Manuel Delanda, "Deleuze and the Use of the Genetic Algorithm in Archite...

WE SHOULD IMMEDIATELY LOOK INTO THIS AS A WAY TO GENERATE OUT CITY'S FORMAL RULES AND STRUCTURE. FRACTALS AND SCRIPTING. IT STILL STRONGLY RELATES TO THE NATURAL ( WATCH VIDEO TO SEE WHY)

Thailand World Famous Floating River Market

Train Runs Through Bangkok Market

Im here

This is a test.

up and running

The main purpose of this blog, is to simply share our thoughts, just like we do in school, but at the same time document them, so we can actually, all share our ideas in one topic or subject, and collectively grow into better architects.


over and out..

my point of view on..

this is a paper I did for urban theory with Monica, i would like to know what you think..

over and out..

Ricardo Moreno

AAU ARH 635

CONTEMPORARY URBAN THEORY

Monica Tiulescu

My point of view on:

The breathing cities and their creator.

As a young architecture student and human being I do not have the answers and solutions to all the questions and problems of an ideal and utopic city. But for the last year and a half, my interests in buildings, cities and urban planning have overtaken my thoughts and the way I experience life. This paper’s intention is to express them all, they might be right; they might be utopic or even wrong. It is just my interpretation of the discussions held on class, the incessant thoughts about cities and their future; and the great passion I have about it

We as humans have failed over time to understand our surroundings, the way they function, and react to the input we are stressing on them, not only the planet is suffering from our lack of understanding from it, but animals (including ourselves) and even the outer space. We have failed to understand that all this surroundings and their contents are not ours, but part of an intricate and elaborate system, in which we are not higher up nor lower down we are just part of it.

  

Part of the problem, is, what makes us different and unique from the rest of all the beings in this “system”, our ability to think/analyze, and the extraordinary capacity of remembering the past, this two things combined have been our blessing and doom, it has created the most wonderful inventions of this world i.e. arts, bicycles, houses, etc; yet it has also created the most disgusting and unimaginable ways of destruction and hatred, i.e. nuclear weapons, wars, massacres, etc.

          

Understanding that eventually we will cease to exist, and not knowing what that light at the end of the tunnel leads us through, creates a sense of “I want to get the most out of this time and place I am inhabiting”. Grief is a perfect example of that hunger to have more and more (more power, more money, more belongings, more property), at the expense of someone or something else’s.

 The way this “economic world” functions today is: people with the power and the money wants the people with no money and no power, to stay that way, to stay ignorant, to stay out of what this “few bunch” are doing with the world and the human kind, so it is easy and inexpensive to generate more and more money out of them, not caring what so ever about the same people they make money out of.

The clearest example of how wrong this “economic world” is, lies in front of us, everyday, every single meal we have; the average citizen, no matter how wealthy or poor, does not know what he/she is putting into his/her mouth. People just don’t realize how that food is made and all the processes it had to go through to get to their tables. Now a days there is more information about it, and people are starting to understand what is at stake, their own lives; and beyond that, the whole human race, threatened by our own ignorance, grief and stupidity. But even nowadays when information is so accessible to a grand majority of the world’s population, people are still controlled by media, and media is controlled by that “few bunch” that run the show, and take the big decisions.

Along the way, we left behind what worked; past civilizations, seemed to work better, the people who had the power to make decisions, were people with real wisdom and worried about the people, new civilizations have replaced them with corrupted and money oriented “politicians”.

Nothing in this world will change until that “few bunch” (people with real power to change cities, countries and continents) understand that not only some people, but the human kind, the planet we inhabit and even the universe itself, are affected by the money-based decisions they are taking on a daily basis; and the way these decisions have been made over the last decades is wrong.

Tsunamis, the excess of hurricanes, global warming and an endless list of natural happenings, are an example of how the planet is trying to communicate, that we are about to overpass ITs limits, that IT is about to give up on human kind, and when that happens, we will be gone, the planet earth will be here and IT will keep existing long after we are gone, we are not kill the planet, we are killing ourselves.

The future does not have a pleasant view. If we as a single human kind entity, do not act fast and effectively, we will not be able to outlive this millennia; and personally I think it is extremely sad, that being such “intelligent” and capable organisms, we don’t have the will and strength to eradicate and stop this massive destructive behaviors and habits we have been carrying with us since the beginning of our so called industrial revolution.

      

We as humans have and will always have this tendency to act as a virus to our surroundings, but the planet earth was maintaining itself pretty good, before cities, and population started growing at epidemic proportions, before it was fast, easy and cheap to grow cities and objects.

Its time to learn that not everything that makes our pockets fatter will, in the long run, be beneficial for us, the planet and the universe.

It is time to understand that our actions, not only have repercussions within 20, 30 miles from where we are. Our actions will echo through time endlessly. It does not matter if it is an empty can of beer we dump or toxic waste dumped into a river, they are both wrong, equally irresponsible and disgusting.

                    

It is time this human race thrives from being a spoiled and reckless teenager into a mature and responsible adult. Because if not now, never.

As fatal as all this sounds, I believe it is the way the cards are going to fall, unless we get united and understand that behind the different languages, religions and skin colors; we are all the same: humans on the verge of thriving or perishing.

The solution is within us, it does not matter what you, the neighbor or me do for a living (lawyer, medic, architect, teacher, policeman, street cleaner), we all have the same responsibility and the same effect upon our actions.

The responsibilities within an architect might seem stronger than in other professions, working and developing such a tangible product (buildings), but they are as important as anybody else’s.

In this paper I wont go too deep into green architecture, because it is a given, without green architecture, we are simply doomed. According with archdaily.com “buildings cause 40% of the total carbon emissions”. It is imperative that the building codes get extremely clear and strict.

The architecture approach to this challenge, the challenge of keeping alive the human race, should be to stop worrying about a building as an isolated object within a system of isolated buildings, architecture is not anymore about creating a beautiful and functional building within itself, it has evolved into performing and creating building that communicate, share and depend on the rest of the city’s buildings and infrastructures; believing that worrying about floor plans, sections, elevations and the clients needs and tastes is everything there is, is an mistake, this epoch requires to take that as a given  and start thinking about a living web, in which cities are being transformed re defined and re-owned by the citizens every single day. Just as any animal, the planet or any living system, the cities are alive, they breathe, evolve, transform, decay and die.

As hard as it seems to believe that a bunch of concrete, glass, steel, stone, fabric, asphalt, etc; is alive, I believe that everything that interacts with something as alive as a human being, becomes alive immediately, everything that has the power to change the course of a living being, or a group of them, is alive.

The city needs us to survive; we are the bloodstream running through cities veins. Just as we need bacteria, cells, blood, and an infinite number of smaller organisms living within us, without them we would not be able to move, think, breathe, and simply exist. Cities and humans have something in common they both depend on other organisms to maintain the alive status.

    

As any organism-organism relationship, cities and humans share a symbiotic relationship; we need cities to shelter us, to operate on them, to have somewhere to live, work, rest, recreate, and spread. Cities also bring humans together, they create societies, entities and specific groups in which each individual find certain comfort on that feeling of belonging to something bigger than ourselves. The cities take care of us, and we should take care of the city.

Its time for us to start understanding cities as organisms, as part of this immense and infinite system called the universe. Cities are not only an static element, but a very active, and thriving element, and from my point of view, we as humans have failed to understand the organisms called cities, just like we have with the planet, the animals and the big impact our acts have locally globally and universally.

Just like the planet cities are not our possession to keep, adjust and correct, we have to give cities the opportunity to thrive by themselves, to experience changes, that nobody planned and nobody “authorized”.

It is time that cities break the grid, and start becoming more organic, organic meaning, being able to spread and to act individually.

It is imperative that we (architects, urban designers, politicians) understand that just like a human body or any other organism, cities must have viruses, every single organism known, has them, why trying to eradicate them from cities then?

Those “ugly” things a city holds (homeless, “sketchy parts of town” higher crime areas, etc) they are necessary, for a balanced organism, as necessary as the “pretty parts of town; and beyond understanding they are necessary we have to respect them and understand that without all of it a city just could not sustain itself. I do not believe it I possible to have an immaculate city where everything is “pretty” and clean, and if so, what is the cost of having it that way? And I would question in the long run how these cities would evolve.

It is necessary to have “ugly” parts of town, so the people with less income have the possibility to live within the city and do not commute for hours to get to their jobs.

It is necessary to have robbery, at least in capitalism, because it is imperative to balance things out, poor people no matter what need “soma” and if you cannot by “soma” you have to steal “soma”. No matter what human beings will always have the hunger to have, buy, create, posses, own, new objects. It makes us feel good, that is “soma” the “pill” one “takes” when going sopping and buying a new pair of shoes.

Lets give the city the physical opportunity to expand, thrive, change, and regenerate.

A city should try and incorporate as many lifestyles as possible, not only the ones that give more profit; a city should not be only skyscrapers to get more out of the sq footage. We should try and embrace the poor and the rich, with no isolation of one or the other, but with clear distinctions. For this to work the rich the “educated” part of this complicated poor-rich symbiotic relationship, have to understand that they need the poor people, and that no matter what as long as capitalism (an economic model that has proven over time that is here to stay) is the reigning economy model, there will always be rich and there will always be poor. But the rich have to understand that “feeding” the poor will be beneficial to them. SRO´s , the Projects, and all sort of projects with the same purpose (aid the low income citizens) should not be excluded from the rest of the city and the society, they should not be only in the “sketchy” part of town, but little by little we have to start incorporating them to the city and society.

A city should always and will always have a “red district” it is good to a certain point to have within a city a recreational district, a pressure off zone where people can go and blow their steam partying, getting drunk and what not, people will not change, and people will always (not all of us) feel, from time to time, the need to go and “party hard”.

Real cities will always have high end neighborhoods, “ugly” ones, but is should try to include everything in between; and beyond that it I imperative to understand that this districts with time will change and mutate into something that might not exist today; so the city should be extremely flexible and tolerant to this changes, i.e. the mission district used to be and in grand majority still is where a great segment of the Latino population lives, and it used to be an area of the city where rent was not as expensive as in some other ones, but nowadays, it is trendy and hip to live in the mission, so prices have been rising up, and part of the Latino community living there because of their low income situation, are not being able to maintain their places, and had to move further away from the city, probably still in the mission district, but further way from the public transportation access. And very likely that will be the case for the next years, but who knows what the mission district will be in 100 years from now. Having this in mind the city needs to be able to still accommodate the people moving within the same city.

Synthetic or prefab cities, are not the solution, specially with the problem ahead of us, trying to damage the planet as little as possible, we cannot take the risk of producing cities, that will not work, that will people simply dispose, disassemble and start all over again, we cannot afford that luxury. It is time to take the time to grow slowly and with firm steps, to not make the mistakes we have been doing over the past decades. Even though we are running out of time, we need to step back, and pace the speed in which we as humans are growing and creating express cities.

It is impossible to understand fully what a city is, and how to measure it, I do not believe there is a tool or a set of parameters that can tell us what a city is, or how to design one, because even if we consider the 100% of variables around the city, there will always exist that unpredictability factor, that makes each city different reach and pure. But if we add on top of that, that we as architects and urban planners, are trying to come up with new designs for new cities, from our “artsy/creative” minds or from a group of people working in the same company, it is harder to believe that we would be able to understand deeply what a city is what needs it has got and how to approach a solution. We need a bigger team, a team of politicians, historians, poets, philosophers, lawyers; and pretty much everyone from different fields which is interested in living in a better city, not only for themselves but their loved one, the ones to come, and most important for the future of this human race. We have to accept that within our architect’s mindset, we do not hold all of the answers. Nobody does, we need to team up with people from different fields. Because at the end of the day it doesn’t matter what profession we have, we all are citizens, no matter what, so we should all have an opinion and an approach for a better breathing city.

These above are some of the thoughts I have had about cities and what they are, all based from the main idea that as hard as it sounds the are as alive as we are, and they have a similar life cycle: birth- growth, reproduction-decay-death. But sometimes it happens either too slowly or too fast, too close to us or to far away from us that we can not tell that the city is in constant change, movement and evolution.

As I stated in the beginning of this paper, I do not hold all of the answers to the questions; part of it because I am still young in this game called “urban design”, another part, simply because I am just human. But one thing is for sure, I do understand what is at stake, and what we have to do, to avoid this fatal human cease. We have to unite ourselves for a greater cause, and I am not talking about fighting the so-called “system” I say we use it to our own benefit. It is time to stop being intelligent ignorant irresponsible beings, and start opening the eyes to the truth that we, the human race is decaying and exterminating all that we and all of the beings in this planet need to survive on: THE PLANET ITSELF. And as architects and urban designers I believe we have the obligation to focus all of our efforts to push towards our salvation and towards a peaceful relationship with Gaia, the mother earth.

Bibliography:

The systems view of life

Chapter 8 of the turning point: science society and the rising culture 1982- Fritjof Capra.

The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems

Fritjof Capra

The smart growth manual

Andres Duany, Jeff Speck, Mike Lydon

The Rebel Sell

Joseph Heath, Andrew Potter

Video references:

Food inc.

Robert Kenner

The Matrix (trilogy and animatrix)

Wazowski brothers

Alex Grey

Alex Grey

Make no little plans Daniel Burnham and the American city

Judith Paine McBrien