Franck argues for a new urbanism that focuses on the middle ground of sustainable, compact neighbourhoods rather than focusing only on architecture as individual green buildings, or the city at an metropolitan scale.  I’ve heard this urban commons recently called the “middle landscape”, not detached sprawl, not the hyper-urban central business district but  livable, mid-scaled sets of buildings that demand less energy while remaining functional and convivial.  These example of Asian cities, however, suggests that as the planet moves toward an uban population of around 4.5 billion, it will be in the style and density of cities such as Jakarta, Hong Kong and Shanghai rather than the European ideal of Parisian cityscapes of 6 to 8 storeys.

– Rob

Review Essay by Jim Morrow

Ecological Urbanism is, literally and figuratively, a thick text that merges traditional academic articles with media and design to lay-out the foundation for a new, ecologic approach to urban planning. Its purpose, as the book’s back cover promises, is to draw-up “an imaginative and practical method for addressing existing as well as new cities.”

In many previous texts on urbanism and environmental matters, the city is treated as an unremediable site of critique. It’s seen as an environment that is a ‘blight’, ‘decayed’ or ‘ruined’. And this style of critique has seemingly become a default method in most discussions of urban ecology. And beyond being bleak and depressing, such discussions rarely wander from an apocalyptic narrative that views ecology as a material object – like a verdant place set apart from the machinic life of humanity – when it is, instead, a construct of relations, whether it be human or plant or toxin.

Fourier Phalanastère (Thanks to George Mason Univ.)

Ecological Urbanism has a unique view of the city. Rather than being built on critique, it tries to be conceptual and focus on applications that promote a “new ethics and aesthetics of the urban.” The text’s numerous entries aim to re-purpose ‘design practise’ – a term meant to bring together multiple disciplinary fields that work on the urban, namely architecture, landscape design, planning, and transport – as a functional avant-garde whose aesthetic values can transform the life of a city.

But there are several limits to Ecological Urbanism’s “cross-disciplinary and collaborative” method of blending high academic and aesthetic. The most noticeable limit is the text itself, which often comes-off as a mash-up that lacks coherent purpose. For example, the book includes an entry by Rem Koolhaas, who goes the full Al Gore and mails-in a PowerPoint that has text and visuals that do not reproduce well outside of their native habitat of the lecture hall. Additionally, in trying to balance moral imperative, the aesthetic, and the applied – which may be the design equivalent of Lacan’s psychoanalytic order – the text’s entries read and view as though they are holding-back, unsure of whether they want to create a “future city” or redesign what’s already been built. And this may be a premonition of a common problem if ecological urbanism, the design practise, was to spread off its pages and into the streets.

1. Utopia

Given the growing impossibility of imagining a more sustainable city, it is best to start with a topic Ecological Urbanism did not discuss: Utopia. It’s not that they were wrong to focus on realistic applications, instead it’s that they did not establish an imaginary on which the contributors could use the abstract to point-out what is possible.

By definition, utopia means ‘good place’ or ‘no place’. It is what Henri Lefebvre calls a “virtual object” that’s built “on new foundations, on another scale and in other conditions, in another city”. It’s an imaginary, a dreamscape that’s different from the “old city” and reflects a given historical period’s swank ideas and aspirations, as well as technologies.

In Plato’s Republic, and later More’s Utopia – and to some extent Machiavelli’s Prince, Hobbes’ Leviathan or Locke’s Second Treatise – the utopian imaginary was about the just city and social control. Design and planning were not essential. Rather, morals and laws constituted utopia, with layout being of little concern or consequence.

In the early 19th century, Charles Fourier made designs for a living utopia. His work is significant because it had architecture – it was a significant step in making a virtual ‘no place’ real. According to his sketches, communities would be constructed around Phalanstères that resembled industrial-scale Parisian arcades and would be models of prosperity and social harmony.

In the first half of the 20th century, Le Corbusier drew-up plans for a new Greater Paris. According to his designs, the city would be an ecology of concrete and steel built for speed and technology. In fact, in his models, people are largely absent from the industrial landscape – they’re often represented as small ovals behind the wheel of a speeding car – almost like they’re an afterthought or accessory to the pure, efficient function of technology.

Like Le Corbusier, Albert Speer made plans – however dark and disturbed – for a Nazi utopia, Germania. But unlike Le Corbusier, speed and technology were not the emphasis of Speer’s designs. Instead, his utopia was a monument to the Triumph of the Will and National Socialism: There was no populace present in his models, only structures that garrisoned the Party’s apparatus.

In the second half of the 20th century, with the exception of a few inverse-Caligulan plans to bring Earth to the Moon, utopia became more manageable and focused on individual aspirations. Large-scale schemes were replaced by plans that were self-contained and focused on interior design. For example, in the UK, sections of cities were cleared for council estates or block flats – resembling individual components of Le Corbusier’s architecture – that were part of larger conurbations. Or in the United States, the imaginary became suburban tracts with nostalgic or sylvan names, like ‘Reunion’ or ‘Woodland Hollow’. Likewise, utopia represented an individual aspiration that could be personalised to best serve specific tastes and interests.

At the beginning of the 21st century, utopia continued to reduce in scale to the point that it was designed around single serving, one-off buildings and interior spaces. Instead of redefining everyday life, it is now the facade of the old city; its imaginary replaced by a desire for cultured indulgence.

2. Scale

In the meantime, as utopia has been scaled-down and designed around Brasnäs flatwoven area rugs and granite counter-tops, it has become difficult for architects and planners to imagine a different city. Likewise, if additional matters of concern, like environmental damage and pollution – not to mention a moral imperative – are taken into consideration, the idea of designing a new city seems daft.

Bruno Latour, in his short entry in Ecological Urbanism, warns against getting “lost in a jungle of dreams that never added up to much”. He’s right. But scale is the problem that confronts design practise. The jungle has become overgrown with baroque remnants of failed utopian dreams, not to mention an increasingly toxic environment, that anything short of clear-cut makes it impossible to get a bearing and begin the process of “re-engineering the imagination”.

Sustainable design is limited by scale. As Mohsen Mostafavi says, “LEED certification [the American design standard for sustainable construction] deals with the architectural object, and not with the larger infrastructure of the territory of our cities and towns”. Solid design and construction can aspire to take a building off a national grid that is powered by the worst environmental practises imaginable, yet the grid remains present or expands because urbanisation carries-on. Ecology, therefore, is an urban problem; and design practise has to work on a larger scale than a ‘green’ shed at the allotment.

Laying-out and planning on a large-scale requires letting-go of the architectural object as the purpose of design. And this is a issue handled well by Ecological Urbanism’s contributors. For example, Charles Waldheim notes that a city is not a “collection of objects.” He says the city is, instead, a “continuous system of relational forces and flows”. However, in adapting to an ecologic scale and embracing abstract concepts, like ‘complex relations’, over objects, designers have to also accept root instability – as flows and relations have to be constantly negotiated, unlike objects which have to be stable to be built – which creates added tension between what’s imagined and aesthetic application. Put another way, a change in scale means that design practise has to create a living environment, as opposed to built.

3. Ecology

It’s common to assume that ecology is positive, that it is harmonious and defined by some notion of equilibrium. But such assumptions are misleading. Ecology is qualitative: It is the organisation of a community that comes-of dynamics and relations of different populations, as well as variations in environmental disturbance and resilience. There is no equilibrium, no utopian stability or established order. Likewise, just as there are multiple species and different environmental niches, there are multiple ecologies composed of various and constantly changing relations. As Gregory Bateson points-out “There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds…” And it should be added that there’s an ecology of living rooms and flat screen televisions, as there was an ecology of Eichmanns in Speer’s Nazi utopia.

The problem with Ecological Urbanism and its focus on the aesthetics of ecology is that design practise does not inhabit the city; it only creates the form and imaginary of an urban environment. To paraphrase Guattari, within the built environment, the life of a city – it’s other ecologies – reside in its mental and social ‘registers’. And, admittedly, in the case of a text as ambitious as Ecological Urbanism, the task of documenting added ecologies would take multiple, thicker volumes.

By itself, the aethetics and construction of a city are not an environmental problem. It is a symptom of larger ecological disturbances in the life of a city. Likewise, the issue of scale remains; design and planning do not work on a scale that can change the mental and social life of the city, let alone infrastructure. At best, design practice can modify urban form and influence a population’s everyday life – and in Ecological Urbanism, there are some good examples, like pop-up parks, floating gardens, and well thought-out transit solutions. But an ecological urbanism – which is utopic, as it currently exists ‘no place’ – cannot be built without total reorganisation of mental and social ecologies: Everyday life, people’s sensibilities, their habits, their values and culture have to change for the city to change.

For there to be an ecological urbanism, ideas of equilibrium have to go the way of the design object. Instead, it has to address earlier utopian questions of the just city or the political consititution of public space, which means embracing designs that are provisory and capable of adapting to conflicting and constantly changing conditions. Consequently, ecological urbanism is an inherently unstable or agonistic habitus: It has to be built for different, nuanced and dissensual styles of life. It also has to be laid-out in a way that allows relations between constitutients of the urban environment to not be pre-fabricated – which is still a problem of scale, as it implies a multitude of one-off designs. Though, as previously noted, this is not necessarily a design matter, as much as it is a problem with the ecology of living rooms and malls, where relations are habituated and commodified.

4. Concluding Remarks

With ecological urbanism there is matter of moral imperative and aesthetic value: A more ecological city must remediate environmental damage and improve the conditions of everyday life. But a city founded on moral imperative has a problem of being a new city built to solve the aesthetic and particular failures of the old city. This, in turn, implies that the city is a dialectic process, which also means that the city remains a staid built object, and not a lived environment.

For there to be an ecologic city, even if it’s an utopian imaginary, the design object has to be supplanted by a more vitalist imaginary – this is not to say it’s the only option, there are others, but this specific idea is played-with most often in Ecological Urbanism. However, a vitalist city has a multitude of problems and absurdities, the most significant being that it can’t be planned. As Bergson explains, the future is a contingency of unknown possibilities, and laying-out a plan would mean setting a foundation that cannot carry the capacity of future circumstance, which is problem of the contemporary city. Also, in becoming vitalist, design practise has to create space – which itself is oxymoronic – for what Guy Debord called dérive or drift, “for sudden changes in ambiance… within the space of a few metres”, which can give any city a certain uneven quality that already exists in places like Kinshasa or Jakarta. And in choosing vitalism, there also has to be cultural acceptance of a grittiness or carnivalesque that is never present in any urban plan, such as movements of passion or feverish sleeplessness.

Also, the matter of infrastructure remains. Design practise can make a difference in the life of a city. But there can be no significant change in the ecologies of the city, including the mental and social, without total reorganisation of infrastructure. Specifically, infrastructure is a mixed creation or hybrid, it is both an object that has designed material form, but is also vital, as it provides myriad forces and flows that make possible city life. Infrastructure is, therefore, the logical transitional foundation between the old and new city. Utility objects like the energy grid, highways, communications facilities, water supply and waste-water services can be redesigned to alter the nature of goods, services, markets, and forms of care, like education or health care.

Finally, Ecological Urbanism proposes is an aesthetic solution to a political problem. This is not necessarily an urgent matter of concern, but it is akin to using form to manipulate function, and in some ways is technocratic and managerial. And in a risk society, technocratic measures are not necessarily a new or novel solution to old problems. Moreover, as has been painfully learned multiple times, the careful technical calculations of design design can be easily upset by externalities like risk assessment, market forces or even political will, leading to multiple revisions and compromise of the imaginary.

- Jim Morrow

I am writing a paper at the moment where I want to link the practice of home making to thge German notion of Heimat. The first version of this paper will be presented as a lecture at the next European Sociology Degree Summer School in Dresden (12-23 September 2010). The following is uis the abstract:

Being at home is often thought to be possible without having a home. Homeless people can feel at home somewhere too, but I want to argue that today that we should be less focused on being and more on having. This is because I want us to be mindful of the properties of being at home, which are not modalities of being but modalities of having. Moreover, I want to develop the claim that the English word for Eigen, which we tend to be the core of identity: das Eigene, which is “proper” ,has become linked with a notion of cleanliness “being proper” which is linked to developments in the 19th Century, during the confirmation of modern, western, European society. Furthermore,. focusing on the development of the Victorian household (see Ian Roderick’s contribution to the very first issue of Space and Culture on Flow), I want to point out the links between the development of the modern European subject, and an emergent scientific outlook on social ordering. Finally, I want to focus more closely on that dimension of ‘being at home’ that we often forget: the domestic; and argue that the propriety of the domestic , to show that the “becoming homely” of modern Europe has above all become a matter of gendering.

… Joost

Perhaps we should try and link the current riots in England with the so called Arab Spring and we would see other things at stake. Suddenly, criminals would become legitimate protestors fighting against an oppressive state who have turned democracy into a puppet show (is this perhaps the real reason why Spitting Image has disappeared from our television screens: reality is already funny enough?). Do we blame Al Jazeera for being too critical? What is clear among all of this is that analysis is failing in a most rudimentary sense. This, I would argue, is the most powerful indicator that we are dealing with an apocalypse.

In 1997, the second issue of space and culture appeared under the title ‘Apocalypse’ and there I asserted that the apocalypse had already happened, if one were to define it not as a complete and total rapture, but as a ‘cool revelation’ that the world as we know it has come to an end. That was 3 years before the dot.com economy collapsed, 4 years before 9.11, 6 years before the second gulf war, 7 years before the premiere of Team America World Police and the revelation that Kim Jong Ill, the alleged center of the Axis of Evil, is in fact a cockroach, 8 years before the Tsunami, 10 years before the credit crunch, 13 years before Fukushima.
In no way is what we published back in 1997 a prophecy of what was to come. We simply maintained that it had already happened. Everything that followed was nothing more than a repetition of what happened before. As we act like vultures, hovering over the cadavers of meaningless reflection, all we can do is perform the same cycles over and over again.

To go back then to the riots, the most sensible next step would be to stop meaninglessly asserting the meaninglessness of collective violence and start engaging in more meaningflul responses.  If the riots are mere imitations, what is being imitated? Why are these imitations taking place in England and why now? What alternatives can we offer those who are inclined to ’seize the opportunity’ to go out in the streets and engage in collective violence?

… Joost

Space and culture, then, is still all about the ‘and’; about the connections between practices of repetition and processes of objectification. What we aim to achieve, in the next 15 years or so, is to become a venue where social sciences can engage empirically with questions of the everyday. The key questions remain the same; they are concerned with presence, presentation, and representation. They are still concerned with the way in which these processes are distinctive social spatializations. Likewise, we are still concerned with the relative durability of significance as it is inscribed in distinctive objects. However, they need to become more precise, more empirical, more specific, -because the smaller is always more complex – and therefore more revealing than the larger. We want to learn in more detail which repetitions have taken place to enable which particular objectifications. How do distinctive imitations ‘make’ space. We want to know more about objects; how they have been constructed; how they have been modified; what work they are called upon to perform; which associations they have enabled; which associations they have disabled.

Association, the ‘and’ is what permeates both space and culture. Perhaps we will be accused on re-inventing a certain formalism or structuralism, a juxta-structuralism to be more precise. Perhaps we will be accused of naïve objectivism or empiricism. Yes, we are interested in juxta-structurings as particular ways of ordering, i.e. in terms of sequences or patterns. True, we are intending to ‘make objects speak’ and we are certainly not going to shy away from the principle that experience grounds all possibilities for thought. Above all, I hope we will be able to embrace a ‘philosophy of having’ rather than a ‘philosophy of being’. That is, what if we start thinking of spaces as ‘having’ specific qualities (objects), which would in turn have to be reversed in the sense that a space ‘is being had or has been had’ because we always have to explain the larger from the smaller.

This Tardean insight, which has been put in practice for the last 30+ years by several actor network theorists, implies a new way of doing social sciences as well as a return to a pre-Kantian metaphysics (one that could be traced back to Epicurus but is perhaps most famously attributed to Baruch Spinoza) as ‘monism’. The key to monism is the non-separation of ‘mind’ and ‘body’, or more importantly, the abolition of the idea of a splitting of matter between essence and appearance.

Although this may not sound very revolutionary, and it has indeed been repeated quite frequently throughout the last 200 years by philosophers such as Nietzsche, Bergson, Whitehead, Heidegger, Deleuze, Stengers and Latour, the consequences are still immense. If we no longer think in terms of a separation between the Ideal and the Real, which is thus an acceptance of the univalence of the Virtual, we are liberated from having to work on the basis of deeply problematic assumptions. We can just start ‘in the middle’ which is in the middle of empirical research, because as Whitehead states, only experience can provide philosophical evidence.

So, we are proposing a new beginning for space and culture research; one that more radically embraces the empirical, yet at the same time, does not get bogged down with ‘describing places’. We want encounters with perspectives of virtualities that generate concepts, i.e. the work of philosophy; we want to make objects speak by generating functives and prospects, i.e. the work of science, and we want to develop ways of appreciating by generating percepts and affects, i.e. the work of art. We want to be a journal for empirical philosophy and social science and for that reason we require contributions that have a strong grounding in empirical research. We are not looking for studies that apply concepts, but ones that create concepts.

Percepts: http://armchairarcade.com/neo/node/1345

…. Joost

http://www.journal-online.co.uk/article/2693-new-cell-discovery-could-advance-understanding-of-cancer

Culture as reification is perhaps a relatively new theme for us. Reification is a double edged sword. On the one hand, it refers to the life of objects, in the straightforward empirical sense of ‘objects coming to life’ when they are engaged in action. However, at the same time, reification is often identified as a fallacy of misplaced concreteness: one abstracts generic qualities from particular object-relations and holds them ‘for real’. However when taken as this doubling, ‘theorizing culture as reification’ begets a critical edge which, despite its duplicity, leads to questioning everything that exists in terms of valuation.

Objectification, the making of objects, is what makes it possible for us to speak of ‘culture’ in the first place. It is always important to look at the smaller things, because they are more meaningful than the larger more abstract concepts. Culture as such an abstraction means very little, but when we look at distinctive cultures, they already become more complex. Cultures of bacteria, for example in yoghurt, are immensely complex in comparison with the sociological concept of culture as ‘shared meaning’. Bacteria expand through reproduction, which is a social activity, and this expansion is also referred to as ‘cultivation’. Although cultivation often entails an intentional connotation of deliberate, careful action, this is not an essential requirement. Cultivation can also happen spontaneously, and moreover, through imitations. In the end, intentionality makes not such a major difference to objectification as such; it is just one particular venue for imitation, alongside many others.

… Joost

Social spatialization is, following the same Tardean logic, a specific form of repetition, namely that of ‘imitation’. It is through imitation that spatiality becomes possible as existent. Imitation is easily observed in terms of materiality, which, for example through acts of building, planning and even architectural conceptualization, become necessary preconditions for a space to exist in the first place.

In the social sciences, the word reification has a bad resonance and is usually invoked to denounce some sort of conceptualization of process as ‘wrong’. However, it is at the core of what culture is: repetitions of practices which constitute a ‘becoming-real’, one might even say ‘realization’, of meaning. Realization, being at once ‘becoming real’ and ‘becoming aware’, is such a wonderful term exactly because it shows us the ‘in between’ (becoming) as a relational event. When reification is simply taken as another word for realization, then perhaps we can begin to let go of the negative connotations that this term has been burdened with.

http://www.wix.com/hci_msrp/empty_space

…. Joost

http://www.google.com/

… And …

“And”, the word that connects, is the real problem for space and culture. And is what enables both the possibility of spatialization, as the virtual-material creation of a relational presence, as well as the possibility for ‘objectification’, as the creation of flows of repetitions of presence, as that which returns and therefore appears to ‘last’ over time.

These are perhaps somewhat strange remarks, for, after more than 15 years of the journal, we should already know what space and culture is about. However things have changed. The world is not the same anymore. Until recently, it was beyond doubt that for us, culture had something to do with ‘everyday life’ as well as ‘meaning’. It was also clear that we engaged with a notion of ’social spatialization’ as a common, everyday pratice.

The special place of the everyday is not in question; however, we want to invite you to think in a more radical empirical way about what everydayness is, and therefore what ‘social spatialization’ could be in relation to what we still call ‘culture’, but perhaps within a radically different analytical ethos. Following Gabriel Tarde, we need to acknowledge that the notion of ‘ordinary everydayness’ is constituted by repetitions. Only through repetitions can we become aware of ‘ordinariness’ (as patterns of repetitions). Repetition is of course already inscribed in the very word everyday.

The everyday is, in the first instance, conceptualized as space. The repetition of specific actions, which constitutes ordinariness, is spatially manifest because it is a frequency: it makes “time” visible. This thus means that the temporal inscription of the everyday, as intervals marking the frequency of repetitions, is that which enables the very possibility of thinking space.

…Joost

Berlin Hauptbahnhof as Work in Progress:

Source: http://www.designladen.com/berlin/source/berlin.baustelle.pict3824.html

Introduction

I have been involved in the project called Space and Culture since the mid-1990s. The project had a concept: building up a community of researchers who would be (1) interested in sharing their ideas about how to rethink space through culture and culture through space; (2) daring enough to offer ideas in progress rather than finished products to enable agenda setting capacity; and (3) keen to develop theoretical reflections based on empirical work.

This concept was primarily developed by Rob Shields and its first main manifestation has been the journal Space and Culture, which has been running consecutively since 1997. The first four years were an extremely experimental stage. Every cover had art work across the full page and was printed in color. We published a wide range of different kinds of articles, including poems, postcards and photo-essays. It was taken over by Sage in 2001, which provided a turn towards professionalization of the journal. Its home moved from Ottawa to Edmonton.

In 2004, a second major adventure was unleashed in the shape of this blog, which has turned out to be a perfect venue for launching ideas and sharing among a much wider constituency of thinkers, including those who live and work beyond the confines of the academy. The blog went from strength to strength and became much more than a mere spinoff of the journal.

In 2006 the journal headquarters moved from Canada to the UK when I became editor-in-chief. In 2010, it moved again: from England to Germany, where it has found a new home at the Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. It was here where we decided to expand the editorial team and to launch the third phase of the journal. Part of that re-launch is also that we aim to increase our presence on the blog.

As one of the editors, I have decided to engage with this blog to initiate a discussion about the journal itself. And to do that, I would like to start with a reflection on its title: Space and Culture. Because I am a mechanistic thinker, I have decided to do it word for word. But because I am not a linear thinker, I want to start in the middle.

… Joost

Sergio Benicio, UFPernambuco, Recife and Rob Shields, Univ. of Alberta, Edmonton presenting on McLuhan and Virilio at the Media Ecology Association 2011 conference 'Space Place and the McLuhan Legacy'

Happy Birthday Marshall!

Marshall McLuhan was born and spent his childhood in Edmonton in 1911, so we’re celebrating at the University over the next few months with the Media Ecology Association and a few projects such as Wave.

-Rob