ (it is difficult to lose somethingthat was never there) and the ‘loss of urbanity’ (ditto) causedby the dispersed city, the work of OSA is an urbanistic credothat is testimony to a belief in emerging new social practicesthat are enabled by the insertion of the public spaces oftomorrow in an open city that is still only on the verge ofbecoming urban.4

Notes1. For a more elaborated history of the Belgian urbanisation process see, forexample, Bruno De Meulder and Michiel Dehaene, Atlas – Fascikel 1: ZuidelijkWest-Vlaanderen, Anno 02, Kortrijk, 2002.2. Fernand Brunfaut, La condition municipale, Le Travail (Verviers), 1951.3. For more detailed information see, for example, Bruno De Meulder et al,‘Patching up the Belgian Landscape’, Oase, 52, 1999, pp 78–112. 4. Jean Remy, Ville: Ordre et violence, PUF (Paris), 1981, p 59.5. ‘Secondarity’ refers to the non-functional and irrational concretisation of adesired spatial experience, a space that is created by processes of bricolage,the subconscious and subversive trial-and-error production of new commongrounds.6. ‘Primarity’ characterises a condition where the production of space isdictated by the necessities of subsistence and survival. It is a modus operandithat assembles utilities to create efficient environments, mostly regulated byan engineering rationality.7. Bruno De Meulder, ‘Lintbebouwing: Algemeen én Belgisch’, SRO (86), 2005,4, pp 40–3.8. See, for example, the case study in Bruno De Meulder and Oswald Devisch,Atlas – Fascikel 3: Wevelgem, 2002.9. The urbanistic work presented here forms part of the ‘Atlas-project SouthwestFlanders that OSA undertakes, in collaboration with and commissioned by, theLeiedal intermunicipal association in South Flanders. So far it includes a study ofthe municipality of Wevelgem, the Buda Island project in the city of Kortrijk, thesecret gardens project on Buda Island, the redevelopment of the St Amands-college in Kortrijk, the redevelopment of the power plant site in Zwevegem, alandscape development strategy for the Bossuit-Kortrijk canal, a landscapedevelopment strategy for the E17 highway in Southwest Flanders, and a study ofthe ‘Pand’ in Waregem. Results of this urbanistic work are published as fasciclesof the Atlas Southwest Flanders: fascicles 0, 1, 2 (on architecture); 3 Wevelgem;4 Transformator, Project voor de Electriciteitscentrale, Zwevegem; 6 KortrijkBuda; 7 Gelijktijdige Landschappen, Canalscape, and so on.

Text © 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © OSA-KULeuven

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Water and AsphaltThe Project of Isotropy in theMetropolitan Region of Venice

B Secchi, P Viganò and students of the IUAV PhD in Urbanism, Water and Asphalt: The Project of Isotropy, 10th Architecture Biennale, Venice, 2006Water and asphalt: the project of an isotropic territory. The research is based on the hypothesis that new conditions today existfor redevising the isotropic space in the greater metropolitan area of Venice starting from its main support: water and asphalt.

Water and AsphaltThe Project of Isotropy in theMetropolitan Region of VeniceThrough an exploration of the Veneto region close to Venice, in northeasternItaly, Paola Viganò provides an alternative definition of the dispersed territory.Rather than archetypal sprawl, which has developed out of untamed growth ofmetropolitan areas, this is an ancient landscape of evenly scattereddevelopment that has grown up alongside roads and waterways.

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Territories of Dispersion‘Sprawl’ cannot adequately describe a territory of dispersionwhere specific economies, society and cultures are related toan extended way of experiencing, using, and living in a place.It is a term pertaining to English-speaking cultures, and hasa long and heavily connoted history. The phenomenon ofdispersion in Europe can be interpreted in at least twodifferent ways:1 the first emphasises the breaking of anequilibrium, the traditional relationship between town andcountry; the second insists on development ‘withoutfractures’2 that distributes resources and createsopportunities for individual undertakings. Following theformer, sprawl concerns the spreading out of the city and thecommuting of its inhabitants; the second deals withtraditional conditions of dispersion – for example, a densenetwork of infrastructures – which, since the 1960s inseveral parts of Italy, have supported the original economyand territorial form.

The two interpretations often coexist and overlap, but toforget the latter in favour of ‘sprawl’ means, at least for manyEuropean regions, accepting oversimplified and genericexplanations. There are similarities between sprawl and theterritories of dispersion, but the process of diffusion, theextended use of the territory3 and the mix of functions differ:ancient as opposed to recent; horizontal instead of vertical;integrated more than juxtaposed. In the metropolitan regionof Venice, the longue durée dispersion has been related to thepresence of specific infrastructural configurations, inparticular of a diffused and isotropic sponge of roads andwaters – isotropic in the sense that they more or less createthe same conditions throughout the territory, whatever thedirection and wherever the point of observation. Movementsof different kinds can percolate through them.

Water and Asphalt: RationalisationsIn the territory around Venice, water and asphalt today havedifferent types of relations: they run parallel, constructing thesame landscape, or separately defining opposing features. In avery close dimension one can appreciate totally differentexperiences: you only have to turn the corner and you enterinto a different landscape where rhythms and sounds producean estrangement. The supports of a population whose social

mobility has been very high in recent decades, water andasphalt are today in deep crisis. They are no longer consideredadequate for contemporary needs and for contemporaryimagery: new projects bring to bear a logic of hierarchisation,fragmentation and homogenisation.4

To understand this hiatus we started by naming.5 Ourvocabulary is ever less rich and ever less suited tounderstanding how the various devices that make the plain,the high, dry and permeable plain, the mid-wet andimpermeable plain, and the low reclaimed plain, work. Weencounter a long history of territorial rationalisation: theRoman centuriatio (a technique for the reclamation andsubdivision of the land made by a grid of canals and roads of710 metres/2,329 feet), the river diversions and rectifications,the waterways excavated in the lagoon, the fishing valleys,filling and reclaiming, the building of roads, highways,tramways and so on – a process in which different forms ofrationalities have been superimposed on each other.

In a very short and simplified overview, three mainperiods/events can be identified. The first importantrationalisation was the Roman centuriatio. Starting from the2nd century BC, it developed at the same time as a drainagesystem, a plot subdivision and a road infrastructure, andproceeds along the mid-wet and impermeable plain, twistingand turning to reach the draining slopes. In the Middle Agesthe Benedictine order reclaimed the abandoned system,partially reconstructing it and bringing it into the modernera. The 16th century witnessed the beginning of the greatdiversions of the rivers entering the lagoon by the VenetianRepublic to avoid the silting up of the protective water surfacewith sand and gravel brought from the northern mountains –the second important rationalisation. The rivers weredisplaced to the east and to the west of the lagoon in anincredible effort that is at the origin of the new science ofhydrology.6 And in the 1930s, the Fascist period, hugereclamation works were carried out in the low wet areasaround the lagoon using polderisation procedures similar tothose being used by the Dutch. This third great rationalisationwas strong enough to completely change the physical andecological character of the area.

Each rationalisation has created its own landscape: thecenturiatio, for example, combines rows of trees, cultivatedfields divided by minor drainage lines, roads and, morerecently, houses and factories.

The Project of IsotropyThis study poses three principal questions: What is stillcontemporary in the past process of rationalisation? Isisotropy a figure of contemporary and future rationality?What new conditions have emerged to enable the conceptionof a new project of isotropy?

The process of dispersion, as mentioned above, can berelated to the spatial configuration of diffused and isotropicinfrastructures. The utopia of an isotropic territory lies withinthe character of this as of other territories of dispersion.

In the territory around Venice,water and asphalt today havedifferent types of relations: theyrun parallel, constructing thesame landscape, or separatelydefining opposing features.

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Each rationalisation has created its own landscape. Top left: The aggeratio, for example, combines rows of trees, cultivated fieldsdivided by drainage lines, roads and, more recently, houses and factories.Above: The landscape of the dry plain contains the remainder of a mesh ofcanals transformed in a tree structure of concrete canals in the Fascist periodto irrigate the industrial agriculture in the gravel plain. New processes ofrationalisation are today modifying these. Left: The landscape of reclamation.The landscape of the low wet plain is the result of a strong process ofreclamation during the Fascist period in favour of industrial agriculture. Todaythe role and function of these areas can be rethought.

View from the hillside towards the plain in the proximity of Vicenza, in theVeneto region. The picture is quite exemplary, showing the way in whichhouses and industries merge with agricultural features, a dense road networkand an even denser water system.

B Secchi, P Viganò and student S Favaro, Water and Asphalt, EuropeanPost-graduate Master in Urbanism (EMU), fall semester, 2006Water (red) + asphalt (grey) + pits and dumps (black). In the metropolitanregion of Venice, water and asphalt define the isotropic conditions. Oldpits and dumps are dispersed, but in relation to the geological features,and can be reused to design an extended net of public spaces in relationto water and asphalt.

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Isotropy is an extreme and ideal figure: the territory is notperfectly isotropic and it is not homogeneous. Today a newproject of isotropy is at the same time the acknowledgementof a territorial specificity, a scenario to be investigated in itsmanifold consequences, and a design hypothesis that can beconcretely devised in terms of intervention on the watersystem, on roads and public transport, alternative mobility,forms of diffused welfare, innovative agriculture and thedecentralised production of energy.

The research here is based on the hypothesis that newconditions now exist for redevising the isotropic space in themetropolitan area of Venice. This is not a big urban project,but an incremental series of undertakings beginning withwater and asphalt: the problems of flooding and scarcitydemand more space for water; the future of agriculture, afterthe EU policy of subsidies, is to become a multifunctionallandscape; the fragments, often marginal and dispersed, ofthe modern welfare state, schools, sport fields, playgrounds,public green and so on represent an impressive isotropicdistribution that can match with and reinforce a mesh ofrailways, tramways, waterways and paths; and the energycrises can be tackled with decentralised production. In thisframework, isotropy reveals traditional aspects of economic,political and ecological rationality: less costs due to flooddamage, an increase in territorial porosity and permeability,both social and ecological. Although not fully accomplished,the great image of isotropy – and its consequences on thedesign of space – is perhaps the only one able to reconstruct acomprehensive image and the possibility of a territorial design.

Processes of rationalisation. The Venetian territory has been invested with strong processes of rationalisation: theRoman aggeratio, river diversions and rectifications, waterways in the lagoon, filling and reclaiming, the building ofroads, highways, tramways and so on – a process in which the isotropic features have often been reinforced.

The landscape of reclamation. The schemes here show the complex hydraulicsystem of the reclaimed land of the low wet plain.

The paradox of public spacesin the territories of dispersionis clear, revealing at the sametime the crisis of traditionalurbanity, of the modernconcept of public space andthe limits of a stronglyindividualised way of life.

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A new project of isotropy is now possible: the problems of flooding andscarcity demand more space for water. The future of agriculture, after the EUpolicy of subsidies, is to become a multifunctional landscape also fordecentralised energy production and woods; and the fragments of themodern welfare state represent an impressive isotropic distribution that canmatch with and reinforce a mesh of railways, tramways, waterways and paths.1. Water and flooding areas; 2. More space for the water; 3. Existing woods; 4.Minimum 10 per cent new woods; 5. Roads + railways (in black) + waterways(in red); 6. A new mesh of public transport (each circle is 5 kilometres/3.1miles); 7. New woods and agricultural areas.

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The Territory: A New Scale for Public SpaceThe paradox of public spaces in the territories of dispersion isclear, revealing at the same time the crisis of traditionalurbanity, of the modern concept of public space and the limitsof a strongly individualised way of life. A weak structure ofsmall squares, roadside churches, and modern facilities oftenin marginal and disconnected areas, is dispersed throughoutthe territory. In recent years, much investment has been madeto requalify public spaces within a traditional urbanframework, often inventing them where they had neverexisted and in competition with new places of consumption.The welfare city, highly standardised and isotropic, has foundit difficult to represent the peculiar mix of rurality andurbanity of the Venetian territory, and has remained apredominantly functional space.

Public space is something larger. It is an infrastructuralspace that individuals cannot afford on their own. Yet it is asocial space that we consider our own. It is not only related tourbanity or to the modern idea of welfare, but to largersymbolic representations. In a metropolitan region such asVenice, where more than 70 per cent of the land is stillcultivated (only producing 2.8 per cent of GDP), the referencecannot be Times Square, nor the village community space. Inthe European dispersed territories, along the isotropicnetwork of water and asphalt, minimal and large-scaleprojects can produce denser environments. Flooding areas,

former gravel-pits, new forests, irrigation devices, canals andpublic transport nodes are materials and places with and inwhich to reformulate the concept of public and the concept ofpublic space. They are dispersed elements that could supporttoday’s different activities connected to an extended use ofthe territory, to new forms of collective representation andfree time. They are not related to an idea of centre andperiphery, but to the construction of a field of horizontalconditions for contemporary practices and ecology. 4

Notes1. P Viganò (ed), New Territories, Q2, Officina Edizioni (Rome), 2004. See inparticular my introduction.2. G Fuà and C Zacchia, Industrializzazione senza fratture, Il Mulino (Bologna), 1983.3. B Secchi, Un progetto per l’urbanistica, Einaudi (Turin), 1989. 4. H Lefebvre, La production de l’espace, Anthropos (Paris), 1974; see inparticular the introduction to the third edition (1986).5. See P Viganò, U degli Uberti, G Lambrechts, T Lombardo and G Zaccariotto,Paesaggi dell’acqua (Landscapes of Water), forthcoming; B Secchi, P Viganòand students of the IUAV PhD in Urbanism (M Ballarin, M Brunello, NDattomo, D De Mattia, E Dusi, V Ferrario, S Giametta, E Giannotti, M Gronning,T Lombardo, P Marchevet, J McOisans (Centre de recherches sur l’espacesonore & l’environnement urbain-Grenoble), M Patruno, M Pertoldi, S Porcaro,C Renzoni, A Scarponi, L Stroszeck, M Tattara, F Vanin, F Verona, GZaccariotto, A Zaragoza), Water and Asphalt: The Project of Isotropy, 10thArchitecture Biennale, Venice, 2006.6. P Bevilacqua, Venezia e le acque, Donzelli (Rome), 1995.

Text © 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 36(tr&br), 39 © Paola Viganó;pp 34, 36(tl), 37, 38 © Bernard Secchi, Paola Viganó; p 36(cl&bl) © TerraItaly™by Pictometry, © Compagna Generale Riprese Aeree

P Viganò, U degli Uberti, G Lambrechts, T Lombardo and G Zaccariotto, Landscapes of Water research project, IUAV, Venice, 2006Redesign of a gravel pit as a public space and water reservoir (section). The Merotto gravel-pit recuperation is a pilot project that explores thereuse of gravel pits as flood-water reservoirs together with a new canal as a new public space. The canal has a variable section, and utilisesflood control to introduce a new type of landscape within the widespread territory and with it a new connection between differing environments.

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Intermittent CitiesOn Waiting Spaces and How to Inhabit Transforming CitiesIntermittent CitiesOn Waiting Spaces and How to Inhabit Transforming Cities

Claudia Faraone and Andrea Sarti tap into the potential of thetransient contemporary city, which is incessantly growing and evolving.By networking a series of sites – either officially or unofficiallyawaiting development – they provide the city of dispersal with a highlydynamic, ready-made urban culture.

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Contemporary cities, especially their dispersed parts, tend tochange and grow incessantly. The phenomenon of city sprawlingcharacterised the second half of the 20th century and becameso widespread and powerful that it has shifted the way citieswere traditionally organised, from well-contained urbanitiesto the dispersed territories we live in today.

The industrial progress in building constructions, thedevelopment of technology and communication, the massdiffusion of individual privately owned cars, and thetransformation of the heavy-industry based economy into aservice one, together made cities spill out beyond their

surrounding territories and regenerate their interiors in acontinuous cycle of building on undeveloped areas and reuseof existing urban terrains.

Exemplary results of this process can be clearly foundwithin the European territory, where different types ofsprawling cities, produced by different economic, social andpolitical conditions, compose an even yet small-grained entity.Looking at a satellite image of the European territory, werecognise the Dutch structured dispersion or the Flemishdiamond and, further south, the mixed diffused city of theVeneto region of northeast Italy.

Four different examples of waiting spaces: Top: Near a construction site but disconnected from the surrounding urban transformation, on the edge of a development in Marcon. Upper middle: Beside a productive and commercial area, close to an exchange parking lot and a bus stop in Mogliano Veneto. Lower middle: Disused bus depot in Mestre.Bottom: Close to a residential area, within a consolidated neighbourhood in Marghera.

Claudia Faraone and Andrea Serti, Intermittent Cities: On Waiting Spaces and How toInhabit Transforming Cities, Veneto, Italy, 2004Map of waiting spaces in a portion of the dispersed city in the Veneto region (the so-calledcitta diffusa, or diffused city) between Venice-Mestre, Mogliano Veneto and Marcon. Thewaiting spaces will build on the existing infrastructure of roads, cycle paths, exchangeparking lots and bus lines to create an interconnected network.

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Spatial configurations depending on waiting space availability and location.

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A duration sequence in the network of waiting spaces.

Spatial configuration of modular units according to different activities. Foreach waiting space, a series of spatial configurations is made possibledepending on how much time is available, the location of the space and therequested activities. Each is provided with a city info-point or a modular unitsituated at the entrance to the waiting space, and a basic, self-sustainableinfrastructure as a possible means of ‘awakening’ the space (for example,parking lots with solar panels).

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While preparing the Intermittent Cities project, we observed and participatedin similar projects that were a real test of the short-term organisationnecessary for a waiting space. One of these was organised by Esterni, asociocultural association that promotes non-profit public and culturalactivities in Milan. In Piazza Freud, near Garibaldi station, and running parallelto Milan Design Week 2004 for 10 days, this waiting space was ‘turned on’,with concerts, performances, university classes and public lectures,reclaiming the space.

Among the outcomes of this consuming and recycling ofthe territory, an emerging kind of urban space can berecognised: ‘waiting spaces’ – a definition that comes fromtheir main characteristic of standing empty or unused, andtherefore waiting, while their immediate surroundings aregrowing, evolving and being used.

On the one hand, waiting spaces are areas that belong toexpanding portions of the city that have never been used butin which it is nevertheless predictable that a transformationwill occur. These can be found in peripheral commercial centresand new city extensions around Mestre and Venice city, or incontested urban spaces such as Piazza Freud in Milan.

On the other hand, waiting spaces can be found inabandoned structures and places now ready to be used again:the ACTV bus storage in Mestre, or beyond the Veneto regionBattersea Power Station in London.

Interpreting the dispersed city as composed of intermittentlyfunctioning waiting spaces, a new design approach can beapplied to the portions of urban territory that are in the timespan: just before their turning on or soon after their turningoff. Since they have the ability to re-create themselvesendlessly, waiting spaces can provide a temporal shelter forurban activities that are temporary or cannot take placeinside the canonical productive system of contemporary cities.

This newly imagined intermittent city will be produced bytemporally networking a series of waiting spaces at the scaleof the urban region, using the existing infrastructure of roads,bicycle paths, exchange parking lots and bus lines, and usingwireless technologies and self-sufficient energies.

As a continuously changing entity, the intermittent citycan be switched on or off, assembled or dismantled based ondemand. ‘Catching’ intervals of time will allow for a

This newly imaginedintermittent city will beproduced by temporallynetworking a series of waitingspaces at the scale of theurban region, using theexisting infrastructure ofroads, bicycle paths, exchangeparking lots and bus lines,and using wirelesstechnologies and self-sufficient energies.

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A possible testing location for a long-term waiting space is a site inCampalto, between Mestre and Venice airport. Because of its edgeconditions, near a settlement with few facilities and very close to the airportand the main road to Venice, and with a parking lot nearby, we tested ourspace configurations by organising them in thematic strips. Artistic,recreational, information and promotion strips with different andcomplementary levels of activities were used to meet every eventuality:from art galleries that might need modular units for their satelliteexhibitions, to libraries that might need to close their central building for awhile, or the school nearby requiring a new playground for its pupils.

This constantly updated online database of available waiting spaces can mappossible locations and works in coordination with the Venice municipality’surban planning website. Acting as a territorial interface, it allows single usersand small public/private institutions such as art galleries, culturalassociations, libraries and community associations to contribute towardsbuilding a collective urban and cultural awareness across the territory.

temporary transformation of waiting spaces into publicspaces: from a matter of fact to an urban design proposition.

Individuals, groups of individuals or small collectiveentities will be given the opportunity to incrementally buildthe ‘software’ needed to produce an urban culture for thedispersed city. Small-scale private or public actions with ahigh amenity value will improve waiting spaces by hostingcurrently missing urban public activities. Temporal ways ofinhabiting and experiencing the city would be possible insidethese spaces, along with their management and regulation,through events such as concerts, conferences, sportsperformances, as well as public activities and facilities likeplaygrounds, art galleries, small satellite libraries, bicyclesharing points and so on.

Working with mobile and changeable architecture, smallmodular units equip the waiting spaces with flexible devicescapable of various spatial configurations to host differentusers. Sustainable, self-sufficient elements andinfrastructure will guarantee that the intermittent city willfunction, and once a series of activities becomes linked tothe waiting space it will begin to attract other, similar orcomplementary, activities.4

NoteThis project has been developed as part of the authors’ thesis at IUAV,Architecture University of Venice, with Bernardo Secchi as promoter andStefano Munarin as co-promoter.

Text © 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Claudia Faraone and Andrea Sarti

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At the high end, superblocks function as the ultimate in gated communities – truly wonderfultower-in-the-park environments. Alternatively, they can be relentless in their standardisation andrepetitiveness. Whether a project becomes one or the other is often entirely up to the developer.

String Block Vs SuperblockPatterns of Dispersal in China

The superblock in China has become the dominant unit of urban planning,allowing for rapid urban growth while also meeting the needs of state andproperty developer alike. Kjersti Monson explains the conditions that havegiven rise to the superblock, while challenging it by proposing an alternative‘stringblock’ approach, rooted more in collective culture and addressing thedemands of the market-driven economy.

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The superblock represents the DNA of urban expansion inChina. As the basic unit of urban planning and real-estatetransactions it defines the new Chinese city in a way that thegrid and parcel defined New York. The grid and parcel laid thefoundation for real-estate transactions in the American citythat were in keeping with US values related to the individual’sright to land and property. So does the superblock lay thefoundation for transactions that are in keeping with Chinesevalues related to the state and collective culture. Basic culturalinstitutions and assumptions underlie the superblock form,which was not born in China but has perhaps reached itszenith as a megatypology within that context.

Because the superblock type is so dominant as the vehiclefor Chinese urbanisation, it is here that any discussion shouldstart by considering improving the qualitative outcomes ofnew development as it pertains to the public interest, publicspace and sustainability.

A superblock can vary in size from 8 hectares (20 acres) inan existing urban area to 40 hectares (100 acres) or more innewly urbanising rural peripheries. As a type, it is efficient forimplementing rapid expansion since it allows the governmentto limit its hard investment to the planning and constructionof a widely spaced pattern of major infrastructure only,shedding enormous chunks of developable land with approveduse rights in single transactions, wherein the private ownerwill plan and build interior roads. The sheer scale of a typicalsuperblock requires that the developer has large capitalreserves and high political standing, and must also possessthe operational and financial capacity to produce a megaproject.

Standard superblocks create an urban fabric characterisedby discrete, large and homogenous cells – a ‘candyboxurbanism’. This phenomenon is underscored by therequirement in newly planned expansion areas (Pudong issuch an area, being built from the ground up on previousagricultural lands) for 15-metre (50-foot) or greater ‘greenbuffer’ zones between the kerb and the proposed buildings.This precludes multiple blocks from relating to one anotherwith a cohesive streetscape, and furthermore necessitatesfrontage roads to be built within the green buffer, oftenduplicating the existing road and encircling the inner block.

Because the typical superblock morphology is cellular, itis not a type that blends well with its environment and itinherently tends to diminish the possibility of cohesivepublic space or the stewardship of natural systems. However,its spatial logic is practical from a planning, constructionand leasing point of view. Discrete circulation (in the spiritof the cul-de-sac) for each building phase is consideredpreferable so that leasing can begin on one area whileanother is still under construction.

The land is parcelled and planned by the government at ascale that requires large financial transactions, both in thesale of rights as well as in the ensuing land improvements andconstruction. Each superblock project can rapidly deliver largenumbers of housing units to market while offering afinancially attractive prospect to the global-standard

developer and financier. Buildings within a superblock projecttend to be standardised, streamlining the design process andreducing costs. The process capitalises on the strength of theChinese systems of Local Design Institutes (LDIs) – a system ofstate-owned architecture and engineering institutes thatprovide standardised construction documentation at a verylow cost. The LDI system is designed for maximum efficiencythrough an institutionalised preference for using templatesand standards instead of pushing design innovation. LDIs aretypically a required partner for projects of any scale on theChinese mainland.

In the end, although the result of this process sometimesleaves a lot to be desired with regard to public space,sustainable city-making and social justice, the will to changeit is hard to find since it has thus far functioned adequatelyfrom both a state and private development perspective. Ascities expand ever further into the hinterland, performance isharder to gauge.

Collective Culture and the Built Environment

The creation of collectivized dining halls, nurseries, kindergartens,dormitories, laundries, and repair shops will really break radicallywith the existing family attitude toward property, and this willprovide the economic premises for the extinction of the family as aneconomic unit.

NA Miliutin in Sotsgorod: The Problem of Building SocialistCities, 19741

The Communist Revolution is the most radical rupture with existingproperty relations; no wonder that its development is the most radicalrupture with traditional ideas.

K Marx and F Engels, Communist Manifesto2

A history steeped in collective culture, along with the culturalassumptions that grew from the system of institutionalisedarchitecture created to realise the communal builtenvironments in the style of Soviet communism, informed howChina ultimately structured its land lease and developmentregulations, which allowed for a real-estate market to emergein the late 1980s. In addition to defining a legal and politicalprocess for bringing land to market, the government defineda planning process for urban land with the superblock as itsbasic unit. The lack of a finer grain of parcellisation ensuredthat development would continue at the scale of the collectiverather than of the individual. Given the allowable densities,single developers could house entire small cities in one project.

The dominant typology for land transactions, and thereforefor urban expansion under the current system, is thesuperblock. In order to understand why transactions areoccurring only at this scale, and why the individual remainsperipheral to land development in China, it is useful toexplore the country’s history as a collective culture.

Collective culture, long an underlying component ofChinese civilisation, became a tangible characteristic of each

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Chinese citizen’s daily life in the 1950s through the bricks-and-mortar restructuring of both city and countryside intoworking communal environments and political structuresunder Mao. When the People’s Republic was formed, theChinese population was collectivised, with the basic and mostimportant unit of socialisation being the ‘work unit’. Thework unit was at the core of everyday life, and was thebuilding block of Chinese socialism. In the city, this buildingblock was called the ‘danwei’. In the countryside, it was the‘production team’. The work unit was the nucleus of thepolitical and social life of a village, and had spatialimplications depending on the means of productionemployed. An agricultural village was cell-like; an industrialvillage was linear, and most likely sited along a canal. Anurban danwei provided the worker members with everythingthey needed within a defined and controlled area, includingthe workplace or factory, residential dormitories, cafeteriaand school. As large-scale, closed-loop and collectivised walledcompounds, danweis constituted the basic social and builtstructure of the Chinese city. They were defined first andforemost as centres of production.

Throughout most of the pre-marketisation communist eraor, more specifically, from 1953 to 1984, land wasnationalised. Under the law, two kinds of land wererecognised: state-owned land, which was either urban land ora nationally significant natural resource, and collectivelyowned land, which was rural or suburban. The system of localadministration was split into three levels: the people’scommune (administrator of the town and liaison to higher

officials), the production brigade (administrator of the‘natural village’ – often a group with familial ties – andcoordinator of production teams), and the production team (adesignated group of peasant labourers working togethertowards production goals).

Land and resources were not held individually, but by thestate or commune. Nevertheless, under the law, land rightswere necessarily represented by designated parties – thosewith standing to negotiate in the event of a dispute or land-use change. The state was the legal representative of urbanland rights and natural resources. The production team wasthe legal representative of collectively owned land rights.Therefore the legal framework governing land rights reflectedthe ideological values of Chinese socialism by privileging twoparties with legal standing under the law: the state and thework unit (production team).

Collectivisation meant more than the pooling of labour andthe communal allocation of resources. It also meant commoneating and living spaces – a standard feature of the dormitoryliving units built at this time. Standardising communal livingarrangements underscored the national dedication toinstilling socialist values at every level. The work unit, ordanwei, was not only the building block of the socialist city, itwas the core of communist identity. It represented socialidentity through work, familial ties and national ideology.

The enormous model of downtown Shanghai at the Shanghai Urban PlanningMuseum reveals a large-grained cellular pattern of development typical ofsuperblock fabric. Each block is distinct with regard to massing, circulationand open space, and is typically disconnected from other blocks by large andfast-moving roads, resulting in a sort of insular ‘candybox urbanism’.

As the basic unit of urban planning and real-estate transactions in China, thesuperblock defines the new Chinese city in the same way that the grid definesNew York. As a type, it has difficulty coping with context, environment andexisting conditions. Nevertheless, due to its high efficiency for rapid expansion,clear terms of transaction and strong formal likeness to the collectivecompounds of China’s recent history, it is likely to remain dominant and shouldbe considered as a formal and functional type ready for urban design innovation.

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Marketisation

Land parcels are the most important State-owned assets valued at 25trillion yuan (US$3.019 trillion), more than triple the total value ofother State-owned properties.

People’s Daily Online, 25 June 20023

Instead of moving toward a completely capitalist socio-economicsystem, China is in transition to a market socialism.

… a natural resource (land), whose monetary value had beenneglected since 1949, suddenly assumes a very important role in theoverall Chinese economy … How then does this ‘from nothing toeverything’ situation come about?

Li Ling Hin, Privatization of Urban Land in Shanghai, 19964

Marketisation is a legal and political process by which state-owned land in China becomes developable, and throughwhich real property is brought to market. The marketisationprocess in China has heralded a period of unprecedentedurban expansion. It has also resulted in the resettlement oflarge numbers of people and the loss of agricultural land ascities and infrastructure rapidly expand.

The first hint that there is something fundamentallyunique about the new mode of land distribution anddevelopment in China is the political incorrectness of usingthe term ‘privatisation’ to describe it. Indeed, among Chineseplanners and officials, ‘marketisation’ is the correct term.Because the state has not in fact turned over ownership ofland, but rather has established a system of long-term leasesand rights of use, it is considered incorrect to refer todevelopable land as ‘privatised’. China still perceives itself verymuch as a socialist state, albeit one that has floated a marketof tradable land rights.

When marketisation began as a result of new legislation inthe early 1980s, the communes of the People’s Republic weredecollectivised and political structures and organisations wererenamed. ‘People’s commune’, ‘production bridgade’ and‘production team’ became ‘township’, ‘administrative village’and ‘natural village’. The two forms of property remained:state owned (urban land) and collectively owned (rural andsuburban land). A key difference under the new system,however, was that no legal representative of collectiveownership rights was identified under the law.

The laws and processes of development for state-ownedurban land have been quickly and precisely mapped out overthe past 20 years. State-owned urban land has a cleardelineation of use rights and specific quantitative planningand entitlement regulations, giving it the stability andpredictability that is a prerequisite of any serious investor ordeveloper. Part of this predictability comes from the fact thatthe process of bringing developable urban land to market is ahighly controlled process in China.

As new expansion areas are identified and approved byBeijing, they enter into state- or municipal-level designinstitutes where land uses and infrastructure are planned andapproved. Masterplans are produced according to top-downplanning agendas, whether the creation of new governmentcentres for peripheral new towns, expanded industry andlogistics around a new deep-water port, key financial districtsor new residential units to meet projected demand. Theseplans typically – and sometimes rightfully – have norelationship to the fabric that existed before them,necessitating substantial relocation and compensation to beundertaken by the developer. Plans focus on majorinfrastructure and land uses, using the superblock as thebasic structural and transactional unit. An auction occurs inwhich land-use rights are sold to developers who proceedthrough the site planning, entitlements, construction andlease-up that bring new real estate to market.

At the time of the initial land transaction between publicand private, government planners have already defined thescale, general land use and scope of what will be built. Thegovernment rarely imposes additional conditions that couldforward the public interest, such as easements facilitatingpublic space or environmental goals, exactions orperformance-based rules. This should be an important subjectfor advocates of the ‘good city’ in China, as it is in definingthese nuances of the regulatory relationship between publicand private that one truly begins to affect change on amassive scale with regard to quality-of-life outcomes. In thecurrent regulatory climate in China, the outcome of a ‘by-the-book’ development is typically a fabric of disconnected densemegablocks that may pose challenges to both social andecological systems. At the high end, these blocks function asthe ultimate in gated communities – truly wonderful tower-in-the-park environments. At the low end, they are relentlessrows of standardised housing. Whether a project becomes oneor the other is entirely up to the developer.

As China turns its attention to the ever expanding periphery and thecountryside, the broad-axe development framework represented by thesuperblock will necessarily have to adapt. The superblock is highly efficientfor planning and land transactions, but its form creates enormous disruptionto existing natural and cultural systems.

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The fate of collectively owned land has been different fromthat of state-owned urban land. Rural and suburban villagesare still largely functioning as collectives, although individualfarmers have been granted leases. With no recognised legalowner-representative, the land has by default been subject toland grabs and wasteful development practices by localofficials throughout China.

One area under the collective land law that has developedquickly is the land impressment process, or how land can bereclaimed by the state, converted to urban land and itsresidents resettled. Meanwhile, the simple questions of whoowns the land, what villagers can do to improve their ownsituation or benefit from growth, and the problem of howpotential investors might engage this territory remain vague.From the perspective of an entrepreneur, this hinterlandrepresents too many legal grey areas, with indistinct rights

and limitations. As it currently stands, the countryside isfrozen from a land rights point of view, awaiting stateintervention. The refined process of land development via thesuperblock does not fit rural or suburban land. The scale ofdevelopment and market absorption that a superblockdevelopment must inherently assume in order to justify sucha large land acquisition at the start may not be realistic inperipheral areas, where the population may be sparse,migration minimal and buyers hard to come by.

There are differences in both the social frameworks andlegal frameworks governing urban land as compared to ruralor suburban land. Market reform in China has led to a specificform of collectively owned enterprise in rural areas (Town andVillage Enterprise),5 but has yet to clarify collective propertyownership rights, resulting in major hurdles for sustainedeconomic growth and investment. These differences are aboutto become significant barriers as China turns its face to thecountryside, or more precisely the New Socialist Countrysideas outlined in its ‘11th Five Year Plan’ in 2006.6

EvolutionCreation of a centralised system of planning, a top-downhierarchy of architectural institutes linked to the state, andthe construction of communal living and workingenvironments all underwrote socialist tenets in tangible waysin each Chinese citizen’s life and community from the 1950sonwards. The social and political system made communaldecision-making a way of life, and the basic unit of socialorganisation was not the individual but the collective.

When China implemented the land-use regulations (LURs)of the 1980s, it created a revised system of land rights,moving towards a system of market socialism. The process ofcreating land supply and parcelling newly developable land

The basic unit of collectivisation in China was the production team, or workunit, which was granted communal land rights under the law. The revolutionsought to shift definition of the basic economic building block and propertyrights from being family-based to being commune-based.

In both city and countryside, settlements in the latter half of 20th-centuryChina were defined first and foremost by the means of production employedin them. Residents would work in the factory or farm that defined theircommune, or danwei, live in the commune, and obtain services in thecommune as a collective. Here, a suburban industrial commune has a linearform, taking advantage of a large canal. A farming commune takes on acellular form, with a dense residential centre and surrounding farmlands.

Former collective types such as lilong (lane) housing or hutong (courtyard)housing are now being replaced as marketisation brings new superblocksonline throughout city centres and peripheries. The superblock may differ inthe way it engages the private sector in order to be produced, but it maintainsthe socialist lineage of planning and city building in units of large-scaleinsular compounds rather than city-building at a parcel scale.

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Top of City in downtown Shanghai is a good example of relative success insuperblock planning. The small scale of the block (around 7 hectares/18 acres)makes for an intimate and gardenesque centre. A man-made lake is maintainedas a living habitat where turtles, fish and toads reside. The communitymaintains a newsletter and encourages residents to get to know one anotherthrough planned events. However, the project turns its back on the public,with sentries posted at each entrance, and although it engages the natural itdoes so at a superficial level – creating a sort of pond aquarium that sits ontop of underground parking without engaging any larger functioning ecologies.

for transaction took the form of superblocks and maintainedthe fundamental powers of the state to implement top-downcontrol. It also preserved the basic principle of planning at thescale of the collective rather than the individual.

Despite the problems inherent in superblock planning –especially environmental degradation and the polarisation ofcity and countryside – the principles of collective culture thatunderlie the rise of the superblock as the definitivecontemporary Chinese urban form are not likely to changequickly, if at all. This is not because officials deny or do notcare about the apparent problems inherent in the type.Indeed, for a system only around 20 years old, one might besurprised that there are not more severe conflicts arising. Alot of trouble has been avoided through the government’sfocus on urban land, not suburban and rural land, in this firstsurge of growth.

As China turns its attention to the ever expandingperiphery and the countryside, the broad-axe developmentframework represented by the superblock will necessarilyhave to adapt. The superblock is highly efficient for planningand land transactions, but its form creates enormousdisruption to existing natural and cultural systems. Whenapplied in rural settings, it is a destructive force that can beconsidered speculative at best with regard to real-estatemarkets, since no one can predict the kind of density asuperblock will assume on a site that is entirely peripheral tothe city. As the superblock is not designed to coexist but toreplace, it requires a tabula rasa attitude towards context thatmakes any notion of organic or phased growth that engageslocal populations nearly impossible to imagine.

I propose exploring the superblock as a malleable type thatmay adopt alternative, less inherently damaging forms. Giventhe right regulatory framework, superblock-style landtransactions and financing could be adapted for redeploymentin suburban or rural areas seeking development – keeping thebasic DNA of the superblock method intact while adopting amore integrated attitude towards context and form.

A Masterplan for the Fengxian District Suburb of ShanghaiIn 2005, while living in Shanghai, I created a Hong Kongcompany with two partners – Aaron Loke, a business leaderand McKinsey consultant, and entrepreneur Francis Yum.The company, Design Community China, Ltd (DCC), signed amemorandum of understanding with Fengxian District,suburban Shanghai, to undertake an experimental planningprocess and possible development for Fengcheng town thatculminated in an 80-page planning document. Fengcheng isone of the nine towns in Shanghai’s ‘One City Nine Towns’2020 Plan.7

DCC sought to establish a formal framework for organicgrowth in the district that would benefit the matrix offarming villages that surround the town, as well as attractdevelopment interests who prefer the predictability of thesuperblock planning model. We evaluated the existinglandscape structure north of the town, noting that where

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Design Community China (DCC), Masterplan for Fengcheng town,Fengxian District, Shanghai, China, 2005In a planning study for an area of 150 hectares (371 acres) in conjunction withthe town of Fengcheng in Fengxian District, a suburb of Shanghai, DCCmapped the pattern of existing agricultural and industrial communes on thesite and determined where village mortality would occur as a result of theexisting superblock masterplan.

The DCC masterplan for peripheral Fengcheng proposed a pattern ofdevelopment that would allow new fabric to coexist with the communes andfarmland already on the site. ‘Developable land’ consisted of out-of-dateindustrial uses, villages that were already facing demise due to existingsuperblock development, and low-grade commercial edges. Functioningfarmland and small villages were largely preserved.

The Fengxian plan maintains the basic DNA of the superblock but presents asmore of a string. The circulation hierarchy, phasing and leasing are the same,but the simple choice of where to draw a property line during the landimpressment process – which is entirely at the discretion of the governmentplanner – has enormous potential impact on surrounding communes.

superblocks are already planned and infrastructure underconstruction, there would already be some village mortality.

Using this matrix as an organising structure, weendeavoured to create a plan that could be built, phased andfinanced like a superblock but that would interact morepositively with its context.

The plan was composed of focused development areas,allowing existing farmlands to continue functioning, leavinghydrology intact and respecting the boundaries of communallands. It does not assume or even advocate that these landsremain active farmland in perpetuity – indeed this seemsunlikely. The principle at stake is that a new developmentshould not necessitate the demise of functioning webs ofactivity at its edges. The simple choice of where to draw aproperty line – which is entirely at the discretion of thegovernment planner – has enormous potential impact onsurrounding communes.

Our proposal reflects the basic DNA of the superblock interms of density, circulation, use, public planning role andfinancing. Formally, it differs from the traditional superblock.It presents as more of a string than a cell, in order to allowadjacent uses to coexist with the intervention. The stringblock maintains the fundamental components of standarddevelopment, but with different structuring rules.

Ultimately, the breadth and limitations of suburban andrural residents’ rights will have to be clarified under the law.Once this happens, it is highly unlikely that the superblockwill persist in its current ‘candybox’ form as a developmenttype in peripheral areas. As land rights and regulations arefleshed out and become more complex under the law, so willurban form. This project is a tentative first step, but in thefuture it is hoped that urban designers and planners willfurther push the boundaries of what is possible withinChina’s superblock megatypology.

Ultimately, our plan was supported by officials in thedistrict (including the offices of the planning bureau,agricultural bureau and party secretary) but has as yet failedto be approved by Shanghai Municipality. Insufficient landquotas, the relative insignificance of the project from amunicipal point of view, defiance of typical planning processesand political barriers have all played a role in the delay, andwe continue to await a final outcome on the venture. 4

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The Fengxian masterplan sought to create a positive interface between agricultural lands and new development. Fieldswould provide vista opportunities for key public spaces, and views to them were designed into the plan. A farmers’ marketacted as the heart of the development and the most direct interaction between new residents and farmers. Where villagemortality was occurring, the team envisioned existing structures as reuse opportunities with a unique scale and fabric.

Notes1. NA Miliutin, Sotsgorod: The Problem of Building Socialist Cities, MIT Press(Cambridge, MA), 1974, p 81.2. As quoted in NA Miliutin, op cit, p 81.3. ‘Land Market Reform Advances, But Calls for Fair Play’, People’s Daily Online,25 June 2002. (http://english.people.com.cn/200206/25/eng20020625_98507.shtml)4. Li Ling Hin, Privatization of Urban Land in Shanghai, Hong Kong UniversityPress (Hong Kong), 1996, p 2.5. Enrico Perotti et al, ‘Working Paper Number 150: State-Owned versusTownship and Village Enterprises in China’, The United Nations UniversityWorld Institute for Development Economics Research, 1998, pp 24–5.6. The 11th Five Year Plan of the Chinese Communist Party was adopted inthe fourth session of the 10th National People’s Congress in October 2006.Highlights of the rural development policy and particularly the New Socialist

Countryside concept can be found on China’s official government website athttp://english.gov.cn/special/rd_index.htm.7. Shanghai’s ‘One City, Nine Towns’ 2020 Plan has been discussed and itscomponents published and interpreted widely in various media since the planwas adopted by the State Council in May 2001. Maps and documents are notpublicly available in print form, but can be viewed on display at the ShanghaiUrban Planning Exhibition Center in downtown Shanghai. The authordocumented key elements of the plan through photographs of this exhibition,policy research, and interviews with Chinese planners and academics over nearlythree years spent living and working in China. The author also visited, studiedand in two cases worked in focus areas of the 2020 plan, including AntingNewtown, Qingpu District, Chongming Island and Fengcheng, Fengxian District.

Text © 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Kjersti Monson

As development pushes further into the Chinese countryside, and as the New Socialist Countryside concept of China’s 11th FiveYear Plan takes shape in the coming years, the superblock type will have to evolve and adapt to a new set of regulatory issues,increasing pressure to ensure social justice and address the very real concerns about environmental degradation in China.

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In the Our Beautiful FutureMartha Rosler describes Oleanna, a collaborative project, manifested in part at the2003 Venice Biennale, that joined together students and artists in imagining alternativepublics to ‘rescue the utopian hopes of modernity’.

Oleanna was a project for the ‘Utopia Station’ exhibition at theVenice Biennale 2003. The exhibition was organised by Hans UlrichObrist, Molly Nesbit and Rirkrit Tiravanija. Of these, only Obrist is aprofessional curator; the other two are, respectively, an art historianand an artist. The attraction of this exhibition was its origin in adiscursive project: a proposed book, a number of public and privatediscussions, and latterly a set of posters – an ongoing investigationthat seemed to have flopped over on to an exhibition like a fish toolarge for the plate.

That year I was teaching a project class in Stockholm’sKonstfack and another class in Copenhagen, at the Royal Academy(in Mur og Rum, a school noted for communal action and socialprojects), and I invited the students to collaborate on a project forVenice. Considering Scandinavia’s recent history of utopian designand social engineering against a centuries-long backdrop of fratri-cidal war, I proposed that we think together, imagining an alternativepublic through a new transnational/postnational collectivity.

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We named this imaginary post-place collective space Oleanna,after a failed mid-19th-century colony in Pennsylvania, dreamed upby Norwegian violinist and adventurer Ole Bull, who encouragedScandinavian farmers to join him there without ascertaining arabil-ity. (Oleanna was memorialised in a satirical song by Norwegiannewspaperman Ditmar Meidel in 1853. I learnt of it through PeteSeeger’s version in the 1960s.)

Arguing Oleanna’s attributes, writing constitutions, manifestosand mottos, we considered Hardt & Negri, Lefebvre, Chris Marker,Debord and fellow Situationists, Tafuri, Buck-Morss, BenedictAnderson, Foucault, Niemeyer, Buckminster Fuller, Kiesler andutopian feminist science fiction, as well as documents andmanifestos of resistance and of everyday utopian life on earth, inimaginary spaces, and even in outer space. We interviewed localactivists and Free University theorists, as well as a few of the rene-gade Scandinavian (‘Bauhaus’) Situationists – those expelled fromthe movement for refusing to renounce the art world. (During theBiennale of 1968, a season of widespread protests and boycotts ofclasses and refusal to participate in exhibitions, members of thisgroup held a brief ‘sit-in’, calling themselves a Trojan horse; tocommemorate this 35-year anniversary, we flew a Trojan horsebanner over our spiral-adorned seminar hill top.)

A building to house our projects, to act as a base, and toprovide a watering station in summertime Venice, seemednecessary; we considered Futuro, a 1950s vacuum-formed plasticholiday house, or a more updated blob. The group’s idea was self-effacing infinitude, open structure and hospitality. We decided on anunfinished building that would be a hybrid space bridge, spaceshipand space station. I invited the Massachusetts-based architectAndrew Herscher, whom I had met mid-project in New York, towork with us online. Herscher’s plans, after many consultations andadjustments (incorporating Biennale-imposed strictures), led to theconstruction of the space/ship/ station – nothing like a blob, finally,(except possibly the roof) or the mutable bundles of aluminiumtubes and plastic sheeting Herscher initially proposed – but a raisedwooden octagon with intermittent walls. We carried building sectionsin teams on unbuilt roads from the canalside. Forbidden to usemechanical equipment, we raised our building like a barn, by hand.

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The roof was a drape of transparent plastic dotted with metalcircles, such as I had seen at a Copenhagen graveyard. The wallswere painted in representative colours and bore painted ellipses –shadows of the absent Futuro – folk-based Danish cutouts, thenames, in alphabetical order, of the project’s Venice participants,and a bicycle wheel, since the Scandinavians missed their bikes incanal-crossed Venice (our main poster showed the participants onbikes spiralling into the cosmos). Interior seating was provided bycushions sewn into strips, while outdoors we used ‘seminar cloths’of oilcloth bearing mottoes of resistance (such as singer Ani diFranco’s ‘Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right’). On pillows or‘thought balloons’ attached to the cloth, art students sewed anarray of direct, allusive or ironic slogans (reclaim public space,water, gross national happiness, friendship, space, power, solidarity,reclaim democracy …).

We saw our building as a symbolic bridge and way station toutopia, parked in the garden of the Arsenale to house our imaginedcommunity as we reflected on – just after the global multitudeshad demonstrated against the US war in Iraq, which began anywayand continues on – matters of exodus and exile, from the Aeneid tothe space age (cf the Swedish poet Harry Martinson’s epic poemAniara, of 1956, about post-apocalyptic Mars-bound colonistscatapulted into deep space, a meditation on art and civilisation). Wereported on intentional communities in Copenhagen and Jutland,produced a 10-issue newspaper (in Copenhagen and Venice), andmade videotapes, performances and quite a few posters on thetheme of utopia. Our project, hosted by ‘Utopia Station’ within theBiennale, hosted other projects centred on social space. Somewere by local architecture students and others included artistsKirsten Dufour and Finn Thybo Andersson’s plans for a Palestiniancommunity centre in Copenhagen and antiwar flyers from my NewYork artists’ group. We flew the multicoloured PACE flag displayedthroughout Italy that summer.

I invited participation by students in my graduate sculpture classin New Haven (Yale) and a small group of international artists (theFleas) who had participated in a workshop I had led in Florida ayear earlier (we still continue with a robust online correspondence).Our group project, in addition to a poster, was a 9-metre (29.5-foot)long banner on the theme ‘In Our Beautiful Future’, produced for usby the Vienna-based Museum in Progress. But the bulk of theproject was accomplished with the Scandinavian students, whocame together to work, prepare meals, watch and produce moviesand tapes, read, think, argue, drink beer, do research and designwork, and construct the building sections in Copenhagen beforeVenice (where we were joined by Flea members from Australia,Canada, Germany and the US).

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In addition to providing rest, shade and water, and a space fordreaming for visitors to our garden site (about a kilometre from theArsenale entrance) in the crushing heat of the opening week, weprovided a shady spot on our seminar hillock, furnished with ourseminar cloths, where we also held a talk on women and sciencefiction, a seminar for curators on art projects outside institutionalwalls, and I did a performance, ‘Speculations and Speculative Fic-tions’, recapitulating some of our themes.

A quotation from Susan Buck-Morss offered us a reigning idea:we have to ‘work our way through the rubble’ to rescue the utopianhopes of modernity, because ‘we cannot afford to let themdisappear’.1 Our unfinished project was meant finally to provide anarchive and to create a network for work to be done elsewhere andotherwise.4

Note1. Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of MassUtopia in East and West, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 2000, p 68.

Text © 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 54, 57(br) © Oleanna/MarthaRosler; pp 55, 56 and 57(t) © Martha Rosler; p 57(bl) © Fleas/Martha Rosler;artwork by Deborah Kelly

Oleanna: My Andersson Lind, Nanna Debois Buhl, Tamar Guimarães,Tarje Eikanger Gullaksen, Christina Hamre, Molly Haslund, UllaHvejsel, Charlotte Bergmann Johansen, Line Skywalker Karlström,Karoline H Larsen, Jens Hultquist Laursen, Per Nyström, KasperAkhoj Pedersen, Mia Joo Vo Rosasco, Martha Rosler, Mille Rude,Annesofie Sandal, Julie Sinding, Ulrika Sparre, Nanna Starck, MariaWerger, Lilach Weiss Zach, Erik Åkesson. Fleas: Daniel Blochwitz,Jill Dawsey, Deborah Kelly, Ellen Moffat, Horit Herman Peled, MarthaRosler, Trebor Scholz, Mary Jo Walters

Archipelago of the Negev DesertA Temporal/Collective Plan for Beer Sheva, IsraelArchipelago of the Negev DesertA Temporal/Collective Plan for Beer Sheva, Israel

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Countless efforts to establish a dense and active city centre forBeer Sheva have failed. Its extreme desert climate, culture andsociopolitical conditions have not allowed the development of atraditional city core. Within the early years of the Israeli state, andunder the motto of ‘blooming the desert’, Beer Sheva – in the southof the country – found itself part of the new Zionist frontier thatsought to combine advanced agriculture with the national missionof settling new Jewish communities in the Negev Desert. It becamethe emblematic tabula rasa; its peripheral location and desertsetting served as a site of urban and architectural experimentation.Notable here were the attempts to appropriate Modernist concretehousing slabs to the extreme arid climate. The construction of BeerSheva went in hand with state objectives to push the nomadBedouin tribes outside the city. Historically, during the early 20thcentury, under Ottoman rule, the city was conceived as a regionalcentre of exchange and gathering that came to life just a few daysa week when the nomadic tribes (Bedouin) came to set up themarket on Wednesdays and congregate for joint prayers on Fridays.

The desire to turn the city into a larger fixed urban centre for apermanent modernised Jewish population met with too manydifficulties: that of drawing new inhabitants to the city, as well aslack of government support which, for political and strategicreasons, favoured other towns and settlements that were situatedcloser to territorial conflicts and thus considered a higher priorityfor national security. Later attempts to house new immigrants in thecity increased social and ethnic separation, leading to segregatedcommunities: utterly disconnected from any sense of urban identity,they are still referred to by the alphabet describing the land plots onthe city’s masterplan (‘neighborhood c’, ‘neighborhood d’, and so on)

The fact remains that although situated in a beautiful desertlandscape, in an area with access to water, Beer Sheva is currentlyone of the most run-down cities in Israel. Inhabited by diversegroups (such as Ethopian Jews, Russian immigrants and older-generation settlers) in neighbourhoods socially set apart from eachother, it has all the infrastructure of a populated urban environmentyet it lacks the sense of city – a notion that led to its nickname asthe ‘non-city’. Beer Sheva’s architecture and urbanism disregard itsunique natural setting, missing opportunities to benefit from thisresource. This attitude towards the environment is also reflectedthrough the attitude towards the Bedouin tribes – most of themcurrently occupying areas within a 20-kilometre (12.4-mile) radiusof Beer Sheva, with a population equivalent to the number ofIsraelis living within the current city boundaries.

Sketch exploring urban erasure.

Known locally as the ‘non-city’, Beer Sheva insouthern Israel is made up of segregatedcommunities with no central core. Rafi Segalproposes a way of creating connectivity whileaccepting the city’s lack of centre andoptimising on its beautiful desert landscapeand Bedouin inheritance.

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Rafi Segal, Archipelago of the NegevDesert, Beer Sheva, Israel, 2007 In this proposal, developed with YonatanCohen and Kate Snider, the residentialneighbourhoods of Beer Sheva become‘islands’, shifted apart by the entry of the desertinto the city. Top: Existing neighbourhoods.Bottom: The proposed plan. Publicbuildings/institutions are in red.

erasure # 1

1900s

erasure # 2

1950s

erasure # 3

2000s

Growth and erasure: the growth of Beer Shevathroughout the 20th century (left column) and theproposed future development (right column) involvinga process of erasure to expand the city’s inner voids.

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New collective spaces are created by giving shape to different programmeswithin the expanded inner-city voids. Since the programmes are temporal,each with its own cycle, they can overlap and occupy the same space atdifferent times. (1) zones for Bedouin herd movement; (2) flower tourism(flower fields that bloom in the desert aproximately three weeks a year); (3)community agriculture; (4) market areas/trade zones; (5) four-wheel driverecreation routes; (6) tent camps.

1 2

3 4

5 6

Public Voids/Temporal Programmes Departing from the understanding that Beer Sheva’s lack of a centreis one of its inherited conditions, the proposal here introduces adecentralised urban scheme in which the city is fragmented intodistant neighbourhoods, allowing the desert to flow through it.

These neighbourhoods are set apart from each other, becoming‘islands’ floating in a desert landscape. The existing inner voids areexpanded to a point where they become continuous, creating an‘ocean’ of desert space in which the island-like neighbourhoods arescattered. This ocean of unclaimed land becomes a transient publicspace. Within it are formed designated collective areas/zones, eachinscribed with a new temporal programme with its own cycle/timeframe of activity. The collective zones/programmes intersect andoverlap, in many cases occupying the same space at differenttimes. From an environmental and ecological point of view, thisinner void prevents the city from becoming one large mass,allowing both desert and city to ‘breathe’. The Bedouin tribes takepart in activating this space, as a place of passage from one part ofthe desert to the other.

Segregation, usually understood negatively as interrupting thelivelihoods of people, here allows coexistence. It perpetuates flowand enables distinct modes of living and diverse groups of peopleto occupy the same space.

The notion of the urban is established through links andconnections between nodes of activity and the juxtaposition of thecollective programmes with smaller neighbourhood clusters – allsurrounded inside and out by the unique desert landscape onwhich Beer Sheva has until now turned its back.4

1 2 3

4 5 6

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Overlay of all temporal collective programmeswithin the inner voids. Existing public buildingsare in orange. The collective programmes areshown simultaneously although each occurs at adifferent time/season.

Existing inner city void, Beer Sheva, 2007.

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The Negev Desert, Israel, 2007.

Text @ 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Rafi Segal

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Peripheral Landscapes,El Caracol, Mexico CityIn Mexico City, unplanned illegal development exists cheek by jowl with developer-driven housing. Jose Castillo of arquitectura 911sc explains how the practice’s projectfor New Caracol provides leisure facilities and open space that afford opportunitiesfor social and cultural exchange between the two different communities.

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Historically, the urbanisation that characterises Mexico City’speriphery is the materialisation of a twofold process. On the onehand informal urbanisation, the formerly dominant model of city-making, has been produced outside the legal, regulatory andprofessional frameworks through different forms of occupationsuch as squatting, illegal sales and subdivisions of underservicedland. On the other we see a more recent phenomenon,characterised by the large-scale transformation of greenfield andbrownfield tracts of land into developer-driven housing.

El Caracol is such a site – a palimpsest of histories, geological,hydrological and industrial, as well as social and political followingthe logic of real-estate and informal processes. The El Caracolplant was built on the site in 1942 to desalinate the water of LakeTexcoco by moving it through a series of shallow ponds in a spiralpath and extracting the sodium carbonate. In the mid-1990s theplant shut down, and 10 years later 13,000 new units of low-incomehousing were built. Just next to them is the informal settlement ofEl Salado, a continuously growing self-built, para-legal community.

arquitectura 911sc’s project for the New Caracol recognises thesite as a space between city and landscape, between the suburband the shanty town, between the natural and the post-industrial. Itis also the space of negotiation between conflicting forces, such asthe public need for preservation and the private thrust fordevelopment. El Caracol introduces a new kind of open space thatsupports the coexistence of multiple forces. Aside from functioningas a park for leisure and contemporary art, and a workinghydrological infrastructure, it also acts as a rapport between formaland informal development.

arquitectura 911sc (Jose Castillo andSaïdee Springall), New Caracol,Ecatepec, Mexico City, 2007Render: View from the southeast. Bydensifying through specific punctualinterventions in the northwestern part ofNew Caracol and leaving thesoutheastern section as a hydrologicalinfrastructure, the project strives to erasethe distinction between infrastructureand park, city and landscape.

During the mid-20th century, El Caracolbecame a quite productive industriallandscape, with a spiral jetty movingwater along shallow ponds extractingthe sodium carbonate by evaporatingthe water and then processing it to useit in the factories nearby. An area ofagricultural fields, with no housing, justinfrastructure, would become asettlement of close to two millionpeople in just five decades.

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Development diagrams. The transition from greenfield/brownfield to (sub)urbanisedland is always an incremental process with complex dynamics over time.

Satellite image showing the different patterns of urbanisation, dis- and sub-urbanisation operating in the northern peripheryof Mexico City. Caracol remains the most visible geographical marker, and the other urban dynamics operate around it.

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In arquitectura 911sc’s proposal, the autonomous 13,000-unitdevelopment and the adjoining informal settlement arecomplemented by programmes in the New Caracol that theycurrently lack, including workspaces and retail spaces, open spaceand infrastructure.

In the context of large megacities, where sprawl is thedominant mode of growth and where there is always a battlebetween nature and urbanisation, the project strives to putinfrastructure on the front burner, achieving improvedperformance even within the context of low-density growth. Bypreserving the defined geometry of El Caracol, and charging itwith programmes and use, geography and infrastructure becomea more relevant urbanism for the outskirts.4

Text © 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 64-5, 66-7 © arquitectura911SC; p 65(t) © Aerofoto México

The multiplicity of conditions at El Caracol show the ambiguous nature of the periphery.

Plan: scale 1:10,000. The New Caracol project is a landscape of negotiation:between the formal and the informal, the natural and the urban, and thehydrological and the leisure park.

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Urban Voids:Grounds for ChangeReimagining Philadelphia’sVacant Lands

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Dispersal is most often regarded as anupshot of population rises as thedemographic grows and spreads outwards ofthe city centre. Cities, though, cansimultaneously experience contraction andexpansion. Despite being the sixth largestcity in the US, Philadelphia is a ‘shrinkingcity’; deindustrialistion has prompted urbanabandonment at the same time as thegrowth of urban sprawl. Deenah Loeb,executive director of the City ParksAssociation of Philadelphia, describes howthe URBAN VOIDS competition waslaunched in order to trigger public discussionand the reimagining of a greened city.

What does a city do to respond to its vacancy crisis? Decreasingpopulations in many American cities during the last 40 years haveshifted the dynamics of the built environment across the nation.Philadelphia is an example of a cityscape that has been greatlyimpacted by both deindustrialisation and suburbanisation: the citycurrently has more than 30,000 vacant plots totalling around 405hectares (1,000 acres), an area roughly the same size as its citycentre. Philadelphia’s present vacancy crisis is a result of urbanabandonment and extensive sprawl. It is a place where the‘economy is drifting as it responds incoherently to continuedindustrial restructuring’1 – concerns that are shared by citiesthroughout the country.

The City Parks Association launched URBAN VOIDS: groundsfor change2 in September 2005 as the second phase of thePhiladelphia LANDvisions initiative (www.landvisions.org). Thismultiphase programme was created to generate new thinkingabout the future of Philadelphia’s vacant lands and to act as acatalyst for implementation: vacancy could be an opportunity toimagine a new future for the city that had lost its population,resulting in lower urban density.

The URBAN VOIDS: grounds for change international ideascompetition attracted 220 entries from 27 countries, and challengedentrants to propose new visions and possibilities for Philadelphia’sextensive inventory of vacant land by responding to the city’sunique ecological infrastructure. It offered an opportunity to designin relation to shifting human and urban marks on the land. Similarto the way that land and water resources have historically drawnpeople to settle, the ecology of a place can again be a force thatcan shape urban form.

The competition entries featured here investigate and illustratehow this low-density urban environment can be reoccupied,instilling the voids with a wide range of new uses.4

Notes1. Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, Back toProsperity: A Competitive Agenda for Renewing Pennsylvania, BrookingsInstitution, December 2003, p 1.2. Competition advisor, Van Alen Institute, New York.

City of Philadelphia: density of vacant properties, 2006.

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Front Studio (Yen Ha and Ostap Rudakevych), Farmadelphia, 2006Front Studio’s entry proposes transforming the city’s urban fabric with the introduction of farmlands – incongruousrural elements that create a juxtaposition between farm and city. The conversion of vacant sites would provideemployment and encourage entrepreneurship: the act of farming seeks to empower residents to take charge of theirland while creating localised centres of activity. Farm and city begin to function as one integral machine combiningthe pleasure of open sky and land with the richness of city living.

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Thaddeus Pawlowski and Srdjan Jovanovic, Hilltopia: new topographies, new communities, 2005The Hilltopia team suggest taking the excess soil from rapidly developing suburban areas to build new topographiesin the city. These new landforms – hill-bounded neighbourhoods – would guide the city’s evolution of new boundariesproviding spaciousness and privacy . The mounded forms could also support new energy-efficient housing models,employ sustainable practices for managing storm-water treatment or, at their summits, turbines for new energy.

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Anuradha Mathur and Dillip da Cunha, Bio-Philadelphia.com: engineering a new surface, 2005Bio-Philadelphia is poised to champion the transition from technology to biotechnology, from making inert things (suchas manufacturing) to making living things. This shift of industry will open new frontiers in science and in the nature ofhuman settlement. Philadelphia will sculpt new multifaceted working landscapes that support greenhouses, experimentalfields for energy, environment and economy, and dynamic living surfaces. The new landscape will blur boundaries betweenindustry and habitation in every sense, ‘reactivating the American frontier toward the cultivation of a new living surface’.

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Jill Desimini and Danilo Martic, Timescapes: densifying community activities, 2006Timescapes proposes to stimulate discourse between the vacant lots of the inner-city neighbourhood and theadjacent open space of Fairmount Park, while looking skyward as a strategy to cultivate density. The 3-Dsidewalk is a specific development of this investigation, gathering together a range of activities in a verticalspatial element that engages the edges of the neighbourhood.

Text © 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 68 © City of Philadelphia; pp 69-73© Urban Voids: grounds for change, City Parks Association of Philadelphia

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Urban [IM]plantsTactics for Recombining Landscape andCollective Space in Bonheiden, BelgiumBonheiden, in the province of Antwerp in Belgium, lies in a region known for itsexceptional natural beauty. Though the surrounding rural setting has remainedprotected this has often been to the detriment of urban life, as the built environmenthas been subject to a process of banal suburbanisation. Els Verbakel and Elie Derman explain how they propose to turn this situation around by creatingpublic spaces that use the town’s ‘original landscape as the base material’.

Urban [IM]PlantsInstead of a masterplan, Els Verbakel, Elie Derman and Ward Verbakel propose a more flexible, interactiveand dispersed approach of pinpointed interventions. Each intervention can occur independently of theothers and can function as a catalyst for its immediate surroundings and beyond.

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Els Verbakel, Elie Derman and Ward Verbakel, Image Quality Plan,Bonheiden, Belgium, 2005Landscape vs public spaceWhile the current urban fabric of Bonheiden separates the public from thelandscape, Ward Verbakel’s proposal brings the landscape to the publicspaces, pulls the public into the landscape and creates hybrid living typologiesbetween urbanity and nature, thereby creating a ‘collective landscape’.

Flanders: Traditional urban model vs dispersed urban modelWhen looking at Flanders according to the traditional urban model, Bonheidenis an island surrounded by a peripheral void, floating in the mazes of anetwork of cities. In accepting the new dispersed urbanised territory as partof this urbanity, Bonheiden becomes an important player in what could beseen as the dominant urban condition in western Europe.

In the autumn of 2005, Bonheiden, a town of 14,000 inhabitants inthe Flemish periphery, organised an invited competition to rethinkthe spatial quality of its centre. The Belgian township called for avision that could cope with an ageing population and developmentpressures without losing its rural character. Once famed for itslandscape of heath, fenland, marshland and forests, the town isnow gradually losing its raison d’ê tre. It is just one example of manyFlemish towns undergoing the aftereffects of the countryside’smassive postwar suburbanisation. The population that graduallymoved to suburban villas in the periphery of rural villages duringthe 1960s and 1970s is now ageing and relocating to high-endmulti-unit housing projects in the centre of town. In recent years,Flanders has become a prime case study of urban dispersal,deeply rooted in the economic and political history of the region. Atthe scale of western Europe, the Old World version of suburbia hasbecome the standard model for living. According to traditional waysof studying the city, Bonheiden is an insignificant suburban islandfloating in a peripheral void, in between larger urban coresconnected by highways and trains. Yet when this new dispersedurban condition is recognised in its own right, a new vision for thetown can play an exemplary role within the region and beyond.

Designated by the Flemish Structure Plan as a ‘Built PeripheralLandscape’, Bonheiden’s future does not look very bright. TheFlemish policy for this town and similar areas in Flanders limitsfuture urban growth and preserves the existing green space,thereby ‘freezing’ the present situation and encouraging the currenttendency for grey, boring and generic towns. However, DermanVerbakel Architecture and Ward Verbakel Architect proposereinterpreting this vague terminology and exploring the possibilityof boosting the town by developing a new vision for its publicspaces, using its original landscape as the base material.

The proposal was selected by Bonheiden to provide strategiesto increase the built density of the suburban town whilereintroducing and strengthening its connection to landscape andnature. The project offers an alternative to a conventionalmasterplan by presenting a ‘design toolbox’ instead – a matrix ofpinpointed interventions of various scales and budgets that can beflexibly modified and implemented on demand, leaving the townthe power to control its own progress and ‘master’ its own future.

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Former town hall: before and afterBonheiden’s centre currently suffers from an ageing population anddevelopment pressures, particularly high-end multi-unit housing projects thatare quickly turning the town into a generic, grey and boring place. The projectoffers an alternative future where the introduction of hybrid living typologies,combining urbanity and nature, turns the centre into a vertical landscape and,through combined programming, can attract a mixture of inhabitants.

urban [im]plants = landscape as collective

The project uses a technique of urban [im]plants: recombining segments of public space and landscapein punctual interventions of changing scales. It thereby reintroduces the formerly wild heath landscapeback into the city centre through specific, highly tangible design interventions. Landscape, in its mostprimordial sense, thus becomes the main component of the renewed public space. Recovering this initialattractor neither replaces nor erases the identity of recognisable public spaces; rather, the reintroductionof a wild heath landscape remoulds and reactivates the town centre into a new and surprising type ofurban space, allowing the inhabitants direct interaction with the primary natural condition of the place.

The emergence of a collective landscapeThe majority of the town’s landscape is currently in private hands – mostly inthe form of villa gardens – which does not sustain a lively public space. In thelong term this will discourage new inhabitation. However, by reclaiming thelandscape as collective and, in addition, transforming the existing publicspaces, a collective landscape will stimulate new urban life.

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Parking plusBoth in the public and in the private domain, the project proposes a series of‘urban hybrids’ that formally and programmatically recombine urbanity andlandscape in small-scale interventions. One such example is the ‘parkingplus’ fields, hybrids between parking lots and fields of nature such asorchards, small-scale agriculture, parks, and so on. This combined typologyallows for an increased number of parking spaces in the town centre while atthe same time enlarging the green spaces and activating collective living.

Floating pergola and café-terraceA series of architectural typologies was developed to ensure that in the private domain every structure can contribute to a new visual identity forthe town. For example, a floating pergola can be added on undeveloped sites adjacent to commercial properties to create a new vertical landscapein the centre of town, and can be rented for private events or for commercial promotions. A café-terrace can be added to existing restaurants orbars, providing outdoor seating areas that can be closed off in the winter and, again, contribute to a new and green collective street facade.

urban [im]plants = hybrid interventions

Modifying relationships between built fabric and nature producesnew hybrid urban conditions. In the core of each designintervention, urbanity and nature merge into an irreversible hybridof structure and vegetation, ranging from green kiosks andecological advertisement panels to hanging-garden modules andvegetated street lighting. The hybrid implants are organisedaccording to three spatial registers, characteristic of the urbanconfiguration of Bonheiden: Fields – surfaces such as squares,parks and natural domains; Lines – continuous spaces alongstreets and paths; and Points – structures and art installations.Every component can be implemented independently as astimulator of the surrounding urban space.

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Toolbox: point interventionsA toolbox organises all proposed interventions according tolocation and category. In this case the point interventions area series of architectural proposals that intensify vertical greenspace within the town’s collective spaces.

Building regulationsIn a second phase, Els Verbakel, Elie Derman and Ward Verbakel translatedtheir vision for vertical green space and hybrid living typologies into a seriesof building regulations, formulating nine principles for any new building in thetown. The regulations range from ‘virtual parcellation’ to ‘green fingers’ and‘parking plus or minus’.

urban [im]plants = toolbox strategies

To achieve flexible and innovative design and policy strategies, amatrix organises all of the interventions according to location, typeof intervention and morphology, which operates as a ‘toolbox’ ofdesign interventions and principles. Instead of a fixed predefineddocument such as the traditional masterplan, Derman VerbakelArchitecture and Ward Verbakel Architect suggested an open-source method that could be ‘mastered’ by the design team, thetown and its inhabitants. The interventions range from art projects,small and larger buildings and public spaces to buildingregulations, urban design guidelines and communication projects,in which the landscape serves as a point of departure. Eachintervention was tagged with an ID card specifying the componentlocation, architecture, investment, urban impact and revenue. Thisallows components to be assessed in communication with thetown and its inhabitants throughout the process of implementation,and permits the town to instantly imagine a future quality for itscentre through pinpointed proposals.

A piecemeal and guided approach provides greater flexibility,but also offers space for close collaboration with inhabitants andother user groups. Through a feedback mechanism, the results ofthe interventions are continuously evaluated and redirected beforefurther investments are planned.

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Architectenbureau Reginald Schellen BVBA, Project Hoek KerkpleinBerentrodedreef, Bonheiden, Belgium, 2007As a result of the case study exercises above, the image quality planinfluenced the architecture of new building.

The project is currently being implemented through differentmechanisms such as the creation of a legally binding structuralexecution plan, an image quality chamber that stands in directdialogue with local developers and architects and advises the townon each building application, the execution of ‘test projects’ such as‘parking plus’ locations and more. The practices’ approach ofstrategic [IM]plants has proven to be an effective method not onlyto formulate an appropriate vision for the town, but also toimplement this vision in small steps with immediate results,without having to wait for slow and after-the-fact policies. Theproposed collective landscape has therefore already entered theimagination of the town’s officials and inhabitants, providing themwith a new identity as a dispersed yet urban entity.4

Text © 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 74-8, 79(t) © Els Verbakel andElie Derman, Derman Verbakel Architecture and Ward Verbakel Architect; p 79(b) © Architectenbureau Reginald Schellen BVBA

Building regulations case studyFor specific project proposals, the team applied the principles ofthe building regulations by visualising them for specific locationssuch as the church square.

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User-Focused Public Space(M)UTOPIA in Denmark

The Mikado Plaza consists of a green area with grass and fir trees, criss-crossed by three blue paths and one of asphalt. Each path forms a so-called activity space with a theme of its own.

The Danish practice MUTOPIA brings to public space a strong sense of delightand playfulness, while demonstrating an overriding concern with the end user.As Serban Cornea of MUTOPIA explains, a temporary plaza for the extensivedevelopment of Ørestad Nord in Copenhagen aims ‘to speed up the processof creating the area’s own identity’, while the practice’s housing for Lyngby-Taarbæk, Hovedstaden, audaciously puts the ‘garden’ back into the ‘gardensuburb’ by relocating the transport infrastructure to the rooftops.

The Danish practice MUTOPIA brings to public space a strong sense of delightand playfulness, while demonstrating an overriding concern with the end user.As Serban Cornea of MUTOPIA explains, a temporary plaza for the extensivedevelopment of Ørestad Nord in Copenhagen aims ‘to speed up the processof creating the area’s own identity’, while the practice’s housing for Lyngby-Taarbæk, Hovedstaden, audaciously puts the ‘garden’ back into the ‘gardensuburb’ by relocating the transport infrastructure to the rooftops.

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MUTOPIA is a young Copenhagen-based architecture office thatmerges idealism and visionary activity (UTOPIA) with expediency,evolution and change (MUTATION) working towards an architecturebased on user participation. The practice’s user-focused designapproach produces public space by combining a wide range ofdesign tools and communication strategies for mediating betweendifferent interests and needs, which encourages support amongthe stakeholders, while it engages in dialogue with the users andtesting insights gained during processes of user exchange.

Mikado Plaza, Ørestad Nord, Copenhagen, 2005

Mikado Plaza is the first of several MUTOPIA-designed temporaryurban public spaces (TUPS) planned for Ørestad, a new urbandevelopment in Copenhagen that extends south of the city centretowards the airport and the Øresund link to Sweden.

With an estimated building time of 20 years, Ørestad is lackingthe identity provided by the multiple layers of the historic citycentre. Due to the size of the development, the area will continue topresent itself to visitors and new residents as a gigantic buildingsite with few, if any, public spaces for many years to come.

TUPS were conceived as a strategy for creating temporaryurban public spaces on the building sites in Ørestad, in order toprovide recreational facilities for the residents of areas underconstruction. Using unique spatial interventions, the strategyinvolves the residents in the process of defining their urbanenvironment, thereby providing a one-to-one testing ground forurban life.

The design for the Mikado Plaza was shaped by the dreams andneeds of 100 future users, visualised as a statistical diagram witheach column representing their favourite activity. The columns werethen ‘thrown’ over the area, like gigantic Mikado (‘pick up’) sticks,whereby each activity was proportionally represented within theavailable open space – not only providing the desired activities butalso encouraging multiple ways of interaction between differentinhabitants, visitors and passers-by.

The TUPS strategy was devised by MUTOPIA as a catalyst forpublic life and identity by means of participatory planning andflexibility. By using the building sites of today as temporary publicspaces, it aims to speed up the process of creating the area’s ownidentity, while at the same time providing the residents with asense of history.

PLAYCER, an internet-based scenario game, enables users andinhabitants to visualise and discuss ideas for future urbanenvironments. The insight and knowledge produced by suchscenarios will inspire future design concepts, for the transformationof Mikado or the development of new temporary public spaces, thatwill continuously evolve and transform in an ongoing dialogueprocess between inhabitants, users, designers and authorities.

MUTOPIA is in the process of completing the city park in the Ørestad Citydowntown district. The 7.5-hectare (18.5-acre) project is due for completion inspring 2008 and is operating with concepts similar to Mikado Plaza; namely, a(flexible) matrix of round ‘islands’ that have been programmed by means of aparticipatory planning process in collaboration with local residents.

The Ørestad development comprises a series of urban areas – Ørestad Nord,Amager Fælled, Ørestad City and Ørestad Syd – separated by greenrecreational areas in between. A hundred people whose daily movementstake them to Ørestad Nord were asked to select their favourite activity from achoice of five, ranging from chill-out to sport. Their answers, represented asa statistical diagram with each column representing an activity, havesubsequently triggered the design of the space.

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Star gardens suburban dwellings, Lyngby-Taarbæk,Hovedstaden, Denmark, competition proposal, 2004

‘Lifting up’ the car traffic on the roofs of the terraced houses allows for amore intensive use of the buildings’ footprint: each housing ‘finger’ containsboth dwellings and the required car access and parking areas organised as‘sky streets’ on top, while at the same time the landscape wedges in betweenthe housing fingers are preserved as car-free public recreational areas. Eachdwelling unit has two entrances (one from the upper roof deck and one fromthe park), as well as two different private spaces related to each entrance (aroof terrace and a garden), which unite the best of both worlds: urban lifeabove and suburban greenery below.4

Urban sprawl has been and often still is motivated, commerciallyand ideologically, by the aspiration to access substantial amountsof green areas. However, the massive amount of infrastructurerequired by sprawl, along with the interest from the private marketin higher-density buildings, leaves little or no room for gardens.

Here, elevating car traffic on the roofs of 180 terraced housesallows for a more efficient use of the building footprint, organisedin a star shape. Each housing ‘finger’ combines dwellings, caraccess and parking areas into new hybrid infrastructures, or ‘skystreets’. Car-free landscape wedges created in between thehousing fingers provide collective recreational areas.

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The star-shaped layout of the residential area creates a central plaza, unites the northern andsouthern parts of the site as a coherent whole, and provides the development with a strong identitywhile at the same time securing public accessibility throughout the entire area.

Text @ 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: © MUTOPIA ApS

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Royal Dutch Military Police CampusZvi Hecker’s Landscape UrbanismSituated close to Schiphol Airport, Zvi Hecker’s new police campus for the Royal DutchMilitary Police is located in the Randstad area; the ‘rim city’ conurbation that comprisesthe four biggest Dutch cities – Rotterdam, Amsterdam, The Hague and Utrecht – andhas come to epitomise the most intensive European condition of dispersal. As Rafi Segal describes, Hecker chooses to address this context by providing the campus with ‘a notion of the urban’ that creates ‘a city within a wall’.

Zvi Hecker, Royal Dutch Military Campus (KMar), Schiphol International Airport, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 2002–This project unites in a single location the various branches of the Royal Dutch Military Police, responsible for maintaining security atSchiphol International Airport. Programme: multifunctional complex of living, working and training facilities for 1,500 staff stationed atSchiphol Airport, with a built area of 33,000 square metres (355,209 square feet) on a 77,000 square-metre (828,821-square-foot)site. Client: DVD (Ministerie van Defensie); Project manager: DHV bouwadviseurs; Structural engineer: Arup, Amsterdam.

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Increasing demands for airport security led the Dutch governmentto establish a new centre for the Royal Dutch Military Police (KMar)at a site adjacent to Schiphol International Airport. In addition tothe requirements to combine living, working and training facilities inone complex, the symbolic presence of the project as the maingateway to the Netherlands, seen from the air and the runways,also played an important role. These programmatic demands camewith a problematic site and several constraints: exposure to theinvasive noise of air and highway traffic, radar limitation on thelocation of the various programmes on site, restrictions on buildingheights, and other more general conditions such as building on asite that is below sea level – in this case by 3.6 metres (11.8 feet) –as is common in the Netherlands.

The architectural challenges of this project were thereforetwofold: first, to create an environment of good working and livingconditions in an unfavourable and restricted site, and second toprovide an architectural expression for an institution of state powerand control in a 21st-century democratic society.

Characteristic of airports and their surroundings, which are forthe most practical reasons located in low-density environments,this site is situated within the dispersed Dutch Randstad.Although placed outside the traditional urban context, theproject’s complex programme, multiple scales, connections andinclusion of diverse routes and speeds of movement tie it more tothe notion of the urban. In contrast to the concept of the campusas a collection of individual scattered buildings implanted ingreen space, KMar is conceived of as a continuous wall-like barbuilding, set along the edges of the site forming a peripheralstructure that gradually opens up towards the centre. The ‘bar’

buildings that form the structure accommodate offices,dormitories, educational facilities and other programmes, freeingthe central space for common facilities and sports fields. The barsare layered and juxtaposed one on top of the other, creating botha larger scale massing that relates to the linearity of the runwaysand highway, and smaller intimate spaces that shield and protectfrom the external disturbances.

This architectural strategy turns the campus as a whole into akind of landscape created by the interweaving of the wall-likebuildings and the open spaces created in between them andaround them. The long greened roofs of the bar buildings mergewith the surrounding fields and create a series of terraces. Fromthe air and at eye level, the line between building and landscape isblurred. Yet from a functional point of view, the campus resemblesmore a kind of city; with streets, bridges, elevated buildings,courtyards, clusters and other elements – a sequence of spacesdefined by buildings and linked by routes of movement. In thissense, it is, as its designer Zvi Hecker called it, ‘a city within a wall’or an emptied-out fortress, of which the walls have split and shiftedto allow light, air and space to enter. The project thus challengesthe traditional distinction between city, landscape and building. Itdraws a line that oscillates between these while incorporating theminto one architectural-urban thinking.

Hecker’s KMar campus offers an integration of building,landscape and infrastructure. It does so while provoking a newexpression for the public institution of the state’s military police. Itspublic dimension is not only evident in the variety of collectivegathering spaces created within it, but also through its externalpresence and location – representing a government institution.

View from the southeast. Highway no 4defines the northern edge of the site.

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Studies and sketches of the site plan as it developed.

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Detailed views of the courtyard spaces.

The KMar campus as a continuous wall-like structure.

The campus’ horizontal, dynamic and dispersed nature countersthe concentric, symmetric, hierarchical and enclosed buildingscommonly associated with state power, control and supervision. Amain element of enclosure – the peripheral wall – becomes herethe building itself, which does not enclose a thing but meandersaround open spaces. Furthermore, this peripheral ‘wall’ ispermeable; by its mere shape and configuration it creates a formthat interweaves and connects open and closed, building andlandscape, collective and private spaces, allowing the campus toremain ‘exposed’, open and porous. Here lies its programmatic andsymbolic strength. As Hecker himself noted: ‘Given that democraticsociety requires an army and police, the architect should find a wayto express this need. It is only in dictatorial regimes that one doesnot know where and how police operate.’14

Note1. Zvi Hecker, letter to the author, April 2007, recalling his statement in thecommission interview for the project, 2001.

Text © 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Zvi Hecker

Site plan. The campus located along highway no 4, and runways 1 and 2 of Schiphol International Airport.

Sketch of the overlapping ‘bar’ buildings.

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Manuel de Solà-Morales, Ville-Port, Saint-Nazaire, France, 1998Aerial view of the project intervention.

Ville-Port, Saint-NazaireThe Historic PeripheryThe harbour town of Saint-Nazaire on the Atlantic coast of Brittany in northernFrance remains divided both by its memories and its built environment.Manuel de Solà-Morales describes how his Ville-Port project seeks toaddress the structural, visual and mnemonic divisions that have grown upover time between a working port and seaside resort.

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Saint-Nazaire’s tragic destiny during the Second World War was toleave two dramatic footprints: the almost complete destruction ofthe city by the Allies; and the submarine base built by the Germansas a refugee camp and arsenal in the Atlantic Front fortificationplan from Burdeos to Brest.

Situated at the Loire‘s estuary end, well known for its Chantiersde l’Atlantique shipyards since the 19th century, Saint-Nazaire’spostwar reconstruction (the Maresquier plan) focused on a leisure-based beach/city centre relationship, as portrayed by Tati’s MonsieurHulot character. The shipyards, even though relatively central in theirlocation, thereby became peripheral to the uses of ordinary life.

The Ville-Port project in Saint-Nazaire, drawn up in successivecompetition and execution phases between 1994 and 1998, andcompleted in 2001, aimed to defy this broken city–port link andperipheral perception with the introduction of new collective uses,both within the submarine base and on its roof.

There are geographic peripheries that have given rise to theterm ‘peripheral’, and there are historic peripheries, places that timeand memory have pushed to the margins of daily life. Sometimes,the urban unconscious masks the areas that it doesn’t want torecognise, because they are inconvenient, muddled and filled withconflict. And yet these zones can be absolutely central to thetopographic viewpoint. Just as there are ‘historic centres’, placesthat history has considered central, there are also peripheriesconstructed by history.

History has thus turned the French port of Saint-Nazaire into aperiphery: a history of memories of suffering and destruction,stemming from the effort required to rebuild the town after it wasbombed during the war and from the presence of the submarinebase, which is a concrete symbol of occupation and tragedy. Thereare also more recent histories of segregationist zoning in order tomaintain the conformist banality of the beach, of industrial crisis atthe legendary Chantiers de l’Atlantique, and of centripetal retreat inthe face of growing suburban dispersion.

The desire to tackle the periphery of the port again is above allan act of intelligence on the part of the town. It is a mark ofawareness of the present and of superiority with respect to thepast – a superiority based solely on respect and understanding.Identifying the periphery will signify assuming the hybrid conditionof the space of the harbour, its vast holding capacity, and its docksas broad as its horizons, and establishing a controlled relationshipat a distance with the centre of the town, one that retains theexisting differences and the empty expanses as a pregnantexpression of space. Voids on the ground and voids in space,voids even in use, a sense of waiting for things to come.

Yet the obvious tension between monument and city, between amass with a volume of 900,000 cubic metres (31,783,201 cubicfeet) and a continuous and homogeneous town, but oneconstructed with a very low density, turns the apparent conditionsof the periphery on their head.

The new semantics remain on the margins, and the urban fabricappears to be no more than reassuring support for the mysteriouspresence on the industrial edge of the water. In fact, if we were tocalculate the total volume of buildings in the central area (75hectares/185 acres), it would come to 1,247,400 square metres(13,426,902 square feet), which does not amount to much more,altogether, than the enormous truncated pyramid of concrete.

Intervening in such a spatial and psychological tension is adelicate operation, especially when one is a foreign architect,always well received but also subject to the perennial suspicion ofinsensitivity to local problems.

The Ville-Port project proposes a system of new references inthe port territory designed to involve the town and harbour in a newand more open, composite and active relationship. The referencesare, in the immediate surroundings, the empty spaces (squares,parking lots) between the centre and the military base; the ramp

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Project masterplan. Implementation in Saint-Nazaire’s urban fabric.

Night lighting and reflections on the water basin.

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Ramp and esplanades to access the submarine base.

Longitudinal section and detail.

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Glass wall and transparency.

Parking and transparency through the submarine base.

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providing access to the roof of the base, with its incorporatedbuildings (hypermarket, housing); and the ‘atrium of the barber’created in the transparent interior of the base (vestibule ofexhibition halls, cinemas and restaurants). And, in the distance,involving this perimeter that delimits the base, the towers (bothexisting and new) that rise above the harbour and thereinforcement of the avenues that run around it, fusing the entirearea into a structure that is both loose and strong. This is astructure of visual and functional relations that effectively mark aterritory on the periphery, maintaining all the vitality of its industries(storage facilities, refrigeration plants, the manufacture of fishingnets and moorings), but mixing them with – just a few – regionaland civic functions of recreation, culture and commerce.

The twin access routes to the military zone, with its platformroofs and small cells at water level, are traces that, owing to theirsize, link the centre of the city to the open horizon of the harbourand estuary. All around, even though far away, the landmarks ofthe silos and high-rise buildings accentuate the extent of the emptyspaces in between, and establish the scale and the new peripheralcondition of the territory.4

Text © 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 90(b), 91 © Manuel de Solà; pp 88,90(t), 92-3 © Dominique Macel, Service du Communication de Saint-Nazaire

Night view of interior spaces.

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Nam Van Square, MacauA peninsula, lying 60 kilometres (37 miles) to the southwest of Hong Kong, Macau isthe Las Vegas of the new China. As Manuel Vicente explains, when he was asked tocreate an important new public space for the city it provided the opportunity to createa plaza that was able to assimilate the past forms of the historic city withoutabsorbing the symbolism of its colonial history.

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‘Os cavalos a correr, as meninas a saltar …’1

After all the noise and excitement over Macau’s administrativetransition settled down post 19 December 1999, the new localgovernment was faced with the requirement for a new public square,distinctly postcolonial, not only from a symbolic point of view, butalso and most urgently from a functional point of view: the inheritedhistorical civic space was clearly inadequate, even in mere capacityterms, to harbour the collective rites and rituals of the new Macau.

When VLB Arquitectura & Planeamento LDA were appointed todesign the project, they immediately presumed that the mainobjective of the new administration was not to create a sitecondemned to the usual pastiche – either ‘Chineseness’ or‘Palladianess’ – but instead to create the opportunity for somethingnew: free of any symbolism though eager to pursue the hybridismof the urban form that consistently configured the city throughoutthe course of history.

A new development plan for the central shore of the historic city– the Nam Van Lakes plan designed by Manuel Vicente throughoutthe late 1980s and 1990s, which interpreted and extended thecurve of the historic bay out into the river and featured aculmination point in the form of a formal/functional roundabout atthe meeting point of the two lakes – stood out as the irrefutableplace for the new civic project. This was even more irrefutablegiven the immediate vicinity of the newly built Macau Tower, aquintessential modern and abstract structure, and a true icon withno connotations with the city’s past.

Designing a public site requires recognition of a place prior andbeyond the invention of its space. In the south, the creation ofpublic space traditionally begins almost as a casual accident in theurban fabric, the poetic essence of which becomes, in the course oftime, successively ascertained through the interplay andmanipulation of hidden geometries waiting to be named.

The values VLB proposed for Macau’s new Nam Van Squarewere mainly those related to the plural and diversified fruition ofthe site. From the core of the roundabout’s inner square, the formalhard-surfaced floor that represents the real foundation of the publicspace, one can walk through the series of familiar typologies thatirradiate from it – esplanades, terraces, gardens, walkways andembankments – to the lake’s shore, along a path shaded by thetraffic flyovers that form an important part of the design of the newcivic square. Here the architects’ reconfiguring of the supportingstructures as part of the new built landscape creates a show ofdifferent speeds and rhythms made by the conjugation of peopleand machines, simultaneously circulating, in a whole complexconcoction pregnant with unsuspected urbanities.

An urban park was commissioned two years after the square, asa simple landscaping of the access areas for the new (third) bridgeto the outlying islands, in an adjoining stretch of causeway. Thisproject organises two different park areas along the twowaterfronts, each finding a design pattern to divorce itself from itsproximity to the roads. On the lakeside, a sloping scenic gardenwith pools on different levels overlooks the city and transforms theover-imposing macro-presence of the bridge as a framer of views.And on the riverside, a children’s playground stretches along thewater, like a palace in an Indian fairytale.4

Note1. ‘Horses are galloping.’

Overview of the Macau peninsulabefore the construction of the thirdbridge.

A flyover as shelter.

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Plan of the whole territory of Macau, showing the water beds and majorgambling investments (in orange). Nam Van Square is between the twowestern bridges. The reclamation between the two islands is thelocation of the new megacasino strip.

Map of the city of Macau showingthe Nam Van Lakes reclamationscheme and its integration within thehistoric Praia Bay. Nam Van Squareis shown at the intersection of thetwo lakes and the river.

The points of intensity in the design are concentrated on the transition of levels and the transferfrom road to public space structures. The flyovers were developed as two-sided objects: the trafficdisappears when viewed from the lakeside, and flies by when seen from above.

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View towards the lake. The landscape areas bind the different levels and functions.

The curved complexity transverses different levels.

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General plan for the urban parkunder the third bridge.

The modelling of the floor, which creates an organic movement along the lakeshore, provides a means of simultaneously alienating and integrating themassive presence of the pre-existing bridge flyovers.

Macau, located on the South China coast, was aPortuguese-administered enclave from 1557 until 19December 1999: the date when it was returned to thePeople’s Republic of China, thus becoming the SpecialAdministrative Region of Macau. It comprises thepeninsula of Macau and two islands, a total area of 24square kilometres (9.3 square miles), up from 14 squarekilometres (5.4 square miles) 20 years ago.

The liberalisation of the territory’s gambling industryin 2002 was the political milestone that triggered animmense leap in the city’s urban development, with theambition of moving away from a South China nostalgiainto a regional economic player.

Macau’s architectural legacy is the fruit of a symbioticconfrontation of Portuguese city-making praxis against amatured local Chinese social context and modusfacendi. Its geopolitical status, between China and theAsian archipelago, has historically been a place ofmiscegenation and deviation, which has produced in thearchitectural field a culture of typological hybridism.

Text © 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 94-5 © MacauInformation Bureau; pp 96, 98(t), 99(r) © Rui Leão, Carlotta Bruniand Manuel Vicente, photos Carlotta Bruni; pp 97(t&c), 99(l) ©Rui Leão, Carlotta Bruni and Manuel Vicente; p 97(b), 98(b) © RuiLeão, Carlotta Bruni and Manuel Vicente, photowww.almosterstudio.com

Mur Island, Graz, Austria

Acconci Studio, Mur Island, Graz, Austria, 2003The dome functions as a café/restaurant. It isentered from above, on to a terrace, or from belowinto the restaurant/bar area. A canopy above thelower entrance twists down to create loungeseating around the edge of the dome.

The New York artist Vito Acconci has chosen to work through architecture,seeing the potential of it as a medium to engage ‘the public with the worldaround them’. He explains why he believes the location of his highly successfulcultural centre for Mur Island, Graz, in Austria missed the opportunity torejuvenate areas of the city beyond the historic core.

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A twist in the river, a node in the river, a circulation route in the middle of theriver which is an island: the island is a dome that morphs into a bowl thatmorphs into a dome.

The bowl functions as a theatre, and is lined with transparent bleachers madeof grating or perforated metal that step down to the stage below. When notbeing used as a theatre, the bowl functions as a public space, a plaza, in themiddle of the river. Each line of bleachers waves in and out, and expands andcontracts, thus instead of sitting facing straight ahead, visitors can sit face toface and enjoy everyday conversation.

This floating island for the 2003 European cultural capital includedan open-air theatre, a small café and children’s playground. Theselected site, which was chosen by Graz 2003, the organisationbehind the initiative, was the River Mur, which runs through theAustrian town. This choice of site was determined by its proximityto the town’s bridges, the town centre and the planned Peter Cookand Colin Fournier’s Graz Museum (now completed). AcconciStudio’s own preference would have been for a different location,away from the existing bridges and the urban centre. This wouldhave allowed for an alternative strategy to be pursued, whichprovided an additional river crossing on Mur Island at a point wherethere are currently no bridges, and would have rejuvenated aquieter part of the city and provided an alternative cultural area tothat which already exists in the historic core. In this sense, it wouldhave acted as a device for drawing activity beyond the establishedcity confines, without tying into existing public spaces, and allowedthe island as a public, collective space to function independently ofthe continuous urban fabric.

Temporality was never much of an issue during the designprocess; the studio was always aware that if the island drewpeople in significant numbers it would endure beyond 2003 whenGraz was European Capital of Culture, which it assumed, and verymuch hoped, would happen. The greatest consideration was putinto the river context with its water and tides and floods; anchoringthe island to the bottom of the river allowed it to respond to therise and fall of the changing tide.

As with other projects, Acconci Studio is interested in engagingthe public with the world around them, the world they are in. Theyare involved with design and architecture because design allowsthe possibility of dealing with (at least some of) the occasions ofeveryday life. Architecture, contrary to art, is oriented towardsusers rather than viewers: design and architecture deal inherentlywith participants and inhabitants. 4

Plan of Mur Island. Where the dome morphs into a bowl, and vice versa, aplayground is formed by the warp. This in between space is a three-dimensional grid that functions like monkey bars, a field to climb up and crawlthrough and hang on to. In addition, there is a slide that cuts through the grid.

Text © 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: © Acconci Studio, photo ElviraKlamminger; © Acconci Studio, photo Harry Schiffer; © Acconci Studio

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Many agree that the notion of the urban and public areintertwined: that is, we cannot conceive of the urban withouta conception of public space. Yet in the current reality ofurban environments at low densities, the interdependence ofurbanity and public space as we know it can be questioned.

The concept of public space enables the architecturalprofession to go beyond the sole service of the private sector,beyond the whims and particular desires of the individualclient, and directly engage in giving shape to public life.Architects here become ‘interpreters’ of the public ‘good’ –their client being the ‘public’ itself, they act on behalf of thecollective interest.

Can urbanity exist without the production of public spaceor vice versa? And, in parallel, can architecture as aprofession give up the role of designing for the public?

Stan Allen: I think to start with we need to be sceptical of thisvague notion of ‘public space’. Public space is a concept that ison the one hand hardly ever defined with any degree ofspecificity, and on the other never questioned as to its value.That’s a dangerous combination. We think of the traditionalcity as the locus of public space, but what do we mean? It isworthwhile to look at the traditional city, historically, and askwhat was the notion of public space, what and where arethese public spaces, squares, markets, etc, and how are theyused? We would find that each one has a very specific andoften very different pattern. If we look specifically at the

American city, as Robert Venturi pointed out, the romanticnotion of the European piazza (as the emblematic publicurban space) is something that never really existed in theAmerican city. So, with full awareness that I am treading on asacred icon (public space is like motherhood or apple pie, itcan’t be criticised), I would start by signalling my scepticismabout the concept as it is usually evoked – especially in theAmerican context. In my view it’s more important to thinkfirst about publics, in all their specificity and multiplicity, andthen look at their spatial practices.

This notion of spatial practice derives from Michel deCerteau’s, who also elaborates a distinction between spaceand place. Space is an abstract notion that acquires specificityin relation to specific practices. ‘Place,’ writes de Certeau, ‘ispracticed space.’ So you would almost have to ask thequestion: What are the spatial practices that could activatethis abstract notion of public space? We can talk about thosespatial practices that create the potential for public places. Inthe larger sense, another interesting thing about de Certeau’sviews is that he has a faith in the collective creativity ofsubjects, in their tendency to invent ways to use the spacesthat are given to them. You could argue that the traditionalnotion of public space is a kind of top-down argumentwhereby public space is ‘given’ to the public. I would turn thatequation around to say: How does the collective create publicspace with the spaces that are given/found?

This means that the role of the architect is to make a spacefor that public – to create the conditions where the public can

Discussion

Paola Viganò, Landscapes of Water, Veneto, Italy, 2006 Architekt Daniel Libeskind AG, Westside, Berne, Switzerland, due for completion 2008

Architecture and DispersalArchitecture and DispersalTo close the issue, guest-editors Rafi Segal and Els Verbakel curated a discussion withStan Allen, Margaret Crawford, Marcel Smets and Sarah Whiting, and put some provocativequestions to them: What constitutes public space in the contemporary city? Can the publicsphere still exist in the urban context? Should public space be fought for by architects andurban designers? Or, as Allen proposes, is it the landscape architects alone who have beenquick to realise the potential of the empty spaces in our cities as a ripe terrain for change?

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freely exercise its collective creativity. It’s for this reason thatI’ve always been suspicious of the attempt to overscript theuse of public space. For me, a successful public space isprecisely a space where something unanticipated happens. Sothe job of the architect becomes calibrating the right mixbetween specificity, imagining and projecting potential usesinto the space, creating the right measure, understandingflow and access, while always leaving some noise in thesystem, a degree of ‘play’, that allows for the unexpected. Thearchitect’s job is to create spaces with potential. Thatpotential is in turn activated by the way in which the space isput to use – put into play – by the public itself. There is animportant paradox that has been articulated by MichelFoucault, who has pointed out that there are architecturesthat constrain freedom and free expression, but there are nospecifically ‘liberating’ architectures. ‘Freedom,’ writesFoucault, ‘is a practice.’ In this sense it can be given space, butit cannot, by definition, be dictated from above. I don’t seethis as a problem for architects, but rather quite the reverse –it means that our job is not to script spatial practices, butrather to create the precise architectural conditions wherethose practices have the best chance of survival.

Marcel Smets: The classic answer would be that the churchsquare no longer works, since people no longer go to church.Public space has become a ‘telanovela’, an individual yet sharedexperience. In each type of urbanity, places that are sharedcan be considered public spaces. Whether this is necessarily ahighly concentrated space can be questioned. Even in highdensities we see a tendency for isolation. In a certain way, weare talking about places where we frequently spend time,spaces that touch and connect people with other people, fromcemeteries to recreation places, sports fields, transportlocations, etc. ‘Public’ space does not disappear but multiply,it loses its hierarchy and has become more temporary, forexample in the form of events and festivals.

Cities are now concentration points in urban nebulae.Places of gathering that used to be associated with city centresare splintering. In Flanders, this has created a new type of citycentre where recreation is the only urban activity left. Inmany Flemish towns, even civic services such as post offices

and administrative centres are moving away from the centrebased on a false idea of efficiency. The main square that usedto host political demonstrations is now only a place forentertainment and tourism. The flocking together ofprogrammes such as sports, education, etc causes urbanity todisappear. Collective space gets to be pre-coded if not privatised.

Sarah Whiting: Lament-drenched, post-lapsarian narrativesabout a lost public sphere that needs to be ‘recovered’ appearto have wormed their way even into AD. These sentimentsinvariably feed futile ‘retrieve and recover’ missions thatshare success/failure rates with other contemporary missionsbased on myths. The public sphere in the US has, from itsinception, been tied as much, if not more, to business than toits presumptive origin in government or some variant ofpublic organisation. As much as we may want to believe in thealtruistic alignments of public space and public agency, nowmore than ever the public sphere invariably finds easieralliances in private partnerships than it does in public policy.Bottom Line Public Spaces (BLPS) dot the entirety of Americanurbanism and are very likely the only hope for public spacethat we will see in the near future. The American urbanlandscape, beginning with Daniel Burnham’s ChicagoExposition of 1893, the Washington DC MacMillan Plan of1902 (also designed by Burnham), or beginning even earlierwith the nation’s land surveys and acquisition policies, haslong been directed primarily by monetary concerns. Whilecolonial cities such as Savannah were organised so as tocreate miniature cities within a city, each centred on a publicgreen, the incentive for cities planned after independence hasarisen from the private sector, illustrating John Locke’sobservation of 1690 that: ‘The great and chief end, therefore,of men’s uniting into commonwealths, and puttingthemselves under government, is the preservation of theirproperty.’ In short, the space of the American urban landscape– urban, suburban, dense, or not – utilises the delineation ofproperty ownership as its base map. This fact simply cannotbe avoided when discussing public space.

The privatisation of public space finds a willingaccomplice in programming – in the definition,organisation and construction of what happens in that space.

Manuel Vicente, Carlotta Bruni and Rui Leão, Nam Van Square, Macau, China, 2007 Manuel de Solá-Morales, Ville-Port, Saint-Nazaire, France, 1998

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But as the programming of contemporary life accelerates, theprogramming of contemporary public space cannot keep pace.Unlike Burnham’s Grant Park of 1909, a green and sandy stripbetween the city and the lake, Chicago’s recent MillenniumPark is fully programmed with music, art, wildflower paths,skating and eating. It was easier to believe that we had apublic sphere when we felt that we had time for it; now,without that time, we’re seeing how small that sphere maybe. Accompanied by constant headlines such as ‘Is your childtoo busy? Make sure to schedule family fun time too,’ we arefast becoming a culture with no time or space, let alonepublic. The Center for Economic Policy Research, based inWashington DC, points out that the US is the only advancedeconomy in the world that does not guarantee its workerspaid vacations, and that 61 per cent of workers in the US takeless than 15 days vacation a year. If we drop the falsenarrative of an original, ‘pure’, wholly public sphere andaccept that, at least in the American context, the publicsphere is always very much intertwined with the private oneand is being squeezed out of existence because of a lack ofspace and time to perceive it, the ensuing questions need to beretooled. How do we, as architects, foster new possibilities inthe public sphere, particularly in the dispersed environmentsthat are the focus of this issue of AD? Lamenting an absentidealised public sphere is futile. Starting from the status quodoesn’t mean selling out: given the public sphere that we’veinherited – the American BLPS – here is what we need to do:

BOTTOM LINES: Give public space a bottom line. Let it make aprofit.

MASS MARKET: Multiply, multiply, multiply. Like LadybirdJohnson’s wildflower campaign, the small aggregates tocreate the large. And the large is just fine.

STACK THE DECK: If lawns and asphalt are irresponsible,discover the new horizontal.

MAKE A PITCH: Sell the public to the public. Let them speak,and give them a space to say it in.

KNOW YOUR MEDIUM: To know your image is to know yourpublic (even when it looks funny).

LOVE YOUR SKIN: Revel in surfaces. Colours, textures, patterns… these are the plinths, frames and tones of public space.

The fleeing of the public from the city, as described in thisissue of AD by Bruce Robbins’ reading of Thomas Pynchon onthe one hand, and Albert Pope’s analysis of changes in theorganisation of settlements from grid to cul-de-sac on theother, raises questions about the relevance of previous formsand expressions of public space to contemporary culture andsettlement patterns.

Alex Wall seems to suggest that in Southeast Asia, thelifestyle shopping centre has the potential to become a modelof a new type of public space. More and more we see theemerging of a wide range of collective spaces produced by ahighly advanced private market. Their design andorganisation is based on mechanisms of high profit, limitedaccess and high security environments.

How can architects develop new models for public spacewithin dispersed urbanities? Can self-contained spaces withlimited access be considered public?

Margaret Crawford: There are many opportunities forproducing public spaces within existing suburban landscapes.But, in general, architects know almost nothing aboutsuburban life. Trying to understand how people live, work andinteract in dispersed areas should be their first priority. Theyalso need to acknowledge the enormous variety of dispersedurban conditions. In the US, suburbs can be rich or poor, closeor far from a city, with or without a centre, to name just a fewdistinctions. To discuss, say, Montecito, a wealthy suburb ofSanta Barbara, California, and working-class Medford,Massachusetts, outside of Boston as equivalent examples ofdispersed urbanism does justice to neither. Although thediversity of suburban lives and circumstances demandsspecific strategies, still, there are several obvious types of sitesthat cry out for a little more public-ness. One is the ubiquitousstrip mall. Home to virtually every suburban commercialfunction, from grocery stores to restaurants to local boutiques,the strip mall’s current form is a bar of programmesurrounded by a sea of parking. Yet with a little tweaking itcould become a public place. Add a piazza or town green,include some public functions (library, vehicle registrationdepartment, city offices), a coffee shop or café, close the bar

arquitectura 911sc, New Caracol, Ecatepec, Mexico City, 2007 MUTOPIA, Mikado Plaza, Ørestad Nord, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2005

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with two wings, and rearrange the parking. Voila! a newpublic/private place that would satisfy most urbanists. Andwithout disturbing the mall’s necessary commercial functions.A beautifully designed strip mall? Why not?

Other suburban sites whose public-ness could easily beamped up include schools (by adding functions, introducingafter-hours uses or even commercial activities), existing butfaded main streets (where, often, everyday commercialactivities like supermarkets can enliven street life), or evenmonofunctional civic centres (whose lives can be extendedbeyond working hours with new public and privateprogrammes such as theatres, sports complexes and parks).All of these transformations should acknowledge the realitiesof dispersed urbanism, such as the primacy of the automobile,by providing sufficient parking. But at the same timeresidents should also be offered alternative means of access bycreating bicycle and pedestrian paths, and even well-designedbus stops. In dispersed areas, architects will have to give uptheir dream of fixed rail transit as a generator of publicspaces. Buses are cheaper, more flexible, and with new formsof electronic scheduling can nearly reproduce the door-to-doorcapacities of private automobiles.

Marcel Smets: To turn this question around, the governmentcould play a more active role in increasing accessibility topublic spaces. As architect to the Flemish government, Imyself make an effort to raise awareness about makingcollective spaces more accessible. On the other hand, theRoman forum or the Greek agora were also never fullyaccessible and we should be careful not to fall for a myth.The space of infrastructure is usually accessible for all,although not always equally. After all, the space that doesnot belong to anyone is potentially the most public. Thestreet, the anonymous main street, rather than theneighbourhood street, can be seen as public, where beggarsand homeless walk side by side with inhabitants and visitors.Although there are many mechanisms that make claimedspaces such as supermarkets more multivalent, unclaimedspace seems to offer more possibilities. In Brussels’ 19th-century belt we can find examples of unclaimed space,where a more layered collectivity can take place, not only

shared by equally minded users. This is the kind of urbanitywe should strive for, rather than the increasing cocooning ofprivatised public space, a pseudo-urbanity that has beenfixed ahead of time. For example, walking in Manhattan it issurprising how the New York University compound hasbecome so much more predictable than it used to be. All theingredients of a university campus have been provided, themenu of a ‘nice neighbourhood’.

To a certain extent, design is always running behind thefact, but it can also be a confrontation. Not everybody findsthe current developments that interesting; they can becomforting yet not challenging, and in parallel there existmicroworlds that are more interesting. As designers we havethe responsibility to make people imagine and realise thatbeauty can lie in very small things. The scene in the movieAmerican Beauty, where the camera follows a plastic bag flyingin the air, is extremely fascinating yet also very depressing.Our perceptions have become private experiences, while thepublic sphere requires the sharing of experience. As designerswe can draw attention to small, shared experiences of beauty,unexpected, multilayered, accessible. We can work withmicro-interventions and lost spaces that function as implants,teasing and provoking the current state of terrifying banality.How else to operate than in the margin? Large projects aretoday managed by developers who work according to thestereotypical representations and expectancy patterns of theirusers. Nevertheless, architects can challenge theseexpectations and strive for a surprise effect. In the currentboredom of banality, this kind of approach is very much needed.

In several projects presented in the issue, we can identifyattempts of the urban plan to employ landscape as an activeurban force that can give meaning to otherwise loose,neglected voids within the larger low-density environment(for example, in projects such as the Philadelphia UrbanVoids competition, Bonheiden, Belgium, and El Caracol inMexico City). Research projects such as the work of PaolaViganò and Bruno De Meulder suggest that whole geographicregions and landscapes be read as one continuous spacelayered with different systems/networks. Other projects(such as KMar and Mikado) incorporate the landscape feature

Els Verbakel, Elie Derman and Ward Verbakel, Image Quality Plan, Bonheiden, Belgium, 2005 Claudia Faraone and Andrea Sarti, Waiting Spaces/Intermittent Cities, Veneto, Italy, 2004

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as an integral part of the urban thinking, and experimentwith the non-built as a generative element.

Temporality and transience, traditionally attributed tonature and ecology, have now become an important aspect ofdesigning public spaces in dispersed environments. Severalprojects propose a non-permanent approach to design,working with users and inhabitants (for example those byMUTOPIA and Claudia Faraone) or provide options for futurechanges (Timescape and the Urban Voids competition).

Can strategies of landscape design offer new approachesfor designing public space in environments of urbandispersal? Is this an indispensable compromise of thedispersed city? Can public space only exist temporarilyand then again disappear?

Marcel Smets: Both landscape and infrastructure are in theprocess of acquiring new roles within the contemporaryurban condition. The flocking together of similar programmesand activities creates a highly developed system ofconnections that can receive a new meaning as public space.Landscape, on the other hand, becomes very much related tothe question of identity. Much of the built space starts to looksimilar, which makes landscape into a place of identity. At thesame time, landscape has become a place of escaping thepredefined. For example, the festival emerged as an attemptto break out of the theatre into the landscape. A promise ofcontinuous change can now be found in the landscape.Landscape offers an ‘unclaimed’ territory, and thereforepossibly a new type of public space.

Margaret Crawford: Landscape architects, used to dealingwith open spaces, are clearly more adept than architectswho are obsessed with filling space, in working withdispersed urban conditions. Landscape architects can designparks, parking lots, subdivisions and roadsides, all staples ofthe dispersed landscape. In fact, trees, gardens and greenspaces of all kinds are among the suburbs’ primaryattractions. This suggests that we are urgently in need of anew discourse of ‘landscape suburbanism’.

Time as much as space should be a key component of thisnew discourse. As Robert Fishman has argued, life in the newdispersed city depends on time as much as space. Thus,adding a temporal dimension to design in the suburbs shouldnot be viewed as a compromise, but as an amplification ofpossibilities. In the suburbs, public experiences, rather thanexisting as fixed points in spaces, accumulate over the courseof the day and night, week and weekend, winter and summer.The challenge for designers is to weave more of these publicmoments into the built and unbuilt fabric of dispersedurbanism. Again, this would require them to acquire a deeperknowledge of the circuits and cycles that constitute suburbanlives. But I am convinced that paying close attention to thesuccessive events of suburban life can produce new andunexpected ways to experience public life.

Stan Allen: Landscape architecture – or what has come to becalled ‘landscape urbanism’ – is an absolutely key term tobring up when you talk about dispersed cities. The attractionof landscape urbanism is that it offers a new set of tools tobe deployed in the design of the void spaces, the so-calledempty spaces, between buildings, roadways, infrastructureand what has been traditionally called landscape, but istoday something beyond the mere design of gardens andparks. These tools – new ways of thinking and working – areideally suited to this emerging dispersed field. As adiscipline, in part because of its ‘minor’ status and lack ofhistory, landscape architecture has the potential to become akind of synthetic discipline that incorporates the insights ofecology, infrastructure and urbanism – landscapearchitecture is situated at the point of intersection betweenregional ecologies, infrastructure, open space design,architecture and urbanism.

So landscape urbanism has already emerged as a seriousfield of study: it has a 10-year history, a number ofrecognised practitioners, a catalogue of projects, and its ownliterature (at least two well-conceived collections haveappeared recently, for example). This is a very promisingdevelopment, and it opens up a lot of interesting territory. Itdoesn’t seem accidental that the rise of landscape urbanism

Vito Acconci, Mur Island, Graz, Austria, 2003 Martha Rosler, Oleanna/Utopia Station, Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2003

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parallels the emergence of the city as a dispersed fieldcondition in the late 20th century.

Recognising that attraction, I just want to point out threeareas that, for me, constitute both the areas of greatestpromise, but, paradoxically, the potential pitfalls of thelandscape urbanism approach. It is possible to identify threekey terms that have to do with the overlap and intersectionbetween the discourses of landscape and architecture:

Connectivity: It’s no accident that there is a parallelfascination in architecture and landscape for thesurface. Surface is the territory of landscape, and thereis an idea that the warped surface promises totalconnectivity, doing away with architecture’s verticaldimension, which has become associated withpartitioned space. This is of course attractive but naive.It becomes easy to fall into a false utopia of totalconnectivity, continuous flows, etc. This suggests closerattention to breaks, discontinuities and separations –and their social/programmatic value – in both landscapeand architecture.

Indeterminate programme or multi-use: Here, too, thereis this attractive idea that on an open field anything canhappen – sports, festivals, demonstrations, concerts,picnics, etc. To my mind, it is something of anabdication of responsibility, a kind of loose thinkingwhere it is possible to say, ‘Don’t worry aboutprogramme, there is no need for the architect todetermine anything, because programme take care ofitself.’ This approach can be seen analogous to thenotion of 1960s universal space – a space, in theory,where anything can happen, yet where, as was often thecase, nothing happens. The architect’s obligation tospecificity and design remains.

Emergence: In both architecture and landscape therehas been a fascination with self-organisation andemergence, the notion that the architect supplies a kindof infrastructure and then you just let things happen

over time. This is based on a loose appeal to ideas ofecological succession. The idea that self-organisation andemergence are associated with lack of specificity andlack of design is itself a misunderstanding. What anecologist will tell you, on the contrary, is thatemergence does not happen all by itself, in a vacuum.It’s triggered by differences and imbalances in the initialconditions. In the urban or landscape realm, where weare talking about artificial ecologies, you don’t getemergence without very carefully designed initialconditions. The architect’s obligation to design thoseinitial conditions with a high degree of precision andspecificity remains.

So for me, landscape urbanism is an important emergingfield. What is interesting is that each of these areas has bothan enormous potential and some room for error. It’s a youngfield where things are still in flux, ideas are still being workedout. That’s what makes it exciting. It has the potential tochange our notion of urban design by making available a newset of tools and, above all, by foregrounding the question oftime and the question of process. To my mind these are thereal contributions of landscape urbanism. On the other hand,it is possible to look somewhat critically on the actualpractices of landscape urbanism: most practitioners havebeen doing large-scale urban parks, they haven’t actuallybeen doing urbanism. In part this is because theinstitutional realm – those who commission large-scaleprojects – have yet to catch up. Landscape urbanism isenormously promising, but we haven’t yet seen the fullimpact in practice. We are still waiting for projects that showa real synthesis of landscape and urbanism. 4

Text © 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 102(l) © Paolo Viganò; p 102(r)© Architekt Daniel Libeskind AG; p 103(l) © Rui Leão, Carlotta Bruni andManuel Vicente, photo Carlotta Bruni; p 103(r) © Dominique Macel, Service duCommunication de Saint Nazaire; p 104(l) © Jose Castillo Ólea, arquitectura911sc; p 104(r) © MUTOPIA ApS; p 105(l) © Els Verbakel, Elie Derman ofDerman Verbakel Architecture and Ward Verbakel Architect; p 105(r) © ClaudiaFaraone and Andrea Sarti; p 106(tl) © Acconci Studio; p 106(tr) © MarthaRosler; p 106 (bl&br) © © URBAN VOIDS: grounds for change City ParksAssociation of Philadelphia; p 107(l) © Rafi Segal; p 107(r) © Zvi Hecker

Rafi Segal, Archipelago of the Negev Desert, Beer Sheva, Israel, 2007 Zvi Hecker, KMar, Schiphol International Airport, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2007

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Acconci Studio is a collaborative studio thatundertakes design and architecture projects.Stemming from Vito Acconci’s background inwriting and art, the studio seeks to combinemathematical, biological and other models withnarratives and action, using space as a fluid,changeable and portable instrument. Currentprojects include a retractable bridge in Boulogne-sur-mer and housing folded inside a hill inBeaumont, France.

Stan Allen is a registered architect and Dean of theSchool of Architecture, Princeton University. Hisurban projects have been published in Points andLines: Diagrams and Projects for the City (PrincetonArchitectural Press, 1999) and his theoretical essaysin Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation(G+B Arts, 2000). Responding to the complexity ofthe modern city in creative ways, he has developedan extensive catalogue of urbanistic strategies, inparticular looking at field theory, landscapearchitecture and ecology as models to revitalise thepractices of urban design. He has been awardedfellowships in architecture from the New YorkFoundation for the Arts and the New York StateCouncil on the Arts, a Design Arts Grant from theNational Endowment for the Arts, a GrahamFoundation Grant, and a President’s Citation fromthe Cooper Union in 2002.

Jose Castillo is a practising architect living andworking in Mexico City. He is the principal,alongside Saidee Springall, of arquitectura 911sc, anindependent architectural and urban practice. Hiswork and writing have been published in PraxisJournal, Bomb, Arquine, Architectural Record, 2G andDomus. He has curated and participated in variousexhibitions including ‘Mexico City Dialogues’ at theCenter for Architecture in New York and shows atthe Rotterdam, São Paulo, Venice and CanaryIslands biennales. He is currently a professor atUPenn’s School of Design.

Margaret Crawford is a professor of Urban Designand Planning Theory at the Harvard GraduateSchool of Design. Her research focuses on theevolution, uses and meanings of urban space. Shehas published several books including Building theWorkingman’s Paradise (Verso, 1996) and, with AlanBerger, Nansha Coastal City (Harvard Graduate Schoolof Design, 2006). She received a BA from theUniversity of California at Berkeley, a graduatediploma from the Architectural Association, and aPhD in Urban Planning from UCLA.

Bruno De Meulder is a professor of urbanism atKatholieke Universiteit, Leuven, Belgium, and theTechnische Universiteit Eindhoven. He has publishedmany books, including The Brussels Mont des ArtsReconsidered (Rotterdam, 2000), Nakuru: An African Town(Leuven, 1998), Kuvuande Mbote: A Century of ColonialUrbanism in Congo (Antwerp, 2000) and De Kampen vanKongo (Amsterdam, 1996). His research is situated at the crossroads of urbanism and urbanisation, andthe crossroads of practice and theory.

Elie Derman founded Derman VerbakelArchitecture, with Els Verbakel, in 2001, withprojects in Belgium, Israel and New York. He hastaught architectural design at the Bezalel Academy,Jerusalem, New Jersey Institute of Technology andthe Pratt Institute. He obtained a professionaldegree in architecture (Israel) and an MSc inarchitecture and urban design (ColumbiaUniversity). He has won several awards forexcellence in design and his work has beenexhibited internationally.

Claudia Faraone, an architect and urbanist, hasparticipated in various architectural and artisticprojects on the subject of cities and urban space,among them ‘Studio OpenCity’ in Brussels/Kortrijk(2000) and www.bordersproject.org in Venice(2003–04), and as tutor in the Advanced Course inVisual Art at Fondazione Ratti in Como (2006). She

is currently working on a research project on Skopjecity centre as her final thesis for the Europeanpostgraduate Masters’ in Urbanism she attended atKU Leuven, TU Delft and UPC Barcelona.

Zvi Hecker was born in Krakow, Poland, in 1931,and grew up in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. He studiedarchitecture in Technion, Haifa, Israel, and paintingat the Avni Academy in Tel Aviv where he set up thepractice Hecker, Neumann, Sharon. He has taughtat the Universite Laval in Quebec, Canada andUniversität für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna. In1991 he also set up a practice in Berlin.

Deenah Loeb is the executive director of City ParksAssociation, a historic organisation whose workacts as a catalyst for change by advancingvisionary thinking about natural resources in theurban community(www.cityparksphila.org). Shehas more than 25 years’ experience in programmeinnovation and implementation in theenvironmental field and the arts, and holds aMasters of Landscape Architecture.

Kjersti Monson is a planner and urban designerwith EDAW/AECOM, and is currently living andworking in Atlanta, Georgia. From 2003 to 2006 shewas based in Shanghai where she worked as aconsultant and designer on projects throughouturban and rural China. She was a 2006 Fellow of theFudan University Center for Urban Studies, andcontributed to organising the Fudan UniversityInternational Urban Forum in 2006.

MUTOPIA was founded in 2004 by architects SerbanCornea and Kristina Adsersen, and has establishedits distinct profile through ‘user-focused design’, aworking method and architectural strategy thatchallenges the role of the architect while welcomingcitizens and professionals into the design process.This has spawned new types of dialogue and processtools, as well as a range of innovative urban andarchitectural designs promoting social andenvironmental sustainability.

Albert Pope is an architect living in Houston,Texas. He has published and lectured extensivelyon contemporary architecture and urbanism. He isthe author of Ladders (Princeton, 1996), and is theGus Sessions Wortham Professor of Architecture atRice University.

Bruce Robbins is a professor of English andcomparative literature at Columbia University. He hasalso taught at the universities of Geneva andLausanne, and at Rutgers University, and has heldvisiting positions at Harvard, Cornell and NYU.During the 1990s he was co-editor of the journalSocial Text. His most recent book is Upward Mobilityand the Common Good (Princeton, 2007).

Martha Rosler uses photographs and montages,videos, text works, installations, performances andcritical writing to investigate social conventions, themedia, war-making and the built environment. She isa professor at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste(Städelschule) in Frankfurt and at RutgersUniversity in New Brunswick.

Andrea Sarti, an architect and photographer,currently works as a freelance in Venice. Within thecollaborative and interdisciplinary studiowww.cast1466.com he carries out commercial workas well as research projects dealing with citytransformations and public spaces. He works withphotography as a tool to describe and therefore tointerpret the reality of cities and territories, andcurrent projects include a visual one about publicspaces in European capitals and the visual mappingof the transformations of Venice’s industrial area,Porto Marghera.

Rafi Segal studied and taught architecture at theTechnion–Israel, and at Princeton University wherehe is currently completing a doctoral dissertation.

He worked for several years with Architect ZviHecker in Tel-Aviv, and later established his ownpractice while also working in partnership with EyalWeizman. He has lived in the US since 2004.

Marcel Smets is the Flemish government architect.He received professional degrees in architectureand urban design from the universities of Ghentand Delft, and obtained a PhD at the University ofLeuven where he was appointed to the chair ofUrbanism in 1978. He has published widely,including books on H Hoste, Ch Buls, the BelgianGarden Cities and the reconstruction of Belgiumafter 1914. As a practising urban designer, he wasin charge of large urban design projects inBelgium and Italy.

Manuel de Solà-Morales is an architect and cityplanner, mostly dedicated to urban design matters.He is chair professor of Urbanism at the School ofArchitecture of Barcelona, and a founder and head,since 1968, of the Laboratori d’Urbanisme deBarcelona, a research group in urban morphology.

Manuel Vicente has been working simultaneouslyin Macau and Lisbon for the past 45 years. Hisbuildings in Macau, mainly the social housingschemes, are still a strong reference for Portugueseand Macanese architects. His design partnershipwith Rui Leão and Carlotta Bruni began in Lisbon,in the office of Trav do Noronha, while working onthe pavilions and strategies for the Lisbon Expo 98.Their most significant projects include the ColoaneIsland masterplan, the renovation of the MoorishBarracks, UNESCO-WHS, Nam Van Square, the SaiVan Urban Park and, more recently, a project forthe new opera house in Harbin, China.

Els Verbakel founded Derman VerbakelArchitecture, with Elie Derman, in 2001, withprojects in Belgium, Israel and New York. She is avisiting professor at the Technion University andBezalel Academy, Israel. She has taughtarchitectural theory and design at KU Leuven,Columbia University, Pratt Institute and PrincetonUniversity, and has published widely. Sheobtained a professional degree in architecture(Belgium) and an MSc in architecture and urbandesign (Columbia University), and is a PhDcandidate at Princeton.

Paola Viganò is an architect. After her PhD (‘La cittàelementare’, Skira, Milan, 1999) she became anassociate professor of urban design and urbanism atthe IUAV, Venice, and a member of the board of thePhD in urbanism. She has been a guest professor inseveral European schools (EPFL Lausanne, KULeuven), and in 1990 she founded Studio BernardoSecchi Paola Viganò with Bernardo Secchi, workingon competitions and projects such as the reuse ofthe disused railway area in Spoornoord, Antwerp,and the design of new housing in La Courrouze, anold military area, in Rennes, France.

Alex Wall is an architect and Chair of Urban Designin the Faculty of Architecture at the University ofKarlsruhe, Germany. His most recent publicationsinclude Victor Gruen: From Urban Shop to New City(Actar, 2005). He is also co-author ofZwischen_Stadt_Entwerfen (Mueller + Busmann, 2005),an attempt to define the components and designstrategies for European low-density urban regions.Current research projects include SHAKTI –Research for the Sustainable Development ofHyderabad, India, and PRUDEV – What is the role ofthe shopping centre clusters in the future urbandevelopment of Jakarta?

Sarah Whiting is an assistant professor at Princeton University’s School of Architecturewhere she teaches urban history andcontemporary theory, and coordinates the Masterof Architecture thesis programme. She is also apartner, along with Ron Witte, of WW, anarchitecture firm based in Princeton.

Contributors

4+110+Interior EyeReinvigorating ChildhoodHoward Watson

114+Practice ProfileKieranTimberlake AssociatesJayne Merkel

120+UserscapeNatural Methods of InteractionOr Natural Interaction in theEveryday Digital WorldValentina Croci

124+Spiller’s BitsPutting the ‘I’ back intoArchitectureNeil Spiller

126+Unit FactorRadical InterfaceAA New Media ResearchInitiativeJoel Newman, TheodoreSpyropoulos and VasilisStroumpakos

130+Yeang’s Eco-Files On Green Design (Part 3)The Basic Premises for GreenDesignKen Yeang

134+McLean’s NuggetsWill McLean

C O N T E N T S

Interior Eye

Howard Watson is uplifted by the ‘brave, gracefulsubtlety’ of Caruso St John’s redevelopment of theBethnal Green Museum of Childhood in eastLondon. He finds the pared-down spaces of theinterior surprisingly in accord with the originalVictorian structure, drawing their inspiration from‘the regimented order of grand Victorian museology’.

ReinvigoratingChildhoodReinvigoratingChildhood

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In the last decades of the 20th century, an appreciation thatyoung minds can more readily accept the shock of the newdrove parts of the museum sector to investigate using theadvances of technology within child-orientated displays. Itbecame a familiar sight to witness children banging buttons,touching screens and interacting with displays, while jealousadults would stand elsewhere, peering at a mistyped paperlabel beside a dusty, badly lit display. It would be tempting toexpect the refreshed Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood tobe an excessive den of bright lights, colour, computerwizardry and child-friendly chaos, but Caruso St John’s five-year redevelopment has shied away from wearing whizz-bangintentions on its sleeve. It carries through the realisation ofthe museum’s contemporary ambitions with a brave, gracefulsubtlety that draws on the regimented order of grandVictorian museology. They even dimmed the lights.

Caruso St John was established in 1990 and has gainedrespect in Britain for its innovative arts-related buildings,such as the New Art Gallery in Walsall and the (ongoing)Centre for Contemporary Art in Nottingham. The architectshave combined their ability to construct cultural permanencein sometimes unlikely settings with ground-breakingexhibition design, often resolving complex aesthetic ideas anda political will for community and cultural integration with

deceptively simple design solutions. The Museum ofChildhood, which is run by the Victoria & Albert Museum, hasbeen one of their longest-running projects, involving a two-phase redevelopment of a Victorian building. It wasconstructed in 1856/57 by Charles Young & Company as atemporary structure for the new South Kensington Museum,which became the V&A. Formed in three parallel sections, itwas a large iron building, with corrugated iron walls, ironcolumns and girders, and a glass roof. In 1865 it was replacedand the temporary structure was moved to Bethnal Green, animpoverished part of east London, at the request of localphilanthropists. The museum resides beside a park, formingperhaps one of the best-kept examples of the Victorian desireto bring health and culture to London’s poorer regions.

The three parallel sections were not divided, so themuseum principally comprises one large, almost tunnel-likevolume, and the iron walls were replaced by typical Victorianred brickwork. JW Wild designed a new entrance andadditional facilities, but his plans were never completed dueto a lack of funds. Consequently, as a working venue, themuseum has been dogged by its incompletion. The lack ofaccessible facilities has hampered its ability to move forwardand offer the quality of community and educational resourcesthat suit its remit. Meanwhile, the main exhibition spaceevolved somewhat haphazardly to become a charming, butcluttered and disorganised space. Caruso St John was facedwith trying to create new access to resources and facilitiesunder the building while refocusing the design of the mainexhibition space and galleries.

Caruso St John, V&A Museum of Childhood, Bethnal Green, London, 2007The main exhibition hall, comprising three sections with curved ceilings, is nowuncluttered, with the original ironwork helping to regiment the space. The marblemosaic floor tiles were made by women prisoners in Woking jail and installedwhen the structure was relocated from South Kensington to Bethnal Green.The pattern has now been repeated and enlarged on the mezzanine ceilings.

The pattern of the front facade can be seen as building blocks, but the materialsare exquisite. The variety of quartzite, porphyries and limestone draws on thered of the Victorian brick behind. The facade creates a new relationship with thecommunity and geographical setting, highlighting accessibility and reflectingthe street and greenery of the surrounding park through tall windows.

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When reorganising the main museum display system, architect Peter St Johnsays he drew upon the best of Victorian museum architecture, including theoriginal cases of the Natural History Museum. The museum is full of elementsof physical interaction, but these are mainly pushed to the outer wall.

Section of the new entrance, creating a new level of accessibility to the facilities. The charming but somewhat disorderly main display area before theredevelopment. The mixture of too much direct light from the rooflanterns and chaotic lighting has been replaced by an ordered systemthat enhances the objects.

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Diane Lees, the director of the museum, explains thesuccess of Caruso St John’s designs: ‘The design of the newextension is sensitive to the original building and thematerials are inspired by and blend with the historical contextof the design. This has been combined with practical, inclusivedesign that has enabled a wide range of visitors to access themuseum physically and intellectually.’ The first phase of theredevelopment concluded in 2003, including crucialrenovation of the roof and ceiling, the reordering of the maindisplay space and a new exhibition display area on the firstfloor. The second phase undertook the major building work –a new entrance and learning centre – as well as introducing anew gallery space and toilets, completing the design of newcollection displays, and resolving access and circulation issues.

The new entrance replaces its shambolic predecessor withone that addresses the immediate surrounds, visuallyconnects to the design of the main building, and cures someof the prime logistical problems. The facade is clad inquartzite, porphyries and limestone in a decorative patternthat is emblematic of connection, community and outreach:each of the three components of one shape form a componentof an adjacent one, while the overall impression is of building

blocks – a ‘constructive’ reminder of the learning processes ofchildhood. The simple entrance interior, with its granolithicterrazo floor, large windows and decorative grilles that pickup the pattern of the exterior, has a dual importance: itprovides an exhibition display for the work of local childrenand an ordered circulation route into the main hall and, viastairs, down to the new learning centre and facilities below.There is now also a direct, accessible entranceway to theseresources on the level below.

Inside the main building, the chaos has gone. Formerly allwhite, the interior is now a soft, pale pink that calms thespatial threat of the huge main volume and creates a warmerenvironment. The ad hoc, evolved lighting that added to thedisarray has been replaced by a neatly ordered system thatcomplements the interior’s ironwork structure. Largely, thedisplays are now housed in freestanding, large wooden andglass cabinets that consciously draw on the museum’sVictorian past. The result is a natural grid, introducing orderwithout partitioning.

The redevelopment of the museum is not quite complete,but Diane Lees says that: ‘The project has “fixed” about 90 percent of the issues we had in operating as a family friendlymuseum.’ Many of the late-20th-century interactive displays insmaller museums across Britain seem to be permanently ‘outof order’ or at least out of step with new developments. Bycontrast, the Museum of Childhood has managed to get itselfin step with contemporary needs and prepare itself for thefuture through an intelligent, grand, but subtle approach tointerior architecture. It has consequently won Caruso St Johna 2007 RIBA Award. 4+

Howard Watson is an author, journalist and editor based in London. He is co-author, with Eleanor Curtis, of the new 2nd edition of Fashion Retail (Wiley-Academy, 2007), £34.99. See www.wiley.com. Previous books include TheDesign Mix: Bars, Cocktails and Style (2006), and Hotel Revolution: 21st-Century Hotel Design (2005), both also published by Wiley-Academy.

Text © 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 110-11, 112(t), 113(l) ©Hélène Binet; pp 112(bl&br), 113(r) © Caruso St John Architects

The cool, calm interior of the new entrance which, as well as refocusing theorientation to the facilities, provides an exhibition space for local children.

The plan of the main hall, with its rearranged displays and improved circulation.

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Practice Profile

KieranTimberlakeAssociates

James Timberlake (left) and StevenKieran (right) in their studio.

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Sidwell Friends Middle School, Washington DC, 2006 KieranTimberlake’s expansion and renovation of a bland, boxy, modern brick middle school replaced an uglymansard roof with a flat ‘green’ one, and a parking lot with two wings and a functioning wetlands courtyard.In doing so, it fostered a new commitment to environmental efficiency at this progressive day school.

Nothing about the beautifully detailedbuildings that Steven Kieran, JamesTimberlake and their colleagues are creating,mostly for schools and colleges, suggeststhat they have a radical agenda. There are nocrazy shapes, dayglo colours or otherattention-grabbing devices in them. But whatthese architects are doing in their built work,research and teaching attempts no less thanto change the way that buildings are made.Jayne Merkel explains how they areexpanding the architect’s sphere beyondmere ‘design’ to become ‘master builders’ ofa uniquely 21st-century kind – developingnew materials and ways to save energy, andintroducing methods of collaboration andfabrication drawn from the automobile,aeroplane and shipbuilding industries.

The pleasant, postmodernised old industrial building withlittle punched windows and a prominent central entrancewhere KieranTimberlake Associates work on an otherwise old-fashioned street gives no clue that anything extraordinary isgoing on inside. If anything, the location on the edge ofdowntown Philadelphia, near the Art Museum and Free Library,across the street from a neat row of 19th-century town housessuggests a rather traditional architectural practice.

The first hint that something else is afoot comes when theelevator door opens to a lobby framed by sloping sheets ofsteel like those in a Richard Serra sculpture. Around thecorner, a 2,137-square-metre (23,500-square-foot) open loftwith 6.7-metre (22-foot) ceilings contains movableworkstations, exposed wiring, models on pedestals, andconference areas formed by tilted steel walls with absorbentinner surfaces for pin-ups. But the space that reveals theunique nature of the practice is the shop at the end of theroom, behind a glass wall.

Here, tables stacked with models abut workbenches strewnwith tools. Shelves are filled with product samples, such asautoclaved concrete, a porous white material the architectsare considering for a house in Texas. Traditional materialsbeing used in new ways are being tested alongsideexperimental ones, such as grey ductile concrete, a materialthat the architects are developing with CompositeTechnologies. Here, it takes the shape of an Ionic column andof bubble wrap. A full-scale freestanding wall of black glazedand brown buff brick being considered for the student

services office building at Ohio State rises from the floor. Aceiling mock-up for the Yale University Sculpture Buildinghangs overhead. In a small room on the right, a three-dimensional printer transforms drawings into plaster models.Another little room with cement board walls houses a welder.There is also a compressor, a laser cutter, raw material racks,and exterior wall panels being considered for various projects.The office even has ‘a full-time shop director who was trainedas an architect, but gets his kicks from making things’, asTimberlake explains.

He and Kieran are pretty obsessed with making as well – inthe largest possible sense. Their interest is in part a reactionto the emphasis on imagery that they saw at Venturi, Rauchand Scott Brown, where they worked in the late 1970s aftergraduating from the University of Pennsylvania architectureschool. Just as Venturi was reacting against the Modernistdisregard for symbolism and history, Kieran and Timberlakesaw the lack of interest in building technology, which wastypical of the time, as something they wanted to explore. Inthe 1980s they both had fellowships, independently, at theAmerican Academy in Rome, where they found that whatinterested them most was the fabric of ancient buildings. Asteachers (they have taught at Penn, Yale, the University ofMichigan and other schools), they emphasise materials andthe construction process, subjects often neglected inAmerican architectural education. In addition, their firm’sfirst commissions – low-budget additions and alterations at

Loblolly House, Taylors Island, Maryland, 2006This holiday home for the Kieran family on the eastern shore of Maryland,near Washington DC, is built of factory-made components that were hoistedinto place on site, sparing most of the nearby forest. The aesthetic, whichblends rather seamlessly into the landscape, demonstrates that prefabricatedconstruction can also be ‘natural’, site specific and unique.

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Chestnut Hill College, East Stroudsburg University, HaverfordCollege, and to a few houses – forced them to think aboutdetails and construction.

Their first book, Manual (Princeton Architectural Press,2002) focuses on various aspects of building (framing, hinging,joining, lining, patching, profiling, scaling, selecting, slippingand weaving). It provides numerous examples of differentapproaches to each category taken from their own work, oftenwith a healthy dose of self-criticism. One example of ‘joining’is the Melvin J and Claire Levine Hall, the new glass-walledhome of the Department of Computer and Information Scienceat the University of Pennsylvania that connects several brickstructures in different historical styles by stepping back andcreating an additional courtyard. Carefully proportioned,transparent, ventilated curtain walls provide visual connectionsbetween the activity inside and campus life outside. Anintriguing example of ‘patching’ is a row of brick privacywalls inserted between stone columns under low brick archesin the basement of Princeton University’s Stafford Little Hall,which was built by Cope and Stewardson in 1899 and 1901.While trying to decide which unusual brick pattern to use to

give student rooms more privacy, someone asked: ‘Whychoose?’ So every partial enclosure is different from the next –a veritable museum of brick patterns that are differentiatedfrom the existing surfaces and interesting in their own right.

One of KieranTimberlake’s first major jobs at Yale – therenovation of Pierson and Davenport residential colleges –involved a good deal of hinging and patching and joining. Thetwo building complexes, designed by James Gamble Rogers in1930, consisted of dormitory rooms, libraries and dining halls(separate ones for each college) built around generouscourtyards on the Oxbridge model. They are sheathed withstone and detailed in a Neo-Gothic style on the street facades,and made of red brick with Neo-Georgian shutters andclassical colonnades on the inner courtyard sides, so there aresome quirky contrasts even in the original fabric.

The architects’ work involved converting the old dining-hall kitchens (intended for waiters) to self-serve cafeteria-style spaces, enlarging the study areas in the libraries, andconnecting the two colleges underground to provide moretypes of recreational facilities to be shared by students ofboth colleges. Here they replaced old pipes, storage rooms

Yale University Sculpture Building, New Haven, Connecticut, 2007This 17,559-square-metre (189,000-square foot), $42 million project, which was built in 22 months instead ofthe university’s usual 48, consists of three separate structures: a four-storey, steel-framed, glass-walledstudio building in the middle of the block; a single-storey art gallery around the corner; and a four-storeyconcrete parking garage for 280 cars with open steel and Cebonit walls and shops at the base.

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and squash courts (which all Yale colleges once had) withfitness rooms, a basketball court, music practice room, atheatre and cafés, combined the two pressrooms into one (allYale colleges also had their own presses), and added recyclingareas, a laundry and new mechanical services. The newunderground spaces are naturally somewhat grittier than theformal ones upstairs, but the architects take the same delightin details and materials as their predecessors, using brick,stone, resin-varnished Fin-ply wood, concrete and steel withaplomb. Their masterpiece here is a pair of open concrete-and-steel staircases leading in opposite directions up to themain living spaces of Pierson and Davenport colleges. KieranTimberlake’s is a nuts-and-bolts approach, but it doesnot prevent them from looking at the bigger picture. In orderto learn what might be possible today, they used theAmerican Institute of Architects’ first Latrobe NationalResearch Prize to study how automobiles, ships andaeroplanes are now being made. The result of that researchappears in their next book, Refabricating Architecture: How

Manufacturing Methodologies Are Poised to Transform BuildingConstruction (McGraw-Hill, 2004). This fully illustrated, littleblack-and-white paperback argues that the time is right tofulfil the early 20th-century Modernist dream of massproduction – only they call it ‘mass customisation’ becausecontemporary technology can offer numerous options. Todaymost parts of buildings can be built ‘off site’ (in a factory)faster, better and more safely than with standardconstruction. KieranTimberlake have demonstrated how thismight be done in the most unlikely place – on the PiersonCollege ‘beach’, a leftover outdoor space where they created anew small courtyard and a wing of dormitory rooms with 27beds, called TomKat Hall. These were prefabricated in NewJersey, shipped to the site, and erected in four days duringthe spring break. The dark-red brick, gabled structuremanages to nod to its historic neighbours while subtlyproclaiming its 21st-century origins with clever downspouts,‘fingered brick’ elastomeric sealed expansion joints (almostzippers) between components, and other details.

Yale University School of Art Gallery, 2007The big, open, loft-style gallery, which connects to the sculpture studios by an underground passage, will be used bothfor professional exhibitions and for shows of student work. The glass walls of its corner ‘front porch’ facing the streetcan be opened completely to the outside during events. The building’s recycled wood walls relate to old houses nearby.

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The firm’s research on the fabrication processes being usedby the transportation industries convinced them thatarchitects need to give up the typical top-down approach to‘design’ because it usually limits their involvement, separatesthem from the building process, and cuts them off fromadvances in construction technology. They advocate acollaborative process that involves architects, contractors,materials scientists and product engineers, working togetherwith computerised communication from the conception of aproject to the end.

Materials scientists are essential because Kieran andTimberlake believe in using the wide range of new materialsavailable now. Many save energy, cost less, last longer and canbe readily adapted to the off-site construction process, whichis faster, more efficient, more accurate and not subject to thewhims of weather.

A holiday home that Kieran built for his family in 2006demonstrates that it is possible to create something original,

unique and apparently indigenous entirely with factory-madeparts. The Loblolly House is named for the loblolly pine forestinto which it nestles almost imperceptibly – it stands ontrunk-like stilts and is sheathed with irregularly spacedvertical strips of red cedar. Its fourth facade opens toChesapeake Bay with accordion-folding glass walls andretractable translucent aeroplane-hangar doors that remainopen on most summer nights. Few nearby trees had to becleared for construction because, in only six weeks, thehouse’s prefabricated parts were hoisted on to a platform andset into a scaffold when they arrived from the factory. Wholerooms with ceilings, walls, windows, plumbing, electricalconnections and lighting were set within 30-centimetre (12-inch) deep horizontal sandwich panels made of plywood orcement board filled with ductwork. Horizontal panels containinsulation, vapour barriers and sheathing. Since the architectsbelieve that buildings should have a lifecycle like everythingelse, the 204-square-metre (2,200-square-foot) structure wasdesigned to be dismantled eventually. Most of its parts arerecyclable. However, even if it is demolished, the LoblollyHouse may live on, since the architects are working with adeveloper on a mass-producable version.

Like other American architects, KieranTimberlake havebecome increasingly interested in energy efficiency, butbecause they know a lot about building technology they areable to take this concern to a higher level than most of theircolleagues. At the Sidwell Friends Middle School, an extensiverenovation of and addition to a private Quaker school inWashington DC (where Chelsea Clinton was once a student),they replaced an old mansard roof with a functional ‘green’one. Where a parking lot once stood, two new wings create acourtyard that both recycles waste water and serves as anoutdoor laboratory. The buildings, which were sited to

Melvin J and Claire Levine Hall, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 2003The 4,181-square-metre (45,000-square foot) addition and 1,393-square-metre (15,000-square-foot) renovation wedge new facilities for theDepartment of Computer and Information Science between the School ofEngineering’s 1906 Towne Building and 1967 Graduate Research Wing, whileopening up new campus paths (where parking and service spaces used tobe) to the English Department’s 1912 Bennett Hall. Levine Hall’s innovativeventilated curtain wall saves energy while creating a desired sense oftransparency because air circulates between the double-paned skin and thesingle-glazed interior skin. The project adds new laboratory space, facultyoffices and an auditorium to the School of Engineering.

TomKat Hall addition to Pierson College, Yale University, 2004The new suite of rooms was built off site from manufactured components anderected on site in four days even though, because of the tight nature of thesite, the modules had to be lifted over existing buildings from trailers in anadjoining alley. The site-built construction of the slate roof, interior finishes,porches, terraces and landscaping took another four months. The site, off acorner of Pierson courtyard, was formerly used for recreation and services.

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maximise passive solar heat gain, were opened to natural lightwith glass-walled corridors along the outer walls and sheathedin recycled wood from wine barrels. They also have photovoltaicpanels, high-energy pulse boilers, linoleum made from 10different natural materials, and bamboo casework. The designhas influenced the curriculum so significantly that herbsproduced on the green roof are used in the dining hall, whereorganic food is now served, and the impact of the building onstudent health and mental acuity is the subject of a study bythe Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. The new Sculpture Building at Yale is equally innovative. Itmay realise more energy savings than any glass-walledstructure in America, but in order to achieve this thearchitects had to make some pretty radical changes to theprogramme. Since they were required by the city to replacethe parking spaces that had filled the site, university officialsassumed they would build a parking structure in the middleof the largely residential block and locate the sculpturestudios along the street on the west side. But that would havemeant orienting the building east–west, even though anorth–south orientation would provide ideal northern lightand the opportunity to capture southern heat gain. So,KieranTimberlake placed the elegant, glass-walled studiobuilding in the middle of the block and the open-walledconcrete black parking structure on the street where it willhave shops on the ground floor. They also opened the interiorof the block with pathways in both directions leading to thestudios, and pulled out the art gallery, which will be used bythe other art departments too, so that it opens on to a prettyresidential street around the corner from the garage.

The gallery is sheathed in the same western cedar sidingrecycled from wine casks that the architects used at Sidwell,only here it is in horizontal bands with metal strips like thoseon barrels. The architects also gave the little building an abstractfront porch, in a nod to nearby 19th-century houses with

clapboard siding and prominent porches, removing every otherboard on that corner for a more porous feel. The glass wallsunder the porch can be opened to the street for events. Thegallery’s sidewalls bow out slightly. The 6.7-metre (22-foot) tall,single-storey gallery has exposed steel ceiling beams, and littlelight slits in the corners and at the edges of the ceiling underthe functioning green roof. It is connected by an undergroundpassage to the studios behind it, which have porches onseveral levels with big trees and other plantings on them.

It is the high-performance studio building walls, however,that will set new standards for energy efficiency. Those on thesouth have exterior metal sunshades projecting from the wallsurface, which has operable transparent triple-pane windowsabove 10-centimetre (4-inch) thick, Aerogel-filled translucentfibreglass panels with a subtle, almost Japanese, feel.Perforated black metal panelling on interior columns houses adisplacement ventilation system that uses 40 per cent lessenergy than usual. Black steel ceilings in stairwells with largerperforations achieve a similar aesthetic that hovers betweensculptural and industrial. Even the surfaces in the corridors –fibreboard varnished with urethane – are efficient, rugged andattractive at the same time.

At night the building glows from within, lighting up themixed-used residential and commercial area around it. By day,people passing by can glimpse the studios from the side yardsof nearby houses and apartment buildings. The complexextends the activity of the Yale campus into a mixed-use areathat could use some new energy and sets a new standard forbuilding at Yale. That is, after all, KieranTimberlake’s goal:raising the bar aesthetically, technologically, environmentallyand socially – not a small ambition. 4+

Text © 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 114(t), 115, 118(t), 119 © EdWheeler; p 114(b) © Barry Halkin; pp 116-17 © Peter Aaron/ESTO/VIEW; p118(b) © KieranTimberlake Associates

Pierson and Davenport Colleges,Yale University, New Haven, 2004and 2005The two adjacent residential collegeswere extensively renovated with newmechanical services, recreationalfacilities and small additions at acost of $40.5 million each. The twoare now connected undergroundwhere they share facilities. Thearchitects demonstrate their love ofcraft and materials in theunderground, back-to-backstaircases.

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Userscape

Natural Methods of InteractionOr Natural Interaction in the Everyday Digital WorldComputers, mobiles and automatised machines are so omnipresent that the means by whichwe interact with digital devices is now generally regarded as a given. Italian practice iOAgency, though, questions our use of mechanised interfaces and the language that theyrequire us to learn. Valentina Croci explains how iO Agency has developed more naturalways for people to interact with digital environments through physical or tactile ‘triggers’.

iO Agency, iOO Design, 2006iOO Design is a series of products developed incollaboration with the 3M Corporation, which includes iOO, asystem of interactive projections, of which only 100 exampleswere produced. It is composed of a ceiling-mounted unit thatgenerates an interactive projection on the surface of a table.To interact with the projection, all one has to do is moveone’s hands above the surface, without touching it.

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Interaction between digital tools and those who use them isgenerally managed by graphic interfaces, for example thecomputer screen, handheld devices, mobile phones, or eventhe display screen on automated ticket machines. Theseinterfaces use methods of interaction based on an analyticallanguage composed of icons and access panels, such askeypads, buttons or a mouse. The resulting manipulation ofinformation is not direct, but requires that the user adapt toa language that differs from the way in which we relate toother objects in the physical world. The fact that the usermust adapt to the language of the machine often generatesfrustration, creating a barrier between the user andtechnology. Given the increase in the number of digitalinstruments in everyday spaces, we must design newmethods of interaction between users and technology.

An example of this approach can be found in the work of theItalian office iO Agency, founded in 2004 in Treviso with theaim of developing interactive spaces. The office now has 22associates, many of whom were involved in the ‘Net Economy’(the virtual arena in which business is conducted that emergedin the mid-1990s), in addition to boasting a collaboration withthe Centro di integrazione dei media (Media Integration Centre),part of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Florence.One of the centre’s members, Alessandro Valli, is also one ofthe founders of iO Agency and the theorist, in 2001, of theconcept of ‘natural interaction’, a form of interaction between

users and technology-enhanced spaces that is based on theimitation of reality and common gestures. Here, actions suchas walking, touching or pointing become the ‘triggers’ of thedigital system; the user, unlike with traditional media, is notrequired to learn how the machine functions. This creates animmediate relationship between the user and digitaltechnology, the result of the direct manipulation of the latterby the former. Given that the user carries out familiar actions,his or her attention passes from the process of using digitaltechnology to the experience that it can generate.

The approach taken by iO Agency is different from thattaken by other offices involved in the creation of digitalinstallations or interactive objects. iO Agency’s final objectiveis the creation of spaces in which technology is integratedwith the everyday, part of an environment in which digitalinstruments dialogue with one another. With respect to otherdigital installations, the projects by iO Agency do not seek thecomplete immersion of the user within altered or exasperatedsensations, removing their attention from the sensorialexperience in favour of the effects of the digital environment.Each project is calibrated based on the functions it is toperform – conferring information or, more simply, decoratingan environment – and based on the number of people whowill use it or a specific target of users.

For iO Agency, natural interaction takes place through aprocess that involves the simplification of possible operations,

iOO can be applied to the horizontal surface of acarpet. The user can personalise the backgroundimage and patterns of movement of the figures(speed or effects of movement) using very simplesoftware installed on a home computer. The user canalso periodically update the contents, varying theatmosphere and colour of the spaces. Interactionrequires no specific technical skills.

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iO Agency, Installation for the New Fiat 500, Cappellini Temporary Store, Milan, 2007Three months before the launch of the new Fiat 500, iO Agency was asked to design an installation that would represent the car withoutactually presenting the physical product. The office designed a series of workstations that visitors could use to configure a version of thenew Fiat 500 and, later, view it at 1:1 scale inside a dark room. The system also simultaneously created a personalised brochure of thecar. The installation focused on the effect of surprise and the shared, playful experience enjoyed by a group of people.

iO Agency, Sensitive Space System, Milan, 2005–The Sensitive Space System is a range of products developed in collaboration with the 3M Corporationand designed to create three-dimensional interactive spaces for retail and advertising spaces. At theItalian headquarters of 3M it is possible to visit their showroom: a space with translucent walls, thecolour and intensity of which can be modulated and used to project interactive displays. The space alsoincludes an interactive floor surface. The final objective of the showroom is that of demonstrating, via theexaggerated symbolism of interaction, the various methods of accessing digital content.

Sensitive Space System objects include devicesconnected to a central system that unties theirvarious operations. The catalogue also includes‘touch-less’ products such as this informationstand, which provides a gallery of imagesaccessed through visual, and non-analytical,interaction.

Another of the Sensitive Space System devices is the interactive 3M catalogue. The interface-display was designedto be used by the company’s sales staff who are accustomed to reading a catalogue of products based on an indexsimilar to a periodic table. The semantic nature of the interface, the gestures used to indicate products and themovement of elements on surfaces are natural movements for this category of users.

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Modular concept for L’Oréal Professionel Salons, Cosmoprof Fair, Bologna, Italy, 2005This environment was designed to support sales and track client behaviour.The project is articulated in four functional modules that can exist separatelyor as part of an integrated group: an interactive display case that allowspassers-by to interact with L’Oréal products; a sales support station that usesbar-code recognition and projects interactive information about the productbeing purchased; a client management system that offers personalisedsuggestions for specific purchases; and the Colour Studio.

Part of the modular conceptdesigned for L’Oréal, the ColourStudio is an instrument ofsupport for the sales of hair-colour products. Sales clerkscan use a handheld device orPC tablet to display the variouscolours being proposed on avideo wall, turning a routineevent into a spectacular andtheatrical experience.

and the reduction of the number of actions that the user mustmake using the interface. The form of the instrument ‘attracts’the user by clearly representing its function, while the interfacemakes reference to a precise number of gestures – point, move,grab or walk – connected to a precise operation performed bythe machine. The interpretation of people’s behaviour and itsreduction to ‘triggers’ that activate the system is a very difficultpart of the design process: the technology must be able todistinguish between the actions of the subject and ‘backgroundnoise’. It is thus important to define the final objectives of thedevice beforehand, together with the sequences of accessingits functions. iO Agency does not produce standard products;its devices are partially manufactured elements with advancedlevels of engineering, capable of implementing serialapplications based on a client’s needs. For the definition ofproducts at the industrial scale, iO Agency works withexternal partners; for example, the 3M Corporation, withwhom they collaborated on the design of the range ofSensitive Space System products. Their partially manufacturedproducts operate based on the logic of uniform interaction.However, the definition of the interface and the functionalspecifications are calibrated for each single application.

The final objective of these devices is that of introducingnew services within everyday spaces. Digital applications donot replace traditional computerised objects, which employmetaphors (the desktop or the operating system) that are heldto be satisfactory for the functions that they must perform.The applications created by iO Agency identify alternative andmore emotional forms of logic that allow for a greater level ofintervention on the form of space and the perception of thequality of a given environment. This type of interactive object,or better yet, a space filled with integrated, interactive

elements, allows for the construction of a richer experiencethat leads, in turn, to new design possibilities, above all forpublic spaces or spaces of social interaction.

iO Agency stresses that the design of interactiveenvironments within the spaces of the everyday is not onlyrelated to the engineering of digital technologies, but also tothe creation of a synergic process involving architects anddesigners. The introduction of this type of digital technologycan sensibly modify the atmosphere of a given space – as inthe case of the Sensitive Space System, for which iO Agencystudied the possibility of simultaneously modifying light,sound and the emissions of odours using interconnectedinteractive objects.

The design challenge for interactive spaces is not simplythe creation of temporary installations with a significantimpact, as much as the development of applications foreveryday life, inserting, within our everyday habits, interactivemethods of using space and alternative mechanisms foraccessing services. Thus, as iO Agency points out, the designchallenge is to be found, on the one hand, in technologicalinnovation and, on the other, in the maturation of a newculture that is interested in this research. 4+

Translated from the Italian version into English by Paul David Blackmore

Valentina Croci is a freelance journalist of industrial design and architecture.She graduated from Venice University of Architecture (IUAV), and attained anMSc in architectural history from the Bartlett School of Architecture, London.She achieved a PhD in industrial design sciences at the IUAV with atheoretical thesis on wearable digital technologies.

Text © 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 120-22 © iO Agency; p 123 © L’Oréal Paris

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So if digital design is so revolutionary, exciting and cuttingedge, why does it all look the same – pretty though some of itmay be? Is it because clients are very conservative and havejust got around to managing to accept the double-curved inarchitecture? Certainly. Is it because architectural fashionoften precludes the personal approach? Of course. Architectsoften deny themselves in their work – it is often apolitical andlacking in any but the most abstract references to the complexmind of its designers. I like ‘I’. I only know what I’m likeaesthetically and intellectually; I don’t know what anybodyelse likes for sure. We are all different, you are different to me

and I am different to you, and this is great. I don’t believe in‘Styles’. This can take on an almost religious aspect. In the lastUK government census, something like 100,000 Britonsdeclared themselves ‘Jedi’ in respect of their religion. If I werecornered I’d probably say ‘Radical Constructivist’.

At the root of this Radical Constructivism is GiambattistaVico (1668–1744). A Neapolitan historian and philosopher,Vico was appointed by Charles III of Naples as hishistoriographer in 1734. The fundamental notion that makesVico memorable is his ‘versum ipsum factum’ (‘the truth is thesame as the made’). This idea was first published in 1710 in

Putting the ‘I’ backinto ArchitectureNeil Spiller gets personal in a bid to put the ‘I’ back into architecture. He celebrates thespatial experimentation of the work of Charlotte Erckrath. Creating a space of desire, sheproduces a subjective ‘synthesis of architect, body, space and view’.

Erckrath developed each element so thatit could be rearticulated and reconfiguredin relation to the viewer’s body.

The space of desire, the gaze andthe body are not excluded from thework, as in the case of muchcontemporary architecture.

Spiller’s Bits

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his treatise De antiquissima Italorum Sapientia. ‘As God’s truth iswhat God comes to know as he creates and assembles it, sohuman truth is what man comes to know as he builds itshaping it by his actions.’1

Cybernetic Radical Constructivists believe that there is nomind-independent reality and that an individual constructshis or her understanding of his or her world by observationand operating within it. It in turn is readjusted in theindividual’s dealings with others and other world-viewsmediated by cybernetic conversation. Thus Vico is sometimescalled the first Radical Constructivist.

We all construct our view of the world as we navigatethrough it. This world is not the controlled, tame, acetic worldof science. It is a world of experimentation, of near misses andof desire – a nomadic, expedient pseudo-science.

So in this particular ‘Bits’ I would like to honour spatialexperimentation, ‘I’ and the space of desire by introducingCharlotte Erckrath’s work. The inspiration of this piece is aphotograph produced by Helmet Newton in 1981: ‘Self Portraitwith Wife June and Models’. The photograph resonates backin time to Las Meninas of Velázquez, and its theoreticalcontent was sketched out by Victor Burgin in 1992.2 Erckrathhas identified the various modes of observation illustrated by

the picture and the act of viewing it. These are: The Spectator,The Photographer, The Mirror, The Voyeur and The Backdrop.She has then taken these ideas and included herself and herbody in the act of viewing and interpreting in herarchitectural work. Perhaps unsurprisingly, her work can beseen in comparison to Duchamp’s Large Glass, but here are noillusions to masturbatory, vibrating bachelors divided from anunobtainable mechanised bride – no sexual binary opposites,more a personal synthesis of architect, body, space and view.This conclusion should be the aim of all architects and theirwork, and not the impersonal taxonometrically similardesigns that so many of our profession perceive as inspired,earthshaking architecture. The earth never moves for meunless ‘I’m’ involved. 4+

Neil Spiller is Professor of Architecture and Digital Theory and Vice Dean atthe Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London.

Notes1. G Vico, De antiquissima Italorum Sapientia, Stamperia de’Classici Latini(Naples), 1858, chapter I, 1:5–6.2. V Burgin, ‘Perverse space’, in B Colomina, Sexuality and Space, The NewPress (New York), 1992, pp 219–41.

Text © 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Charlotte Erckrath

Charlotte Erckrath, Making the Idea: Subjectivity and Objects in Self-Portrait with Wife June and Model by Helmut Newton, 2007The piece is produced by exploring boundaries, thresholds, points of view,parallax and the engagement of the viewer.

This is an anthropometric scaled, intimate project that cannot be separatedfrom its architect. Here is a detail of one of the movable junctions, itsgeometries inscribed with further bodily syntax and vectors.

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Unit Factor

Radical InterfaceAA New Media Research InitiativeAt the Architectural Association in London, Joel Newman, Theodore Spyropoulos andVasilis Stroumpakos are spearheading the New Media Research Initiative. Here they call forarchitecture to abandon its hold on the formal qualities of the physical in favour of a mode ofexperience that provides an interface that fully reflects the way we inhabit space today.

Theodore Spyropoulos and Vasili Stroumpakos, Techne, AADRL Research Fellowship, 2002–04 These explorations, performed by Nick Puckett, were designed as a series of limitation devices that are integrated withdispersal software systems that become the testing ground for where we can turn these immersive technologies back onourselves. The goal is that by doing these experiments on ourselves we can gain critical insight into our adaptive cognitionwhile acquiring a tangible understanding of the sensorial.

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In architectural and product design, physicality is stillperceived as the main reference for judgement, whileembedded 2-D design is treated as a secondary or subsidiaryconsideration, an addendum at best. This is the residue of anolder paradigm in which structure is matter and fresco isdecor. Although this was a reasonable mode of thought forthe design of building in the past, contemporary designshould adopt the mode of experience, the way that space isinhabited today. What you see is what you use. Interface isboth function and performance, and the aesthetics of formand material are secondary.

Function and ExperienceHowever, function does not have to be boring, and certainlydoes more than merely respond to route planning, or ‘go fromA to B, but do not pass C’. Function in contemporaryarchitecture is the creation of an environment of experience.Creating experiences refers to the real target of interfacedesign: to generate new forms of engagement with informationand communication; to excite the human intellect with newforms of interaction. This requires consideration andunderstanding of the complex aspects of perception andcognition. Interfaces have existed for a relatively short time,both in terms of scientific research and in public applications,and so they are a grand and continuing experiment.

Form and GraphicsWhen the iPod was released, Apple described it as the productthe company was created to make, a device that could embodythe company’s philosophy: the interface is the product. In thedesign of devices, the separation between the three-dimensional form and the interface is under question. For along time, devices such as mobile phones were judged

primarily, if not exclusively, on the physical characteristics ofthe case. Shape, the appearance and feel of the materials, thepractical and ergonomic parameters were all important.Interface rarely featured strongly in the design process or inthe critical evaluation of the design. Today, with theintroduction of a new generation of more complex devicessuch as Apple’s iPhone and the BenQ Black Box, interface hasfound its apotheosis in the new physical space of the screen.The interface is the new material, and the product is theinterface, so contemporary design education ought to beprepared for that.

The Experimental WebIt is fair to say that the new level of interface design is not theexclusive result of one particular studio or company, but alogical progression of 10 years of experiment on the WorldWide Web. Interface experimentation certainly did take placewithin labs and research centres, but many dedicatedamateurs, smart kids and professionals alike were also deeplyengaged and loosely hooked together by the Web.

With the introduction of the internet, people started tocreate personal pages, driving the development of better andpowerful software. Many pages were simply just peoplewanting to put forward their voice, their opinions andfeelings to the world: writing about their likes and dislikes,showing photographs of their friends and families, creatingan image of their lives and perspective on the world they livein. This continues today in the blogsphere.

However, a small but growing number of users becamemore interested in the interface itself, leaving the content toevolve from the words and images of the Web population.Fascination with the new tools (Flash, Director, Java and laterProcessing) led this generation of dedicated amateurexperimenters to contribute greatly to the evolution of userinterfaces. Although this kind of work had been, or still is,characterised as Web or computer art by some, substantiallyit is rigorous research through experimentation.

During a design workshop at the AADRL, students were asked to developlimitation devices. One of the briefs was to design an instrument as aseeing stick for the blind.

Thomas Chan, Interface Catalogue, 2007Intermediate 6 student Thomas Chan (tutors: Veronika Schmid and AlistairGill) designed and developed a comprehensive custom-made interface inFlash through which he could control and inform the 3-D modelling software.

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Experimentation does not need to be beautiful, but ratheran outrageous lack of compromise. Simultaneousexperimentation by a multitude of people producesinnovation through evolution. Radical interface design byinnovators such as Yugo Nakamura, Joshua Davis, Ed Burton,Dextro, Lia, Martin Wattenberg, Jared Tarbell, Golan Levin,Zachary Lieberman and Ben Fry provides distinctive examplesof direct and applied ‘research’ for architects working incomputation. Their work defines a new understanding ofinterface design and screen-based interaction. They adoptextreme and radical modes in their engagement withexperimental design, and the momentum that these types of

works has created affected, and still affects, a wide range ofcreative disciplines, including architecture.

AA Method as PracticeThe Architectural Association (AA) is at the forefront innurturing these approaches, and this is reflected in theformation of its New Media Research Initiative, whichemerged through the continuous engagement of the school’svarious programmes within the domain of interface. Thistakes place on three levels. First through the agendas ofseveral studios in the undergraduate and graduate school,where student research undertaken at the AA Design

Theodore Spyropoulos and Vasilis Stroumpakos, Facebreeder software/installation, Selfridges, London, 2004 and the AA, London, 2006 Fabricated by the authors and a group of DRL students, Facebreeder emerged as an aftermath of the Techne research fellowship.

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Research Lab (AADRL) and Emtech as well as undergraduateunits such as Int 3, Int 6, Int 8 and Dip 14 clearly depicts ashift in the architectural design paradigm employingmethods and concepts, but also developing approaches thatblend digital interface with spatial and experience design.Second through research fellowships such as Techne thatwere developed by Theodore Spyropoulos and VasilisStroumpakos and led to projects such as the Facebreederthat engaged the AA community. And finally throughexplorations conducted in the Media Studies programme.

The New Media Research Initiative aims to work as anumbrella for these engagements by reinforcing the interfacedialogue: on the one hand by a series of events/talks includingkey speakers Stelarc, Dextro, Ed Burton, Zachary Lieberman,Christopher Lindiger and United Visual Artists that took placeduring 2006/07; and on the other by engaging with relatedprojects such as the cross-programme event laptop-jamsessions promoting and presenting student work and staffresearch that responds to concepts of space as interface. 4+

Joel Newman studied fine art at Reading University and has exhibited his workwidely. He has run the AA’s audiovisual department since 1994, and teachesvideo-making.

Theodore Spyropoulos is a co-director of the AA Design Research Lab (AADRL) inLondon. He is a visiting research fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studiesworking with the Interrogative Design Group. He directs the experimental designpractice Minimaforms, and has worked as a project architect at the offices of PeterEisenman and Zaha Hadid.

Vasilis Stroumpakos studied at the AADRL (MArch) and at AUTH in Thessaloniki,Greece. He is co-author of ramtv.org’s Negotiate My Boundary! He has been aresearch fellow at the AA and is currently part of the academic staff at the AADRLand AA Media Studies programme. He also runs the practice 00110.org.

‘Unit Factor’ is edited by Michael Weinstock, who is Academic Head and Head ofTechnical Studies at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London,and also a visiting professor at Yale University and at ESARQ Barcelona. He is co-guest-editor with Michael Hensel and Achim Menges of the Emergence:Morphogenetic Design Strategies (May 2004) and Techniques and Technologies inMorphogenetic Design (March 2006) issues of Architectural Design. He is currentlywriting a book on the architecture of emergence for John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Text © 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 126, 127(t), 128(t&br) © TheodoreSpyropoulos and Vasilis Stroumpakis; pp 127(b), 129(b) © ArchitecturalAssociation; p 128(bl) © Theodore Spyropoulosz and Vasilis Stroumpakis, photoSue Barr; p 129(t) © dextro.org

AA New Media Cluster Kick-Off Event, Architectural Association, London, 2006Stelarc performs involuntary acts with student volunteers at a new mediaclusters launch event at the AA.

Brian Dale and Luis Fraguada, CCdb project, AA New Media LaptopSessions, London, 2007The cross-programme event brings together interface-related student workfrom various departments of the school.

Dextro, Interactive applet, ArchitecturalAssociation, London, 2007Pioneer in contemporary computer art, Dextro,presented his work at the AA.

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On Green Design (Part 3)The Basic Premises for Green Design

Foster + Partners, University of Technology Petronas, Malaysia, 2004The campus’ crescent-form roof responds to the climate of the Malay peninsula by coveringpedestrian routes. It provides shade from the heat and shelter from monsoon rains.

In the final part of his short series that outlines the main principles of ecodesign,Ken Yeang turns his attention to the alternatives that are on offer to designers whowant to ensure comfortable internal conditions in their buildings. He covers the fullgamut of choices and hybrids from buildings that are constructed in ‘passive mode’,without the need for any electromechanical systems, to those that are conceived in‘productive mode’ producing their own energy.

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As designers we should be looking at ways of configuringindividual built forms as low-energy systems, while alsoapplying the same thinking to the operational systems of thegreater built environment and our own businesses. Inaddressing these systems we need to look into ways ofimproving the internal conditions of our buildings so as tomake them more comfortable. There are essentially fiveways of doing this: passive mode, mixed mode, full mode,productive mode and composite mode, the last being acomposite of all the preceding modes.

The practice of sustainable design requires that we lookfirst at passive mode (or bioclimatic) design strategies; thenwe can move on to mixed mode, full mode, productive modeand composite mode, all the while adopting progressivestrategies to improve comfortable conditions relative toexternal conditions.

Meeting contemporary expectations for comfortableconditions in the office cannot generally be achieved bypassive mode or by mixed mode alone. The internalenvironment often needs to be supplemented by the use ofexternal sources of energy, as in full mode. Full mode uses

electromechanical systems often powered by external energysources – whether from fossil-fuel derived sources or fromlocal ambient sources such as wind or solar power.

Passive mode means designing for improved internalcomfort conditions over external conditions without the useof any electromechanical systems. Examples of passive modestrategies include the adoption of suitable buildingorientation and configuration in relation to the localclimate, as well as the selection of appropriate buildingmaterials. When considering the design of the facade, issuesof solid-to-glazed area ratios, thermal insulation values, theincorporation of natural ventilation and the use ofvegetation are also important.

Building design strategy must start with passive mode orbioclimatic design, as this can significantly influence theconfiguration of the built form and its enclosure systems.Passive mode requires an understanding of the climaticconditions of the locality; the designer should not merelysynchronise the building design with the localmeteorological conditions, but optimise the ambient energyof the locality to create improved internal comfort

WOHAA Architects/Wong MunSumm and Richard Hassell,Moulmein Rise Residential Tower,Singapore, 2003 Here the traditional monsoon windowis adopted in a 28-storey, speculativehousing block. This horizontal openinglets in the breeze but not the rain. Itclearly demonstrates the potential ofthe monsoon window as an effectivepassive cooling device in acontemporary urban setting.

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conditions without the use of any electromechanicalsystems. The fundamental nature of these decisions clearlydictates that once the building configuration, orientationand enclosure are considered, the further refinement of adesign should lead to the adoption of choices that willenhance its energy efficiency. If, as an alternative, a designsolution is developed that has not previously optimised thepassive mode options, then these non-energy efficient designdecisions will need to be corrected by supplementary fullmode systems.

Such a remedy would make a nonsense of low-energydesign. Furthermore, if the design optimises a building’spassive modes, it remains at an improved level of comfortduring any electrical power failure. If the passive modeshave not been optimised, then whenever there is noelectricity or external energy source the building maybecome intolerable to occupy.

In mixed mode, buildings use some electromechanicalsystems such as ceiling fans, double facades, flue atriumsand evaporative cooling.

Full mode relies entirely on the use of electromechanicalsystems to create suitable internal comfort conditions. Thisis the option chosen for most conventional buildings. Ifclients and users insist on having consistent comfortconditions throughout the year, this will inevitably lead tofull mode design. It must be clear now that low-energydesign is essentially a user-driven condition and a lifestyleissue. We must appreciate that passive mode and mixedmode design can never compete with the comfort levels ofthe high-energy, full mode conditions.

Productive mode is where a building generates its ownenergy. Common examples of this today can be seen in thegeneration of electricity through the use of photovoltaic

panels that are powered by solar power, and wind turbinesthat harness wind energy. Ecosystems use solar energy thatis transformed into chemical energy by the photosynthesisof green plants, which in turn drives the ecological cycle. Ifecodesign is to be ecomimetic, we should seek to do thesame; however, we will need to do so on a much larger scale.

The inclusion of systems that create productive modesinevitably leads to sophisticated technological systems that,in turn, increase the use of material resources, the inorganiccontent of the built form, the embodied energy content andthe attendant impact on the environment.

Composite mode is a combination of all the above modesin proportions that vary over the seasons of the year.

Ecodesign also requires the designer to use materialsand assemblies that facilitate reuse, recycling and theireventual reintegration with ecological systems. Here againwe need to be ecomimetic in our use of materials in thebuilt environment: in ecosystems, all living organisms feedon continual flows of matter and energy from theirenvironment to stay alive, and all living organismscontinually produce ‘waste’. However, ecosystems do notactually generate waste since one species’ waste is reallyanother species’ food. Thus matter cycles continuallythrough the web of life. To be truly ecomimetic, thematerials we produce should also take their place within theclosed loop where waste becomes food.

Currently we regard everything produced by humans aseventual garbage or waste material that is either burned orends up in landfill sites. The new question for designers,manufacturers and businesses is: How can we use this wastematerial? If our materials are readily biodegradable, they canreturn to the environment through decomposition. If wewant to be ecomimetic, we should think, at the very early

Typical floor plan illustratingthe location of the monsoonwindows. The designaddresses the challenges ofthe tropical climate byincorporating monsoonwindows and the perforatedwall, while establishing arelationship of differentvolumes to maximise aircirculation.

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design stages, how a building, its components and itsoutputs can be reused and recycled. These designconsiderations will determine the materials to be used, theways in which the building fabric is to be assembled, howthe building can be adapted over time, and how thematerials can be reused after the building has reached thelimits of its useful life.

If we consider the last point, reuse, in a little more detail,we come to an increasingly important conclusion. Tofacilitate the reuse of, let us say, a structural component, theconnection between the components should be mechanical,ie bolted, rather than welded so that the joint can bereleased easily. If, in addition to being easily demountable,the components were modular, then the structure could beeasily demounted and reassembled elsewhere. This leads tothe concept of ‘design for disassembly’ (DfD), which has itsroots in sustainable design.

Another major design issue is the systemic integration ofour built forms, operational systems and internal processeswith the natural ecosystems that surround us. Suchintegration is crucial because without it these systems willremain disparate artificial items that could be potentialpollutants. Unfortunately, many of today’s buildings onlyachieve eventual integration through biodegradation thatrequires a long-term process of natural decomposition.

While manufacture and design for recycling and reuserelieves the problem of deposition of waste, we shouldintegrate both the organic waste (eg sewage, rain water runoff, waste water, food wastes, etc) and the inorganic waste.There is a very appropriate analogy between ecodesign and

surgical prosthetics. Ecodesign is essentially design thatintegrates man-made systems both mechanically andorganically with the natural host system – the ecosystems. Asurgical prosthetic device also has to integrate with itsorganic host being – the human body. Failure to integratewill result in dislocation in both cases. These are theexemplars for what our buildings and our businesses shouldachieve: the total physical, systemic and temporalintegration of our human-made, built environment with ourorganic host in a benign and positive way. There are, ofcourse, a large number of theoretical and technical problemsto be solved before we have a truly ecological builtenvironment. However, we should draw encouragementfrom the fact that our intellect has allowed us to createprosthetic organs that can integrate with the human body.The next challenge will be to integrate our buildings, ourcities and all human activities with the natural ecosystemsthat surround us. 4+

Kenneth Yeang was Chairman of the Master Jury of the 2007 Aga KhanAward for Architecture. The Moulmein Rise Residential Tower and Universityof Technology Petronas were two of nine projects presented with awardsthis year. For details of the award scheme and other award-winningprojects, see www.akdn.org/architecture.

Kenneth Yeang is a director of Llewellyn Davies Yeang in London and TRHamzah & Yeang in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He is the author of manyarticles and books on ecodesign, including Ecodesign: A Manual forEcological Design (Wiley-Academy, 2006).

Text © 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 130-32 © Courtesy of theAga Khan Award for Architecture; p 133 © Dr Ken Yeang

TR Hamzah & Yeang Snd Bhd (aLlewellyn Davies Yeang, UK, sistercompany), Standard Chartered BankPriority Building Pavilion, KualaLumpur, Malaysia, 2001This glass pavilion is an example ofmixed-mode design. It has an air-curtain above the entrance, which hasbeen modified to accommodate anumber of small jets within the middleof the blower. These emit a fine sprayof water that evaporates and creates amisty cloud around the doorway. Thislowers the ambient temperature of thezone around the entrance. It gives asensation of cooling to passers-by,inviting them into the pavilion.

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Smithson’s Floating Island – a 30 x 10metre (98 x 33 foot) flat-decked bargeof fully grown trees and large rocksbeing towed up and down theHudson River, finally realised in2005, 32 years after his prematuredeath, which may have beeninteresting, but without the artistlooks like a late delivery. For theland-based movable feast we findLondon-based artist Cedric Christie’selegant collection of mobile art,which consists of a previouslyunremarkable fleet of second-handcars being individually (and showspecifically) inscribed with theparticipants of Kassel’s ongoingfive-yearly, 100-day international artOlympics of the ‘Documenta’exhibition.

The De- and Re-Materialisationof the Art ObjectThe logistics of art is an internationalbusiness, with galleries andmuseums functioning as temporarystops or viewing platforms, wherethe art lover, or someone trying tokeep out of the cold, may saunterpast a good work, or not.

The business and total amountof artwork in transit (measurable inweight, monetary value or the morecomplex measure of humanhappiness) we will leave foranother time.

It is the self-recognisable artlogistic (or the art of logistics) thatseems more pertinent. Aside fromthe Europewide doyens of a tradeformerly known as road haulage suchas Willi Betz, Norbert Dentressangle

and the UK’s largest private logisticscompany ‘brand’ of Eddie Stobart,there are independent artists whooperate in the field of artworks thatare designed to move. We can take tothe water with French artist DanielBuren’s sailing sculptures, whichconsisted of his trademark Voile(stripes) decorating the sails of aseries of sailboats at Lake Grasmere(July 2005), or Aldo Rossi’s Teatro delMondo (1979), a floating theatre for250 that visited Venice andDubrovnik. Also briefly appearing ina Venice canal (1985) was ClaesOldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’scollaboration with Frank O Gehry – atheatrical spectacular featuring a 25-metre (82-foot) long floating Swissarmy knife as its centrepiece. Morerecently we witnessed Robert

Detail of Cedric Christie’s‘Documenta 4’ car parkedin a London street.

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Performance-EnhancingArchitecture?During a recent conversation with aformer employee of a largemultinational food and domesticgoods combine, he was kind enoughto tell me about a sector of the non-alcoholic drinks industry entitledPerformance Enhancing Beverages(PEB). Employed by the firm as apsychologist, it was one of his jobs toassess (under strict scientificprocedures) the short-termphysiological effects of ingestedliquid refreshment, whereupon thecompany may or may not be allowed(by various advertising standardsorganisations) to make substantiatedclaims for their new wonder drink.This kind of psychologicalassessment of architecture, and itssubsequent consumption, is not soobviously deployed, or perhaps notqualitatively. The space syntax mobmay or may not be able to predictand somewhat guide us around thelarge peopled environments ofstadiums, airports and shoppingcentres, but the designed tools andmechanisms for the traffic andcomfort and ultimate enjoyment ofthe user seem simplistic and largelysymbolic. Can we not learn from thehighly tweaked ingredients of thepsychologically complex PEB andmake some architecture thatdemonstrably makes you feel good?Although ‘good’ is a rather imprecisedescriptor; what about ‘architectureis good for you’ – though I doubt theprofession’s representative bodies ormany of its practitioners and clientswould try and support such astatement. Whether through sometranscendental detailing or a morerobust appreciation of need andappropriate servicing, designersshould begin to manufacture morestimulating and more physiologicallytuned environments.

Going LocalLike an observation recentlyoverheard at the nearby motorwayservices that ‘the problem withGretna Green [the UK’s premiereloping destination] is that it is nottacky enough’, seemingly unwillingto submit to a Las Vegas-styleupgrade, you are left with a faintlymoribund invented tradition thatowes its existence more to thetachometer proximities of thelogistics industry.

So what future in the BritishHoliday destination? Leaving asidethe middle-class enclaves slummingit in high-priced Nuevo rusticboutique hotels or the beach-hutinvestments of the south coast, areBritish holiday towns (and inparticular the seaside variety) thedoomed economic blackspots of ourcurrent imagination, or doesplanning supremo Sir Peter Hallhave a point when he suggests thatthese ready-made eco holiday resortshave all the residual social andphysical fabric to sustain aneconomic transformation? Writingin Town and Country Planning, Hallpoints to the tourism successes ofthe previously esoteric ‘adventure’destinations of the GalápagosIslands or Machu Picchu, offering‘natural habitat and exotic culture’,1

which in a generation have becomeso popular that visitor numbers arestrictly controlled.

Also spotted in the Institute ofDirectors’ magazine After Hours(Spring 2007) was a highly servicedneo-primitive tourist destinationwhere you pay good money for ‘laservice ruistique’, where the cultivatedcivilities and etiquette rigmaroles ofthe 20th century are replaced by amore loosely formed set of high-grade (that is to say, not expensive)prosaic or ‘real’ experiences.

If the UK were not still sodominated by short-termedentrepreneurship and the desire fordifference so well represented in the

proverbial ‘twist’, then we and ourincoming tourist visitors might wellbe able to enjoy the regionaldifferences and delicacies that are soprevalent, and hardly need anotherreinvention. We must all be carefulso as not to miss the point (or thedestination). 4+

Note1. Town and Country Planning Association,Town and Country Planning, Vol 76, No 3,March 2007, pp 78–9

‘McLean’s Nuggets’ is an ongoing technicalseries inspired by Will McLean and SamanthaHardingham’s enthusiasm for back issues ofAD, as explicitly explored in Hardingham’s ADissue The 1970s is Here and Now(March/April 2005).

Will McLean is joint coordinator of technicalstudies (with Peter Silver) in the Departmentof Architecture at the University ofWestminster.

Text © 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Will McLean

A beach ashtray distributed free by theMenorca reserva de biosfera. The Balearicisland of Menorca was declared a biospherereserve by UNESCO in 1993, for theexploration of sustainable development.There are currently 400 such designatedbiosphere reserves throughout the world.

4 Architectural Design

Cities of DispersalGuest-edited by Rafi Segal and Els Verbakel

Questioning the traditional boundaries between cities, suburbs, countryside andwilderness, this issue of AD explores emergent types of public space in low-density environments. It describes this new form of urbanism: decentralised, in aconstant process of expansion and contraction, not homogenous or necessarilylow-rise, nor guided by one mode of development, typology or pattern.

While functionally and programmatically dispersed, settlements operate as aform of urbanism; the place of collective spaces within them has yet to bedefined and articulated. The physical transformation of the built environment onthe one hand, and the change in our notion of the public on the other – due toglobalisation, privatisation and segregation – call for renewed interpretations ofthe nature and character of public space. The concept of public space needs tobe examined: replaced, re-created or adapted to fit these conditions. What is theplace of the public in this form of urbanism, and how can architecture addressthe notion of common, collective spaces? What is the current sociopolitical roleof such spaces? How does the form and use of these spaces reflect theconception of the public as a political (or non-political) body? And canarchitecture regain an active role in formulating the notion of the collective?These and other issues are addressed through essays, research projects andbuilt work by distinguished writers such as Bruce Robbins, Albert Pope and AlexWall, and practitioners including Zvi Hecker, Vito Acconci, MUTOPIA, Manuel deSolá-Morales, Martha Rosler and Manuel Vicente in a search for new collectivearchitectures within the dispersed city.

4+Interior Eye Bethnal Green Museum of ChildhoodPractice Profile KieranTimberlake AssociatesUserscape iO AgencyUnit Factor AA New Media Research InitiativeRegular columns from Will McLean, Neil Spiller and Ken Yeang

cities of dispersal edited by rafi segal els verbakel

Documents