Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Photo Presentation
If there would be a nice exposition of our work at the NAI or at the Biennale, we would like to present a series of pictures linked with words from our urban alphabet. We would select the pictures and words that translate our perception of the public sphere of Sao Paulo best. I think this would be a nice and accessible way to introduce Public Sao Paulo to the people that neither have been there nor are familiar with architectural thinking and urban research. Here are some examples:
'A Final Statement'
The city fascinates us. Mainly because of its enormous diversity and complexity. But what do we refer to when we are talking about the city? Can we still describe the city with the language and research methods we have created for describing the city? The first thing that comes to mind when we think of the city is the spatial arrangement of a highly dense building environment. Cities established as the clustering of a place to trade and developed many supporting services as the settlements grew into cities. But surely, the cities we live in today, and especially the metropolises, have reached an incredible complexity with innumerable layers of history, stacked over time. The city is a time box in which over time snapshots of its contemporary situations have been collected, from the establishment of the settlement until the city it has become today. The city carries the memory of its own development.
Within the city the public sphere has always played an important role, because of its potential for communication, confrontation and connectivity. We refer to it as a sphere because there is not one public layer or dimension but many, one nothing less important than the other. They are all realities that all together form the Public City. To develop our notion of this complex theme in a city of incomprehensible scale, we have chosen for a threefold approach: firstly we have observed the public sphere in Sao Paulo and documented our experiences in pictures, sketches, diagrams and texts; secondly we have started to develop an ‘urban vocabulary’ that relates to the concept of the city in general. The next step has been to link the urban alphabet with our experiences of public Sao Paulo, as a tool to render the publicness of Sao Paulo in a broader context. By interlinking the words and images we could discover different realities or layers of publicness that cover the contemporary situation of Public Sao Paulo best. Important to understand is that many more layers can be found within this public sphere of the city, but as we have not intended to decompose the city’s complexity into a few defined layers that form a complete representation of the city’s publicness, these are the ones that describe our notion of Public Sao Paulo best.
The final step would be to find out how these different realities relate to one another. As can be seen in the public web and the diagrams, the different layers are not isolated but are connected and influence eachother. The informal city meets the infrastructural city where the infrastructural network congests and traffic jams grow, making it the perfect spot for entrepreneurs to sell their goods or services to the awaiting mass. The formal city meets the universal city when people want to recreate, to represent themselves and confront others in a representational environment, when people want to disconnect from their private situations and plug themselves into the public. Within these overlaps we find potential. The potential to trigger something new, not for the benefit of one group of users but for more.
The question is not how can we decompose the complex city into fragments and into a language that we understand? Not how to make the notion of the city graspable. Because it is this ‘ungraspability’ that makes the city so fascinating. And perhaps, our own language would not suffice in taking on this task and therefore could not represent the Reality. Neither have we intended to confine the public sphere of Sao Paulo and the city in general since the public sphere has an inexhaustible capability to grow, adapt and transform itself. The quality of the public realm lies within its freedom for different interpretations. Let the people have their own interpretations, their own realities, multiple realities.
The question is how can we as architects, urban planners and municipality develop a tool or strategy to leave space for these different interpretations and design public spaces that in fact are public, that have the potential to transform into something more. In stead of confining the public realm, excluding undesired visitors, determine and control the user’s behaviour within our pretty ‘public’ spaces we design for profit and consumption today. At the same time, this is nothing new because ever since the first public places, like the Agora in Athens, undesired guests were not welcome to participate. Still, here a little more passiveness would be in place. While at the same time, temporarily or locally, the city is left unguarded and abandoned when a more proactive approach is needed. Within this quest valuable lessons can be learned from the flexible, adaptable informal city, always in a process of development into something appropriate.
Within the city the public sphere has always played an important role, because of its potential for communication, confrontation and connectivity. We refer to it as a sphere because there is not one public layer or dimension but many, one nothing less important than the other. They are all realities that all together form the Public City. To develop our notion of this complex theme in a city of incomprehensible scale, we have chosen for a threefold approach: firstly we have observed the public sphere in Sao Paulo and documented our experiences in pictures, sketches, diagrams and texts; secondly we have started to develop an ‘urban vocabulary’ that relates to the concept of the city in general. The next step has been to link the urban alphabet with our experiences of public Sao Paulo, as a tool to render the publicness of Sao Paulo in a broader context. By interlinking the words and images we could discover different realities or layers of publicness that cover the contemporary situation of Public Sao Paulo best. Important to understand is that many more layers can be found within this public sphere of the city, but as we have not intended to decompose the city’s complexity into a few defined layers that form a complete representation of the city’s publicness, these are the ones that describe our notion of Public Sao Paulo best.
The final step would be to find out how these different realities relate to one another. As can be seen in the public web and the diagrams, the different layers are not isolated but are connected and influence eachother. The informal city meets the infrastructural city where the infrastructural network congests and traffic jams grow, making it the perfect spot for entrepreneurs to sell their goods or services to the awaiting mass. The formal city meets the universal city when people want to recreate, to represent themselves and confront others in a representational environment, when people want to disconnect from their private situations and plug themselves into the public. Within these overlaps we find potential. The potential to trigger something new, not for the benefit of one group of users but for more.
The question is not how can we decompose the complex city into fragments and into a language that we understand? Not how to make the notion of the city graspable. Because it is this ‘ungraspability’ that makes the city so fascinating. And perhaps, our own language would not suffice in taking on this task and therefore could not represent the Reality. Neither have we intended to confine the public sphere of Sao Paulo and the city in general since the public sphere has an inexhaustible capability to grow, adapt and transform itself. The quality of the public realm lies within its freedom for different interpretations. Let the people have their own interpretations, their own realities, multiple realities.
The question is how can we as architects, urban planners and municipality develop a tool or strategy to leave space for these different interpretations and design public spaces that in fact are public, that have the potential to transform into something more. In stead of confining the public realm, excluding undesired visitors, determine and control the user’s behaviour within our pretty ‘public’ spaces we design for profit and consumption today. At the same time, this is nothing new because ever since the first public places, like the Agora in Athens, undesired guests were not welcome to participate. Still, here a little more passiveness would be in place. While at the same time, temporarily or locally, the city is left unguarded and abandoned when a more proactive approach is needed. Within this quest valuable lessons can be learned from the flexible, adaptable informal city, always in a process of development into something appropriate.
The Cities Within
The Formal City is the city we are most familiar with. It is the city where most of us work, where people from in- and outside the city recreate and where we can find our institutional buildings. It’s the flagship of the municipality, that leaves no effort untouched to make sure the formal city looks as pretty as possible and is used by the most-favoured visitors in the most-favoured manner. It’s a display of modernity, that shows the city governments’ construction towards an “ideal” future.
In Sao Paulo there is not one formal core that tries to evolve and expand, but rather many formal clusters that differ in scale but all have the same sense of control. Since Sao Paulo has grown so rapidly during the last century the formal clusters have become surrounded by informal tissue and therefore harder to control because of the many “threats” around them. This has led to an unrivalled desire of municipality to control the formal city and protect it from undesired influences. In other words, undesired visitors are excluded from use of this city, either by raising a gate around the cluster like at Ibirapuera, by patrolling the streets with surveillance cars like at Centro, by interiorizing public places like the indoor terraces of most bars/restaurants and many shopping malls or even by privatizing (= depublicizing) the public.
The Informal City is the city that grows where the formal city doesn’t suffice. It is the oldest way of city development and grows out of necessity and functionality. The informal city is never finished, it is in a constant process of transformation and improvement. This is the purest form of bottom-up development, where only what is needed gets built at a time when there are the possibilities to built it. Inhabitants of this city are not cared for by their formal counterpart. They often live in illegality but long for acknowledgement, citizenship and constitution.
In Sao Paulo the share of the informal city is enormous. City development could not cope with the uncontrollable growth of the city half a century ago and many city inhabitants were one their own. This led to the establishment of new communities, close to the formal city, and developed their own systems, strategies and set of rules. Throughout the last decades pieces of informal tissue have been swept away by city planners trying to formalize the tissue and expand the formal clusters into one core. But as informality is always a response to formality, the evicted inhabitants found new sites with potential to occupy and start all over. Occupy, appropriate, grow, transform and develop. Can city development be more pure than that?
The Infrastructural City is the city that creates a constant situation of dynamical flux throughout the entire city. It provides a network of connections from one place to another. Users of the infrastructural city use this city very often but never permanent, on the contrary, rather as brief as possible. Therefore the infrastructural city is always in a constant process of advancement too, trying to provide its users the best service possible. Since there are many ways of transportation, all customized to the preconditions of the desired undertaking, this city is often multilayered and complex.
In Sao Paulo, a city of 18 million inhabitants and 8000 km2, we would not be able to speak of one metropolis without the support of an infrastructural network. The incredible density, in big parts of the city 200 – 13000 inhabitants per km2, shows the need for a sufficient infrastructure. One that is not there at the moment. The scale and density of the city and the singularity of the existing infrastructure guarantees the congestion of the infrastructural city throughout the year. The car dominates, leaving no space for cyclists and pedestrians, while the public network is in now way appropriated to the massiveness of the city. An infrastructure of only overcrowded streets, overloaded roads and congested highways screams for the development of a sufficient underground network, that at the moment has only 2 decent lines, comparable with Rotterdam, a city 30 times smaller than Sao Paulo.
The Deserted City is the city that gets abandoned, often temporarily and sometimes only locally. This city expels the reality of the other cities from time to time, the night being its favorite domain. The dynamical whole of people using the streets during the day is replaced by nothing but emptiness, having a permanent smell of fear and danger that evicts large groups of users but attract others for whom there is no place during the day. This is the city that becomes territorial in a matter of hours, almost as fast as it disappears.
In Sao Paulo this permanent smell of fear and danger has become an integral part of the urban life. In every big city this is a reality, yet not at the same scale as in Sao Paulo. Usually there are certain neighbourhoods that become deserted and need to be avoided for your own safety. But here almost the entire city is abandoned at night. The taxi driver passing by only now and then, with only few concentrations of active nightlife. Even there is space for publicness, there is none to find. Two striking examples: bars, restaurants and clubs have their outdoor spaces inside and can only be reached by car or taxi; and the business district, the territory of men in suits, glitter and glamour at daytime, morphs into the territory of the homeless and the drug addicts at night, lining up their pieces of cardboard in front of abundant banks and offices to form a temporal community and using the impressive boulevards as their collective toilet.
The Universal City is the city creation of the urge for publicness of people. People leave their private domain, where they can find harmony and work on their public appearance, to show this homegrown identity and compare it to those of others. The universal city is the place to meet strangers, to become part of society, to put your life in perspective, but not less important to forget about the concerns of the everyday life and their responsibilities, to become anonymous for a while.
In Sao Paulo is the wrong way to start off this sentence because the universal city is the city that in concept is universal. It is everywhere around us, because it is where the people are. It is not even restricted to the tangible world anymore, nowadays the internet is just as much the place to communicate, to confront and to evolve your identity. Throughout the entire city people trade, play and talk, the public space still being the perfect place to do so. Take a stroll through Ibirapuera Park in the weekend and publicness is what you will find.
In Sao Paulo there is not one formal core that tries to evolve and expand, but rather many formal clusters that differ in scale but all have the same sense of control. Since Sao Paulo has grown so rapidly during the last century the formal clusters have become surrounded by informal tissue and therefore harder to control because of the many “threats” around them. This has led to an unrivalled desire of municipality to control the formal city and protect it from undesired influences. In other words, undesired visitors are excluded from use of this city, either by raising a gate around the cluster like at Ibirapuera, by patrolling the streets with surveillance cars like at Centro, by interiorizing public places like the indoor terraces of most bars/restaurants and many shopping malls or even by privatizing (= depublicizing) the public.
The Informal City is the city that grows where the formal city doesn’t suffice. It is the oldest way of city development and grows out of necessity and functionality. The informal city is never finished, it is in a constant process of transformation and improvement. This is the purest form of bottom-up development, where only what is needed gets built at a time when there are the possibilities to built it. Inhabitants of this city are not cared for by their formal counterpart. They often live in illegality but long for acknowledgement, citizenship and constitution.
In Sao Paulo the share of the informal city is enormous. City development could not cope with the uncontrollable growth of the city half a century ago and many city inhabitants were one their own. This led to the establishment of new communities, close to the formal city, and developed their own systems, strategies and set of rules. Throughout the last decades pieces of informal tissue have been swept away by city planners trying to formalize the tissue and expand the formal clusters into one core. But as informality is always a response to formality, the evicted inhabitants found new sites with potential to occupy and start all over. Occupy, appropriate, grow, transform and develop. Can city development be more pure than that?
The Infrastructural City is the city that creates a constant situation of dynamical flux throughout the entire city. It provides a network of connections from one place to another. Users of the infrastructural city use this city very often but never permanent, on the contrary, rather as brief as possible. Therefore the infrastructural city is always in a constant process of advancement too, trying to provide its users the best service possible. Since there are many ways of transportation, all customized to the preconditions of the desired undertaking, this city is often multilayered and complex.
In Sao Paulo, a city of 18 million inhabitants and 8000 km2, we would not be able to speak of one metropolis without the support of an infrastructural network. The incredible density, in big parts of the city 200 – 13000 inhabitants per km2, shows the need for a sufficient infrastructure. One that is not there at the moment. The scale and density of the city and the singularity of the existing infrastructure guarantees the congestion of the infrastructural city throughout the year. The car dominates, leaving no space for cyclists and pedestrians, while the public network is in now way appropriated to the massiveness of the city. An infrastructure of only overcrowded streets, overloaded roads and congested highways screams for the development of a sufficient underground network, that at the moment has only 2 decent lines, comparable with Rotterdam, a city 30 times smaller than Sao Paulo.
The Deserted City is the city that gets abandoned, often temporarily and sometimes only locally. This city expels the reality of the other cities from time to time, the night being its favorite domain. The dynamical whole of people using the streets during the day is replaced by nothing but emptiness, having a permanent smell of fear and danger that evicts large groups of users but attract others for whom there is no place during the day. This is the city that becomes territorial in a matter of hours, almost as fast as it disappears.
In Sao Paulo this permanent smell of fear and danger has become an integral part of the urban life. In every big city this is a reality, yet not at the same scale as in Sao Paulo. Usually there are certain neighbourhoods that become deserted and need to be avoided for your own safety. But here almost the entire city is abandoned at night. The taxi driver passing by only now and then, with only few concentrations of active nightlife. Even there is space for publicness, there is none to find. Two striking examples: bars, restaurants and clubs have their outdoor spaces inside and can only be reached by car or taxi; and the business district, the territory of men in suits, glitter and glamour at daytime, morphs into the territory of the homeless and the drug addicts at night, lining up their pieces of cardboard in front of abundant banks and offices to form a temporal community and using the impressive boulevards as their collective toilet.
The Universal City is the city creation of the urge for publicness of people. People leave their private domain, where they can find harmony and work on their public appearance, to show this homegrown identity and compare it to those of others. The universal city is the place to meet strangers, to become part of society, to put your life in perspective, but not less important to forget about the concerns of the everyday life and their responsibilities, to become anonymous for a while.
In Sao Paulo is the wrong way to start off this sentence because the universal city is the city that in concept is universal. It is everywhere around us, because it is where the people are. It is not even restricted to the tangible world anymore, nowadays the internet is just as much the place to communicate, to confront and to evolve your identity. Throughout the entire city people trade, play and talk, the public space still being the perfect place to do so. Take a stroll through Ibirapuera Park in the weekend and publicness is what you will find.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Urban Alphabet
The public sphere is one of the most complex themes in architectural theory. To get a better grasp on this subject, I tried to establish an archive of words that all relate to the Public. After making a dictionary of words that all relate to this theme in general, I weighed them and linked them to my experiences of the Public in Sao Paulo. By doing that and linking related words to eachother, I found a way to describe the different realities of the Public in Sao Paulo. It’s clear that Sao Paulo is too big, too complex and there are too many contradictions to be able to narrow it down to a single reality.
Now I’ve found a few realities that all show a different aspect of Sao Paulo, this makes it easier for Nicola and me to select the words that describe the public sphere of Sao Paulo best for our second part of our presentation for the expositions. We want to select some pictures that show the different realities and accompany them with a word that describes these varying aspects. I think that would really add something to the presentation since “one image says more than a thousand words.” This could be in the form of large printed out pictures or a video presentation.
By no means, this dictionary is finished and complete. Feel free to add more words and comment on my experienced realities. Because that’s what always fascinates me about the Public, there is space for different interpretations of the same.
A
Acceptance
Alternative
Anonymity
Appropriation
Authority
B
Behaviour
Bureaucracy
C
Citizenship
Coherence
Collectivity
Communication
Community
Concentration
Concept
Condition
Conflict
Confrontation
Congestion
Connectivity
Consolidation
Constitution
Construction
Contact
Context
Continuity
Control
Clustering
Culture
D
Danger
Decor
Destination
Democracy
Density
“Depublicisation” (privatization)
Development
Differentiation
Digitalisation
Distraction
Downgrading
Dynamical
E
Emptiness
Exclusion
Experience
Experiment
F
Facilitation
Fear
Flexibility
Formality
Freedom
Functionality
G
Genericality
Globalisation
Growth
H
Hierarchy
Homelessness
Hybridism
I
Identity
Illegality
Improvement
Informality
Infrastructure
Integration
Interiorisation
Isolation
J
K
L
Layeredness
Law enforcement
Locality
M
Maintenance
Memory
Migration
Mobility
Modernity
Monstrosity
Monumentality
N
Necessity
Neglection
Network
O
Occupation
Openness
Organisation
P
People
Planning
Potential
Popularity
Power
Privatization (“depublicisation”)
Process
Protection
Provocation
Q
R
Reality
Recreation
Regulation
Restriction
S
Safety
Segregation
Society
Spatiality
Statical
Strategy
Structure
Supervision
Surveillance
Sustainability
T
Temporality
Territory
Trade
Tradition
Transformation
Transportation
Tourism
U
Universality
Unemployment
Urbanity
V
Visibility
W
X
Y
Z
Zoning
As I said there is not one reality that really says it all about the public sphere of Sao Paulo. The city is a monster, in the way that this city more than anywhere has created itself for decades without the strict supervision of a municipality. From my point of view, for a long time the city has literally been “out of control.” Now municipality is trying to get back in control, but not without resistance. Informal processes follow out of necessity and establish themselves in their purest form. They are there for a reason, have developed through time and can not be easily replaced by a formal layer of urban planning. Besides, informality is always a response to formality, so formalizing the informal will evoke new informal processes because certain groups, behaviour etc. will be displaces that have established there place on that spot through time.
Next to the formal-informal realities, there is a big difference between Sao Paulo at day and at night. At daytime the city becomes something between a hysterical circus and an overloaded infrastructure that in now way can supply the demand of its population. The car is the only option because distances are great and the development of the public transport has been on a stand still while Sao Paulo was growing out of its own skin. Not to mention the pedestrian and the cyclist that are liked guests of our European cities but have no place in the public network. Of course all these things are relative. For instance, there are clusters of a vivid public life where pedestrians are very present, but these clusters often are poorly connected, creating a tissue around them that is dominated by cars again. And very apparent is the way these clusters are dealt with: often with a gate around it and surveillance controls making sure there are no unwelcome guests that do not comply to the “appropiate” behaviour. At night, the streets become deserted. Again clusters of nightlife, but anywhere else the smell of trouble in the air. This fear has established itself over the years but has become an important factor in the way people use the city but also the way people have designed the city. Contrary to the stereotypical Brazilian outdoor public life you will find in most other cities in the country, a significant part of the public life of Sao Paulo occurs indoors. Yes this also has to do with the climate etc but it can’t be denied that the fear of danger plays an important role in this. Putting the Public behind a door makes it easier to control, protect and watch them. People will always have the urge to become public: to meet with strangers, to claim your own place in society, to give your life a meaning and an identity, to get distracted and to be just an anonymous element in the mass before turning back to the private again, where comfort is found but responsibilities and duties too.
Reality 1: the Reality of the Formal City
Authority, Behaviour, Conflict, Control, Exclusion, Formality, Hierarchy, Isolation, Law enforcement, Maintenance, Power, Privatization (“depublicisation”), Protection, Restriction, Segregation, Surveillance, Zoning
Reality 2: the Reality of the Traffic
Congestion, Connectivity, Clustering, Destination, Dynamical, Infrastructure, Mobility, Network
Reality 3: the Reality of the Night
Danger, Fear, Emptiness, Homelessness, Interiorisation, Territory
Reality 4: the Reality of the Informal City
Acceptance, Appropriation, Citizenship, Community, Constitution, Density, Development, Flexibility, Functionality, Genericality, Growth, Illegality, Informality, Necessity, Neglection, Occupation, Potential, Process, Transformation
Reality 5: the Reality of the Public Man
Anonymity, Collectivity, Communication, Confrontation, Contact, Democracy, Digitalisation, Distraction, Freedom, Globalisation, Identity, Integration, People, Recreation, Society, Trade, Tourism, Universality, Urbanity, Visibility
Now I’ve found a few realities that all show a different aspect of Sao Paulo, this makes it easier for Nicola and me to select the words that describe the public sphere of Sao Paulo best for our second part of our presentation for the expositions. We want to select some pictures that show the different realities and accompany them with a word that describes these varying aspects. I think that would really add something to the presentation since “one image says more than a thousand words.” This could be in the form of large printed out pictures or a video presentation.
By no means, this dictionary is finished and complete. Feel free to add more words and comment on my experienced realities. Because that’s what always fascinates me about the Public, there is space for different interpretations of the same.
A
Acceptance
Alternative
Anonymity
Appropriation
Authority
B
Behaviour
Bureaucracy
C
Citizenship
Coherence
Collectivity
Communication
Community
Concentration
Concept
Condition
Conflict
Confrontation
Congestion
Connectivity
Consolidation
Constitution
Construction
Contact
Context
Continuity
Control
Clustering
Culture
D
Danger
Decor
Destination
Democracy
Density
“Depublicisation” (privatization)
Development
Differentiation
Digitalisation
Distraction
Downgrading
Dynamical
E
Emptiness
Exclusion
Experience
Experiment
F
Facilitation
Fear
Flexibility
Formality
Freedom
Functionality
G
Genericality
Globalisation
Growth
H
Hierarchy
Homelessness
Hybridism
I
Identity
Illegality
Improvement
Informality
Infrastructure
Integration
Interiorisation
Isolation
J
K
L
Layeredness
Law enforcement
Locality
M
Maintenance
Memory
Migration
Mobility
Modernity
Monstrosity
Monumentality
N
Necessity
Neglection
Network
O
Occupation
Openness
Organisation
P
People
Planning
Potential
Popularity
Power
Privatization (“depublicisation”)
Process
Protection
Provocation
Q
R
Reality
Recreation
Regulation
Restriction
S
Safety
Segregation
Society
Spatiality
Statical
Strategy
Structure
Supervision
Surveillance
Sustainability
T
Temporality
Territory
Trade
Tradition
Transformation
Transportation
Tourism
U
Universality
Unemployment
Urbanity
V
Visibility
W
X
Y
Z
Zoning
As I said there is not one reality that really says it all about the public sphere of Sao Paulo. The city is a monster, in the way that this city more than anywhere has created itself for decades without the strict supervision of a municipality. From my point of view, for a long time the city has literally been “out of control.” Now municipality is trying to get back in control, but not without resistance. Informal processes follow out of necessity and establish themselves in their purest form. They are there for a reason, have developed through time and can not be easily replaced by a formal layer of urban planning. Besides, informality is always a response to formality, so formalizing the informal will evoke new informal processes because certain groups, behaviour etc. will be displaces that have established there place on that spot through time.
Next to the formal-informal realities, there is a big difference between Sao Paulo at day and at night. At daytime the city becomes something between a hysterical circus and an overloaded infrastructure that in now way can supply the demand of its population. The car is the only option because distances are great and the development of the public transport has been on a stand still while Sao Paulo was growing out of its own skin. Not to mention the pedestrian and the cyclist that are liked guests of our European cities but have no place in the public network. Of course all these things are relative. For instance, there are clusters of a vivid public life where pedestrians are very present, but these clusters often are poorly connected, creating a tissue around them that is dominated by cars again. And very apparent is the way these clusters are dealt with: often with a gate around it and surveillance controls making sure there are no unwelcome guests that do not comply to the “appropiate” behaviour. At night, the streets become deserted. Again clusters of nightlife, but anywhere else the smell of trouble in the air. This fear has established itself over the years but has become an important factor in the way people use the city but also the way people have designed the city. Contrary to the stereotypical Brazilian outdoor public life you will find in most other cities in the country, a significant part of the public life of Sao Paulo occurs indoors. Yes this also has to do with the climate etc but it can’t be denied that the fear of danger plays an important role in this. Putting the Public behind a door makes it easier to control, protect and watch them. People will always have the urge to become public: to meet with strangers, to claim your own place in society, to give your life a meaning and an identity, to get distracted and to be just an anonymous element in the mass before turning back to the private again, where comfort is found but responsibilities and duties too.
Reality 1: the Reality of the Formal City
Authority, Behaviour, Conflict, Control, Exclusion, Formality, Hierarchy, Isolation, Law enforcement, Maintenance, Power, Privatization (“depublicisation”), Protection, Restriction, Segregation, Surveillance, Zoning
Reality 2: the Reality of the Traffic
Congestion, Connectivity, Clustering, Destination, Dynamical, Infrastructure, Mobility, Network
Reality 3: the Reality of the Night
Danger, Fear, Emptiness, Homelessness, Interiorisation, Territory
Reality 4: the Reality of the Informal City
Acceptance, Appropriation, Citizenship, Community, Constitution, Density, Development, Flexibility, Functionality, Genericality, Growth, Illegality, Informality, Necessity, Neglection, Occupation, Potential, Process, Transformation
Reality 5: the Reality of the Public Man
Anonymity, Collectivity, Communication, Confrontation, Contact, Democracy, Digitalisation, Distraction, Freedom, Globalisation, Identity, Integration, People, Recreation, Society, Trade, Tourism, Universality, Urbanity, Visibility
Thursday, April 16, 2009
An exploration of public spaces
The last two days I explored the northeastern half of the strip stretching from Coroa in the northeast to Villa Nova Conceicao, just southwest of Ibirapuera Park. In this exploration I documented the public spaces in the different neighbourhoods, trying to find the different established approaches in dealing with these spaces. In my last blog I tried to state some phenomena that make Sao Paulo’s public spaces and public culture different from what I’ve seen in other cities. While describing phenomena usually end up in generalizations, my intention was not to generalize Sao Paulo’s approach towards this theme but to find some similarities in the public spaces throughout the various neighbourhoods that influence the experience of the public culture of the user.
This exploration confirmed most of my thoughts towards the allocation of the most interesting public spaces. Indeed many are found behind fences or facades, making them well-controlled and well-maintained. But I also found places where it’s not this black and white. Here there is the potential to develop into something more. Something that is not anchored to this specific location and only available from time to time. But something that is on the border of the street, where there often is no alternative for using it for transportation, and the public or semi-public domain. It is these spaces that allow a different usage by different users whilst not restricting it to specific time periods or a specific group of people.
Another important discovery has been that walking through a big part of the strip I got a better understanding of the different neighbourhoods and their approach towards public space as a tool to create an interesting environment where it is nice to remain for a while. These different neighbourhoods all have an own identity, and looking at their public spaces I found some variables that influence the use of these spaces and its flexibility:
- profile of the streets
- programme
- maintenance/security
- location (within logistical and demographic web)
- connections between concentrations of interesting public spaces
- accessibility
All these variables differed highly from neighbourhood to neighbourhood and determine how the public spaces are used right now and their potential in developing into a more flexible/dynamical public culture since most of these spaces right now only allow for on specific type of use. This leads to my approach towards my presentation on this theme. It consists of 2 parts:
- documentation of the actual situation regarding the public spaces and culture throughout the different neighbourhoods
- creating strategies to change the spaces that only allow for a singular use or almost no use at all
Finally I will summarize in what kind of products this will result. The documentation consists of maps where I define the different neighbourhoods and their different approaches/situation regarding the public spaces/culture. These maps will be accompanied by pictures and diagrams that show their design, use and an explanation of this type of use on these specific locations. The strategies will consist of a listing of interventions that could be made in order to redevelop the public spaces and culture that need attention because they are lacking quality at the moment. Step by step I will address these interventions and accompany them with diagrams, referential spaces and text that explain how they can improve these public spaces and their use.
This exploration confirmed most of my thoughts towards the allocation of the most interesting public spaces. Indeed many are found behind fences or facades, making them well-controlled and well-maintained. But I also found places where it’s not this black and white. Here there is the potential to develop into something more. Something that is not anchored to this specific location and only available from time to time. But something that is on the border of the street, where there often is no alternative for using it for transportation, and the public or semi-public domain. It is these spaces that allow a different usage by different users whilst not restricting it to specific time periods or a specific group of people.
Another important discovery has been that walking through a big part of the strip I got a better understanding of the different neighbourhoods and their approach towards public space as a tool to create an interesting environment where it is nice to remain for a while. These different neighbourhoods all have an own identity, and looking at their public spaces I found some variables that influence the use of these spaces and its flexibility:
- profile of the streets
- programme
- maintenance/security
- location (within logistical and demographic web)
- connections between concentrations of interesting public spaces
- accessibility
All these variables differed highly from neighbourhood to neighbourhood and determine how the public spaces are used right now and their potential in developing into a more flexible/dynamical public culture since most of these spaces right now only allow for on specific type of use. This leads to my approach towards my presentation on this theme. It consists of 2 parts:
- documentation of the actual situation regarding the public spaces and culture throughout the different neighbourhoods
- creating strategies to change the spaces that only allow for a singular use or almost no use at all
Finally I will summarize in what kind of products this will result. The documentation consists of maps where I define the different neighbourhoods and their different approaches/situation regarding the public spaces/culture. These maps will be accompanied by pictures and diagrams that show their design, use and an explanation of this type of use on these specific locations. The strategies will consist of a listing of interventions that could be made in order to redevelop the public spaces and culture that need attention because they are lacking quality at the moment. Step by step I will address these interventions and accompany them with diagrams, referential spaces and text that explain how they can improve these public spaces and their use.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
a knot
…a knot in the public web, triggered by some pedestrian space and a subway station, a infrastructure joint.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Publicness
The project in short
Perception of architectural space
The theme for my graduation project is driven first by the fascination of the role that human perception and phenomenological experience plays in architecture and second by the curiosity about the public web in the urban structure, the city life.
In short to describe what the project will be about I would like to statement that I understand the public network along with the interaction in it as the city life. If we look at public buildings we might say that public buildings express the society, the common public life. There from rises the general question ‘how build material can express?’ and more related to the theme of the public ‘How do we perceive a public building as being public and when do we experiencing pleasure as well as feeling invited?’ These question leads to phenomenology and from its discourse I would like to build up the design arguments for a public building supposedly related to cultural as a fine art.
Focus in Sao Paulo
Publicness
Based on its enormous diversity, complexity, history and cultural richness the city of Sao Paulo offers a fascinating frame for a thesis project that has the concern about publicness and the interdependence of public and representation. This in mind I chose Sao Paulo as the context of the design project.
With the focus on publicness I would like to walk through the defined strip of Sao Paulo looking for public spaces. Defining public spaces as the places where strangers meet I would like to study the conditions of these particular public places asking ‘What turns them into what they are?’ with a particular view on public buildings and its particular use as well as its respond to its environment. With the result I will define a potential location for the design object of the graduation project.
As a method the walk will be tracked by GPS and documented by photography with particular focus on the transition/entrance from the street to the inside of public buildings.
Perception of architectural space
The theme for my graduation project is driven first by the fascination of the role that human perception and phenomenological experience plays in architecture and second by the curiosity about the public web in the urban structure, the city life.
In short to describe what the project will be about I would like to statement that I understand the public network along with the interaction in it as the city life. If we look at public buildings we might say that public buildings express the society, the common public life. There from rises the general question ‘how build material can express?’ and more related to the theme of the public ‘How do we perceive a public building as being public and when do we experiencing pleasure as well as feeling invited?’ These question leads to phenomenology and from its discourse I would like to build up the design arguments for a public building supposedly related to cultural as a fine art.
Focus in Sao Paulo
Publicness
Based on its enormous diversity, complexity, history and cultural richness the city of Sao Paulo offers a fascinating frame for a thesis project that has the concern about publicness and the interdependence of public and representation. This in mind I chose Sao Paulo as the context of the design project.
With the focus on publicness I would like to walk through the defined strip of Sao Paulo looking for public spaces. Defining public spaces as the places where strangers meet I would like to study the conditions of these particular public places asking ‘What turns them into what they are?’ with a particular view on public buildings and its particular use as well as its respond to its environment. With the result I will define a potential location for the design object of the graduation project.
As a method the walk will be tracked by GPS and documented by photography with particular focus on the transition/entrance from the street to the inside of public buildings.
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