Terrain Vague

As planners and designers have turned their attentions to the blighted, vacant areas of the city, the concept of “terrain vague” has become increasingly important. Terrain Vague seeks to explore the ambiguous spaces of the city— the places that exist outside the cultural, social, and economic circuits of urban life. From vacant lots and railroad tracks, to more diverse interstitial spaces, this collection of original essays and cases presents innovative ways of looking at marginal urban space, with studies from the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, from a diverse group of planners, geographers, and urban designers. Terrain Vague is a cooperative effort to redeﬁne these marginal spaces as a central concept for urban planning and design. Presenting innovative ways of looking at marginal urban space, and focusing on its positive uses and aspects, the book will be of interest to all those wishing to understand our increasingly complex everyday surroundings, from planners, cultural theorists, and academics, to designers and architects.

Manuela Mariani is an Italian architect and co-founder of the ﬁrm Intadesign. She has practiced in Italy and the Netherlands, as well as in the United States. She is Assistant Director of Foundation Studios at the Boston Architectural College, where she is part of the design studio faculty.

Patrick Barron is an Associate Professor in English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the American Academy in Rome, the Fulbright Commission, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His books include The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto and Italian Environmental Literature: An Anthology. This page intentionally left bank Terrain Vague Interstices at the Edge of the Pale

Edited by Manuela Mariani and Patrick Barron First edition published 2014 by Routledge

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

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The right of Manuela Mariani and Patrick Barron to be identiﬁed as authors of the editorial material, and of the individual authors as authors of their contributions, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Terrain vague: interstices at the edge of the pale/[edited by] Manuela Mariani, Patrick Barron.—First edition. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Terrain vague. I. Mariani, Manuela, editor of compilation. II. Barron, Patrick, 1968– editor of compilation. NA9050.T47 2013 711′.4–dc23 2013006667

ISBN13: 978–0–415–82767–6 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–82768–3 (pbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–52217–2 (ebk)

Typeset in Univers by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK Contents

List of Figures vii

Preface xi Manuela Mariani and Patrick Barron

1 Introduction: At the Edge of the Pale 1 Patrick Barron

2 Terrain Vague 24 Ignasi de Solà-Morales

Part I Locations 31

3 Welcome to Bachoura, or the Found City as Interstice 33 Carole Lévesque

4 Open Space Appropriations and the Potentialities of a “City of Thresholds” 48 Stavros Stavrides

5 Three Meditations on the Ruins of Detroit 62 Jerry Herron

6 Perception and Exploration of Interstitial Space: Slots in San Francisco 75 Tanu Sankalia

7 Void Potential: Spatial Dynamics and Cultural Manifestations of Residual Spaces 89 Heike Rahmann and Marieluise Jonas

Part II Traversings 105

8 Transurbance 107 Francesco Careri

v Contents

9 On the Threshold: Terrain Vague as Living Space in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker 114 Stanka Radovic’

10 Paradoxical Spaces 130 Guy Königstein

11 Garbage Arcadia: Digging for Choruses in Fresh Kills 138 Jennifer Scappettone

12 Isn’t All Public Space Terrain Vague? 153 Karen A. Franck

Part III Applications 171

13 Notions of Nature and a Model for Managed Urban Wilds 173 Jill Desimini

14 Interim Spaces: Vacant Land, Creativity, and Innovation in the Context of Uncertainty 187 Krystallia Kamvasinou and Marion Roberts

15 The Interstitial Challenge: Manifestations of Terrain Vague in Detroit and Clichy-sous-Bois, Paris 201 Jim Stevens and Anirban Adhya

16 Following the Berlin Wall 216 Elizabeth Golden

17 Vague Recollections: Obscurity and Uncertainty in Contemporary Public Memorials 230 Quentin Stevens

List of Contributors 249 Index 252

vi Figures

1.1 Fire Pit, Wooded Debris Slope, State Laboratory (Boston, 2012) 2 1.2 Wetland, Grafﬁtied Wall, Train Tracks (Boston, 2012) 4 1.3 Squatter Campsite (Boston, 2013) 5 1.4 Train Tracks, Charles River Footpath, Soldiers Field Road, Massachusetts Turnpike (Boston, 2012) 6 1.5 Underpass (Boston, 2012) 8 1.6 Charles River White Geese, Boston University Bridge, Train Trestle (Cambridge, 2012) 10 1.7 Pedestrian, Ballard Way, Gas Lamp, Fence (Boston, 2012) 12 1.8 Valle della Caffarella (Rome, 2007) 13 1.9 Valle della Caffarella (near the Via Latina, Rome, 2007) 15 1.10 Valle della Caffarella (Rome, 2007) 17 3.1 Tyan Street (Beirut, 2011) 38 3.2 St. George Church (Beirut, 2011) 42 3.3 “Hear it Ring” Installation (Beirut, 2010) 43 3.4 “Have a Seat” Installation (Beirut, 2010) 44 3.5 “Come In” Installation (Beirut, 2010) 45 3.6 “Look, a Door” Installation (Beirut, 2010) 46 4.1 Deactivated Thresholds? 50 4.2 Trans-Experiences in the Buffer Zone of Nicosia. (Stephanie Keszi and Georgia Frangoudi; Supervisor, Stavros Stavrides) 52 4.3 Washing the Abandoned Waiting Lounge Chairs. (Performance by Andrea Savva) 53 4.4 Airport Chairs in the Buffer Zone. (Performance by Andrea Savva) 54 4.5 Syntagma Square Reoccupation: Collective Washing Common Space 59 6.1 Slots in San Francisco 77 6.2 View of Slot. (Drawing by Paul Madonna) 79 6.3 Inside the Slot, “Bracket.” (Photo by Moshe Quinn) 80 6.4 Plan, Section, and Axonometric of Slot. (Drawings by Catherine Chang) 81 6.5 Light Installation by Elaine Buchkholtz 84

vii Figures

6.6 Slots Cast as Positive Forms. (Models by Samuel North, Daniel Begaye and Michael Conrad) 85 7.1 Tokyo Void Space 90 7.2 Odaiba, Tokyo (December, 2010) 92 7.3 Building Surrounded by Fenced-in Vacant Lots at a Road-Widening Site (Komaba, Tokyo) 93 7.4 Kasu Harappa ONDI (Yanaka, Tokyo) 101 7.5 Butoh Performance at ONDI 101 9.1 The Zone as an Ordinary Terrain Vague 118 9.2 The “Backward” Orientation of Stalker 119 9.3 The Landscape of Human Features 120 9.4 Lingering on the Threshold 123 9.5 Interior Rain: The Ambiguous Relationship Between the Inside and Outside 124 10.1 Railway (Munich, 2010) 131 10.2 Bench (Eindhoven, 2009) 132 10.3 Windows (Munich, 2010) 132 10.4 Door (Eindhoven, 2009) 133 10.5 Bridge (Eindhoven, 2009) 133 10.6 Ramp (London, 2011) 134 10.7 Tree (Munich, 2010) 134 10.8 Walls (London, 2011) 136 10.9 Road (Munich, 2010) 136 10.10 Window and Street Lamp (Zurich, 2011) 137 11.1 Performer Rebecca Davis Wanders Among Grasses and Invasive Phragmites on the North Mound of Fresh Kills Landfill During Fieldwork for PARK on September 12, 2011. (Photo by Jennifer Scappettone) 139 11.2 Performers Abby Block and Tessa Chandler Placing Threaded Trash-Texts on the Surface of the North Mound at Fresh Kills. (Photo by Marina Zamalin) 141 11.3 Audience Participants Atop the North Mound at Fresh Kills Landfill During a Performance of PARK, Choreographed and Directed by Kathy Westwater, on November 5, 2011. (Photo by Marina Zamalin) 144 11.4 Hilary Chapman, Lorene Bouboushian, and Audience Ascend the Landfill Mound. (Photo by Marina Zamalin) 145 11.5 James Simmons, Hilary Chapman, and Kathy Westwater Collapsing the City-Block-Sized Word-Chorus. (Photo by Marina Zamalin) 147 11.6 Rebecca Davis Entwined with Compressed Word-String Mass, Surrounded by Audience, on the Summit of the North Mound. (Photo by Marina Zamalin) 150 12.1 East River Waterfront, Brooklyn. An artist and his friends install “The Pirate” in an abandoned railroad yard. Over a

viii Figures

period of a dozen years, single individuals and groups of people intermittently appropriated this section of the waterfront for recreation, dwelling, production, commemoration, and artistic expression, despite several closures of the site by the police. (Photograph by Daniel Campo) 155 12.2 Zuccotti Park, New York. Starting in September 2011, Occupy Wall Street demonstrators used this privately owned public space 24 hours a day for two months for political, artistic, and religious expression, dwelling, commerce, recreation/exercise, education, and production 156 12.3 The Seine, Paris. Two individuals appropriate a secluded space on the waterfront for dwelling 158 12.4 Broadway, Times Square, New York. Every summer solstice since 2002, the local business improvement district association closes two blocks of Broadway to traffic to allow this form of exercise/recreation 159 12.5 Vanderbilt Avenue, Brooklyn. A single individual regularly appropriates a sidewalk near his home for several hours for production, artistic expression, and commerce 160 12.6 Riverpark Farm, New York. Working in partnership with the company that will occupy the future building on this “stalled site,” the owners of the adjacent restaurant grow vegetables and herbs until construction resumes 161 12.7 Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn. Every Christmas, a Vermont farmer appropriates a section of the sidewalk for two weeks for commerce 163 12.8 Lent Space, Tribeca, New York. A real-estate developer invited the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to install a temporary park, to remain on this site until a luxury apartment tower is built, requiring that it be enclosed by a fence and not be called a “park,” as that suggests permanence. (Photograph from Interboro) 163 12.9 Zacharhy’s Corner, Berkeley. Since 2009, when Zachary was hit by a truck at this site, family and friends have continuously appropriated the traffic circle for commemoration 165 12.10 Zuccotti Park, New York. Starting in November 2011, the police barricaded this privately owned public space 24 hours a day for nearly two months to prevent all uses by Occupy Wall Street. (Photograph by Te-Sheng Huang) 166 13.1 Natures Enumerated 175 13.2 Ridge Avenue Cycles 180 13.3 Sharswood Suburbanization 181 13.4 Two Sides of North 20th Street 182 13.5 Ridge Avenue Redefined 185

ix Figures

14.1 Location for King’s Cross Central Development Scheme, London. (Image Credit: Anna Smith) 191 14.2 The Skip Garden, King’s Cross, London. (Image Credit: Anna Smith) 192 14.3 Dig for Victory: Working on an Allotment in Kensington Gardens, London, 1942. (Image Credit: Imperial War Museum, London) 193 14.4 “The Secret Garden.” Presentation Board, Leadenhall City Farm Competition Project by Mitchell Taylor Workshop. (Image Credit: Mitchell Taylor Workshop) 194 14.5 “Meadow.” Leadenhall City Farm Competition Project by Mitchell Taylor Workshop. (Image Credit: Mitchell Taylor Workshop) 195 15.1 Artistic Appropriation of a 1940-Built Wall, Humanizing the Historic Segregation. (Photo by Anthony Printz, 2012) 205 15.2 Detroit’s Racial and Ethnic Divides and Its Weak Economic Conditions as Seen Through Vacant Land. (Map reconstructed based on guidelines developed by Eric Fisher. Data from Census 2000. Base map from University of Michigan Map Library database) 206 15.3 Correlation Between Terrain Vague and Mapable Features— There Is None. (Photographs and graphics by Kyle Post, 2010) 210 15.4 Wallace Drinking Fountain Design. (Kyle Post, 2010) 213 15.5 Bridge Conﬁguration and Placement Within the Terrain Vague Landscape. Project: exposure.9313. (Pandush Gaqi and Steven Kroodsma, 2010) 214 16.1 Removal of the Berlin Wall Near the Reichstag. (Photo credit: Landesarchiv Berlin/Edmund Kasperski) 217 16.2 The Sterile Border Zone. (Photo credit: Landesarchiv Berlin/ Lohse) 219 16.3 Catching Glimpses of the Inaccessible Death Strip 225 16.4 The New Berlin Wall as Veil 226 16.5 Memorial for the Victims of the Berlin Wall 227 17.1 Angels’ Circle (September 11 Memorial), Staten Island, New York 234 17.2 Peacekeeping Monument, Ottawa 235 17.3 National Police Memorial, Canberra: Empty Plaques Provided for Commemorating Future Deaths 236 17.4 Reconciliation Place, Canberra 237 17.5 Rosa Luxemburg Memorial, Berlin 239 17.6 “Admonishing Millstone,” Temporarily Placed on the Main Market Square in Trier, Germany, in March 2011 241 17.7 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin, July 15, 2006, the Day 500,000 People Attended the Nearby Free Electronic Music Festival, the Love Parade 243

x Preface

As landscape theorists and professionals from a variety of fields have increasingly turned their attention to overlooked, seemingly vacant areas at the edges of the city, the concept of terrain vague, roughly meaning “wasteland” or “ambiguous space,” has gained wide currency since it was adopted by Ignasi de Solà-Morales in the mid 1990s as the basis for a theory of design that takes into account “strange places” that “exist outside the city’s effective circuits and productive structures.” Describing leftover spaces that are difficult to categorize—from vacant lots and disused rail lines to urban wilds and a motley of interstitial public spaces—terrain vague possesses complex, fragmented, and at times, contradictory meanings. Because terrains vagues make up a significant part of our everyday surroundings and contain within them complex resources— yet are often either misunderstood or overlooked—it is all the more important that they be given their fair due. It is to our own peril, and the peril of public space, that we overlook the overlooked, neglect the neglected. Terrain Vague: Interstices at the Edge of the Pale at once clarifies and expands upon Solà-Morales’s and other writers’ related ideas, arguing for terrain vague as a collective term for a multitude of subtypes of marginal, leftover land, from “derelict land” and “brownfield” to “void” and “dead zone.” The book is a cooperative effort to refine terrain vague as a central concept for urban planning and design, as well as other fields, including architecture, landscape architecture, film studies, cultural geography, literature, photography, and cultural studies. It investigates examples of terrain vague in critical case studies on a range of areas, from Beirut and Berlin to Fresh Kills and Clichy- sous-Bois, and suggests exciting new understandings of terrain vague in theoretical, architectural, and artistic applications. Presenting innovative ways of looking at interstitial space, and focusing on its positive uses and aspects, the volume will be of interest to those wishing to better understand our increasingly complex everyday surroundings. The book begins with an introduction that provides a contextualizing theoretical and creative framework within which to locate the collection of essays in relation to the rich existing literature on the topic—represented in an extensive bibliography that we envision as a valuable tool for future research. Next is Solà-Morales’s seminal essay, which provides the basis for our

xi Preface explorations of what he so evocatively identified as terrain vague’s seemingly paradoxical combinations of vacancy with freedom, of absence with possibility, and of limitlessness with mobility—central to comprehending the full range of our interstitial urban areas, ever in flux, neither clearly urban nor rural, and always on the verge of disappearing. The essays that follow are organized into three overlapping parts, beginning with close attention to specific terrains vagues, followed by movement across, into, and out of terrains vagues, and ending with sustained engagements with terrains vagues. The first section, “Locations,” is an assembly of case studies of terrains vagues in an array of cities. Carole Lévesque’s opening essay examines the temporarily overlooked, war-damaged neighborhood of Bachoura in Beirut as a source of inspiration for the reinvention of public spaces. Focusing on another conflict-generated terrain vague, Stavros Stavrides follows with an analysis of interventions in the Cypriot city of Nicosia that seek to reactivate its demilitarized zone as common space. Jerry Herron’s piece on Detroit similarly digs beneath the surface of seemingly vacant space, in order to question nostalgic and touristic appropriations of the city’s vast “ruins.” The next two essays shift focus to less obvious terrains vagues—Tanu Sankalia’s on interstitial “slots” between Victorian-era buildings in San Francisco as sites for phenomenological and artistic study, and Heike Rahmann and Marieluise Jonas’s on residual “voids” in Tokyo as sources of condensed terrain vague containing seeds of varied, interactive, and enriching forms of urban space. The second part, “Traversings,” contains accounts of creative or unexpected interactions with terrains vagues, in addition to reconsiderations of their transformative, transitory nature. It begins with Francesco Careri’s “Transurbance,” based on his work with the Roman architect and artist collective Stalker, that makes the case for walking as a form of aesthetic urban intervention. Stanka Radovic’’s related essay on Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, an important source of inspiration for Careri, argues that the film presents terrain vague as a space for an “alternative humanity.” This sense of hidden potential is picked up in Guy Königstein’s photographic essay on “paradoxical spaces,” marginal areas with enigmatic objects and spaces where planning logic breaks down. It is followed by Jennifer Scappettone’s account of similarly playful and subversive efforts, to reveal layered histories implicit within Fresh Kills Landfill, currently being remediated as a park. The section ends with Karen Franck’s provocative essay “Isn’t All Public Space Terrain Vague?” which, in crossing a wide range of “open” spaces, further questions the nature and limits of terrains vagues. The third and final part, “Applications,” offers various terrain vague design interventions, applying knowledge gained from careful interstitial attention. The first essay, by Jill Desimini, focuses on the importance of terrains vagues as sources of biodiversity, left alone or encouraged to develop into future

xii Preface forests, and woven into a hybrid fabric of wild and built land. Krystallia Kamvasinou and Marion Roberts’s contribution and Jim Stevens and Anirban Adhya’s both discuss sensitive design interventions meant to enrich interstitial spaces. Kamvasinou and Roberts present frameworks for transitory projects in vacant lots temporarily available owing to stalled developments, and Stevens and Adhya offer a theory of responsible “tending” of terrains vagues, with an emphasis on areas with poor infrastructure and concentrations of disadvantaged inhabitants. The ﬁnal two pieces, by Elizabeth Golden and Quentin Stevens, examine how memory, both personal and public, resides within terrains vagues, and how various interventions, from trails and parks to monuments and memorials, act to at once clarify and mask our connections to the past. Manuela Mariani and Patrick Barron, 2013

xiii This page intentionally left bank Chapter 1

Introduction

At the Edge of the Pale*

Patrick Barron

What if there is no “space,” only a permanent, slow-motion mystic takeover, an implausibly careening awning? (Lisa Robertson, 2003, p. 17)

That zero panorama seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is—all the new construction that would be built. This is the opposite of the “unromantic ruin” because buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built. (Robert Smithson, 1996a/1967, p. 72)

Seemingly abandoned or overgrown sites—where the landscape has gone to seed and been left to its own devices, is in suspended redevelopment, or is being furtively inhabited or otherwise used, under the radar of local authorities— can be found nearly everywhere within the margins and interstices of cities. Existing at the blurry edges of the built world, such areas cast doubt on spatial and behavioral codes. Whether vacant lots, derelict industrial sites, or unkempt border areas, these terrains vagues act variously as refuges, mirrors, and memento mori. Residual and ambiguous, they allow us to examine ourselves and our everyday surroundings from outside the frenetic circuits of work, commerce, and transit. As counter-spaces, terrains vagues are also containers of a fragmented shared history, illuminating the imperfect process of memory that constantly attempts to recall and reconstruct the past.

1 Patrick Barron

Terrains vagues are everyday areas that expose the stratified or palimpsest nature of all places, especially those with the appearance of codified stability where there exists, as Michel de Certeau (1984) puts it, a sense of “immobility” and “an illusory inertia” (p. 201). Terrains vagues are what the architect-and-artist collective Stalker (1996) calls, in its manifesto, “spaces of confrontation and contamination between the organic and the inorganic, between nature and artifice” that “constitute the built city’s negative, the interstitial and the marginal, spaces abandoned or in the process of tran- formation.” Terrains vagues can be thought of as subversive forms of Henri Lefebvre’s (1991/1974) “spaces of representation” (complex, intimate, layered spaces), from whose perspective and amid whose remains we may examine the shortcomings of “representations of space” (designed or planned spaces) while seeking temporary retreat from dominant “spatial practices” (habitual behaviors that tend to reinforce spatial norms). All three forms of Lefebvre’s loose triad are implicit in terrains vagues, which, although abandoned, are likely to be claimed and transformed into categorizable, built space in the future. Often terminally temporal, terrains vagues can be seen as shifting assemblages of contradictory nuances, especially in terms of particular sites’ layered, frequently violent histories of displacement—part of the destructive and, at times, colonial nature of architectural projects (Solà-Morales, 1994). Many terrains vagues 1.1 Fire Pit, Wooded Debris contain problematic series of eviction and erasure that, although difficult to trace, Slope, State Laboratory are critical to understanding how terrain vague is both a condition and a process. (Boston, 2012)

2 Introduction: At the Edge of the Pale

Forms of “loose space” (Franck & Stevens, 2007), terrains vagues provide potential outlets for unexpected or spontaneous encounters, informal events, and alternative activities outside our increasingly commodified, controlled, and privatized “open” urban spaces. Many terrains vagues, especially those easily accessible, large enough, and containing interesting physical features, from empty buildings and ruins to varied vegetation and other natural features, are inviting to a range of people to make creative, unintended, and unplanned use of them—becoming “animated ‘indeterminant spaces’” or “free-zones” (Groth & Corijn, 2005). Because they are thus temporarily appropriated, often without permission, as forms of public space, and because they are widely viewed as empty and useless, terrains vagues are particularly well suited for critical appraisal of all that is external to them. In this regard, terrains vagues can also be understood within the purview of Michel Foucault’s (1967) “heterotopias,” especially as conceived of as “counter-sites” in which “all the other real sites that can be found within the culture are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” Of special note are the heterotopias he identifies as linked “to time in its most flowing, transitory, precarious aspect, to time in the mode of the festival,” giving the example of “fairgrounds, these marvelous empty sites on the outskirts of cities”—although, as Gil Doron (2008) skeptically notes, such sites “have never been empty” (p. 204). Many terms have been used to describe abandoned, leftover areas: “derelict land” (Barr, 1969; Kivell & Hatfield, 1998; Oxenham, 1966); “zero panorama,” “empty or abstract settings,” and “dead spots” (Smithson, 1996a/ 1967; 1996b/1968; 1970, as cited in Reynolds, 2003); “vacant land” (Bowman & Pagano, 2004; Northam, 1971); “wasteland” (Gemmell, 1977; Nabarro & Richards, 1980); “il vuoto” (“the void”) (Borret, 1999; Secchi, 1989/1984); “urban wilds” and “urban sinks” (Lynch, 1990); “new, nameless places” (Boeri, Lanzani, & Marini, 1993); “dross” (Lerup, 1994) and “drosscape” (Berger, 2006); “no-man’s land” (Leong, 1998); “dead zones” and “transgressive zones” (Doron, 2000); “superfluous landscapes” (Nielson, 2002); “spaces of uncertainty” (Cupers & Miessen, 2002); and “le Tiers-Paysage” and “les délaissés” (“the Third Landscape” and, roughly, “leftover lands”) (Clément, 2003). Other common terms, among others, include “brownfields,” “in-between spaces,” “white areas,” “blank areas,” and “SLOAPs” (Spaces Left Over After Planning) (Doron, 2007). All of these terms have varyingly specific and useful, if often negative, connotations. “Wasteland,” “derelict land,” “drosscape,” and “brownfield” frequently refer to areas abandoned by industry and contaminated with toxic by-products; “vacant land” implies land currently “empty” and “unused” that would be improved if developed; “void” conjures up parking lots and highway buffer areas; “white area,” “blank area,” “SLOAP,” and “dead zone” indicate temporary oversight by planning commissions and developers; “superfluous landscape” may mean an extra or surplus area, but also an inessential one;

3 Patrick Barron

“nameless place” and “space of uncertainty” suggest ambiguity and transience; 1.2 and “transgressive zone” implies a place for alternative or subversive activities. Wetland, Graffitied Wall, Train Tracks (Boston, “The Third Landscape” is a broad category of areas of nonhuman landscape 2012) evolution; the more specific “les délaissés” are leftover places colonized by wild plants and animals. “Zero panorama” playfully recognizes the living evi - dence of present entropy and the promise of future entropies, inherent in all terrains vagues and beyond. In choosing “terrain vague” as the key, overarching theoretical term for this collection of essays, we are drawing upon the work of Ignasi de Solà- Morales (1995), who adopted it to refer to marginal islands and oversights in the landscape, “mentally exterior in the physical interior of the city, its negative image, as much a critique as a possible alternative” (p. 120). The expression’s seemingly paradoxical combinations of vacancy with freedom, of absence with possibility, and of limitlessness with mobility, are vital, he argues, to understanding the evocative potential of the full range of our interstitial urban areas— leftover, ever appearing–disappearing, and never clearly urban or rural. As Solà-Morales (1995; 1996) and Luc Lévesque (1999) contend, the expression contains subtleties and opportunities for interpretation not possible in roughly equivalent translations in English (as well as other languages), such as wasteland, vacant land, and derelict land, which all contain restricting or negative qualifiers. “Terrain” (from the Latin terranum, or land) in French may mean a delimited portion of land, such as a lot, field, or site—either urban or

4 Introduction: At the Edge of the Pale

1.3 rural—as well as refer to ground, soil, or earth. In English, the term generally Squatter Campsite refers to a tract or extent of rural land, especially with regard to natural features; (Boston, 2013) it may also, less commonly, mean position or standing ground. The closely related word, terrene, contains the additional twist of earthly or secular, as opposed to heavenly or spiritual. Vague (from the Latin vacuus, or empty, and the German Woge, or wave) in French contains three main connotations: wave or billow; empty or vacant; and uncertain or indeterminate, its primary connotation in English.

5 Patrick Barron

Rare or obsolete forms in English include prank; trend or fad; and to wander or stray. This last meaning is especially fitting, given that there are rarely clear paths through terrain vague, the exploration of which is best done with no clear destination or direction in mind—evident, for example, in Stalker’s situationist- inspired traversings of the Roman periphery (Stalker, 2000); Lisa Robertson’s (2003) meandering “Seven Walks from the Office of Soft Architecture” through half-dissolved cities; and Gabriele Basilico’s “Eclectic Atlases”—rambling photographic explorations along various stretches of Italian sprawl (Basilico & Boeri, 1998). Terrain vague, indeed, contains within it a multitude of possible connotations, and is thus well suited to serve as a collective term for various subtypes of leftover land within the edges of the pale—boundaries that, as they proliferate, are also increasingly difficult if not impossible to delineate. Cognizant of the dilemma that attempting to more clearly name or identify terrains vagues, much less categorize them, may indeed be a pointless exercise, given their mutable and ephemeral nature, we nonetheless here offer a rough outline of typical situations and sites in which they can be found. Often they are surrounded or run through by—and are, in part, a result of—what Marc Augé (1995) calls “non-places,” areas of transit or commerce in which users 1.4 experience a heightened sense of anonymity and a compulsion to adhere to Train Tracks, Charles strictly codified behavior, such as freeways, shopping malls, railways, super- River Footpath, Soldiers Field Road, markets, and airports. Terrains vagues that are less extensive in concentrated Massachusetts Turnpike area may narrowly border non-places when they take the form of buffer zones, (Boston, 2012)

6 Introduction: At the Edge of the Pale such as bands of land flanking railroads and highways, and small pockets of land, commonly where two forms of transportation meet, such as a bridge and a road. In other cases, more controlled and seemingly sterile terrains vagues, such as tiny islands and narrow slivers of routinely “emptied” land—including median strips, parking lots, and corridors of land between industrial complexes, commercial buildings, and residential development—can be hard to tell apart from non-places. These “gaps” or “contradictions” as Sze Tsung Leong (2001) terms them, function to hold in suspension what Bernardo Secchi (1993) calls “immense collections of objects tactically placed next to one another, mute,” wherein “similarity does not imply proximity,” and “each object and place takes different itineraries; the origin and the destination of each is specific and personal” (p. 116). Gianni Celati (1989) describes such areas, typical of diffuse, sprawling peripheries, as “a new variety of countryside where one breathes an air of urban solitude” (p. 9), and where, as Secchi elaborates, “the space ‘in-between things,’ between objects and subjects next to one another,” between home and work, house and store, house and neighboring house, “is traversed by strangers, and is not a meeting place; it has become ‘empty’ because it plays no recognizable role; this space is permeable, and should be traversed with as little friction as possible” (p. 116). In such “super-visible cities,” as Amedeo Martegani (2003) calls them, “everything is like you imagined leaving it, and are now finding it. You’re leaving, but the space between you now and later is erased by sleep, food, and the lack of smells in the air” (p. 198). The forms of terrain vague usually most recognizable from the outside—and perhaps as likely to be informally utilized as loose space for a variety of alternative activities as they are to be reclaimed as normalized built space—are areas of antiquated infrastructure and former industrial sites, such as abandoned factories, slaughterhouses, gasometers, water towers, freight and shunting yards, military zones, mining installations, general markets, warehouses, canals and locks, hospitals, schools, depuration plants, bridges, tunnels, and dry docks (Barr, 1969; Boeri, 1990; Davis, 2002). Secchi (1989/1984) gives some well-known examples, from port areas in San Francisco, Rotterdam, Liverpool, and London (many of which have by now been redeveloped), to the sprawling Fiat Lingotto factory building in Turin (renovated in the late 1980s into a multiuse complex according to a plan by Renzo Piano) and the former race track in Modena (now the Parco Enzo Ferrari). More recent examples include the VR railway warehouses in Helsinki (which, after years of informal artistic, social, and cultural activities, burned down in 2006 and were replaced by a controversial concert hall); the immense “railway workshop” industrial complex in Berlin (in part currently occupied by RAW–Tempel, an artistic and cultural center); and Léopold Station in Brussels (before its demolition, the site of a brief series of carnavalesque events in 2001, held in part to seek more transparent and community-oriented urban planning)

7 Patrick Barron

1.5 Underpass (Boston, 2012)

8 Introduction: At the Edge of the Pale

(Groth & Corijn, 2005). These sites and many others like them, such as the improbably long-enduring Freetown Christiana founded in the early 1970s in an ex-military area of Copenhagen (Thornburgh, 2012) and the ex-slaughterhouse complex in the Campo Boario quarter of Rome, used since the early 1990s by the multicultural community center Villaggio Globale (Careri & Romito, 2005; Lang, 2007), have been innovatively, if for the most part ephemerally, used for a variety of artistic, recreational, and political activities. The potential social values of terrains vagues are not always readily discernable from the outside, especially given the generally negative associations these areas carry, such as appearing outmoded, uncared for, dirty, and dangerous. Of course, sometimes there are good reasons for keeping one’s distance, such as toxic contamination and unstable buildings, but, as Tim Edensor notes, ruins and other forms of leftover space can be useful reminders of the “depredations wrought by a destructive capitalism,” whose allegorical presence “can cause us to question the normative ways of organizing the city and urban life” (1995, p. 166). On a more subtle level, he adds, “hidden within ruins are forgotten forms of collectivity and solidarity, lost skills, ways of behaving and feeling, traces of arcane language, and neglected historical and contemporary forms of social enterprise” (pp. 166–167). In a survey of five large “derelict” sites in England, including detailed resident questionnaires in a sample of adjacent neighborhoods, Philip Kivell and Sarah Hatfield (1998) found that there was an “unresolved dichotomy” in many people’s minds, such that, although a given site was perceived to be in a state of abandon by former economic uses or “untidy,” it was not considered “useless because some natural regeneration had taken place and people used it unofficially for a variety of informal activities,” from children’s play, team games, riding bikes, fishing, meeting friends, and seeking freedom not existing elsewhere, to personal appreciation of heritage value, often based on memory or fragmented remains of former uses (pp. 121–125). Despite much duality of response, public opinion was more favorable than unfavorable, with a pervasive sense in which local residents viewed the areas as integral parts of their communities. Some of the most significant contributing positive attributes were possibilities for unregulated play and recreation, the presence of vegetation and wildlife, and “an open aspect,” seen by many “to be preferable to continuous buildings,” especially in its role of “breaking up the high density landscape” (p. 122; see also Qviström, 2007). Wim Wenders (1996) describes a similar phenomenon in which,

empty spaces allow the visitor and the people in Berlin to see through the cityscape. Not only in the sense that they can see through space, and even see the horizon [. . .] but they can also see through these gaps in a sense that they can see through time. (p. 99)

9 Patrick Barron

On a more basic level, John Stilgoe (2005) underlines the importance of unsupervised open (albeit non-toxic) land for children to have freedom to shape space through play, and to create lasting bonds with place (p. 23). This is true too of adults, who also need opportunities to test limits, to participate in what Kenny Cupers (2005) calls “nomadic geographies,” crossing back and forth between the known and unknown, between the familiar and the strange. And, as Martegani (2003) puts it, “having an alternative is like having a place of one’s own, having the option of not existing, of disappearing, of creating one’s own void without having to put up with other people’s” (p. 198).

1.6 Charles River White Geese, Boston University Bridge, Train Trestle (Cambridge, 2012)

10 Introduction: At the Edge of the Pale

Various species of both common and rare animals and plants have also discovered “places of their own” in terrains vagues, which, over time, if left relatively undisturbed tend to gain ecological diversity. In a study of bird habitat in 55 Berlin terrain vague sites characterized by sparse vegetation, Meffert and Dziock (2012) discovered the presence of 12 threatened bird species and signiﬁcant evidence that urban terrain vague habitats may help offset the decline in biodiversity in rural areas due to increasingly industrialized agriculture. This is also at times true in areas heavily impacted by human activities, such as Torsviken, Sweden, a site with widespread refuse dumping and pollution, and surrounded by oil deposits and an abandoned airport, that is also a renowned habitat for birds—evidence, as Katarina Saltzman (2006) argues, that “nature is contradictory” (p. 21). Terrains vagues also contribute to higher urban ﬂoristic diversity, acting as connective habitats and providing sources of plant species to colonize newly vacant sites (Lizet, 1989; Muratet, Machon, Jiguet, Moret, & Porcher, 2007; Page & Weaver, 1974). This is even the case at some sites where industrial by-products have been dumped, for example alkali waste and blast furnace slag, whose high alkalinity and lack of major nutrients, and in the absence of competition, support the establishment of rare species, such as orchids in northwest England (Gemmell, 1977). As Gilles Clément (2011/2002) expresses this phenomenon in his “In Praise of Vagabonds,” “abandoned areas constitute the principal refuge for pioneers of exhausted, bare, ‘turned over,’ or littered soil—and an opportunity for a certain expression of diversity” (p. 280). In many cases, however, the extreme and continuing erosion of topsoil, or the high toxicity of the materials, both on site and carried in water and air to neighboring areas, is so deleterious that rehabilitation and restoration are needed, whether the land is to be “rewilded” (converted into wildlands) (Hall, 2005), or more intensively developed. Other terrains vagues, although not extensively polluted, such as sites where masonry structures have been demolished, lack nutrients necessary for many types of plant growth. Diverse plant communities, and eventually richer topsoil, can be helped to develop by supplying nitrogen through techniques such as planting herbaceous legumes and hardy grasses (Bradshaw, 1989; Oxenham, 1966). Adriaan Geuze and Matthew Skjonsberg (2010) propose a more idealistic reclamation solution for terrains vagues that builds a “new” or “second nature” out of them, in part a combination of various landscape restoration techniques, and in part an updating of Frederick Olmsted’s practice of crafting and carefully planting abused landscapes that then later function as semi-wild parks. Geuze and Skjonsberg, however, place an emphasis on allowing plant communities to colonize areas without human control, developing within a few decades into mature “climax[es] of vegetation with different biotopes and microclimates” that then in turn may be recolonized by future urban growth incorporating key aspects of the “new nature” (p. 42). This may be somewhat

11 Patrick Barron

quixotic thinking, but terrains vagues even partially reclaimed, reused, activated, 1.7 adapted, or added to in similar, ideally participatory ways, on both small and Pedestrian, Ballard Way, Gas Lamp, Fence large scales, could be transformed into loose forms of “earthwork art,” as (Boston, 2012) Robert Smithson (1996c/1973) describes Olmsted’s reclaiming of “Central Park” from nineteenth-century “urban blight” into recycled wilderness—an early precedent for his own works of land “cultivated or recycled as art” (pp. 165–166). Given that terrains vagues are always in flux, often in temporary suspension between former and future speculative developments, and are host to forms of marginality that are not always welcoming, certain forms of innovative conceptual and design participation, in addition to restoration and reclamation, beg our attention. In order to move past what he terms a sterile dialectic between terrain vague conceived as either a disorderly vacancy (in need of development into regulated space), or as an emancipated space somehow disassociated from economic forces (and romantically reified as outside of history), Lévesque (2005) proposes a dual attention to factual details of specific sites coupled with experimentation with what he terms “the conceptual field of the interstitial” (p. 115). In such engagements, porous, transformative, and disruptive interstitial landscapes—both real and invented— activate imaginative and inventive ways of perceiving, conceiving of, and taking part in our everyday surroundings. Such semi-invented interstitial landscapes range from creative projects not directly embodied in actual sites, such as works

12 Introduction: At the Edge of the Pale

1.8 Valle della Caffarella (Rome, 2007)

13 Patrick Barron of literature, film, and visual art, to site-based interventions, such as sculptures, performances, and various installations, including outdoor furniture (see Bertrand, 2005). A relatively simple intervention that welcomes diverse users of terrain vague, encouraging looseness and interactivity while avoiding rigid codification, is trails—or, as Ken Greenberg (2009) calls their recent resurgence in urban contexts, “new green sinews” (p. 39). Often located along canals, railways, creeks, roads, and deindustrialized port areas, these links open formerly off-limits areas to the public, including at times larger areas of terrain vague. And yet, as Jennifer Foster (2010) notes, two well-known recent projects that transformed former terrains vagues into public “trails”—New York’s High Line and Paris’s Sentier Nature—in addition to many positive aspects, have constructed ecologies that aestheticize nature, attract new, or reinforce existing, concentrations of capital invested in immediately adjacent neighborhoods, and remove inhabitants and alternative uses seen as threatening to the new orderly status quos. Terrains vagues are clearly capable of inspiring, not only internal interstitial projects, but also external ones that affect other, more or less familiar everyday public spaces, wherein people are hopefully stimulated to playfully and critically engage with what Guy Debord (1983/1967) termed “the society of the spectacle”—and beyond. It is important, however, as Lorenzo Romito (2001) warns, that we remain wary of increasingly sophisticated and prepackaged, spectacular “pseudo-situations” that falsely promise liberty of choice and action. These include many designed “public” spaces that may seem, at first glance, to be looser than they actually prove to be when used— such as small, privately owned squares, open to the public, but with restrictions on use, including Zuccotti Park in New York City, the contested site of Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011. More promising examples of recent public space, with meaningful connections to terrain vague, include Binnenrotte and Schouwburgplein, two squares in Rotterdam designed by Adriaan Geuze and inspired, as Kristiaan Borret (1999) argues, by the semantic uncertainty of “void” spaces in which conflict takes precedence over predetermined use. Another is Rem Koolhaas’s (1995) urban plan for Melun-Sénart in France, a large area of mixed open countryside and small villages bordering (and being slowly engulfed by) Paris, wherein development would be restricted by a network of overlapping corridors of land in which nothing may be built—in essence, a form of intentionally residual terrains vagues. Stefano Boeri’s (2010) ideas for “a planetary garden,” as proposed in the ongoing Biomilano and Expo 2015 projects in Milan, attempt to enrich the peri-urban fringe in a variety of innovative ways, including “a global kitchen garden,” a “metrobosco” (or urban forest), with areas for human use and nonhuman habitat, and a “vertical forest” of residential towers that will hold over a thousand trees. Additional projects of note include Paola Viganò’s

14 Introduction: At the Edge of the Pale

1.9 Valle della Caffarella (near the Via Latina, Rome, 2007)

15 Patrick Barron requalification plans for diffused urban landscapes in the Italian province of Lecce, in which both various human activities and diverse animal and plant life are stimulated; François Grether and Michel Desvigne’s “dispersed and mobile” system of parks in semi-abandoned industrial lands where the Saône and Rhône rivers meet in Lyon, France; and Andrea Branzi’s Agronica and Strijp Philips projects in Eindoven, the Netherlands, based on his ideas of “weak urbanization” and a relational, mobile architecture able, like forms of agriculture, to adjust to varying needs and seasons (Shannon, 2006). In this brief introductory overview of various interpretations of, and approaches to, terrain vague, from sites and situations, to interventions and applications, we hope to have provided a contextualizing theoretical and creative framework within which to locate our collection of essays, coming from a range of fields, including landscape studies, film studies, literature, architecture, and photography. Far from an encyclopedic terrain vague “map”—surely a futile, if not simply oxymoronic, task—what we offer instead is a representative sampling of studies, provocations, proposals, and engagements, each of which in its own way helps to suggest and extend possible meanings of, and engagements with, terrain vague, both in situ and beyond. We also hope that the impressive range of work collected here will make all the clearer the rich possibilities that terrain vague offers to thinkers and practitioners invested in understanding and enriching our everyday surroundings. The book opens with Ignasi de Solà-Morales’s seminal essay, and then is structured into three loose, overlapping sections—”locations,” “traversings,” and “applications”—with essays that range in topic from Rome’s hinterlands to Tokyo’s voids.

Locations

The slipperiness of the term “location” in relation to terrain vague is evident in Carole Lévesque’s opening essay on Bachoura, a temporarily bypassed area in central Beirut of war-damaged buildings and overgrown lots that host a variety of informal uses. Due to be erased by planned development, the transitory neighborhood acts as a collection of interstitial “found seeds” of imaginative devices for the creation and reinvention of public spaces. In the next essay, an examination of another conﬂict-generated terrain vague, Stavros Stavrides considers methods of reactivating the Cypriot city of Nicosia’s demilitarized zone through understanding it as a blocked urban threshold that can be reactivated as common space through interventions that seek to sustain “negotiation encounters.” Lévesque’s consideration of vivid forms of life in an apparently vacant quarter, and Stavrides’s digging beneath the surface of “emptied space” in search of a deeper understanding of the collective, resonate in Jerry Herron’s contribution, which problematizes the voyeuristic and touristic appropriations

16 Introduction: At the Edge of the Pale

1.10 Valle della Caffarella (Rome, 2007)

17 Patrick Barron of Detroit as a city of ruins and wastelands—often compared to “war zones” in the mass media. Herron playfully offers critical positions for understanding Detroit as a complex, stratified cultural product, while cautioning against the dangers of both blinding nostalgia and detached aestheticizing. Within dense and affluent San Francisco, Detroit’s seeming alter ego, Tanu Sankalia explores the phenomenological implications of the city’s ubiquitous interstitial “slots” between Victorian-era residential buildings. He argues for a move away from discourse centered on the “city as object,” echoing Herron’s rejection of reductive sentimentality and aesthetics. His discussions of various art practices that express negative space, such as lighting and casting, are followed by Heike Rahmann and Marieluise Jonas’s meditative essay on residual void spaces in Tokyo, a city whose high property values and position on the Pacific Rim’s Ring of Fire are two of a number of qualities in common with San Francisco. Rahmann and Jonas examine the morphological and temporal qualities of emptied, tiny urban lots as forms of concentrated terrain vague with which to form counter-perspectives to homogeneity and predictability in urban design.

Traversings

With its orientation on movement and discovery, this second part contains accounts of creative or unexpected interactions with terrains vagues, as well as reconsiderations of their transitory, transformative nature. It begins with Francesco Careri’s “Transurbance,” a psychogeographic engagement with the idea of walking as a form of urban intervention, an autonomous form of art, a symbolic yet transformative act of “negotiated” space, and an aesthetic instrument of knowledge. Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, a major source of inspiration for the namesake architect-and-artist collective that Careri helped form, is the focus of the next essay by Stanka Radovic’, which makes a case for terrain vague as a concept with transformative possibilities, challenging connections between human subjectivity and space. Radovic’ argues that Stalker presents terrain vague as a space for “an alternative humanity,” not merely an alternative spatiality. A similarly hopeful line of thinking is evident in Guy Königstein’s photographic essay, which explores the conflicts and contradictions evident in what he terms “paradoxical spaces”—marginal areas in which the processes that shape our cities break down—where, instead of the results of planners’ oftentimes tedious logic, we find “intriguing irrationality” and quirky riddles. A strong sense of enigmatic contradiction is also at play in the next essay, by Jennifer Scappettone, who charts a variety of poetic, architectural, and choreographic efforts to reveal the volatile layered histories, especially their messy “productive, consumptive, and digestive” processes, within Fresh Kills

18 Introduction: At the Edge of the Pale

Landfill near New York City, currently undergoing remediation and redesign as a park. A certain wide-ranging nomadism evident in all the essays in this section is inherent in Karen Franck’s thought-provoking “Isn’t All Public Space Terrain Vague?” In it she canvasses a variety of apparent and masked terrains vagues, exploring similarities and differences between both privately and publicly owned “open” spaces that have visible, traditionally defined uses; leftover spaces that seem to have never had a defined use; and abandoned spaces with former uses that are now partially illegible.

Applications

This final part, dedicated as much to the applications of lessons learned from terrains vagues to the built world, as to sensitive, participatory interventions within and with terrains vagues, opens with Jill Desimini’s contribution on managed urban wilds that discusses the value of spontaneously vegetated abandoned lands in deindustrializing “shrinking cities,” giving Philadelphia as a case study. After providing a historical overview of evolving concepts of nature, she proposes a hybrid form of built and wild land with interwoven cultural and ecological values. A more concentrated and terminally temporal species of terrain vague is examined in Krystallia Kamvasinou and Marion Roberts’s essay on London’s “interim spaces”—vacant land that is provisionally available owing to stalled building projects. They survey a variety of initiatives for transitory interventions in spaces that would otherwise be cordoned off, and argue for a “light touch” framework to stimulate positive flux and interactivity in changing urban landscapes. Jim Stevens and Anirban Adhya present similarly sensitive design responses to terrain vague, based on their observations of Detroit and extra-urban Paris, especially areas with deficient infrastructure and concentrations of poor, disadvantaged inhabitants. Stevens and Adhya propose an unobtrusive, graceful, and evolving “tending” of terrain vague—as opposed to linear problem solving and colonialist creation—as a design practice based on understanding and restraint that they term “the interstitial challenge.” The last pair of essays in the book explore aspects of memory and history embedded within the landscape, and how interventions in terrain vague may serve to variously intensify and obscure our connections with the past. Elizabeth Golden studies how the Berlin Wall, since its fall in 1989, has evolved through new developments, such as bike trails, memorials, and parks, to become an ambiguous palimpsest of dual remembering and forgetting. In examining a selection of projects, she makes the case for adaptable, open- ended design solutions that are sensitive to past events as well as present uses. In the closing piece on “obscure” memorials, Quentin Stevens reflects

19 Patrick Barron on recent memorial designs that embody characteristics of terrain vague identiﬁed by Solà-Morales in his essay that begins this collection—that they are emptied or evacuated spaces that imply availability, and that they are often semantically and spatially ambiguous, suggesting openness of interpretation and use. In surveying a number of provocative designs, Stevens underlines the essential role of terrain vague in reminding us of the importance of keeping the meanings, forms, and uses of public space dynamic and open, so that innovative social and cultural purposes have the space to reveal themselves.

Note

* This book has its origins in a two-week film retrospective that the editors organized at the American Academy in Rome in the winter of 2006, entitled “Rome: Architecture in Film.” The event featured films set in Rome and explored how architectural aspects of the city—such as intersections, piazzas, buildings, and neighborhoods—are employed in a variety of cinematic approaches. The series also highlighted the close links between cinema and architecture, specifically how both forms of art recreate temporal and social structures, and how they delineate and explain lived space. This in turn led to an essay (Mariani & Barron, 2011) that examined cinematic engagements with terrain vague, in particular how films represent and misrepresent, reveal and conceal, exaggerate and minimize, and, in short, selectively illuminate and seek to transform the urban interstice.

References

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21 Patrick Barron

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Solà-Morales, Ignasi de. (1995). Terrain vague. In Cynthia Davidson (Ed.). Anyplace (pp. 118–123). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Solà-Morales, Ignasi de. (1996). Present and futures: Architecture in cities. In Ignasi de Solà-Morales & Xavier Costa (Eds.). Present and futures: Architecture in cities (pp. 10–23). Barcelona: ACTAR. Stalker. (1996). Manifesto. Retrieved from www.osservatorionomade.net/tarkowsky/manifesto/ manifesting.htm Stalker. (2000). Attraverso i territori attuali/À travers les territoires actuels. Paris: Subjet Objet/Jean- Michel Place éditions. Stilgoe, John. (2005). Landscape and images. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Thornburgh, Nathan. (2012). Christiana for sale. Retrieved from http://roadsandkingdoms.com/ 2012/christiania-for-sale/ Wenders, Wim. (1996). The urban landscape from the point of view of images. In Wim Wenders & Michael Hoffman. The act of seeing: Essays and conversations (pp. 93–101). London: Faber & Faber.

23 Chapter 2

Terrain Vague*

Ignasi de Solà-Morales

The representation of the metropolis in various media has had at its disposal one particularly privileged instrument since its beginnings: photography. Generated by technological apparatuses dating from the period of the expansion of the great cities, images of Paris, Berlin, New York, and Tokyo and of the inhabited continuums of the first, second, and third worlds have entered our memory and our imagination by way of photography. Landscape photography, aerial photographs, and photographs of buildings and of the people living in big cities constitute a principle vehicle for information that makes us aware of the built and human reality that is the modern metropolis. Photography’s technical and aesthetic development has seen the evolution of different sensibilities in relation to the representation of architecture, to the point where it has become impossible in recent years to separate our understanding of modern architecture from the mediating role that photographers have assumed in this understanding. The manipulation of the objects captured by the camera—framing, composition, and detail—has decisively influenced our perception of the works of architecture photographed. It is impossible to imagine a history of twentieth-century architecture that would not refer to specific architectural photographers. Even our direct experience of the built object cannot escape the mediation of photography. It would thus be meaningless to evoke some Manichaean idea of a direct, honest, authentic experience of buildings, against which to set the manipulated perverse other of the photographic image. The same is true of the city. Not only is the possibility of accumulating direct personal experiences problematic in places in which one has not lived for a long time, but our gaze has been constructed and our imagination shaped by photography. Of course we also have literature, painting, video, and film,

24 Terrain Vague but the imprint of the photographic (that “minor art,” as Pierre Bourdieu would have it) continues to be primordial for our visual experience of the city. During the years of the metropolitan project, of its theorization, and of the propaganda presenting the great city as the indispensable motor force of modernization, photography played a decisive role. The photomontages of Paul Citroen, Man Ray, George Grosz, and John Heartfield set out the accumulation and juxta- position of great architectonic objects as a way of explaining the experience of the big city. As Rosalind Krauss has shown, photography operates in semiological terms not as an icon but as an index. Photography’s referent has no immediate relation, as a figure, to the forms produced by photography. No formal analogy makes transmission of the photographic message possible. Rather, this occurs through the physical proximity of the signified and its photographic signifier. When we look at photographs, we do not see cities—still less with photomontages. We see only images, static, framed prints. Yet by way of the photographic image we receive signals, physical impulses that steer in a particular direction the construction of an imaginary that we establish as that of a specific place or city. Because we have already seen or are going to see some of these places, we consume this semiological mechanism of communication, and the memories that we accumulate through direct experience, through narratives, or through the simple accumulation of new signals produce our imagination of the city. After World War II, photography developed a system of signs completely different from that of the density of the photomontage. We could call this the humanist sensibility of urban narratives constructed from images of anonymous individuals in settings devoid of architectonic grandiloquence. “The Family of Man,” an exhibition organized by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955, was produced after the Magnum photo agency had initiated the “existentialist” reading of the city and landscape (which reached its apotheosis in Robert Frank’s 1962 book The Americans). Yet the phenomenon that interests me here dates from the 1970s, with the inauguration of quite another sensibility that directed yet another gaze on the big cities. Empty, abandoned space in which a series of occurrences have taken place seems to subjugate the eye of the urban photographer. Such urban space, which I will denote by the French expression terrain vague, assumes the status of fascination, the most solvent sign with which to indicate what cities are and what our experience of them is. As does any other aesthetic product, photography communicates not only the perceptions that we may accumulate of these kinds of space but also the affects, experiences that pass from the physical to the psychic, converting the vehicle of the photographic image into the medium through which we form value judgments about these seen or imagined places.

25 Ignasi de Solà-Morales

It is impossible to capture in a single English word or phrase the meaning of terrain vague. The French term terrain connotes a more urban quality than the English land; thus terrain is an extension of the precisely limited ground fit for construction, for the city. In English, the word terrain has acquired more agricultural or geological meanings. The French word also refers to greater and perhaps less precisely defined territories, connected with the physical idea of a portion of land in its potentially exploitable state but already possessing some definition to which we are external. The French vague has Latin and Germanic origins. The German Woge refers to a sea swell, significantly alluding to movement, oscillation, instability, and fluctuation. Two Latin roots come together in the French vague. Vague descends from vacuus, giving us “vacant” and “vacuum” in English, which is to say “empty, unoccupied,” yet also “free, available, unengaged.” The relationship between the absence of use, of activity, and the sense of freedom, of expectancy, is fundamental to understanding the evocative potential of the city’s terrains vagues. Void, absence, yet also promise, the space of the possible, of expectation. A second meaning superimposed on the French vague derives from the Latin vagus, giving “vague” in English, too, in the sense of “indeterminate, imprecise, blurred, uncertain.” Once again, the paradox of the message we receive from these indefinite and uncertain spaces is not purely negative. While the analogous terms that we have noted are generally preceded by negative particles (indeterminate, imprecise, uncertain), this absence of limit precisely contains the expectations of mobility, vagrant roving, free time, liberty. The triple signification of the French vague as “wave,” “vacant,” and “vague” appears in a multitude of photographic images. Recent photographers, from John Davies to David Plowden, Thomas Struth to Jannes Linders, Manolo Laguillo to Olivio Barbieri, have captured the condition of these spaces as internal to the city yet external to its everyday use. In these apparently forgotten places, the memory of the past seems to predominate over the present. Here, only a few residual values survive, despite the total disaffection from the activity of the city. These strange places exist outside the city’s effective circuits and productive structures. From the economic point of view, industrial areas, railway stations, ports, unsafe residential neighborhoods, and contaminated places are where the city is no longer. Unincorporated margins, interior islands void of activity, oversights, these areas are simply un-inhabited, un-safe, un-productive. In short, they are foreign to the urban system, mentally exterior in the physical interior of the city, its negative image, as much a critique as a possible alternative. Contemporary photography does not fix on these terrains vagues innocently. Why does this kind of landscape visualize the urban in some primordial way? Why does the discriminating photographer’s eye no longer incline toward the apotheosis of the object, the formal accomplishment of the

26 Terrain Vague built volume, or the geometric layout of the great infrastructures that constitute the fabric of the metropolis? Why is this landscape sensibility, potentially unlimited with regard to this artificial nature populated by surprises, devoid of strong forms representing power? The Romantic imagination, which still survives in our contemporary sensibility, feeds on memories and expectations. Strangers in our own land, strangers in our city, we inhabitants of the metropolis feel the spaces not dominated by architecture as reflections of our own insecurity, of our vague wanderings through limitless spaces that, in our position external to the urban system, to power, to activity, constitute both a physical expression of our fear and insecurity and our expectation of the other, the alternative, the utopian, the future. Odo Marquand has characterized the present as “the epoch of strangeness in front of the world.” That which characterizes late capitalism, the leisure society, the post-European era, the postconventional epoch is the fleeting relationship between the subject and her/his world, conditioned by the speed with which change takes place. Changes in reality, in science, in behavior, and in experience inevitably produce a permanent strangeness. The exposure of the subject and the loss of consistent principles correspond ethically and aesthetically. Following Hans Blumberg, Marquand reorients his analysis around a posthistorical subject who is, fundamentally, the subject of the big city: a subject who lives permanently in the paradox of constructing her/his experience from negativity. The presence of power invites one to escape its totalizing presence; safety summons up the life of risk; sedentary comfort calls up shelterless nomadism; the urban order calls to the indefiniteness of terrain vague. The main characteristic of the contemporary individual is anxiety regarding all that protects him from anxiety, the need to assimilate the negativity whose eradication is seemingly the social objective of political activity. In confronting simultaneously the perception of the messages that reach us through our openness to the world and the resulting behaviors, Marquand, thinking along the general lines of radical post-Heideggerian hermeneutics, seeks to transcend the split between aesthetics and ethics, between experience of the world and action on the world. Marquand’s “epoch of strangeness in front of the world” picks up on the Freudian theme of the unheimlich as glossed in recent years by those who have sought in the individual experience of dislocation and displacement the starting point for the construction of a politics. In Étrangers à nous-mêmes [Strangers to Ourselves], Julia Kristeva sets out to reconstruct the problematics of alien status in the public life of advanced societies. This discourse, directed at understanding the xenophobia dangerously on the rise in Europe, takes the form of a philosophical text concerning the meaning of the other, of that which is radically strange and alien.

27 Ignasi de Solà-Morales

Kristeva, in her tour of the great landmarks of Western culture, from Socrates to Augustine and from Diderot to Hegel, returns to the Freudian text that takes the strangeness of contemporary men and women as their strangeness to themselves. Freud points out the radical impossibility of finding oneself, of locating oneself, of assuming one’s interiority as identity. This theme of estrangement, from the political perspective of an increasingly multicultural Europe with its conflicting nationalisms, with the rebirth of particularisms of all kinds, also ultimately leads from the political to the urban discourse. From the polis to the urbs, Françoise Choay has said, and from the notion of belonging to a collective to an identification with race, color, geography, or any kind of group. “Strangers to ourselves” reveals the individual as carrier of an internal conflict between his/her conscious and unconscious, between helplessness and anxiety. Not the individual endowed with rights, liberties, and universal principles, not the subject of the Enlightenment and of the Declaration of the Rights of Man: on the contrary, here is a politics for the individual in conflict with himself, despairing at the speed at which the whole world is transformed, yet aware of the need to live with others, with the other. The photographic images of terrain vague are territorial indications of strangeness itself, and the aesthetic and ethical problems that they pose embrace the problematics of contemporary social life. What is to be done with these enormous voids, with their imprecise limits and vague definition? Art’s reaction, as before with “nature” (which is also the presence of the other for the urban citizen), is to preserve these alternative, strange spaces, strangers to the productive efficiency of the city. If in ecology we find the struggle to preserve the unpolluted spaces of a nature mythicized as the unattainable mother, contemporary art seems to fight for the preservation of these other spaces in the interior of the city. Filmmakers, sculptors of instantaneous performances, and photographers seek refuge in the margins of the city precisely when the city offers them an abusive identity, a crushing homogeneity, a freedom under control. The enthusiasm for these vacant spaces—expectant, imprecise, fluctuating—transposed to the urban key, reflects our strangeness in front of the world, in front of our city, before ourselves. In this situation, the role of the architect is inevitably problematic. Architecture’s destiny has always been colonization, the imposing of limits, order, and form, the introduction into strange space of the elements of identity necessary to make it recognizable, identical, universal. In essence, architecture acts as an instrument of organization, of rationalization, and of productive efficiency capable of transforming the uncivilized into the cultivated, the fallow into the productive, the void into the built. When architecture and urban design project their desire onto a vacant space, a terrain vague, they seem incapable of doing anything other than introducing violent transformations, changing estrangement into citizenship, and striving at all costs to dissolve the uncontaminated magic of the

28 Terrain Vague obsolete in the realism of efficacy. To employ a terminology current in the aesthetics underlying Gilles Deleuze’s thinking, architecture is forever on the side of forms, of the distant, of the optical and the figurative, while the divided individual of the contemporary city looks for forces instead of forms, for the incorporated instead of the distant, for the haptic instead of the optic, the rhizomatic instead of the figurative. Our culture detests the monument when the monument represents the public memory of power, the presence of the one and the same. Only an architecture of dualism, of the difference of discontinuity installed within the continuity of time, can stand up against the anguished aggression of technological reason, telematic universalism, cybernetic totalitarianism, and egalitarian and homogenizing terror. Three different images of a single place at the center of a great European metropolis—the Alexanderplatz in Berlin— provide an example of the multiple ways in which we treat terrain vague. The most recent image comes from the post-Stalinist years of all-embracing state power. It is Big Brother’s rendering of the modern utopia. The form of the place is no more than the repetition of a universal, radically generic ordering through which the geometry of the buildings, the paving of the public space, and the square are consolidated as a constructed principle. Here, in theory, the rights of the modern citizen, the tireless worker, find the setting for their abiding happiness. What results is, in fact, the space of horror, of the primacy of the abstractly political converted into absolute dominion. The second image shows the Alexanderplatz in 1945, after its sustained bombing by the Allied air forces. It reveals the disfigured city, the dislocated space, the void, imprecision and difference. An urban space becomes a terrain vague through the violence of war. The contradiction of war brings to the surface the strange, the indescribable, and the uninhabitable. The third image, while earliest chronologically, is last in this intentionally antichronolog- ical sequence. In Mies van der Rohe’s 1928 photomontage of a project for Alexanderplatz there is action, production of an event in a strange territory, the casual unfolding of a particular proposal superimposed on the existing, repeated void on the void of the city. This silent, artificial landscape touches the historical time of the city, yet neither cancels nor imitates it. Flow, force, incorporation, independence of forms, expression of the lines that cross the city—all find expression in Mies’s visionary plan. It is beyond art that unveils new freedoms. It goes from nomadism to eroticism. Today, intervention in the existing city, in its residual spaces, in its folded interstices can no longer be either comfortable or efficacious in the manner postulated by the modern movement’s efficient model of the enlightened tradition. How can architecture act in terrain vague without becoming an aggressive instrument of power and abstract reason? Undoubtedly, through attention to continuity: not the continuity of the planned, efficient, and legitimated city, but of the flows, the energies, the rhythms established by the

29 Ignasi de Solà-Morales passing of time and the loss of limits. Marquand proposes the notion of continuity in contrast to the clarity and distinctness with which the strange world presents itself to us. In the same way, we should treat the residual city with a contradictory complicity that will not shatter the elements that maintain its continuity in time and space.

Note

* This essay originally appeared in the following publication: de Solà-Morales, I. (1995). Terrain Vague. In C. Davidson (Ed.). Anyplace (pp. 118–123). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ©1995 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Permission to reprint granted by the MIT Press.

30 Part I

Locations This page intentionally left bank Chapter 3

Welcome to Bachoura, or the Found City as Interstice

Carole Lévesque

Lebanon is a country that has had a long history of successive periods of conquest, destruction, and reinvention of its landscape. From Phoenicians to Romans, Crusaders, Ottomans, and French, all have left their marks throughout cities, villages, and mountains. The afﬁrmation of one’s power through the destruction and reconstruction of a new fabric appears as a familiar pattern. In the country’s recent history, political struggles have been widely fought in the capital, transforming the city yet again. Through the long and complex civil war, followed by occupation and series of bombardments, the city saw huge numbers of buildings severely damaged and abandoned, sometimes partially inhabited without access to electricity, running water, or other basic functions. In 1994, after a period of truce, a venture group named Solidere took over the central district by offering a return on investments in exchange for property rights. Although the processes and outcomes of this renewal strategy have been widely questioned (Rowe & Sarkis, 1998; Vale & Campanella, 2005), it has nevertheless brought to the city a new period of transformation, this time not in the name of an invader, but rather following the precepts of neoliberal development, resulting in massive capital investment and real-estate speculation. Though there are diverging opinions in regards to these processes, one must admit that the rapid transformation of the city center has brought a relative sentiment of calm, and hope that peace might endure, giving Beirut a chance to redeﬁne itself again as a worldly capital. However, despite this renewed and

33 Carole Lévesque hopeful transfiguration, large pockets of the city are left stagnant, no longer at war nor in reconstruction, as if violence had ended yesterday. While waiting to see which private investors will take over these areas, some have taken on a life of their own, secluded from the general rapid development, and appearing as the only remaining neighborhoods where alternatives to the flattening speculation might still be possible. If it is quite normal for a city to be constituted by all sorts of neighborhood, some more prosperous than others, some better taken care of than others, Beirut is a city where contrasts abound: derelict buildings next door to high-tech towers, city blocks without proper electricity next to fully air- conditioned ones. It is also a city where old buildings disappear in a matter of days, leaving uncertain the fate of several areas. This essay investigates the particularities of the Beiruti terrain vague, focusing on a central neighborhood known as Bachoura, a large, inhabited, and vibrant terrain vague within the city center. Because of its location and because it is still largely neglected by the recent reconstruction, I argue that this pocket can provide alternative discourses on the perceptions and reuse of damaged buildings, and on the much-needed creation of public space in Beirut. Building on the intricacies of Bachoura and on the found, improvised, temporary, illegal uses of the city, I explore how a parallel Beirut can be envisioned, where the uninhabitable remnants of abandoned buildings, overgrown lots, and improvised playgrounds act as imaginative devices for differentiation and informal reinvention. While recounting a series of small-scale architectural interventions built in the spring of 2010, the essay illustrates how the appropriation of terrains vagues can encourage temporary public spaces and uses to emerge, presenting Bachoura both as a stimulating interstice and as an active participant in the future of Beirut. These interventions, although decidedly grounded in the social condition, emerged as seeds of inflection to the current privatized development of the city, unveiling marginalized potentials.

Khandaq el Khamiq: The Imaginative Field

Largely considered as eyesores spoiling the desired image of the wished-for city, empty lots are most often ignored, relegated to becoming parking lots or, in the case of Beirut, to inner-city garbage dumps. When coining the term “terrain vague” in his contribution to Anyplace (Davidson, 1995), Ignasi de Solà-Morales (1995) proposed that empty or abandoned spaces within the city fabric, i.e., precisely limited grounds, ﬁt for construction and either unused or underused, were portions of cities that offered evocative potentials of free, available, and unengaged exploitation. Although Solà-Morales was in fact speaking in terms of a positive fascination towards terrain vague, it is easy to understand the possible threat that lies within its boundaries: Although it often

34 The Found City as Interstice reveals itself as a site for utopian visions, it can also bring fears of the unknown and of possible dystopias. Terrain vague can also represent a threat to tradition, to a future embedded in secure ways and values. Both possibilities are complicit in neglecting the present and the real, the essence of what Solà-Morales described. They neglect the present because reality is messy and frightening: “Lives of even the happiest people among us,” writes Zygmunt Bauman (2005), “are anything but trouble-free” (p. 1). Left to negotiate with innumerable unannounced, unpleasant, and uncomfortable events, our inability to defend ourselves against unpredictable adversities leaves us powerless, frightened, and fearful. Along similar lines, Jeremy Till (2009) notes that utopia, and one could also add tradition, finds its powerful attraction in its freezing of time: “the architect can edit the world, can appropriate the bits that are full of aesthetic or technical potential and discard those that are not along with the scars of history (and) the fright of uncertainty” (p. 88). It is in the escape through time, past or future, that one avoids the true terrain vague. But why do vistas of a traditional past or visions of the future seem to be better suited to fulfill our desires than what is found in our cities? Continuing with Bauman’s (2005) argument, this ever-present fear of reality has forced us to move “the land of solutions and cures from the far away into the here and now” (p. 1). Bauman argues that we are no longer living towards imagined worlds, but that we now live inside immediate utopias—satisfying our every immediate need as an accomplishment of our projected desires. This form of imagination, that of the individualistic, consumer society already announced by Guy Debord (1967), can only be shortsighted, moving from one immediate personal desire to the next, doomed to live in instant futures, and rendering impossible alternatives grounded in the real. According to Henri Lefebvre, it is the fear of allowing our lives to be reduced to the real here and now, to the ordinariness of everyday realities, that drives us to flee into shortsighted alternatives, and, through this process, drives us also to neglect and disregard such places as terrains vagues. It is therefore quite common to come across observations on terrains vagues through a descriptive vocabulary filled with negativity. The simple denomination of these areas demonstrates common disdain: badlands, derelict sites, brownfields, dead zones, and again in their descriptive characteristics: uncertain, undefined, imprecise, disengaged. Based on this first set of words commonly used to describe terrain vague, one could argue that such sites manifest, land-wise, what Foucault (1967) proposed with his heterotopias, where the enacted utopia of the unwanted site and possible affiliated uses, or lack thereof, take place within our cities. For Foucault, the “utopia of the real” is found in activities set in locations at odds with normative experience: the cemetery, the fair, the holiday retreat. Heterotopias represent real places that contest and reverse reality, transgress the normative to reveal their own illusive

35 Carole Lévesque nature. If Foucault thought of these sites as being at odds with standardized, acceptable activities and behaviors, it is easy to imagine terrain vague as an equivalently obscure, misunderstood place denouncing the “real” city. However, if these negative views and perceptions of terrains vagues are very much present in the Lebanese conception, the Beiruti terrains vagues are paradoxically inhabited by a second contradicting meaning: While being eyesores and dirty, occasionally feared or avoided places, they are also understood as opportunities or signs of hopeful prosperity, as chances to rebuild and move on—rather than being manifestations of an economic downturn, terrains vagues in Beirut are signs of soon-to-come economic growth. Even if this chance to reconstruct a possible future comes with the inevitable loss of the urban fabric and the ever-growing privatization of the city, the desire to build a prosperous future devoid of signs of a troubled past holds sway over any opened land. Although terrain vague is most often understood as a singular space or a succession of a few accumulated lots, or small pockets of a city that are not directly inhabited, Beirut holds within its fabric large urban areas that, though inhabited by vibrant communities, can be understood as abandoned. This is a second particularity of the Beiruti terrain vague: It comes in the form of an inhabited terrain vague, or what I will call a vague urbain. Engaging the same connotations outlined by Solà-Morales, the term is no longer limited to a precise, determined lot, but rather seeks to encompass leftover swatches of the city’s fabric where property ownership is unclear and informal behaviors are part of everyday occurrences. The particularity of these vagues urbains, compared with their building or lot size counterparts, lies in the nature and complexity of imaginable possibilities and modes of resistance that we usually lend to terrains vagues. Whereas the latter can be sporadically inhabited, the vague urbain thrives with life: It is composed of multiple layers and is animated by constant activities and surprises. The vague urbain is not an empty lot we look at from a distance, behind the protection of a fence. With our two feet in the middle of it, the vague urbain forces us to accept and think of other ways of understanding how life in the city can be found and imagined. There is an apparent irreducible quality to it, a form of resilience coming through its creative practices. These imaginative ﬁelds constitute true in-betweens, in terms of both space and time, a demonstration of resistance through their unique rhythms and context: They appear as the stronghold of the wild, the unplanned, and the uncertain. In a search for creative opportunities, the vague urbain appears as an enigmatic protagonist who might have something novel to offer, revealing itself incremen- tally as one uncovers its sense of being, its traces of past, present, and future events. Cornered by prosperous Solidere and Monot (another thriving neighborhood, where fashionable restaurants, local designers’ boutiques, and

36 The Found City as Interstice imported goods have grown), Bachoura is at a standstill, resisting, for the time being, pressures from aggressive investors and speculators’ fashionable residential towers. In a state of in-between, without a future other than its eventual tabula rasa, and with a present overwhelmed with the weight of the recent past, Bachoura appears as one of the few remaining neighborhoods in central Beirut where finding an imagined other is possible, and where differentiated fragments can be projected. Engrained in an ever so ordinary everyday, this vague urbain, itself punctuated by a large number of variously sized terrains vagues, is in an everlasting present, where, under the initial protective layer maintained by its inhabitants, lie possibilities of hopeful self- determination. Coincidentally, its local name, Khandaq el-Ghamiq, brings its own imaginative field: “The deep ditch,” its English translation, suggests a world set apart, physically divided from a world further above, with the promise of never-before-seen constructions, be they real or imaginary. Although there is a general disregard for the social, architectural, and urban value of the neighborhood, Bachoura is not derelict; despite the closed confinements of the neighborhood between three major roadways, two of which are elevated, and a cemetery, also at a higher topography, defining very clearly the extent of its (non) participation in the city, the neighborhood is filled with metal, glass, and crafts workshops, a public school, a mosque, one of only four public libraries in Beirut, and a vibrant market. Although it is certain that its disappearance is imminent, Bachoura is not vacant. Despite its empty buildings, either newly renovated or tumbling down, it is densely inhabited, and every inch is occupied in all sorts of creative ways. If Bachoura is neither derelict nor abandoned, it occupies a temporal no man’s land. Though still used as a territory worthy of inhabitation, it is now under the transformative eye of nascent prosperity. Whether one’s worries lie with the historical buildings or with the residents, all will be disposed of. But this is not to say we should fall into a pre-emptive nostalgia of a past that is still there. What is particularly enlightening about this vague urbain is its opened potential right before the moment of its transformation, when all possibilities render themselves available. It seems essential that we not abandon the abandoned and that we seek instead, in the here and now, in the city as a found site of available possibilities, the latent potentials that can help us move towards imaginative and positive futures. If the over-organization, privatization, and desensitization of cities overlook the poetic potentials of imaginative processes, it seems all the more essential that we investigate alternative discourses and practices, that we see, amid the misfortunes of our cities, that it is in fact fortunate that places of different paces and natures remain. Whether we speak of them as terrains vagues, as vagues urbains, as interstices, or as marginal areas, the chosen term counts in fact for very little. It is not so much our ability to name them that is important. What is important about them, once

37 Carole Lévesque recognized, accepted or not, lies in the challenge they pose as a negotiation for balance, as a counterweight keeping our cities aﬂoat. What is crucial about them is their ability to propose valuable potentials, though often unrecognized or undervalued: required imaginative potentials for our cities to regenerate and live long and healthy lives. If Bachoura is clearly not a space offered to spontaneous appropriations, as Luc Lévesque (2002) would describe terrain vague, mostly owing to its political “ﬂavors,” which trigger, more often than not, suspicion and surveillance, I have nevertheless found there a terrain opened to curiosity and imagination.

Tyan Street: Down in the Interstice

Tyan Street is the only path one can take across Bachoura. From its southern limit, built during the civil war when the army covered Independence Street with a metal bridge to ease the circulation (of tanks), the sound of endless engines carries on the carbon monoxide-polluted air. There used to be a direct 3.1 access to the main market street, but now only the equivalent of an alleyway Tyan Street (Beirut, is left behind the protective cement blocks. 2011)

38 The Found City as Interstice

Early morning: the market bustles with women buying fruit just arrived from the mountain, a man parks his fish-market van on the sidewalk, others hang their various merchandise from metallic awnings built in front of their small stores. The day has begun, and the landscape is being organized. Past the market: the housing density. In buildings covered with heavily colorful drapes protecting the balconies from the morning sun, clothes are being hung to dry, men are coming out to smoke and drink their first Nescafé. At the street corner, along a beige-colored concrete wall closing off a large, empty lot, three men sit on their equally beige plastic chairs, an arguileh to the side, ready for what the day will bring. Cars and motorcycles zoom by: drivers maneuver up and down the street between the randomly parked cars. Amid the traffic, fruit vendors walk slowly down the hill, holding on to their large wooden carts. The sounds and smells of metal-shops on perpendicular streets reach Tyan, while workers of all trades make their way to work elsewhere in the city. Past the intersection, Tyan Street becomes quieter by the step, as a series of colonial buildings, sporadically inhabited, stand facing the abandoned St. George church, before coming to its end at the traffic-jammed highway.

Henri Lefebvre proposed, in Le droit à la ville, that the creation of an ideal community could only be pursued through the study of everyday life, in everyday urban settings, or what he called “experimental utopia.” Lefebvre believed that the city of tomorrow could be built from the dreams of today (Kofman & Lebas, 1996, p. 152), if only architects and urban planners could appreciate the significations perceived and lived by those who inhabit the real. For Lefebvre, everyday life harbored within itself the possibility of its own transformation, and so we ought to support and help what is already there to come out and grow. As he did in Critique de la vie quotidienne, where he asserted that everydayness is not doomed to an immutable grayness but rather is filled with unaccomplished possibilities (Lefebvre, 1961, p. 25), his proposal implied that there is, embedded within the existing context, a world to be discovered and valued. There are, therefore, some things that organize day-to-day life on their own terms, some things that resist pressures from others. In dialogue with the Situationists, he proposed that this resistance is at the heart of the found situation, and that it is within this resistance that possibilities are born and where the relations between present and future are lived (Lefebvre, 1961, p. 198). In architectural terms, the idea of resistance emerged at the same time as Lefebvre’s first volume of Critique de la vie quotidienne, as a young Aldo van Eyck insisted that traffic circles, street edges, leftover spaces, and trash-filled backyards be cleaned up and transformed into playgrounds. Liane Lefaibvre (Lefaibvre & de Roode, 2002) thoroughly documented this near 30-year project and counts these playgrounds almost to a thousand. Although

39 Carole Lévesque most European postwar reconstruction followed the teachings of the CIAM (Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne), a functionalist model developed at the grand urban scale, van Eyck argued that this mechanical model led to a clear neglect of existing conditions and left behind what was wrongly considered minor spaces. In a presentation at the Otterlo conference of 1959, van Eyck went so far as to claim that rarely had the profession been granted such an opportunity as the post-World War II reconstruction, and yet never had the profession failed so miserably at its task (Lefaibvre & Tzonis, 1999, p. 13). By looking carefully at the city and by recognizing both the qualities and the large number of neglected spaces, van Eyck inserted the idea of the in-between as a transformative strategy. With the discovery of situations located between the space and time of existing buildings, he saw that the existing city played a direct role in providing new relationships between people and contributed to its renewal. Peter and Alison Smithson also proposed to subvert the modernist dogma: In line with van Eyck’s work, they envisioned a new present by engaging a “direct” recognition of the found. Their “as found” spoke of direct- ness, immediacy, rawness, and material presence as qualities that could re-energize reality: Whereas the Modernists gave prevalence to the “whole,” the Smithsons sought to endow “parts” with their own internal disciplines and complexities; whereas Le Corbusier spoke of architecture as a magniﬁ- cent play of masses under the light, the Smithsons claimed that ordinariness and banality could build new perspectives, this time “real” under the light. Instead of engulﬁng the weakened city with grand utopian idealism, they proposed an urban vision empowered by a recognition and transformation of the everyday. What the thoughts of Lefebvre, the Smithsons, and van Eyck suggest is that there is a possibility to project the future within what is already there and “experiencable,” that small becoming realities exist within the already existing fabric of the everyday. Rather than building on the presumption that the everyday is hopeless or, even worse, fearful, they propose that found situations, places, and daily events contain the extraordinary, if one is willing to observe and is prepared to admit the possibility that creative potential is stored in the most unexpected places, a useful proposal for contemporary Beirut.

If the upper part of Tyan Street is often pierced by transversal secondary streets, alleyways, or passages through apartment buildings, down the hill is a different story: A stretch of ﬁve large buildings, equally impermeable, equally abandoned, form a wall of cinder-blocked passages and doors. Two upper ﬂoors are partially inhabited: Plants on the balcony and spots of fresher paint demon - strate ownership and appear to say: life here is not dead yet. If the sun shines on Beirut most mornings, this is a dead-ended canyon: Blocked by the rising

40 The Found City as Interstice highway, it is an empty, dark, cool, and silent corridor; unmoved cars parked on the sidewalk and overflowing garbage bins frame the descent. Only the midday sun will be able to penetrate, when the air itself seems to shine. As the light brushes down the canyon, the depths of the façades are revealed, the intricacies of interior balconies are animated by slowly moving shadows; the fruit carts make their way back up the hill; the ka’ak baker finishes the early morning baking and hangs his last breads out on the sidewalk, spilling the smell of sesame over Tyan Street; an old woman comes out to see if anything is going on. On the opposite side of the street, the church stands alone, gates closed, entrance blocked. But through the gaps left between the cinder blocks and doorframes, a glimpse of blue skies appears. While the street is slowly emerging out of its darkness, the church is lively with the songs of birds, with the life of its wild garden. Without the means to rebuild, and with the remote chance of allowing other occupants to take over, let alone other religious groups, the Maronites have locked the gate, but failed to fix the one broken section. Inside is a spectacular garden: Shaded by an enormous rubber tree, wild plants abound, and gigantic insects rustle through the leaves on the ground. The bell tower stands silent, having become a monumental open-air toilet. Whereas the main axial entrance has been filled in with cinder blocks, the back room no longer has a door, allowing one to enter. Past the peed-on mattress and various garbage piles, pieces of the broken-up marbled floor offer a vantage point from where to spy on the birds in their nests. No trace of a roof is perceivable, no windows remain, and no floor sits on the graveled ground, as if grass was thought better suited to the feet. The striped decorative pattern on the walls now mingles with plants coming out at all elevations, and, from her upper balcony, the old woman is the only one to keep an eye on things.

St. George Church: Seeds of Inﬂection

The spatial experience of the city is physical and social, spontaneous and surprising: It is discovered haphazardly and participates in building our perceptions. Manuel de Solà-Morales proposes that the uses we make of our cities are what constitute the city: If one finds room for appropriation and transformation of its uses, then one gains the power to transfigure the city. In an approach that could be qualified as optimist, Solà-Morales (1999) proposes, “that the architect’s ideal role in the city is not [. . .] the solution of problems, but the creation of meanings, the clarification of what is obscure and the enrichment of what is muddled” (p. 53). Within this frame of mind, the Welcoming City Design Studio, a three- year project led by the Department of Architecture and Design at the American

41 Carole Lévesque

University of Beirut,1 set out to envision what could be done with the existing fabric of Bachoura. After many hours spent walking its streets and in discussion with its inhabitants, we concluded that the St. George church was an ideal test ground for our first operation: Behind its religious affiliation, questions of transformation and openness became apparent. Hoping we could shed a new and enthusiastic light over the becoming of Bachoura, our work meant to link the site back to the neighborhood, to gather perceptions of the city onto a common ground, and build interventions that would interact with the community. We seized an opportunity to build an ethical relation towards found sites, to transform them into temporary public spaces, and, hopefully, to influence the representations and uses of Bachoura.

Hear it ring!

Hundreds of cans were hung in the bell tower. A most basic and recognizable sign for community gathering, it became active again with the noise of the 3.2 suspended cans jostled by the hands of visitors, rebounding against the concrete St. George Church stairway, chanting with a new voice. (Beirut, 2011)

42 The Found City as Interstice

Please have a seat, rest a few moments to enjoy the sound of the rustling leaves.

A long carton-tube platform climbed around the gigantic rubber tree, linking the two levels of the garden together again and providing visitors with a place to sit, away from the street noise, yet with a novel view onto the street.

Come in, come in, and let me introduce you.

Using bamboo sticks, a web-like room sat at the side entrance of the church, redirecting visitors into the main axis of the church, as well as creating a site for random encounters and interactions.

Look at this, a door!

A fourth, and last, machine was hung over the main entrance of the church: 3.3 The ascending bottle panel, maneuvered through a pulley system ﬁxed to the ”Hear it Ring” Installation (Beirut, balcony level, was meant to re-open the church, this time as a temporary, 2010) welcoming, public garden.

43 Carole Lévesque

Our presence was rapidly noticed: Our strolls around the area, the 3.4 cleaning up of the site (over a hundred garbage bags), the building of the ”Have a Seat” Installation (Beirut, installations, and a ﬁnal event that attracted a large crowd, all stimulated 2010) curiosity in the neighborhood, leading to informal exchanges with and within the community. The interventions were left on site for 10 days, and, immediately, signs of appropriations appeared: a demonstration that empty lots and abandoned buildings could, as we thought, be turned into, and used as, temporary public spaces. The found city is a site of unquestionable ambiguous temporality. Whether referring to Lefebvre’s everyday, where everydayness breathes future becoming, or de Certeau’s (1984) proposal of the future being somewhere embedded in the present, a ﬁeld of possible actions, tenses mingle potentials for action. As Jean-François Lyotard asserts in his Peregrinations (1988), it is by paying close attention to small differences that the “real” events of the everyday are revealed:

There are many events whose occurrence doesn’t offer any matter to be confronted, many happenings inside of which nothingness remains hidden and imperceptible. [. . .] They come to us concealed under the appearance of everyday occurrences. To become sensitive to their quality as actual events, to become competent in listening

44 The Found City as Interstice

3.5 to their sound underneath silence or noise, to become open to the ”Come In” Installation “It happens that” rather than to the “What happens,” requires at (Beirut, 2010) the very least a high degree of reﬁnement in the perception of small differences. (p. 18)

It thus becomes possible to think of the found city, of the “It happens that,” as a valuable present worthy of exploration, suggesting that the city as found is something we need to be ready for and willing to imagine. The imaginable city lies in our ability to ﬁnd the vividness of possible situations within the ordinary. Not only is the city as found something we need to imagine, the city as a site of found seeds of alternatives can provide the means to resist what Bauman called the shortsightedness of the here and now and supply the material from which to build hopeful potentials. It also becomes possible to think of Beirut as a city where temporary fragments can be welcomed as explorations questioning the relentless destruction of its found urban character, and for imagining other possible futures within the city.

45 Carole Lévesque

3.6 ”Look, a Door” Installation (Beirut, 2010)

46 The Found City as Interstice

Note

1. The Welcoming City Design Studio 2010 was conducted at the Department of Architecture and Design at the American University of Beirut, by Professor Carole Lévesque and Hala Younes. The students participating in the studio were: T. Alam, N. Aldoukhi, D. Arakji, A. Attalah, S. Bazzy, J. Chaftari, B. Chahwan, C. Farjallah, G. Abi Ghanem, R. Gholmieh, N. Harake, T. Kreidieh, D. Mazraani, S. Naim, and M. Shaar.

References

Bauman, Zygmunt. (2005). Living in utopia. Communication presented at the London School of Economics, October 27. Davidson, Cynthia (Ed.). (1995). Anyplace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. de Certeau, Michel de. (1984). The practice of everyday life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Debord, Guy. (1967). La société du spectacle. Paris: Buchet Chastel. Foucault, Michel. (1967). Of other spaces (Jay Miskowiec, Trans.). Retrieved from http://foucault.info/ documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html Kofman, Eleanor, & Lebas, Elizabeth. (1996). Henri Lefebvre: Writings on cities. Oxford: Blackwell. Lefaibvre, Liane, & de Roode, Ingeborg (Eds.). (2002). Aldo van Eyck: The playgrounds and the city. Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Rotterdam: NAi Publishers. Lefaibvre, Liane, & Tzonis, Alexander. (1999). Aldo van Eyck, humanist rebel. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers. Lefebvre, Henri. (1961). Critique de la vie quotidienne, II: Fondement d’une sociologie de la quotidienneté. Paris: L’Arche. Lévesque, Luc. (2002). The Terrain vague as material—some observations. In House Boat/ occupations symbiotiques (pp. 6–7). Hull/Gatineau: AXENÉO7. Lyotard, Jean-François. (1988). Pérégrinations. Paris: Galilé. Rowe, Peter, & Sarkis, Hashim (Eds.). (1998). Projecting Beirut: Episodes in the construction and reconstruction of a modern city. New York: Prestel. Solà-Morales, Ignasi de. (1995). Terrain vague. In Cynthia Davidson (Ed.). Anyplace (pp. 118–123). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Solà-Morales, Manuel de. (1999). Manuel de Solà-Morales: Progettare città = Designing cities. Milan: Electa. Till, Jeremy. (2009). Architecture depends. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vale, Lawrence, & Campanella, Thomas. (2005). The resilient city: How modern cities recover from disaster. London: Oxford University Press.

47 Chapter 4

Open Space Appropriations and the Potentialities of a “City of Thresholds”

Stavros Stavrides

It is probably very difficult to consider spaces that are included in the urban milieu of a city as empty spaces. The term terrain vague in all its complicated etymological links seems to suggest primarily this possibility: empty space. And it is true that sometimes people tend to describe certain urban spaces as spaces with no content. However, what this gesture of naming, defining, or simply describing such spaces does is to institute a comparison: Spaces are empty compared with others that are not, and spaces are perhaps emptied compared with others that are being filled. What if emptiness does not exactly describe the status of a certain urban terrain, but rather the result of a finished process or the potentiality of a process that may begin? What if emptiness is rather the end or the beginning of an action imagined by those who observe it? In this case, urban emptiness, urban void, vacant land, or terrain vague (in the term’s primary meaning) can be possibly understood as a kind of temporal suspension: The use of space— because uses seem to cause the filling of spaces—has either ceased or is about to begin. This interpretive imagining, which needs to describe spaces as empty only because it cannot see those spaces as being used, has its own

48 Open Space Appropriations implicit presuppositions. The most prominent of these is the belief that space exists in order to be filled, that urban space, which necessarily contains human artifacts and traces of human action, has been already used or is bound to be used. Empty space thus appears as space temporarily “out of order” (literally and metaphorically). If empty space, however, is perceived and interpreted as space “out of order,” then what is implicitly or explicitly presumed is that something, some force, is blocking the functioning of space. Empty space is space blocked, space “stopped.” One can see this blocking with a longing for times (imagined or real) in which space used to be full of life. But one can also see this blocking as an opportunity for a new beginning, for a different filling of space. Imaginary projections, however, as well as memory-centered visits to the past, are inherently transformative gestures. We cannot “restart” or “redeem” space without transforming it. Space is not a container to be filled with, or to be emptied of, a specific content. Space is rather a network of relations activated, rearranged, and made meaningful by human actions (Amin & Thrift, 2002; Lefebvre, 1991; Massey, 2005). Empty space thus is always already filled with tensions characterized by comparable qualities and traversed by potentially meaningful differentiations of material and non-material elements. Naming and perceiving a certain urban territory as empty can already be a gesture towards actions of appropriating and transforming it. True, some of the actions that face the emptiness of space as a challenge can be and are being connected with a predominant will for development. For such actions, filling empty space simply means integrating it with the rest of the city— ”restarting” it as part of an already functioning machine reproduces dominant forms of social life. Doron rightly describes such interventions of “regeneration” as acts of “re-colonization on an urban scale” (2007, p. 214). It is interesting, however, to follow forms of collective action (and corresponding shared representations) that, although sharing a common diagnosis with the development-oriented ones (space waiting to be transformed), gesture towards a quite different form of actual or imagined intervention: Empty space becomes for them a space of emerging and dissensual possibilities. A hypothesis will be connected with the problematization of such forms of action: Appropriating and thus transforming such abandoned or simply emptied spaces often introduces new forms of spatiality that characterize and organize osmotic (Stavrides, 2007, p. 175), rather than partitioning spatial, relations. It is because empty space already appears as interstitial, as a rupture that disconnects existing defined urban territories, that it can be appropriated as a potential network of in-between spaces. Acts of empty space appropriation, in such a prospect, “secrete” forms of threshold spatiality. Empty spaces, as potential threshold spaces, are spaces to be appropriated through practices of commoning (Linebaugh, 2008), practices that

49 Stavros Stavrides reinvent common space both as a shared area of common life and as a new form of social relations. Commoning practices, thus, are both the prerequisite and the result of such collective appropriation.

Nicosia’s “Buffer Zone”

Nicosia is a divided city—not simply in the way large cities all over the world are divided, through cultural, class, or zoning barriers. Nicosia is a city that is traversed by a boundary created after a war. The northern part of Cyprus remains under Turkish occupation (including the northern part of Nicosia), and the southern part is an independent state known as the Republic of Cyprus (including the southern half of Nicosia city). The political history of the area is complicated and includes hostilities between the neighboring nations of Turkey and Greece, as well as various levels of coexistence and hostility between the two parts of the population of Cyprus, the Greek Cypriots and the Turkish Cypriots. What is important, however, in the context of this essay, is that, between the two parts of Nicosia city, a so-called buffer zone was instituted and is controlled by UN forces.

Nicosia’s buffer zone is a peculiar, empty space, or rather a violently 4.1 emptied space, that explicitly divides the city (sometimes even dividing Deactivated Thresholds?

50 Open Space Appropriations buildings) and includes large, “unused” areas, such as the abandoned Nicosia International Airport. This zone was never actually converted to a flattened territory of empty lots, but still contains haunted buildings and haunted streets, all left to deteriorate, though they used to contain the rich public life of a busy city center. Reclaiming this zone of actual and symbolic separation of the city has often been part of the acts and gestures of people from both sides who want their city reunited again. For these people, the buffer zone becomes a kind of terrain vague on which the possibility of a different, inclusive future for the island society of Cyprus can be inscribed. Let us try to understand, through three indicative examples of such gestures, how people actually have attempted to “restart” the buffer zone as a connecting rather than a separating area of the city. The first is the modest proposal of two Cypriot architecture students from the National Technical University of Athens. Their proposal not only offered a fresh look at the meaning of the spatial reunification of Nicosia, as it was made four years ago when negotiations started to produce results as the reopening of passages in the buffer zone, but has also been re-presented recently in the context of a project named “Stitching the Buffer Zone” (Grichting Solder, Costi de Castrillo, Keszi, & Frangoudi, 2012). As one of the project’s co-creators suggests, “the threads of the city” can be recreated and be used for “the stitching of ‘two Nicosias’ together again” (p. 71). What characterizes this diploma design proposal1 is an effort to punctuate the buffer zone space with a series of designed passages that will potentially re-stitch the city’s fabric. The Nicosia zone was demarcated after a ceasefire negotiation, but what is really impressive is that, in this zone, material traces of an everyday, mundane life that abruptly stopped still exist (derelict buildings, abandoned objects, growing plants, materials, even smells, and certainly sounds). So the challenge in terms of the design proposal was: How can one integrate a future life-in-common into the existing spatial characteristics of the buffer zone? The answer was to use a kind of scaffolding construction, ephemeral and self-transforming, as a passage created by people that would reuse materials from the deteriorating buildings. Familiar textures can help people reappropriate an emptied space, and choreographies of suggested movements can guide them in their effort to examine the opposite side of the city, in order to understand the status and the magnitude of the buffer zone, to perceive the similarities and differences of an urban fabric violently torn apart (Grichting Solder et al., 2012, pp. 168–172). Buffer zone terrain vague was interpreted by the students as an in- between area that simply serves as a strongly controlled boundary (with varying depth—in-between space does not matter). By being blocked, a threshold was converted to its opposite: a border line of separation. The proposal reintroduces threshold spatiality in the buffer zone. The new construction invents new

51 Stavros Stavrides

passages, spaces that neither simply unite nor simply separate. The prospect 4.2 of a reunited Cyprus, thus, is not seen as part of the naive utopia of a Trans-Experiences in the Buffer Zone of homogenized society, but as a challenge to devise areas of negotiation, of Nicosia. (Stephanie mutual awareness and respect between different people who want to live Keszi and Georgia together. Threshold spatiality, then, carefully embedded in the material and Frangoudi; Supervisor, Stavros Stavrides) symbolic characteristics of the buffer zone, tends to become the model of the future and longed-for practices of commoning. Common space, as space generated by practices of sharing and negotiations between equals, emerges as threshold space, space created by people who test each other’s limits and aspirations. The second example comes from a more ambitious collective project. “Uncovered” was a project conceived and executed by two curators, a Greek Cypriot, Pavlina Parskevaidou, and a Turk, Basak Senova, and had as its focus the abandoned Nicosia International Airport, which is now part of the buffer zone. Commissioned works were meant to develop “a space of encounter for cultural producers from across the divided island” (Senova & Paraskevaidou, 2011, p. 9). According to the curators, “The project explores how this space, frozen in time, indicates and exposes the operational and organizational logics of control that have evolved on the island over the past decades” (p. 9). The airport, as a machine of ﬂows control, was certainly not an area of unregulated encounters and creative face-to-face interactions. It was a designed public space, supervised, as all public spaces are, by an authority that established

52 Open Space Appropriations

rules for its use and protocols of acceptable behaviors. Can the abandoned airport, which used to be a regulated and regulatory passage, become, through an artistic “restart,” an area of potential commoning? “Uncovered” starts from a description that already inaugurates an intervention. Having been a controlled threshold, an in-between space that used to create highly controlled spatial relations between states, the airport can be reactivated as a threshold space of artistic and cultural encounters through which people from both communities can develop new forms of life-in-common. Threshold spatiality becomes both the form and the medium of threshold relations that build bridges over existing and respected differences. Distances are not magically eliminated, but are meant to be crossed from both sides, again and again. Andrea Savva’s contribution to the project can explicitly illustrate the interweaving of threshold spaces with new forms of potential commoning. His work consisted of at least two important performances. In the first, he filmed himself “vigorously sweeping the floor and washing the chairs as though the airport is imminently returning to operation” (Senova & Paraskevaidou, 2011, p. 53). Symbolically preparing an abandoned public space for public use through personal work is indeed a gesture towards a future commoning procedure. But Savva did one more thing. He also “commissioned replicas of the airport seats which . . . he placed outside the exhibition venue in the buffer zone” (p. 53). For the limited time during which the buffer zone was transformed by this installation, chairs taken out of their context encouraged visitors and passers- by to use them. As the curators explicitly summarize it, “Uncovered establishes a platform for a discussion on the airport’s potentiality and its deployment as a conceptual paradigm of becoming the space of commons through the application of a commoning” (Senova & Paraskevaidou, 2011, p. 20).

4.3 Washing the Abandoned Waiting Lounge Chairs. (Performance by Andrea Savva)

53 Stavros Stavrides

Let us now see a relevant third example that shows how direct 4.4 exemplary action can take place in a terrain vague by effectively—albeit often Airport Chairs in the Buffer Zone. temporarily—transforming it into an opened threshold. (Performance by It was on October 15, 2011 that an unexpected action took place in Andrea Savva) one of the deﬁning areas of Nicosia’s buffer zone. Inspired by the Arab Spring and the European indignados movement, what was called the “Occupy Buffer Zone” movement (OBZ) started ﬁrst as an initiative to create a miniscule tent settlement in one of the passages that traverse Nicosia’s buffer zone. As one of their press releases declares, “the so-called ‘Cyprus problem’, is a result of the competitions that are created in capitalism and express the interests of local and international forces in the region” (Press Release Occupy Buffer Zone, 2012). A member of the movement remarks, “We’ve created an alternative model of co-existence in Cyprus” (Evripidou, 2012). And another one adds, “We declared that we have already established peace and we are living it, living the solution” (Evripidou, 2012). Symbolic action thus assumes the character of an experiment. It not only declares an alternative attitude towards a problem, but also attempts to paradigmatically show what this attitude will look like. Soon, the established tent settlement evolved to a very lively meeting point, with Saturday parties celebrating peace, and the UN Command becoming nervous. But things became more threatening to the established authorities on both sides when OBZ made its next, more ambitious move. The young “bufferers,” as they called themselves, occupied an abandoned building at the edge of the buffer zone and tried to transform it into a cultural center focused

54 Open Space Appropriations on the idea of peaceful and creative coexistence. Within four months, following a growing escalation of sabotage and media articles discrediting the movement, the Cypriot Special Anti-Terrorist Force (with the support of the UN authorities) invaded the building and arrested the occupiers. “After reclaiming a dead outdoor square, we decided to reclaim a dead indoor square” (Bufferer, 2012). The occupied building was, for them, a terrain vague too, which needed to be restarted and transformed. The police raid was only an act aimed at restoring the building to its previous “out of order” condition. The OBZ activists explicitly understood the Ledra/Locmaci street passage that connects the two parts of the island (currently under strict UN surveillance and controlled by the corresponding authorities on both sides) as an area that does not actually unite, but continues the separation of, Cyprus. Their acts were meant to use the space of the buffer zone (which they interestingly call, as most Cypriots do, “dead zone”) as a potential bridge, as an extended network of thresholds that invites people to communicate, to exchange thoughts and aspirations, to try to live together. A no man’s land was converted during the occupation into a symbolically freed passage, to an area with which everybody could identify, without claiming to be its sole proprietor. OBZ acts had projective characteristics, as the analyzed diploma project did, because they tried to depict a possible future. Those same acts were also expressive, as they actually used art’s transformative potential in order to transcend reality (or rather political realism) by opening an imagined ﬁeld of potentialities. The OBZ movement, however, added one more step to the transformation of a terrain vague. Acts were not merely symbolic, but also had performative aspects: They practiced and made concrete the ideas in the name of which they tried to inspire people. The thresholds those people temporarily created, with their tents, the everyday objects they placed in the passage, the spatial arrangements they developed in the occupied buildings, their everyday activities, and their feasts, were real, experienced thresholds. The bufferers’ common life during the occupation days was meant to depict a possible future life in common by actually making it happen. “Preﬁgurative politics” (Dhaliwal, 2012, p. 268) was combined with the ephemeral production of spaces of encounter, contributing to what Massey calls “a politics of grounded connectedness” (Massey, 2005, p. 188). Commoning, thus, was already a way of creating an emergent community that was developed by those who wanted to redeem the power common space has to unite without eliminating differences.

Threshold Space as Common Space

Solà Morales introduced the term terrain vague in an effort to understand the qualities of urban voids. This effort seems to have been triggered by the need

55 Stavros Stavrides to explain a widely spread enthusiasm about vacant urban spaces considered as “expectant, imprecise, ﬂuctuating” (Solà Morales, 1995, p. 122). For Solà Morales, terrain vague seems to be predominately marked by a feeling of strangeness. And strangeness, for him, appears to be a predominant ingredient of any form of self-awareness developed in contemporary cities (p. 121). Strangeness, however, can’t completely capture the peculiar feeling that arises when one tries to make meaningful the terrain vague experience. Terrain vague is not an alien land; it can be, perhaps, an alienated land, but that means that what appears as alien was not always so. Terrain vague frightens us or simply disrupts our established expectancies because it emits a sense that something went wrong. This approach returns us to the distinction between empty and emptied urban space. Emptiness may indeed convey a feeling of unease, anxiety, or even fear, because it vaguely hints towards a past of fullness, a past that can be imagined from the traces it has left. Those traces are frightening because we are used to equating traces of life, in the absence of life itself, to the most dramatic possible presence of death. In the case of Nicosia’s buffer zone, the presence of death could be taken as obvious. After all, this was an area that was emptied of life after a war, and people have died in this war, as in every war. When Cypriots, however, call this a dead zone (in direct contrast to the bureaucratic euphemism the UN ofﬁcial language uses in naming the area as a “green zone”), they not only connect this area to a period of war. They probably also understand the buffer zone as a tangible indication of a process through which part of their city was killed, deadened. The dead zone, then, is a terrain vague that was emptied of life, and this makes it an urban area that is perceived as an unhealed wound. However, Cypriots from both sides of this in-between, dead area have to live everyday with this open wound. And life, in its everyday survival process, cannot continue with a prolonged feeling of loss and fear. Everyday life, thus, has somehow tamed this “out of order” urban area, by integrating the images of blocked streets and abandoned buildings with everyday routines. This is probably a version of G. Simmel’s “blasé attitude” (Simmel, 1997b, p. 73) in a different context, as this kind of attitude is not, of course, the result of an effort to deal with the modern metropolitan turmoil of diverse stimuli. In all its everyday presence, however, the buffer zone retains an atmosphere of the unhomely—mundane and terrifying at the same time. It is as if the blasé attitude is not an attitude, but rather a process of warding off anxiety. Any glimpse of the buffer zone may potentially upset any perceived urban order. Solà Morales warns us against efforts to tame terrain vague, against efforts to reintegrate these emptied areas into the dominant urban order. In his reasoning, any architectural intervention will most probably be connected, as always, with the “introduction into strange space of the elements of identity necessary to make it recognizable, identical, universal” (Solà Morales, 1995, p. 122).

56 Open Space Appropriations

What the gestures and actions described in this essay have probably tried was not to reintegrate the buffer zone into an imagined reunited city. What these attempts share is an effort to build upon the characteristics of the buffer zone as an area of possibilities, and possibilities became apparent because the buffer zone was approached, not only as a violently emptied space, but also as a blocked threshold. This is, perhaps, why the gestures described, projective, expressive, or exemplary, were targeted, neither at eliminating the buffer zone, nor at transforming it into simply useful space. A wound may become a scar, and thus sustain shared collective memories, and cities that do not efface urban memories, with the aid of gentrification’s plastic surgery, may learn to love their scars. Terrain vague’s in-betweenness can indeed become activated by the unblocking of the paralyzed potentialities of a threshold space. Liminality, in the sense used by the anthropologists V. Turner (1977) and A. Van Gennep (1960), describes a social condition in which people experience the transition from one social identity to another, and societies explicitly control these periods of passage by regulating “rites of passage,” which are meant to ensure that people pass to a different social role without threatening social reproduction (Stavrides, 2010, pp. 16–17). Threshold spaces are spaces marked by experiences of social liminality. As those spaces do not simply circumscribe a defined area of use, but rather offer a passage from one area to another, they are spaces with a strong power to institute comparisons, to encourage new relations between people (Stevens, 2007, p. 89), to make differences communicate. A threshold is not a boundary that divides and keeps apart. A threshold connects and separates at the same time, connecting while separating, and separating while connecting (Simmel, 1997a, p. 69). What can we learn from a city divided by a terrain vague? We see of course that, even in such an extreme case of urban partitioning, the dominant capitalist mode of urban order is not threatened. Divisions and various forms of partitioning abound in contemporary cities (Caldeira, 2000; Marcuse & Van Kempen, 2002). However, what Lefebvre described as abstract, undifferentiated space (1991, p. 395) still prevails as a mode of spatial organization and representation. Divisions actually establish spatial taxonomies that ensure the reproduction of spatiotemporal social order (Stavrides, 2010, pp. 26–31). Can we possibly discover, however, in the potentialities of unblocked urban thresholds, which often have the form of abandoned, unused, deadened spaces, the emergence of a counter-dominant spatiality? Can we appreciate thresholds as areas of liminality in which people may possibly find ways to negotiate their differences, to explore possible new forms of common life? Unblocked, reactivated thresholds are not “temporary autonomous zones” (Bey, 1991). They are not liberated strongholds to be defended by those

57 Stavros Stavrides who seek a shelter–enclave in which to experiment with new forms of social relations. Thresholds become more like opened areas of experimentation, in which new forms and new products of commoning may emerge. By encouraging encounters, rather than barricading acts, thresholds become areas in a constant process of emergence. This is how an empty, deactivated urban area may retain its in-between character when being transformed into common space, without losing the characteristics that made it a challenge to dominant urban order. Difference in such a context does not simply dwell on thresholds. The fascinating strangeness that many artists discover in terrain vague is not to be praised as the sign of an untamed urban otherness. Difference as a rupture in urban spatiotemporal continuity can be experienced through thresholds, not in them—because difference as rupture exists in and through a process of comparison. Difference exists socially as a process of performed differentiations that necessarily involve comparisons, and comparisons reveal resemblances alongside differences. So, thresholds become the sites of a potential culture of commoning based on the power of negotiating encounters. What Rancière terms “the art of translating,” in order to describe a continuous process through which people compare their experiences (2009, p. 11), and what Hardt and Negri describe as “felicitous encounters” (2009, p. 254) in the context of a new production of the common (p. 255), can both be included in collective acts of inventing and activating areas (in physical and social space alike) that have threshold characteristics. Thresholds, however, only offer opportunities; they do not guarantee results. Their power lies in the opening of channels that facilitate mutual awareness without establishing dominant points of definition: Definitions have to be negotiated through thresholds. Commoning, in such a prospect, is not connected to a process of reinventing closed communities of commoners who define themselves as different from all the others. As the examples of buffer zone interventions show, commoning through the projective, expressive, or exemplary creation of thresholds between existing communities is something more than affirming each community’s right to exist as a separate and well-defined entity (De Angelis & Stavrides, 2010, p. 12). Cyprus as a reunited island will be created by interconnected communities with porous boundaries and intersecting forms of life-in-common. Commoning, thus, can be clearly distinguished from the processes through which different social groups secure the perimeter of their common life (spatially defined through the various enclaves that constitute contemporary urban order). Commoning, based on the social and spatial experience of thresholds, is a reinvention of the public. Reinvented public space will not be the space of a different kind of authority (different from a central state authority), an authority that will represent an established sovereign community that will necessarily be exclusionary. Reinvented public space will be common space as threshold space—space created through practices of

58 Open Space Appropriations

negotiation that avert acts of enclosure as well as acts of sealing the boundaries of the corresponding developing communities. During the Syntagma occupation in Athens (an occupation sharing many common characteristics with the Occupy Movement, with which the OBZ can also be compared), an existing important public square was transformed into a network of micro-squares through which emergent micro-communities established an area of mutual involvement and practices of commoning (Stavrides, 2012, p. 588). Syntagma was not a terrain vague of course, although the model of undifferentiated, consumable capitalist space deﬁnes the square’s spatial organization and uses, and this gives it the appearance of a no man’s land that people usually cross hurriedly without paying any attention to the surrounding urban setting. But Syntagma was turned into a literal terrain vague, into a space violently emptied, during one of the days of the occupation, when the police tear-gassed the area and chased the occupiers in an effort to “empty” the place of the encampment, which had become a very lively meeting 4.5 point for Athenians. As people managed to return to the square, a strange Syntagma Square and highly indicative incident happened. People “restarted” the square–terrain Reoccupation: Collective Washing Common vague by choosing to collectively wash the area of the poisonous tear gas Space remains, forming human chains to transport water from the square’s fountain

59 Stavros Stavrides using all available bottles and buckets, as everything else had been destroyed by the police. Is it perhaps that those human chains are a molecular example of the process of reinventing public space as threshold space? Is it perhaps that people created, through their bodies, areas of communication, encounter, and, above all, areas of commoning, through which the square was reinvented, neither as public space nor as terrain vague, but rather as common space? Caring about space and using space as a network of opportunities for people to produce new forms of solidarity are thus emblematized in a rather mundane act of cooperation. Could this be the deﬁning mark of practices of commoning experienced through the creation or reactivation of urban thresholds? Perhaps, as the case of Nicosia’s buffer zone shows, a violently imposed, empty in- betweenness can sometimes be turned into an opportunity for establishing an opened in-betweenness, a threshold potentially full of new forms of life-in- common. To be able to collectively invent an emancipating future, we need to create shared threshold spaces in which different but open identities may negotiate. Against and beyond today’s “city of enclaves”: a possible “city of thresholds”?

Note

1. A “diploma project” is a student design project submitted during the ﬁnal semester of study.

References

Amin, A., and Thrift, N. (2002). Cities: Reimagining the urban. Oxford: Polity. Bey, Hakim. (1991). TAZ. The temporary autonomous zone, ontological anarchy, poetic terrorism. New York: Autonomedia. Bufferer. (2012). Participatory planning and social architecture OBZ (in Greek). Retrieved from http://occupythebufferzone.wordpress.com/2012/01/14 Caldeira, T. (2000). City of walls: Crime, segregation and citizenship in São Paulo. Berkeley: University of California Press. De Angelis, M., and Stavrides, S. (2010). Beyond markets or states: Commoning as collective practice (a public interview). An Architektur, 23. Retrieved from www.e-ﬂux.com/journal/view/150 Dhaliwal, Puneet. (2012). Public squares and resistance: The politics of space in the Indignados Movement. Interface, 4 (1), 251–273. Doron, G. (2007). Dead zones, outdoor rooms and the architecture of transgression. In K. Franck & Q. Stevens (Eds.). Loose space: Possibility and diversity in urban life. London: Routledge. Evripidou, S. (2012). “Occupy”: We’re living the Cyprus solution. Retrieved from www.cyprus- mail.com/features/occupy-we-re-living-cyprus-solution/20120414 Grichting Solder, A., Costi de Castrillo, M., Keszi, S., & Frangoudi, G. (2012). Stitching the buffer zone. Nicosia, Cyprus: Bookworm Publications. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2009). Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space (Donald Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell. Linebaugh, P. (2008). The Magna Carta manifesto. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Marcuse, P., & Van Kempen, R. (Eds.). (2002). Of states and cities: The partitioning of urban space. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Massey, D. (2005). For Space. London: Sage. Press Release Occupy Buffer Zone. (2012). Retrieved from http://occupythebufferzone.wordpress.com/ 2012/04/13/press-release-occupy-buffer-zone-obz/ Rancière, J. (2009). The emancipated spectator. London: Verso. Senova, B., & Paraskevaidou, P. (2011). Uncovered: Nicosia International Airport. Nicosia. Simmel, G. (1997a). Bridge and door. In N. Leach (Ed.). Rethinking architecture: A reader in cultural history (pp. 66–69). London: Routledge. Simmel, G., (1997b). The metropolis and mental life. In N. Leach (Ed.). Rethinking architecture: A Reader in cultural history (pp. 69–79). London: Routledge. Solà-Morales, Ignasi de. (1995). Terrain vague. In Cynthia Davidson (Ed.). Anyplace (pp. 118–123). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Stavrides, S. (2007). Heterotopias and the experience of porous urban space. In K. Franck & Q. Stevens (Eds.). Loose space: Possibility and diversity in urban life. London: Routledge. Stavrides, S. (2010). Towards the city of thresholds. Trento: Professionaldreamers. Stavrides, S. (2012). Squares in movement. South Atlantic Quarterly, 111 (3), 585–596. Stevens, Q. (2007). Betwixt and between: Building thresholds, liminality and public space. In K. Franck & Q. Stevens (Eds.). Loose space: Possibility and diversity in urban life. London: Routledge. Turner, V. (1977). The ritual process. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Van Gennep, A. (1960). The rites of passage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

61 Chapter 5

Three Meditations on the Ruins of Detroit*

Jerry Herron

First the Facts

Forget what you think you know about this place. Detroit is the most relevant city in the United States for the simple reason that it is the most unequivocally modern and, therefore, distinctive of our national culture: in other words, a total success. Nowhere else has American modernity so completely had its way with people and place alike. Reputedly “historic” towns, such as Philadelphia, New Orleans, and San Francisco, merely seem old by comparison. Others, such as New York, Los Angeles, and Miami, are not American at all, but more like small, poorly run foreign countries, with insufﬁcient fresh water and arable land. And Chicago, no less than its sun-belt reﬂex, Houston, has been forced to compensate with high-rise architecture for the general lack of autochthonous culture. This makes Detroit the revealed “Capital of the 20th Century,” and likely the century ahead, because this is the place, more than any other, where the native history of modernity has been written. This same modernity has made Americans collectively, and globally, what we are all still becoming today, bringing along with us the rest of the so-called “developed” world. The genius of this becoming was our genius (for those fortunate enough to live in Detroit): a native son. “Nothing original, yet everything new,” as Terry Smith (1993) has characterized the modernity of Henry Ford:

Not one of thousands of engineering and other tooling discoveries that attended the success of the new processes was his creation.

62 Three Meditations on the Ruins of Detroit

The inventive genius represented by his name was above all an organizational one: elements developed elsewhere were shaped into a productive system of incessantly self-reﬁning functionality in which nothing was original except the system itself. (p. 15)

What is lost to us now, perhaps, is the liberatory moment of Ford’s systemic modernity, the perpetual making new, which it has become conventional to reduce to a panoptic regime of idiotic, duplicable production, an “incessantly self-refining functionality.” But to stop there is to lapse into the worst kind of Foucauldian nostalgia: a longing for lost discipline that makes postmodern punishment seem a relief. That is to say, it is missing the point. At least, it is missing a point that remained crucial to the emergent structure of feeling that made modernity seem desirable and therefore worth buying (at frequently exorbitant rates). The problem of the modernist subject now, at any rate, the problem invented by some aspiring post-historians of modernity, is the loss of that defining, historical Other: the time-bound we that all of us once knew ourselves really to be, as opposed to some modernist ideal. “The practical problem of urban design now,” Richard Sennett (1987) has written, for example, with reference to the plate- glass architecture inspired by Mies, “is how men and women can cope with the solitude imposed upon them by modernism” (p. 7). One could make such a statement only in the absence of that lost collective Other of history. The question is for whom and to what extent Sennett’s once-upon-a-time Other has been dispersed. An oppositional history was characteristic not only of the privileged subjects of modernist “high” culture, along with middle-class aspirants to simulacral entitlement; it seems to have defined the working-class subjects of “Fordism” as well.1 The modernity of their labor, looked back at now, consisted of the mechanical equivalent of Sennett’s isolation: the day spent in tasks so idiotically small as to refer to nothing outside their repetitive, mindless simplicity, with the necessary speed of the line executing a kind of noisy, mechanical “solitude imposed upon them by modernism.” “The man who places a part does not fasten it,” Ford decreed, “The man who puts in a bolt does not put on the nut; the man who puts on the nut does not tighten it” (Lacey, 1986, p. 109). “Imagine it if you can,” a writer for Colliers magazine began his description of Henry Ford’s Highland Park assembly line in 1914, during the peak production years of the Model T, “its endless rows of writhing machinery, its shrieking, hammering, and clatter, its smell of oil, its autumn haze of smoke, its savage-looking foreign population—to my mind it expressed but one thing, and that was delirium” (Holli, 1976, p. 134). Seventy years later, Fredric Jameson (1991) would imagine he had discovered in postmodernity the “savage” self-fragmenting subjectivity

63 Jerry Herron described here, which he would dub the “hysterical sublime” (pp. 34–35). Those two moments of hysterical projection share the same strategy, which, like Sennett’s, reduces to unintelligible ruin any subject position not precisely supervised by their own prescriptive nostalgias, each yearning for a moment of historicist repression that may never have existed, at least not in those terms.

How Not To Visit Detroit

First the facts. Now a thesis. A ruin is not found, it is made: an anti-historical compound of nostalgia and merchandising. This collusion is suggested in the sociologist Dean MacCannell’s (1976) formulation, from his book, The Tourist (subtitled “A New Theory of the Leisure Class”): “The deep structure of modernity is a totalizing idea, a modern mentality that sets modern society in opposition both to its own past and to those societies of the present that are premodern or un(der) developed” (pp. 7–8). Elsewhere, MacCannell concludes, quite beautifully, in fact, “As a tourist, the individual may step out into the universal drama of modernity” (p. 7). I would say he has things about right, except in reverse, rather like Fredric Jameson writing under the influence of his politically nostalgic unconscious. As a tourist, the individual does not step into, but out of, the historically negotiated drama of modernity. The totalizing impulse MacCannell ascribes to modernity is, in other words, more nearly postmodern in its origins. With postmodernity, it shares an academic, institu- tionalizing urge to control history, reducing memory to sites of corporate supervision by merchandizing history as nostalgic ruin. But to whom does a ruin first appear as a ruin? Not to native inhabitants, surely, for whom history is not a holiday diversion, but a continuous, if haphazard, way of living. When did Romans, for example, first realize that they no longer lived in a city, but in a ruin? Perhaps not until English gentlemen, taking the Grand Tour, found themselves in need of souvenirs. What those souvenirs spoke to genteel collectors was not history, but the humiliation of history; not the “lessons” of the past, but the mastery of ownership, as if consumption had taken the place of self-knowledge, because in fact it had. “A world ended in Detroit,” Camilo José Vergara (1995, p. 38) has declared, connoisseur-like, in Metropolis magazine, with his article serving both as advertisement for a recently published coffee-table book (The New American Ghetto) and as a traveling exhibition of his photographs. Vergara has been dining out on Detroit for a number of years, as a matter of fact, in the pages of such journals as the Nation, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. He has devised a version of Detroit, that most classically representative of cities, which proves attractive to great numbers of middle-class Americans who share his urge to get over the responsibility of history by reducing its memory to nostalgic ruins. Vergara’s “solution” to the problems of the city, and his nominal

64 Three Meditations on the Ruins of Detroit reason for writing his now much reproduced article in Metropolis magazine, was to propose that a large chunk of downtown Detroit be turned into a kind of dystopian theme park: “a dozen city blocks of pre-Depression skyscrapers be stabilized and left standing as ruins: an American Acropolis” (p. 33). “All I can do,” Vergara confesses touristically, “is to record the fading splendor of the buildings and the disjointed and anguished cries of those who try to make a home among them” (p. 38). This high-mindedness is perhaps all well and good, liberal romanticism notwithstanding. It is the naive tourism implicit in Vergara’s proposals that is both more consequential, and also representative of postmodern souvenir taking and the down-sizing nostalgias that reduce the cause-and-effect of history to the disjointed stuff of coffee-table publication. “The tourists,” MacCannell writes in his un-self-regarding characterization, “return home carrying souvenirs and talking of their experiences, spreading, wherever they go, a vicarious experience of the sight. Authentic experiences are believed to be available only to those moderns who try to break the bonds of their everyday existence and begin to ‘live’” (pp. 158–159). “Just back from Detroit,” the self-authenticating Vergara assures his readers, “which I visit every year. Its downtown moves me like no other place” (p. 33). Vergara acts out a vicarious self-authentication. He is “moved” by the spectacular “ruin” of the city, which his own photographs translate into marketable souvenirs. These sights are offered for sale to the supposedly disauthenticated, postmodern populace for whom “the fading splendor of the buildings” and the “anguished cries of those who try to make a home among them” have alike been translated to aestheticized curios. “As experience is increasingly mediated and abstracted,” Susan Stewart (1993) points out in her description of souvenirs, “the lived relation of the body to the phenomenological world is replaced by a nostalgic myth of contact and presence” (p. 133). Vergara’s sightseeing, his vicarious “myth of contact and presence,” replaces the reader/citizen’s actual bodily visit to the city, and records (as souvenir trope) an abandonment of urban space, both real and imaginary, that is of great historical consequence. As MacCannell suggests, it is the “authenticity of the self,” Vergara’s prototypical self, that is really the question. Vergara’s concern with an aesthetic of feeling renders history not so much impossible as irrelevant: “All I can do is to record the fading splendor.” Of course, that is not all he can do, but all he wants to do. He is shrewd, if not precisely original in his wish both to remember Detroit, and at the same time to know nothing whatsoever about it: “We could transform the nearly 100 troubled buildings [downtown] into a grand national historic park of play and wonder, an urban Monument Valley” (p. 36). Here, the potential for aesthetic “play and wonder” entitles the connoisseur to make an empty “ruin” of the place where a million people still live and work, many of them in conditions of enforced desperation. (Vergara’s photographs, offered as souvenirs from a theme park that will probably never be built, rarely include human ﬁgures, regardless of his rhetorical sensitivity to

65 Jerry Herron the “anguished cries” of the invisible citizenry.) The historic “solitude” imposed by modernity, to which Richard Sennett refers, is not so much solved as it is thematized, Disneyﬁed, as consumable entertainment. If “Detroit is everywhere,” as Vergara proposes, then so too is his conveniently packaged “Disneyzone” anodyne, to use Michael Sorkin’s (1992) dismissive term for a postmodern (and postmortem) “urbanism without . . . a city” (p. 231). Vergara’s is a perfectly unhistorical space, wherein the politics of middle-class feeling take the place of understanding, responsibility, and action. That is a solution of sorts, I suppose, and one that has kept Vergara consistently in the news, as if to conﬁrm the wish of Americans to generally escape the old modernist stand-offs: memory versus desire, history versus utopia. If we could only just get rid of the one, then we would be free to enjoy the other.

Meditation One: Do You Remember Hudson’s?

Perhaps the greatest of all the “ruins” in Detroit is the now leveled structure that once housed the J. L. Hudson Company, Detroit’s premier downtown retailer. At its completion in 1929, it was the world’s largest department store. The building, demolished in 1998, represented an architectural consolidation undertaken in stages between 1924 and 1929 under the supervision of Smith, Hinchman, and Grylls. The structure was 25 stories, with 4 additional stories below ground; it encompassed 2.2 million square feet of floor space. There were 5,000 windows, 700 dressing rooms, and 51 passenger elevators, each with their own white-gloved attendant. Hudson’s had storage space for 83,000 furs. A seven-story flagpole topped the structure. This mercantile enormity displaced the former high points of civic culture: the church steeples and city hall tower. The lives of citizens would no longer be triangulated by those outmoded referents; instead, people were invited to discover themselves in relation to a commercial culture that they could buy and dispose of piecemeal, as they pleased. It was the modern way. The enormous building was vacated in 1983, when Hudson’s (by then a subsidiary of a Minneapolis retail chain) closed its doors in Detroit forever. Only downsized suburban outposts remain. The old downtown store was never too far out of the public mind, however. At holidays, it served as a gigantic reminder of all the good times that people (who invariably no longer lived there) say they used to have in Detroit, but which the city (abandoned by more than half of its former residents) now seemingly makes impossible. The fact is that Hudson’s was not a ruin of anything, except a sentimental wish to impose on someone else a kind of life that modernity has taught us all, collectively, to leave behind. The suburbs did not kill Hudson’s, in other words, we simply outgrew it, just as we were intended to. The J. L. Hudson Company built the first

66 Three Meditations on the Ruins of Detroit suburban shopping center in the United States (called Northland) and, along with other “downtown” interests, developed (at enormous profit) the housing and transportation routes required to make suburbia viable. Not incidentally, the year of Northland’s completion (1954) was the same year that previously growing sales at the downtown store began an irreversible decline. And no surprise, Hudson’s taught consumers how to master and ultimately condescend to the many-storied plot that was once crucial to the pedagogy of department- store consuming: the omniscient, commercial narrative that moved shoppers through the store and into lives defined in imitation of its disciplinary regime. Just as labor unions ceased to script the enfranchisement of individual workers, centralized shopping became anachronistic to the mature desires of fully individuated consumers who preferred the come-as-you-are populism of shopping mall entry. In both instances, “we” outgrew the master narratives, those training wheels on our ideological bicycle, and now feel sufficiently confident to go forward on our own. And that represents not a ruin of modernity, but its ongoing vitality, a vitality vouchsafed not only to those who have left the city behind. “I am disappointed by the reaction against the ruins park,” Vergara muses, in a state of disingenuous incredulity. He seems unable to fathom the preference of homeless citizens, for example, when they say they would prefer heat, shelter, and jobs, instead of his Motown Acropolis, which “would occupy only a minuscule fraction of the city’s idle space” (p. 38). Perhaps what is at stake is a native grasp of the danger implicit in his fantasy. All too easily, the poor and disenfranchised are reduced to souvenir extras when “we” who are not poor execute our nostalgic “contract” with America, as if history were subject to periodic renegotiation. That opportune figuration simply cannot be sustained at ground level, surely not around the old Hudson’s store, in this city of desperate (if illegal) modernity. Here, the illicit economy is, for some cohorts of the population, the main employer, especially of young men. They seem not to require a public monument to “our throwaway cities,” to use Vergara’s terminology. Their lives prove sufficient reminders of where and who they are, and of the value yet to be discovered in a history that others would prefer to blame on resident “indifference” and then simply leave behind.

Meditation Two: Horace Rackham’s Doorknob

On both sides of Woodward Avenue, just north of Detroit’s so-called New Center (a semi-successful attempt to relocate the city’s overcongested downtown in the 1920s) is a neighborhood that was once home to some of the richest and most powerful men in the United States. Boston–Edison, it is called, after two of its main streets. Henry Ford, then a recently minted billionaire, built his ﬁrst mansion here in the years just before the First World

67 Jerry Herron

War. S. S. Kresge (founder of K-Mart) lived in a great house, the grounds of which occupied a full city block. J. L. Hudson, who created the Hudson’s department store, lived only a street away. Ranged around them were the less wealthy and elite of Detroit: retailers and car magnates and manufacturers. Even Ty Cobb was a resident, if not precisely a neighbor. On Edison Avenue, just a couple of houses down from where Ford would one day make his home, Horace Rackham built his house. Before he became rich and philanthropic (endowing, among other things, the University of Michigan’s graduate school), Rackham was an attorney and investor who, along with a small group of Detroiters, loaned Henry Ford the money he needed to build his first commercially successful car: the original Model A. This was Ford’s third try at auto manufacturing. The first two attempts having ended in financial wreck, investors were hard to come by. “The horse is here to stay,” a banker friend of Rackham’s advised, “the automobile is only a novelty—a fad.” Nevertheless, Rackham bought 50 shares of Ford stock, at a cost of $5,000. Between 1903 and 1919, he was paid $4,750,000 in dividends on that investment. When Ford bought him out in 1919, taking the company private, Rackham’s shares were redeemed for $12,500,000. He became, on the spot, an immensely wealthy man. Rackham’s house still stands, like most of the houses in this district. It is a modest place, by local standards, not nearly so fine as many of his neighbors’. I know the people who live there now, a mathematician and an artist. The first time they invited me over, before ringing the bell, I put my hand on their front doorknob, which appeared to be original. I imagined Rackham doing the same thing, then opening the door on that April afternoon, 80 years before, after he had collected his check from Henry Ford: “Honey, I’m home, and here’s the 12.5 million.” It is doubtful this little vignette ever got played out. Rackham was probably driven home, arriving not in front, but at the side or the rear, greeted by a servant. No wonder I get things wrong; it is hard for me to imagine his life, except as the wish-fulfilling fantasy, the retro-souvenir, of a West-Texas used-car dealer’s son who grew up knowing very little about wealth, or servants, or porte-cochères. Not that my friends who own Rackham’s house are any more knowledgeable about such things. Like virtually all the current residents in the neighborhood, they inhabit places (often near palaces) never intended for people like themselves. But then who could have guessed that one day, half the city’s population and most of its wealth would just walk away? Before that happened, people of the class, or race, of the neighborhood’s current homeowners would likely have been consigned to the back stairs, the third floors, the cottages of tradesmen and domestics. Sometimes, present-day Detroiters buy the great houses as if to get even for their prior exclusion. They make a payment or two, strip out the doors and fixtures, and sell these to dealers; then they default on the mortgage loan. Many of the homes have been wasted that way, and then abandoned to the next stage in their devolution.

68 Three Meditations on the Ruins of Detroit

Here, impromptu recyclers ply their trade, day and night, with old shopping carts and rattletrap pick-ups, for the most part unmolested by the law, making their way up and down Detroit’s unmaintained streets. Inevitably, these houses reach the ﬁnal stage in this process of controlled decay, becoming yet another crumbling souvenir of the glory that was once Detroit. “The houses, mostly standing as they stood a half-century ago, are dismal structures,” Russell McLauchlin (1946) wrote, for example, in a reminiscence of his own (even more dilapidated) childhood neighborhood, not far from Boston–Edison:

Some have night-blooming grocery stores in their front yards. Some have boarded windows. All stand in bitter need of paint and repair. It is a desolate street; a scene of poverty and chop-fallen gloom; possibly of worse things. But once, within a clear middle-aged memory, Alfred Street was a lovely place. (p. xi)

McLauchlin’s description was written at the end of the Second World War; the intervening years have only increased the local appetite for nostalgia. This nostalgic sighting of the past offers a retroactive justification for the very acts of abandonment that produced the “ruins” in the first place. These ruins are now made to appear, sui generis, as the result of some native deficiency of culture, which those lucky enough to have escaped need to prevent from overtaking their newfound homes. What is interesting is how little power such grand residences as existed on Alfred Street or, somewhat later, in Boston–Edison, held over the original owners, who abandoned them long before the neighborhoods got old. As E. P. Thompson (1966) has taught us with regard to social class, modernity is no less invisible, except when it is in motion. Such mobility is what made the Boston–Edison houses desirable as destinations, and then antiquated them almost as fast, because money, especially when newly made, is expressive only on the go, when it is buying something new. Detroit’s “substantial families,” as R. D. McKenzie called them in his 1933 study (dealing with the years 1900–1930), had always been moving away from the past and the central city, out toward, and then into, the suburbs. What McKenzie discovered is that this pattern of migration was much faster for Detroit’s richest citizens than for similar citizens in New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago. In those cities, the population of “notables” in fact increased between 1910 and 1930 (McKenzie, 1976, pp. 122–123). In Detroit, that population declined, because people who had “made it” considered getting out of the city to be a necessary imprimatur of success. McKenzie’s conclusion, in his quaintly snobbish sociology, was that the preponderance of heavy industry and working-class immigrants was responsible for the elite’s evacuation of Detroit. But that is to mistake the cause

69 Jerry Herron for the effect. Detroit had so many mobile rich people, many of whom started out as working-class immigrants, because it was and is a place given over entirely to industrial modernity. That is what created Boston–Edison, and that is what made it available, almost immediately, to somebody else on the way up. “Nothing original, yet everything new,” as Terry Smith remarked of Henry Ford’s modernity. Ford himself, a farmboy turned mechanic, only stayed in his house at 66 Edison Avenue a couple of years before building Fair Lane in suburban Dearborn, where he moved in 1916. The Boston–Edison houses, even the ones that have been truly ruined by predation, are not souvenirs of lost elegance, failed culture, depopulation, or something else. Souvenirs are something you bring back from a trip after it is over. For the people who live here, the trip is far from done, so these historic houses keep getting moved into, and used, because for somebody they still represent “everything new,” no matter how old it may be.

Meditation Three: Romance of the Road

Perhaps the most important historic site in Detroit goes entirely unnoted because it is not marked. A state commemorative plaque is located, not at the site itself, but in a historic neighborhood some distance removed. The stretch of Woodward Avenue between Six and Seven Mile Roads was the first piece of concrete paved highway in the United States, laid down in 1909, before anybody could have guessed at the importance of what was being done. The paving represents an act of pure creativity. Like pure science or pure math- ematics, it pre-dated the use that would reveal its premonitory value. Industrial modernity produced the workers who would build the cars, in such great numbers and so cheaply that everyone, including the workers themselves, would eventually be able to buy one. And by then, the value of modern pavement would seem so self-evident as to merit no special notice of this long- since forgotten moment of foresight. Today, high-velocity pavement grids the geography of our sight-specific modernity, enabling a schematic wonder that makes all attendant wonders seem likewise possible by association. Sight-specific modernity was no less powerful in 1951, when Detroit celebrated its 250th anniversary, which became the occasion for the publication of This Is Detroit: 250 years in pictures. The “Postlude,” subtitled “The Vision and the Fulfillment,” offers the following recollection of the city’s founder, Antoine Laumet de la Mothe Cadillac:

On the site of Cadillac’s fort of 250 years ago the imposing buildings of the new Civic Center are now rising. As long as her citizens shall continue to dream and dare greatly, the future of the City Cadillac founded will remain secure. (Quaife, 1951, p. 197)

70 Three Meditations on the Ruins of Detroit

The final two images in the volume are of then not yet extant freeway interchanges: the Lodge/I-94 interchange north of the Wayne State University campus, and the Lodge/I-75 interchange near Tiger Stadium. The two images are titled, aptly, “Works in Progress,” just as the city itself was, and is, a work still in progress. Each shows an aerial rendering of the city and, superimposed over it, a tracing of the planned freeways that would innervate that historic terrain, just as a nerve innervates muscle tissue and endows it with the capacity to move. The future of Detroit will remain secure, the anniversary volume advised, “as long as her citizens shall continue to dream and dare greatly.” That is what these photographs are all about. They are maps of the dream and wonder of modernity, expressed at the intersection of pavement and history. However, the photographic superimposition gives a false impression, and merely confirms the now prevalent, and nostalgic, view that freeways laid waste to otherwise vital communities that would still be vital today if only they had not been submitted to the eminent domain of concrete. These claims are utter nonsense, because the freeways did not interrupt the historical logic of American urbanism. On the contrary, they are its purest, most sublime expression. The photographic image is a false one because the freeway is not a superimposition, but rather a natural outgrowth, a fulfillment of the modernity of which the city is the sight-specific expression. And now that we have arrived at the future always already inscribed in our design, the question is whether we will have the courage to take responsibility for the results. This is a complicated question, obviously, and only made more so in a city such as Detroit. In this respect at least (Vergara notwithstanding), Detroit is an exaggerated paradigm of all American cities. By default, it has been inherited by populations (many of them poor and poorly educated minorities) whose attitude toward historic “preservation” can only be a vexed one. Particularly so, as the history in question was one scripted to exclude them from the scheme that made modernity so highly profitable to somebody else, someone who has now moved away. As to what became of our ability to dare and dream greatly, there is no simple or single answer. Perhaps it is our frustrated national impatience with the future, and our concomitant wish to devour it ahead of time, before it runs out. “Futurology” displaces history, and nostalgia supplants modernity as “cultural dominant” (to use Fredric Jameson’s term): a nostalgia for how we imagine the by now exhausted future used to make us feel. William Whyte (1988), for example, is among the most famous and famously nostalgic of city interpreters. In his book City, subtitled “Rediscovering the center,” he recounts with sociological exactitude his love affair with pedestrian streets, which are the nostalgic Other of high-speed pavement. He laments the unwillingness of Americans to walk more than 800–1,000 feet before getting in their cars, noting this distance as approximately that between the anchor stores in a suburban shopping mall. He concludes, “If Americans could widen their walking radius

71 Jerry Herron by only 200 feet, there would be a revolution in U.S. land use. However, there would have to be structural changes. There would have to be places to walk” (p. 303). It is not as if Whyte is wrong, or not entitled to his nostalgia for a redemptive future, which of course he is. The problem is his presumption that the behavior of Americans is evidence of a kind of ignorance, or moral degeneracy, although these are perhaps highly convenient assumptions to adopt. This strikes me, nevertheless, as the worst kind of pandering. In the name of bringing things back, of rediscovering our center, “we,” whoever that is, are invited to see as ruin that which others might want to call history. The city, in fact, counter to Whyte’s presumptions, did produce places to get to. We got there, by choice, on paved highways. And it is the extraordinary wealth produced by the city, by this city, Detroit, that made the trip possible for numbers of individuals unprecedented in the long history of human societies. That is what the city did. Now, to presume its putative exhaustion is evidence of anything but the city’s successful design is like blaming the gas tank for getting empty or the tires for wearing out when somebody drives the family car. The problem is not that so many people used the city to get to where they wanted to go, which was someplace else. The problem is that not everybody was allowed to come along for the ride, so that a population who has been excluded from its entitlements now often inhabits the structural apparatus of modernity. To blame those people for conditions over which they have had little control, or to blame the historic city for its insistent, if problematic, witness to its own success is to miss the fundamental point, only hinted at in Whyte’s suggestion of a need for “structural” change. That is precisely what is needed: a structure for changing nostalgia into intelligence, ruin into history, for recalling the sights of modernity to a still relevant speciﬁcity. There will be no arbitrary posting of the Modern, in other words, until we have reached its end, architectural cartoons notwithstanding. As to what, precisely, that end may be, it is all a matter of arrival. That is to say, it is all about cars.

Conclusion

The automobile is the mechanical summation of our urban predicament: the ultimate love object of our national desire, which renders the city at once accessible, and also outmoded, inconvenient, unnecessary, like the history, supposedly, from which it was born. There is simply nowhere convenient to park, in the city or history. Whatever is to become of the metropolis, then, and us along with it, will be determined by the confrontation of cars with historic space. The most sublime expression of our national identity was sight speciﬁc, to be apprehended behind the wheel. That is where individualist

72 Three Meditations on the Ruins of Detroit democracy and industrial modernity converge climactically in an embrace of man (or woman) and machine that is perhaps the supreme moment of fulfillment we will know as a people, with the fit of dream and reality being perfect, or nearly so. This was all made possible, regardless of how we may feel about the results, through the logic of the “sunken ditch.” This is the origin of the American freeway and also the cause of much derisive, and mistaken, criticism by architects and urban planners, who presume that some kind of gigantic mistake was made. Quite the contrary: Freeways were the populist fulfillment of an urban “dream” distinctively our own (to recall the language of the 1950s Detroit commemorative volume). By sinking roadways below street level, civic authorities could control access and therefore allow greater speed of travel for urban motorists. Not incidentally, this made good on the sight-specific promise that cars had only been hinting at ever since Henry Ford drove his first “Quadricycle” through the streets of Detroit on that fateful June morning in 1896: the promise that automobiles would carry us out of the past and into the modern world. Quite clearly, Detroit is the capital of the twentieth century, and probably the century to come. Here, we built the auto-matic future, and it drove us out of town and into the world beyond, where it is every American’s God- given right to park directly in front of wherever it is we are going. “The road generates its own patterns of movement and settlement and work,” J. B. Jackson (1994) proposes, tantalizingly, in A sense of place, a sense of time, “without so far producing its own kind of landscape beauty or its own sense of place” (p. xiii). I am not so sure that those conclusions are sustainable, given the witness of Detroit, although the implication that modernity should yield a traditionally recognizable “beauty” is possibly the problem. The sense of place that modernity produces, finally, may require new, un-nostalgic categories to comprehend it. Whatever image we make of the city now, whether we left or stayed behind, it will be of the city, this city, confronted through a windshield. This is the sight toward which modernity has driven us: screened by our private nostalgias, protected by an individually serviceable technology, and traveling at speed through the ruins our evacuation has made of Detroit.

Notes

* This essay originally appeared in the following publication: Herron, J. (2001). Three meditations on the ruins of Detroit. In G. Daskalakis, C. Waldheim, & J. Young (Eds.). Stalking Detroit (pp. 33–41). Barcelona: Actar Press. Permission to reprint granted by Actar Press.

1. For an introduction to Fordism and post-Fordism in the context of Detroit, see Schumacher, P., & Rogner, C. (2001). After Ford. In G. Daskalakis, C. Waldheim, & J. Young (Eds.). Stalking Detroit (pp. 48–56). Barcelona: Actar Press.

73 Jerry Herron

References

Holli, M. G. (Ed.). (1976). Detroit. New York: New Viewpoints. Jackson, J. B. (1994). A sense of place, a sense of time. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lacey, R. (1986). Ford: The men and the machine. Boston: Little Brown. MacCannell, D. (1976). The tourist: A new theory of the leisure class. New York: Schocken Books. McKenzie, R. D. (1976). Detroit’s substantial families: 1900, 1930. In M. G. Holli (Ed.). Detroit (pp. 141–144). New York: New Viewpoints. McLauchlin, R. (1946). Alfred Street. Detroit, MI: Conjure House. Quaife, M. M. (1951). This is Detroit. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Sennett, R. (1987). Plate glass. Raritan, 6 (4), 1–15. Smith, T. (1993). Making the modern: Industry, art, and design in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sorkin, M. (1992). Variations on a theme park: The new American city and the end of public space. New York: Hill & Wang. Stewart, S. (1993). On longing: Narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Thompson, E. P. (1966). The making of the English working class. New York: Random House. Vergara, C. J. (1995, April). Visible city. Metropolis, 33–38. Whyte, W. H. (1988). City: Rediscovering the center. New York: Doubleday.

74 Chapter 6

Perception and Exploration of Interstitial Space

Slots in San Francisco*

Tanu Sankalia

Nothing is more difﬁcult than to know precisely what we see. (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 2002/1945, p. 67)

We think of cities, and their built environments, as though they were fully constituted, finding in them certain characteristics or essences that are an outcome of preformed consciousness. This is because the material world that confronts us is already inscribed with discourse and meaning, unfolding as a body of prevailing images, forms, rules, data, dimensions, and archives, or as knowledge that is given. No doubt then, as Merleau-Ponty (2002/1945) suggests, it is difficult “to know precisely what we see” (p. 67). However, the material world, he argues, is not “readymade,” but in a constant state of formation. We reconstitute the world as we find and discover characteristics and essences based on our perception through processes of embodied experience, and not merely by thinking and reflecting. Thus, perceiving the material world—the built environment of cities, architecture, and urban form—and reconstituting it is an ongoing dialectical process based on creative engagement of the body’s gaze. Proposing new ways of seeing is precisely how we can dislodge entrenched epistemologies and inaugurate new knowledge.

75 Tanu Sankalia

In this chapter, I address epistemological and visual problems of engaging the built environment and suggest inventive ways that provide new perspectives. I do so by turning to interstitial spaces, or what I call “slots,” located in the historic Victorian residential fabric of San Francisco.1 I hope to provoke the recognition of slots as discrete elements in the urban field, which, not surprisingly, despite their predominance and apparent visibility, have gone largely unnoticed and undocumented. Part of this perceptual conundrum, I argue, is our enigmatic inability to recognize that which lies outside existing historical and epistemological ways of seeing. Gestalt modes of perception are still dominant, as figure trumps ground and produces, as in the case of San Francisco, an image of urban and architectural form intently focused on the object: the city viewed as silhouette, the building encapsulated as edifice. I thus turn to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of perception, which promises an intriguing schema to refocus our gaze—to look beyond the apparent and easily recognizable, to not take for granted knowledge based purely on “thought,” but to employ perception through situated experience and the engagement of the gaze as a way to construct, as in this case, an alternative narrative of the city. By emphasizing negative space—the void, the ground, the shadow, the slot—I seek to enhance our perception of it through exploratory processes of casting and lighting. These art-based practices are powerful techniques to express objects in strikingly different ways from their familiar representations— to dislodge them from their predetermined associations.2 The perception and exploration of slots, I propose, produces images and objects that develop new perspectives of architecture and urban form in San Francisco. They trigger architectural imagination in potentially transformative ways. Slots, also referred to as “notchbacks,” “spacing,” “light wells,” “side yards,” and “recesses,” are specific kinds of space that exist between Victorian residential buildings in San Francisco (Moudon, 1986, p. 162; San Francisco Planning Department [SFPD], 1971, pp. 21–35, 1979). They are generally narrow, open-to-sky spaces of varying width and depth that are approximately 3–11 feet wide and 10–50 feet deep. Their bounding surfaces are punctuated by doors and windows, animated by faceted or semicircular bay windows, and embellished with roof overhangs, service features, and elemental articulation. Variations in material conditions such as surface finishes, ornament, landscaping, ground paving, fixtures, and other functional details further articulate the spaces, and also reflect socioeconomic diversity across neighborhoods. A vast range of forms can be observed in the central part of San Francisco, from simple rectangular slots to more complex adaptations. Although initially planned almost exclusively to serve as light wells and access to rear yards, slots have accommodated new functions, turning into service areas, garages, gardens, and entrances, thereby creating new layers of use and meaning.

76 Interstitial Space: Slots in San Francisco

6.1 The emergence of slots is related to the historic development of Slots in San Francisco San Francisco’s urban morphology. Between 1850 and 1900, as the city expanded to the west from its initial northeast downtown nucleus, surveyors used a grid form in conjunction with the Spanish vara unit of measurement (1 vara = 2.75 feet) to lay out a pattern of streets, blocks, and open spaces. This survey—known as the 50-vara survey—resulted in blocks that had six square lots of 50 square varas each, and that measured 275 × 412.5 feet. Over time, the 50-vara lots were further subdivided, or “short-platted” as it was termed, to result in parcels that had a variety of dimensional combinations, with the most common being 27.5 × 137.5 feet or 25 × 100 or 137.5 feet (Lowell, 1988; Moudon, 1986). By the 1870s, a surge in speculative row-house development and in owner-built homes resulted in the construction of numerous two-to-four-story wood-frame houses on contiguous lots. The narrow and deep lots forced a linear arrangement of rooms along the longer dimension (100 feet or 137.5 feet) and compelled builders to construct deep recesses or slots in the façades to bring daylight and air into the inner rooms. The result was a pattern of narrow spaces that punctuated the street wall, connected the public realm to the private space of the slot, and, in some cases, extended all the way to the rear yard. This pattern of light wells facing the street is unique to

77 Tanu Sankalia row-house developments in San Francisco and may be seen across several neighborhoods in the central part of the city. To consider slots as “lived space” of the residential block cannot be overstated. Cluttered with wires, pipes, and garbage bins, littered with junk, or pristinely paved and landscaped, slots serve as access to apartments and thoroughfares to backyards; from the interior of a house or apartment, they provide a view to the street. Slots act as yet another vital space for the performative “rhythms” of everyday life—gathering, gardening, cleaning, repairing, or just hanging out (Lefebvre, 2004). They challenge elemental and regulatory clarity by blurring distinctions between private space and the public realm. When ungated or unfenced and open to the street, they serve as physical extensions of the public realm—the sidewalk—as they indent into the residential block, practically encouraging one to wander in, at least with one’s gaze if not feet, into private space. Visually, slots disrupt and break the continuous street wall of house façades. They act as a pause, a narrow zone of unadorned silence amid the visual cacophony of eclectic façades. As deep recesses, they are architectural expressions of rhythm, depth, and shadow. At the margins of the architectural object, in diametric opposition to the adorned façades of Victorians and their stylistic specificity, they embody through their prosaic presence the building’s uncertain and secondary stylistic properties. At first glance, slots are camouflaged in the architecture of the Victorian block. Although they intrinsically belong to the house, they also do not—an ambiguous condition produced by the application of Gestalt perception, that of privileging a shape against a background, a solid form against empty space, or a lit object against a dark backdrop. Merleau-Ponty (2002/1945) seeks to challenge this nineteenth-century Gestalt approach to perception, which endorses the ability of the mind to conjure complete forms (p. 35). This challenge is important in the light of critiques of formal clarity that underpin neoclassical and modern architecture and urban design: building forms as objects in space. Merleau-Ponty argues against the notion that the visual field is composed of clear, well-defined objects set against an “indeterminate background,” thereby dislodging the primacy of the figure and encouraging the use of our body’s gaze over vision constructed by means of abstract thought (p. 77).3 Merleau-Ponty argues for perception drawn from multiple, infinite views and perspectives that render the object a translucent entity whereby the greater field becomes visible. He urges that we “see as things the intervals between things themselves” (p. 18) and recognize spatial intervals within the urban field so as to trigger a moment of perceptual ambiguity that alters the very appearance of the world. Such a phenomenal moment, Merleau-Ponty asserts, does not merely rearrange the relationship of objects to one another, but actually initiates the perception of “another world” (p. 18). It was this objective of providing a different perspective of San Francisco’s historic residential architecture and urban form—another world, as

78 Interstitial Space: Slots in San Francisco

6.2 View of Slot. (Drawing by Paul Madonna)

it were—that inspired an art and architecture exhibition I curated in spring 2010 at the University of San Francisco’s Thacher Gallery. Drawings by Paul Madonna and photographs by Moshe Quinn served to inaugurate a view of slots never seen before; they compel the viewer to inhabit the space, and draw one’s gaze in different directions, so that new layers and membranes of the city are revealed. Architectural drawings by Catherine Chang, especially sectional cuts, dissolve the familiar façades of Victorians to take the viewer inside the space, disclosing unusual spatial relationships and potentialities of occupation, while axonometric extrusions reveal the positive form of negative space, thus entirely

79 Tanu Sankalia

6.3 Inside the Slot, “Bracket.” (Photo by Moshe Quinn)

encapsulating the space of the slot. Performance videos choreographed by Amie Dowling and directed by Pedro Lange evoke, through the movement of bodies in contained space, the ciphered contents of the slot’s presence.4 It is these methods of observation, documentation, and expression that bring slots readily into view and suggest interpretive possibilities. But perhaps their very recognition and expression have been constrained by a priori knowledge, a distinct view of San Francisco: the city as object, the building as façade. For Merleau-Ponty (2002/1945), though, the world is not already constituted, as I introduced earlier, but is the setting for our perceptions and thoughts, which then tend towards breaking with a familiar acceptance of the world (p. xv). As he writes, “All knowledge takes its place within the horizons opened up by perception” (p. 241). But, just as perception inaugurates new knowledge, it is important to underscore its relationship to history. Merleau- Ponty does not disavow history, but in fact speaks of its “body”—a body that it is neither purely ideological, the “head” (in the Hegelian sense), nor purely materialist, the “feet” (in the Marxist sense), but one that must be engaged from the vantage point of the subject in the dialectical process of constituting the world (p. xxi).

80 Interstitial Space: Slots in San Francisco

6.4 The perception of slots I propose here, as a distinct way of con- Plan, Section, and stituting San Francisco’s urban and architectural identity, must be seen in the Axonometric of Slot. (Drawings by light of historic discourses that have shaped the city’s image. To begin, San Catherine Chang) Francisco’s Urban Design Plan of 1971 (SFPD, 1971) has been instrumental in deﬁning the city’s urban form over the last four decades. In the 1950s and 1960s, as indiscriminate development negatively impacted the physical image of San Francisco—its unique amalgam of natural setting and built form—the 1971 plan provided a compelling case in support of the city’s aesthetic

81 Tanu Sankalia aspirations and the conservation of its environmental resources. The 1971 plan was created by architects, urban designers, and city planners who were greatly influenced by Kevin Lynch’s Image of the city (1960), in which the city was seen as an extrinsic construct, where its constituent parts and patterns—its paths, edges, nodes, districts, and landmarks—could be easily grasped and organized into a coherent unified whole, namely the “image.” For Lynch (1960), the clarity of image meant a clearer mental picture of city form for its residents, and therefore a more pleasurable urban experience. The city was consequently modeled as a well-defined object or, as Lynch had put it, a “construction in space” (p. 1) meant to be viewed and read from afar, crystallizing a distinct conception of place based on an exteriorization of form. Ostensibly, the phenomenological exploration of urban form, I propose here, opposes the perception of the city as a stable object, a conceit that animates Lynch’s view of the city, his taxonomy, and his cognition of it. Lynch’s Cartesian city—surveyed at times from a helicopter hovering at 5,000 feet above, or from a moving car (the windshield survey)—delimits the gaze, as Merleau-Ponty would argue, in readily definable objects and elements (paths, edges, nodes, districts, and landmarks), rather than the “indeterminate background” between them.5 It ignores, in this sense, the terrain vague of the city, the spatial fragments and unattended spaces that lie outside neat spatial boundaries and building envelopes. In contrast, Merleau-Ponty urges us to create a broader conception of the world around us based on situated experience and infinite perspectives—in other words, the city seen from everywhere. San Francisco’s urban image—especially in the light of new projects being developed in downtown, in former industrial areas close to downtown, and on the fringes of the city—is still somewhat contested by residents, and the 1971 Urban Design Plan, which guides this image, is considered limiting by its detractors. But the debate surrounding the city’s aesthetic image is still largely confined to style, as critics appeal for architecture that is either modern, or inspired by the city’s industrial past (Schwarzer, 2004). The city’s architectural identity—particularly in its residential neighborhoods (which form almost three-quarters of the city)—has often been pegged to the stylistic attributes of its Victorian architecture. For instance, Times wondrous change (1962), a guidebook devoted to the stylistic categorization of Victorian architecture, and Great houses of San Francisco (1974), a nostalgic monograph devoted to house form, containing numerous perfectly composed, frontal, black and white photographs of Victorians, are particularly noteworthy examples. The 1971 Urban Design Plan, too, identified Victorian residential buildings and their contiguous street frontages as distinctive, character-defining features (SFPD, 1971, pp. 21–35). This inclination towards stylistic preservation and codification in the 1960s and 1970s, however, needs to be recognized in the context of the large-scale destruction of Victorians brought on by urban renewal in the preceding two decades. Nevertheless, since the 1970s, nostalgic

82 Interstitial Space: Slots in San Francisco residents, preservationists, and realtors have forged an unabashed historicism— a discourse that unequivocally privileges image and style—turning Victorians into fetishized objects of pecuniary and symbolic value. What has inadvertently emerged, it can be argued, is an image of the city based on resplendent Victorian architecture and picturesque place. In contrast, Anne Moudon’s (1986) study, Built for change: Neigh- borhood architecture in San Francisco, can be read as an example of a perception that is constituted in relation to the history of the city. Her approach was morphological, emphasizing the identity and character of the city’s historic architecture and urban form in terms of its intrinsic structure of grids, blocks, streets, lots, and houses. Indeed, Moudon (1986) had unambiguously identified and documented the emergence of slots in the city’s Victorian house form as an outcome of the relationship of house design to land subdivision. Moudon described slots as “breathing spaces” and “recesses,” which she contended provide “resilience,” i.e. the structural continuity of urban form— or, put in another way, urban memory (1986, p. 162). Likewise, the 1971 Urban Design Plan identified slots as “lines” between Victorians, whereas the Residential design guidelines published by the SFPD in 1979 referred to slots as “notchbacks,” recognizing “spacing” as an important attribute of architectural design in historic neighborhoods. However, none of these studies goes into any depth and detail regarding the morphology of slots, or their potential for signaling an alternative reading of architectural and urban form in San Francisco that could spark design imagination. Architects and urban designers tend to continue to view the historic city as either a container of obsolete forms and patterns, or as a repository of styles that can be replicated in new projects. Because the city is rarely considered as an embodiment of “lived space,” observed and perceived through situated experience, marginal yet significant spaces go largely unnoticed. The experience of phenomena—bringing slots into view and interpreting them—does not, according to Merleau-Ponty (2002/1945), initiate some mystic state of inner realization, but, on the contrary, is a moment to begin deliberate analysis (p. 68). Analysis or “attention,” for him, is an “expressive value not confined to logical signification” (p. 35). Such emphasis on expressive value is concomitant to Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on philosophy as “expressive cognition” (Haas, 2008, p. 3). Contrary to the traditional conception of thinking as representation, whereby thought and language, as well as other forms of representation such as drawing, photographing, and modeling, represent a “reality”—that of classical thought—expressive cognition offers an intrinsically creative engagement with the city’s built environment through perception and phenomenological method. I am therefore interested in the notion of “saying to show,” to unravel and explore possibilities for creating alternative narratives of the built environment that the perception of interstitial space offers.6

83 Tanu Sankalia

The evocative and experimental practices of lighting and casting have well-established traditions in avant-garde twentieth-century art.7 They highlight how our gaze can be engaged in ways previously unexplored, they enrich perception, and further elucidate what has remained largely unseen. These practices therefore initiate an “abundance of phenomena,” or a heightened perception of the city, and a persuasive dialectic that inverses our reading of the city by rendering the clear obscure and the obscure clear (Merleau-Ponty, 2002/1945, p. 7). As Merleau-Ponty writes:

Aesthetic expression confers on what it expresses an existence in itself, installs it in nature as a thing perceived and accessible to all, or conversely plucks the signs themselves—the person of the actor, or the colors and canvas of the painter—from their empirical existence and bears them off into another world. (p. 212)

In other words, not only is an object expressed in a significantly different way from its familiar representations, but it is also sufficiently disassociated from those representations, thereby allowing an entirely independent and new reading to emerge. In early 2010, light artist and sculptor Elaine Buckholtz illuminated a 6.5 series of slots on Golden Gate Avenue in San Francisco’s North Panhandle Light Installation by district using dual-mounted stage floodlights. As the speckled, late winter dusk Elaine Buchkholtz

84 Interstitial Space: Slots in San Francisco

gradually gave way to pitch darkness, 1,150 watts of luminosity saturated the open-ended and ambiguous spaces, emphatically announcing their presence. The focused light beams ﬁlled the spaces, casting them as positive forms, clearly distinguished from their adjoining ornamental façades. This moment produced an arresting inversion of our normative perception—of ﬁgure on ground, solid against void, and light over shadow—instigating, in effect, a perceptual reversal. What is normally in relative darkness and hidden by day—the slot— was revealed, and what is typically lit and noticed by day—the façade—was now concealed. Consequently, another disparate view, another integument of the city, was made starkly visible. Through light, Buckholtz conveyed these spaces into the public consciousness (Guthrie, 2010). If illumination is a direct method of articulating presence, then casting is another tactile process of expressing the existence of unseen space and embodied experience. Whereas lighting is an ephemeral way of expressing negative space, casting is a more traditional, physical, and permanent method that involves pouring a congealable liquid into a mold and letting it harden to provide a material impression or cast of the void. Precisely such a process was 6.6 Slots Cast as Positive used to further emphasize and express the very presence and spatiality of slots. Forms. (Models by Models at different scales—multiple blocks, a single row on a block, and at Samuel North, Daniel Begaye, and the level of the individual space—unravel several distinct forms of slots, their Michael Conrad) pattern of repetition, and their relationships to surrounding spaces. In the case

85 Tanu Sankalia of a single space and a row of spaces, the Victorian residential buildings were replicated as scaled-down plaster forms to serve as molds, and the interstices were recaptured as wax casts. As one sees and holds the cast, the multifaceted form of space is educed, drawn out, as it were. The slot, now perceived as positive, tangible form, provides a sense of not only what it is, but also what it can be. It inaugurates a moment of new knowledge, the incipience, as Merleau-Ponty (2002/1945) would contend, of “another world” (p. 18). The work of the American artist Bruce Nauman, in the 1960s, is emblematic of this search for depicting the unseen—of giving materiality, not to what is there, but to what is not there. With A cast of the space under my chair, Nauman triggered the viewer’s imagination by provoking one to ponder the neglected void space. Nauman’s sculpture is not limited to the mere “association of previous images and forms,” but is actively engaged in constituting new objects, and articulating what was until then an “indeterminate horizon” (Merleau-Ponty, 2002/1945, p. 35). Casting is also a highly physical act—it is analogous to what Merleau-Ponty calls “delving into the thickness of the world by perceptual experience” (p. 212). It is this idea of “becoming the work,” of blurring distinctions between object and subject, that is inscribed in the sculptural casts of British artist Rachel Whiteread (Colomina, 2001). By creating concrete and resin casts of lost houses, the space behind a shelf, or the insides of a bottle, Whiteread works like an archeologist of space, rendering tangible the liminal spaces of our everyday lives. However, the sculptural cast for Whiteread is not merely an art object focused on aesthetic exploration, it is instead based on her acute perception of urban life—an inclination to construct a subjective narrative of the city. Beatriz Colomina (2001) claims that, by embodying “her past, her pains and her memories” (p. 72), Whiteread inhabits the cast—she becomes the work. This coming together of object and subject in the work of Whiteread underscores the latent corporeality contained in casting. Lighting and casting thus serve as striking examples of “cognitive expression” where categories of Gestalt perception—clarity of form in light— are subject to inversions. They serve as persuasive practices that reveal, lay bare phenomena, and show what is out there in ways that are open-ended and inventive.8 In their very nature as explorative, as opposed to conclusive, methods of understanding built form, casting and lighting eschew prescription, and perhaps expand the notion of “critically substantive knowledge” of the city— the “what is” and “why”—to include a level of interpretation, or “what can be” (Gauthier & Gilliand, 2006, p. 42) These art experiments not only offer an alternative visual language, but also begin to point to an epistemology of the city based on interstitial space. They furnish powerful material for triggering artistic imagination, and thereby enrich practices of architecture and urban design.

86 Interstitial Space: Slots in San Francisco

What I have tried to suggest in this chapter is that the city offers an inﬁnite range of phenomena—spaces and objects—that we interminably process through situated, bodily experience, thereby giving new meaning to the form and function of the city. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy provides critical methods to question ingrained epistemologies, to invert visual phenomena, and explore, creatively (not prescriptively), new horizons that perception opens up. The very act of looking and perceiving the world around us—the built environment, architecture, and urban form—is a process of “reconstituting the world at every moment” (Merleau-Ponty, 2002/1945, p. 240). And that moment is provided to us, as I have tried to demonstrate, in seeking the obscure, the unseen, the marginal, the liminal, the indeterminate background, or the terrain vague of the city, and in exploring it through creative and experimental art practices. This moment is also rich with potential, or, as Ignasi de Solà-Morales (1995) has intimated, “promise.” But it is also just another juncture in the inﬁnite process of perceiving and exploring the spaces of our cities.

Notes

* A different form of this essay, titled “Looking in, looking aside, looking beyond: Perception and exploration of in-between space,” was ﬁrst presented as a conference paper at Flesh and Space: Intertwining Merleau-Ponty and Architecture, part of the 34th Annual Merleau-Ponty Circle Conference, held at Mississippi State University, September 9, 2009. Thanks to Pedro Lange for his instructive comments on the paper.

1. The word slot also appears in Randolph Delehanty and Sexton Richard’s work (1991, pp. 132–133). 2. The Russian literary critic Victor Shklovsky (1990, p.6) has suggested the concept of “enstrangement,” which involves the use of linguistic devices, or images, to describe an object in a different way from its familiar representations. Such a strategy, he points out, works to question our understanding of objects or subjects based on preconceptions and established conventions. 3. Merleau-Ponty’s (2002/1945) characterization of the “indeterminate background” as a dis - articulated zone, absence, and void resonates in Ignasi de Solà-Morales’ (1995) conception of terrain vague. 4. See www.Urban-unseen.net 5. Kevin Lynch and Donald Appleyard surveyed San Diego from a helicopter in 1974 while drawing up an urban design plan for the city (Gosling, 2003), and the “imageability” of San Francisco’s skyline was surveyed through the windshield of a moving car (SFPD, 1971). 6. Haas (2008, pp. 5–7) here refers to Heidegger’s phenomenological argument—”says to show”— that uses language (or, as is the case here, images) to direct our attention, point out, and make us notice something in our worldly experience. 7. I am referring here to the work of artists Bruce Nauman, James Turell, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Rachel Whiteread. See, for example, Colomina (2001); Townsend, (2004); Neumann (2002); Lee (2000); and Lewallen (2007). 8. For Solà-Morales (1995), the emptiness and absence that characterize terrain vague serve as a space of promise, “of expectation,” meant to be discovered through mobility, thus echoing Merleau-Ponty’s idea of “cognitive expression” that suggests the transformative and interpretive power of phenomenological perception.

87 Tanu Sankalia

References

Colomina, Beatriz. (2001). I dreamt I was a wall. In Rachel Whiteread: Transient spaces. Berlin: Deutsche Guggenheim. Delehanty, Randolph, & Sexton, Richard. (1991). In the Victorian style. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. Gauthier, P., & Gilliand, J. (2006). Mapping urban morphology: a classification scheme for interpreting contributions to the study of urban morphology. Urban Morphology, 10 (1), 42. Gosling, David. (2003). The evolution of American urban design. Sussex: Wiley-Academy. Guthrie, Julian. (2010, March 6). Art finds the space between SF Victorian. San Francisco Chronicle. Datebook. E1, E6. Retrieved from www.sfgate.com/default/article/Art-finds-the-space-between- S-F-Victorians-3271260.php Haas, Lawrence. (2008). Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lee, Pamela (2000). Object to be destroyed: The work of Gordon Matta-Clark. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lefebvre, Henri. (2004). Rhythmanalysis: Space, time and everyday life. New York: Continuum. Lewallen, Constance. (2007). A rose has no teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lowell, Waverly. (1988). Architectural records in the San Francisco Bay Area: A guide to research. New York: Garland. Lynch, Kevin. (1960). Image of the city. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (2002). Phenomenology of perception. London: Routledge Classics. (Original work published 1945.) Moudon, Anne Vernez. (1986). Built for change: Neighborhood architecture in San Francisco. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Neumann, Dietrich. (2002). Architecture of the night: The illuminated building. Berlin: Prestel. San Francisco Planning Department. (1971). The urban design plan for the comprehensive plan of San Francisco. San Francisco: San Francisco Planning Department. San Francisco Planning Department. (1979). Residential design guidelines for new development in old neighborhoods. San Francisco: San Francisco Planning Department. Schwarzer, Mitchell. (2004). San Francisco: San Francisco in an age of reaction. In Edward Robbins & Rodolphe El-Khoury (Eds.). Shaping the City: Studies in history, theory and urban design (pp. 177–193). London: Routledge. Shklovsky, Victor. (1990). Theory of prose. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press Solà-Morales, Ignasi de. (1995). Terrain vague. In Cynthia Davidson (Ed.). Anyplace (pp. 118–123). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Townsend, Chris (Ed.). (2004). The art of Rachel Whiteread. London: Thames & Hudson.

88 Chapter 7

Void Potential

Spatial Dynamics and Cultural Manifestations of Residual Spaces

Heike Rahmann and Marieluise Jonas

In everything, no matter what it may be, uniformity is undesirable. Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth. (Yoshida Kenk¯o, 1998, p. 1331).

The transient ideal of imperfection remains a main principle of aesthetic appreciation in contemporary Japan. In this, the idea of wabi-sabi nourishes the thought that nothing is finished, all is ephemeral and fading—and in fading, the most beautiful. Can this ideal affect the way transient spaces are understood? Would this view enable the appreciation of beauty in the unfinished and ever-changing city, in its gaps and holes, which have no function or purpose other than the silent waiting for development behind fences and immaculate white walls? In this essay, we aim to discuss Tokyo’s urban voids through their morphology and their background, and to establish a framework of ideas around the “imperfect” and “appropriated.” For us, a void is an ephemeral object—a site, yet not only a space—but also a counter-perspective on a predictable city. Voids are possibilities, which are flexible in time and space.

Morphology of Tokyo’s Void Spaces

Ruptures in the surface are abundant in any city, where growth, restructuring, and decline produce urban voids: spaces in transition from one stage of

89 Heike Rahmann and Marieluise Jonas

7.1 Tokyo Void Space

development to another. Tokyo’s voids are as diverse as their surrounding context in their morphology, in shapes and sizes ranging from small gaps to large tracts of land. Some are overgrown in thickets of plants; most are well hidden away from urban life, behind fences and tall white walls. In the complex, multilayered, and fragmented environment of Tokyo, voids are inconspicuous, subtle breaks in the ever-continuous urban tissue. However, their morphology is distinct and can be discussed through aspects of time, ownership, legislation, and their specific contextual situations. In cities such as Detroit, Berlin, Manchester, or Ivanovo, vacant spaces became synonymous with deindustrialization, periph- erization, suburbanization, or post-socialism (Oswalt, 2005), but in Tokyo vacant spaces are products of development and growth, rather than shrinkage and decay. Over the past 15 years, the overall extent of urban voids has remained relatively unchanged.1 The dynamic of individual voids appearing and disappearing, however, remains uncaptured. In the spatially complex and fragmented environment of mostly small, detached residential plots, constant renewal is the norm, with buildings lasting 26 years on average (Tsukamoto, 2010). The highly dynamic and fragmented nature of most of Tokyo’s urban fabric stands in stark contrast to the unified spatial experience often presented quite effortlessly by Western cities. Unlike them, Tokyo is chaotic. Ritchie (2000) likens Tokyo’s spatial structure to a box of spilled toys: Each individual toy is carefully designed, but bears no relation to others or to their contexts. The individuality of buildings reflects the pattern of individual lots, as walls don’t connect. Daniell (2008) poignantly states:

Perhaps the central paradox of Japanese architecture is that a cityscape of such incredible heterogeneity is produced by an

90 Void Potential

apparently conformist society. The tiny lots and constant replacement of building stock act to reduce architecture’s wider social and urban responsibilities, vindicating the most perverse and indulgent designs. (p. 165)

Tokyo’s vastly complex urban environment might be best represented through its peculiar “dame” (bad) architecture and infrastructure hybrids, described in Made in Tokyo (Kaijima, Kuroda, & Tsukamoto, 2008), or the smallest “impossible” buildings documented in Pet architecture guide book (Tsukamoto Architectural Lab & Atelier Bow Wow, 2001)—all by-products of urban development. In addition, Tokyo’s building fabric still consists of a large number of inadequately built residences, many of them wooden houses built in the postwar era of rapid growth. A tradition of rebuilding, rather than renovation, keeps the cycle of restructuring alive. Small shops might be rebuilt as residences, thus shifting functions, when retirement funds become available. This succession cycle of rebuilding produces the most prevalent type of urban voids: individual, mostly small, vacant lots. These small lots might be vacant for some weeks, months, or years. Smaller vacant lots in dense neighborhoods in central Tokyo often result from subdivision prompted by tax policy, which has had a dramatic effect on the city by fragmenting urban plots. Practically, with inheritance tax as high as 40 percent of the land value, each generational shift in land ownership causes subdivision of plots. This process has reduced the average size of a residential plot in Setagaya to 80 square meters, a third of the original 240 square meters in 1940 (Tsukamoto, 2010). The process of subdivision is producing small and fragmented plots of a few square meters, in strips and flagpole shapes, which effectively become less attractive for residential development. Larger void spaces can be linked to larger-scale developments, most prominent in the unsuccessful development, constructed from the mid 1980s onward, of Tokyo’s waterfront on artificial landfill islands in Tokyo Bay. Odaiba was planned as a futuristic living showcase for 6,300 inhabitants and a working population of 106,000 (Cybriwsky, 1998) and scheduled to be completed for the International Urban Exposition “Urban Frontier” in 1996. Odaiba is still characterized by a large number of vacant tracts of land, some intermediately utilized as parking spaces or greenways. Toyosu, and more recently completed adjacent artificial islands, share a similar fate. Despite a condominium tower boom that has shaped some recent developments in the area, a large number of vacant plots remain. Most of these large, vacant spaces are victims of over-exaggerated expectations prevalent in the late 1980s bubble economy. Effects of urban planning in infrastructure adjustment further produce void spaces. An indirect cause of voids is the planning overlay. In this process, plots are overlaid with setback rules specifying a certain percentage or size of

91 Heike Rahmann and Marieluise Jonas

7.2 Odaiba, Tokyo (December, 2010)

area to be acquired for road construction. The setbacks often take over a significant proportion of a small plot’s area: In some cases, the plot size is reduced so significantly that conventional construction becomes ineffective, and the plot therefore remains vacant. Road widening also directly causes the appearance of strips of vacant plots along small roads. Where readjustment plans are overlaid on existing building infrastructure, Tokyo Metropolitan Government generally purchases affected plots as they become available. As buildings are demolished, the vacant spaces are cleared of all material and often paved. The vacant lots for road widening are fenced. The multiplicity of individual plots, and more or less cooperative plot owners, involve significant investment of time. In Kjojima, a dense and old neighborhood extremely vulnerable to the effects of earthquakes, a project was initiated in 1981 with the aim of widening roads. This contribution to disaster mitigation was planned on a 1,800-meter-long stretch of the road. Fifteen years later, in 1996, merely 186 meters of the initial plan had been achieved (Hohn, 2000). In these slow processes of adjustment, the atmosphere of formerly small gaps shifts to a scene of decay, as more and more buildings disappear, until only stoic individuals remain—inevitably, they too will disappear. Similarly, vacant spaces originate in the process of large-scale development or land readjustment projects. Owing to both the density and the disjointed structure of Tokyo, a common strategy for large-scale infrastructure projects is to acquire land slowly over long periods of time. It is notable, for example, that it took nearly 17 years to acquire all the plots necessary for the Roppongi Hills development complex. Much of that time was spent cutting through red tape and persuading hundreds of reluctant residents to move (Fackler, 2008).

92 Void Potential

7.3 Phenomenology of Tokyo Voids Building Surrounded by Fenced-in Vacant Lots at a Road-Widening Site What might be described as a Tokyo void is constituted by different types of (Komaba, Tokyo) void linked to plots of land and processes of development: the small and disjointed leftover spaces, gaps between buildings described as “linear auras” by Suzuki (2000), and spatial by-products of elevated expressways and train lines. The particularity of Tokyo’s voids is rooted in context and culture and in the unpredictable and complex nature of the city. Here, some of the vague spaces are rooted in mechanisms of reconstruction and development, and others exist outside the city’s “effective circuits and productive structures” (Solà-Morales, 1995, p. 110). However, the expression of “strangeness” that Solà-Morales employs in uncovering terrain vague seems insuffi- cient once the familiarity of a structured urban pattern is lost. What is the familiar in Tokyo? The density, scale, and vastness of the metropolis stand in stark contrast to the smallness of most voids. A shift in scale becomes necessary to capture and understand the void’s potential. On the microscale, an expression of otherness and possibly wilderness can be perceived in patches of moss in the shadow of neighboring buildings. From an insect’s perspective, the spaces possess the vastness and attributes of unconstricted disorder that define terrain vague. The otherness in the vague spaces lies in the way we seek to see them. Here, the detail is offering the strangeness. Remnant broken floor

93 Heike Rahmann and Marieluise Jonas tiles on otherwise vacant plots relate back to the previous function of a space, like faded building silhouettes on adjacent walls. But is it possible to see the other? It seems as if society has swallowed the instinct of seeking otherness. In addition, the cultural codex describes a strong respect for private property. Often, only minimal or subtle markers are required to identify privacy. A very common inventory of the vacant spaces is a tiny, almost invisible, rope that separates a site from the surrounding condition. Its physical presence is weak; however, the symbolic meaning is strong enough to prevent entry and unappreciated activities. From a Western perspective, questions might be raised: What in fact is to be protected—the site from the potential intruder, or the potential intruder from the unpredictability of the site (Rahmann, 2008)? Larger voids are rarely noticeable, masked to blend into the building fabric by tall, immaculate walls mimicking frontages and the spatial attributes of buildings. The largest tracts of vacant land are inaccessible, surrounded by fences endlessly displaying the ubiquitous slogan, anzen dai ichi—safety first. Road readjustment produces spatial expressions that defy the bizarre: cage-like structures of green fences in the middle of sidewalks, empty no-access areas in centers of activity. The voids are mostly clean. They appear kempt. If plants take over, they would not be noticed by passers-by owing to walls and fences. Only vacant spaces in more dilapidated areas may attract trash; in residential neighborhoods, rare litter is removed by residents, who are normally eager to maintain the visual integrity of their environments by sweeping fallen leaves and collecting rubbish. Intertwined with buildings in the urban structure, ubiquitous voids form an integral part of a landscape of constant renewal. Voids are inseparably connected to the organic structure of becoming, maturation, and decay. Therefore, they are not alien to the Japanese cultural context, which offers alternatives in recognizing value in emptiness. Voids can be read as transmitters of the ephemeral. Bleak, illogical emptiness colonized by patches of spontaneous vegetation, rainwater collecting on an abandoned pavement, reflecting the humming air-conditioning units—a moment on a Tuesday afternoon in Ginza. The transient spaces serve no productive purpose. They offer the possibility of accidental discoveries and nonproductive activities, experiences that are unplanned and momentary. They offer, maybe, just a glimpse of the unfinished. Voids can be seen as recorders of time, as Nitschke (1993) offers: “The size of experiential space is not so much determined by its physical dimensions, but by our concrete experience of the quantity and quality of the events contained in it” (p. 35). The experience that these spaces offer reflects a rich legacy through remnants on site and the contextual discrepancies of scale and material. How intensely the site is experienced becomes a matter of time and scale. Where new developments sprout close to long-term voids, the contrast of void and new matter creates a striking memento. A rupture in a thick blanket of context—or a parking space?

94 Void Potential

There still remains the nostalgia for harappa: an innocent childhood memory, of overgrown, open, vacant spaces conquered for play and adventure. Memories of harappa play are frequently cited in association with void spaces, a lingering idea of possibilities. Harappa (literally, open field, wild field) seems to function as a code for instantly grasping the capacity the spaces offer: playgrounds for exploration and games. The much-loved manga and anime Doraemon documents the practice of uninhibited child play and the excitement of otherness. The main character, a robotic cat from the future called Doreamon (the name is derived from dora neko, literally, stray cat) likes to roam harappa spaces with its human friends. There, harappa spaces serve as meeting spots and baseball fields. However, the ground for play has disappeared. Doraemon, who was created in 1969, has disappeared from harappa sites, and the shift to more organized and indoor play activities has left the capacity of harappa unused. Tokyo’s voids, halted value taken from a chain of profit, form an integral part of the urban landscape; they function as mirrors of the past and offer counter-perspectives to normative space. The specific quality of spontaneous vegetation gives aspects of nature and wildness to a city of 12.8 million inhabitants who have limited availability of formally designated open green spaces (Tokyo Metropolitan Government, 2010). Still, 3.1 percent of Tokyo is vacant land. The paradox, which lies between the large potential and the marginalization of daily life environments, is viewed as the main problem of this research. How is it possible to give meaning to something that is not part of modern developments or contemporary discussion, something that is part of a cycle, a “natural component of every dynamically evolving city” (Berger, 2006), a reaction to a particular development strategy, something that is not permanent, something that is not wanted—but still encompasses large potential to enhance urban space by understanding its reality? How is it possible to engage with the potential of this waste(d)land? Like Doraemon and his friends, who create different spaces each time they engage with the harappa sites, it is necessary to actively develop strategies and ideas. “The wilderness is not fun in itself. Almost daily, one has to invent new ways of playing” (Jun Aoki, as cited by Cassegard, 2010, p. 12).

Appropriation, Transgression, and Intervention

If we consider the potential of terrains vagues as alternative spaces of spatial and social freedom in the otherwise homogeneous urban landscape (Cassegard, 2010), it is open to us to question how we can respond to theses spaces from a designerly point of view. What kinds of intervention can take place, and how do they deﬁne the scope of site appropriation? In general discussions, the

95 Heike Rahmann and Marieluise Jonas informal appropriation of abandoned sites seems to be the prevailing image, led by a subculture of people reclaiming territories for their needs, which range from subversive actions pushed to hidden areas in the city through to the creative class that enjoys the planning and regulatory freedom of these spaces (see Cassegard, 2010; Lévesque, 2002; Overmeyer, 2007). In stark contrast to informal, user-led appropriation stands the formalized development of vacant sites in the form of architectural, landscape architectural, or urban design interventions. In responding to terrain vague, formalized design approaches are challenged by those forces that initially produced these spaces (Lévesque, 2002). The challenge lies in the fundamentally different nature, on one hand, of destructive forces and, on the other hand, growth characterized as the intention for new development. While Solà- Morales and Lévesque argue for the need for a dualistic architectural response to terrain vague, we point to yet another challenge: the underlying memories of a derelict site. Reminiscence of the past, both tangible and intangible, will not necessarily be what we commonly describe as beautiful. Although various design theories have pointed to a necessary shift in perspective when thinking about aesthetic values and expressions (Jackson, 1986; Meyer, 2008), the design profession still has to find its way in approaching these challenges meaningfully. The Tokyo Void research project aims to investigate utilization strategies that are appropriate for Tokyo’s specific conditions. It navigates between the platforms of formality, informality, and hybrid forms of intervention, with their various expressions of ownership, involvement, and initiation. A central question here is how much control design can or should execute in order to generate successful outcomes. If we better understand the relation between spatial production and terrain vague, we might be able to redefine the role of the architect in the design process.

Formality

As many authors claim, it seems particularly difficult for the discipline of architecture to find a meaningful approach to void spaces without falling back into common practice and focus on form generation, aesthetics, and productivity (Gissen, 2009; Lévesque, 2002; Solà-Morales, 1995). Although other disciplines, such as landscape architecture or urban design, may not focus on form generation and aesthetics as much as architecture, they still rely inherently on economic forces and commercial outputs. This reliance provokes a question: Is a designerly response to terrain vague in fact at all possible, or will economic and commercial imperatives inevitably mean that a designerly response finds itself in opportunistic domains? Although the concept of embracing roughness, incompletion, and subversive natural qualities in designs is relatively new to architecture (Gissen,

96 Void Potential

2009), there are some promising landscape architectural examples for the transformation of derelict, abandoned spaces. Richard Haag’s Gas Work Park in Seattle, dating from the 1970s, could be regarded as one of the first projects to actively engage discussion about the qualities of derelict industrial sites and design interventions. More recent examples, such as works by Latz & Partner (Landscape Park, Duisburg-Nord, Germany, in 1994), James Corner Field Operations (Fresh Kills, from 2007, and the New York High Line, in 2009) or D.I.R.T studio (Urban Outfitters’ headquarters, in 2011), increasingly expand such design explorations. In embracing the distinct character of roughness, ugliness, and otherness, these formally designed projects challenge conventional notions of the aesthetics and functionality of parks, industrial sites, and vacant land in metropolitan cities. The particular quality of these projects lies in the sensitive balance between space and time. The design only sets the spatial framework in which natural processes occur, while the site is in constant transformation, unpredictable and unfinished, providing the possibility for a different kind of environmental and spatial experience. The common characteristic of these projects is the orientation towards large-scale territories: the reclamation of abandoned, often polluted, postindustrial sites, transformed into recreational public spaces that incorporate in the initial development stage an iconic status. In consequence, these projects become substantial drivers for tourism for both local and international travellers. Here, the interstitial reflects more than a mere site—a small, hidden unit in the urban fabric. Although still part of a larger urban context, these places transcend into independent landscapes that inhabit their very own spatial, functional, ecological systems. One large-scale reclamation in Tokyo that falls into this category is Umi no Mori (Sea Forest), a project initiated by architect Tadao Ando in collaboration with the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. It was launched as part of Tokyo’s bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics. Located adjacent to Odaiba, Umi no Mori is part of the Inner Central Breakwater Reclamation Area, a group of artificial islands composed of garbage landfills created between 1973 and 1987. In contrast to the colossal building structures planned for Odaiba, Umi no Mori is intended to represent the next generation of land reclamation, empowered by the image of sustainability and citizen participation. The concept behind this project is to transform this artificial island into an 88-hectare large urban forest. Very much in the old Japanese tradition of Muda, Mura, Muri (Waste Not, Want Not), the architect envisions this project becoming a worldwide symbol for recycling, a symbiosis between the forest, people, the city, and ultimately nature (Kanki Knight, 2009). Almost as redemption for Odaiba’s past failures, Umi no Mori also turns to citizens for active engagement in the project (Tokyo Metropolitan Government, 2008). Local elementary schools participate in the plant production and, alongside celebrities and other volunteers, in occasional planting events,

97 Heike Rahmann and Marieluise Jonas which continued even after Tokyo’s Olympic bid failed in October 2009 (Corkill, 2008). Consciously embracing the dimension of time, the project exerts another novelty in Tokyo’s urban development. Rather than focusing on the final product, the project communicates through processes, transformation, and growth. The basic framework of the forest is planned to be in place by 2017, with full completion expected around 2037. With this 30-year timeframe for completion, it is unclear what kind of product Umi no Mori really will develop into. Currently available renderings present an immaculate image of an island fully covered in a homogeneous green blanket, an aesthetic idealization of a forest that seems frozen in time. This perfect image allows no sense of time and activity within the forest itself—processes of growth, maturing, decay, harvesting, or maintenance. This is further supported by the absence of ideas about how the forest might in fact be used by residents. We have come to some understanding of the immense potential of massive void spaces and terrains vagues in a city such as Tokyo, where that potential is explored through the interplay of citizen participation and time. Paradoxically, the promotion of citizen participation and the passage of time also demonstrate Umi no Mori’s limitations: The island is kept in almost complete isolation, and all processes conform to a strict choreography of events and products that allows no other opportunity, no freedom, for spontaneous actions and unpredictable outcomes. It is possible that the image of symbiosis between the forest, people, city, and nature might not progress beyond the notion of “beautiful scenery.” As discussed earlier, Japanese cities are inherently defined by smallness and inwardness. Large-scale concepts are somewhat alien to that environment and, therefore, seem not entirely applicable to the cultural and spatial context. Japanese culture is renowned both for designing high-end quality in small things and for embracing the ephemeral as cultural practice. However, innovative strategies for combining these practices as a response to Tokyo’s urban voids have yet to be found. Currently, the predominant practice is to transform void spaces into coin-operated parking lots. The benefits are promoted by the specific operators who take care of the full operational service, from demolishing a derelict house and clearing the space, to establishing a parking lot and providing suggestions of the most profitable site layout and financial benefits through additional equipment such as lucrative vending machines. Lévesque (2002) characterizes the practice of temporary parking spaces as an expression of an urban vision that decries “the disorder (these spaces) represent in the city.” Tokyo’s coin- operated parking spaces go even a step further as they try to overcome the disorder on both macro- and microscales. On the macroscale, coin-operated parking spaces neatly integrate into the urban material by avoiding the disruption of economic performance

98 Void Potential and productivity. On the microscale, they pretend a visual integrity through their immaculately designed surfaces and equipment. Often, this attempt is so over- performed that their immaculate bitumen appears a little too black, the markers a little too white. In this state of over-performance, the coin-operated parking spaces remain alien to their urban environment, inevitably appearing rather voids than terrains vagues. A poignant critique to coin-operated parking was offered by Tokyo- based designer architects Mi-ri-meter, who conceptualized and implemented coin camping on a vacant lot as a direct reference to the many urban voids serving as coin-operated parking sites. The one-day event questioned commercialization and the notion of vehicular consumption by diversifying a prefabricated space. Through this event, the designers aimed to experiment with the lifestyle of “pay-as-you-go” for the urban population (Mi-ri-meter, 2005). Investigating culture-speciﬁc notions of space in contemporary Japanese architecture, Tokyo-based Atelier Bow-Wow explored concepts of smallness and inwardness, among others. In their House of Weeds project, an installation for the Mito Art Festival, the team transformed a vacant house into a Weed house, critiquing its imminent demolition and transformation into a temporary parking space while speculating about its occupancy. By excavating the ﬂoor and opening the ruin to the sky, the interior spaces were planted with durable weeds, literally reversing the order of interior and exterior, public and private space (Kaijima & Tsukamoto, 2006). The staged process of nature reclaiming formed a striking image and a critique of the instant city.

Informality

In Tokyo, a number of informal practices are ingrained in daily activities. Residents in structurally extremely dense areas traditionally practice informal gardening involving mobile ﬂowerpot gardens. This tradition of shared informally reclaimed space is producing green, livable, socially rich community spaces (Jonas, 2007, 2008). Often, the informal ﬂowerpot gardens are the only green found in areas that otherwise lack parks and other open space. Where the informal gardens impinge on the public realm by being placed on roads and footpaths, the space use is carefully negotiated through acceptance and subtle adaptations, rather than the potted plants being removed or destroyed. The respect for the property and the respect for the investment in community—by beautifying areas of neglect through potted plants—prevent interference with the informally extended territories. These dynamic processes of informal uses sometimes extend to the appropriation of vacant spaces. Domestic uses such as drying clothes, drying and storing vegetables, gardening, and washing can all be observed in vacant spaces. In addition, the vacant lots frequently are appropriated to provide services for the public, such as do-it-yourself garbage

99 Heike Rahmann and Marieluise Jonas sorting systems and do-it-yourself ashtrays made from cans, which are attached to the fences of vacant lots. The deeply embedded practice of informal appropriation might point to utilization and activation strategies for temporarily available spaces and form a starting point for reinvestigating the potential of void spaces. At present, however, the everyday practice of appropriation and the rich tradition of informal gardens are mostly neglected in the academic and design realms, unlike in the European or North American context (see Müller, Schmitt, & Selle, 2003; Overmeyer, 2007).

Hybridity

A wide range of possible interventions in the spectrum of control are situated between formal actions and informal interventions. We wish to describe these other possible interventions as hybrid interventions. Hybridity could be defined as the process of formal activation by means of informal interventions. Like other informal appropriations, the intervention that is undertaken transforms the vacant space on a temporary basis, influenced only by the participants in the intervention, while the activation process itself is set up and coordinated by a formal party, such as the owner. Hybrid interventions form a part of what, in other contexts, is described as design activism, where activities are initiated pro bono. One such example is the Kasu Harappa ONDI, literally a vacant rental space, situated in a quiet neighborhood of Yanaka. The site blends itself into the surrounding amalgamation of low-rise residential housing, shops, and temples. Only a thin rope indicates the demarcation line between public and private. It is so well blended that one could pass the site without even recognizing its rather unusual nature. The owners of this site deliberately set aside the financially lucrative coin-operated parking option. Instead, they placed a higher value on the quality of the neighborhood, appreciating its tradition of cultural and creative richness exemplified by the increasing number of galleries, workshops, and cafes selling handicraft and artworks. The owners decided to contribute to the creative neighborhood atmosphere by providing a gallery space that local artists, performers, and other creative people could rent for events and exhibitions at a minimal fee. Rather simple rules outline the terms of use, enabling prospective users to take responsibility for their event, while also providing maximum freedom as to how the space can be used. This offers the possibility for a diverse mix of events, ranging from performances, demonstrations, art exhibitions, and cultural celebrations, to market events and student workshops. The idea behind ONDI is to provide a space that supports conversation and invites everyone to participate. The site transforms into an open stage, without walls or roof, where strolling residents and visitors become part of the audience—participants in the event, not just spectators.

100 Void Potential

7.4 Kasu Harappa ONDI (Yanaka, Tokyo)

In addition, ONDI opens up discussion about the physical qualities of Tokyo’s vacant spaces. The name Kasu Harrapa ONDI plays with the association surrounding the word harappa and ONDI (地). The latter means sound of soil, reﬂecting the beauty of the site as it is exposed to the natural elements. A Butoh dance performance, held on ONDI in the summer of 2009, choreographed the often absurd and extreme expressions of Butoh with the strangeness of light and shadow reﬂected in wet dirt, and thereby created an experiential quality that could hardly have been achieved on a conventional theatre stage. It is precisely this quality of depth and openness in the unsealed surface that offers real momentum for unpredictable, serendipitous activity in Tokyo, a city dominated by concrete and asphalt.

7.5 Butoh Performance at ONDI

101 Heike Rahmann and Marieluise Jonas

Since ONDI’s inception in 2006, the number of activities on the site has increased significantly. The popularity of ONDI is reflected both in the increasing number of hosted events and in the increasing interest among ordinary Tokyoites, showing the immense potential of this alternative concept for inspiring creative action and bringing people together. With a low profile, ONDI nonetheless realizes the vision of a lively and engaging neighborhood. It does so without all the publicity surrounding Ando’s mega-projects.

Tokyo Void Potential(?)

Considering the contextual and cultural dimensions of Tokyo’s terrain vague, how can we define potential alternative scenarios of critical spatial practice on a large urban scale? Some spaces do not provide the physical quality for hosting common outdoor activities. The contextual situation, mainly adjacent high-rise buildings, oppresses the site, emphasizing its smallness and creating dark, narrow, and damp niches that do not even support the growth of otherwise durable weeds or foster any other quality associated with the potential of terrain vague. If we would like to include these spaces in our compendium of sites, there might be an argument that there is a need to search for a new paradigm of functions, occupation, and activity. There might even be the potential for these small spaces to induce their very own typology of activities. The fragmented nature of Tokyo’s cityscape confronts us with smallness and dispersal. This condition offers a differentiated view of voids, which might not be the strange and other, but might rather be a part of countless contradictions, a piece of an ever-transforming, complex system. Internalization and immersion unravel the experiential potential and reveal a depth of the spaces that might only be achieved by the indeterminate, as in the Butoh dance performance at ONDI. Smallness sets limits to the range of experience and activities. With increasing density, the inner-city building structure continues its transformation from low- to medium– and high-rise, radically transforming the relation of proportions and scale, and subsequently transforming atmospheric qualities on the street level. Smallness creates proximity, enforcing surveillance and superimposing already existing challenges. Looking inward by focusing on an individual site, on an individual activity, brings us therefore only so far as to recognize limitations. Tokyo’s terrains vagues call for a trajectory of experiences that are offered sequentially. The void effectively becomes a different space each time it hosts events and activities. Void potential: a constant flux in space and time. Where conventional parks and open spaces are fulfilling capacities for open space, their centralized locations form an obstacle to integrating these spaces into daily urban lives. Further, the pressure of a large population creates heavily regulated spaces and blunt designs that reflect the ambitions of easy maintenance and low production cost. The Tokyo Void project2 therefore views

102 Void Potential the main potential of small spaces as residing in a fragmented notion of smallness, close proximity, and ﬂuctuating appearance and disappearance. Small spaces offer the clear advantage of multiplicity. Networks of interconnected spaces can offer sequential, simultaneous, and diverse types of use or levels of interaction. The decentralized and dispersed situation of voids offers close proximity and variability. We speculate on the possibility of a network of spaces that combines the practice of informal uses, widely in place in Tokyo, with the necessity to address the lack of green space and a perspective of the incomplete. Potential types of use mainly depend on four factors: the wishes of the owner of a space; the desired use of the potential user; the size of the space; and temporary availability. Additionally, the spaces offer the capacity to substantially contribute to the sustainable urban regeneration of Tokyo. In areas of less demand for active uses, the spaces potentially can function as micro- habitats, buffers for urban heat islands, and mitigation of other extreme climate events. A network of small, dispersed, yet interconnected spaces can fulﬁll all ecological functions of green spaces, such as the provision of open soil in an otherwise fully sealed urban context, storm water collection, biodiversity, dust absorption, and improvement of microclimate. In the context of Tokyo, the urban wilderness, on the microscale, truly renders the perspective of the other. If we consider the possibility of including Tokyo’s voids in a repertoire of functions, we are ultimately faced with the consequential loss of the unpredictable and imperfect. However, the conditions of urban density faced in Tokyo might allow us to speculate about a gradient between architectural uses, the reintegration of imperfect sites in the formative context of a cityscape, and “incomplete,” open space. We might consider the leftover, the spaces that offer a counter-perspective to the predictable spaces of consumption. What might be considered “void” is the full neglect of potential, not the spaces themselves.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Toshiyuki Makizumi, owner of ONDI, for his time and kind assistance in providing background information on his inspiring practice.

Notes

1. Unused land in central Tokyo (23 wards’ area): 1996, 4 per cent; 2001, 3.3 per cent; 2006, 3.1 per cent; 2008, 3.1 per cent (Tokyo Metropolitan Government, 2010). 2. TokyoVoid.com is the authors’ web-based agency of designers and researchers in landscape architecture. Our aim is to connect “void” with “potential.” Highlighting the concept and possibilities for utilization of temporary vacant spaces, the agency aims to bring owners of Tokyo’s vacant lots together with users, thereby creating a network of small spaces that offer ﬂexible uses.

103 Heike Rahmann and Marieluise Jonas

References

Berger, A. (2006). Drosscape: Wasting land in urban America. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Cassegard, C. (2010). The atelier and the park. Retrieved from http://carlcassegard.blogspot.com/ 2010/07/atelier-and-park.html Corkill, E. (2008). Icon and iconoclast. Retrieved from www.japantimes.co.jp/ Cybriwsky, R. (1998). Tokyo: The Shogun’s city at the twenty-first century. Chichester, England: Wiley. Daniell, T. (2008). After the crash: Architecture in post-bubble Japan. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Fackler, M. (2008, March 27). The builder who pushes Tokyo into the CLOUDS. The New York Times. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/business/worldbusiness/27mori.html Gissen, D. (2009). Subnatures: Architecture’s other environments. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Hohn, U. (2000). Stadtplanung in Japan: Geschichte–Recht–Praxis–Theorie [Urban planning in Japan: History–Legislation–Practice–Theory]. Dortmund, Germany: Dortmunder Vertrieb für Bau- und Planungsliteratur. Jackson, J. B. (1986). Discovering the vernacular landscape. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Jonas, M. (2007). Private use of public open space in Tokyo. A study on the hybrid landscape of Tokyo’s informal gardens. Journal of Landscape Architecture, 4, 18–29. Jonas, M. (2008). Hybrid landscapes of Tokyo’s informal gardens—Case study Yanaka. In D. Radovic (Ed.). Another Tokyo—Places and practices of urban resistance. Tokyo, Japan: Ichii Shobou. Kaijima, M., Kuroda, J., & Tsukamoto, Y. (2008). Made in Tokyo (9th ed.). Tokyo, Japan: Kajima Institute Publishing. Kaijima, M., & Tsukamoto, Y. (2006). Bow-Wow from post bubble city. Tokyo, Japan: Inax. Kanki Knight, G. (2009). Fab 40: The Sea Forest, Tokyo Bay. Wallpaper* Magazine Fab 40: Japan. Retrieved from www.wallpaper.com/architecture/fab-40-the-sea-forest-tokyo-bay/3834 Kenko¯, Y. (1998). Essays in idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenko (D. Keene, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Lévesque, L. (2002). The “terrain vague” as material—some observations. Retrieved from www. amarrages.com/textes_terrain.html Meyer, E. (2008). Sustaining beauty: The performance of appearance. A manifesto in three parts. Journal of Landscape Architecture, 1, 6–23. Mi-ri-meter (Producer). (2005). Coin Camping Tents24. Retrieved from www.mi-ri.com/tents24/ about.html (accessed January 18, 2011). Müller, H., Schmitt, G., & Selle, K. (Eds.) (2003). Stadtentwicklung Rückwärts! Brachen als Chance? [Urban development backwards! Brown fields as chance?] Aachen, Dortmund, Hannover, Germany: Dortmunder Vertrieb fuer Bau- und Planungsliteratur. Nitschke, G. (1993). From Shinto to Ando: Studies in architectural anthropology in Japan. London: Academy Editions. Oswalt, P. (2005). Shrinking cities—Volume 1: International research. Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz. Overmeyer, K. (Ed.) (2007). Urban Pioneers (Senatsverwaltung fuer Stadtentwicklung, Ed.). Berlin: Jovis Verlag. Rahmann, H. (2008). Small is beautiful. Tokyo, Japan: The University of Tokyo. Ritchie, D. (2000). Ein Spaziergang durch Tokio/A walk through Tokyo. Arch. 151, 58–63. Solà-Morales, I. (1995). Terrain vague. In C. Davidson (Ed.). Anyplace (pp. 118–123). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Suzuki, R. (2000). Tokio—Stadt der Luecken/Tokyo—City of Gaps. Arch. 151, 22–23. Tokyo Metropolitan Government. (2008). Umi no Mori [Sea Forest]. Retrieved from www.uminomori. metro.tokyo.jp Tokyo Metropolitan Government. (2010). Tokyo Statistical Yearbook. Tokyo Metropolitan. Retrieved from www.toukei.metro.tokyo.jp/tnenkan/tn-eindex.htm Tsukamoto Architectural Lab & Atelier Bow Wow. (2001). Pet architecture guidebook. Tokyo, Japan: Tokyo Institute of Technology. Tsukamoto, Y. (2010). Escaping the spiral of intolerance: Fourth-generation houses and Void Metabolism. In K. Kitayama, Y. Tsukamoto, & R. Nishizawa (Eds.). Tokyo metabolizing (pp. 28–43). Tokyo: Toto.

104 Part II

Traversings This page intentionally left bank Chapter 8

Transurbance*

Francesco Careri

Barefoot in the Chaos

During the same years in which Smithson was exploring the empty spaces of the American peripheries, architects were trying to comprehend what was spontaneously growing in the territory before their incredulous eyes. Looking up from their analyses of historical centers, typo-morphological relations, and urban tracings, architects realized that something was happening around them that they had refused to notice, and that eluded all their categories of interpretation. They couldn’t understand how a sort of cancer had gotten hold of the city and was destroying it. Around the city something had been born that wasn’t city, and which they didn’t hesitate to deﬁne as “non-city” or “urban chaos,” a general disorder inside which it was impossible to comprehend anything except certain fragments of order randomly juxtaposed in the territory. Some of these fragments had been built by the architects themselves, others by speculators, while others still were the result of intervention originating on a regional, national, or even multinational scale. The vantage point of those who observed this type of chaotic city was located inside the historical city. From this position, the architects approached the thing the way a doctor approaches a patient: It was necessary to cure the cancer, to restore order; what was happening was unacceptable, it was necessary to intervene, re-qualify, to impose quality. At this point it was also noticed that—once again, there beside the historical city, in the “periphery”—there were large empty spaces that were not being utilized, that could lend themselves to large-scale operations of territorial surgery. Given their large scale, they were called urban voids. Design would have to work on these areas and bring new portions of order into the chaos of the periphery: to reconnect and re-compose the fragments, to saturate

107 Francesco Careri and suture the voids with new forms of order, often extracted from the quality of the historical city. Even today, many architects approach the cancer of the periphery with these intentions and these operative modes. With the downfall of these positivist certainties, the debate on the contemporary city developed other categories of interpretation. Attempts were made to look at what was effectively happening and to ask why. A first step was to understand that this system of disintegration extended far beyond the limits of what had been thought of as the city, forming a true territorial system, “the diffuse city,” a system of low-density suburban settlement that extends outward, forming discontinuous fabric, sprawling over large territorial areas. The inhabitants of this city, the “diffuse settlers,” were people who lived outside of the most elementary civil and urban laws, inhabiting only the private space of the home and the automobile. Their only idea of public space was the shopping mall, the highway rest stop, the gas station, and the railroad station. They would destroy any space designed for their social life. These new barbarians had invaded the city and wanted to transform it into that global Happy Valley where everyone lives in a single-family house, in a habitat whose only outward extensions are real highways and the virtual highways of the Internet. Observing this new territory that had sprouted up everywhere, in various local versions, it became increasingly evident that, apart from the new objects of anonymous building development, there was also a presence that, after having long been a mere backdrop, was increasingly the protagonist of the urban landscape. This presence was the void, empty or “open” space. The model of the diffused city effectively described what had spontaneously taken form around our cities, but once again it analyzed the territory by starting with the full parts, the solids, without observing inside the empty parts, the voids. And the inhabitants of the diffuse city, in fact, did not spend time only in houses, highways, webs, and rest stops, but also in those open spaces that had not been inserted in the system. In effect, the open spaces turned their back on the city to organize their own autonomous, parallel life, but they were inhabited. These were the places where the “diffusion dwellers” went to grow vegetables without a permit, to walk the dog, have a picnic, make love, and look for shortcuts leading from one urban structure to another. These were the places where their children went in search of free spaces for socializing. In other words, beyond the settlement systems, the outlines, the streets, and the houses, there is an enormous quantity of empty spaces that form the background against which the city defines itself. They are different from those open spaces traditionally thought of as public spaces—squares, boulevards, gardens, parks— and they form an enormous portion of undeveloped territory that is utilized and experienced in an infinite number of ways, and in some cases turns out to be absolutely impenetrable. The voids are a fundamental part of the urban system, spaces that inhabit the city in a nomadic way, moving on every time the powers

108 Transurbance that be try to impose a new order. They are realities that have grown up outside and against the project of modernity, which is still incapable of recognizing their value and, therefore, of entering them.

The Fractal Archipelago

Observing the aerial photo of any city that has developed beyond its walls, the image that immediately springs to mind is that of an organic fabric, of a thread-like form that accumulates in more or less dense lumps. At the center the material is relatively compact, but toward the edges it expels islands detached from the rest of the constructed fabric. As the islands grow, they are transformed into centers in their own right, often equivalent to the original center, forming a larger polycentric system. The result is an “archipelago” pattern: a grouping of islands that float in a great empty sea in which the waters form a continuous fluid that penetrates the solids, branching out on various scales, all the way to the smallest abandoned nooks and crannies between the portions of constructed city. Not only are there large portions of empty territory, they are also linked by many voids, on different scales and of different types, that combine to constitute a ramified system that permits interconnection of the large areas that have been defined as “urban voids.” In spite of its apparently formless figure, the design of the city obtained by separating the full parts from the empty parts can, instead, be interpreted as a “form” of complex geometries, or those used to describe systems that define their own structure and appear as accumulations of matter “without form.” If we accept the fact that the city develops in keeping with a natural dynamic similar to that of the clouds or the galaxies, it follows that this process will be difficult to program and predict, owing to the quantity of forces and variables involved. By observing the process of growth, however, we can see that the islands, as they expand, leave empty areas inside themselves, and form figures with irregular borders that have the characteristic of “autosimilar- ity,” an intrinsic property of fractal structures: On the different scales, we can observe the same phenomena, such as the irregular distribution of full zones, the continuity of empty areas, and the irregular borders that permit the void to penetrate the solids. This system, by nature, does not simply tend to saturate itself, filling the spaces that have remained empty; it also tends to expand, leaving a system of voids in its interior. Whereas the original center has less probability of developing and changes more slowly, at the edges of the system the transformations are more probable and rapid. At the margins, we find those landscapes Lévi-Strauss would define as warm and Robert Smithson would define as entropic. Urban space–time has different speeds: from the stasis of the centers to the continuous transformation of the margins. At the center,

109 Francesco Careri time stands still, transformations are frozen, and when they happen they are so evident that they cannot conceal anything unexpected: They happen under the close surveillance and rigid control of the city. At the margins, on the other hand, we find a certain dynamism and can observe the becoming of a vital organism that transforms itself, leaving entire parts of the territory in a state of abandon around and inside itself, in a situation that is difficult to control. It is important to emphasize the self-representative character of the fractal archipelago form: Our civilization has constructed it on its own to define its own image, in spite of the theories of architects and town planners. The empty spaces that define its figure are the places that best represent our civilization in its unconscious, multiple becoming. These urban amnesias are not only waiting to be filled with things, they are living spaces to be filled with meanings. Therefore, we are not looking at a non-city to be transformed into city, but at a parallel city with its own dynamics and structures that have yet to be fully understood. As we have seen, the city can be described from an aesthetic– geometric but also an aesthetic–experiential point of view. To recognize a geography within the supposed chaos of the peripheries, therefore, we can attempt to establish a relationship with it by utilizing the aesthetic form of the erratic journey. What we discover is a complex system of public spaces that can be crossed without any need for borders or buffers. The voids of the archipelago represent the last place where it is possible to get lost within the city, the last place where we can feel we are beyond surveillance and control, in dilated, extraneous spaces, a spontaneous park that is neither the environ- mentalist’s re-creation of a false rustic nature nor the consumer-oriented exploitation of free time. The voids are a public space with a nomadic character that lives and is transformed so rapidly that it eludes the planning schedules of any administration. If we climb over a wall and set off on foot in these zones, we find ourselves immersed in that amniotic fluid that supplied the life force of that unconscious of the city described by the Surrealists. The liquid image of the archipelago permits us to see the immensity of the open sea, but also what is submerged there, on the seabed, at different depths, or just below the surface. Plunging into the system of voids and starting to explore its capillary inlets, we can see that what we have been accustomed to calling “empty” isn’t really so empty after all; instead, it contains a range of different identities. The sea is formed by different seas, by congeries of heterogeneous territories positioned beside one another. These seas, if approached with a certain predisposition for crossing borders and penetrating zones, turn out to be utterly navigable, so much so that often, by following the paths already traced by the inhabitants, we can walk all around the city without ever actually entering it. The city turns out to be a space of staying entirely crisscrossed by the territories of going.

110 Transurbance

Zonzo

In Italian, andare a Zonzo means, “to waste time wandering aimlessly.” It’s an idiomatic expression whose origins have been forgotten, but it fits perfectly into the context of the city wandered by the flâneurs, and the streets roamed by the artists of the avant-garde of the 1920s, or the sites of the “driftings” of the youthful Lettrists after World War II. Today, Zonzo has been profoundly changed; a new city has grown up around it formed of different cities, crossed by the seas of the void. When “going to Zonzo” at the beginning of the last century, one was always aware whether the direction of the wanderings led toward the center or toward the outskirts. If we imagine walking through the Zonzo of yesteryear in a straight line from the center to the outskirts, first we encounter the denser zones of the center, then rarefied zones of small buildings and villas, followed by the suburbs, the industrial zones, and, finally, the countryside. At this point, we could have found a lookout point, to enjoy the view: a unitary, reassuring image of the city surrounded by countryside. Following the same route today, the sequence of spaces is no longer so simple. We encounter a series of interruptions and reprises, fragments of constructed city and unbuilt zones that alternate in a continuous passage from full to empty and back. What we thought of as a compact city is actually full of holes, often inhabited by different ethnic groups. If we get lost, we cannot easily figure out how to head toward an outside or an inside. And if we do manage to find a high spot from which to observe the panorama, the view will no longer be very reassuring: It would be hard to recognize, in this strange magma, a city with a center and a periphery. Instead, we are faced with a sort of leopard skin, with empty spots inside the constructed city and full spots in the middle of the countryside. Getting lost outside the walls of Zonzo today is a very different experience, but we believe that the modes and categories made available by the artistic experiences we have analyzed can help us to understand and transform this situation without erasing its identity. Dada had discovered, in the tourist-attracting heart of Zonzo, the existence of a banal, quotidian city in which to continuously run into unexpected relations; with an act of attribution of aesthetic value, the “urban readymade,” it revealed the existence of a city that opposed both the hypertechnological utopias of the Futurist city and the pseudocultural city of tourism. The Dadaists understood that the entertainment system of the tourist industry had transformed the city into a simulation of itself, and, therefore, they wanted to call attention to the nonentity, to reveal the cultural void, to exalt banality, the absence of any meaning. The Surrealists realized that something was hidden inside the void indicated by Dada, and they understood that it could be filled with values. Deambulating in the banal places of Zonzo, they defined this void as the unconscious city: a large sea in whose amniotic liquid we can find what

111 Francesco Careri the city has repressed, territories never investigated but dense with continuous discoveries. Rejection and the absence of control had produced extraneous, spontaneous places inside Zonzo that could be analyzed like the human psyche, and the Situationists, with their psychogeography, proposed a tool for their investigation. The Surrealist–Situationist city is a living, empathic organism with its own unconscious, with spaces that elude the project of modernism and live and transform themselves independently of the will of the urbanists and, often enough, of the inhabitants themselves. The dérive made it possible to steer one’s way through this sea and to direct the point of view in a non-random way, toward those zones that more than others appeared to embody an elsewhere capable of challenging the society of the spectacle. The Situationists sought out, in the bourgeois city of the postwar era, the places forgotten by the dominant culture, off the map of the tourist itineraries: working-class neighborhoods off the beaten track, places in which great multitudes lived, often far from the gaze of the society, waiting for a revolution that never happened. The concepts of psychogeography, the dérive and unitary urbanism, once combined with the values of the nomadic universe, had produced the city in permanent transit of Constant, a city aimed at being just the opposite of the sedentary nature of Zonzo. New Babylon was a system of enormous empty corridors extending across the territory, permitting the continuous migration of the multicultural populations. Empty corridors for nomadic wandering took the place of the consolidated city, superimposing themselves on the land like a formless, continuous, communicating spiderweb, in which life would be an adventure. But, if we venture today into the empty wrinkles of Zonzo, we get the impression that New Babylon has ﬁnally been realized. The seas of Zonzo are like a New Babylon without any megastructural or hypertechnological aspects. They are empty spaces like deserts, but like deserts they are not so empty after all; in fact, they are city. Empty corridors that penetrate the consolidated city, appearing with the extraneous character of a nomadic city living inside the sedentary city. New Babylon lives inside the amnesias of the contemporary city like an enormous desert system ready to be inhabited by nomadic transurbance. It is a sequence of connected sectors, no longer elevated above the ground, but immersed in the city itself. Inside the wrinkles of Zonzo, spaces in transit have grown up, territories in continuous transformation in time and space, seas crossed by multitudes of “outsiders” who hide in the city. Here, new forms of behavior appear, new ways of dwelling, new spaces of freedom. The nomadic city lives in osmosis with the settled city, feeding on its refuse and offering, in exchange, its presence as a new nature, a forgotten future spontaneously produced by the entropy of the city. New Babylon has emigrated; it has left the outskirts of Passaic, crossed the oceans, and reached culturally different, ancient climes, raising interesting issues of identity. Venturing into New Babylon can be a useful method for the interpretation and transformation

112 Transurbance of those zones of Zonzo that, in recent years, have thrown the disciplines of architecture and urban planning into crisis. And, thanks to the artists who have roamed its interior, this city is visible today and appears as one of the most important unresolved problems of architectural culture. To design a nomadic city would seem to be a contradiction in terms. Perhaps it must be done in keeping with the manner of the Neo-Babylonians: transforming it playfully from the inside out, modifying it during the journey, restoring life to the primitive aptitude for the play of relations that permitted Abel to dwell in the world. Good transurbance.

Acknowledgment

Translation by Steve Piccolo.

Note

* This chapter originally appeared in the following publication: Careri, F. (2002). Transurbance. In Walkscapes: Walking as aesthetic practice (pp. 176–189). Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili. Permission to reprint granted by Editorial Gustavo Gili.

113 Chapter 9

On the Threshold

Terrain Vague as Living Space in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker

Stanka Radovic’

For my mother Mirjana

Terrain vague, as a concept and as an actual space, evokes uncertainty. Its potential lies in its ability to call forth the ephemeral significance of a marginal location. The concrete and bound space of terrain vague can always be interpreted, however briefly, as metaphorical and open. The power of such a space is therefore situated in its position “in between”: As it fluctuates between physical specificity and conceptual vastness, terrain vague escapes and challenges rigid definitions. Is it urban or is it natural? Is it a concept or a concrete place? Free or forlorn? The term “terrain vague” translates into English as “wasteland,” “derelict area,” or “vacant land,” and refers to abandoned or unoccupied portions of urban land that remain available for spontaneous use. Architect and urban theorist Ignasi de Solà-Morales (1995) describes terrains vagues as those spaces that are internal to the city yet external to its everyday use. The nature of such space wavers: No longer officially occupied, it continues to exist in a state of functional indeterminacy. Terrain vague thus allows for spatial uncertainty in which our defining categories and our spatial way of being must be reformulated. Solà-Morales (1995) suggests a powerful reading of such stranded space:

The relationship between the absence of use, of activity, and the sense of freedom of expectancy is fundamental to understanding

114 On the Threshold

the evocative potential of the city’s terrains vagues. Void, absence, yet also promise, the space of the possible, of expectation. (p. 120)

Terrain vague is, in this analysis, a negative image of the busy, developed, and striving city:

Unincorporated margins, interior islands void of activity, oversights, these areas are simply un-inhabited, un-safe, un-productive. In short, they are foreign to the urban system, mentally exterior in the physical interior of the city, its negative image, as much a critique as a possible alternative. (p. 120)

If terrain vague is more than a simple negation (un-inhabited, un-safe, unproductive) and constitutes, as Solà-Morales suggests, an urban “oversight,” it also creates room for what is unaccommodated. It is not only a marginal space, but also a space for the marginal. In approaching terrain vague from this perspective of radical “in- betweenness” and marginality, I wish to emphasize its potential to suggest, at one and the same time, the concrete and the abstract, the actual location and the idea of a location. In this sense, terrain vague designates a reality and evokes a utopia: It is an actual wasteland, which is suddenly understood as having an alternative meaning, of being the alternative. In the world of obsessively rational goals, the romance of detritus and remainder is magical indeed, because it presents silent opposition to the clamor of social concerns recognized as central. Through Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker, I wish to explore this interstitial and uncertain magic of terrain vague as a kind of utopia. In this film, terrain vague is a concrete cinematic space called the Zone, but it is also a representation of the relationship between the human being and space, and, consequently, of the hope that an alternative space may generate an alternative human existence. I will argue that the concrete cinematic space in Stalker leads to an exploration of spatial existence more broadly by offering terrain vague, not only as an alternative spatiality, but also as a space for alternative humanity, represented through the main protagonist, the Stalker. This alternative humanity, often explored in Tarkovsky’s films, entails a radical reevaluation of rigid utility, blind interest, and unexamined purpose in human life and living environment. In defining what he calls “the culture of the ‘beyond,’” or the interstitial cultural image, Homi Bhabha (1994) suggests that the main conceptual value of interstitiality lies in its potential to sketch out an alternative humanity (both singular and communal), which finds itself in the gap between categories and always in excess (and therefore in the margin) of stable social

115 Stanka Radovic’ and theoretical positions: “These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood—singular and communal—that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself” (pp. 1–2). Tarkovsky’s Zone is a reflection on terrain vague as precisely this kind of “in-between” space, which might allow an alternative understanding or, in Bhabha’s terms, an alternative “strategy,” of selfhood. In this essay, I will explore a few fundamental questions raised by Tarkovsky’s exploration of the terrain vague: (1) Can this type of marginal space be used to challenge and reformulate our concept of (competitive and goal-oriented) humanity and its relation to the physical environ - ment? (2) Can terrain vague—productive for imagination precisely because devoid of productive purpose in purely functional terms—maintain its alternative potential, once it is defined and pursued as an alternative? Loosely based on Boris and Arkady Strugatsky’s sci-fi novel Roadside picnic (2007), Stalker presents us with the enigmatic and supernatural territory of “the Zone,” whose exact origin remains uncertain in the film. The Zone is a dangerous, possibly radioactive, territory left after the passage of a meteorite or an alien spacecraft and it contains a Room in which the innermost wishes of its visitors will be granted. Its main and less obvious characteristic, however, lies in its being alive: As Tarkovsky’s protagonists advance through this strange, derelict land, we learn that the landscape itself is animate and responds to the thoughts, movements, and feelings of the travelers. Encircled in barbed wire and guarded by the military, the Zone ceases to be a simple sci-fi prop and begins to exercise an amazing visual magic on the viewer: Can this ordinary wasteland really be alive, responsive, supernatural? The magic of Tarkovsky’s terrain vague lies in the fact that the physical environment cannot be separated from the inner world of the protagonists. If the Zone is alive and constantly responds to its visitors (much like the extraordinary planet in Tarkovsky’s 1972 film, Solaris), how can we distinguish the visitors from the space they traverse? In Stalker, terrain vague becomes the material embodiment of an idea—that the world around us is, ultimately, the world we think into existence and, at the same time, the world that inhabits us. What is magical in this version of terrain vague (which, as Solà-Morales suggests, is indeed “evocative”—it “calls forth”) is that people bring their world into being, so that terrain vague, in its productive indeterminacy, becomes a tangible manifestation of an otherwise suppressed or forgotten dialogue between the human being and the physical environment.1 Architectural and urban studies also approach terrain vague as an alternative engagement with the environment that challenges our self- understanding. For example, describing terrain vague as an interstitial haven for what is otherwise excluded from the city’s official spaces, a group of Italian architecture students known as “Stalker,” named partially in homage to Andrei Tarkovsky’s film, uses the terrains vagues of Rome as a setting for “a series

116 On the Threshold of staged events assembled to attract public attention to sites in the city that had virtually disappeared from the catalogue of popular urban spaces” (Lang, 2008, p. 218). Their inaugural art event was a hike across Rome’s abandoned landscapes, with the intention of freeing architecture from its self-referential framework in favor of an experimental and participatory “architecture” of organized experiences and collective performance. As Peter Lang (2008) explains, “Stalker intentionally sought to construct an experiential passage that would refute classic architectural and urban precedents,” and that would “not intervene where local conditions would be most transient and fragile” (p. 220). Francesco Careri, one of the founders of the Stalker collective, emphasizes in an interview his interest in Tarkovsky’s Zone as a “mutant space” of deliberate detours, where efficacy and purpose are challenged by the very fact that “one must never proceed on a straight line from A to B” (Lang, 2008, p. 219). Careri’s sense of Tarkovsky’s Stalker relies on the notion that terrain vague is not only multi-natured itself, but also conducive to unofficial and creative reappropria- tions. In its 1996 manifesto, the Stalker collective emphasizes precisely this interstitial, even hybrid, nature of a city’s abandoned zones as “spaces of confrontation and contamination between the organic and the inorganic, between nature and artifice. Here the metabolization of humanity’s discarded scrap, or nature’s detritus, produces a new horizon of unexpected territories, mutant and by default virgin” (Stalker, 1996). Here, terrain vague is not only a deviant space in conflict with all notions of efficient use and orderly urbanism; it is also a hybrid, which transcends its role as actual location to become the physical manifestation of an idea to challenge efficacy and order. It is in this manner that it becomes a mutant, ambiguous space: actual and imagined, phenomenal and utopian, practical and abstract. The inherent duality of terrain vague turns it into a site of potential: Nothing can be fixed or reduced when the two possibilities (it is a location, it is an idea) remain perpetually intertwined, mutually defining, and endlessly circular. The etymological root of “ambiguous” suggests as much: The ambiguity of terrain vague lies in its dual nature (from the Latin ambo, meaning “both”), as well as in its constant shifting between the two (L. ambigere—to wander or waver). The urban examples only confirm the perpetual wavering of terrain vague, which in Solà-Morales’s words becomes “as much a critique as a possible alternative.” But what precisely does terrain vague critique, and what does it offer as an alternative? Stalker opens with two visitors, the Writer and the Scientist, who hire a guide named Stalker to lead them into the Zone. Their ultimate goal is to reach the Room, where the Zone will, rumor has it, grant them their innermost wish. Most of Tarkovsky’s film focuses on this transit to the Room and is composed of slow and brooding images of the three men’s journey across terrain vague, filled with ruins, forgotten decayed objects, and mementos of a past for which there is no longer any clear context. In the Strugatsky brothers’ novel, although the objects from outer space remain illegible to the stalkers

117 Stanka Radovic’

(there are a few in the novel) and their charges, they all make money from the acquisition and sale of these extraterrestrial commodities. They are, as Žižek (1999) points out, “deft scavengers organizing robbing expeditions” (p. 226). In the novel, the alien artifacts, even misunderstood or misused, have market value and trigger not only the interest in the Zone, but also its exploitation. The origin of the Zone is attributed to the extraterrestrial visitors who made a brief stop on Earth, as if they were having a picnic by the side of the road. When they left, what remained were all the artifacts that the stalkers now desperately seek. Yet these are nothing more than the residue of an insignificant passage of strangers on their way to somewhere else. The Zone is, then, itself a remainder to which people cannot find a purpose. Fascinated by its supernatural properties, they believe it is the sign of the future, but, in reality, the entire area is no more than an alien leftover, the cosmic past mistakenly perceived as a terrestrial future. Exploring this idea from a different angle, Tarkovsky removes the notion of an alien species from the Zone and presents it instead as the living repository of the human past. He also deliberately removes the market dimension of the Strugatskys’ Zone and focuses instead on an alternative version of the future: His Zone does not contain impossible, fancifully named objects from outer space. Tarkovsky’s Zone is an ordinary terrain vague: In the vacant fields, the protagonists find everyday human objects, discarded and decayed. The future of Tarkovsky’s sci-fi film is therefore a close encounter with the most ordinary past. Terrain vague is here an area of unaccommodated traces, the residue of time. Because it is also a responsive and dialogical space, shaped

9.1 The Zone as an Ordinary Terrain Vague

118 On the Threshold

by its visitors’ mental world, the three travelers are reciprocally a kind of human residue, the unaccommodated human remainder, or, to borrow Mike Davis’s (2006) compelling term, the image of “surplus humanity” (p. 174).2 In his autobiographical essay on cinema, Sculpting in time, Tarkovsky often underscores his fascination with “patina,” or with what he considers to be a Japanese aesthetic concept and mistakenly names “saba”—rust.3 Through this notion, Tarkovsky contemplates the significance of the stamp of time on physical spaces. From the corrosion that time exerts on any object (and subject equally), the past can be reconstructed and, possibly, understood. The careful observation of a derelict space and its detritus would, in Tarkovsky’s analysis, allow us a kind of Proustian partial recovery of a lost time: “In a certain sense the past is far more real, or at any rate more stable, more resilient than the present” (Tarkovsky, 2008, p. 58). Emphasizing this “backward” orientation of his film, or rather its future past, Tarkovsky’s slow camera forces the spectator anxiously to anticipate the full discovery of a face or an object. Typically, we follow his protagonists from behind, staring at the exposed backs of their heads. We are never allowed to be ahead of the film or cover any distance until the protagonists have done so. In one exemplary scene, the camera precedes the three men as they advance through an underground tunnel, but, instead of giving us a vision of what lies ahead, it turns backwards and shows us the three men hesitantly following the camera. Tarkovsky compels us not to look ahead but to turn backwards and explore the space we have already covered.

9.2 The “Backward” Orientation of Stalker

119 Stanka Radovic’

Following his keen interest in the past and not the future, Tarkovsky (2008) insists on stripping the ﬁlm of all fantastic elements:

In Stalker only the basic situation could strictly be called fantastic. It was convenient because it helped to delineate the central moral conflict of the film more starkly. But in terms of what actually happens to the characters, there is no element of fantasy. The film was intended to make the audience feel that it was all happening here and now, that the Zone was there beside us. (p. 200)

The extraordinary feel of Tarkovsky’s terrain vague does not come from the potential presence of an extraterrestrial power, but from the forgotten potential of the terrestrial things cast away and suddenly perceptible as things. Stripped of their purpose, the objects found in the Zone draw attention to themselves as objects: They are not only traces of human creativity, but also the residue of the most fragile dimension of human life—its dailyness. The human shape itself is placed on the same level as any one of the rusty objects, carrying the traces of its past on the landscape of its features. As Johnson and Petrie (1994) point out, Tarkovsky “creates a whole landscape out of the human face and body and is not afraid to let his camera linger and explore it” (p. 155). The three men slowly become indistinguishable from the landscape, not just because the environment supposedly takes the shape of their feelings, but also because they are examined, inquisitively and patiently, as if they were objects or natural phenomena.

9.3 The Landscape of Human Features

120 On the Threshold

In its appearance, the Zone is nothing but an ordinary uninhabited landscape, often quite serene and beautiful, overgrown with trees and bushes and filled with remnants of decayed civilization. Film critic Mark Le Fanu (1987) notices that, “there is a curious absence of horror in the fields” (p. 102). Still, the scenery is unsettling; it is somehow other. This effect is produced by the kind of vision we are allowed to have. As we linger, almost painfully, over the remnants of an abandoned world, we struggle to understand what we are looking at. As the Stalker warns his companions, the Zone can never be the same twice and will not allow its travelers to retrace their steps. The landscape is constantly changing as it interacts with those who traverse it. The spectators’ feeling of the vastness and unpredictability of space comes, therefore, not from anything that really appears on the screen, but rather from the sense that, in the Zone, although the past is always immediate, there can be no repetition and no return.4 In other words, the future of the Zone is the past to which our relationship constantly changes. From Tarkovsky’s perspective, at stake is human existence stripped of its future orientation. Yet, critics have complained about Tarkovsky’s slow and brooding films, whose plot and purpose, if they even exist, are often difficult to reconstruct. Even Fredric Jameson (1992), an otherwise careful and generous reader of film, finds Tarkovsky’s Stalker to be,

the most lugubrious religious fable, his camera and his actors moving if anything more slowly than real time itself, with a solemnity quite intolerable to any but the truest believers (in Tarkovsky, I mean, and I speak as one who has a great deal of tolerance for the longueurs of this auteur). (p. 92)

Interestingly enough, what Jameson regrets the most is Tarkovsky’s decision to strip the Strugatsky novel of its crucial “science fictional baggage and trappings” (p. 88) and to introduce, instead, superfluous religious gravity and artistic pretentiousness.5 It is, however, precisely in Tarkovsky’s “longueurs” (which are significantly not only temporal but also spatial) and in the superfluous nature of his mutant space that the meaning (not purpose) of the Zone as terrain vague can be gleaned. Addressing his 1962 film Ivan’s Childhood, Tarkovsky (2008) remembers, for example, his lack of interest in the heroics of World War II operations and describes how he chose to focus, instead, on the interval between two missions, i.e., the time in-between in which pent-up intensity could be felt, “reminiscent of the cramped tension of a coiled spring that has been tightened to the limit” (p. 17). This cinematic approach is radically opposed to the convention of gradual narrative progress towards some ultimate purpose: instead, a non-developing state of tension allows Tarkovsky’s films to reach,

121 Stanka Radovic’ as he puts it, “the highest possible pitch, and manifest themselves more vividly and convincingly than in a gradual process of change” (Tarkovsky, 2008, p. 17). In Stalker, the refusal to conclude and reach the ultimate destination is contained in the story itself: Instead of entering the wish-fulfilling Room at the end of the film, the three protagonists remain on the threshold, unable or unwilling to reach their goal. In all these examples, Tarkovsky’s films refrain from the expected conflict and solution and from the expedient movement between these two recognizable narrative poles. Tarkovsky’s choice to turn the Strugatsky brothers’ supernatural Zone into an ordinary terrain vague is, in my view, a radical move by which he places the shape of human life in human hands: Far from being solemnly religious, Tarkovsky’s terrain vague is squarely human in origin and shape. What provokes the feeling of unease in Stalker is nothing but a sudden, steady focus on the ordinary world and the recognized possibility of its ultimate lack of purpose. This quality is, according to Robert Bird (2008), characteristic of Tarkovsky, who “sought not to impose an interpretive scheme upon reality, but to imprint or record it together with all its contingency and potentiality” (p. 9). No religious gravity grounds this world; it is instead a world unmoored in the vagueness of terrain vague and its utopian potential—always present and never fully realized—to become whatever we wish, to be filled with any content. For, as soon as terrain vague becomes the definitive site of and for the margin, for the planned alternative and orchestrated resistance, it runs the risk of no longer offering a threshold to any potential. It is, instead, a fixed locale shackled to a clear purpose: With its ambig - uity and fluctuations gone, terrain vague is just a terrain, an enclosed territory, whose metaphorical possibilities have been removed with the removal of its uncertainty. The ambiguous and endlessly reversible relationship between people and space in Stalker is, then, a question of uncertain vision and of the unforeseen possibilities of such uncertainty. From the first half-open door, with which the film begins, until its end, we are led to contemplate or enter the scenes through various doors and windows, dirty windowpanes, or door-like openings in half- demolished walls. Often, the protagonists, the camera, and the spectators linger on the threshold, undecided whether to go any further, uncertain about the space beyond the door. In this manner, Tarkovsky thematizes the notion of entry into the Zone and, by extension, into one’s own past and interiority. The ordinary landscape makes visible what we imagine is the inner life of the protagonists, whose presence, in each moment, creates and recreates the Zone. Thus, the abandoned houses, rusted tanks, debris, and remnants of some forgotten life do not really exist on their own terms but reflect the memories, thoughts, and desires of the travelers. In this manner, the slow progress towards the wish-fulfilling Room reveals to the three men their otherwise hidden or lost selves. The strange ambiguity of terrain vague is projected from the interior world of each character onto the land itself and

122 On the Threshold

9.4 Lingering on the Threshold

creates, for the spectator, the unsettling sensation of moving through someone else’s mind and history. As every location in the film is potentially also a product of individual thoughts and feelings, we are made to question the very notion of the “outside.” Whatever appears outwardly tangible and undoubtedly material is, at the same time, a reflection of an “inside,” momentarily transformed into a visible shape. In the end, faced with the opportunity of entering the Room and having their secret wishes fulfilled, the Writer and the Scientist choose not to cross the threshold. We observe them as if we were the Room, while they sit on the threshold and watch the sudden rain that, in typical Tarkovsky style, begins to fall inside the room, emphasizing yet again the ambiguous relationship between the inside and outside. Their reluctance is at least partially motivated by an anecdote about a former stalker who wanted to bring back to life his brother, for whose death he was accidentally responsible. Instead, he came out of the Room to find himself extremely wealthy, and he hung himself shortly afterwards. The danger of the confrontation with the Zone thus lies in the discovery of what our real, not our imagined, aspirations may be. Fearful that, for all their lofty humanistic or sober scientific theories, they might ultimately prove to be merely greedy, the Writer and the Scientist remain on the threshold of the Room. Stalker, however, never intended to enter it at all and, despite the number of times that he had traversed the Zone and located the wish- fulfilling Room, he formulates no wish, pursues no dream. We know, however, that he is desperately poor and that his daughter is, because of his engagement in the Zone, a mutant. Shouldn’t he ask for a correction in his circumstances, a better future? In the Strugatskys’ novel, the Stalker (Red) has a definite wish

123 Stanka Radovic’

9.5 Interior Rain: The Ambiguous Relationship Between the Inside and Outside

to cure his daughter. In the film, that too is stripped from the plot: Tarkovsky’s Stalker has no desire other than to be in the Zone. Tarkovsky’s point is to show Stalker as a different kind of human being. From his closeness with the Zone, he has become a human equivalent of the terrain vague: a marginal, undefined, and interstitial person, whose life is both unofficial (his work as guide is illegal) and transient. Yet Stalker not only accepts his own fragility, but he, like Dostoevsky’s Count Mishkin, the idiot, chooses it in the first place. This notion of conscious and chosen pliability is, for Tarkovsky, a path to the dissolution of self-centered identity. Fragility, in this case, signifies the possibility of taking in and being inhabited by the phenomenal world, yet without any authoritative desire to intervene in that world or control it. Instead of entering the Room or crossing into the forbidden territory, Stalker lets the Room and the territory enter him. Instead of a rigidly formed selfhood, clearly separated from the environment and from others, Tarkovsky examines the ultimate dissolution of independent identity and the reciprocity between the individual and the world. In Stalker, the separation between self-contained people who fail to enter into contact with one another and with their environment entails a potential loss of respect for the living world, represented by the Zone. Stalker also unsettles our tendency to divide the animate from the inanimate, the subject from the object. We see them merging into a living mobile space in which what we perceive may well be a projection of a thought or feeling. Finally, there is no purpose or goal in the Zone: Its possible, yet by no means necessary or prescribed, significance lies, instead, in the exploration of its “longueurs,” its patina and seeming emptiness. These constant reversals of, or challenges

124 On the Threshold to, our received ideas produce that sense of estrangement and uncertainty that either thrills or infuriates Tarkovsky’s viewers. The inanimate becomes animate through a perpetual dialogue between the men and their surroundings, so that the strongest feeling of estrangement from familiar sights comes to us as a consequence of the abolished outside. There is, in the end, no difference at all between the objective world and the human psyche; as they become inseparable, they jeopardize our very notion of selfhood, which always presupposes a clear distinction between the inside and outside. For the purpose of my argument, it is important to clarify the possibilities and limitations contained in this alternative humanity shaped by Tarkovsky’s use of terrain vague. Can we define this alternative humanity as an uncharted dialogue with the uncertainty and mutability of terrain vague through which the visitor’s understanding of self is also transformed? The Stalker abandons the notion of purpose in favor of the simple, always improvised experience of space and exchanges practical use for an ephemeral but perpetually transformative dialogue with the environment. He neither controls nor conquers this space, but merely exists in it and responds to its possibilities. Also, in this space, the visitor suddenly looks away from the future and into the past, examining the trace, the excess, and the remainder for what they can tell him about the fleeting present. The image of this visitor makes utopian use of terrain vague by offering us a vision of a human being freed from quests and targets. Tarkovsky’s living terrain vague thus encapsulates the way this space is discussed by many urban theorists and architects, from Solà-Morales to Gil Doron, as a spatial possibility they tend to celebrate. Terrain vague is, however, not restricted to urban sociality, but also constitutes a view of the world and has the potential to revise the nature of our relation to our environment. The social alternative represented by terrain vague and by its nature of excess and marginality—it is too much space, it is a space with no “beneficial use” (Doron, 2008, p. 204)6—constitutes, potentially, a space for the alternative: for everything that has no beneficial use in the world of contemporary global capitalism. So the ultimate contestation that terrain vague offers is an alternative to use: to being useful and being used, to defining a use or seeking it. But, as soon as it is formulated, some of the essential vagueness and uncertainty of terrain vague is lost and might be co-opted. Given an agenda, no matter how alternative it strives to be, terrain vague suddenly acquires the nature of a terrain, a firm ground, and loses its “vague,” fluctuating quality. In response to the demand to define the Zone and explain what it symbolizes, Tarkovsky (2008) writes:

I am reduced to a state of fury and despair by such questions. The Zone doesn’t symbolize anything, any more than anything else does in my ﬁlms: the zone is a zone, it’s life, and as he makes his way across it a man may break or he may come through. (p. 200)

125 Stanka Radovic’

This refusal to think of the terrain vague as symbolic, as standing in for something else, draws attention to Tarkovsky’s concern with the immediate experience of the spatial uncertainty this space can offer: To define the Zone is to lose its interstitiality, which is meant to force its visitors to reevaluate their notions of identity and their desires. In his reflection on Tarkovsky’s films, Slavoj Žižek (1999) lists a number of possible meanings of the Zone (it is a Gulag, a terrain of technological and biochemical hazard, a prohibited territory, etc.), only to reject them all. He concludes:

The point, of course, is that the question “So which is the true meaning of the Zone?” is false and misleading: the very indeterminacy of what lies beyond the limit is primary, and different positive contents ﬁll in the preceding gap. (p. 227)

Žižek insists here, quite in keeping with Tarkovsky’s own position, that the Zone’s potential lies in the multiplicity and indeterminacy of its meanings, or, in other words, in its ability to absorb and reflect any number of different contents.7 Žižek suggests that the seeming “void” of the Zone serves to emphasize the space beyond its limit. In terms of my discussion, this would mean that terrain vague reflects and redefines the meaning of orderly urban spaces, calling them into question, but also allowing them to appear in contrast. More importantly, however, the “beyond” that terrain vague conjures has a distinct utopian dimension: It calls forth not only what exists beyond its physical limit, but also what could exist beyond it as a spatial and social alternative. Solà-Morales (1995) warns that,

when architecture and urban design project their desire onto a vacant space, a terrain vague, they seem incapable of doing anything other than introducing violent transformations, changing the estrangement into citizenship, and striving at all costs to dissolve the uncontaminated magic of the obsolete into the realism of efﬁcacy. (pp. 122–123)

Because contemporary architecture might become, in relation to terrain vague, “an instrument of power and abstract reason” (p. 123), terrain vague should, I would suggest, remain not only a space of ﬂow and rhythms “established by the passing of time and the loss of limits” (p. 123), but also the actual and conceptual terrain for random visitors, whose identities are either dissolved or suspended by the visit, and for diverse arts, which can temporarily respond to the openness of an unplanned space. Solà-Morales’s warning against the regulatory impulses of certain kinds of architecture and urban planning echoes the theoretical contributions of Henri Lefebvre, who, in The Production of Space (1991), distinguished

126 On the Threshold between space as conceived, perceived, and lived. In Lefebvre’s famous “triplicity” of space, the conceived and perceived spaces tend to belong to the world of production, planning, management, and technocracy. Lived space, by contrast, resists regulation and order; it is, as Lefebvre writes, space that is

directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of “inhabitants” and “users,” but also of some artists and perhaps of those, such as a few writers and philosophers, who describe and aspire to do no more than describe. This is the dominated—and hence passively experienced—space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate. It overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects. (p. 39)

Terrain vague would clearly fall under Lefebvre’s category of lived space, because its existence is oriented towards spontaneous users and the way their imaginative practices reinterpret the seeming emptiness of terrain vague. Also, it is crucial for lived space, and therefore for terrain vague as well, to remain passive, experiential, and unproductive except for the imagination, which seeks to appropriate it, but, as Lefebvre suggests, always provisionally and temporarily. The engagement with such a space is non-interventionist: In Lefebvre’s terms, it is a space we seek to describe in imaginative ways and live in through images and symbols;8 it is not a space we occupy, possess, or exploit. In other words, terrain vague, along with other lived spaces, suggests an ideal, a utopia, a story, or image of possible life, rather than the definitive actualization of some project or goal. The unspecified nature of the terrain vague, its wavering between being a real place and being an image of a possible place, is the only way in which its radical alternative can express and maintain itself. In exploring Tarkovsky’s cinematic reflection on terrain vague, my intention has been to emphasize the importance of the indefinable “non-physical” qualities of the terrain vague, which must remain just as crucial to this ambiguous space as its more definable physical qualities. By focusing on the immaterial and temporal qualities of space, Tarkovsky manages to transform the Zone’s terrain vague into more than just a visual representation of derelict space. The notion of terrain vague is extended here to become the very nature of human existence: The liminal uncertainty of the Zone triggers the conceptual wavering of the protagonists themselves. The strange (yet perfectly ordinary) spaces they cross are increasingly reflected in their characters and slowly transform their initial certainties into questions. Suspended on the threshold of the wish-fulfilling Room, the three protagonists become themselves a kind of terrain vague— wavering, unnamed, open to any possibility, and settled on none. Tarkovsky’s Stalker, therefore, offers an open model for terrain vague by emphasizing the

127 Stanka Radovic’ need to protect its temporal continuity as an ambiguous space. As such, terrain vague is also a reﬂection of a fundamental human need for spontaneous, ephemeral, and renewable dialogue with the mutable community in an open space. To be in terrain vague is, indeed, to be a stalker: someone who shapes and is shaped by the place, but never makes an ultimate use of it. Someone who, in order to keep the space alive, chooses to inhabit that space by remaining on its conceptual threshold.

Notes

1. In a lengthy recent study of Tarkovsky’s work, The sacred cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, Jeremy Mark Robinson (2007) sees in this aspect of Tarkovsky’s animism a trace of “hippy culture,” whose feature is “the exaltation of the natural world, and the urge to escape the city for nature” (p. 37). In this account, Tarkovsky is, rather hastily, called “a bit of a tree-hugger.” I would emphasize, instead, the fact that Tarkovsky’s cult of nature has much to do with the particular syncretic dimension of Eastern Orthodoxy in which the pagan animism becomes deeply imbricated with the Orthodox faith (this imbrication has traditionally been called, and called into question as, “dvoeverie”). Tarkovsky explores this dialogue between animism and Russian Orthodoxy, not only in Stalker, but also and more explicitly in Andrei Rublev (1966). 2. The term “surplus humanity” is, in all likelihood, a paraphrase of Charles Dickens’s famous “surplus population” from Ebenezer Scrooge’s speech in A Christmas Carol (1843). 3. What Tarkovsky (via Ovchinnikov) calls “saba” is probably the Japanese notion of “sabi” (rust, patina) in the aesthetic doctrine of “wabi-sabi,” which focuses on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. For this terminological clarification, I am thankful to Paola Iovene and Michael John Raine at the Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations at the University of Chicago. 4. Ironically, Stalker was shot twice over, because of a processing failure that destroyed the negative. The film that explores the impossibility of repetition had itself to be repeated. 5. For an alternative understanding of Tarkovsky’s “religious” films, see Slavoj Žižek’s “The Thing from Inner Space: On Tarkovsky.” 6. Gil Doron (2008) points out that terrain vague is defined by the National Land Database in the UK as “Land so damaged by previous industrial or other development that it is incapable of beneficial use without treatment,” but that this definition does not clarify what “beneficial use” is, or to whom this use would be beneficial (p. 204). 7. Robert Bird’s (2008) interpretation of the elusive Zone emphasizes its metacinematic potential and its relevance for all Tarkovsky’s cinematic spaces:

The Zone, then, is the quintessence of Tarkovsky’s spaces: a locus of experience formed of inquisitive human gazes and an uncanny impersonal gaze that cannot simply be identiﬁed with the camera. The Zone is where one goes to see one’s innermost desires. It is, in short, the cinema. (p. 69)

8. As Tarkovsky insists, although the Zone itself does not symbolize anything, it allows nevertheless for the kind of symbolic interpretations that Lefebvre attributes to lived space; it allows its users to make symbolic use of it. This distinction, between what a space is and what it makes possible, is crucial.

128 On the Threshold

References

Bhabha, H. (1994). The location of culture. London: Routledge. Bird, R. (2008). Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of cinema. London: Reaktion Books. Davis, M. (2006). The planet of slums. London: Verso. Doron, G. (2008). “. . . those marvelous empty zone at the edge of cities”: Heterotopia and the “dead zone.” In M. Dehaene & L. De Cauter (Eds.). Heterotopia and the city: Public space in a postcivil society (pp. 203–213). London: Routledge. Jameson, F. (1992). The geopolitical aesthetic: Cinema and space in the world system. London: BFI Publishing. Johnson, V. T., & Petrie, G. (1994). The ﬁlms of Andrei Tarkovsky: A visual fugue. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lang, P. (2008). “Stalker Unbounded: Urban activism and the terrain vague as heterotopia by default.” In M. Dehaene & L. De Cauter (Eds.). Heterotopia and the city: Public space in a postcivil society (pp. 215–224). London: Routledge. Le Fanu, M. (1987). The cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky. London: BFI Books. Lefebvre, Henri. (1991). The production of space (Donald Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell. (Original work published 1974) Robinson, J. M. (2007). The sacred cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky. Maidstone, Kent: Crescent Moon Publishing. Solà-Morales, Ignasi de. (1995). Terrain vague. In Cynthia Davidson (Ed.). Anyplace (pp. 118–123). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Stalker. (1996). Manifesto. Retrieved from www.osservatorionomade.net/tarkowsky/manifesto/ manifesting.htm Strugatsky, Arkady, and Strugatsky, Boris. (2007). Roadside picnic. London: Gollancz. (Originally published in 1972) Tarkovsky, A. (1979). Stalker [Motion Picture]. USSR: Gaumont. Tarkovsky, A. (2008). Sculpting in time: Reﬂections on cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press. (Originally published in 1986) Žižek, S. (1999). “The thing from inner space: On Tarkovsky.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 4 (3), 221–231.

129 Chapter 10

Paradoxical Spaces

Guy Königstein

Improvised, faulty, or unplanned. Incomplete, neglected, or illogical.

The following visual article introduces “paradoxical space” as an alternative approach to understanding terrain vague, especially in terms of the actions or “urban behavior” that this understanding enables.

We are bored in the city, we really have to strain to still discover mysteries. (Ivan Chtcheglov, 1981/1953)

In recent decades, Western societies have occupied themselves very intensively with improving the quality of urban life. We were constantly aiming, and still are, to simplify our daily routines and to achieve a cleaner, more structured, more efﬁcient, and safer environment. Admiring and cherishing our cities, we continue eagerly to enlarge and develop them.

We cultivated landscape and drew instead straight lines. We built, demolished, and rebuilt. We created systems and agreed on codes and terms of use. We paved and schematically planted unnatural nature. We constructed borders and secured them with cameras. We collected our waste and sent it far away. We thought, discussed, argued. We planned accurately and executed systematically.

And, as the years passed, we rationalized the built environment to such an extent that it became an almost sterile and monotone landscape. In this urban

130 Paradoxical Spaces

landscape, there is hardly any room left for experiments, humor, and surprises. Poetry and emotions are unusual, excitement and sensation quite rare. More than 50 years later, one would still agree with Chtcheglov. Our city is boring. However, the contemporary processes that configure our cities do not always begin and end the way they were originally thought and planned. Either at the edge of the city, in territories in which legal situations remain unclear, in timeless spaces, along borders, or in hidden and forgotten areas, certain conditions allow the emergence of conflicts. Every now and then mistakes happen, and plans are adapted or changed while they are being executed; the urban collides with the rural; the new clashes with the old; different processes contradict each other. If we look carefully, we discover roads to nowhere or encounter unsitable benches. We find ourselves outside but are actually inside. We look through nontransparent windows, or open doors towards the sky. The spaces that host these conflicts and contradictions differ from the city landscape described above. Instead of strictness, we encounter here imperfection. Instead of boring logic, we are confronted with intriguing

10.1 irrationality. Instead of the usual banality, we experience here poetical Railway (Munich, 2010) paradoxes.

131 Guy Königstein

10.2 Bench (Eindhoven, 2009)

10.3 Windows (Munich, 2010)

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10.4 Door (Eindhoven, 2009)

10.5 Bridge (Eindhoven, 2009)

133 Guy Königstein

10.6 Ramp (London, 2011)

10.7 Tree (Munich, 2010)

134 Paradoxical Spaces

The earth is a form of writing, a geography of which we had forgotten that we ourselves are the authors. (Georges Perec, 1974)

The contradictory character of such places lends itself to a comparison with the ﬁgure of speech “oxymoron,” a combination of two contradicting terms, used by writers and poets to enrich their text with certain magic.

False Truth . . . Dark Light . . . Noisy Silence . . . Virtual Reality . . . Sweet Sorrow

The missing logic within these pairs of words seems to challenge the minds of readers and to stimulate their imagination and fantasy. One tries to imagine what “noisy silence” would sound like, how “sweet sorrow” would feel— though absolute and objective definitions seem impossible. Nonetheless, as we human beings are well familiar with the experience of mixed feelings, we can indeed identify with such illogical conjunctions. The comparison between this figure of speech and paradoxical urban spaces suggests that planners and residents of a city can be seen as writers and readers of an urban text. This means that designers and architects could enrich the built environment by implementing such literary devices in urban processes. Embedding oxymora in the city could provoke and stimulate the imagination of the residents. Visual conflicts and physical contradictions could render the contemporary Western city more inspiring. Paradoxical spaces could help make it more magical and poetic.

In order to conﬁrm how meaningful fantasy is for us, one should simply try to imagine a world without it. (Siegfried Lenz, 1988)

When examining the existing paradoxes in the city, we can easily conclude that they are principally neither planned nor designed. They are often results of mistakes, coincidences, neglect, or misunderstanding. They are un- ﬁnished or improvised, or serve as temporary solutions. Thus it seems that their poetic value lies in their faulty and incomplete nature. Would it then be possible to create paradoxical spaces intentionally? Inarguably not: Planning the unplanned would be unsuccessful, and deliberately improvising or making mistakes would not save our city from its boring future. Nonetheless, one can still preserve existing paradoxes or create conditions that allow new ones to occur. Instead of perceiving paradoxical spaces as a problem to be solved, we should see them as an opportunity; we could emphasize their poetical potential and enhance their aesthetic qualities. Instead of rationalizing the city and eliminating the possibility of urban oxymora,

135 Guy Königstein

10.8 Walls (London, 2011)

10.9 Road (Munich, 2010)

136 Paradoxical Spaces

10.10 we should study these absurdities, react to them, and learn from the way they Window and Street come into existence. Lamp (Zurich, 2011) We should stop cherishing and perceiving our city as an ultimate and faultless living environment and allow the unplanned and improvised to inspire future urban development. We can make room in the city for more magic, fantasy, mixed feelings, and personal interpretations—and every now and then even try to leave things to chance. We can, for example, allow ourselves to implement two plans at the same time, or sometimes even interrupt the whole process at once. We can manipulate urban renewal processes, so that buildings would be constructed inside buildings, bridges would lead us to nowhere, gates would loose their fences, and houses would travel on railways. Using the right words and devices, we can write cities full of fantasy.

References

Chtcheglov, Ivan. (1981). Formulary for a new urbanism. In Ken Knabb (Ed. and Trans.) Situationist international anthology (pp. 1–4). Berkeley, CA: Bureau of public secrets. (Original work published 1953.) Lenz, Siegfried. (1988). Etwas über fantasie [Something about fantasy]. In Über das Gedächtnis [About memory]. Munich, Germany: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. Perec, Georges. (1974). Species of spaces. In Species of spaces and other pieces (John Sturrock, Trans.). London: Penguin Books.

137 Chapter 11

Garbage Arcadia

Digging for Choruses in Fresh Kills

Jennifer Scappettone

Fresh Kills: a landscape yielded from half a century of “mounding,” or the dumping of up to 29,000 tons of trash per day, for decades the largest of its kind in the world. Such massiveness abstracted from its contents isn’t articulate, and a monument to consumption, on land still off limits, has to exist in time, in transit. This is how a writer came by fits and starts to salvage garbage by threading the dregs of post-consumer language for a chorus: 150 million tons of trash, as sheer lumpen mass, balks eloquence. Is it possible to mobilize the disgust provoked by encounter with what has been cast off, to transform a wasteland from an abject repository of undifferentiated filth into an archive?1 Can one render its contents, negated and amalgamated as ambiguous matter, coherent only in being excluded from the polis as stuff and as discourse, legible to the senses? Iconography falls short of what’s required to apprehend this monument bulging from the margins of New York City, notoriously “visible from space” and yet invisible to most of the city’s inhabitants: Fresh Kills Landfill, now capped and amounting to 2,315 acres of hillscape risen from a disquieted estuary along the western seams of Staten Island. We are prone to identify monuments by their awe-inspiring 1 measurements: The Washington Monument stands 550 feet, 5 /8 inches of marble high; the flagpole of the 100-ton Iwo Jima memorial is 60 feet high, and its bronze carbine and M-1 rifle are 12 and 16 feet long; Christo’s Abu Dhabi Mastaba is to be wrought of 410,000 oil barrels, at a cost of US$340 million; and so forth. But that Fresh Kills Landfill encompasses 2,315 acres (roughly the size of Lower Manhattan; almost three times the size of Central Park) transmits no sense of what it’s like to stand amid one of the world’s most

138 Garbage Arcadia

11.1 populous urban agglomerations surrounded by nothing but the reticence of Performer Rebecca Davis hillgrasses and sublimity of sky, disrupted only by the occasional crook of a Wanders Among Grasses and Invasive methane pump. Phragmites on the North In the brief lifespan of the landfill across the postwar booms and Mound of Fresh Kills busts of 1948–2002, over half a century of conspicuous consumption, four Landfill During Fieldwork for PARK on immense mounds of garbage, rising 125–210 feet high—and containing 150 September 12, 2011. million volatile tons of solid waste—emerged amid tidal creeks and coastal (Photo by Jennifer marshes once inhabited by Lenape fishermen. The moundscape’s alarming rise Scappettone) from a long-rural zone whose human presence dates back to 12,000 BCE, from a low-lying island whose giant tulip trees and ocean views were admired by Henry Thoreau, where Charles Olmsted started an experimental farm, must be read in symbiotic relation to the enthusiasm for demolition that characterizes the modern American metropolis, so that, as a 1929 journalist for The New Yorker observed, “one does not have to wait if one wants archaeology.”2 In the same fateful year, marketing consultant Christine Frederick wrote:

It is the ambition of almost every American to practice progressive obsolescence as a ladder by which to climb to greater human satisfactions through the purchase of more of the fascinating and thrilling range of goods and services being offered today.3

139 Jennifer Scappettone

However, it was not until the postwar moment that this performative enlistment of Americans in a program of planned obsolescence would be practiced on a massive scale, in what Heather Rogers identifies as the “invention” of garbage: With mass production come mass consumption, in which less is actually “consumed,” encouraged by disposable merchandise and the manufactured inefficiency of salvage, and a new need for sanitation.4 The clay ponds of Fresh Kills, first dug for brickmaking in the nineteenth century, were initially slated as a temporary dump by Robert Moses in 1947, part of a “Sanitation, Reclamation, Recreation” plan that would turn Staten Island’s salt marshes into real estate. Dumping began directly on the clay, the meadows were leveled, and the dump stayed open; over time, and as the environmental regulations of the 1970s and 1980s encouraged the consolidation of landfills, Fresh Kills became the favored (and, by 1991, the only) dumping ground for the household waste of New York City—until Mayor Rudolph Giuliani finally conceded to political pressure from residents of Staten Island in 1999, agreeing to export the city’s trash to South Carolina instead. The facility stopped accepting municipal waste in 2001, only to reopen months later in a controversial effort to handle the material fallout of 9/11: 1.2 million tons of material from the World Trade Center was

1 sifted down to ⁄4-inch masses and screened before indiscernible remains were laid to rest in an area of clean soil on the West Mound. Currently inert to the naked eye, this reticent memorial of excess and neglect is on the verge of a 30-year transformation into a green public park, upon the initiative of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and in accordance with a visionary draft master plan released in 2006 by James Corner Field Operations that led Staten Island Borough President James Molinaro to assert,

Staten Islanders can ﬁnally exhale and vacate from within all those remaining pent-up fears—large and small, real and imagined, from the personal to the community-based—that for two generations both deﬁned and stigmatized Staten Island to the nation and the world as someplace you did not want to be in or even near.5

But reclamation does not come without ambivalence, skepticism, and even anger on the part of residents who can recall the stench that pervaded the nearby shopping mall and the sky until recently black with gulls. As the landﬁll undergoes capping in preparation for the site’s remediation as Freshkills Park —the words “Fresh” and “Kills,” a Dutch term for “creek,” being fused in the interest of softening the morbid name—the subdocumentary methods of collaborators on a multiphase performance project called PARK have sought to express the volatility of the processes that are being tamped down in the interest of moving on.

* * *

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11.2 There are a couple of facts about landscape that make it interesting for a poet, Performers Abby Block or perhaps one fact and one truism. For one thing, it is devoid of language— and Tessa Chandler Placing Threaded Trash- apparently. Second, it is full of structure. The structure of these hills, which Texts on the Surface of resemble a sudden upwelling of Northern California on the Atlantic seaboard, the North Mound at provides a thick, dark, and even militaristic poetic in being deeply strategic, Fresh Kills. (Photo by Marina Zamalin) anything but immediately lyrical: Sophisticated engineering wrests stability of what is inherently unstable, as in Rome’s Monte Testaccio, a 550,000-cubic- meter hill composed entirely of shards from oil amphorae and pottery that arrived in the ancient imperial capital as tribute from the colonies, which the pragmatic Romans, suited to manufacturing landscapes from nullity and vice versa, methodically shattered and stacked. The need to avoid plateaus, to track garbage from different boroughs, and, from the late 1980s forward, when Fresh Kills was forced into environmental compliance by multiple state charges, to prevent landfill by-products from migrating into the surrounding earth, water, and air made for an increasingly sculpted and monitored topography. Regula- tions obliged the eventual installation of a complex of wells, pumps, terraces, trenches, and swales for the capturing of landfill gas, a product of anaerobic decom position that can cause explosions, and of the million or more gallons of leachate, an ammonia-rich excretion generated when rainwater picks up decaying garbage, that were, for decades, being dumped into New York Harbor every day. The gas now makes its way through a network of wells, to be either burned off or “purified,” its methane extracted for sale to National Grid to fuel homes,

141 Jennifer Scappettone at least until it is no longer profitable to do so. (When that happens, it will be released passively, at legal levels, through the goose-necked pipes punctuating the mounds.) The troublesome leachate juice is now collected in trenches surrounding each mound and piped to a treatment plant, where it is siphoned off from solids, aerated, exposed to bacteria of a certain age that feed on ammonia, exposed to chemicals that pull out metals, and filtered through sand before being released into the Arthur Kill as effluent; the leachate solids are shipped as “cakes” to a landfill in Pennsylvania. These functions will be under surveillance for 30 years, according to the law, as the trash settles inch by inch. Meanwhile, the waste mounds are capped like layer cakes, following an elaborate formula of barriers between rubbish and public: soil, gas vent and drainage layers, impermeable plastic liners, synthetic barrier protection materials, and, finally, planting soil. Ironically, the barriers that stave off the pollution of neighboring earth in landfills have also tended to preserve garbage, preventing it from biodegrading: When a University of Arizona team of researchers, led by archaeologist William Rathje, called The Garbage Project, dug up refuse around the country, it found decades-old fractions of legible newspaper, discarded steaks, and hot dogs still preserved.6 So, in coming across a distressed but still recognizable Barbie leg during a spring ramble across the mound, one visual- izes not only slime, but cells of legible commodities crammed below. On the other hand, the barrier to development on these thousands of acres makes the alienated Fresh Kills terrain a unique habitat for non-human species of Mannahatta—red-tailed hawks, great egrets, muskrats, ospreys, ring-necked pheasants, deer, killdeer, snapping turtles, invasive phragmites, and various meadow grasses and wetland habitats that could restore sacrificed and sorely needed functions such as flood control—to gather and thrive, in hillscapes laced by glimpses of industrial Jersey, the Manhattan skyline, and the Verrazano bridge. These conditions forge a fruitfully estranging hybrid of organic and inorganic phenomena, nature and engineering, and legible and illegible cultures in the process of an intriguing transition: from wasteland to garbage arcadia. In the tender phases of remediation, the compacted trash hills of this still-unplowable terrain—the bulk of which is officially an active construction site, still under the auspices of the Department of Sanitation—call out for “loosening.”7 Unleashing the “heap of broken images” below that balks articulation into the furrows of verse (balk originally denoting, in Middle English, “land left unplowed”) exposes the shifting, metamorphic foundations of the new pastoral.8 Although Fresh Kills presents itself as dry, sterile, bureaucratic infrastructure, it’s surrounded by juicy, clashing rumors and gossip. Gossip reintroduces the messy details of private life—disease, corruption, fallibility —into the disinfected infrastructure of public life; it sutures public and private back together after they have been cleaved away from one another by the decorum of official discourse. Gossip as talk reminds us not only that upstanding politicians and golf stars have desires and depravities, but also that

142 Garbage Arcadia infrastructure has lurid blind spots and leaks. The result can only resound ethically, where the personal meets the social. While gossip is an obsolete term for godparent, or spiritual sponsor (literally, God-kin), it has come to index unregulated, unsponsored knowledge, as if hailing from a limbo between gods and men—knowledge that’s faulty, that takes the risk of being horribly wrong, even as it risks being horribly right about unwanted truths. In this way it’s like poetry, for the fault lines of poetry are also the fault lines of possible knowledges: Like doubt, they are inventive, damaging, erotic. Rumor seeps out of the infrastructure of managed landscape. When regulations arrive decades late, and impact reports prove inconclusive, it is gossip that helps us divine that the infrastructure of tragedy turns out to be one and the same as the infrastructure of abundance, in both material and aesthetic senses: It suggests that the infrastructure of cancerous by-products may trail the infrastructure of planned obsolescence. These painfully complementary relationships are reflected in art, for the roots of Greek tragedy as a genre lie in fertility rituals. The word chorus, which comes from the root for enclosure, hortus—garden, garth—refers to the bounded threshing floor where seed would be beaten out of the harvest, as the threshing platform, or orchestra, was the only possible dance floor in a landscape that was all curve, convexity, and concavity. Dancing, the seduction of fertility, becomes formalized in the place where fertility is violently extracted. The poetic feet of the chorus in Greek theater evolve a contrapuntal relation to those of the looser puppets of the gods onstage, like the gossip, expressing darkling secrets and anxieties that the actors cannot. Over time, the chorus comes to articulate an increasingly obsolete viewpoint: sympathy with the suffering actors of a tragic diegesis. If Greek tragedy grew out of the fertility rituals taking place on the level platform for dance wrested by the threshing floor, in the bulging mounds of Fresh Kills, tragedy has paved the way for the new fertility: that of a postlapsarian Eden in search of a chorus line.

* * *

My analysis of the bald Fresh Kills panorama is contaminated: not only by an ear for rumor, but by ancestral memory, by an ingrained thrill of hunting in the city for salvageable junk. I hail from generations of ragpickers: My great- grandfather moved to Lower Manhattan from the foothills of Vesuvius, following the devastation of his crops at the turn of the twentieth century, and acquired a pushcart for the sale of used items, joining the “swarms of Italians who hung about the dumps” that Jacob Riis described in How the other half lives: laborers paid to sort through rags, tin cans, bones, and other waste, thereby reproducing “conditions of destitution and disorder which, set in the frame-work of Mediterranean exuberance, are the delight of the artist, but in a matter-of-fact American community become its danger and reproach.”9 “The wretched refuse of your teeming shore” described in Emma Lazarus’s 1883 sonnet “The New Colossus,” and engraved into the Statue pedestal just across the harbor,

143 Jennifer Scappettone included those non-picturesque figures hungry enough to parse it for value. The pushcart peddling thrived and led to the opening of a salvage shop downtown, co-managed by my grandfather, who learned to read and to speak English; and the tradition persisted as my parents supplemented my father’s endangered underling-on-Wall-Street salary by selling antiques and other seemingly random collectibles at flea markets on Sundays. My father would expertly scan driveways and open garages on weekend mornings for identifiable cast-off toys and figurines, wound and ticking things, and tchotchkes of value, while my mother dug for costume jewelry and other rhinestones-in-the-rough. By some strike of fortune, our house faced twin sites I always associated with garbage as a kid, though their waste was never forthcoming to the naked eye, but emerging as rumor, and anonymously inhaled and imbibed: a postindustrial complex overseen by a black water tower branded CERRO WIRE, overtaken 11.3 by the Department of Highway, and an imperfectly fenced-off landfill that Audience Participants accepted the Cerro complex’s industrial waste (as I learned decades later) next Atop the North Mound to my elementary school just down the hill, around the corner from the house at Fresh Kills Landfill During a Performance of of a friend who died of leukemia the year I left for college, and closed for capping PARK, Choreographed (along with the school itself) the following year. It wasn’t until I worked on the and Directed by Kathy excavation of two ancient garbage dumps in the agora of Morgantina, Sicily, Westwater, on November 5, 2011. and discovered a bust of Persephone discarded from a nearby sanctuary, that (Photo by Marina I discovered a methodology and inspiration for digging into this history of landfill; Zamalin)

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it wasn’t until I began to research the cancer cluster that struck our community and learned the term “Superfund” that I had the drive to confront it. I was in the midst of composing the quarreling strains in this “toxic autobiography”10 as a poetic archaeology of the landfill called Exit 43 when I met choreographer Kathy Westwater at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program; she was developing a work about the destruction and creation of natural and seminatural worlds called PARK, and our mutual interests in the uncanniness of Fresh Kills, and in the relationship between landscape, language, and the body, began to converge in conversation and an exchange of practices. For the past four years, together with architect Seung Jae Lee and a series of performers, we have collaborated in the studio, in the field, and across networks on these questions. Our gropings into the muteness of Fresh Kills have been conducted in the spirit of the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, founder of Maintenance Art and resident artist at New York City’s Department of Sanitation since 1977, and of Robin Nagle, founder of Discard Studies, author of the forthcoming Picking Up, and anthropologist-in-residence at the Department of Sanitation since 2006—while tracking farther-flung projects of literal reclamation, 11.4 Hilary Chapman, Lorene such as Favio Chavez’s “Recycled Orchestra,” composed of instruments made Bouboushian, and out of oil cans, cooking implements, utensils, and other salvaged trash in the Audience Ascend the 11 Landfill Mound. (Photo landfill slum of Cateura, Paraguay. Through a series of collaborative residencies by Marina Zamalin) at Freshkills Park that granted us unique access to mounds still off-limits to the

145 Jennifer Scappettone public, and through the stewardship of various arts organizations, we have explored what it’s like to veer from authorized pathways in the restricted to- be park, gathering views and refuse with unsteady footing; we have spoken on-site and off with Staten Island workers and residents, with other artists, and with the public about their perceptions of the site, while investigating possibilities in the studio for routing processes embedded in the mounds back to civic consciousness through space, the body, and voice. Along the way, engineers and urban planners have taught us about the methane recapturing process that makes gooseneck columns on the hills hiss, spiraling sludge swales, and “the bugs” designed at City College to eat Fresh Kills toxins. Staten Islanders have related facts less toothsome: the stink still conjurable to memory and cancer cases and the lawsuits by families of 9/11 victims and not wanting to take their kids to the dump for a picnic. The infrastructure of our responses mingles utopian aspirations for remediation with the indigestible, the residual. Mapping the reciprocity between the liminal landscape and the city, and investigating behaviors of consumption stemming from both panic and affection, we have sought to move from disgust to responsibility. We have worked to create scores that interrogate the pathways of desire, waste, and biological retribution in this terrain vague and beyond through movement, textscapes, and design. We have strained to articulate the fact that Fresh Kills is the no-longer-stinking underbelly of Manhattan, just as Coney Island (whose parachute jump is visible from the mounds) is its fantasy-double;12 and that the facility’s closure merely pushes the problem out of view, as the same trash is now foisted on less prosperous regions, so as to outsource the transfiguration of New York into a space of leisure—Fresh Kills being a mere metonym for a far more immense trash crisis that poisons the populations of the global South and that ultimately has no place to land. (As I write, mounds of stinking garbage line the streets of my great-grandfather’s kin in Naples, while plans for creation of a landfill adjacent to Hadrian’s Villa in Rome are hotly debated.) That Fresh Kills faces the absent Twin Towers, monuments to global finance capitalism and scars of its ruin, and that the site received the aftermath of 9/11 for apparent lack of any other harbor, swarmed in consciousness as the 10th-year anniversary of the tragedy passed, and Zuccotti Park was occupied across the waters as Liberty Square. Could language, dance, and design restore social substance to the abjected material underbelly of capital? Through our respective languages—movement, poetry, pathmaking, architecture—we have sought to imagine the harrowed landscape’s translation from a site of trauma to a possible commons.

* * *

Like gossip, like rumor, poetry gives body to the ﬁssures of infrastructure; its orchestrations force intimate and public matters, digestion and expression, to inhabit the same byways. Like gossip, like rumor, poetry is most seditious when

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11.5 it takes the risk of coursing where it’s not wanted. It addresses incompletely James Simmons, Hilary virtual pleasures and traumas in a medium that’s incompletely intimate, Chapman, and Kathy Westwater Collapsing sounding the entanglement of a personal ethos with a collective one. Tapping the City-Block-Sized this medium, with its unparalleled capacity to preserve ambivalence through Word-Chorus. (Photo by caesuras and breaks, one might restore rumor to the mounds silenced in the Marina Zamalin) name of reclamation, modernization, and gentrification—in New York as in Cairo’s Moquattam Hill, where the Zabaleen community has provided highly efficient informal trash collection and salvage for seven or eight decades, now eclipsed by foreign contractors, and in Mexico City’s Bordo Poniente landfill, whose closure reduced carbon dioxide emissions but triggered waves of illegal dumping. I drew inspiration from Vik Muniz’s portraits of the catadores (“pickers”) of Rio de Janeiro’s 60-million-ton Jardim Gramacho landfill, rendered from recycled garbage the pickers salvaged from the site. Though Jardim (“Garden”) Gramacho closed weeks in advance of the UN’s 2012 Rio+20 megaconference on sustainable development, and was replaced by a sophisticated facility like the recent installation at Fresh Kills, which will generate hundreds of millions of dollars in methane sales and carbon credits, the Muniz portraits and accompanying documentary ensure that the catadores’ endangered welfare cannot be elided.13 In strategizing the poetic component of PARK, I aimed to formulate a verbal and material archive of the indigestible contents of the mounds, amalgamating phases of research conducted online (“barged nine days South”),

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field notes (“monarch quiver, unidentified fire”), oral testimonies (“sequential batch reactors,” “mercaptans”), and histories from witnesses such as Ted Nabavi, a chemist and engineer with the Department of Sanitation, who described the serenity of the mounds as “zero atmosphere” and confessed, “Going up there after 9/11 I used to think I saw people.” During the first on-site performance of PARK in June 2010, I collected live impressions according to constraints supplied to audience members on the bus out to the mounds: “TRASH MOUNTAIN KILLDEER/PLASTIC PERCOLATOR DRANO/IN SMELLING DISTANCE/TIM AND GOLF/DEAD FACE/PASSIVE/MY MATTER EFFLUENT/MY MOM HELPED.” During our second residency at Fresh Kills in 2011, it emerged as essential to imagine knowledges buried further, too, to transmit the afterlife of rabid consumption habits being broken down under our feet. I scoured the language of advertising past through virtual magazine searches: “‘oh! oh! oreo!’ ‘they’re femineered!’ ‘happier with a hoover’ / ‘computer moves in’ ‘cut the wire’ // ‘fight’ ‘in-plant hazards’ ‘to turn her on . . .’.” Yet oral testimony, virtual research, and projected ads still weren’t literal enough to conjure the dilated, noxious materiality of Fresh Kills. The residency was unfolding as the Occupy movement spread across the harbor, on Wall Street and beyond; my collaborators were developing a series of mapping, trailbuilding, and wandering scores on the mound, exploring the freedom of pedestrian movement and individual improvisation on prohibited land, as well as the impossibility of “building” anything on the massive expanse. A score transpired as Seung Jae Lee, grappling with the obstruction to anchoring anything to the problematic surface of the mounds, invoked the code of Hansel and Gretel. Keeping in mind that trailbuilding is inherently about language—the roots of language being tied to preliterate interpretative practices such as divination or reading animal tracks—I responded by proposing a trail of linguistic remains that could be left behind in the grasses, yet followed and voiced by multiple passers-by, picked up, woven, or pulled taut in rows.14 I imagined words from underground extracted as dysfunctional kites, or quarrelsome marionettes dragged by immense strings along the unsettled surface of the mounds: I proposed a score for weaving choruses out of waste. I began reaping the language of my garbage; we all began hoarding garbage language, living with it, amused, revolted. This slow accrual of plastic, paper, and cardboard exposed the plural orders of squandering incorporated into the waste stream: not only the throwing away of raw material, of labor, of the energy required to transport commodities across great distances, but the waste of intellectual labor and aesthetic skill spent branding them, designing fonts, devising product jingles or names. I discovered that plastic bags were exceptionally polite, thanking us, reminding us how much they care, pleading us to return them, proclaiming themselves champions of nature; I was reminded of the exceptional quantity of “smart” products on the market; and, slowly, dissonant choral messages began to transpire, as in some bidirectional

148 Garbage Arcadia osmosis between landscape and body: “Reckless/INJURY CASES/Ready Crust/ HarvesTime/retirement/and fleas/about/the dance.” Out of such language, manufactured utterly within capitalist cycles of consumption, how was any insubordinate message to emerge? Branding had then to be irrupted by idioms other to it: nursery rhymes and lullabies inspired by the hills innocent of building, nonsense logics, technology news (the phantom of Steve Jobs uttering “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow”), and the chants then filling the rerouted streets and newly public squares, printed in emergency colors. Teams of dancers armed with oversized needles threaded words on 500-foot-long kite strings, occupying whole afternoons in parks; the end results looked not as I’d imagined them, abject, but rather like the celebratory flags that one sees at festivals or marking off car dealerships. We tested the cobbling of choral vocalizations in the studio, their circulation from rumor to noise to song. During the public culmination of a residency with iLAND (the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature, and Dance) in November 2011, the texts were held aloft as the giant city-block formation that Seung Jae Lee had proposed to imprint on the mound through the body and flexible string, a frame/twin resembling pageantry. Alien to anything a lyricist could have composed, and belted across the mounds by dancers parading with megaphones, limbs layered in denim, flannel, and wool in the bitter autumn chill, the chorus’s strophe and antistrophe alternated between programming, reproach, absurdity, whimsy, and lament. Then, the rectangle of strung language folded in upon itself as performers rushed toward the center of the mound, tangling and formulating of a sudden a bewildering web, megaphones becoming dunce caps or faulty cornucopias—jingles whipping in the redoubtable unimpeded winds of Fresh Kills, increasingly challenging to read and sing, committed instead to strained memory. In the end, the seemingly interminable lines of wasted words hung finely knotted about the body of a single dancer, occupying hardly any space at all; and bodies settled once more into release from language, sequences of vertiginous solo dances accompanied by the knocking of wood and wail of Tamio Shiraishi’s saxophone, purgefully cyclical.

* * *

A. C. Bradley, writing in 1904, located the expressive center of tragedy precisely in “the impression of waste” at the heart of its performance: the mystery of the world’s devouring what is invaluable. “Tragedy . . . forces the mystery upon us, and it makes us realize so vividly the worth of that which is wasted that we cannot possibly seek comfort in the reﬂection that all is vanity.”15 The relationship of waste to the worth of ecstatic political discourse has yet to be formalized, however. Trash strikes and trash demonstrations have potent effect in prodding the best-planned cities into tumult, as laborers from Naples to Amsterdam to Bangalore have driven home: When reinjected into the city center, trash serves as an acrid reminder of the elements of the oikos cast off in the interests of

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economy. In the weeks following the November performance, the subversive 11.6 political discourse of the Occupy movement was being policed out of cities in Rebecca Davis Entwined With Compressed Word- the name of “sanitation,” despite preemptive cooperative efforts on the part String Mass, of protestors to organize their own “Department[s] of Sanitation” to clean the Surrounded by plazas: Filth in the occupations was ascribed to a lack of leadership, and 30 tons Audience, on the Summit of the North of debris were soon all that was left of the two-month undertakings of Occupy Mound. (Photo by Los Angeles;16 Mayor Ed Lee declared Occupy San Francisco a “public health Marina Zamalin) nuisance” (as if garbage hadn’t polluted the streets of the Tenderloin for years);17 City Director Erma Hendrix referred explicitly to Occupy Little Rock as “garbage”;18 and sanitation, rather than terrorism, was given as the reason for Bloomberg’s clearing of Liberty Plaza. In October 2011, ﬁve women from the Action Now group, aged 55 to 80, had been arrested in Chicago when they dumped garbage from a foreclosed house in a branch of the Bank of America—the waste’s displacement underscoring the bond between the abstract value manipulated by ﬁnance and the fetid material remnants of its victims. These tetherings, both unconscious and strategic, underscore trash’s equivalence to both the abjected matter and the discourse violently to be removed from earshot and view of the enlightened city—its equivalence even to the organized vocalization of unspon - sored masses, masses regarded as too vaguely aggregated.19 The cast-off murmurs buried in the apparent serenity of Fresh Kills literalize the fundamental kinship between the manufacture and disposal of

150 Garbage Arcadia values in the polis across the waters, and simultaneously suggest that the restoration of language and ecstatic mobility to forcefully evacuated repositories of social substance need not entail the sterilization of history.

Notes

1. In a now canonical afterword to her analysis of minor affects, Sianne Ngai suggests that the “centrifugal” feeling of disgust, “defined by its vehement exclusion of the intolerable,” could be the most politically efficacious of emotions in a thoroughly differentiated and commodified society (Ngai, 2004, p. 344). For canonical studies of attitudes toward dirt and garbage, see Douglas (2005) and Scanlan (2005). On the wasteland concept, see Nabarro and Richards (1980). 2. From the November 13, 1929 issue of The New Yorker (as cited in Douglas, 1995, p. 17). 3. As cited in Rogers (2005, p. 113). 4. Rogers (2005, p. 31). 5. Field Operations, Hamilton, Rabinovitz, Alschuler, Inc., and New York Department of City Planning (2006). 6. For the complete account, see Rathje and Murphy (2001, p. 114). 7. Franck and Stevens (2006). 8. Eliot (1922). Verse’s relationship to furrows by the turning plough is discussed in Agamben (1999). 9. Riis (1971, pp. 43–44). 10. Richard Newman identifies “toxic autobiography” as a genre in “Darker shades of green: Love canal, toxic autobiography, and American environmental writing” (Foote & Mazzolini, 2012, pp. 21–48). 11. Chavez’s orchestra, “Los Reciclados,” and the youth music program Sonidas de la Tierra are the subject of a forthcoming documentary directed by Alejandra Nash and Juliana Penaranda-Loftus called Landfill harmonic. 12. The concept of Coney Island as Manhattan’s double is elaborated in Koolhaas (1994). 13. For the story behind these portraits, see the documentary film Waste land (Walker, Jardim, & Harley, 2011). 14. For the links between language and preliterate interpretation, see Ginzburg (1989, pp. 96–125). 15. Bradley (1992). For a recent exegesis of Bradley with applications to current sociopolitical crises, see Clark (2012). 16. “Occupy L.A.,” 2011. 17. “Public Health and Occupy,” 2011. 18. “Occupy Little Rock,” 2012. 19. “Our idea of dirt is compounded of two things, care for hygiene and respect for conventions” (Douglas, 2005, p. 7).

References

Agamben, G. (1999). The end of the poem: Studies in poetics (D. Heller-Roazen, Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bradley, A. C. (1992). Shakespearean tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth (3rd ed.). New York: St. Martin’s Press. Clark, T. J. (2012). For a left with no future. New Left Review, 74, 53–75. Douglas, Ann. (1995). Terrible honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Douglas, M. (2005). Purity and danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. London: Routledge.

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Eliot, T. S. (1922). The waste land. New York: Boni & Liveright. Field Operations, Hamilton, Rabinovitz, Alschuler, Inc., & New York Department of City Planning. (2006). Fresh Kills Park: Lifescape, Staten Island, New York, Draft Master Plan, March 2006. New York: New York City Department of City Planning. Foote, S., & Mazzolini, E. (Eds.) (2012). Histories of the dustheap: Waste, material cultures, social justice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Franck, K., & Stevens, Q. (2006). Loose space: Possibility and diversity in urban life. New York: Routledge. Ginzburg, C. (1989). Clues, myths, and the historical method. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Koolhaas, R. (1994). Delirious New York: A retroactive manifesto for Manhattan. New York: Monacelli Press. Nabarro, R., & Richards, D. (1980). Wasteland: A Thames Television report. London: Thames Television. Ngai, S. (2004). Ugly feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Occupy L.A.: 30 tons of debris left behind at City Hall tent city. (2011, November 11). Los Angeles Times. Occupy Little Rock: We are not garbage. (2012, February 28). Fox News. Public Health and Occupy. (2011, November 29). San Francisco Bay Guardian. Rathje, W., & Murphy, C. (2001). Rubbish!: The archaeology of garbage. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Riis, J. (1971). How the other half lives: Studies among the tenements of New York, with 100 photographs from the Riis Collection. New York: Dover. Rogers, H. (2005). Gone tomorrow: the hidden life of garbage. New York: New Press. Scanlan, J. (2005). On garbage. London: Reaktion Books. Walker, L., Jardim, J., & Harley, K. (Writers). (2011). Waste Land. Arthouse Films: New Video.

152 Chapter 12

Isn’t All Public Space Terrain Vague?

Karen A. Franck

With the term terrain vague, architect and urban designer Ignasi de Solà- Morales (1995) named a type of urban space he had observed, noting in evocative language various qualities it possesses. So identiﬁed and characterized, this kind of space and the term attracted the interest of researchers and practitioners in a variety of ﬁelds, as this book demonstrates. Focusing on a particular type of public space is a common practice in urban theory, research, and practice. The topic of interest may be a type of space and its uses: one that is commonly known, such as the sidewalk (Loukaitou-Sideris & Ehrenfeucht, 2009), or a range of traditional public spaces (Carr, Francis, Rivlin, & Stone, 1992); one that has recently been developed through administrative arrangements, such as privately owned public space (Kayden, 2000; Miller, 2007; Németh, 2009); or one the researchers have conceptualized themselves, such as terrain vague or lost space (Trancik, 1986). Or the approach may focus on the uses of a variety of public spaces, uses that the spaces were not originally intended to accommodate. Examples are everyday urbanism (Chase, Crawford, & Kaliski, 1999), loose space (Franck & Stevens, 2007b), insurgent space (Hou, 2010), and temporary urbanism (Bishop & Williams, 2012). Researchers largely specialize in one of three topics: traditional public spaces of streets, squares, parks, and sidewalks; less traditional spaces; or alternative uses, wherever they may occur. Identifying and scrutinizing various types of public space and their uses create a more complete understanding of well known types, offer characterizations of new types, and bring existing but overlooked spaces to the attention of researchers and practitioners. However, a disadvantage of

153 Karen A. Franck researchers’ tendency to specialize in distinct types or distinct uses is that we may never sufficiently recognize how all kinds of public space make up a complex domain of places and possibilities, and, in addition, how many of the types we have implicitly treated as distinct and, hence, different from each other may in fact exhibit similar uses and share common qualities. The purpose here is to do just that: to explore some similarities and differences between terrains vague, as defined by Solà-Morales, and other public spaces. The purview extends to privately owned spaces as well as publicly owned ones that have conventionally defined uses, leftover public spaces that never had a defined use, and abandoned spaces that formerly had a clearly defined use. Most of the spaces considered are outdoors. To pursue this exploration, I have adopted a conceptual framework consisting of four factors: (1) qualities of the space; (2) types of activity; (3) time and duration of activities; and (4) originator of the activity. In this essay, the qualities of public space I consider are those I have teased out from Solà- Morales’s essay: abandoned, empty, marginal, unproductive, fluctuating, and indeterminate. Developing some earlier ideas, I categorize activities in public space as: recreation/exercise, commerce, production, expression, commemoration, education, and dwelling (Franck, 2011). What unifies these activities and what qualifies them for discussion here is that they often occur in spaces not planned or designed for them; they either extend the possibilities of a space or resist its design or legal constraints, whether it is an abandoned space, a leftover space, or a conventional sidewalk, plaza, park, or playground (Franck & Stevens, 2007a).

Abandoned: No Apparent “Ownership”

The spatial characteristic that seems to most clearly distinguish terrains vague from other kinds of public space is its state of abandonment. It is usually apparent that a previous use is no longer present, and that current uses, should they be present, are probably not ofﬁcially sanctioned. The previous owner of the property may no longer hold title or may have ceased using or maintaining the property, leaving it in limbo. Whether the sites are empty buildings, remnants of buildings, empty land, or some combination, they are frequently derelict and deteriorated, possibly wild and overgrown. The wildness, the strange conﬁgurations of building remnants and overgrown trees and plants and mysterious clues to past uses all make such sites extremely interesting to explore and offer possibilities for risky or transgressive activities, as the cases of abandoned industrial landscapes in Buffalo (Schneekloth, 2007) and industrial ruins in northern England (Edensor, 2005, 2007) illustrate. Once it is appropriated for a single, ongoing, all encompassing use that affords no room or time for additional activities, the space in question is

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12.1 really no longer abandoned and, hence, no longer a terrain vague. Examples East River Waterfront, are community gardens (Francis, Cashdan, & Paxson, 1984), city beaches Brooklyn. An artist and his friends install “The (Stevens & Ambler, 2010), and buildings appropriated by artists or small Pirate” in an abandoned businesses (Groth & Corijn, 2005; Oswalt, 2013). Even though they may retain railroad yard. Over a some of the qualities of abandonment, they have been fully adopted and period of a dozen years, single individuals and maintained by new, full-time “owners.” However, if a variety of changing, co- groups of people existing uses still occur, if the space in this way is still “open,” one could say intermittently that it remains a terrain vague. This is true of many formerly industrial appropriated this section of the landscapes, such as those described by Schneekloth and Edensor, that still waterfront for retain a high degree of emptiness, another characteristic of terrains vagues. recreation, dwelling, For many years, a former railroad yard on Brooklyn’s East River waterfront production, commemoration, and remained a terrain vague, supporting a very diverse range of changing and co- artistic expression, existing uses: skateboarding, exploring, ﬁshing, bird-watching, making and despite several closures displaying sculptures, holding performances and concerts, and dwelling (Campo, of the site by the police. (Photograph by Daniel 2002, 2013). Campo) Both observable uses of a space and evidence of its ongoing care and maintenance present evidence of “ownership.” Consequently, if publicly owned spaces such as parks or squares are not maintained, they may well appear abandoned, even if they are still publicly owned.

Empty: Available for the Unintended

Solà-Morales draws upon the origins of the French adjective vague to explicate the qualities that examples of terrain vague possess. He cites two Latin roots.

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12.2 Zuccotti Park, New York. Starting in September 2011, Occupy Wall Street demonstrators used this privately owned public space 24 hours a day for two months for political, artistic, and religious expression, dwelling, commerce, recreation/exercise, education, and production

The first is vacuus, which led to “vacant” and “vacuum,” and so to a terrain vague being “empty, unoccupied, yet also free, available, unengaged” (1995, p. 119). Curiously enough, this is a quality of most traditional public spaces as well: sidewalks, squares, and parks are highly accessible and easily appropriated for activities they were not intended to accommodate, activities that may then be contested by the authorities. This physical and legal openness of public space, particularly when it is publicly owned, may be its most distinctive characteristic and the one most frequently negotiated and contested. Whereas a terrain vague may become completely filled with activity for an extended period of time, by intention, design, and regulation, traditional public spaces generally remain open and available. The exception is when they too become filled with activity to the exclusion of any additional activities (usually temporarily), or are closed by the authorities. In fall 2011, until they were forcibly removed by the police, Occupy Wall Street participants made full and ingenious use of the steps, raised areas, and granite seats and tables of a privately owned plaza two blocks from Wall Street (Franck & Huang, 2012). Occupants transformed the plaza into a place of dense and diverse activities: political, religious, and artistic expression; dwelling; education; recreation and exercise; commerce; and also production. They generated electric power by bicycling, made artwork, stenciled t-shirts, which they sold, wrote blogs, established a library, held musical performances and yoga classes, cooked, and slept there. Interior privately owned public spaces in New York City, carefully maintained and controlled, with tables and chairs, climate control and lighting, turn out to be excellent places for groups of people to meet on a regular basis to pursue shared interests related to recreation and

156 Isn’t All Public Space Terrain Vague? production: to learn or practice a language; to discuss the Great Books; to play chess, backgammon, or mahjong; and to engage in art projects (Huang, 2013)— shared activities that the critics of such spaces have apparently overlooked. Some leftover public spaces, often next to transit routes or at the edges of bodies of water, have no intended use whatsoever, being then even emptier and more available for appropriation than other public spaces. From 7 to 9 in the morning, five days a week, a group of 50 elderly Chinese women gather on a concrete pad under a freeway overpass in Bejing to dance the yangge (Chen, 2010). Here, they find a flat surface and a “ceiling” that protects them from sun and rain and also creates good acoustics for the drumming and the cymbals. Just as individuals and groups fill public space with expected and unexpected activities, so too do arts and community organizations, private companies, and city government. Empty lots in urban centers become sites for official interim uses as they await development, uses that may or may not produce revenue. The openness and accessibility of public spaces of all kinds invite an incredible diversity of activities: from rituals of gathering and creating informal memorials (Franck & Paxson, 2007) to risky kinds of recreation, to small-scale licensed or unlicensed vending and other commercial uses, to living, to all kinds of political expression, the latter being essential to democratic societies (Parkinson, 2012), as well as to revolutionary struggles to become democratic (Franck & Huang, 2012). The emptiness of the space itself, as well as government’s tolerance of diverse activities (as long as they are not seen as too disruptive), provides opportunities for the increasingly frequent and diverse appropriations of public space that so many commentators have noted (Bishop & Williams, 2012; Chase et al., 1999; Franck & Stevens, 2007b; Hou, 2010).

Marginal: Geographically, Socially, Economically

Solà-Morales points out that terrains vagues “exist outside the city’s effective circuits and productive structures” (1995, p. 120), “in the margins of the city” (p. 122), and “external to its everyday use” (p. 120). This marginality could be geographic, economic, social, or temporal. Abandoned industrial sites may be geographically remote from the current everyday life of the city and not easily visible or controllable. They may also be socially and economically marginal, as they are remote from daily life and produce no revenue. Leftover or lost spaces along transit routes can be considered geographically and economically marginal: certainly they are on the edges of something else that has an assigned use—a street, a rail line—and again generate no revenue. If they are not easily visible, they offer good sites for living or for illicit activities. If they are distant from other activities, visible or not, they allow for noisy activities to be carried on without fear of troubling others. When the spaces

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are visible, they offer sites of commemoration: People create informal roadside 12.3 memorials to remember the loss of life in accidental deaths. The Seine, Paris. Two individuals appropriate a Marginal can also refer to social aspects of the activity: What is secluded space on the happening may fall outside the work routines of city life. By definition, parks waterfront for dwelling are intended to serve this purpose—to be places of recreation, exercise, and respite. If we think of marginal in temporal terms, we see that sidewalks and streets, even though they are integral to the economic functioning of the city, also host activities and events that are external to its practical and productive routines when they become places of spontaneous play (Stevens, 2007), or when the work routine is interrupted, with official authorization and protection, to hold a parade, a block party, a celebration of New Years or the 4th of July, an annual city-wide marathon, or a full day of yoga. These activities in public space may well generate revenue for the city when they attract participants who frequent restaurants, buy souvenirs, or stay in hotels. What is in itself economically marginal can have economic benefits.

Unproductive: Of What?

When Solà-Morales characterized terrains vagues as “un-productive” (1995, p. 120), one can assume he was referring to the market economy of cities. However, one might also view productivity more inclusively—as referring to

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12.4 Broadway, Times Square, New York. Every summer solstice since 2002, the local business improvement district association closes two blocks of Broadway to trafﬁc to allow this form of exercise/recreation

159 Karen A. Franck anything that is grown or made. An increasingly frequent use of urban public space is for agriculture in what were once abandoned spaces, and more recently in city parks and other public locations. Starting in the 1970s, residents in New York began making use of empty, derelict lots by planting vegetables and creating community gardens throughout the city (Francis et al., 1984). As these lots became valuable for building on, the gardens were threatened, and many were lost, but, under recent agreements between city and several non- proﬁt organizations, about 400 are protected and so will remain gardens. No longer vague, no longer either abandoned or empty, instead they constitute a new type of public space. In Seattle and other cities, residents also grow

12.5 Vanderbilt Avenue, Brooklyn. A single individual regularly appropriates a sidewalk near his home for several hours for production, artistic expression, and commerce

160 Isn’t All Public Space Terrain Vague?

12.6 Riverpark Farm, New York. Working in partnership with the company that will occupy the future building on this “stalled site,” the owners of the adjacent restaurant grow vegetables and herbs until construction resumes

vegetables on the earth strip between sidewalk and street, a space owned by the city. Conventional public spaces, leftover spaces, and terrains vagues can all be sites of artistic production: drawing and painting; photographing; holding photo shoots or ﬁlming on city streets and sidewalks; creating sculptures on an abandoned Brooklyn waterfront (Campo, 2002, 2013); or jointly creating a doll in a privately owned public space of a corporate atrium (Huang, 2013). With the ease of writing on a laptop or other electronic device, people also do written work in public space. And in many cities, vendors cook or otherwise prepare food for sale in public space. In U.S. cities, gourmet food trucks are becoming more and more popular. Each Saturday, such trucks gather in an empty lot in

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Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that awaits redevelopment. In Portland, Oregon, the city rents space to trucks to install themselves, for the long term, in sites such as the perimeter of a downtown parking lot. The Stalled Sites Program of New York City’s Building Department allows companies to suspend their construction work permits if they ﬁle plans for maintaining the safety and security of the properties where construction has stalled. Without this being an intention of the program, some participants have taken the further step of seeking temporary uses for their sites. Near the East River, the very elegantly designed Riverpark Farm, complete with space for evening dinners and community workshops, grows herbs and vegetables in transportable milk crates for the adjacent upscale restaurant. The real-estate company that owns this stalled site, and charges the restaurant no rent, was keen to make the site “productive” until construction can proceed (Barr, 2011). In the summer months, a city-owned property in downtown Brooklyn, planned for mixed-use development, accommodates a weekly market, with small businesses installed in shipping containers selling food and drink and other items. Vendors pay rent to a company that manages the market. These initiatives on the part of companies, developers, city governments, entrepreneurial individuals, and social organizations to install interim uses into land or buildings that are likely to be developed or redeveloped in the near future are increasingly common (Bishop & Williams, 2012; Groth & Corijn, 2005; Oswalt, 2013; Oswalt, Misselwitz, & Overmayer, 2007). If we consider productive to mean the production of revenue, it is notable that many of these activities do produce revenue for those pursuing the activity, and often for the city as well—through sales taxes, rent, and fees for licensing. In fact, activities in public space that the city government may see as disruptive or costly, given the required maintenance or police security, can also bring in tax revenue through the tourists the activities attract. A repeated and regular pattern of a recreational use, not originally intended for that location, can draw an audience, become well enough known to be a tourist destination, and so bring revenue to a city—as Love Park did in Philadelphia when skateboarders gathered there, attracting international attention, until the city forbade that activity in that park and redesigned it (Németh, 2006).

Fluctuating: Change over Time

For Solà-Morales (1995), the meanings of the Germanic root of the word “vague”—sea swell or wave—suggest the “movement, oscillation, instability, ﬂuctuation” of terrains vagues (p. 119). Indeed, the many changes in activities that occur, both in spaces that remain terrains vagues, and in many other public spaces, demonstrate the importance of considering the dimension of time, both the time of occurrence and the duration of an activity.

162 Isn’t All Public Space Terrain Vague?

12.7 Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn. Every Christmas, a Vermont farmer appropriates a section of the sidewalk for two weeks for commerce

12.8 Lent Space, Tribeca, New York. A real-estate developer invited the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to install a temporary park, to remain on this site until a luxury apartment tower is built, requiring that it be enclosed by a fence and not be called a “park,” as that suggests permanence. (Photograph from Interboro)

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Outdoor commercial ventures often follow a regular schedule to attract business. Street vendors in New York selling coffee, tea, and breakfast snacks appear near workplaces on weekday mornings and leave before noon. Farmers markets and flea markets are held on set days at fixed locations. On the summer solstice, many join yoga classes right on Broadway at Times Square. Every year, Vermont farmers sell Christmas trees, wreaths, and boughs on the sidewalks of Brooklyn for several weeks preceding Christmas. They lean the trees against building walls, stretch ropes between poles on the sidewalk’s edge for the trees to lean against, or build wooden scaffolding to display the trees. Although their use of the sidewalk is temporary, it is also regular, occurring at the same time and for the same period each year, and extends late into the night. Routine activities that people pursue in public space often follow what David Seamon (1979) has called a “place ballet,” as occupants coordinate their movements with each other. This may be carefully negotiated over the course of the day and evening, as on Samsen Road in Bangkok. When the shops are closed and no longer use the sidewalk for display, tables and chairs placed next to the buildings transform the sidewalk into places for eating. Stalls are placed at the outer edge of the sidewalk, and the gutter becomes a place for serving, food preparation, and washing up, activities that compete with the parking of cars (Dovey & Polakit, 2007). Other street commerce may be more sporadic but predictable: When it rains on a weekday in New York, vendors of umbrellas appear quickly at transit hubs and in business and shopping areas. Commemorative activities such as parades and anniversary gatherings at memorials fall on days that have meaning for those events. Every day, at lunchtime, in Berkeley, when the sun is out, people eat their lunch from the nearby takeout restaurants in the one place nearby that is sunny—the median on Shattuck Avenue. Indeed, like waves, these activities are rhythmic. Other uses of public space may be sudden and singular, sometimes despite attempts to repeat the activity, as with forms of political expression. So far, Occupy Wall Street has been able to occupy Zuccotti Park only once, but the demonstrators did so for an extended period of time. Certain places may be sites for repeated and extended political expression, such as Tahrir Square in Cairo. Indeed, public squares in many cities are favored for political demonstrations, given their size and central location (Parkinson, 2012). When demonstrators receive permits to hold the event, both the time and place are known in advance by authorities and demonstrators, but others in the city do not have this knowledge. For them, the occurrence may appear sudden and unexpected. Building lots that owners have abandoned and that remain open to appropriation by individual citizens, as well as those lots where interim uses have been officially inserted, are “in process.” An abandoned lot with remnants of previous industrial uses may become an “accidental playground,” vibrant

164 Isn’t All Public Space Terrain Vague?

with various, unpredictable activities that are constantly changing, remaining largely unknown to the larger public (Campo, 2002, 2013). Later, the same site may be cleared of all debris and, while awaiting the construction of luxury towers, may host regularly scheduled, well-publicized events: gourmet food trucks on Saturdays and a ﬂea market on Sundays.

Indeterminate: Relationship of Activities to Spaces

The second Latin root of the English word vague that Solà-Morales identiﬁes is vagus, meaning “indeterminate, imprecise, blurred, uncertain” (p. 120). As with the other adjectives I have selected from his essay, one could pursue

12.9 Zachary’s Corner, Berkeley. Since 2009, when Zachary was hit by a truck at this site, family and friends have continuously appropriated the trafﬁc circle for commemoration

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different interpretations and applications. I have chosen the adjective 12.10 “indeterminate,” because it captures what seems to be an essential quality of Zuccotti Park, New York. Starting in November public space generally: The relationships between existing spatial or physical 2011, the police features of the space and the activities that do or could take place are neither barricaded this privately fixed nor narrow. The same goes for terrain vague. Spatial emptiness and owned public space 24 hours a day for nearly physical accessibility, along with various smaller-scale physical features, two months, to prevent generate many possibilities that people recognize and pursue with creativity all uses by Occupy Wall and determination (Franck & Stevens, 2007a). Street. (Photograph by Te-Sheng Huang) As a result, one encounters the surprising and the unexpected in cities, even without seeking out the strangeness of still-abandoned industrial sites. In other mainstream public spaces, one may encounter: flowers, candles, small toys, and a cross nestling around a stop sign; bicycle racks, tall tree trunks, or public sculptures encircled with brightly colored knitting called “graffiti knitting” or “yarn bombing”; parsley and basil growing around a tree on a public sidewalk; a painter installed with his easel on the sidewalk; a market, café, bar, stage, and art gallery all made of plywood and shipping containers, all in what was, just a few weeks before, a parking lot; hundreds of people with their legs in the air on Broadway; a joyful pillow fight in Union Square; people sitting at a table in a public square eating breakfast and asking others to join them (part of the now international Permanent Breakfast project); or a bench and a potted plant on a stretch of astro-turf close to the curb, next to a parking meter (a Park(ing) Day event invented by the San Francisco art and design studio Rebar). Notably, the U.S. exhibition at the 2012 Architecture Biennale in Venice, called “Spontaneous Interventions,” was an interactive display of 124

166 Isn’t All Public Space Terrain Vague? interventions made by architects, designers, planners, artists, and everyday citizens to improve public space in cities. The word spontaneous was a bit misleading: Individuals, groups, or organizations necessarily plan these interventions, although not through a mediated bureaucratic process, but more directly and more quickly, which may be the reason for the term “spontaneous.” As importantly, for the urban stroller, who is not involved in the planning or has not been informed of the event in advance, they are complete surprises. They illustrate the unpredictability of urban public life: Who will be doing what, when, where? They demonstrate yet another quality of terrain vague that Solà-Morales identifies but is not developed here—the alternative, the strange (p. 122). Even as many accurately note the growing homogeneity, privatization, and control of public space, the cornucopia of new and unexpected possibilities is also growing richer and more plentiful, as artists, activists, social and religious organizations, landscape architects, architects, planners, and others invent yet more activities, events, and physical interventions for and in urban public space. It is as if some kind of dam has opened in the US and other countries, releasing creativity, enthusiasm, and energy to invent, plan, and coordinate what was previously not done in these locations. Conventional links between kinds of space and kinds of activity are attenuated. Pillow fights usually occur at home or in dormitories; one grows herbs in one’s own yard or porch; people do yoga at home or in a yoga studio or gym; one usually eats breakfast at home or in a restaurant; a parking space is for a car not a park. The increasing range of unexpected activities and interventions in public space illustrates the indeterminacy and the fluidity between existing features and possible activities and (re)arrangements. What is also indeterminate is what the authorities will allow. In their ongoing, if not increasing, efforts to maintain order and control, police forces in 2011 often used brute force to remove Occupy Wall Street demonstrators from public spaces in New York, Oakland, and other cities. In New York, Occupy Wall Street took its case to court to contest the decision of the owner of Zuccotti Park to forbid camping or sleeping in the park. This is just one of many cases in the never-ending struggle over citizens’ rights in public space (Mitchell, 2003; Staeheli & Mitchell, 2008). So the increasing invention of new uses and interventions and the renewed use of public space in the US for political expression are accompanied by a high, albeit varying, degree of uncertainty about what activities will be allowed, when, where, and pursued by whom. A pillow fight in Union Square, but not demonstrating in Zuccotti Park; wine in Central Park at a concert of the Metropolitan Opera, but not beer on your front stoop in Brooklyn; a political demonstration in Chicago, but nowhere near the political event that is the subject of the protest; graffiti knitting of a stop sign, but not a public sculpture. The openness of public space to possibilities, and the indeterminacy of the relationship between space and activity are always subject to laws and their enforcement, which are continually contested and negotiated.

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Towards More Complete Theorizing

In the framework outlined here, “abandoned” and “empty” are the two qualities that refer most fully and directly to the character of a space. The appearance of abandonment and the absence of an ongoing use seem to be the best criteria for identifying a terrain vague, but, as noted above, once the space is filled with a new, all-encompassing, and continuous use, it is no longer available for other possibilities. In contrast, most other public spaces are always spatially open to possibilities, and, by virtue of their state of disrepair, some public spaces may appear abandoned, even if legally they are not. Thus, “abandoned” (in appearance) and “empty” may well characterize various kinds of public space, not only terrain vague. (Indeed, I would argue that “empty” and thereby spatially open to possibilities characterizes nearly all public space.) The qualities of marginal, productive/unproductive, and fluctuating, which refer to both spaces and activities, also characterize various kinds of public space. Exploring the quality of “unproductive” can lead us to examine the different ways that public spaces are, in fact, productive, while “fluctuating” highlights the importance of the dimension of time. “Indeterminacy” characterizes the relationship between the physical and spatial features of a space and the activities that do or can take place there, an idea key to the notion that people, through their actions in, as well as insertions into, public space, stretch or “loosen” it (Franck & Stevens, 2007a). Indeterminacy can also refer to the legal status of the activities, which is often uncertain or continuously contested and negotiated. That seems to be an unavoidable, but also beneficial, characteristic of public space—another way it is always in process. Activities, not only spaces, are prominent in the framework I have outlined, for it is through their actions that people produce a space, often regardless of its name or intended purposes, as many writers on the appropriation of public space have observed (Bishop & Williams, 2012; Chase et al., 1999; Franck & Stevens, 2007b; Hou, 2010). One dimension that could be added to the framework is the kind and extent of physical as well as legal interventions or modifications needed to pursue alternative or new uses. The final dimension is the party or parties that initiate these activities. The kinds of production of urban public space that have received the most attention from researchers emerge directly from people’s own actions and from the grassroots efforts of individuals or arts and other organizations. It is time to study other origins of new or alternative uses, including city government, real-estate companies, and other large businesses. The former, bottom–up efforts have been called DIY urbanism, while all strategies, regardless of their origin, can be considered “tactical urbanism” (Lydon, 2012). To achieve a more inclusive and systematic theorizing of public spaces and their uses, I propose that the following factors be considered: (1)

168 Isn’t All Public Space Terrain Vague? qualities of the space or activity, such as those presented here (possibly with ownership to replace abandonment); (2) types of activity that take place; (3) time of occurrence and duration of activities; (4) kinds and duration of physical intervention to support the activities; (5) legal status of the activities; and (6) initiators of, and participants in, the activities.

Acknowledgments

I appreciate comments from Te-Sheng Huang and Caroline Chen on an earlier version of this essay.

References

Barr, M. (2011). Farms, stores brighten stalled NYC building lots. Associated Press (December 3). Retrieved from http://news.yahoo.com/farms-stores-brighten-stalled-nyc-building-lots-150435606. html Bishop, P., & Williams, L. (2012). The temporary city. London: Routledge Campo, D. (2002). Brooklyn’s vernacular waterfront. Journal of Urban Design, 7, 171–199. Campo, D. (2013). Accidental playground: Brooklyn waterfront narratives of the undesigned and unplanned. New York: Fordham University Press. Carr, S., Francis, M., Rivlin, L., & Stone, A. (1992). Public space. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chen, C. (2010). Dancing in the streets of Beijing: Improvised uses within the urban system. In J. Hou (Ed.). Insurgent public space: Guerrilla urbanism and the remaking of the contemporary city. London: Routledge. Chase, J., Crawford, M., & Kaliski, K. (Eds.) (1999). Everyday urbanism. New York: Monacelli Press. Dovey, K., & Polakit, K. (2007). Urban slippage: Smooth and striated streetscapes in Bangkok. In K. A. Franck & Q. Stevens (Eds.). Loose space: Possibility and diversity in urban life. London: Routledge. Edensor, T. (2005). Space aesthetics and materiality. Oxford: Berg. Edensor, T. (2007). Social practices, sensual excess and aesthetic transgression in industrial ruins. In K. A. Franck & Q. Stevens (Eds.). Loose space: Possibility and diversity in urban life. London: Routledge. Franck, K. A., & Huang, T. (2012). Occupying public space 2011: From Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park. In R. Shiffman, R. Bell, L. J. Brown, & L. Elizabeth (Eds.). Beyond Zuccotti Park: Freedom of assembly and the occupation of public space. Oakland: New Village Press. Franck, K. A. (2011). Occupying the edge and the underneath. In T. Hauck, R. Keller, & V. Kleinekort (Eds.). Infrastructural urbanism: Addressing the in-between. Berlin: DOM Publishers. Franck, K. A., & Paxson, L. (2007). Transforming public space into sites of mourning and free expression. In K. A. Franck & Q. Stevens (Eds.). Loose space: Possibility and diversity in urban life. London: Routledge. Franck, K. A., & Stevens, Q. (2007a). Tying down loose space. In K. A. Franck & Q. Stevens (Eds.). Loose space: Possibility and diversity in urban life. London: Routledge. Franck, K. A. & Stevens, Q. (Eds.) (2007b). Loose space: Possibility and diversity in urban life. London: Routledge. Francis, M., Cashdan, L., & Paxson, L. (1984). Community open spaces. Washington, DC: Island Press.

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Groth, Jacqueline, & Corijn, Eric. (2005). Reclaiming urbanity: Indeterminate spaces, informal actors and urban agenda setting. Urban Studies, 42 (3), 503–526. Huang, T. (2013). Is the public invited? Design and management of privately owned public spaces in New York City. PhD dissertation, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark. Hou, J. (Ed.) (2010). Insurgent public space: Guerrilla urbanism and the remaking of the contemporary city. London: Routledge. Kayden, J. S. (2000). Privately owned public space: The New York City experience. New York: Wiley. Loukaitou-Sideris, A., & Ehrenfeucht, R. (2009). Sidewalks: Conflict and negotiation over public space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lydon, M. (2012). Pattern cities. Retrieved from http://patterncities.com Miller, K. F. (2007). Designs on the public: The private lives of New York’s public spaces. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mitchell, D. (2003). The right to the city: Social justice and the fight for public space. New York: The Guilford Press. Németh, J. (2006). Conflict, exclusion, relocation: Skateboarding and public space. Journal of Urban Design, 11 (3), 297–318. Németh, J. (2009). Defining a public: The management of privately owned public space. Urban Studies, 46 (11), 2463–2490. Oswalt, P. (2013). Urban catalyst: Strategies for temporary use. Barcelona: Actar. Oswalt, P., Misselwitz P., & Overmayer, K. (2007). Patterns of the unplanned. In K. A. Franck & Q. Stevens (Eds.). Loose space: Possibility and diversity in urban life. London: Routledge. Parkinson, J. (2012). Democracy and public space: The physical sites of democratic performance. New York: Oxford University Press. Solà-Morales, Ignasi de. (1995). Terrain vague. In Cynthia Davidson (Ed.). Anyplace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Schneekloth, L. (2007). Unruly and robust: An abandoned industrial river. In K.A. Franck & Q. Stevens (Eds.). Loose space: Possibility and diversity in urban life. London: Routledge. Seamon, D. (1979). A geography of the lifeworld: Movement, rest and encounter. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Staeheli, L. A., & Mitchell, D. (2008). The people’s property: Power, politics, and the public. New York: Routledge. Stevens, Q. (2007). The ludic city: Exploring the potential of public space. London: Routledge. Stevens, Q., & Ambler, M. (2010). Europe’s city beaches as post-Fordist place making. Journal of Urban Design, 15 (4), 515–537. Trancik, R. (1986). Finding lost space: Theories of urban design. New York: Wiley. Part III

Applications This page intentionally left bank Chapter 13

Notions of Nature and a Model for Managed Urban Wilds

Jill Desimini

It is a fact that Homo sapiens has, to all intents and purposes, colonised the earth. Mankind’s presence is not a modest one. Every corner of the earth has been occupied, laid out or been marked in some way. The idea of virgin nature is more metaphor than reality. (Adriaan Geuze, 2010, p. 40)

Philadelphia’s abandoned land, now being colonized by wild plants, offers urbanists and landscape architects an opportunity to conceive of new ways to think of and manage such land, so that it becomes a culturally and ecologically positive, productive component of the postindustrial city. Such a recon- ceptualization demands new ways of categorizing nature, and, for intellectual clarity, ﬁrst requires a review of previously conceptualized kinds of nature. Nature and cities are intertwined, cyclically occupying the same territory, growing and shrinking inversely. Ideas of nature, as determined by human relationships to pristine lands, have a rich history. This history is most often thought of sequentially as the creation of cultivated lands and then gardens, but it has become increasingly relevant to a discussion of the postindustrial urban landscape, where what we think of as nature is in fact previously developed land. A chronological account of natures, however, would be too simplistic to address the status of vacant lands left in the city by the evacuation of industry and people. It does, however, provide a foundation for

173 Jill Desimini understanding the interplay of nature and city, as well as clues about how to use these ideas to restructure the shrunken city-in-need, in this case the terrain vague of Philadelphia. Since at least ancient Rome, philosophers, historians, and designers have struggled with the slippery concept of nature, defining first (primeval), second (cultivated), third (horticultural), fourth (postindustrial), and even fifth (artificial) natures. The historian John Dixon Hunt (2000) explores first, second, and third natures in Garden perfections: The practice of garden theory. First nature is “unmediated” by human activity and is the original condition against which the other natures are defined. According to Hunt, the Roman philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero first alluded to the idea of a second nature (and therefore also an implied first nature) in The nature of the gods (45 BCE):

Total dominion over the produce of the earth lies in our hands. We put plains and mountains to good use; rivers and lakes belong to us; we sow cereals and we plant trees; we irrigate our lands to fertilize them. We fortify river-banks, and straighten or divert the courses of rivers. In short, by the work of our hands we strive to create a sort of second nature within the world of nature. (Cicero, 2008/45 BC, book 2:152, p. 102)

Second nature, for Cicero, is land reengineered as crop ﬁelds, pastures, and managed forests, together with urban development and infrastructure. Implicit in second nature is the need to survive; aesthetics are irrelevant. The idea of third nature, the garden, was introduced explicitly in the 1500s by the Italian humanists Bartolomeo Taegio and Jacobo Bonafadio; here, aesthetics apply:

For in the gardens . . . the industry of the local people has been such that nature incorporated with art is made an artiﬁcer and naturally equal with art, and from them both together is made a third nature, which I would not know how to name. (Hunt, 2000, pp. 32–33)

This third nature is comprised of horticulturally rich landscapes designed for beauty, pleasure, and recreation; it requires maintenance. The messiness and complexity of the ideas of nature and city increase with the advent of both the postindustrial urban condition and disciplinary shifts among landscape architecture, urban design, and engineering. In the new, more complex nature, deﬁnitions based on extents of human intervention are undermined; what is not strictly nature again takes on aspects of what was previously considered nature. The wild plants of ﬁrst nature again colonize (postindustrial urban) land, but the resulting nature doesn’t have any

174 Notions of Nature

divinely ordered purity—it is affected by the prior human interventions. In this more complex state, the ecologically blind single-mindedness of engineering and urban development efforts is questioned by sensitive city-makers, and, as a result, the interweaving of nature and city requires more careful definition. For landscape architect Adriaan Geuze (2010), “second nature” is not the cultivated land Hunt describes, but instead a wildness resulting from neglect, an opportunity for the rebirth of a predictable self-sustaining nature out of decaying and unused landscape. Geuze ignores the cultural context of Hunt’s second and third natures, positing that nature describes something that maintains itself regardless of its lineage. Cultural ecologist Sabine Hofmeister makes a similar distinction between what she terms “second” and “third wilderness.” Wilderness here is a cultural value rather than an uncultivated, untouched condition. Hofmeister defines wilderness as “the unfamiliar” and “the unrecognized,” as seen in “the difference between knowledge and ignorance, between nature known and nature unknown” (Hofmeister, 2009, p. 294). She gives three distinct classifications—first (primeval) wilderness, second (simulated) wilderness, and third (hybrid) wilderness. First wilderness—the nearly vanished, primordial one that occurs separate from society—shares similarities with third wilderness (the culture–nature hybrids that occur in places such as the wild urban woodlands of formerly industrial land). First and third wildernesses are self-reproductive and exist in cycles, rather than in abstract, linear time heading toward a human goal. Like Geuze’s “second natures,” they are self-sustaining. Second wildernesses—conservation areas, national parks, wild gardens—by contrast, are simulacra of first wilderness, constructed, maintained, and presented. The “unfamiliar and the unrecognized” are realized only in the feeling of getting lost, of being in an alien place. For Hofmeister, the second and third wildernesses are not chronological—both are in evidence today—although she does make a case that third wilderness presents a more positive alternative for

13.1 the future: “Wild ‘natures’ are far more rich, surprising, and shrewd than the Natures Enumerated dominated, controlled, calculated, and miscalculated nature of our past” (p. 304).

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175 Jill Desimini

Ideas of nature now begin to have potentially confusing numbering systems: For German ecologist Ingo Kowarik, Hofmeister’s “third wildernesses,” the successional woodland that emerges on certain abandoned postindustrial sites, is the “fourth nature,” following the three natures described by past philosophers and historians, including Hunt. However, it is important to keep in mind that, as an ecologist, he is simply describing the chronology of human manipulation of land, not a conceptual hierarchy. Following Hunt, one could argue that “natures” are becoming increasingly more manipulated. With Kowarik (Kowarik & Körner, 2005), the level of human involvement directly affects the ecosystem function of the four natures that he describes. Fourth nature, however, does not imply a greater human impact than third nature. It is rather related to what landscape architect Gilles Clément terms the “Third Landscape”—all of the land left by man to biological evolution (Clément, 2009; Clément & Jones, 2006). These are the territories no longer subject to human exploitation, now relinquished to succession—urban areas of untypical biodiversity. Finally, for landscape architect Christophe Girot, this post-occupied landscape merely posits a new nature, or “nouvelle nature,” without any numerical modiﬁer or chronological distinction. What is important about Geuze’s “second nature,” Hofmeister’s “third wilderness,” Kowarik’s “fourth nature,” Clément’s “Third Landscape,” and Girot’s “nouvelle nature” is not their nomenclature but their comparison with primordial and pristine ﬁrst nature. The second and third natures of agriculture and horticulture require overt and ongoing human maintenance in order to arrest the invasion of weeds and unwanted saplings. By contrast, “third wilderness,” “fourth nature,” “third landscape,” and “nouvelle nature” have all come to be because of a lack of human maintenance. In the case of swaths of abandoned urban lands, nature has become the primary driver in a landscape previously governed by human activity, primarily industry and housing. Thus human-made conditions underlay natural succession. Both the human abandoners and the non-human colonizers shape the succession. Yet, as Girot (2005) explains, this new nature is neither pristine ecology nor human design. Instead, it provides a different way to approach the natural environment in the city. In his plea for landscape design to address the conditions of urban dereliction and decay, he says that “nouvelle nature” has the potential to “sharpen our senses and reconcile us with our environments” (p. 19). The present urban condition cannot rely on past readings of nature. Rather, it must evolve out of previous realities into a hybrid condition, one that, for Girot, merges time with a contemptuous landscape or “vast zone of conspicuous neglect where residual nature is mixed with industry, waste and infrastructure” (p. 19). Out of nouvelle nature, a development model emerges:

The city will recognize its natural assets and dynamic structures, and will develop them into amended landscape environments adapted

176 Notions of Nature

to given conditions. The city’s new landscapes will confer a strong yet changing natural identity. Much of this nouvelle nature will not be made visible at once; it will require both faith and patience over decades and will undoubtedly provoke a fundamental shift in our understanding of the architecture of landscape. (p. 32)

Girot’s deﬁnition of nouvelle nature takes the posthuman natures and wildernesses of Kowarik and Hofmeister a step further, merging them with design in a new model of practice. Like Clément, he espouses a landscape architecture that embraces slowness and evolution. The new nature incorporates the coinciding concerns and realities of urbanization, deurbanization, and environmental degradation through a reevaluation of the design, role, and kind of nature in urban public space in both growing and shrinking cities. To push further, terrains vagues and urban wilds could serve as catalysts of this new nature, conserved, augmented, expanded, and connected to shape urban growth. Here, the wilds that are a by-product of past development cycles become the backbones rather than the casualties of future urbanization. New development is responsive to, and respectful of, the successional landscapes of abandoned urban-industrial areas (Kowarik & Korner, 2005). Urban populations are exploding worldwide: More people now live in urban areas than outside them. Most of this growth is occurring in the megacities of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as opposed to in the traditional urban centers in Europe and North America. Increased population drives physical growth, concentration, and eventual sprawl, so that the footprint of urbanization expands. Urban areas make signiﬁcant contributions to climate change, including 75 percent of greenhouse gas emissions (Langner & Endlicher, 2007, p. 5). In contrast, many postindustrial cities have shrunk—a condition that breeds fascination and unease. Witness Detroit, the media’s poster child of postindustrial shrinkage. Population decline in the North American rust belt, an over 50-year-old phenomenon, seems irreversible, with emaciated cities located in the heart of more economically and demographically stable regions. It is not that the people have disappeared; former urban dwellers have left the city proper to settle in both the suburbs and growing regions elsewhere in the country (Bruner, 2012). There are 35 cities in the United States (including Detroit and Philadelphia) that once had populations of at least 100,000 people, where now only 50–75 percent of those people remain (U.S. Census Bureau, 2012). As a result, these cities are faced with dwindling tax bases, oversized and under- maintained physical infrastructures, missing social amenities, and lots of open land—land that is both an opportunity and a burden. Ecologists have recently recognized the potential value of this wild new urban wasteland. Cities have rich ecosystems, often with higher biodiversity than areas considered nearly natural, such as agricultural land (Langner

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& Endlicher, 2007, p. 10). This biodiversity results from the complex, compact land use patterns of urban areas that create many habitats in a relatively small area (Rink, 2009). The species that grow in these swaths of unmaintained land create productive ecosystems, “‘hotspots’ of botanic and animal diversity” (Langner & Endlicher, 2007, p. 5). The question becomes whether these spaces can be designed to increase their cultural and economic benefits, without compromising their ecological value. With an economy and a national ideal predicated on growth, shrunken cities present a practical and psychological dilemma. We cannot build our way out of this condition. There is too much land, too little demand, and a complex set of economic, social, and environmental issues. The density model used to build cities—measured in the amount of developable area, using target numbers for square footage of building footprints, floor area ratios, or people per square foot—is not applicable in neighborhoods with few people already. Furthermore, transformation building-by-building or lot-by-lot cannot match the scale of vacancy. There is a role for building, but a limited one, given the extent of political, social, and economic change. An energy-neutral green building— while itself reducing energy use—falls flat in a brown, unremediated, economic and social context. Architecture is too fixed, ossifying over time and lacking enough flexibility to address the scale and fragmented reality of the perforated, shrunken city. To go further, the shrunken city is not a ruin to cart away. With demolition—the only active form of modification occurring in the most vacant parts of the city—empty lots, surface parking areas, sidewalks, and roads are being attacked by nature and returning to a second primordial state. Although there is a measurable ecosystem functioning in a lot taken over by “volunteer species” such as mugwort, ragweed, and paulownia, the human cultural implication is that of neglect. What does it mean to allow or even facilitate industrial cities turning into the wildness of fourth nature? Through specific land management regimes—planting, mowing, fencing, grading—a gradient of urban wilds could be deliberately maintained, allowing a reproductive landscape to emerge from the voids. In addition, programmatic insertions, including cultiva- tion, silviculture, and stormwater management, would offer hybrid economic– ecological models within the greater conservation regime. This urbanism would not allude back to desolate expanses of ancient glacial sands, wild prairies with buffalo roaming free, or the thick Alleghany highland forest, but would offer an alternative future. Where urban population has declined, terrain vague is not only a great challenge but also a great opportunity to contribute to new city- building ideas. By addressing the question of how wildness and people can co- inhabit the urban fabric in a socially, economically, and environmentally viable way, the shrinking city could also propel a different development model for expanding cities worldwide. Respecting natural systems in city building is an old idea, but respecting and encouraging “fourth nature” as a viable, novel

178 Notions of Nature ecosystem, complete with the cosmopolitan wild plants that inhabit cities, is relatively new. Shrinking cities have the context—enough land and time—both to pursue the establishment of ecosystems on urban-industrial wastelands and to prove the benefits of ample wildness, lessons applicable far beyond the rust belt. In the shrunken city, the void becomes the primary ground for future engagement, and the definition, aggregation, and dispersion of voids become a means of structuring the city. Work with voids will demand a different temporal approach to city making: care, patience, and slowness. Landscapes require time to establish; change on them is not immediately perceivable. The foregrounding of time also suggests an alternative to the introduction of something static and fixed into the urban fabric. Inherent flexibility is essential to the future of the still-unstable shrunken city, in which its physical form does not fit its population size and economic means, much like a young child wearing an older sibling’s big clothes. Its physical and demographic size is in flux, and this means it could change for the better. Rapid advances in transportation, communication, and information technologies have created virtual mobility. Global telecommunications connectivity has important ramifications for urban work locations: Physical infrastructure no longer presents as much of a constraint. This spatial collapse— coupled with the pervasiveness of resource depletion and the threats of climate change and natural disaster—weakens people’s desire to seek exotic nature in foreign lands (Girot, 2005, p. 20). Nature is now not integrated into people’s lives only through their conquering the exotic or colonizing the pristine. Exploration turns inward to the local urban landscape and to the postindustrial urban void, the future site of the city.

The Case of Philadelphia

Within North America’s urban context, Philadelphia has a long history, extending both through the development cycles of colonization, consolidation, evacuation, and repopulation, and the nature cycles (ﬁrst, second, third, and fourth, using Hunt’s and Kowarik’s deﬁnitions). Located at the juncture of the escarpment of the Atlantic seaboard fall line—which divides the piedmont and the coastal plain—and the Schuylkill River, Philadelphia was once forest. If left to grow back into wild terrain, it would likely again be forest—this time, a forest deeply altered by the occupation, contamination, and climate change that have occurred since the city was a forest over 400 years ago. Parts of Philadelphia are economically and socially robust, bearing few traces of prior occupations. Other parts form the decimated, postindustrial periphery, with piles of post-demolition debris and beginnings of successional woodlands.

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Structurally, Philadelphia is an unassuming, gridded city, formally laid out by William Penn and Thomas Holme in 1682. Underpinning the grid were utopian urban planning ideals. Penn conceived of a garden city consisting of 800-square-foot city blocks, each with a central mansion surrounded by ﬁelds and gardens. Broad and High (now Market) Streets intersect at Centre Square (where City Hall now is) and divide the city into four quadrants. Each quadrant contains a major public park in its four squares: Rittenhouse, Washington, Franklin, and Logan (Circle). The imposed grid, although rational and rigid, left the residual traces of past routes in the form of diagonal roads and avenues extending out from the core quadrants. Ridge Avenue is one of these routes, a winding road that derives its name from following the high backbone between the Schuylkill and Wissahickon valleys. Originally a Lenni Lenape Indian trail, Ridge Avenue remained an important connection between the center city and its outskirts throughout its development. Urban historian Kenneth Jackson (1985) touted Ridge Avenue as Philadelphia’s spark, calling it the city’s “most important axis of growth” to the northeast (p. 23). Just as Ridge Avenue provided a conduit for urban growth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it has subsequently provided a conduit for postwar and postindustrial urban dispersion. The once-vibrant commercial corridor is now dotted with voids as it makes its way through some of the city’s most distressed neighborhoods. The history of the avenue includes the four natures, going from forest to trail, from farmland to parkland and buildings, from worker housing and factories to vacant lots. Paucities of density are obvious all along Ridge Avenue. The dialectic of growth and dispersion is visually evident. Missing teeth appear in the once continuous row-house blocks. Demolition forges larger gaps. Patches of land have been cleared and abandoned, and buildings removed to entice new development. The area is teetering between evacuation and repopulation. In the Sharswood neighborhood, near the city center and higher-rent residential neighborhoods, the balance seems to be leaning toward a repopulation scheme that promotes the suburbanization of the inner city.

The result is a strange non-conversation between the new housing 13.2 and the remaining expanses of vacant land taking place across the residual Ridge Avenue Cycles

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13.3 infrastructure of the gridded streets. In one part of the neighborhood, the blocks Sharswood have entered the cycle of development, moving from row houses to cul-de- Suburbanization sac subdivisions, while in the other, the blocks engage the cycles of nature, becoming ever more complex ecosystems within the city. Both have emerged from a condition of decline and demolition, but the resultant physical forms respond only to internal logics and not to each other or the overall urban context. Without larger instruments of organization and reciprocity, happenstance proximity trumps urban conversation. To consider the vast ecological potential of these blocks, to see them as a new urban nature to be safeguarded within the dominant global trend toward increased urbanization, questions of appropriate use become paramount.

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How can the voids become productive building blocks for the city? How can 13.4 the shrinking city become a model for the growing city? How can the suburban- Two Sides of North 20th Street ization of the inner city not have the same physical form as the suburbanization of the outer city, with cul-de-sacs and gated communities awkwardly ﬁlling the city block structure, while isolating themselves from the rest of the urban fabric? How can the connection between development and postindustrial “fourth nature” be encouraged rather than inhibited? These questions are prompted from the regional scale to the lot scale. In addition to ameliorating the environmental context and providing potential health beneﬁts, new land use models must be culturally accepted and economically viable. Maintenance is often seen as a burden, but, when compared with alternative building schemes, could form a low-cost, ecologically defensible, contextually appropriate strategy for the urban void. Something can be learned and emulated from ecology—ecology not as metaphor but as material reality shaped by civic and social agendas. Through the creation of a gradient of wildness, human activity, programming, and maintenance, both ecological and urban needs can be addressed across a new connective tissue. To reinvent the shrunken city, one must abandon the conventional concept of the city. Over a decade ago, landscape architect James Corner (2002) made a distinction between landscape and wilderness: “Landscapes are . . . the inevitable result of cultural interpretation and the accumulation of representational sediments over time; they are thereby made distinct from ‘wildernesses’ as they are constructed, or layered” (p. 144). With the reversal of forest depletion starting to occur in the northeastern United States, ecologists are beginning to heed the concept of layering:

Today 65–95% [of New England] is forested and, consequently each forest has a legacy of former use as either woodlot, pasture, or plowed ﬁeld. These contrasting histories exert a strong inﬂuence on modern forest composition. Likewise, even 100–150 years after formerly plowed sites have naturally reforested and resemble natural

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forests, the soil retains a distinctive signature of the past in its structure, appearance, and chemical composition. (Foster, 2000, p. 5)

As ecologists ask how to approach inhabited and cultivated lands that are becoming forest, similar questions are being asked about how to approach previously built-on urban lands that are turning into open terrain. According to ecologist David R. Foster, three voices now dominate the land conservation debate surrounding non-urban lands: those in favor of letting it go wild; those for intensive natural resource use; and those for a cultural restoration of past land uses no longer sustained in the changing environment. From an ecological perspective, the three approaches have various pros and cons. What Foster calls wildlands—unmanaged landscapes—have the advantage of supporting animal habitat in need of wide and connected ranges, but, unlike their urban counterparts, these lands have few total species and even fewer species that are rare or endangered. Intensively used forests have the advantage of providing a resource locally and the opportunity for community-based forestry, with less need for both wood importation and the cutting of old growth forest. However, they require heavy logistical and ﬁnancial investment. Cultural lands— managed landscapes with clear human legacies—maintain diversity, arresting the natural progression to forest and preserving grasslands, wetlands, scrublands, and early successional forests. Further, in many cases, these land use types can be at great risk, often occurring in coastal and riverine environments where there is development pressure. Although they maintain overall diversity, they require intensive land management, including grazing, clearing, mowing, and burning. The urban environment could alter these advantages and disadvan- tages where the constraints and pressures are more intense, but their relative beneﬁts and maintenance requirements would be similar. Wild urban woodlands would foster habitat. An urban forestry project would create a community-based economy, but would require logistical agility and investment. An urban meadow would require initial tilling and annual mowing. Above all, plant species would have to be adapted to the particular social, economic, and environmental conditions of the postindustrial vacant lot. They would need to be tough enough to handle poor soil conditions and heavy use, and would have to be pleasing to passers-by. A similar conservation model has been applied on a small scale in the urban environment at the 18-hectare Natur-Park Südgelände in Berlin, where park designers adopted a hybrid culture–wilderness model to transform a wild urban woodland into a cultural amenity. After nearly 50 years of unchecked spontaneous growth, the site—monitored by a group of interested urban ecologists—was nearly 70 percent woodland. Owing to strong protests against development, the site opened in 2000 as a landscape and nature

183 Jill Desimini conservation area, leaving most of the vegetation and many of the industrial structures intact. The entire “park” was conserved as landscape, with only a portion managed, and most left wild to develop successionally. The remaining areas are arrested, mowed by sheep and maintained by staff, as herbaceous clearings free from shrubs and groves. Overlaid are recreational areas, art pieces, and visitor amenities (Kowarik & Körner, 2005). Should such tactics be applied to the vacant lands along Ridge Avenue in North Philadelphia? The city has already altered building history by enticing cul-de-sac developments on former row-house plots. Why not reverse this history further and encourage forests, woodlots, and grasslands? In this case, the “fourth nature” of the postindustrial wild lands would either progress into a full-fledged forest, reaching “fourth nature” maturity, or continue to cycle into a fifth nature. Fifth nature might not be so much a defeatist condition, in which people sit inside with piped water and potted plants and look to their video screen for exotic landscapes, but rather a more hopeful nature, a less invasive ally of the old second nature, supporting stormwater management and agro-forestry practices. In this instance, the single-family or duplex house that has been introduced into the row-house city would meet up with familiar adjacencies in a compressed space: On one side of Ridge Avenue would be urban housing and infrastructure; on the other, an expanse of trees or meadows. An urban dialogue would be staged. The two sides of the street would demonstrate the productive relationship between city and landscape. The street would no longer be divisive, but rather would articulate an interstitial space that encourages cross-fertilization between humans and plant inhabitants. As a place of both robust buildings and robust nature, Ridge Avenue would again become an important corridor for the city and a spark for its regrowth. The void as building material would express itself at the scale of individual and connected lots, but also as a greater assembly of lots that reveal a new structure for the city. Layers of both geological and urban history would be celebrated, as Ridge Avenue would once again organize and connect commercial and ecological activities. Beyond the avenue, entire blocks could be incorporated into landscape and nature conservation areas, with the gridded streets changing purpose where they no longer provide boundaries for built structures. The city would begin to evolve beyond its once imposed boundaries into a hybrid condition. Swaths of vacant land could: (1) absorb water and carbon, reducing runoff, flooding, and urban pollution, and become an urban infrastructure that would be prohibitively expensive to otherwise build and maintain; (2) be connected to other land to increase habitat for birds and mammals; (3) enhance the cultural benefit of the city, providing rich backyards for residents; (4) increase ecological value; and (5) transition into a sixth nature, a reinvention of the urban park or garden, a designed landscape that does not cede eco-

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13.5 system value and respects the realities of maintenance in the present Ridge Avenue Redeﬁned urban economy. The landscape can return to being the heart of the city, as the seventeenth-century squares were once the heart of Philadelphia, and the nineteenth-century parks were the heart of their cities. This time, though, the heart would not be symbolic. It would not devolve into underused open spaces and vacant lots. The terrain vague would become the terrain vivant, a working heart pumping new life into the porous urban fabric.

References

Bruner, J. (2012). American migration [interactive map]. Forbes. Retrieved from www.forbes.com/ special-report/2011/migration.html Cicero, M. T. (2008). The nature of the gods (P. G. Walsh, Trans.). Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. (Original work published 45 BC.) Clément, G. (2009). The natural history of forsaken places (A. Christian, Trans.). Harvard Design Magazine, 31, 40–43. Clément, G., & Jones, L. (2006). Gilles Clément, une écologie humaniste. Genèva: Aubanel. Corner, J. (2002). Representation and landscape. In S. Swafﬁeld (Ed.). Theory in landscape architecture: A reader (pp. 144–165). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Foster, D. (2000). Conservation lessons and challenges from ecological history. Forest History Today, (Fall), 2–11.

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Girot, C. (2005). Vers une nouvelle nature. In A. Kim, M. Kohte, & C. Moll (Eds.). Landscape architecture in mutation: Essays on urban landscapes (pp. 18–33). Zürich: gta Verlag. Geuze, A. (2010). Second nature. Topos: The International Review of Landscape Architecture & Urban Design, 71, 40–42. Hofmeister, S. (2009). Natures running wild: A social-ecological perspective on wilderness. Nature and Culture, 43 (3), 293–315. Hunt, J. D. (2000). Greater perfections: The practice of garden theory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Jackson, K. T. (1985). Crabgrass frontier: The suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press. Kowarik, I., & Körner, S. (2005). Wild urban woodlands: New perspectives for urban forestry. Berlin, New York: Springer. Langner, M., & Endlicher, W. (2007). Shrinking cities: Effects on urban ecology and challenges for urban development. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Rink, D. (2009). Wilderness: The nature of urban shrinkage? The debate on urban restructuring and restoration in Eastern Germany. Nature and Culture, 43 (3), 275–292. U.S. Census Bureau. (2012). American FactFinder. Retrieved from http://factﬁnder2.census.gov/ faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml

186 Chapter 14

Interim Spaces

Vacant Land, Creativity, and Innovation in the Context of Uncertainty

Krystallia Kamvasinou and Marion Roberts

In urban studies, there is growing recognition of a particular type of urban space emerging in the developed world: vacant land temporarily available owing to stalled developments. The phenomenon is not new. Vacant land tends to follow a cyclical itinerary, always reemerging at times of recession in the development cycle. Examples of “shrinking cities” in the US and Eastern Europe, and abandoned developments in Greece and Ireland, warn of the consequences of a sharp drop in investment. Yet such decline offers its own potential for improvement in terms of interim and everyday use of alternative types of public space. In Detroit, some 33,000 empty lots and vacant houses have been reclaimed for urban farming (Bull & Edwards, 2010). Temporary uses that only last for a short time can range from environmental art projects, such as Agnes Denes’s 1982 “Wheatﬁeld—A Confrontation” in New York, to creative industries located in old railway buildings in Berlin (Oswalt, Misselwitzz, & Overmeyer, 2007). In some cases, temporary uses can become permanent, as for instance in London’s Camley Street Nature Reserve, Gillespie Park, and Meanwhile Gardens (see Kamvasinou, 2011). All examples point to using available resources creatively in times of scarcity, while highlighting issues of transition from a site’s previous use to interim use and future development, including public perceptions and possible opposition. Because of the uncertainty of the duration of each recession, such land exhibits some of the characteristics of terrain vague, as theorized by architect and academic Ignasi de Solà-Morales (1995): open, vacant, leftover,

187 Krystallia Kamvasinou and Marion Roberts undeveloped urban spaces of ambiguous purpose and ownership, uncertain in terms of boundaries and interim in terms of use. The notion of terrain vague “carries both negative and positive connotations: unused but also free to be occupied spontaneously” (Kamvasinou, 2006, p. 255). It challenges common perceptions of “wastelands” as empty and abandoned, as, under closer scrutiny, terrains vagues may prove to be anything but empty, often occupied by everyday activities and reclaimed by nature, hence actively enriching a city’s societal and green space resources. Such interstitial spaces tend to contest official views that classify them as unproductive and disorderly areas, or “dead zones” (Doron, 2007) within the economic structure of the city. The power of terrain vague lies in its offer of an alternative space of freedom to usually heavily monitored and commercialized contemporary public spaces. However powerful, this assertion is not unproblematic in itself, not least so when encountered with the fields of architecture and urban design, where intervention on the land is often the necessary mode of action. It prompts two fundamental questions: First, is there a way that interim use can be incorporated in future plans, and the qualities of terrain vague be integrated in, and inspire, future designs? Second, is terrain vague an idea that can only exist if untouched; is it prone to erasure the moment intervention begins? As Berger (2006, p. 35) has suggested, the former question can find sufficient support in examples from late twentieth-century landscape architecture discourse and practice in relation to postindustrial or inner-city decommissioned infrastructural landscapes. Such practice has led to the emergence of “vague parks” (Kamvasinou, 2006), ex-terrains vagues turned into public spaces, while acknowledging and accommodating existing informal use and activities. Notable examples include the Natur-Park Südgelände in Berlin and the Duisburg Nord Landscape Park in the Ruhr region in Germany, the High Line and Fresh Kills in New York, and the riverfront at Bordeaux in France. Such practice, however, is only possible because, in the past few decades, industrial ruins and disused infrastructure have been widely acknowledged as part of the Western world’s cultural heritage and have often been reused as public amenities with the support of local communities. This has been reinforced by further literature on “urban wildscapes” (Baines, 2008; Jorgensen & Keenan, 2008; Kowarik & Körner, 2005), which supports embracing the wild, natural side of such spaces. The second question about its vulnerability to erasure is perhaps harder to confront, without diminishing terrain vague to an overtly romanticized space of resistance. It is important, hence, to delve into the etymological roots of the term “vague,” one of which reminds us of its temporal dimension: it is “woge” (wave, in German) and, hence, space in flux, in constant change. Any attempt to freeze it in time is against terrain vague’s very own nature, and ultimately all we are left with is celebrating its ephemerally charming character.

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This brings along the issue of temporariness in the city. There is a growing literature on the rise of “temporary urbanism” and “loose space” as catalysts and alternative strategies for the future development of cities (Bishop & Williams, 2012; Franck & Stevens, 2007a, 2007b; Groth & Corijn, 2005; Oswalt et al., 2007; Temel & Haydn, 2006). This suggests that vacant land “can accommodate a range of activities not easily permitted or tolerated in officially designated public spaces” (Kamvasinou, 2011, p. 161), such as creative uses, which add color and life in a neighborhood, or activities that, “could deliver local skills and products which outlive the sites and remain as a long- term legacy” (Taylor, 2008, p. 5). Bottom–up approaches to vacant land in relation to urban agriculture and food production have been investigated and theorized as “Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes” (Viljoen, 2005). Mostafavi and Najle (2003) have suggested that “temporary uses of such sites already contain clues to the potential diversity of future activities they might contain” (p. 7). Overall, interim uses constitute a critique of the aestheticization of urban space by design that does not reflect the social needs of the community of users in a more substantial manner; they act as an alternative to overt commercialization, privatization, and sanitization of public space (Lees, 2010). Interim uses of vacant land offer an increase in public accessibility, bringing together people from all walks of life. There is now a growing body of research into the “publicness” of public space (see, for example, Carmona, 2010a, 2010b; De Magalhaes, 2010; Nemeth & Schmidt, 2011; Varna & Tiesdell, 2010). Here, the argument is that the relative “success” of public space can be related both to its various physical attributes and to its “co-production” with its users (Holland, Clark, Katz, & Peace, 2007; Worpole & Knox, 2007). In this respect, there is much to be learned from the spontaneous, unofficial use of urban leftover or derelict space with regards to urban resilience and a light framework for intervention.

From Urban Resistance to Urban Resilience

Vacant lands are often perceived as marginal lands, but also as presenting an alternative to contemporary public spaces that tend to be heavily monitored and formalized. Despite often being privately owned, they can be easy to access and can accommodate a variety of interests and ages, often performing as outlets for escapism or adventure in ways similar to “adventure playgrounds.” Terrains vagues have been often associated with marginal groups and activities and, hence, portrayed as either spaces of resistance or spaces outside the law. Interim use of terrains vagues suggests a more balanced view that includes, and beneﬁts, a wider range of actors, moving thus from “resistance” to “resilience.” Implicit here is the possibility that an increase in temporary uses

189 Krystallia Kamvasinou and Marion Roberts increases “urban resilience” to dramatic changes to the development cycle. Urban resilience is a multifaceted concept still under debate as to its full definition (Berkes, Colding, & Folke, 2003; Berkes & Folke, 1998). References to the reduction of vulnerability to both natural and man-made hazards (United Nations secretary general, as cited in Heathcote, 2010) position resilience as a concept that encompasses all three facets of sustainability: environmental, social, and economic. Emergent research has focused on how uncertainty and ecosystem services can be integrated into the social practice of urban planning (see Bull, 2010; Ernstson et al., 2010), which traditionally has focused on long- term, permanent uses (Cullingworth & Nadin, 2009). Urban resilience implies that cities are not just part of the problem but also part of the solution, as innovation tends to be concentrated in cities (see Bettencourt, Lobo, Helbing, Kuhnert, & West, 2007; Ernstson et al., 2010). Resilience implies bouncing back after crisis: returning back to “normal” by embracing change, with the environment acting as a backdrop for political action. In this sense, reinventing, reimagining, and appropriating terrains vagues can be seen as acts of resilience, possibly the only sensible acts in a climate of public spending cuts, scarce land resources, and reduced funds for public space. Interim use of vacant land can offer both short- and long-term creative solutions for uncertainty. For example, a number of top–down initiatives in relation to allotments and food growing were undertaken in London in the period 2009–2010 in response to larger or smaller, and often central, city spaces being left undeveloped after the financial downturn of 2008, or more generally left over owing to lack of maintenance funds. Although it is too early to propose a theory for interim use of vacant land and urban resilience based on the effects of these initiatives, a first overview of their representation in the press can inform a critical assessment with a view to formulating an emerging framework for intervention. In February 2010, Property Week, the weekly news magazine for the commercial property sector, launched its “Site Life” campaign, “aimed at encouraging the public and private sectors to work together to bring temporary uses to empty sites and buildings” (Rigby, 2010a). Although the campaign was not necessarily focused on food growing and gardening, in March 2010, this was followed by “Urban Gardens,” a government-backed initiative in conjunction with the Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens. The scheme supported landowners to temporarily let unused land to gardeners via a “Meanwhile license.” The initiative was based on research that also supported the concept of a community “land bank of publicly and privately owned sites for allotments, city farms, and gardens” (Rigby, 2010b, p. 13). Although the response to the former initiative registered a strong professional willingness to participate in such temporary schemes, the latter initiative confirmed that there is also public appetite for “meanwhile” uses. Surprisingly, the starting point was the non-stalled regeneration scheme near

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14.1 Location for King’s Cross Central Development Scheme, London. (Image Credit: Anna Smith)

King’s Cross train station. Here, the key idea was to utilize parts of the site while they were waiting their turn to be developed in later phases. To avoid the risk of people assuming that the temporary use would become permanent, and, hence, inhibiting future development, developers Argent introduced mobile “skip gardens” that could be moved to different locations on site, or elsewhere. Subsequently, the mayor of London, together with the chair of London Food Link, launched the Capital Growth scheme to transform 2,012 pieces of land in London into space for food growing by 2012—the year the Olympic Games were held in London. Organizations involved in providing land for community gardening schemes included British Waterways, local councils, schools, hospitals, housing estates, and private companies, and the National Trust and the Royal Parks provided allotments (Vidal, 2009). The Edible Estates competition, which was launched in June 2010 and ran until October 2010, was part of Capital Growth. It aimed at “encouraging housing associations and local authorities to commit plots of land for tenants to nurture into thriving food gardens” (Pati, 2010, p. 33). The focus was on

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social housing, as “these estates often have large areas of open space around 14.2 them, but they are not always imaginatively designed, well-used or well- The Skip Garden, King’s Cross, London. (Image maintained” (Williams, as cited in Pati, 2010, p. 35). Examples of food-growing Credit: Anna Smith) projects shortlisted for the award demonstrate how they have helped people to reclaim open space, and housing providers to engage with the community (Pati, 2010). In many cases, the projects have created a strong sense of community ownership and helped to manage antisocial behavior, evidenced by the lack of vandalism. The loss of allotments has also been highlighted during the progress of the Olympic Games projects in northeast London (McEwan, 2009). The Capital Growth project is, hence, a good step, as it encourages innovative ways of setting up unused land for growing, although the actual financial support is limited. Its success is evidenced by the diversity of the 500 Capital Growth plots across London, which can be found in places such as “schools, on roofs, in skips, and even on a canal boat” (Boycott, 2010, p. 30). The benefits of food growing are seen as wide ranging, from contributing to the regeneration of local communities and improving the quality of open spaces, to solving antisocial behavior issues, counteracting obesity with fitness and healthy eating, and promoting intergenerational collaboration and social cohesion, as well as aiding better space management. It has to be noted here that London has a history of food growing as an act of resilience that dates back to the Second World War. The related

192 Interim Spaces

campaign then was called “Dig for Victory” and reﬂected the immediate survival needs of the British urban society. Based on the premise that food growing could be done anywhere, even by ordinary householders, Kensington Palace’s gardens were dug up, as were tennis courts, golf clubs, public parks, and even the moat of the Tower of London (Minns, 1980). By 1943, there were 1.4 million allotments, and a survey showed that half of all manual workers either had an allotment or productive garden (Minns, 1980, p. 95). It is, hence, also due to this local history that food-growing initiatives in London have been so enthusiastically received. On the other hand, the most discussed initiative in relation to the intended, but in the end not realized, creation of a new public space has been landowner British Land’s (the UK’s second-biggest property company) small- budget competition for a public realm project in the City of London. This would have been in the place of architect Richard Rogers’ mothballed “Cheese Grater” building on Leadenhall Street. The development had been put on hold in the summer of 2009, but developers and landowners were invited by the local planning authority to ﬁnd alternative uses during the recession. A number of young and promising practices took part; tellingly, the winning scheme was a farm-like public space, which could form a prototype for other stalled sites.

14.3 Dig for Victory: Working on an Allotment in Kensington Gardens, London, 1942. (Image Credit: Imperial War Museum, London)

193 Krystallia Kamvasinou and Marion Roberts

The competition was seen in a positive light by both young practices 14.4 enthusing about being able to “make their mark on the City in such a prestigious ”The Secret Garden.” Presentation Board, site” (shortlisted Asif Khan, as cited in Hopkirk, 2010) and the public, who were Leadenhall City Farm expecting “a tranquil urban oasis for at least a couple of years” (Clarke, 2009). Competition Project by Editor of Building Design Amanda Baillieu spoke of developers’ “civic duty” Mitchell Taylor Workshop. (Image and “nurturing talent” (Baillieu, 2010, p. 36), while others spoke of “enlightened Credit: Mitchell Taylor thinking.” Despite the huge publicity, which included “PopUp City: Ideas for Workshop) re-using vacant urban sites,” an exhibition of shortlisted entries at the Building Centre in London in March 2010, the project did not materialize, allegedly owing to the improvement of the commercial property market happening more quickly than predicted in 2009. Skeptics, however, have since criticized the initiative as being about developers “being seen to be doing rather than actually doing” (Taylor, as cited in Rogers, 2010). Other interim uses in London have included football pitches, with Powerleague (the largest 5-a-side football provider in the UK) operating on temporary sites in central London and claiming “innovative approaches to building and pitch design to allow them to be non-intrusive and quickly removable should the site be reactivated for development,” as well as allocating signiﬁcant time for the community to use the pitches for free (Tony Scott, as cited in Rigby, 2010b, p. 13). Vacant land has also been used as pop-up

194 Interim Spaces

14.5 exhibition space, for example by South Kensington Estates, which for three ”Meadow.” Leadenhall years has utilized its temporarily empty shops and land in central London for City Farm Competition Project by Mitchell this purpose, as part of the Brompton Design District initiative, together with Taylor Workshop. local partners in the retail and creative industries. Such use adds vibrancy to (Image Credit: Mitchell unused space; by collaborating with the nearby Royal College of Art and the Taylor Workshop) Victoria and Albert Museum, the intention was to also “bring design beyond the boundaries of the Institutions and on to the streets,” and to provide “designers and artists with a temporary, low-cost platform for their work” (Rigby, 2010b, p. 12).

A “Light Touch” Framework for Intervention

The above review has led to a number of critical ﬁndings. First, it is becoming apparent that, in contrast to historical examples, which were characterized by bottom–up initiatives, namely local activists reclaiming unused land and subsequent political lobbying to keep the status of such land as public space, current examples stem from top–down initiatives, initiated by landowners, developers, governmental bodies, and even the mayor of London. This fundamental change marks a paradigm shift in attitudes that displaces perceptions of vacant land and interim use from the “margins” to a more “mid-ground” place. Examples of genuine collaboration between the mayor of London, local councils, and local ALMOs (arm’s length management organizations), led by local residents, point to a key criterion for intervention that can ensure that,

195 Krystallia Kamvasinou and Marion Roberts in a difficult economic climate, sites do not remain closed off and unused, but that they continue to contribute to city life. Temporary interventions could form part of a developer’s corporate social responsibility, establishing a reputation that would make future development more acceptable by the community. They can offer good value for money, at a time when public space funds are being reduced, and can act as generator of other similar initiatives. Importantly, a framework for intervention needs to broaden the notion of “community” in this context. As evidenced in the previous analysis, vacant land is contested ground, with a number of actors competing over it. In this schema, which also includes landowners, developers, and local authorities, community is routinely considered a unified entity in opposition to, or at best in synergy with, some of the other actors; however, it is obvious from the examples examined that this is not usually the case. Local residents in housing estates may be wary of antisocial youths occupying no-go areas, while the latter obviously also form a social group with its own demands on space. Temporary uses are often cited as enabling those disparate community groups to come together and their internal tensions to be resolved. These uses can thus provide a common ground where different social needs and goals can coexist—so long as the proposed uses allow enough freedom and do not seem to explicitly represent one social group over another. However, the range of temporary uses may vary, from relatively subtle to more organized and popularized, and at either end there is the danger that marginal groups will be perceived as either “excluding” everybody else, or the other way around. It is worth noting here that there is often a misconception relating to the perceived lack of management of interim spaces. For a temporary use to be installed, there is a fair amount of management required, which often equals that of a more permanent project. The main difference is that the organization and commitment involved are usually bottom–up, with no pre- existing infrastructure. One of the emerging criteria for a framework of interim use management seems, hence, to be flexibility. This requires an acceptance that the whole temporary project is not tied to a specific piece of land, but rather to a specific time period. The temporariness of intervention enables innovation (Baines, as cited in Vidal, 2009): Interim spaces often carry experiments in land uses, governance, and design, as there is minimum risk that these will turn into permanent failures. Successful experimentation can offer the potential for replication of interim interventions on other sites and for longer periods, or for their integration into more permanent developments. Appropriation and embracing of interim spaces from the different factions within the local community are also important, as local people are more likely to know where such spaces are and to occupy them on an everyday basis. A framework for intervention should, therefore, build upon the plurality of local meanings of value attributed to interim spaces, even if those may initially contrast rather than complement more mainstream definitions of value

196 Interim Spaces associated with other involved actors. Bringing residents together, teaching people new skills and how to learn from each other, and enhancing community cohesion through structured social events, as well as by involving people in the making and management of the intervention, can instill a strong sense of ownership that helps reduce vandalism and increase safety (Baverstock, as cited in Hickey, 2010). Despite the positive initiatives, barriers do exist. Landowners may be “reluctant to give permission, often because they are fed up with the long- term management issues of the space” (Boycott, 2010, p. 30). However, a notable example sets a new standard in dealing with temporary use. Transport for London (TfL) has created a template lease agreement—similar to a “meanwhile license”—that can also be used by others for free, allowing community growers to initiate projects for a limited period on TfL land (Boycott, 2010, p. 30). Similar temporary leases can allow for experimental uses, while reassuring landowners that interim spaces will remain just that—interim. “Temporary use requires a ‘light touch’ in planning to marry the demand for speed with the need to safeguard surrounding occupiers and the environment” (Haylock, as cited in Tighe, Sherwood, & Bolger, 2011). The overall trend is for interim uses to provide innovative ways of setting up unused land with limited ﬁnancial support. This marks a change in perception that has brought the topic to the foreground of people’s discussions and has highlighted the importance of interim spaces, beyond their monetary value, for a number of related stakeholders. As interim uses become more widespread, knowledge of the range of approaches taken by different initiatives will help both landowners and the public to widen their horizons as to what is possible.

Conclusions

As cities have succumbed to a process of recession, vacant land has been increasing, generating “vague” spaces that can be seen as opportunities for temporary urbanism rather than a threat. Although planning laws may not be particularly accommodating for interim uses, the current experience from London shows that local authorities and the mayor of London can act as facilitators of such a process, encouraging developers and landowners to offer unused land for creative public use. This emerging practice has been supported by previous research in Europe (Groth & Corijn, 2005; Oswalt et al., 2007) and forms a signiﬁcant demonstration of the beneﬁts of “loose space,” as theorized by Franck and Stevens (2007a, 2007b). The extent to which vacant land is used for interim intervention is still limited, but its impact on people’s empower- ment, landowners’ perceptions, and future planning reform should not be underestimated.

197 Krystallia Kamvasinou and Marion Roberts

Revisiting the two fundamental questions posed at the beginning of this essay, it is important to ponder their relevance to the London initiatives studied. First, our brief review shows that incorporating interim use and the qualities of terrain vague in planning and design can help enhance a site’s present and future value, not only for the benefit of landowners and local groups, but also for users of the wider open space network of the city. Vacant land, either raw or “lightly touched,” emerges as the ground for vital public acts, namely indeterminate and collective occupation, which can help develop a no- go area into a well-valued community space, acting thus as a catalyst for putting a neglected urban space back on the map. Recent initiatives in London (for example, the competition “Meanwhile London: Opportunity Docks”) have already started to incorporate this knowledge into their bidding briefs, expecting the bidders to indicate how the interim use may prepare the ground for a more permanent one in the future, especially in cases such as the London docks, where future development is very likely. A light-touch framework for intervention, which, as we saw, is already spontaneously emerging in practice, could be formally incorporated in planning policy and design guidance to help with funding and management, and to assist with the short timeframes of such projects. The second question was whether terrain vague can only exist if untouched. Critically, do terrains vagues lose their special charm and (unmanaged) nature, once brought to the foreground and opened up, and even further, once intervention begins? This question stems from a romantic view that conceives of terrain vague as a playground of fascination and adventure, a field of freedom away from regulation. We have shown that this view assumes a homogenous community (of social outsiders, or eccentrics) that does not exist; for many, terrain vague can be considered a precarious wasteland. A more balanced view may accept some degree of physical or social danger that the users can self-regulate, and even distinguish between “actual as opposed to perceived risks” (Tylecote, 2008, p. 103), in order to leave some of the existing “wild” qualities of terrain vague untouched and achieve a balance between preservation of social and natural diversity and enhanced public accessibility. It is important to note, however, that fixing uses can be a barrier to the social and natural processes, and the ongoing transformations, that are partly the nature of terrain vague. An argument can thus be made for acknowledging certain terrains vagues as official vessels for change, for all types of non- designated public and semi-public use—a market for 10 years, a nature reserve for another 10 years. The small-scale, low-cost examples of current initiatives in London show that, in times of increased environmental awareness and economic downturn, terrains vagues accommodating interim uses can redefine public space in the resilient city. We believe that, in the contemporary city, terrain vague is a necessity, not a problem: an important urban valve, an urban space in flux, unfixed, and, hence, one welcoming, absorbing, and registering

198 Interim Spaces change, a barometer of a city’s inherent pressures and processes of growth and decline.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the following individuals: Anna Smith, Eric Mackenzie, and Rob Mitchell. We are also grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for supporting this research.

References

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200 Chapter 15

The Interstitial Challenge

Manifestations of Terrain Vague in Detroit and Clichy-sous-Bois, Paris

Jim Stevens and Anirban Adhya

Introduction

Manifestations of terrain vague take diverse forms. Ever since Ignasi de Solà- Morales (1995) coined the term to describe a form of strange absence in the contemporary metropolis, scholars have studied the varying urban morphology of terrain vague—from abandoned spaces in a city (Oswalt, 2006) to spon - taneous opportunities in the periphery (Lévesque, 2002), from urban waste landscapes (Berger, 2007) to postindustrial infrastructure (d’Hooghe, 2009), from an “adaptive capacity” of community design activism (Fuad-Luke, 2009) to a way of design thinking in places and non-places (Augé, 1995; Crang & Thrift, 2000). In the context of such a heterogeneous notion of terrain vague, we define terrain vague from the perspective of everyday urbanism (de Certeau, 1984) as a shifting urban form shaped by on-the-ground everyday actions, reactions, and appropriations of people, organizations, and institutions. Our definition is shaped by past academic definitions (descriptive and analytical identifications), but also interpreted through the lens of design, as we identify challenges and appropriate responses. The interstitial challenge of terrain vague is a design problem that requires understanding and restraint. To this end, we propose a vision of design as an act of tending, as opposed to linear problem solving. To tend to terrain vague is to reach comfort with the apparent systems at hand,

201 Jim Stevens and Anirban Adhya systems not created, regulated, or designed by architects or urban planners. Given the cultural and formal training received by most working urban planners and architects, the idea of tending, as opposed to colonialist creation, is a challenging limitation we term “the interstitial challenge.” Our essay investigates the ways in which different agencies and processes influence terrain vague, and how terrain vague morphology could become a rich narrative of urban transformation through design. Despite the fluidity and diversity of terrain vague morphology, we emphasize the consistent presence of certain processes influencing terrain vague morphology, rather than the forms themselves. Our intent is not so much to discuss the undefined nature of terrain vague as to consider it from the perspective of large-scale systems and specific responses to these systems. We do so by examining the city as a problem of organized complexity, in which systematic organization of forces and agencies influencing and affecting the diverse landscapes of terrain vague becomes the unit of analysis. Introducing a design process into terrain vague requires proactive and unsolicited acts that are crucial to the continual understanding of such areas. Designing in terrain vague necessitates a shift from a linear process of decision- making to a circular loop of information that requires constant tending. The design process of tending must be conducted in a sensitive way; we must use our full powers of observation and resist the impulse to design unobtainable solutions. Terrain vague is not a blank canvas for design. Terrain vague is, in itself, the outcome of social and environmental dilemmas providing a framework for continual understanding of these complex sociopolitical processes. To design for terrain vague is to accept the process of tending. We consider this process of tending by conducting case studies of two distinct urban systems: Detroit and Clichy-sous-Bois, Paris (hereafter referred to as Clichy). Whereas Detroit exemplifies a weak, post-Fordist central city with population density and economic opportunities in the periphery, Clichy represents a segregated suburban edge with a strategic lack of mobility and accessibility from the sociopolitical epicenter of urban Paris. Though these two cities have very different center–periphery relationships, similar historic social–perceptual forces and similar political and economic agencies (institutions, organizations, and communities) have been critical in the evolution of their urban landscapes. Our case study methodology involves empirical documentation, mapping, and analysis of three critical processes of terrain vague transformation: (1) construction of historic boundaries; (2) connection between economic and political systems; and (3) sustenance of social perceptions.

Metro Detroit and Clichy-sous-Bois

Half of humanity now lives in cities and their associated urbanized regions. Within the next two decades, nearly 60 percent of the world’s population will

202 The Interstitial Challenge be urban dwellers (United Nations Center for Human Settlements, 2009). The phenomenon of global urban growth, though universal, is characterized by a powerful contradiction that reveals that the growth is not uniform in many urban situations. In shrinking cities, the growth is occurring in certain pockets of the metropolis. Although there is overall metropolitan growth, there is simultaneous displacement, deterioration, and devaluation of other urban areas—urban cores, inner-city areas, and ﬁrst ring suburbs. This is the territory in which terrains vagues occur, regardless of scale, urban typology, or size of city or suburb. Terrain vague is ﬂuid across scale and content. It is the manifestation of forces and processes that cut across scale of building, site, community, and city. Such a dynamic urban condition characterizes the terrains vagues of greater Detroit and Clichy-sous-Bois.

Detroit

When driving through the city of Detroit, one frequently sees a bumper sticker that reads: “I Lift Detroit in Prayer.” Well intentioned, the driver broadcasts his/her prayer with the hope that the salvation of Detroit will materialize. As the church spiritually engages in helping the city, the mayor launches The Detroit Works Project, one of the many roadmaps responding to the difficult issues Detroit faces. Meanwhile, politicians from different constituencies continue to quibble over power sharing and the respective roles of the city and suburbs in the metro area, each side protecting its political boundaries. At the same time, a corporate ketchup manufacturer receives approval to use a large quantity of vacant properties in Detroit to create urban farms. Corporations create spin to help the city gain population—they have somehow contributed to the city’s growth, but still many questions of neighborhood needs and development remain unanswered. In response to the corporate plans, several artists cover walls along the Dequindre Cut with graffiti of a rustic city and the everyday struggles for survival in the city. These painters, many from affluent suburbs, are seduced by the city’s decay and create iconographic murals influenced by the international marketing phenomenon known as hip-hop. The church, the politician, the capitalist, and the artist are all actively reacting to the unprecedented decline of one of the United States’ greatest cities.

Clichy-sous-Bois

Arriving at the Gare de Gargan, one has little sense of being on the edge of Paris. It is not Haussmann’s Paris, but a suburban Paris where the tree-lined streets and dense housing provide a different urban scale. The continuity soon gives way to the sprawling public towers of Clichy, the origin of rioting and civil

203 Jim Stevens and Anirban Adhya unrest in the fall of 2005. Clichy is one of the poorest and most crime-ridden Parisian banlieues (suburbs). The population of Clichy’s housing projects suffers from substandard living conditions and exclusion from French society (Champagne, 2000; Hajjat, 2005; Poupeau, 2006). The social breakdown (fracture sociale) between Paris proper and Clichy is evident in the pervasive graffiti campaigns that proclaim “Nique le police” (Fuck the police) and “Hardcore 93” (93 being the French postal code for Clichy). In Detroit and Clichy, we find two comparable issues for analysis: one social, one environmental. “White flight” and urban renewal in Detroit are parallel to the urban policies of France (politique de la ville), and both of these conditions have shaped a terrain vague landscape outside the control of its occupants, marked by poverty and joblessness. Detroit, once a city nearing 2 million, has fallen to fewer than 1 million, resulting in vast urban decay and widespread demolition. The once dense city is now perforated by a not-quite- urban, not-quite-rural landscape that is visually and emotionally jarring to many, intriguing and beautiful to others. By contrast, the environmental oddment of Clichy was a planned terrain vague. Yielding to Le Corbusier’s utopian vision of high-rise “towers in the park” with “streets in the sky,” the occupation of the landscape has been shifted upwards, leaving ambiguity at the street level. Manifestation of terrain vague is distinctly different in Detroit and in Clichy; nevertheless, we posit that these manifestations result from critical social and environmental dilemmas influenced by similar forces and agencies of change.

Examining the Social and Environmental Dilemmas: Spatial Geographies and Human Ecologies

The intersection between the social and the environmental dilemmas in Detroit and Clichy presents unique design challenges for architects and urban designers. How can we understand terrain vague landscapes? What is an appropriate design response to these landscapes? How does an architect or designer conceive of designs, while avoiding normative ideals and counterproductive urban renewal policies? What does an empirical architecture look like, and how does it operate and perform? How does one study such an area without treating the occupants as zoo animals (Parc de Thoiry) or cheapening the seriousness of the issues through expressions of voyeuristic aestheticism (Daskalakis, Waldheim, & Young, 2001)? What programmatic design solutions are appropriate, and what new design territory can be discovered within the unique social and environmental contexts found in both Detroit and Clichy? We examine the spatial geography and human ecology of terrain vague by focusing on four critical forces of transformation: (1) historic boundaries, (2) economic forces, (3) social perceptions, and (4) politics.

204 The Interstitial Challenge

Historic Boundaries

Once a vibrant industrial and urban machine, “the arsenal of democracy,” Detroit brought hope and refuge to thousands. In the aftermath of the Great Depres- sion, Detroit led the nation in economic triumph (Sugrue, 1996). The rapid expansion of wartime production drastically reduced unemployment in the city. Between 1940 and 1943, the number of unemployed workers in Detroit fell from 135,000 to 4,000 (Sugrue, 1996). The excitement driven by automation and the assembly line lifted the city in a time of defeat. Fast-forward to 2002: Detroit had lost nearly half of its population since 1950 (Sugrue, 1996). Today, an estimated 40 of the city’s 139 square miles of formerly built land are now vacant, a total area roughly the size of San Francisco or Boston (Gallagher, 2009). Throughout these transformations, the racial constructions of blackness and whiteness have assumed spatial meaning. The discriminatory process is crystallized by many urban renewal and housing projects. Poor Black neighborhoods have been bulldozed for new highways, and, in several housing project developments, with the help of federally insured home loans (FHA), walls were built to create concrete separations between new White development and nearby Black communities, which were portrayed as “slums.” Historic boundaries built on racial politics and economics are found, still intact, throughout the Detroit region. Today, historic city boundaries such as Eight Mile and Alter Road are reinforced spatially and politically through popular culture and media (Figure 15.1). As a result, a formal physical barrier between communities at the urban boundaries

15.1 Artistic Appropriation of a 1940-Built Wall, Humanizing the Historic Segregation. (Photo by Anthony Printz, 2012)

205 Jim Stevens and Anirban Adhya enforces a lack of connectivity and integration. At the northern boundary of Detroit, Eight Mile Road not only defines the historic city–suburb divide, but also embodies a larger geography of racial segregation. Highlighted in Figure 15.2, Eight Mile Road has become a spatial expression of territoriality, defined by its racial dimension. As a result, the postindustrial landscape, marked by a weak urban core and surrounded by fragmented communities, has reinforced the character of the Detroit metropolitan area. Racial distribution in Detroit is spatially manifested in a strong territorial order, based on often-vague perceptions about race and arbitrary political intentions. Though the urban territories are shaped by rigid and historic sociopolitical boundaries, the evolving human ecology across this geopolitical boundary transforms the edge into a site for careful examination and empirical studies of complex terrain vague phenomena of economic and demographic evolution. Further understanding of other dimensions of the urban condition, such as income distribution, political alliances, spatial distribution of age, and everyday collaborations, might reveal a plethora of possibilities within this urban periphery, making the municipal boundaries porous and open for on-the-ground appropriation by residents and institutions. Unlike Detroit, Clichy was a planned utopia, whose designers hoped to provide housing and open green space to suburban Parisians. Today, Paris’s 15.2 banlieues range dramatically from wealthy to poor. Originally built in response Detroit’s Racial and to a postwar housing shortage, the banlieues were initially occupied only by Ethnic Divides and Its Weak Economic middle-class citizens. As the housing shortage eased, most middle-class Conditions as Seen inhabitants relocated to urban areas. The housing blocks were left for North Through Vacant Land. African immigrants, many of whom were living as refugees from the Algerian (Map reconstructed based on guidelines War, displaced by the decolonization of French colonies in Africa. As with developed by Eric Detroit, the environmental result was the dramatic separation and isolation of Fisher. Data from the poor. Census 2000. Base map from University of The physical configuration of Clichy, purposeful or not, reinforces the Michigan Map Library ideals of isolation and separation. Originally conceived according to the database)

206 The Interstitial Challenge architectural ideals of Le Corbusier, with distributed public housing blocks, Clichy is also arranged with a clear separation of urban program; housing is relegated to mid-rise blocks, retail and services are on the ground level, and “public” green spaces fall in between, creating uncomfortable, non-human- scale proportions. To further aggravate the isolation, the housing blocks are surrounded by ring roads, the N403 and N407. The roads operate as physical and perceptual boundaries, discouraging pedestrian circulation into the neighborhoods. The isolation is physical and infrastructural. The 601ab bus is the most blatant example of infrastructural isolation. Clichy’s only direct link to the outside world, the 601ab bus, takes more than two hours to travel to Paris (far longer than buses from other suburbs of equal distance).

Economic Forces

The economy of southeast Michigan is in the midst of a structural crisis. The region is in imminent danger of losing its ability to grow in the face of out- migration encouraged by the weak economic conditions and resultant infrastructure vacancy (Figure 15.2). With its vacant spaces, diminishing employment, changing demographic proﬁle, and deteriorating physical environment, the current landscape reﬂects the enormous economic pressures the metropolis is facing. Like the postindustrial economy as a whole, the region faces a continued decrease in the manufacturing and retail industrial base, with a simultaneous increase in knowledge-based industries, healthcare and social services, and administrative and waste services (Southeast Michigan Council of Governments, 2008). This evolution of the industrial economy requires an exploration of terrain vague with an eye to identifying resources, restructuring economic policies, and forging creative partnerships. The terrain of industrial heritage and high-quality workforce is spread across the region, cutting across political boundaries of the city and the suburban counties. The region’s failure to understand economies of scale, especially in terms of regional frameworks, exacerbates the problem of economic and industrial transformation. The economic conditions of Clichy declined sharply after the postwar middle-class exodus from the estates or cités. Prior to the 2005 riots, most French citizens knew that Clichy was depressed, but failed to realize how severely. The riots exposed the conditions in Clichy, and the government was forced to respond with large infusions of public money. Several new towers on the edge of Clichy now provide 2,111 dwelling units. Despite the multi-million euro investment, however, little improvement has been provided to the thousands of residents who live in the Chêne Pointu estate located in the heart of Clichy (Le Roux, 2010). To further aggravate the economic conditions, one- third of the population of Clichy is on welfare, with 30–40 percent of people under the age of 24 out of work (Le Roux, 2010). Even with the large investment,

207 Jim Stevens and Anirban Adhya the conditions in Clichy are dire. No amount of euros will mend the social scars from the past; it will take a large shift in social orientation for the economic potential of Clichy to emerge.

Social Barriers and Perceptions

Detroit’s postwar urban crisis is the result of complex interrelated histories of race, residence, and work. The landscape of Metro Detroit is spatially deﬁned by economic inequality (failed capitalism) and unequal treatment of the poor underclass (problems of race and class). It is further complicated by misguided and racially motivated policies (Black political retributions in Detroit and White backlashes in the region). Racial discrimination in housing and employment during the 1940s and 1950s constrained the poor African–American population within the city limits of Detroit as a permanent underclass. Their situation worsened during 1960s urban renewal projects. The limited choices remaining for the Black urban poor, and the failed policies of three decades, led to the 1967 race riot that is still a scar on the social landscape of Detroit. Along with the historic Black–White divide, the social ecology of postmodern Detroit is further complicated by diverse cultures and plural values based on ethnicity (Polish, Irish, Hmong, Chaldean, Arabic, Southeast Asian), sexual orientation (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, straight), class (blue collar, white collar), age (young, middle aged, old), and family structure (traditional family with a mother and father, empty nest, single parent, non-traditional family with same-sex parents). Instead of fostering diversity and multicultural values, the historic sociocultural barriers have created stereotypical images of various social groups, resulting in mistrust and fear. This fear of the “other” has created friction among people and communities regarding allocation, management, control, and sustenance of resources in valuable assets such as schools, libraries, recreation centers, and cultural centers. Within this context of segregation and mistrust exists an aggregation of urban decay that is the catalyst of the interstitial landscape. Regardless of social class, the term banlieues has become, for many French, a euphemism for poor, emigrant, and Muslim housing. The negative connotation has given the poor Muslim youth of suburban Paris a rallying point and a self-identity that is not “secular French” but “Muslim banlieue.” This isolation has been reinforced by policies that further isolate the population socially and economically. In 2004, the French government passed a law restricting Muslim girls from wearing headscarves in public schools (Crampton, 2011). Framed as a means of promoting laïcité (French secularism), such laws have alienated Muslims. Constant harassment from police and an increase in arrests have bred a negative relationship of mistrust and anger. In the fall of 2005, the tension between citizens and law enforcement reached a fever pitch, and riots broke out in Clichy. Police, after being called

208 The Interstitial Challenge to a construction site to investigate a possible break-in, apparently chased three teenagers into a nearby power substation. Two of the teenagers died from electrocution, and one was seriously injured (Klausner, 2011). In retaliation for what was seen as an overzealous police response, the Paris banlieues erupted in riots, releasing years of underlying social tension. After weeks of a government-declared state of emergency, thousands of arrests, and burned cars, the 2005 riots ended, but the mutual tension and mistrust between citizens and the government still remain. Spurred by social barriers and mistrust, a radical redistribution of urban assets created the not-quite-urban, not-quite-suburban landscape of Detroit—a brittle, perforated landscape that frames terrain vague. Terrain vague has manifested itself in Detroit in the spaces between the surviving elements of the city’s former landscape. To further complicate our understanding of terrain vague, there is no clear quantitative method to map it, as one might map other features of the city (roads, buildings, natural features) (Figure 15.3). It is difficult to develop cartography that delineates divisions between terrain vague and clearly quantifiable property boundaries and easements that are legislated, outlined, or drawn by planners or city officials. By locating vacant spaces and observing their position between active and inactive spaces, one can identify possible manifestations of terrain vague, but it is impossible to confirm their existence without further investigation. Terrain vague exists at the intersection between complex social conditions and environmental results that can be identified only by close observation of use (does it differ from the use the designers intended?), occupants (are they engaging in actions of co-opting?), and owners (do they lack interest in enforcing land regulation?).

Interstitial Challenge—Understanding and Responding

Currently, there is no sanctioned, professional design response to terrain vague. The interstitial spaces in cities are relegated to broad classifications within planning documents that have no way of truly defining their presence or importance to the community. Without legal classification or a clear definition of ownership, interstitial spaces fall between the cracks and are rarely mentioned as relevant territory for design outside of select academic writings. Terrains vagues are abandoned, left to be adopted by the city’s occupants and used as a palette for graffiti writers to broadcast their own agendas. If terrain vague is to be seen as a new design territory, the design community will need to redefine what constitutes design motivations and ethical behavior. Architects agree to participate in ethical thought and action on many different levels. Professional licensure and membership in the American Institute of Architects and the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards are common ways

209 Jim Stevens and Anirban Adhya

the profession impresses upon its American members a set of rules based on 15.3 ethical behavior. These deontological forms of ethics attempt to promote good Correlation Between Terrain Vague and Map- character and behavior through adherence to rules. However, they all fail to able Features—There Is emphasize the proactive, ethical behavior expected from professionals in a time None. (Photographs and of crisis, or when designing for new territories not deﬁned by legal boundaries graphics by Kyle Post, 2010) or sanctioned by a given commission. This is not to imply that laws or professional organizations should obligate architects to ﬁx societal issues, but rather to suggest a reexamination of the ethical behavior of complacency, and to recommend the development of a framework of design restraint when dealing with such environments. The current conditions of Detroit and Clichy expose how unacceptable it is for such an empowering and encompassing profession to let its standards fall short of addressing the design challenges of all members of society, as well as how little we can actually do when following our mission to “improve” our surroundings if we merely follow the status quo. Many well-intentioned architects have become involved in a conta- gious reaction to the destruction of Detroit and Clichy. Countless conceptual projects have been completed on how to “rebuild” the city of Detroit and Paris’s

210 The Interstitial Challenge

banlieues. It is fair to say that design alone cannot fix Detroit or Clichy. It is also important to note that architects should be careful not to operate within the idea of a design utopia. Despite economic, professional, and philosophical challenges, architects cannot negate their responsibilities. A new model of architectural and design intentions must be sought to allow further fulfillment of a postindustrial fiducial responsibility. The current ethics that we operate under need to be expanded to address the context of practice within terrain vague. To accept this expansion of ethical behavior is to stand for a subversive architecture of our time that addresses all spaces and all members of society.

Parc de Thoiry and the Phenomenon of the Rubberneckers

In various forms of media, including ﬁlms such as 8 Mile and La Haine, areas of Detroit and Clichy are examined as alien environments, and their inhabitants

211 Jim Stevens and Anirban Adhya are gazed upon as if they were zoo creatures. What has followed is disrespectful observation. Just as we need to balance the idea of restraint with design (tending), we need to view and study these landscapes sensitively. Detroit has been the subject of many public art projects that tread very close to mocking a tragic urban condition. Encasing an abandoned home in ice or painting an abandoned block safety-orange is intellectually stimulating, and at times inspiring, but these projects are seldom crafted through the eyes of the residents. In Clichy, after the riots of 2005, the residents were often photographed from afar by camera crews reporting on the post-riot conditions. There are many websites dedicated to the urban decay and the decay aesthetic of Detroit. Referred to as “voyeuristic estheticism” in the 2001 publication Stalking Detroit, this image and what it represents to the larger population can be damaging. To complicate this phenomenon further, many of the offenders have only the best intentions of “helping.” The citizens of Detroit and Clichy are not subjects that should be studied from afar. This is not to say that only locals can engage in the design of the sites; we are simply acknowledging that distance, separation, and a view of equality are only the ﬁrst step to full understanding. You can visit, engage, observe, and depart without viewing the citizens as an estranged and somehow lesser “other”; by doing so, the designer will gain a fuller understanding of space. To engage in an anti-colonial architecture—one that does not represent the failed urban renewal projects of the past—is to be fully engaged or immersed in the context. Immersion occurs only with sensitive, yet intense, observation and listening, as well as the ability to provide design answers that are ultimately out of the control of the designer.

Conclusion: Terrain Vague Responses—”Comfortably Out of Control”

Tending is a new framework deﬁned by the proactive installation of design within terrain vague. The act of “tending to” may not necessarily result in a built form, but may have many other manifestations that can be seen, heard, felt, or otherwise known. The following responses to terrain vague found in Clichy and Detroit illustrate the new framework of design tending. Unobtrusive, informative, and ever evolving (just like terrain vague itself), they are meant to be graceful and intriguing.

Subtle Interventions: An Empirical (Anti-colonial) Architecture

With close observation and tending, a designer can work with the complex systems at hand within the interstitial challenge. If they are based on a broad

212 The Interstitial Challenge

understanding, subtle interventions can align with the subversive nature of user alterations. Inspired by Paris’s Wallace drinking fountains, the Wallace Unit was designed to be installed in multiple locations in both Detroit and Clichy (Figure 15.4). The unit is an infrastructural column that provides power, water, and septic services. Yielding to the users, and not demanding a prescribed top–down solution, the column facilitates modification of the urban infrastructure system without interrupting any of the current land uses or activities. It operates as an independent design agent that can be exploited (or not) by the citizens. The unit takes a “first do no harm” approach to design by not requiring the dismantlement of any user-defined areas. The column supports without dictating and enables boundless possibilities for user development. After close observation of user-defined footpaths, the designers of Project: exposure.9313 proposed a footbridge that connected two such pathways in Clichy (Figure 15.5). In an effort to extend the users’ environment, the footbridge is the only prescribed element, with the connecting path’s 15.4 beginning and end defined by the citizens. The footbridge’s façade is designed Wallace Drinking Fountain Design. (Kyle to be altered to accommodate sitting, viewing, and lounging. As spectators, Post, 2010) we find comfort in the idea that this will not only be a bridge but could also

213 Jim Stevens and Anirban Adhya

become what the user dictates by rearranging the elastic façade. Less subtle 15.5 than the fountain, the bridge does show how to take a pre-scripted design Bridge Configuration and Placement Within typology and allow it to be only a suggestion. In both, the designers showed the Terrain Vague restraint and understanding of the environment, without relinquishing the Landscape. Project: authorship of design. exposure.9313. (Pandush Gaqi and Steven To tend to terrain vague is to reach comfort with the apparent Kroodsma, 2010) systems at hand; systems not created, regulated, or designed by architects or urban planners. Given the cultural and formal training received by most working urban planners and architects, the idea of tending, as opposed to a colonialist creation, is a challenging limitation—this limitation is the interstitial challenge. Postmodern America and France are predicated on imagined environments that are stereotypical and quantifiable. The results are homogeneous landscapes void of the possibilities of diversity and authenticity. In both Detroit and Clichy, users alter and interpret their landscape for new and different uses, outside of the original intent. These solutions operate on the same clear separation of uses expected in most cities. Commerce co-opts many interstitial spaces by way of street vendors (legal and illegal alike). Circulation rarely follows planned walkways, with footpaths passing diagonally across Cartesian parks and vacant, undefined areas of land. Shelter, a fundamental human need, occurs at any and all locations found to be acceptable by occupants. In Detroit, citizens interpret private, social space with folding chairs, and a discarded mattress as a hearth, to create their own “private” domain. The territorial lines drawn by this alteration are just as clear as those of a suburban living room. In Clichy, shopkeepers drag billiard tables into the alleyways and surround them with overstuffed chairs, creating an undeniable clubhouse. All of these acts are subversive, in that they deny the

214 The Interstitial Challenge rituals presumed by the designer. In all cases, the designer expects, in a colonialist way, that the occupant will use every aspect of the city in the way for which it was intended. An alley would not be used for billiards; a street corner would not be used for commerce; a garden would not be planted in a right-of-way; and someone would not dwell under a stairway. Despite architects’ best efforts, this is what occurs. To become comfortable with these alterations is to be true to the end-user of design. Becoming comfortably out of control allows a designer to tend by way of understanding these smart, subtle interventions.

References

Augé, Marc. (1995). Non-places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity (John Howe, Trans.). London: Verso. Berger, A. (2007). Drosscape: Wasting land in urban America. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Champagne, P. (2000). Violence visible, violence invisible. In Thomas Ferenczi (Dir.). Faut-il s’accommoder de la violence? (pp. 235–246). Editions Complexe. Crampton, T. (2011, January 18). Behind the furor: The last moments of two youths. New York Times International. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2005/11/07/international/europe/07youths.html Crang, M., & Thrift, N. (2000). Thinking space. London: Routledge. Daskalakis, G., Waldheim, C., & Young, J. (2001). Stalking Detroit. Barcelona: Actar. de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life. Berkeley: University of California Press. d’Hooghe, A. (2009). A prospective geography of America. Cambridge: ORG. Fuad-Luke, A. (2009). Design activism: Beautiful strangeness for a sustainable world. London: Earthscan. Gallagher, J. (2009, September 29). Detroit’s fight against vacant land gets tougher. Detroit Free Press (real-estate section). Hajjat, A. (2005). Immigration postcoloniale et mémoire. Paris: L’Harmattan. Klausner, A. (2011, January 18). Bombing modernism: Graffiti and its relationship to the (built) environment. Core77: Industrial Design Magazine Resource. Retrieved from www.core77.com/ reactor/04.07_klausner.asp Le Roux, G. (2010, October 27). Five years after riots, Paris suburb is a neglected powder keg. France 24. Retrieved from www.france24.com/en/20101027-2005-riots-paris-suburbs-neglected-powder- keg-clichy-sous-bois-france Lévesque, L. (2002). The “terrain vague” as material—Some observations. Retrieved from www. amarrages.com/textes_terrain.html Oswalt, P. (2006). Shrinking cities: International investigation. Retrieved from www.shrinkingcities.com/ Poupeau, F. (2006, June 11). French sociology under fire: A preliminary diagnosis of the November 2005 “urban riots.” Retrieved from http://riotsfrance.ssrc.org/Poupeau/ Southeast Michigan Council of Governments. (2008). 2035 Forecast for Southeast Michigan: Population, households, and jobs for counties, cities, villages, and townships 2005–2035. Solà-Morales, Ignasi de. (1995). Terrain vague. In Cynthia Davidson (Ed.). Anyplace (pp. 118–123). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sugrue, T. J. (1996). The origins of the urban crisis. Princeton: Princeton University Press. United Nations Center for Human Settlements. (2009). State of the world cities 2008/2009: Harmonious cities. London: Earthscan.

215 Chapter 16

Following the Berlin Wall

Elizabeth Golden

The removal of walls, towers and fences created an emptiness: a shadow monument present in the minds and memories of the people not only in Berlin, but all over the world (Axel Klausmeier and Leo Schmidt. 2004, p. 27)

Introduction

A 25-mile long stretch of empty space straddled by two walls and patrolled by armed guards was the quintessential icon of the Cold War, a key component of the Iron Curtain. If any one man-made entity represented a division of people and ideologies, it was the Berlin Wall. Through the process of its destruction in 1989, the Wall became a powerful symbol of liberation and unity. Since then, the open wound left by its removal has inspired intense political debate. The Berlin Wall was, in fact, more than one wall. It was a series of defense fortifications consisting of walls, fences, and an empty space, commonly called the “no man’s land” or Todesstreifen, a death strip that defined an inner- city border zone running between East and West Berlin. Today, in many parts of the city, especially in the highly developed areas near the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag, traces of the Wall have been all but erased. No uncomfortable reminders have been left behind to tell the story of Berlin’s division. In contrast, grassy fields marked by broken pieces of the border fortifications can be found; vacant spaces in the city remain open for

216 Following the Berlin Wall

16.1 Removal of the Berlin Wall Near the Reichstag. (Photo credit: Landesarchiv Berlin/Edmund Kasperski)

217 Elizabeth Golden interpretation and experimentation. As a tool of the East German regime, the Berlin Wall’s sole purpose was to restrict and to conﬁne, and its signiﬁcance was a threat to the freedom of thought and movement. This essay will examine how this former dividing line, once dead and limited, has evolved since 1989, to become a palimpsest for multiple meanings and uses. In The language of landscape, Anne Spirn (1998) cautions against removing all traces of the Wall, as it “prevents dealing with memories and forfeits the possibility of transformation” (p. 244). Preserving reminders of a painful past within a rapidly expanding and changing city is a challenge, calling for solutions that are open- ended, diverse, and adaptable. New developments, such as parks, bike trails, and memorials, all contribute to the reading of the former border area as something both negative and positive, a barrier and open space, making it a place of simultaneous forgetting and remembering.

Borders and Sectors

At the end of World War II, the European Advisory Commission divided Berlin into four Allied administrative sectors. Initially, Berlin’s citizens could move freely between the various sectors, but, as time went on and tensions between the Soviets and the Western Allies mounted, the communist government made it increasingly difficult for people to move in and out of the Soviet-controlled areas. From 1949 until August 1961, more than 2.7 million people emigrated from Soviet-controlled East Germany to the West—many of them through Berlin— to seek better economic opportunities or escape from a government that was becoming progressively more autocratic (Hirschman, 1993). This massive flow of people from East to West created a huge political problem for the Soviet- controlled, and newly founded, German Democratic Republic. In an impressive maneuver of tactical planning and manpower, the border between East and West Berlin was solidified overnight, on August 12, 1961. On the morning of August 13, the citizens of Berlin awoke to find an impenetrable barrier of barbed wire, patrolled at intervals by armed East German police. Over time, the barbed wire was modified and replaced by a brick wall and, at its final stage of development, two concrete walls replaced the brick one, and a no man’s land containing guard towers was added between them. This border defense system, or “Anti-Fascist Protection Wall,” as it was called by the East German authorities, became known as the Berlin Wall.

Stolen Space

Although the original barrier began as an improvised barbed-wire barricade, it was quickly fortiﬁed and imposed onto the city fabric. As the barrier was

218 Following the Berlin Wall

reinforced and enlarged, it swallowed up all that it traversed. Every portion of the city falling within and adjacent to the path of the Wall was modified to accommodate the new border fortification. Buildings were either vacated and demolished, or left with their border-facing windows bricked up. Waterways were fitted with metal gates, and rooftop parapets were installed with machine- gun mounts. Cemeteries were cleared of gravestones, and bodies were moved to make way for the Wall. Streets, waterways, and other public places were distorted into spaces that would no longer be used for their intended functions. Lines of movement and locations formerly full of life all became vacuous expanses where no person, other than an armed East German border guard, was permitted to tread. These urban spaces were stolen from the citizens of Berlin and turned against them as a weapon in the Cold War. The Berlin Wall went through several permutations, with the final, “4th generation” iteration being considered by the East German government as a masterpiece of engineering. The Berlin Wall actually consisted of several security layers, making it an almost insurmountable barrier. Between two walls lay a no man’s land or death strip containing obstacles, such as trip wires, for 16.2 possible escapees. The emptiness of the death strip played an important role The Sterile Border Zone. in allowing an unobstructed view of the border area. A paved road running along (Photo credit: Landesarchiv the border area permitted solders to patrol the death strip, either on foot or in Berlin/Lohse) vehicles. Floodlights positioned at regular intervals lit the entire border area,

219 Elizabeth Golden deterring any possibility of slipping through unseen by night, and a control strip of raked sand would show any traces of fugitives. Anyone spotted ﬂeeing over the border by a guard would be detained or risked being shot. The construction of the border fortiﬁcations cleared away the complexity of quotidian life, opening a “sterile” border zone, a perilous, empty landscape hostile to any intrusion (Flemming & Koch, 2004).

Forgetting and Remembering

On the night of November 9, 1989, East and West Berliners joyously began hacking at the wall that had divided the city for 28 years. Soon, very little of the Berlin Wall remained. Today, there are only three remaining sections of the Wall still standing in the city, their length totaling just over one mile. In their article, “Die Berliner Mauer—Erinnerung ohne Ort?” Jarausch, Sabrow, and Hertle (2005) describe the destruction of the Wall and the implications of its hasty destruction:

Because of its hated omnipresence, the breach of the horrific border fortification coincided with failure of the East German government, and in 1990, the year of [Germany’s] reunification, it was so thoroughly demolished and disposed of that the remaining pieces could only be found with difficulty. One and a half decades later, the success of the project “Tear Down the Wall” is a tragedy, and the Wall’s destruction now undermines the desire for an authentic place of remembrance, a place that makes the frightening memories of the Wall tangible. (p. 1)

One of the main points of interest for Berlin’s visitors is the Wall. An article from Der Spiegel Online (maw, 2008) reports that a recent survey by the Berlin Tourism Board found that many tourists were disappointed to ﬁnd that very few portions still remain. Who can blame Berlin’s citizens for quickly removing something that had restricted their freedom for so many years? The destruction of the Wall inspired an emotional catharsis for many Germans (Flemming & Koch, 2004). The act of physical liberation resolved rapidly, but the struggle for psychological liberation from memories associated with the division will continue for many years to come. The exhibition Virtuelle Mauer/ReConstructing the Wall opened on August 13, 2008, on the 47th anniversary of “Barbed Wire Sunday,” the day Berlin was ﬁrst divided. In an attempt to recreate part of the Berlin Wall, two artists—sponsored by the city and federal government—built a 3D computer model of a portion of the Berlin Wall as it stood in the mid 1980s. The project’s

220 Following the Berlin Wall concept was to give exhibition visitors an “encounter with the city and the Wall, and with the human drama that arose where the two collided” (Thiel & Reuter, 2008). Comments left by readers of an online article about the newly opened exhibition express the contradictions arising out of recreating, even virtually, the “human drama” produced by the Wall: “As a native ‘Easterner,’ I am for removing every small piece of the Wall . . . a project like the ‘Virtual Berlin Wall’ is a joke. What good does it do to open the wound over and over again?”; and the response to his comment: “‘to open the wound over and over again’ is absolutely the wrong expression, with that kind of argument one could say that no reminders of the horrors of Third Reich should remain today!” (mat & helmut_berlin, 2008). Another facet of the psychological disjuncture left by the Wall is a concept Germans often refer to as the Mauer im Kopf, the “Wall in the mind,” an invisible mental barrier separating East Germans from West Germans. Differing political ideologies, stereotypes remaining from years of separation, and perceived economic inequality have all led to a sense that the country continues to struggle with the pain of disconnection and estrangement caused by the division. Comprehending this mental separation is critical when considering proposals for the areas once occupied by the Wall. Making places that foster reconciliation and healing for communities along the former dividing line, while concurrently retaining reminders essential to creating an “authentic place of remembrance,” is a difﬁcult balancing act (Jarausch et al., 2005). Different parts of society, East and West Berliners, East and West Germans, and visitors to the city from around the world, all have diverse expectations of how the spaces left by the Berlin Wall should function, and what they should represent today; the following projects all attempt in varying degrees to incorporate many of these values and expectations into their planning.

The Berlin Wall Trail

Directly after the fall of the Wall, Berliners frequently used the guard patrol road located between the two fortification walls as a bike path. Environmental action groups pushed to have the path, which was proposed to run along the area previously occupied by the Berlin Wall, declared an official public bike trail. Bike symbols were painted on the patrol road to claim it for bicycles, but were later removed, and portions of the paved road were destroyed by East German border guards still in control of the border zone. Taking its inspiration from the Boston Freedom Trail, the plan to create a bike path along the Wall later resurfaced, and, in 2001, the Berlin city government approved the $6.5 million proposal to create a bike and hiking route, now officially known as the “Berlin Wall Trail.” The Berlin Wall Trail is a portion of a larger “Iron Curtain Trail,”

221 Elizabeth Golden planned to run from the Barents Sea in the Arctic to the Black Sea. A large portion of the trail falls directly in the no man’s land created by the Wall, turning the erstwhile death strip into a vital thread running through the city, connecting nature preserves, parks, and public spaces as a green belt (Cramer, 2007). The path takes on various identities for those who use it. The trail that follows the remainders of the inner-city fortifications runs from the northern edges of Berlin to the southern city limits, makes it possible to traverse the entire city by bicycle. In its most utilitarian role, the path functions simply as an alternate way of traveling through the city. In cases where the trail passes through parks and nature preserves, it is used for recreational purposes. Families use it for their Sunday walks in the countryside, and bird watchers stop to identify birds alongside it. For these people, the path’s significance is as a nature trail in the city, but the traces of the Wall can still be seen, if one chooses to look. It is possible for tourists, or anyone curious about the Wall, to follow the Berliner Mauerweg signs and stop at any of the 40 stations providing historical information about various points of interest marking the way. The idea for the trail sprang from its unofficial use by the community. By recognizing this new purpose as an official trail and funding its construction, the city has successfully activated many portions of the no man’s land left by the Wall in the city. Whether it functions as a transportation route, a place for recreation and relaxation, or as a learning tool, the Berlin Wall Trail affords its users a variety of experiences. It can function as a common trail like any other, but its path permits its users to interact with the Wall’s historical artifacts in a new, dynamic way. By connecting key parts of the city once touched by the Wall, the trail creates a new perception of the former border; places where all traces have disappeared can now easily be compared with areas where the Wall still has a presence. In this way, the Wall can be read as a narrative created by series of places. The trail connects two sites, Engelbecken and Bernauer Strasse, which exemplify radically different approaches to planning in the former border area.

Engelbecken

When following the Berlin Wall Trail through the district of Kreuzberg, one discovers a large open space with a church at one end, facing out towards a large pool of water. Engelbecken, or “Angel Fountain,” was restored in the years following German reuniﬁcation as part of a public garden; it is the only body of water still remaining from the Luisenstadt Canal, designed by Peter Joseph Lenné in 1842. Lenné’s plan created a major axis along the canal punctuated by a series of “water spaces,” pools of water deﬁned by walkways and apartment buildings. The axis ended at Engelbecken, named for its guardian angel perched atop the adjacent church of St. Michael. The canal was eventually

222 Following the Berlin Wall refilled in 1926 and converted to a garden, keeping with the overall form of Lenné’s original design. In an unfortunate turn of events in 1961, Engelbecken and the garden were completely filled in, as the Berlin Wall cut through the area, severing the axis created by Lenné. Ironically, a portion of the Wall still followed the form of his original plan, thereby incorporating the space left by Engelbecken into the death strip—the unrelenting monotony of the Wall was paradoxically broken by the gentle curve of the classical plan. The construction of the Wall caused many community buildings and public spaces to be destroyed or cut off from the residents who used them. As with numerous other sites in Berlin, the division of the neighborhood surrounding Engelbecken had an enormous impact on the inhabitants living adjacent to the Wall. The church of St. Michael, for example, was located on the eastern side of the border, leaving approximately 7,000 members of the congregation located in West Berlin unable to worship in their church. The construction of the Wall sealed the fate of the entire ensemble: a church without its congregation, and the fountain and garden disconnected from the neighborhood— destined to lie trapped under the weight of the border fortifications for 28 years. After reunification, the garden and Engelbecken were gradually uncovered and restored. The neighborhood grassroots group, Bürgerverein- Luisenstadt, was heavily involved in overseeing the full restoration of the garden. Its members clearly saw the restoration as a way to “bring the inhabitants of the two parts of Luisenstadt [the neighborhood] closer to each other” (Geschichte, 2012). Owing to the lack of public funds, the fountain was only partially excavated in the early 1990s, where it slowly began to fill with ground water, attracting wild birds such as herons and ducks; fish and turtles could also be found swimming in the water. This new development furthered the argument that the garden’s restoration should be fully funded and completed. Although the Wall had a powerful effect on the neighborhood, both as a physical and mental presence, very little tangible evidence of its existence now remains. Nature, playing a role in the no man’s land erasure, has created an oasis for wildlife and people alike. Following its final phase of restoration in 2007, Engelbecken has become one of the most attractive spots in Berlin. The park and fountain now stand as a testament to the community’s desire to resurrect a history predating the Wall. For them, this was the most positive way they could overcome their painful past. Engelbecken is now a place where new memories can take shape.

Bernauer Strasse

One of the most infamous places found along the Berlin Wall Trail is Bernauer Strasse. For older Germans, hearing the name of that ill-fated street evokes

223 Elizabeth Golden memories of people jumping out of windows to escape from apartment buildings, suddenly captured in the dividing line between East and West Berlin. The apartment buildings stood in the East, whereas the street out front lay in the West. In their article, Remembering the Berlin Wall: The Wall Memorial Ensemble Bernauer Strasse, Knischewski and Spittler (2006) observe that the Wall as an archetype has historically been understood in several ways, and these readings have, in turn, influenced society’s interpretation and understanding of the remains of the Wall today. The fragments of the Wall can be claimed as evidence of the East German regime’s brutality; they can also be viewed as reminders of the division of the German people. For some, they remain as icons of the Cold War, commemorating the victory of the West over communism. Knischewski and Spittler (2006) argue that all of these readings are simplistic, each one with its fallacies and truths. Synthesizing the complex set of values assigned to the Wall is extremely difficult: Any new intervention in the former border area can influence how the place is interpreted by society today. A memorial now stands at the Wall fortifications that remain at Bernauer Strasse, which are now some of the best preserved in Berlin, making it a prime location for a memorial and open-air exhibition space. The memorial, designed by Stuttgart architects Kohlhoff and Kohlhoff, is a 695-foot stretch of repaired and perfectly preserved border fortifications, consisting of east- and west-facing walls and the no man’s land between them, complete with patrol path and floodlights. The whole complex is bounded on both sides by two 26- foot-high walls made of weathering steel. The entry to the memorial leads visitors to an area located behind the east-facing wall, where one can attempt to peek through slits in the wall to catch glimpses into the inaccessible death strip. The architects’ intention for the entry sequence is unclear. During the time of division, people approaching the area from the East would have put themselves in grave danger: this view of the Wall never existed for the average person in the German Democratic Republic. If this symbolic approach is to signify that times have changed, then the architects have created a paradox, in that the death strip is still impossible to enter, except by jumping the wall like a fugitive. In reality, the memorial “blocks the view that one is supposed to see,” according to Alice Ströver, the Green Party’s spokeswoman in the Berlin parliament (Greiner, 2005). Most visitors to the memorial are confused by what they have witnessed and leave with more questions than they had when they entered the space. Perhaps it was the perplexing statement of the Berlin Wall Memorial, with its ambiguous intentions, that motivated the city government to seek a clearer and more definite proposal for the area adjacent to it, a section of the former no man’s land set aside for the Berlin Wall Open-Air Exhibition Space and Information Center. This area is part of the Berlin city government’s Gesamtkonzept, a new master plan for the entire Berlin border area, including the aforementioned Berlin Wall Trail. The Berlin Senate envisions Bernauer

224 Following the Berlin Wall

16.3 Strasse as a place where the public can learn from the tangible artifacts and Catching Glimpses of spaces left by the Wall. “Here, history becomes more comprehensible and the Inaccessible Death Strip meaningful because [Bernauer Strasse] is an authentic showplace; it has a connection to real life experiences” (Senatskanzlei, 2006, p. 36).

Open-Air Exhibition Space and Information Pavilion

The competition for the Berlin Wall Open-Air Exhibition and Information Center at Bernauer Strasse was held in 2007 with three explicit goals, as specified by the Berlin Senate for Urban Development in the program statement. The first goal was to reveal the physical remains of the Wall and to create a place that would permit the viewer to see it as it once stood—without recreating what no longer exists. The second aspiration was to reveal the immaterial traces of historical occurrences at the Wall, such as escapes, or the interruption of daily life caused by the Wall. The final aim of the competition was to provide a meaningful place for the names of those who died trying to escape to the West. In addition, the Information Center would provide a library and gallery for further historical documentation of the site (Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung, 2007). The award-winning ensemble was proposed by the Berlin architects Mola Winkelmüller, ON Architektur, and the landscape architecture firm Sinai.

225 Elizabeth Golden

One of the key concepts of the design was to create a new network from the remaining artifacts of the border at Bernauer Strasse; as a unifying design element, weathering steel accentuates and links the remaining Wall traces. Thin rods of rusted metal ﬁll in the gaps—they are positioned to recreate the scale and the path of the Wall when viewed from the side, while becoming almost completely invisible when viewed from the front. The rods allow people to pass freely to and from the Open-Air Exhibition area, while permitting visitors to visualize the space of the former no man’s land. Ms. Lüscher, the director of the Senate for Urban Development comments on the ephemeral power of the new addition: “What is special about this proposal, is that the designers had the guts to erect the Wall again, but as a veil . . . a veil that is porous” (as cited in Jürgens, 2009).

16.4 The New Berlin Wall as Veil

226 Following the Berlin Wall

In the years after the Wall fell, the former no man’s land located on this part of Bernauer Strasse went from being a barren military border zone to an abandoned empty lot, overgrown with weeds and blackberry brambles. The staff of the adjacent Sophien Cemetery used the space as a storage depot and dumping ground for broken headstones and decaying flower arrangements. The design of the Open-Air Exhibition area has transformed this space into an open grassy field punctuated by information kiosks, which are programmed with personal narratives and photos describing events that occurred while the neighborhood was still divided. Key artifacts left by the border fortifications have also been carefully highlighted and connected by the information network, which permits visitors to understand and visualize the magnitude of the Berlin Wall as it once stood. A small memorial commemorating those who lost their lives fleeing from East to West has been erected in the middle of the Open-Air Exhibition area. A heavy metal framework holds individual panes of glass etched with the victims’ portraits; it is unmistakably a new addition to the exhibition. This personal representation of the victims adds another scale of understanding to 16.5 the network. The Wall can be envisaged, not only as a physical construct, but Memorial for the Victims of the Berlin also as a psychological presence that deeply affected East German citizens, so Wall much so that they were willing to risk death to escape to the West.

227 Elizabeth Golden

The Berlin Wall Information Center stands as a beacon next to the former border area. The rusted façade sets it apart from its surroundings, but also signals that it belongs to the same ensemble as the Wall Memorial and the Open-Air Exhibition. The base of the building runs parallel to the street and also marks the phantom path of the Wall, while the top floor rotates to give visitors an unimpeded view over the Open-Air Exhibition. Thus visitors are able to observe the physical space of the border area, while simultaneously viewing exhibitions that focus on the Wall and the former East German regime. The residual space at ground level created by the rotation of the volumes results in a covered entry for tour groups and visitors. The design of the Information Center is austere and contemporary; its materials and massing set it apart from much of the architecture built in Berlin in recent years. Its presence clearly signifies the Berlin Senate’s desire to reach out to a younger generation, one that may not remember what the Berlin Wall once signified. The Information Center and the Open-Air Exhibition at Bernauer Strasse have set a new precedent for planning areas situated along the former border between East and West Berlin. It is the first plan for the former no man’s land that has put education and transparency as a priority. Whereas Engelbecken has fostered a renewal through the erasure of the border, the Information Center and the Open-Air Exhibition at Bernauer Strasse have uncovered and revealed a painful and recent history, which was almost lost under a pile of headstones and weeds.

Conclusion

After the Berlin Wall’s removal in 1989, the controlled environment of the no man’s land was literally and ﬁguratively unbound. The resulting terrain vague, both in the mind and on the ground, is a space offering openness, potential, and growth. The identity of the void left by the Berlin Wall has been redeﬁned in diverse ways, and it remains a place that attracts meaning to it in the way that, “a lightning rod attracts thunderbolts” (Barthes, 1997). Engelbecken and the Information Center and Open-Air Exhibition at Bernauer Strasse, connected by the Berlin Wall Trail, are but a few of the recent interventions that are slowly beginning to stitch together the remaining fragments along the East–West border in a manner that allows people to visualize, and to potentially come to terms with, past events that have remained incomprehensible for such a long period of time. Each intervention, whether for healing or remembrance, imparts a new understanding of the space, which ultimately negates the totalitarian ideology that once had a hold over it.

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References

Barthes, Roland. (1997). The Eiffel Tower and other mythologies. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cramer, Michael. (2007). Berliner Mauer-Radweg. Radingersdorf, Austria: Verlag Esterbauer GmbH. Flemming, T., & Koch, H. (2004). Die Berliner Mauer: Geschichte eines politischen Bauwerks. Berlin: Be. bra Verlag. Geschichte. (2012). Retrieved from www.buergerverein-luisenstadt.de/luisenstadt/geschichte Greiner, Tania. (2005, July 7). Grüne wollen die Mauer wieder hochziehen. taz.de. Retrieved from www.taz.de/index.php?id=archivseite&dig=2005/07/23/a0219&type=98 Hirschman, A. O. (1993, January 1). Exit, voice, and the fate of the German Democratic Republic: An essay in conceptual history. World Politics, 45 (2), 173–202. Jarausch, Konrad H., Sabrow, M., & Hertle, H. (2005). Die Berliner Mauer—Erinnerung ohne Ort? Memorandum zur Bewahrung der Berliner Mauer als Erinnerungsort. Potsdam, Germany: Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung. Jürgens, Isabell. (2009, November 21). Baustart, Info-Pavillon für die Geschichte der Berliner Mauer. Berliner Morgenpost. Retrieved from www.morgenpost.de/printarchiv/bezirke/article983102/ Info_Pavillon_fuer_die_Geschichte_der_Berliner_Mauer.html Klausmeier, A., & Schmidt, L. (2004). Wall remnants—Wall traces: The comprehensive guide to the Berlin wall. Berlin: Westkreuz-Verlag. Knischewski, G., & Spittler, U. (2006). Remembering the Berlin Wall: The Wall memorial ensemble Bernauer Strasse. German Life and Letters, 59.2 (286), 280–293. mat and helmut_berlin [pseud.]. (2008, August 12). Die Mauer wird wieder aufgebaut – am Computer. Der Tagespiegel Online. Comments posted on www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/Berliner-Mauer- Ausstellung;art270,2590921 maw [pseud.]. (2008, April 03). Tourists want to see more Berlin wall. Der Spiegel Online. Retrieved from www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,539223,00.html Senatskanzlei. (2006). Gesamtkonzept zur Erinnerung an die Berliner Mauer: Dokumentation, Information und Gedenken (Publication no. 2.1.1, 18). Berlin: Dr. Flierl, Thomas. Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung. (2007). Erweiterung der Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer. Berlin: Abteilung Städtebau und Projekte. Spirn, A. W. (1998). The language of landscape. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Thiel, T., & Reuter, T. (2008). Virtuelle Mauer/ReConstructing the Wall Project. Retrieved from www. virtuelle-mauer-berlin.de/index.htm

229 Chapter 17

Vague Recollections

Obscurity and Uncertainty in Contemporary Public Memorials

Quentin Stevens

It would seem inherent in the purpose and the expense of public memorials that they would seize our attention, explain events from the past, and help us remember those events. Because public memorials are generally intended to represent people, events, and values of lasting importance, one might assume memorials would always be designed as obvious, legible, physically durable objects in prominent locations. There is something strange, then, in the fact that many contemporary memorials are invisible, insubstantial, or illegible. Since Musil (1987) first noted, in 1927, the problem of monuments becoming unnoticed and their purposes being forgotten, the subject matter, design, and location of public memorials have diversified greatly. Memorials can often be found in very marginal, leftover spaces. Contemporary memorials may be small, insubstantial, fragmentary, or even ephemeral; many lack explicit sym - bolism and explanatory text. Some memorials take the form of voids, rather than solid objects. The purposes and messages of contemporary memorials are often unclear. As a consequence of these vagaries, people visiting commemorative sites do not always recognize their intended significance and sacredness. Contemporary memorial designs thus reflect two distinct aspects of terrain vague that are identified by Solà-Morales (1995): many of them are evacuated spaces, physically empty and available; and they are often spatially, experientially, and semantically vague spaces, which suggest liberty of interpretation and use.

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Vague Investments

As a category, public memorials are all vague spaces, because they occupy valuable urban sites, but are not functional and productive in the normal, narrow sense of those terms. Commemoration is surplus to practical economic needs. A memorial is excessive, an expensive void. Bataille (1988) argues that this luxury or “wastefulness” in the use of urban space emphasizes the importance that society places on its memorials and their subject matter, as ends in themselves. The symbolic centers of many national capitals are void spaces that give great prominence to the few objects and meanings admitted within them. Bataille (1997) also emphasizes monuments’ very practical role in both reflecting and reinforcing social order; memorials help justify society’s constraints by giving meaning and purpose to people’s productive efforts and sacrifices. This is, at least, the aim behind memorials created by those in power, which can perhaps better be categorized as monuments. Such monuments are anything but vague. They are ideologically powerful, presenting “the word in stone” and expecting of their audiences no more than “complicitous silence” (Taylor, 1974; Bourdieu, 1977, p. 188; Dovey, 1999). Not all public memorials, however, are developed by governments, or under their terms. Most individuals have their own share of surplus productivity that they can squander how they wish. Memorials created by and on behalf of other interests highlight that societies are often not tidy, narrowly productive organizations; through their experiments in art and architecture, societies pursue and reflect upon a wide range of goals that are in themselves also often unclear and contested. Bataille highlights that society’s luxurious consumptions, by their nature, cannot be recouped. Efforts to expend surplus productively—for example, to make memorials more effective, or even efficient—simply help produce more resources, and therein lies the necessity of vagueness and waste. The functional and spatial emptiness and abstractness of memorials allow for a wide variety of responses and actions from users, and thus admit the possibility of transcending and countering the productive system that has created them. To the extent that a memorial is not productive, it is also potentially counterproductive. Instead of silence, memorials often provoke debate. Having outlined this vagueness of commemoration in conceptual terms, what remains to be explored is how the emptiness and abstraction of commemorative purpose are developed through the physical design of memorials and the ways users experience them.

Commemorating in Evacuated Spaces

Public memorials do not always carve out important, prominent spaces for themselves within the urban structure. Many memorials are to be found in

231 Quentin Stevens existing void spaces, marginal and interstitial sites, either beyond or between the productively designed and used spaces of the city (Lévesque, 2002). In London’s Trafalgar Square, Admiral Nelson stands high atop a central column, and raised plinths on three of the square’s corners are adorned with permanent statues of military figures. The fourth plinth stood empty for more than 150 years. In semantic terms, this central showplace of one of the world’s richest-ever empires thus has its own terrain vague, a gap that anticipates a major commemoration. Since 1999, a range of new, temporary artworks have been commissioned for this fourth plinth, including statues of Jesus Christ, a naked, pregnant disabled woman, and a boy on a rocking horse, as well as several non-anthropomorphic sculptures. A proposed permanent statue of the Royal Air Force commander who defended London during the Battle of Britain was rejected. The Greater London Authority prefers to keep the square’s meanings in play, to leave space open for alternative symbols and values. Such prime urban sites seldom sit vacant for so long, waiting for the right memory. More often, city centers are argued by their managers to already be semantically full, and only marginal terrains vagues remain available. Planners in memorial-saturated Washington and Berlin consciously try to redirect many proposed memorials to peripheral sites, or transmogrify them into less permanent forms—to play down sponsors’ aspirations to prominence, thereby making these commemorations more obscure (L. Kempf, interview, June 16, 2011; Bornhöft, 2007). Washington’s National Mall has been closed off to future memorial proposals, as the government curates a hierarchy of prominence for collective memories. The large new Martin Luther King Jr. memorial was among the last approved for the Mall. It occupies a peripheral site facing the tidal basin, outside the Mall proper and unaligned to its defining axes. It has no clear spatial relation to the nearby Lincoln Memorial, site of King’s most historic speech. Indeed, the memorial has a long wall screening it from the Mall, and the central statue of King has its back turned to the Lincoln Memorial. Sometimes, new terrains vagues open up within cities, through natural disaster, attack, demolition, or neglect, making space available for new functions, including memorials. Such is the case with Berlin’s former wall zone. The location chosen for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (MMJE), just southeast of the Brandenburg Gate, was primarily a matter of convenience. The German government owned this large, empty, centrally located plot of land, because it had previously been occupied by East Germany’s border wall and, before that, by the gardens of government ministries. Unlike many sites in Berlin, this plot has no particular historical relation to the fate of the Jews, and the memorial built here has no relation to the history of the site; indeed, this memorial obscures the history of the emptiness and conflict of Germany’s partitioning. As Huyssen (2003) notes, the meanings and the history of Berlin are better legible in these multiple, ill-defined absences than in its figural

232 Vague Recollections objects and spaces. Filling up such voids, even with memorials, is in many ways an act of forgetting, of tidying up a difﬁcult past. Berlin’s richly historic and meaning-ﬁlled vague spaces remind us that a palimpsest, the leading trope of the postmodern city, is a surface characterized not by a superimposed layering of texts, but by repeated acts of erasure. Its richness lies in the many things that are no longer there.

Vague Locations

Marginal, evacuated urban spaces such as open parklands are often dumping grounds for memorials deemed unimportant to official histories. Ottawa’s monument to Canadian involvement in the wartime defense of Hong Kong sits on the grass verge between a wide highway off-ramp and a wooded riverbank, screened from nearby Confederation Boulevard by a thicket. The Netherlands– Australia Memorial in Canberra, also commemorating wartime cooperation, is aligned on a major urban axis, but the structure is low, turns inwards, and is obscured behind the 200-foot-high Australian–American memorial. Residual spaces also offer opportunities for unofficial, informal memories to enter the public realm. Angels’ Circle (Figure 17.1) is an informal memorial garden on a traffic island in suburban Staten Island, New York, where loved ones can view and adorn portraits of 253 local victims of the September 11 World Trade Center attack. This space eventually gained official sanction, being adopted as a city park. The September 11 terrorist attack could also be commemorated within the vacant site of the destroyed World Trade Center towers, but with the London terrorist attack in July 2005, three bombs exploded inside underground trains, and there is in fact no site to commemorate, at least not any that can be seen or visited. A fourth bomb exploded on board a bus, and a small plaque has been inconspicuously attached to the façade of an adjoining building. Following both attacks, individuals spontaneously created collective memorials by leaving items such as flowers, poems, candles, and photographs in doorways of nearby buildings, on steel-mesh fencing, and on walls and lampposts. These too are small terrains vagues: blank spaces, normally only used momentarily in the act of passing, could easily be appropriated (Franck & Stevens, 2007).

Memorials as Evacuated Spaces

Memorials do not just occupy terrain vague; they sometimes contribute to it. Many contemporary commemorative works are designed speciﬁcally as emptiness. Contrasting with the upright, solid, ﬁgural character of conventional

233 Quentin Stevens

monumentality, which typically signifies and celebrates greatness, such 17.1 memorials take the form of voids that express the loss or absence of specific Angels’ Circle (September 11 buildings, objects, or people (Danto, 1985). From the “gash of shame” of Maya Memorial), Staten Lin’s Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, to Micha Ullman’s empty library under Island, New York Berlin’s Bebelplatz remembering Nazi book-burnings, to Arad and Walker’s “Reflecting Absence” that reproduces the destroyed World Trade Center’s outlines, memorials often use dark, sunken, or hollow forms, and evoke the shapes of things now lost (Sturken, 1991; Young, 1999). Such spatial characteristics are understood metonymically, as a vocabulary that commemorates victims rather than heroes (Doss, 2010), and society’s faults and weaknesses rather than its strengths (Tomberger, 2007). Some scholars argue that these vacant memorials are therapeutic and personal, creating spaces where mourners can deal with their loss, in contrast to the didacticism and universalism of traditional monuments (Griswold, 1986; Homans & Jonte-Pace, 2005; Rowlands, 1998). The 2000 Oklahoma City National Memorial uses 168 chairs to signify the absences of individual victims, thereby providing sites for personal mourning. The 2008 Pentagon Memorial similarly uses 184 benches. Other memorials use negative forms to depict or suggest the negativity of specific acts they seek to recall. Part of Ottawa’s Peacekeeping Monument (Figure 17.2) is in the form of a destroyed town, depicting the devastation within which peacekeepers operate. The Memorial to the Deserted Room in Berlin’s Koppenplatz is a kitchen table with two chairs, one of which

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17.2 lies tipped on its back. This too evokes a violent event that is not visible: the Peacekeeping forced removal of Jewish residents by the Nazis. Monument, Ottawa Perhaps the most eerie vacancies, even if unintentionally so, are those on national police memorials. Most tragedies are finite and lie in the past, but large blank surfaces on these police memorials highlight our resignation to the inevitability of tragedies yet to come: there needs to be adequate room for adding the names of those who will die at some future time. The Canadian Police and Peace Officer’s Memorial has been designed to provide sufficient blank space for another 100 years of commemorations; Australia’s National Police Memorial still has 500 blank plaques (Figure 17.3); the United States National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial is expected to be completely filled by 2050. These various recent kinds of “empty” memorial show that vagueness is not a pure, a priori state of nature, but is sometimes deliberately produced to unsettle audiences. The psychological power of these negative spaces underscores Solà-Morales’s (1995) observation that, “we inhabitants of the metropolis feel the spaces not dominated by architecture as reflections of our own insecurity” (p. 121). Two memorials by artist Jochen Gerz use a physical evacuation of space to stimulate awareness and memories of loss. The first, a column “against Fascism” in Hamburg, was gradually sunk into the ground over a seven- year period. The other, where the names of 2,146 Jewish cemeteries destroyed

235 Quentin Stevens

by the Nazis were apparently carved on the underside of cobblestones, was 17.3 invisible from the beginning. Young (2000) argues that such “disappearance National Police Memorial, Canberra: . . . would return the burden of memory to those who came looking for it” Empty plaques provided (p. 7). The use of the verb “looking” here is significant. These memorials for commemorating frustrate the gaze. The intention is that memory should not be symbolically future deaths prescribed, even in the negative. The invisible memorial leaves behind “only the rememberer and the memory of a memorial” (p. 131). Memory is not about looking, but is instead an active social process, where people “look within themselves” (p. 119). Although all the memorials discussed here are physically empty, they certainly do not mean nothing. Indeed, following Bataille, the unrecouped losses that negative memorials signify are what make them so profound. As Solà-Morales (1995) draws from Marquard (1991/1986), cultural identity defines itself increasingly through negativity. However, in spite of their significance, such memorials remain terrains vagues because, unlike affirmational monuments, their sites are typically open to human activity and to later additions of forms and meanings.

Memorials as Negation

Some physically “empty” or “negative” memorials are created as an explicit counterpoint to an extant, afﬁrmative memorial, in order to contest, contradict,

236 Vague Recollections

or undermine the power of official stories and opinions about the past (Stevens, Franck, & Fazakerley, 2012). Such evacuated “counter-memorials” are in some ways very precise landscapes, to the extent that they focus on the particular physical location, design vocabulary, and meanings of existing memorials. However, counter-memorials are also a powerful reassertion of terrain vague, through their criticism of specific representations of power, and through their negation of the sense of completeness with which traditional, massive, permanent stone markers consign memory to the past. Counter-memorials puncture the idea that collective memory and commemorative landscapes are consensual, orderly, and finished. An illustration is provided by Reconciliation Place in Canberra, begun in 2002 (Figure 17.4). This commemorative scheme was designed to cut across the Australian capital’s key representational axis, between Parliament House and monument-lined Anzac Parade with the Australian War Memorial. A raised grass mound interrupts this axial view. A series of scattered, fragmentary forms have been added over time to the cross- axis, designed by various artists, with varied media, themes, and levels of didacticism. These works incorporate Indigenous perspectives into Australia’s national narrative, including negative experiences of marginalization and victimization, and specific government abuses of power. The site’s physical openness encourages visitors to explore divergent routes and thus alternative 17.4 Reconciliation Place, interpretations of the events, themes, and people represented. It is intended Canberra that new works will be added, as the nation’s reconciliation process continues

237 Quentin Stevens to unfold (Strakosch, 2010; Vernon, 2006). The layout, formal vocabulary, and themes of this precinct all contest the state’s hegemony in deﬁning the past. This counter-memorial is itself much contested. The project was largely government-driven, and is not intended to be permanent (National Capital Authority, 2002). Aboriginal groups criticized the abstract nature of one element for failing to clearly articulate the government’s wrongdoings and victims’ sufferings. Reconciliation Place tends to usurp attention from the long- standing, politically active Aboriginal tent embassy nearby, which also blocks the major axis (Ware, 2001). The scheme was also developed around the very instrumental intention of enhancing pedestrian connections between several national cultural venues. These shortcomings do not dispel the potential these kinds of counter-memorial schemes have to free up the urban terrain for new meanings and experiences, and open up debates about commemorative process, authorship, site, subject, form, and vocabulary.

Insubstantial Memories

Most memorials are solid and prominent, but many contemporary memorials are intentionally designed as terrains vagues in the second, perceptual sense identified by Solà-Morales (1995): as objects and settings that are “indeterminate, imprecise, blurred, uncertain” (p. 120). Vague commemorative terrains, which are spatially, experientially, and semantically imprecise and indistinct, present a challenge, suggesting liberty of interpretation and use. The most straightforward manner of such vagueness is memorials that surreptitiously blend in with their surroundings, perhaps only rarely and suddenly coming to consciousness. The emptiness of sidewalks and plazas provides ample opportunities for subtle, insubstantial commemorative interventions that capture people’s attention and induce reflection, without compromising the accessibility and amenity of public space. In such cases, terrain vague involves maintaining a balance between transcendent reflection on the past and keeping public space open to the full scope of practical uses. One such intervention is the Stolpersteine, or “stumbling blocks,” developed by artist Gunther Demnig. These are small brass plaques set flush among the paving stones of the sidewalks outside the front doors of houses, on each of which is written the name, birth date, and fate of an individual who had previously lived at that address and was murdered by the Nazi regime. There are now more than 30,000 such plaques in over 500 cities and towns in Germany and in 10 other countries (see www.stolpersteine.de). The name “stumbling block” neatly suggests both their accidental discovery by people walking past, and the difficulty of dealing with this shocking historical absence. One can stumble across many similarly unobtrusive memorials in Berlin’s streets, squares, and parks. Where the central sections of the former

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17.5 Rosa Luxemburg Memorial, Berlin

239 Quentin Stevens

Wall were removed to reinstate a pre-1914 vision of urbanity and statehood (Pariser Platz, Leipziger Platz, the Parliamentary Quarter), a subtle trace of the Wall’s previous alignment is reinstated in an unbroken row of cobblestones that cuts across the alignments of new streets, pavements, and parks, labeled at intervals with simple steel plaques. A similarly “all but invisible” memorial, to murdered communist leader Rosa Luxemburg, exists on the plaza bearing her name, site of the pre-Nazi communist party headquarters (Figure 17.5). Sixty long brass strips set into the sidewalk, street, and plaza are engraved with text from her publications, speeches, and letters (Sholette, 2006). The actual sites where the Nazis clandestinely killed and dumped the bodies of Luxemburg and fellow communist Karl Liebknecht are unsurprisingly quite obscure: a pond and canal deep within the shadowy canopy of the Tiergarten park. They are marked with two small memorials. A large, inconspicuous mirror wall at the rear of Hermann Ehlers Platz in Berlin Steglitz is etched with the names and addresses of thousands of Jews deported from the city, but this memorial often goes unnoticed, reflecting back the plaza’s trees and its social activity, including a regular outdoor market. Many seemingly innocuous signs on streets and buildings in nearby Schöneberg are reproductions of the litany of restrictions and prohibitions on Jewish life under the Nazi regime. Outside the Wittenbergplatz underground station, what appears to be a normal destination signboard is actually a list of concentration camps where Jews were deported. It is because such memorials blend subtly within the city’s everyday, productive spaces and activities that they can potentially disturb meanings and behavior. Another type of obscurity is characterized by recent memorials that are not permanent and solid. This would seem to be contrary to the central role of a memorial, to provide a lasting public marker of events and people now gone. The mahnender Mühlstein or “admonishing millstone” (Figure 17.6) is a temporary memorial warning against violence and sexual abuse toward children. Since 2008, this 1.4 tonne stone wheel, engraved with a biblical quotation, has toured to major public spaces in 14 German cities, often directly in front of their cathedrals. The AIDS Memorial Quilt is also not fixed to a particular location. Being composed from the inputs of many individuals, it does not have a fixed content or configuration (Hawkins, 1993). It also has a limited durability. White wreaths that are laid out on public spaces to enumerate the suicides in a given year are, similarly, ephemeral and changeable (Ware, 2004). An Ottawa memorial for the 100th anniversary of the Canadian Navy was carved out of ice and internally lit in multiple colors: visually striking, although only for as long as the weather remained cold. Even more ephemeral and dematerialized is Norbert Radermacher’s installation near a former Nazi forced labor camp in Berlin, where the nighttime passing of pedestrians activates light projections of text describing the site’s history; or Krzysztof Wodiczko’s various projections onto existing monuments and buildings that reframe their meanings; or Julian

240 Vague Recollections

17.6 ”Admonishing Millstone,” temporarily placed on the Main Market Square in Trier, Germany, in March 2011

241 Quentin Stevens

LaVerdiere and Paul Myoda’s “Tribute in Light,” which uses searchlights to recreate the shafts of New York’s now-gone World Trade Center towers on every anniversary of their destruction (Huyssen, 2003; Saltzman, 2006; Young, 1992). Some grassroots memorials aspire to permanence, but do not gain official approval for permanent installation. Australia’s SIEV-X Memorial remembers 353 asylum seekers who drowned in 2001 when their “Suspect Illegal Entry Vessel” sank off the coast of Indonesia en route to Australia. Each victim is commemorated by a wooden pole, individually decorated by school - children or a community group. The memorial was originally installed on the shore of Canberra’s Lake Burley Griffin for just one day, the fifth anniversary of the tragedy, and then again for six weeks the following year (Ware, 2008). The vagueness of these commemorative works lies in their temporariness and their lack of monumentality. Their temporariness gives them a very different relation to memory and to the unfolding history of the sites where we experience them. Old memorials might go unnoticed, but ephemeral memorials disappear, and only endure in memory. After a certain time, they are, like the events they commemorate, gone and potentially forgotten. They are mutable. What gives these ephemeral memorials great power is that they permeate the everyday public realm, taking advantage of its openness, and charging it temporarily with new meanings, potentially inspiring different thoughts and actions. Unlike permanent stone memorials, which endure but gradually become invisible, these projects are visually arresting, because of their suddenness and unexpectedness, their closeness, their bright contrast with the darkness, blandness, and ordinariness of urban space.

Experiencing Vague Objects

The design of permanent memorials can suggest indeterminacy and uncertainty in a variety of ways. From the outside, Ottawa’s Peacekeeping Monument (Figure 17.2) is a traditionally monumental arrangement atop a stone base. Inside, visitors encounter an interstitial space where a path winds between the overgrown rubble walls of a destroyed village. This apparently remnant space artfully uses rough built form and resurgent vegetation to embody the rawness of real historical events, to illustrate the social conﬂict and violence that are repressed inside many memorials, and to suggest destruction and transformation over time. It matches well Lévesque’s (2002) evocation of terrain vague as a hostile “urban wilderness” characterized by a richness of materials and bodily engagement. The visitor has the sense of suddenly stepping into a war- torn setting. The memorial’s dirty, gravelly, ruined inner walls merge into the smooth, white, stone-like, geometric exterior walls, which angle upward and meet in the form of a ship’s prow. They guide the eye to three anonymous

242 Vague Recollections

peacekeepers perched on the prow, who use binoculars and radio to look to the horizon and establish contact to the outside world. An open plaza provides room for assemblies. Its backing wall lists details of international peacekeeping actions. Engraved texts confirm the values of peacekeeping. The Peacekeeping Monument thus resolves uncertainty in favor of an orderly, sensible world. The terrain vague serves merely as a brief establishing shot to provide the commemorative subject with a vivid back-story. Another inexplicit kind of vagueness is achieved through the abstraction of many contemporary memorial designs. Memorial architecture is not always, to use Solà-Morales’s (1995) terms, optical, figurative, and distant. Since the precedent of Maya Lin’s 1982 Vietnam Veterans Memorial, many memorials have been sculpturally minimal and largely illegible, lacking any explicit visual symbols, and, in some cases, any explanatory text. Two examples illustrate the extremes of stripping away the figural and textual content and

17.7 spatial sequences that have traditionally guided visitors’ attention, recollection, Memorial to the and emotion. The 2004 Lady Diana Memorial Fountain is a low, 60-meter- Murdered Jews of diameter ring-shaped cascading fountain set in an inclined lawn landscape within Europe, Berlin, July 15, 2006, the Day 500,000 London’s Hyde Park. The 2005 MMJE in Berlin (Figure 17.7) is an unfenced People Attended the two-hectare ﬁeld of 2,711 thick, grey, rectangular columns, or stelae, of varying Nearby Free Electronic Music Festival, the heights, set in closely spaced, gridded rows on an undulating paved ground Love Parade plane.

243 Quentin Stevens

Both these memorials are simple, concrete shapes. Neither contains any symbolic imagery or explanatory text. Fried’s (1967) critique of the “theatricality” of 1960s minimalist sculpture provides a useful framework for understanding how people encounter these memorials. Because these objects are representationally empty, visitors’ attention is drawn to the work’s purely aesthetic structure, as well as the context surrounding the artwork, their own physical relation to the artwork, their non-visual sensory experiences, their own actions, and the actions of other visitors (Stevens, 2009). Visitors’ varied, often playful actions illustrate their exploratory relation to the sensory delights and bodily challenges of these terrains vagues. The attention of most people visiting these memorials is not on the subjects being commemorated, but on the here-and-now of themselves and what they are doing (Foster, 1996). In contrast to Solà-Morales’s (1995) interpretation of the vagueness of forgotten leftover spaces, at these sites, the present dominates memory of the past. Both memorials are located in busy public areas frequented by tourists, and both were designed without boundaries. Thus part of the vagueness of both memorials is the way they close the distance and blur the boundaries between the non-functional emptiness of memorials and everyday public space, interspersing their activities. Many visitors encountering these memorials are not specifically seeking to remember, and do not recognize them as hallowed spaces. Some visitors are walking to work or going for a jog, sitting and drinking or smoking, lying and sunbathing or sleeping, reading or using mobile phones. Both these memorial sites are terrains vagues in terms of their physical openness and lack of practical function, but even more so in terms of their lack of clear, obvious meanings and their behavioral permissiveness. The designers of these minimalist memorials argue that, rather than eliminating meaning, they have sought new ways of provoking engagement and responses from visitors, transmitting meanings, and addressing new subjects of remembrance. The playful uses of the Diana Memorial are in keeping with designer Kathryn Gustafson’s intention that encouraging children’s play would aptly commemorate Diana’s own interest in, and effect on, children. The MMJE’s architect, Peter Eisenman, anticipated that the sensory, bodily experience of his design would induce a rather different kind of vagueness. By placing the rows of dark, tall stelae at the MMJE close together, he intended that visitors walking between them would feel confined and trapped. Large, heavy stelae tilting out over the visitor would make them feel weak and insignificant. The gradually sinking ground plane and blocking of external views and sounds would disorient visitors. People would be compelled to traverse the memorial in single file or in separate aisles, and thus feel alienated and alone. The uneven, cross-sloping ground plane would make visitors feel unsteady and destabilized. Eisenman’s intention was that the experience would be gradually and subconsciously disturbing, and that visitors would eventually start to think about why a sculptural landscape in the city centre was so

244 Vague Recollections disconcerting. These vague, uncanny sensations were to be a perceptual analogy to the Holocaust itself, and the experiences of its victims, which could not be represented through conventional means. Physiological discomfort would gradually stimulate psychological discomfort. However, empirical findings do not bear this out. Eisenman claims to be unconcerned that many visitors do not make an analogical connection between their bodily sensations and the historic events. The project sponsors’ interest in bringing clarity to this vagueness are apparent from later additions at the site perimeter, including patrolling security guards regulating people’s behavior, ground-mounted plaques outlining rules of visitor conduct, and tall signposts warning against running (Stevens, 2012). Such additions suggest that memorials need to be recognized as such in order to engender respect. The aura of respect had traditionally been maintained through “the logic of the monument”: figurative representation, and the use of pedestals and verticality to define relationships between sculpture, landscape, and audience (Krauss, 1979, pp. 33–34). This was lost, however, with increasingly cheap mass production of cast-bronze memorial statues (Doss, 2010; Michalski, 1998). Musil’s (1987) comments on monuments’ invisibility, and modern art’s resultant turn to abstraction (Krauss, 1979), should be understood in this context of an oversaturated, overdetermined field of commemorative representation. The delimitation of Krauss’s “expanded field” for the reception of sculpture becomes very vague when minimalist works such as the memorials discussed here are placed in the public realm and are opened to uncritical public reception. I mean “uncritical” here in a positive sense. Unlike much abstract art that has sought to address the Holocaust (see Godfrey, 2007), the MMJE and Diana Memorial are liberated from the protective, explanatory, laudatory aura of the gallery setting and Art’s wider institutional context (Benjamin, 1936; Berger 1972). The vague memorials to Diana and the Murdered Jews of Europe enable “alternative ways of experiencing the city,” both its spaces and its meanings and memories, by reasserting the importance of the experiencing body, and giving wide latitude for action (Lévesque, 2002). They engage with “the haptic instead of the optic, the rhizomatic instead of the figurative” (Solà- Morales, 1995, p. 123).

Conclusion

Contemporary memorials can be vague in many ways, whether physically empty, representing emptiness or lack, invisible in the interstices of urban space, or unnoticed directly underfoot, whether splintered or insubstantial or rendered indistinct. This is not to deny that most memorials are still monumental, large objects that obviously and convincingly afﬁrm social identities and

245 Quentin Stevens power relations. The continued, even accelerating interest in leaving clear, permanent reminders in the public landscape is highlighted by the filling up and closure of central commemorative precincts in many national capitals (Stevens, 2011). These immense accumulations of social affirmation in traditional monuments reflect the condition of modern society as a spectacle that, “manifests itself as an enormous positivity, out of reach and beyond dispute. [. . .] The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained [. . .] by its monopoly of appearance” (Debord, 1994/1967, p. 15). However, no amount of positivity can annul the impact of more equivocal commemorations. Increasing numbers of public memorials have followed the conceptual lead offered by modernist sculpture, as “the negative condition of the monument” (Krauss, 1979, p. 34). These formal changes have suited a shift in the thematic focus of commemoration toward negative events and feelings (Marquard, 1991/1986; Solà-Morales, 1995). The variety of commemorative negations, erasures, uncertainties, and statements of loss and guilt sketched out above have irreversibly expanded the language, mean - ings, and purposes of commemoration. In their denial of didactic, definite meanings, their lack and their discomfort, in their very un-monumentality, the contemporary memorials discussed here open up memory to difficult questions and alternative viewpoints. They suggest that the past and its interpretation in the present are not clear and simple. Commemoration is more than orderly, obedient consumption and reproduction of the monumental history of winners. It requires doubt, careful reflection, open discussion, and a continuous process that Germans refer to as Auseinandersetzung, or “working through.” This examination of various kinds of vagueness in contemporary memorials emphasizes that terrain vague in broader terms is not void of purpose; its important cultural role is to give new social purposes room to reveal themselves. That requires not tying down the form, use, and meaning of public space too tightly. Canberra’s recently developed commemorative precinct, Reconciliation Place, illustrates a government’s attempt to recoup uncertainty and negativity, to make them as productive as possible. This project uses formal abstraction to elide difficult truths about its subject, so that the visitor’s overall experience can be aesthetically and conceptually pleasant. Although it is innovative in displacing attention from the government’s earlier representations of identity, it also displaces attention from the Aboriginal community’s own existing representations. Although it is a luxurious, wasteful investment in expressing meaning and history, it validates these expenditures as a pedestrian amenity. Its most abiding merit is that it is spatially and temporally open-ended, like the history and memory that it recounts. Alongside the central focus of this analysis on the spatial, representational, and phenomenal vagueness of recent memorials, the cases studied here also highlight two broader, linked aspects of terrain vague. The first is

246 Vague Recollections recognizing people’s active, even transgressive, engagements with spaces, traditions, and memories. This is true of memorial visitors and also of their designers. Despite their special claims to immutability, commemorative landscapes are constantly being created and transformed through human action. The current forms and management regimes of memorial sites are not necessarily so old, nor necessarily inviolable (Stevens, 2011). The second, wider theme, then, is change. Change in the meanings and forms of sites is constantly occurring, through both ofﬁcial and unofﬁcial appropriations of available spaces; and change will continue, no matter how much the landscape is weighed down with monuments. History is not over, and sites are being set aside, and will need to be set aside, for future tragedies and for reconsiderations of the past. Washington has a database of 100 suitable empty sites, an orderly catalog of current terrains vagues. However, the course of future history is also a vague terrain, and we can assume that at least some future memorials will rise in quite unexpected locations—or perhaps sink beneath them.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (project number FT0992254) and a Small Research Grant from the British Academy (Award Number SG-42175). The author would like to thank Karen Franck and Ruth Fazakerley for their contributions to the wider project upon which this essay draws.

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248 Contributors

Anirban Adhya is an Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at Lawrence Technological University, where he is an active proponent of the Detroit Studio, a community outreach program of the university in Metro Detroit.

Patrick Barron is an Associate Professor in English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His work ranges from scholarly essays on literature and cultural geography, to translations and poetry. His books include The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto and Italian Environmental Literature: An Anthology.

Francesco Careri is a founding member of Stalker, an urban art workshop with an open, interdisciplinary structure that conducts research on the city through experiences of transurbance in open spaces and in interaction with the inhabitants. He teaches at the Department of Urban Studies at the University of Roma Tre in Rome.

Jill Desimini is an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Prior to joining the full-time faculty, she was a Senior Associate at Stoss Landscape Urbanism in Boston. Her research focuses on reproductive strategies for abandoned urban lands.

Karen A. Franck is a Professor in the College of Architecture and Design at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, where she also serves as Director of the PhD Program in Urban Systems. Her books include Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life (2007), which she edited with Quentin Stevens, and the forthcoming Spaces of Engagement: Memorial Design, Use and Meaning, also co-edited with Stevens.

Elizabeth Golden is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture in the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington, where she teaches graduate design studio and building technology seminars.

Jerry Herron, a Professor of English and American Studies at Wayne State University, has written widely on cultural and urban studies. His publications

249 Contributors include two books, Universities and the Myth of Cultural Decline and After Culture: Detroit and the Humiliation of History.

Marieluise Jonas is a Program Director in Landscape Architecture at the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University in Melbourne. She is currently a visiting research fellow at the University of Tokyo, where she has initiated the Tokyo Void research project with colleagues Heike Rahmann and Hiroshi Ota.

Krystallia Kamvasinou is an architect and landscape architect, based in London, and is currently Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of Westminster, where she also teaches in the School of Architecture and the Built Environment. Her research interests include transitional landscapes and motion perception; ﬁlm/video in research; and terrain vague landscapes.

Guy Königstein is an independent artist who lives in Amsterdam. He works on spatial and theoretical projects in the intersection between art and design, and is interested in the “production of narratives” as a means of creation, participation, and stimulation.

Carole Lévesque’s work focuses on temporary architecture as a means to articulate exploratory and alternative discourses on the city and architectural education. She is a Professor at the School of Design of the University of Québec in Montreal, where she teaches history, theory, and criticism of design.

Stanka Radovic’ is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto, where she teaches postcolonial literature and theory. Her research focuses on the representations of space and identity in postcolonial literature, with a speciﬁc focus on the anglophone and francophone Caribbean.

Heike Rahmann is a landscape architect and Lecturer at the University of Melbourne. She is currently a visiting research fellow at the University of Tokyo. Her research interests include contemporary design practices in landscape architecture and design strategies for civic spaces in Asian megacities.

Marion Roberts is a Professor of Urban Design at the University of Westminster. She has published extensively on the topic of urban design and carried out research projects for major charities and government departments.

250 Contributors

Her current research is focused on the inﬂuence of place on youth leisure behavior.

Tanu Sankalia is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Art and Architecture at the University of San Francisco. He is currently completing a book manuscript called The Urban Unseen, which examines the historical, theoretical, and design themes related to interstitial spaces in San Francisco’s historic urban fabric.

Jennifer Scappettone is the author of the poetry collection From Dame Quickly and the forthcoming critical study Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice. She also edited and translated Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli. She is at work on Exit 43, an archaeology of the landﬁll and opera of pop-up pastorals. She is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Chicago.

Ignasi de Solà Morales (1942–2001) was a Catalan architect and theorist who wrote widely on a number of topics, including architectural and urban history. He was Professor of Architectural Composition at the School of Architecture in Barcelona, and also taught at the universities of Princeton, Columbia, Turin, and Cambridge.

Stavros Stavrides is an Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens, Greece, where he teaches graduate courses on housing design, as well as a postgraduate course on the meaning of metropolitan experience. His research is currently focused on forms of emancipating spatial practices.

Jim Stevens is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Lawrence Tech- nological University, Southﬁeld, Michigan, where he is the founding and acting Director of makeLab, a digital fabrication and design studio.

Quentin Stevens is an Associate Professor at RMIT University, and Reader in Urban Design at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London. His research focuses on environment–behavior relations, in particular unplanned uses of public spaces. He is author of The Ludic City and (with Karen Franck) Spaces of Engagement, and co-editor of Loose Space and Transforming Urban Waterfronts.

251 Index

8 Mile 211 Schöneberg 240 Aboriginal or Indigenous groups 237, 238, 246 Steglitz 240 absurd 101, 137, 149 Tiergarten (Park) 240 accidental 94, 123, 158, 164, 238 Wittenbergplatz 240 Agamben, Giorgio 151 Bhabha, Homi 115–116 AIDS Memorial Quilt 240 Boeri, Stefano 3, 6–7, 14 allotments 190–193 Borret, Kristiaan 3, 14 anti-colonial architecture 212 Boston 2, 4–6, 8, 12, 205, 221 appropriation xii, 16, 34, 41, 44, 50, 95, 96, boundaries 6, 34, 50–51, 57–59, 82, 184, 188, 99–100, 157, 164, 168, 196, 201, 195, 202–207, 209–210, 244 205–206, 247 brownﬁelds xi, 3, 35 Arad, Michael 234 buffers 3, 6, 50–60 archaeology 139, 145, 152 built environment 75–76, 83, 87, 130, 135 architecture xi, 6, 16, 20, 24, 27–29, 40–41, 51, Butoh 101–102 62–63, 75–76, 78–79, 82–83, 86–87, 90–91, 96, 99, 103, 113, 116–117, 126, Campo Boario 9 146, 166, 174, 177–178, 188, 204, Campo, Daniel 155, 161, 165 211–212, 226, 228, 235, 231, 243 Canberra 221, 233, 235–238, 242, 246 Athens 51, 59 capital growth 191–192, 203 Augé, Marc 6, 201 Cassegard, Carl 95–96 casting 18, 76, 84–86 Bachoura xii, 16, 33, 34, 37, 38, 42 Celati, Gianni 7 banlieues 204, 206, 208–209, 211 Certeau, Michel de 2, 44, 201 Barbieri, Olivio 26 chance 33, 36, 41, 137 Barthes, Roland 228 Chtcheglov, Ivan 130–131 Basilico, Gabriele 6 Citroen, Paul 25 Bataille, Georges 231, 236 Clément, Gilles 3, 11, 176–177 Bauman, Zygmunt 35, 45 Clichy-sous-Bois xi, 201–204, 206–208, Beirut xi–xii, 16, 33, 34, 36–38, 40, 42–47 211–216 Berger, Alan 3, 95, 188, 201, 234, 245 Cold War 216, 219, 224 Berlin: Colomina, Beatriz 86–87 Alexanderplatz 29 commoning 49–50, 52–53, 55, 58–60 Berlin Wall Memorial 224 contamination 2, 9, 117, 179 Berlin Wall Trail 221–224, 228 Corijn, Eric 3, 9, 155, 162, 189, 197 Bernauer Strasse 222–229 Cramer, Michael 222 Hermann Ehlers Platz 240 Crang, Michael 201 Koppenplatz 234 Cupers, Kenny 3, 10 Leipziger Platz 240 Cybriwski, Roman 91 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe Cyprus 50–55, 58, 60 (MMJE) 232, 240, 243–246 Pariser Platz 240 d’Hooghe, Alexander 201 Parliamentary Quarter 240 Dada 111 Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz 239–240 dead spots 3

252 Index dead zones xi, 3, 35, 55–57, 60, 188 Gerz, Jochen 235 Debord, Guy 14, 35, 246 Gestalt 76, 78, 86 decay 69, 90, 92, 94, 98, 117–118, 121, 141, Geuze, Adriaan 11, 14, 173, 175–176 175–176, 203–204, 208, 212, 227 Girot, Christophe 176–177, 179 délaissés, les 3, 4 Gissen, D. 96–97 Deleuze, Gilles 29 Grosz, George 25 Demnig, Gunther 238 Groth, Jacqueline 3, 9, 155, 162, 189, 197 dérive 112 Gustafson, Kathryn 244 detritus 115, 117, 119 Detroit Works Project, The 203 Haas, Lawrence 83, 87 diffuse city, the 108 habitat 11, 14, 103, 108, 142, 178, 183, 184 Dig for Victory 193 Haine, La 211 Doraemon 95 Hamburg 235 Doron, Gil 3, 49, 125, 128, 188 Harappa 95, 100–101 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 124 Heartfield, John 25 Douglas, Mary 151 Hertle, Hans-Hermann 220 drosscape 3 heterotopia 3, 35 Hofmeister, Sabine 175–177 ecology 11, 14, 19, 28, 97, 103, 173, 175–178, Holocaust, the 245 178, 181–184, 204, 206, 208 Hou, Jeffrey 153, 157, 168 Eden 143 Huyssen, Andreas 232, 242 Edensor, Tim 9, 154–155 hybridity 100 Edible Estates 191 Eight Mile Road 206–207 imperfection 89, 128, 131 Eisenman, Peter 244–245 improvisation 34, 125, 130, 135, 137, 148, Eliot, T. S. 151 218 Engelbecken 222–223, 228 in-betweenness 3, 7, 36, 37, 40, 49, 51, 53, estrangement 28, 125–126, 221 56–58, 60, 87, 114, 116, 121, 169, everyday, the xi, 1–2, 12, 14, 16, 25, 35–37, 207 39–40, 44, 51, 55–56, 65, 78, 86, 100, indeterminacy 3, 114, 116, 126, 167, 168, 114, 118, 153, 157, 167, 187–188, 196, 242 201, 203, 206, 240, 242, 244 informality 3, 7, 9, 16, 21, 34, 36, 44, 96, 99, 100, 103–104, 147, 157–158, 170, 188, fertility 143, 174, 184 199, 233 finance 146, 150 infrastructure 7, 19, 27, 91–92, 142–143, 146, flâneurs 111 174, 176–177, 179, 181, 184, 188, Flemming, Thomas 220 196, 201, 213 food growing 189–193 interim 19, 157, 162, 164, 187–190, Ford, Henry 62–63, 67–68, 73 194–198 Foucault, Michel 3, 35–36 interstitial xi, xii, 2, 4, 12, 14, 16, 18, 19, 22, fourth nature 176, 178, 182, 184 49, 76, 83, 86–87, 97, 115–117, 124, fractal archipelago, the 109–110 126, 184, 188, 201, 208–209, 212, 214, Frank, Robert 25 232, 242 Freetown Christina 9 irrationality 18, 131 Fresh Kills xii, 18, 97, 138–150, 188 Fried, Michael, 258 Jackson, John Brinkerhoff 73, 96 Fuad-Luke, Alastair 215 Jameson, Fredric 63–64, 71, 121 Futurist city, the 91, 111 Japan 89, 90, 94, 97–99, 119, 128 Jarausch, Konrad H. 220–221 garbage 34, 41, 44, 78, 97, 99, 138–151 geography xi, 10, 18, 28, 70, 110, 135, 157, Koolhaas, Rem 14, 151 204, 206 Kowarik, Ingo 176–177, 179, 184, 188

253 Index

Krauss, Rosalind 25 negotiation 16, 38, 51–52, 59, 67, 170 Kristeva, Julia 27 New Babylon 112 New York City 14, 19, 24–25, 62, 69, 97, 138, land management 178, 183–184, 192, 140–141, 145–147, 151, 156, 160–162, 195–198, 208, 247 164, 187–188, 233–234 landﬁll xii, 19, 91, 97, 138, 139–142, 144–147, Nicosia xii, 16, 50–52, 54, 56, 60–61 151 Ngai, Sianne 151 landscape xi, 1, 3, 4, 9, 11–12, 16, 19, 24, 25–27, 29, 33, 39, 73, 78, 94–97, 103, obsolescence 139, 143 108–109, 116–117, 120–122, 130–131, occupy movement 14, 54, 59, 148, 150, 138, 141–146, 149, 154–155, 167, 164 173–179, 182–185, 188–189, 199–202, Odaiba 91–92, 97 204, 206–209, 212, 214, 218, 220, Oikos 149 225, 237, 242–247 Oklahoma City 234 Lebanon 33 Olmsted, Charles 139 Lefebvre, Henri 2, 35, 39, 40, 44, 49, 57, 78, Olmsted, Frederick 11–12 126–128 Ondi 100–103 Lenné, Peter Joseph 222–223 Oswalt, P. 90, 155, 162, 187, 189, 197, Leong, Sze Tsung 3, 7 201 Lévesque, Luc 4, 12, 96, 98, 201, 232, 242, Ottawa 233–235, 240, 242 245 Overmeyer, K. 96, 100, 187 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 109 ownership 36, 40, 64, 90–91, 96, 154–155, liminality 57, 86–87, 127, 146 169, 188, 192, 197, 209 Lin, Maya 234, 243 oxymoron 16, 135 London 7, 19, 187, 190–195, 197–198 Greater London Authority 232 paradox xii, 4, 18, 26–27, 36, 90, 95, 98, Hyde Park 243 130–131, 135, 233, 224 July 2005 terrorist bombings 233 Parc de Thoiry 204, 211 Trafalgar Square 232 parkland xii, xiii, 3, 7, 11–12, 14, 16, 19, 34, Luxemburg, Rosa 239–240 39, 41, 63, 65, 67, 72–74, 83, 91, 94, Lynch, Kevin 3, 82, 87 97–100, 102, 104, 108, 110, 138–140, Lyotard, Jean-François 44 144–148, 152–158, 160–164, 166, 175, 178, 180, 183–185, 188, 191, McEwan, G. 192 193, 204, 214, 218, 222–223, 233, maintenance 98, 102, 145, 155, 162, 174, 176, 238, 240, 243 182–183, 185, 190 Paris 14, 19, 24, 158, 201–215 marginality i, xi, 2, 4, 12, 18, 34, 37, 83, 87, pastoral 142, 251 95, 114–116, 124–125, 155, 157–158, Perec, Georges 135 168, 189, 196, 230, 232–233, 237 Philadelphia 19, 62, 162, 173–174, 179, 180, Marquand, Odo 27 184–186 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 75–76, 78, 80, 82–84, photography xi, xii, 6, 16, 18, 24–26, 28, 64–65, 86, 87 71, 79, 82–83, 162, 212, 233 Moudon, Anne Vernez 76–77, 83 planners 18, 39, 73, 82, 110, 135, 146, 167, 202, 209, 214, 232 Nabarro, Rupert 3, 151 poetry 131, 143, 146 Natur-Park Südgelände 183, 188 polis 28, 138, 151 nature xii, 2, 6, 11, 14, 18–22, 27, 28, 36–37, politique de la ville 204 84, 86, 90, 93, 95, 97–100, 102, PopUp City 194 109–110, 112, 114, 117, 121, 125, post-Fordist 202 127–128, 130, 135, 142, 148–149, postindustrial 97, 144, 173–174, 176–177, 173–185, 187–188, 198, 202, 213, 222, 179–180, 182–184, 188, 201, 206–207, 223, 231, 235, 238 211

254 Index

Poupeau, F. 204 leftover xi, 3–4, 6, 9, 19, 36, 39, 93, 103, Project: exposure.9313 213, 214 118, 154, 157, 161, 187, 189, psychogeography 18, 112 201, 208, 230, 244 loose 3, 7, 153, 189, 197 Rathje, William 142, 151 as metaphor 49, 114, 122 Ray, Man 25 negative 18, 76, 79, 85 recycling 12, 69, 97, 145, 147 public xi, xii, 3, 14, 19–20, 29, 34, 52–53, remediation xii, 19, 140, 142, 146, 178 58, 60, 108, 110, 153–168, 177, 187, resilience 36, 83, 119, 189, 190, 199 190, 189, 193, 195–196, 238, 244, 246 Richards, David. A. 3, 151 spatial experience 41, 58, 90, 97 Riis, Jacob 143 Spittler, Ulla 244 Roadside picnic 116 spontaneous vegetation 94–95 Robertson, Lisa 1, 6 Stalker xii, 2, 6, 20–21, 116–117 Rohe, Mies van der 29, 63 Stalker xii, 18, 114–129 Rome 16, 20, 116–117, 141, 146, 174 stalled developments xiii, 19, 161–162, 187, Campo Borio 9 190, 193 Valle della Caffarella 13, 15, 17 Steichen, Edward 25 Romito, Lorenzo 9, 14 Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris 116–118, 121–123 salvage 138, 140, 144, 145, 147 Sugrue, Thomas J. 205 San Francisco xii, 7, 18, 62, 75–88, 150, 166, supernatural 116, 118, 122 205 Surrealism 110–112 Sculpting in time 119 sustainability 73, 97, 103, 147, 190 Secchi, Bernardo 3, 7 shrinking cities 19, 173, 177–179, 182, 187, temporality 44 203 temporary use 191, 196–197 Site Life 190 Third Landscape, the 3–4, 176 situationism 6, 39, 112 third wilderness 175–176 skip gardens 191–192 threshold 16, 48–61, 122–123, 127–128 SLOAP 3 Thrift, Nigel 49, 201 Smith, Terry 62 Tiers-Paysage, le 3, 20 Smithson, Robert 1, 3, 12, 40, 107, 109 Tokyo xii, 16, 18, 24, 89–104 Solà-Morales, Ignasi de xi, 2, 4, 16, 20, 34–36, Tokyovoid 103 87, 93, 96, 114–117, 125–126, toxicity 3, 9–11, 145, 151 154–155, 157–158, 162, 165, 167, tragedy 143, 146, 149, 151, 220, 242 187, 230, 235–236, 238, 243–244, trails xiii, 14, 19, 143, 148, 180, 218, 221–224, 246 228 Solà-Morales, Manuel de 41 transgressive 3–4, 154, 247 Solaris 116 Tsukamoto, Y. 90–91, 99 space: abstract 3, 57, 115, 117, 231 Ullman, Micha 234 alternative 115, 188 uncanny 128, 245 common xii, 16, 50, 52, 55, 58–59, 60 uncertainty 4, 14, 35, 114, 122, 125–127, 167, counter 1, 3, 18, 57, 89, 95, 103 187, 190, 230, 242–243, 246 derelict xi, 1, 3,4, 9, 34, 51, 96–98, 114, urban agriculture 189 116, 119, 127, 154, 160, 189 urban discourse 28 empty 48–50, 78, 216 urban wilds xi, 3, 19, 173, 177–178 ﬂuctuating 28, 56, 103, 125, 154, 162 utopia 27, 29, 35, 39–40, 52, 66, 111, 115, 117, hybrid xiii, 19, 91, 96, 100, 117, 178, 184 122, 125–127, 146, 180, 204, 206, 211 insurgent 153 interstitial xi, 2, 4, 12, 16, 18, 49, 75, 83, vague parks 188 86, 97, 115–117, 184, 188, 232, 242 vague urbain 36–37

255 Index

Vergara, Camilo José 64–76, 71, 74 Wenders, Wim 9 voyeuristic estheticism 204, 212 white ﬂight 204 wilderness 12, 93, 95, 103, 175–177, 182–183, wabi-sabi 89, 128 186, 242 Wall Street 14, 148, 156, 164, 166–167 wildness 95, 154, 175, 178–179, 182 Wallace Unit 213 Wodiczko, Krzysztof 240 wandering 6, 27, 78, 111–112, 117, 139, 148 Washington (DC) 232, 234–235 Yanaka 100–101 waste 11, 71, 95, 97, 111, 130, 139–140, 142–144, 146, 148–151, 176, 201, 207, zero panorama 1, 3, 4, 148 231 Žižek, Slavoj 118, 126, 128 wasteland xi, 3, 4, 114–116, 138, 142, 151, Zuccotti Park 14, 146, 156, 164, 166–167, 177, 198 169

256