The Graz Museum is hosting a festival exhibition entitled The City as Data Field. How we want to live in the future. It raises the question of how individuals and society are doing with global networking, “Big Data” and “navigating through data”. “First we make the data, then they make us” – what possibilities of “humanization” (Flusser) does technology open up, what do we need to pay attention to? The exhibition runs until 29th August 2021 and is one of the larger projects of the extended cultural year 2020 and belongs to the thematic focus “Digital Living Worlds”.
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The narrative of The City as a Data Field. How We Want to Live in the Future follows images proposed by the philosopher of technology Vilém Flusser and his plea for moving towards “designing fate” and venturing utopia as a playful testing of alternative possibilities of a “decent” life in response to the crisis. According to Flusser, the “we” to be reconfigured could be “no longer subject to values, but composes them instead.”
The City as a Data Field: The ubiquity of data control in public and private products and services
Flusser’s visionary background provides the stage for addressing the conflict between efficiency and optimisation versus personal and collective freedom of choice. The City as a Data Field. How We Want to Live in the Future is about the advance of data-driven automatic control into more and more intimate personal spheres of life. Whether “smart city”, “smart home”, choice of partner and family planning, body implant or child rearing – the ubiquity of data control in public and private products and services in the post-digital age of Industry 4.0 demands a reflection on the goals that guide us.
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Three performative formats that invite repeated active participation
- Festival and interactive exhibition in ten themed rooms on the ground floor and 2nd floor of the Graz Museum—with high-level international artworks, historical technical objects and themed installations.
- Ten-week discourse festival on the themes of the exhibition spaces, partly in the Graz Museum and Graz Museum Schlossberg as well as at striking cultural locations with lectures on the individual themes and participation by Graz-based initiatives.
- Thematic tours on changing focal points such as data economy, privacy, security and much more.
- Accompanying and in-depth discursive web format that also assumes the function of a catalogue that will perpetuate the exhibition.
Festival exhibition with different dimensions
- dynamic, not static; it responds to visitors and changes over time. A performative exhibition in which the contradictory nature of the creative forces and the open-endedness of the development of technology are introduced (not resolved).
- metaphorical, a “stage play in ten images”; it begins with Peter Weibel’s and Christian Lölkes’ eponymous work “The World as s Field of Data”, in which one no longer navigates by the stars but by data, and ends where one is as close to the stars as nowhere else in Graz: on the Schlossberg, near Richard Kriesche’s ARTSAT disc with a workshop to release a manifesto: “How We Want to Live in the Future”.
- contradictory; it leads us into contradictions and experiences, into feelings about the world, but it never radiates powerlessness or dystopia, but confidence; it is about decent living without giving concrete directions. The question is not how I want to live but how we want to live.
- participatory; the festival format invites active participation.
For more information click here.
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Curators: Peter Rantaša, Otto Hochreiter
Exhibition design and graphic design: BUERO41A
Exhibition design ground floor: studio-itzo
Project controlling: Sibylle Dienesch
Project management: Johanna Fiedler, Angela Rossmann, Franziska Schurig
Text Credits: Graz Museum
How can a simple steel box of 20 by 8 by 8 feet in size transform cities all over the world and change the way people live, work and consume? The modern shipping container, originating in the mid-20th century, has not only been a driving force in the development of international trade but also in urban progress and decline. When it comes to the world economy’s widespread adoption of the shipping container in terms of mutation, one might wonder whether it is an outcome of capitalism or simply human nature. In any case – the box itself has undergone a mutation, too. Like organisms that adapt and mutate in order to survive mass extinction, new technology, such as the IoT-enabled smart container, has come to the fore to once again change patterns of human behaviour.
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Few people have much reason to pass through Amsterdam’s Westhaven district. Too far out of town and too industrial, it doesn’t hold a candle to the city’s captivating Grachtengordel, with its famous old canals and all the pretty architecture from the so-called Dutch Golden Age. But if you want to get the whole truth about Amsterdam, or any city for that matter, you have to go to places like Westhaven. Among other things, it’s here that you’ll find the OBA Bulk Terminal, which contains several great mounds of coal, along with other piles of agricultural products, minerals and biomass.
“An image of urban progress which almost completely denies the underlying environmental and human costs”
This is the dirty stuff that keeps the Dutch economy ticking over. Everyone thinks modern cities like Amsterdam long ago dispensed with the need for this kind of economic activity, but not all this stuff could be shipped off to China. Some of it had to remain close by, even if it was pushed to the margins. The invisibility of such areas is essential to our image of the modern city. Ordered, hightech, and most of all, clean, this image would be impossible without the intermodal shipping container, a form of cargo container that allows goods to be transferred from one mode of transport to another without the costly process of unpacking and repacking. With this one simple innovation in the management of goods, we were finally able to close our eyes to the wildly complex material processes that are required to reproduce the city, and in the process create an image of urban progress which almost completely denies the underlying environmental and human costs.
The modern shipping container has its origins in 1955, when trucking magnate Malcom McLean teamed up with engineer Keith Tantlinger to hammer out the container’s essential design, which remains practically the same to this day: 8 feet wide, 8 feet tall, 20 feet long, with 20 mm-thick corrugated steel walls that can, amazingly, hold a weight of 25,000 kg. The design’s persistence, ubiquity and overall success was not only due to its simplicity, however, it was also thanks to McLean encouraging Tantlinger to give away the patents to the industry for free, so that the same standard could be replicated on trucks, ships, cranes and ports across the world.
“Port-side areas turned into ghost towns”
The shipping container quickly and drastically cut the number of dock workers needed to handle goods at ports. In Britain, for instance, the number of people employed in the port industry declined by 72 per cent between 1961 and 2001, while the number of people employed as dock workers declined by 90 per cent. With no need to have so many people present on the docks, what followed was the mass abandonment of inner-city ports, with large swathes of warehouses left empty (and ripe for redevelopment). At the same time, with no need to have a large pool of labour on-hand in nearby neighbourhoods, the port-side areas of these cities turned into ghost towns.
We see the first effects of this in the port cities along America’s East Coast: Boston, New York City, Philadelphia and Baltimore. But the effects also spread to other historic port cities elsewhere in the world like London and Amsterdam, where the warehouses along the Oostelijk Havengebied (Eastern Docklands) were first squatted and then, in many cases, turned into cultural venues like Pakhuis de Zwijger. In London, after hundreds of years as the beating heart of international trade, the Docklands closed completely, leaving eight square miles of derelict land which was quickly redeveloped and given a big boost by the creation of the Canary Wharf financial district.
“The shipping container took the city’s dirt elsewhere”
It was not just port cities that were affected, either. In America, cities like Detroit went from being the centre of the world’s car industry to a hollow shell in a matter of decades. The reason for this: not only did the shipping container make dock work redundant, it also made it possible to displace manufacturing work to other parts of the world where labour costs were lower and workers less unionised. Eventually, many of these cities found a way to bounce back from the desolation, converting the abandoned warehouses or demolishing them and putting luxury condos in their place. They slowly managed to draw people back in with the promise of various sorts of service work, instead of the dirty work of processing and manufacturing goods that had fuelled their economic growth in the first place. In more ways than one, the shipping container took the city’s dirt elsewhere.
“One of the most important boats in the history of canals”
All this occurred because of one simple 8’ by 8’ by 20’ feet steel box. But why did this occur, and could it have happened sooner? Precursors to the intermodal cargo container have existed since at least the early Industrial Revolution. In 1766 James Brindley signed the “Starvationer”, a ship that could navigate the underground waterways of the Bridgewater Canal from the Duke of Bridgewater’s coal mine at Worsley to Manchester, and whose skeletal ribs inspired its peculiar name. The box boat had ten wooden containers that allowed coal to be transported by boat and then be transferred to horse-drawn carriage. Waterfront, the magazine of The Canal & River Trust describes it as “one of the most important boats in the history of canals”.
“Tetrapods that finally went on to conquer the land”
Much like McLean’s container, it helped usher in a new industrial age by cutting the cost of coal in half, almost overnight, thereby enabling the rapid expansion of industry in booming Manchester. But the Starvationer never captured the true potential of the intermodal container. Nor did the handful of other increasingly sophisticated examples that followed in its wake. These were the amphibians that ventured further outside the water but never left it altogether. McLean’s containers are the tetrapods that finally went on to conquer the land. But explaining all these transformations with the analogy of mutation is too easy.
“Tendency to describe socio-economic processes by way of nature metaphors”
There’s an intention to these changes which belies the nature metaphor. In his book Uneven Development, geographer Neil Smith explains that this tendency to describe socio-economic processes by way of nature metaphors has a very specific ideological function: to make these processes seem “normal, God-given, unchangeable”. By talking about the world economy’s widespread adoption of the shipping container in terms of mutation, “nature, not human history, is made responsible”, and as Smith says, “capitalism is treated not as historically contingent but as an inevitable and universal product of nature which, while it may be in full bloom today, can be found in ancient Rome or among bands of marauding monkeys where survival of the fittest is the rule. Capitalism is natural; to fight it is to fight human nature.”
Which is to say, this elegant metaphor for the sweeping and highly complex changes to our global economy obscures the human-made tragedy that followed as a result of, among many other things, destroying the industrial power of dock workers and factory workers in cities like Liverpool and Detroit, or allowing the decades-long emptying-out of cities like New York and Amsterdam, leading both places to buckle under the pressure of lost tax revenue for decades. All this was anything but natural. It depended on ideological choices that were made for very particular reasons. (…)
Read the entire article in topos 113 on urban mutations.
Social housing is urgently needed in many countries. But how can we provide affordable housing in low-income environments? 3D printing offers a potential solution for housing inequality.
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In March 2021, Germany’s first 3D printed house in Beckum is set to be completed. In China, Russia and many other countries, first trial neighbourhoods consisting exclusively of 3D printed houses are starting to mushroom. In Mexico’s federal state of Tabasco, a non-profit organisation has built several complete homes using 3D printing. This works with a combination of cement and advanced additives. The mixture is printed from a huge printer that layers the material. Within days, a whole house can be printed.
“Within days, a whole house can be printed.”
Advantages of 3D printing houses seem convincing: the material is very resistant, withstands even extreme climatic conditions and can be manufactured anywhere in the world. Completion of a 3D printed house is possible faster and at a much lower price than a traditional house. Furthermore, the impact on the environment is much lower when 3D printing a home (up to 50 per cent less CO2 emissions compared to a traditional construction process), since construction is quick, almost silent and less resource-intensive. This reduces costs and waste. But perhaps most importantly, printing homes is hailed by some as a solution to housing inequality.
“Printing homes is hailed by some as a solution to housing inequality.”
The hope and expectation is that modern printers will be able to provide affordable, decent housing in poor communities, help the homeless, and enable rapid responses after environmental disasters. In Tabasco, about 50 families with an income of less than 3 USD a day now live in 3D printed houses that are earthquake-proof. The beneficiaries were able to upgrade from the makeshift huts they resided in before, and now have two bedrooms, a living room, and a bathroom in each house. Is this a real possibility also for larger-scale products? Social housing by definition means affordable housing. It is usually rationed in order to award it only to those with a housing need. Typically, it is state or non-profit organisations that provide social housing.
“Technology cannot solve every problem.”
So far, 3D printed homes have mostly been built by private housing developers. The relatively new technology is not yet accessible to the state or to non-profit organisations with low financial strength, which mostly seems due to lacking funds and experiences in this area. At the same time, the built environment alone is not a solution for the quality or liveability of a city. Even if printing social housing for the masses were technically feasible today, the technology cannot solve every problem. For example, factors such as successful public spaces, eco-friendly and people-friendly mobility, short routes, safety and reduced waste in the urban environment are crucial to improving our cities.
“Manufacturing of 3D houses in the hands of local communities.”
Therefore, a successful integration of 3D printing technologies into social housing efforts requires an innovative and holistic approach. The cooperation between local authorities, non-profit organisations and the potential recipients is key in order to work out how the provision of affordable, stable, eco-friendly and adequate housing solutions could work. Grants for entire neighbourhoods that allocate space for public space design are desirable. An interesting approach is that of the fabricationcity that places the manufacturing of 3D houses in the hands of local communities. This kind of a project was launched in 2011 by the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, the Fab Foundation and the Barcelona City Council. The fabrication city starts off by giving local makers access to fabrication labs, where they learn how to 3D print houses.
“We need to foster acceptance for 3D printing.”
In these “incubators”, future entrepreneurs are trained. In addition to their new skills, they also learn how to design for a neighbourhood and are invited to use participatory processes in order to include other residents in the planning process. Ideally, this results in a truly participatory co-creation of housing. To make the fabrication city a reality, we need to foster acceptance for 3D printing. This requires more analysis of the experience of houses and structures that have already been printed. The ambitious dream of printing social housing also requires community education, funding and planning permissions, integrated plans for upgrading urban environments around the social housing projects, and of course the necessary technology and materials at affordable prices. Until it ispossible to make all of these ingredients available, 3D printed social housing on a large scale will be stuck in the printer queue.
LAURA VON PUTTKAMER is an urban development specialist from Germany. She has a Master’s degree in Global Urban Development and Planning from The University of Manchester and currently lives in Mexico City. She blogs for parcitypatory.org.
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This opinion piece is from topos 114. Read more from that issue on the topic of fringes.
When it comes to air pollution, cities are fighting a permanent pandemic. In light of the magnitude of the problem, Barcelona architect and curator Olga Subirós recognised the urgency of addressing the climate crisis and public health emergency from an urbanistic point of view. Using Barcelona as a case study, the project Air/Aria/Aire analyses data sets to showcase the impact of air pollution from the urban scale down to the street level. An exhibition about Air/Aria/Aire, curated by Olga Subirós, will be presented at the International Architecture Exhibition 2021 in Venice, exploring the notion of air as a common good that is vital to people’s health and striving to respond to the Biennale’s theme of ‘How will we live together?’ – an even more vital question in times of coronavirus.
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Air pollution is the second leading cause of death from non-communicable diseases after tobacco smoking, according to the WHO. Worldwide, nine out of ten people breathe air that exceeds the safe limits set by the WHO guidelines. Last year’s EU report on air quality in Europe stated that air pollution “…is currently the most important environmental risk to human health”. In Europe alone, an estimated 400,000 people die every year from exposure to fine particulate matter in polluted air.
Air as a common good
In light of the magnitude of the problem, Barcelona architect and curator Olga Subirós recognised the urgency of addressing the climate crisis and public health emergency from an urbanistic point of view. Noticing the absence of any major exhibitions with a focus on these issues at the previous Venice Architecture Biennale in 2018 she decided to enter the competition to represent Catalonia in Venice in the latest edition, curated by Hashim Sarkis, which has now been postponed until 2021. A unique interpretation of the Biennale’s theme “How will we live together?”, Air/Aria/Aire acknowledges and explores the notion of air as a common good that is vital not only to live but to survive together. The spotlight has been shifted from the built environment to the void that surrounds it, a space often neglected by architects.
Urban analytics and data curation to examine complex environments
Using Barcelona as a case study, Air/Aria/Aire meticulously analyses large data sets in order to showcase the impact air pollution has on the city, from the urban scale down to street level. With 6000 cars/km2, Barcelona has the highest vehicle density in Europe. Around 500,000 cars enter and leave the city every day. Streets and parking lots occupy 60 per cent of public space. Like Madrid, the city consistently breaches EU rules on nitrogen dioxide values and has been referred to the Court of Justice because of poor air quality. To map the city for Air/Aria/Aire, Olga Subirós teamed up with the award-winning local firm 300.000 Km/s, an architecture studio specialising in the use of digital technologies to harness open data and citizen-generated data. With projects such as their Land Use Plan for Barcelona’s old city centre, they reinvented the traditional master plan with new methodologies of spatial analysis. According to the firm’s directors Mar Santamaria and Pablo Martínez, “The city will belong to those who map it”.
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Citizen participation is crucial
Traditional urban planning tools are no longer adequate for investigating and describing the complexity of our fast-changing urban landscapes. “This is why studying the city using big data and the models derived from it is invaluable to improving knowledge and, most of all, empowering citizens and allowing people to make collective decisions about their urban environments.” Data sets from the European Space Agency and weather stations as well as models established by Catalan research groups, such as an air pollution simulation by the Barcelona Super-computing Centre, Lobelia Earth’s predictive air pollution model and health impact studies by ISGlobal and the Barcelona City Council’s Public Health Agency were all used to produce the maps. Big data doesn’t necessarily tell you who uses the city. This is why the inclusion of qualitative individual data obtained through citizen participation is crucial. In addition, Air/Aria/ Aire used information gathered through initiatives such as the citizen science project xAire, where air pollution data was collected by Barcelona school children. Subirós also mentions the importance of grassroots movements such as Recuperem la Ciutat (Let’s Reclaim the City) and Eixample Respira (Eixample Breathes) to raise public awareness.
The unequal distribution of vulnerability and impact
Air pollution and public health in general have been subject to an intense public debate since the coronavirus outbreak forced us to reconsider how we inhabit our cities. A recent scientific study published in Cardiovascular Research estimates that about 15 per cent of deaths worldwide from coronavirus could be attributed to long-term exposure to air pollution. The current pandemic has been described as the crisis that exposed the fragility of marginalised groups, the social and economic divide within our society and the climate emergency. Air/Aria/Aire visualises correlations between the environmental crisis and social and spatial inequalities.
In their maps and cartographies, 300.000 Km/soverlaid the physical features of the urban fabric with the invisible characteristics of the city. “A closer look at the distribution of health data with regard to space shows us how equal levels of exposure, lead to different levels of mortality,” they explain. This phenomenon can be observed due to the different levels of vulnerability among citizen groups, depending on demographics, social and housing conditions and the urban environment. Air pollution is neither evenly distributed nor stagnant: it can disperse and shift. Nitrogen dioxide emitted in the Barcelona metropolitan area is transformed into ozone, which in turn is dispersed and can be found on the outskirts of the city and even in the Catalan countryside.
40 m2 of living space and 6 m3 of air per inhabitant
There is, of course, a long history of public health and hygiene as driving factors of urban planning. Indeed, Ildefons Cerdà’s pioneering concept for Eixample, Barcelona’s 19th century urban extension, envisaged a green city full of fresh air and light. But the district fell victim to an unregulated housing market and property speculation. Now one of the neighbourhoods most affected by air pollution, Eixample’s percentage of green spaces decreased from 30 per cent to 0.6 per cent over time. Its original planning principles, set by Cerdà to optimise the size and proportions of housing blocks and units, envisaged a minimum provision of 40 m2 of living space and 6 m3 of air per inhabitant.
Designing space, and specifically public space, using the concept of three-dimensional volumes measured in m3 instead of m2 is an important shift in perspective, required to successfully design the urban environment and guarantee the essential right to breath clean air, stresses Subirós. So, how exactly can we redefine the relationship between urban design and public health? In recent months, we have seen pop-up bike lanes appearing in cities all over the world. Parking spaces have been converted to outdoor terraces, and streets closed to traffic. Paris has introduced the concept of the 15-Min-City, while Barcelona is accelerating the implementation of its Superblocks. The research institute ISGlobal predicts that a rollout of all 503 of the initially planned Superblocks could prevent 667 premature deaths every year and lead to an annual economic savings of 1.7 billion euros. Ambient Nitrogen Dioxide pollution could be reduced by up to 24 per cent. Yet, Subirós argues, “We need more ambitious measures that include congestion charges and traffic-free zones and a faster implementation of other measures described in our research.”
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“Modify the relationships that the city has with its urban area in order to ensure an environmental balance”
Though Barcelona has just launched a 10-year-plan to introduce new green spaces and turn one in three streets in the Eixample district into green zones, the proposal will neither sufficiently alleviate the public health crisis nor reduce traffic significantly, Subirós suggests. Moreover, factors of urban morphology like the street canyon effect or the radical need of a mixture of uses have not been taken into account. Air/Aria/Aire introduces twelve measures to help reorganise the city and “modify the relationships that the city has with its urban area in order to ensure an environmental balance”. These measures include the elimination of traffic, the expansion of the public transport network and promotion of sustainable mobility, the reduction of parking spaces and the creation of new public green spaces to mitigate heat island effects. Another key factor is the creation of mixed-use neighbourhoods to counteract the decentralisation of workplaces.
Urban density and the control of new uses is up for discussion
Urban density and the control of new uses – also a hot topic since the current pandemic started – is up for discussion, as some areas will have to be deurbanised and desaturated, while others can still be densified. Last-mile delivery is another aspect that will play an important role. The demand for home delivery is increasing rapidly and much of the traffic on our streets is generated by the supply of goods, which can be addressed through a consolidation of the distribution within the city and public management of the system. The last measure reacts to the housing crisis Barcelona is experiencing, which often exacerbates inequality and health issues. Poorly ventilated flats, ill-fitting, leaky windows, bad insulation and furnishings can all harm the health of people inhabiting such spaces. The upgrading of flats and provision of equal access to high-quality housing are therefore two of the most signification actions to undertake.
Bringing health to the forefront
Air/Aria/Aire presents a vision of a more citizen-centred, equal city. Due to its focus on public health and local action, it delivers a more tangible strategy for combating climate change while at the same time creating a sense of urgency. The coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated that quick and radical action is possible. Olga Subirós hopes the maps and planning tools created with Air/ Aria/Aire can be a catalyst for change both within the architecture community and the local administration.
Through the exhibition, she aims to reach the wider public on a more emotional level with a multi-sensory installation. “The longer you work on this project,” she concludes, “the more activist you become.”
Read the full text in topos 113 – urban mutations.
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Digital Talk on Air Pollution vs. Healthy City
Join our digital talk on 1 Feb 2021 on “Air Pollution vs. Healthy City – Urban data for new challenges: The project Air/Aria/Aire”
What kind of solutions do the project Air/Aria/Aire offer in regard to the climate emergency and public health crisis? What role do architecture and urban planning play in this context? How can we use Big Data to improve city life, empower citizen and make our cities more liveable, healthier, greener and more equal? Join the talk on 1 Feb at 6.30 p.m. and learn from architect and curator Olga Subirós; Co-founder of 300,000 Km/s and urban planner Mar Santamaria; Carolyn Daher from ISGlobal and landscape architect Sigrid Ehrmann.
How to join? Click here to register.
With a symposium at the Aedes Network Campus on March 5, 2021 and a four-week long exhibition in the BDA gallery in Berlin, the AMM Architecture Media Management Master`s program will discuss the latest findings and fragmentary positions on digital, hybrid and analog teaching in architecture.
Fragmentary positions on digital, hybrid and analog teaching in architecture
Under direction of Prof. Jan R. Krause, the 14th AMM Symposium will become an educational summit for digital teaching. Renowned architecture professors are introducing experimental digital, hybrid and analog teaching methods dedicated to four central formats of architecture studies: the studio, the workshop, the library, and the excursion.
How are these elements changing in times of digital transformation? What is missing due to fragmented teaching and which dimensions can be gained from new media and changed user behavior?
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The balancing act between spatial distance and new forms of interaction in architecture
These and other questions are also the subject of the AMM exhibition “d.fragmentation” in the BDA gallery curated by Astrid Bornheim. Its focus lays on innovative approaches that master the balancing act between spatial distance and new forms of interaction in architecture. Speakers, guests, and exhibition visitors will discuss how digital and analog teaching fragments complement each other and which new methods can be developed for an architectural discourse.
The Symposium and Exhibition are designed as hybrid events by the master’s students of the 19th AMM year at Bochum University. They will be available for the exchange of experiences and perspectives as well as for personal networking on site and in the digital space. The conference is requested as a training event from the Chamber of architects. Participation is free.
14th AMM-Symposium
05.03.2021, 14.00-17.30
Aedes Network Campus ANCB, Christinenstr. 18-19, 10119 Berlin
AMM-Exhibition
06.02.-06.03.2021, Vernissage 06.02.2021, 11.00-14.00
BDA Galerie Berlin, Mommsenstraße 64, 10629 Berlin
Partners: BDA Berlin, ANCB Hochschule Bochum, Etex Germany Exteriors GmbH, GIRA
Text Credits: Prof. Jan R. Krause, Institute for Architecture Media Management AMM, Bochum University –Department of Architecture
The AEDES Architecture Forum in Berlin is currently hosting the exhibition “City of Refugees – Four Utopian Cities on Four Continents” until January 7th 2021, that presents four exemplary, innovative concepts of cities for refugees that have emerged from a three-year research project at the University of Houston.
There are more than 70 million people on earth who had to flee their homeland and have to build a new life for themselves in other foreign countries. Since only a few countries are willing to accept these people in large numbers or at all, they are trapped in tent cities or makeshift shelters. These circumstances often result in permanent housing situations, which hold considerable challenges both for the infrastructure as well as for the inhabitants.
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Temporary camps that have become “cities”
For example, the Kutupalong refugee camp in Bangladesh exists since 1991 and is the world’s largest camp for refugees. In an area of just 13 square kilometers, around 600,000 people are living there, pushing the infrastructure that has been developed over time to its limits. The Zaatari camp in Jordan is another example for a camp that was conceived as a “temporary” camp but now, over time, has become a “city” in its own right. Around 80,000 people who fled from the Syrian civil war have been living here since 2012. The camp has city-like structures like a main street with market stalls and shops, kindergartens and schools, solar power and its own drinking water system. Despite this infrastructure, however, it is a “temporary” settlement that is dependent on humanitarian aid.
Four concepts to meet the needs of the inhabitants
With all this in mind, a research project at the University of Houston has been looking for new solutions: In the three-year project under the direction of Peter J. Zweig, FAIA (Fellow of the American Institute of Architects) and Gail Borden (FAIA), in the workshops at the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design, four concepts for cities have been developed by the students. Between 50,000 – 500,000 people can live in these cities, which were designed for four different continents. The cities’ structures are able to meet the needs of the inhabitants and at the same time also promote their independence. The concepts are based on universal architectural principles and taking local traditions into account at the same time. The results of this project can now be seen at the AEDES Architecture Forum in Berlin since the end of October until January.
“By reallocating a very small portion of the defence spending, a single ‘City of Refugees’ could be financed.”
However, before the students thought about urban design, they first analysed the US defence costs of recent years: Nearly 700 billion USD are spent every year for defence purposes. Peter Zweig notes: “By reallocating a very small portion of the defence spending – which actually is less than a quarter of a percent of the military budget – a single “City of Refugees” could be financed.” Therefore, he suggests that the US could for example postpone the construction of a submarine used for military purposes for a year and thus make it possible to build an entire city – an interesting argument that is certainly worth to be further discussed.
Basis for a new multi-ethnic society
Using maps and data, which can also be seen in the exhibition, the students analysed and documented the global migration tendencies and routes of the refugees. Based on this, the prototypes of the cities were designed.
The City of Refugees is an ideal place that reaches beyond the fate of those displaced from their homes. The inhabitants should be able to act freely and independently here. The students also considered that the cities, as a free economic zone promoted by the United Nations, could create a basis for a new multi-ethnic society. This society within each city should be based on justice and tolerance, being economically viable and CO2 neutral. To this end, the model cities use sustainable technologies, changing the concept of the road as no cars are needed, and include regional and at the same time universal architecture.
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Proposed solutions to one of the most important international problems
In the exhibition, visitors can use models, images, videos or augmented reality to gain a comprehensive insight into these imaginary cities and their socio-political, economic and cultural aspects. Though it is an fictional image for a city, the inherent concepts are a good step towards a possible solution to one of the most important international problems of our time.
The exhibition can be visited until January 7th 2021 at the AEDES Architekturforum in Berlin (Christinenstr. 18-19). The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of online discussions on various topics covered in the exhibition. Click here for more information.
It is timely in the Anthropocene, and even more so during a global pandemic, to search for a non-anthropocentric mode of reasoning, and consequently also of designing. Adapting to a post-coronavirus world means re-designing our society from the point of view of the viral ecosystems that are now inhabiting it. From this new perspective, nature appears as disconnected from its picturesque image and becomes hardwired into the complex infrastructures and non-linear digital processes that drive organisation in contemporary cities, the so-called Urbansphere. How does green technology evolve in a creative framework unburdened by dualistic or picturesque notions of the human and the natural?
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The current rush of many cities to develop blue-green plans dealing with future threats of climate change is a testament to the obsession of our society with searching for ‘true’ answers within a problem-solving framework. The current global pandemic, however, highlights the urgent need for a new perspective to design innovation capable of engaging the systemic nature of the urban landscape and its architecture. Architects and planners often rely on a ‘sanitised’ and therefore highly aestheticised vision of the world’s ecosystems, exemplified by the very notion of green planning and its focus on greening cities. This notion may be one of the most enduring aspects we have inherited from modernity. And if bacteriological control was at the origin of its sanitation efforts, modern architecture and urban design turned it into a style; in other words, modernity did in fact embed sanitation into an aesthetic value system. The contemporary paradigms of green cities and green tech are the direct consequence of the evolution of that value system. However, urban systems today are non-linear and composed of billions of interlocking feedback loops, they are an Urbansphere. Waste production, pollution emission, food and water contamination are some of the most intense processes within the Urbansphere and a critical part of its contemporary metabolism. These processes often constitute the dark side of urban ecology, a side that is often invisible to the human eye; it is confined to restricted zones of our cities and it is often transferred to poorer regions of the world. And, most significantly, it is erased from the consciousness of most urban dwellers in our developed world.
Microbiological landscapes
Reassessing the dark side of urban ecology implies bringing to focus a new aesthetic of nature and, consequently, of the urban landscape. This new aesthetic of nature projects the design practice into the realm of urban “waste”, the byproduct of urbanisation, where micro-organisms such as virus, bacteria and fungi become protagonists. These creatures induce fear because their tactics often elude our comprehension; however, their intelligence endows them with exceptional properties. For example, they can turn what we consider waste and pollution into nutrients and raw material. This realisation has pushed the cutting edge of green design innovation today to work directly with the living urban micro-biome. Among the most promising micro-organisms, cyanobacteria certainly stand out as one of the favourites among researchers and bio-designers alike. In the work of design innovation practice ecoLogicStudio, for example, algae emerged as a design medium already in 2006. Early research focussed on bioinspired computation, essentially developing new digital techniques to draw biological patterns, as well as the mapping and simulation of key environmental factors affecting the urban realm. In other words, researchers were trying to draw the invisible, giving form to the kind of forces that often escape the tectonics of architecture but that are nevertheless spatial. The urban heat island effect is a good example. At the urban scale, it is the product of the interplay of anthropic emissions, urban morphology and local microclimatic forces; as such it is a complex system that can only be explored with the support of high-resolution satellite monitoring and digital thermal modelling. At the local scale however, people intuitively adapt to its manifestations, for instance by changing clothing or moving towards shade or greener environments. Integrating sensors give buildings similar abilities. Soon, however, it emerged that plants have exceptional abilities to register and respond to these gradients as, for instance, many species are phototropic. In addition, with their metabolism, they can affect these fields, for instance through evapotranspiration and oxygenation. In other words, plants could function as integrated sensors as well as actuators and, since they are living systems, they could do that efficiently within their own metabolic energy budget. But just how efficiently? Researchers discovered that micro-algae, or mono-cellular cyanobacteria, could be on average ten times more efficient at photosynthesis than large trees by unit of biomass. Also, their microscopic nature offered another interesting opportunity.The team at ecoLogicStudio, in an academic partnership with the Synthetic Landscape Lab at Innsbruck University and the Urban Morphogenesis Lab at the Bartlett UCL, was able to design artificial growing habitats and very efficiently integrate them in the built environment, even in very dense urban conditions or over existing buildings. Cyanobacteria such as Spirulina platensis then became one of the most exciting media to actualise computational environmental drawings and simulations into the physical realm of architecture, essentially by evolving into living bits of bio-digital information or into “bio-pixels”. In the years to follow, ecoLogicStudio built a long series of urban algae gardens, creating biological maps of light and radiation intensity in the urban realm, and more recently also of air pollution and carbon dioxide emissions. In all of them algae respond, activating photosynthesis and growing new biomass. What can be considered – in the computational realm of environmental engineering – a simulated abstraction of the real, actualises in ecoLogicStudio’s installations into a complex bio-digital assemblage. From this perspective, cyanobacteria are the perfect organism to interface efficient engineering, aided by advanced computation, with the beautiful designs of the living world, thus short-circuiting the ethical and aesthetical imperatives that fuel most of green tech’s desire to innovate. Designing living “bio-pixels” promotes the emergence of a broader notion of “pixelated nature” in the urban realm and the emergence of the concept of synthetic landscape. At this level of abstraction, nature appears as disconnected from its picturesque image and becomes hardwired into the infrastructural and digital processes that drive organisation in cities and in the Urbansphere. In the Anthropocene age, this new perspective on nature and its aesthetic value system has a crucial role to play in the innovation of the disciplines of architecture and urban design. Aesthetic here is intended as a form of meta-language enabling a deeper level of communication between multiple ecological systems.
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Deep Green
This crucial realisation has recently gained significance within the international debate. For many years the focus of design research has been firmly on the conception of new biomaterial systems. Recently however, their aesthetic actualisation has gained much attention. This is not so much in connection to traditional ideas of style, or provocation through image, but rather in connection to the notion of intelligence, of ecological intelligence. In many living systems, the patterns that they exhibit, which we often recognise as beautiful, are essentially a manifestation of their internal organisation, or the way they deal with material flows and how they optimise their metabolism. They are evolutionary traits emerged out of their interaction with the environment. The same can be said of contemporary green technologies. Developing a specific bio-digital language is a way of enhancing intra-systemic communication. A communication that is not just digital or verbal, but is enabled by a visual language that people as well as non-human species and intelligent machines can read and reproduce. It may be a provocative language to many, since it questions their assumptions about the concept of nature, or the relationship between nature and technology in the Anthropocene age.
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Green tech and urban planning
What does it mean today for architecture to be green and sustainable? And what does it mean to be green for the technology we use to design, built, feed and power our cities? Contemporary researchers strive to have an impact. Today there is certainly more urgency. That urgency however should not let us forget that to have a positive impact, innovation needs to go through a profound cultural transition that technology alone cannot support. Hence the importance of design aesthetics, to open a window into the unknown, or a window into the natural world that, as we are now realising, we have collectively been misunderstanding for most of modernity. Significant questions for example arise in places where it is impossible not to see and not to face the reality of the landscapes of the Anthropocene. ecoLogicStudio has recently been involved in a research project on the application of Artificial Intelligence to urban re-greening in collaboration with the United Nations Development Program. The project focussed on several test cities, one of them being Guatemala City. Guatemala City is situated on a complex and highly unstable terrain surrounded by mountains and volcanoes, some of which are still active. Its ecosystems, originally rich in biodiversity, are now made fragile by unchecked urbanisation and, given the region’s climatic zone, the effects of climate change. In Guatemala City this scenario is exacerbated by a serious lack of waste management. The Guatemala City garbage dump is the biggest landfill in Central America, containing over a third of the total garbage in the country. Ninety-nine per cent of Guatemala’s 2,240 garbage sites have no environmental systems and are classified as “illegal”. Consequently, the terrain of Guatemala City is today a synthetic landscape composed of several layers of plastic and other man-made contaminants interlocked with layers of soil, rock and living vegetation.To unpack the complexity of this scenario, ecoLogicStudio created an interface registering and connecting the bottom-up processes of self-organisation, such as the many local waste recycling activities that are emerging out of necessity in the areas closer to the dumping sites, with the strategic decision-making that occurs at municipal, national and international levels. The aim is to find new synergies and direct investments where they have the most potential to engender positive change.
Read the whole article (including references) in topos 112 on green technologies
Scenes of flying cars is something we know from movies like Blade Runner, Star Wars or The Fifth Element. The air space in such visual spectacles has become the place to be. In real life, however, individual mobility is still far removed from such fictional worlds – unless one talks to someone like Patrick Nathen, co-founder of the Urban Air Mobility company Lilium. In his words, travelling through the air sounds much less utopian. Lilium wants to take off into the third dimension by means of an environmentally friendly on-demand air jet. We spoke with Patrick about the chances local air mobility offers for people living in cities as well as in the countryside and what effects this could have on the structure of our cities.
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topos: Patrick, how do you see the future of cities?
NATHEN: I see it as very crowded. If you take into account that in 2050 nearly 70 per cent of the world’s population will be living in urbanized areas, it is to be expected that cities the world over will morph into highly compact, massively cramped metropolises. This will obviously lead to a surge of inner-city traffic, but also an increase of traffic between city and country. Permanent congestion will be the rule instead of the exception. Not even to mention the intensification of air pollution and other environmental impacts.
topos: This sounds distinctly negative. What would have to happen, in your view, for the city to be able to offer a positive future?
NATHEN: Mobility will have to change. Mobility determines our well-being as urban residents and also as people living in the countryside or the suburbs. I do believe, however, that if growing numbers of people in urban agglomerations compete not only for space, but also for the ways in which they move around, we will need additional space in order to provide sufficient room and opportunities for mobility. That’s why I’m convinced it will be necessary to expand mobility into the third dimension, i.e. into the air space. Obviously this should not be done through arbitrary means. Rather, it must be realized sustainably, meaning we cannot simply let our stinking, noisy traffic conquer the air space as well. Instead, we will have to use environmentally friendly vehicles.
topos:… like your Lilium Jet. What are the specific features of this vehicle?
NATHEN: Our Urban Air Taxi Jet has 36 electric engines, it takes off vertically and can be operated autonomously. The engines are integrated into the wings and run very quietly. We have already completed the first successful test flights on an airfield in Munich. The plan is that this jet will be able to transport up to five people from A to B – within the city, but also from the city to destinations in the countryside and suburbs. This way, the technology provides relief for the urban traffic infrastructure and offers new connections into the city for residents of rural areas. This new form of mobility would make life in the countryside more attractive and thereby decrease population pressure in cities.
topos: What is the operating range of the new vehicle?
NATHEN: The Lilium Jet is projected to fly at a speed of 300 kmh and have a range of 300 km. Such a range will guarantee a mobility that reaches beyond the confines of the city.
topos: Patrick, some media have criticized you for holding out prospects of a range of operation that is not technically feasible. But disregarding this issue for a moment: Is it possible that there are too many critics who are afraid of the mobility revolution? Traffic as we know it, due to all the problems that come with it, seems to be no longer adequate to the challenges of our time.
NATHEN: There are indeed many critics but there is nothing wrong with that. We need a debate that involves all members of society, addresses the interests and needs of citizens across the board and makes everyone want to participate. This is the only way to bring about a fundamental transformation of our mobility, to relieve our cities and create closer ties between rural and urban areas – without putting further strain on the environment. Acceptance is an important goal here. We work in the field of individual Urban Air Mobility (UAM), which is a very new area of business. Introducing the kind of vehicles we are developing would completely change our cities and how we move around in them. It’s a prospect that will produce fears. And such fears are legitimate, especially as long as the technical, technological and political framework that UAM requires has not been set up. A lot of work remains to be done.
topos: Do you talk to representatives of municipalities and cities, to urban planners and architects? This is not just about flying air taxis, there is also the issue of creating the infrastructure needed to make that possible.
NATHEN: We not only want to provide the jets, but we also want to be involved in building the take-off and landing infrastructure as well as shaping the customer experience and the processes involving passengers. For this we will need partners, just like any other company working in Urban Air Mobility. These partners are the cities, political institutions and authorities, architects, urban planners, mobile communication companies. Without them, our vision will not materialize. Urban planners and architects in particular will be crucial here, as they are the ones to integrate this new form of mobility into urban planning regimes. One important issue will be existing infrastructures. How can this type of mobility be embedded into existing facilities? How can the structures that are already there be converted and expanded, instead of building new ones?
topos: I’m thinking of densely built cities like Tokyo, New York or Mexico City… Where will your jets take off and land? How does one change taxis? Where will they be parked? Do you have concepts of how all this can be worked out in a well-functioning way?
NATHEN: Our vehicles will be capable of taking off and landing in the middle of cities, as they are very quiet and take off vertically. Possible places would be roofs, airfields, car parks, the facilities of existing park-and-ride systems. Any of these places could be used as a hub from where people can get on and off air taxis, change jets, and where the vehicles’ batteries will be recharged. The architectures of these hubs can be based on a template that is usable for many locations. And they can be set up where needed. Ideally at large traffic junctions. This will also guarantee a certain flexibility so that we can position these hubs in any city, regardless of the type of existing built structures. Obviously these are only ideas and concepts at this point. But there are, in fact, cities that already use Urban Air Mobility successfully. We will be able to build off of that.
topos: In other words, your vision goes in the direction of integrating UAM into the existing traffic concepts of cities?
NATHEN: Precisely. Mixed mobility is the answer to the question of how we will travel in urban environments in the future. I use car sharing, I rely on Uber, take the subway for part of the distance, I walk, perhaps I use an e-scooter or a bicycle, and another part I cover by air taxi. In my eyes this would work particularly well for those living in rural areas and working in the city. Such a mix of different forms of mobility might also be of interest to the world’s megacities – in today’s Shanghai, Delhi, London or Tokyo, if you want to travel ten kilometers, you are likely to spend hours caught in traffic jams. The same goes for vastly sprawling cities like Los Angeles… Mixed mobility could be the beginning of a transformation of our traffic patterns.
topos: Could be?
NATHEN: Yes, “could be”, because the problem is that while we have many different mobility services, they are not really coordinated. For a mobility flow to arise and for users to be able to choose between different options, it is necessary to have a platform that rethinks mobility in terms of going beyond the city limits and that coordinates it accordingly. So far, services exist separately side by side, but do not constitute an integrated “whole.” Here and there we find certain pilot projects that bring together public transportation and private mobility services, but what is lacking is a publicly instituted framework – a framework that would allow all the different types of mobility to become part of everyday life, have the various systems interlock and thus, generate maximum benefit for the users.
topos: Making UAM applicable for large numbers of residents in tomorrow’s cities, it will be necessary to redefine existing urban infrastructures and traffic management systems…
NATHEN: Indeed, and that is of course a huge task. Especially given the fact that, admittedly, a market for Urban Air Mobility does not even exist so far. The research we do concerns a sector of products regarding which the users are not even aware that they will have a need for them in the future. But in a similar way, this was the case with electric automobiles. And here we are currently being taught a lesson, even if it has much to do with the effects of climate change. It is precisely this circumstance that manned UAM is (still) a kind of playing field that makes it so difficult to speak in plain terms when it comes to rethinking urban infrastructures and traffic management systems.
topos: My last question, Patrick, concerns cities – as you mentioned already – that have already crossed the threshold into the third dimension. In Singapore, Mexico City and San Francisco, for example, helicopter taxis fly around already. Their operational costs are very high and they couldn’t be considered ordinary means of transportation, yet it is a first step. Which city, in your view, would particularly profit from UAM?
NATHEN: Basically all cities. But of course there are numerous agglomerations where people are caught in traffic jams for hours day after day. Many of the fast growing megacities in Asia in particular are close to a general traffic breakdown. These cities change rapidly, are highly dynamic and have no choice but to consider innovative solutions, because for them managing traffic, which involves the transport of millions of residents, commuters and tourists, is becoming an infeasible task. Or consider Paris. I can’t remember when it did not take around two hours to get from Charles de Gaulle airport to the inner city. Imagine we could simply fly over all the congested arteries…
Read the interview in topos 110 on mobility and get more insight into the world of urban mobility.
