cityofsound

Processional: Jeremy Deller/Manchester vs. Victoria Bitter/Australia

I like British artist Jeremy Deller's work a lot. I referred to his Acid Brass project years ago - in a very early entry on music metadata - as well as his moving recreation of the Battle of Orgreave (in Sheffield and The North). Recently I heard about his 'It Is What It Is' as I was ploughing through old Studio 360 shows, given the iPhone's new double-speed playback mode (which I'm loving, although I think it doubles my heart-rate too. Particularly listening to New Yorkers.)

So I watched his recent 'Procession' for the Manchester International Festival with interest. An actual procession through the centre of Manchester, it's a great big ramshackle civil serpent; sometime endearing, sometimes camp, sometimes misplaced, sometimes sad. Not everything works but it's a great idea - in a 'the city is shaped by events' sense. Here's a video on the artwork from The Guardian's report.

So imagine my surprise when someone's Twitter feed led me to the new advert for 'legendary' Australian beer VB. It's a beautifully done ad; pretty bloody funny - I can't decide between 'Cashed-Up Bogans', 'Manscapers' or 'Blokes Punching Above Their Weight'. Obviously the tone, location and purpose is quite different, but being a former resident of one city and a current resident of the other country, it's almost like I can imagine the two processions colliding, with hilarious consequences, The VB ad perhaps owes, well, a bit of a debt to Deller, no? [Higher quality here, embedded below]

David Gissen (Postopolis! LA)

David Gissen delivered one of my favourite talks at Postopolis! LA, for sure. Gissen is a historian - yet lest that conjure up a certain image - an AJP Taylor, EP Thompson, or Eric Hobsbawm, bless ‘em - he actually cuts a very different kind of figure: exploratory, intrinsically multidisciplinary, and given to speculative imagination. Gissen delivered a fascinating, illuminating and often funny presentation which utterly reconfigured ideas of preservation and historical research.

Mary-Ann Ray / Studio Works (Postopolis! LA)

Mary-Ann Ray has worked with Michael Graves, James Turrell and Richard Meier. She is now principal, along with Robert Mangurian, of the firm Studio Works in Los Angeles. She, they, also teach at SCI-Arc. I like that her CV includes several schools in the USA, and would like to hear more about the process of designing state schools in the US, yet tonight she is talking at Postopolis! LA about their work in China, which includes the studio BASE (confusing website ahoy) in Caochongdi.

Unfortunately I missed the start of her talk due to ‘technical issues’ (as in, the need to buy some fries from the bar opposite, in order to stay warm and nourished throughout the slowly chilling evening.) Apologies to Mary-Ann for this.

I returned to find her halfway through a fascinating discussion on a 1959 plan for Beijing. Apparently, this has never been published and it’s an extraordinary document. Ray notes that Mao played a primary role in the idea of making the city of Beijing - "as a kind of ruralised urbanism”. The plan divides the city into a series of “dispersal group units” - these are tripartite arrangements that each has elements of housing (commune), factory and natural productive districts. These are then distributed in various combinations all over the city. Between these settlements are trees and green spaces, meaning around 40% of the total land is gardens, parks and farms. Ray notes that there are currently 3 million trees being planted in Beijing, so at least this aspect of the plan is perhaps being realised ...

Cars b/w Are Friends Electric

An article in The Economist suggests that electric cars should generate a noise to compensate for the loss of combustion engine noise, as they are so quiet.

Despite noting there is little research (thought I’ll note some later), The Economist says “Some drivers say that when their cars are in electric mode people are more likely to step out in front of them. The solution, many now believe, is to fit electric and hybrid cars with external sound systems.” Their subtitle - “Sound generators will make electric and hybrid cars safer“ - indicates this is their position too.

Where to start?

Postopolis! LA, day five / SYNTHe green roof project / Los Angeles

Final day of Postopolis! LA. On the one hand, it’s difficult to believe that the end is in sight (and sad, too); on the other, my tiredness is an indication that, yes, we have been doing this for almost a week now. But the exhilaration associated with the event carries us through the finale and beyond.

Before the evening’s events unfold in predictably unpredictable fashion though, most of the Postopolis! LA organisers, curators and several speakers and guests converge on the SYNTHe urban green roof project in Downtown LA. This is a pretty fantastic project in many ways, and allegedly the ‘first green roof in LA’ (although that’s slightly hard to believe. Or indeed define. Also, conflict of interest alert: Arup Los Angeles were consultants to the project, which I had no idea about until afterward.)

 

 

Designed by SCI-Arc teacher Alexis Rochas it’s a laser-cut (increasingly everything in LA is laser-cut) galvanised metal roof, creating a curving landscape on the top of The Flat, a converted Holiday Inn. The roof curves not just for formal experiment but also as sits on top of the varied bulky services that typically adorn such buildings, neatly covering up these air-conditioning units as well as creating a new façade (This aspect of exploring the “fifth façade” of the roof is interesting in itself - given the rise in popularity of both tall buildings and satellite-based mapping like Google Earth, these surfaces are looked down upon as never before. There is no longer any justification not to care about the design of these spaces.)

No two panels up here are alike; each panel is bent to shape (along score marks created by the CNC machines, presumably?) and then snapped into place on-site.

 

 

 

However, the roof is essentially significant due to its productive capacity. The roofing structure is designed with grooves of varying depth, filled with a custom soil mix and then planted with various edible plants which are used by the restaurant at the base of the building (called Blue Velvet. Dennis Hopper not included perhaps fortunately). Food waste from the restaurant (the non-meat stuff, to avoid rodents) is returned to the garden as compost. The residents of the low-income apartments that comprise the rest of The Flat get to tend and use the garden apparently, though its primary function is in this nice closed loop with the restaurant.

 

Initial concern over heat build-up due the use of the metal was dissipated a little by realising that the reflected heat will reduce the thermal build-up in the building (if more roofs were like this, would it have the same impact as the humanity-saving white paint idea?). And of course green roofs have fantastic qualities in terms of better dealing with stormwater run-off as well as this natural thermal insulation. Still, it was hot up there that day, and it wasn’t summer yet. It’ll be interesting to see how the plants will do when it's hotter than July, but their planting is rotated to match the menu and seasonality, so presumably the plants are selected with climate in mind too.

 

95% of the planting is edible, with the remaining 5% to brighten the place up (though lavender is there both for ice-cream etc. but also to attract bees to help with pollination.) There was a patch of grass down one ‘terrace’, which was deliberately planted for people to sit on towards the end of the day, as the sun is going down. The view is fairly spectacular from up there, being on the edge of Downtown largely facing away from the high-rises, and being up there with a glass of wine, a book and a sunset would be wonderful. Grass is thirsty, so there plan is to water it until it’s fully bedded in and then let it dry out to form a kind of thickish layer of dry grass matting, which seems smart.

 

 

The roof was strong enough to hold a fair few people, as tested by our visitors gathering around Rochas, eager to hear more details about the garden (in fact, one thinks some informatics display illustrating the garden's real-time performance from street level would be interesting (web cam, soil temperature, acidity, moisture etc.). You'd never know it was there from the street.) Still, this garden structure absorbs people very well, creating dramatic, almost heroic, romantic views.

 

 

 

It's an odd but enjoyable feeling being up there. The structure gives a little under foot, contributing slightly to the sense that you shouldn't be up there. But that's derived from our traditional and absurd waste of these spaces. (When I think of Saul Griffiths' concept of 'peak waste', I often interpret it as much spatially as anything else, through wasted roofs, under-used office space, inefficient systems like car parks and the like.)

 

There are always loading issues when retrofitting existing buildings with green roofs, as wet soil can get very heavy. Rochas explained a special soil mix reduced the load. Irrigation is by hand at the moment, via volunteers who look after the garden, but they’re keen to get “robots” to do the watering in future.

I’m not sure how much food it generates, or indeed what is used by the restaurant. At lunch after, it’s clear that a very small percentage of the restaurant’s needs could be catered for by the garden, just as the restaurant would produce far more compost than the garden could possibly handle. So the loop is a little out of kilter. However, the project remains inspirational. Standing up there, looking down onto thousands of square metres of non-productive, non-useful roof space, just sitting there in the sun soaking up heat, wasting energy and giving nothing back to the city, you realise you’re standing on a structure and a system that could be 'cut-and-paste' across all those roofs, utterly changing the city. [More SYNTHe photos here and lots more detail on the project here]

If it had only demonstrated this, it would have been a great project, but it's fascinating and engaging on numerous levels. It’s perhaps the primary project I’ve talked to people about since I got back to Australia, just as Benjamin Bratton’s talk tonight was and remains the most thought-provoking presentation.

And as such, SYNTHe echoed one of the primary themes emerging from the week’s work. Oddly enough - or perhaps not oddly at all - car-bound, concrete-covered LA is home to numerous thriving projects, at all scales, that engage with food production, gardens and other productive landscapes. Not least in the work of Fritz Haeg, Ari Kletzky, Fallen Fruit, Greenmeme and others speaking at Postopolis! but also visible elsewhere around the city.

Perhaps the other themes emerging from the week, for me at least, would gravitate around the complex form of LA itself (I always learn so much from the cities that conferences are held in that it should be listed as a formal component of the conference) and the palpable sense of innovation around the place.

Directly related to my work, the talks by Ben Cerveny, Eric Rodenbeck, Patrick Keller, Christian Moeller, Robert Miles Kemp and Bryan Boyer were particularly useful and enlightening.

Another theme would be the increasingly ubiquitous presence of fabrication tools, techniques and practice: through laser-cutting, CNC machines and sometimes rapid prototyping. Evidence of this is everywhere. You walk into any restaurant, bar or shop and you’re likely to be looking past a complex undulating roof structure or a panelised screen etched, scored and punctured to within an inch of its life. On a recent trip to London, I was struck by the preponderance of large LED screens around the city; here it’s laser-cut structures of varying scales. (Is that due to lack of sunshine in London and excess of same in California?!)

More significantly of course, its influence is visible at larger scale in the work of Eric Owen Moss and others emerging in and around the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), with many documented in the edition of A+U I mentioned earlier. This work exemplifies the looming, benevolent influence of SCI-Arc on ‘the scene’ here. Just as certain universities provided a silent backdrop to Postopolis! New York, here SCI-Arc is behind a lot of the work and thinking here, often to great effect (a note to follow on that).

This emphasis on fabrication has a long history in Los Angeles architecture, design and engineering, not least due to the ability to borrow tools and techniques from the car design industry so strong around here. And before that, an earlier wave of LA designers like Neutra, Eames, Lustig et al relied on the skills and craft of the boat-building industry. So this concern with fabrication and industrial design has a long and honourable history here, yet it feels like this is allied with an increasingly broad intellectual framework. Again, this is perhaps a sign of SCI-Arc at work.

In an occasionally oblique interview at Archinect, current director of SCI-Arc Eric Owen Moss talked a little about this. About “those people understanding, utilizing and applying new technical skills; milling skills, CNC skills, vacuum forming skills, laser cutting skills, all of the 3D forming skills, parametric drawing and BIM skills, and so on. But what you want, are the students who can combine those tools with conceptual skills ... you want students who are not interested in (only tools) but also interested in conception, idea, fabrication.”

He had earlier stated:

“Sci Arc is not a trade school. We still have the capacity to satisfy the requirements of accreditation boards. However, our objective has always been to create independent, critical and intellectual students. I think the point is, to teach a group of students to deal with complicated subjects, in a clear coherent way. To speak to the world they are going into, and not to speak to the architects only. The architects as professionals have the problem of only talking the language of their profession. In the process of doing buildings nowadays, especially the bigger projects, architects have to have the capacity to talk and work with many people who are not necessarily architects. This is very important. So, we have many people coming from different areas lecturing on philosophy, science, engineering, fabrication, history. We are bringing in the usual and the unusual voices into the profession to develop that capacity to think, understand and analyze. And after that, the students have to go out into the world and find a way to make their critical and intellectual capacities useful and productive.” [Interview with Eric Owen Moss at Archinect]

This points to another theme of Postopolis! LA: that of architects and other designers increasingly engaging in fields outside their traditional discipline boundaries, working in multi-disciplinary collaborations often focused on deploying ‘design thinking’ to the broader themes of the day. Not simply solving problems but framing questions. Not simply building stuff but helping shape a lens through which to understand and shape our world. This I am all in favour of, with the caveat that it is best done with grace, humility and broad skills and experience. The theme emerged several times, and is perhaps the most interesting area of design at this point. But one also wonders whether it is simply a reaction to the global financial crisis and the vertiginous drop in jobs in architecture and urban development i.e. a need to find a new job, a new role. (Later that evening, Paul Petrunia mentioned that Archinect job listings had plummeted by something like 90% almost overnight.) Fortunately, most of the time at Postopolis! LA, the discussion was a lot deeper than the need to find a new job, not least in Bryan Boyer’s great contribution and some of the local practices’ Q&As with the ArchDaily Duo.

Most of all though, the backdrop to this Postopolis! was not Los Angeles, food production and fabrication, or the changing nature of architecture and urbanism but the Banquo at the feast that is the GFC itself (an ugly acronym which does not possess the elegance, power or appropriate levels of heartbreak as the term ‘Great Depression’ it seems to me.)

As noted I was struck by the intensity of focus on this subject, sometimes in maudlin hand-wringing fashion, sometimes with due concern and trepidation, and sometimes as an inspiration for actively and creatively trying to shape better things. It’s not quite the same in Sydney, a city half the size of LA but with much in common. The wheels of creative destruction turn slower here in Australia, which is both good and bad. Most people would not yet be arguing that there’s little or no future in daily newspapers, most mining, broadcast advertising models and much broadcast media, most domestic commercial aviation, speculator-driven property development, private education, shopping malls, supermarkets, big cars, big houses and Nicole Kidman. Or more importantly, that we should “resist the recovery”, as Bratton put it, and that perhaps much of the world needs this change. Much of Australia hasn’t felt the sharp end yet and may be meandering along a little too comfortably, perhaps buffered by China. Perhaps. Though China, of course, already has a very different economic and political model. It would be ironic if Australia were left last man standing with an un-reconstructed 'western-style' neo-liberal economic model due to its trade relationship with China. Although Rudd's government is possibly beginning to move things on - witness the brave and ambitious decision to build a government-led FTTP national broadband network, announced while I was in LA - the scale and complexity of change required is daunting.

When he was Treasurer, Paul Keating, who would later become Prime Minister of Australia, famously said of the early ‘90s recession that it was “the recession Australia had to have”. Well, I suspect this might actually be the one. However. It would be insensitive to stress this point given that tens of thousands of Australians have already lost their jobs.

I realised during this week in Los Angeles that the USA was already being hammered by recession to a far greater degree. perhaps as it had gone bigger and deeper than anywhere else in the first place. Yet this meant that some were thinking about alternative futures to a far greater degree than elsewhere too. To some degree that is coinciding with the Obama effect - how wonderful to hear his speeches sampled in hip-hop all around - though whether he can, or wants to, go far enough isn't clear. In a decent attempt to reimagine the American character - though even I might say written in overly-optimistic fashion - Kurt Anderson notes that aspects of the 'Obama effect' (which would be as temporary as the Bilbao effect anyway) have been put on the back-burner given the need to get on with business. Or get on with reconfiguring what business is. But he's doing the right thing fairly often e.g. General Motors e.g. high-speed rail etc. Government is there to lead, not merely reactively heal over market failure, and this combination of Obama + GFC is leading in potentially interesting directions. Outside of government or other macro-scale movements, perhaps more so.

I understood this intellectually before I arrived, but to see it and hear it in situ was often compelling. I had not thought that witnessing or even partaking in some of these conversations and thought-processes would be a thrilling, unforeseen and personally valuable side-effect of the event. For this I am grateful.

This sensation was most clearly articulated in Benjamin Bratton’s talk, which was the curtain-raiser on our final day on the rooftop of The Standard. I’ve written that one up and Bratton’s kindly agreed that we could re-post his talk in full, so do go and have a read. I think it will continue to resonate for some time. Geoff noted that Bratton’s profile had been framed in the late-afternoon sun by a giant Citibank logo on a ‘scraper behind him. While we're doing landscape irony, over Bratton’s left shoulder was the gleaming cylon-esque form of the Bonaventure hotel, which Fredric Jameson had pronounced the icon of late-capitalism in his landmark 1988 essay ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’. A building as theoretical signifier of a theory about signifiers. Bratton noted that:

“As Zizek was fond of saying, quoting Jameson talking about blockbuster sci-fi movies featuring exploding aliens and cities, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. Perhaps that is less so today.”

Quite so. But if late capitalism might now be late as in parrot, we have work to do. The Bonaventure, which was the structure that instantly cut me off from the street on my first day in Los Angeles, sat there across the urban airspace, stubbornly glaring at us throughout the week. Whether it exemplifies or resists late-capitalism I'll leave to the professional theorists, but I recall it also features as a silent signifier in William H. Whyte's quietly powerful book The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, not directly referenced in the text but sitting there glowering on the page nonetheless, amidst his impassioned chapter on megastructures:

"One feels somewhat disembodied in these spaces. Is it night? Or day? Spring? Or winter? And where are you? You cannot see out of the place. You do not know what city you are in, or if you are in a city at all. The complex could be at an airport or a new town. It could be in the East or the West. The piped music gives no clue. It is the same as everywhere. You could be in a foreign country or on a space satellite. You are in a universal controlled environment. And it is going to date very badlly. Forms of transportation and their attendant cultures have historically produced their most elaborate manifestations just after they have entered the period of their obsolescence. So it may be with the megastructures and the freeway era that bred them. They are the last convulsive embodiment of a time passing, and they are a wretched model for the future of the city." [From The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces by William H. Whyte]

Quite so again. Whyte was writing that almost 30 years ago and Bonaventure and the freeways are still there - this is a problem with hard infrastructure - but I take great solace in the fact that Postopolis! LA was going on right under its nose, and that many of the protagonists were carving out far more interesting, useful and exciting futures for the city.

Bratton was followed by an artist whose work I’ve long admired: Christian Moeller (see a couple of entries in this earlier post on facades) and it was a pleasure to meet him. Write-up to follow.

Yet after Bratton and Moeller the format for the rest of the evening comprised of panels. With Postopolis! New York, this was the one aspect that arguably didn’t work. There the last day felt a bit shambolic, which was probably more of a reflection on us organisers than the panellists. Here, the panels largely worked. The first, on new media art, didn’t fire on all cylinders perhaps, but the subsequent panels were largely fascinating. I won’t attempt to annotate these however. Reviewing a single speaker is tricky enough; a quick-fire panel of between 3 and 5 contributors, 1 or 2 moderators and audience Q&A is beyond me. Suffice to say I gleaned a lot from the media and photography panels in particular, and the last session with the editors of Dwell and Good magazines also worked well.

The turnout for the last day was great, as it had been all week, so thanks again. However, our plans for a grand closing party were foiled somewhat by the venue. But they’ve been gracious hosts for most of the week so we can’t complain too much. Apologies to those who wanted to hear Jace Clayton DJing again (but to those who were hoping to hear Dwell editor Sam Grawe's promised balearic stylings, you might have been better off without.) The event dissipates with a gracious 'thank you to all' from Storefront director Joseph Grima, and people drift off into the night. Most of us organisers actually hang around on the rooftop for a while, slightly dazed but happily chattering away, slowly beginning to relax and unwind, cold fingers gripping glasses of rapidly chilling red wine. It's almost as if we can’t leave the place, or don’t want to. We’re all so happy with the week that we feel we could just carry on. Do another week just like it. After a day off perhaps.

If I'd criticise elements of the week, I'm a little disappointed we didn't manage to get more representation of a Latino view on the city and its landscape (save Rochas perhaps, and Michael Dear, though I'm not either 'qualify' as such). Still we don't want to be tokenistic about such things. We had a few technical hitches but then it's all done for not-much-money, as if you couldn't tell, so that's going to happen. The temperature was of course ridiculous at times. In terms of the online distribution of the event, I though the Twitter feed was particularly good (thanks Geoff), and although our blog entries could've got up quicker, I like the fact they're delayed. Someone commented on one of my posts that 'it's almost like there was more information in there than the actual talk'. Well, that's the idea. You can't approach the sensation of being there, but you can at least add context, analysis, links and your own take on such things. This will slow the process down (as you'll see, when my reviews of this thing are still emerging a few weeks from now) but I hope it's better for it. Anyway, these quibbles aside, I'm personally really happy with how Postopolis! LA turned out..

Thanks so much to all the speakers who contributed their time and thoughts; to the audience who braved the cold (who knew LA could even get that chilly?), as well as those watching the live streams, Twitter feeds and blogs; huge thanks to my fellow curators and co-hosts at BLDGBLOG, Subtopia, We Make Money Not Art, Mudd Up! and ArchDaily - we had a blast; to ForYourArt for all their help in supporting the event and The Standard for hosting; and to the Storefront for Art & Architecture extended crew for performing above and beyond the call of duty again, playing away from home this time; and to director Joseph Grima in particular, for making it all happen.

I’ll now concentrate on getting all these other notes online, and you might also read various summings-up, across numerous blogs, websites and news outlets elsewhere, and from the Postopolis! LA team themselves e.g. Bryan’s rather poetic post-PostOps post, Regine’s various great summary posts (days 1, 2, 4 and 5), Geoff's thanks and narrative planetarium, ArchDaily’s reflections and so on. There’s more to come here, but for now, until the next time …

Postopolis! LA [Storefront for Art and Architecture]
SYNTHe photos [Flickr]
More details on SYNTHe project [io-platform.com]

Benjamin H. Bratton (Postopolis! LA)

Benjamin Bratton’s talk was another absolute highlight for me, and indicated the value of having someone on hand to pick apart, delineate and articulate the theoretical landscape emerging around the event. I also value his saving me from what would’ve been a particularly tricky write-up by sending me the talk and letting us post it here in full (see below).

I hugely appreciated his contribution. Benjamin had spent a few days soaking up Postopolis! LA by the closing day, and so was well-placed to be performing a kind of ‘summing up’, speaking as a sociologist rather than a designer as such. But he went beyond that, placing the talks in a fundamentally important wider context, politically and theoretically.

Despite being prepared for it, I’d been fascinated by the quantity and ferocity of attention focused onto the ‘global financial crisis’ in the US, from the mainstream media’s news channels certainly but also as a pervasive topic of conversation and concern amongst most I met - it’s way more so than in Australia (which could be because it hasn’t hit Australia fully yet; or because it won’t to the same degree) and although I saw more signs of it in the UK recently, the concern in the US is more so than there too. It appeared to be gripping almost everyone and often with a paralysing effect. (Though there were also healthy signs of the apparently innate American drive to reinvent a way out of dead ends, fresh shoots in unlikely places, and Postopolis! LA was far from pinned down by gloom. Wandering around the city, too - rather than watching CNN - I feel more confident for its future. And in the context of Bratton's talk, the dizzying depth of the crisis here might actually be constructive.)

Bratton quickly and usefully outlined some broad brushstrokes of what this all means, exploring the vocabulary of ‘post-’ in numerous contexts, and then went at least one better by outlining a few key ideas that might move us forward. I was drawn to three in particular. Firstly, that of using subtraction as a design principle rather than addition (a theme that LA is well-placed to explore, having both an over-abundance of macro-scale infrastructure in the first place, which could be pared back in interesting fashion, as well as an endemic informal creativity at a micro-scale). This alongside an openness to accidents and informal improvisation (something I’ve explored over the years around the idea of adaptive design). Secondly, that we should “resist the recovery”, as ‘recovery’ necessarily implies going back to something, trying to recreate conditions which would then merely set us up for the fall again. So we need a new way of thinking about moving forward from this place, rather than looking backwards or thinking we are post- yet. Thirdly, that the political - including governance in all its forms - is something we cannot allow to simply disintegrate, but we must actively engage with, including (perhaps especially, though he didn’t emphasise this) from a design perspective.

His talk was deeply serious - perhaps we’ll soon be post-irony, and not before time - without being soporific or sanctimonious. It was also deeply learned, and pinned up on a complex latticework of useful references, yet accessible and entertaining in a fashion that’s often beyond academics. This, despite his laconic performance comprising of simply reading out his printed-out talk, leaning against the lectern in the late-afternoon sun - “I want to be precise” he said.

(Somewhat interestingly, in addressing the ‘post-’ in the Postopolis! title, he became only the second person out of over 50 speakers across both events so far to take on this idea, along with James Sanders in NYC. Although as Geoff later pointed out, the Postopolis! name is derived from the ‘posts’ that bloggers produce - almost imagining a city composed of so things - rather than implying it necessarily concerns a condition ‘after the polis’ as such. I personally like the ambiguity of the title, and both Sanders and Bratton took the idea for a walk in interesting directions, and both quite differently, amidst different global conditions.)

Bratton later said modestly that there’s an “inherent advantage in batting last”. Well, you still have to step up to the plate and knock the ball out of the ground. Which he did.

So here below and in full is Benjamin Bratton’s talk from Postopolis LA!, entitled Pre and Post, and which he’s releasing under a Creative Commons ‘attributions no derivatives’ license. I've added contextual links where I felt appropriate.

Mike the Poet (Postopolis! LA)

This is the only performance at Postopolis! LA - and this genuinely was a performance - that I just had to close the laptop and stop ‘recording’. So expect notes to be short, entirely in inverse proportion to my enjoyment of Mike Sonksen aka Mike the Poet.

A third-generation LA native, Sonksen’s a tour guide and teacher by day, and however you describe this by night. Coming on like the unholy union of a rapper, gospel preacher, the late night ranting of a gentleman of the street, a particularly engaging geography teacher and an unhinged urban planner, he careered around the Standard’s conference room, a bundle of energy to close out the night. His repeated mantra - “I’m A-Live in Los Angeles!” - providing punctuation between about 4 or 5 poems depicting the history of the city, its music scene, its authors, its landscape etc.

Entirely spoken-word, it’s a little like Mike Ladd or Saul Williams without the backing tracks - less lyrically or sonically adventurous, for sure, but hyper-focused on Los Angeles, and so unique. Mike Davis, no less, has said “Mike The Poet sings the flatlands and the mean streets. In the City of Quartz, he is his generation's Walt Whitman.” Davis, who taught Sonksen at UCLA, has also said "He's the hipster antidote to my glum books."

Sonksen has a CD and non-glum book called I’m Alive In Los Angeles, and you can hear a few of his pieces up at MySpace - though it’s odd to hear the slightly sanitised, slower versions of those poems there. They hardly compare to seeing Sonksen from a few yards away, voice overloading the mic, words tumbling out of his mouth, the room a suddenly engulfed in a raging torrent of street names, myths and cultural history.

Although we'd moved inside by this point - it was a bitterly cold night 15 storeys up - this is one session I wish could've been back on the rooftop. It would've been amazing to see him in that context. Still, the very next ‘performer’ at Postopolis! LA, the following evening, would be the LAPD’s Chief of Counter-Terrorism. Which was just about perfect.

Mike the Poet [MySpace]
Profile of Mike the Poet at the Los Angeles Times

Postopolis! LA, day four / Los Angeles

(Photos and links to follow)

Day four of Postopolis! LA. All is going well. Over halfway through.

I have to buy a camera battery charger, and after a bit of research I head out to the quite wonderful Samy’s camera shop in Fairfax. Four floors stuffed with Hasselblads, Leicas, Nikons, books, software, film, paper, specialist services and knowledgeable staff. Nearby a Whole Foods supermarket is fairly extraordinary - busy, and full of organic, locally-sourced food, though not exactly at low, low prices. There’s a small recycling facility outside, and a few bikes, yet part of the real     footprint of the store is visible in the form of the large car-park outside. This all needs fixing (ideally by a smart home delivery network of grocery boys and girls, on bikes laden with sensors.) I’m particularly taken by the giant rusting arms which hoist billboards in to the sky. There are a few signs of closed shops here, and several of the billboard arms stand there empty, as if giant hands plaintively stretching up into the blue sky.

I catch the bus back from Fairfax, which drives along the vast 3rd Avenue, first past wide palm-lined streets of mansions, and then through Latino suburbs emblazoned with fabulous vernacular typography. The bus rides here are great, each a kind of moving census.

Earlier that day, I’d wandered around the quite unique Bradbury Building. As a tourist in Downtown, it’s near obligatory. It’s pretty special, though I was also taken by a ziggurat-like modernist block opposite, ‘The Angelus Plaza’, which turned out to be housing for senior citizens. Next to the Angel’s Flight funicular up to MOCA and the Walt Disney Concert Hall, those oldies - or “elders”, as they quaintly call them here, as if we are forest-folk - sure are lucky. Even better, they’re opposite the fantastic Grand Central Market.

As good as Whole Foods is, I much prefer this market. Described as ‘European-style market’ - which presumably means it’s not to be confused as a supermarket - It’s the real thing alright. As I’ve mentioned here before, I think public markets tell you a lot about the city, whether that’s a chic array of fresh flowers and furry chestnuts for the well-heeled of Zürich’s Burkliplatz, or the fresh fish, coffee and newspapers at Seattle’s Pike Place, or the lush produce for foodies at Melbourne's Victoria Market, or the bustling modernista Bocqueria in Barcelona’s Ramblas. Or best of all, the Mercat Santa Caterina in Barcelona, which combines ancient civic function with contemporary architecture by EMTB (see related entries one and two).

This one isn’t quite in the class as the Santa Caterina, but has the heritage (relatively) and is certainly full of life. The food itself sketches a picture of LA, comprised primarily of Latino and Chinese offerings. It’s all mariscos and tacos and beans and chop suey and chow mein. It’s busy too, the polyglot chatter providing another informal census. I could spend hours here, people-watching.

Yesterday’s overcast conditions prove to be a blip in a week of warm spring-into-summer sunshine during the day, clear blue skies that will later magic away the day’s heat from our base-camp pitched halfway up the LA skyline. It gets cold early and stays there, but we decide to stay up there too, all night. The rooftop location is an integral part of this particular Postopolis! experience. Amazingly many people stay out all night too, so thanks for the hardy denizens of LA for this.

Standout talks for me tonight are by the LAPD’s Chief of Counter-Terrorism Michael Downing, SINTRA’s Bryan Boyer, Stamen’s Eric Rodenbeck, Matthew Coolidge of the Centre for Land-Use Interpretation, and Christopher Hawthorne of the LA Times. It’s a very strong, varied line-up tonight. The contrast between the last session of the previous day (Mike the Poet) and the start of this one (the LAPD’s Downing) could not be stronger. This exemplifies Postopolis! to me; that we can have such a breadth of speakers - both articulate, informed and deeply concerned with the urban landscape of LA, in their own very different ways - and in a near-continuous flow which is appropriately disjunctive given the city, yet with hidden or oblique connections waiting to be uncovered (credit to Bryan Finoki, who happened to invite both.)

As weekend is approaching, the bar over the other side of the building kicks into party mode, and the music bounces around the corners of the Standard in our direction, the skyscrapers around us forming a kind of resonant chamber. During Fallen Fruit’s talk, 'Don't Stop Till You Get Enough' briefly spills out directly over us from a speaker mounted on the wall we're projecting onto, bringing a temporary halt to proceedings. Regine has head in hands, though everyone takes it in good humour, some even throwing a few shapes. After a word from Joseph Grima, the Postopolis!-side speaker falls silent again. (Though “You can be my lucky star” drifts across later on ...)

The wi-fi is not holding up well to the demands of Postopolis!, though to be fair we are streaming the events to hundreds of people directly over the hotel’s internet connection. I’m also uploading a few hundred 4mb photos per day, as are others. Cesar, Jose, Ferris and the Storefront crew do a fantastic job in lashing all the equipment together with numbed fingers, particularly as two DV cameras have inexplicably burned out in the last day alone. We end up streaming via a MacBook’s in-built camera, propped in front of the speakers, connected directly over the side of the building to an ethernet socket in a hotel room about 4 floors below. Notes to follow.

MIchael Dear / USC (Postopolis! LA)

(Photos and links to follow)

Michael Dear of USC's Geography department is the first to address the conditions of the US-Mexico border with respect to LA. I hadn’t read his book The Post-Border City but I had read the excellent Princeton Architectural Press publication Hyper-Border (see also Regine's review), which covers some of the same, contested ground.

An engaging speaker, despite the gloom into which he submerged (day one, pre- speaker lights) and working without images, he sounded English (I later wonder how this affects his view of the situation).

He starts be saying that LA “is a border city. We’re now living on the border. In fact, anywhere on the US you’re living on a border”. In a sense, he sees this as the “portable border”, the “border to go”, or the ‘frontera portade’ as a colleague of his has it. He states that “the border is a pre-eminant condition defining what we are and where we’re going to be.”

Dear undertook numerous journeys along the border in researching the book (Bryan Finoki, who introduced Dear, later tells me that Dear has driven its entire length (2000 miles?), on both sides. It occurs to me that a bit of infrastructure this large, complex, variable and politically-loaded is likely to generate surreal responses.) As if to to illustrate this, Dear relates a remarkable, ludicrous situation: he asks us to imagine a large, steep canyon that existed close to Tijuana (‘Smugglers’ Gulch’?) which directly connects Mexico to US. The US have poured 2.5 million cubic yards of earth into the canyon, such that this particular border no longer exists. A dam is built to deal with the geographical impact of this, costing over 4 billion dollars to reinforce this new border zone. Yet in order to prevent the dam from being eroded, there’s a tunnel through the dam. So imagine an an earthenware dam that’s 150 feet high, with a tunnel going through it that not only allows water through, but allows people to pass through. He says a border patrol person he was talking to thought “the whole thing would last about a week … the whole project was at least 99 per cent politics”.

Another illustration: in East Colorado, it’s difficult to know where the border is. You can inadvertently cross it - and thus inadvertently break the law. It’s become an area dotted with memorials for some reason, and Dear suggests he’s become a bit of a “monument freak”. As the memorial is on the border, you can walk around the memorial taking pictures and you’re crossing the border each time. He describes doing this constantly to the delight of a few old Mexican men, cackling away and shouting out, “That’s illegal, you understand!”

He unreels another vignette, about the leader of a vigilante group (who are ostensibly citizens who take it upon themselves to patrol the border, to huge controversy) who who went to jail because he was aiding migrants across the border illegally. (This is a land of extreme contradictions.)

“LA is a post-border condition”, he says. In the last census in 2000, 46% of LA residents were of Latino origin. It will be a majority by the next census, and by 2050, the majority of California will be of Latino origin. He says that even if the boundaries were closed now and no other person crossed, the proportion would still increase, as the Latino growth is due to ‘natural increase’ i.e. people having babies. Which, he wryly points out, is what people do.

He declares that “LA is now the rule, not the exception.” This condition is increasingly applying to all American cities. And he says this is undoubtedly a good thing. “Diversity is a privilege”, he says, and one of the most remarkable features of this city in particular is its diversity.

“LA and Southern California represents a rule about the way urban centres are made”, Dear says. In the old days we had centres (Chicago, Boston etc.), and the centre expanded outwards. LA flips that logic, not building the centre first, but last. “It comes from the hinterland inwards. It gets built later. There are 26 downtowns in LA county. It was built on different principles.”

He asks us to drive out towards Palm Springs and see that there are no town centres there. “They’re added later, as a decoration, to improve consumption, to let you celebrate. We’ve reached a different kind of city-building in this region.”

Dear says he’s “driving it home as it’s the material basis for urban change. The future of cities is shown by Los Angeles more than any other city in this country. San Francisco has become so like LA they’ve become inseparable. Sure, it’s got a nice bay, but the fundamental urban organisation is the same.”

He says he first saw this in Sao Paulo. The numerous centres. He thought it looked like LA.

They all have this LA “scrim”. A “decentralised fragmented urbanism”, and this place is the best place to start looking at this.

(This is all fascinating, and I would broadly agree with much of it. However, I’m not sure LA as a model can stretch quite as far as Dear and others imagine. Here, partly due to his impassioned delivery pushing him to it perhaps, he’s perhaps pushing LA too far as the model for all US cities, and cities elsewhere. He doesn’t quite say that LA is the city that can tell us most about the world, but he’s not far off. Los Angeles will do this to you. It’s the kind of ‘solipsurbanism’ that almost traps Kazys Varnelis too, in the introduction to his otherwise thoroughly excellent book ‘The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles’. We can learn from Los Angeles, clearly (and rather more than Las Vegas) but the applicability of its lessons, characteristics and modes to all other cities ignores vast local differences in urban culture elsewhere.)

(Again, I wonder if this is because Dear is also migrant (English > New World), who can tend to romanticise and exaggerate difference c.f. Banham, to some extent. I do this all the time in Australia, and here, as you’ll have noted.)

(This idea of building the centre afterwards, if at all, is a fundamental problem in LA. It leaves a city bereft of civic gestures, with a concomitant reinforcing effect on the individualism that can affect Anglo New World cities. The solution is not clear, not easy, of course, but it’s a problem nonetheless and not necessarily to be celebrated. The idea that a civic loam is thriving in LA in certain areas, certain communities is certainly true, and a more interesting aspect to observe. But is it enough to bind a city?)

(And I should note that LA always had a downtown, a centre. So the thesis is a little oversimplified in that respect. It’s a minor quibble however - the ‘improvise numerous centres as you develop, and post-habitation’ thesis is broadly true, and as noted previously this polynodal aspect of LA is now a hugely desirable model for cities over 2 million inhabitants. If the civic space can emerge too.)

Dear concludes by looking at the border region, again “as a manifestation of all these changes”. He says “What’s happening here is what’s going to happen to the country - and I for one will be very glad about that. America was not founded by closing its doors to immigrants, me included. It’s greatness is in assimilating all those things. The sooner we absorb the postmodern condition, the sooner we will get over so many of the hang-ups that infect our discussion of what this city is becoming …”

It’s a great talk, and helps frame numerous subsequent discussions over the next few days.

(I’m also intrigued by the focus on the border, in a way. Even in framing the talk as ‘post-border’ or ‘portera frontade’. Obviously it’s an important facet of the relationship between the US and the south, but as LA makes abundently clear - as does Dear talking about the census - the border may as well not exist. In that LA is a city centred on far more complex organisations than a sharp line in the sand. Rather, the way it moves is far more diffuse, dissolving such structures in hybridised networks. As Varnelis et al make clear, a vast stew of variable, transient, occasionally interdependent networks is a more promising organising model for the city, if more complex. Dear clearly understands this, but I wonder if it makes more sense to just ignore the border altogether.)

Bryan asks some questions in follow-up, around these ideas of diversity and control. Dear’s responses are around the ideas of “the spaces we see in cities as function of the fragmented, decentralised city.” He says “you’re going to go on building spaces of difference. We’re not building spaces of diversity, as diversity is overcoming the physical space”. He says that “all cities have their gated communities now. There is no integrated city being developed, I don’t think. The contemporary example is Dubai, jewels scattered throughout the city … I think this is OK (perhaps he means 'understandable' here) because we don’t have old forms of society.” (This is at the heart of my note above - do we still have the need for civic spaces as we society has changed? I think we do, but am aware that could be wishful thinking.)

He then flips up “the more optimistic side of the coin. That people have long time found ways of overcoming the physical space.” His example here is of Brasilia (I think I heard him say Brasilia) where people arrived there and destroyed all of that symmetry … People have a way of overcoming space. People have a way of overcoming international boundaries. And that particular boundary is only since 1848.”

Michael Dear (USC)
The Post-Border City, by Michael Dear

Postopolis! LA, day three / Los Angeles

(Photos and links to follow)

Day three of Postopolis, and fewer sneaky excursions, so fewer observations.

I do get out to Broadway though. This is an amazing example of adaptive reuse of urban space. It’s essentially the same form it was built in, but it’s changed completely in use and occupation. And as a result, the street feels busy, alive. In this way, it validates numerous examples from the talks at Postopolis! LA - and from the city itself - about how vibrant city life can be enabled not through glittering new infrastructure (chance would be a fine thing anyway) or designed urban development, but instead by ‘subtracting’, ‘re-use’, ‘appropriation’ and ‘un-designing’.

Broadway is an amazing array of buildings - and particularly facades - from the ‘20s and ‘30s and ‘40s, but these same spaces are now home to numerous, multiple units of consumer electronics shops, jewelry and 3 pairs of sneakers for 20 dollars. It’s quite a spectacle. Broadly Latino though all with the other facets of LA’s demographics in attendance, it’s as if the city had just left a giant movie set behind to be inhabited as the city saw fit. (Hollywood did do that with aspects of LA, movie facades later adapted and appropriated by residents - this is the same principle, though more so.)

Entrepreneurial commerce fits into the tiniest of gaps here, probably on the most tenuous legal basis and in highly mobile, transient sense. Sure, the street feels scruffy. It’s low-rent, and probably does not make much money for the people working here, incredibly long hours I would guess. But is full of life nonetheless, a bit of Downtown that feels like a giant, dispersed market, in sharp contrast to the often largely empty streets of the more designed parts of Downtown or the wasteland of Pershing Square. In the context of the global financial crisis, which is on constant rotation on CNN, this part of town is redolent of a thriving economy. Many lesssons here for the urban planner, no matter how unpalatable to the traditional schools of thought and practice. This is as close to Non-Plan as you’ll get.

The downtown itself is an odd place. There are some beautiful buildings here, though not quite as well-crafted as some earlier US cities perhaps. It’s caught in the throes of these turbulent movements, eddies of activity like Broadway jostling against the new loft spaces, characterised more by plaintive ‘for rent’ signs more than activity. But there are signs of that other new resident population emerging nonetheless, with 7/11s, Rite Aids, bars and galleries dotting some streets.

The USC Geography department’s walking maps of Downtown LA explain why the area feels like a movie set:

“To the surprise of many urban experts and millions of suburban residents of Los Angeles — who view sprawling Los Angeles as "100 suburbs in search of a city" — there always has been a significant downtown Los Angeles, even before the new skyscrapers began sprouting in the 1960s. Ironically, much of the built environment of the old commercial downtown was not destroyed by new development, mainly because most new projects were located to the west and northwest of the old "historic core." Today, dozens of blocks and hundreds of buildings (most of which are exactly 150 feet tall) in this subregion look essentially the same as they did in the 1930s. The human occupance and use of this subregion, however, is very different than it was 60 years ago”

Contemporrary LA emerges from these adjacent streets called, from East to West: Spring, Main, Broadway, Hill, Olive, Grand, Flower, and Figueroa, before exploring into larger numbered grid, and then erupting at all points, in all directions.

US cities are always about myth-making, and here perhaps most of all. So there’s also an air of nostalgia that is played out on these streets, for all its post-modernity - or indeed because of that.

‘What to do with this city?’ is also a question that hangs heavy as one walks around. Its built fabric is firm, and the most obvious thought is that the streets are wide-enough to take the return of trams, or light rail, as well as bikes. That pocket parks will be cultivated in the numerous square kilometres of (generally empty) parking lots that punctuate every block. That the resident population will bring life back to all these streets, not just the frayed edges of the rapidly-dispersing Skid Row. But this is urbanism-lite, and entirely out-of-step with the city and its ability to be conceived of in such easy, over-simplified and often ethically dubious measures.

The next-most-obvious thought (usually the more interesting ones, as Eric Rodenbeck later notes) is that the city is perfect for post-boom re-appropriation and subtraction (in Bratton's sense), and that the streets of Broadway, Toy District, Fashion District (and Little Tokyo to some extent) are the places to look. Think instead of a deserted city slowly overgrown with variegated life, left to its own devices rather than planned. Those parking lots becoming parks through time and accretion of native vegetation, slowly engulfed by local weeds due to the removal of cars rather than the insertion of urban design. No need for bike lanes as peak oil wreaks its havoc on the number of cars on the street and they become safe for cycling and walking, through a more sophisticated and ‘natural’ approach of shared space. The freeways become mile-long markets or gardens, overgrown with flowers. The LA River becoming the world’s largest continuous urban park through neglect rather than re-design (although the stormwater and sewage infrastructure for LA does admittedly need altering to fully enable this - more later), its length punctuated by food production, retrofitted PV arrays, PRT hubs, snaking bike paths and Rollerball tournaments. Spending any available money on articulating new civic structures through soft infrastructure of legal, social, cultural, informatic, political approaches, and nurturing activities rather than building hard infrastructure.

I don’t mean to associate the citizens of Broadway, in all their sophisticated innate understanding of street life, with weeds and other flora, nor fall into the ethnographer's trap of seeing them as a homegenous teeming mass of sauvages noble, but I hope you see what I’m getting at. When walking through Pershing Square, what seems to be a disaster of professional planning and design, on the way to bustling Broadway, and in the context of large cities worldwide struggling to build new hard infrastructure anyway (having sold their armature long ago, through lowering taxes, encouraging private property and thus NIMBYism) tactics such as this seem the only game in town.

To Postopolis! LA, day three. Today, it’s overcast, even cold. There’s another good crowd, but it’s freezing early. (Will we ever attain an even temperature at Postopolis!?) So we move down downstairs from the rooftop at the earliest opportunity. This hurts, as the rooftop, mid-skyline location is as absolutely essential to this iteration of PostOps as the permeable Storefront was to the first, and the conference room at The Standard is just that - a conference room. But it’s warmer, and far more comfortable for all concerned.

Another great free-wheeling cascade of talks tonight. Ben Cerveny was great on new systems of urban scale inteventions through informatics (I would be interested in this, but the audience were too.) Gary Dauphin was great. I was fascinated by Austin Kelly’s comparisons of architecture practice in LA and Switzerland. Benjamin Ball, of Ball-Nogues, was also quite superb.

I thought Steve Roden’s performance was particularly fantastic. Within moments he had the audience wrapped around his little finger, engaging deeply through his slow, quiet, careful, distinctly Californian delivery. And featuring a short performance on a small xylophone that spell-bound everyone. In complete (LA-style) contrast, Mike the Poet brought the house down at the end.