Rethink WhatIf

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magazine about thought and space

what

february 2012

issue #01

if

the political issue


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MASTER DEGREE PROGRAMME IN

BUILDING ENGINEERING/ARCHITECTURE

ITALIAN CHINESE CURRICULUMGeneral Agreement between University of Pavia,

IUSS - Institute for Advanced Study Pavia,

and Tongji University of Shanghai, March 2009

Supervisor:

Prof. TIZIANO CATTANEO

Candidate:

MARIO GENOVESI

a.y. 2010/2011


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editor’s note

index

capitalism, democracy & the suburbs

city as a political space

occupy wall street

italy & the 70s

bibliography & references


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on criticism and crisis

(reality)n

depressed production

2-3

4-5

12-19

34-41

108-117

28-33

70-77

78-81

82-87

88-95

42-45

46-51

52-65

66-69

6-11

20-27

96-107

mapping

shrinking cities

analogy

analogous city

derelict architecture

visioning

what’s with the neighbourhood?


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What If is a magazine, a product, within the market, and it advertises the consumption of space

What If reects upon contemporary realityWhat If is an accumulation of thoughts

What If aims at generating dissensus and provoking conict

What if wonders about the role of the architect within society

What If raises doubts, doesn’t give answersWhat If questions the system

What If speaks about publicWhat If stimulates a shared architectural knowledge

What If is voluntarily ambitious and structurally limited

What If refuses moralismWhat If has the arrogance of making statementsWhat If investigates crises, conicts and antagonisms as constructive paradigms

What If shakes ivory towersWhat If exploits images and makes fun of them

What If claims for spatial activismWhat If is analytical outburstWhat If conveys visceral projections of fragmented intensity

What If crashes objects and disrupts processes

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Space and politics. Two words that are not of-ten written close together, that at a rst glancedo not share much. Yet they are both concer -ned – or at least should be – with the concept ofpublic. Politics may represent a key for interpre-ting the so-called public space in contemporarycities, as politics relates with society, economics,image and representation. And so does space.Reality is engaged from a lateral perspective, hi-ghlighting how crises and conicts acting on thespace of the city may lead to disruption of thepolitical status quo, while the paradigms of themarket economy alienate the meaning of bothdemocracy and architecture.

Dissecting reality becomes a means of questio-ning it within the present. Future therewith is notsomething that has to be found outside of rea-lity, but by experimenting alternative practiceswithin a given situation.Architecture needs to reclaim its agency, itsability of pro-actively investigating urban structu-res and dynamics, using the project as a tool tochallenge reality. Hence, making things public.

“The Apollo of the ancients was an aristocrat, a cultural assistant for prin-ces and for the privileged class. The gure of the patron developed fol-

lowing that example. 20th century democracy needs to replace the pa-tron with the cultural willingness of the citizen. In it Apollo becomes a new

cultural symbol, he becomes the compensating factor for technique’smaterialistic power. We are all called upon to contribute to this image”

Walter Gropius

editor’s note


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y asa political space

city as

standing shoulder to shoulder, strugglingfor a common cause. It clearly looks likea manifestation of the collective – merelyintended as groups of people – not ne-cessarily sharing belonging to the samesocial structure; remarkably, these cohesi-ve phenomena appear to reach beyondthe acknowledged script of society, theychallenge the status quo in their the basic

motives, whether them being politicaldictatorship, social inequity, economic im-morality or informational censorship. Theseendeavours cling onto a sort of naturalforce, driving citizens to gather and drawattention towards their common issues.We learnt that humans are social animals,after all.Moreover it seems likely that the space forcollective stances acquires a political di-

mension: I am referring here to an etymo-logical meaning of the word ‘politics’, asin groups of people making collectivedecisions, regardless of the actual form ofinstituted government. It is therefore theopen-endedness of the public space thatallows for the exertion of a variety of par -ticipatory practices, as expression of thecollective will.What I am trying to suggest here is that –

almost in a primordial way, as if it was themost natural response to the most naturalof needs – humans choose the space of

the city to give strength to their collectivevoice. Thus, the physical space of the cityhasn’t ceased to respond to the elemen-

Manifestations of the so-called ArabSpring, upheavals and riots within theperipheries of Western European capitals,global phenomena of discontent againstthe nancial system, claims for equality,democracy and human rights. This is whatwe get to read about daily in the news.Different people. Different places. Diffe-rent issues. For multiple reasons, whether

peacefully or violently, it looks like peopleare rising up. And they’re taking to thestreets.Far from seeking an overall understan-ding of these complex historical events,it is my concern to select them as strongand meaningful symptoms of the criticalrelationship between communities, ideasand spaces.Though looking for a common terrain

among them all would be quite a daringtask to undertake, it is hard to deny thatthese situations do share two main fea-

tures: the multitude and diversity of theparticipating subjects and agents and thespatial categories where such actions ndtheir setting.At a rst glance, it is possible toacknowledge the plurality of the subjectsinvolved in these contemporary phe-

nomena. It’s not just about a handful ofworkers striking for higher wages or stu-dents protesting for the right to get an

education or migrants striving for asylum.People of different age, education,ethnicity, profession, and religion are all


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Ebitisint, officiate de quuntot atioriaquis a quia quiatentiis asperor

empore


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tal instinct for the collective. As far as space is involved,cities cannot help but be the common scenery for thesediverse episodes of the Human Comedy.More precisely cities provide public space: roads, squaresand parks are the stage for people to raise their voices,logically identifying the collective space as the space forpublic life. These sites are engaged as the selected spa-

ces for practices of social dissent.As a consequence public space becomes the stage forconict, claiming, coming together, activating the city asa potential eld for extended democratic paradigms. Ina nutshell we could claim that crisis activates publicspace politically, shaking the space of the city from itspolitical and institutional standoff.Pier Vittorio Aureli, Italian architect and theorist, claimsthat ‘the city is a political space even before being aphysical space’, which in other words asserts the primacy

of the political stance within the space of the city overthe materiality of the city itself.Cities were founded in order to respond to the need ofsettling, and people have increasingly been attracted tourban centres to full their basic needs, from food suppliesto work, from education to facilities.Historically, we couldn’t deny that the conguration ofhuman settlements had always somehow been meansto express political content. Yet this content is unavoida-bly double-sided: the ideology of the established system

of institutions on the one hand, and the micro-political,bottom-up collective ows, on the other.We can therefore address this intricate relationshipbetween politics and the city dialectically, referring to theclassical dichotomy between urbs and civitas.An innite set of examples, drawn from the history of theWestern cities and civilizations, could be provided, withthe aim of showing that the historical process of the cityhas been cyclically determined by endless oppositionsbetween the architecture of the civitas and the architec-

ture of the urbs.Buildings on the agora, as a matter of example, – in the

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restrictive meaning given to the concept of ancientGreek democracy – is a stance of civic belonging andrepresentation, as well as the technique of central per -spective dominating representations of ideal cities in theRenaissance stands for the construction of a city revolving

around the centrality of the civic space as utmost realmof human intellect, reaching sublimation in its adhesion tothe public. That is ideal representation of the civitas, in thecomplete identity between citizenship and forma urbis.On the contrary, throughout history power and authorityhave been exerted by governments of all sorts in order toinform the citizen with structure and rule. In different cen-turies and according to different fashions, architectures ofabsolute power have regulated the hierarchical struc-ture of the city, imposing a scaling process to the gures

in the public space: the large dimension represents theauthority and its emanations, in the shape of the buildingsdevoted to the public. They specically dene the notionof public, and to a large extent this is a mere expressionof the power itself.A rather insightful point of view on the issue of the politicalspace in the city, torn between the civic and institutio-nal, is offered by Louis Kahn’s drawings represen-ting the Civic Forum: he interestingly hybridises in thearchitecture of the institutional buildings perfect shapes,

namely the circle, with their formal arrangement as open,growing building, determining an inner open civic space.As Michel Foucault highlighted, “from the eighteenthcentury on, every discussion of politics as the art ofgovernment of man necessarily includes a chapter orseveral chapters on urbanism, on collective facilities, on

1. The Ideal City

2. Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin, 1995

Christo, Jeanne-Claude

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hygiene, and on private architecture”.Along with the development of democracy as the prin-cipal political form in Western countries, institutions en-gaged a renovated tool for exerting some sort of abso-lute power on their territories. Structuring, determining,controlling and managing the space are amongst the

key points of the overdeveloped discipline of urban andspatial planning. Though often animated by the best ofintentions, in the course of the last century spatial realiza-tion of power and political stances has frequently beenreached, in accordance with tools of intensive and com-prehensive planning and social rhetoric.The western-type of Welfare State model continues to ex-pand, despite the clear cracks that have emerged, andis accompanied by the illusion of good city form, largelyalienated from the strive for construing a civic space for

the sake of organizing a technically awless urban space.The repression of the political content from the spacewithin the late capitalist city has taken several forms, fromthe domestication of alterity to the belief that techno-cratic solutions are able to calm every crisis, resolve inan impartial manner every antagonism, satisfy all socialgrievances and abort political explosions, paradigms ofexclusion and urban outburst of violence and aggressiveacting-outs, post-political antagonism as opposed to apossible political adversarial agonism.

If it’s then true that thinking about politics cannot be ea-sily disentangled from representing space, the last deca-des have increasingly performed a spatial reductionism inpolitical reasoning and imagination.Christo wrapped Berlin’s Reichstag in 1995: this image stilllooks very appropriate for describing the disconnection,

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both symbolic and physical, between institutions andcities.In his book ‘On Politics’ the sociologist Zigmunt Baumanrefers to the global citizen as a solitary entity, living in aworld institutionally dominated by the concern for gene-ral safety; what remains left out, though, is the fact thatcitizens stand completely alone, feeling thoroughly unsa-

fe, cast out from any possibility of actual representationby or dialogue with political institutions, especially in thelack of real space for pursuing political goals.The common denominator in this large amountof factors characterizing the current historicalprocess can be recognized in the concept of apermanent and insurmountable crisis of the veryassumptions holding together urbs and civitas,resulting in a social, economic and political re-bellion of the citizenship to the structures of the

city itself.The consolidated instruments of territorial planning andspatial organization merely forget to acknowledge sucha crisis as a permanent and constructive condition, an

asymptotic sequence of unstable equilibriums, yet theystrive to freeze the urban space into a state in whichnothing is allowed to happen if not foreseen, and theysacrice to the über-design idol, from the fork to themetropolis, producing a ridiculous parody of the Moderndystopia (once utopia).

Though it doesn’t sound new that the political power hasalways been involved in the design of space, I think thatthe political potential of masses in the construction of thepublic space is still somewhat unexploited, being so farexpression of radical acts. Yet space unarguably con-stitutes a site of dislocation, rupture, contradiction andcontingency. Space is not just a tool for social control, onthe contrary spatial practices can contribute to transfor -mative politics.But is it somehow so imaginable to suggest an hybridisa-

tion between political theory, social activism, and thearchitecture of the city?

1-2. Civic Forum, Louis I. Kahn

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occupy wall street

:Anarchichal occupation of the space, and the city

a psycho-analyticalapproach

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There is a new system additional to or asan accumulation of all the smaller poten-tials citizens collectively have that, sup-

ported by the systems of communicationon the internet, can equal or exceed thepower of those who are in a privilegedposition today: the Occupy Wall StreetMovement is based on this very conceptof the power of a critical mass.Social media played a largely relevantrole: at rst virtual space replaced the realspace, which was, even if not formallybut ideologically, restricted to people, as

the ruling paradigm in the contemporarycity discourages the public use of publicspace. The web as democratic realm thatreduces social distance, and the urbanspace as the supposed and seized outlinefor that.The Occupy Wall Street Movement spre-ads internationally: it appears to afrm anextremely humane principle of settlement,on the one hand almost primordial, on

the other hand extremely globalised andcontemporary. And it is global becauseit battles a global problem at a global

scale, the market. This shows how globalcan gain power as an addition of localphenomena.

According to his theory about collectiveintelligence, the French philosopher PierreLévy, supports the idea that the virtualnetwork represents an instrument prone

to enhance the capacity for coopera-tion among people, as the Web puts inplace a potential synergy that managesto maximize this form of shared intelligen-ce. Stemming from this basis, the Belgiansociologist Derrick de Kerchove develops

the concept of connective intelligence,stressing the importance of connectionsand links to achieve a widely intertwinedplural intelligence. Thus, moving fromvirtual connectivity to spatial connectivitysounds like bringing the plural to a wholenew level, the realm of real space.It’s then logically agreeable that this phe-nomenon goes along with the concept ofcollective and connective: people sharing

a common stance about the System, andorganizing their intelligence to upgrade itto an actual, widespread and common


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political act.Precisely at this point, allow me to introdu-ce an audacious metaphor. The OccupyMovement as an expression of a globalcollective unconscious. Borrowed fromphilosopher and psychiatrist Carl GustavJung, collective unconscious represents auniversal psychic container, as in that partof human unconscious that is commonto all human beings. It contains the ar -

chetypes, the forms and the symbols thatappear in all people across every culture.Archetypes exist before experience, there-fore they are instinctual.On the whole, the Movement can then beseen as a paradigm for the re-denition ofthe space as a universal psychic contai-ner, as collective unconscious manifestsitself through a common will to inhabit thatspace. The Movement therefore repre-

sents a struggle to give a new, humanemeaning to those archetypes, deniedfrom experience by contemporary struc-tures. The re-appropriation of forms andsymbols goes through re-seizing the urbanspace as human habitat, by all means in

its collective sense.Public space becomes the space foractual political conict and for experimen-ting new forms of democracy, of inhabi-ting and of producing. And it is the streetas symbolic place, historically the theatrefor civil and political commitment, thatneeds to gain a new collective signican-ce.What was once the Agora, the pu-

blic space with political meaningpar excellence is now is ZuccottiPark : Zuccotti Park as self-made sensitivepublic space – mirror of an open sourcecity –, conrming the networking idea andthe afrming role of the street and thesquare as enhanced social space, entren-ched with digital culture, a Street 2.0.The Occupy Movement is congured asa sort of neo-Situationist gesture, as the in-

formal occupation of the space becomesa struggle to connect with the lost identityof the space itself, of the sense of place. Itis a stance against abstract market forcesthat detach people from social institutionsand have overpowered the specic for -


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ces of attachment identied with place.

We therefore witness a crucial switchin the globalised doom of the city: theOccupy Movement represents, perhapsunconsciously, the citizen-driven reactionto the contemporary phenomenon oferosion of place aimed at regaining thespace in the most physical and real sense,that is by settling on it. In principle, what’shappening in Zuccotti Park hardly differsfrom the actual foundation of a city. One

of the basic political principle is clearlythe self-governance, based on a horizon-tal network more than on a hierarchicalstructure.In this atmosphere of social guerrilla,architecture as a discipline is challenge inengaging the streets to achieve more with

less than ever: form will not only followfunction, but also friction.Architects must turn into multifaceted cul-

tural producers and everyday program-mers of the city. They must incorporate thehuman claim for re-inventing the publicspace, and they have to do that beco-ming truly streetwise.

“My thesis then, is as follows: in addition toour immediate consciousness, which is of

a thoroughly personal nature and whichwe believe to be the only empirical psy-

che, there exists a second psychic systemof a collective, universal, and impersonal

nature which is identical in all individuals.This collective unconscious does notdevelop individually but is inherited. Itconsists of pre-existent forms, the archet-

ypes, which can only become conscioussecondarily and which give denite form

to certain psychic contents.”

C. G. Jung


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The late Sixties and the early Seventies are a period of intense criticaldiscourse in the eld of Italian architecture and urbanism.

Within this specic historical framework, I would like to highlight the distin-ct endeavours, of Aldo Rossi, Archizoom Associates and Superstudio, inthe sense of their precious contributions to the political approach regar -ding the discourse on the city.In the multi-faceted work of these diverse cultural actors a partaking canbe seen in the radical critique towards some compromised theoreticalpositions, apologetic to the status quo, that were animating the debateon the city. These intellectuals addressed a critique towards the notionsof mobility and network as fundamental diagrams of the city (in thecelebration of the city-territory model), and the Arcadian proposals for

socially regressive models such as neighbourhoods, villages or commu-nities, meanwhile sharing the disbelief towards the positivistic utopia ofenvisaging urban megastructures, regarded as technologically advan-ced but politically regressive models of designing the city.Aldo Rossi poses the fundamental thesis that urbandevelopment, in terms of its physical contribution, that is

and avant-gardismre-foundation

italy and the seventies

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indeed architecture, should be understood accordingto political development. Architecture is therefore afrmed as

an integral part and a morphogenetic cause of the evolution of urbanphenomena: the legacy of the Modern Movement brought across theissue that architecture could no longer be seen merely as a productof masters, but rather as the fundamental act of dening a rule for thecity’s dynamics, and therewith afrming itself as the primary means ofconstituting the politics of the modern city. In his process of reinterpretingthe Modern through a renewed historical sensitivity, Rossi elaborates histheory on the city within the realm of the bourgeois city, claiming that itsappropriation and reinvention should construct the basis in order for the‘socialist city’ to set roots in the political process of History. An easy Mar -

xist reference might come to hand here: it is hardly deniable that Rossi’scontribution to urban studies is subject to a certain fascination for theconcept of history as a stage for class ght, and herein the constructionof the city as both an analytical record of this process and a powerfulinstrument to enhance political fractures.What is striking in Rossi’s cultural approach is the intriguing concept of

1. Supersurface, Superstudio

1


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battling the enemy from within its own structures, mentioning, “appro-

priation of the city as it was, as the taking over of already establishedworking-class typologies”: it is indeed a matter of raising architecture tothe level of achieving autonomy in criticizing reality, not just representingit, as it ignites the discourse on the city back to its political paradigm andto its supremacy over the nonsensical accelerated urban developmentfor its own sake.But Rossi does not convey a delusional message: he is well aware of thecapitalist exploitation of urban design – blameful of persevering in theprocess of dismantling the compact city –, in favour of regressive settlingforms, such as garden cities, satellite cities and city-territory. By all means

he surrenders to the idea of the built environment as unavoidable ex-pression of the dominant class. And from within this conicting scenario,he refreshes the cultural and political role of architecture and its mostpowerful tool, the project. The project of architecture has to claim backthe role of critical statement confronting the established script, striving tostimulate the possibility of alternative political choices, being an exem-

plum for the collective.

According to him, it’s all about designing states of exception, geographi-cal singularities; there he sets the framework for his analysis of the cityrevolving around the concept of urban geography – or locus, city as abuilt environment of conicting parts –, based upon the notions of typo-logy (as a means of constitution and evolution of urban forms) and theformal individuality of the urban artefact, as architecture, in its materialand visible manifestation, contributes to the development of the urbannarrative by means of circumscribed, closed and intelligible forms. It isonly the possibility of a closed, dened form that permits other forms toemerge, as urban space is composed of nite juxtaposed parts.

The prominence in Rossi’s theoretical and architectural work residestherefore in this achieved notion of locus; in this specic contextit is my urgency to denounce this major concept as a basic category todescribe and interpret, both aesthetically and politically, the architectu-re of the contemporary city. For this purpose, however, what is interestingabout the subtle denition of locus provided by Rossi is how it represents

1. Project for Business Centre,

Turin, 1973,

Rossi, Polesello, Meda

1

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1. Continuous Monument,

Superstudio

1

the possibility of looking at the city as the political manife-

station of a collective urban memory, overpoweringthe mere empirical visibility of the city itself and grasping the dialecticalconict between constitutive and constituted forces, thus highlightingthe notion of form as principal character on the stage of architecture.Aldo Rossi states a fundamental point about the relationship betweenpolitics and the form of the city, battling against the hybrid and techno-logically heteronomous forms proposed by neo-capitalist urbanism. Wi-thout doubt, his research proves extremely valid nowadays, yet a furtherquestion cannot be easily avoided: more than thirty years have passedsince the formulation of his theory and the realm of politics and architec-

ture have proceeded on very distinct paths, seldom nding, if ever, anypoints of tangency. Still, they share a fundamental common concern. Itis indeed the obsession for image, claimed as the only valuable horizonof understanding in contemporary culture. Might then Rossi’s concernnd a rephrasing, and possibly grasp the present anew, in terms of rela-tionship between image of the city and image of the politics? If the cityis supposed to represent a primary site for political choices, how can thatbe positively affected by the image culture?


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The avant-gardist groups Archizoom and Superstudio engage the con-

tradictory task of envisioning alternatives to the capitalist city, intendedas potential alternative use of the city from its own productive class.Critical to technocracy and to the positivistic myth of industrial produc-tion and mass consumption, the manifesto of the joint exhibition Superar -chitettura, developed between 1966 and 1968, makes use of irony asa strategy of subversion through appropriation.Consumption is greeted along with the objects, images and spaces asso-ciated with it: it calls for both a subversion of advertising and an embra-ce of the images used in it, which combined form the visual experienceof the urban space. The representation yields to the absurd, concocted

through scenarios of wild realities, stemming from maximal exaggerationof capitalism itself. It’s an approach of exquisite and deliberate cynicalrealism, where the juxtaposition between real and imagined – challen-ging the very concept of reality as it is found – results in a constructedimage that may be seen as both material and imagined.Buildings and cities are both considered receptacles for ideas and fan-

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tasies, as well as constructions structuring imagination and a type of freethinking. Evocative buildings can set off a series of associations in the re-

cipient, in an act similar to dreaming, and allow for a creative rethinkingof the given environment and its architectural objects. The visions theyprovide are somewhere between the existent, that is taken as inspiration,

and a call for imaginary interventions in the lived environment.Superstudio’s Monumento Continuo and Archizoom’s No Stop Cityrealize the critical possibilities of the complex and intermediate spaceof architecture. The potential of imagined objects moves past the builtform, and challenges the recipient to rethink his or her position in regardto the constructed environment. Living space is presented as tran-sgured representation, intended as an image loaded with

associations and meanings.No-Stop City critically develops the concept of spatial isotropy as a toolfor liberating space from bourgeois ideals and questioning hierarchy inarchitecture. A non-hierarchical grid that opens movement in all direc-

1. No-Stop City, Archizoom

2. Supersurface, Superstudio

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tions is displayed over an indenite and innite territory, emphasizingrepeatable homogeneous forms and continuous built worlds, while dia-lectically giving space to unplanned activities; an endless space that is

represented with abundant evocative objects punctuating it.Archizoom’s architectural stances, especially driven by the gure ofAndrea Branzi, move along with social and political activism: in April1967 the city of Milan became a sort of real experimental eld for thesetheories, when the creation of an urban tent camp and the squattingof an unoccupied hotel in the city centre were events built in order toreect the city as an open space to be occupied for communal living, asa space of choice and imagination.The theme of homogeneity and isotropy is developed in Superstudio’sIstograms of architecture and Supersurface: forcing the positivistic con-

cept of quantity as the only horizon of architecture, space is made po-tential as a mental action, in a realm of pure potentiality and total lackof architectural language. These works pave the way for the broadereffort of Monumento Continuo, as they abrogate the nitely built form infavour of open expanses of a free play of thought, fuelled by the overlo-ad of stimuli of the metropolis and those possibilities opened by a subver -sion of consumer culture. It is a spatialization of the relation,that is ignited by the object and that provokes thedissolution of the object itself: it isn’t the object itselfthat is of signicance, but the spatial relationship it

prompts. Performing a radical dissolution of the object, the city as aresult is no longer a collection of individual architectural objects, whosemateriality is thereby destroyed. Moreover they install a critical architec-tural dialogue with the superlative objects of mass culture, realizing theradical value of media representation(s) in their ability to destabilize thexedness of total design and the material urban space.

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capitalism,democracy,&

Exploring the deep intertwinement, both in terms of

representation and actuality, of the sprawling urban

paradigm of the American suburbs with the so-cal-

led late-capitalism market democracy - a celebra-

tion of individuality coupling an erosion of the social.

the suburbs

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The rhetoric of the ‘networked city’ (or ‘city territory’) in a globalized

world only enhances the actual disentanglement of the suburban dwel-ler from the city: suburbs have given up on the city, crystallized in a cloudof atomized monads, doomed with the equal potential of the absenceof place. Globalization paradigms strongly rely on the concept of ahighly structured network system, an efcient management of ows, ofmainly people, goods and information, streaming along the tentacularnet of infrastructure. There’s no question here about the overall fact thatinfrastructural systems, though aiming at the superior goal of achievingconnectivity and minimizing the outdated idea of distance, physicallyand spatially determines severe situations of radical exclusion. Infrastruc-

tural axes install fractures along the territory: they represent the geo-graphical hindrances of contemporary times, but not in terms of spatialdistance, which they battle, rather in terms of existential gap betweenthe city and the suburbs.Therefore, suburban life is characterised by an isolation from urban acti-vities and external forces: it is disconnected from the city, no matter how

many roads and railway links are provided. To some extent it is impos-

sible to deny that the suburban development of cities, and specicallyof American cities, was born from the very infrastructural logic: sturdilyreliant on the individual transportation mode, life in the suburbs program-matically chose to be detached from the urban experience.However this does not seem to present an issue. Suburban dwellers havemainly chosen to indulge in the well-advertised ‘American Dream’. Theyhave voluntarily given up their role in the urban sphere to pursue the hi-ghest goal in contemporary democracy: the front lawn with a driveway.Someone may also have dened it as the American apartheid. Theydeclared themselves satised, as voluntary captives – borrowing Rem

Koolhaas’ words – of sameness, safety, shopping.Unsurprisingly, suburban everyday life is rmly standing on a tripod oflong-established, well-manicured institutions: the house, the workpla-ce and the mall. And rather fastly isolation paves the way to a systemcentred on the self: the overall result becomes devastatingly signicant


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for a highly structured paradigm of mass individualism, where family isidentied as the highest horizon of collective behaviour. Although it maysound as an oxymoron, it is a mass-based phenomenon, resulting in thecomplete social atomization. As a logical outcome, individuals, deprivedof their social genes, nd refuge in the holy pursuit of property as a formof solace. And the very celebration of the property translates into anhypertrophy of the suburban ego occupying the space.Eventually, suburbs provide a spatial pattern for life that erodes the inte-ractive social foundations of everyday existence, thereby leading to adecay of democratic forms of living. It is the spatial representation of the

liberal political and cultural utopia: to be able to separate public andprivate according to individual judgement and be able to live unencum-bered by the various obligations of public and social life. In the end, thesuburbs give actual physical display to the whole utopian idea of liberaldemocracy: the single house in the suburbs is not just a house, it deliversa strong political stance.Borrowing a very common word from the nancial crisis in 2008, we mightas well talk about “subprime” in architecture. In the identication with


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the fullment of the ‘American Dream’, suburbs have proven to be acrucial space of speculation for the real-estate market, advertising theright for property as the ideological base for making people own more.And suburbs is where the housing bubble exploded, following that sameunsocial and unsustainable pattern that created it.Clearly, aside representing an objectionable way of living, the suburbanlife deeply affects the political culture: mass individualism leads inevitablyto the pursuit of self-conservation, refusing any kind of cultural differenceor conict, stigmatising the options for change.Yet, to simply dene the whole suburban phenomenon as a wrong and

undesirable urban practice would be an unreasonably biased opera-tion. As Robert Venturi and Denis Scott Brown teach us in their “Learningfrom Lewittown” experiment, suburbia bears a great deal of ambiva-lence within its white fences and neo-colonial facades. It is evidentlythe environment representing the sphere of the everyday, numbed bythe massive intrusion of global economy, and haunted by the paranoidconcern of stigmatizing the strange and of calculating the risk. Suburbia

is somewhere suspended between the secured, fully materialised utopiaof the perfect life and the alienation of anything possibly stirring its xity.At the same time though, it represents a potential incubator for vitality,veiled under the driveways and hidden behind the real-estate ads.In order to possibly activate liberating revolutions and radical creativity -hidden under the sterilized condition of the suburban taken-for-grantedalienation -, the everyday life must shake off its sense of ineluctable

necessity and predictability, and be re-politicised: let the fantasy andabsurdity of the suburban arise, in the strive to reinvent its deserted roadsas a new local place, a space for poetics, politics, and mythology.


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Architectural practice has always been accom-panied by architectural thinking. The forms andfolds all the theories, manifestoes and discourses onarchitecture and urbanism have engaged in are

by all means not a matter of interest in this context.What, on the contrary, is of interest here is the waythey have been interpreted as an advancement ofthought, thanks to a copious set of enthusiastic con-rmations or harsh negations provided by architectsand theorists, which we could le in the archive ofarchitectural critique. And it is exactly around thespeculation on the notion of critique, this mysteriousand mistreated category of modern thinking, where

I would like here to place here some constructiveconsiderations.In the attempt of gaining a deeper understanding of

the contemporary urban phenomena, it has beenshown how the discourse on architecture during the

Post-Modernity has critically assumed fascinatingpositions regarding the institutional, economic andsocial models inuencing the contemporary era,and the potential power of the architecture of the

city as tool for conrming or disrupting the state ofthings. Although the urban, capitalist, and modernevery day is pushing towards increased homoge-neity in daily life, the irreconcilable disjunctions bornin a post-industrial city full of anachronistic intersti-ces make it impossible to think of modernizationas only negative. To this regard, a certain insight isoffered by the work of the French philosopher andsociologist Michel de Certeau: in his ‘The Practice of

Everyday Life’ he outlines an analysis of the produc-

on criticism and crisis


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Utopia, Thomas More

tion and consumption mechanism – crucial cate-gories in my process of understanding –, stating theimpossibility of a full colonization of everyday life bythese induced paradigms. Therefore individuals andcollective entities, in their unconscious navigationthrough life, bear the capacity for potential alter -natives, since they arrange resources and choosemethods according to continuously creative arran-gements.At this point the role of the critical intellectuals


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gets to be questioned, as they frequently burythemselves in the ivory tower of Thought, foreclosingthemselves from looking at everyday life from aninside perspective. Evasion is a common approachof critical stances, as distancing philosophical spe-culations from the corruption of the real world feelscompelling to those who regard themselves theGuardians of Thought – every so often, critical prac-

tices reject the reality of things as a whole, unsubtlyforgetful of the multiplicity of shades achieved incontemporary society.Refuge into utopia represents a common outcomefor them, whether openly advocated or fearfullydisguised. Unfortunately, utopian discourse oftendries out into sterility, driven by such an unrealisticbias. Betraying the potential of disclosing a fresh per -spective on what is there, utopists, especially within

the eld of architectural thinking, often indulge in amoralistic and self-consolatory attitude, delusionalof the fact that dreaming about alternatives to thepresent reality should have nothing to do with thepresent itself and envisioning dreams of a lost para-dise. Utopias feed illusions, and generate disenchan-tment along with it, inevitably producing negativepolitical outcomes.In correction to that, Immanuel Wallerstein, Ameri-can sociologist and social scientist, puts forward theconcept of Utopistics: “Utopistics is the scrupulousevaluation of historical alternatives, the exercise ofour judgement on the rational materiality of alter -native possible historical systems. It is the balancedevaluation, rational and realistic, of human social


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systems, of their precluded possibilities, and of spa-ces open to human creativity. It is not the face of aperfect future (and inevitable), but that of an alter -native future, likely better, and historically possible(yet far from being certain). Thus, it is an exercise ofscience, politics and ethics, all at once”.Acknowledging this difference, it’s likely to afrmthat Utopistics determines political categories,

whereas utopia, yet driven by a political demand,conjectures spatial congurations that repress po-litics, dening a model of suspension of everythingthat is political.Playing with the subtle, yet founding, semanticsbetween utopia and Utopistics, another plausiblesimilitude comes to mind: critique and crisis. Etymo-logically kindred spirits, the concepts of critique andcrisis partake in the duplicity of their meaning, origi-

nally deriving from the Greek verb krino, conveyinga sense of separating and discerning. The two wordsshare the meaning of rupture point, both positivelyand negatively intended, a ritual of passage from aspecic situation to another.That’s the focal point of this exercise of the thought:the construction of a kaleidoscopic image –builtallegedly by weighing up the schizophrenic particlesof contemporary reality, remoulding and exaggera-ting them, displaying them in a catastrophic scena-rio – provocatively aims at fracturing common senseon reality, making unprincipled use of the germs ofcontradiction and criticality present and readablein the contemporary space. It stands for an actionof outdoing critique with crisis, and contempora-neously downsizing the unrealistic grandeur of uto-pia to the effective communicability of utopistics.


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“ B e a u t y t o d a y c a

n h a v e n o o t h e r m e a s u r e

e x c e p t t h e

d e p t h t o

w h i c

h a w o r k r e s o l v e s c o n t r a d i c t i o n s . A w o r k m u s t c u t

t h r o u g h

t h e c

o n t r a d i c t i o n

s a n d o v e r c o m e t h e m , n o t b y c o v e r i n

g t h e m

u p , b u t b y p

u r s u i n g t h e m

”

T h e o d o r A d o r n o


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The Analogous City is the caricature representation ofthe real city, or - better said - of real cities. Of them, it

is an anamorphic projection. it sees Sin City as a docu-mentary, not a ctional movie


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When we are kids, we are taught to tell real from imagina-ry. We are taught to stay in the world according to spatialand temporal categories, “here” or “there”, “now” or “nextweek”. We are taught that we should spend some time withother kids, instead of just hanging out with our imaginaryfriends.

Yet it is a fairly tricky concept, reality, and leaves us no choi-ce but to inquire into the delicate balance of elements thathelp to dene it. Ultimately every thinking being questionsthe very concept of reality, in terms of objectiveness andsubjectivity. Performing a slight diversion from this existentialloop, I will try to investigate a different possible way to lookat ‘what is supposed to be real’, by incorporating objectsand subjects, perceptions and ideas.As it has already been said it is not just a matter of represen-ting reality. It is about interpreting it. In the realm of archi-

tecture and urban design, the notion of context arises asthe ultimate horizon for confronting reality. Yet its denitionis rather peculiar, since on the one hand it shows a deepstrive for objectivity (context as physical and actual presen-ce of objects and events on a real, geographical territory,context as a unstable equilibrium between natural and builtenvironment, etc.), and on the other hand it is clearly advo-cated as a design tool, therefore bowed to the willingness ofthe Ego.But what if we engaged in the heretical attempt of blurring

those stiff, common sense driven barriers between object

enhancing Realityconceptualizing Context

[reality]n


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and subject, what if we acknowledged the possibility ofmixing things up?

It looks like Bernard Tschumi, in the third instalment of hisbook series ‘Event Cities’, provides a remarkable analysis ofthe relation between contexts, concepts and contents. Heprovides a series of statements, provocatively intended to stirthe hierarchy amongst these three overly used architecturalwords.

Hence, a relevant liberation of context - from its supposedcoincidence with actuality and objectivity – is performed,becoming inextricably intertwined with the very act of theproject.Moreover he states that “conicts, confrontations andcontaminations between concept, context and content

are part of the denition of contemporary urban culture,

and therefore of architecture”. According to him, “concep-tualizing the context means turning the idiosyncrasies andconstraints of a context into the driving force behind thedevelopment of an architectural idea”: architecture there-fore seems to ourish when exposed to crises and conicts,bearing the potential of transforming human stances intospatial practices, shifting the focus of the discipline from an

Contexts are framed and dened by concepts, just as thereverse is true

Context is not a fact; it is always a matter of interpretation

Context is often ideological and hence may be qualied

or disqualied by concepts

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activity of problem solving to one of problem nding. At this point, it comes as no surprise that I am here advoca-ting the conscious and proactive perturbation of the threenotions, concept, context and content. As a consequence,the ad hoc creation of a context is not necessarily an idealor de-materializing action. In fact I preach it to be an act ofhyper-realism, as the analogical context becomes a hyper-real avatar of the actual, real context. It is a sort of enhan-ced reality, it is an emphasis of the expression of realism.

At the same time, the construction of an analogical contextis an extreme synthesis of the present time, stemming fromthe belief that nostalgia of our past and utopian dreamsabout our future prevent us from looking at our present; thatsaid, the question doesn’t move away from consideringthe present as a mere contribution to the historical process,and aims at stressing the idea that through the dissection ofour current condition we can yield evolution, cherishing ourlegacy more brightly.Despite showing a commitment to a spatial and temporal

extreme realism, the analogical context possesses no localspecicity, as the look on reality is intended to show theo-retical and political mediation. As a matter of fact, in there-denition of the discourse on the context, I can’t help butconsider its adjustment to the scenario of a globalised world.

As outlined by Saskia Sassen, in her wide work on the socio-logy of globalisation, the materiality of the global processes,in terms of economic, social and institutional issues, is thorou-ghly embodied in cities: the political discourse, at a point inwhich the world witnesses disintegrated national borders, is

downsized to the urban level. Cities which, according to Sas-sen, are arranged in a network of ‘world cities’ and ‘capitalcities’, become the political horizon in the globalised era.Though they represent geopolitical symbolic forms, theseglobal urban entities lack in strongly identied places, as aresult of political and geographical complexity in terms of


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regional and transnational cooperation.Furthermore, Sassen states the urgency of a reafrmationof centrality of the cities, both as gravitational points for theeconomic system and as institutional and symbolic fulcrumin the apparent space-endlessness of the contemporarycity. Almost paradoxically, the paradigms of globalisationre-produce the conict, once internationally based, on thelocal level of the space of the city, inducing actual urbanconict: it is in those cities where critical mass has accumu-

lated and signicant actions have been enacted that thepolitical issue manifests triumphantly and is displayed.Thus, it comes as no surprise that the choice for an analo-gous context falls in the realm of the urban, indeed aimingat dening plausible readings capable of completing aproject in the mundane context of the everyday.In conclusion, I would like to quote the Italian philosopher

Giorgio Agamben,: “the only interesting way, or anyhowpossible, of thinking of something as a sort of biography, oras a relationship with places, between life and places, is

cartography. Usually biographies are linked to time, yet timeis way too intimate and relies on memory… for a forgetfulperson like me, I prefer space, and places. Then it is better toproject life on a big imaginary city.”

Is the contemporary image of the city representing the contem-porary image - and substance - of the citizenship?

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“In the correspondencebetween Freud and Jung, thelatter denes the concept ofanalogy in the following way:I have explained that ‘logical’thought is what is expressed inwords directed to the outside

world in the form of discourse,‘analogical’ thought is sensedyet unreal, imagined yet silent;it is not a discourse but rathera meditation on themes of thepast, an interior monologue.Logical thought is ‘thinking inwords’. Analogical thoughtis archaic, unexpressed, and

practically inexpressible inwords. I believe I have found

in this denition a differentsense of history conceived ofnot simply as fact, but ratheras a series of things, of effec-tive objects to be used by thememory or in a design…”

Aldo Rossi. An analogicalarchitecture (1976)

>The Analogous City is an analytical instrumcomposed of elements that are real, ideal

analogy


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nt, it is the construction of a global context,symbolic, iconic, immaterial, immanent<

1. Campus Martius, G.B. Piranesi

2. La Città Analoga, A.Rossi

3. Via Appia, G.B. Piranesi

4. Roma Interrotta, J. Stirling

5. Gotham City

6. Exodus, R. Koolhaas

14

3

2 65

question of method


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>The Analogous city is demonstration by absurdity,made up to achieve an image of new relationships, not

just of opposition but of hybridization and alliance<

glorification of waste

compenetration


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“It is the desperate momentwhen we discover that this em-

pire, which had seemed to usthe sum of all wonders, is anendless, formless ruin, that cor-ruption’s gangrene has spre-

ad too far to be healed by oursceptre, that the triumph overenemy sovereigns has made usthe heirs of their long undoing.Only in Marco Polo’s accountswas Kublai Khan able to di-scern, through the walls and to-

wers destined to crumble, thetracery of a pattern so subtleit could escape the termites’gnawing.”

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1972


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From the UNHABITAT ‘State of the World’s Cities:

2010/2011’ report: “The United Nations predicts

that by the year 2030, more people in every

region of the world will live in urban than in rural

areas, even in Asia and Africa, which are now

the least urbanized parts of the globe. Our sharedfuture will largely come about through the social,

political, economic, and cultural dynamic that is

urbanization – the convergence of human activi-

ty and aspiration in all cities, regardless of size”.

.generalities


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No real identity denes the analogouscity, identity is a fake.It’s eye-lifted, liposuctioned, designer-clothed.It’s a corpse in disguise.Its only true nature is waste, garbage,by-product.The city no longer expresses a place, buta behavioural model, a condition that istransmitted by merchandise.

.identity


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In the Analogous City it is all about urbanism, and it reliesupon the paradox of smoothness and complexity. Marketsmoothness takes shape within the city in clustered urban

complexes, radically disconnected from the city and highlyconnected to global infrastructure; formal complexity mimics

the real complexities enhancing them. It is merely a tool tonumb people’s minds from what complexity really means and

truly entails. A visual complexity is a rhetorical stance of thestatus quo, complexity as the ‘New Unknown’.

.urbanism


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.politicsIt was once the agora, now it’s the market.

Find out the seven small differences betweenthe pictures.


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.farewell tothe program

technocracy + financial program = perfect masterplan

The Mother Board is the perfect masterplan, deterministicallyorganized, efcient, neat. The Analogous City is a Planning

Temple, where, in praise of technocracy, the only program isnancial.


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Space in the Analogous City is strictlymonitored: nothing escapes from the

everywhere present security cameras.Urban space is shaped to allow only what

is expectable and what is safe.

.marble cctv


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powered by


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The Analogous City has forgotten public life. Neverthe-less, it is keen on having Public Space©.

As a city council, you can order Public Space© online,choosing among several features and nishes. And

you are guaranteed a winning team of professionalsto set it up for you, and they deliver anywhere in theworld. A team of artists, publicists, marketing expertsand engineers will take care of every minute detail,from lighting to plumbing to advertising. They’re life-

proof formula has acquired wide esteem among citygovernments all over the globe. It is clean, it is safe, it

is energy efcient and self-maintained, it is paved, it iscovered, it is sunny, it is anything you ask for. And it is

highly customizable too, with optional Public Art©, youcan choose from the American Pop Art Style, includingreproductions of Oldenburg, Calder, Koons, or you can

opt for murals and guerrilla-style installations, originalcopies from Basquiat, Banksy, Space Invader and

many others. You can even have your own wrapped-up, Christo-like monument.

You also get to choose the Public Green©, rangingfrom centuries-old Mediterranean Olive trees, to ce-

dars of Lebanon, to red maples from Japan.

.public space


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> Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brownonce told us the story of ducks and deco-rated sheds. We can now identify a furthercategory, the apotheosis of duck and de-corated shed all in one: the brand. In bran-ded architecture the brand gives form tothe actual building, it doesn’t simply cover it.


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.architecture


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aesthetical epoché

Contemporary culture no longer keeps track of its history in texts orwords, as much as it does in images. Along with it, the late-capitalistcity is obsessed with the image delivered through its archi-tecture: buildings and spaces can’t help but be victims of this para-digm perpetrated by the dictatorship of the market. Yet image culturebears a huge potential: images are an innite source of meanings and

possibilities and it would be pointless to diminish their constructive might.On the whole they store a capacity of stimulating vision, when interpre-ted as a starting point or instrument, not as an aim to achieve.Moreover history itself is contradicting the paradigm of planning as anoutdated tool of grasping reality in its multiple forms, and the overallidea of the possibility to structurally determine the space of the city as animage of completeness and efciency: it is impossible in these days andage to create a city in the old modernist planning tradition of a static,hierarchically organized, top-down approach, where the focus is on thenal image.

As engaged with the responsibility of determining the urban space,architects will have to bring across a political stance, a positioning, or aconstant becoming, within a project that goes beyond the agenda ofglobal capitalism. They can’t just map the existing dynamic programsfound within the milieu of the multitude, resample and give them a spa-tial and temporal expressivity. They will rst have to invent new nonlinearprograms on top of, within and by it, second to renew from within, andthird dare to have a say – a project in the literal meaning of “throwingsomething forward” – in relation to it, in order to create other options tochoose from besides the ones the market provides.

In the Eclectic Atlases, Stefano Boeri suggests that in order to stimulate adebate and to achieve a re-foundation of the “themes of the discourse”(intended as the general categories of judgement within the commonculture), it is necessary to rstly act on the “themes of the sight”. The“variety” of the contemporary urban condition, nourished by distancedassociations of the relationship between individuals and urban space,asks for strategies of observation – and consequently of vision, not ofmere planning – different from the ones experimented in the Europeancity. Strategies that cannot rely on the restitutions of an aesthetic chaosperceived from a zenithal perspective, in fact they propose a variation

of the point of view, a sort of oblique perspective towards reality.As a consequence, it is necessary to trigger the process of “city being” –which goes beyond the deterministic creation of images within the city- according to a double level, in the motto of “think big and act small”.Envisioning from within reality enhances the possibility of questioning it, of

mapping the analogous c

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experimenting its potentials and drawbacks, of politically implementingalternatives and liberations. In such a way, visions overcome spatial di-mensions, engaging reality as a whole, yet at the same time they main-tain focus on addressing it as a sum of micro-decisions, an ensamble ofpotential conditions to be activated.Envisioning results in an aesthetic epoché - an amoral suspension of the

judgement -, based a priori on a pre-contemporary image of the city:

the notions of “what should be” and “how it should be like” are refused,as the action within existing reality aims to disrupt its consolidated structu-res.As the artist Max Ernst once said, Beauty is the chance meeting upon adissecting table of a sewing-machine with an umbrella.

ty


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Michael Sorkin

The City will not export its waste or import itswater.The City will grow its food.The City will not emit carbon—it will be green.Literally: The equivalent of 100% of the City’ssurface area will be green.The City’s buildings will be cross-ventila-ted.There will be balconies, terraces, and gardens forall who want them.It will be easy to get to the City’s many sportsfields and parks.There will be sufficient mature trees for everycitizen to sit under one alone.The City will not interrupt the flow of thecountryside through it.The City’s contiguous territory will coincide with

its ecological footprint.The City will embrace biodiversity.There may be foxes, certainly worms.Certain microbes may be disfavored.The City will be healthy.The City will love its children, who will play wellwith others.The City will love its old.The City will love its strivers and its indolent.

The City will love its others and its differently-abled.The City will love everyone, for Chrissakes.The City will get over any unrequited love. It’snone of the City’s business.All langu ages will be s poken in theCity.This will not necessarily affect official docu-ments.

The City will have a special jones for cookery andthere will be many restaurants.Quite a few of them will deliver.The City will respect the views of its citizens—political and scopic.T h e r e w i l l b e l a u g h t e r i n t h e s t r e e t s .The City will revere its great accomplishments andits tiny accomplishments.T h e C i t y w i l l h a v e a l o n g m e m o r y .


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For two centuries global urbanization has progressed at a rapid pace. Around 1800,2% of a billion people worldwide lived in cities. In 2000 it was about 50%of approxi-mately 6.5 billion people. It is estimated that by 2050 it will be about 75% of some

8.5 billion people. However, not all cities are growing. Between 1950 and 2000 morethan 350 large cities experienced, at least temporarily, signicant declines in popu-

ation. In the 1990s more than a quarter of large cities worldwide shrank. The numberof shrinking cities is continuously increasing, even though urban growth will continue

to dominate in coming decades. An end is in sight, however: around 2070-2100,the world population will reach its zenith and the process of urbanization will largelyreach a balance, and urban shrinkage will be a process as common as it was befo-

re industrialization began.

from shrinking cities, exhibition atthe Venice Biennale, 2006


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Over the last century, the phenomenonof sprawling cities has widely infested themajority of Western countries as a com-mon and wide-spread settlement system,fed by economic growth and celebratedas the modern paradigm of freedom and

well-being. The discourse on the city haslong ago started to raise questions re-garding the limit confronting the deliriousinnite urban expansion, identifying thenecessity of nding a new reading for theunprecedented quantity of objects pun-ctuating the landscape and irrationallydevouring the territory.The theme of the edge of the city and ofthe undistinguishable boundary betwe-

en urban and rural has lled decades ofarchitectural literature, resulting in thestigmatization of suburbs and peripheralurban areas. For sure, they represent a sortof anti-city, a negation of the spatial rela-tionships of density and proximity typicalof the compact city, as they are somehowconsidered failed architectural examples,suspended in an undened spatial andtemporal in-between.

It is interesting to note, however, that su-burbs and peripheries are the actual livingspace of a great deal of urban dwellers,places that they call home. Herein lies,without doubt, the potential for a certaintype of urban identity, a sense of belon-

1-2-3-4-5. Detroit, Ghost City

shrinking cities

and subprime suburbs

1

4

3

2 5


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ging to this space. The empty space re-presents the seat of this potential.Rangingfrom the vacant lots to the dismissed buil-dings, from neglected parks to the waste-land of the infrastructure, void should beaddressed by strategies aiming to afrmits meaning of being public. Public spacemore than a space that is of collectiveproperty just because it is left out from thereal-estate market.

Moreover the phenomenon of the shrin-king population of former industrial-basedcities and their consequent pervasive con-

dition of dereliction and vacancy showshow the theme of the urban (and subur -ban) void needs attention and rethinking.Through the reconversion of the existingconstruction trauma, it is necessary tode-mythicise Modern and Post-Modern fe-tishes, acknowledging the possibility of the

different scales against the ruling para-digm of the extra-large scale, allowing forcodes of exclusion, denition of enclaves,and schizophrenic consumption of theterritory.Acknowledging this failure of formal andhighly structured urban design strategies,

foreclosure architecture


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1-2-3. Schemes for

foreclosed houses public re-appropriation

4-5-6. Public invades former private space

1

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CONSUMPTION AND PRODUCTION SPACEas a possibiliy for for public qualityand intensity to arise.


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it is interesting to look at the problem from

a different perspective, considering thepossibility of learning from informal prac-tices. Informality represents the need forover-organised and afuent societies tond conicting, if not literally free, modesof practice. These forms of occasionalurbanities are a constructive operation

of appropriation and re-interpretation ofthe left-behind space and of the wastedarchitecture, sharing Gilles Clément idea

of a residual landscape of space with highbiological vitality.Informal and occasional architecturesare often triggered by crises, either socialor economic, andthey bear a politicalscope, as these are eloquent situations ofa rebellious subjectivity. Mostly they stemfrom practices of dissent and practices ofsurvival, and they are mainly based on acollective and intense understanding of

the public space. Public space becomesa source of equity and freedom at thesame time, revealing the micro-politicalnature of the poetic deeds performed inthe urban space, through the abolishmentof the communal illusion as nal objec-tive for society. The reection on publicspace will focus on the mechanism throu-gh which subjectivity aspires to a full lifebeyond the private perimeter of romantic

intimacy.What needs to be put forward throughbottom-up strategies is political con-sciousness. The apolitical, senseless, unat-tended public space in the contemporarycity needs to be stirred, transformed into

1. Multi-functional platform dening diversity

within the retail space

2. Alternative shopping (from Storefront for Art

and Architecture, New York)

2

1

take me out to the mall


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something undetermined again, full ofsurprise and adventure.It needs to be politicised again in thesense that it has to become a necessaryspace for people to live in, to make it partof their everyday life. In order to stir thenumbed public realm, random programsand unexpected objects become narrati-ves of a social landscape. Dreams at theturn of a corner.

1. Installation by Diller-Scodio, NYC

2. Picture by Mark Jenkins

3. Built and open space ratio

1

3

2

Strip-Tease


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derelict ar


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hitecture

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1-2-3. Voids in the city, pictures by Jodi Bernardò

4-5-6. Pictures by Kobas Laksa

1

5

4

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what’s with thTraditionally, we think about public space in terms of streets, squares andparks. In the contemporary city, the capability of giving a public contentto the urban space has been lost, as to some extent urban design prac-tices have triggered a privatization of public space and a multiplication

of gated communities. Regardless the property of it, urban space hasincreasingly become a capitalistic space. At a micro scale, the capitali-stic space is bombarded under promotional pressure, continuously car -ried out through all communication means and media, transforming thehome into an absolute centre of a consumerist culture of the ephemeral.In his The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch identied the housing unit as


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neighbourhood?the stable and durable element in the urban fabric: by means of that, the urge arises forreinterpreting the spaces and the gures of the open space of the urban neighbourho-od, questioning the role and the potential of the streets connecting housing blocks, of

the small neglected squares along them, and of the neighbourhood parks of the semi-private inner courtyards.Given their features of proximity and in-between-ness, the spaces abovementionedrepresent a valuable resource, yet it cannot be expected from the public to simply bethere, waiting passively for the arrival of cultural commodities. The public is a provisio-nal construction in permanent mobility that can be described in terms of its evolving

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relations to a space in permanent mobility, not only physically but alsosocially and politically. Therefore, a renewed approach to architecture

and urban planning cannot merely be initiated by centralised struc-tures, and governmental bodies. It must, rather, include ‘microscopicattempts’ at the collective and individual level, reecting their desireswithin the micro-social segments of public space: neighbourhood asso-ciations, informal teams, self-managed organisations, small institutions,alternative spaces, and from individuals themselves. Urban developmentpolicies need to learn how to make provisions for such attempts.The micro-dimension of public works’ interventions (i.e. manufactured

objects, improvised urban furniture, cleaning and gleaning, etc.), bringsprecision, detail, and localisation within the public space. Additionallythese activities are effective in their attempts to change and transformspaces. The scale of proximity, the small-scale devices and the walkingdistances that demarcate the area of intervention, brings another quality

to the networks and the relationships between participants. They increa-se the intensity of living, aiming to dene pro-active spaces so individualsmay nd a way of sublimating their subjectivities into the collective, invi-ting them to rediscover possibilities of being social, outside of enclaves,.Struggling against the concept of public space as a container for pe-ople and ordering agent of conict, but rather an afrmation of the

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elements of inconstancy and inconsistency that the city itself generates,still spatial proximity isn’t enough to grant the denition of acting spaces:the project of space in transition has to acknowledge crisis as a state ofproductive emergency, as a specic awareness of temporality, refusinga nal and completely determined image of architecture and urbanspace.Raymond Williams says that “however dominant a social system may be,

the very meaning of its domination involves a limitation or selection of

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the activities it covers, so that by denition it cannot exhaust all social ex-perience, which therefore always potentially contains space for alterna-tive intentions which are not yet articulated as a social institution or evenproject.” So freedom is not something that has to be established outsidereality – by being critical towards society – but only by and through alter -native practice experiments within a given situation.


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dep re s sed


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For decades, industrial buildings were thesymbol of economic development of theWestern countries, as well as the conrma-

tion of the capitalist model of production.Several urban organisms have develo-ped around this model, facing a suddengrowth in their extension and an increase

in their wealth. It was the years of a certainpositivistic faith in production, and Modernarchitecture and planning represented itsspatial counterpart: activity zoning was aruling paradigm in the urban design strate-gies, determining as a result huge industrial

enclaves along urban boundaries as longas mono-functional housing districts tohost the growing working classes.Gradually over the last forty years, fa-cing the information technology revolu-tion, Western countries have decided to

alienate a great deal of their productiveforce, concentrating on realms based oncreative and innovative production aswell as on nancial speculation. Contem-

porary Western cities live almost comple-tely disentangled from the physical pro-duction of goods, both agricultural andindustrial, and rely on a service-orientedsociety fuelled by retail commerce.As a result, European and Americancities found themselves with previouslyextended industrial compounds whoseproduction and employment capacitywas dramatically shrinking, and facing the

reality of repairing these wounds in theurban fabric. The discourse around dismis-sed industrial areas dominated, and still

p roduc t i on


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dominates, the debate on urban renewal,often resulting in gentrication processesproducing fashionable neighbourhoodsand enclaves. In his book devoted tothe production of space, Henri Lefebvreunderlines the abstract character ofcapitalistic space “which acts as a tool or

domination”. The methods and scenarioswhich try to be “creative” and “attracti-ve” (by offering Theme Parks, Urban Re-newal Zones, “City Branding” operationsetc.) are often a failure because space isabove all considered in terms of nancialyield and its subjects are manipulated toaccomplish just that. Capitalist economycontinues to create de-subjectivated,consumerist, and abstract urban spaces.

The early capitalist model of productionwas characterized by a strict hierarchyand the need for wide working surfaces,

and it represented a social model: indu-strial enclaves were gravitational centres,spatial attractors in terms of ows of pe-ople, goods, and money, set in strategicterritorial nodes of a larger productive net,and concentrated within their guardedperimeter of technological and logistic

facilities able to grant productivity and

1. Traditional industrial production model

2. “Exploded” production model,based upon public space, at the scale of the city

21


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1. Squatted Building in Amsterdam

2. Re-functionalised industrial space

for new productive use

2

1

efciency.Nowadays it would be absolutely ana-chronistic to consider the possibility ofre-installing such intruding mechanisms inthe structure of Western cities, yet it’s alsotrue that, given the current economic andnancial climate, agricultural manufactu-

re and industrial production have provenable to grant a certain stability in times ofcrisis. Therefore it is to some extent neces-sary to re-develop productive paradigmswithin the space of the city: one couldbend the production model by explo-ding it, micronizing its program in order

to activate the numbed public space ofWestern cities, and intensify it by means ofa productive network.

As a result of a widely spread productiveprogram, engaging the scale of the cityand settling on public space, the possi-bility of determining bio-political produc-tion arises, intended as the stimulation ofcooperative subjectivities and the enhan-cement of micro-economic cycles. Accor -ding to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negriin their work Commonwealth, “making thecommons” is a synonym for enhancing

productivity of social cooperation, byproviding the infrastructures necessary for


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public amenitylane

glasshouse

studio living

workshoplab


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THE STRIP AS A CONNECTING TRAIL... the street as sour ting heterotopias.

acting spaces that become spaces to question everybarriers, its imposed temporalitiessynaptic space

bio-political production; making the commons has to be understood, then, not as thecreation of marginal communities that share resources producing alternative subcultu-ral forms of life, but rather as a process in the centre of the contemporary metropolis,with the potential of becoming a radical process of de-territorialisation that could take

society, through capitalism, beyond capitalism. The commons would therefore be thosemilieus of shared resources that are generated by the participation of the many and


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of passibilities, connec-

ay life, its potential, its

multiple, which may constitute the essential productive fabric of the 21st century metro-polis.

open air library / shelter / performing space


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In his The Anti-City, Stefano Boeri sug-gests that, in order to produce inno-

vation in the governance of a city,it is crucial to unhinge bureaucraticstructures and rhetoric, introducingatypical and lateral logics of peoplecoming from realms outside of politics.He acknowledges the possibility that

the spaces of our cities can becomeactual laboratories of a new fashionof making politics. It is an implicit, butvery powerful act of delegating: thisnew political mode asks architectureto be able to do what serious politicsshould always be able to do: buildingvisions for the future, set on the dailypresent.

Moreover, as Saskia Sassen remarks inher work, globalization has triggeredprocesses that make cities, as part of

a global network, as the only possiblehorizon for a development of politicaldiscourse, given that states and na-tions have somehow alienated theirsovereignty for the sake of globalisedinterests.On this basis, projects for the city can’thelp but stem from a political appro-ach, embodied in the idea of the cityas an habitable space: the architec-tural project has to posit itself as aninstrument of political reproducibility,

battling the idea of architecture asa neutral, smooth, descriptive andmerely communicative instrument. Thismeans subtracting the discourse on ar-chitecture from the aesthetical milieuand fro-accessory role, and re-introdu-cing it in the political milieu as urbanideology, a vision of the city foundedon use and not on mere consumption.

Architecture should be politically in-volved in exploiting the folds and thecriticalities of the status quo in order topursue the questioning of the consoli-dated structures, and the proposal forplausible and localized alternatives, ashybridization of theory, activism andreal practices in the construction ofthe space for the citizenship.

Stanford Kwinter, in its Requiem: ForThe City At The End Of The Millennium,interestingly quotes the concept ofplane of immanence proposed byDeleuze and Guattari, suggesting thenecessity for architecture to engage

visioning


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actual visions, instead of deterministicplanning, as a plane of immanence“endowed thought itself with a newrole: its task now would be to disen-gage structures from the real materialworld and to set them in promiscuousmotion, tracking their trajectories andmigrations from one state of contactand reengagement to another. The“abstract” and the “concrete” fromnow on would have lives of their own,participating in a perpetual ballroomdance where partners are exchanged

promiscuously, according to design”.The public dimension of architecturedoesn’t only reside in its function it is

also determined on a symbolic level,by its ability of transferring – through itsmere presence – a message of atten-

tion and a cure towards local commu-

nities. Public space as the backboneof society in the bi-directional rela-tionship with civitas, which eventuallybrings identication, as construction ofthe public space can only arise ac-cording to the development of civitas:as Plato would put it, there is the law,and then there is the ineffable. Civitasis the category to nourish in order togrant democracy and social liberty,expressed in the paradigms of pro-

duction and agonism, as the idea of acity form and city order is the existen-tial and foundational horizon in therepresentation of the civitas through

public space: it seeks a sort of overall

result obtained by hybridizing GeniusLoci (spirit of the place), Zeitgeist (spiritof the time) and collective uncon-sciousness.


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dissident ironingdiller & scofidio


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To some extent, an architectural con-cern should then be to transform thespace of political representation into

an actual civil and habitable space;according to Guattari and Deleuze,micropolitics and macropolitics are noseparable things, they continuously in-tertwine, and the problem is not abouttaking the side of one or the other, as

much as nding a way of articulatingtheir relationship.Supporting that there is the concept of

heterotopia, proposed by the Frenchphilosopher Michel Foucault, as thattype of counter-site capable of juxta-posing elements that are in themsel-ves incompatible, and establishing abreak in ordinary time. Foucault makesuse of a metaphor to explain the me-aning of heterotopia: “The ship is theheterotopia par excellence. In civili-

zations without boats, dreams dry up,espionage takes the place of adven-ture, and the police take the place ofpirates”.

Architecturally and spatially speaking,alienating and confusing programsbecomes a trajectory beyond clichés

with the possibility for radical optionsto emerge, re-activating political andhistorical discourse through crisis. It’san actual coup d’état, put into prac-tice on a spatial level, driven by thepowerful tools of architecture: institu-tional space becomes porous to thepublic and the political, acquiring thefeatures of an architectural collective

incubator, where the intertwinementof interests and activities takes intoaccount the productive paradox

of confrontation, where oppositionalways implies the acknowledgementof the adversary.This becomes the claim for a renewedrepresentation of public space withinthe city, as a reaction to the existing

liberal forces that today pattern thecity as an agglomeration of individua-lities.


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architectural

coup d’état


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1 Coliseum Elevation, Superstudio2. Facade Patchwork

3. Michigan Theatre, Detroit

1

3

2


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chimerasArchitecture becomes a matter ofdissensus, making aesthetics becomea form of politics, making action beco-me form. It strives against the concep-tion of the city as an unknown entity,theatre of uncontrollable and unintel-ligible social and economic forces, a

boundless, sprawling and self-organi-zing organism in a seemingly biologi-cal state of ux, deprived of any politi-cal intention. The city is re-afrmed asan intelligible point of gravity for thehuman needs of sociality and repre-sentation, the city as a real, tangibleand dense form is ever-present andstill constitutes a crucial demand of re-search for architects. The city must berediscovered as a strongly identiableplace, a crucial laboratory for urbanconsciousness and as a constructibleand intelligible physical form: this has

to inevitably result in the investigationof the relationship between the indivi-dual and the process of history.Architectures acquire the form ofchimeras, machines of production ofsubjects, resulting from relationships ofpower and relationships of knowledge,

as citizenship nds a way of practicingthe right to participate in collectiverituals and to gain access to publicspaces, as political spaces.Architecture becomes the embodi-ment of what Deleuze and Guattarirefer to as singularities: “singularitiessignal and constitute a phase muta-tion and are set

Rethink WhatIf

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