After decades in which ecology was exclusively about technicalinnovation, it was high time to be talking about society in generaland how we live our lives."The important thing now is not to make plans, but to changesociety and us who live in it. Our competence as architectsand planners is required—we have only to step into these newarenas. However, our constant focus on individual projects tendsto objectify urban development at a time when the perspectiveinstead requires interaction, dialogue and political decisiveness." ; Chapter in booklet QC 20191104
Cemetery as a space that offers places for collective tombs is hardly seen in the history of China. More often it's a family tomb or a single tomb owned by the emperor or his relatives that takes up enormous space on a mountain, which in a sense tells the power of the owner. For citizens, their tradition is to find their own tombs in the mountains. Some might also decide to bury themselves with their beloved one. This somehow become a remaining problem for the contemporary life for the fact that the act of individual without guidance would easily cause chaos and misbehaviour. As a consequence, the government started to set up suburban cemeteries, which is a completely new typology that exists in China. And the result is a highly effective space which is too full for people to stay in the cemetery. While the cemetery arranged by the government helps resolve the problem of randomness, it itself becomes a problem with its huge spanning space, destroying the landscape of mountains and affecting the community living in the suburban area. My proposal would work under this contemporary dilemma, providing a possible example for developing the cemetery in China in a different way - a cemetery that embraces the urban life, mourning spaces and nature. In the project, much effort is paid to create a place of calmness, where the landscape and the building integrate together. Beside the imagination of the cemetery, the proposal also investigates the ways to blend in with the context of the site - with an incomplete ancient city wall and a topography that tilting towards the sea. The result is a series of designs spanning from different scales, different themes that tangles together as an organic entity. The project is developed by my own interest in the cemetery as a neutral space to discuss the essential theme of human being, life and death, together with my inclination to explore an interdisciplinary approach. Hopefully, this project provides a convincing image for a poetic place for life and death.
At the time of writing, in early May 2020, most architecture educators have passed through all five stages of the Kübler-Ross model of grief: denial, anger, depression, bargaining, acceptance (Kübler-Ross, 1969). We spent the first two months of the year in a politically-sanctioned period of denial. When it became apparent that the virus was not contained to a specific geographic region or demographic, our governments instigated restrictions and our universities closed. At that point, we entered the phase of anger. Some made it to bargaining and then depression. Those who made it out the other side are emerging with a lukewarm glow of acceptance: we are all distance educators now.
Suburbia prevails throughout Norwegian cities. Yet, the ideals behind the villa are in many ways representative of a bygone era. Transformation is unpopular and politically challenging. There are legitimate concerns about the manner in which densification is taking place today. This project raises the question of whether it's possible to work within the existing structure of suburbia, addressing the many problems associated with urban sprawl, while, at the same time, imagining a new suburban ideal. ; submittedVersion
This paper is a systematic review. The overall objective is to present and discuss perspectives on compensation in urban planning and research. The paper is based on an investigation that has three starting points. Firstly, it is Swedish experiences that are being presented in this paper. I want to report contemporary ideas of compensation in social planning from the development of comprehensive plans to building permits. Secondly, the paper focuses on planning processes, which result in detailed plans. Thirdly, the paper highlights compensation in relation to building projects in areas with cultural heritage. The target group for this survey is developers, constructors, consulting firms, public organizations and academic institutions. They produce documents on compensation. Planning tools, professional practice and research & development in this field of knowledge are dominated by ecological compensation. However, methods to identify and describe, analyze, measure and reconstruct environmental functions and values in the landscape cannot be transferred to cultural compensation. Nature and heritage represent in this perspective two very different forms of knowledge with its own scientific agenda. They have developed separately, mainly as part of science on one hand and on the other hand humanities. Compensatory actions in urban planning are in the center of research interest in this review. There are four key actors producing documents that are used in planning processes; government agencies, municipalities, consulting firms and universities. There is a growing body of knowledge on compensation in planning processes when it comes to ecological compensation or environmental compensation. Cultural compensation has not been studied on the same level. This stands out as an important result of the review. The investigation is summarized in eleven conc1usions in terms of (a) advantages and opportunities for the preservation of cultural values by compensation, (b) risks and disadvantages when heritage becomes an ...
"What is prison architecture and how can it be studied? How are concepts such as humanism, dignity and solidarity translated into prison architecture? What kind of ideologies and ideas are expressed in various prison buildings from different eras and locations? What is the outside and the inside of a prison, and what is the significance of movement within the prison space? What does a lunch table have to do with prison architecture? How do prisoners experience materiality in serving a prison sentence? These questions are central to the texts presented in this anthology. Prison, Architecture and Humans is the result of a collaboration between researchers and architects from Italy, Norway and Sweden. It presents new approaches to prison architecture and penological research by focusing on prison design, prison artefacts, everyday prison life and imprisoned bodies. The book will be of interest to students, researchers, architects and politicians." - Hva er fengselsarkitektur og hvordan kan den studeres? Hvordan blir begreper som humanisme, verdighet og solidaritet oversatt til fengselsarkitektur? Hvilke ideologier og ideer kommer til uttrykk i fengsler til ulike tider og på ulike steder? Hva betyr bevegelser i fengselslandskap? Hva er utside og innside av et fengsel? Hva har et lunsjbord å gjøre med fengselsarkitektur? Hvordan erfarer innsatte fengselsmaterialitet? Dette er sentrale spørsmål i de tekstene som presenteres i denne antologien. Boken er et resultat av samarbeid mellom arkitekter og forskere i Italia, Norge og Sverige. Den tilbyr nye tilnærminger til studier av fengselsarkitektur og pønologisk forskning gjennom sitt fokus på fengselsdesign, fengselsartefakter, fengselshverdagsliv og innesperrede kropper. Boken vil være nyttig for studenter, forskere, arkitekter og politikere.
In 1947, Soviet architect Alexey Shchusev developed a large-scale urban renewal project for the post-war city of Chisinau, the then-capital of the SSR of Moldova. Part of the master plan was the construction of Boulevard D. Cantemir, which would cut through the city's historic fabric. Only two sections of the boulevard were built before the project was abandoned. During the period of radical institutional political and economic shift towards a market economy in the early 1990s, initiatives to build the boulevard re-emerged through red lines, zoning documents, and planning regulations. The lack of political consensus caused planning paralyses over the city, creating a legal void where different actors competed to appropriate spaces. The power of the red lines has prompted various kinds of materializations of the boulevard. The real battle takes place in the sphere of the imaginary, and memory management is one of the main planning tools. Exploring the trajectory of the "Ghost Boulevard," I reveal conflicting political and economic agendas and the many forces that constitute complex processes of planning today. ; 1947 utvecklade den sovjetiska arkitekten Alexey Shchusev ett storskaligtstadsförnyelseprojekt för Moldaviens huvudstad Chisinau i dåvarande Sovjetunionen.En central del av planen var en boulevard som skulle skära igenomstadens historiska struktur: Boulevard D. Cantemir. Endast två delar avboulevarden byggdes innan projektet övergavs 1989. Efter Sovjetunionensfall i början av 1990-talet privatiserades Chisinaus resurser och staden prägladesav radikala institutionella, politiska och ekonomiska förändringar moten marknadsekonomi. Under denna tid återuppstod initiativet att byggaboulevarden och i de nya planerna som utformades för att förbättra stadensinfrastruktur markerades boulevarden i form av röda linjer dragna över dengamla stadskärnan.Översiktsplanen, som är ett av de två huvudsakliga planeringsdokument,godkändes 2007 medan den andra, mer detaljerade markanvändningsplanenför stadskärnan, avvisades av ...
Planetary Urbanization (Brenner, Shmid, 2011) opens up a radical shift in analysis from urban form to urbanization process, as suggested through the radical hypothesis of the complete urbanization of society, put forward by Henri Lefebvre four decades ago. This situation means, that even spaces that lie well beyond the traditional city cores and suburban peripheries, have become integral parts of the worldwide urban fabric. Political-economic spaces can no longer be treated as if they were composed of discrete, distinct, and universal "types" of settlement. Under such scope, in every region of the globe, erstwhile "wilderness" spaces are being transformed and degraded through the cumulative socio-ecological consequences of unfettered worldwide urbanization. In this way, the world's oceans, alpine regions, the equatorial rainforests, major deserts, the arctic and polar zones, and even the earth's atmosphere itself, are increasingly interconnected with the rhythms of planetary urbanization at every geographical scale, from the local to the global. These spaces become critical for urban development (and moreover, for urban political ecology debate). For that, Sweden is a paradigmatic case study where the urbanization of the southern part of the country is sustained upon an extremely intensive appropriation of natural resources from the North (Sörling 1988), (Tidholm 2014). Norrboten, the northernmost land of Sweden, is a paradigm for territorial metabolism where a complex combination system of mining industry urbanization shaped the area. Thus becoming the connecting concept of Norrbotten Technological Megasystem NTM (Hansson, 1990) [fig.1], it's key actors: natural resources, mining, transport, H2O, energy, military infrastructure, mining communities, the indigenous Sami. Today the nature of industry remains the same, the social, political and economic leverage NTM exerts over the region is absolute; the economic profit, financial stability and wealth of the Swedish state take precedence over the environment. However, much of the industrial paradigm that underpinned its implementation is now under a severe change; as the global economy is facing an era of human development where resources, metals, minerals and energy will be more critical than ever, a renewed urban and territorial framework is urgently needed. The set of relations between environment and communities is currently under an unprecedented revision based on socio-environmental reflections. This short paper will pose for discussion how heavy territorial infrastructure respond to the changing metabolism that is following after the short-term appropriation of resources so characteristic of industrial development in northern Europe. By critical graphic comparative analysis and trans-scalar research by design (Barcelloni & Cavalieri, 2015), the thesis will empirically investigate these processes to be able to cope with the debate on infrastructural adaptation through political ecology perspective.
Pause is a technique for troubling routines, a tactical device for change capable of disturbing established flows. Where urban public spaces are concerned, a pause is a device, an act however tiny that unsettles the balance or order of those spaces, bringing about a moment of dysfunction in which an individual is liberated for an unspecified duration. While the dominant power is busy 'fixing' this pause, alternatives can emerge. In this paper taking on the voice of a fictional character, I investigate the ins and outs of pause through the case of the Standing Man of the Occupy Gezi movement in Turkey (2013). The pause of Standing Man is used as a concept to rethink the architectural profession. Drawing on Lefebvre theory of 'moment', pause is discussed as an event destined to fail. This inevitable failure of the pause makes the moment of failure intense and tragic. In this way duration matters, and one of the contributions that architectural practice could make in working with pause would be to work with this duration – and to expand it. To study further how architecture can contribute to the idea of pause, a case of the unfinished building in Tehran during the 1979 revolution is discussed in relation to the Standing Man. The discussion is built up around the infrastructural nature of pauses, the importance of body politics to the idea of pause as a device and the post-production of space by means of occupation. In this regard, reflecting on the work of architecture, there might be a need for pause in the architectural profession itself, in its attitude to 'completing' the world. The narrator in this paper, an architect who participated in the 1979 revolution, examines the pause of the Standing Man through an architectural lens while watching a video of the event on YouTube. The argument is built up through a lecture on the subject, a discussion with a group of architecture students, and through snippets of nostalgic daydreaming and introverted contemplation. The flashbacks, the lecture, the movie and the train ...
The Nile Delta is considered one of the deltas most vulnerable to climate change worldwide. Apart from the immediate threat of sea level rise it is additionally facing water scarcity, agricultural and ecological degradation in parallel to an unprecedented population increase and the vast urbanization of scarce agricultural land. The urbanization of the Nile Delta, which may be considered an even bigger threat than climate change, is dominated by informal building processes mainly for the lower income sector while the formal sector is planning new cities in the desert. To overcome the pressure of land scarcity in the Nile Valley and Delta, which make up only 4% of the country, the ongoing governmental strategy since the 1970s also for the delta's fringes has been land reclamation in the desert, for both agricultural, industrial and settlement purposes. Yet, up until today "New Urban Communities" have not been able to attract the designated number of inhabitants as they fail to meet the needs of a large part of the population. Instead they have become market-steered recluses to a growing middle class that longs for a suburban life style and can afford it. Apart from offering a privileged lifestyle, desert developments are investment objects for the private sector. In the formally organized planning processes, sustainable design remains vanguard. As low-rise, high-density and mixed-use neighborhoods, informal developments evolving along canals and transportation nodes in the delta, meet a number of sustainability criteria. While these neighborhoods often lack proper infrastructure and safe accessibility internally, it is their location on scarce agricultural land that proves to be their main deficiency in the light of an increasing geographic vulnerability of the delta. In summary, currently both formal, market-steered developments on reclaimed desert land and informal developments in the Nile Valley and Delta lack ecological awareness. To become more resilient, how can ecological intelligence of people and places be incorporated in this spectrum of formal and informal settlement processes? Water scarcity and quality stand at the top of the list when looking at Egypt today. An overview of current social and spatial conditions in the Nile Delta region and of planning practice in Egypt today depicts a highly complex condition. This paper proposes Water Sensitive Urban Design as a tool for both formal and informal urban developments to negotiate between social and topographical extremes to increase resilience of the Nile Delta and its adjoining desert developments.
Shrinking Cities or Urban Transformation is a PhD-thesis conducted at the Department of Architecture and Design, Aalborg University in the period 2004-2008. The PhD concerns the spatial changes that emerge in contemporary urbanity. Contemporary urbanity can among others be characterized as both growing and declining. On the one hand, a concentration of the urban into a highly urbanized nodal point is happening and on the other a deconcentration of the urban fabric in declining territories is taking place. The starting point for the dissertation is the term shrinking cities, which has been introduced to describe the declining territories. This term is investigated resulting in a questioning of the term. This questioning of the term brings about a further theoretical investigation of growth and decline and the underlying trends. Following the theoretical investigations an empirical investigation of the cases Baltimore and Denmark is conducted. This shall shed light upon whether the theoretical assumptions correspond to what is happening in the real world. The introduction of the term urban transformation is the result of these investigations and a response to shrinking cities. Urban transformation is a holistic and relational conception embracing both growth and decline. Thus, the urban landscape can be described as a conglomerate containing built-up and open spaces as well as urban growth and urban decline. Following the theoretical and empirical analysis the thesis enters into a focus of how to handle negative urban development. This concerns the investigation of design interventions conducted in the two cases Denmark and Baltimore. These investigations are then transformed into a guiding model for how to handle shrinking cities. This frame consists of five overall themes: multifunctional landscapes, soft tools, pragmatic solutions, strategic solutions and, arhcitecture and design and approaching the field of negative urban development by encompassing the following issues: working overall strategically and locally with the place-based potentials; to combine the local space pioneers with overall policies, to combine political will with the use of place-based potentials, to work in between phasing out and development, to create distinction and add new energy.
Published within half a century from each other, French manual The Corset Through the Ages (1893) written by Ernest Léoty and the Swedish housing investigation The Family that Outgrows its Home (1941) led by social researcher Brita Åkerman constituted two landmarks of the sexo-political discourses for the construction of the sexualized body and the regulation of gender and family politics. While the French corsetier presented the stay as a technological and social mold of the feminine body that had its routes in antiquity, Åkerman was amassing one of the most thorough collections of knowledge on residential spaces in order to penetrate and modify daily life and social relations within the Swedish domestic realm. This article juxtaposes two apparatuses external to the body —the corset of the Victorian period and the Swedish research-based domestic space of the postwar years— that were aimed at regulating the feminine and masculine anatomy and its movements, imposed physical and sexual literacy and instigated procreative conducts. By looking into the scientific discourses governing each mechanism, their specific technologies and the instructional knowledge designed to deploy them, this study seeks to chart how orthopedic politics developed during the 19th and 20th century through disciplinary exoskeletons have helped to invent, map out and fix the somatic fictions of sexual epistemology that constituted the basis of the biopolitical modern regime. Through a close reading of garment patterns, housing plans, scientific texts, how-to manuals and usage guidelines, the article discusses Foucauldian models of biopolitical power and the administering of life as a tool for architectural analyses. Based on this proposition, it reflects on the centrality of sex and sexuality in modern ortho-architectural apparatuses and rises critical questions about their intervention into the biological and social structure of our contemporary society.
In 2004, development plans for the Swedish municipality of Järfälla detected a severe disappointment concerning appropriate forms of housing for frail older citizens. In 2006, the municipality organized an architectural competition in order to renew housing for dependent and frail older persons. In 2007, a winner was selected from 33 submitted proposals. The proposal was made by Danish architects, who envisioned different types of housing that were organized around a central residential care home that became the centre for the town plan.The paper is a study on how architectonic visions were converted into a built environment under the influence of Swedish civil administration. Interviews with 10 key informants, involved in different stages of the process, along with official documentation allowed for reconstructing stages that influenced the course of the project. The research was focused on the perceived similarity between the winning proposal and the actual realization.The analysis of the research material identified three decisive stages in the realization of the winning proposal. Firstly, the commission, which the architects had won, created problems since it could be seen as merely a town plan or a plan in combination with a building commission. Secondly, public regulations on tendering procedures generated spatial problems for the key building of the town plan as well as for segments of the full plan. Thirdly, the financial market in a large city region affected the level of architectural quality. The study identified a continuum of exterior influence that could be termed as adaptiveness that organisational and political priorities imposed on the competition proposal. ; QC 20170109
The optimism emanating from the opening quote, which I fundamentally share, confronts a grim landscape of universal cynicism, toxic capitalism and liberal, fake ethics. Those seem to be the reigning kings of the world we live in. Or in other words, shit-is-fucked-up-and-bullshit. The sentence, as found in the placards of some of the Occupy protesters, can be read in different ways. On the one hand, one could see it as the epitome of modern cynicism, which Sloterdijk has famously described as "enlightened false consciousness"2 ; in this case, the informed consciousness that 'shit is fucked up', i.e. things are going quite bad and everything is out of control, we are not in control – no one is in control – and those in power are 'bullshitting' us while selling out to investors. There is no way out… we can't do anything but continue expressing our cynical critique and turning our back on reality to focus on our own, already difficult, survival. On the other hand, the sentence could also be understood as the necessary denunciation of an unacceptable state of things, a loud cry that signals a profound disappointment and acts as the starting point of a search for justice, one that could thrust things towards what Simon Critchley has recently called an ethics of commitment and political resistance.3 It is certainly an active stance that I believe we should take, and one that avoids falling on the side of active nihilism: it is not about bringing this world down, destroying it and putting a new one in its place, but rather about transforming it radically from within. We have to imagine (and make become) another future, using the imaginative space of architecture, through the direct engagement in here-and-now situations. My suggestion is that sharing, displacing, caring might be important and necessary ingredients of such a demanding endeavour. In what follows below, I will try to sketch out what I mean by each of those verbs and the implications of such a performative approach for spatial practices. ; Formas Strong Research Environment "Architecture in Effect"
We define architecture not as an 'it' but as a process, or an apparatus; in our sense, architecture is a verb: to architect. Rather than refer to the (paradoxical) limiting of intervention's in-between, we posit a new concept: intravention. Intra's focus on the 'within' establishes intraventions as already a part of the spaces and times in which they are 'intravening'.We find this a very productive notion, one which is useful in defining the (makeshift) edges of specific situations with which we engage; it helps us negotiate the expanse of the relational meshwork of material, sensory and discursive flows, and allows us to start 'doing/making' immediately. When we 'intravene', we cut within the site we inhabit to conceive and construct it. It also speaks about intentionality: one decides what the intravention includes or excludes. It is therefore an intensely political act, as well as an aesthetic one. We will discuss the notion of intravention in relationship to its ability to interfere with the complex making of the city and the world, articulating, detonating, and re-articulating relations, actions and intra-actions between various things, apparatuses, people, ANTs, spiders and, very possibly, sugar dispensers.
