cityofsound

Essays: Same Old New World Cities; or, the missing vision for Australian cities; or, asking the right questions in the first place

The Australian Commonwealth government's Major Cities Unit recently released a National Urban Policy discussion paper. I was part of Arup's formal response, but I was also asked to write an individual response by Justine Clark, the (excellent) editor of Architecture Australia magazine (until recently). You should buy the magazine, but I'm also posting a fuller version of the response below. Thos who don't know the local Australian references—who don't know their Woolloomooloos from their Dandenongs—needn't worry; the core points are fairly general and, I think, applicable elsewhere to varying degrees. An experienced Australian architect suggested that the essay has probably managed to "offend most of the people working in the urban planning space" here ("with good reason", he added), so there's a reasonable chance it might offend people elsewhere too. 

Offending people isn't the intention, though. As you'll see from what follows I didn't think much of the discussion paper, but rather than pick it apart I tried to offer a constructive critique, outlining some recent thinking about 'dealing with' cities. In this, I'm following recent lines of enquiry here and elsewhere about the increasingly questionable value of traditional professional approaches to contemporary cities. Or rather, what is the value of using the traditional tools, processes and sensibilities of architecture, urban planning and related disciplines to the processes and practices of producing cities?

In particular, I'm trying to focus on the idea of 'identifying the right questions', rather than letting discipline-based thinking or unthinking define answers to what may be the wrong questions (in this approach, and as usual, I owe a debt to Cedric Price.)

In spirit, it follows the various and ongoing discussions I've had with Bryan Boyer, Rory Hyde, Edwin Gardner, the UTS crowd and various colleagues at Arup, Gerard Reinmuth, Tim Horton, Justin McGuirk, Greg J. Smith, Jane-Frances Kelly, Mimi Zeiger and several others, as well as drawing from recent project work in Helsinki, Melbourne and Adelaide. And in particular, a project I've been conducting in the Melbourne suburb of Knox—an urban renewal programme centred on fusing new models of manufacturing and urbanism—where the clients, Ingo Kumic, Mark Holdsworth and Kim Rawlings, have particularly shaped my thinking around assessing the primary drivers in cities, and attempting to create urban conditions rather than urban form. It also follows some questions I outlined in my recent critique of Steven Holl's Linked Hybrid in Beijing, or an earlier review of Sydney's urban strategy, as well as my response to being caught up in the Brisbane floods.

It probably also started with work on a project for a National Plan for Kazakhstan, a couple of years ago. The project went nowhere for us—which is another story for another day, perhaps—but piqued some thoughts about national projects, national conversations and working with culture at this scale.

In retrospect, I realise it's also partly the summation of almost a year's worth of public speaking, particularly around the idea of 'Big Australia'. This storm-in-a-policy-teacup emerged when population growth figures were announced by then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, pointing to an Australian population of around 35m+ people within the next 30 years or so (Australia's population is currently 22m people.) The national conversation, or what passes for it in Australia, rapidly polarised into 'Small Australia' and 'Big Australia' camps. There were some unlikely alignments here, but most were focusing on the abstract idea of a number—should it be 25m? 35m? 45m?—rather than any sense of what kind of Australia we want?

And so I would point out that the number itself doesn't matter i.e. Big Australia does not necessarily mean Ballardian social breakdown, given that Germany can fit 81m people into an area (357,000 km²) which easily fits more than a couple times over into the state of New South Wales alone (809,000 km²), with a perfectly high standard of living. It just requires thinking through and new approaches of planning. (Note: the poor soil quality and high temperature levels of much of NSW means you wouldn't actually want to inhabit all of it, but still.) Equally, a Small Australia of 22m could punch above its weight, as the Nordic Region demonstrates.

This is not to suggest that Australia should try to emulate Germany or the Nordics—It's an increasingly Asian country with its own traditions—but both analogies indicate qualitative possibilities. So the question isn''t what number of people should live in Australia, but instead what kind of country do we want? In other words, what is Australia for? Addressing that question would enable us to plan effectively.

I know this question resonated. (I gave speeches around this topic almost weekly, for most of last year, which ultimately contributed to me being selected as one of 'the 100 most influential people in Sydney' by the local broadsheet, which is somewhat laughable, clearly completely erroneous, and an honour, all at once—but either way, was partly due to my public field-testing of the ideas in the following essay on various audiences. It shows that speeches, if you're comfortable with holding forth on half-formed ideas, can be a form of prototyping, perhaps.) 

So when it comes to Australian cities, the question still stands. What do we want Australian cities to be? That is un-stated, and certainly un-answered, in the National Urban Policy discussion paper, which, to a designer brought up on working with that awkward word 'content', is a strange oversight.

At core, I'm suggesting that, without considering these and other core strategic questions, few of the existing approaches to planning and designing cities are working, certainly on any meaningful, systematic scale.

In Australia, it's sometimes difficult to tell—until you look at the numbers—that this is the case, as at first glance what could possibly be wrong with these cities? The sun is shining, the food and drink is good, people seem well-fed, well-housed, well-educated and well-off, and the cities themselves are often beautifully-sited amidst stunning terrain. (Hence their high-placing in urban quality of life surveys, alongside Canadian and middle-European cities. It's worth noting that most of these rankings are often designed with a highly-specific agenda and judged by non-residents, and so they bear little relation to actual life in the cities in question.)

Equally, the economy—again on the surface—is outperforming much of the 'Western developed' nations. (Or 'over-developed nations', as some might say.) Powered by an unprecedented resources boom, it's not even in full gear yet apparently. But even The (laissez-faire) Economist recently outlined the dangers in not being able to strategically take advantage of this boom, suggesting a sovereign wealth fund. I'd wholeheartedly endorse this, alongside various strategic taxation measures, but also argue for an innovation-focused fund in particular, after the Sitra model perhaps. As the Future Fund indicates, it's not enough just to grow money, but to direct it strategically too.)

However, in a bit of Sydney that doesn't look like the gleaming harbourside suburbs or one of the world's wealthiest nations—which is to say, the bulk of Sydney—some people are taking architecture into their own hands and creating self-defence structures like this, which presumably would not look out of place in Tripoli or Abidjan about now:

This is one kind of warning light on the dashboard, and albeit highly unrepresentative, it is at least viscerally memorable, no?

But there are numerous others less obvious but perhaps even more substantial issues, well-known in Australian urban planning, architecture and policy circles. They revolve essentially around climate change, health, extremely high carbon footprint, ageing population, car- and oil-dependency, largest, most over-priced and increasingly unaffordable housing in the world, monopolised retail sectors, crumbling infrastructure, diminished surrounding food basins with nutrient-poor soil, falling productivity, rising income inequality and so on. While some of these are fundamental, there should also be concern over some of Australia's cultural attitudes, especially those relating to propensity for change and innovation, which would indicate a capacity to address these issues. 

And yet these cities and this culture often do work, in the almost effortless, small, quotidian sense as well as through the occasional grand gesture. I've learnt as much about what makes good cities tick from Australian cities as anywhere else. There's the paradox. And a national urban policy requires an appetite to engage with the everyday complexity of this position.

So while there's a discomfort in addressing a strategic question or national conversation in a culture predisposed to letting these things just emerge, for better or worse, my response is written with this core thought in mind—can we pull focus on the question of what cities are, on how they are produced, and so create better patterns for urban development, and ultimately, a better Australia, punching above its weight rather than below it?

And within all this, given the context of AA, I'm trying to suggest a repositioning of architecture and other design disciplines within all this, moving into a position of strategic, creative influence rather than the increasingly marginalised, beleaguered position it's currently occupying.

It's a big question, and this is in no way an answer, but this essay is in the spirit of asking the right questions in the first place. Comments, as ever, are most welcome.

(Note: this is the original 'director's cut' version of the essay. The snappier version appears in the current edition of Architecture Australia, which is well worth picking up.)

 

Stadsmuziek, by Akko Golenbeld

Difficult to resist giving this one a quick nod, given the subject. A physical model of Eindhoven rolled onto a drum and attached to a piano. A form of player piano with the city as the score. [By Akko Golenlbeld for Design Academy Eindhoven, exhibited at Salone del Mobile in Milano.]

Instantly triggers all kinds of unruly thoughts and references about city symphonies from Copland to Cage to Flying Lotus, as well as other hybrids of city modelling, fabrication and player piano rolls, but it also makes me think about other attempts to 'capture' the sound of the city itself and re-present as artwork, such as Walter Ruttman's Weekend (read a PDF by Jesse Shapins about that here) or his Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt.

Although the end result is perhaps a little frivolous at first glance, the translation to physical form is very appealing—as is often the case, the creation of physical form by digital means (assuming that this was produced through digital craft rather than through exacting hand-made craftsmanship) lends the realisation more weight, in every sense, as compared to purely digital representation. Although the physical and aural realisation is bounded literally by the form of the piano, it also makes you wonder what other noise-makers could the city be attached to? And what other aspects of the city's manifestation could be modelled, fabricated and sounded out—other built form such as road and rail would provide linear drones, perhaps; what about soft infrastructure as well as hard?. Physical city models such as these are often used to test development applications for urban insertions, in terms of shadows created, ruined sightlines and so on, but Stadsmuziek suggests, albeit metaphorically, we should also ask what proposed urban development would sound like.

Ironically, despite its dependence on built form as input mode, such translations might enable a way of thinking about the way the city is realised beyond simple viewsheds. A generative piece, not least in terms of further thoughts ...

And, as physical city models increasingly abound, what would different cities sound like. What if you ran this baby through it?

Stadsmuziek by Akko Golenbeld [Designboom]

[via Paul Schütze - thanks]

More than "a mere building": Kwinter on Beaubourg

After that entry on Steven Holl's Linked Hybrid in Beijing—and thanks for the feedback—I happened to be by chance reading Sanford Kwinter's Requiem for the City at the End of the Millennium (Actar, 2010).

A beautiful little book in every sense, Kwinter writes wonderfully and perceptively about the city, and architecture and urbanism, and particularly its relationship to technology. There's a lot in this small book, but the very first chapter resonated immediately, creating a chance juxtaposition between Linked Hybrid and Centre Pompidou, aka Beaubourg.

Kwinter places that extraordinary building in the context of the early-'70s, where he had been a student, as well as the work of artist Gordon Matta-Clark, particularly his Conical-Intersect (1975), a dirty great bore-hole through a series of apartments in Beaubourg:

Kwinter almost positions Pompidou in the same light, suggesting both interventions repositioned the everyday "neighbourhood of flats" as "social and economic infrastructure" instead. When writing about the architectural 'intersect' of Rogers and Piano, which opened a couple of years later, he uses language entirely redolent of descriptions of Matta-Clark's work: 

"Beaubourg is a social, economic, and intellectual performance of great risk, even violence..."

But what's particularly interesting is that Kwinter suggests that Beaubourg not only reflects, expresses, or makes manifest the emerging social and cultural patterns of the day, but also that he implies that it there is a symbiotic relationship. He suggests that the building itself exerts some influence in return, in effect calibrating those forces, perhaps in a way that I'm suggesting Linked Hybrid looks like it will not be able to, and as Kwinter later states, Gehry's Guggenheim does not either.

"The Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers tour de force was the intellectual harbinger of cultural and especially economic processes that wrere then remotely and invisibly preparing themselves and that today have become so plain to see: the multiple, subtle "coups" of economic liberalization, globalization, and the systematic subsumption of social and cultural capital by financial rationality."

"No more than a couple of times in an era, a building comes along that fully transcends its specialised context—that is, that challenges and intervenes within developments taking place across an entire society. Such a building forces us to acknowledge that the shaping of subjectivity and the organisation of (productive and other) forces in a society are dynamic activities, which can be understood as somehow ubiquitous design processes that are guided by invisible hands. Sometimes an architectural work can make these processes palpable, or like a delicate servo-mechanism guiding a much larger machine, it can modulate the larger system's output in such a way as to make its dynamic apprehensible. In these cases nothing is more stifling and misleading than forced recourse to the technical languages and concepts of architectural appreciation and analysis." [emphasis added]

So is Kwinter suggesting that the effect of Pompidou is not just in potentially apprehending such modernising "coups" but also in redirecting their forces such that it simultaneously enables an entire national culture to modernise, through placing "logiciel" at the core of its society?

The design team for the Pompidou often sounds like the opening line of an unsavoury joke—"An Italian, an Englishman, an Italian-Englishman, and an Irishman walk into a pub ..."—but this is a serious trick to pull off, if it's the case. A tantalising idea.

"French society in the post-Pompidou era has far surpassed the American public in its tolerance of urban infrastructure modernization (perhaps slightly overtaken now only by the Dutch and the Finns) ..." [Intrigued by these last references to Dutch and Finns, by the way - DH]

Both the Pompidou and Linked Hybrid projects are 'acupunctures' of a sort, both inserting a form of "urban infrastructure modernization" into hugely different existing conditions; Pompidou into the old 4th arrondissement, Linked Hybrid into a haphazard corner of the gargantuan second ring road in Beijing. Yet although Linked Hybrid would also claim to be an indication of a new kind of urban space and pattern of habitation, and the scale and quality of the development suggests such a statement is being attempted, it already does not seem to resonate as Beaubourg did, and does.

Is the programme of cultural centre able to do perform this 'alchemy' in a way that an essentially residential environment—albeit a mixed-use one—cannot? Or did the cultural ferment of the late-60s/early-70s, centred on Paris, provide a crucible for such a transformative project, whereas Linked Hybrid gets lost amidst the extraordinary profusion of building innovation in contemporary China?

Or is it that architecture itself shifted at this point, precociously suggesting a promise that has rarely been achieved since? In Kwinter's words:

"It might be said that this was the moment when architectural practice first confronted its capacity to function as a science as well as art. Architecture was no longer entirely wedded to buildings, but was becoming a form of knowledge, research, activism."

If we accept Kwinter's idea that Beaubourg did shape cultural forces, and my suggestion that Linked Hybrid will fall short of that, it would be interesting to further assess why Beaubourg can when Linked Hybrid can't. And by extension, what kind of architecture and design practice can exert this wider influence, and turn a "mere building" into "delicate servo-mechanism guiding a much larger machine"?

Related
Linked Hybrid by Steven Holl Architects, and designing for the occupation of space in contemporary Beijing
Requiem for the City at the End of the Millennium, by Sanford Kwinter [Amazon | Actar]

Journal: Linked Hybrid by Steven Holl Architects, and designing for the occupation of space in contemporary Beijing

(Continuing to empty out my old Beijing notebook from October 2009.)

Beijing was such a whirl that I didn’t even get to see much of the city’s archetypal and much-discussed urban form: the hutong. (Read Sorkin on hutongs and lilongs.) While that’s a regret, as they’ve been disappearing for years, recent reports indicate they are finally being valued, and so preserved. I’ll see them next time—I didn’t want to rush it. Equally, I only saw CCTV, Water Cube, Bird’s Nest from a taxi and a bus. I didn’t see the Forbidden City, only drove past Tiananmen Square. Didn’t get on the subway. Missed the Beijing Railway Station.

Still, I saw a fair bit, as reported previously, and I did get to one project I’d particularly wanted to see: the MOMA building, aka the Linked Hybrid, by Steven Holl Architects et al.

By way of background, here’s an introduction to the project by the architects themselves:

“The 220,000 square meter pedestrian-oriented Linked Hybrid complex, sited adjacent to the site of old city wall of Beijing, aims to counter the current privatized urban developments in China by creating a new twenty-first century porous urban space, inviting and open to the public from every side. Filmic urban public space; around, over and through multifaceted spatial layers, as well as the many passages through the project, make the Linked Hybrid an "open city within a city". The project promotes interactive relations and encourages encounters in the public spaces that vary from commercial, residential, and educational to recreational. The entire complex is a three-dimensional urban space in which buildings on the ground, under the ground and over the ground are fused together. “ [StevenHoll.com]

As ever in Beijing, getting there was an achievement in itself. I’d attempted to visit it the night before, getting a taxi as close as I could but ultimately getting wonderfully lost, as reported previously. Thinking back, my ineptitude reminds of Don DeLillo on tourists:

"Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travellers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm." [Found in Geoff Dyer's Working the room]

Given that the "mechanism of the host country" here isn't particularly geared in this way, the next morning, I decided to use a prop to overcome the gulf in language between Beijing’s taxi drivers and me. Pouncing on Linked Hybrid’s distinctive form, I quickly sketched out its shape on a bit of paper and showed it to the driver. The driver was relatively old—though you never know here; he had the kind of skin that looked as if it was aged by the conditions of Beijing rather than the natural passage of time—but good-natured with it, and though he looked utterly bewildered by the scribble, he shrugged and decided to give it a go.

So off we head into the smog, heading down one of the enormous freeways that rise up and run through the neighbourhoods fanning out of the centre of Beijing. We can only see a little way into the distance, and it takes a while before something that looks like Linked Hybrid suddenly emerges from the gloomy light. The driver glances across at my scrap of paper and a broad grin appears. He starts laughing and nodding, pointing at the paper and then the building. This is more of a tribute to the imageability of Holl’s work than my draughtsmanship. (Which reminds me of an old entry here about how quickly and recognisably one could draw a building.)

It then takes a while to pick our way through the knot of highways. These massive roads almost seem designed to prevent you leaving them, as if the roads themselves had been the designers, resisting any attempt to question their permanence at the heart of things.

The taxi drops me next to a building site. The Linked Hybrid looms in front of me through the hazy orange early morning light, but there’s a trail of debris to negotiate first, running alongside a narrow canal which almost acts as a protective moat. The building is ostensibly on the Xibahe South Road, near the expressway to the airport.