Designing with Different Times
Agropolis shows how even the simplest of projects—a small urban farm—is part of a range of relationships, movements and events. Agropolis illustrated the joys of working with earth, soil, plants, waste, food, sunlight, seasons and the connections and movements shared by them and larger urban systems. This is a powerful contrast with the kinds of timeless or anti-temporal design that characterise many contemporary generic spaces such as malls, shopping centres and supermarkets, frequently designed with the intent to erase the passing of time by removing entities such as the sun, sky, shadows or time of day.
Earlier discussions explored viewing temporality as an ecology, as being constituted by experiences of permanence, temporariness, circular and repeating habits, the spirals of slow change and turbulences of uncertainty. Perhaps architecture might benefit if we gave more presence and better vocabulary to the actors—devices and humans—that do the work to sustain the things we often take for granted. In doing so, we might break away from understanding buildings as finished when constructed and towards a view of things that are both never quite finished and always being finished. An ecological approach suggests the boundaries of a project are of less importance that the movements through and over the border crossings along it. Ecologies have no final state; they exist as flows and movements and patterns of energy, nutrients and transformations. Perhaps our understanding of buildings as complex and living things increases when we give more presence to the flows, shifts, events and activities of buildings as they move through time.
This essay is a selected range of different typologies of time and described how they might mingle, overlap and interfere with one another. The usual classifications of objects as being either permanent or temporary are not false, but they do not describe the full range of experiences and activities that register within and around projects and buildings. In doing so, the tidy binary between temporary and permanent objects has been both challenged and expanded.
01Timothy Moore and Barnaby Bennett, “The Transitional City,” Volume #43 Self-Building City, (2015): 56–61.
02Bruno Latour, “Trains of Thought: Piaget, Formalism, and The Fifth Dimension,” Common Knowledge 6 (1997): 170–91.
03Ibid., 173.
04Ibid.
05Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 74.
06Mohsen Mostafavi and David Leatherbarrow, On Weathering (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 5.
07Ibid.
08Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift, “Out of Order: Understanding Repair and Maintenance,” Theory, Culture & Society 24, no. 3 (2007): 1–25.
09Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (Picador, 2008).
10Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built (Viking, 1994), 2.
11Peter Bishop and Lesley Williams, The Temporary City (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 5.
12Author interview with Bailey Perryman, 2015.
13Bernard Tschumi, Event-Cities (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).
14Ryan Reynolds, “Desire for the Gap,” in Once in a Lifetime: City-building after disaster in Christchurch, ed. Barnaby Bennett et al. (Christchurch: Freerange Press, 2014), 167.
15Georgina Stylianou, “Christchurch red zone curtain set to fall,” The Press, 27 March 2013, accessed January 24, 2017, http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/8478832/Christchurch-red-zone-curtain-set-to-fall
16Barnaby Bennett et al., eds., Once in a Lifetime: City-building after disaster in Christchurch (Christchurch: Freerange Press, 2014), 67.
17Ibid., 42.
18Barnaby Bennett, Eugenio Boidi and Irene Boles, Christchurch: the transitional city Pt IV (Christchurch: Freerange Press, 2013), 176.
19Georgina Stylianou, “Arts Centre bouncing back in 2016,” The Press, 19 Jan 2016, accessed Jan 24 2017, http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/business/the-rebuild/75995949/Arts-Centre-bouncing-back-in-2016
20Barnaby Bennett, Eugenio Boidi and Irene Boles, Christchurch: the transitional city Pt IV (Christchurch: Freerange Press, 2013), 176.
21Georgina Stylianou, “New CBD building to be demolished,” The Press, 30 March 2013, accessed Jan 24 2017, http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/rebuilding-christchurch/8488917/New-CBD-building-to-be-demolished
22Barnaby Bennett et al., eds., Once in a Lifetime: City-building after disaster in Christchurch (Christchurch: Freerange Press, 2014), 34.
23Ibid., 32.
24Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton University Press: 2001), 40.
25Ibid.
26Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time (New York: 1995), 59.
CUI BONO?
THE CITY AS A PRODUCT OF SOCIETAL NEGOTIATION
Christof Mayer
How do we imagine the city in which we want to live? The answer to this seemingly simple question assumes a common understanding of what we mean when we talk about cities. Taking post-Wall Berlin as a case study, this text explores the agency of urban activism and temporary projects and their implications for long term urban developments.
City as space—Space as a function of interaction
Our traditional image of the city has little to do with the complex social, economic and political contingencies that currently define urban reality. For quite some time, the image of the city as a territorial entity, one with clear demarcations between city and countryside, has ceased to correspond to the actual conditions of the development that is at the heart of our burgeoning urbanisation; ‘the new millennium has ushered in the Age of Cities. For the first time in human history, the majority of the world’s population lives in cities.’1 Yet we still lack suitable tools to understand the city, indeed, to grasp it.
The term ‘city’ is perhaps misleading, as it invokes ‘the city’ as an object. The city as a social reality is also the space for the daily activities of the citizens that live in it. Space is thus not an object, or an independent construct that can be considered separate from human activity. ‘Humans produce space. Space is not only conscripted into the actions of everyday life, it is also produced by these actions.’2 This now means something concrete for the production of cities, or for an urban practice that understands the city not as the object, but rather as a space for possibility, for design and for negotiation, in which the users are not only consumers, but also citizens, and hence demand participation, and their right to the city.3
In opposition stands the fact that space in a neoliberal, capitalist society is a commodity that is marketed for monetary gain with no regard for the interests of the common good. This leads to a segregated, de-mixed and exclusive sort of city, one that disregards all those lacking adequate financial means to be able to participate. This use of space as a commodity follows the logic of a capitalisation of space, whereby the idea of capital is reduced to economic capital alone. Other types of capital—cultural, social or symbolic—are largely overlooked.4 Unless spaces can be marketed in an alternative way and capitalised upon economically—for example through temporary uses, which enhance the symbolic value of locations