Hannah Arendt about the Polis

Hannah Arendt explains her concept of the polis departing from an ancient Greek (Heraclitus, Aristotle) understanding of this term. In The Human Condition (1958) she argues:

"The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be. "Wherever you go, you will be a polis": these famous words became not merely the watchword of Greek colonization, they expressed the conviction that action and speech create a space between the participants which can find its proper location almost any time and anywhere. It is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely, the space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly.

This space does not always exist, and although all men are capable of deed and word, most of them—like the slave, the foreigner, and the barbarian in antiquity, like the laborer or craftsman prior to the modern age, the jobholder or businessman in our world—do not live in it. No man, moreover, can live in it all the time. To be deprived of it means to be deprived of reality, which, humanly and politically speaking, is the same as appearance. To men the reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of others, by its appearing to all; "for what appears to all, this we call Being," and whatever lacks this appearance comes and passes away like a dream, intimately and exclusively our own but without reality." [1]

And about the public realm and the space of appearance:

"Power preserves the public realm and the space of appearance,and as such it is also the lifeblood of the human artifice, which, unless it is the scene of action and speech, of the web of human affairs and relationships and the stories engendered by them, lacks its ultimate raison d'etre. Without being talked about by men andwithout housing them, the world would not be a human artifice but a heap of unrelated things to which each isolated individual was at liberty to add one more object; without the human artifice to house them, human affairs would be as floating, as futile and vain, as the wanderings of nomad tribes." [2]

[1 ]Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, (1958) 1998, p. 198, 199.

[2] Ibid, p. 204.

Definition of Architecture

Today I found a very nice definition of architecture by David Harvey in Spaces of Hope (2000):

"The architect has been most deeply enmeshed throughout history in the production and pursuit of utopian ideals (particularly through not solely those spatial form). The architect shapes spaces so as to give them social utility as well as human and aesthetic/symbolic meanings. The architect shapes and preserves long-term social memories and strives to give material form to the longings and desires of individuals and collectivities. The architect struggles to open spaces for new possibilities, for future forms of social lives."

Harvey, David, Spaces of Hope, Edinburgh University Press, 2000, p. 200.

The favela as a image of counter-modernity?

Daniela Fabricius in: Resisting Representation - The informal Geographies of Rio de Janeiro.

"Even though they are very much a product of modern economies and social transformations, favelas are still associated with an abject, primitive. or regressive form of urban life. Even if Rio's favelas were once visited and celebrated by figures like Le Corbusier and Marintetti, they remained an image of counter-modernity, particular in a country like Brazil, which developed a strong Modernist ethos. Favelas are frequently misunderstood as a transitional urbanism, a phase of urban form as it evolves from a premodern to a modern civilization. The slums that appeared in European cities in the 19th century and gave way to today's modern metropolises are often used as examples to argue this point. But there is no evidence or reason to believe that the informal settlements in the Third World will or should develop as European cities do. Brazilian favelas are over 100 years old and don't necessary become more urbanized with time; sometimes, in fact, "favelization," a planned and newly constructed portion of the city eventually (sometimes in just a few years) becomes a favela."

Slavoj Žižek - Violence

“Violence is usually the arm of the impotent.”

For Slavoj Žižek we have to make a distinction between subjected violence and objected violence.
Objective violence is violence where there is a clear agent – a mobster, a criminal, a terrorizing parent – who did the act of violence. You know the agent of violence. This kind of violence is in the media all the time.
Subjective violence is more invisible and systemic and we do not notice it as violence. This subjected violence is present in the capitalist system, and it is a ‘anonymous violence,’ where there is no clear agent to blame. For example during a economic crisis; it just happens and nobody is responsible.

“I think – that’s the underlying thesis of the book – that, too put it in somewhat bombastic terms, if humanity is to survive, confronting all the crisis we have today, the threat of ecological crisis, the threat of social violence, provoked by new forms of apartheid. One the one hand gated communities, on the other hand people living in excluded areas; slums, favelas and so on. Our next ethical step is to learn, to except to be responsible, even for this objective violence. We say: ‘Sorry, it is objective what can I do [about it]. We are responsible for it.”

Žižek argues that we ‘live in a era where violence is the big taboo.’ Thinks that were seen as tasteless fifteen years ago are now seen as a form of violence. The last decades there has grown a higher sensitivity towards subjected violence. The interesting point is that this sentivity goes hand in hand with  a increase of objected violence and social violence. Žižek states: ‘The paradox for me is that this extreme sensitivity to subjected violence is a very dangerous ideological phenomenon, something which goes hand in hand with social violence.’

Proposal Graduation Project

Sao Paulo grow during the twentieth century into one of the larges metropolises of the world. High-rise buildings shoot up like mushrooms, Sao Paulo became an ‘urban jungle’. However, beside this intensive urban city emerged also an expansive periphery more poorly developed. This periphery mainly came into being through a process of autoconstruction (autoconstrução), the working classes build their own houses because they were not able to participate the formal market. Nowadays almost all the house have sewage system, electricity and water, a significant part of the roads are asphalted. Interesting is that the architect in this process only operates somewhere in the margins.

Exceptional is the building system CEU (Centros Educacionais Unificados), in this project design is deployed in a very strategic and pragmatic way in order to add public services to the periphery. More than forty of these centre’s have been build, all with the same repeating building objects. The centre’s contain among other things: different schools, a cultural centre, a theater, sporting facilities and swimming pools municipal services. The strength of this project is that it within a short period of time, and for a large amount of people, offered access to services that where lacking before. What interests me professionally is that fact that architecture can play a role on the metropolitan scale. An elementary architectonic intervention – sometimes called ‘urban acupuncture’ – can till a certain extent improve the daily life of many people. Standardization makes it possible to create a generic type of architecture; quick to build, cheap and accessible for many. In my graduation project I want to investigate this topic further. So my research questions is as follows:

                Is it possible to develop a typological public space, that is less uniform as the CEU’s and more                 is integrated in the context, without giving up its repetitive and adaptable characteristics.

In relation to this research question I want to examine the following topics:

1. Theoretical Framework: Public space in a city characterized by segregation and fear.
The Brazilian anthropologist Teresa Caldeira writes about Sao Paulo as a ‘City of Walls’; a city where the public space is ‘imploded’. Many inhabitants of Sao Paulo feel imprisoned because of strong fear for violent crime, resulting in an increasing ‘fortification’ of the public space. This causes on the one side of the spectrum the rise of the so called ‘gated community’ or ‘fortified enclave’, while the poor live in favela’s, a contemporary version of the ghetto. However, we have to realize that these two are the extremes, the majority of the people live in between these conditions. I want to examine want the possiblities of public space are in these urban conditions. Is public space – by Hannah Arendt defined as ‘a space of appearance’ – still a realistic in a segregated society? Or do we need to change our strategies as designers?

2. Historical Inspiration: The potentials of the Roman system for the contemporary informal city.
The architecture of the Roman city had a strong typological character. In every city there were comparable public buildings, build with an ‘urban toolbox’. Roman architecture balanced between specific and generic. The different urban components repeated themselves in various places: the enclosed square, the theater, (public space), triumphal arc (monumentality), the arcade (binding element), the basilica (commercial space), the temple (religious space), bathhouses (hygiene and leisure). In many cases these different – more or less standardized - functions where brought together around the forum and resulted in a multifunctional public space. I want if it is possible to design a contemporary toolbox; one that is adaptable to the specific context, but remains generic.

The Fallacy of Physical Determinism - Herbert J. Gans

In the essay Urban Vitality and the Fallacy of Physical Determinism (1968) Hebert J. Gans critizes urban planners, saying that the overestimate their capacity of influencing the life of people through urban planning. This essay in particular criticizes Jane Jacobs famous book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), arguing that see falls in the same trap of as the modernist city planner; her opponents. Gans, who is a sociologist, say that it is not so much the physical form of the city that determines behavior. He argues that rather the cultural codes of a social group determine behavior. The way people use the urban spaces depend on with social or ethnic group they belong to.  The reason why people in a certain neighborhood have a intensive street life and others not, could have been caused by the fact that the house is reserved for the family, and therefore the social life has to take place on the street.[1] So the determiner of the use of space is in itself not physical but sociological. The modernist planners of the city, but also their criticizers like Jane Jacobs are losing themselves in ‘the fallacy of physical determinism,’ which mean that they put too much weight at the physical appearance of space when it comes to sociological phenomena.
Gans writes about the American middle-class who prefers to live in the suburbs and don’t want to live in diverse neighborhoods, the retreat from the working class parts of the city is a very conscious decision, that is not in the first part determined by physical space but by the status they want to represent among their equals. They don’t want to travel by public transport, they want to travel by car, as every middle-class family does. They don’t want to go to the small merchant, they prefer the supermarket where they have more choice and it is much easier to park your car.
I will write more about this interesting sociologist, because I think that the nuances he makes are very still very valid today; especially to prevent to lose ourselves for the trap of the ‘technical fix’, the attitude that social problems are easily solvable by technology.

[1] Herbert J. Gans, Urban Vitality and the Fallacy of Physical Determinism, in: People and Plans: Essays on Urban Problems and Solutions (1968, 1972) Cox & Wyman Inc., London, p. 34,35.

Farewell to Old Amsterdam!

Very beautiful images from Amsterdam shortly after the second world war.