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thoughts
Historically, there are many parallels between the understanding of our bodies and our relationship to the city. When we started understanding our blood system in the 17th century for example, the words 'artery' and 'veins' were applied to city streets in the eighteenth century by designers who sought to model traffic systems on the blood system of the body. French urbanists like Christian Patte used the imagery of arteries and veins to justify the principle of one-way streets.
Later, we saw the city analogised as an extended nervous system, making vivid something of the growing impact made by transport and communication since the mid-nineteenth century. But it also suggests that rather than suffering form physical problems the city suffers from psychopathology. Our cities have become megalomaniacal, sociopathic, passive aggressive...
Today, we are on the verge of a new era. Craig Venter describes it in this year's Richard Dimbleby lecture as "a DNA-driven world, because I believe that the future of our society relies at least in part on our understanding of biology and the molecules of life - DNA." How will this paradigm-shift influence our relationship with the city? What does it mean for children, communities? What will the new urban fantasies and anxieties be?
Another beautiful story out of Ben Highmore's book was the evolution in the types of superheroes and how that related to changes in the cities of those times.
In the 1930's, there was DC Comics: Batman and Superman. Both superheroes were socially remarkable types, being extremely wealthy or coming from another planet. In the 1960's, one could witness the rise of a new type of superstars, from a more ordinary and almost geeky, white collare origin. Peter Parker was bitten by a radio-active spider and became spiderman. In the same way, Fantastic Four and Daredevil, other heroes of Marvel Comics came from an ordinary background.
Coinciding with the silver age of Marvel comics is an unprecedented expansion of office space; vertical expansion in the shape of skyscrapers. With these offices came a shift from manufacturing to office works, at the same time a shift in gender patterns of work.
"In this context, Marvel's silver-age heroes, drawn from a world of white-collar work, begin to look like a compensatory fantasy of remasculinization: from feminized office-bound weakling to muscle bound hero." Along with this, the vertical and horizontal expanse of the city required fantasies of mobility for compensation. Hence, Spiderman's ability to climb the sheer walls of Manhattan's high-rise buildings and Daredevil's easy jumping and swinging around the modern city's obstacles.
I read Ben Highmore's 'Cityscapes. Cultural readings in the material and symbolic city' last week. I really enjoyed the way the book digs underneath the surface of our everyday cities (and their past), using novels, films and popular culture as a starting point. One of the beautiful stories from the modernising cities of 19th century is that of the anxieties and fantasies rising with the development of department stores and particularly shopwindows.
Jean Baurdrillard, for instance, notes that: 'whether as packaging, window or partition, glass is the basis of a transparency without transition: we see, but cannot touch. The message is universal and abstract. A shop window is both magical and frustrating - the strategy of advertising in epitome'. It is this immaterial materiality that ushers in a new theatricality to the city.
Photo by Marcus BleasdaleI very much enjoyed reading "Kinshasa: Tales of the invisible city", describing the mirroring reality lurking underneath the material surface of the Congolese city . The city's collective religious imagination for example, given form by the prominent presence of churches, indicates the ways in which the invisible is overgrowing the city's visible reality. One of the stories described by Filip De Boeck which clearly illustrates this, is the story of Kinshasa's witch-children.
'Invisible Cities: architecture without building' was the title of my dissertation, inspired by Calvino's wonderful 'The Invisible Cities'. The interest in cities grew out of my fascination with 'systems of people'. I'm intrigued by the way people in all their individualistic stupidity manage to form these functioning systems yet at the same time deny they're only a part of that system. My dissertation explores these micro-macro scales in an urban context, it looks at how a city is made up by our everyday practices rather than buildings or streets. We are co-producers of our cities, resulting in not one but many cities, each refracting and reflecting one another. That has its consequences for cities as a political space and the way we design or intervene in these spaces.
Partly the reason I ended up at Demos this summer, this is also something I want to explore further in my work this year. The installation we did for demos was a tiny experiment in this direction but I want to take this further. How will new technologies affect the way we perceive and live in our future cities? What new pleasures and anxieties will that create? How will it affect the systems we live in? And I'm hoping to use this space on my website to posts more thoughts and possible directions.
Last week, our visiting professor Natalie Jeremijenko came in for a lecture and some studio chats. She put into words a few concerns with environmental design which I could really connect to. First there's the limitation of 'raising awareness'. We've seen a gazillion of design projects creating awareness on environmental issues but we must still see the first fundamental changes in our behaviour. Maybe it's because we don't always know the motivations of our behaviour? Second point is the negative and pessimistic attitude of the majority of the environmental movement, beautifully phrased as: "If Martin Luther King would have been an environmentalist, he would have opened his speech with 'I have a nightmare'".
I think an important question is "How do we build the social systems necessary for tackling problems on these scale?" And also, who will do this: engineers, scientists, politicians, users, designers? Part of the problem is that people don't always feel qualified enough to operate on this interdisciplinary scale. Natalie's projects do operate on this scale and although the website is still under construction and not always revealing the power of the projects, it's worth to keep an eye on the environmental health clinic.
