un-real estate kowloon

The only Chinese settlement allowed in British territory in HongKong was the over-saturated Kowloon walled city, once the most dense place of the planet.

Before its destruction in 1993, a Japanese team could map informal housing inside this amazing maze, drawing a cross-section of this squatting paradise.

Chinese authorities could not but beg local mafias not to build over 15 floors. Brothels, opium smoking rooms, illegal hospitals and trashy eateries led to another conventional Chinese-style public park today, once all dwellers were evicted.

[Images 1,2> Kowloon walled city cross section via Zoohaus] [Images 3,4> views before destruction in 1993-94 by Ian Lambot via der Spiegel] [Image 5> current Kowloon city Park from googlemaps]

Published on March 30, 2010 06:19.
Filed under: mutant

reclaim luxury refuges

The Charter of Dubai is a future urban vision by SMAQ architecture urbanism research, berlin.

Proposed for the Rotterdam Biennale 2009/10, “it has been drafted at a moment in time when the global real estate market has ground to a halt. Looking around, we find ourselves with the remains of an investment practice that focuses on built premium spaces: malls, business parks, gated communities, retreats, resorts. This document is based on the thesis that the luxury refuges of today will be inevitably reclaimed.

Across the world, these refuges have been confirming the tendency towards the development of a fragmented and socially stratified urbanity, which was pertinently described as splintering urbanism by Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin. [...] By manipulating the perimeters and parameters of the refuge, new forms of interdependencies will proliferate. This act of border manipulation also provides gaps, occasions, or potentials to misuse infrastructural networks.

How to turn the refuge from a traditional burgh (a fortified town) into a borough, a quarter that is a functional and thorough part of the urban landscape?

The Palm Jumeirah, also called the Palm Dubai, is not only the most spectacular of upscale refuges but it is also the paradigm: the ultimate diagram in terms of figure, internal organisation and external relations. [...] On the Palm, so-called virtual villas have been bought and re-sold ten times before the first stone was laid. Prices tripled and when they suddenly fell, people with no actual interest in using the homes called themselves owners. In the aftermath, what remains of these dysfunctional spectres is the laid-out infrastructure, literally the earthwork, roads, cables, tubes, and building stock.”

[Images> googlemaps and The Charter of Dubai by SMAQ]

Published on March 29, 2010 09:25.
Filed under: post-crisis, urban research

manual of decolonization

P’sagot Hill used to be an open space for recreation in Palestine, which turned to a conventional single-family house settlement after the Israeli occupation.

Salottobuono researched this condition of the new residential area and proposed strategies of subversion: a Manual of Decolonization. It is a generic toolbox for post-occupation scenarios, aiming to reuse existing structures.

Since 20 years ago, Jewish single-family houses adopted red pitched roofs as standard. Since Palestinians mostly build terraced roof tops, Jewish settlements were a political statement in themselves; far beyond aesthetics, they could be easily recognised by Israeli troops, and prevented them from attacks against Palestinians. Therefore, the Manual of Decolonization proposed in its Un-roofing strategy to rethink these stigmatized roofs towards an interactive social space.

By re-parcelling, re-combining, re-plugging, re-settling, un-folding, un-homing or un-grounding, their strategies seek a better future for the area through processes of negotiation among dwellers.

[All images> Manual of decolonization by Salottobuono, currently exhibited at UNPLANNED - Superfront L.A.]

Published on March 26, 2010 09:24.
Filed under: urban research

building 173

Cosmopolitan Apartments were one of the first luxury buildings in Shanghai 1930s, in a time when the city was known by some as the Paris of the East or by others as the Whore of Asia.

Building 173 is a more socialist name to refer to this 9-storey art déco residential block. But also is a documentary, which takes viewers behind closed doors and into the rooms of 1 apartment building in downtown Shanghai to watch the stories of 7 families unfold over 3 generations.

With Mao’s Cultural Revolution the once glamorous tenants had to choose a new life: to flee abroad, to share their dwellings with other comrades families, to move to their formerly car-garage in the first floor, commit suicide… As in most urban dwellings, large apartments were turned into dwellings for 3 to 5 families each, subdividing every piece of living space. Their stories of life, death and survival under one roof shed new light on China’s turbulent recent history.

Nowadays, some floors of 173 Shaanxi Road remain overcrowded and subdivided into pieces; other parts wait empty for rising property price; and others have already fallen into gentrification. Coming back to its cosmopolitan times again, but in a contemporary China, which is rushing towards an even more fierce luxury than in Old Society.

[All images> Stills from the documentary Building 173 by Charlotte Mikkelborg and Petter Eldin] [Watch trailer]

Published on March 25, 2010 04:33.
Filed under: post-crisis

crops into cities

Thread-like sky is to be seen inside Urban Villages in Southern China, among their hyper-compact mini-towers.

These former farmer villages did not go to the city, but the City came suddenly to them. Keeping the field property structure and minimal 1-2 metres narrow paths, rice crops were turned into 5-7 storey housing blocks, since the 1980s. And informally, peasants became real estate developers.

Despite this urban agglomeration, some villages (Shuping Village in Guangdong Province) learned how to convert themselves into a shareholding company, which helped restructure the power relationship between the administrative village and villagers’ teams.

This self-organized shareholding system strengthened villagers’ collective identity; unlike agricultural collectivism under Mao, which focused on production, real estate-centered collectivism in the village shareholding system emphasizes the distribution of collective wealth, as well as provide health care and education facilities for their members (a kind of danwei-ization of villages, as former planned economy had done).

As You-tien Hsing concludes in The Great Urban Transformation, village corporatism highlights the active role of society in urban social transformation through a bottom-up approach; a self-initiated strategy against state expropriations. [Source> You-tien Hsing: The Great Urban Transformation - Politics of Land and Property in China. Oxford University Press 2010]

[Image 1> thread-like sky in a Guandong Urban Village by Houhong] [Image 2> aerial view of a Shenzhen Urban Village from googlemaps] [Image 3> informality in Urban Villages by Peter Herrle] [Image 4> Wuuf Village proposal by Aberrant Architecture for an ironic redevelopment of Shenzhen Urban Village]

Published on March 24, 2010 08:37.
Filed under: participation

so moving

Location over Site? 2 examples of moving constructions in Shanghai, China.

In 2004, the old Concert Hall was moved 66 metres southeast to avoid noise and pollution coming from a nearby highway, towards its present location in the quieter middle of the block.

Currently, the former Qiu Mansion, struggling to survive to surrounding demolitions, will be moved 57 metres south, turning into a commercial hub towards the façade line of a busy street.

Puzzling the city….

[Image above> 57 metres south planned relocation of the Qiu Mansion, Shanghai] [Image middle> 66 metres southeast relocation in 2004 of the Shanghai Concert Hall] [Image below> moving house malaysia] [Sources> telegraph.co.uk; enerpac; malaysian post]

Published on March 23, 2010 16:37.
Filed under: ersatz

expressing highways

[Image> Shanghai elevated road at night by takaki]

Profiting from wastelands under expressways is one of the challenges of Urbanity. Far beyond of drug-dealing and informal settlements, these voids call for identity. Shanghai decided to dress its elevated roads in a radiant light-blue and London officials in a soccer green.

[Image> Shanghai elevated road at night by jacob montrasio via spacing]

[Image> London soccer field under highway by Charles Fred via spacing]

But appart from these top-down initiatives, citizens also come up with their own solutions for everyday needs. Under the Viaduto do Café in Sao Paulo, there has been an informal boxing club since 2006. Very popular box trainings and competitions are held in this new kind of civic square. Having started with a basic waste reused equipment, they serve now daily meals for the homeless and maintains a public library out of donated books. [Source> Projetos Urbanos]

In Portland, Oregon, skateboarders built a park themselves under the Burnside Bridge, without city approval; displacing a conflictive urban squat, they turned this area into one of the best skateparks of the world. [Source> spacing]

However, architecture can also be a powerful and simple weapon to avoid such bottom-up spatial appropriations. As Tobias Armborst, Daniel D’Oca and Georgeen Theodore describe (Interboro for IABR 2009/10), outdoor shopping malls sometimes install outdoor speakers that play classical or smooth jazz music in hopes of scaring skateboarders away. Another trick used in German train stations is to control the temperature of air-conditioning in selected areas over benches, and turning it much warmer or colder to make undesirable users move somewhere else.

[Image> Portland skatepark by Stephie van de Graeff via spacing]

[Image> skate-proof surface under the highway by KOre]

[Image> Architecture of control via archinect]

Published on March 20, 2010 16:30.
Filed under: co-optation/zwischennutzung

party pirates

“Fleeing from hideous benefits of Imperialism such as slavery, serfdom, racism and intolerance” Buccaneers set up temporary Utopian societies wherever they sailed.

“In the middle of an inquisitor European 15th century, the New World saw these pirates intermarrying with Indians, accepting blacks and Spaniards as equals, electing their captains democratically, rejecting all nationalities, and forbidding flogging and punishments. These misunderstood “social bandits” created utopias almost ex nihilo in terra incognita, enclaves of total liberty occupying empty spaces on the map. These utopias were meant to be temporary, since their true republics were their ships.”

Pirates were known for their love for music and often hired musicians for the duration of each cruise. This party atmosphere and freedom of their everyday life extended to sexuality. B.R. Burg in Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition suggests that the vast majority of pirates were homosexual, enjoying both female prostitutes on board as well as their male companions.

MUSIC was declared to be the central principle of the Republic State of Fiume, regarded by Hakim Bey as the last pirate utopia and the only modern example. Gabriele D’Annunzio (poet, artist, musician, aesthete, womanizer, pioneer daredevil aeronautist, black magician, genius and cad) decided to declare independence in this harbour city in 1920, understanding the concept of music as revolutionary social change. Although it only lasted until 1924, the party never stopped. Artists, bohemians, adventurers, anarchists, fugitives and Stateless refugees, homosexuals, military dandies and crank reformers of every stripe began to show up at Fiume in droves.

Using Bey’s terms, psychic nomads (or rootless cosmopolitans) profiting from music-based societies, following an itinerant scene…

[Source> The Temporary Autonomous Zone, ontological anarchy, poetic terrorism by Hakim Bey] [eco-action.org] [pirate heterotopias by Brianne Selman]

[Image> pirate party from Jason Godesky via Anthropik]

Published on March 19, 2010 12:26.
Filed under: homo ludens

xxxlms

Pedestrians are reclaiming more and more space. are big cities not big enough for small lives?

Last February, New York City announced that their initiative from last spring to turning Broadway in a pedestrian entertainment strip will become permanent. Citizens and spontaneity alike won one battle to traffic. [Source> urbanism.org and The New York Times]

And a new dimension of a congested megalopolis is rediscovered: sun-bathing at Tiffany’s!

Increasing the amount of space for street-users also expand another dimension of the city. Living in the clouds can literally help to reduce lack of civic squares. In 2008, a floating Rowan Gorilla VII platform structure entered Rotterdam harbour; this spectacular Jack-up device is used to drill for gas in the sea. Could such gigantic mega-structures be reused for a JackUpCity proposed by Rietveld Landscape? Again, literal, Bottom-Up initiatives for enjoying streetlife.

[Image above> pedestrian Broadway by Damon Winter from The New York Times] [Image below> Rowan Gorilla VII at Rotterdam via the Pop-Up City]

Published on March 18, 2010 04:10.
Filed under: co-optation/zwischennutzung

no-tech toy

$0.50 is the price of this Chinese bird (depending on one’s skills for bargaining). No batteries. just a couple of turns to the handle, and the bird takes off…upwards…gliding…to the ground. only an elastic band, a wire, and a pattern plastic sheet.

dating back from 475 BC, kites were first produced in China out of wood, turning later into paper, bamboo frames and silk. “Instead of being playthings, early kites were used for military purposes. Historical records say they were large in size; some were powerful enough to carry men up in the air to observe enemy movement, and others were used to scatter propaganda leaflets over hostile forces.” [Source> china info]

[Image above> plastic birds by deconcrete 2010] [Images below> Chinese kites by china info, china kites and weifang kite festival]

Published on March 14, 2010 04:14.
Filed under: hybrids

dissolving politics

After reading about Walleyball in boiteaoutils, and the volleyball game over the US/Mexican border wall, i come up with the results of the popular tournament Placa-Placa in the Spanish news.

Under this onomatopoeic  jeu de mots, there has been a call-for-signs from October 2009 to February 2010. Participants should simply remove and gather any fascist sign, name or shield still remaining in the streets since Franco Dictatorship’s era (1939-1975). A national law for Historic Memory was passed last year in Spain, but still some towns cling to their traditional street names. Organised by antifascist collectives, such as Yesca, this successful first edition has erased 216 symbolic signs, which had been forgotten by authorities.

In the same line of dissolving political meanings of democratic public space, artist kamila szejnoch did an installation in Warsaw, Poland in 2008. Just by hanging a swing from the iron arm of a communist sculpture, the whole memorial site acquired then a new ludic character; losing or loosening its symbolic burden.

[Image above> Placa-placa results via Yesca] [Image below> swing communism installation by kamila szejnoch]

Published on March 11, 2010 03:18.
Filed under: propaganda

downtown farms

When talking about shrinking cities, Detroit always comes up leadering rankings of stunning loss of buildings throughout the years; from a rich auto-metropolis to a literal void in downtown.

After decades of homeless, wanderers and junkies inhabiting this apocaliptical semi-rural townscape, “fruit trees and vegetable farms would replace neighbourhoods that are an eerie landscape of empty buildings and vacant lots”, has recently been announced by the officials of the city. With the remaining population increasingly living in the suburbs, Mayor Dave Bing has released this renewal plan, consisting basically of turning downtown Detroit into fully rural, “saving itself by shrinking even more”. [source> David Runk via detroit unreal estate agency]

Madrid is not shrinking and its abandoned opera houses are not turned into parking garages. But it also happens to be invaded by sheep wandering through its downtown streets, claiming for the historic Royal Tracks (Cañadas Reales). Traditionally,  peasants have been using these routes to move cattle hundreds of kms on foot throughout Spanish territory, from North to South and viceversa (phenomenon known as Trashumancia), seeking fresh pasture and warmer temperatures in heavy winters, or shelter from extreme heat in the summer.

This Cañadas Reales network, crossing Madrid centre, are a kind of heritage protected no-man’s land. Therefore, it is the idyllic location for the settlement of drug dealing huts (mostly in its km. 16 leaving Madrid towards Valencia). Until today it used to be the hotspot in Spain for trafficking, but now is under threat of official eviction plans. [more> a tactic Manifesto against eviction by Andres Jaque]

[Image above> desire line paths in downtown detroit by sweet juniper] [Image below> Sheep in downtown Madrid by jovenlobo]

Published on March 10, 2010 02:36.
Filed under: co-optation/zwischennutzung

unused dying objects

UFO settlements of San-zhi and Wanji in the northern coast of Taiwan are about to disappear (if not already gone). Bulldozers were already reported to be besieging them in 2008, in order to make place for a new luxury tourist-resort. Built as summer-holiday houses for accommodated Taipei citizens in the 1980s, they have been vacant for a while, since the money-fevered developer went bankrupt before ending the complex. Inheriting some ideas of The Futuro house by Matti Suuronen, it is now when they have turned into outer-space-like micro-environments…


[source> rollmops] [Aerial view from googlemaps] [All pictures by cypherone]

Published on March 8, 2010 10:14.
Filed under: forensic destruction

city as playground

Huizinga proclaimed that play is a serious matter.

In the picture above, 12 different floorplans of classrooms in Werner Seyfert’s school buildings. Depending on children’s age, space is organised in a forum-like or a blackboard-addressed configuration, avoiding monotonous authoritarian models of a rectangle.

“Hard, psychologically opaque, or merely intellectually conceived forms can stir semiconscious feelings of alienation in their users; they are not experienced as physically or psychologically user-friendly.” David Adams describing the organic functionalism of Rudolf Steiner’s school buildings for Waldorf pedagogic movement.

In order to recover that creativity, which rectangular Functionalism had already seized from citizens, 700 playgrounds were built in vacant derelict urban plots of postwar Amsterdam by Aldo van Eyck between 1947-1978.

“The focus of how space could be appropriated, stood in clear opposition to the prevailing modernist conception of space in architecture” (Merijn Oudenampsen). Just by providing variable and simple steel-bar structures all over the city, children would use their imagination to recreate worlds of fantasy.

[Image above> Werner Seyfert's floorplans for classrooms according to age from waldorf reserach institute]

[Image below> Aldo van Eyck's playground in Amsterdam from flexmens.org]

Published on March 7, 2010 14:55.
Filed under: homo ludens

please, do touch

saturday afternoon in shanghai and it rains cats and dogs.

hundreds of people head to IKEA, but buying something is more an accident than the real aim. Nowadays, when home ownership in China is boosting, interior design malls are becoming the theme-parks for entertainment: heating, soft seats, free soda refill and dreams of a modern house. Apart from potential buyers, the upper floor with the showroom, is packed with teenager couples hanging out together or elderly chatting in small groups. small alleys in the city and their social function are then replaced by the alley-labyrinth marked by Swedish marketing.

Pictures are taken everywhere, from girls posing among loads of teddy bears or in shiny red kitchens, to men dreaming of an American-like office space. Others just photograph fully decorated living-rooms to gather ideas of how to distribute pictures in their own walls at home. Meanwhile, the lower floor, with shelves with simple items on display does not succeed that much. If upstairs is a terribly low procession through an arts and crafts contemporary museum, downstairs is a much emptier supermarket.

[All images at IKEA shanghai, china by deconcrete 2010]

Published on March 6, 2010 08:29.
Filed under: co-optation/zwischennutzung

the bigger the better

CHINA:

- the 5 largest shopping malls on earth

- 2 of the 3 longest bridges

- 5 of the world’s 10 tallest buildings

- the world’s new largest urban plaza

- the largest dam

- the biggest gated community

- the world’s most extensive national highway network (to be completed)

- the world’s highest rail line

- the world’s longest, largest bus

- the biggest airport terminal

- the largest bowling alley

- the biggest tennis complex

- the most expansive golf course

- the largest skateboard park

- the world’s largest lamp

- the biggest Buddhas on earth

- the world’s largest dragon

- the world’s largest McDonald’s

- more housing built in 25 years than any nation in history

- more migrants to cities in 25 years than the entire population of the US

[Source> J.T. Campanella's The Concrete Dragon] [Guzhen's lamp from bldgblog] [largest bus from timw]

Published on March 6, 2010 04:16.
Filed under: ersatz

blurring walls

Enabling negotiation as a planning tool, allows this Internet-based strategy to provide more interactive environments between neighbours.

Negotiate my boundary! is a project by RAMTV from 2002, which gives dwellers enough power to decide the kind of relationship they might like to have with the person living next door. The Threshold is therefore rethought towards an ergonomic and communicative device. One could design his own intimacy level, by means of the software provided in the website: from a BigBrother-like openness to the most enclosed cocoon.

Far beyond the physical experience of Share your space, they also introduced the Make your home public events. Each dweller can advertise his apartment as an open public restaurant for a few hours a week, as well as a cinema or exhibition photo-gallery.

This social movement of turning one’s home into an informal open restaurant for a few hours, is spreading all over London. The Movable Restaurant organises a weekly dinner changing location every time; Marmite Lover ranges thematic country cuisine at every dinner; The Secret Ingredient; Saltoun Supper Club… In London they are called Underground restaurants, in the US Supper Clubs and in Cuba Paladares. A mix of social interaction and extra earnings out of one’s cooking hobbies.

Berlin has another version: one has to get inscribed in a mailing-list and the organizers will group people together in small teams. The initiative is to have breakfast at one house, lunch in a different one, with different companions, and dinner in a third place with new people again. Final party/meeting at a certain bar to share the experience of the day all together.

[Image> ramtv.org] [the guardian] [gastronomiconet]

Published on March 5, 2010 09:25.
Filed under: co-optation/zwischennutzung

imposed city

“Modernism ended at 3.32 pm on 15 July 1972, at the point when a clutch of high-rise residential blocks Pruitt-Igoe in St Louis, Missouri, were dynamited – an act of destruction which has been taken to signal the bankruptcy of both the modernist project and State-sponsored mass-housing.” [Jonathan Hughes in Non-Plan]

“The final plan designated the Igoe apartments for whites and the Pruitt apartments for blacks. Whites were unwilling to move in, however, so the entire Pruitt-Igoe project soon had only black residents.” [Alexander von Hoffman]

33  11-story buildings (raised in 1954) gave place to a still vacant immense lot.

[Images from wikipedia]

Published on March 4, 2010 14:48.
Filed under: forensic destruction

my house is a carousel

In ONE WEEK (1920), Buster Keaton accidentally re-composed a house, creating an exaggerated version of an architecture that could accommodate diverse spatial uses in close proximity.

One could also dream of an IKEA really providing such magic spaces for a playful way of life: inaccessible main door, revolving walls, handrails as ladders, textile floorslabs, houses turned into a trailer, into a carousel…

…almost Fairytale Houses, for Little Red Riding Hood, for Cinderella,…as Izaskun Chinchilla would visualize them.

Far beyond the aesthetics of the amazing resulting piece, even compared to Gehry’s house, 83 years later the Office of Socially Engaged Architecture (offsea) proposed a DIY-ed system based on Keaton’s follies; in a cocktail together with Neufert’s most boring standards, Tessenow’s most logic construction and Debord’s most poetic dérives.

By criticizing and rethinking the suburban detached house, they urged architecture to devise new methodologies and design strategies to meet contemporary needs. While reinterpreting participatory models of the 1960s and 1970s, offsea keeps on researching how everyday situations, habits and rituals inform and redefine domestic architecture and how space could be more responsive to these.

“The postponed meeting of Neufert, Tessenow and Buster Keaton; Situationism 2003″ by OFFSEA.

[Image> europan 7 graz] [Source> CRD brighton] [watch One Week in youtube]

Published on March 3, 2010 11:52.
Filed under: participation

the white wall

Once heritage buildings have proved to be economically as valuable as skyscrapers, planners go for this niche market.

Former guilty consciences towards destroying old downtowns in Chinese cities have evolved towards market-oriented historic preservation. Taken the case of nowadays Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province, a virtual white wall is the new sort of curtain to hide the scene of a backstage fulled with ambitious investors.

“the new yearning to consume the past has also led to the transformation of entire urban streetscapes into stage sets for history-themed consumption.” as Thomas J. Campanella describes in The Concrete Dragon.

Without considering dramatic eviction of local dwellers, restructuring alleys into high-level fashion shopping malls are already regarded as a sustainable future, supported by the argument of respecting architecture... “the value of making history pay” (Campanella)

[all images from to-be-gentrified Old Town Kunming, China by deconcrete 2010]

Published on March 2, 2010 08:27.
Filed under: forensic destruction

drive-out

[Image> pink car in shanghai, by deconcrete 2009]

“It may well be that the car is a kind of placebo for freedoms yet ungained in China. An automobile also provides a luxurious measure of privacy and personal space. In China [...] an automobile is a piece of real estate as well as a means of getting about town.” As Campanella describes it in The Concrete Dragon, cars acquire the function of cocoons in aggressive megacities, providing climate-control, high-tech sound system, shelter from noise and air pollution, and a kingdom where the driver is the absolute sovereign.

During the cosmopolitan urban 1920s-30s in China, some projects already envisioned reusing medieval city walls as elevated highways, anticipating a huge demand of automobiles in society. After the lapse of Mao-era, where bicycles were almost as numerous as citizens, cars seem today to have long overtaken other sustainable means of transport. Whereas Western cities regard bicycles as the future for urban mobility, Shanghai bans its use in many old district streets for the sake of luxurious cars. Nonetheless, it is in this framework of anti-bicycle city policy, that World Expo 2010 brings with it paradoxically the marketing of bike-renting initiatives. In spite of this masquerade, Biking in Shanghai nowadays leads one to get stuck at most crossings without being able to keep on riding, but to ride back again and try next street.

Automobile City malls are blossoming in every Chinese coastal city, together with Drive-in cinemas (where carless people could even rent one to watch the movie), Mac-Autos, and pay-per-lap Formula Three tracks (where drivers can race against each other in their own vehicles).

[Image> city wall as elevated highway, china ca. 1930 in The Concrete Dragon by T.J. Campanella]

[Image> Maple Garden drive-in cinema, beijing, with reused concrete pavers from Tiananmen Square as flooring, by Robert Worby via bbc]

[Image> elevated roads, shanghai, by deconcrete 2009]

[Source> The Concrete Dragon, by J.T. Campanella]

Published on March 1, 2010 09:39.
Filed under: forensic destruction