Von Bart Lootsma.
Von Bart Lootsma.
In 1995, the editors of Assemblage wrote an introduction to two projects by Greg Lynn and Reiser/Umemoto for the Cardiff Bay Opera House, in which they talked about a return to the sixties and of ecology. They did their utmost best to make clear that this had nothing to do with the ‘old ecology of the messy evangelical politics of the sixties green movement’, but instead with the powerful qualities the computer has in the fields of physics and biology and, further, aspires itself to the condition of biomorphic intelligence and how it behaves as an organism in the design phase. ‘We would like to suggest that the oikos and the logos of ecology in the 1990s is the computer and the theories and images of complexity it enables.’1) Instead of relying on symmetry as a general organization principle (according to Greg Lynn something which, in the design process can be compared to a ‘default’ position in the software), the architects make use of new computer software that consists of open, flexible and adaptive systems by which they think they can achieve an increase in organization. But of course the ecological aspect only relates to the way the internal organization of a project uses information from the site in the design process. In the end, the built form of the project appears as an autonomous and static unit. It is implied that the different organization of the projects, the way they are dealing with a different form of symmetry, is better suited to accommodate ‘life’.
Certainly, this new tradition in architectural thinking that since the early nineties has deeply influenced architects all over the world produces interesting forms and organizations that are powerful and important contemporary cultural statements. However, it neglects the fact that any architectural form inevitably intervenes in the organization of life. An architectural project may grow like an organism in the design phase, its realization on the building site, which usually takes place much later and takes several years, is a brutal cut in this process only after which the building is colonized by its inhabitants or users. Their settlement, which could theoretically very well be an organic process, reacts to the organization of the organization of the building it finds, not to the original conditions on the site. Of course, this could still be an improvement to more traditional forms of organization but strictly taken, this means that this approach in the end only produces a simulacrum of life, not life itself in the original ‘ecology’ (by which I do not mean the ecology of the computer but the ecology that feeds the computer).
More importantly, American architects seem to have settled for the limited political role they can play in the sense of large-scale urban processes. This certainly is a difference with the situation in the European welfare states, where architects, urban designers and landscape architects always had a role that was immediately related to politics. The concepts they developed could therefore influence politics as well. However, the political organization in Europe in regard to urban planning and at the same time the physical environment in which European architects work are changing dramatically. This produces a highly instable situation in which the aspect of ecology becomes a new meaning. This new condition forces and inspires European architects to come up with new concepts to regulate urbanization.
Instability
In Europe, over the last decade, landscape is becoming a more and more important issue and the influence of landscape architects in urban planning and urban design has increased. Of course this has to do with the increasing political weight that is given to ecology. According to Adriaan Geuze, a landscape architect himself, the success of landscape architects in urban planning is also explained by their natural ability to deal with unstable situations. ‘Architects and industrial designers often see their designs as a final product of genius, whose aesthetic entirety originated in their minds. A design like that is thrown of by the slightest damage. Landscape architects have learnt to put that into perspective, because they know their designs are continually adapted and transformed. We have learned to see landscape not as a fait accompli, but as the result of countless forces and initiatives.’2) This is interesting, because it shows how ecological thinking beyond designing green corridors, nice pavements and parks is becoming an integral part of urbanism.
Indeed, eight years ago in 1994 when Adriaan Geuze made his remark, Europe was going through the first phase of a process of changes that speeded up after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989. These changes have to do with the unification of Europe, which is first and foremost economically driven: the ultimate goal being the creation of a free market with such a critical mass that it could compete with other large economies in the world. This reorganization has however many side effects. Basically, they cause a dramatic crisis of the European welfare state. And as architecture and urban planning have always been at the core of the welfare state they are in crisis as well.
The suspension of national borders, the introduction of new infrastructure like High Speed Train Lines and the liberalization of air traffic produces a reshuffling of regions, some of which gain importance, others of which lose importance. From a continent of competing countries, Europe will change in a continent of competing regions, cities and companies. However, within the European countries, old provincial and municipal borders and the national, provincial and municipal governments with their corresponding policies and jurisdictions remain largely unchanged.
The introduction of the Euro causes many deregulations and privatizations, because in order to make the Euro a stable currency, the national deficits and inflation levels have to be reduced to an absolute minimum. This means that many services that were traditionally not only publicly controlled but also publicly financed, like urban planning, infrastructure, social housing etcetera, are taken over by the market. All of this happens of course on top of worldwide tendencies of globalization and individualization and against the background of what Ulrich Beck has called the ‘Risk Society’.3) The awareness of collective environmental risks has enormous consequences for the reorganization of the rural landscape. It does not just mean that nature reserves are protected but policies to stimulate biological farming will totally change the agricultural landscape in large parts of Europe.
As most European cities reached their borders and the agricultural land that surrounds them loses its economical basis, outside of their territories unprecedented and uncontrolled processes of sprawl occur. These processes are based on countless individual initiatives but nevertheless the development goes so rapidly, that whole regions change in character in just a few years. Now that the dominant flows of capital have definitively shifted from governments and municipalities to the market, we witness a tendency towards fragmentation, as more and more independent parties are involved in the way the built up environment takes shape. New developments are divided in many small parts that appear relatively unrelated. However, when added up they certainly threaten the traditional concept of landscape, as something that is opposed to the city, regardless if it is natural or agricultural in nature. Instead, we see the rise of a boundless ‘città diffusa’, as Bernardo Secchi called it.
More than in any other European country, in the Netherlands the debate about architecture and urban planning revolves around different strategies to preserve the remaining open and green parts of the landscape. This is of course not surprising in one of the most densely populated countries in the world. It is the key issue to understand governmental policies about planning, but also to understand much of the architectural work that is produced. 4) The existence of these governmental policies that even involve national planning, explains the radical nature of some projects by OMA, like Point City/South City and the densification of the city center of Almere. The former is a polemical radicalization of the Fourth Memorandum of National Planning, that is largely based on concentrated growth in and around existing cities, the latter the consequence of this memorandum on a local scale. In the case of OMA the belief in more concentrated forms of urbanization is also a belief in the quality of urban culture.
Also the work of MVRDV cannot be understood without this specific tradition of national planning policies in the Netherlands, but different from OMA the fear of collective ecological risks plays a more crucial role. MVRDV wants to reveal these collective risks to a larger audience and to politics to force collective solutions that would maintain or even restore a clear distinction between city and countryside. Metacity/Datatown is an installation that wants to explain to a large audience what the spatial consequences are of certain policies that deal with among others food production and waste. Pig City not only demonstrates the spatial consequences of biological pig farming (it would occupy most of the Dutch territory) but also proposes a solution in the form of autarchic high rises that incorporate everything from food production for the pigs and manure recycling to the slaughterhouse. 3D City is an exploration into the possibilities to build a three dimensional megacity that would allow to keep large parts of the landscape open for purposes of ecology and leisure.
The methods MVRDV uses are largely derived from the methods modernist urban planners developed in the first half of the twentieth century. Just as they did, they first present the problems of the contemporary city in an exaggerated form. The design method makes use of extrapolations of demographical, economical, technological and all kinds of other statistical data that are however reorganized differently in order to produce proposals for new cities. This is very similar to what notably Le Corbusier, Hilberseimer, Van Eesteren and Van Lohuizen did.5) However, the situation today is very different from the early twentieth century. Cities are more and more dependent of each other, not only when they are close to each other, but even on a global scale. Also, unexpected or negative side effects cannot be as easily externalized as they used to be. Therefore, in order to make these methods work again, MVRDV has to create petri dish like conditions: almost all their projects are thought of as autarchic. That makes the projects of MVRDV, to paraphrase Slavoj Zizeks criticism of the risk society, at the same time too general and too specific. Not only do we not know what the sum of our actions really makes up to, but also there is no global mechanism that regulates our interaction. The risks of the risk society are so ungraspable, that they become almost irrational. 6)
It is interesting that these issues were already problematic for Van Lohuizen and Hilberseimer. . Hilberseimer emphasized the importance of regional plans when he was working on Chicago In solving them for Amsterdam in the nineteen twenties, Van Lohuizen discovered the Randstad, the ring shaped conurbation in the West of the Netherlands, incorporating Amsterdam, Haarlem, The Hague, Rotterdam and Utrecht. Later on, these arguments convinced the Dutch government to come up with national plans. However, in the fifth version of the Dutch national plan that just came out recently and is currently decided upon in the Dutch parliament, it is interesting to note that national and even municipal borders are not drawn into the maps ay more. The Netherlands find themselves in a continuum that starts somewhere in the North Sea –that is more urbanized than one would expect- and stretches into Germany and Belgium. One has to be very well informed to see the differences in the development in these countries. Dominant in the planning process are just the landscape in terms of its geological characteristics, existing cities and conurbations and infrastructure. One of the main critiques of this Fifth Nota is that it remains quite unclear how the Minister will protect the characteristics of the landscape by limiting the growth of certain developments. This is however not just a problem for the Netherlands, but a general problem of urbanism today.
The work of MVRDV would like to be a solution for this problem, but the difficulty is that, just like the projects of the modernists, it relies on a form of representational democracy that deals with masses and takes decisions for the masses. However, very different from the early twentieth century, nowadays the European society cannot be so easily defined in terms of a class struggle, even if it is still very present in many different ways, and the policies to deal with it cannot be so easily generalized. In Europe, the middle class has become dominant in an unprecedented way. Apart from globalization, individualization is one of the most dominant characteristics of contemporary society. Individualization is a process that will probably continue in many different forms over the next decades, as globalization (migration, global culture, production) and ideological arguments from the traditional left and the traditional right that favour individualization (the freedom to shape one’s own biography and individual entrepreneurship as the basis of capitalism) merge in to a complex force field.7) One thing is clear however and that is that the ‘pure’ individual, as it appears in all different ideologies, does not exist, but operates in all kinds of groups and groupings, organizations and networks, multiplicities as Foucault and Deleuze call them, that very often transcend or expand over national borders. We will have to investigate the functioning and power of these multiplicities much more to understand them, whether it is just the spatial manifestation of the multiplicities themselves, as I have tried to do with my students at the Berlage Institute in the past couple of years 8), or the multiplicities as they manifest themselves within a certain territory or morphology, as Stefano Boeri has done.
Boeri started analyzing the kind of processes of urban transformation that produce the ‘città diffusa’ in the Milan region already in the nineteen eighties. In ‘Il territorio che cambia, Ambienti, paesaggi e immagini delle regione milanese’, written together with Arturo Lanzani and Edoardo Marini, develops a new language to describe this new urban landscape. The analysis is based on a careful interpretation of different maps, aerial photographs and photographs made on eye level by Gabriele Basilico. In the end, Boeri develops a series of prototypical developments, based on a reading of ‘urban facts’.9) In ‘Italy, Cross sections of a country’ Boeri develops this method further.10) In the research developed together with ‘Multiplicity’ for the Mutations exhibition in Bordeaux, Boeri is more interested in the driving forces that produce change from within certain territories.11) Until today, Boeri did not come up with a design strategy based on this research however. Xaveer de Geyter, whose approach in his book ‘After-Sprawl’ is in many ways similar to that of Boeri, does come up with solutions, but only in the form of a catalogue that demands again a kind of eclectic representational democratic body.12)
The Milan region Boeri is dealing with is still linked to a major city, even if the developments are border crossing and stretching out into Ticino in Switzerland. But there are also explosive developments in areas that either incorporate several cities or are even far away from major cities but within a Europe without borders suddenly have a new strategic position. An important criterium is that these areas offer a high quality of life, which is usually related to the natural quality of the landscape. The province of Noord Brabant in the Netherlands is one example, just as the Belgium of Xaveer de Geyter, the Ruhrgebiet, Thomas Sievertz ‘Zwischenstadt’ near Stuttgart, and the triangle Basel-Zürich-Bern. Others are certain areas in the Swiss Alps (St.Moritz), the area around Graz in Austria and there are probably several others. This condition that cannot just be called sprawl anymore and that Xaveer de Geyter therefore calls ‘after sprawl’ is becoming the generic urban condition in Europe.
The landscape architects Stefan Tischer and Helene Hoelzl, for example, made a proposal for possible ways of structuring the pressure on Bolzano in Italy. As Silvano Bassetti of the city of Bolzano writes in the introduction of the book in which the plan is presented: ‘It is not the organized expansion of the city that threatens the landscape. The land ‘spoils itself’ from the inside, it changes into something else and delivers itself to speculation.’13) Instead of that approach and after an intensive analysis of the area, Tischer and Hoelzl propose a series of building rules that are based on the 4 existing landscapes they distinguish in Bolzano. Thereby the characteristic of these landscape is safeguarded, while at the same time the allowed new buildings have much more specific qualities, that are derived from their location in the landscape. Still, the rules allow for private initiatives and developments.
In an introduction to the project, Tischer and Hoelzl write that ‘over the last decades, urbanism only knew only one possibility of extension. Piece by piece parts of the landscape were taken away and urbanized: the city was against the landscape.’14) This seems to be a crucial point for any new approach that wants to deal with the new ‘landscape urbanism’ that is demanded today. It is a field that, if compared to the approaches that were developed in the early twentieth century, has to deal with many contradictions. Bas Princen for example, discovered that in the Dutch province of Brabant certain programs that are realized in the countryside, programs that are basically ‘urban’ (notably programs that are related to leisure: theme parks, second houses, villa parks, certain sports), even generate forest. These programs attach themselves to existing ‘green’, for example former production forests that have turned into nature reserves, and than build a forest around the new development. 15)
A completely new method –even if it makes use of methods developed by the Situationists- has been developed by Raoul Bunschoten and CHORA. Like Stefano Boeri, Bunschoten works on different scales at the same time: from the scale of satellite photographs that show global movements to very local situations. However, Bunschoten is not so much interested in the history of typological and morphological changes, but in the future extrapolation of certain narratives and their spatial consequences or better, the consequences for the transformation of what he calls the ‘Skin of the Earth’. In order to trace the possible seeds of these narratives, Bunschoten uses a series of different methods: from the study of larger political, economical and social processes to the Situationist derive and from the collection of certain traces of human behavior to game theory.16) More than any other contemporary architect, Bunschoten, who is a profound scolar of Spinoza, uses the dynamics of the multiplicity itself to generate possible spatial scenarios. That makes that his work appears at the same time as very real and even down to earth and poetically vague and even utopian. That can be a strength as long as his methods are used in workshops with different parties to reveal the potentials of a site –what Bunschoten calls the proto urban conditions. However, it is also the weakness of his projects, because he categorically refuses to take the existing power structures or representational bodies into account.
I think that the phenomenon of what Xaveer de Geyter calls ‘after sprawl’ is a much more important reason that the importance of landscape architects is increasing than just the ability to deal with instability. The terrain in which this sprawl occurs is the traditional terrain of the landscape architect. He is experienced in dealing not just with the geological characteristics, but also with the many small municipalities that have a say in the process. For urban planners and designers landscape would not just be something that happens outside of the city, they are also used to deal with just one political body: town hall.
Very different from the early twentieth century, now it is not the city that is under threat of pollution, congestion and diseases, but nature and the countryside. That is a very fundamental reversal, to which no one has found a real answer yet. The debate about the landscape is almost always first and foremost a very emotional one. Even if already for a long time landscapes are the product of their cultivation, there is still the idea that landscape equals nature. And nature, unless it produces a direct threat to civilization, is always good and beautiful. Landscape architects have always relied on the implicit goodness of what they are doing. Now they are facing a period in which they have to make strong proposals for regional plans that are based on strong argumentations to seduce and convince politicians, in a similar way that urban planners and designers from the beginning of the twentieth century did for the city. They will have to make dirty hands and not just by putting plants in pots. They will have to do research into the processes that transform these regions. And, just like the generation of architects and urbanists that grew up in the nineteen twenties, they will have to involve themselves in politics, in the formulation of laws and norms to come up with a consensus about a bureaucracy that is able to deal with the issues that are involved in the contemporary landscape. Designing is not enough: it is about the implementation of schemes and the limitation of undesirable and unsustainable developments. Indeed, this is an enormous task as, to quote Ulrich Beck again ‘today ‘any attempt to come up with a new concept that would provide social cohesion must depart from acknowledging that individualism, diversity and scepticism are rooted in Western culture’.17) It would be interesting to find out if we could merge the best of the American approach of ecology, in which computer simulations are used to deal with complex dynamic systems, with the very real political issues European architects are dealing with. Probably we will have to merge the two approaches. But also we will have to find ways to predict how both approaches, either separately or together, will develop into the future, be it by extrapolation or within strategic policies. It is cynical, but the only thing that might help in this process is that landscape in terms of something vast, green and uninhabited is becoming a more and more scarce product.