what if

magazine about thought and space

the political issue

issue #01

february 2012

MASTER DEGREE PROGRAMME IN

BUILDING ENGINEERING/ARCHITECTURE
ITALIAN CHINESE CURRICULUM

General Agreement between University of Pavia,

IUSS - Institute for Advanced Study Pavia,
and Tongji University of Shanghai, March 2009

Supervisor:

Prof. TIZIANO CATTANEO

Candidate:

MARIO GENOVESI
a.y. 2010/2011

index

editors note

city as a political space

occupy wall street

italy & the 70s

capitalism, democracy & the suburbs

bibliography & references

on criticism and crisis

(reality)n
analogy

2-3

analogous city
46-51

34-41

4-5
42-45

52-65

66-69

mapping

96-107

12-19

70-77
6-11

78-81
shrinking cities

20-27 108-117
28-33

82-87
88-95

derelict architecture

whats with the neighbourhood?

visioning

depressed production

What If is a magazine, a product, within the market, and it advertises the consumption of space

What If reflects upon contemporary reality

What If is an accumulation of thoughts

What If aims at generating dissensus and provoking conflict

What if wonders about the role of the architect within society

What If raises doubts, doesnt give answers

What If questions the system

What If speaks about public

What If stimulates a shared architectural knowledge

What If is voluntarily ambitious and structurally limited

What
If
refuses
moralism
What If has the arrogance of making statements

What If investigates crises, conflicts and antagonisms as constructive paradigms

4|5

What If shakes ivory towers

What If exploits images and makes fun of them

What If claims for spatial activism

What If is analytical outburst

What If conveys visceral projections of fragmented intensity

What If crashes objects and disrupts processes

editors note
editors note
Space and politics. Two words that are not often written close together, that at a first glance
do not share much. Yet they are both concerned or at least should be with the concept of
public. Politics may represent a key for interpreting the so-called public space in contemporary
cities, as politics relates with society, economics,
image and representation. And so does space.
Reality is engaged from a lateral perspective, highlighting how crises and conflicts acting on the
space of the city may lead to disruption of the
political status quo, while the paradigms of the
market economy alienate the meaning of both
democracy and architecture.
Dissecting reality becomes a means of questioning it within the present. Future therewith is not
something that has to be found outside of reality, but by experimenting alternative practices
within a given situation.
Architecture needs to reclaim its agency, its
ability of pro-actively investigating urban structures and dynamics, using the project as a tool to
challenge reality. Hence, making things public.

The Apollo of the ancients was an aristocrat, a cultural assistant for princes and for the privileged class. The figure of the patron developed following that example. 20th century democracy needs to replace the patron with the cultural willingness of the citizen. In it Apollo becomes a new
cultural symbol, he becomes the compensating factor for techniques
materialistic power. We are all called upon to contribute to this image
Walter Gropius

city
as
city as
a political space
Manifestations of the so-called Arab
Spring, upheavals and riots within the
peripheries of Western European capitals,
global phenomena of discontent against
the financial system, claims for equality,
democracy and human rights. This is what
we get to read about daily in the news.
Different people. Different places. Different issues. For multiple reasons, whether
peacefully or violently, it looks like people
are rising up. And theyre taking to the
streets.
Far from seeking an overall understanding of these complex historical events,
it is my concern to select them as strong
and meaningful symptoms of the critical
relationship between communities, ideas
and spaces.
Though looking for a common terrain
among them all would be quite a daring
task to undertake, it is hard to deny that
these situations do share two main features: the multitude and diversity of the
participating subjects and agents and the
spatial categories where such actions find
their setting.
At a first glance, it is possible to
acknowledge the plurality of the subjects
involved in these contemporary phenomena. Its not just about a handful of
workers striking for higher wages or students protesting for the right to get an
education or migrants striving for asylum.
People of different age, education,
ethnicity, profession, and religion are all

standing shoulder to shoulder, struggling

for a common cause. It clearly looks like
a manifestation of the collective merely
intended as groups of people not necessarily sharing belonging to the same
social structure; remarkably, these cohesive phenomena appear to reach beyond
the acknowledged script of society, they
challenge the status quo in their the basic
motives, whether them being political
dictatorship, social inequity, economic immorality or informational censorship. These
endeavours cling onto a sort of natural
force, driving citizens to gather and draw
attention towards their common issues.
We learnt that humans are social animals,
after all.
Moreover it seems likely that the space for
collective stances acquires a political dimension: I am referring here to an etymological meaning of the word politics, as
in groups of people making collective
decisions, regardless of the actual form of
instituted government. It is therefore the
open-endedness of the public space that
allows for the exertion of a variety of participatory practices, as expression of the
collective will.
What I am trying to suggest here is that
almost in a primordial way, as if it was the
most natural response to the most natural
of needs humans choose the space of
the city to give strength to their collective
voice. Thus, the physical space of the city
hasnt ceased to respond to the elemen-

Ebitisint, officiate de quuntot atioria

quis a quia quiatentiis asperor
empore

8|9

tal instinct for the collective. As far as space is involved,

cities cannot help but be the common scenery for these
diverse episodes of the Human Comedy.
More precisely cities provide public space: roads, squares
and parks are the stage for people to raise their voices,
logically identifying the collective space as the space for
public life. These sites are engaged as the selected spaces for practices of social dissent.
As a consequence public space becomes the stage for
conflict, claiming, coming together, activating the city as
a potential field for extended democratic paradigms. In
a nutshell we could claim that crisis activates public
space politically, shaking the space of the city from its
political and institutional standoff.
Pier Vittorio Aureli, Italian architect and theorist, claims
that the city is a political space even before being a
physical space, which in other words asserts the primacy
of the political stance within the space of the city over
the materiality of the city itself.
Cities were founded in order to respond to the need of
settling, and people have increasingly been attracted to
urban centres to fulfil their basic needs, from food supplies
to work, from education to facilities.
Historically, we couldnt deny that the configuration of
human settlements had always somehow been means
to express political content. Yet this content is unavoidably double-sided: the ideology of the established system
of institutions on the one hand, and the micro-political,
bottom-up collective flows, on the other.
We can therefore address this intricate relationship
between politics and the city dialectically, referring to the
classical dichotomy between urbs and civitas.
An infinite set of examples, drawn from the history of the
Western cities and civilizations, could be provided, with
the aim of showing that the historical process of the city
has been cyclically determined by endless oppositions
between the architecture of the civitas and the architecture of the urbs.
Buildings on the agora, as a matter of example, in the

1. The Ideal City

2. Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin, 1995
Christo, Jeanne-Claude

restrictive meaning given to the concept of ancient

Greek democracy is a stance of civic belonging and
representation, as well as the technique of central perspective dominating representations of ideal cities in the
Renaissance stands for the construction of a city revolving
around the centrality of the civic space as utmost realm
of human intellect, reaching sublimation in its adhesion to
the public. That is ideal representation of the civitas, in the
complete identity between citizenship and forma urbis.
On the contrary, throughout history power and authority
have been exerted by governments of all sorts in order to
inform the citizen with structure and rule. In different centuries and according to different fashions, architectures of
absolute power have regulated the hierarchical structure of the city, imposing a scaling process to the figures
in the public space: the large dimension represents the
authority and its emanations, in the shape of the buildings
devoted to the public. They specifically define the notion
of public, and to a large extent this is a mere expression
of the power itself.
A rather insightful point of view on the issue of the political
space in the city, torn between the civic and institutional, is offered by Louis Kahns drawings representing the Civic Forum: he interestingly hybridises in the
architecture of the institutional buildings perfect shapes,
namely the circle, with their formal arrangement as open,
growing building, determining an inner open civic space.
As Michel Foucault highlighted, from the eighteenth
century on, every discussion of politics as the art of
government of man necessarily includes a chapter or
several chapters on urbanism, on collective facilities, on

10|11

hygiene, and on private architecture.

Along with the development of democracy as the principal political form in Western countries, institutions engaged a renovated tool for exerting some sort of absolute power on their territories. Structuring, determining,
controlling and managing the space are amongst the
key points of the overdeveloped discipline of urban and
spatial planning. Though often animated by the best of
intentions, in the course of the last century spatial realization of power and political stances has frequently been
reached, in accordance with tools of intensive and comprehensive planning and social rhetoric.
The western-type of Welfare State model continues to expand, despite the clear cracks that have emerged, and
is accompanied by the illusion of good city form, largely
alienated from the strive for construing a civic space for
the sake of organizing a technically flawless urban space.
The repression of the political content from the space
within the late capitalist city has taken several forms, from
the domestication of alterity to the belief that technocratic solutions are able to calm every crisis, resolve in
an impartial manner every antagonism, satisfy all social
grievances and abort political explosions, paradigms of
exclusion and urban outburst of violence and aggressive
acting-outs, post-political antagonism as opposed to a
possible political adversarial agonism.
If its then true that thinking about politics cannot be easily disentangled from representing space, the last decades have increasingly performed a spatial reductionism in
political reasoning and imagination.
Christo wrapped Berlins Reichstag in 1995: this image still
looks very appropriate for describing the disconnection,

1-2. Civic Forum, Louis I. Kahn

both symbolic and physical, between institutions and

cities.
In his book On Politics the sociologist Zigmunt Bauman
refers to the global citizen as a solitary entity, living in a
world institutionally dominated by the concern for general safety; what remains left out, though, is the fact that
citizens stand completely alone, feeling thoroughly unsafe, cast out from any possibility of actual representation
by or dialogue with political institutions, especially in the
lack of real space for pursuing political goals.

The common denominator in this large amount

of factors characterizing the current historical
process can be recognized in the concept of a
permanent and insurmountable crisis of the very
assumptions holding together urbs and civitas,
resulting in a social, economic and political rebellion of the citizenship to the structures of the
city itself.
The consolidated instruments of territorial planning and
spatial organization merely forget to acknowledge such
a crisis as a permanent and constructive condition, an
asymptotic sequence of unstable equilibriums, yet they
strive to freeze the urban space into a state in which
nothing is allowed to happen if not foreseen, and they
sacrifice to the ber-design idol, from the fork to the
metropolis, producing a ridiculous parody of the Modern
dystopia (once utopia).
Though it doesnt sound new that the political power has
always been involved in the design of space, I think that
the political potential of masses in the construction of the
public space is still somewhat unexploited, being so far
expression of radical acts. Yet space unarguably constitutes a site of dislocation, rupture, contradiction and
contingency. Space is not just a tool for social control, on
the contrary spatial practices can contribute to transformative politics.
But is it somehow so imaginable to suggest an hybridisation between political theory, social activism, and the
architecture of the city?

occupy
occupy wall street

: a psycho-analytical
approach

Anarchichal occupation of the space, and the city

12|13

y wall str
There is a new system additional to or as
an accumulation of all the smaller potentials citizens collectively have that, supported by the systems of communication
on the internet, can equal or exceed the
power of those who are in a privileged
position today: the Occupy Wall Street
Movement is based on this very concept
of the power of a critical mass.
Social media played a largely relevant
role: at first virtual space replaced the real
space, which was, even if not formally
but ideologically, restricted to people, as
the ruling paradigm in the contemporary
city discourages the public use of public
space. The web as democratic realm that
reduces social distance, and the urban
space as the supposed and seized outline
for that.
The Occupy Wall Street Movement spreads internationally: it appears to affirm an
extremely humane principle of settlement,
on the one hand almost primordial, on
the other hand extremely globalised and
contemporary. And it is global because
it battles a global problem at a global

scale, the market. This shows how global

can gain power as an addition of local
phenomena.
According to his theory about collective
intelligence, the French philosopher Pierre
Lvy, supports the idea that the virtual
network represents an instrument prone
to enhance the capacity for cooperation among people, as the Web puts in
place a potential synergy that manages
to maximize this form of shared intelligence. Stemming from this basis, the Belgian
sociologist Derrick de Kerchove develops
the concept of connective intelligence,
stressing the importance of connections
and links to achieve a widely intertwined
plural intelligence. Thus, moving from
virtual connectivity to spatial connectivity
sounds like bringing the plural to a whole
new level, the realm of real space.
Its then logically agreeable that this phenomenon goes along with the concept of
collective and connective: people sharing
a common stance about the System, and
organizing their intelligence to upgrade it
to an actual, widespread and common

political act.
Precisely at this point, allow me to introduce an audacious metaphor. The Occupy
Movement as an expression of a global
collective unconscious. Borrowed from
philosopher and psychiatrist Carl Gustav
Jung, collective unconscious represents a
universal psychic container, as in that part
of human unconscious that is common
to all human beings. It contains the archetypes, the forms and the symbols that
appear in all people across every culture.
Archetypes exist before experience, therefore they are instinctual.
On the whole, the Movement can then be
seen as a paradigm for the re-definition of
the space as a universal psychic container, as collective unconscious manifests
itself through a common will to inhabit that
space. The Movement therefore represents a struggle to give a new, humane
meaning to those archetypes, denied
from experience by contemporary structures. The re-appropriation of forms and
symbols goes through re-seizing the urban
space as human habitat, by all means in

its collective sense.

Public space becomes the space for
actual political conflict and for experimenting new forms of democracy, of inhabiting and of producing. And it is the street
as symbolic place, historically the theatre
for civil and political commitment, that
needs to gain a new collective significance.

What was once the Agora, the public space with political meaning
par excellence is now is Zuccotti
Park: Zuccotti Park as self-made sensitive

public space mirror of an open source

city , confirming the networking idea and
the affirming role of the street and the
square as enhanced social space, entrenched with digital culture, a Street 2.0.
The Occupy Movement is configured as
a sort of neo-Situationist gesture, as the informal occupation of the space becomes
a struggle to connect with the lost identity
of the space itself, of the sense of place. It
is a stance against abstract market forces
that detach people from social institutions
and have overpowered the specific for-

16|17

ces of attachment identified with place.

We therefore witness a crucial switch
in the globalised doom of the city: the
Occupy Movement represents, perhaps
unconsciously, the citizen-driven reaction
to the contemporary phenomenon of
erosion of place aimed at regaining the
space in the most physical and real sense,
that is by settling on it. In principle, whats
happening in Zuccotti Park hardly differs
from the actual foundation of a city. One
of the basic political principle is clearly
the self-governance, based on a horizontal network more than on a hierarchical
structure.
In this atmosphere of social guerrilla,
architecture as a discipline is challenge in
engaging the streets to achieve more with
less than ever: form will not only follow
function, but also friction.
Architects must turn into multifaceted cultural producers and everyday programmers of the city. They must incorporate the
human claim for re-inventing the public
space, and they have to do that becoming truly streetwise.

My thesis then, is as follows: in addition to

our immediate consciousness, which is of
a thoroughly personal nature and which
we believe to be the only empirical psyche, there exists a second psychic system
of a collective, universal, and impersonal
nature which is identical in all individuals.

This collective unconscious does not

develop individually but is inherited. It
consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious
secondarily and which give definite form
to certain psychic contents.

C. G. Jung

italy
and
t
italy and the seventies
re-foundation
and avant-gardism

20|21

The late Sixties and the early Seventies are a period of intense critical
discourse in the field of Italian architecture and urbanism.
Within this specific historical framework, I would like to highlight the distinct endeavours, of Aldo Rossi, Archizoom Associates and Superstudio, in
the sense of their precious contributions to the political approach regarding the discourse on the city.
In the multi-faceted work of these diverse cultural actors a partaking can
be seen in the radical critique towards some compromised theoretical
positions, apologetic to the status quo, that were animating the debate
on the city. These intellectuals addressed a critique towards the notions
of mobility and network as fundamental diagrams of the city (in the
celebration of the city-territory model), and the Arcadian proposals for
socially regressive models such as neighbourhoods, villages or communities, meanwhile sharing the disbelief towards the positivistic utopia of
envisaging urban megastructures, regarded as technologically advanced but politically regressive models of designing the city.

Aldo Rossi poses the fundamental thesis that urban

development, in terms of its physical contribution, that is

the seventies
1

1. Supersurface, Superstudio

indeed architecture, should be understood according

to political development. Architecture is therefore affirmed as

an integral part and a morphogenetic cause of the evolution of urban

phenomena: the legacy of the Modern Movement brought across the
issue that architecture could no longer be seen merely as a product
of masters, but rather as the fundamental act of defining a rule for the
citys dynamics, and therewith affirming itself as the primary means of
constituting the politics of the modern city. In his process of reinterpreting
the Modern through a renewed historical sensitivity, Rossi elaborates his
theory on the city within the realm of the bourgeois city, claiming that its
appropriation and reinvention should construct the basis in order for the
socialist city to set roots in the political process of History. An easy Marxist reference might come to hand here: it is hardly deniable that Rossis
contribution to urban studies is subject to a certain fascination for the
concept of history as a stage for class fight, and herein the construction
of the city as both an analytical record of this process and a powerful
instrument to enhance political fractures.
What is striking in Rossis cultural approach is the intriguing concept of

battling the enemy from within its own structures, mentioning, appropriation of the city as it was, as the taking over of already established
working-class typologies: it is indeed a matter of raising architecture to
the level of achieving autonomy in criticizing reality, not just representing
it, as it ignites the discourse on the city back to its political paradigm and
to its supremacy over the nonsensical accelerated urban development
for its own sake.
But Rossi does not convey a delusional message: he is well aware of the
capitalist exploitation of urban design blameful of persevering in the
process of dismantling the compact city , in favour of regressive settling
forms, such as garden cities, satellite cities and city-territory. By all means
he surrenders to the idea of the built environment as unavoidable expression of the dominant class. And from within this conflicting scenario,
he refreshes the cultural and political role of architecture and its most
powerful tool, the project. The project of architecture has to claim back
the role of critical statement confronting the established script, striving to
stimulate the possibility of alternative political choices, being an exem-

1
1. Project for Business Centre,
Turin, 1973,
Rossi, Polesello, Meda

22|23
plum for the collective.
According to him, its all about designing states of exception, geographical singularities; there he sets the framework for his analysis of the city
revolving around the concept of urban geography or locus, city as a
built environment of conflicting parts , based upon the notions of typology (as a means of constitution and evolution of urban forms) and the
formal individuality of the urban artefact, as architecture, in its material
and visible manifestation, contributes to the development of the urban
narrative by means of circumscribed, closed and intelligible forms. It is
only the possibility of a closed, defined form that permits other forms to
emerge, as urban space is composed of finite juxtaposed parts.
The prominence in Rossis theoretical and architectural work resides
therefore in this achieved notion of locus; in this specific context
it is my urgency to denounce this major concept as a basic category to
describe and interpret, both aesthetically and politically, the architecture of the contemporary city. For this purpose, however, what is interesting
about the subtle definition of locus provided by Rossi is how it represents

the possibility of looking at the

city as the political manifestation of a collective urban memory, overpowering

the mere empirical visibility of the city itself and grasping the dialectical
conflict between constitutive and constituted forces, thus highlighting
the notion of form as principal character on the stage of architecture.
Aldo Rossi states a fundamental point about the relationship between
politics and the form of the city, battling against the hybrid and technologically heteronomous forms proposed by neo-capitalist urbanism. Without doubt, his research proves extremely valid nowadays, yet a further
question cannot be easily avoided: more than thirty years have passed
since the formulation of his theory and the realm of politics and architecture have proceeded on very distinct paths, seldom finding, if ever, any
points of tangency. Still, they share a fundamental common concern. It
is indeed the obsession for image, claimed as the only valuable horizon
of understanding in contemporary culture. Might then Rossis concern
find a rephrasing, and possibly grasp the present anew, in terms of relationship between image of the city and image of the politics? If the city
is supposed to represent a primary site for political choices, how can that
be positively affected by the image culture?

1. Continuous Monument,
Superstudio

The avant-gardist groups Archizoom and Superstudio engage the contradictory task of envisioning alternatives to the capitalist city, intended
as potential alternative use of the city from its own productive class.
Critical to technocracy and to the positivistic myth of industrial production and mass consumption, the manifesto of the joint exhibition Superarchitettura, developed between 1966 and 1968, makes use of irony as
a strategy of subversion through appropriation.
Consumption is greeted along with the objects, images and spaces associated with it: it calls for both a subversion of advertising and an embrace of the images used in it, which combined form the visual experience
of the urban space. The representation yields to the absurd, concocted
through scenarios of wild realities, stemming from maximal exaggeration
of capitalism itself. Its an approach of exquisite and deliberate cynical
realism, where the juxtaposition between real and imagined challenging the very concept of reality as it is found results in a constructed
image that may be seen as both material and imagined.
Buildings and cities are both considered receptacles for ideas and fan-

24|25

Superachitecture is the architecture of superproduction, of superconsumption, of superpersuasion to costume, of the supermarket, the superman,
of superoctane gasoline. Superarchitecture accepts the logic of production
and consumption, and works for its demystification.
Superarchitecture admits the logic of production and consumption and
exerts on that an action of demystification. It is an architecture of images with
a strong content of evocativeness, able of inducing the same in the consumer. It is an architecture bearing the subversive might of advertising, yet even
more effective due to the insertion of images loaded with great intentionality
in a grand design and in the reality of the city, with all its permanencies and
history.

Superarchitecture 1966-1968

1. No-Stop City, Archizoom

2. Supersurface, Superstudio
2

tasies, as well as constructions structuring imagination and a type of free

thinking. Evocative buildings can set off a series of associations in the recipient, in an act similar to dreaming, and allow for a creative rethinking
of the given environment and its architectural objects. The visions they
provide are somewhere between the existent, that is taken as inspiration,
and a call for imaginary interventions in the lived environment.
Superstudios Monumento Continuo and Archizooms No Stop City
realize the critical possibilities of the complex and intermediate space
of architecture. The potential of imagined objects moves past the built
form, and challenges the recipient to rethink his or her position in regard
to the constructed environment. Living space is presented as tran-

sfigured representation, intended as an image loaded with

associations and meanings.

No-Stop City critically develops the concept of spatial isotropy as a tool

for liberating space from bourgeois ideals and questioning hierarchy in
architecture. A non-hierarchical grid that opens movement in all direc-

tions is displayed over an indefinite and infinite territory, emphasizing

repeatable homogeneous forms and continuous built worlds, while dialectically giving space to unplanned activities; an endless space that is
represented with abundant evocative objects punctuating it.
Archizooms architectural stances, especially driven by the figure of
Andrea Branzi, move along with social and political activism: in April
1967 the city of Milan became a sort of real experimental field for these
theories, when the creation of an urban tent camp and the squatting
of an unoccupied hotel in the city centre were events built in order to
reflect the city as an open space to be occupied for communal living, as
a space of choice and imagination.
The theme of homogeneity and isotropy is developed in Superstudios
Istograms of architecture and Supersurface: forcing the positivistic concept of quantity as the only horizon of architecture, space is made potential as a mental action, in a realm of pure potentiality and total lack
of architectural language. These works pave the way for the broader
effort of Monumento Continuo, as they abrogate the finitely built form in
favour of open expanses of a free play of thought, fuelled by the overload of stimuli of the metropolis and those possibilities opened by a subversion of consumer culture. It is a spatialization of the relation,

that is ignited by the object and that provokes the

dissolution of the object itself: it isnt the object itself
that is of significance, but the spatial relationship it
prompts. Performing a radical dissolution of the object, the city as a

result is no longer a collection of individual architectural objects, whose

materiality is thereby destroyed. Moreover they install a critical architectural dialogue with the superlative objects of mass culture, realizing the
radical value of media representation(s) in their ability to destabilize the
fixedness of total design and the material urban space.
26|27

capitalism,

& the

democracy,

suburbs

Exploring the deep intertwinement, both in terms of

28|29

representation and actuality, of the sprawling urban

paradigm of the American suburbs with the so-called late-capitalism market democracy - a celebration of individuality coupling an erosion of the social.

The rhetoric of the networked city (or city territory) in a globalized

world only enhances the actual disentanglement of the suburban dweller from the city: suburbs have given up on the city, crystallized in a cloud
of atomized monads, doomed with the equal potential of the absence
of place. Globalization paradigms strongly rely on the concept of a
highly structured network system, an efficient management of flows, of
mainly people, goods and information, streaming along the tentacular
net of infrastructure. Theres no question here about the overall fact that
infrastructural systems, though aiming at the superior goal of achieving
connectivity and minimizing the outdated idea of distance, physically
and spatially determines severe situations of radical exclusion. Infrastructural axes install fractures along the territory: they represent the geographical hindrances of contemporary times, but not in terms of spatial
distance, which they battle, rather in terms of existential gap between
the city and the suburbs.
Therefore, suburban life is characterised by an isolation from urban activities and external forces: it is disconnected from the city, no matter how

many roads and railway links are provided. To some extent it is impossible to deny that the suburban development of cities, and specifically
of American cities, was born from the very infrastructural logic: sturdily
reliant on the individual transportation mode, life in the suburbs programmatically chose to be detached from the urban experience.
However this does not seem to present an issue. Suburban dwellers have
mainly chosen to indulge in the well-advertised American Dream. They
have voluntarily given up their role in the urban sphere to pursue the highest goal in contemporary democracy: the front lawn with a driveway.
Someone may also have defined it as the American apartheid. They
declared themselves satisfied, as voluntary captives borrowing Rem
Koolhaas words of sameness, safety, shopping.
Unsurprisingly, suburban everyday life is firmly standing on a tripod of
long-established, well-manicured institutions: the house, the workplace and the mall. And rather fastly isolation paves the way to a system
centred on the self: the overall result becomes devastatingly significant

for a highly structured paradigm of mass individualism, where family is

identified as the highest horizon of collective behaviour. Although it may
sound as an oxymoron, it is a mass-based phenomenon, resulting in the
complete social atomization. As a logical outcome, individuals, deprived
of their social genes, find refuge in the holy pursuit of property as a form
of solace. And the very celebration of the property translates into an
hypertrophy of the suburban ego occupying the space.
Eventually, suburbs provide a spatial pattern for life that erodes the interactive social foundations of everyday existence, thereby leading to a
decay of democratic forms of living. It is the spatial representation of the
liberal political and cultural utopia: to be able to separate public and
private according to individual judgement and be able to live unencumbered by the various obligations of public and social life. In the end, the
suburbs give actual physical display to the whole utopian idea of liberal
democracy: the single house in the suburbs is not just a house, it delivers
a strong political stance.
Borrowing a very common word from the financial crisis in 2008, we might
as well talk about subprime in architecture. In the identification with

From graphic novel

Tales From Outer

Suburbia,
by Shaun Tan

the fulfilment of the American Dream, suburbs have proven to be a

crucial space of speculation for the real-estate market, advertising the
right for property as the ideological base for making people own more.
And suburbs is where the housing bubble exploded, following that same
unsocial and unsustainable pattern that created it.
Clearly, aside representing an objectionable way of living, the suburban
life deeply affects the political culture: mass individualism leads inevitably
to the pursuit of self-conservation, refusing any kind of cultural difference
or conflict, stigmatising the options for change.
Yet, to simply define the whole suburban phenomenon as a wrong and
undesirable urban practice would be an unreasonably biased operation. As Robert Venturi and Denis Scott Brown teach us in their Learning
from Lewittown experiment, suburbia bears a great deal of ambivalence within its white fences and neo-colonial facades. It is evidently
the environment representing the sphere of the everyday, numbed by
the massive intrusion of global economy, and haunted by the paranoid
concern of stigmatizing the strange and of calculating the risk. Suburbia

is somewhere suspended between the secured, fully materialised utopia

of the perfect life and the alienation of anything possibly stirring its fixity.
At the same time though, it represents a potential incubator for vitality,
veiled under the driveways and hidden behind the real-estate ads.
In order to possibly activate liberating revolutions and radical creativity hidden under the sterilized condition of the suburban taken-for-granted
alienation -, the everyday life must shake off its sense of ineluctable
necessity and predictability, and be re-politicised: let the fantasy and
absurdity of the suburban arise, in the strive to reinvent its deserted roads
as a new local place, a space for poetics, politics, and mythology.

on criticism an

on criticism and crisis

34|35

Architectural practice has always been accompanied by architectural thinking. The forms and
folds all the theories, manifestoes and discourses on
architecture and urbanism have engaged in are
by all means not a matter of interest in this context.
What, on the contrary, is of interest here is the way
they have been interpreted as an advancement of
thought, thanks to a copious set of enthusiastic confirmations or harsh negations provided by architects
and theorists, which we could file in the archive of
architectural critique. And it is exactly around the
speculation on the notion of critique, this mysterious
and mistreated category of modern thinking, where
I would like here to place here some constructive
considerations.
In the attempt of gaining a deeper understanding of
the contemporary urban phenomena, it has been
shown how the discourse on architecture during the
Post-Modernity has critically assumed fascinating
positions regarding the institutional, economic and
social models influencing the contemporary era,
and the potential power of the architecture of the
city as tool for confirming or disrupting the state of
things. Although the urban, capitalist, and modern
every day is pushing towards increased homogeneity in daily life, the irreconcilable disjunctions born
in a post-industrial city full of anachronistic interstices make it impossible to think of modernization
as only negative. To this regard, a certain insight is
offered by the work of the French philosopher and
sociologist Michel de Certeau: in his The Practice of
Everyday Life he outlines an analysis of the produc-

nd crisis

Utopia, Thomas More

tion and consumption mechanism crucial categories in my process of understanding , stating the
impossibility of a full colonization of everyday life by
these induced paradigms. Therefore individuals and
collective entities, in their unconscious navigation
through life, bear the capacity for potential alternatives, since they arrange resources and choose
methods according to continuously creative arrangements.
At this point the role of the critical intellectuals

36|37

gets to be questioned, as they frequently bury

themselves in the ivory tower of Thought, foreclosing
themselves from looking at everyday life from an
inside perspective. Evasion is a common approach
of critical stances, as distancing philosophical speculations from the corruption of the real world feels
compelling to those who regard themselves the
Guardians of Thought every so often, critical practices reject the reality of things as a whole, unsubtly
forgetful of the multiplicity of shades achieved in
contemporary society.
Refuge into utopia represents a common outcome
for them, whether openly advocated or fearfully
disguised. Unfortunately, utopian discourse often
dries out into sterility, driven by such an unrealistic
bias. Betraying the potential of disclosing a fresh perspective on what is there, utopists, especially within
the field of architectural thinking, often indulge in a
moralistic and self-consolatory attitude, delusional
of the fact that dreaming about alternatives to the
present reality should have nothing to do with the
present itself and envisioning dreams of a lost paradise. Utopias feed illusions, and generate disenchantment along with it, inevitably producing negative
political outcomes.
In correction to that, Immanuel Wallerstein, American sociologist and social scientist, puts forward the
concept of Utopistics: Utopistics is the scrupulous
evaluation of historical alternatives, the exercise of
our judgement on the rational materiality of alternative possible historical systems. It is the balanced
evaluation, rational and realistic, of human social

38|39

systems, of their precluded possibilities, and of spaces open to human creativity. It is not the face of a
perfect future (and inevitable), but that of an alternative future, likely better, and historically possible
(yet far from being certain). Thus, it is an exercise of
science, politics and ethics, all at once.
Acknowledging this difference, its likely to affirm
that Utopistics determines political categories,
whereas utopia, yet driven by a political demand,
conjectures spatial configurations that repress politics, defining a model of suspension of everything
that is political.
Playing with the subtle, yet founding, semantics
between utopia and Utopistics, another plausible
similitude comes to mind: critique and crisis. Etymologically kindred spirits, the concepts of critique and
crisis partake in the duplicity of their meaning, originally deriving from the Greek verb krino, conveying
a sense of separating and discerning. The two words
share the meaning of rupture point, both positively
and negatively intended, a ritual of passage from a
specific situation to another.
Thats the focal point of this exercise of the thought:
the construction of a kaleidoscopic image built
allegedly by weighing up the schizophrenic particles
of contemporary reality, remoulding and exaggerating them, displaying them in a catastrophic scenario provocatively aims at fracturing common sense
on reality, making unprincipled use of the germs of
contradiction and criticality present and readable
in the contemporary space. It stands for an action
of outdoing critique with crisis, and contemporaneously downsizing the unrealistic grandeur of utopia to the effective communicability of utopistics.

Theodor Adorno

Beauty today can have no other measure except the depth to

which a work resolves contradictions. A work must cut through
the contradictions and overcome them, not by covering them
up, but by pursuing them

The Analogous City is the caricature representation of

the real city, or - better said - of real cities. Of them, it
is an anamorphic projection. it sees Sin City as a documentary, not a fictional movie

40|41

[reality]n

conceptualizing Context

enhancing Reality

When we are kids, we are taught to tell real from imaginary. We are taught to stay in the world according to spatial
and temporal categories, here or there, now or next
week. We are taught that we should spend some time with
other kids, instead of just hanging out with our imaginary
friends.
Yet it is a fairly tricky concept, reality, and leaves us no choice but to inquire into the delicate balance of elements that
help to define it. Ultimately every thinking being questions
the very concept of reality, in terms of objectiveness and
subjectivity. Performing a slight diversion from this existential
loop, I will try to investigate a different possible way to look
at what is supposed to be real, by incorporating objects
and subjects, perceptions and ideas.
As it has already been said it is not just a matter of representing reality. It is about interpreting it. In the realm of architecture and urban design, the notion of context arises as
the ultimate horizon for confronting reality. Yet its definition
is rather peculiar, since on the one hand it shows a deep
strive for objectivity (context as physical and actual presence of objects and events on a real, geographical territory,
context as a unstable equilibrium between natural and built
environment, etc.), and on the other hand it is clearly advocated as a design tool, therefore bowed to the willingness of
the Ego.
But what if we engaged in the heretical attempt of blurring
those stiff, common sense driven barriers between object

and subject, what if we acknowledged the possibility of

mixing things up?
It looks like Bernard Tschumi, in the third instalment of his
book series Event Cities, provides a remarkable analysis of
the relation between contexts, concepts and contents. He
provides a series of statements, provocatively intended to stir
the hierarchy amongst these three overly used architectural
words.

Contexts are framed and defined by concepts, just as the

reverse is true
Context is not a fact; it is always a matter of interpretation
Context is often ideological and hence may be qualified
or disqualified by concepts
Hence, a relevant liberation of context - from its supposed
coincidence with actuality and objectivity is performed,
becoming inextricably intertwined with the very act of the
project.
Moreover he states that conflicts, confrontations and
contaminations between concept, context and content
are part of the definition of contemporary urban culture,
and therefore of architecture. According to him, conceptualizing the context means turning the idiosyncrasies and
constraints of a context into the driving force behind the
development of an architectural idea: architecture therefore seems to flourish when exposed to crises and conflicts,
bearing the potential of transforming human stances into
spatial practices, shifting the focus of the discipline from an

42|43

activity of problem solving to one of problem finding.

At this point, it comes as no surprise that I am here advocating the conscious and proactive perturbation of the three
notions, concept, context and content. As a consequence,
the ad hoc creation of a context is not necessarily an ideal
or de-materializing action. In fact I preach it to be an act of
hyper-realism, as the analogical context becomes a hyperreal avatar of the actual, real context. It is a sort of enhanced reality, it is an emphasis of the expression of realism.
At the same time, the construction of an analogical context
is an extreme synthesis of the present time, stemming from
the belief that nostalgia of our past and utopian dreams
about our future prevent us from looking at our present; that
said, the question doesnt move away from considering
the present as a mere contribution to the historical process,
and aims at stressing the idea that through the dissection of
our current condition we can yield evolution, cherishing our
legacy more brightly.
Despite showing a commitment to a spatial and temporal
extreme realism, the analogical context possesses no local
specificity, as the look on reality is intended to show theoretical and political mediation. As a matter of fact, in the
re-definition of the discourse on the context, I cant help but
consider its adjustment to the scenario of a globalised world.
As outlined by Saskia Sassen, in her wide work on the sociology of globalisation, the materiality of the global processes,
in terms of economic, social and institutional issues, is thoroughly embodied in cities: the political discourse, at a point in
which the world witnesses disintegrated national borders, is
downsized to the urban level. Cities which, according to Sassen, are arranged in a network of world cities and capital
cities, become the political horizon in the globalised era.
Though they represent geopolitical symbolic forms, these
global urban entities lack in strongly identified places, as a
result of political and geographical complexity in terms of

Is the contemporary image of the city representing the contemporary image - and substance - of the citizenship?

regional and transnational cooperation.

Furthermore, Sassen states the urgency of a reaffirmation
of centrality of the cities, both as gravitational points for the
economic system and as institutional and symbolic fulcrum
in the apparent space-endlessness of the contemporary
city. Almost paradoxically, the paradigms of globalisation
re-produce the conflict, once internationally based, on the
local level of the space of the city, inducing actual urban
conflict: it is in those cities where critical mass has accumulated and significant actions have been enacted that the
political issue manifests triumphantly and is displayed.
Thus, it comes as no surprise that the choice for an analogous context falls in the realm of the urban, indeed aiming
at defining plausible readings capable of completing a
project in the mundane context of the everyday.
In conclusion, I would like to quote the Italian philosopher
Giorgio Agamben,: the only interesting way, or anyhow
possible, of thinking of something as a sort of biography, or
as a relationship with places, between life and places, is
cartography. Usually biographies are linked to time, yet time
is way too intimate and relies on memory for a forgetful
person like me, I prefer space, and places. Then it is better to
project life on a big imaginary city.

44|45

analogy
analogy

In the correspondence
between Freud and Jung, the
latter defines the concept of
analogy in the following way:
I have explained that logical
thought is what is expressed in
words directed to the outside
world in the form of discourse,
analogical thought is sensed
yet unreal, imagined yet silent;
it is not a discourse but rather
a meditation on themes of the
past, an interior monologue.
Logical thought is thinking in
words. Analogical thought
is archaic, unexpressed, and
practically inexpressible in
words. I believe I have found
in this definition a different
sense of history conceived of
not simply as fact, but rather
as a series of things, of effective objects to be used by the
memory or in a design
Aldo Rossi. An analogical
architecture (1976)

>The Analogous City is an analytical instrume

composed of elements that are real, ideal,

question
of
method
and interpretation

3
1

1. Campus Martius, G.B. Piranesi

2. La Citt Analoga, A.Rossi
3. Via Appia, G.B. Piranesi
4. Roma Interrotta, J. Stirling
5. Gotham City
6. Exodus, R. Koolhaas

ent, it is the construction of a global context,

, symbolic, iconic, immaterial, immanent<

4
5

1. L. Fontana
2.-3. Merzbau, K. Schwitters
4. A. Rossi
5-6. G. Matta Clarke

parat
parataxis

>The Analogous City is glorification of the waste. It is at

once the Waste Land and its nemesis. It is autopsy of
a living corpse<

>The Analogous city is demonstration by absurdity,

made up to achieve an image of new relationships, not
just of opposition but of hybridization and alliance<

compenetration

taxis
glorification of waste

It is the desperate moment

when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us
the sum of all wonders, is an
endless, formless ruin, that corruptions gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our
sceptre, that the triumph over
enemy sovereigns has made us
the heirs of their long undoing.
Only in Marco Polos accounts
was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the
tracery of a pattern so subtle
it could escape the termites
gnawing.
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1972

>The Analogous City is a diagnostic

operation, exercise of suspicion,
suspension of judgement<

city of order
The city that we are examining apparently doesnt have anything strange, it has
streets, squares, gardens, old and new
houses, indeed its a city like any other,
it could seem like your own city; the only
thing is that has been governed by the
same mayor for 45 years.
Superstudio, Twelve Ideal Cities, 1971

54|55

.generalities
From the UNHABITAT State of the Worlds Cities:
2010/2011 report: The United Nations predicts
that by the year 2030, more people in every
region of the world will live in urban than in rural
areas, even in Asia and Africa, which are now
the least urbanized parts of the globe. Our shared
future will largely come about through the social,
political, economic, and cultural dynamic that is
urbanization the convergence of human activity and aspiration in all cities, regardless of size.

.identity

.identity

No real identity defines the analogous

city, identity is a fake.
Its eye-lifted, liposuctioned, designerclothed.
Its a corpse in disguise.
Its only true nature is waste, garbage,
by-product.
The city no longer expresses a place, but
a behavioural model, a condition that is
transmitted by merchandise.

.urbanism
.urbanism

In the Analogous City it is all about urbanism, and it relies

upon the paradox of smoothness and complexity. Market
smoothness takes shape within the city in clustered urban
complexes, radically disconnected from the city and highly
connected to global infrastructure; formal complexity mimics
the real complexities enhancing them. It is merely a tool to
numb peoples minds from what complexity really means and
truly entails. A visual complexity is a rhetorical stance of the
status quo, complexity as the New Unknown.

.politics
It was once the agora, now its the market.
Find out the seven small differences between
the pictures.

58|59

.farewell to
the program
The Mother Board is the perfect masterplan, deterministically
organized, efficient, neat. The Analogous City is a Planning
Temple, where, in praise of technocracy, the only program is
financial.

technocracy + financial program = perfect masterplan

12|13

.marble cctv

.marble cctv
Space in the Analogous City is strictly
monitored: nothing escapes from the
everywhere present security cameras.
Urban space is shaped to allow only what
is expectable and what is safe.

powered by

.public spa
.public space

The Analogous City has forgotten public life. Nevertheless, it is keen on having Public Space.
As a city council, you can order Public Space online,
choosing among several features and finishes. And
you are guaranteed a winning team of professionals
to set it up for you, and they deliver anywhere in the
world. A team of artists, publicists, marketing experts
and engineers will take care of every minute detail,
from lighting to plumbing to advertising. Theyre lifeproof formula has acquired wide esteem among city
governments all over the globe. It is clean, it is safe, it
is energy efficient and self-maintained, it is paved, it is
covered, it is sunny, it is anything you ask for. And it is
highly customizable too, with optional Public Art, you
can choose from the American Pop Art Style, including
reproductions of Oldenburg, Calder, Koons, or you can
opt for murals and guerrilla-style installations, original
copies from Basquiat, Banksy, Space Invader and
many others. You can even have your own wrappedup, Christo-like monument.
You also get to choose the Public Green, ranging
from centuries-old Mediterranean Olive trees, to cedars of Lebanon, to red maples from Japan.

>

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown

once told us the story of ducks and decorated sheds. We can now identify a further
category, the apotheosis of duck and decorated shed all in one: the brand. In branded architecture the brand gives form to
the actual building, it doesnt simply cover it.

.architectu

.architecture
.architecture

mapping the a

mapping the analogous ci

aesthetical epoch
Contemporary culture no longer keeps track of its history in texts or
words, as much as it does in images. Along with it, the late-capitalist

city is obsessed with the image delivered through its architecture: buildings and spaces cant help but be victims of this para-

66|67

digm perpetrated by the dictatorship of the market. Yet image culture

bears a huge potential: images are an infinite source of meanings and
possibilities and it would be pointless to diminish their constructive might.
On the whole they store a capacity of stimulating vision, when interpreted as a starting point or instrument, not as an aim to achieve.
Moreover history itself is contradicting the paradigm of planning as an
outdated tool of grasping reality in its multiple forms, and the overall
idea of the possibility to structurally determine the space of the city as an
image of completeness and efficiency: it is impossible in these days and
age to create a city in the old modernist planning tradition of a static,
hierarchically organized, top-down approach, where the focus is on the
final image.
As engaged with the responsibility of determining the urban space,
architects will have to bring across a political stance, a positioning, or a
constant becoming, within a project that goes beyond the agenda of
global capitalism. They cant just map the existing dynamic programs
found within the milieu of the multitude, resample and give them a spatial and temporal expressivity. They will first have to invent new nonlinear
programs on top of, within and by it, second to renew from within, and
third dare to have a say a project in the literal meaning of throwing
something forward in relation to it, in order to create other options to
choose from besides the ones the market provides.
In the Eclectic Atlases, Stefano Boeri suggests that in order to stimulate a
debate and to achieve a re-foundation of the themes of the discourse
(intended as the general categories of judgement within the common
culture), it is necessary to firstly act on the themes of the sight. The
variety of the contemporary urban condition, nourished by distanced
associations of the relationship between individuals and urban space,
asks for strategies of observation and consequently of vision, not of
mere planning different from the ones experimented in the European
city. Strategies that cannot rely on the restitutions of an aesthetic chaos
perceived from a zenithal perspective, in fact they propose a variation
of the point of view, a sort of oblique perspective towards reality.
As a consequence, it is necessary to trigger the process of city being
which goes beyond the deterministic creation of images within the city
- according to a double level, in the motto of think big and act small.
Envisioning from within reality enhances the possibility of questioning it, of

analogous city

ity

experimenting its potentials and drawbacks, of politically implementing

alternatives and liberations. In such a way, visions overcome spatial dimensions, engaging reality as a whole, yet at the same time they maintain focus on addressing it as a sum of micro-decisions, an ensamble of
potential conditions to be activated.
Envisioning results in an aesthetic epoch - an amoral suspension of the
judgement -, based a priori on a pre-contemporary image of the city:
the notions of what should be and how it should be like are refused,
as the action within existing reality aims to disrupt its consolidated structures.
As the artist Max Ernst once said, Beauty is the chance meeting upon a
dissecting table of a sewing-machine with an umbrella.

merry
man
A
merr
merry mani
A Amerry
m
merry
A
m
erry
mani
merry
man
A merry
ma
A
merr
A merry
rryA manife
merry
merry man
The City will be open.
Come on in, go anywhere!
Live where you will!
The City will house everyone well.
The income gap will narrow to nothing: The City
will be just in distributing its assets.
The City understands, nevertheless, that peoples
desires differ.
The City knows that its resources are finite.
The City will do its best to reconcile all of this.
The City will be both diverse and mutable.
The City will be under the control of its citizens.
All of them, on the basis of free choice.
Anything may be anywhere in the City as long as it
has no obnoxious effects on other creatures.
This is sure to generate much debate.
Fine!
The City will be dense and compact.
Not every City, of coursetoo late for that.
The City will prefer its citizens to move about on
foot, horizontally and vertically.
Many buildings will, therefore, be low-ish.
The City will be beautiful, although there are likely to be disagreements about this.
Every City will be different, which should help.
The City will be quiet and noisy.
The City will be hospitable and encourage gatherings of all kinds.
The City will offer lots of privacy.
The City will acknowledge and support its many publics, if they want it.
The City will be safe, but confusing.
The City will grow old and be constantly refreshed.
The City will be based in its neighborhoods,
The City will have special places. Many of these
will be incomprehensible to many.
The City will have secrets.
The City will confer the right to change.
This right will belong to every citizen.
The City will not restrict any authentically private act.
The City will be a place to speak freely and act
freely.
The City will employ all its citizens.
The City will strive to replace all imports. Within
reason.
The City will love the sun, and the sun will energize the City.
The right to insolation shall not be infringed.

nifesto
ry
manife
ifesto
manifesto
ymerry
manifest
man
ifesto
nifesto
anifesto
ry
manife
y manifest
esto
y
manifes
nifesto
The City will not export its waste or import its
water.
The City will grow its food.
The City will not emit carbonit will be green.
Literally: The equivalent of 100% of the Citys
surface area will be green.
The Citys buildings will be cross-ventilated.
There will be balconies, terraces, and gardens for
all who want them.
It will be easy to get to the Citys many sports
fields and parks.
There will be sufficient mature trees for every
citizen to sit under one alone.
The City will not interrupt the flow of the
countryside through it.
The Citys contiguous territory will coincide with
its ecological footprint.
The City will embrace biodiversity.
There may be foxes, certainly worms.
Certain microbes may be disfavored.
The City will be healthy.
The City will love its children, who will play well
with others.
The City will love its old.
The City will love its strivers and its indolent.
The City will love its others and its differentlyabled.
The City will love everyone, for Chrissakes.
The City will get over any unrequited love. Its
none of the Citys business.
All languages will be spoken in the
City.
This will not necessarily affect official documents.
The City will have a special jones for cookery and
there will be many restaurants.
Quite a few of them will deliver.
The City will respect the views of its citizens
political and scopic.
There will be laughter in the streets.
The City will revere its great accomplishments and
its tiny accomplishments.
The City will have a long memory.

Michael Sorkin

For two centuries global urbanization has progressed at a rapid pace. Around 1800,
2% of a billion people worldwide lived in cities. In 2000 it was about 50%of approximately 6.5 billion people. It is estimated that by 2050 it will be about 75% of some
8.5 billion people. However, not all cities are growing. Between 1950 and 2000 more
than 350 large cities experienced, at least temporarily, significant declines in population. In the 1990s more than a quarter of large cities worldwide shrank. The number
of shrinking cities is continuously increasing, even though urban growth will continue
to dominate in coming decades. An end is in sight, however: around 2070-2100,
the world population will reach its zenith and the process of urbanization will largely
reach a balance, and urban shrinkage will be a process as common as it was before industrialization began.

from shrinking cities, exhibition at

the Venice Biennale, 2006

shrinking cities

and subprime suburbs

Over the last century, the phenomenon
of sprawling cities has widely infested the
majority of Western countries as a common and wide-spread settlement system,
fed by economic growth and celebrated
as the modern paradigm of freedom and
well-being. The discourse on the city has
long ago started to raise questions regarding the limit confronting the delirious
infinite urban expansion, identifying the
necessity of finding a new reading for the
unprecedented quantity of objects punctuating the landscape and irrationally
devouring the territory.
The theme of the edge of the city and of
the undistinguishable boundary between urban and rural has filled decades of
architectural literature, resulting in the
stigmatization of suburbs and peripheral
urban areas. For sure, they represent a sort
of anti-city, a negation of the spatial relationships of density and proximity typical
of the compact city, as they are somehow
considered failed architectural examples,
suspended in an undefined spatial and
temporal in-between.
It is interesting to note, however, that suburbs and peripheries are the actual living
space of a great deal of urban dwellers,
places that they call home. Herein lies,
without doubt, the potential for a certain
type of urban identity, a sense of belon-

4
1

5
3

1-2-3-4-5. Detroit, Ghost City

foreclosure architecture
ging to this space. The empty space represents the seat of this potential.Ranging
from the vacant lots to the dismissed buildings, from neglected parks to the wasteland of the infrastructure, void should be
addressed by strategies aiming to affirm
its meaning of being public. Public space
more than a space that is of collective
property just because it is left out from the
real-estate market.
Moreover the phenomenon of the shrinking population of former industrial-based
cities and their consequent pervasive condition of dereliction and vacancy shows
how the theme of the urban (and suburban) void needs attention and rethinking.
Through the reconversion of the existing
construction trauma, it is necessary to
de-mythicise Modern and Post-Modern fetishes, acknowledging the possibility of the
different scales against the ruling paradigm of the extra-large scale, allowing for
codes of exclusion, definition of enclaves,
and schizophrenic consumption of the
territory.
Acknowledging this failure of formal and
highly structured urban design strategies,

2
3

1-2-3. Schemes for

foreclosed houses public re-appropriation
4-5-6. Public invades former private space

CONSUMPTION AND PRODUCTION SPACE

as a possibiliy for for public quality
and intensity to arise.

take me out to the mall

1. Multi-functional platform defining diversity

within the retail space
2. Alternative shopping (from Storefront for Art
and Architecture, New York)

it is interesting to look at the problem from

a different perspective, considering the
possibility of learning from informal practices. Informality represents the need for
over-organised and affluent societies to
find conflicting, if not literally free, modes
of practice. These forms of occasional
urbanities are a constructive operation
of appropriation and re-interpretation of
the left-behind space and of the wasted
architecture, sharing Gilles Clment idea
of a residual landscape of space with high
biological vitality.
Informal and occasional architectures
are often triggered by crises, either social
or economic, andthey bear a political
scope, as these are eloquent situations of
a rebellious subjectivity. Mostly they stem
from practices of dissent and practices of
survival, and they are mainly based on a
collective and intense understanding of
the public space. Public space becomes
a source of equity and freedom at the
same time, revealing the micro-political
nature of the poetic deeds performed in
the urban space, through the abolishment
of the communal illusion as final objective for society. The reflection on public
space will focus on the mechanism through which subjectivity aspires to a full life
beyond the private perimeter of romantic
intimacy.
What needs to be put forward through
bottom-up strategies is political consciousness. The apolitical, senseless, unattended public space in the contemporary
city needs to be stirred, transformed into

Strip-Tease
something undetermined again, full of
surprise and adventure.
It needs to be politicised again in the
sense that it has to become a necessary
space for people to live in, to make it part
of their everyday life. In order to stir the
numbed public realm, random programs
and unexpected objects become narratives of a social landscape. Dreams at the
turn of a corner.

3
1. Installation by Diller-Scofidio, NYC
1 2

2. Picture by Mark Jenkins

3. Built and open space ratio

The Analogous City is the caricature representation of the real city, or - better said - of real cities. Of them, it is
an anamorphic projection. it sees Sin City as a documentary, not a fictional movie

THE STRIP AS A CONNECTING TRAIL...

The street as source of possibilities for connecting heterotopias,
its a synaptic space.
Acting spaces that become spaces to question everyday life,
its potential, its barriers, its imposed temporalities,
turning to the fantastical and absurd that utter normality can offer.

dereli
derelict arc

78|79

ict
arc
chitecture

4
5

2
3

1-2-3. Voids in the city, pictures by Jodi Bernard

4-5-6. Pictures by Kobas Laksa

80|81

whats with the

Traditionally, we think about public space in terms of streets, squares and
parks. In the contemporary city, the capability of giving a public content
to the urban space has been lost, as to some extent urban design practices have triggered a privatization of public space and a multiplication
of gated communities. Regardless the property of it, urban space has
increasingly become a capitalistic space. At a micro scale, the capitalistic space is bombarded under promotional pressure, continuously carried out through all communication means and media, transforming the
home into an absolute centre of a consumerist culture of the ephemeral.
In his The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch identified the housing unit as

82|83

e neighbourhood?
the stable and durable element in the urban fabric: by means of that, the urge arises for
reinterpreting the spaces and the figures of the open space of the urban neighbourhood, questioning the role and the potential of the streets connecting housing blocks, of
the small neglected squares along them, and of the neighbourhood parks of the semiprivate inner courtyards.
Given their features of proximity and in-between-ness, the spaces abovementioned
represent a valuable resource, yet it cannot be expected from the public to simply be
there, waiting passively for the arrival of cultural commodities. The public is a provisional construction in permanent mobility that can be described in terms of its evolving

relations to a space in permanent mobility, not only physically but also

socially and politically. Therefore, a renewed approach to architecture
and urban planning cannot merely be initiated by centralised structures, and governmental bodies. It must, rather, include microscopic
attempts at the collective and individual level, reflecting their desires
within the micro-social segments of public space: neighbourhood associations, informal teams, self-managed organisations, small institutions,
alternative spaces, and from individuals themselves. Urban development
policies need to learn how to make provisions for such attempts.
The micro-dimension of public works interventions (i.e. manufactured

objects, improvised urban furniture, cleaning and gleaning, etc.), brings

precision, detail, and localisation within the public space. Additionally
these activities are effective in their attempts to change and transform
spaces. The scale of proximity, the small-scale devices and the walking
distances that demarcate the area of intervention, brings another quality
to the networks and the relationships between participants. They increase the intensity of living, aiming to define pro-active spaces so individuals
may find a way of sublimating their subjectivities into the collective, inviting them to rediscover possibilities of being social, outside of enclaves,.
Struggling against the concept of public space as a container for people and ordering agent of conflict, but rather an affirmation of the
84|85

86|87

elements of inconstancy and inconsistency that the city itself generates,

still spatial proximity isnt enough to grant the definition of acting spaces:
the project of space in transition has to acknowledge crisis as a state of
productive emergency, as a specific awareness of temporality, refusing
a final and completely determined image of architecture and urban
space.
Raymond Williams says that however dominant a social system may be,
the very meaning of its domination involves a limitation or selection of

the activities it covers, so that by definition it cannot exhaust all social experience, which therefore always potentially contains space for alternative intentions which are not yet articulated as a social institution or even
project. So freedom is not something that has to be established outside
reality by being critical towards society but only by and through alternative practice experiments within a given situation.

depressed

88|89

production
For decades, industrial buildings were the
symbol of economic development of the
Western countries, as well as the confirmation of the capitalist model of production.
Several urban organisms have developed around this model, facing a sudden
growth in their extension and an increase
in their wealth. It was the years of a certain
positivistic faith in production, and Modern
architecture and planning represented its
spatial counterpart: activity zoning was a
ruling paradigm in the urban design strategies, determining as a result huge industrial
enclaves along urban boundaries as long
as mono-functional housing districts to
host the growing working classes.
Gradually over the last forty years, facing the information technology revolution, Western countries have decided to
alienate a great deal of their productive
force, concentrating on realms based on
creative and innovative production as
well as on financial speculation. Contemporary Western cities live almost completely disentangled from the physical production of goods, both agricultural and
industrial, and rely on a service-oriented
society fuelled by retail commerce.
As a result, European and American
cities found themselves with previously
extended industrial compounds whose
production and employment capacity
was dramatically shrinking, and facing the
reality of repairing these wounds in the
urban fabric. The discourse around dismissed industrial areas dominated, and still

1. Traditional industrial production model

2. Exploded production model,
based upon public space, at the scale of the city

dominates, the debate on urban renewal,

often resulting in gentrification processes
producing fashionable neighbourhoods
and enclaves. In his book devoted to
the production of space, Henri Lefebvre
underlines the abstract character of
capitalistic space which acts as a tool or
domination. The methods and scenarios
which try to be creative and attractive (by offering Theme Parks, Urban Renewal Zones, City Branding operations
etc.) are often a failure because space is
above all considered in terms of financial
yield and its subjects are manipulated to
accomplish just that. Capitalist economy
continues to create de-subjectivated,
consumerist, and abstract urban spaces.
The early capitalist model of production
was characterized by a strict hierarchy
and the need for wide working surfaces,
and it represented a social model: industrial enclaves were gravitational centres,
spatial attractors in terms of flows of people, goods, and money, set in strategic
territorial nodes of a larger productive net,
and concentrated within their guarded
perimeter of technological and logistic
facilities able to grant productivity and

efficiency.
Nowadays it would be absolutely anachronistic to consider the possibility of
re-installing such intruding mechanisms in
the structure of Western cities, yet its also
true that, given the current economic and
financial climate, agricultural manufacture and industrial production have proven
able to grant a certain stability in times of
crisis. Therefore it is to some extent necessary to re-develop productive paradigms
within the space of the city: one could
bend the production model by exploding it, micronizing its program in order
to activate the numbed public space of
Western cities, and intensify it by means of
a productive network.
As a result of a widely spread productive
program, engaging the scale of the city
and settling on public space, the possibility of determining bio-political production arises, intended as the stimulation of
cooperative subjectivities and the enhancement of micro-economic cycles. According to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
in their work Commonwealth, making the
commons is a synonym for enhancing
productivity of social cooperation, by
providing the infrastructures necessary for

1
2

1. Squatted Building in Amsterdam

2. Re-functionalised industrial space
for new productive use

public amenity
lane

glasshouse

studio living

workshop
lab

THE STRIP AS A CONNECTING TRAIL... the street as sourc

ting heterotopias.
acting spaces that become spaces to question every
barriers, its imposed temporalities
synaptic space

bio-political production; making the commons has to be understood, then, not as the
creation of marginal communities that share resources producing alternative subcultural forms of life, but rather as a process in the centre of the contemporary metropolis,
with the potential of becoming a radical process of de-territorialisation that could take
society, through capitalism, beyond capitalism. The commons would therefore be those
milieus of shared resources that are generated by the participation of the many and

ce of passibilities, connec-

yday life, its potential, its

open air library / shelter / performing space

multiple, which may constitute the essential productive fabric of the 21st century metropolis.

visionin
visioning
In his The Anti-City, Stefano Boeri suggests that, in order to produce innovation in the governance of a city,
it is crucial to unhinge bureaucratic
structures and rhetoric, introducing
atypical and lateral logics of people
coming from realms outside of politics.
He acknowledges the possibility that
the spaces of our cities can become
actual laboratories of a new fashion
of making politics. It is an implicit, but
very powerful act of delegating: this
new political mode asks architecture
to be able to do what serious politics
should always be able to do: building
visions for the future, set on the daily
present.
Moreover, as Saskia Sassen remarks in
her work, globalization has triggered
processes that make cities, as part of
a global network, as the only possible
horizon for a development of political
discourse, given that states and nations have somehow alienated their
sovereignty for the sake of globalised
interests.
On this basis, projects for the city cant
help but stem from a political approach, embodied in the idea of the city
as an habitable space: the architectural project has to posit itself as an
instrument of political reproducibility,

battling the idea of architecture as

a neutral, smooth, descriptive and
merely communicative instrument. This
means subtracting the discourse on architecture from the aesthetical milieu
and fro-accessory role, and re-introducing it in the political milieu as urban
ideology, a vision of the city founded
on use and not on mere consumption.
Architecture should be politically involved in exploiting the folds and the
criticalities of the status quo in order to
pursue the questioning of the consolidated structures, and the proposal for
plausible and localized alternatives, as
hybridization of theory, activism and
real practices in the construction of
the space for the citizenship.
Stanford Kwinter, in its Requiem: For
The City At The End Of The Millennium,
interestingly quotes the concept of
plane of immanence proposed by
Deleuze and Guattari, suggesting the
necessity for architecture to engage

ng

actual visions, instead of deterministic

planning, as a plane of immanence
endowed thought itself with a new
role: its task now would be to disengage structures from the real material
world and to set them in promiscuous
motion, tracking their trajectories and
migrations from one state of contact
and reengagement to another. The
abstract and the concrete from
now on would have lives of their own,
participating in a perpetual ballroom
dance where partners are exchanged
promiscuously, according to design.
The public dimension of architecture
doesnt only reside in its function it is
also determined on a symbolic level,
by its ability of transferring through its
mere presence a message of attention and a cure towards local commu-

nities. Public space as the backbone

of society in the bi-directional relationship with civitas, which eventually
brings identification, as construction of
the public space can only arise according to the development of civitas:
as Plato would put it, there is the law,
and then there is the ineffable. Civitas
is the category to nourish in order to
grant democracy and social liberty,
expressed in the paradigms of production and agonism, as the idea of a
city form and city order is the existential and foundational horizon in the
representation of the civitas through
public space: it seeks a sort of overall
result obtained by hybridizing Genius
Loci (spirit of the place), Zeitgeist (spirit
of the time) and collective unconsciousness.

dissident ironing
diller & scofidio

To some extent, an architectural concern should then be to transform the

space of political representation into
an actual civil and habitable space;
according to Guattari and Deleuze,
micropolitics and macropolitics are no
separable things, they continuously intertwine, and the problem is not about
taking the side of one or the other, as
much as finding a way of articulating
their relationship.
Supporting that there is the concept of
heterotopia, proposed by the French
philosopher Michel Foucault, as that
type of counter-site capable of juxtaposing elements that are in themselves incompatible, and establishing a
break in ordinary time. Foucault makes
use of a metaphor to explain the meaning of heterotopia: The ship is the
heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up,
espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of
pirates.

Architecturally and spatially speaking,

alienating and confusing programs
becomes a trajectory beyond clichs
with the possibility for radical options
to emerge, re-activating political and
historical discourse through crisis. Its
an actual coup dtat, put into practice on a spatial level, driven by the
powerful tools of architecture: institutional space becomes porous to the
public and the political, acquiring the
features of an architectural collective
incubator, where the intertwinement
of interests and activities takes into
account the productive paradox
of confrontation, where opposition
always implies the acknowledgement
of the adversary.
This becomes the claim for a renewed
representation of public space within
the city, as a reaction to the existing
liberal forces that today pattern the
city as an agglomeration of individualities.

architectural
coup d
tat

1
2

3
1 Coliseum Elevation, Superstudio
2. Facade Patchwork
3. Michigan Theatre, Detroit

chimeras
Architecture becomes a matter of
dissensus, making aesthetics become
a form of politics, making action become form. It strives against the conception of the city as an unknown entity,
theatre of uncontrollable and unintelligible social and economic forces, a
boundless, sprawling and self-organizing organism in a seemingly biological state of flux, deprived of any political intention. The city is re-affirmed as
an intelligible point of gravity for the
human needs of sociality and representation, the city as a real, tangible
and dense form is ever-present and
still constitutes a crucial demand of research for architects. The city must be
rediscovered as a strongly identifiable
place, a crucial laboratory for urban
consciousness and as a constructible
and intelligible physical form: this has

to inevitably result in the investigation

of the relationship between the individual and the process of history.
Architectures acquire the form of
chimeras, machines of production of
subjects, resulting from relationships of
power and relationships of knowledge,
as citizenship finds a way of practicing
the right to participate in collective
rituals and to gain access to public
spaces, as political spaces.
Architecture becomes the embodiment of what Deleuze and Guattari
refer to as singularities: singularities
signal and constitute a phase mutation and are set at the points where intensity shifts take place, where chains
and machines exceed consistency
threshold and assume new features of
expression.

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MASTER DEGREE PROGRAMME IN

BUILDING ENGINEERING/ARCHITECTURE
ITALIAN CHINESE CURRICULUM

General Agreement between University of Pavia, IUSS - Institute for Advanced Study Pavia,
and Tongji University of Shanghai, March 2009

Supervisor:
Prof. TIZIANO CATTANEO
Candidate:
MARIO GENOVESI