Thursday 28 April 2016

27.4. Texts

We went through a choice of texts - some more academic, some more fictitious.

Georg Simmel: Metropolis and Mental Life 1903


"The psychological basis of the metropolitan type of individuality consists in the intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli. Man is a differentiating creature. His mind is stimulated by the difference between a momentary impression and the one which preceded it. Lasting impressions, impressions which differ only slightly from one another, impressions which take a regular and habitual course and show regular and habitual contrasts-all these use up, so to speak, less consciousness than does the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions. These are the psychological conditions which the metropolis creates. With each crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life, the city sets up a deep contrast with small town and rural life with reference to the sensory foundations of psychic life. The metropolis exacts from man as a discriminating creature a different amount of consciousness than does rural life. Here the rhythm of life and sensory mental imagery flows more slowly, more habitually, and more evenly. Precisely in this connection the sophisticated character of metropolitan psychic life becomes understandable - as over against small town life which rests more upon deeply felt and emotional relationships. These latter are rooted in the more unconscious layers of the psyche and grow most readily in the steady rhythm of uninterrupted habituations. The intellect, however, has its locus in the transparent, conscious, higher layers of the psyche; it is the most adaptable of our inner forces. In order to accommodate to change and to the contrast of phenomena, the intellect does not require any shocks and inner upheavals; it is only through such upheavals that the more conservative mind could accommodate to the metropolitan rhythm of events. Thus the metropolitan type of man-which, of course, exists in a thousand individual variants - develops an organ protecting him against the threatening currents and discrepancies of his external environment which would uproot him. He reacts with his head instead of his heart. In this an increased awareness assumes the psychic prerogative. Metropolitan life, thus, underlies a heightened awareness and a predominance of intelligence in metropolitan man. The reaction to metropolitan phenomena is shifted to that organ which is least sensitive and quite remote from the depth of the personality. Intellectuality is thus seen to preserve subjective life against the overwhelming power of metropolitan life, and intellectuality branches out in many directions and is integrated with numerous discrete phenomena."


Italo Calvino: Invisible cities 1972

Cities and memory 3: Zaira

In vain, great-hearted Kublai, shall I attempt to describe Zaira, city of high bastions. I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades’ curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper’s swaying feet; the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen’s nuptial procession; the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn; the tilt of a guttering and a cat’s progress along it as he slips into the same window; the firing range of a gunboat which has suddenly appeared beyond the cape and the bomb that destroys the guttering; the rips in the fish net and the three old men seated on the dock mending nets and telling each other for the hundredth time the story of the gunboat of the usurper, who some say was the queen’s illegitimate son, abandoned in his swaddling clothes there on the dock.
As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks up like a sponge and expands. A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.


Illustration of Zaira by Karina Puente.


Jane Jacobs: Death and Life of Great American Cities 1961

“Great cities are not like towns, only larger. They are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers. To any one person, strangers are far more common in big cities than acquaintances. More common not only in places of public assembly, but more common at a man’s own doorstep. Even residents who live near each other are strangers, and must be, because of the sheer number of people in small geographical compass.

The bedrock attribute of a successful city district is that a person must feel personally safe and secure on the street among all these strangers.”


David Evans ed.: The Art of Walking 2013




William Gibson: Count Zero 1986



Peter Bishop and Lesley Williams: The Temporary City 2012

The Temporary City is a great overview of, say, ten years of temporary urban initiatives and development efforts. Showcasing a rich variety of good practices, the book describes what has happened over the last years in planning and urbanism, when the pop-up trend became more relevant. Bishop and Williams focus both on theory and practice. On the one hand a wide range of urban interventions, bottom-up projects and design solutions are featured, but one the other hand the books poses the question why urban planning and design have always been so intrigued with permanence.

















Monday 25 April 2016

Metropolis - and what is that? 14.4.

Eetu Viren talked about metropolis. If you know Finnish you can also read the book Viren & Vähämäki: Seutu joka ei ole paikka - see also Pontus Purokuru's review Prekariaatin monumentti of the book.

We started with some images discussing how to define metropolis - I'm posting some similar ones:


Take the metro to the final destination in a suburb and you'll always find an Asian Fusion take-away. Mixture of cultures, ethnicities and extending outside all borders. In fact, not "mother-city" sending out extensions to colonies, but original urban mixture - "urban immensities".


Original also in the sense that metropolis is not a merely modern, global big city - but something that we have had before in history. And in fact, we had a long talk and Eetu explained his idea about where culture and man as a cultural animal comes from: cities are born from the original need to meet, drink beer and have sex with strangers. Not commerce or war-fare. Whole theory and speculation where our brains came from.


The global actual metropolis then: every space is covered with advertisement - surfaces are not solid, flow of information and communication is expanding everywhere.

One grounding concept or theory that Eetu also talked about was the production of value: out of the fordist factory, where time and space of production was defined and limited and the end product was a tangible commodity we have moved to a process of production that has expanded outside the factory. As Toni Negri said, the metropolis is to the post-fordist production what the factory was for fordism. The value of the tangible end-product is now a minimal part of the value production, the main part being made up of the "brand" - and the brand is something produced by all who use and consume the products. Value production has expanded like the metropolis, like our form of life.

Thursday 14 April 2016

Imagining Otaniemi 13.4.

First Kristo Vesikansa told us about the history of Otaniemi, showing a wealth of interesting images. Now we know Otaniemi in the 1940ies was still mostly wood and some farm fields of the Otaniemi mansion. The campus of the then Helsinki University of Technology was a post-war effort, very much part of the general rebuilding, and also very much part of the initiative of the students and the student organisation. In fact the first edifices to be built were the student houses in the North. We saw a bunch of interesting architecture that is still part of Otaniemi - and then some bold proposals for the future. I'm putting some examples of the pictures with thanks to Kristo!

After the Otaniemi pictures there will be some pics from the drawing exercise we did with Anna K, drawing first a place that interests you, going through how you drew it and why, and then adding there something that would make the place a nice place you'd like to be in.














Anna-Sofia adding stuff to her picture

Monday 11 April 2016

Walking and experiencing space with Anna Kholina

Anna told us about her doctoral thesis work and questions concerning design of urban space - and then experiencing urban space. Anna said:

What transforms our being in the urban space into an experience? Can every encounter with the surroundings be considered an experience, or is our perception only a fragmented sequence of fleeting moments lost in time and space?

According to John Dewey, an experience includes an active aspect (not just “Having an experience”) and these two — having an experience and being active — are interconnected. An experience happens when means are aligned with ends, it includes the sense-giving consciousness (typical for human beings) by which meanings are assigned to events.

Although Dewey points towards the very important features that characterise an experience, it is difficult to link his philosophical reflections with the daily practice. One way to bridge this gap is to create an active state of the experience artificially, for example, though a walk in the urban space guided by a game-like set of cards, each containing a task that transforms an ordinary routine into an active search for new perspectives. Documenting the journey with the help of collage made of drawings and tangible objects allows to uncover the tacit layer of the experience: what was meaningful and sense-containing. It sheds light on the most important aspects of the urban space which contribute to our experiential knowledge.



And then everybody did a walk, equipped with a set of tasks and questions like:
Walk where you normally don't.
Do you see an unusual color?
Where are most of the people? go there and do what they're doing.
Can you find somewhere to rest?







And then we drew maps of our walks.










Sunday 10 April 2016

6.4. What is urban?

“- Would you have three hundred strangers in your neighborhood?
- Fuck yes, it’s called city dwelling, you fucking buckets.”




“Great cities are not like towns, only larger. They are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers. To any one person, strangers are far more common in big cities than acquaintances. More common not only in places of public assembly, but more common at a man’s own doorstep. Even residents who live near each other are strangers, and must be, because of the sheer number of people in small geographical compass.

The bedrock attribute of a successful city district is that a person must feel personally safe and secure on the street among all these strangers.”
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, p30.


Quotes about the impossibility to define “the city”

Weber: The many definitions of the city (have only one element in common)
(What he actually says is, the city may be defined in many ways – the same that St Paul says about God. Theologians have taken St Paul seriously.)

Simmel: In the same way, a city consists of its total effects, which extend beyond its immediate confines.

Park: A sociological definition of the city must accept the fact that such a complex phenomenon cannot sufficiently be characterized by any one characteristic, or with a combination of formal and random characteristics.

Benjamin: The city is uniform only superficially.

Canevacci: The city presents itself polyphonic from the first encounter.

La Cecla: The city is not only that which we know, but the reserve of unknown that we know to exists, and which calms (or disturbs) us for the fact that we may come to know it.

Jacobs: No single element in a city is, in truth, the kingpin or the key. The mixture itself is kingpin, and its mutual support is the order.

Kostof: Cities never rest; they resist attempts to explain them neatly … in the end, the truth about the city is mobile.


Founding elements of the city:

1. Impossibility to define : you may try to define what a/the city is, but it is too complex a phenomenon to be characterized unequivocally or formally. The city resists attempts of clear definitions.

2. Essential plurality/ multiplicity: The city is polyphonic, a mixture, a self-contradictory multiplicity and its uniformity is only superficial.

3. Extension: The city extends over the visible; over its own proper boundaries and over all that is immediately present and visible. The city includes what is strange to it.