PechaKucha in a Grid

Updated Abstract 10/8

Cities hold great promise for new modes of living and personal expression by the dynamics of exchange and closeness their inhabitants experience each day. Shared contentiousness within cities can generate a creative and just use of urban resources whether they be physical or cultural systems.  However, the 21st century city in North America (specifically New York City)  has sold its potential out from under the feet of its inhabitants, opting for repressive structures that spatially control and exclude many from the critical discourse necessary to build an equitable city. The corporatization of public space is strategically fashioned to serve only the dominant power base, its whims, and those who tangentially hang on. Landscape Architecture must leverage its own marginal status to re-imagine public spaces that are curious and unexpected, and reflect the idiosyncratic accretion of urban life;  both socially and physically. What if the rebuilding of crumbling urban infrastructures became a means/site(s) to reinvent social relationships through revealing a collective need for resilience, empathy, and knowledge ?

Precedent 1: Schouwburgplein (in progress)

Social Space Precedent 1:  Schouwburgplein, Rotterdam, Netherlands
                                            West 8 Urban Design & Landscape Architecture BV
                                            Completed 1996


Schouwburgplein (Theater Square) in Rotterdam binds the urban space around it through its own void.  What appears to be empty is full of activity and the energy of change. The materiality of the square is deployed as an organizational feature as much as an aesthetic expression.  The ground plane is elevated 14 inches above a car park, creating a broad stage that echoes the main buildings of the square; a concert hall, city theater and multiplex cinema.  Taking a clue from the function of the area, the square itself calls the public to perform in innumerable ways, through day and night and across seasons. The flat plane allows the surface materials to be magnified in their careful juxtaposition as they define specific zones that heighten physical awareness of people as they inhabit the square. The flatness recalls agricultural patterning of the Dutch countryside while its emptiness releases an urban experience of spontaneous interaction, distinct, sudden and fleeting.

The design of Schouwburgplein uses light, both natural and artificial as a material source of meaning.  The considered placement of materials is associated with fugitive daylight while at night the light is layered and embedded in the activity of the square. Green illumination from under the pavement amplifies the floating quality of the square while fragments of these same lights turn white and brighten into a picture of the milky way.  The ventilation towers and the theaters themselves cast different characters of light. The most dramatic element of the square are the four hydraulic lighting masts.  By day their sculptural presence recalls to the cranes of the Rotterdam shipyards in their mechanic animal bodies.  As the sun goes down they can be adjusted by users to illuminate any activity below, sweeping wide or narrowly focused. Like the  surface materials, light performs as both object and subject in the generation of meaning.  These physical and transient elements are situated to activate civic discourse through gesture, invitation, and opportunity.

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Critique

Reaction to  essays:  What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue, Judith Butler
                                  Being Critical, Marc Treib


The two essays describe the function, task, and meaning of critique at two very different registers of intensity. The Treib essay comes from a pedagogical perspective as he focuses on the development of  critical thinking as a foundational premise of teaching and learning. Through the student’s exposure to teachers and invited critics at design reviews, the process of critique leads to the student’s absorption of critical questions that she/he will later bring to their work as the make it, developing the skills of evaluation on their specific projects. Later this ability is transferred into constant critical thinking as they approach their own work and the work of others.  Treib’s hope is that critical thinking will inspire perpetual assessment of ones values while shaping those values at the same time.

The Butler essay pulls out from Foucault’s idea of virtue a deeply carved significance of critique as a means of self generation.  There is reciprocal action here also in the assertion that critique’s function is always seen in relationship to another thing or set of conditions.  Unlike in the Treib essay, critique does not express a process of evaluation, but rather it provokes a stance and a view that interrogates the structures that influence our perceptions, internally as well as externally.  Through the practice of critique our interactions in the world (with the world) can both illuminate the framework from which we see, question, and judge and open the opportunity to develop an ethical perspective that is individual because it is central to the formation of the self.  In opposing dominant power structures, virtue is inherently revealed by the act of resistance for Foucault.  Butler asserts the practice of critique is a state of poiesis, a critical moment when one thing is transformed into another, when the act generates a more virtuous and free self.

Sheila Moss
Thesis Abstract,  and working thoughts


Cities hold great promise for new modes of living and personal expression by the dynamics of exchange and closeness their inhabitants experience each day.  One has to be alive to the other.  Proximity and activity within cities also engenders the capacity for creative and just use of urban resources whether they be physical or cultural systems.  However, the 21st century city in North America (specifically New York City)  has sold its potential out from under the feet of its inhabitants, opting for insidious, repressive structures to spatially control and exclude marginalized people while serving the dominant power base and its desires.

The present corporatization of public space is akin to a strain of colonialism especially in lower income urban neighborhoods.  Beyond gentrification, this urban colonialism is lauded because of its privatization while being sanctioned by state and municipal governments.  Seemingly, much public good comes from these relationships on the surface, yet are cities destined to the tyranny of the trickle-down theory in order to change their shape and mission?

Current power structures orchestrate public space and dictate its use, effecting people’s sense of  possibility. Activated as contested terrain with multiple constituencies, rather than sites of acquiescence to an assumed authority, urban social space reveals the underlying dynamics along with openings for resistance, transgressions, new alliances, and regeneration.

Genre entry

In-progress Annotated Bibliography

Harvey, David. Rebel Cities From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, Verso, London, New York,2012.

Krauss, Rosalind E.  The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 1986.  Richard Serra, a Translation p.260-276.  Sculpture In the Expanded Field p.276-291.

MacLeod, Gordon and Kevin Ward. Spaces of Utopia and Dystopia: Landscaping the Contemporary City, Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, Vol.84, No.3/4, Special Issue: The Dialectics of Utopia and Dystopia (2000), p. 153-170, Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography, Blackwell Publishing.
  
   The article identifies social solidarity as a key component to earlier Utopian expressions which has since been dislodged from social discourse in deep functional ways, erasing it from the collective memory. Macleod and Ward contend that the present condition is composed of hostile elements; extreme wealth and poverty, dissolution of governmental fiscal support steered by global competition. Private-Public partnerships funnel money from the public to private interests and degrade the public-ness of public space, rendering it unrecognizable. Privatized for the sole purpose of maximizing profit, consumption and entertainment are the thin skin covering a much more malignant social practice which increasingly becomes integrated, accepted, normalized.
Spatial phenomena are examined for their dual function as creator and creation (product) of what is referred to as an “uneven patchwork of utopian and dystopian spaces...physically proximate but institutionally estranged.”  Edge Cities, (self-contained, politically non-cohesive,complacent) Suburbs (exclusionary, escapist) 1980s Urban Gentrification (entrepeneurial ‘pioneer’, regenerative associated with ‘Revanchist’ urbanism culminating with police state (Guiliani’s NYC)
   The authors make a distinction between urban voids (wastelands) and the practices of less visible social groups, artistic communities and ecological wildlife. Power can be exercised from the margins by transgressive act towards asserting visibility of more vulnerable groups (homeless, underclass). Ed Soja and Leonie Sandercock are sited as proponents of inclusion of “multiple spatialities”  Sandercock sites planners as being overwhelmed and obsessed with control as she argues for a confrontation with “shifting spatialities....of inter-woven migration of ideas, economies and people.”  Holston asks to recast citizenship based on participation rather then territorial origin.

Meyer, Elizabeth K.  The Post-Earth Day Conundrum: Translating Environmental Values into Landscape Design. Excerpt from Environmentalism in Landscape Architecture, edited Michel Conan. Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington, DC.  2000.

   Meyer begins with Huyssen’s idea that post-modernity is critical in its readjustment and ‘repositioning’ of aspects that modernity askewed, identifying landscape architecture with the desire to connect human experience in a sensual way with the environment,  breaking free from the modern notion of form as, “isolated, bounded form or space experienced by a detached, contemplative observer.”  Ecological environmentalism and opportunities to expand ones perceptive capacities through interaction can act as a ‘mediating’ force between oppositional thinking of the past that posits art against science, and environmentalism against design.
   Artists employed site-specificity and attention to local conditions as a means to free themselves from the restraints of the gallery and dismantle the object-ness of traditional sculpture. Focus moved to active participation and experience, privileging the fleeting, temporal aspects of process and form over permanence. Landscape is posited as both ‘medium’ and site for ‘inquiry’.  Meyer alludes to changing political consciousness of the general culture towards environmentalism in the 60’s and 70’s with the Earth Day reference. The interest in phenomenology, and work of philosophers John Dewey and Maurice Merleau-Ponty was influential in evolving ideas of the body and space as articulated by art critic Arnold Berleant in Art and Engagement, 1991,  “To grasp environment, every vestige of dualism must be discarded. There is no inside and outside, human being and external world, even in the final reckoning, no discrete self and separate other.” Other related strands of thought such as regionalism, contextualism and scientific analysis of site were also circulating and shifting the boundaries of landscape architecture practice and  burgeoning theory. Aesthetics also emerges as a powerful approach in the writings of Catherine Howett and Anne Whiston Spirn in the 1980’s.
   Meyer contends that landscape architecture is the ‘bridge’ between ecological environmentalism and design, a ‘mediating’ force between traditional opposing disciplines with the capacity to reconcile environmental consciousness with aesthetics. Siting the work of designers, Child, Haag, Hargreaves, Meyer, Olin, Schwartz, Smith and Van Valkenburgh in the 80’s, she writes, “...they made the environment legible to a culture distanced from the natural world by employing the materials and processes of nature. Such experiments frequently resulted in the construction of an “aesthetic of experience” rather than an “aesthetic of objects.”
  
  
Meyer, Elizabeth K. Sustaining Beauty, The Performance of Appearance. A Manifesto in Three Parts, Journal of Landscape Architecture / Spring 2008.
 
    In Part 1, Meyer positions ‘Beauty’ as a concept in the history of landscape architecture that was both generator and visible evidence (object) of healing and transformative potential.  As a response to the environmental abuses of industrialization the park movement propelled itself as caretaker to the poor and with a recuperative and civilizing capacity. She addresses its marginalization in contemporary landscape architecture as being a result of the dominance of Capitalism over humanism during the 20thc.  Appearance is defined as as inclusive of the body and its experience leading to a re-seeing, open to alternative terms and responses.  
   Part 2 links the ambivalence of landscape architecture to beauty with that of its precarious position on sustainability.  Torn with its service oriented practice and the monetary constraints of clients, landscape architects were left with the McHargian analysis of doing the least harm but forsaking aesthetics in design (‘reductive ecological functionalism”) The ambivalence towards both beauty and sustainability have varying degrees across the field, identified as:  Yawn, Embrace, Dismiss and Distain.  Meyer argues that the concept of beauty must be reasserted into the discourse of sustainability for both to re enforce the other and propel the practice with more innovative designs.
   Her manifesto of new priorities is outlined with 11 points in Part 3. I’ve paraphrased and condensed them: Culture is expanded and challenged when social and spatial practices are utilized to draw understanding of processes and new visions of beauty. “Cultivated hybrids” allows for the evolution of a new language that transforms binary oppositions into overlapping - connected ideas. [Through new language is the capacity for new thinking.]  Natural processes are valued over natural forms with performance potencies in all realms, social, ecological and cultural. “Hypernature” employs exaggeration, concentration, juxtaposition as agents of revealing beauty and constructing experience. Freed from object-subject division, experience can provoke and challenge assumptions. Sustainable beauty operates from the point of its on specificity, ‘particular’  and is dynamic.  Forces of disturbance, resilience and adaptability are prioritized by the non-static, temporal, ever-changing processes.
  

Purcell, Mark. Excavating Lefebvre: The right to the city and its urban politics of the inhabitant, GeoJournal 58: 99-108, 2002. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003, The Netherlands.

Purcell introduces Lefebvre’s contribution as broadening the range of Marxist theory to an empathetic concern with everyday life of city dwellers and the understanding of production of social space, with  a three part dialectic:  1. (le percu)  everyday practices/perceptions 2.(le concu) representations/theories of space 3.(le vecu) spatial imagery of the time.  Space is a social construction based on  values, practices, perceptions of inhabitants.  Lefebvre sees value and agency in the “conflictual, contradictory and political character of the processes of the production of space.”  Purcell sites Gramsci, “social production of space is commanded by the hegemonic class as a tool to reproduce dominance.”  Lefebvre argues that every society produces a particular kind of space, commiserate with its practice and needs.  Purcell discusses and applies Lefebvre’s theories to current context of  globalization and the disenfranchisement of urban dwellers.   (to be continued.....)


Stanek, Lukasz. Henri Lefebvre on Space, Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis/ London, 2011.

Weschler, Lawrence. Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, Over Thirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin. University of California Press, Berkeley/ Los Angeles/ London, 2008.