{ Restricted Access } or The Open City? Kees Christiaanse During a conference in Beijing in Octo- ber 2006, environmental politics expert Klaus Tépfer made a memorable state ment: “The battle for a sustainable soci- ety is won or lost in the city.” As the mo ment draws near when two thirds of the world population live in cities or at least in an urbanized environment, it is clear how urgent this statement has become. The city is our center of culture, science, politics, and trade. Various recent studies by social scientists have made it clear that cities are the breeding grounds of economic growth and innova: tion. Apparently, density attracts density and leads to intensive interaction. Intensi turn, leads to innovative activities. Henri Lefeb: e interaction, in vre once described how the interaction between various social networks leads to the eme1 ‘of new networks. In Delirious New York, Rem ence Koolhaas writes about the Culture of Congestion and the City of the Capti: a compression of extreme expressions of culture and life styles; in his book Creative Cities, Richard Florida identifies the three T’s (Technology, Tal- ent, and Tolerance) as the most important factors lobe, which consists of for the emergence of creative industries. All this. that the high-density city is not just a 138 transitional phase in the development of human settlements that would eventually be replaced by a state of Arcadia, as Frank Lloyd Wright hoped for in his book The Living City a utopian project Broadacre City. The high-density city must be regarded, now more than ever, as an isualized in his inevitable and constituting form of organization of life on earth. At the same time, the city also is the stage upon which extreme energy consumption, pol- lution, social abuse, and social conflicts have ‘emerged. In Beijing, for instance, the air quality sometimes has become so bad that even radical measures like the strict limitation of private car use has had only negligible effects. The enormous water consumption has lowered the groundwater level to such an extent that the entire region now wge and draughts, not to ‘mention impending geological problems. In Lagos suffers from water sh and other tropical mega-cities, the shortage of Clean water and appropriate sewage systems and the ubiquitous open garbage dumps have led to se- rious threats to the public health and to an almost irreversible pollution of the soil. In Sao Paulo and me and Johannesburg, excessive differences in inc prosperity between social groups has resulted in Cities that consist of archipelagos of gated islands where the crime tate is sky high, Los Angeles is all but paralyzed by its enormous suburban expansion combined with the lack of adequate public trans- portation, Broaddore City was the antithesis ofa city and the apothe: shaped through W particular vision. Itwas both a pla osis of the nevly born suburh he's ing statemen socio-political scheme by which each US. family would be given done acre (4,000 m?) plot ofland from the federal lands reserves, and a Weight-conceived community would is. Ina sense it was the exact opposite ‘be built anew from of transit oriented development. There isa train station“The city isin debe to the surrounding coun- try” says Topfer. “Te uses her natural resources and the products of its cheap labor, and, in return, gives back waste, erosion, and crime.” Of course, this isa bit rhetorical: as part of the urbanized land- scape, cityand country are complementary and inseparably bound to one another in an ever more complex relation. In Edge City, Joel Garreau points cout that polycentric agglomerations form produc- ers and peripheral developments function complementary to each other (ie., city dwellers go to the count: recreation, and suburban duellers ¢ shop), and Saskia Sassen, in her book Global City, esses the co-dependeney of urban agglon tive organisms where local cei tothe city to tions and their global economy environments. As faras the use of resources is concerned, we are now faced with a paradox: the so-called devel- oped world has arrived at a so-called sustainable urban culture and a humane standard of comfort. However, despite widely-applied sustainable tech- nology, the growth of wealth has led to a steady increase of energy-use, hence an increase in the waste and carbon dioxide emissions. And although the trend is digressive, a turning point, a significant reduction of pollution, is nowhere in sight. On the other hand, the so-called developing world lives in so-called unsustainable way —ie., living without sewer systems, the proliferation of refuse dumps, and the burning of wood, ete. But on the whole, the developing world uses only a fraction of the and. few office and apartment buildings in Broudacre City but the apartment dwellers are expected to be a small mi- nority Allimportant transportation is done by automobile and the pedestrian can exis safely only within the confines lof the one acre (4,000 m?) plots where most ofthe popula- energy produced, and the pollution generated per persons in no way comparable. Most people in the First World find it difficule to re-adjust their consumer lifestyle with an eye to- wards environmental responsibility, whereas most people in the Third World want to live like people in the First. The First World’s concerns about the ecology of the Third World have been interpreted as hypocritical and moralistic, This may partly be true, but, of course, one of the motives of this concerns the question whether the developing nations may skip a few stages in the evolution towards amore sustainable condition. Development rests on cumulative acquisition and management of knowledge, which results in economic growth and technological innovation. Apparently, of trial and error, of consumptio have to go through an evolution id squander: ing before we can sublimate our life into sustain- ability. The efficiency and the effectiveness of the ‘combustion motor has more than doubled since its invention. The Internet has become an indi. pensable global communication instrument with unprecedented positive effects. We owe it to the American army, which developed it in order to have an anti-hierarchic communication network that would remain operational even if great parts of it were destroyed by enemy attacks The notion of rial and error has led some people to believe that innovation can only prosper under non-compulsory conditions. This has been 138illustrated by the refusal of George Bush to sign the Kyoto Protocol, arguing that reduction of global warming will either be the result of technological innovation under non-compulsory conditions or the result of a shortage that will force us to act. Arguing in this way, we need not worry about the balance of energy in a city like Dubai. After the invention of the refrigerator, after all, it should not be too difficult to apply its principle to the heat of the desert in order to transform the city into a well ne heat conditioned environment. Likewise, the s could be used to turn seawater into fresh water, for A carefully balanced interaction with nature, its future golf courses in the de resources, and the refuge from the city it provides. however, requires self restraint Sustainable City? The word sustainable has been subject to in tion and multiple interpretations and, therefore, it is difficult to define precisely. In view of its topi- cality and its global acceptance, however, we are obliged to use it: Inurban planning, if we ask ourselves, What nes a sustainable city? we realize quickly that ithas become a very complex question, given that ge as well as social, cultural, and economic influences character aphical and structural aspects of urban form can have a sustainable influence comparable to that of applying sustainable technology. In Tokyo, 140 for instance, the limited number of square meters buile per person and the low percentage of car gical footprint con- siderably when compared to Western agglome: ownership has reduced its eco tions with a similar size of population. Its size and structure make it difficult to cross Tokyo by cat: Car ownership is only allowed if one has a parking space, which, in turn, is hard to come by and some times as expensive as an apartment (which is hardly bigger than a parking space). Public transpor is highly developed and ubiquitous and, therefore, tion int of ‘one may assume that an average inhabi ‘Tokyo lives rather sustainably as far as pressure on public space and mobility are concerned, eis plausible that influencing the form of the city influences social behavior —hence, an enor ‘mous potential is created for what we call social sustainability. The efficient use of public space which helps to keep the urban footprint compact, can lead to various advantages. Higher density can stimulate the pedestrian traffic and use of public transportation, thus encouraging social interaction Fig 1 Left: The city turns into islands of spatial, functional and social difference, connected by single access, Right: A network allows multi-directional, anti-hierarchical, sti foran open system in which diverse communities can settle and interact.which, in turn, leads to economic growth and in- novation. Density can also reduce the size of tech- nical infrastructures like roads, pipes, and cables ~and, thus, save energy. A socially sustainable city encourages combina- tions of functions, which allows city distriets to be largely self-sufficient. Local in sustenance within walking distance, which has a ants find their positive effect on mobility: The key to a socially sustainable city, however, is the network of public spaces, Ie forms the underlying structure on which social interaction, activation, combination of func- tions, density, and transformation can develop in an open exchange, which allows us to speak of an open city? The Open C In the roth-century city, public space—the network of streets and squares —was the place of both communicating information and transporting goods. Many r9th-century city districts still look the same, but their role and social meaning have radically changed. The physical and social cities have been torn apart. In the minds of the people, there are multiple social networks which stretch across physical and virtual distances, but which do not necessarily have any connection with the place where they find themselves at that moment ‘These urban quarters—be it Greenwich Village in New York, Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin, Qud-Zuid The authors concept of open city differs From the already i Open c existing definitions of such, See ikipediaorg/witi ives equal access and status to inhabitants and visitors of allfaiths, races, Open. City %28disambiguation nd nationalities; as opposed to a city that is declared demilitarized dusing a war, thus entitled to im ‘munity from attack under international lav; in Amsterdam or Besiktash in Istanbul — have the great capacity of adapting and assimilating to changing circumstances. Apart from the building typology and the principles of allocation, ic, city planning, this is mainly due to the open, multiple and non-hierarchical street pattern, which is why we can speak of an open cit This city has developed more or less by itself as people are in principle free to move, settle, and live; they are protected by a equal rights. Rather than the development of the proverbial melting pot of the Open City, an entropic soup of everything mixed together, instead it is an organism of concentrations of social groups and functional differentiations, an archipelago of social and urb city bas emerged through the interaction, cross stem of justice and islands. The notion of open fertilization, and friction among these groups and networks, which creates urban cultures Fig. 2 Left: Until 850, a space: the living city was to 1 with the physical cigy interaction took place in public Right: Today people mo the same purpose (Fi, Finshopping), in virtual ‘with their social networks. How dreadful this ns, ia compliment for the adaptability ofthe city to from mall to mallas types fol lox 141For instance, although a Chinatown within an occidental city is a concentrated, closed commu nity, at the same time, it has opened its doors for others through commerce and gastronomy in its street facades. It has no fixed borders but overlaps and interacts with other communities that settle ‘within the open system. ‘The Open City is not a stable, but a dynamic state, a temporary equilibrium between openness ind reticence and based on tolerance. In that sense, he Open City can also occur locally in an agglom eration. This temporary equilibrium makes the Open City vulnerable because its existence has been threatened by its own mechanisms, for instance by the mono-functional concentration ofa like- minded middle class ina suburban enclave ‘The City as a'Trec ‘The Open City is threatened by its own mecha- nisms of tolerance and voluntary closed-ness, in short, by its own freedom. These mechanisms stimulate the emergence of enclaves with separate functions at great distances from each other with mensional connectivity, In 1965, in City Is Not a Tree, Christopher Alex his article ander pointed this out, at atime when itwas still widely believed that Modernism would have an unequivocal beneficial effect on the city: In some city centers, despite the physical robustness of the old urban structure, entire blocks 142 have become privatized compounds that have been increasingly interconnected beyond the pu realm and form a second network with restricte access. A good example is the map of the original street pattern and the growth of the network of lifted pedestrian passages between shopping malls in the center of Houston, found in the book Lad: ders by Albert Pope. The emergence of such con- ronments also happens invisibly like in the area around Times Square in New York, which seems to be part of an open city, but in reality itis an area that is completely managed and controlled by trolled en Disney The present day segregation and isolation of ur ban districts is partly due to the development of in- dividual transportation. Through the development of differentiations and hierarchies into pedestrian zones, main-streets, and motorways with one- dimensional connectivity, the city changes into an archipelago of urban islands with few connections, and, thus, with lower communication potential Fig, 3: Analysis of tre like road network and related built developmentin Zurich North.‘The open network has been changed into trees and branches (irees according to Alexander or ladders according to Pope), where traffic flows are always connected to the main branches, Together with the jump in speed and radius that modern transporta- tion systems have caused, this development is re- it that today we live in another city, in which itis difficult to create a qualitative and coherent and communicative system of inter- connected public space — where tolerance has been sponsible for the replaced by tension or even conflict and where physical and social barriers dominate. Allover the world, this new species of city, an archipelago of tree- and ladder shaped access routes to which cling island-shaped suburbs, cam- puses, gated communities, shopping malls and business parcs, is developing according to the same principles, and, therefore, it constitutes a Global City counter-model to Saskia Sassen's Global City Sassen’s Global City isa specific, characteristic, historic, closed metropole which attracts global actors. The counter-model Global City is the exact opposite: generic, non-descript, a-historic urban- ized landscapes, which attract local actors. Ifwe look at Greenworld in Shanghai, Leidschenrijn in Utrecht, Goktiirk in Istanbul, Sea Side in Florida or even a Jewish Settlement on the western bank of the river Jordan near Jerusalem, we notice that they are made up of the same in- gredients, as ifan arrangement of LEGO building blocks which can be combined at will. Tt appears to. o Deal be atwo dimensional hyper-arrangement of standard clements: highway exits, gas stations, private resi- dences with garages, shopping malls, sports facili ties, business parks, school campuses, and wellness centers, IfJerusale: hermetically closed compounds where strangers Sea Side, and Greenworld are are not welcome, in Leidschensijn there are streets Fig. 4: The original street pattern of Houston is overwrit tenby a covered pedestrian network of interconnected, malls on the first floor level Fig. 5: Lefts The cluster of the medical faculty in the heart ‘of Rotterdam slowly turns into a compound of limited access, Right: Times Square today as an “invisible” gated compound, programmed by Disney 143which are gradually developing into ethnic com- munities, ust like the Chinatown in the old city And in the suburb Géktiirk near Istanbul, informal settlements ofimmigrants from Fastern Turkey have formed a complementary symbiosis with the gated communities. The space between the gates around the residential areas has been filled up by ‘gececondos, yap-sat apartments, and shops, which has [ed to active street life and small-scale services within walking distance. The last two develop: ncouraging because they show that urban re-animation is also possible in the suburbs. ‘ments are Hope Does this mean that the Open City has reached the end of its existence? In Europe, the city was entirely surrounded by walls until the beginning of the 19th century. After that, the walls were broken down and the city opened itself, Will the city close again by the year 2080? Will our great-grandchil- dren tell their children that there was a period between 1820 and 2080 when the city was open? As we have seen, the Open City is not acity but acondition—a dynamic equilibrium between open’ and closed, and the physical reflection of our social conditions. In this respect, it has become urgent that we investigate the conditions constituting the vulnerable equilibrium of the Open City: Which kinds of urban structures support the Open City? Can we stimulate Open Gity forms by pro ‘Gececondos nts buile without regard to consteuction st *Yapsat”is a Turkish expression that literally means “do isa Turkish expression for “high-rise apart dards. 1h6 intervention with design and process management? Today, the most urgent task for urban planners is to safeguard the structures of public space and connectivity that negotiate between the open and the closed and encourage the communication be- tween them, aswell as to implant urban catalysts, that is, local projects which have a positive initiat ng effect on their surroundings If the Open City can be seen as a positive equilibria then luckily this still exists in many places, for between uniting and separating forces, instance, in former harbors and industrial areas. The Bilgi University in Istanbul, for instance, was founded by two young Turks who had studied abroad and recognized the need to stimulate hig q tality education and research. They sold their eds to essful ICT company and used the proc found the Bilgi University, which in just five years has developed into an institution with seven facul- ties and more than 7,000 students and connections: ‘with famous foreign universities, The first housing, accommodations were created by renovating a for mer school building in an old city district and ever since, the same housing strategy was consciously adopted forits expansion. Today, the university ‘owns several units all over the city, which form a network of decentralized clusters that stimulate the development of the surrounding city districts. Their most recent and most ambitious project Sentral, consists of the redevelopment of an old electricity plant on the peninsula where the Golden Horn marks the space where two small rivers flow together. This project (in its size and program) is comparable to Zeche Zollverein in Essen, Ger many: it consists of a big park which is open for the public by day and apart from faculties, laboratories, and student halls in and around the transformed factory buildings, a Museum of Modern Art has been built for some 50 million dollars. The campus }ous urban catalyst for its envi- has become an enor ronment. Not only has a unique cultural park on the tip of the Golden Horn been realized, but the presence of the campus stimulates a self-gencrating, urban renewal in the surrounding districts. In Harbor City in Hamburg, for which we de- signed the master plan and the public space in the form of streets, courts, docks, plazas, bridges, abut- ments, parks, and harbor basins to form a sensitive network —all in all, defining the scale, orientation, and communication with the city. In spite of the tempestuous and partly uncontrolled developments of Harbor City, this network has survived thus far and has proven to be an intelligent blueprint where various programmatic and architectural initiatives have taken root and can engage in a dialogue with their environment. It goes without saying that a ‘master plan of such magnitude in the middle of the city has been subject to a multitude of forces: politics, planning authorities, project development, investors, judges of design competitions, general complaints from the populace, and economic fluc- tuations. These forces come into play in different degrees against or with each other, which also puts the cohesion of the master plan to the ultimate test. During the realization of the project, it turned out that the master plan was much more flexible and adaptable than expected, leading to a diversity and heterogeneity which has only yielded positive effects, thus far The stakeholders’ consensus about its basic qualities has also made sure that the identity of the plan as a coherent organism has been maintained, even without much unity in the design. By and by, a city district is emerging where the network of public spaces has become the basis of negotiation between architectural styles, programs, and activities within the plan. Thereby, the ground plan of Harbor City has acquired a stratification through negotiation, replacement, and the revision of rejected concepts, which one might call its urdwn memory. Due to the speed of its development, Harbor City will continue to be built up over the next 15 years, but even before that it will have started on process of revision and change through replace- ‘ment or adaptation of buildings and structures, which will feed its urban memory. The ground plan of Rome has a memory, a palimpsest, in which its history is recorded. Harbor City will show that we can initiate such a memory for a new project as a and this rather basis for creating an Open than designing, may well be the architect's most SK important 1465