Architectural Design-Cities of Dispersal (2008-0102) PDF

4
Cities of
Cities of
Dispersal
Guest-edited by
Rafi Segal and Els Verbakel
4 Architectural Design
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March/April 2008, Profile No 192
Versatility and Vicissitude: Performance in Morpho-Ecological Design

Guest-edited by Michael Hensel and Achim Menges
This third AD by the guest-editors of the highly successful Emergence and Techniques and Technologies in
Morphogenetic Design titles shifts the morpho-ecological design project into the realm of performance.
Whereas the dictionary definition of performance to carry out an action or to fulfil a task invokes a
tired utilitarian debate, Hensel and Menges inject the meaning of the word performance with an entirely new life. In this context, form is redefined not as the shape of a material object alone, but as the multitude of effects, a milieu of conditions, modulations and microclimates that emanate from an objects
exchange with its specific environment; a dynamic relationship that is perceived and interacted with by
a subject. A synergetic employment of performance and morpho-ecological techniques combine to create
integral design solutions that will render an alternative model for sustainability. This issue presents historical precursors and precedents for this approach, as well as the current state of the art of morpho-ecological design. Key contributors include: Klaus Bollinger and Manfred Grohmann of Bollinger &
Grohmann, Aleksandra Jaeschke, OCEAN NORTH, Professor Remo Pedreschi, Defne Sunguro
glu, Peter
Trummer and Michael Weinstock.
May/June 2008, Profile No 193
Interior Atmospheres
Guest-edited by Julieanna Preston
What does one mean when describing a room as atmospheric? Does it allude to a space that has been
designed, stylised or even thematised? Is it a spatial quality conditioned by ones perception? Does
atmosphere originate from material attributes inherent to interior finishes and dcor? Is it simply the
dramatic effect resulting from skilful use of lighting and colour? Is atmosphere an immersive ambience?
How is atmosphere crafted? Does it have a critical edge, literally and theoretically?
Visually exciting and provocative, Interior Atmospheres combines contemporary projects and interviews alongside analytical essays. Authors such as Rachel Carley, Ted Krueger, Malte Wagenfeld and
Hlne Frichot explore the distinctions between visible and invisible realms within architectural design.
The technological interface between design and atmosphere is tested through digital and creative material works by Petra Blaisse, Kevin Klinger, Gregory Luhan, Andrew Kudless, Walter Niedermayr, Kazuo
Sejima and Ryue Nizhisawa, LaMonte Young and Marian Zazeela, Joel Sanders and Karen Van Legnen,
Scott Gowans and Steve Wright and Lewis Tsurumaki Lewis Architects. Paul James, Mary Anne Beecher
and Lois Weinthal probe the physical limits of atmosphere in regard to site, 'the outside' and interiority.
Contributors and projects straddle the boundaries of design, art and architecture in order to gain a fuller
understanding of atmospheres elusive and pervasive presence.
July/August 2008, Profile No 194
Proto Architecture: Analogue and Digital Hybrids

Guest-edited by Bob Sheil
The illusive and uncertain world of translating ideas into matter is a negotiation between the ideal and
the real and a central preoccupation of architectural production. By invading the toolbox of digital fabrication, design has transgressed into protocols of manufacturing previously the domain of other disciplines and skills sets. Craft, assembly and installation, once the realm of trades, are qualities that are
now dependent upon design information and its status as an instruction to make. The ensuing loop
between the physical and tactile, the imaginary and speculative, has defined a new expectation in making architecture as a construct that is part real, part ideal.
With contributions from Lebbeus Woods, Evan Douglis, Theo Jansen, Shin Egashira and many more,
Proto-Architecture presents an explicitly diverse collection of works from leading and emerging practitioners, educators, researchers and visionaries from all corners of the innovative field.
Architectural Design
January/February 2008
Cities of Dispersal
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Front cover: Desert within a city: proposed
plan for the city of Beer Sheva, Israel, 2007. Rafi
Segal (with Yonatan Cohen and Kate Snider).
Rafi Segal
[ISSN: 0003-8504]
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Editorial
Helen Castle
Introduction
Urbanism Without Density
34
Water and Asphalt

The Project of Isotropy in the
Metropolitan Region of Venice
Paola Vigan
40
12
The Public and the V2

Bruce Robbins
Intermittent Cities
On Waiting Spaces and How to
Inhabit Transforming Cities
Claudia Faraone and
Andrea Sarti
16
46
Terminal Distribution
Albert Pope
22
Public Lifestyle in the

Low-Density City
Alex Wall
28
Old Dispersions and Scenes for

the Production of Public Space
The Constructive Margins of
Secondarity
Bruno De Meulder
String Block Vs Superblock

Patterns of Dispersal in China
Kjersti Monson
54
In the Our Beautiful Future

Martha Rosler
58
Archipelago of the Negev Desert

A Temporal/Collective Plan for
Beer Sheva, Israel
Rafi Segal
64
Peripheral Landscapes, El
Caracol, Mexico City
Jose Castillo
4+
68
Urban Voids: Grounds for

Change
Reimagining Philadelphias
Vacant Lands
Deenah Loeb
74
Urban [IM]plants
Tactics for Recombining
Landscape and Collective Space
in Bonheiden, Belgium
Els Verbakel and Elie Derman
80
User-Focused Public Space

(M)UTOPIA in Denmark
Serban Cornea
84
Royal Dutch Military Police

Campus
Zvi Heckers Landscape
Urbanism
Rafi Segal
88
110+
94
114+
Ville-Port, Saint-Nazaire
The Historic Periphery
Manuel de Sol-Morales
Nam Van Square, Macau

Manuel Vicente
100
Mur Island, Graz, Austria

Vito Acconci
102
Discussion
Architecture and Dispersal
with Stan Allen, Marcel Smets,
Sarah Whiting and Margaret
Crawford
Interior Eye
Reinvigorating Childhood
Howard Watson
Practice Profile
KieranTimberlake Associates
Jayne Merkel
120+
Userscape
Natural Methods of Interaction
Or Natural Interaction in the
Everyday Digital World
Valentina Croci
124+
Spillers Bits
Putting the I back into
Architecture
Neil Spiller
126+
Unit Factor
Radical Interface
AA New Media Research
Initiative
Joel Newman, Theodore
Spyropoulos and Vasilis
Stroumpakos
130+
Yeangs Eco-Files
On Green Design (Part 3)
The Basic Premises for Green
Design
Ken Yeang
134+
McLeans Nuggets
Will McLean
Editorial
When most people are asked where they would like to live, they will answer quite categorically the
town or the country. Yet fewer and fewer people worldwide actually inhabit city centres or truly rural
surroundings. Home for most of us is somewhere in between, whether it be outer- or inner-city
suburbia, urban sprawl or a makeshift shanty town. This is a trend that is set to intensify with the
growth of the worlds population from 5 billion in 1987 to 6.7 billion in 2007. According to the UN
Habitat 2006 Annual Report, for the first time in history half of the people worldwide are now living in
towns or cities; this shift towards urbanisation is only set to continue with 60 per cent of the worlds
population living in or around cities by 2030. Whereas growth and diffusion of urbanity has been
most famously associated with the edge city of Los Angeles or the unharnessed development of
illegal housing in India and South America, it is a situation that affects us all. It is most apparent in
some of the small wealthiest nations of northwestern Europe, such as Belgium, the Netherlands and
the UK, where space is scarce and, despite falling birth rates, their buoyant economies continue to
attract migrant workers, boosting their ageing populations. This is epitomised by the Dutch
conurbation of the Randstad, made up of the four major cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht and
The Hague, and their respective satellite towns, which form a continuous rim around a green
heartland. One also only has to drive along the M4 corridor to wonder where London begins or ends.
Rafi Segal and Els Verbakels title of AD represents an important shift in mindset and aspirations. It
squarely positions the dispersed city as a fertile territory for architectural intervention. Whereas outer
urban areas have conventionally been the stronghold of the house builder or commercial developer, it
places architects and urban designers sights on exurbia. Segal and Verbakel regard dispersal as an
opportunity to reinvent urbanity, and specifically to question the notion of public space, which was
traditionally positioned in the centre of cities. Featured projects range across the world from Macau
in southern China to Copenhagen and Mexico City. Sometimes the investigations are theoretical, but
always the focus is on application. Both guest-editors have undertaken projects in this field; Segal
here publishes his own project for Beer Sheva in the Negev Desert of Israel, and Verbakel her
scheme for the town of Bonheiden in Flemish Belgium. What all the contributors share is an
understanding of the possibilities of reinventing and re-editing the given built environment.
Abandoned is the notion of Modernist control; to have a place in this setting one has to be deft and
flexible, content to engage with the world as it is rather than to recast it as one would like it to be. 4
Helen Castle
Guy Saggee, Digital print, 2007

In a response to the theme of this issue and in collaboration with its guest-editors, graphic artist Guy Saggee
explored images of dispersed cities. Similar to the production of collective space in dispersed urban conditions, his
graphic technique of dithering produces a blurred image interspersed with emerging patterns.
Text 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Image Guy Saggee
Introduction
Urbanism
Without
Density
The predominance of sprawling, low-density

urban environments throughout the world
begs the question: What constitutes a city?
Such environments also require us to rethink
public space, traditionally at the core of city
centres. Rafi Segal and Els Verbakel outline
the challenges and opportunities that cities
of dispersal raise.
the American context),1 wild living and the diffused city

(citta diffusa mostly referring to the European context).2
Dispersal functions as an umbrella term for these
phenomena, by zooming out and describing them as part of a
larger global tendency. In this context, Cities of Dispersal can
be recognised as emerging types of low-density environments:
decentralised, heterogeneous, and radically different from
traditional definitions of the city in their spatial organisation
and patterns of growth.3
Our built environment is in the process of reorganising itself,

redistributing densities of buildings, population and activities.
Cities are expanding, growing and sprawling, while at the
same time their centres and downtowns are shrinking,
disappearing, voiding out.
Between 1960 and 1990, the population in more than 200

American cities increased by 47%, while urbanised land
increased by 107%, resulting in a density decrease of 28%.
Statistics from David Rusk, Cities Without Suburbs,
Woodrow Wilson Center Press (Washington), 1995
By mid-century, the populations of 39 countries are

projected to be smaller than they are today: for example,
Japan and Germany 14% smaller, Italy and Hungary 25%
smaller, and the Russian Federation, Georgia and Ukraine
between 28 and 40% smaller.
Statistics from World Population Prospects: The 2000
Revision, Department of Economic and Social Affairs,
United Nations, 2000
This process of growth and redistribution has been partially
described by terms such as sprawl, suburbs (with roots in
Throughout these physical transformations of the urban

environment, the notion of public space has not remained
unaltered. Public space has long been a decisive factor in our
understanding of the city. Furthermore, we can say that the
notion of the public itself, even if by virtue of imagination,
has been essential for any act of urban design or planning.4 It
is therefore inevitable to ask: What is the place and role of
public space in new dispersed urban environments? How have
dispersed urban conditions changed the notion of public? And
what are the current notions of the public that influence the
way we conceive cities?
Veneto, Italy
Philadelphia, US
50% of US housing is suburban, 20% of US housing is

non-metropolitan.
From American Housing Survey for the United States:
2001, US Census Bureau, 2002
The traditional distinction between the urban and the nonurban relied on a hierarchical organisation of density. Cities
at the centre were the densest, most concentrated, moving to
less dense areas towards the suburbs, the countryside, and yet
further to the wilderness. These different types of
environments not only presented different degrees of human
intervention and habitation, they also developed different
ways of living. The opposition between negative and positive
attributes of city and countryside has long been supported by
clear boundaries between one and the other, be it through
walls, ring roads, green belts and the like. Yet over the course
of the 20th century, whether due to economic, industrial,
military or technological developments, the distinctions
between city, suburb, countryside and wilderness have
become blurred.
In their currently advanced state of dispersal, cities have
lost their traditional boundaries.5 Due to a redistribution of
urban activities and intensities, we can no longer recognise a
clear pattern of high density in the centre and lower densities
at the periphery. In this process, programmes that were
previously associated with the city centre, such as commerce,
office work, leisure and entertainment, have been transplanted
to suburbia and have taken on a different shape. Suburbs,
new towns and satellite cities, initially designated for housing,
have gradually become multifunctional environments,
independent of the city. The distinction between the city as a
centre and suburbia as its subordinate kin has become, in
many cases, neither accurate nor appropriate. Low-density
environments have ceased to be sub-urban, no longer relying
on the city as their centre, or raison d tre.
Many of these low-density environments (also outside the
European and American context), despite their increasing
integration within urban systems, are generally not viewed as

urban or as cities. This is mainly due to their lack of density
and centrality, the absence of a coherent urban fabric or
distinguishable boundaries, and a damaged relationship
between the pedestrian and urban space.6 More importantly,
they are seen to lack the conventional forms and uses of
urban public spaces to which we have become accustomed.
Current attempts to qualify dispersal usually refer to the loss
of these characteristics.7 Yet when we look at examples of
sprawling cities such as Los Angeles and Mexico City, or
larger, spread-out areas such as the Veneto region in Italy or
the state of New Jersey, we find different urbanities that have
emerged from such apparent losses. Dispersal has led many to
paint a sombre picture of an irresponsible non-urbanity,
from which the only escape is a move back into the city.
However, if we are to accept Rem Koolhaas claim that the city
is dead, or Mark Wigleys statement that the city has ceased to
be a useful idea in planning, we are left in confusion, with
losses on both sides.8
This issue of AD treats dispersal as an opportunity to
reinvent urbanity. It questions whether the urban should
remain reserved solely for the dense physical environment.
Can not the notion of the city be established through
combined degrees of interaction, access and communication
that do not necessarily require high densities? High degrees of
exchange, interconnectivity, the overlapping of networks,
juxtapositions and proximities of diverse programmes all
can create an intensity that generates an urban condition,
urban in its function, notions and experiences (chance,
anonymity, conflict, and so on). Moreover, in the process of
seeking new opportunities for alternative urbanities, the
notion of public space itself needs to be questioned. Recent
studies of contemporary urbanities have suggested that
traditional definitions of public space are no longer accurate
to describe chance encounters, temporary spaces of gathering,
partially accessible meeting places, commercialised and
themed entertainment. Can we, then, replace the more
Macau, China
Saint-Nazaire, France
restad, Denmark
Mexico City, Mexico
demanding term public space with the somewhat more

adaptable option of collective space? And how does this
impact our understanding of the city?
Within the field of urban design and planning, the
shaping of public space has been considered the primary task
of the architect or urbanist.9 Its role and place in the city as a
space of gathering and exchange has been treated as a kind
of glue that holds together the city and promises to
generate urban coherence and active use. Yet this notion has
undergone substantial changes. Rather than a singular,
continuous sphere or space, the public today is better
understood as a fragmentary interplay of multiple publics
and multiple groups. The idea of a public sphere, as identified
by J Habermas as having emerged from 18th-century
bourgeois society,10 no longer functions for the reasons that
brought it about as the place where opinions and ideas
about society and state were formed and discussed. With the
rise of consumption culture, the public sphere has become an
arena for advertising channelled at pleasing various tastes
and personal preferences. With this understanding, critical
reason is seen to have shifted to other groups (lawyers,
doctors, academics, and so on) who engage in it un-publicly,
while mass consumers might have a public receptiveness but
remain non-critical.11 This shift of rationalism and criticism
has left the public sphere prone to stronger forces such as
marketisation and privatisation, processes that have been
considered by some a threat to democracy. Public space,
according to this conception, is essential to the preservation
of democracy since it provides the space for freedom of
speech and public assembly, enables the publicising of
dissent, maintains awareness of the needs of others, and
allows the organisation of grassroots campaigns.12
Mechanisms that have contributed to the privatisation of
public space (at least within the American context), such as
the reorganisation of collective space towards consumption,
the extension of undemocratic governance systems such as
home-owners associations and development districts, and
jurisprudence13 preoccupied with locating the boundary

between public and private can be seen as those
mechanisms that also propagated urban sprawl.
Our changing notion of the public has thus allowed
certain forms of urbanity to evolve, but on the other hand
changes in the urban realm have contributed to creating new
notions of public space. The problem lies in the fact that
there is not always a clear or direct correlation between
social, political and cultural notions in this case the notion
of the public and their architectural or urban expression.
While the public is an abstract, highly dynamic, at times
vague and unpredictable notion, urban space by its nature
refers to concrete places that undergo slower processes of
change in appropriating new conceptions and conditions.
This inertia of the urban environment is enhanced by the
general tendency (also of architects and urbanists) to preserve
old models and expressions even though they may no longer
serve current necessities.14
Many previous approaches to public space in sprawled
conditions have attempted to impose traditional urban
models rather than seek new types of spaces, forms and
programmes. They have seldom led to innovative work and
have often contradicted contemporary notions of scale,
diversity and flexibility.
The Congress for the New Urbanism, for example, proposes
the reintegration of traditional forms of public space such as
urban plazas, commercial main streets and other components
of a townscape tradition within contemporary sprawled
environments. Its approach operates within a new urban
condition that assumes a notion of an old public mimicking
traditional architecture (and a historic way of life), enforcing
pedestrian movement, limiting social diversity, and
discouraging long-distance commuting even when these are
alien to the way we live today.
Other approaches to urban dispersal understand and thus
address contemporary notions of the public and public space
but without projecting new urban configurations, and
Schiphol, The Netherlands
Veneto, Italy
without considering the need for a new urban/architectural

expression. Reinterpreting Foucault, Grahame Shane and
many others explain how the concept of heterotopia provides
opportunities for hosting contemporary spaces of gathering or
collectivity within the city.15 Yet a primary trait of heterotopia
is its mirror-function. It mirrors an existing reality, meaning
it does not carry a form or shape of itself. It is not particular
to any specific physical-spatial setting, but rather capable of
taking on several forms/shapes/arrangements present in the
existing environment. Identifying heterotopia as a type of
public space does not therefore require a new urbanarchitectural setting.16
While these approaches have contributed considerably to
the discourse on dispersal and the role of architects/urbanists
within this type of environment, the relationship between
new publics and new urban spaces has yet to be explored,
potentially leading to more innovative models and approaches
of design and intervention.
Cities of Dispersal is an attempt in this direction. It calls
for an investigation of the public and/or collective
dimensions of dispersed urban conditions, presenting both
research essays and design examples from different scales,
cultures and geographies.
Two framing essays open the issue, offering new ways of
looking at the relationship between collective spaces and
urban dispersal. Bruce Robbins, in The Public and the V2,
describes how certain literary ideas of public space can
possibly inform urban thinking. In parallel, Albert Pope
examines the morphological and structural processes that
characterise the development of low-density urbanisms. The
essays, research and design projects that follow present an
interpretation, understanding and/or critique of how new
forms of collective space can be imagined.
The research presented in this issue includes parts of the
extensive studies and mappings of European urban
dispersal by Bruno De Meulder (on Flanders) and Paola
Vigan (on the Veneto region).
Alex Wall outlines the emerging typology of lifestyle

centres, large-scale commercial complexes situated in lowdensity urban areas, as a possible prototype for a new kind
of public space. The dominance of bigness within urban
sprawl is also examined by Kjersti Monson in a critical
investigation of the Chinese superblock, one of the most
rapid modes of urban expansion worldwide.
These critical observations are further explored by a series
of much more speculative projects. Martha Roslers utopian
community challenges existing structures of interaction and
advances the potential of the art project as space for social
change. The notion of utopia also characterises the Beer Sheva
(Israel) proposal by Rafi Segal, which imagines the desert
landscape as a site of shared, temporal programmes that
function as urban voids, separating different communitybased neighbourhood islands.
The use of landscape, agriculture, ecological tourism
and other forms of programmed open spaces become
alternatives to redensifying former city centres such as
the urban voids of Philadelphia (the Grounds for Change
competition proposals) featured in Deenah Loebs article.
In other projects such as Jose Castillos El Caracol in
Mexico City, landscape becomes a strategy for urban
peripheries. Both cases present the transformation of a
negative useless space to a positive attractor, while
establishing a new balance of built and open space for
ecological and infrastructural functions, and the
betterment of urban living,
The last section of the issue pulls together a series of built
work, or projects under construction, some of which
emphasise a method for urban growth and renewal rather
than offer one solution. Els Verbakel and Elie Derman present
a toolbox of interventions a method for combining green
and collective spaces for the suburban town of Bonheiden in
Belgium. Danish group MUTOPIA propose an interactive
approach that utilises user-based computer software to aid in
appropriating collective spaces.
Shanghai, China
Bonheiden, Belgium
From a more direct architectural point of view, the meeting

of dispersal and the notion of collective space produces
intriguing projects such as Zvi Heckers KMar campus in
Amsterdam or Manuel de Sol-Morales mixed-use project in
Saint-Nazaire, France, where the conventional distinction
between city, building and landscape is questioned. These
projects manage to overcome a restricted and problematic
site, reproducing their own context and creating a sequence
of inner voids/open spaces that are integral to the
architecture.
The potential of public space as an island can be seen in
the Nam Van Square project in Macau (Manuel CM Vicente,
Carlotta Bruni and Rui Leo) and in Vito Acconcis Mur Island,
a temporary floating bridge/gathering space. Both of these
suggest, on different scales, that infrastructure can generate
multi-use spaces, rather than monofunctional structures
intended only for movement from one place to the other.
This collection of research essays, projects and built work
raises questions on how to approach the emptiness of the
dispersed city, how to use, appropriate and inhabit the space
in between spread-out buildings, and how to redefine this
space as part of the public realm. 17
These questions provide a major challenge for architects
and urbanists, who have tended to look down on dispersal,
conveniently avoiding it, claiming no responsibility for its
outcome.
The projects and explorations presented here point out the
opportunities of what are commonly seen as negative
characteristics of sprawl, low density, suburbs and the
diffused city. Fragments become islands, voids become
landscapes, lack of context becomes an opportunity to create
an artificial context, large distances and building plots
provoke super-size design approaches, and the non 24/7
lifespan of programmes opens up a redefinition of accidental
places of gathering. The unbearable fluidity of dispersal has
the potential to be transformed into a more grounded
condition whereby new collective spaces take a prominent
role: whether ecological, utopian, social. Whether in the form
of super-size islands, piecemeal implants or ad hoc and userbased events, they are spatialised not by streets and piazzas
but by infrastructure and landscape.
In addition to the potential of the void, the question also
arises whether the notion of public space may be replaced by
spaces of collectivity, less dependent on designations of
democracy and freedom. Here there is room for broader
discussions concerning the place of collective spaces in
sociopolitical processes, and the role of the architect/urbanist
in these processes through the shaping and programming of
space whether by offering new imaginations of collective
life, or by repeating conventional forms associated with past
notions of the city. The selected essays, projects and buildings
that appear in this issue of AD aspire to address the former
rather than the latter, thereby unfolding a spectrum of critical
and self-conscious approaches that contribute to a new field of
research and design yet to be further defined and explored. 4
Notes
1. In the American context, and consequently other regions in the world,
sprawl has largely been initiated by the post-Second World War housing
crisis, the democratisation of the good life, and the encouragement of
consumption: a growing demand and supply of choice, privacy and mobility.
Also in Europe, suburban communities gained importance after the Second
World War with massive reconstruction efforts and the creation of new towns
as satellite settlements around existing cities.
2. Diffused city, a term invented during the 1990s to describe the spread-out
urban fabric of Italys northern Veneto region, has been adopted to identify
multiple regions in Europe such as the Dutch Randstad, the Flemish
Diamond, the German Ruhr area and others. These areas have grown from a
network of medium- to small-size cities interspersed with former agricultural
territories and rural villages, transformed into a mixture of industrial parks,
commercial complexes and suburban housing. Similarly, the term wild living
refers to the massive inhabitation of the dispersed European territory.
Originally introduced in reaction to Dutch government-controlled standardised
housing, it came to describe the process of modernising the rural landscape
as a means to prevent city growth.
3. Even though much attention has recently been drawn to cities being built
from scratch, whether in China or the Middle East, the phenomenon of urban
dispersal the spreading out of existing metropolitan areas is much greater
in scope.
4. If we did not have a practical sense of what publics are, if we could not
unself-consciously take them for granted as really existing and addressable
10
Beer Sheva, Israel
Venice, Italy
social entities, we could not produce most of the books or films or

broadcasts or journals that make up so much of our culture; we could not
conduct elections or indeed imagine ourselves as members of nations or
movements. Yet publics exist only by virtue of their imagining. Michael Warner,
Publics and Counterpublics, Zone Books (New York), 2005, p 8.
5. One of the forefathers of urban design (town planning), Patrick Geddes
pointed out a hundred years ago that the antagonism between city and
country, wilderness or suburbia is no longer sustainable. Even contemporary
urban historians and theorists such as Marcel Smets and Manfred Khn still
raise the need to overcome this dichotomy.
6. In current urban design practices, what most people (including architects
and urban planners) would consider good urban form is largely a convention
based on the spatial and architectural qualities of historical models such as
medieval town squares, Renaissance piazzas, 19th-century city boulevards
and others. A common belief is that we have not created any good cities
since the 19th century. The fact is that new forms of settlements have been
created, or re-created, since, from the garden cities to new towns, suburbs,
edge cities, sprawled cities, diffused cities and so on. These forms of
dispersed settlements have now begun to be transformed into a new type of
urbanism.
7. Many theorists and practitioners have studied the losses that have occurred
during processes of dispersal, thereby offering new descriptive models that
stress the lack of coherence, definition, limits. See, for example, Richard
Ingersolls Sprawltown: Looking for the City on its Edges, Princeton
Architectural Press (New York), 2006, and the Shrinking Cities project an
ongoing exhibition and publications (200205) of the Federal Cultural
Foundation, under the direction of Philipp Oswalt (Berlin) in cooperation with
the Leipzig Gallery of Contemporary Art, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and
the magazine archplus.
8. Mark Wigley, Resisting the city, in Joke Brouwer, Arjen Mulder and Laura
Martz, TransUrbanism, NAI Publishers (Rotterdam), 2002, p 103.
9. Shaping public space is considered the first order of urbanism by the
architect/urbanist. Thus the primary role of urban design is to develop
methods of doing so. Alex Krieger, Territories of urban design, in Malcolm
Moor and Jon Rowland (eds), Urban Design Futures, Routledge (London and
New York), 2006, p 22.
10. See Craig Calhoun (ed), Habermas and the Public Sphere, MIT Press
(Cambridge, MA, and London), 1992, pp 148. See also Catherine Zuromskis,
Introduction in Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture,
Issue 6, Visual Publics, Visible Publics, 2003
(www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_6/issue6title.html): Our
theoretical understanding of the public has changed since Jrgen Habermas
introduced the high bourgeois public sphere (1962), the more recent work of
Bruce Robbins, Nancy Fraser, Rosalyn Deutsche and Michael Warner present a
less definable singular public sphere but rather a fragmentary interplay of
multiple publics and counter publics.
11. From Craig Calhoun, op cit, p 26.

12. The main argument presented by Margaret Kohn in Brave New
Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space, Routledge (New York and
London), 2004.
13. From Margaret Kohn, op cit.
14.The layout of the parliament house, for example, as it emerged during the
Enlightenment (discussed by Bruno Latour in Making Things Public),
established an architectural expression to that periods conception of political
assembly. The parliaments architecture, space and setting, made manifest a
certain public-political activity. This same setting is still used today to
represent the public (as a political body), even though the structure, function
and spaces of political activity/debate have changed drastically. Latours
examination of past notions of the public as a political body suggests that in
our world, beyond the political, there are many other kinds of assemblies that
gather a public around things: church, supermarket, disputes involving natural
resources, and so on. Bruno Latour, From Realpolitik to Dingpolitick or How
to make things Public, in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds), Making Things
Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ZKM (Center for Art and Media),
Karlsruhe, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA, and London), 2005, pp 1444.
15. Graham Shane, Recombinant Urbanism: Conceptual Modeling in
Architecture, Urban Design and City Theory, Wiley-Academy (Chichester),
2005. In Chapter 4, Shane extensively discusses definitions of heterotopias
and their potential use in city modelling and urban design.
16. Supported by recent discussions held during the conference Visionary
Power: Producing the Contemporary City at the 3rd International Rotterdam
Biennale. The concept of heterotopia, as understood by Lieven De Cauter and
Michiel Dehaene, leads to a reading of the environment as made up of binary
poles, centre and periphery, leaving no middle ground. From this point of view,
existing spaces are reinterpreted as heterotopian, either belonging to
conditions of hyperarchitecture (of the sanctuary) or in opposition infraarchitecture (of slums, camps, etc).
17. What is called empty should be understood in relative terms, specifying
that of which it is vacant: vacant of buildings, vacant of activities, vacant of
human presence. It is a search for the materialisation of this emptiness, or
what Willem-Jan Neutelings calls the density of the void. Willem-Jan
Neutelings, De Ringcultuur, Vlees en Beton Publishers (Ghent), 1988.
Text 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 6(l) Paolo Vigan; p 6(r)
Van Alen Institute, photo Jonathan Cohen Litant; p 7(l) Macau Information
Bureau; p 7(r) Dominique Macel, Service du Communication de Saint
Nazaire; p 8(l) MUTOPIA ApS; p 8(r) Jose Castillo lea, arquitectura
911sc; p 9(l) Zvi Hecker; p 9(r) Claudia Faraone and Andrea Sarti; p 10(l)
Kjersti Monson; p 10(r) Els Verbakel, Elie Derman of Derman Verbakel
Architecture and Ward Verbakel Architect; p 11(l) Rafi Segal; p 11(r)
Martha Rosler
11
The Public and the V2

The London Blitz has come to epitomise the golden age of urban togetherness and
bonhomie when the public was bound by a common enemy threat. Through his reading of
Thomas Pynchons Gravitys Rainbow, literary critic Bruce Robbins questions the archetypal
view of the Second World War as a watershed after which the ideal intact city and its
community were ultimately destroyed.
12
Listing agents of what he calls the implosion of the urban

core, Albert Pope begins with Allied bombers and aggressive
freeway engineers, and ends with celebrated architects and
the precise trajectory of the V2 rocket.1 To a literary critic like
myself, this pairing of architects and V2s as agents of radical
transformation, and of both with the fate of the modern city,
seems reasonable enough. What we literary critics tend to be
less sure of is whether the urban core has indeed imploded
whether we have definitively lost the centrality and publicness
that we have come to associate, rightly or wrongly, with the
pre-implosion city.
The V2 rocket is at the heart of Thomas Pynchons vision of
the city in Gravitys Rainbow, the greatest American novel of
the past half-century. The tale begins with the sound of the V2
(A screaming comes across the sky) and with two V2-related
scenes.2 The first is a dream-like scene of Evacuation (the word
is capitalised) that turns out to be, indeed, a dream. It throws
the dreamer into a sudden intimacy with the poor, sharing
with them both their vulnerability and their experience of
Londons grimy, neglected infrastructure, the suddenly revealed
urban space that the would-be evacuees must traverse. The
second is a morning scene, also in London, in which a British
officer wakes up after a wild party it is he, apparently, who
has been dreaming. He goes up to his roof garden to gather
bananas for one of his famous Banana Breakfasts, and in the
sky he sees, far off, the trail of another V2 on its way down.
These are scenes of dispersal. As you begin to prepare your
breakfast, the city in which you live is already the target of
violence launched from overseas. The public is usually
described, roughly speaking, as a sphere in which there can be
common conversation, undisturbed by power differentials
between the participants, about matters important to their
common welfare. Violence, especially violence from a
distance, thus seems its very antithesis.3 A public that would
include those who launch the V2s as well as those on whom
they come down is hard to imagine. By definition, the city at
which the rockets are aimed cannot encompass so much; it
will not qualify. Under the V2s city and publicness have come
apart. And the city reacts, one might say, by emptying itself
out. The Evacuation anticipates the rush to the suburbs after
the Second World War during the precise years when Pynchon
was writing. It is as if ordinary citizens felt that the public
decisions arrived at in the metropolis had failed them, and
had responded by fleeing towards suburban privacy. The
explosions of the rockets and the implosion of the urban
core belong to the same story of what the novel will call
scattering, a story we are accustomed to think of as the loss
of community, the loss of centred public space.
For a vigilant reader, however, these two scenes also
contain clues that Pynchon may be trying to tell a very
different kind of story. The miraculous bananas, for example:
could they really grow in London, at least before global
warming? Bananas, like V2s, usually come from far away. If

they are staples of the urban breakfast, then the city was
already causally linked to faraway places before the rockets
started falling. And if you inspect those faraway places, dont
you detect violence behind the process of production by which
the bananas so reliably arrived? (Consider the massacre of
striking banana plantation workers in Garcia Marquezs One
Hundred Years of Solitude.) Isnt it a good thing, in the dream
sequence, that the dreaming evacuee encounters the truth of
Londons infrastructure, its secret entrances of rotted
concrete and trestles of blackened wood, its places whose
names he has never heard ?4 And his emphatic rubbing-ofelbows with the poor in the Evacuation: doesnt this seem less
like a loss of the public and more like a move in the direction
of a more strenuously inclusive, more properly democratic
public? At the end of the novel, when the protagonist is
scattered,5 no longer visible as any sort of integral
creature,6 the reader is left wondering how much this ought
to count as a failure and how much it might on the contrary
satisfy a desire. Perhaps the disappearance of the privileged
American individual he once was makes it possible for him to
represent a threateningly dispersed but nonetheless ethically
desirable inclusiveness.
From one perspective, Gravitys Rainbow might be described
as an attempt to model the public a radically and
necessarily more comprehensive public under stressful
contemporary circumstances. The novel will reveal that the
site of each V2 explosion, marked with a pin on a London city
map and dated, corresponds in time as well as space with a
map of the protagonists sexual encounters (hence the phallic
rhyme between rocket and banana). A pattern can be detected
behind what would otherwise appear to be random
dispersiveness the dispersiveness of rocketry, of desire, and
of the city-destroying force we have come to call globalisation.
In pursuit of this pattern, the novel will send its protagonist
abroad, seeking the mysterious connection between the
rockets and his sexuality. Indeed, it will devote many of its
pages to those who develop and launch the rocket, thereby
drawing together figures who did not seem capable of
inhabiting one single story, one single conversation. This new
story occupies a different, transnational geography what
Pynchon names the Zone. And the interrelations of its
multinational cast continue uninterrupted after the Second
World War is over. If this is something less than a full
blueprint of a transnational public sphere, it is certainly a
critique of the earlier notion of the public, which
complacently or nostalgically assumed that the public was
something that did its job and was ours to lose in other
words, that before the era of rockets, bananas and suburbs we
were already firmly in possession of it.
The phrase dispersed urbanism has a no doubt calculated
ambiguity. Has urbanism been dispersed, hence destroyed,
Defusing a Nazi bomb, London, 1940.
13
An aerial view of an area of London that suffered heavy bombing, c 1940.
leaving behind something that is not urban? Or is there a

version of urbanism that persists, however paradoxically, as
urbanism, an urbanism that somehow takes a dispersed form?
These are questions that Pynchon also addresses. And they are
questions that are inherent in the very definition of the
public. If the public is what pertains to the social whole, as we
sometimes say, what exactly do we mean by pertain? Some
very diverse things. We might say something public is
potentially accessible to the community. Or we might say it
is already visible to and viewed by the community. Or we
might say it is that which belongs to and/or is controlled by
the community. Or we might say it is that which affects or is
of significance to the community. Or that which is
authorised by the community. Or that which is done in the
service or on behalf of the community. Each option overlaps
to some degree with the others, but each also leads to a
different moral appeal and a different mode of action.
Some of the terms power lies in the confusions it makes
possible between these different options. By switching, for
example, between 1) the public as what is owned, decided
upon, and managed by the community, and 2) the public as
what is merely observed by and relevant to the community
that is, between the public as active participant (modelled on
the organised political group) and the public as passive
spectator (modelled on theatrical audience and reading public)
the word can imply that the active, participatory aspects of
politics are present within the more passive, aestheticised

context of spectatorship. This switch encourages a tendency to
inflate the degree and significance of agency available in the
act of cultural consumption the suggestion, say, that
shopping and striking are comparable practices. Yet this
ambiguity also raises such productive questions as how
distinct the two sorts of publicness are and what role
theatricality and symbolism can play within politics. The same
ambiguity drives media research into how, when and whether
what is public in the minimal sense of visibility (celebrity,
publicity) translates into what is public in a weightier sense
like sociability or organised political will. For urban
planners, the key question is perhaps whether the urban has
been superseded by the digital; in the words of Manuel
Castells, whether public space has come to be defined as the
space of communication.7 Or must successful political action
eventually move out of the digital and back into physical
space, where access to infrastructure, commuting time and
the cost of fossil fuels matter?
This is related to the ever more interesting issue of the
publics scale. The word public has been most frequently
used about collectivities, like the city, up to but not
exceeding the scale of the nation. This fits its association
with zones of actual conversation and self-consciously shared
destiny, which have historically been limited. On the other
hand, the concept of the public as a zone of causal
14
Londons Smithfield Market damaged by enemy action, c 1941.
connectedness those actions relevant to, or significant for,

the welfare of a given group, whether or not the group is in
conversation with itself or with the begetters of the actions
is much vaster. In the era of the world market, not to speak
of official and unofficial violence across borders, this zone
has become increasingly international. Thus the restrictively
national scale of the public (in the sense of conversation and
control) is seen to be stretching, and/or to need stretching.
Enlarging the scale of international attention, conversation
and opinion so as to match the scale of international causal
connectedness that is, bringing these two senses of the
public into congruence with each other means resetting the
boundaries of the relevant moral community so that those
likely to be affected by a course of action, wherever they live,
are included in those invited to debate it.
Among other things, this is a question, to quote an
article in Latour and Weibels Making Things Public, of the
spatial grammar of the politics of who votes where.8
Where you vote counts unequally in its effects. An
American vote counts for far more than votes in other parts
of the world because it comes backed up by structures of
enforcement that can project it into the world Remember
that the course of a large part of the world hung on a small
number of hanging chads and on the fact that only 51
percent of the American electorate voted in the 2000
presidential election. Perhaps we should all be able to vote
in the US elections! We should certainly consider the

possibility of allowing residents in one part of the world to
exercise their citizenship rights in another part of the world
over common planetary issues, through some form of
coupon democracy or world parliament.9 Or, to put this
differently: The notion of an unbound site prompts designers
to consider not simply the territory under their direct
control, but the more expansive physical, social and
temporal arenas impacted by their actions.10
As a literary critic, I will not presume to say what it might
mean to architects and urban designers to think of the public
less as a default setting or an inheritance, already functional
and always in danger of being lost, than as a sort of miracle,
always in need of enlargement, always needing to be reimagined creatively. What criteria would have to be satisfied?
The citys degree of openness to strangers is something
planners are already thinking about, and necessarily so. It
seems to me that the citys vulnerability to rockets must be
added, but only if there is some way of alluding
architecturally to the city not just as victim, but also as source
of violence, including the rockets it sends out, so to speak, as
well as the everyday violence of imported fruit. The novel has
had to stretch to find a way to make these distant relations of
force part of its form, a form that is much more comfortable
following the fate of a handful of private individuals. Most
novels dont manage to be public in the strongest sense. Its
always a stretch. 4
Notes
1. Albert Pope, Ladders, Rice University School of Architecture (Houston),
1996, p 102.
2. Thomas Pynchon, Gravitys Rainbow, Penguin (New York), 1973.
3. Mike Hill and Warren Montag, What was, what is, the public sphere? PostCold War reflections, Masses, Classes, and the Public Sphere, Verso (London),
2000. Absolutely central to the notion of the public sphere in all its versions,
Hill and Montag write, is the opposition between reason and force (p 6). They
trace the logic by which this conceptual suppression of force leads Jrgen
Habermas, for example, to identify the enemies of the public sphere as those
who use force, mainly outside the NATO countries, and thus to support
defending them with force (p 7), including the massive prolonged war against
Iraq (p 7) at that time still merely a reference to the violence of sanctions.
4. Pynchon, op cit, p 3.
7. Manuel Castells, Communication, power and counter-power in the network
society, International Journal of Communication 1, 2007, pp 23866. Thanks to
Noah Brick for the reference.
8. Ash Amin, Nigel Thrift, Helen Baker and Doreen Massey, Centers dont
have to be points: Political influence of US Republican Party overseas, in
Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of
Democracy, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA) and ZKM (Center for Art and Media),
Karlsruhe, 2005, p 811.
9. Ibid.
10. Andrea Kahn, The project of urban design, in Andrea Kahn, Charlie
Cannon, Phu Duong and Els Verbakel (eds), Constellations: Constructing
Urban Design Practices, Columbia University Urban Design Program (New
York), 2007.
Text 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 12 & 13 Hulton-Deutsch
Collection/CORBIS ca. September 1940, London, England, UK; p 15
CORBIS ca. 1941, London, England
15
Terminal Distribution
Could the late 20th-century rejection of Modernist planning, and along with it the notion of a
universal subject, mean that urban designers and architects might have lost sight of who
they are designing cities for? Albert Pope sets out on a search to define the contemporary
who and finds some answers in Michel Foucaults notion of the historically grounded subject.
Subjectivity
It has long been argued that society constructs individuals.
Simply stated, we construct the world and the world
constructs us. The study of subjectivity attempts to
understand how society constructs individuals by analysing
the individual itself. In the language of the human sciences,
this individual is referred to as the social subject. When the
study of the subject is extended to the study of cities, it
becomes clear that the unique environment of cities
constructs unique individuals. From this perspective we can
easily see how individuals in medieval cities would be
constructed in an entirely different way than the individuals
in industrial cities. Moving forward, we can apply the analysis
of subjectivity to modern urbanism, specifically the Radiant
City urbanism that emerged in the 1920s and was codified in
the 1930s and exported worldwide following the Second
World War. Like all cities before it, the Radiant City was
imagined to create a unique subject. This subject the
universal subject of Modern architecture and urbanism was
a subject like no other.
In the 1920s, the advocates of Modern urbanism saw
technical, economic and political change of such magnitude
as to require the reorganisation of the city at an existential
level. Out of this reorganisation, it was imagined that an
entirely new mode of subjectivity would emerge. This led to
the notion that the urban subject could be both anticipated
and designed for. In other words, the constituent of the
modern city did not yet exist, but it would be the ultimate
result of its construction. This anticipation of a truly
universal subject was hardly defensible, and the early 1970s
critique of it was definitive. Such a subject did not, and could
not, exist but as a figment of a utopian imagination. With 50
years hindsight, the universal subject was seen as an agent
for the emergence of a brutal and oppressive mode of
urbanisation.1 It is safe to argue that the universal subject of
modern urbanism was a naive attempt to establish an
unknown and unrecognisable subject against all
subjectivities that came before.
This naivety regarding an urban subject was largely
overcome through the writing of French historian Michel
Foucault. In the mid-1970s, Foucault redefined subjectivity
around two key innovations: that the subject was both
historically grounded and socially individuated.2 The
implication of a historical, individuated subject on the

discourse of architecture and urbanism should have been
significant, for it answered much of the critique that modern
urbanism was undergoing at virtually the same time. The
Postmodern critique, however, became a polemic,
condemning not only the universal subject, but the notion of
projecting subjectivity altogether. It can be argued that the
problem of Radiant City urbanism was not that it projected
subjectivity, but that it projected subjectivity devoid of
recognisable features. Over the past 30 years, this outright
rejection of subjectivity has had drastic consequences that can
be summed up in a few simple questions that are rarely asked
and almost never answered, even today. Who, exactly, is the
subject of contemporary architectural and urban design? Who
are our discourses (such as this one) targeting? For whom do
we presume to speak? Given that subjectivities are the
inevitable outcome of historical forces, what is the role of
urban form in their construction? Ever since Foucaults cogent
argument, the prospect of a modern universal subject has
been substantially diminished, but the question of who
nonetheless remains.
It is clear that Foucaults conception of a historically
grounded subject could help answer the contemporary
question of who?. His conception of an individuated subject,
on the other hand, was far more problematic. If architects
and theoreticians conceive of the subject at all, they usually
conceive of it in collectivist terms. This devotion to the
collective subject is nearly second nature, and it has all but
eliminated any obvious alternatives. It is generally
understood that urban spaces such as the agora, the parvis,
the royal square and the village green all created the
constituencies they contained. These constituencies and
others continue to exist in enduring urban form to this day.
And while more recent examples of collective subjectivity
exist the people, the working class or mass society, to
begin the list they are rarely associated with contemporary
urban form. For a whole host of reasons we are unable to
account for a collective subject in the practice and discourse
of contemporary urbanism leading us to further discount the
projection of subjectivity. This begs the question of whether
Foucaults analysis of an individuated subject might point the
way to an alternative subject position. It will be the
contention here that individuated subjectivity is more
16
relevant to contemporary urban form specifically

infrastructural form than its collective counterpart. The
substitution of the universal subject for a historical,
individuated subject and the encoding of that subject in the
concrete form of the city will be the primary objective of the
text that follows. This development animates the evolution of
recent urban history as the emphasis of forms has shifted
from a validation of the collective to a validation of an
individuated subject.
Infrastructure
Subjectivities are found encoded at all levels of the built
environment. Foucault found them encoded in various
institutions such as prisons, asylums, schools and factories.
And while he rarely speculated on an urban scale, it is
nevertheless true that powerful subjectivities are encoded,
not only at the level of individual building, but also at the
base level of urban organisation. I am referring to the
subjectivities constructed by street infrastructure. By street
infrastructure I mean the layout of water and sewage lines,
electrical and communications grids, pedestrian walks,
Diagram 1
The first pattern is that of the urban gridiron. Up until the 1950s, the gridiron
street structured a century and a half of American and European urbanism.
Through its many variations, the gridiron form supported multiple
subjectivities, both individual and collective. In this regard, its negotiation of
the social is extremely clear, especially in the case of the early 20th-century
metropolis. This diagram shows, in basic geometry, how collective
subjectivities are supported by the gridiron infrastructure. The large circles
suggest social groupings of various sorts and sizes. What is unique about the
gridiron infrastructure is that the social groupings can be moved and sized
independent of the forms that support them. The circles can indicate ethnic
enclaves such as a Chinatown or a Little Italy, or indicate a district identified
with a distinctive urban feature such as Marquette Park, a district in Chicago,
or the Flatiron district in Manhattan. They can also indicate areas of
development distinguished by density, such as Midtown Manhattan or the
Mid-Wiltshire district of Los Angeles, or be a direct reflection of class such as
the colloquial expression uptown. The circles can also recognise fluid
political constituencies such as the old ward system or todays narrowly
focused special interest groups. With the gridiron, all of these subjectivities
are negotiated and renegotiated unhindered by an open and continuous
urban matrix. It is important to note that in the gridiron city, as in the mass
society, there is no hierarchy, or there is only a simple two-level hierarchy of
STREET/DESTINATION.
drainage capacity, along with unpaved or paved roadbeds.

While largely a matter of civil engineering, the significance of
street infrastructure goes far beyond its technical
specification. I would like to argue here that street
infrastructure both historical and contemporary embeds
social organisation at the deepest levels of urban existence.
Infrastructure provides the baseline to the elaborate
choreography of social organisation, whether it be the
convergence, for example, of a large group of people upon a
stadium or the retreat of a far-flung commuter. There is, in
other words, a fundamental relation between infrastructural
form and the construction of urban subjectivities.
It is, at first, counterintuitive to imagine that street
infrastructure would have an equal or greater impact on
subjectivities than those buildings that take social
organisation as their aim (prisons, factories, schools). This
difficulty in understanding, however, demonstrates what is
perhaps infrastructures greatest strength, its subliminal
ubiquity. Infrastructure is literally everywhere. It exists all
around us, even where you are right now. You can see it when
you sit at your desk, look out of your window and when you
watch television. You feel it when you go to work, or go to
church, or go to school. Urban infrastructure is there every
time you walk out of the door. It operates, without effort, 24
hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Infrastructure
cannot be put down like a newspaper or a book, shut off like a
computer or radio, or walked out of like a film or a building.
It determines whether you walk fast or slow, left or right, up
or down. It determines, actually, whether you walk at all.
Infrastructure is a more potent means of encoding social
organisation precisely because it operates subliminally. As
opposed to a work of architecture, infrastructure leaves us
largely unaware of the mechanisms of social organisation that
surround and define it. It allows us the very necessary fiction
of unfettered agency that most modern societies require.
Because infrastructure is everywhere, we take it for
granted, and because we take it for granted we fail to
acknowledge its importance in the constitution of the lived
world. This is unfortunate because urban infrastructure has
undergone a dramatic transformation over the past halfcentury. A major shift from open, gridiron cities to closed,
cul-de-sac cities has irreversibly changed the course of
urbanisation.3 Because this change is so recent, and so
profound, it is especially illuminating with regard to the
relation between infrastructural form and social
organisation. This radical shift in form begs the question of
whether social imperatives gave rise to form, or whether
formal transformation brought about profound social
change. In either case, we are situated at the nexus of a
social and formal negotiation.
Three Stages
What follows are the diagrammatic descriptions of the three
infrastructural configurations that marked the
transformation of infrastructure in the 20th-century city (see
17
Diagram 2
The second, intermediate pattern is that of the superblock. Gridiron
construction effectively came to an end in the period following the Second
World War. What succeeded the gridiron was the superblock. A superblock is
an increase in the unit of urban aggregation beyond the characteristic of a
conventional city block. This significant increase in economic, demographic or
territorial dimension represents not only a change in size, but also a change
in kind. This change in kind dramatically affects the subjectivities of the
gridiron. The exact same circles representing social groupings can be drawn
as they were in the previous diagram, but unlike the gridiron infrastructure,
the groupings cannot be moved or resized independent of the superblock
infrastructure that creates them. The circles still indicate a number of
collective subjectivities such as formed by political or ethnic identities, and
they can still indicate a district identified with a distinctive urban or natural
feature. The subjectivities of the superblock correspond precisely to the
infrastructural form so that a lock between programmme and structure is
created. Besides being locked into the infrastructure, these subjectivities can
also be more easily isolated as a result of a defined perimeter and the
reduced number of entrances and exits that typically occur in superblock
development. In other words, the same groups can be formed, but the
dynamic between them is utterly changed. Superblocks are the organisational
unit of such well-known projects as Frank Lloyd Wrights Broadacre City and
Llewelyn-Davies Milton Keynes. They are also characteristic of the immediate
postwar subdivision in North America. The superblock encodes another level
of hierarchy within the urban infrastructure. With the addition of the access
road, the superblock shows a third level of hierarchy non-existent in the
gridiron. This three-level hierarchy can be expressed as
BOULEVARD/STREET/DESTINATION.
Diagrams 13). The three stages gridiron, superblock and

cul-de-sac reveal a change in the interaction between
infrastructural form and social organisation. The diagrams
are arranged in a split-screen format that directly juxtaposes
the formal and the social. The line patterns on the left-hand
side represent the planimetric base form of the
infrastructure. The diagrams on the right-hand side represent
the familiar icons of statistical analysis. Such figures often
depict the quantities of a statistical sampling representing
1X, 10X, 100X and so on. This is the case here. But it is also
the case that the figures suggest a specific place, as if it were
a literal image of a large number of people occupying a space
and time such as Times Square on New Years Eve.
What this three-stage transformation reveals is a
progressive fragmentation that continues to the point at
which the part is isolated from the whole and the whole is
lost to cognitive awareness. One of the most important
characteristics of gridiron urbanism was that it allowed
various subgroupings to be taken as a single,

undifferentiated, non-hierarchical mass. It is not a
coincidence that the gridiron underlies the most celebrated
form of 20th-century urbanism the metropolis. The ability
for the gridiron to encompass the whole is what allows it to
support the metropolis most characteristic subjectivity: an
industrialised mass society. This subjectivity was encoded
directly in the urban infrastructure, specifically in the open
and infinitely extensible gridiron street. In other words, a
mass society was as open and infinitely extensible as the
street infrastructure that supported it.4 The systematic
disassembly of a mass society by the consumer economy is
nowhere more evident than in the recent transformations of
infrastructural form. These transformations will be referred
to as a process of individuation.
Itineraries
It is apparent from the first three diagrams that the relation
between the social and the formal is far more than utilitarian,
especially in a time of dramatic urban change. The correlation
between social organisation and infrastructure is apparent in
Diagram 3
The third and terminal stage in the transformation of 20th-century urban
infrastructure can be seen in the emergence of a cul-de-sac organisation. This
stage can be seen as an important refinement of the superblock from an
isolated gridded organisation into what can be more strictly defined as a
spine. This spine emerges through two important transformations in street
organisation: the elimination of the cross-axial field of gridiron organisation
and the emergence of a terminal node, or dead-end street. The principal
example of cul-de-sac organisation comes from the large planning projects of
Mies van der Rohe and Ludwig Hilberseimer. Lafayette Park in Detroit stands
out as the primary example among many similar unrealised schemes. Cul-desac organisation is also characteristic of the majority of contemporary North
American subdivisions as well as European and Asian New Towns. The
elimination of the cross-axial field brings additional levels of hierarchy to
street infrastructure. With the introduction of urban motorways into areas of
new urban construction, subdivision and classification come into their own.
The advent of the freeway and feeder road bring a fifth and sixth level of
hierarchy into play, as follows:
FREEWAY/FEEDER/BOULEVARD/SPINE/STREET/DESTINATION. Through
these levels of hierarchy, the broad range of social grouping allowed by the
flexible infrastructure of the previous diagrams is diminished. For the first
time, a completely individuated subjectivity comes into view.
18
the historically specific subjectivities that rose and fell

throughout the 20th century. It is clear that changes in form
affected the dynamics between these subjectivities, including
the ability to isolate and control them as well as the ability to
understand them as a whole. These observations in
themselves may be sufficient to theorise a relation between
social life and urban form, yet there is something banal (read
behavioural) in the equation of social organisation to a circle.
Planimetric circles limit us to mapping the social as a group.
Furthermore, they privilege collective subjectivities as
opposed to individuated subjectivities that are more
characteristic of contemporary cities.
It is important to remember that the organisational logic
of any given urban system is not identical to the logic of form.
What this means is that the analysis of form alone does not
yield the decisive characteristics of urban organisation. This is
made clear in the next pair of diagrams that trace habitual
paths of movement, or itineraries. Itineraries are sketched
on top of the infrastructure diagrams and are often at
variance with the forms that support them. We can proceed
with a mapping of itineraries by locating six destinations
marked by the small circles on the diagram (see Diagram 4).
These small circles represent individual destinations rather
than the large circles that represented social groups. With
regard to gridiron urbanism there exists a near-infinite
number of paths that connect any of the six destinations. If
each destination represents home, office, school, market, then
the daily routines that connect them are almost infinitely
variable. This diagram of gridiron itineraries is meant to
contrast with the itineraries generated by the cul-de-sac. To
this end, the same six destinations are drawn on top of the
cul-de-sac infrastructure. As opposed to the infinite number of
routes or circuits created between the six locations on the
grid, the cul-de-sac drastically reduces the connections
between the six centres. Any connecting path must move
several levels back up the hierarchy, often returning to a
primary axis (such as an urban freeway) of organisation
before descending again to one of the specific locations.
Unlike the infinite number of itineraries between all possible
points on the grid, the points on the closed system allow only
a single connection between any two points. This drastic
reduction of choice from near infinity to one is not revealed
by the direct juxtaposition of the circle and the grid. As a
diagramming technique, the itinerary is interesting because
it lies between the social entities and the formal
infrastructure, eliminating the direct (deterministic)
correspondence and potentially tying the two together.
Once again it is clear that the relation of social
organisation to urban infrastructure far surpasses functional
considerations. The increasing isolation of the cul-de-sac
destination due to the systematic elimination of connecting
paths is clearly revealed by the itinerary. Here the drastic
elimination of choice is so severe that it is in danger of
cutting the analysis short. Putting judgement aside,
temporarily, and focusing on the analysis at hand, we realise
that the difference being marked is between urban systems

that are open and urban systems that are closed. Open urban
systems are made up of networks characterised by circuits,
loops and nodes of continuation. Closed urban systems, on
the other hand, are made up of networks characterised by
hubs, spokes and nodes of termination. The difference
between the nodes of continuation that characterise open
urban systems, and nodes of termination that characterise
closed urban systems, cannot be overstated. What is
important to remember is that these network nodes form
utterly opposed subject positions. Nodes of termination forge
a highly individuated subject position encoded at the
ubiquitous level of urban infrastructure.
Individuation
While the integration or separation of social entities is
important to the working of a city, it is not the only effect of
infrastructure. It is possible to take the analysis of itineraries
one step further in order to understand these patterns of
movement beyond their already significant implications. It is
possible to push this analysis into the existential realities that
are the result of the ubiquitous nature of urban
infrastructure. In other words, the impact of urban form
Diagram 4
This pair of diagrams traces the paths of individual movement on top of the
infrastructure diagrams. The patterns generated by these paths are often at
variance with the forms that support them. In this diagram, six locations are
marked by the small circles. These circles represent individual destinations
rather than the large circles in the preceding diagrams that represented social
groups. The left-hand diagram shows that in gridiron urbanism there exists a
near-infinite number of paths that connect any of the six destinations. If each
destination represents home, office, school, market, then the daily routines
that connect them are almost infinitely variable. The diagram of gridiron
itineraries on the left is meant to contrast with the itineraries generated by
the cul-de-sac shown on the right. On the right-hand side, the same six
destinations are drawn on top of the cul-de-sac infrastructure. As opposed to
the infinite number of routes or circuits created between the six locations on
the grid, the cul-de-sac drastically reduces the connections between the six
destinations. Any connecting path must move several levels back up the
hierarchy, often returning to a primary axis of organisation before descending
again to one of the specific locations. Unlike the infinite number of itineraries
between all possible points on the grid, the points on the closed system allow
only a single connection between any two points. This drastic reduction of
choice from near infinity to one, more accurately depicts the contrast between
the open, gridiron and closed cul-de-sac organisation.
19
extends beyond the issue of interconnected parts to the

construction of subjectivity at an existential level.
In order to extend the analysis, it is important to
understand how discrete locations are established in the
extended urban field of the cul-de-sac city. As mentioned, culde-sac cities are made up of networks characterised by nodes
of termination. Terminal nodes are unlike the nodes of
continuation that characterise gridiron urbanism. The path to
a specific place in the cul-de-sac city will always terminate in
an exclusive destination or endpoint (see Diagram 5), The path
on the open grid, on the other hand, will never terminate
because the gridiron is infinite in all directions. As opposed to
the cul-de-sacs termination of movement, the grid offers only
a series of arbitrary stopping points often described as
coordinates in space: for example, 239 East 339th Street. The
organisational logic of a grid produces points that are
connected by an infinite number of circuits or loops. The
organisational logic of a cul-de-sac produces, on the contrary,
a distribution of terminals or terminal distribution.
The ability of the cul-de-sac city to establish fixed endpoints
has significant implications for urban subjectivity. This is best
revealed in another itinerary diagram. In the cul-de-sac city,
the pattern of movement through urban space traces the
figure of a discrete SPIRAL through a succession of the
overlaid structural hierarchies described above. This path
might begin on a primary urban freeway and from there turn
inwards towards a singularly defined place. This in-turning
spiralling path from freeway to feeder to collector to
development spine to driveway forms the trajectory of a
closed urban system. Turning inwards on itself, the path
configures a series of discrete segments each more exclusive
than the last. Everyone now lives not on an anonymous grid
coordinate, but at the end of a particular path, on the last
driveway, on the last cul-de-sac, in a city whose overall form is
unknowable. In the cul-de-sac city we are right where we have
always wanted to be, at the very origin of the spiral, each of
our delicate egos seated at the base of a terminal destination.
This spiralling inwards constitutes the mechanism of
individuation that creates the existential reality that lies
behind the nodes of termination.
The manner in which the cul-de-sac city defines a
destination speaks volumes for the magnitude of change seen
in urban infrastructure over the past century. This is not,
however, so much a change in urban form as it is a change in
urban subjectivity. Viewed from this perspective, there can be
no greater contrast between the collective subjects the
gridiron street produces and the individuated subjects the culde-sac produces. I would argue that the gridiron did
ultimately sustain a collective subject even if that subject was
defined as an undifferentiated mass society. In the cul-de-sac
city, this mode of subjectivity is no longer possible. The cul-desac city privileges individuated subjects at the expense of any
massification or incorporation. This is its historical
uniqueness as it is the historical uniqueness of the city in our
time. Whatever characteristics of gridiron urbanism we may
Diagram 5
This diagram maps the logic of the terminal node in cul-de-sac urbanism. The
path to a specific place in the cul-de-sac city will always terminate in an
exclusive destination or endpoint. The path on the open grid, on the other
hand, will never terminate because the gridiron is infinite in all directions. As
opposed to the cul-de-sacs termination of movement, the grid offers only a
series of arbitrary stopping points often described as coordinates in space:
for example, 239 East 339th Street. The organisational logic of a grid
produces points that are connected by an infinite number of circuits or loops.
The organisational logic of a cul-de-sac produces, on the contrary, a
distribution of terminals or terminal distribution. In the cul-de-sac city, the
pattern of movement through urban space traces the figure of a discrete
SPIRAL through a succession of the overlaid structural hierarchies described
above. This path might begin on a primary urban freeway and from there turn
inwards towards a singularly defined place. This in-turning spiralling path
from freeway to feeder to collector to development spine to driveway forms
the trajectory of a closed urban system. Turning inwards on itself, the path
configures a series of discrete segments each more exclusive than the last.
Everyone now lives not on an anonymous grid coordinate, but at the end of a
particular path, on the last driveway, on the last cul-de-sac, in a city whose
overall form is unknowable. In the cul-de-sac city we are right where we have
always wanted to be, at the very origin of the spiral, each of our delicate egos
seated at the base of a terminal destination. This spiralling inwards
constitutes the existential reality of terminal nodes.
admire, or even prefer, we are not able to ignore the fact that
gridiron urbanism cannot support the individuated
subjectivities that are prevalent today. More important,
perhaps, is the need to update the Modernist conception of
the universal subject, bringing to modern urbanism a
workable alternative. This is to say, finally and without
equivocation, that urban form is historically unique as are the
subjects it produces.
At this juncture it is possible to provide a tentative answer
to the question of who. Who, exactly, is the subject of
architectural and urban design? For whom do we presume to
speak? A first, tentative answer to that question is that we
speak for the highly individuated subject of the contemporary
city. While such an answer is certainly not definitive, nor does
it suggest that individuation is an inevitable or even a
desirable outcome, it does provide a less-than-arbitrary
starting point for continued analysis.
20
In a short text dating from 1972, Foucault made the

following remark about the construction of an individuated
subjectivity. He wrote: Do not demand of politics that it
restore the rights of the individual, as philosophy has
defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is
needed is to deindividualize by means of multiplication and
displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be
the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a
constant generator of de-individualization. (authors italics).5
Seldom do we question the fundamental value of the
individual. It is as if our liberal heritage safeguarded the
existence of our humanity in a world defined by the
encroachment of mass society. It has been suggested that the
liberal conception of the individual is as dated as the
conception of mass society itself and that, today, it may be the
case that individuality or difference constitutes as much a
threat to our humanity as it does to its safeguard.6 This unique
understanding comes to us as designers who recognise the
concealed logic of urban infrastructures and how it may
unwittingly block or accelerate the development of the social. 4
Notes
1. On the critique of the universal subject, Manfredo Tafuri argued that the
effect of modern urbanism was not to reinvent the subject, but to eliminate it.
He wrote that: The problem was to plan the disappearance of the subject, to
cancel the anguish caused by the pathetic (or ridiculous) resistance of the
individual to the structures of domination that close in upon him, to indicate
the voluntary and docile submission to those structures of domination as the
promised land of universal planning. Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia,
MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1976, p 73.
2. Foucaults reinvention of the subject can be broken down into two distinct
features historicising the subject and individuating it. The first pursued an
understanding of subjectivity as a historical phenomenon. Before Foucault,
the social was defined in essentialist terms. What this means is that the
social had been interpreted as the essence of community or the essence of
humanity that was distilled down through the ages into an idealised subject
position that transcended its many historical manifestations. In architecture,
this essentialist subject was most often referred to as a modern, universal
subject, a position that is still promoted (however unwittingly) today. Foucault
undermined all such essential positions through a detailed study of the
historic record, and put into its place a subject that was historically defined.
The second way in which Foucault reinterpreted the social was to shift the
emphasis from an incorporated or collective subject to an individual one.
Traditionally, the historical study of an individual subject was limited to the
reign of a king or another such significant person and would ultimately
constitute the great man theory of history. Like these historians, Foucault
focused on an individual subject. Instead of writing the history of kings and
generals, however, he studied the factory worker, lunatic, the schoolchild, or
the prisoner and the so-called disciplinary regimes that made them exactly
what they were. In other words, these subjectivities were socially constructed
by specific disciplinary regimes that constituted and regulated society (by
targeting individuals) on a one-by-one basis. His celebrated study of the
penitent criminal in Jeremy Benthams Panopticon is the premier example of
Foucaults focus on these individuated disciplinary regimes.
3. Street infrastructure is one of the oldest and best demonstrations of the
autonomous evolution of urban form. By autonomous form is meant form that
follows prior form in succession over time, ultimately creating a stable
typology. The grid form typical of street infrastructure has existed since
antiquity. It has evolved since that time through numerous variations in
pattern including regular and irregular syncopation, larger- and smaller-scaled
spacings, orthogonal and curvilinear geometries, but the logic of the grid form
has endured. This autonomous evolution was abruptly terminated following
the Second World War when the gridiron form of the Western city was
eclipsed by a new pattern of organisation. Since the late 1940s, no gridiron
street infrastructures have been produced in the American city. Instead,

closed, cul-de-sac organisation has dominated urban development, creating a
decisive transformation in what we understand to be street infrastructure. I
have argued elsewhere that the cul-de-sac is not a further evolution of the
ancient grid typology, but a rupture of that typology that brings entirely new
qualities into the urban environment, positive and negative. And while the
typology is ruptured, it is not the case that the infrastructure has become,
again, merely a technical or functional matter.
4. In the 19th century, collective subjectivity was not established by the urban
plaza or square, for the mass would always exceed its fixed boundaries.
Collective subjectivity (political identity) was constructed by the open street. It
then follows that the gridiron infrastructure was characterised by a distinctive
feature of mass society: the ability to grow without boundary.
5. Foucault, preface to Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis), 1983, p xiv. This
quotation does a lot in four sentences. It offers two opposing types of
individuals. The first type is one that Foucault claims to be the product of
power. The implication is that power produces a hierarchised individual that
is organically bonded into the unity of a larger group. The six-level hierarchy
FREEWAY/FEEDER/BOULEVARD/SPINE/STREET/DESTINATION
revealed in Diagram 3 allows us to readily identify this type of individual.
Against this hierarchised, or ranked, individual, a second type of unranked,
non-hierarchised individual is offered by Foucault. This second type of
individual is deindividualised by a process that actively undermines the
organic bond that traditionally ties it to a larger group dynamic. This process
is accomplished by means of multiplication and displacement and by
replacing the organic unity of assimilated individuals with diverse
combinations. The individual is therefore not seen as something that is
restored with reference to a series of essential (philosophically defined)
rights. It is instead seen to be constructed by the multiplication and
displacement of itself. Such specific procedures suggest not the shoring up
of an essential integrity, but an individuation that is accomplished by a
multiplication of individuality a hyper-individuation. In this regard, the group
becomes not a hierarchical encoding of individuals, but a constant generator
of multiplicity, and this multiplicity produces a kind of unranked individual that
is not subject to the type of disciplinary technologies that Foucaults work
reveals. Following Foucault, we can thus identify a process called
deindividuation that is the means by which an individual that is ranked into a
unitary hierarchy is unranked into a form of organisation that can be
described not as a group or a mass, but as a multiplicity. This multiplicity
shares a striking resemblance to a new form of global political subjectivity
that has been defined by a number of political philosophers as the multitude.
6. The individuation of urban infrastructure follows the decline of the welfare
state and global embrace of neo-liberal economic policies. While the link
between neo-liberalism and individuated subjectivity seems reasonably clear,
what is less clear is the specific constitution of a global subjectivity that may
ultimately emerge from this condition. This situation raises the stakes on the
question of who our discourses presume. Recently, political theorists have
invented a placeholder for the emerging global subject called multitude. By
all accounts, and there are many, the multitude is highly individuated.
Text 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images Albert Pope
21
Public Lifestyle in the

Low-Density City
Much maligned, shopping centres have come to represent many of the
negative aspects of low-density areas. They are all too often associated
with high car dependency and a paucity of cultural and public amenities.
Alex Wall questions this preconception. Could the well-conceived and
designed shopping centre actually prove to be urban sprawls redemption?
The Idea of Centre in Low-Density Urbanism

For some decades now, the low-density city has been the
predominant urban form in North America and western
Europe. Sometimes it replicates or reinterprets aspects of the
traditional city; otherwise it develops new forms of cityscape
and landscape to suit the needs and desires of its builders,
developers and inhabitants. Its spaces are a function of
mobility and access. The low-density city is best understood as
a process of urbanisation, yet the expressions urban and
urbanism seem inappropriate. This is not because it is not
urban, but rather because it has not yet found its own urban
design practice. For traditional urbanists, the diffuse nature of
the low-density city is a threat to the specificity of the historic
urban cores. There are three additional irritants: the lowdensity city does not seem to have a proper centre; it is a
milieu served primarily by the private automobile; and it
seems to represent a lifestyle devoted to consumption.
The regional shopping centre epitomises all of these

questions, yet it was the first postwar building type to
effectively manage the flows of cars and trucks, thus creating
the basis for comfortable, safe and clean outdoor pedestrian
spaces that attracted many thousands of people. In its latest
manifestation as a lifestyle shopping centre, the same
questions asked 50 years ago still apply: What is the role of
the public spaces of shopping centres, and what kind of
urbanity do they represent? Can retail, in combination with
other functions, create a central place in the low-density city?
This articles seeks to address these issues by focusing on
the role and potential of the shopping centre in the
consolidation of the low-density city. It starts by looking back
at the nascent American suburbs where the regional shopping
centre first made its claims for centrality, then moves to
middle Europe where two current projects in Switzerland are
using a synthesis of branded urban district and intensively
22
public and private initiative and responsibility may be

changing again. In the European and Southeast Asian
examples illustrated below, there are indications that a new
model of participation between private, public and
community actors is emerging. It is an optimistic thesis yet a
necessary question: Can private development take
responsibility for the public realm, and can it bring to market
an equitable balance of housing?
Architekt Daniel Libeskind AG, Masterplan, Westside,
Berne, Switzerland, due for completion 2008
Superposition of regional centre and highway space. View
from the highway showing the fractal public spaces
piercing the shopping centre envelope.
choreographed urban public space as a mechanism for

restructuring the city region. Finally, it assesses the potential
of a specific phenomenon in the Southeast Asian city of
Jakarta: shopping centre clusters as initiators of public space,
as agents of reurbanisation and as the starting point for the
long and difficult negotiation towards a sustainable megacity.
Who Builds the City?
The phenomenon of low-density urbanism raises the question
of who builds the city. In post-Second World War North
America, the build out of the suburbs required the formation
of a formidable cartel of bankers, merchant builders,
shopping centre developers and the road lobby.1 As cities
spread out, often beyond statutory boundaries, the newly
formed real-estate industry came to dominate questions of
where, how and what to build. Developers came to do what
public authorities could or would not do; thus the private not
the public hand would build the city. Yet the balance between
Commerce as the Generator of New Urban Space, New Urban Images

The shopping centre, originally a product of the regional
marketing strategies of downtown department stores, was
one of the agents that transformed the area outside American
cities into a low-density urban cityscape-landscape. Its impact
on the development of the suburbs, the renewal of the
downtowns, and the spatial and programmatic order of the
new metropolitan regions can be traced in the built work of
Victor Gruen.2 In his early centres, for example Northland
(1954) outside Detroit, Gruen argued that the attractor was
the public spaces with their sculpture, landscaping and
modest community rooms. Southdale (1956), the nations first
indoor mall, was planned to function as the centrepiece of a
planned community, but its significance was in the extent to
which the public space became a stage for events, and a place
to both see and to be seen.
Gruens fusion of retail with the idea of a social and
cultural centre was a first step leading from the postwar
suburban shopping centre to the branded urban districts of
today. This evolution was picked up by the developer James
Rouse and architect and planner Jon Jerde. Rouses particular
innovation was to link retail, historic structures and tourism,
a strategy that led to his trademark Festival Marketplaces.
Bostons Quincey Market (1976) and Baltimores Harborplace
(1984) were exemplary public-private projects of their time
and required close cooperation between innovative city
mayors, the developer and his architects. CityWalk (1993), in
Los Angeles Universal City, was Jerdes breakthrough project
and amounted to a new development type the urban
entertainment centre. Even more explicitly than Rouses
Festival Marketplaces, CityWalk posed questions for urbanists:
for example, what is urban and what is city? Overturning
private/public and real/artificial, CityWalk is both private and
artificial, while being popular and urban. Jerdes project showed
that the retail component could be scaled back and replaced by
entertainment functions and narrative urban space.
Lifestyle Centres: Mix
The shopping centre, having conquered the city, has
returned to the suburbs, recast as a lifestyle centre. This
bewildering designation describes what is basically an
upmarket shopping village with multiple buildings, a street
grid with sidewalks allowing some drive-up access, wellfurnished outdoor spaces and a broad variety of
consumption activities. Often described as town centres,
they are built near upper-middle-class residential areas and
23
Architekt Daniel Libeskind AG, Masterplan, Westside, Berne, Switzerland,

due for completion 2008
The masterplan in 2006. On the land bridge over the A1 are the lifestyle
shopping centre complex to the left, and housing plots to the right. The
shopping centre is flanked by a cineplex, hotel and conference centre, pool
complex with a spa and fitness centre, and a garden centre. The housing will
consist of 80 flats for the elderly, and 800 apartments for some 2,700 people
to be built over the next 10 years. The regional rail line runs along the lower
edge of the site. Regional bus lines stop at the two plazas in light blue.
include offices and some accommodation. In the low-density

city, their theme is a relaxed urbanity.3
In Europe, more distinctive hybrids of the lifestyle centre
are Brandhubs, or branded urban districts. They are defined
by Kerstin Hoeger as developments at an urban scale,
undertaken within a framework of public-private partnership,
and strategically implemented at a planning and government
level to foster urban development. They use architecture and
urban space to create an ambience for a brand. The complex
interweaving of social and economic goals requires the
cooperation of many stakeholders besides developer, property
owner and investor. From the beginning, Brandhubs have
required the equal partnership of the public sector, including
the surrounding communities.4
Westside, Berne
A project near the Swiss capital of Berne, scheduled to open in
2008, revisits in European terms the postwar restructuring of
the American city-region by the regional marketing strategies
of the great downtown department stores. Westside,5 a
lifestyle shopping centre complex sponsored by the Swiss
department store group Migros, will form a new regional
subcentre and provide an anchor and identity to the disparate
settlements on either side of the A1 highway west of the city.
The initial gesture is a major civil engineering work,
bridging over the A1 to provide a landlink for the existing and
planned communities. A new interchange will make the
complex accessible to one million people within half an hour,

and a regional railway station will link Westside to the Swiss
rail network. The core of the project is the shopping centre
and a series of public spaces designed by Daniel Libeskind.
Every large-scale multifunctional urban development has
an impact on its city and region, yet in the case of Westside,
what is new is that Migros, the developer, the city and canton
of Berne, and the surrounding communities have been
involved in negotiations from the start of the project. The goal
was to build consensus and support for the project on the part
of all stakeholders. For the Migros brand, and by extension all
of the other participating retailers, the goal is to develop a
robust long-term relationship with their client communities.6
Berne is a city of civil servants with stagnating population
and growth, while the suburbs to the west have above average
numbers of unemployed and foreign born. The Westside
complex should not merely physically link the fragmented
western suburbs, but provide a thematic focus: contemporary
lifestyle shopping in an architectural setting. We will soon be
able to see whether this fusion of infrastructural planning
with consumption and leisure activities anchored by signature
architectural spaces will be the starting point for a new model
of centrality and Swiss identity.7
Ebisquare, Ebikon, Lucerne
A traditionally contested aspect of shopping centres is their
public spaces; who owns them, who has the right to use
them and who is excluded? Social space in the low-density city
is an endless variation of semipublic, semiprivate, mobile and
virtual. However vague the term lifestyle centre may be, the
credibility of these places as centres depends on the
programmatic mix and the nature of the public spaces. A
second project by the same developer located on an industrial
strip intends to provide answers to these questions.
Where Westside is dependent on the architecture,
Ebisquare, set to open in 2011 in Ebikon near Lucerne,
focuses not on the building but on the performance of the
internal public space. As the project is currently out to bid,
we will focus briefly on the intentions of the designers,
Holzer Kobler Architekturen of Zurich. The lifestyle shopping
centre, with a programme similar to Westside, will be
animated by a public space that is intended to be in
permanent transition. The different spaces of the mall,
conceived as a Mbius strip, juxtapose virtual landscapes
and interactive functions with the adjoining consumption
spaces. At this point we cannot judge to what extent the
public space at Ebisquare will be an instrument or merely
spectacle. But what is certain is that the architects seek to
offer space that is informed and restless besides being
architecturally or urbanistically distinctive.
At Westside the larger urban organism is what is
important, with the architecture as the selling point, while at
Ebisquare the selling point will be the wild interior space.8 If
Westside reflects the complex participatory synergies that
must be in play in order to equip the low-density city, Ebisquare
24
Holzer Kobler Architekturen, Ebisquare, Ebikon, Lucerne, Switzerland,

due for completion 2011
Water + Meadows: continuous curated space. For the developer, the
starting point for the spatial concept should celebrate science, media,
communications and culture. Holzer Koblers goal is that the linear space
of the mall, formed into a continuous strip, will be a series of landscapes,
using sound and light to create both a real and virtual experience. The
chain of associations should extend to the product displays resulting in a
fusion of communications, atmosphere and stage design.
Since the 1970s, a large number of shopping centres have

been built, yet what is significant in terms of urban typology,
urban structure and public space is that many of them are
located adjacent to each other in clusters.10 Below I propose
the reurbanisation of such clusters as the basis for creating a
spatial and programmatic network of public places across the
broad cityscape of a megacity.
Section through lifestyle centre complex. Through an act of spatial surgery,

Holzer Kobler have inserted a Mbius strip of interactive mallspace that
incorporates the roof of the building. The space will be curated to ensure the
effect and meaning of real and virtual elements. Top: a typical section
showing a central internal mall. Below: the mall incorporates the roofscape.
The buildings on the right are the Senior Living Center.
may demonstrate the continued vitality of public space even

in the medialised, automobile-oriented low-density city.
Jakarta: Shopping Centre Clusters as the Beginning
of Public Space?
The meaning and function of the large shopping centres in
Jakarta is slightly different from that in North America and
western Europe.9 They are practically the only place for outof-home leisure, thus they become an essential social meeting
place. For the middle classes, other than the shopping centres
there is no public space in which to meet. At the moment,
lifestyle is best expressed in the proliferation of restaurants
and cafs where people come to eat, and indeed on Sunday the
restaurants are crowded with families having sit-down meals.
Shopping Centre Clusters as New Central Places

The shopping centre industry in Jakarta would like to
compete in the arena of shopping tourism with Singapore,
Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok. Yet merely continuing typical
real-estate development practices of the last decades, in which
the agenda of private development has overtaken the role of
public planning, will lead the city into an economic, ecological
and social cul-de-sac. The retail market is already saturated,
and the problems of traffic, air and water quality,
consumption of energy, and social segregation together
present difficult challenges.11 Neither government, private
enterprise nor community pressure can resolve these
problems on their own. Only a new synthesis of cooperative
and collective action can begin to roll back the metastasising
consequences of runaway development, governmental
weakness and the neglect of physical and social
infrastructure.12
Similar to the emergence of the North American edge cities
described by Joel Garreau, the shopping centre clusters in
Jakarta have become de facto subcentres in an expanding cityregion.13 To contribute to a new Jakarta identity and reframe
their potential as social, cultural and commercial magnets,
25
Cadiz International, Manila and Anggara, and PT Perentjana Djaja, Kelapa

Gading Mall, Jakarta, Indonesia, 1987
Google Earth view of shopping centre cluster. Under constant expansion since
1987, the cluster consists of La Piazza Entertainment Center and Gading Food
City (village), both of which are open-air and have their own public spaces,
shopping centres 1, 2 and 3 with parking (forming an L-shape), a site for
future shopping centre 4 with a hotel, the Summit Apartments, a traditional
bazaar, shop houses and La Piazza parking. The planned central pedestrian
boulevard will require the building of new entrances to all the adjoining
buildings. To what extent will the facades to the street be opened, and how
will the complex contribute to the liveliness of the surrounding boulevards?
Envirotech Indonesia, Mangga Dua district, Jakarta, 1988

Google Earth view of Mangga Dua district. Straddling its central boulevard,
the Mangga Dua cluster consists of four trade centres interconnected by
bridges, with adjoining hotels and parking garages. The surrounding district is
structured by a T-junction array of boulevards, with four trade centres and
hotels straddling the long arm of the T (left). Nearby two train lines serve a
passenger station at the edge of a large, now disused, freight railway yard.
Along the shorter arm of the T is a new trade centre and a large shopping
centre (both to the right). Due to market saturation, both of these new
complexes are having difficulties. Enhancing accessibility and diversifying the
functional mix of the different centres can prevent duplication and
redundancy. Cannibalistic retail development is an unsustainable practice.
developers need to innovate by adding non-retail functions,

such as education and training, thus supporting social equity.
A concept needs to be developed for the spaces between the
buildings, and legible connections to the surrounding
neighbourhoods must be established. The potential for Jakarta
is that, at the scale of the city, a network of public places can
be created consisting of the shopping centre clusters, the
historic colonial centre (Kota), the monumental public
buildings and spaces commemorating independence (Monas),
and the historic seafront (Ancol). All of these need to be linked
by coordinated public transport.
reinforcing both its external and internal accessibility, Kelapa

Gading is near to being an integrated district centre.
The trade centre cluster of Mangga Dua (1988) is known
throughout Southeast Asia as a destination for wholesale
buyers and retail shoppers for textiles and electronics.14 Lying
just east of the historic centre of Jakarta, the Mangga Dua
district is larger and more complex than Kelapa Gading.
Rather than an internal pedestrian concourse as at Kelapa
Gading, the urban value of the Mangga Dua district should be
given by the spatial quality of the boulevards. Not merely
traffic arteries, they should be extensively planted with trees,
equipped with pedestrian amenities and be well served by
various forms of public transport. Living boulevards would
bind the different trade and shopping centres into a single
cityscape. If the adjacent freight railyards could be developed
into a new mixed-use residential quarter served by the two
train lines, then Mangga Dua could develop into a selfsupporting urban district.
Two Shopping Centre Clusters: Kelapa Gading and Mangga Dua

Kelapa Gading Mall (1987) is a multi-use cluster with a
mixed market segment lifestyle mall selling everyday articles
at one end, while the other end is anchored by the spaces and
products that can be found in a good-quality shopping centre
in the West. By 2010, all of these fragments will be united by a
central pedestrian boulevard, which will require new facades
and entrances to the existing buildings.
The decision to reorient all of the functions to a new public
space is more easily undertaken when the whole complex is
under single ownership, yet this is the spatial development
that all of the other clusters must follow if these complexes
are to have any greater urban value than as mere shopping
precincts. Closely surrounded by compact middle-class
neighbourhoods, the management at Kelapa Gading contributes
to the security and maintenance of the nearby streets. By
Reimagining the Relationship Between Mall and City

While global entertainment and media corporations are
developing branded urban spaces and even branded urban
districts, more and more people have come to expect urban
space that is not only multifunctional and urban, but also safe
and convenient. Yet these new large-scale commercial
ensembles raise many of the same problems and questions
that were levelled against suburban and urban shopping
centres. Can the design of the marketplace lead to urban and
26
social renewal? Under what conditions do corporations want

to play a more positive social, cultural and environmental
role? And how are the goals of private development to be
balanced with the needs of local communities?
Our thesis is that current and future environmental
problems can only be met by a cooperative effort between the
stakeholders.15 In the context of Berne, existing planning
structures were modified to enable the creation of the
ensemble at Westside. Commerce is being used to rebalance
regional settlement, to create centrality, and hopefully to
create opportunity across the social spectrum. In contrast to
the consensus building and planned regional restructuring of

the Swiss examples, in Jakarta where questions of
sustainability and the effects of climate change are creating
pressure, such district management, communication and
participation structures need to be developed. Can the
collective ownership of the shopping centre clusters, working
in partnership with city government and the local
communities, frame and initiate long-term transformation
towards a legible and equitable city? At the heart of this
question is mediating the discrepancy between the new rich,
the middle classes and the working poor. 4
Notes
1. See, for example, D Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban
Growth 18202000, Pantheon (New York), 2003, pp 1658.
2. Three examples of the first generation of regional shopping centres,
diverse in their location and form, were John Grahams Northgate for Bon
March of Seattle, KGS for Jordan Marsh in Framingham, Massachusetts, and
Victor Gruen for the JL Hudson Co of Detroit, and again at Southdale for the
Dayton Co department store in Minneapolis. These arguments and the pivotal
role of Victor Gruen are further developed in my Victor Gruen: From Urban
Shop to New City, ACTAR (Barcelona), 2005.
3. See two recent articles posted on the internet: Andrew Blum, The Mall
Goes Undercover, It Now Looks Like A City Street, culturebox
(http://www.slate.com/id/2116246/), posted 6 April 2005, copyright
Washington Post 2007; and, Parija Bhatnagar, CNN (http://money.cnn.com/
2005/01/11/news/fortune 500), posted January 12, 2005.
4. Kees Christiaanse and Kerstin Hoeger, Corporate urbanism and
sustainability, in Built Identity: Swiss Res Corporate Architecture, Birkhauser
(Basel, Boston, Berlin), 2006, pp 1347.
5. Westside is owned by Migros Aare, managed by Neue Brnnen AG, was
conceived by Nuesch Development AG, and masterplanned by Daniel
Libeskind. Project partners are the city and canton of Berne. The idea to
create a regional centre to the west of Berne originated in the 1960s but was
shelved because of the oil crisis of the 1970s. Westside is the largest private
construction project in Switzerland. Direct precedents for our discussion of
branded urban districts are CityWalk, Universal City, Los Angeles; Disneys
Times Square Development, New York; and the Sony Centers in San
Fransisco, Berlin and Tokyo.
6. As Christoph Rossetti of the City Planning Department of Berne explained
in his email answer to my questionnaire, the participation takes place at
different levels: local landowners could register their ideas as the basic
programme was being developed; the masterplanning model and urban
design concept were developed by professionals of course, yet any citizen, or
citizen group, could take part; affected merchants or citizens could raise
objections; before permission was given to changes in the lifestyle shopping
centre, alterations were presented at hearings attended by cantonal civil
servants as well as local citizens groups; and finally the client, Migros,
asserted its claims during the planning and especially with respect to the
infrastructure contract.
7. The building of the Westside complex has had to overcome a number of
difficulties, including the decking over of the A1. Professionals and critics may
debate the merits of the architecture, but ultimately the skill of the
merchandising concept and the variety of the functional mix will be important
to engage visitors with the public spaces.
8. Conversations with Klaus-Peter Nuesch, Nuesch AG, St Gallen; Kerstin
Hoeger ETH, Zurich; and Barbara Holzer of Holzer Kobler Architekturen, Zurich.
Christoph Rossetti, city planner in Berne, kindly answered a questionnaire.
9. Shopping centre clusters are agglomerations comprising two or more
shopping centres of different generations, one or more trade centres, hotels,
apartment buildings and offices. Shopping centres in Jakarta are socialeconomic entities providing one job per 10 square metres (108 square feet)
of net retail space. For example, at the Taman Anggrek Mall, the number of
staff needed to run the complex is 200 administration, 400 security, 300
housekeeping, 100 parking and 200 building maintenance engineers. These
figures do not include sales staff for the shops and restaurants. In the trade
centres, for example at Pasar Pagi, there are 4,000 staff and sales personnel.
10. The study of the role of urban shopping centres for the future
development of Jakarta is a joint project, PRUDEV (The Role of the Private
Sector in Urban Development), between Real Estate Indonesia, the
department of City Planning and Urban Development at the University of
Tarumanagara, Jakarta, and the Chair of Urban Design at the University of
Karlsruhe. I thank Eduard Tjiahadi, Jo Santoso, Kemal Taruc, Liong,
Herlambang, and everyone who gave me their advice and time. Also, from the
shopping centres I thank Soegianto Nagaria of Kelapa Gading and Andreas
Kartawinata, Director, Lippo Group.
11. These problems are exacerbated by the effects of the Asian financial crisis
of 19902, which precipitated civil strife between ethnic Chinese and
Indonesians; the real-estate crisis of 1997, which left the city littered with
rotten buildings; and the devastating floods of 2002 and 2007.
12. Current problems include the citys concern that the explosion of retail
space represents a bubble economy. Shopping centre owner-operators and
their investors face market saturation: with a further 1.5 million square metres
(16.1 million square feet) in the pipeline, there will be an increasing number of
dead malls. Shopping centres pay extra taxes, and because of their reliance
on air conditioning incur high energy costs. There is a lack of political will and
inadequate tools to mediate spatial segregation and social inequality. City
land consistently falls to big investors. For local communities there is a lack
of purchasing power, housing, health and education. There is no supply of
affordable housing, and the resulting demand is exacerbated by immigration
from the rural hinterland. The programme of integrating small and mediumsized enterprises, and allotting 20 per cent of retail space to street vendors,
has proved difficult to implement.
13. In November 2006, Real Estate Indonesia sponsored a conference on
trends in real-estate and shopping centre development that was attended by
shopping centre developers, real-estate investors, academics and members
of local and national government. Here the City Governor, Fauzi Bowo,
exhorted the real-estate industry to work with all stakeholders to engage the
problems of the city.
14. Trade centres are large multistorey buildings housing up to several
hundred mom and pop stores, primarily offering textiles and/or electronic
goods; they have open floors for a large number of small shops. Based on
the practice in Taiwan, stall- or shopholders buy outright or lease their space
long term. The largest trade centres have several hundred shopholders.
15. Government must provide vision, guidance and regulation; in practice this
means balancing regulatory and tax conditions, creating incentives for
affordable housing, and supporting increased public transit. Public and private
consultant organisations must provide critical inputs, new cooperative and
participation models and equitable development strategies. Local
communities need to lobby support for housing, education and small
businesses. Finally, the strategic and economic power of private developers
must be harnessed for implementation. Given the forecast of growth over the
next three to five years, now is the time for stakeholders to begin these
transformative processes.
Text 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 22-3 & 24 Architekt Daniel
Libeskind AG, Renderings Edit-Bilder fr Architektur; p 25 Holzer Kobler
Architekturen, General planning Burckhardt und Partner; Architecture and
Facade Peter Vlki, Renderings Art Tools; p 26 Adapted from Google Earth
27
Old Dispersions and

Scenes for the Production
of Public Space
The Constructive Margins of Secondarity
The density of development in Belgium is such that the entire country has
become an open city, with little sense of where one metropolitan area begins
and another ends. Bruno De Meulder describes the underlying logic of this
unbroken urbanscape, and the opportunity it affords for re-editing and
reinserting informal social spaces in areas of wasted land.
Urbanisation of rural networks

The general urbanisation of the territory is to a large extent a parasite of the pre-existing network of rural roads
which undergoes no restructuring during urbanisation. Instead the urbanisation leads to an incremental infill of
plots along rural roads unequipped for urban use. In a second phase dendrite-like structures are grafted on to
the existing network in order to disclose the second order behind the ribbon development.
28
The nearly total urbanisation of the territory of Belgium

surely makes it an emblematic case in discussions about
dispersed urbanism, sprawl, citta diffusa, and so many other
terms that attempt without too much success to grasp the
reality of the contemporary urban condition. Belgium has
since unremembered time been a country of laissez faire,
where the cacophonic juxtaposition of built fragments
delivers surprise after surprise, where an intense poetry this
is Magritte territory lurks side by side with a nauseating
banality of everyday habitation. This at the same time
incredibly chaotic and urban landscape seems at first sight to
lack any coherence whatsoever. Nevertheless, a closer look
allows at least an insight into the ordering logics that
determine the continuous production and reproduction of the
seemingly chaotic territory, and eventually the development
of urban strategies to deal with it.
Factors1 that explain the unusual situation of the Belgian
territory include: the extraordinary fertility of the soil, which
gave rise to the very dense occupation of the countryside since
the early Middle Ages; a multitude of small-scale provincial
cities, usually only 20 kilometres (12.4 miles) apart; and the
intensive division of land property. The territory is
administered by a multitude of municipalities which, since
the municipal law of 1838, all have the same rights and
powers from hamlet to village to the larger city.2 This
extremely decentralised administration turned the territory
into an archipelago of municipalities which themselves are a
mosaic of the small land properties that underwent a
continuous process of further division through inheritance
law. Given the general laissez faire attitude, and consequently
the absence of any centrally imposed town-planning
regulations, the bulk of development takes the form of
incremental, piecemeal additions or transformations.
Development equals incremental mutation.
This general and uncoordinated urbanisation of the
territory was fuelled by two main Belgian characteristics: a
prevalent and persistent anti-urban catholic ideology (which
also implied a resistance to any centralisation of power), and
the implementation, step by step, of incredibly dense,
nationwide networks of different complementary
infrastructures (canals, national roads, railways, tramways
and, after the Second World War, express roads and highways).3
While the catholic ideology promoted home ownership in the
municipality of origin, the density, completeness and
accumulation of this different nationwide network created in
a certain way a universal accessibility for each spot of the
territory. The unification of the national territory resulted in
a unified national land, housing and labour market. Each spot
embodied the same accessibility and, consequently, in the
long run an equal development potential that ultimately led
to an isotropic condition (which might be considered as a zero
degree of redistributive democracy). Everywhere on the
periphery of the capital city or in remote hamlets an
emerging, permanent type of urbanity was generated,
juxtaposing housing, industry and commerce, which spread
over the whole territory. This urbanity has generally never

consolidated it is permanently emerging given the
mismatch between the disclosed development potential and
the effective development capacity required.
This process of unification and equalisation distorted the
traditional settlement pattern, and broke the monopoly of the
city as the centre of production and consumption,
concentration of labour, population, economical and political
power, as a forum of public debate, and so on. Put simply, it
eroded the notion of centrality. In terms of development
potential, any crossroads of two national roads, a train
station, tramway stop or a highway exit acquired the same
competitive advantage as the traditional city. Both centre and
periphery vanished and were replaced by an almost
omnipresent secondarity.4 Historic cities became merely
insignificant relicts in the isotropic territorial continuum
where industry (dense networks of flexible small- and
medium-sized enterprises), commerce, residence and
agriculture negligently cohabitate.
Conventional wisdom condemns this secondarity as a
burden, as it does not allow economies of scale, and nor does
it generate the synergies that concentration and accumulation
allow. Because it remains dispersed, incremental and
unconsolidated, it does not create any significant public
space, nor an established (hegemonic) order. On the other
hand, this absence of rules and norms, this generalised
condition of secondarity5 in opposition to primarity6
generates an ambiguous space. It creates an open city, an
embryonic territorial constellation that always remains
receptive. Its continuously reproduced undefinedness renders
permanent its character of wasteland, a terrain whose
potentiality is unconsumed.
In concrete terms, the combination of a sustained
generalised dispersion and a permanently emerging urbanity
gave rise to the formation of recurrent tissue figures in the
territory: the isolated terraced house in the middle of
nowhere; the notorious corner with (by now closed/shut
down) pubs at the tramway stop; the commercial ribbon
development along national roads;7 the ribbon fragment
along whatever road; the oversized and only half-developed
perimeter block8 that results from urbanisation without any
urbanistic restructuring of former rural road networks, and so
on. Over the last decade, plots varying in size, quality and
character (residential, industrial, commercial) have been
filling in the remaining open meshes of the multitude of
urbanised nets that cover the territory.
As a result, most of the spatial patterns are endless
recombinations of the aforementioned figures, creating such
a redundant variety that the territory becomes isotropic,
undefined by over-definition.
Since practically no sites have consolidated and become
primary land, they remain permanently emerging. The
landscape by definition becomes the defective interplay of
simultaneous and contradictory landscape forms: urban and
rural, yet, due to the negligent/secondary urbanisation
29
OSA, Atlas Southwest Flanders, 2002: Ferraris

1777 map of Ypres, West Flanders, and the
surrounding area
The late medieval territory here is intensively
occupied. The countryside is characterised by a
dense network of evenly distributed farms of
relatively small scale, with a very fine division of
the land and a large number of cities, often less
then 20 kilometres (12.4 miles) apart. The cities
often with crossroads between river and road
create centralities that appear as an
archipelago of cities in a sea of intensively
exploited and very fine-mazed rural territory.
30
Territory of West and East Flanders: from archipelago to rhizome (17702000)

From the 18th century onwards, a dense network of national roads, railways, tramways, highways and
expressways is superimposed on this territory. The proliferation of crossroads, stations, tramway stops,
exits on highways and so on distorts the spatial structure of the territory, as each of the crossroads creates
an equal accessibility and is hence a potential point of centrality. The archipelago of cities mutates in a
heavily infrastructured rhizome of secondary centres, and a territory of secondarity is generated.
Oversized perimeter blocks,

Wevelgem, West Flanders
Over time, this parasitic incremental
urbanisation process leads to the
formation of redundant figures in the
landscape, such as the well-known
ribbon development and oversized
perimeter blocks with their ever
expanding dimensions. In a second
phase the second order behind the
ribbons is sometimes filled in with
additions, garages, warehouses,
industrial buildings or, in recent
decades, with allotments that
consume the last of the open space.
This leads to an urban landscape in
which conglomerate and template
coexist as morphological principles.
31
OSA: Atlas Southwest Flanders, 2004: Buda intimacy/exposurepublic/private

The urban fabric that is generated by rather ad hoc and unconsidered infill, construction, demolition, reconstruction, and so
on leads to a large variety of open spaces with very different relationships to the private constructions. This unordered,
chaotic juxtaposition of open spaces offers on the one hand all conceivable gradients between public and private space, and
on the other opens up a register of spaces ranging from extremely exposed to intimate. A re-editing allows the articulation
and exploitation of this richness of open-space qualities as what is conventionally only seen as residual space.
process, a lot of residual landscape fragments. These are

neither urban nor rural, waste(d) lands that hopelessly try to
mediate between different scales, conflicting functions,
contradictory qualities and spatial paradigms: ribbon
development versus allotment, traditional building block
versus Modernist composition, urban versus rural,
conglomerate versus template, and so on.
In this territory, with its zero degree of spatial quality,
wave after wave of development deposited a layer of urban
material to the point where the whole territory was
covered/urbanised in one way or another.
The urbanistic project consequently becomes an intertextual work of re-editing (a weak embryonic) text. The
projects presented here, by OSA (the University of Leuvens
Research Group for Urbanity and Architecture), attempt such
a re-editing exercise in Southwest Flanders.9 They attempt to
use new development to insert minimal spatial qualities,
necessary structures and missing public spaces, while at the
same time avoiding an overdose of structuring and definition,
which would eventually destroy the fundamental quality of
the open city Belgium has become, including the protodemocratic character of its spatial constellation. By no means
do they aim for a comprehensive requalification of the
territory. However, they do focus on potential sites of
condensation (in the sense of subconcentration and
precipitation the fallout of new material) that allow
articulation, relief and contrast, and are, in one way or
Buda block/element
The urban fabric is generated by ad hoc infill along ribbons and the
unconsidered induction of freestanding, large-scale buildings often in a first
order/second order relation.
32
another, intended to substructure the open city mainly via the

introduction of public spaces of a new kind. They are not
programmatic programmes are usually interchangeable
anyway but try to use the interstices between production
and reproduction to re-create ambiguous spaces (public in this
case) that invite given their reaffirmed secondarity new
social practices. In the end, social practices are the sole
creators of public life, and hence public spaces.
What all of OSAs projects have in common is the search
for new types of scenes secret gardens, platforms, quays,
fields and parks that without too much emphasis invite
and facilitate new types of social interaction. They are far
from neutral, but at the same time everything but overdefined and deterministic. These open signifiers have the
ambition to unlock the latent potentiality of waste(d) land, the
latent urbanity of the open city.
In short, instead of following the mainstream discourse
on the loss of public space (it is difficult to lose something
that was never there) and the loss of urbanity (ditto) caused
by the dispersed city, the work of OSA is an urbanistic credo
that is testimony to a belief in emerging new social practices
that are enabled by the insertion of the public spaces of
tomorrow in an open city that is still only on the verge of
becoming urban. 4
Notes
1. For a more elaborated history of the Belgian urbanisation process see, for
example, Bruno De Meulder and Michiel Dehaene, Atlas Fascikel 1: Zuidelijk
West-Vlaanderen, Anno 02, Kortrijk, 2002.
2. Fernand Brunfaut, La condition municipale, Le Travail (Verviers), 1951.
3. For more detailed information see, for example, Bruno De Meulder et al,
Patching up the Belgian Landscape, Oase, 52, 1999, pp 78112.
4. Jean Remy, Ville: Ordre et violence, PUF (Paris), 1981, p 59.
5. Secondarity refers to the non-functional and irrational concretisation of a
desired spatial experience, a space that is created by processes of bricolage,
the subconscious and subversive trial-and-error production of new common
grounds.
6. Primarity characterises a condition where the production of space is
dictated by the necessities of subsistence and survival. It is a modus operandi
that assembles utilities to create efficient environments, mostly regulated by
an engineering rationality.
7. Bruno De Meulder, Lintbebouwing: Algemeen n Belgisch, SRO (86), 2005,
4, pp 403.
8. See, for example, the case study in Bruno De Meulder and Oswald Devisch,
Atlas Fascikel 3: Wevelgem, 2002.
9. The urbanistic work presented here forms part of the Atlas-project Southwest
Flanders that OSA undertakes, in collaboration with and commissioned by, the
Leiedal intermunicipal association in South Flanders. So far it includes a study of
the municipality of Wevelgem, the Buda Island project in the city of Kortrijk, the
secret gardens project on Buda Island, the redevelopment of the St Amandscollege in Kortrijk, the redevelopment of the power plant site in Zwevegem, a
landscape development strategy for the Bossuit-Kortrijk canal, a landscape
development strategy for the E17 highway in Southwest Flanders, and a study of
the Pand in Waregem. Results of this urbanistic work are published as fascicles
of the Atlas Southwest Flanders: fascicles 0, 1, 2 (on architecture); 3 Wevelgem;
4 Transformator, Project voor de Electriciteitscentrale, Zwevegem; 6 Kortrijk
Buda; 7 Gelijktijdige Landschappen, Canalscape, and so on.
Text 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images OSA-KULeuven
Buda secret garden

The Buda Island project exploits and articulates the coincidence of opposing
morphological logics (oversized perimeter block versus freestanding
buildings, both zero-degree versions of traditional building blocks and the
Modernist paradigm) to create a variety of open and closed spaces that are
different in character and nature, as a support for an open city, an inviting
space that can accommodate a variety of different uses and atmospheres
side by side.
Simultaneous landscapes/canalscape project

The existing infrastructure of canals, railway lines and national roads
generated the mutation of the countryside into a rhizomatic urban landscape
composed of simultaneously present landscapes (industry, urban, rural). The
project requalifies this infrastructure in a canalscape, a network of quays,
gardens, fields and forests that inscribe themselves in the netcity and in
doing so restructure the netcity and introduce spaces for public appropriation.
33
Water and Asphalt

The Project of Isotropy in the
Metropolitan Region of Venice
Through an exploration of the Veneto region close to Venice, in northeastern

Italy, Paola Vigan provides an alternative definition of the dispersed territory.
Rather than archetypal sprawl, which has developed out of untamed growth of
metropolitan areas, this is an ancient landscape of evenly scattered
development that has grown up alongside roads and waterways.
B Secchi, P Vigan and students of the IUAV PhD in Urbanism, Water and Asphalt:
The Project of Isotropy, 10th Architecture Biennale, Venice, 2006
Water and asphalt: the project of an isotropic territory. The research is based on the hypothesis that new conditions today exist
for redevising the isotropic space in the greater metropolitan area of Venice starting from its main support: water and asphalt.
34
Territories of Dispersion
Sprawl cannot adequately describe a territory of dispersion
where specific economies, society and cultures are related to
an extended way of experiencing, using, and living in a place.
It is a term pertaining to English-speaking cultures, and has
a long and heavily connoted history. The phenomenon of
dispersion in Europe can be interpreted in at least two
different ways:1 the first emphasises the breaking of an
equilibrium, the traditional relationship between town and
country; the second insists on development without
fractures2 that distributes resources and creates
opportunities for individual undertakings. Following the
former, sprawl concerns the spreading out of the city and the
commuting of its inhabitants; the second deals with
traditional conditions of dispersion for example, a dense
network of infrastructures which, since the 1960s in
several parts of Italy, have supported the original economy
and territorial form.
The two interpretations often coexist and overlap, but to
forget the latter in favour of sprawl means, at least for many
European regions, accepting oversimplified and generic
explanations. There are similarities between sprawl and the
territories of dispersion, but the process of diffusion, the
extended use of the territory3 and the mix of functions differ:
ancient as opposed to recent; horizontal instead of vertical;
integrated more than juxtaposed. In the metropolitan region
of Venice, the longue dure dispersion has been related to the
presence of specific infrastructural configurations, in
particular of a diffused and isotropic sponge of roads and
waters isotropic in the sense that they more or less create
the same conditions throughout the territory, whatever the
direction and wherever the point of observation. Movements
of different kinds can percolate through them.
In the territory around Venice,

water and asphalt today have
different types of relations: they
run parallel, constructing the
same landscape, or separately
defining opposing features.
Water and Asphalt: Rationalisations
In the territory around Venice, water and asphalt today have
different types of relations: they run parallel, constructing the
same landscape, or separately defining opposing features. In a
very close dimension one can appreciate totally different
experiences: you only have to turn the corner and you enter
into a different landscape where rhythms and sounds produce
an estrangement. The supports of a population whose social
mobility has been very high in recent decades, water and

asphalt are today in deep crisis. They are no longer considered
adequate for contemporary needs and for contemporary
imagery: new projects bring to bear a logic of hierarchisation,
fragmentation and homogenisation.4
To understand this hiatus we started by naming.5 Our
vocabulary is ever less rich and ever less suited to
understanding how the various devices that make the plain,
the high, dry and permeable plain, the mid-wet and
impermeable plain, and the low reclaimed plain, work. We
encounter a long history of territorial rationalisation: the
Roman centuriatio (a technique for the reclamation and
subdivision of the land made by a grid of canals and roads of
710 metres/2,329 feet), the river diversions and rectifications,
the waterways excavated in the lagoon, the fishing valleys,
filling and reclaiming, the building of roads, highways,
tramways and so on a process in which different forms of
rationalities have been superimposed on each other.
In a very short and simplified overview, three main
periods/events can be identified. The first important
rationalisation was the Roman centuriatio. Starting from the
2nd century BC, it developed at the same time as a drainage
system, a plot subdivision and a road infrastructure, and
proceeds along the mid-wet and impermeable plain, twisting
and turning to reach the draining slopes. In the Middle Ages
the Benedictine order reclaimed the abandoned system,
partially reconstructing it and bringing it into the modern
era. The 16th century witnessed the beginning of the great
diversions of the rivers entering the lagoon by the Venetian
Republic to avoid the silting up of the protective water surface
with sand and gravel brought from the northern mountains
the second important rationalisation. The rivers were
displaced to the east and to the west of the lagoon in an
incredible effort that is at the origin of the new science of
hydrology.6 And in the 1930s, the Fascist period, huge
reclamation works were carried out in the low wet areas
around the lagoon using polderisation procedures similar to
those being used by the Dutch. This third great rationalisation
was strong enough to completely change the physical and
ecological character of the area.
Each rationalisation has created its own landscape: the
centuriatio, for example, combines rows of trees, cultivated
fields divided by minor drainage lines, roads and, more
recently, houses and factories.
The Project of Isotropy
This study poses three principal questions: What is still
contemporary in the past process of rationalisation? Is
isotropy a figure of contemporary and future rationality?
What new conditions have emerged to enable the conception
of a new project of isotropy?
The process of dispersion, as mentioned above, can be
related to the spatial configuration of diffused and isotropic
infrastructures. The utopia of an isotropic territory lies within
the character of this as of other territories of dispersion.
35
B Secchi, P Vigan and student S Favaro, Water and Asphalt, European

Post-graduate Master in Urbanism (EMU), fall semester, 2006
Water (red) + asphalt (grey) + pits and dumps (black). In the metropolitan
region of Venice, water and asphalt define the isotropic conditions. Old
pits and dumps are dispersed, but in relation to the geological features,
and can be reused to design an extended net of public spaces in relation
to water and asphalt.
View from the hillside towards the plain in the proximity of Vicenza, in the
Veneto region. The picture is quite exemplary, showing the way in which
houses and industries merge with agricultural features, a dense road network
and an even denser water system.
Each rationalisation has created its own landscape.

Top left: The aggeratio, for example, combines rows of trees, cultivated fields
divided by drainage lines, roads and, more recently, houses and factories.
Above: The landscape of the dry plain contains the remainder of a mesh of
canals transformed in a tree structure of concrete canals in the Fascist period
to irrigate the industrial agriculture in the gravel plain. New processes of
rationalisation are today modifying these. Left: The landscape of reclamation.
The landscape of the low wet plain is the result of a strong process of
reclamation during the Fascist period in favour of industrial agriculture. Today
the role and function of these areas can be rethought.
36
Processes of rationalisation. The Venetian territory has been invested with strong processes of rationalisation: the
Roman aggeratio, river diversions and rectifications, waterways in the lagoon, filling and reclaiming, the building of
roads, highways, tramways and so on a process in which the isotropic features have often been reinforced.
Isotropy is an extreme and ideal figure: the territory is not

perfectly isotropic and it is not homogeneous. Today a new
project of isotropy is at the same time the acknowledgement
of a territorial specificity, a scenario to be investigated in its
manifold consequences, and a design hypothesis that can be
concretely devised in terms of intervention on the water
system, on roads and public transport, alternative mobility,
forms of diffused welfare, innovative agriculture and the
decentralised production of energy.
The research here is based on the hypothesis that new
conditions now exist for redevising the isotropic space in the
metropolitan area of Venice. This is not a big urban project,
but an incremental series of undertakings beginning with
water and asphalt: the problems of flooding and scarcity
demand more space for water; the future of agriculture, after
the EU policy of subsidies, is to become a multifunctional
landscape; the fragments, often marginal and dispersed, of
the modern welfare state, schools, sport fields, playgrounds,
public green and so on represent an impressive isotropic
distribution that can match with and reinforce a mesh of
railways, tramways, waterways and paths; and the energy
crises can be tackled with decentralised production. In this
framework, isotropy reveals traditional aspects of economic,
political and ecological rationality: less costs due to flood
damage, an increase in territorial porosity and permeability,
both social and ecological. Although not fully accomplished,
the great image of isotropy and its consequences on the
design of space is perhaps the only one able to reconstruct a
comprehensive image and the possibility of a territorial design.
The paradox of public spaces

in the territories of dispersion
is clear, revealing at the same
time the crisis of traditional
urbanity, of the modern
concept of public space and
the limits of a strongly
individualised way of life.
The landscape of reclamation. The schemes here show the complex hydraulic
system of the reclaimed land of the low wet plain.
37
A new project of isotropy is now possible: the problems of flooding and

scarcity demand more space for water. The future of agriculture, after the EU
policy of subsidies, is to become a multifunctional landscape also for
decentralised energy production and woods; and the fragments of the
modern welfare state represent an impressive isotropic distribution that can
match with and reinforce a mesh of railways, tramways, waterways and paths.
1. Water and flooding areas; 2. More space for the water; 3. Existing woods; 4.
Minimum 10 per cent new woods; 5. Roads + railways (in black) + waterways
(in red); 6. A new mesh of public transport (each circle is 5 kilometres/3.1
miles); 7. New woods and agricultural areas.
38
P Vigan, U degli Uberti, G Lambrechts, T Lombardo and G Zaccariotto, Landscapes of Water research project, IUAV, Venice, 2006
Redesign of a gravel pit as a public space and water reservoir (section). The Merotto gravel-pit recuperation is a pilot project that explores the
reuse of gravel pits as flood-water reservoirs together with a new canal as a new public space. The canal has a variable section, and utilises
flood control to introduce a new type of landscape within the widespread territory and with it a new connection between differing environments.
The Territory: A New Scale for Public Space

The paradox of public spaces in the territories of dispersion is
clear, revealing at the same time the crisis of traditional
urbanity, of the modern concept of public space and the limits
of a strongly individualised way of life. A weak structure of
small squares, roadside churches, and modern facilities often
in marginal and disconnected areas, is dispersed throughout
the territory. In recent years, much investment has been made
to requalify public spaces within a traditional urban
framework, often inventing them where they had never
existed and in competition with new places of consumption.
The welfare city, highly standardised and isotropic, has found
it difficult to represent the peculiar mix of rurality and
urbanity of the Venetian territory, and has remained a
predominantly functional space.
Public space is something larger. It is an infrastructural
space that individuals cannot afford on their own. Yet it is a
social space that we consider our own. It is not only related to
urbanity or to the modern idea of welfare, but to larger
symbolic representations. In a metropolitan region such as
Venice, where more than 70 per cent of the land is still
cultivated (only producing 2.8 per cent of GDP), the reference
cannot be Times Square, nor the village community space. In
the European dispersed territories, along the isotropic
network of water and asphalt, minimal and large-scale
projects can produce denser environments. Flooding areas,
former gravel-pits, new forests, irrigation devices, canals and

public transport nodes are materials and places with and in
which to reformulate the concept of public and the concept of
public space. They are dispersed elements that could support
todays different activities connected to an extended use of
the territory, to new forms of collective representation and
free time. They are not related to an idea of centre and
periphery, but to the construction of a field of horizontal
conditions for contemporary practices and ecology. 4
Notes
1. P Vigan (ed), New Territories, Q2, Officina Edizioni (Rome), 2004. See in
particular my introduction.
2. G Fu and C Zacchia, Industrializzazione senza fratture, Il Mulino (Bologna), 1983.
3. B Secchi, Un progetto per lurbanistica, Einaudi (Turin), 1989.
4. H Lefebvre, La production de lespace, Anthropos (Paris), 1974; see in
particular the introduction to the third edition (1986).
5. See P Vigan, U degli Uberti, G Lambrechts, T Lombardo and G Zaccariotto,
Paesaggi dellacqua (Landscapes of Water), forthcoming; B Secchi, P Vigan
and students of the IUAV PhD in Urbanism (M Ballarin, M Brunello, N
Dattomo, D De Mattia, E Dusi, V Ferrario, S Giametta, E Giannotti, M Gronning,
T Lombardo, P Marchevet, J McOisans (Centre de recherches sur lespace
sonore & lenvironnement urbain-Grenoble), M Patruno, M Pertoldi, S Porcaro,
C Renzoni, A Scarponi, L Stroszeck, M Tattara, F Vanin, F Verona, G
Zaccariotto, A Zaragoza), Water and Asphalt: The Project of Isotropy, 10th
Architecture Biennale, Venice, 2006.
6. P Bevilacqua, Venezia e le acque, Donzelli (Rome), 1995.
Text 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 36(tr&br), 39 Paola Vigan;
pp 34, 36(tl), 37, 38 Bernard Secchi, Paola Vigan; p 36(cl&bl) TerraItaly
by Pictometry, Compagna Generale Riprese Aeree
39
Intermittent Cities
On Waiting Spaces and How to Inhabit Transforming Cities

Claudia Faraone and Andrea Sarti tap into the potential of the
transient contemporary city, which is incessantly growing and evolving.
By networking a series of sites either officially or unofficially
awaiting development they provide the city of dispersal with a highly
dynamic, ready-made urban culture.
40
Contemporary cities, especially their dispersed parts, tend to

change and grow incessantly. The phenomenon of city sprawling
characterised the second half of the 20th century and became
so widespread and powerful that it has shifted the way cities
were traditionally organised, from well-contained urbanities
to the dispersed territories we live in today.
The industrial progress in building constructions, the
development of technology and communication, the mass
diffusion of individual privately owned cars, and the
transformation of the heavy-industry based economy into a
service one, together made cities spill out beyond their
surrounding territories and regenerate their interiors in a

continuous cycle of building on undeveloped areas and reuse
of existing urban terrains.
Exemplary results of this process can be clearly found
within the European territory, where different types of
sprawling cities, produced by different economic, social and
political conditions, compose an even yet small-grained entity.
Looking at a satellite image of the European territory, we
recognise the Dutch structured dispersion or the Flemish
diamond and, further south, the mixed diffused city of the
Veneto region of northeast Italy.
Four different examples of waiting spaces:

Top: Near a construction site but disconnected from the surrounding urban transformation, on the edge of a development in Marcon.
Upper middle: Beside a productive and commercial area, close to an exchange parking lot and a bus stop in Mogliano Veneto.
Lower middle: Disused bus depot in Mestre.
Bottom: Close to a residential area, within a consolidated neighbourhood in Marghera.
Claudia Faraone and Andrea Serti, Intermittent Cities: On Waiting Spaces and How to
Inhabit Transforming Cities, Veneto, Italy, 2004
Map of waiting spaces in a portion of the dispersed city in the Veneto region (the so-called
citta diffusa, or diffused city) between Venice-Mestre, Mogliano Veneto and Marcon. The
waiting spaces will build on the existing infrastructure of roads, cycle paths, exchange
parking lots and bus lines to create an interconnected network.
41
Spatial configurations depending on waiting space availability and location.
42
A duration sequence in the network of waiting spaces.
Spatial configuration of modular units according to different activities. For

each waiting space, a series of spatial configurations is made possible
depending on how much time is available, the location of the space and the
requested activities. Each is provided with a city info-point or a modular unit
situated at the entrance to the waiting space, and a basic, self-sustainable
infrastructure as a possible means of awakening the space (for example,
parking lots with solar panels).
43
Among the outcomes of this consuming and recycling of

the territory, an emerging kind of urban space can be
recognised: waiting spaces a definition that comes from
their main characteristic of standing empty or unused, and
therefore waiting, while their immediate surroundings are
growing, evolving and being used.
On the one hand, waiting spaces are areas that belong to
expanding portions of the city that have never been used but
in which it is nevertheless predictable that a transformation
will occur. These can be found in peripheral commercial centres
and new city extensions around Mestre and Venice city, or in
contested urban spaces such as Piazza Freud in Milan.
On the other hand, waiting spaces can be found in
abandoned structures and places now ready to be used again:
the ACTV bus storage in Mestre, or beyond the Veneto region
Battersea Power Station in London.
Interpreting the dispersed city as composed of intermittently
functioning waiting spaces, a new design approach can be
applied to the portions of urban territory that are in the time
span: just before their turning on or soon after their turning
off. Since they have the ability to re-create themselves
endlessly, waiting spaces can provide a temporal shelter for
urban activities that are temporary or cannot take place
inside the canonical productive system of contemporary cities.
While preparing the Intermittent Cities project, we observed and participated

in similar projects that were a real test of the short-term organisation
necessary for a waiting space. One of these was organised by Esterni, a
sociocultural association that promotes non-profit public and cultural
activities in Milan. In Piazza Freud, near Garibaldi station, and running parallel
to Milan Design Week 2004 for 10 days, this waiting space was turned on,
with concerts, performances, university classes and public lectures,
reclaiming the space.
This newly imagined

intermittent city will be
produced by temporally
networking a series of waiting
spaces at the scale of the
urban region, using the
existing infrastructure of
roads, bicycle paths, exchange
parking lots and bus lines,
and using wireless
technologies and selfsufficient energies.
This newly imagined intermittent city will be produced by
temporally networking a series of waiting spaces at the scale
of the urban region, using the existing infrastructure of roads,
bicycle paths, exchange parking lots and bus lines, and using
wireless technologies and self-sufficient energies.
As a continuously changing entity, the intermittent city
can be switched on or off, assembled or dismantled based on
demand. Catching intervals of time will allow for a
44
This constantly updated online database of available waiting spaces can map
possible locations and works in coordination with the Venice municipalitys
urban planning website. Acting as a territorial interface, it allows single users
and small public/private institutions such as art galleries, cultural
associations, libraries and community associations to contribute towards
building a collective urban and cultural awareness across the territory.
A possible testing location for a long-term waiting space is a site in

Campalto, between Mestre and Venice airport. Because of its edge
conditions, near a settlement with few facilities and very close to the airport
and the main road to Venice, and with a parking lot nearby, we tested our
space configurations by organising them in thematic strips. Artistic,
recreational, information and promotion strips with different and
complementary levels of activities were used to meet every eventuality:
from art galleries that might need modular units for their satellite
exhibitions, to libraries that might need to close their central building for a
while, or the school nearby requiring a new playground for its pupils.
temporary transformation of waiting spaces into public

spaces: from a matter of fact to an urban design proposition.
Individuals, groups of individuals or small collective
entities will be given the opportunity to incrementally build
the software needed to produce an urban culture for the
dispersed city. Small-scale private or public actions with a
high amenity value will improve waiting spaces by hosting
currently missing urban public activities. Temporal ways of
inhabiting and experiencing the city would be possible inside
these spaces, along with their management and regulation,
through events such as concerts, conferences, sports
performances, as well as public activities and facilities like
playgrounds, art galleries, small satellite libraries, bicycle
sharing points and so on.
Working with mobile and changeable architecture, small
modular units equip the waiting spaces with flexible devices
capable of various spatial configurations to host different
users. Sustainable, self-sufficient elements and
infrastructure will guarantee that the intermittent city will
function, and once a series of activities becomes linked to
the waiting space it will begin to attract other, similar or
complementary, activities. 4
Note
This project has been developed as part of the authors thesis at IUAV,
Architecture University of Venice, with Bernardo Secchi as promoter and
Stefano Munarin as co-promoter.
Text 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images Claudia Faraone and
Andrea Sarti
45
String Block Vs Superblock

Patterns of Dispersal in China
The superblock in China has become the dominant unit of urban planning,
allowing for rapid urban growth while also meeting the needs of state and
property developer alike. Kjersti Monson explains the conditions that have
given rise to the superblock, while challenging it by proposing an alternative
stringblock approach, rooted more in collective culture and addressing the
demands of the market-driven economy.
At the high end, superblocks function as the ultimate in gated communities truly wonderful
tower-in-the-park environments. Alternatively, they can be relentless in their standardisation and
repetitiveness. Whether a project becomes one or the other is often entirely up to the developer.
46
The superblock represents the DNA of urban expansion in

China. As the basic unit of urban planning and real-estate
transactions it defines the new Chinese city in a way that the
grid and parcel defined New York. The grid and parcel laid the
foundation for real-estate transactions in the American city
that were in keeping with US values related to the individuals
right to land and property. So does the superblock lay the
foundation for transactions that are in keeping with Chinese
values related to the state and collective culture. Basic cultural
institutions and assumptions underlie the superblock form,
which was not born in China but has perhaps reached its
zenith as a megatypology within that context.
Because the superblock type is so dominant as the vehicle
for Chinese urbanisation, it is here that any discussion should
start by considering improving the qualitative outcomes of
new development as it pertains to the public interest, public
space and sustainability.
A superblock can vary in size from 8 hectares (20 acres) in
an existing urban area to 40 hectares (100 acres) or more in
newly urbanising rural peripheries. As a type, it is efficient for
implementing rapid expansion since it allows the government
to limit its hard investment to the planning and construction
of a widely spaced pattern of major infrastructure only,
shedding enormous chunks of developable land with approved
use rights in single transactions, wherein the private owner
will plan and build interior roads. The sheer scale of a typical
superblock requires that the developer has large capital
reserves and high political standing, and must also possess
the operational and financial capacity to produce a megaproject.
Standard superblocks create an urban fabric characterised
by discrete, large and homogenous cells a candybox
urbanism. This phenomenon is underscored by the
requirement in newly planned expansion areas (Pudong is
such an area, being built from the ground up on previous
agricultural lands) for 15-metre (50-foot) or greater green
buffer zones between the kerb and the proposed buildings.
This precludes multiple blocks from relating to one another
with a cohesive streetscape, and furthermore necessitates
frontage roads to be built within the green buffer, often
duplicating the existing road and encircling the inner block.
Because the typical superblock morphology is cellular, it
is not a type that blends well with its environment and it
inherently tends to diminish the possibility of cohesive
public space or the stewardship of natural systems. However,
its spatial logic is practical from a planning, construction
and leasing point of view. Discrete circulation (in the spirit
of the cul-de-sac) for each building phase is considered
preferable so that leasing can begin on one area while
another is still under construction.
The land is parcelled and planned by the government at a
scale that requires large financial transactions, both in the
sale of rights as well as in the ensuing land improvements and
construction. Each superblock project can rapidly deliver large
numbers of housing units to market while offering a
financially attractive prospect to the global-standard
developer and financier. Buildings within a superblock project

tend to be standardised, streamlining the design process and
reducing costs. The process capitalises on the strength of the
Chinese systems of Local Design Institutes (LDIs) a system of
state-owned architecture and engineering institutes that
provide standardised construction documentation at a very
low cost. The LDI system is designed for maximum efficiency
through an institutionalised preference for using templates
and standards instead of pushing design innovation. LDIs are
typically a required partner for projects of any scale on the
Chinese mainland.
In the end, although the result of this process sometimes
leaves a lot to be desired with regard to public space,
sustainable city-making and social justice, the will to change
it is hard to find since it has thus far functioned adequately
from both a state and private development perspective. As
cities expand ever further into the hinterland, performance is
harder to gauge.
Collective Culture and the Built Environment
The creation of collectivized dining halls, nurseries, kindergartens,
dormitories, laundries, and repair shops will really break radically
with the existing family attitude toward property, and this will
provide the economic premises for the extinction of the family as an
economic unit.
NA Miliutin in Sotsgorod: The Problem of Building Socialist
Cities, 19741
The Communist Revolution is the most radical rupture with existing
property relations; no wonder that its development is the most radical
rupture with traditional ideas.
K Marx and F Engels, Communist Manifesto2
A history steeped in collective culture, along with the cultural
assumptions that grew from the system of institutionalised
architecture created to realise the communal built
environments in the style of Soviet communism, informed how
China ultimately structured its land lease and development
regulations, which allowed for a real-estate market to emerge
in the late 1980s. In addition to defining a legal and political
process for bringing land to market, the government defined
a planning process for urban land with the superblock as its
basic unit. The lack of a finer grain of parcellisation ensured
that development would continue at the scale of the collective
rather than of the individual. Given the allowable densities,
single developers could house entire small cities in one project.
The dominant typology for land transactions, and therefore
for urban expansion under the current system, is the
superblock. In order to understand why transactions are
occurring only at this scale, and why the individual remains
peripheral to land development in China, it is useful to
explore the countrys history as a collective culture.
Collective culture, long an underlying component of
Chinese civilisation, became a tangible characteristic of each
47
The enormous model of downtown Shanghai at the Shanghai Urban Planning

Museum reveals a large-grained cellular pattern of development typical of
superblock fabric. Each block is distinct with regard to massing, circulation
and open space, and is typically disconnected from other blocks by large and
fast-moving roads, resulting in a sort of insular candybox urbanism.
Chinese citizens daily life in the 1950s through the bricksand-mortar restructuring of both city and countryside into
working communal environments and political structures
under Mao. When the Peoples Republic was formed, the
Chinese population was collectivised, with the basic and most
important unit of socialisation being the work unit. The
work unit was at the core of everyday life, and was the
building block of Chinese socialism. In the city, this building
block was called the danwei. In the countryside, it was the
production team. The work unit was the nucleus of the
political and social life of a village, and had spatial
implications depending on the means of production
employed. An agricultural village was cell-like; an industrial
village was linear, and most likely sited along a canal. An
urban danwei provided the worker members with everything
they needed within a defined and controlled area, including
the workplace or factory, residential dormitories, cafeteria
and school. As large-scale, closed-loop and collectivised walled
compounds, danweis constituted the basic social and built
structure of the Chinese city. They were defined first and
foremost as centres of production.
Throughout most of the pre-marketisation communist era
or, more specifically, from 1953 to 1984, land was
nationalised. Under the law, two kinds of land were
recognised: state-owned land, which was either urban land or
a nationally significant natural resource, and collectively
owned land, which was rural or suburban. The system of local
administration was split into three levels: the peoples
commune (administrator of the town and liaison to higher
officials), the production brigade (administrator of the

natural village often a group with familial ties and
coordinator of production teams), and the production team (a
designated group of peasant labourers working together
towards production goals).
Land and resources were not held individually, but by the
state or commune. Nevertheless, under the law, land rights
were necessarily represented by designated parties those
with standing to negotiate in the event of a dispute or landuse change. The state was the legal representative of urban
land rights and natural resources. The production team was
the legal representative of collectively owned land rights.
Therefore the legal framework governing land rights reflected
the ideological values of Chinese socialism by privileging two
parties with legal standing under the law: the state and the
work unit (production team).
Collectivisation meant more than the pooling of labour and
the communal allocation of resources. It also meant common
eating and living spaces a standard feature of the dormitory
living units built at this time. Standardising communal living
arrangements underscored the national dedication to
instilling socialist values at every level. The work unit, or
danwei, was not only the building block of the socialist city, it
was the core of communist identity. It represented social
identity through work, familial ties and national ideology.
As the basic unit of urban planning and real-estate transactions in China, the
superblock defines the new Chinese city in the same way that the grid defines
New York. As a type, it has difficulty coping with context, environment and
existing conditions. Nevertheless, due to its high efficiency for rapid expansion,
clear terms of transaction and strong formal likeness to the collective
compounds of Chinas recent history, it is likely to remain dominant and should
be considered as a formal and functional type ready for urban design innovation.
48
As China turns its attention to the ever expanding periphery and the
countryside, the broad-axe development framework represented by the
superblock will necessarily have to adapt. The superblock is highly efficient
for planning and land transactions, but its form creates enormous disruption
to existing natural and cultural systems.
Marketisation
Land parcels are the most important State-owned assets valued at 25
trillion yuan (US$3.019 trillion), more than triple the total value of
other State-owned properties.
Peoples Daily Online, 25 June 20023
Instead of moving toward a completely capitalist socio-economic
system, China is in transition to a market socialism.
a natural resource (land), whose monetary value had been
neglected since 1949, suddenly assumes a very important role in the
overall Chinese economy How then does this from nothing to
everything situation come about?
Li Ling Hin, Privatization of Urban Land in Shanghai, 19964
Marketisation is a legal and political process by which stateowned land in China becomes developable, and through
which real property is brought to market. The marketisation
process in China has heralded a period of unprecedented
urban expansion. It has also resulted in the resettlement of
large numbers of people and the loss of agricultural land as
cities and infrastructure rapidly expand.
The first hint that there is something fundamentally
unique about the new mode of land distribution and
development in China is the political incorrectness of using
the term privatisation to describe it. Indeed, among Chinese
planners and officials, marketisation is the correct term.
Because the state has not in fact turned over ownership of
land, but rather has established a system of long-term leases
and rights of use, it is considered incorrect to refer to
developable land as privatised. China still perceives itself very
much as a socialist state, albeit one that has floated a market
of tradable land rights.
When marketisation began as a result of new legislation in

the early 1980s, the communes of the Peoples Republic were
decollectivised and political structures and organisations were
renamed. Peoples commune, production bridgade and
production team became township, administrative village
and natural village. The two forms of property remained:
state owned (urban land) and collectively owned (rural and
suburban land). A key difference under the new system,
however, was that no legal representative of collective
ownership rights was identified under the law.
The laws and processes of development for state-owned
urban land have been quickly and precisely mapped out over
the past 20 years. State-owned urban land has a clear
delineation of use rights and specific quantitative planning
and entitlement regulations, giving it the stability and
predictability that is a prerequisite of any serious investor or
developer. Part of this predictability comes from the fact that
the process of bringing developable urban land to market is a
highly controlled process in China.
As new expansion areas are identified and approved by
Beijing, they enter into state- or municipal-level design
institutes where land uses and infrastructure are planned and
approved. Masterplans are produced according to top-down
planning agendas, whether the creation of new government
centres for peripheral new towns, expanded industry and
logistics around a new deep-water port, key financial districts
or new residential units to meet projected demand. These
plans typically and sometimes rightfully have no
relationship to the fabric that existed before them,
necessitating substantial relocation and compensation to be
undertaken by the developer. Plans focus on major
infrastructure and land uses, using the superblock as the
basic structural and transactional unit. An auction occurs in
which land-use rights are sold to developers who proceed
through the site planning, entitlements, construction and
lease-up that bring new real estate to market.
At the time of the initial land transaction between public
and private, government planners have already defined the
scale, general land use and scope of what will be built. The
government rarely imposes additional conditions that could
forward the public interest, such as easements facilitating
public space or environmental goals, exactions or
performance-based rules. This should be an important subject
for advocates of the good city in China, as it is in defining
these nuances of the regulatory relationship between public
and private that one truly begins to affect change on a
massive scale with regard to quality-of-life outcomes. In the
current regulatory climate in China, the outcome of a by-thebook development is typically a fabric of disconnected dense
megablocks that may pose challenges to both social and
ecological systems. At the high end, these blocks function as
the ultimate in gated communities truly wonderful towerin-the-park environments. At the low end, they are relentless
rows of standardised housing. Whether a project becomes one
or the other is entirely up to the developer.
49
The basic unit of collectivisation in China was the production team, or work
unit, which was granted communal land rights under the law. The revolution
sought to shift definition of the basic economic building block and property
rights from being family-based to being commune-based.
In both city and countryside, settlements in the latter half of 20th-century

China were defined first and foremost by the means of production employed
in them. Residents would work in the factory or farm that defined their
commune, or danwei, live in the commune, and obtain services in the
commune as a collective. Here, a suburban industrial commune has a linear
form, taking advantage of a large canal. A farming commune takes on a
cellular form, with a dense residential centre and surrounding farmlands.
The fate of collectively owned land has been different from

that of state-owned urban land. Rural and suburban villages
are still largely functioning as collectives, although individual
farmers have been granted leases. With no recognised legal
owner-representative, the land has by default been subject to
land grabs and wasteful development practices by local
officials throughout China.
One area under the collective land law that has developed
quickly is the land impressment process, or how land can be
reclaimed by the state, converted to urban land and its
residents resettled. Meanwhile, the simple questions of who
owns the land, what villagers can do to improve their own
situation or benefit from growth, and the problem of how
potential investors might engage this territory remain vague.
From the perspective of an entrepreneur, this hinterland
represents too many legal grey areas, with indistinct rights
and limitations. As it currently stands, the countryside is

frozen from a land rights point of view, awaiting state
intervention. The refined process of land development via the
superblock does not fit rural or suburban land. The scale of
development and market absorption that a superblock
development must inherently assume in order to justify such
a large land acquisition at the start may not be realistic in
peripheral areas, where the population may be sparse,
migration minimal and buyers hard to come by.
There are differences in both the social frameworks and
legal frameworks governing urban land as compared to rural
or suburban land. Market reform in China has led to a specific
form of collectively owned enterprise in rural areas (Town and
Village Enterprise),5 but has yet to clarify collective property
ownership rights, resulting in major hurdles for sustained
economic growth and investment. These differences are about
to become significant barriers as China turns its face to the
countryside, or more precisely the New Socialist Countryside
as outlined in its 11th Five Year Plan in 2006.6
Evolution
Creation of a centralised system of planning, a top-down
hierarchy of architectural institutes linked to the state, and
the construction of communal living and working
environments all underwrote socialist tenets in tangible ways
in each Chinese citizens life and community from the 1950s
onwards. The social and political system made communal
decision-making a way of life, and the basic unit of social
organisation was not the individual but the collective.
When China implemented the land-use regulations (LURs)
of the 1980s, it created a revised system of land rights,
moving towards a system of market socialism. The process of
creating land supply and parcelling newly developable land
Former collective types such as lilong (lane) housing or hutong (courtyard)

housing are now being replaced as marketisation brings new superblocks
online throughout city centres and peripheries. The superblock may differ in
the way it engages the private sector in order to be produced, but it maintains
the socialist lineage of planning and city building in units of large-scale
insular compounds rather than city-building at a parcel scale.
50
for transaction took the form of superblocks and maintained

the fundamental powers of the state to implement top-down
control. It also preserved the basic principle of planning at the
scale of the collective rather than the individual.
Despite the problems inherent in superblock planning
especially environmental degradation and the polarisation of
city and countryside the principles of collective culture that
underlie the rise of the superblock as the definitive
contemporary Chinese urban form are not likely to change
quickly, if at all. This is not because officials deny or do not
care about the apparent problems inherent in the type.
Indeed, for a system only around 20 years old, one might be
surprised that there are not more severe conflicts arising. A
lot of trouble has been avoided through the governments
focus on urban land, not suburban and rural land, in this first
surge of growth.
As China turns its attention to the ever expanding
periphery and the countryside, the broad-axe development
framework represented by the superblock will necessarily
have to adapt. The superblock is highly efficient for planning
and land transactions, but its form creates enormous
disruption to existing natural and cultural systems. When
applied in rural settings, it is a destructive force that can be
considered speculative at best with regard to real-estate
markets, since no one can predict the kind of density a
superblock will assume on a site that is entirely peripheral to
the city. As the superblock is not designed to coexist but to
replace, it requires a tabula rasa attitude towards context that
makes any notion of organic or phased growth that engages
local populations nearly impossible to imagine.
I propose exploring the superblock as a malleable type that
may adopt alternative, less inherently damaging forms. Given
the right regulatory framework, superblock-style land
transactions and financing could be adapted for redeployment
in suburban or rural areas seeking development keeping the
basic DNA of the superblock method intact while adopting a
more integrated attitude towards context and form.
A Masterplan for the Fengxian District Suburb of Shanghai
In 2005, while living in Shanghai, I created a Hong Kong
company with two partners Aaron Loke, a business leader
and McKinsey consultant, and entrepreneur Francis Yum.
The company, Design Community China, Ltd (DCC), signed a
memorandum of understanding with Fengxian District,
suburban Shanghai, to undertake an experimental planning
process and possible development for Fengcheng town that
culminated in an 80-page planning document. Fengcheng is
one of the nine towns in Shanghais One City Nine Towns
2020 Plan.7
DCC sought to establish a formal framework for organic
growth in the district that would benefit the matrix of
farming villages that surround the town, as well as attract
development interests who prefer the predictability of the
superblock planning model. We evaluated the existing
landscape structure north of the town, noting that where
Top of City in downtown Shanghai is a good example of relative success in

superblock planning. The small scale of the block (around 7 hectares/18 acres)
makes for an intimate and gardenesque centre. A man-made lake is maintained
as a living habitat where turtles, fish and toads reside. The community
maintains a newsletter and encourages residents to get to know one another
through planned events. However, the project turns its back on the public,
with sentries posted at each entrance, and although it engages the natural it
does so at a superficial level creating a sort of pond aquarium that sits on
top of underground parking without engaging any larger functioning ecologies.
51
The Fengxian plan maintains the basic DNA of the superblock but presents as
more of a string. The circulation hierarchy, phasing and leasing are the same,
but the simple choice of where to draw a property line during the land
impressment process which is entirely at the discretion of the government
planner has enormous potential impact on surrounding communes.
Design Community China (DCC), Masterplan for Fengcheng town,

Fengxian District, Shanghai, China, 2005
In a planning study for an area of 150 hectares (371 acres) in conjunction with
the town of Fengcheng in Fengxian District, a suburb of Shanghai, DCC
mapped the pattern of existing agricultural and industrial communes on the
site and determined where village mortality would occur as a result of the
existing superblock masterplan.
The DCC masterplan for peripheral Fengcheng proposed a pattern of

development that would allow new fabric to coexist with the communes and
farmland already on the site. Developable land consisted of out-of-date
industrial uses, villages that were already facing demise due to existing
superblock development, and low-grade commercial edges. Functioning
farmland and small villages were largely preserved.
superblocks are already planned and infrastructure under

construction, there would already be some village mortality.
Using this matrix as an organising structure, we
endeavoured to create a plan that could be built, phased and
financed like a superblock but that would interact more
positively with its context.
The plan was composed of focused development areas,
allowing existing farmlands to continue functioning, leaving
hydrology intact and respecting the boundaries of communal
lands. It does not assume or even advocate that these lands
remain active farmland in perpetuity indeed this seems
unlikely. The principle at stake is that a new development
should not necessitate the demise of functioning webs of
activity at its edges. The simple choice of where to draw a
property line which is entirely at the discretion of the
government planner has enormous potential impact on
surrounding communes.
Our proposal reflects the basic DNA of the superblock in
terms of density, circulation, use, public planning role and
financing. Formally, it differs from the traditional superblock.
It presents as more of a string than a cell, in order to allow
adjacent uses to coexist with the intervention. The string
block maintains the fundamental components of standard
development, but with different structuring rules.
Ultimately, the breadth and limitations of suburban and
rural residents rights will have to be clarified under the law.
Once this happens, it is highly unlikely that the superblock
will persist in its current candybox form as a development
type in peripheral areas. As land rights and regulations are
fleshed out and become more complex under the law, so will
urban form. This project is a tentative first step, but in the
future it is hoped that urban designers and planners will
further push the boundaries of what is possible within
Chinas superblock megatypology.
Ultimately, our plan was supported by officials in the
district (including the offices of the planning bureau,
agricultural bureau and party secretary) but has as yet failed
to be approved by Shanghai Municipality. Insufficient land
quotas, the relative insignificance of the project from a
municipal point of view, defiance of typical planning processes
and political barriers have all played a role in the delay, and
we continue to await a final outcome on the venture. 4
52
The Fengxian masterplan sought to create a positive interface between agricultural lands and new development. Fields
would provide vista opportunities for key public spaces, and views to them were designed into the plan. A farmers market
acted as the heart of the development and the most direct interaction between new residents and farmers. Where village
mortality was occurring, the team envisioned existing structures as reuse opportunities with a unique scale and fabric.
Notes
1. NA Miliutin, Sotsgorod: The Problem of Building Socialist Cities, MIT Press
(Cambridge, MA), 1974, p 81.
2. As quoted in NA Miliutin, op cit, p 81.
3. Land Market Reform Advances, But Calls for Fair Play, Peoples Daily Online,
25 June 2002. (http://english.people.com.cn/200206/25/eng20020625_98507.shtml)
4. Li Ling Hin, Privatization of Urban Land in Shanghai, Hong Kong University
Press (Hong Kong), 1996, p 2.
5. Enrico Perotti et al, Working Paper Number 150: State-Owned versus
Township and Village Enterprises in China, The United Nations University
World Institute for Development Economics Research, 1998, pp 245.
6. The 11th Five Year Plan of the Chinese Communist Party was adopted in
the fourth session of the 10th National Peoples Congress in October 2006.
Highlights of the rural development policy and particularly the New Socialist
Countryside concept can be found on Chinas official government website at

http://english.gov.cn/special/rd_index.htm.
7. Shanghais One City, Nine Towns 2020 Plan has been discussed and its
components published and interpreted widely in various media since the plan
was adopted by the State Council in May 2001. Maps and documents are not
publicly available in print form, but can be viewed on display at the Shanghai
Urban Planning Exhibition Center in downtown Shanghai. The author
documented key elements of the plan through photographs of this exhibition,
policy research, and interviews with Chinese planners and academics over nearly
three years spent living and working in China. The author also visited, studied
and in two cases worked in focus areas of the 2020 plan, including Anting
Newtown, Qingpu District, Chongming Island and Fengcheng, Fengxian District.
Text 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images Kjersti Monson
As development pushes further into the Chinese countryside, and as the New Socialist Countryside concept of Chinas 11th Five
Year Plan takes shape in the coming years, the superblock type will have to evolve and adapt to a new set of regulatory issues,
increasing pressure to ensure social justice and address the very real concerns about environmental degradation in China.
53
In the Our Beautiful Future

Martha Rosler describes Oleanna, a collaborative project, manifested in part at the
2003 Venice Biennale, that joined together students and artists in imagining alternative
publics to rescue the utopian hopes of modernity.
Oleanna was a project for the Utopia Station exhibition at the

Venice Biennale 2003. The exhibition was organised by Hans Ulrich
Obrist, Molly Nesbit and Rirkrit Tiravanija. Of these, only Obrist is a
professional curator; the other two are, respectively, an art historian
and an artist. The attraction of this exhibition was its origin in a
discursive project: a proposed book, a number of public and private
discussions, and latterly a set of posters an ongoing investigation
that seemed to have flopped over on to an exhibition like a fish too
large for the plate.
That year I was teaching a project class in Stockholms
Konstfack and another class in Copenhagen, at the Royal Academy
(in Mur og Rum, a school noted for communal action and social
projects), and I invited the students to collaborate on a project for
Venice. Considering Scandinavias recent history of utopian design
and social engineering against a centuries-long backdrop of fratricidal war, I proposed that we think together, imagining an alternative
public through a new transnational/postnational collectivity.
54
We named this imaginary post-place collective space Oleanna,

after a failed mid-19th-century colony in Pennsylvania, dreamed up
by Norwegian violinist and adventurer Ole Bull, who encouraged
Scandinavian farmers to join him there without ascertaining arability. (Oleanna was memorialised in a satirical song by Norwegian
newspaperman Ditmar Meidel in 1853. I learnt of it through Pete
Seegers version in the 1960s.)
Arguing Oleannas attributes, writing constitutions, manifestos
and mottos, we considered Hardt & Negri, Lefebvre, Chris Marker,
Debord and fellow Situationists, Tafuri, Buck-Morss, Benedict
Anderson, Foucault, Niemeyer, Buckminster Fuller, Kiesler and
utopian feminist science fiction, as well as documents and
manifestos of resistance and of everyday utopian life on earth, in
imaginary spaces, and even in outer space. We interviewed local
activists and Free University theorists, as well as a few of the renegade Scandinavian (Bauhaus) Situationists those expelled from
the movement for refusing to renounce the art world. (During the
Biennale of 1968, a season of widespread protests and boycotts of
classes and refusal to participate in exhibitions, members of this
group held a brief sit-in, calling themselves a Trojan horse; to
commemorate this 35-year anniversary, we flew a Trojan horse
banner over our spiral-adorned seminar hill top.)
A building to house our projects, to act as a base, and to
provide a watering station in summertime Venice, seemed
necessary; we considered Futuro, a 1950s vacuum-formed plastic
holiday house, or a more updated blob. The groups idea was selfeffacing infinitude, open structure and hospitality. We decided on an
unfinished building that would be a hybrid space bridge, spaceship
and space station. I invited the Massachusetts-based architect
Andrew Herscher, whom I had met mid-project in New York, to
work with us online. Herschers plans, after many consultations and
adjustments (incorporating Biennale-imposed strictures), led to the
construction of the space/ship/ station nothing like a blob, finally,
(except possibly the roof) or the mutable bundles of aluminium
tubes and plastic sheeting Herscher initially proposed but a raised
wooden octagon with intermittent walls. We carried building sections
in teams on unbuilt roads from the canalside. Forbidden to use
mechanical equipment, we raised our building like a barn, by hand.
55
The roof was a drape of transparent plastic dotted with metal

circles, such as I had seen at a Copenhagen graveyard. The walls
were painted in representative colours and bore painted ellipses
shadows of the absent Futuro folk-based Danish cutouts, the
names, in alphabetical order, of the projects Venice participants,
and a bicycle wheel, since the Scandinavians missed their bikes in
canal-crossed Venice (our main poster showed the participants on
bikes spiralling into the cosmos). Interior seating was provided by
cushions sewn into strips, while outdoors we used seminar cloths
of oilcloth bearing mottoes of resistance (such as singer Ani di
Francos Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right). On pillows or
thought balloons attached to the cloth, art students sewed an
array of direct, allusive or ironic slogans (reclaim public space,
water, gross national happiness, friendship, space, power, solidarity,
reclaim democracy ).
We saw our building as a symbolic bridge and way station to
utopia, parked in the garden of the Arsenale to house our imagined
community as we reflected on just after the global multitudes
had demonstrated against the US war in Iraq, which began anyway
and continues on matters of exodus and exile, from the Aeneid to
the space age (cf the Swedish poet Harry Martinsons epic poem
Aniara, of 1956, about post-apocalyptic Mars-bound colonists
catapulted into deep space, a meditation on art and civilisation). We
reported on intentional communities in Copenhagen and Jutland,
produced a 10-issue newspaper (in Copenhagen and Venice), and
made videotapes, performances and quite a few posters on the
theme of utopia. Our project, hosted by Utopia Station within the
Biennale, hosted other projects centred on social space. Some
were by local architecture students and others included artists
Kirsten Dufour and Finn Thybo Anderssons plans for a Palestinian
community centre in Copenhagen and antiwar flyers from my New
York artists group. We flew the multicoloured PACE flag displayed
throughout Italy that summer.
I invited participation by students in my graduate sculpture class
in New Haven (Yale) and a small group of international artists (the
Fleas) who had participated in a workshop I had led in Florida a
year earlier (we still continue with a robust online correspondence).
Our group project, in addition to a poster, was a 9-metre (29.5-foot)
long banner on the theme In Our Beautiful Future, produced for us
by the Vienna-based Museum in Progress. But the bulk of the
project was accomplished with the Scandinavian students, who
came together to work, prepare meals, watch and produce movies
and tapes, read, think, argue, drink beer, do research and design
work, and construct the building sections in Copenhagen before
Venice (where we were joined by Flea members from Australia,
Canada, Germany and the US).
56
In addition to providing rest, shade and water, and a space for

dreaming for visitors to our garden site (about a kilometre from the
Arsenale entrance) in the crushing heat of the opening week, we
provided a shady spot on our seminar hillock, furnished with our
seminar cloths, where we also held a talk on women and science
fiction, a seminar for curators on art projects outside institutional
walls, and I did a performance, Speculations and Speculative Fictions, recapitulating some of our themes.
A quotation from Susan Buck-Morss offered us a reigning idea:
we have to work our way through the rubble to rescue the utopian
hopes of modernity, because we cannot afford to let them
1
disappear. Our unfinished project was meant finally to provide an
archive and to create a network for work to be done elsewhere and
otherwise. 4
Note
1. Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass
Utopia in East and West, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 2000, p 68.
Text 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 54, 57(br) Oleanna/Martha
Rosler; pp 55, 56 and 57(t) Martha Rosler; p 57(bl) Fleas/Martha Rosler;
artwork by Deborah Kelly
Oleanna: My Andersson Lind, Nanna Debois Buhl, Tamar Guimares,

Tarje Eikanger Gullaksen, Christina Hamre, Molly Haslund, Ulla
Hvejsel, Charlotte Bergmann Johansen, Line Skywalker Karlstrm,
Karoline H Larsen, Jens Hultquist Laursen, Per Nystrm, Kasper
Akhoj Pedersen, Mia Joo Vo Rosasco, Martha Rosler, Mille Rude,
Annesofie Sandal, Julie Sinding, Ulrika Sparre, Nanna Starck, Maria
Werger, Lilach Weiss Zach, Erik kesson. Fleas: Daniel Blochwitz,
Jill Dawsey, Deborah Kelly, Ellen Moffat, Horit Herman Peled, Martha
Rosler, Trebor Scholz, Mary Jo Walters
57
Archipelago of the Negev Desert
A Temporal/Collective Plan for Beer Sheva, Israel
Known locally as the non-city, Beer Sheva in

southern Israel is made up of segregated
communities with no central core. Rafi Segal
proposes a way of creating connectivity while
accepting the citys lack of centre and
optimising on its beautiful desert landscape
and Bedouin inheritance.
Countless efforts to establish a dense and active city centre for

Beer Sheva have failed. Its extreme desert climate, culture and
sociopolitical conditions have not allowed the development of a
traditional city core. Within the early years of the Israeli state, and
under the motto of blooming the desert, Beer Sheva in the south
of the country found itself part of the new Zionist frontier that
sought to combine advanced agriculture with the national mission
of settling new Jewish communities in the Negev Desert. It became
the emblematic tabula rasa; its peripheral location and desert
setting served as a site of urban and architectural experimentation.
Notable here were the attempts to appropriate Modernist concrete
housing slabs to the extreme arid climate. The construction of Beer
Sheva went in hand with state objectives to push the nomad
Bedouin tribes outside the city. Historically, during the early 20th
century, under Ottoman rule, the city was conceived as a regional
centre of exchange and gathering that came to life just a few days
a week when the nomadic tribes (Bedouin) came to set up the
market on Wednesdays and congregate for joint prayers on Fridays.
The desire to turn the city into a larger fixed urban centre for a
permanent modernised Jewish population met with too many
difficulties: that of drawing new inhabitants to the city, as well as
lack of government support which, for political and strategic
reasons, favoured other towns and settlements that were situated
closer to territorial conflicts and thus considered a higher priority
for national security. Later attempts to house new immigrants in the
city increased social and ethnic separation, leading to segregated
communities: utterly disconnected from any sense of urban identity,
they are still referred to by the alphabet describing the land plots on
the citys masterplan (neighborhood c, neighborhood d, and so on)
The fact remains that although situated in a beautiful desert
landscape, in an area with access to water, Beer Sheva is currently
one of the most run-down cities in Israel. Inhabited by diverse
groups (such as Ethopian Jews, Russian immigrants and oldergeneration settlers) in neighbourhoods socially set apart from each
other, it has all the infrastructure of a populated urban environment
yet it lacks the sense of city a notion that led to its nickname as
the non-city. Beer Shevas architecture and urbanism disregard its
unique natural setting, missing opportunities to benefit from this
resource. This attitude towards the environment is also reflected
through the attitude towards the Bedouin tribes most of them
currently occupying areas within a 20-kilometre (12.4-mile) radius
of Beer Sheva, with a population equivalent to the number of
Israelis living within the current city boundaries.
Sketch exploring urban erasure.
59
1900s
erasure # 1
1950s
erasure # 2
2000s
erasure # 3
Rafi Segal, Archipelago of the Negev

Desert, Beer Sheva, Israel, 2007
In this proposal, developed with Yonatan
Cohen and Kate Snider, the residential
neighbourhoods of Beer Sheva become
islands, shifted apart by the entry of the desert
into the city. Top: Existing neighbourhoods.
Bottom: The proposed plan. Public
buildings/institutions are in red.
Growth and erasure: the growth of Beer Sheva

throughout the 20th century (left column) and the
proposed future development (right column) involving
a process of erasure to expand the citys inner voids.
60
New collective spaces are created by giving shape to different programmes

within the expanded inner-city voids. Since the programmes are temporal,
each with its own cycle, they can overlap and occupy the same space at
different times. (1) zones for Bedouin herd movement; (2) flower tourism
(flower fields that bloom in the desert aproximately three weeks a year); (3)
community agriculture; (4) market areas/trade zones; (5) four-wheel drive
recreation routes; (6) tent camps.
Public Voids/Temporal Programmes

Departing from the understanding that Beer Shevas lack of a centre
is one of its inherited conditions, the proposal here introduces a
decentralised urban scheme in which the city is fragmented into
distant neighbourhoods, allowing the desert to flow through it.
These neighbourhoods are set apart from each other, becoming
islands floating in a desert landscape. The existing inner voids are
expanded to a point where they become continuous, creating an
ocean of desert space in which the island-like neighbourhoods are
scattered. This ocean of unclaimed land becomes a transient public
space. Within it are formed designated collective areas/zones, each
inscribed with a new temporal programme with its own cycle/time
frame of activity. The collective zones/programmes intersect and
overlap, in many cases occupying the same space at different
times. From an environmental and ecological point of view, this
inner void prevents the city from becoming one large mass,
allowing both desert and city to breathe. The Bedouin tribes take
part in activating this space, as a place of passage from one part of
the desert to the other.
Segregation, usually understood negatively as interrupting the
livelihoods of people, here allows coexistence. It perpetuates flow
and enables distinct modes of living and diverse groups of people
to occupy the same space.
The notion of the urban is established through links and
connections between nodes of activity and the juxtaposition of the
collective programmes with smaller neighbourhood clusters all
surrounded inside and out by the unique desert landscape on
which Beer Sheva has until now turned its back. 4
61
Overlay of all temporal collective programmes

within the inner voids. Existing public buildings
are in orange. The collective programmes are
shown simultaneously although each occurs at a
different time/season.
Existing inner city void, Beer Sheva, 2007.
62
The Negev Desert, Israel, 2007.

Text @ 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images Rafi Segal
63
Peripheral Landscapes,
El Caracol, Mexico City
In Mexico City, unplanned illegal development exists cheek by jowl with developerdriven housing. Jose Castillo of arquitectura 911sc explains how the practices project
for New Caracol provides leisure facilities and open space that afford opportunities
for social and cultural exchange between the two different communities.
64
During the mid-20th century, El Caracol

became a quite productive industrial
landscape, with a spiral jetty moving
water along shallow ponds extracting
the sodium carbonate by evaporating
the water and then processing it to use
it in the factories nearby. An area of
agricultural fields, with no housing, just
infrastructure, would become a
settlement of close to two million
people in just five decades.
Historically, the urbanisation that characterises Mexico Citys

periphery is the materialisation of a twofold process. On the one
hand informal urbanisation, the formerly dominant model of citymaking, has been produced outside the legal, regulatory and
professional frameworks through different forms of occupation
such as squatting, illegal sales and subdivisions of underserviced
land. On the other we see a more recent phenomenon,
characterised by the large-scale transformation of greenfield and
brownfield tracts of land into developer-driven housing.
El Caracol is such a site a palimpsest of histories, geological,
hydrological and industrial, as well as social and political following
the logic of real-estate and informal processes. The El Caracol
plant was built on the site in 1942 to desalinate the water of Lake
Texcoco by moving it through a series of shallow ponds in a spiral
path and extracting the sodium carbonate. In the mid-1990s the
plant shut down, and 10 years later 13,000 new units of low-income
housing were built. Just next to them is the informal settlement of
El Salado, a continuously growing self-built, para-legal community.
arquitectura 911scs project for the New Caracol recognises the
site as a space between city and landscape, between the suburb
and the shanty town, between the natural and the post-industrial. It
is also the space of negotiation between conflicting forces, such as
the public need for preservation and the private thrust for
development. El Caracol introduces a new kind of open space that
supports the coexistence of multiple forces. Aside from functioning
as a park for leisure and contemporary art, and a working
hydrological infrastructure, it also acts as a rapport between formal
and informal development.
arquitectura 911sc (Jose Castillo and

Sadee Springall), New Caracol,
Ecatepec, Mexico City, 2007
Render: View from the southeast. By
densifying through specific punctual
interventions in the northwestern part of
New Caracol and leaving the
southeastern section as a hydrological
infrastructure, the project strives to erase
the distinction between infrastructure
and park, city and landscape.
65
Satellite image showing the different patterns of urbanisation, dis- and sub-urbanisation operating in the northern periphery
of Mexico City. Caracol remains the most visible geographical marker, and the other urban dynamics operate around it.
Development diagrams. The transition from greenfield/brownfield to (sub)urbanised

land is always an incremental process with complex dynamics over time.
66
The multiplicity of conditions at El Caracol show the ambiguous nature of the periphery.
In arquitectura 911scs proposal, the autonomous 13,000-unit

development and the adjoining informal settlement are
complemented by programmes in the New Caracol that they
currently lack, including workspaces and retail spaces, open space
and infrastructure.
In the context of large megacities, where sprawl is the
dominant mode of growth and where there is always a battle
between nature and urbanisation, the project strives to put
infrastructure on the front burner, achieving improved
performance even within the context of low-density growth. By
preserving the defined geometry of El Caracol, and charging it
with programmes and use, geography and infrastructure become
a more relevant urbanism for the outskirts. 4
Text 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 64-5, 66-7 arquitectura
911SC; p 65(t) Aerofoto Mxico
Plan: scale 1:10,000. The New Caracol project is a landscape of negotiation:

between the formal and the informal, the natural and the urban, and the
hydrological and the leisure park.
67
Urban Voids:
Grounds for Change
Reimagining Philadelphias
Vacant Lands
68
Dispersal is most often regarded as an

upshot of population rises as the
demographic grows and spreads outwards of
the city centre. Cities, though, can
simultaneously experience contraction and
expansion. Despite being the sixth largest
city in the US, Philadelphia is a shrinking
city; deindustrialistion has prompted urban
abandonment at the same time as the
growth of urban sprawl. Deenah Loeb,
executive director of the City Parks
Association of Philadelphia, describes how
the URBAN VOIDS competition was
launched in order to trigger public discussion
and the reimagining of a greened city.
What does a city do to respond to its vacancy crisis? Decreasing
populations in many American cities during the last 40 years have
shifted the dynamics of the built environment across the nation.
Philadelphia is an example of a cityscape that has been greatly
impacted by both deindustrialisation and suburbanisation: the city
currently has more than 30,000 vacant plots totalling around 405
hectares (1,000 acres), an area roughly the same size as its city
centre. Philadelphias present vacancy crisis is a result of urban
abandonment and extensive sprawl. It is a place where the
economy is drifting as it responds incoherently to continued
1
industrial restructuring concerns that are shared by cities
throughout the country.
The City Parks Association launched URBAN VOIDS: grounds
2
for change in September 2005 as the second phase of the
Philadelphia LANDvisions initiative (www.landvisions.org). This
multiphase programme was created to generate new thinking
about the future of Philadelphias vacant lands and to act as a
catalyst for implementation: vacancy could be an opportunity to
imagine a new future for the city that had lost its population,
resulting in lower urban density.
The URBAN VOIDS: grounds for change international ideas
competition attracted 220 entries from 27 countries, and challenged
entrants to propose new visions and possibilities for Philadelphias
extensive inventory of vacant land by responding to the citys
unique ecological infrastructure. It offered an opportunity to design
in relation to shifting human and urban marks on the land. Similar
to the way that land and water resources have historically drawn
people to settle, the ecology of a place can again be a force that
can shape urban form.
The competition entries featured here investigate and illustrate
how this low-density urban environment can be reoccupied,
instilling the voids with a wide range of new uses. 4
Notes
1. Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, Back to
Prosperity: A Competitive Agenda for Renewing Pennsylvania, Brookings
Institution, December 2003, p 1.
2. Competition advisor, Van Alen Institute, New York.
City of Philadelphia: density of vacant properties, 2006.
69
Front Studio (Yen Ha and Ostap Rudakevych), Farmadelphia, 2006

Front Studios entry proposes transforming the citys urban fabric with the introduction of farmlands incongruous
rural elements that create a juxtaposition between farm and city. The conversion of vacant sites would provide
employment and encourage entrepreneurship: the act of farming seeks to empower residents to take charge of their
land while creating localised centres of activity. Farm and city begin to function as one integral machine combining
the pleasure of open sky and land with the richness of city living.
70
Thaddeus Pawlowski and Srdjan Jovanovic, Hilltopia: new topographies, new communities, 2005
The Hilltopia team suggest taking the excess soil from rapidly developing suburban areas to build new topographies
in the city. These new landforms hill-bounded neighbourhoods would guide the citys evolution of new boundaries
providing spaciousness and privacy . The mounded forms could also support new energy-efficient housing models,
employ sustainable practices for managing storm-water treatment or, at their summits, turbines for new energy.
71
Anuradha Mathur and Dillip da Cunha, Bio-Philadelphia.com: engineering a new surface, 2005
Bio-Philadelphia is poised to champion the transition from technology to biotechnology, from making inert things (such
as manufacturing) to making living things. This shift of industry will open new frontiers in science and in the nature of
human settlement. Philadelphia will sculpt new multifaceted working landscapes that support greenhouses, experimental
fields for energy, environment and economy, and dynamic living surfaces. The new landscape will blur boundaries between
industry and habitation in every sense, reactivating the American frontier toward the cultivation of a new living surface.
72
Jill Desimini and Danilo Martic, Timescapes: densifying community activities, 2006
Timescapes proposes to stimulate discourse between the vacant lots of the inner-city neighbourhood and the
adjacent open space of Fairmount Park, while looking skyward as a strategy to cultivate density. The 3-D
sidewalk is a specific development of this investigation, gathering together a range of activities in a vertical
spatial element that engages the edges of the neighbourhood.
Text 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 68 City of Philadelphia; pp 69-73
Urban Voids: grounds for change, City Parks Association of Philadelphia
73
Urban [IM]plants
Tactics for Recombining Landscape and

Collective Space in Bonheiden, Belgium
Bonheiden, in the province of Antwerp in Belgium, lies in a region known for its
exceptional natural beauty. Though the surrounding rural setting has remained
protected this has often been to the detriment of urban life, as the built environment
has been subject to a process of banal suburbanisation. Els Verbakel and
Elie Derman explain how they propose to turn this situation around by creating
public spaces that use the towns original landscape as the base material.
Urban [IM]Plants
Instead of a masterplan, Els Verbakel, Elie Derman and Ward Verbakel propose a more flexible, interactive
and dispersed approach of pinpointed interventions. Each intervention can occur independently of the
others and can function as a catalyst for its immediate surroundings and beyond.
74
In the autumn of 2005, Bonheiden, a town of 14,000 inhabitants in

the Flemish periphery, organised an invited competition to rethink
the spatial quality of its centre. The Belgian township called for a
vision that could cope with an ageing population and development
pressures without losing its rural character. Once famed for its
landscape of heath, fenland, marshland and forests, the town is
now gradually losing its raison d tre. It is just one example of many
Flemish towns undergoing the aftereffects of the countrysides
massive postwar suburbanisation. The population that gradually
moved to suburban villas in the periphery of rural villages during
the 1960s and 1970s is now ageing and relocating to high-end
multi-unit housing projects in the centre of town. In recent years,
Flanders has become a prime case study of urban dispersal,
deeply rooted in the economic and political history of the region. At
the scale of western Europe, the Old World version of suburbia has
become the standard model for living. According to traditional ways
of studying the city, Bonheiden is an insignificant suburban island
floating in a peripheral void, in between larger urban cores
connected by highways and trains. Yet when this new dispersed
urban condition is recognised in its own right, a new vision for the
town can play an exemplary role within the region and beyond.
Designated by the Flemish Structure Plan as a Built Peripheral
Landscape, Bonheidens future does not look very bright. The
Flemish policy for this town and similar areas in Flanders limits
future urban growth and preserves the existing green space,
thereby freezing the present situation and encouraging the current
tendency for grey, boring and generic towns. However, Derman
Verbakel Architecture and Ward Verbakel Architect propose
reinterpreting this vague terminology and exploring the possibility
of boosting the town by developing a new vision for its public
spaces, using its original landscape as the base material.
The proposal was selected by Bonheiden to provide strategies
to increase the built density of the suburban town while
reintroducing and strengthening its connection to landscape and
nature. The project offers an alternative to a conventional
masterplan by presenting a design toolbox instead a matrix of
pinpointed interventions of various scales and budgets that can be
flexibly modified and implemented on demand, leaving the town
the power to control its own progress and master its own future.
Els Verbakel, Elie Derman and Ward Verbakel, Image Quality Plan,
Bonheiden, Belgium, 2005
Landscape vs public space
While the current urban fabric of Bonheiden separates the public from the
landscape, Ward Verbakels proposal brings the landscape to the public
spaces, pulls the public into the landscape and creates hybrid living typologies
between urbanity and nature, thereby creating a collective landscape.
Flanders: Traditional urban model vs dispersed urban model

When looking at Flanders according to the traditional urban model, Bonheiden
is an island surrounded by a peripheral void, floating in the mazes of a
network of cities. In accepting the new dispersed urbanised territory as part
of this urbanity, Bonheiden becomes an important player in what could be
seen as the dominant urban condition in western Europe.
75
urban [im]plants = landscape as collective

The project uses a technique of urban [im]plants: recombining segments of public space and landscape
in punctual interventions of changing scales. It thereby reintroduces the formerly wild heath landscape
back into the city centre through specific, highly tangible design interventions. Landscape, in its most
primordial sense, thus becomes the main component of the renewed public space. Recovering this initial
attractor neither replaces nor erases the identity of recognisable public spaces; rather, the reintroduction
of a wild heath landscape remoulds and reactivates the town centre into a new and surprising type of
urban space, allowing the inhabitants direct interaction with the primary natural condition of the place.
Former town hall: before and after

Bonheidens centre currently suffers from an ageing population and
development pressures, particularly high-end multi-unit housing projects that
are quickly turning the town into a generic, grey and boring place. The project
offers an alternative future where the introduction of hybrid living typologies,
combining urbanity and nature, turns the centre into a vertical landscape and,
through combined programming, can attract a mixture of inhabitants.
The emergence of a collective landscape

The majority of the towns landscape is currently in private hands mostly in
the form of villa gardens which does not sustain a lively public space. In the
long term this will discourage new inhabitation. However, by reclaiming the
landscape as collective and, in addition, transforming the existing public
spaces, a collective landscape will stimulate new urban life.
76
urban [im]plants = hybrid interventions
Parking plus
Both in the public and in the private domain, the project proposes a series of
urban hybrids that formally and programmatically recombine urbanity and
landscape in small-scale interventions. One such example is the parking
plus fields, hybrids between parking lots and fields of nature such as
orchards, small-scale agriculture, parks, and so on. This combined typology
allows for an increased number of parking spaces in the town centre while at
the same time enlarging the green spaces and activating collective living.
Modifying relationships between built fabric and nature produces

new hybrid urban conditions. In the core of each design
intervention, urbanity and nature merge into an irreversible hybrid
of structure and vegetation, ranging from green kiosks and
ecological advertisement panels to hanging-garden modules and
vegetated street lighting. The hybrid implants are organised
according to three spatial registers, characteristic of the urban
configuration of Bonheiden: Fields surfaces such as squares,
parks and natural domains; Lines continuous spaces along
streets and paths; and Points structures and art installations.
Every component can be implemented independently as a
stimulator of the surrounding urban space.
Floating pergola and caf-terrace

A series of architectural typologies was developed to ensure that in the private domain every structure can contribute to a new visual identity for
the town. For example, a floating pergola can be added on undeveloped sites adjacent to commercial properties to create a new vertical landscape
in the centre of town, and can be rented for private events or for commercial promotions. A caf-terrace can be added to existing restaurants or
bars, providing outdoor seating areas that can be closed off in the winter and, again, contribute to a new and green collective street facade.
77
Toolbox: point interventions

A toolbox organises all proposed interventions according to
location and category. In this case the point interventions are
a series of architectural proposals that intensify vertical green
space within the towns collective spaces.
urban [im]plants = toolbox strategies
Building regulations
In a second phase, Els Verbakel, Elie Derman and Ward Verbakel translated
their vision for vertical green space and hybrid living typologies into a series
of building regulations, formulating nine principles for any new building in the
town. The regulations range from virtual parcellation to green fingers and
parking plus or minus.
To achieve flexible and innovative design and policy strategies, a

matrix organises all of the interventions according to location, type
of intervention and morphology, which operates as a toolbox of
design interventions and principles. Instead of a fixed predefined
document such as the traditional masterplan, Derman Verbakel
Architecture and Ward Verbakel Architect suggested an opensource method that could be mastered by the design team, the
town and its inhabitants. The interventions range from art projects,
small and larger buildings and public spaces to building
regulations, urban design guidelines and communication projects,
in which the landscape serves as a point of departure. Each
intervention was tagged with an ID card specifying the component
location, architecture, investment, urban impact and revenue. This
allows components to be assessed in communication with the
town and its inhabitants throughout the process of implementation,
and permits the town to instantly imagine a future quality for its
centre through pinpointed proposals.
A piecemeal and guided approach provides greater flexibility,
but also offers space for close collaboration with inhabitants and
other user groups. Through a feedback mechanism, the results of
the interventions are continuously evaluated and redirected before
further investments are planned.
78
Building regulations case study

For specific project proposals, the team applied the principles of
the building regulations by visualising them for specific locations
such as the church square.
The project is currently being implemented through different

mechanisms such as the creation of a legally binding structural
execution plan, an image quality chamber that stands in direct
dialogue with local developers and architects and advises the town
on each building application, the execution of test projects such as
parking plus locations and more. The practices approach of
strategic [IM]plants has proven to be an effective method not only
to formulate an appropriate vision for the town, but also to
implement this vision in small steps with immediate results,
without having to wait for slow and after-the-fact policies. The
proposed collective landscape has therefore already entered the
imagination of the towns officials and inhabitants, providing them
with a new identity as a dispersed yet urban entity. 4
Architectenbureau Reginald Schellen BVBA, Project Hoek Kerkplein

Berentrodedreef, Bonheiden, Belgium, 2007
As a result of the case study exercises above, the image quality plan
influenced the architecture of new building.
Text 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 74-8, 79(t) Els Verbakel and
Elie Derman, Derman Verbakel Architecture and Ward Verbakel Architect;
p 79(b) Architectenbureau Reginald Schellen BVBA
79
User-Focused Public Space
(M)UTOPIA in Denmark
The Danish practice MUTOPIA brings to public space a strong sense of delight
and playfulness, while demonstrating an overriding concern with the end user.
As Serban Cornea of MUTOPIA explains, a temporary plaza for the extensive
development of restad Nord in Copenhagen aims to speed up the process
of creating the areas own identity, while the practices housing for LyngbyTaarbk, Hovedstaden, audaciously puts the garden back into the garden
suburb by relocating the transport infrastructure to the rooftops.
The Mikado Plaza consists of a green area with grass and fir trees, crisscrossed by three blue paths and one of asphalt. Each path forms a socalled activity space with a theme of its own.
80
MUTOPIA is a young Copenhagen-based architecture office that

merges idealism and visionary activity (UTOPIA) with expediency,
evolution and change (MUTATION) working towards an architecture
based on user participation. The practices user-focused design
approach produces public space by combining a wide range of
design tools and communication strategies for mediating between
different interests and needs, which encourages support among
the stakeholders, while it engages in dialogue with the users and
testing insights gained during processes of user exchange.
MUTOPIA is in the process of completing the city park in the restad City
downtown district. The 7.5-hectare (18.5-acre) project is due for completion in
spring 2008 and is operating with concepts similar to Mikado Plaza; namely, a
(flexible) matrix of round islands that have been programmed by means of a
participatory planning process in collaboration with local residents.
Mikado Plaza, restad Nord, Copenhagen, 2005

Mikado Plaza is the first of several MUTOPIA-designed temporary
urban public spaces (TUPS) planned for restad, a new urban
development in Copenhagen that extends south of the city centre
towards the airport and the resund link to Sweden.
With an estimated building time of 20 years, restad is lacking
the identity provided by the multiple layers of the historic city
centre. Due to the size of the development, the area will continue to
present itself to visitors and new residents as a gigantic building
site with few, if any, public spaces for many years to come.
TUPS were conceived as a strategy for creating temporary
urban public spaces on the building sites in restad, in order to
provide recreational facilities for the residents of areas under
construction. Using unique spatial interventions, the strategy
involves the residents in the process of defining their urban
environment, thereby providing a one-to-one testing ground for
urban life.
The design for the Mikado Plaza was shaped by the dreams and
needs of 100 future users, visualised as a statistical diagram with
each column representing their favourite activity. The columns were
then thrown over the area, like gigantic Mikado (pick up) sticks,
whereby each activity was proportionally represented within the
available open space not only providing the desired activities but
also encouraging multiple ways of interaction between different
inhabitants, visitors and passers-by.
The TUPS strategy was devised by MUTOPIA as a catalyst for
public life and identity by means of participatory planning and
flexibility. By using the building sites of today as temporary public
spaces, it aims to speed up the process of creating the areas own
identity, while at the same time providing the residents with a
sense of history.
PLAYCER, an internet-based scenario game, enables users and
inhabitants to visualise and discuss ideas for future urban
environments. The insight and knowledge produced by such
scenarios will inspire future design concepts, for the transformation
of Mikado or the development of new temporary public spaces, that
will continuously evolve and transform in an ongoing dialogue
process between inhabitants, users, designers and authorities.
The restad development comprises a series of urban areas restad Nord,

Amager Flled, restad City and restad Syd separated by green
recreational areas in between. A hundred people whose daily movements
take them to restad Nord were asked to select their favourite activity from a
choice of five, ranging from chill-out to sport. Their answers, represented as
a statistical diagram with each column representing an activity, have
subsequently triggered the design of the space.
81
Star gardens suburban dwellings, Lyngby-Taarbk,

Hovedstaden, Denmark, competition proposal, 2004
Urban sprawl has been and often still is motivated, commercially
and ideologically, by the aspiration to access substantial amounts
of green areas. However, the massive amount of infrastructure
required by sprawl, along with the interest from the private market
in higher-density buildings, leaves little or no room for gardens.
Here, elevating car traffic on the roofs of 180 terraced houses
allows for a more efficient use of the building footprint, organised
in a star shape. Each housing finger combines dwellings, car
access and parking areas into new hybrid infrastructures, or sky
streets. Car-free landscape wedges created in between the
housing fingers provide collective recreational areas.
Lifting up the car traffic on the roofs of the terraced houses allows for a
more intensive use of the buildings footprint: each housing finger contains
both dwellings and the required car access and parking areas organised as
sky streets on top, while at the same time the landscape wedges in between
the housing fingers are preserved as car-free public recreational areas. Each
dwelling unit has two entrances (one from the upper roof deck and one from
the park), as well as two different private spaces related to each entrance (a
roof terrace and a garden), which unite the best of both worlds: urban life
above and suburban greenery below. 4
82
The star-shaped layout of the residential area creates a central plaza, unites the northern and
southern parts of the site as a coherent whole, and provides the development with a strong identity
while at the same time securing public accessibility throughout the entire area.
Text @ 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: MUTOPIA ApS
83
Royal Dutch Military Police Campus

Zvi Heckers Landscape Urbanism
Situated close to Schiphol Airport, Zvi Heckers new police campus for the Royal Dutch
Military Police is located in the Randstad area; the rim city conurbation that comprises
the four biggest Dutch cities Rotterdam, Amsterdam, The Hague and Utrecht and
has come to epitomise the most intensive European condition of dispersal. As
Rafi Segal describes, Hecker chooses to address this context by providing the
campus with a notion of the urban that creates a city within a wall.
Zvi Hecker, Royal Dutch Military Campus (KMar), Schiphol International Airport, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 2002
This project unites in a single location the various branches of the Royal Dutch Military Police, responsible for maintaining security at
Schiphol International Airport. Programme: multifunctional complex of living, working and training facilities for 1,500 staff stationed at
Schiphol Airport, with a built area of 33,000 square metres (355,209 square feet) on a 77,000 square-metre (828,821-square-foot)
site. Client: DVD (Ministerie van Defensie); Project manager: DHV bouwadviseurs; Structural engineer: Arup, Amsterdam.
84
View from the southeast. Highway no 4

defines the northern edge of the site.
Increasing demands for airport security led the Dutch government

to establish a new centre for the Royal Dutch Military Police (KMar)
at a site adjacent to Schiphol International Airport. In addition to
the requirements to combine living, working and training facilities in
one complex, the symbolic presence of the project as the main
gateway to the Netherlands, seen from the air and the runways,
also played an important role. These programmatic demands came
with a problematic site and several constraints: exposure to the
invasive noise of air and highway traffic, radar limitation on the
location of the various programmes on site, restrictions on building
heights, and other more general conditions such as building on a
site that is below sea level in this case by 3.6 metres (11.8 feet)
as is common in the Netherlands.
The architectural challenges of this project were therefore
twofold: first, to create an environment of good working and living
conditions in an unfavourable and restricted site, and second to
provide an architectural expression for an institution of state power
and control in a 21st-century democratic society.
Characteristic of airports and their surroundings, which are for
the most practical reasons located in low-density environments,
this site is situated within the dispersed Dutch Randstad.
Although placed outside the traditional urban context, the
projects complex programme, multiple scales, connections and
inclusion of diverse routes and speeds of movement tie it more to
the notion of the urban. In contrast to the concept of the campus
as a collection of individual scattered buildings implanted in
green space, KMar is conceived of as a continuous wall-like bar
building, set along the edges of the site forming a peripheral
structure that gradually opens up towards the centre. The bar
buildings that form the structure accommodate offices,

dormitories, educational facilities and other programmes, freeing
the central space for common facilities and sports fields. The bars
are layered and juxtaposed one on top of the other, creating both
a larger scale massing that relates to the linearity of the runways
and highway, and smaller intimate spaces that shield and protect
from the external disturbances.
This architectural strategy turns the campus as a whole into a
kind of landscape created by the interweaving of the wall-like
buildings and the open spaces created in between them and
around them. The long greened roofs of the bar buildings merge
with the surrounding fields and create a series of terraces. From
the air and at eye level, the line between building and landscape is
blurred. Yet from a functional point of view, the campus resembles
more a kind of city; with streets, bridges, elevated buildings,
courtyards, clusters and other elements a sequence of spaces
defined by buildings and linked by routes of movement. In this
sense, it is, as its designer Zvi Hecker called it, a city within a wall
or an emptied-out fortress, of which the walls have split and shifted
to allow light, air and space to enter. The project thus challenges
the traditional distinction between city, landscape and building. It
draws a line that oscillates between these while incorporating them
into one architectural-urban thinking.
Heckers KMar campus offers an integration of building,
landscape and infrastructure. It does so while provoking a new
expression for the public institution of the states military police. Its
public dimension is not only evident in the variety of collective
gathering spaces created within it, but also through its external
presence and location representing a government institution.
85
Studies and sketches of the site plan as it developed.
86
The KMar campus as a continuous wall-like structure.

Site plan. The campus located along highway no 4, and runways
1 and 2 of Schiphol International Airport.
Sketch of the overlapping bar buildings.
The campus horizontal, dynamic and dispersed nature counters

the concentric, symmetric, hierarchical and enclosed buildings
commonly associated with state power, control and supervision. A
main element of enclosure the peripheral wall becomes here
the building itself, which does not enclose a thing but meanders
around open spaces. Furthermore, this peripheral wall is
permeable; by its mere shape and configuration it creates a form
that interweaves and connects open and closed, building and
landscape, collective and private spaces, allowing the campus to
remain exposed, open and porous. Here lies its programmatic and
symbolic strength. As Hecker himself noted: Given that democratic
society requires an army and police, the architect should find a way
to express this need. It is only in dictatorial regimes that one does
1
not know where and how police operate. 4
Detailed views of the courtyard spaces.
Note
1. Zvi Hecker, letter to the author, April 2007, recalling his statement in the
commission interview for the project, 2001.
Text 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images Zvi Hecker
87
Ville-Port, Saint-Nazaire
The Historic Periphery
The harbour town of Saint-Nazaire on the Atlantic coast of Brittany in northern
France remains divided both by its memories and its built environment.
Manuel de Sol-Morales describes how his Ville-Port project seeks to
address the structural, visual and mnemonic divisions that have grown up
over time between a working port and seaside resort.
Manuel de Sol-Morales, Ville-Port, Saint-Nazaire, France, 1998

Aerial view of the project intervention.
88
Saint-Nazaires tragic destiny during the Second World War was to

leave two dramatic footprints: the almost complete destruction of
the city by the Allies; and the submarine base built by the Germans
as a refugee camp and arsenal in the Atlantic Front fortification
plan from Burdeos to Brest.
Situated at the Loires estuary end, well known for its Chantiers
de lAtlantique shipyards since the 19th century, Saint-Nazaires
postwar reconstruction (the Maresquier plan) focused on a leisurebased beach/city centre relationship, as portrayed by Tatis Monsieur
Hulot character. The shipyards, even though relatively central in their
location, thereby became peripheral to the uses of ordinary life.
The Ville-Port project in Saint-Nazaire, drawn up in successive
competition and execution phases between 1994 and 1998, and
completed in 2001, aimed to defy this broken cityport link and
peripheral perception with the introduction of new collective uses,
both within the submarine base and on its roof.
There are geographic peripheries that have given rise to the
term peripheral, and there are historic peripheries, places that time
and memory have pushed to the margins of daily life. Sometimes,
the urban unconscious masks the areas that it doesnt want to
recognise, because they are inconvenient, muddled and filled with
conflict. And yet these zones can be absolutely central to the
topographic viewpoint. Just as there are historic centres, places
that history has considered central, there are also peripheries
constructed by history.
History has thus turned the French port of Saint-Nazaire into a
periphery: a history of memories of suffering and destruction,
stemming from the effort required to rebuild the town after it was
bombed during the war and from the presence of the submarine
base, which is a concrete symbol of occupation and tragedy. There
are also more recent histories of segregationist zoning in order to
maintain the conformist banality of the beach, of industrial crisis at
the legendary Chantiers de lAtlantique, and of centripetal retreat in
the face of growing suburban dispersion.
The desire to tackle the periphery of the port again is above all
an act of intelligence on the part of the town. It is a mark of
awareness of the present and of superiority with respect to the
past a superiority based solely on respect and understanding.
Identifying the periphery will signify assuming the hybrid condition
of the space of the harbour, its vast holding capacity, and its docks
as broad as its horizons, and establishing a controlled relationship
at a distance with the centre of the town, one that retains the
existing differences and the empty expanses as a pregnant
expression of space. Voids on the ground and voids in space,
voids even in use, a sense of waiting for things to come.
Yet the obvious tension between monument and city, between a
mass with a volume of 900,000 cubic metres (31,783,201 cubic
feet) and a continuous and homogeneous town, but one
constructed with a very low density, turns the apparent conditions
of the periphery on their head.
The new semantics remain on the margins, and the urban fabric
appears to be no more than reassuring support for the mysterious
presence on the industrial edge of the water. In fact, if we were to
calculate the total volume of buildings in the central area (75
hectares/185 acres), it would come to 1,247,400 square metres
(13,426,902 square feet), which does not amount to much more,
altogether, than the enormous truncated pyramid of concrete.
Intervening in such a spatial and psychological tension is a
delicate operation, especially when one is a foreign architect,
always well received but also subject to the perennial suspicion of
insensitivity to local problems.
The Ville-Port project proposes a system of new references in
the port territory designed to involve the town and harbour in a new
and more open, composite and active relationship. The references
are, in the immediate surroundings, the empty spaces (squares,
parking lots) between the centre and the military base; the ramp
89
Night lighting and reflections on the water basin.
Project masterplan. Implementation in Saint-Nazaires urban fabric.
90
Longitudinal section and detail.
Ramp and esplanades to access the submarine base.
91
Parking and transparency through the submarine base.
Glass wall and transparency.
92
providing access to the roof of the base, with its incorporated

buildings (hypermarket, housing); and the atrium of the barber
created in the transparent interior of the base (vestibule of
exhibition halls, cinemas and restaurants). And, in the distance,
involving this perimeter that delimits the base, the towers (both
existing and new) that rise above the harbour and the
reinforcement of the avenues that run around it, fusing the entire
area into a structure that is both loose and strong. This is a
structure of visual and functional relations that effectively mark a
territory on the periphery, maintaining all the vitality of its industries
(storage facilities, refrigeration plants, the manufacture of fishing
nets and moorings), but mixing them with just a few regional
and civic functions of recreation, culture and commerce.
The twin access routes to the military zone, with its platform
roofs and small cells at water level, are traces that, owing to their
size, link the centre of the city to the open horizon of the harbour
and estuary. All around, even though far away, the landmarks of
the silos and high-rise buildings accentuate the extent of the empty
spaces in between, and establish the scale and the new peripheral
condition of the territory. 4
Night view of interior spaces.
Text 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 90(b), 91 Manuel de Sol; pp 88,
90(t), 92-3 Dominique Macel, Service du Communication de Saint-Nazaire
93
Nam Van Square, Macau

A peninsula, lying 60 kilometres (37 miles) to the southwest of Hong Kong, Macau is
the Las Vegas of the new China. As Manuel Vicente explains, when he was asked to
create an important new public space for the city it provided the opportunity to create
a plaza that was able to assimilate the past forms of the historic city without
absorbing the symbolism of its colonial history.
94
Os cavalos a correr, as meninas a saltar 1

After all the noise and excitement over Macaus administrative
transition settled down post 19 December 1999, the new local
government was faced with the requirement for a new public square,
distinctly postcolonial, not only from a symbolic point of view, but
also and most urgently from a functional point of view: the inherited
historical civic space was clearly inadequate, even in mere capacity
terms, to harbour the collective rites and rituals of the new Macau.
When VLB Arquitectura & Planeamento LDA were appointed to
design the project, they immediately presumed that the main
objective of the new administration was not to create a site
condemned to the usual pastiche either Chineseness or
Palladianess but instead to create the opportunity for something
new: free of any symbolism though eager to pursue the hybridism
of the urban form that consistently configured the city throughout
the course of history.
A new development plan for the central shore of the historic city
the Nam Van Lakes plan designed by Manuel Vicente throughout
the late 1980s and 1990s, which interpreted and extended the
curve of the historic bay out into the river and featured a
culmination point in the form of a formal/functional roundabout at
the meeting point of the two lakes stood out as the irrefutable
place for the new civic project. This was even more irrefutable
given the immediate vicinity of the newly built Macau Tower, a
quintessential modern and abstract structure, and a true icon with
no connotations with the citys past.
Designing a public site requires recognition of a place prior and
beyond the invention of its space. In the south, the creation of
public space traditionally begins almost as a casual accident in the
urban fabric, the poetic essence of which becomes, in the course of
time, successively ascertained through the interplay and
manipulation of hidden geometries waiting to be named.
The values VLB proposed for Macaus new Nam Van Square
were mainly those related to the plural and diversified fruition of
the site. From the core of the roundabouts inner square, the formal
hard-surfaced floor that represents the real foundation of the public
space, one can walk through the series of familiar typologies that
irradiate from it esplanades, terraces, gardens, walkways and
embankments to the lakes shore, along a path shaded by the
traffic flyovers that form an important part of the design of the new
civic square. Here the architects reconfiguring of the supporting
structures as part of the new built landscape creates a show of
different speeds and rhythms made by the conjugation of people
and machines, simultaneously circulating, in a whole complex
concoction pregnant with unsuspected urbanities.
An urban park was commissioned two years after the square, as
a simple landscaping of the access areas for the new (third) bridge
to the outlying islands, in an adjoining stretch of causeway. This
project organises two different park areas along the two
waterfronts, each finding a design pattern to divorce itself from its
proximity to the roads. On the lakeside, a sloping scenic garden
with pools on different levels overlooks the city and transforms the
over-imposing macro-presence of the bridge as a framer of views.
And on the riverside, a childrens playground stretches along the
water, like a palace in an Indian fairytale. 4
Note
1. Horses are galloping.
Overview of the Macau peninsula

before the construction of the third
bridge.
95
A flyover as shelter.
Plan of the whole territory of Macau, showing the water beds and major
gambling investments (in orange). Nam Van Square is between the two
western bridges. The reclamation between the two islands is the
location of the new megacasino strip.
Map of the city of Macau showing

the Nam Van Lakes reclamation
scheme and its integration within the
historic Praia Bay. Nam Van Square
is shown at the intersection of the
two lakes and the river.
The points of intensity in the design are concentrated on the transition of levels and the transfer
from road to public space structures. The flyovers were developed as two-sided objects: the traffic
disappears when viewed from the lakeside, and flies by when seen from above.
97
View towards the lake. The landscape areas bind the different levels and functions.
The curved complexity transverses different levels.
98
The modelling of the floor, which creates an organic movement along the lake
shore, provides a means of simultaneously alienating and integrating the
massive presence of the pre-existing bridge flyovers.
General plan for the urban park

under the third bridge.
Macau, located on the South China coast, was a

Portuguese-administered enclave from 1557 until 19
December 1999: the date when it was returned to the
Peoples Republic of China, thus becoming the Special
Administrative Region of Macau. It comprises the
peninsula of Macau and two islands, a total area of 24
square kilometres (9.3 square miles), up from 14 square
kilometres (5.4 square miles) 20 years ago.
The liberalisation of the territorys gambling industry
in 2002 was the political milestone that triggered an
immense leap in the citys urban development, with the
ambition of moving away from a South China nostalgia
into a regional economic player.
Macaus architectural legacy is the fruit of a symbiotic
confrontation of Portuguese city-making praxis against a
matured local Chinese social context and modus
facendi. Its geopolitical status, between China and the
Asian archipelago, has historically been a place of
miscegenation and deviation, which has produced in the
architectural field a culture of typological hybridism.
Text 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 94-5 Macau
Information Bureau; pp 96, 98(t), 99(r) Rui Leo, Carlotta Bruni
and Manuel Vicente, photos Carlotta Bruni; pp 97(t&c), 99(l)
Rui Leo, Carlotta Bruni and Manuel Vicente; p 97(b), 98(b) Rui
Leo, Carlotta Bruni and Manuel Vicente, photo
www.almosterstudio.com
99
Mur Island, Graz, Austria

The New York artist Vito Acconci has chosen to work through architecture,
seeing the potential of it as a medium to engage the public with the world
around them. He explains why he believes the location of his highly successful
cultural centre for Mur Island, Graz, in Austria missed the opportunity to
rejuvenate areas of the city beyond the historic core.
Acconci Studio, Mur Island, Graz, Austria, 2003

The dome functions as a caf/restaurant. It is
entered from above, on to a terrace, or from below
into the restaurant/bar area. A canopy above the
lower entrance twists down to create lounge
seating around the edge of the dome.
This floating island for the 2003 European cultural capital included
an open-air theatre, a small caf and childrens playground. The
selected site, which was chosen by Graz 2003, the organisation
behind the initiative, was the River Mur, which runs through the
Austrian town. This choice of site was determined by its proximity
to the towns bridges, the town centre and the planned Peter Cook
and Colin Fourniers Graz Museum (now completed). Acconci
Studios own preference would have been for a different location,
away from the existing bridges and the urban centre. This would
have allowed for an alternative strategy to be pursued, which
provided an additional river crossing on Mur Island at a point where
there are currently no bridges, and would have rejuvenated a
quieter part of the city and provided an alternative cultural area to
that which already exists in the historic core. In this sense, it would
have acted as a device for drawing activity beyond the established
city confines, without tying into existing public spaces, and allowed
the island as a public, collective space to function independently of
the continuous urban fabric.
Temporality was never much of an issue during the design
process; the studio was always aware that if the island drew
people in significant numbers it would endure beyond 2003 when
Graz was European Capital of Culture, which it assumed, and very
much hoped, would happen. The greatest consideration was put
into the river context with its water and tides and floods; anchoring
the island to the bottom of the river allowed it to respond to the
rise and fall of the changing tide.
As with other projects, Acconci Studio is interested in engaging
the public with the world around them, the world they are in. They
are involved with design and architecture because design allows
the possibility of dealing with (at least some of) the occasions of
everyday life. Architecture, contrary to art, is oriented towards
users rather than viewers: design and architecture deal inherently
with participants and inhabitants. 4
A twist in the river, a node in the river, a circulation route in the middle of the
river which is an island: the island is a dome that morphs into a bowl that
morphs into a dome.
Plan of Mur Island. Where the dome morphs into a bowl, and vice versa, a
playground is formed by the warp. This in between space is a threedimensional grid that functions like monkey bars, a field to climb up and crawl
through and hang on to. In addition, there is a slide that cuts through the grid.
Text 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: Acconci Studio, photo Elvira
Klamminger; Acconci Studio, photo Harry Schiffer; Acconci Studio
The bowl functions as a theatre, and is lined with transparent bleachers made
of grating or perforated metal that step down to the stage below. When not
being used as a theatre, the bowl functions as a public space, a plaza, in the
middle of the river. Each line of bleachers waves in and out, and expands and
contracts, thus instead of sitting facing straight ahead, visitors can sit face to
face and enjoy everyday conversation.
101
Discussion
Architecture and Dispersal

To close the issue, guest-editors Rafi Segal and Els Verbakel curated a discussion with
Stan Allen, Margaret Crawford, Marcel Smets and Sarah Whiting, and put some provocative
questions to them: What constitutes public space in the contemporary city? Can the public
sphere still exist in the urban context? Should public space be fought for by architects and
urban designers? Or, as Allen proposes, is it the landscape architects alone who have been
quick to realise the potential of the empty spaces in our cities as a ripe terrain for change?
Stan Allen: I think to start with we need to be sceptical of this

vague notion of public space. Public space is a concept that is
on the one hand hardly ever defined with any degree of
specificity, and on the other never questioned as to its value.
Thats a dangerous combination. We think of the traditional
city as the locus of public space, but what do we mean? It is
worthwhile to look at the traditional city, historically, and ask
what was the notion of public space, what and where are
these public spaces, squares, markets, etc, and how are they
used? We would find that each one has a very specific and
often very different pattern. If we look specifically at the
American city, as Robert Venturi pointed out, the romantic

notion of the European piazza (as the emblematic public
urban space) is something that never really existed in the
American city. So, with full awareness that I am treading on a
sacred icon (public space is like motherhood or apple pie, it
cant be criticised), I would start by signalling my scepticism
about the concept as it is usually evoked especially in the
American context. In my view its more important to think
first about publics, in all their specificity and multiplicity, and
then look at their spatial practices.
This notion of spatial practice derives from Michel de
Certeaus, who also elaborates a distinction between space
and place. Space is an abstract notion that acquires specificity
in relation to specific practices. Place, writes de Certeau, is
practiced space. So you would almost have to ask the
question: What are the spatial practices that could activate
this abstract notion of public space? We can talk about those
spatial practices that create the potential for public places. In
the larger sense, another interesting thing about de Certeaus
views is that he has a faith in the collective creativity of
subjects, in their tendency to invent ways to use the spaces
that are given to them. You could argue that the traditional
notion of public space is a kind of top-down argument
whereby public space is given to the public. I would turn that
equation around to say: How does the collective create public
space with the spaces that are given/found?
This means that the role of the architect is to make a space
for that public to create the conditions where the public can
Paola Vigan, Landscapes of Water, Veneto, Italy, 2006
Architekt Daniel Libeskind AG, Westside, Berne, Switzerland, due for completion 2008
Many agree that the notion of the urban and public are
intertwined: that is, we cannot conceive of the urban without
a conception of public space. Yet in the current reality of
urban environments at low densities, the interdependence of
urbanity and public space as we know it can be questioned.
The concept of public space enables the architectural
profession to go beyond the sole service of the private sector,
beyond the whims and particular desires of the individual
client, and directly engage in giving shape to public life.
Architects here become interpreters of the public good
their client being the public itself, they act on behalf of the
collective interest.
Can urbanity exist without the production of public space
or vice versa? And, in parallel, can architecture as a
profession give up the role of designing for the public?
102
freely exercise its collective creativity. Its for this reason that
Ive always been suspicious of the attempt to overscript the
use of public space. For me, a successful public space is
precisely a space where something unanticipated happens. So
the job of the architect becomes calibrating the right mix
between specificity, imagining and projecting potential uses
into the space, creating the right measure, understanding
flow and access, while always leaving some noise in the
system, a degree of play, that allows for the unexpected. The
architects job is to create spaces with potential. That
potential is in turn activated by the way in which the space is
put to use put into play by the public itself. There is an
important paradox that has been articulated by Michel
Foucault, who has pointed out that there are architectures
that constrain freedom and free expression, but there are no
specifically liberating architectures. Freedom, writes
Foucault, is a practice. In this sense it can be given space, but
it cannot, by definition, be dictated from above. I dont see
this as a problem for architects, but rather quite the reverse
it means that our job is not to script spatial practices, but
rather to create the precise architectural conditions where
those practices have the best chance of survival.
and administrative centres are moving away from the centre

based on a false idea of efficiency. The main square that used
to host political demonstrations is now only a place for
entertainment and tourism. The flocking together of
programmes such as sports, education, etc causes urbanity to
disappear. Collective space gets to be pre-coded if not privatised.
Marcel Smets: The classic answer would be that the church

square no longer works, since people no longer go to church.
Public space has become a telanovela, an individual yet shared
experience. In each type of urbanity, places that are shared
can be considered public spaces. Whether this is necessarily a
highly concentrated space can be questioned. Even in high
densities we see a tendency for isolation. In a certain way, we
are talking about places where we frequently spend time,
spaces that touch and connect people with other people, from
cemeteries to recreation places, sports fields, transport
locations, etc. Public space does not disappear but multiply,
it loses its hierarchy and has become more temporary, for
example in the form of events and festivals.
Cities are now concentration points in urban nebulae.
Places of gathering that used to be associated with city centres
are splintering. In Flanders, this has created a new type of city
centre where recreation is the only urban activity left. In
many Flemish towns, even civic services such as post offices
Sarah Whiting: Lament-drenched, post-lapsarian narratives

about a lost public sphere that needs to be recovered appear
to have wormed their way even into AD. These sentiments
invariably feed futile retrieve and recover missions that
share success/failure rates with other contemporary missions
based on myths. The public sphere in the US has, from its
inception, been tied as much, if not more, to business than to
its presumptive origin in government or some variant of
public organisation. As much as we may want to believe in the
altruistic alignments of public space and public agency, now
more than ever the public sphere invariably finds easier
alliances in private partnerships than it does in public policy.
Bottom Line Public Spaces (BLPS) dot the entirety of American
urbanism and are very likely the only hope for public space
that we will see in the near future. The American urban
landscape, beginning with Daniel Burnhams Chicago
Exposition of 1893, the Washington DC MacMillan Plan of
1902 (also designed by Burnham), or beginning even earlier
with the nations land surveys and acquisition policies, has
long been directed primarily by monetary concerns. While
colonial cities such as Savannah were organised so as to
create miniature cities within a city, each centred on a public
green, the incentive for cities planned after independence has
arisen from the private sector, illustrating John Lockes
observation of 1690 that: The great and chief end, therefore,
of mens uniting into commonwealths, and putting
themselves under government, is the preservation of their
property. In short, the space of the American urban landscape
urban, suburban, dense, or not utilises the delineation of
property ownership as its base map. This fact simply cannot
be avoided when discussing public space.
The privatisation of public space finds a willing
accomplice in programming in the definition,
organisation and construction of what happens in that space.
Manuel Vicente, Carlotta Bruni and Rui Leo, Nam Van Square, Macau, China, 2007
Manuel de Sol-Morales, Ville-Port, Saint-Nazaire, France, 1998
103
arquitectura 911sc, New Caracol, Ecatepec, Mexico City, 2007
MUTOPIA, Mikado Plaza, restad Nord, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2005
But as the programming of contemporary life accelerates, the

programming of contemporary public space cannot keep pace.
Unlike Burnhams Grant Park of 1909, a green and sandy strip
between the city and the lake, Chicagos recent Millennium
Park is fully programmed with music, art, wildflower paths,
skating and eating. It was easier to believe that we had a
public sphere when we felt that we had time for it; now,
without that time, were seeing how small that sphere may
be. Accompanied by constant headlines such as Is your child
too busy? Make sure to schedule family fun time too, we are
fast becoming a culture with no time or space, let alone
public. The Center for Economic Policy Research, based in
Washington DC, points out that the US is the only advanced
economy in the world that does not guarantee its workers
paid vacations, and that 61 per cent of workers in the US take
less than 15 days vacation a year. If we drop the false
narrative of an original, pure, wholly public sphere and
accept that, at least in the American context, the public
sphere is always very much intertwined with the private one
and is being squeezed out of existence because of a lack of
space and time to perceive it, the ensuing questions need to be
retooled. How do we, as architects, foster new possibilities in
the public sphere, particularly in the dispersed environments
that are the focus of this issue of AD? Lamenting an absent
idealised public sphere is futile. Starting from the status quo
doesnt mean selling out: given the public sphere that weve
inherited the American BLPS here is what we need to do:
The fleeing of the public from the city, as described in this

issue of AD by Bruce Robbins reading of Thomas Pynchon on
the one hand, and Albert Popes analysis of changes in the
organisation of settlements from grid to cul-de-sac on the
other, raises questions about the relevance of previous forms
and expressions of public space to contemporary culture and
settlement patterns.
Alex Wall seems to suggest that in Southeast Asia, the
lifestyle shopping centre has the potential to become a model
of a new type of public space. More and more we see the
emerging of a wide range of collective spaces produced by a
highly advanced private market. Their design and
organisation is based on mechanisms of high profit, limited
access and high security environments.
BOTTOM LINES: Give public space a bottom line. Let it make a

profit.
MASS MARKET: Multiply, multiply, multiply. Like Ladybird
Johnsons wildflower campaign, the small aggregates to
create the large. And the large is just fine.
STACK THE DECK: If lawns and asphalt are irresponsible,
discover the new horizontal.
MAKE A PITCH: Sell the public to the public. Let them speak,
and give them a space to say it in.
KNOW YOUR MEDIUM: To know your image is to know your
public (even when it looks funny).
LOVE YOUR SKIN: Revel in surfaces. Colours, textures, patterns
these are the plinths, frames and tones of public space.
How can architects develop new models for public space

within dispersed urbanities? Can self-contained spaces with
limited access be considered public?
Margaret Crawford: There are many opportunities for
producing public spaces within existing suburban landscapes.
But, in general, architects know almost nothing about
suburban life. Trying to understand how people live, work and
interact in dispersed areas should be their first priority. They
also need to acknowledge the enormous variety of dispersed
urban conditions. In the US, suburbs can be rich or poor, close
or far from a city, with or without a centre, to name just a few
distinctions. To discuss, say, Montecito, a wealthy suburb of
Santa Barbara, California, and working-class Medford,
Massachusetts, outside of Boston as equivalent examples of
dispersed urbanism does justice to neither. Although the
diversity of suburban lives and circumstances demands
specific strategies, still, there are several obvious types of sites
that cry out for a little more public-ness. One is the ubiquitous
strip mall. Home to virtually every suburban commercial
function, from grocery stores to restaurants to local boutiques,
the strip malls current form is a bar of programme
surrounded by a sea of parking. Yet with a little tweaking it
could become a public place. Add a piazza or town green,
include some public functions (library, vehicle registration
department, city offices), a coffee shop or caf, close the bar
104
Els Verbakel, Elie Derman and Ward Verbakel, Image Quality Plan, Bonheiden, Belgium, 2005
Claudia Faraone and Andrea Sarti, Waiting Spaces/Intermittent Cities, Veneto, Italy, 2004
with two wings, and rearrange the parking. Voila! a new

public/private place that would satisfy most urbanists. And
without disturbing the malls necessary commercial functions.
A beautifully designed strip mall? Why not?
Other suburban sites whose public-ness could easily be
amped up include schools (by adding functions, introducing
after-hours uses or even commercial activities), existing but
faded main streets (where, often, everyday commercial
activities like supermarkets can enliven street life), or even
monofunctional civic centres (whose lives can be extended
beyond working hours with new public and private
programmes such as theatres, sports complexes and parks).
All of these transformations should acknowledge the realities
of dispersed urbanism, such as the primacy of the automobile,
by providing sufficient parking. But at the same time
residents should also be offered alternative means of access by
creating bicycle and pedestrian paths, and even well-designed
bus stops. In dispersed areas, architects will have to give up
their dream of fixed rail transit as a generator of public
spaces. Buses are cheaper, more flexible, and with new forms
of electronic scheduling can nearly reproduce the door-to-door
capacities of private automobiles.
shared by equally minded users. This is the kind of urbanity

we should strive for, rather than the increasing cocooning of
privatised public space, a pseudo-urbanity that has been
fixed ahead of time. For example, walking in Manhattan it is
surprising how the New York University compound has
become so much more predictable than it used to be. All the
ingredients of a university campus have been provided, the
menu of a nice neighbourhood.
To a certain extent, design is always running behind the
fact, but it can also be a confrontation. Not everybody finds
the current developments that interesting; they can be
comforting yet not challenging, and in parallel there exist
microworlds that are more interesting. As designers we have
the responsibility to make people imagine and realise that
beauty can lie in very small things. The scene in the movie
American Beauty, where the camera follows a plastic bag flying
in the air, is extremely fascinating yet also very depressing.
Our perceptions have become private experiences, while the
public sphere requires the sharing of experience. As designers
we can draw attention to small, shared experiences of beauty,
unexpected, multilayered, accessible. We can work with
micro-interventions and lost spaces that function as implants,
teasing and provoking the current state of terrifying banality.
How else to operate than in the margin? Large projects are
today managed by developers who work according to the
stereotypical representations and expectancy patterns of their
users. Nevertheless, architects can challenge these
expectations and strive for a surprise effect. In the current
boredom of banality, this kind of approach is very much needed.
Marcel Smets: To turn this question around, the government

could play a more active role in increasing accessibility to
public spaces. As architect to the Flemish government, I
myself make an effort to raise awareness about making
collective spaces more accessible. On the other hand, the
Roman forum or the Greek agora were also never fully
accessible and we should be careful not to fall for a myth.
The space of infrastructure is usually accessible for all,
although not always equally. After all, the space that does
not belong to anyone is potentially the most public. The
street, the anonymous main street, rather than the
neighbourhood street, can be seen as public, where beggars
and homeless walk side by side with inhabitants and visitors.
Although there are many mechanisms that make claimed
spaces such as supermarkets more multivalent, unclaimed
space seems to offer more possibilities. In Brussels 19thcentury belt we can find examples of unclaimed space,
where a more layered collectivity can take place, not only
In several projects presented in the issue, we can identify

attempts of the urban plan to employ landscape as an active
urban force that can give meaning to otherwise loose,
neglected voids within the larger low-density environment
(for example, in projects such as the Philadelphia Urban
Voids competition, Bonheiden, Belgium, and El Caracol in
Mexico City). Research projects such as the work of Paola
Vigan and Bruno De Meulder suggest that whole geographic
regions and landscapes be read as one continuous space
layered with different systems/networks. Other projects
(such as KMar and Mikado) incorporate the landscape feature
105
Vito Acconci, Mur Island, Graz, Austria, 2003
Martha Rosler, Oleanna/Utopia Station, Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2003
as an integral part of the urban thinking, and experiment

with the non-built as a generative element.
Temporality and transience, traditionally attributed to
nature and ecology, have now become an important aspect of
designing public spaces in dispersed environments. Several
projects propose a non-permanent approach to design,
working with users and inhabitants (for example those by
MUTOPIA and Claudia Faraone) or provide options for future
changes (Timescape and the Urban Voids competition).
Time as much as space should be a key component of this

new discourse. As Robert Fishman has argued, life in the new
dispersed city depends on time as much as space. Thus,
adding a temporal dimension to design in the suburbs should
not be viewed as a compromise, but as an amplification of
possibilities. In the suburbs, public experiences, rather than
existing as fixed points in spaces, accumulate over the course
of the day and night, week and weekend, winter and summer.
The challenge for designers is to weave more of these public
moments into the built and unbuilt fabric of dispersed
urbanism. Again, this would require them to acquire a deeper
knowledge of the circuits and cycles that constitute suburban
lives. But I am convinced that paying close attention to the
successive events of suburban life can produce new and
unexpected ways to experience public life.
Can strategies of landscape design offer new approaches

for designing public space in environments of urban
dispersal? Is this an indispensable compromise of the
dispersed city? Can public space only exist temporarily
and then again disappear?
Marcel Smets: Both landscape and infrastructure are in the
process of acquiring new roles within the contemporary
urban condition. The flocking together of similar programmes
and activities creates a highly developed system of
connections that can receive a new meaning as public space.
Landscape, on the other hand, becomes very much related to
the question of identity. Much of the built space starts to look
similar, which makes landscape into a place of identity. At the
same time, landscape has become a place of escaping the
predefined. For example, the festival emerged as an attempt
to break out of the theatre into the landscape. A promise of
continuous change can now be found in the landscape.
Landscape offers an unclaimed territory, and therefore
possibly a new type of public space.
Margaret Crawford: Landscape architects, used to dealing
with open spaces, are clearly more adept than architects
who are obsessed with filling space, in working with
dispersed urban conditions. Landscape architects can design
parks, parking lots, subdivisions and roadsides, all staples of
the dispersed landscape. In fact, trees, gardens and green
spaces of all kinds are among the suburbs primary
attractions. This suggests that we are urgently in need of a
new discourse of landscape suburbanism.
Stan Allen: Landscape architecture or what has come to be

called landscape urbanism is an absolutely key term to
bring up when you talk about dispersed cities. The attraction
of landscape urbanism is that it offers a new set of tools to
be deployed in the design of the void spaces, the so-called
empty spaces, between buildings, roadways, infrastructure
and what has been traditionally called landscape, but is
today something beyond the mere design of gardens and
parks. These tools new ways of thinking and working are
ideally suited to this emerging dispersed field. As a
discipline, in part because of its minor status and lack of
history, landscape architecture has the potential to become a
kind of synthetic discipline that incorporates the insights of
ecology, infrastructure and urbanism landscape
architecture is situated at the point of intersection between
regional ecologies, infrastructure, open space design,
architecture and urbanism.
So landscape urbanism has already emerged as a serious
field of study: it has a 10-year history, a number of
recognised practitioners, a catalogue of projects, and its own
literature (at least two well-conceived collections have
appeared recently, for example). This is a very promising
development, and it opens up a lot of interesting territory. It
doesnt seem accidental that the rise of landscape urbanism
106
Rafi Segal, Archipelago of the Negev Desert, Beer Sheva, Israel, 2007
Zvi Hecker, KMar, Schiphol International Airport, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2007
over time. This is based on a loose appeal to ideas of

ecological succession. The idea that self-organisation and
emergence are associated with lack of specificity and
lack of design is itself a misunderstanding. What an
ecologist will tell you, on the contrary, is that
emergence does not happen all by itself, in a vacuum.
Its triggered by differences and imbalances in the initial
conditions. In the urban or landscape realm, where we
are talking about artificial ecologies, you dont get
emergence without very carefully designed initial
conditions. The architects obligation to design those
initial conditions with a high degree of precision and
specificity remains.
parallels the emergence of the city as a dispersed field

condition in the late 20th century.
Recognising that attraction, I just want to point out three
areas that, for me, constitute both the areas of greatest
promise, but, paradoxically, the potential pitfalls of the
landscape urbanism approach. It is possible to identify three
key terms that have to do with the overlap and intersection
between the discourses of landscape and architecture:
Connectivity: Its no accident that there is a parallel
fascination in architecture and landscape for the
surface. Surface is the territory of landscape, and there
is an idea that the warped surface promises total
connectivity, doing away with architectures vertical
dimension, which has become associated with
partitioned space. This is of course attractive but naive.
It becomes easy to fall into a false utopia of total
connectivity, continuous flows, etc. This suggests closer
attention to breaks, discontinuities and separations
and their social/programmatic value in both landscape
and architecture.
Indeterminate programme or multi-use: Here, too, there
is this attractive idea that on an open field anything can
happen sports, festivals, demonstrations, concerts,
picnics, etc. To my mind, it is something of an
abdication of responsibility, a kind of loose thinking
where it is possible to say, Dont worry about
programme, there is no need for the architect to
determine anything, because programme take care of
itself. This approach can be seen analogous to the
notion of 1960s universal space a space, in theory,
where anything can happen, yet where, as was often the
case, nothing happens. The architects obligation to
specificity and design remains.
Emergence: In both architecture and landscape there
has been a fascination with self-organisation and
emergence, the notion that the architect supplies a kind
of infrastructure and then you just let things happen
So for me, landscape urbanism is an important emerging

field. What is interesting is that each of these areas has both
an enormous potential and some room for error. Its a young
field where things are still in flux, ideas are still being worked
out. Thats what makes it exciting. It has the potential to
change our notion of urban design by making available a new
set of tools and, above all, by foregrounding the question of
time and the question of process. To my mind these are the
real contributions of landscape urbanism. On the other hand,
it is possible to look somewhat critically on the actual
practices of landscape urbanism: most practitioners have
been doing large-scale urban parks, they havent actually
been doing urbanism. In part this is because the
institutional realm those who commission large-scale
projects have yet to catch up. Landscape urbanism is
enormously promising, but we havent yet seen the full
impact in practice. We are still waiting for projects that show
a real synthesis of landscape and urbanism. 4
Text 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 102(l) Paolo Vigan; p 102(r)
Architekt Daniel Libeskind AG; p 103(l) Rui Leo, Carlotta Bruni and
Manuel Vicente, photo Carlotta Bruni; p 103(r) Dominique Macel, Service du
Communication de Saint Nazaire; p 104(l) Jose Castillo lea, arquitectura
911sc; p 104(r) MUTOPIA ApS; p 105(l) Els Verbakel, Elie Derman of
Derman Verbakel Architecture and Ward Verbakel Architect; p 105(r) Claudia
Faraone and Andrea Sarti; p 106(tl) Acconci Studio; p 106(tr) Martha
Rosler; p 106 (bl&br) URBAN VOIDS: grounds for change City Parks
Association of Philadelphia; p 107(l) Rafi Segal; p 107(r) Zvi Hecker
107
Contributors
Acconci Studio is a collaborative studio that
undertakes design and architecture projects.
Stemming from Vito Acconcis background in
writing and art, the studio seeks to combine
mathematical, biological and other models with
narratives and action, using space as a fluid,
changeable and portable instrument. Current
projects include a retractable bridge in Boulognesur-mer and housing folded inside a hill in
Beaumont, France.
Stan Allen is a registered architect and Dean of the
School of Architecture, Princeton University. His
urban projects have been published in Points and
Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City (Princeton
Architectural Press, 1999) and his theoretical essays
in Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation
(G+B Arts, 2000). Responding to the complexity of
the modern city in creative ways, he has developed
an extensive catalogue of urbanistic strategies, in
particular looking at field theory, landscape
architecture and ecology as models to revitalise the
practices of urban design. He has been awarded
fellowships in architecture from the New York
Foundation for the Arts and the New York State
Council on the Arts, a Design Arts Grant from the
National Endowment for the Arts, a Graham
Foundation Grant, and a Presidents Citation from
the Cooper Union in 2002.
Jose Castillo is a practising architect living and
working in Mexico City. He is the principal,
alongside Saidee Springall, of arquitectura 911sc, an
independent architectural and urban practice. His
work and writing have been published in Praxis
Journal, Bomb, Arquine, Architectural Record, 2G and
Domus. He has curated and participated in various
exhibitions including Mexico City Dialogues at the
Center for Architecture in New York and shows at
the Rotterdam, So Paulo, Venice and Canary
Islands biennales. He is currently a professor at
UPenns School of Design.
Margaret Crawford is a professor of Urban Design
and Planning Theory at the Harvard Graduate
School of Design. Her research focuses on the
evolution, uses and meanings of urban space. She
has published several books including Building the
Workingmans Paradise (Verso, 1996) and, with Alan
Berger, Nansha Coastal City (Harvard Graduate School
of Design, 2006). She received a BA from the
University of California at Berkeley, a graduate
diploma from the Architectural Association, and a
PhD in Urban Planning from UCLA.
Bruno De Meulder is a professor of urbanism at
Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven, Belgium, and the
Technische Universiteit Eindhoven. He has published
many books, including The Brussels Mont des Arts
Reconsidered (Rotterdam, 2000), Nakuru: An African Town
(Leuven, 1998), Kuvuande Mbote: A Century of Colonial
Urbanism in Congo (Antwerp, 2000) and De Kampen van
Kongo (Amsterdam, 1996). His research is situated
at the crossroads of urbanism and urbanisation, and
the crossroads of practice and theory.
Elie Derman founded Derman Verbakel
Architecture, with Els Verbakel, in 2001, with
projects in Belgium, Israel and New York. He has
taught architectural design at the Bezalel Academy,
Jerusalem, New Jersey Institute of Technology and
the Pratt Institute. He obtained a professional
degree in architecture (Israel) and an MSc in
architecture and urban design (Columbia
University). He has won several awards for
excellence in design and his work has been
exhibited internationally.
Claudia Faraone, an architect and urbanist, has
participated in various architectural and artistic
projects on the subject of cities and urban space,
among them Studio OpenCity in Brussels/Kortrijk
(2000) and www.bordersproject.org in Venice
(200304), and as tutor in the Advanced Course in
Visual Art at Fondazione Ratti in Como (2006). She
is currently working on a research project on Skopje

city centre as her final thesis for the European
postgraduate Masters in Urbanism she attended at
KU Leuven, TU Delft and UPC Barcelona.
He worked for several years with Architect Zvi

Hecker in Tel-Aviv, and later established his own
practice while also working in partnership with Eyal
Weizman. He has lived in the US since 2004.
Zvi Hecker was born in Krakow, Poland, in 1931,

and grew up in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. He studied
architecture in Technion, Haifa, Israel, and painting
at the Avni Academy in Tel Aviv where he set up the
practice Hecker, Neumann, Sharon. He has taught
at the Universite Laval in Quebec, Canada and
Universitt fr Angewandte Kunst in Vienna. In
1991 he also set up a practice in Berlin.
Marcel Smets is the Flemish government architect.

He received professional degrees in architecture
and urban design from the universities of Ghent
and Delft, and obtained a PhD at the University of
Leuven where he was appointed to the chair of
Urbanism in 1978. He has published widely,
including books on H Hoste, Ch Buls, the Belgian
Garden Cities and the reconstruction of Belgium
after 1914. As a practising urban designer, he was
in charge of large urban design projects in
Belgium and Italy.
Deenah Loeb is the executive director of City Parks

Association, a historic organisation whose work
acts as a catalyst for change by advancing
visionary thinking about natural resources in the
urban community(www.cityparksphila.org). She
has more than 25 years experience in programme
innovation and implementation in the
environmental field and the arts, and holds a
Masters of Landscape Architecture.
Kjersti Monson is a planner and urban designer
with EDAW/AECOM, and is currently living and
working in Atlanta, Georgia. From 2003 to 2006 she
was based in Shanghai where she worked as a
consultant and designer on projects throughout
urban and rural China. She was a 2006 Fellow of the
Fudan University Center for Urban Studies, and
contributed to organising the Fudan University
International Urban Forum in 2006.
MUTOPIA was founded in 2004 by architects Serban
Cornea and Kristina Adsersen, and has established
its distinct profile through user-focused design, a
working method and architectural strategy that
challenges the role of the architect while welcoming
citizens and professionals into the design process.
This has spawned new types of dialogue and process
tools, as well as a range of innovative urban and
architectural designs promoting social and
environmental sustainability.
Albert Pope is an architect living in Houston,
Texas. He has published and lectured extensively
on contemporary architecture and urbanism. He is
the author of Ladders (Princeton, 1996), and is the
Gus Sessions Wortham Professor of Architecture at
Rice University.
Bruce Robbins is a professor of English and
comparative literature at Columbia University. He has
also taught at the universities of Geneva and
Lausanne, and at Rutgers University, and has held
visiting positions at Harvard, Cornell and NYU.
During the 1990s he was co-editor of the journal
Social Text. His most recent book is Upward Mobility
and the Common Good (Princeton, 2007).
Martha Rosler uses photographs and montages,
videos, text works, installations, performances and
critical writing to investigate social conventions, the
media, war-making and the built environment. She is
a professor at the Hochschule fr Bildende Knste
(Stdelschule) in Frankfurt and at Rutgers
University in New Brunswick.
Andrea Sarti, an architect and photographer,
currently works as a freelance in Venice. Within the
collaborative and interdisciplinary studio
www.cast1466.com he carries out commercial work
as well as research projects dealing with city
transformations and public spaces. He works with
photography as a tool to describe and therefore to
interpret the reality of cities and territories, and
current projects include a visual one about public
spaces in European capitals and the visual mapping
of the transformations of Venices industrial area,
Porto Marghera.
Rafi Segal studied and taught architecture at the
TechnionIsrael, and at Princeton University where
he is currently completing a doctoral dissertation.
108
Manuel de Sol-Morales is an architect and city

planner, mostly dedicated to urban design matters.
He is chair professor of Urbanism at the School of
Architecture of Barcelona, and a founder and head,
since 1968, of the Laboratori dUrbanisme de
Barcelona, a research group in urban morphology.
Manuel Vicente has been working simultaneously
in Macau and Lisbon for the past 45 years. His
buildings in Macau, mainly the social housing
schemes, are still a strong reference for Portuguese
and Macanese architects. His design partnership
with Rui Leo and Carlotta Bruni began in Lisbon,
in the office of Trav do Noronha, while working on
the pavilions and strategies for the Lisbon Expo 98.
Their most significant projects include the Coloane
Island masterplan, the renovation of the Moorish
Barracks, UNESCO-WHS, Nam Van Square, the Sai
Van Urban Park and, more recently, a project for
the new opera house in Harbin, China.
Els Verbakel founded Derman Verbakel
Architecture, with Elie Derman, in 2001, with
projects in Belgium, Israel and New York. She is a
visiting professor at the Technion University and
Bezalel Academy, Israel. She has taught
architectural theory and design at KU Leuven,
Columbia University, Pratt Institute and Princeton
University, and has published widely. She
obtained a professional degree in architecture
(Belgium) and an MSc in architecture and urban
design (Columbia University), and is a PhD
candidate at Princeton.
Paola Vigan is an architect. After her PhD (La citt
elementare, Skira, Milan, 1999) she became an
associate professor of urban design and urbanism at
the IUAV, Venice, and a member of the board of the
PhD in urbanism. She has been a guest professor in
several European schools (EPFL Lausanne, KU
Leuven), and in 1990 she founded Studio Bernardo
Secchi Paola Vigan with Bernardo Secchi, working
on competitions and projects such as the reuse of
the disused railway area in Spoornoord, Antwerp,
and the design of new housing in La Courrouze, an
old military area, in Rennes, France.
Alex Wall is an architect and Chair of Urban Design
in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of
Karlsruhe, Germany. His most recent publications
include Victor Gruen: From Urban Shop to New City
(Actar, 2005). He is also co-author of
Zwischen_Stadt_Entwerfen (Mueller + Busmann, 2005),
an attempt to define the components and design
strategies for European low-density urban regions.
Current research projects include SHAKTI
Research for the Sustainable Development of
Hyderabad, India, and PRUDEV What is the role of
the shopping centre clusters in the future urban
development of Jakarta?
Sarah Whiting is an assistant professor at
Princeton Universitys School of Architecture
where she teaches urban history and
contemporary theory, and coordinates the Master
of Architecture thesis programme. She is also a
partner, along with Ron Witte, of WW, an
architecture firm based in Princeton.
4+
110+
Interior Eye
Reinvigorating Childhood
Howard Watson
114+
Practice Profile
KieranTimberlake Associates
Jayne Merkel
120+
Userscape
Or Natural Interaction in the
Everyday Digital World
Valentina Croci
124+
Spillers Bits
Putting the I back into
Architecture
Neil Spiller
126+
Unit Factor
Radical Interface
AA New Media Research
Initiative
Joel Newman, Theodore
Spyropoulos and Vasilis
Stroumpakos
130+
Yeangs Eco-Files
The Basic Premises for Green
Design
Ken Yeang
134+
McLeans Nuggets
Will McLean
Interior Eye
Reinvigorating
Childhood
Howard Watson is uplifted by the brave, graceful

subtlety of Caruso St Johns redevelopment of the
Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood in east
London. He finds the pared-down spaces of the
interior surprisingly in accord with the original
Victorian structure, drawing their inspiration from
the regimented order of grand Victorian museology.
In the last decades of the 20th century, an appreciation that

young minds can more readily accept the shock of the new
drove parts of the museum sector to investigate using the
advances of technology within child-orientated displays. It
became a familiar sight to witness children banging buttons,
touching screens and interacting with displays, while jealous
adults would stand elsewhere, peering at a mistyped paper
label beside a dusty, badly lit display. It would be tempting to
expect the refreshed Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood to
be an excessive den of bright lights, colour, computer
wizardry and child-friendly chaos, but Caruso St Johns fiveyear redevelopment has shied away from wearing whizz-bang
intentions on its sleeve. It carries through the realisation of
the museums contemporary ambitions with a brave, graceful
subtlety that draws on the regimented order of grand
Victorian museology. They even dimmed the lights.
Caruso St John was established in 1990 and has gained
respect in Britain for its innovative arts-related buildings,
such as the New Art Gallery in Walsall and the (ongoing)
Centre for Contemporary Art in Nottingham. The architects
have combined their ability to construct cultural permanence
in sometimes unlikely settings with ground-breaking
exhibition design, often resolving complex aesthetic ideas and
a political will for community and cultural integration with
Caruso St John, V&A Museum of Childhood, Bethnal Green, London, 2007

The main exhibition hall, comprising three sections with curved ceilings, is now
uncluttered, with the original ironwork helping to regiment the space. The marble
mosaic floor tiles were made by women prisoners in Woking jail and installed
when the structure was relocated from South Kensington to Bethnal Green.
The pattern has now been repeated and enlarged on the mezzanine ceilings.
The pattern of the front facade can be seen as building blocks, but the materials
are exquisite. The variety of quartzite, porphyries and limestone draws on the
red of the Victorian brick behind. The facade creates a new relationship with the
community and geographical setting, highlighting accessibility and reflecting
the street and greenery of the surrounding park through tall windows.
deceptively simple design solutions. The Museum of

Childhood, which is run by the Victoria & Albert Museum, has
been one of their longest-running projects, involving a twophase redevelopment of a Victorian building. It was
constructed in 1856/57 by Charles Young & Company as a
temporary structure for the new South Kensington Museum,
which became the V&A. Formed in three parallel sections, it
was a large iron building, with corrugated iron walls, iron
columns and girders, and a glass roof. In 1865 it was replaced
and the temporary structure was moved to Bethnal Green, an
impoverished part of east London, at the request of local
philanthropists. The museum resides beside a park, forming
perhaps one of the best-kept examples of the Victorian desire
to bring health and culture to Londons poorer regions.
The three parallel sections were not divided, so the
museum principally comprises one large, almost tunnel-like
volume, and the iron walls were replaced by typical Victorian
red brickwork. JW Wild designed a new entrance and
additional facilities, but his plans were never completed due
to a lack of funds. Consequently, as a working venue, the
museum has been dogged by its incompletion. The lack of
accessible facilities has hampered its ability to move forward
and offer the quality of community and educational resources
that suit its remit. Meanwhile, the main exhibition space
evolved somewhat haphazardly to become a charming, but
cluttered and disorganised space. Caruso St John was faced
with trying to create new access to resources and facilities
under the building while refocusing the design of the main
exhibition space and galleries.
111+
When reorganising the main museum display system, architect Peter St John
says he drew upon the best of Victorian museum architecture, including the
original cases of the Natural History Museum. The museum is full of elements
of physical interaction, but these are mainly pushed to the outer wall.
Section of the new entrance, creating a new level of accessibility to the facilities.
The charming but somewhat disorderly main display area before the
redevelopment. The mixture of too much direct light from the roof
lanterns and chaotic lighting has been replaced by an ordered system
that enhances the objects.
112+
The plan of the main hall, with its rearranged displays and improved circulation.
The cool, calm interior of the new entrance which, as well as refocusing the
orientation to the facilities, provides an exhibition space for local children.
Diane Lees, the director of the museum, explains the

success of Caruso St Johns designs: The design of the new
extension is sensitive to the original building and the
materials are inspired by and blend with the historical context
of the design. This has been combined with practical, inclusive
design that has enabled a wide range of visitors to access the
museum physically and intellectually. The first phase of the
redevelopment concluded in 2003, including crucial
renovation of the roof and ceiling, the reordering of the main
display space and a new exhibition display area on the first
floor. The second phase undertook the major building work
a new entrance and learning centre as well as introducing a
new gallery space and toilets, completing the design of new
collection displays, and resolving access and circulation issues.
The new entrance replaces its shambolic predecessor with
one that addresses the immediate surrounds, visually
connects to the design of the main building, and cures some
of the prime logistical problems. The facade is clad in
quartzite, porphyries and limestone in a decorative pattern
that is emblematic of connection, community and outreach:
each of the three components of one shape form a component
of an adjacent one, while the overall impression is of building
blocks a constructive reminder of the learning processes of

childhood. The simple entrance interior, with its granolithic
terrazo floor, large windows and decorative grilles that pick
up the pattern of the exterior, has a dual importance: it
provides an exhibition display for the work of local children
and an ordered circulation route into the main hall and, via
stairs, down to the new learning centre and facilities below.
There is now also a direct, accessible entranceway to these
resources on the level below.
Inside the main building, the chaos has gone. Formerly all
white, the interior is now a soft, pale pink that calms the
spatial threat of the huge main volume and creates a warmer
environment. The ad hoc, evolved lighting that added to the
disarray has been replaced by a neatly ordered system that
complements the interiors ironwork structure. Largely, the
displays are now housed in freestanding, large wooden and
glass cabinets that consciously draw on the museums
Victorian past. The result is a natural grid, introducing order
without partitioning.
The redevelopment of the museum is not quite complete,
but Diane Lees says that: The project has fixed about 90 per
cent of the issues we had in operating as a family friendly
museum. Many of the late-20th-century interactive displays in
smaller museums across Britain seem to be permanently out
of order or at least out of step with new developments. By
contrast, the Museum of Childhood has managed to get itself
in step with contemporary needs and prepare itself for the
future through an intelligent, grand, but subtle approach to
interior architecture. It has consequently won Caruso St John
a 2007 RIBA Award. 4+
Howard Watson is an author, journalist and editor based in London. He is coauthor, with Eleanor Curtis, of the new 2nd edition of Fashion Retail (WileyAcademy, 2007), 34.99. See www.wiley.com. Previous books include The
Design Mix: Bars, Cocktails and Style (2006), and Hotel Revolution: 21stCentury Hotel Design (2005), both also published by Wiley-Academy.
Text 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 110-11, 112(t), 113(l)
Hlne Binet; pp 112(bl&br), 113(r) Caruso St John Architects
113+
Practice Profile
KieranTimberlake
Associates
James Timberlake (left) and Steven
Kieran (right) in their studio.
114+
Nothing about the beautifully detailed

buildings that Steven Kieran, James
Timberlake and their colleagues are creating,
mostly for schools and colleges, suggests
that they have a radical agenda. There are no
crazy shapes, dayglo colours or other
attention-grabbing devices in them. But what
these architects are doing in their built work,
research and teaching attempts no less than
to change the way that buildings are made.
Jayne Merkel explains how they are
expanding the architects sphere beyond
mere design to become master builders of
a uniquely 21st-century kind developing
new materials and ways to save energy, and
introducing methods of collaboration and
fabrication drawn from the automobile,
aeroplane and shipbuilding industries.
The pleasant, postmodernised old industrial building with
little punched windows and a prominent central entrance
where KieranTimberlake Associates work on an otherwise oldfashioned street gives no clue that anything extraordinary is
going on inside. If anything, the location on the edge of
downtown Philadelphia, near the Art Museum and Free Library,
across the street from a neat row of 19th-century town houses
suggests a rather traditional architectural practice.
The first hint that something else is afoot comes when the
elevator door opens to a lobby framed by sloping sheets of
steel like those in a Richard Serra sculpture. Around the
corner, a 2,137-square-metre (23,500-square-foot) open loft
with 6.7-metre (22-foot) ceilings contains movable
workstations, exposed wiring, models on pedestals, and
conference areas formed by tilted steel walls with absorbent
inner surfaces for pin-ups. But the space that reveals the
unique nature of the practice is the shop at the end of the
room, behind a glass wall.
Here, tables stacked with models abut workbenches strewn
with tools. Shelves are filled with product samples, such as
autoclaved concrete, a porous white material the architects
are considering for a house in Texas. Traditional materials
being used in new ways are being tested alongside
experimental ones, such as grey ductile concrete, a material
that the architects are developing with Composite
Technologies. Here, it takes the shape of an Ionic column and
of bubble wrap. A full-scale freestanding wall of black glazed
and brown buff brick being considered for the student
services office building at Ohio State rises from the floor. A

ceiling mock-up for the Yale University Sculpture Building
hangs overhead. In a small room on the right, a threedimensional printer transforms drawings into plaster models.
Another little room with cement board walls houses a welder.
There is also a compressor, a laser cutter, raw material racks,
and exterior wall panels being considered for various projects.
The office even has a full-time shop director who was trained
as an architect, but gets his kicks from making things, as
Timberlake explains.
He and Kieran are pretty obsessed with making as well in
the largest possible sense. Their interest is in part a reaction
to the emphasis on imagery that they saw at Venturi, Rauch
and Scott Brown, where they worked in the late 1970s after
graduating from the University of Pennsylvania architecture
school. Just as Venturi was reacting against the Modernist
disregard for symbolism and history, Kieran and Timberlake
saw the lack of interest in building technology, which was
typical of the time, as something they wanted to explore. In
the 1980s they both had fellowships, independently, at the
American Academy in Rome, where they found that what
interested them most was the fabric of ancient buildings. As
teachers (they have taught at Penn, Yale, the University of
Michigan and other schools), they emphasise materials and
the construction process, subjects often neglected in
American architectural education. In addition, their firms
first commissions low-budget additions and alterations at
Loblolly House, Taylors Island, Maryland, 2006

This holiday home for the Kieran family on the eastern shore of Maryland,
near Washington DC, is built of factory-made components that were hoisted
into place on site, sparing most of the nearby forest. The aesthetic, which
blends rather seamlessly into the landscape, demonstrates that prefabricated
construction can also be natural, site specific and unique.
Sidwell Friends Middle School, Washington DC, 2006

KieranTimberlakes expansion and renovation of a bland, boxy, modern brick middle school replaced an ugly
mansard roof with a flat green one, and a parking lot with two wings and a functioning wetlands courtyard.
In doing so, it fostered a new commitment to environmental efficiency at this progressive day school.
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Yale University Sculpture Building, New Haven, Connecticut, 2007

This 17,559-square-metre (189,000-square foot), $42 million project, which was built in 22 months instead of
the universitys usual 48, consists of three separate structures: a four-storey, steel-framed, glass-walled
studio building in the middle of the block; a single-storey art gallery around the corner; and a four-storey
concrete parking garage for 280 cars with open steel and Cebonit walls and shops at the base.
Chestnut Hill College, East Stroudsburg University, Haverford

College, and to a few houses forced them to think about
details and construction.
Their first book, Manual (Princeton Architectural Press,
2002) focuses on various aspects of building (framing, hinging,
joining, lining, patching, profiling, scaling, selecting, slipping
and weaving). It provides numerous examples of different
approaches to each category taken from their own work, often
with a healthy dose of self-criticism. One example of joining
is the Melvin J and Claire Levine Hall, the new glass-walled
home of the Department of Computer and Information Science
at the University of Pennsylvania that connects several brick
structures in different historical styles by stepping back and
creating an additional courtyard. Carefully proportioned,
transparent, ventilated curtain walls provide visual connections
between the activity inside and campus life outside. An
intriguing example of patching is a row of brick privacy
walls inserted between stone columns under low brick arches
in the basement of Princeton Universitys Stafford Little Hall,
which was built by Cope and Stewardson in 1899 and 1901.
While trying to decide which unusual brick pattern to use to
give student rooms more privacy, someone asked: Why

choose? So every partial enclosure is different from the next
a veritable museum of brick patterns that are differentiated
from the existing surfaces and interesting in their own right.
One of KieranTimberlakes first major jobs at Yale the
renovation of Pierson and Davenport residential colleges
involved a good deal of hinging and patching and joining. The
two building complexes, designed by James Gamble Rogers in
1930, consisted of dormitory rooms, libraries and dining halls
(separate ones for each college) built around generous
courtyards on the Oxbridge model. They are sheathed with
stone and detailed in a Neo-Gothic style on the street facades,
and made of red brick with Neo-Georgian shutters and
classical colonnades on the inner courtyard sides, so there are
some quirky contrasts even in the original fabric.
The architects work involved converting the old dininghall kitchens (intended for waiters) to self-serve cafeteriastyle spaces, enlarging the study areas in the libraries, and
connecting the two colleges underground to provide more
types of recreational facilities to be shared by students of
both colleges. Here they replaced old pipes, storage rooms
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and squash courts (which all Yale colleges once had) with
fitness rooms, a basketball court, music practice room, a
theatre and cafs, combined the two pressrooms into one (all
Yale colleges also had their own presses), and added recycling
areas, a laundry and new mechanical services. The new
underground spaces are naturally somewhat grittier than the
formal ones upstairs, but the architects take the same delight
in details and materials as their predecessors, using brick,
stone, resin-varnished Fin-ply wood, concrete and steel with
aplomb. Their masterpiece here is a pair of open concreteand-steel staircases leading in opposite directions up to the
main living spaces of Pierson and Davenport colleges.
KieranTimberlakes is a nuts-and-bolts approach, but it does
not prevent them from looking at the bigger picture. In order
to learn what might be possible today, they used the
American Institute of Architects first Latrobe National
Research Prize to study how automobiles, ships and
aeroplanes are now being made. The result of that research
appears in their next book, Refabricating Architecture: How
Manufacturing Methodologies Are Poised to Transform Building

Construction (McGraw-Hill, 2004). This fully illustrated, little
black-and-white paperback argues that the time is right to
fulfil the early 20th-century Modernist dream of mass
production only they call it mass customisation because
contemporary technology can offer numerous options. Today
most parts of buildings can be built off site (in a factory)
faster, better and more safely than with standard
construction. KieranTimberlake have demonstrated how this
might be done in the most unlikely place on the Pierson
College beach, a leftover outdoor space where they created a
new small courtyard and a wing of dormitory rooms with 27
beds, called TomKat Hall. These were prefabricated in New
Jersey, shipped to the site, and erected in four days during
the spring break. The dark-red brick, gabled structure
manages to nod to its historic neighbours while subtly
proclaiming its 21st-century origins with clever downspouts,
fingered brick elastomeric sealed expansion joints (almost
zippers) between components, and other details.
Yale University School of Art Gallery, 2007

The big, open, loft-style gallery, which connects to the sculpture studios by an underground passage, will be used both
for professional exhibitions and for shows of student work. The glass walls of its corner front porch facing the street
can be opened completely to the outside during events. The buildings recycled wood walls relate to old houses nearby.
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Melvin J and Claire Levine Hall, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 2003

The 4,181-square-metre (45,000-square foot) addition and 1,393-squaremetre (15,000-square-foot) renovation wedge new facilities for the
Department of Computer and Information Science between the School of
Engineerings 1906 Towne Building and 1967 Graduate Research Wing, while
opening up new campus paths (where parking and service spaces used to
be) to the English Departments 1912 Bennett Hall. Levine Halls innovative
ventilated curtain wall saves energy while creating a desired sense of
transparency because air circulates between the double-paned skin and the
single-glazed interior skin. The project adds new laboratory space, faculty
offices and an auditorium to the School of Engineering.
The firms research on the fabrication processes being used

by the transportation industries convinced them that
architects need to give up the typical top-down approach to
design because it usually limits their involvement, separates
them from the building process, and cuts them off from
advances in construction technology. They advocate a
collaborative process that involves architects, contractors,
materials scientists and product engineers, working together
with computerised communication from the conception of a
project to the end.
Materials scientists are essential because Kieran and
Timberlake believe in using the wide range of new materials
available now. Many save energy, cost less, last longer and can
be readily adapted to the off-site construction process, which
is faster, more efficient, more accurate and not subject to the
whims of weather.
A holiday home that Kieran built for his family in 2006
demonstrates that it is possible to create something original,
unique and apparently indigenous entirely with factory-made

parts. The Loblolly House is named for the loblolly pine forest
into which it nestles almost imperceptibly it stands on
trunk-like stilts and is sheathed with irregularly spaced
vertical strips of red cedar. Its fourth facade opens to
Chesapeake Bay with accordion-folding glass walls and
retractable translucent aeroplane-hangar doors that remain
open on most summer nights. Few nearby trees had to be
cleared for construction because, in only six weeks, the
houses prefabricated parts were hoisted on to a platform and
set into a scaffold when they arrived from the factory. Whole
rooms with ceilings, walls, windows, plumbing, electrical
connections and lighting were set within 30-centimetre (12inch) deep horizontal sandwich panels made of plywood or
cement board filled with ductwork. Horizontal panels contain
insulation, vapour barriers and sheathing. Since the architects
believe that buildings should have a lifecycle like everything
else, the 204-square-metre (2,200-square-foot) structure was
designed to be dismantled eventually. Most of its parts are
recyclable. However, even if it is demolished, the Loblolly
House may live on, since the architects are working with a
developer on a mass-producable version.
Like other American architects, KieranTimberlake have
become increasingly interested in energy efficiency, but
because they know a lot about building technology they are
able to take this concern to a higher level than most of their
colleagues. At the Sidwell Friends Middle School, an extensive
renovation of and addition to a private Quaker school in
Washington DC (where Chelsea Clinton was once a student),
they replaced an old mansard roof with a functional green
one. Where a parking lot once stood, two new wings create a
courtyard that both recycles waste water and serves as an
outdoor laboratory. The buildings, which were sited to
TomKat Hall addition to Pierson College, Yale University, 2004

The new suite of rooms was built off site from manufactured components and
erected on site in four days even though, because of the tight nature of the
site, the modules had to be lifted over existing buildings from trailers in an
adjoining alley. The site-built construction of the slate roof, interior finishes,
porches, terraces and landscaping took another four months. The site, off a
corner of Pierson courtyard, was formerly used for recreation and services.
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Pierson and Davenport Colleges,

Yale University, New Haven, 2004
and 2005
The two adjacent residential colleges
were extensively renovated with new
mechanical services, recreational
facilities and small additions at a
cost of $40.5 million each. The two
are now connected underground
where they share facilities. The
architects demonstrate their love of
craft and materials in the
underground, back-to-back
staircases.
maximise passive solar heat gain, were opened to natural light

with glass-walled corridors along the outer walls and sheathed
in recycled wood from wine barrels. They also have photovoltaic
panels, high-energy pulse boilers, linoleum made from 10
different natural materials, and bamboo casework. The design
has influenced the curriculum so significantly that herbs
produced on the green roof are used in the dining hall, where
organic food is now served, and the impact of the building on
student health and mental acuity is the subject of a study by
the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
The new Sculpture Building at Yale is equally innovative. It
may realise more energy savings than any glass-walled
structure in America, but in order to achieve this the
architects had to make some pretty radical changes to the
programme. Since they were required by the city to replace
the parking spaces that had filled the site, university officials
assumed they would build a parking structure in the middle
of the largely residential block and locate the sculpture
studios along the street on the west side. But that would have
meant orienting the building eastwest, even though a
northsouth orientation would provide ideal northern light
and the opportunity to capture southern heat gain. So,
KieranTimberlake placed the elegant, glass-walled studio
building in the middle of the block and the open-walled
concrete black parking structure on the street where it will
have shops on the ground floor. They also opened the interior
of the block with pathways in both directions leading to the
studios, and pulled out the art gallery, which will be used by
the other art departments too, so that it opens on to a pretty
residential street around the corner from the garage.
The gallery is sheathed in the same western cedar siding
recycled from wine casks that the architects used at Sidwell,
only here it is in horizontal bands with metal strips like those
on barrels. The architects also gave the little building an abstract
front porch, in a nod to nearby 19th-century houses with
clapboard siding and prominent porches, removing every other

board on that corner for a more porous feel. The glass walls
under the porch can be opened to the street for events. The
gallerys sidewalls bow out slightly. The 6.7-metre (22-foot) tall,
single-storey gallery has exposed steel ceiling beams, and little
light slits in the corners and at the edges of the ceiling under
the functioning green roof. It is connected by an underground
passage to the studios behind it, which have porches on
several levels with big trees and other plantings on them.
It is the high-performance studio building walls, however,
that will set new standards for energy efficiency. Those on the
south have exterior metal sunshades projecting from the wall
surface, which has operable transparent triple-pane windows
above 10-centimetre (4-inch) thick, Aerogel-filled translucent
fibreglass panels with a subtle, almost Japanese, feel.
Perforated black metal panelling on interior columns houses a
displacement ventilation system that uses 40 per cent less
energy than usual. Black steel ceilings in stairwells with larger
perforations achieve a similar aesthetic that hovers between
sculptural and industrial. Even the surfaces in the corridors
fibreboard varnished with urethane are efficient, rugged and
attractive at the same time.
At night the building glows from within, lighting up the
mixed-used residential and commercial area around it. By day,
people passing by can glimpse the studios from the side yards
of nearby houses and apartment buildings. The complex
extends the activity of the Yale campus into a mixed-use area
that could use some new energy and sets a new standard for
building at Yale. That is, after all, KieranTimberlakes goal:
raising the bar aesthetically, technologically, environmentally
and socially not a small ambition. 4+
Text 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 114(t), 115, 118(t), 119 Ed
Wheeler; p 114(b) Barry Halkin; pp 116-17 Peter Aaron/ESTO/VIEW; p
118(b) KieranTimberlake Associates
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Userscape

Or Natural Interaction in the Everyday Digital World
Computers, mobiles and automatised machines are so omnipresent that the means by which
we interact with digital devices is now generally regarded as a given. Italian practice iO
Agency, though, questions our use of mechanised interfaces and the language that they
require us to learn. Valentina Croci explains how iO Agency has developed more natural
ways for people to interact with digital environments through physical or tactile triggers.
iO Agency, iOO Design, 2006

iOO Design is a series of products developed in
collaboration with the 3M Corporation, which includes iOO, a
system of interactive projections, of which only 100 examples
were produced. It is composed of a ceiling-mounted unit that
generates an interactive projection on the surface of a table.
To interact with the projection, all one has to do is move
ones hands above the surface, without touching it.
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iOO can be applied to the horizontal surface of a

carpet. The user can personalise the background
image and patterns of movement of the figures
(speed or effects of movement) using very simple
software installed on a home computer. The user can
also periodically update the contents, varying the
atmosphere and colour of the spaces. Interaction
requires no specific technical skills.
Interaction between digital tools and those who use them is

generally managed by graphic interfaces, for example the
computer screen, handheld devices, mobile phones, or even
the display screen on automated ticket machines. These
interfaces use methods of interaction based on an analytical
language composed of icons and access panels, such as
keypads, buttons or a mouse. The resulting manipulation of
information is not direct, but requires that the user adapt to
a language that differs from the way in which we relate to
other objects in the physical world. The fact that the user
must adapt to the language of the machine often generates
frustration, creating a barrier between the user and
technology. Given the increase in the number of digital
instruments in everyday spaces, we must design new
methods of interaction between users and technology.
An example of this approach can be found in the work of the
Italian office iO Agency, founded in 2004 in Treviso with the
aim of developing interactive spaces. The office now has 22
associates, many of whom were involved in the Net Economy
(the virtual arena in which business is conducted that emerged
in the mid-1990s), in addition to boasting a collaboration with
the Centro di integrazione dei media (Media Integration Centre),
part of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Florence.
One of the centres members, Alessandro Valli, is also one of
the founders of iO Agency and the theorist, in 2001, of the
concept of natural interaction, a form of interaction between
users and technology-enhanced spaces that is based on the

imitation of reality and common gestures. Here, actions such
as walking, touching or pointing become the triggers of the
digital system; the user, unlike with traditional media, is not
required to learn how the machine functions. This creates an
immediate relationship between the user and digital
technology, the result of the direct manipulation of the latter
by the former. Given that the user carries out familiar actions,
his or her attention passes from the process of using digital
technology to the experience that it can generate.
The approach taken by iO Agency is different from that
taken by other offices involved in the creation of digital
installations or interactive objects. iO Agencys final objective
is the creation of spaces in which technology is integrated
with the everyday, part of an environment in which digital
instruments dialogue with one another. With respect to other
digital installations, the projects by iO Agency do not seek the
complete immersion of the user within altered or exasperated
sensations, removing their attention from the sensorial
experience in favour of the effects of the digital environment.
Each project is calibrated based on the functions it is to
perform conferring information or, more simply, decorating
an environment and based on the number of people who
will use it or a specific target of users.
For iO Agency, natural interaction takes place through a
process that involves the simplification of possible operations,
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iO Agency, Installation for the New Fiat 500, Cappellini Temporary Store, Milan, 2007
Three months before the launch of the new Fiat 500, iO Agency was asked to design an installation that would represent the car without
actually presenting the physical product. The office designed a series of workstations that visitors could use to configure a version of the
new Fiat 500 and, later, view it at 1:1 scale inside a dark room. The system also simultaneously created a personalised brochure of the
car. The installation focused on the effect of surprise and the shared, playful experience enjoyed by a group of people.
iO Agency, Sensitive Space System, Milan, 2005

The Sensitive Space System is a range of products developed in collaboration with the 3M Corporation
and designed to create three-dimensional interactive spaces for retail and advertising spaces. At the
Italian headquarters of 3M it is possible to visit their showroom: a space with translucent walls, the
colour and intensity of which can be modulated and used to project interactive displays. The space also
includes an interactive floor surface. The final objective of the showroom is that of demonstrating, via the
exaggerated symbolism of interaction, the various methods of accessing digital content.
Sensitive Space System objects include devices

connected to a central system that unties their
various operations. The catalogue also includes
touch-less products such as this information
stand, which provides a gallery of images
accessed through visual, and non-analytical,
interaction.
Another of the Sensitive Space System devices is the interactive 3M catalogue. The interface-display was designed
to be used by the companys sales staff who are accustomed to reading a catalogue of products based on an index
similar to a periodic table. The semantic nature of the interface, the gestures used to indicate products and the
movement of elements on surfaces are natural movements for this category of users.
122+
Part of the modular concept

designed for LOral, the Colour
Studio is an instrument of
support for the sales of haircolour products. Sales clerks
can use a handheld device or
PC tablet to display the various
colours being proposed on a
video wall, turning a routine
event into a spectacular and
theatrical experience.
Modular concept for LOral Professionel Salons,

Cosmoprof Fair, Bologna, Italy, 2005
This environment was designed to support sales and track client behaviour.
The project is articulated in four functional modules that can exist separately
or as part of an integrated group: an interactive display case that allows
passers-by to interact with LOral products; a sales support station that uses
bar-code recognition and projects interactive information about the product
being purchased; a client management system that offers personalised
suggestions for specific purchases; and the Colour Studio.
and the reduction of the number of actions that the user must
make using the interface. The form of the instrument attracts
the user by clearly representing its function, while the interface
makes reference to a precise number of gestures point, move,
grab or walk connected to a precise operation performed by
the machine. The interpretation of peoples behaviour and its
reduction to triggers that activate the system is a very difficult
part of the design process: the technology must be able to
distinguish between the actions of the subject and background
noise. It is thus important to define the final objectives of the
device beforehand, together with the sequences of accessing
its functions. iO Agency does not produce standard products;
its devices are partially manufactured elements with advanced
levels of engineering, capable of implementing serial
applications based on a clients needs. For the definition of
products at the industrial scale, iO Agency works with
external partners; for example, the 3M Corporation, with
whom they collaborated on the design of the range of
Sensitive Space System products. Their partially manufactured
products operate based on the logic of uniform interaction.
However, the definition of the interface and the functional
specifications are calibrated for each single application.
The final objective of these devices is that of introducing
new services within everyday spaces. Digital applications do
not replace traditional computerised objects, which employ
metaphors (the desktop or the operating system) that are held
to be satisfactory for the functions that they must perform.
The applications created by iO Agency identify alternative and
more emotional forms of logic that allow for a greater level of
intervention on the form of space and the perception of the
quality of a given environment. This type of interactive object,
or better yet, a space filled with integrated, interactive
elements, allows for the construction of a richer experience

that leads, in turn, to new design possibilities, above all for
public spaces or spaces of social interaction.
iO Agency stresses that the design of interactive
environments within the spaces of the everyday is not only
related to the engineering of digital technologies, but also to
the creation of a synergic process involving architects and
designers. The introduction of this type of digital technology
can sensibly modify the atmosphere of a given space as in
the case of the Sensitive Space System, for which iO Agency
studied the possibility of simultaneously modifying light,
sound and the emissions of odours using interconnected
interactive objects.
The design challenge for interactive spaces is not simply
the creation of temporary installations with a significant
impact, as much as the development of applications for
everyday life, inserting, within our everyday habits, interactive
methods of using space and alternative mechanisms for
accessing services. Thus, as iO Agency points out, the design
challenge is to be found, on the one hand, in technological
innovation and, on the other, in the maturation of a new
culture that is interested in this research. 4+
Translated from the Italian version into English by Paul David Blackmore
Valentina Croci is a freelance journalist of industrial design and architecture.
She graduated from Venice University of Architecture (IUAV), and attained an
MSc in architectural history from the Bartlett School of Architecture, London.
She achieved a PhD in industrial design sciences at the IUAV with a
theoretical thesis on wearable digital technologies.
Text 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 120-22 iO Agency; p 123
LOral Paris
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Spillers Bits
Putting the I back

into Architecture
Neil Spiller gets personal in a bid to put the I back into architecture. He celebrates the
spatial experimentation of the work of Charlotte Erckrath. Creating a space of desire, she
produces a subjective synthesis of architect, body, space and view.
So if digital design is so revolutionary, exciting and cutting
edge, why does it all look the same pretty though some of it
may be? Is it because clients are very conservative and have
just got around to managing to accept the double-curved in
architecture? Certainly. Is it because architectural fashion
often precludes the personal approach? Of course. Architects
often deny themselves in their work it is often apolitical and
lacking in any but the most abstract references to the complex
mind of its designers. I like I. I only know what Im like
aesthetically and intellectually; I dont know what anybody
else likes for sure. We are all different, you are different to me
Erckrath developed each element so that

it could be rearticulated and reconfigured
in relation to the viewers body.
and I am different to you, and this is great. I dont believe in

Styles. This can take on an almost religious aspect. In the last
UK government census, something like 100,000 Britons
declared themselves Jedi in respect of their religion. If I were
cornered Id probably say Radical Constructivist.
At the root of this Radical Constructivism is Giambattista
Vico (16681744). A Neapolitan historian and philosopher,
Vico was appointed by Charles III of Naples as his
historiographer in 1734. The fundamental notion that makes
Vico memorable is his versum ipsum factum (the truth is the
same as the made). This idea was first published in 1710 in
The space of desire, the gaze and

the body are not excluded from the
work, as in the case of much
contemporary architecture.
124+
Charlotte Erckrath, Making the Idea: Subjectivity and Objects in SelfPortrait with Wife June and Model by Helmut Newton, 2007
The piece is produced by exploring boundaries, thresholds, points of view,
parallax and the engagement of the viewer.
This is an anthropometric scaled, intimate project that cannot be separated

from its architect. Here is a detail of one of the movable junctions, its
geometries inscribed with further bodily syntax and vectors.
his treatise De antiquissima Italorum Sapientia. As Gods truth is

what God comes to know as he creates and assembles it, so
human truth is what man comes to know as he builds it
shaping it by his actions.1
Cybernetic Radical Constructivists believe that there is no
mind-independent reality and that an individual constructs
his or her understanding of his or her world by observation
and operating within it. It in turn is readjusted in the
individuals dealings with others and other world-views
mediated by cybernetic conversation. Thus Vico is sometimes
called the first Radical Constructivist.
We all construct our view of the world as we navigate
through it. This world is not the controlled, tame, acetic world
of science. It is a world of experimentation, of near misses and
of desire a nomadic, expedient pseudo-science.
So in this particular Bits I would like to honour spatial
experimentation, I and the space of desire by introducing
Charlotte Erckraths work. The inspiration of this piece is a
photograph produced by Helmet Newton in 1981: Self Portrait
with Wife June and Models. The photograph resonates back
in time to Las Meninas of Velzquez, and its theoretical
content was sketched out by Victor Burgin in 1992.2 Erckrath
has identified the various modes of observation illustrated by
the picture and the act of viewing it. These are: The Spectator,
The Photographer, The Mirror, The Voyeur and The Backdrop.
She has then taken these ideas and included herself and her
body in the act of viewing and interpreting in her
architectural work. Perhaps unsurprisingly, her work can be
seen in comparison to Duchamps Large Glass, but here are no
illusions to masturbatory, vibrating bachelors divided from an
unobtainable mechanised bride no sexual binary opposites,
more a personal synthesis of architect, body, space and view.
This conclusion should be the aim of all architects and their
work, and not the impersonal taxonometrically similar
designs that so many of our profession perceive as inspired,
earthshaking architecture. The earth never moves for me
unless Im involved. 4+
Neil Spiller is Professor of Architecture and Digital Theory and Vice Dean at
the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London.
Notes
1. G Vico, De antiquissima Italorum Sapientia, Stamperia deClassici Latini
(Naples), 1858, chapter I, 1:56.
2. V Burgin, Perverse space, in B Colomina, Sexuality and Space, The New
Press (New York), 1992, pp 21941.
Text 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images Charlotte Erckrath
125+
Unit Factor
Radical Interface
AA New Media Research Initiative
At the Architectural Association in London, Joel Newman, Theodore Spyropoulos and
Vasilis Stroumpakos are spearheading the New Media Research Initiative. Here they call for
architecture to abandon its hold on the formal qualities of the physical in favour of a mode of
experience that provides an interface that fully reflects the way we inhabit space today.
Theodore Spyropoulos and Vasili Stroumpakos, Techne, AADRL Research Fellowship, 200204
These explorations, performed by Nick Puckett, were designed as a series of limitation devices that are integrated with
dispersal software systems that become the testing ground for where we can turn these immersive technologies back on
ourselves. The goal is that by doing these experiments on ourselves we can gain critical insight into our adaptive cognition
while acquiring a tangible understanding of the sensorial.
126+
In architectural and product design, physicality is still

perceived as the main reference for judgement, while
embedded 2-D design is treated as a secondary or subsidiary
consideration, an addendum at best. This is the residue of an
older paradigm in which structure is matter and fresco is
decor. Although this was a reasonable mode of thought for
the design of building in the past, contemporary design
should adopt the mode of experience, the way that space is
inhabited today. What you see is what you use. Interface is
both function and performance, and the aesthetics of form
and material are secondary.
Function and Experience
However, function does not have to be boring, and certainly
does more than merely respond to route planning, or go from
A to B, but do not pass C. Function in contemporary
architecture is the creation of an environment of experience.
Creating experiences refers to the real target of interface
design: to generate new forms of engagement with information
and communication; to excite the human intellect with new
forms of interaction. This requires consideration and
understanding of the complex aspects of perception and
cognition. Interfaces have existed for a relatively short time,
both in terms of scientific research and in public applications,
and so they are a grand and continuing experiment.
Form and Graphics
When the iPod was released, Apple described it as the product
the company was created to make, a device that could embody
the companys philosophy: the interface is the product. In the
design of devices, the separation between the threedimensional form and the interface is under question. For a
long time, devices such as mobile phones were judged
Thomas Chan, Interface Catalogue, 2007

Intermediate 6 student Thomas Chan (tutors: Veronika Schmid and Alistair
Gill) designed and developed a comprehensive custom-made interface in
Flash through which he could control and inform the 3-D modelling software.
During a design workshop at the AADRL, students were asked to develop

limitation devices. One of the briefs was to design an instrument as a
seeing stick for the blind.
primarily, if not exclusively, on the physical characteristics of

the case. Shape, the appearance and feel of the materials, the
practical and ergonomic parameters were all important.
Interface rarely featured strongly in the design process or in
the critical evaluation of the design. Today, with the
introduction of a new generation of more complex devices
such as Apples iPhone and the BenQ Black Box, interface has
found its apotheosis in the new physical space of the screen.
The interface is the new material, and the product is the
interface, so contemporary design education ought to be
prepared for that.
The Experimental Web
It is fair to say that the new level of interface design is not the
exclusive result of one particular studio or company, but a
logical progression of 10 years of experiment on the World
Wide Web. Interface experimentation certainly did take place
within labs and research centres, but many dedicated
amateurs, smart kids and professionals alike were also deeply
engaged and loosely hooked together by the Web.
With the introduction of the internet, people started to
create personal pages, driving the development of better and
powerful software. Many pages were simply just people
wanting to put forward their voice, their opinions and
feelings to the world: writing about their likes and dislikes,
showing photographs of their friends and families, creating
an image of their lives and perspective on the world they live
in. This continues today in the blogsphere.
However, a small but growing number of users became
more interested in the interface itself, leaving the content to
evolve from the words and images of the Web population.
Fascination with the new tools (Flash, Director, Java and later
Processing) led this generation of dedicated amateur
experimenters to contribute greatly to the evolution of user
interfaces. Although this kind of work had been, or still is,
characterised as Web or computer art by some, substantially
it is rigorous research through experimentation.
127+
Theodore Spyropoulos and Vasilis Stroumpakos, Facebreeder software/installation, Selfridges, London, 2004 and the AA, London, 2006
Fabricated by the authors and a group of DRL students, Facebreeder emerged as an aftermath of the Techne research fellowship.
Experimentation does not need to be beautiful, but rather

an outrageous lack of compromise. Simultaneous
experimentation by a multitude of people produces
innovation through evolution. Radical interface design by
innovators such as Yugo Nakamura, Joshua Davis, Ed Burton,
Dextro, Lia, Martin Wattenberg, Jared Tarbell, Golan Levin,
Zachary Lieberman and Ben Fry provides distinctive examples
of direct and applied research for architects working in
computation. Their work defines a new understanding of
interface design and screen-based interaction. They adopt
extreme and radical modes in their engagement with
experimental design, and the momentum that these types of
works has created affected, and still affects, a wide range of

creative disciplines, including architecture.
AA Method as Practice
The Architectural Association (AA) is at the forefront in
nurturing these approaches, and this is reflected in the
formation of its New Media Research Initiative, which
emerged through the continuous engagement of the schools
various programmes within the domain of interface. This
takes place on three levels. First through the agendas of
several studios in the undergraduate and graduate school,
where student research undertaken at the AA Design
128+
Dextro, Interactive applet, Architectural

Association, London, 2007
Pioneer in contemporary computer art, Dextro,
presented his work at the AA.
AA New Media Cluster Kick-Off Event, Architectural

Association, London, 2006
Stelarc performs involuntary acts with student volunteers at a new media
clusters launch event at the AA.
Research Lab (AADRL) and Emtech as well as undergraduate

units such as Int 3, Int 6, Int 8 and Dip 14 clearly depicts a
shift in the architectural design paradigm employing
methods and concepts, but also developing approaches that
blend digital interface with spatial and experience design.
Second through research fellowships such as Techne that
were developed by Theodore Spyropoulos and Vasilis
Stroumpakos and led to projects such as the Facebreeder
that engaged the AA community. And finally through
explorations conducted in the Media Studies programme.
The New Media Research Initiative aims to work as an
umbrella for these engagements by reinforcing the interface
dialogue: on the one hand by a series of events/talks including
key speakers Stelarc, Dextro, Ed Burton, Zachary Lieberman,
Christopher Lindiger and United Visual Artists that took place
during 2006/07; and on the other by engaging with related
projects such as the cross-programme event laptop-jam
sessions promoting and presenting student work and staff
research that responds to concepts of space as interface. 4+
Brian Dale and Luis Fraguada, CCdb project, AA New Media Laptop
Sessions, London, 2007
The cross-programme event brings together interface-related student work
from various departments of the school.
Joel Newman studied fine art at Reading University and has exhibited his work
widely. He has run the AAs audiovisual department since 1994, and teaches
video-making.
Theodore Spyropoulos is a co-director of the AA Design Research Lab (AADRL) in
London. He is a visiting research fellow at MITs Center for Advanced Visual Studies
working with the Interrogative Design Group. He directs the experimental design
practice Minimaforms, and has worked as a project architect at the offices of Peter
Eisenman and Zaha Hadid.
Vasilis Stroumpakos studied at the AADRL (MArch) and at AUTH in Thessaloniki,
Greece. He is co-author of ramtv.orgs Negotiate My Boundary! He has been a
research fellow at the AA and is currently part of the academic staff at the AADRL
and AA Media Studies programme. He also runs the practice 00110.org.
Unit Factor is edited by Michael Weinstock, who is Academic Head and Head of
Technical Studies at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London,
and also a visiting professor at Yale University and at ESARQ Barcelona. He is coguest-editor with Michael Hensel and Achim Menges of the Emergence:
Morphogenetic Design Strategies (May 2004) and Techniques and Technologies in
Morphogenetic Design (March 2006) issues of Architectural Design. He is currently
writing a book on the architecture of emergence for John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Text 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 126, 127(t), 128(t&br) Theodore
Spyropoulos and Vasilis Stroumpakis; pp 127(b), 129(b) Architectural
Association; p 128(bl) Theodore Spyropoulosz and Vasilis Stroumpakis, photo
Sue Barr; p 129(t) dextro.org
129+
In the final part of his short series that outlines the main principles of ecodesign,
Ken Yeang turns his attention to the alternatives that are on offer to designers who
want to ensure comfortable internal conditions in their buildings. He covers the full
gamut of choices and hybrids from buildings that are constructed in passive mode,
without the need for any electromechanical systems, to those that are conceived in
productive mode producing their own energy.
Yeangs Eco-Files
Yeangs Eco-Files
Yeangs Eco-Files

The Basic Premises for Green Design
Foster + Partners, University of Technology Petronas, Malaysia, 2004

The campus crescent-form roof responds to the climate of the Malay peninsula by covering
pedestrian routes. It provides shade from the heat and shelter from monsoon rains.
130+
Yeangs Eco-Files
Yeangs Eco-Files
Yeangs Eco-Files
WOHAA Architects/Wong Mun

Summ and Richard Hassell,
Moulmein Rise Residential Tower,
Singapore, 2003
Here the traditional monsoon window
is adopted in a 28-storey, speculative
housing block. This horizontal opening
lets in the breeze but not the rain. It
clearly demonstrates the potential of
the monsoon window as an effective
passive cooling device in a
contemporary urban setting.
As designers we should be looking at ways of configuring

individual built forms as low-energy systems, while also
applying the same thinking to the operational systems of the
greater built environment and our own businesses. In
addressing these systems we need to look into ways of
improving the internal conditions of our buildings so as to
make them more comfortable. There are essentially five
ways of doing this: passive mode, mixed mode, full mode,
productive mode and composite mode, the last being a
composite of all the preceding modes.
The practice of sustainable design requires that we look
first at passive mode (or bioclimatic) design strategies; then
we can move on to mixed mode, full mode, productive mode
and composite mode, all the while adopting progressive
strategies to improve comfortable conditions relative to
external conditions.
Meeting contemporary expectations for comfortable
conditions in the office cannot generally be achieved by
passive mode or by mixed mode alone. The internal
environment often needs to be supplemented by the use of
external sources of energy, as in full mode. Full mode uses
electromechanical systems often powered by external energy

sources whether from fossil-fuel derived sources or from
local ambient sources such as wind or solar power.
Passive mode means designing for improved internal
comfort conditions over external conditions without the use
of any electromechanical systems. Examples of passive mode
strategies include the adoption of suitable building
orientation and configuration in relation to the local
climate, as well as the selection of appropriate building
materials. When considering the design of the facade, issues
of solid-to-glazed area ratios, thermal insulation values, the
incorporation of natural ventilation and the use of
vegetation are also important.
Building design strategy must start with passive mode or
bioclimatic design, as this can significantly influence the
configuration of the built form and its enclosure systems.
Passive mode requires an understanding of the climatic
conditions of the locality; the designer should not merely
synchronise the building design with the local
meteorological conditions, but optimise the ambient energy
of the locality to create improved internal comfort
131+
Yeangs Eco-Files
Yeangs Eco-Files
Yeangs Eco-Files
Typical floor plan illustrating

the location of the monsoon
windows. The design
addresses the challenges of
the tropical climate by
incorporating monsoon
windows and the perforated
wall, while establishing a
relationship of different
volumes to maximise air
circulation.
conditions without the use of any electromechanical

systems. The fundamental nature of these decisions clearly
dictates that once the building configuration, orientation
and enclosure are considered, the further refinement of a
design should lead to the adoption of choices that will
enhance its energy efficiency. If, as an alternative, a design
solution is developed that has not previously optimised the
passive mode options, then these non-energy efficient design
decisions will need to be corrected by supplementary full
mode systems.
Such a remedy would make a nonsense of low-energy
design. Furthermore, if the design optimises a buildings
passive modes, it remains at an improved level of comfort
during any electrical power failure. If the passive modes
have not been optimised, then whenever there is no
electricity or external energy source the building may
become intolerable to occupy.
In mixed mode, buildings use some electromechanical
systems such as ceiling fans, double facades, flue atriums
and evaporative cooling.
Full mode relies entirely on the use of electromechanical
systems to create suitable internal comfort conditions. This
is the option chosen for most conventional buildings. If
clients and users insist on having consistent comfort
conditions throughout the year, this will inevitably lead to
full mode design. It must be clear now that low-energy
design is essentially a user-driven condition and a lifestyle
issue. We must appreciate that passive mode and mixed
mode design can never compete with the comfort levels of
the high-energy, full mode conditions.
Productive mode is where a building generates its own
energy. Common examples of this today can be seen in the
generation of electricity through the use of photovoltaic
panels that are powered by solar power, and wind turbines

that harness wind energy. Ecosystems use solar energy that
is transformed into chemical energy by the photosynthesis
of green plants, which in turn drives the ecological cycle. If
ecodesign is to be ecomimetic, we should seek to do the
same; however, we will need to do so on a much larger scale.
The inclusion of systems that create productive modes
inevitably leads to sophisticated technological systems that,
in turn, increase the use of material resources, the inorganic
content of the built form, the embodied energy content and
the attendant impact on the environment.
Composite mode is a combination of all the above modes
in proportions that vary over the seasons of the year.
Ecodesign also requires the designer to use materials
and assemblies that facilitate reuse, recycling and their
eventual reintegration with ecological systems. Here again
we need to be ecomimetic in our use of materials in the
built environment: in ecosystems, all living organisms feed
on continual flows of matter and energy from their
environment to stay alive, and all living organisms
continually produce waste. However, ecosystems do not
actually generate waste since one species waste is really
another species food. Thus matter cycles continually
through the web of life. To be truly ecomimetic, the
materials we produce should also take their place within the
closed loop where waste becomes food.
Currently we regard everything produced by humans as
eventual garbage or waste material that is either burned or
ends up in landfill sites. The new question for designers,
manufacturers and businesses is: How can we use this waste
material? If our materials are readily biodegradable, they can
return to the environment through decomposition. If we
want to be ecomimetic, we should think, at the very early
132+
Yeangs Eco-Files
Yeangs Eco-Files
Yeangs Eco-Files
TR Hamzah & Yeang Snd Bhd (a

Llewellyn Davies Yeang, UK, sister
company), Standard Chartered Bank
Priority Building Pavilion, Kuala
Lumpur, Malaysia, 2001
This glass pavilion is an example of
mixed-mode design. It has an aircurtain above the entrance, which has
been modified to accommodate a
number of small jets within the middle
of the blower. These emit a fine spray
of water that evaporates and creates a
misty cloud around the doorway. This
lowers the ambient temperature of the
zone around the entrance. It gives a
sensation of cooling to passers-by,
inviting them into the pavilion.
design stages, how a building, its components and its

outputs can be reused and recycled. These design
considerations will determine the materials to be used, the
ways in which the building fabric is to be assembled, how
the building can be adapted over time, and how the
materials can be reused after the building has reached the
limits of its useful life.
If we consider the last point, reuse, in a little more detail,
we come to an increasingly important conclusion. To
facilitate the reuse of, let us say, a structural component, the
connection between the components should be mechanical,
ie bolted, rather than welded so that the joint can be
released easily. If, in addition to being easily demountable,
the components were modular, then the structure could be
easily demounted and reassembled elsewhere. This leads to
the concept of design for disassembly (DfD), which has its
roots in sustainable design.
Another major design issue is the systemic integration of
our built forms, operational systems and internal processes
with the natural ecosystems that surround us. Such
integration is crucial because without it these systems will
remain disparate artificial items that could be potential
pollutants. Unfortunately, many of todays buildings only
achieve eventual integration through biodegradation that
requires a long-term process of natural decomposition.
While manufacture and design for recycling and reuse
relieves the problem of deposition of waste, we should
integrate both the organic waste (eg sewage, rain water run
off, waste water, food wastes, etc) and the inorganic waste.
There is a very appropriate analogy between ecodesign and
surgical prosthetics. Ecodesign is essentially design that

integrates man-made systems both mechanically and
organically with the natural host system the ecosystems. A
surgical prosthetic device also has to integrate with its
organic host being the human body. Failure to integrate
will result in dislocation in both cases. These are the
exemplars for what our buildings and our businesses should
achieve: the total physical, systemic and temporal
integration of our human-made, built environment with our
organic host in a benign and positive way. There are, of
course, a large number of theoretical and technical problems
to be solved before we have a truly ecological built
environment. However, we should draw encouragement
from the fact that our intellect has allowed us to create
prosthetic organs that can integrate with the human body.
The next challenge will be to integrate our buildings, our
cities and all human activities with the natural ecosystems
that surround us. 4+
Kenneth Yeang was Chairman of the Master Jury of the 2007 Aga Khan
Award for Architecture. The Moulmein Rise Residential Tower and University
of Technology Petronas were two of nine projects presented with awards
this year. For details of the award scheme and other award-winning
projects, see www.akdn.org/architecture.
Kenneth Yeang is a director of Llewellyn Davies Yeang in London and TR
Hamzah & Yeang in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He is the author of many
articles and books on ecodesign, including Ecodesign: A Manual for
Ecological Design (Wiley-Academy, 2006).
Text 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 130-32 Courtesy of the
Aga Khan Award for Architecture; p 133 Dr Ken Yeang
133+
McLeans Nuggets
The De- and Re-Materialisation
of the Art Object
The logistics of art is an international
business, with galleries and
museums functioning as temporary
stops or viewing platforms, where
the art lover, or someone trying to
keep out of the cold, may saunter
past a good work, or not.
The business and total amount
of artwork in transit (measurable in
weight, monetary value or the more
complex measure of human
happiness) we will leave for
another time.
It is the self-recognisable art
logistic (or the art of logistics) that
seems more pertinent. Aside from
the Europewide doyens of a trade
formerly known as road haulage such
as Willi Betz, Norbert Dentressangle
and the UKs largest private logistics

company brand of Eddie Stobart,
there are independent artists who
operate in the field of artworks that
are designed to move. We can take to
the water with French artist Daniel
Burens sailing sculptures, which
consisted of his trademark Voile
(stripes) decorating the sails of a
series of sailboats at Lake Grasmere
(July 2005), or Aldo Rossis Teatro del
Mondo (1979), a floating theatre for
250 that visited Venice and
Dubrovnik. Also briefly appearing in
a Venice canal (1985) was Claes
Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggens
collaboration with Frank O Gehry a
theatrical spectacular featuring a 25metre (82-foot) long floating Swiss
army knife as its centrepiece. More
recently we witnessed Robert
Smithsons Floating Island a 30 x 10

metre (98 x 33 foot) flat-decked barge
of fully grown trees and large rocks
being towed up and down the
Hudson River, finally realised in
2005, 32 years after his premature
death, which may have been
interesting, but without the artist
looks like a late delivery. For the
land-based movable feast we find
London-based artist Cedric Christies
elegant collection of mobile art,
which consists of a previously
unremarkable fleet of second-hand
cars being individually (and show
specifically) inscribed with the
participants of Kassels ongoing
five-yearly, 100-day international art
Olympics of the Documenta
exhibition.
Detail of Cedric Christies
Documenta 4 car parked
in a London street.
134+
Performance-Enhancing
Architecture?
During a recent conversation with a
former employee of a large
multinational food and domestic
goods combine, he was kind enough
to tell me about a sector of the nonalcoholic drinks industry entitled
Performance Enhancing Beverages
(PEB). Employed by the firm as a
psychologist, it was one of his jobs to
assess (under strict scientific
procedures) the short-term
physiological effects of ingested
liquid refreshment, whereupon the
company may or may not be allowed
(by various advertising standards
organisations) to make substantiated
claims for their new wonder drink.
This kind of psychological
assessment of architecture, and its
subsequent consumption, is not so
obviously deployed, or perhaps not
qualitatively. The space syntax mob
may or may not be able to predict
and somewhat guide us around the
large peopled environments of
stadiums, airports and shopping
centres, but the designed tools and
mechanisms for the traffic and
comfort and ultimate enjoyment of
the user seem simplistic and largely
symbolic. Can we not learn from the
highly tweaked ingredients of the
psychologically complex PEB and
make some architecture that
demonstrably makes you feel good?
Although good is a rather imprecise
descriptor; what about architecture
is good for you though I doubt the
professions representative bodies or
many of its practitioners and clients
would try and support such a
statement. Whether through some
transcendental detailing or a more
robust appreciation of need and
appropriate servicing, designers
should begin to manufacture more
stimulating and more physiologically
tuned environments.
Going Local
Like an observation recently
overheard at the nearby motorway
services that the problem with
Gretna Green [the UKs premier
eloping destination] is that it is not
tacky enough, seemingly unwilling
to submit to a Las Vegas-style
upgrade, you are left with a faintly
moribund invented tradition that
owes its existence more to the
tachometer proximities of the
logistics industry.
So what future in the British
Holiday destination? Leaving aside
the middle-class enclaves slumming
it in high-priced Nuevo rustic
boutique hotels or the beach-hut
investments of the south coast, are
British holiday towns (and in
particular the seaside variety) the
doomed economic blackspots of our
current imagination, or does
planning supremo Sir Peter Hall
have a point when he suggests that
these ready-made eco holiday resorts
have all the residual social and
physical fabric to sustain an
economic transformation? Writing
in Town and Country Planning, Hall
points to the tourism successes of
the previously esoteric adventure
destinations of the Galpagos
Islands or Machu Picchu, offering
natural habitat and exotic culture,1
which in a generation have become
so popular that visitor numbers are
strictly controlled.
Also spotted in the Institute of
Directors magazine After Hours
(Spring 2007) was a highly serviced
neo-primitive tourist destination
where you pay good money for la
service ruistique, where the cultivated
civilities and etiquette rigmaroles of
the 20th century are replaced by a
more loosely formed set of highgrade (that is to say, not expensive)
prosaic or real experiences.
If the UK were not still so
dominated by short-termed
entrepreneurship and the desire for
difference so well represented in the
135+
proverbial twist, then we and our

incoming tourist visitors might well
be able to enjoy the regional
differences and delicacies that are so
prevalent, and hardly need another
reinvention. We must all be careful
so as not to miss the point (or the
destination). 4+
Note
1. Town and Country Planning Association,
Town and Country Planning, Vol 76, No 3,
March 2007, pp 789
McLeans Nuggets is an ongoing technical
series inspired by Will McLean and Samantha
Hardinghams enthusiasm for back issues of
AD, as explicitly explored in Hardinghams AD
issue The 1970s is Here and Now
(March/April 2005).
Will McLean is joint coordinator of technical
studies (with Peter Silver) in the Department
of Architecture at the University of
Westminster.
Text 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images
Will McLean
A beach ashtray distributed free by the

Menorca reserva de biosfera. The Balearic
island of Menorca was declared a biosphere
reserve by UNESCO in 1993, for the
exploration of sustainable development.
There are currently 400 such designated
biosphere reserves throughout the world.
Cities of Dispersal
Guest-edited by Rafi Segal and Els Verbakel
Questioning the traditional boundaries between cities, suburbs, countryside and
wilderness, this issue of AD explores emergent types of public space in lowdensity environments. It describes this new form of urbanism: decentralised, in a
constant process of expansion and contraction, not homogenous or necessarily
low-rise, nor guided by one mode of development, typology or pattern.
While functionally and programmatically dispersed, settlements operate as a
form of urbanism; the place of collective spaces within them has yet to be
defined and articulated. The physical transformation of the built environment on
the one hand, and the change in our notion of the public on the other due to
globalisation, privatisation and segregation call for renewed interpretations of
the nature and character of public space. The concept of public space needs to
be examined: replaced, re-created or adapted to fit these conditions. What is the
place of the public in this form of urbanism, and how can architecture address
the notion of common, collective spaces? What is the current sociopolitical role
of such spaces? How does the form and use of these spaces reflect the
conception of the public as a political (or non-political) body? And can
architecture regain an active role in formulating the notion of the collective?
These and other issues are addressed through essays, research projects and
built work by distinguished writers such as Bruce Robbins, Albert Pope and Alex
Wall, and practitioners including Zvi Hecker, Vito Acconci, MUTOPIA, Manuel de
Sol-Morales, Martha Rosler and Manuel Vicente in a search for new collective
architectures within the dispersed city.
4+
Interior Eye Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood
Practice Profile KieranTimberlake Associates
Userscape iO Agency
Unit Factor AA New Media Research Initiative
Regular columns from Will McLean, Neil Spiller and Ken Yeang

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4

Individual backlist issues of 4 are available for purchase

March/April 2008, Profile No 192

Versatility and Vicissitude: Performance in Morpho-Ecological Design

May/June 2008, Profile No 193

July/August 2008, Profile No 194

Proto Architecture: Analogue and Digital Hybrids

ISBN-978 0470 06637 9

Requests to the Publisher should be addressed to:

F: +44 (0)1243 770620

Water and Asphalt

The Public and the V2

Public Lifestyle in the

Old Dispersions and Scenes for

String Block Vs Superblock

In the Our Beautiful Future

Archipelago of the Negev Desert

Urban Voids: Grounds for

User-Focused Public Space

Royal Dutch Military Police

Nam Van Square, Macau

Mur Island, Graz, Austria

Guy Saggee, Digital print, 2007

The predominance of sprawling, low-density

the American context),1 wild living and the diffused city

Our built environment is in the process of reorganising itself,

Between 1960 and 1990, the population in more than 200

By mid-century, the populations of 39 countries are

Throughout these physical transformations of the urban

50% of US housing is suburban, 20% of US housing is

integration within urban systems, are generally not viewed as

Mexico City, Mexico

demanding term public space with the somewhat more

jurisprudence13 preoccupied with locating the boundary

Schiphol, The Netherlands

without considering the need for a new urban/architectural

Alex Wall outlines the emerging typology of lifestyle

From a more direct architectural point of view, the meeting

Beer Sheva, Israel

social entities, we could not produce most of the books or films or

11. From Craig Calhoun, op cit, p 26.

The Public and the V2

Listing agents of what he calls the implosion of the urban

warming? Bananas, like V2s, usually come from far away. If

Defusing a Nazi bomb, London, 1940.

An aerial view of an area of London that suffered heavy bombing, c 1940.

leaving behind something that is not urban? Or is there a

politics are present within the more passive, aestheticised

Londons Smithfield Market damaged by enemy action, c 1941.

connectedness those actions relevant to, or significant for,

in the US elections! We should certainly consider the

implication of a historical, individuated subject on the

relevant to contemporary urban form specifically

drainage capacity, along with unpaved or paved roadbeds.

Diagrams 13). The three stages gridiron, superblock and

various subgroupings to be taken as a single,

the historically specific subjectivities that rose and fell

that the difference being marked is between urban systems

extends beyond the issue of interconnected parts to the

In a short text dating from 1972, Foucault made the

street infrastructures have been produced in the American city. Instead,

Public Lifestyle in the

The Idea of Centre in Low-Density Urbanism