Knowbotic Research

V2_Publishing/NAi Publishers Arjun Appadurai Arjen Mulder Knowbotic Research Lars Spuybroek Scott Lash Rafael Lozano-Hemmer V2_Publishing/NAi Publishers Andreas Ruby Edward Soja Rem Koolhaas Brett Steele Roemer van Toorn Mark Wigley Arjen Mulder TransUrbanism 5 Andreas Ruby Transgressing Urbanism 17 Arjun Appadurai The Right to Participate in the Work of the Imagination 33 Scott Lash Informational Totemism 49 Lars Spuybroek The Structure of Vagueness 65 Edward Soja Restructuring the Industrial Capitalist City 89 Mark Wigley Resisting the City 103 Roemer van Toorn Against the Hijacking of the Multitude 123 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer Alien Relationships with Public Space 139 Lars Spuybroek meets Rem Koolhaas Africa Comes First 161 Knowbotic Research Codes Bad Guys Space 197 Brett Steele Transitory Image Spaces: Urbanism 2.0 221 Bibliography 238 5 Arjen Mulder Arjen Mulder is a biologist and media theorist and has published several books of essays on the rela- tionship between technical media, physical experiences and belief systems. He is a member of Adilkno, a collective that published Cracking the Movement (1994) and Media Archive (1998). He is the writer of Het fotografisch genoegen (1999), The Book for the Electronic Arts (with Maaike Post, 2000) and Levende systemen (2002). In retrospect, one can say that the term “postmodernism” had something reas- suring about it, like all “post-” terms. “Post-” means nothing more than that something is undergoing rapid change with an unknown destination. No terms, or no new ones, yet exist for the outcome, so we have to identify the process by reference to its predecessor. However, what went before – modernism as in “postmodernism,” the city as in the “postmetropolis,” and industrial production as in the “postindustrial society” – indeed, all that is past, becomes in turn more comprehensible and tangible the further we move beyond it. It also grows more glamorous. Yet the clearer the past becomes in form, the more shapeless the present gets. All “post-” terms are by nature backward-looking and hence tend toward nostalgia; at their best they lead to cultural criticism and deconstruction, and at their worst to desperation and a politics of “letting someone else do the dirty work.” The maxim that he who does not remember the past is condemned to forever repeat his mistakes has a new counterpart here: he who knows only the past is condemned to endlessly repeat the same tale of loss. And this is why it has been bon ton for more than 40 years now among architects and urbanists to say that the city is disintegrating and vanishing because of new means of transport and communication. The four urban functions of work- ing, living, leisure and transport which Le Corbusier once so elegantly deployed in his model of the city can no longer be separated from each other either spa- tially or socially. Living and transport have become practically identical (viz. Paul Virilio’s account of the rail commuter who meets his friends and acquaintances in the train and merely passes the night in his dormitory-city home). Insofar as a house still has any function beyond a place to sleep, it derives from the theme 6 park-like character of the surrounding neighborhood (e.g. gated communities, Walt Disney’s Celebration or Amsterdam’s Canal Girdle). What was once a place, the city, has now become a brand, a logo, a “townscape” which itself consists of clusters of brands and logos. The city has ceased to be a clearly localizable spa- tial unit and has transformed into what might be termed an “urban field,” a collection of activities instead of a material structure. The contemporary urban expe- rience is splendidly symbolized by the cell phone: wherever your mobile works is city, and anywhere else is countryside. The Netherlands is consequently one big city, a region-city, and it’s not all that vast in comparison to Beijing or São Paulo, each of which has a population nearly double that of the entire Netherlands. Grumbling about the disintegration of the city always contains an implicit reference to what the city used to be. There are two idealized archetypes that have some currency. The first is the medieval variant, the city as a tangle of narrow streets and little neighborhoods, grouped around a central market square with a cathedral and a town hall – business, religion and politics – entirely surrounded on the outside by a wall marking the boundary between town and country. The other archetype is that of the late-nineteenth-century, semi-industrialized, boule- vard-and-parks city, in which the old impenetrability and rigidity of the urban mass has been broken open, and the boundaries between inside and outside and between politics and business have not so much been erased as blurred. The medieval city is associated with a pre-architectural era: no architect or town plan- ner was ever involved in shaping it. The nineteenth-century city belongs to the heyday of planning and targeted architecture – the former being military in character, the latter scenographic. The street pattern of the medieval city follows the logic of the labyrinth, and that of the nineteenth-century city the logic of the grid. And so on. Once the ideal has been invoked, it becomes possible to portray the decline in vivid colors; to depict how the urban fabric has been torn and frag- mented by the introduction of railways, cars, air transport, TV, computers, the Internet; how the antithesis between the market square and the town perimeter has been replaced by one between the city center and the suburbs; and how non- descript satellite towns then arose, all looking the same but all pretending to be different, while the original centralized city has turned either into an authentic ghetto or a simulated open-air museum. The best model of the world is the world itself. Reducing the world to a few images, slogans, formulas or lines of development doesn’t make it easier to understand. “The city” never existed in history; there were only “cities.” A city is 7 not a machine for the production of goods, people and urban experiences. The only kind of change a machine is party to is wearing out or breaking down, after which we replace the faulty parts or consign the whole thing to the scrap heap. That is not how it happens with cities. A city is an unstable system, a living system which is in a state of continual decomposition, but which also continually reorganizes and rearranges itself, which expands and shrinks. One of the actors or “agents” in this process of self-organization is the urban population, including the city’s architects, urbanists and local government officials. Other “agents” include technological developments, the mass media and migrations. What is wrong with the various “post-” terms is that they describe the city from the outside, from the perspective of the past. But every description of a process is itself a product of that process. Every cityscape is a function of the city imagined. If you want to understand a development, it’s no good standing outside the process; you have to wade into it. You have to allow yourself to be developed by the developments. From the outside, you see only the movements: what stands still, what shifts, what disappears. From the inside, you detect the transformations: what direction things are going in, what is changing and what new things are emerging. Cities have not grown more formless than they were during the last 40, 100 or 1,000 years. There has been no increase in entropy, but rather an ever greater informedness and organization. Cities are growing increasingly complex, increasingly rich in internal and external linkages, increasingly comprehensive and con- centrated, increasingly transparent yet incomprehensible. That’s obvious as soon as you abandon the “post-” position and move on to a “trans-” attitude – in other words, when you consciously go along with the developments instead of frantically trying to maintain a position outside them. People don’t change because they wish to do so, but because they allow themselves to be changed and, in doing so, themselves modify the broader process of transformation in which they are being swept along. The variant within postmodernism known as “posturbanism” is urbanism minus the present: a design strategy characterized by the fragmentation of familiar material, by collage, montage and quotation. “Post-” though it may be, there is no escaping the great mistake of modernism – that the built environment, the walls and the ceilings, don’t really matter and must therefore be made as transparent and functional (i.e. invisible) as possible. The spaces created and the movements that are made possible within these spaces are primary. Those movements are informed by act of building; the build- ings themselves are low in information. “Transurbanism” is by contrast urbanism plus transformation. Transformation is the multiplication of information. 8 Transurbanism is a theory of the transition of cities as they are now, towards a design process in which the highly informed character of every built environment is used as a design resource by that environment itself. Cities have always been places for strangers to visit and live; their presence made it possible for the inhabitants to define themselves as autochthonous. The word “culture” denoted a collection of images, customs, assumptions and peculiarities that were the concrete expression of the autochthony of the inhabitants. A city, a region or a country could be recognized by its building style, costume, festivals and mentality. To paraphrase Johan Huizinga, the culture is where the local population “plays” its identity. The average school today caters for children of 26 different nationalities.

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