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urbi et orbi |
URBI ET ORBI
Religion as a tool of urban design.
"[Architecture] can and does produce positive effects when [...] intentions of the architect coincide with the real practice of people [...]"
Michael Foucault 1
"The cities of an experimental culture will be formed on inconsistent patterns, and will produce them. These will be their chief products, the result of a way of living driven by the need for clarity on shifting landscapes of the ephemeral."
Lebbeus Woods 2
When the profession of arkhitekton was born it was all about proportions and orders, the new ideas in city planning were Euclidean geometry and orthogonal grid. Five centuries later Vitruvius advised to plan new cities on the grid of a military camp. The only tools necessary to design it were a ruler, a set square and a level.
In the 19th century the classical foundations of architecture become unable to support the demands of modern life any more, the matters of built environment are taken from the hands of architects by "engineers and builders of bridges, roads, viaducts, railways, as well as the polytechnicians" 3. Architecture and city planning enter political discourse - built environment becomes no longer an accumulation of architectural objects but a tool for managing society.
Approach to design shifts from geometrical to numerical. New tools like calculus and structural engineering are applied to solving design problems. The new paradigm requires new instruments: ruler becomes slide ruler, compass is replaced by French curve.
Architecture's proportions become precise numbers. The machine for living 4 follows every step of its inhabitants, precisely measured and timed in ergonomic labs. Urban planning maximises productivity and leisure by placing working and sleeping in separate districts. The city and citizens become unified in one mathematic equation.
Well into modernism the equation seems to be missing the infamous human factor. Structuralism with its motto "built form follows social structure" is proposed as a remedy. It introduces basic linguistics and principles of biological growth into architect's toolbox. Building becomes less of a machine and more of an organism which evolution involves inhabitants' participation. A collection of buildings form an urban ecosystem. If people were policed by the 19th century city, in the 20th they are allowed to interact with it.
The most prominent response to failures of modernism is however poststructuralist architecture. Its seemingly playful surface hides a serious under-structure which requires more advanced techniques of design and construction than natural tectonics of modernism and structuralism. Without borrowing Bezier curves from car industry and combining it with CAD software from naval engineering it wouldn't be possible.
Computers open a new chapter in both architectural design and city planning. While architects use it as an improved drawing board, urban designer input large amounts of data and run simulations where a computer model of a design problem can find its own solution.
It was a matter of time before architects adopted this way of thinking. Even before CAD, designers used natural form finding based on wooden splines, hanging chains or soap bubbles. Some simulators were thus direct transcripts of those experiments, other were descendants of multi-agent simulators used in biology and social sciences. The latter achieved unimaginable emergent solutions by defining simple rules of interaction within a swarm, but still turned into painstakingly constructed static structures or at most computer driven smart homes. And while smart city as extension only means responding in real-time to critical conditions, smart materials already point back at the analog form finding experiments of modernism, the roots of structuralism and the postmodern counterculture.
Hippie earthbag domes on the deserts of Arizona, combining space habitat with vernacular architecture, merge desire to translate social structure into built environment with structural engineering. But instead of simulating it, the form is produced by real-life interaction of human, material and environmental agents . It's not necessarily an architecture without architects, but definitely against state control and central planning, an attitude that erupted in a city with long tradition of government controlled urban design - Paris.
The May 1968 events in France were not only a rebellion against the state, but also against the city which realised its policy. Among the protesters where the Situationist International, opposing an oppressive modern conditions with situation, a construct made of objects and people (borrowed from Sartre's theater of situations) which can liberate participants' perception of reality. Situationists propose a city as a vague framework where inhabitants combine play with construction, where an ever changing labyrinth of buildings makes it impossible to follow a mechanistic way of life.
We have seen this concept applied in architecture and urban design: from situationist New Babylon and constructivist Narkomfin, through blazing architecture of Coop Himmelblau and Archigram's instant city, Tschumi's event cities and freespace of Lebbeus Woods, Spuybroek's proprioception and architectural body of Arakawa/Gins, to installations of EXYZT, microinterventions and urban acupuncture. But none of the projects above produced a major change, simply because they stop at designing the physical part of the situation, wishing it will transform the human part. Design of social structure does not enter designers toolbox.
Meanwhile businessmen and politicians adopted design thinking in their practice. The very groups that architects blame for the shortcomings of urban planning. And rightly so, market and state policy together create sprawl, move production in and out of the city, even build cities in the middle of the desert.
Yet there is an even more powerful force and it manifests itself in the cities today more than ever - religion. The power of religion lies in emergence - it creates a set of rules and practices for a swarm, deeply internalized by its agents. In this sense, not only great religious systems fall under this definition, but also various philosophies, political doctrines and subcultures. Even lifestyles, diets and hobbies inspire devotion akin to religious. Everything that gives people purpose and unites their actions under a common vision shares the emergent power of religion.
If we take a look at the urban population we can distinguish not only the traditional religious divides: the Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims but also new tribes: cyclists vs drivers, hipsters vs tracksuit boys, vegans vs paleos, prochoicers vs prolifers. These groups form around ideas unrelated to the city and exist within their respective filter bubbles 5 - their members keep in touch only with fellow believers. When random interaction in public space is seen as suspicious or dangerous there's no place for serendipity. There's place for fear and growing friction between groups that share one physical space yet they ideologically drift apart.
Terrorism is the most violent sign of these processes. Unlike regular crime it strikes at the very idea of public space inherited from Greek polis - a safe place for interaction of citizens and production of consensus. The answer to terror so far is increasing top-down control: more surveillance and less public liberties. However combined with fear it might in the long run undermine the ability of the city to produce not only knowledge and innovation, but emergent phenomena which shape the core of human culture.
Cities formed as nodes of exchange of goods and information. Then they became a place of industrial production, but soon it moved out to factories in developing countries. Now services sector currently employing majority of urban population is gradually moving into the realm of the internet, while production becomes a domain of machines.
Cities change but a unique accumulation of people in physical proximity, unlike both scarcely populated countryside and virtual social networks, always underlies the forces latent and manifested within them.
We see these forces spring up to life when state control is limited: bazaars in post-soviet era, favelas in growing megacities, barricades during protests. Spaces like fablabs, hackerspaces and urban farms are symptoms of change. Airbnb, Uber, Couchsurfing, food coops and countless other platforms try to unlock a dormant potential, but continue to struggle - what served industrial production doesn't necessarily apply to sharing economy and production of knowledge. The industrial city turned traditional swarms (rural families and clans) into a collection of alienated individuals. To succeed it needs to turn back into a swarm, but on new rules.
Citizens would need to reach out of their bubbles and interact with one another, to follow a simple set of rules and practices of interaction. To look a stranger in the eye, to smile, to recognize each other as humans and fellow city dwellers. To overcome the urge of isolating oneself from the city's bustle and the need for perfect order for the sake of realizing the potential of human built environment, so often appearing in the visionary sketches of architects. As ambiguous as it may sound, if a science-fiction writer managed to create a religion with ten million followers maybe architects can do it too.
1 "Space, Knowledge and Power" in "The Foucault Reader", ed. Paul Rabinow, New York, 1984
2 "Lebbeus Woods, Anarchitecture: Architecture Is a Political Act", Architectural Monographs, No. 22, London, 1992
3 Michael Foucault, op. cit
4 Phrase "The house is a machine for living in!" comes from Le Corbusier's "Towards An Architecture", New York, 1927
5 Term coined by internet activist Eli Pariser in "The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You", New York, 2011
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