In cities around the globe today, artists, activists and citizens will temporarily transform metered parking spaces into public parks and other social spaces, as part of an annual event called PARK(ing) Day.
Invented in 2005 by Rebar, a San Francisco art and design studio,PARK(ing) Day challenges people to rethink the way streets are used and reinforces the need for broad-based changes to urban infrastructure.
Creative actions like this seem to be a relatively easy, low-cost, and participatory way to energize public space. But to be successful, it’s not enough to do the action; it must be seen and reported on. I wonder how this will work in a city such as Atlanta with its famously degraded and absent public sphere? Can anyone even see it?
An alley/street of Kowloon Walled City (via archidose)
I had never heard of Kowloon Walled City (KWC) until I began researching squatter settlements and improvisational cities. KWC, which was demolished in 1993, was a mostly self-sufficient enclave within Hong Kong with no functioning government. Having been surrendered by the Japanese and then abandoned by both the British and the mainland Chinese, KWC was left to its own devices to function in near-total anarchy.
The population topped out at somewhere around 50,000 people on 6.5 acres of land. This equals at most 40 square feet per person, making it one of the most densely populated places on the planet at the time. During its heyday from the mid-70s to the late 80s, the city had its own school system, medical facilities, and religious and social organizations, and was reported to have had a lower crime rate than many surrounding neighborhoods.
I’m most fascinated by the improvisational architecture of KWC, which grew up over the course of decades in response to the needs of its residents. The building was mediated not by the state, but only by whatever space, materials, and skills were at hand. Judging from photos, there was no clear distinction between streets, alleys, hallways, and tunnels. The city was so dense that sunlight could not reach the lower levels, forcing the residents to install a system of fluorescent lighting.
Cross-section of KWC by Mr. Suzuki.
Several Japanese researchers took an expedition to KWC just as it was being demolished, thankfully preserving a wealth of information about the city, including a number of incredible maps.
I’m interested in what kinds of alternative urban morphologies get developed under extreme conditions. What happens when building uses the materials provided by an advanced industrial society, but isn’t regulated by that society? What lessons might KWC hold for how we can organize our space in new ways? Is KWC the city of the future?
See this undercover video of a walk around and through the city (see especially 6:00 through 8:00).
Read the whole fascinating story of KWC here and here.
Elena Filatova's photo of Pripyat, a city abandoned after the Chernobyl disaster.
I love cities. Really I do. But there is nothing about them that makes them an inevitable or necessarily permanent feature of human existence. There was after all a time before cities and there may well be a time after cities.
Things that are unsustainable, don’t get sustained. The suburban sprawl and ravenous consumption based on cheap fossil fuels that we’ve seen over the last 60+ years is unsustainable. Dense cities are an improvement by several orders of magnitude. But even cities can’t hold a candle to the ecological sanity of nomadic forms of settlement. A nomadic life may be where all of human civilization is ultimately headed.
Nomads near Namtso by Philipp Roelli
What happens after cities? Is there a way to imagine the city as a more flexible, ecological, impermanent kind of social structure embodied in an alternative system of architecture? Obviously, a post-digital nomadism would look very different from a pre-technological one. But how?
I’ve started asking these questions in the Speculative Design lab at Georgia Tech, designing robots for the post-urban, nomadic world. My first foray into this arena, the Domestibeast, is a modular, mobile, robotic live/work environment that behaves as an integrated organism in an integrated social herd with others of its kind. In other words, mobile, robotic homes that exhibit intelligent herding behavior. More design sketches on this to come.
Atlanta streetscape (right; by Donna Thomas) versus the kind of 19th century Parisian arcade that inspired the urban "flaneur." (photo by William Pollack)
I’ve begun to craft my thesis topic in much more detail. See the abstract below. (Forgive the academicese!)
Grounding the street: Embedding aesthetic digital media interventions in specific urban spaces, the case of Atlanta
Abstract
Digital media artists and designers have begun to establish a tradition of alternative and oppositional visions of urban streets and thoroughfares. Using locative media, collaborative authoring, animated spaces, and other strategies, they seek to redefine and defamiliarize public urban experience (Crang & Graham, 2007). However, the technological architectures of many of these interventions imagine an idealized interactor whose origins trace back to Baudelaire’s notion of the urban flâneur—an un-embedded mobile subject for whom the street is a ubiquitous theater of spectacles and promiscuous, low-obligation interactions (Williams, 2009). Unsurprisingly, many present-day aesthetic interventions assume features of urban morphology and social structure based on a 19th century Parisian model rather than on the economic, social and material realities of any particular contemporary city. The experience of Atlanta’s streets have been shaped by specific economic, historical, and social forces, leading to a unique urban topology. Digital media artists and designers who ignore that specific topology risk reifying the privileged position of the urban flâneur. In this paper, I will outline the problematic figure of the flâneur, focusing on “the street” as a site for particular kinds of experiences. I will then propose grounded, alternative experiences of the street based on features specific to Atlanta’s urban morphology and history. I will ask critical questions of previous digital media interventions in and on Atlanta’s streets with a focus on how they have or have not responded to Atlanta’s specific topology. Finally, I propose to extend the vocabulary of digital media design research by proposing a theory of individuation by which we can emphasize the positionality of urban publics and the specificity of pluralistic urban experiences.
Steve Aishman's wii-enabled public art work at last year's Le Flash in Castleberry Hill
So now I begin my new online (ad)venture. For the last year or so I’ve been moving away from my old web-crank identity, and have been serious about researching what I call “Creative Ecologies,” a shorthand term for how creative worlds, art worlds, etc. are constituted and how they function in urban space. This bleeds over into the whole “Creative Cities” arena, which comes from economics and urban planning, so expect healthy doses of those disciplines here as well. I’m doing this is the context of a Digital Media masters program at Georgia Tech and so my research sits at the intersection of digital media, art criticism, urban studies, and human geography.
Over the next several months I’ll also be using this space to sound out some ideas on my thesis. Briefly, I’ll be researching digital media public art interventions in Atlanta and asking what are the specific elements of Atlanta’s urban experience that can and should make for meaningful digital media engagements in public space.
This hauls in a number of related questions:
What is the nature of “the street” experience in Atlanta?
Who is the idealized consumer of digital media art as practiced in Atlanta?
Who’s left out of that calculation?
What elements of the city are ignored when artists create mere spectacles?
I’m using Atlanta as a case study because I’m here. But the larger project is this: How can we move toward a more grounded practice of digital media and urban informatics that does not erase the specific history and experience of a city in favor of idealized, global, and generic media experiences? Of course, I’ll only hint at a few possible answers with this thesis, but that will be the question spurring me forward on the many, many late nights to come.
Cinqué Hicks I am a cultural code reader; I write, I make art, I curate art exhibits, and I conduct research on the worlds creative people inhabit. more...
