Chasing the City

Models for Extra-Urban Investigations

Joshua M Nason, Jeffrey S Nesbit, Joshua M Nason, Jeffrey S Nesbit

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351202978
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Historically, many architects, planners, and urban designers solicit idealistic depictions of a controllable urban environment made from highly regulated geometrical organizations and systematically defined processes. Rather than working as urban "designers" who set out to control and implant external processes, we shift our approach to that of urban "detectives, " who set out to chase the city.

Charged with approaching the city more responsively, we investigate what we do not know, allowing the city to direct our work. As urban detectives, we have the ability to interrogate and respond to the elaborate patterns emerging from self-generated, internalized urban interactions. Chasing the City asks what are the current design trends shaping how we, first, understand the cities of today to, then, produce informed decisions on the continuously undefined evolving city of tomorrow. Intentionally, the work here does not adhere to rudimentary notions of supposed singularities or rely upon past generations of idealistic utopian models. Rather, Chasing the City delineates current models of urban investigation that seek to respond to the nature of cities and develop heretofore-urban strategies as concurrently negotiated future urbanism.

This edited volume provides a collection of innovative design research projects based on shared notions of Chasing the City through three bodies of strategic frameworks: (1) Mapping, (2) Resource, and (3) Typology. This structure ultimately allows readers, as fellow urban detectives, access to exploratory tools and methods of detection that accumulate from our environs, both practical and projective in our chase of the city.

1

INTRODUCTION

Chasing the Neo-utopian Paradox

Joshua M. Nason and Jeffrey S. Nesbit

FIGURE 1.1 Plan of Miletus (Hippodamus, ca. 460 bce).

Chasing the City is inquiry. It is the act of searching for inherency, for potential, for improvement—all through rigorous reflective processes bounded among urban and extra-urban territories. The investigations for understanding our contemporary city must be expanded, both physically and geo-politically. It is not based on the reliance upon unattainable ideals or the adherence to antiquated formal models. In fact, Chasing the City looks at the city through a critical lens of existing components, techniques of analysis, tools for actuation, and speculative propositions for the distant future supported from within. The city is an integrated field from which the future may be exhumed. By looking at the city as a complex cross-roads of influences, contingencies, reciprocities, and interactions, designers can draw from the existing to determine what tomorrow may hold without segregating the city from its inherent and attainable potentials.

The city of tomorrow has long fascinated humanity. For generations projective urban thinkers have pondered on the future city as an idyllic utopia. Continued today, such depictions of a controllable urban environment made from highly regulated geometric organizations and systematic idealism fail to identify both cultural and social legacies, lacking sensitivity and responsiveness to contextual qualities and needs. The contemporary city is complex, full of irregularities, and composed of continuous oscillations of local and global intersections that require constant attention, adjustment, and reinforcement.

Urban models popularized in the first half of the 20th century, based on control, efficiency, and systematization, failed to adequately deal with the changing diversity of cities. One-size-fits-all master planning models tended to ignore context, history, environment, and many other vital urban influences. Focusing on growth and delaminating layers of the city into distinct structures failed to meet the realities of the emerging city. Post-World War II cities began to decentralize, extending into territories beyond the proper municipal boundaries. Postmodernist planning attempted to return individual qualities of cities and respect some divergence from standardization. Lasting utopian tendencies still pushed city plans toward idyllic proposals—this time overloaded with references amalgamating “other” places and times. Both looked to outside models in order to develop the future city. However, each failed to recognize the vitality of cities as specific, encompassing organisms.

The city is beholden to a host of mutually dependent forces that reside outside the designer’s purview, but are integral to the behavior of cities. Seemingly, such varied design authorship contradicts singular and idealized urban visions. Instead, urban design that incorporates various professions and vantage points can lead to adaptive and responsive proposals helping the city to evolve over time, rather than stagnate it in the now (or, more likely, past). This fosters an understanding of the city as an interconnected series of forces and relationships layered over conflicting isolated moments and processes. This, at times, culminates in unpredictable outcomes. While unpredictability can be unsettling, it can also be productive for its transformative potential. In fact, it is that very unpredictability which forms alternative futures for the city that are impossible to be arrived upon through singular processes and externalized visions. Cities are undergoing rapid change in population, cultural proliferation, and technological interconnectedness. Such changes in the city require us to rethink our interpretations of what they are, and what we can understand.

Therefore, “city” in this book is not merely describing either singular or specific municipalities, but rather conditions of human civilization and ideas of processes impacting the globe. These can be geographically based or less localized. They can be physical, digital, or systematized. They can be synonymous with specific cities, but can also be regional and encompass a larger integration of several cities. Such cities can also be manifested at smaller scales, such as neighborhoods, specific sites, or as bits of data and mobility. The reality of the contemporary city is akin to many of the transformations we have seen in society: boundaries are continuously being reinterpreted, realigned, and even erased in the face of the complex, connected, and connective nature of urbanism today. Therefore, the city must be read and lived in at multiple scales. And as such, those scales include elements and influences previously nonexistent (or that may have been unrecognized).

Consequently, a shift in thinking and a subsequent reassessment of the role of the designer must occur. Approaching design as a fruitful exchange begins when designers accept the futility in attempting to fully dictate the future city. One must work in dialogue with existing and emergent urban components, trends, and behaviors. But designers must be willing to do so, even if it means compromising personal claims, politics, and philosophies to provide authorship embedded within the city and the consequences of the city. The utopian, and even authoritarian, tendencies of individual designers must be deferred in order to pursue access necessary to find what the city already is, and in turn its needs. Through this, designers can develop a more responsive working process rich within each urban instance discovered and potentially folded back into its own fabric, perpetuating an internal process of self-improvement.

Herein lies the neo-utopian paradox. The ideal city does not exist as a prototype to be laid across the globe as a singularity. However, the ideal—or at least broken fragment of the ideal—for each city lies inherently within the conditions that make up the city. For ideal models to be interpreted through a design process, designers, acting as detectives, must resist the tendencies to implant foreign, idealized masterworks upon the cities in which they work. The neo-utopian paradox is an anti-utopian model responding to the reality of contextual elasticity within site-specific conditions shaping the urban domain. Such conditions include ecological impact, cultural context, and continuously changing outputs of data and communication. The grid of Hippodamus expresses our earliest example of the ideal city.¹ As history shows, the impacts of ignoring topographical and environmental considerations, and even in some cases processes leading to such transitions from extraction of raw resources to social consumption, unfortunately thrive for control. The ideal city cannot be built through the superficial implantation of foreign idealized masterworks, as seen with Roman Colonization planning, modernism’s universal anti-historicism, urban design principles, and contemporary derivatives of New Urbanism (among other -isms). In fact, the implantation within or superimposition of ideals upon a fabric can actually tear it apart—killing its identity in the process of trying to perfect it. Instead, it is through the active extraction and re-presentation of inherent qualities within the city that it becomes its ideal self.

Capitalizing upon these inherent qualities of the city is the process by which you chase it. As such, it is the primary role of the designer, as the chaser, to detect, expose, and respond to the latent and emergent essences already established in the stratification of city. This chasing is the central strategy within the neo-utopian paradox—a fruitful paradox defined by the inputs of extracted resources combined with conditional urban outcomes and excesses expressed through the physical form and informational output of the city. It is through engaging the challenges of this paradoxical neo-utopian model that designers chase the contemporary city rather than sacrificing its immediate potential for an unattainable future ideal.

Instead of outlining a new paradigm, Chasing the City intends to reframe and cross-reference some critical positions in urban discourse. This situates the book in an established intellectual context, aspiring to contribute to an urban design that is dependent upon examinations of and within places shaped outside normative master planning practices. The role of designers and planners in the building of a vibrant and connected urban future requires acceptance of and participation in the evolutionary historical context. As a continuation of ideas aimed at challenging utopian idealism, Chasing the City seeks to uncover an anti-utopian accumulation of contradictions and contingencies shaping our current design disciplines. Similar to Camillo Sitte’s 1889 principles based upon the irregularity of the medieval organization, the neo-utopian future considers contemporary urbanism to be folded and unfolded—acknowledging the unbalanced and unpredictable as crucial urban design criteria.² Yona Friedman’s ten principles of spatial urbanism from 1959 provide further pioneering examples of urban divergence, offering flexible programs of spatial agglomeration, unpredictable at its core while simultaneously offering a structural and relational matrix as means of undertaking the whole.³ Reyner Banham’s 1971 seminal book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies lays out an integrated model of understanding a city’s individuality through examining its integrated built, topological, and cultural forces rather than denigrating its inability to fit pre-supposed, foreign urban models or best practices.⁴ The Situationists’ skepticism of the commodification of the city and its coinciding conformity to linear development practices fostering streamlined, anti-experiential norms of sameness provides a vital model for the inquisition of acceptance of city design as business as usual. Although each of the models mentioned above frames an intellectual context shaping irregularity, flexibility, and integration, Chasing the City moves beyond their fixed manifestos of principle-based regulation and suggests a more ongoing interaction with the city itself.

A closer look at such examples reveals tremendous possibilities held within a paradox intentionally confronting the realities of a city framed by its own imperfect utopian potential. Inherent in the neo-utopian paradox lies the duality both of an active human endeavor for civilization and community as well as the city as indeterminable consequences of colliding forces, cultures and ages—each superseding simplistic attempts to tame them. On one hand, the city continuously attempts to become efficient, reaching toward an idealized state. On the other, due to the complexity of interactions, the city is organized through conflicts of varied ideals, thereby producing behaviors beyond the prescribed and predictable. Therefore, a true chasing of the city requires layered, integrated, and evolutionary processes that involve and capitalize upon such a paradox—not merely ignore it. Designs that fail to embrace this two-edged nature of the contemporary city are rendered inadequate, at best, and possibly dangerous in more extreme cases. The authors in this book capitalize upon this tenuous relationship to deploy design strategies as detecting and revealing, beyond any over-idealized, superficial reading of pre-supposed truisms.

Utilizing responsive approaches to urban design, this book postulates a series of essays and design projects curated in accordance with these dualities. Categorized thematically, the chapters explicate the investigation of cities through three main partitions: “Mapping,” “Resource,” and “Typology.” Each part categorically establishes modes of inquiry for chasing identity and potentiality within the city, therein deploying existing contextual processes that explicate the city’s inherent qualities: namely reading, production, and identification processes, respectively. Such modes are not intended as mere descriptors of the city nor tools with which it can be measured. Rather, these processes are frameworks embedded within the city—they are part of it. Further, each chapter signifies a chase that identifies the nature of the city through integral processes. They are not urban-ism, but are urban. The city is in part the fragmentation of ideas that comprise it—a nesting of influential forces inherently shaping its present and future. And since the city is varied, complex, and evolutionary, so should be the ideas in and about it. Thus, the following chapters intentionally span a wide collection of topics and locations. The aim is twofold: to tie together the varied methodological ideas of chasing the contemporary city, and to redefine how we conceptualize the city in order to more successfully detect its possible, speculative futures.

“Mapping,” the first part, collects chapters that propose processes to contextually read the city as a whole through its integral component parts. Chapter 2, “Chasing the Awkward City” by Joshua M. Nason, investigates and offers an overview of mapping processes particularly intended to uncover emerging city identities, otherwise unknown. By drawing (and drawing from) places commonly misunderstood and/or conflicted within the city, one understands underlying, vital, and identifying urban conditions. Chapter 3, “Chasing #Antidrone” by Derek Hoeferlin, examines the impact of water-based systems on the urban realm. Low-technology recording/mapping processes are deployed in order to educate the public about their own urban contexts, teaching them how to read these highly varied ecological circumstances and understand their relationships to larger contexts. “Mapping” ends with Chapter 4, “Chasing the Logistical City and Its Spatial Formations” by Clare Lyster. Here, Lyster describes reading the city through logistical processes that produce highly robust networks of urban infrastructure, transportation, and technological storage. This inquiry looks at processes of transfer expanding the city beyond the boundaries of singular municipalities. Such an expansion communicates the city as simultaneously being handheld and global.

Part II, “Resource,” gathers evidences of extraction and production processes from the inherent and established contextual situations within cities. Naturally occurring and long-standing, these processes, which are ultimately informed by ecological influences, embed into landscapes, the synthetic integral components of a city. Chapter ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Praise
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword: Chasing the City in the Age of New Geography
• 1 Introduction: Chasing the Neo-utopian Paradox
• Part I Mapping
• Part II Resource
• Part III Typology
• Afterword: Chasing Composition
• Index