corner kiosk

Rationalist large-scale housing in Moscow produced vast neighbourhoods of standard pre-fab dwellings. But this rationally imposed city cannot deal with Everyday commerce.

In post-socialist cities, small retail kiosks have been popping up according to demand for flowers, drinks, snacks and knick-knacks. Raumlabor-berlin launched in 2005 an urban research on the social potential of such mobile devices, which hold the magic power of turning monofunctional monotony into an outburst of valuables.

Meeting points between self-organization and daily needs, these kiosks may easily adapt to seasonal scarcities. In the same way as itinerant circus provided entertainment in bored townships, mikrorayons housing mega-blocks depend on such trading resources to make their environment more habitable.

Kioskisierung consists of a documentation of this temporary retail in Moscow (Russia), Halle/Neustadt (Germany), Bratislava (Slovakia) and Lûdz (Poland), proposing guidelines to initiate such an activity, as well as possible flaneurial dérives to enjoy these challenges of contemporary city-making. If the word kiosk once dated back to Persian “corner” or “angle“, nowadays it turned into a successful vivid corner shop, struggling to survive in over-planned societies.

[All images> Kioskisierung project by raumlabor.net & kioskisierung.net]

Published on April 30, 2010 11:12.
Filed under: urban research

present absence

Spring do bring colour-fever everywhere. At the same time I was last posting Indian splash of colour, a guerrilla-group was throwing buckets of pigments at Rosenthalerplatz in Berlin. Cars could not avoid scattering their presence in an absolute physical absence.

Back in town today, i was sad to confirm that street cleaners had hurried up too much to let me take part on this choreography with my bike.

[via urbanshit]

Published on April 27, 2010 13:27.
Filed under: dérive, mutant

splash of colour

Colour blossoms in Indian  spring season…welcome holy Holi festival…

…where separation between castes and genders are blurred in an ephimeral cloud…

[images1&2> holi festival from arthurmag] [image3> holi festival by poras chaudhary via photoshelter]

Published on April 25, 2010 03:15.
Filed under: homo ludens

street sweet home

“Don’t go outside wearing pyjamas, be a World Expo civilised person”

Apart from the largest metro extension ever built in the world and many new pedestrian-friendly public spaces, Shanghai will also inherit a social burden with the Expo 2010. Before Maoist period, two kinds of citizens used to wear pyjamas in the street: rich foreigners showing off their leisurely lifestyle and happy people to display their entertainment.

During communist times, the habit of wearing pyjamas broadened to everyone. Because of tiny dwellings, residents needed to expand their living environment to the outdoor space, and it was a simple practical matter not to change clothes just to go to the public toilet or to the nearby market. The whole city was conceived as one’s own living room.

However, authorities and some Shanghainese, seem to be ashamed of this peculiar habit of the city, and officially it was recently banned. Justin Guariglia documented this comfortable everyday lifestyle, just in case it does never come back after the civilising Expo. Luckily, local controls seem to be more worried about other issues than chasing clothing trends.

[images> Shanghai pyjamas by Justin Guariglia in Planet Shanhai]

Published on April 23, 2010 10:07.
Filed under: dérive, non-pedigreed

domicide

Madrid is dismantling its chabola-settlements (Spanish favelas).

Although having only an average of 50-200 dwellers, each settlement struggles to survive on the urban-rural fringe. Based on recycling, food & retail informal sales, or drug-dealing activities, their dwellers are being relocated into new social housing blocks, as part of the official plan for eradication of chabolas.

With an eye on the Olympics candidate city, madrid’s social workers are giving protocol lessons about how to live and behave in a vertical formal housing community:

*do not dance and hand-clap during flamenco-singing at home, in the early morning.

*do not tear down structural walls.

*do not trick electricity meters.

*do not set up any laundry hangers or A/C in the façade

*do not throw away buckets of water from the window to the street

*do not use collective space to storage personal items

…The social working therapy should rather start by the architect himself, when planning their homes…

[image1> dismantling Las Mimbreras via el mundo] [image2>map of chabola-settlements in madrid by espormadrid] [images3&4> dismantling El Cañaveral via espormadrid] [image5> dismantling Santa Catalina by alvaro garcia via el pais]

Published on April 22, 2010 04:00.
Filed under: forensic destruction, participation

place, nonplace, displacement

Chaos has the power to turn airports into dormitories.

Under recent volcanic ash cloud, main airports, such as Frankfurt or Amsterdam, have installed temporary beds along their non-place transit terminals. Marc Augé likes it or not, Mobility Temples are now really inhabited and dwelt. If World War II changed museums into hospitals, current emergency situation tries to cope with displacement: the contemporary global disease.

Tent-Cities need to appear in case of war refugee camps and hurricane/earthquake temporary dwelling; but also, people may force themselves to inhabit such settlements for electronic music or religious pilgrimage: a matter of fervour in either military-like planning or spontaneous unplannedness.

…in the fields all around, as far as the eye could see, there were people of all social classes lying together, nobles and beggars, matrons of once stately households and peasant women, civil servants and day laborers, monks and nuns: all commiserating with each other, helping each other, cheerfully sharing the little of life’s necessities they’d been able to salvage… [Heinrich von Keist: the earthquake in Chile]

[image1> frankfurt airport temporary bed-scape by efe] [image2> temporary bed settlement in rome for viewing the body of Pope JohnPaul II by marco di lauro via life] [image3>kumbha mela pilgrimage temporary tent city india via sacredsites ] [image4> katrina emergency tent city via katrina destruction] [image5> tent city in Turkey after 1999 earthquake via slate] [image6>camp site Mount Fuji music festival in tokyo by northern continent]

Published on April 20, 2010 04:41.
Filed under: nomads

cultural prostitution

The Reservoir Area of the Three Gorges in deep China historically used to have mobility helpers for their barges and lighters.

Since its landscape is folded, winding  and complicated, helping shipping upstream from the river banks was not easy, even for beasts. Traditionally, Baoding County, a mountaineous area of gorges and narrow passes, used to contemplate nude boat trackers pulling boats. The ancestral reason not to wear clothes was that they walk within the river all day long, their clothes would be torn down by the rope and the wet fibre would stick and rip open their skin easily; plus there are few people along the riverside, so trackers decide not to wear anything for the convenience of work. [Annie Lee, china hush]

After starting to fade with the nearby megalomaniac construction of the biggest dam in the world, there was no longer this need for such a denigrating job. However, local authorities decided to relaunch this practice last month, so that it would attract a boom of tourists, anxious to be moved upstream by sweating nude bodies.

restitution of cultural tradition or introduction of sex tourism?

[image 1> boattrackers in Three Gorges via cqhostel] [images 2,3&4> chinese nude boat trackers by people.com.cn via chinahush]

Published on April 17, 2010 01:26.
Filed under: propaganda

2m2 encapsulation

Inspired by popular capsule hotels in Tokyo, Beijing has also started the micro-house fever.

Early this year, 78-year old Chinese built up 8 units, each of 2 m2, where tenants can sleep, watch TV, surf in the Internet… Instead of being thought for hourly rating, they are being used as a transitional solution for housing fresh-graduated students seeking for a job.

In a country with a non-stop blossoming of self-made tycoons, college students wonder about the point of 10 years at University, to end up in such a cage-like dwelling.

[images 1&5> capsule apartments beijing via fawan] [images 2,3&4> capsule apartment beijing via china hush]

Published on April 16, 2010 03:49.
Filed under: nomads

post-oil city

Gathering plausible solutions for a non-dependent society on fossil energies, Arch+ is opening in Berlin the exhibition Post-Oil City, with sustainable solutions for cities in Dubai (such as SMAQ’s Xeritown) or new mobility initiatives (transport system in Curitiba, Brazil).

Part of it, is also the research on Taiwan Strait by Chora. In the Atlas this London-based team has developed, the liminal space of the sea-void between mainland China and the island of Taiwan, is described as a culture and energy-efficiency incubator.

[Image 1> post-oil city via arch+ magazine] [image 2> climate-incubator on taiwan strait via ifa] [images 3&4> taiwan strait atlas by chora]

Published on April 15, 2010 02:15.
Filed under: urban research

isolated ghost towns

Sometimes economy insists on clinging on to lost enclaves.

Fordlandia (Fordlândia) was the beginning of a failed American Dream by Henry Ford in 1928. In the middle of Brazilian jungle, he thought he could settle a piece of Detroit society, to stop depending on British manufacturers of rubber for his T-model wheels.

Although identical clone suburban houses started blossoming among rubber trees for American engineers, life quality did not come together. Despite having ball-room, cinema, school, hair-salon, bakery, informal alcohol suppliers and even brothel, the American Dream, only for a few, ended up with the uprising of agonizing Brazilian slave-like workers. In 1942, the settlement was definetely abandoned.

Another whim of ersatz society was established in Hashima island, Japan in 1916, with the highest concrete building of the country at the time. The island was 6 times more overcrowded than nowadays Tokyo. Based on an intensive coal-mining activity, Mitsubishi entrepreneur set up another failed utopia there.

Lacking of basic private (intimate) space, dwellers inhabited 10m2 sleeping cells with shared bathrooms. However, entertainment services were also provided, such as swimming pool, kindergarten, clinic, temple, and again as in Fordlândia, a brothel. Since they could not chop rubber trees down to make space for new uses, roofs were the only spheres for expanding personal autonomy.

In 1975, coal was not profitable anymore, and Hashima was abandoned; recently it is experiencing a phase of photography-aficionados tourism.

[Images1&2> googlemaps] [Rest of images> spiegel.de]

Published on April 14, 2010 16:03.
Filed under: ersatz

chairless

85 cm long measures the latest furniture (manifesto?) by Alejandro Aravena for Vitra; with an explicit use of the Spanish word for furniture (mueble),  directly linked to the mobile.

Based on the no-tech chair used by Ayoreo Indians in Paraguay, consisting of a simple piece of string tying up knees and back, Chairless provides a comfortable and simple rest.

Analog to instinctive gestures, such as using one’s hand to cover the face against sun-rays, this chair lets your hands free while sitting on a natural position. A nomad atavistic chair, which recovers lost traces of inherited culture for today’s everyday life.

[image above> chairless via at] [image below> enjoying chairless via el pais]

Published on April 13, 2010 04:01.
Filed under: hybrids

book-self

Between 18/03/2010 and 11/04/2010, 34 books have been lying on my shelves. None of them has a similar format; not even proportional.

Most of them were printed in different countries and continents, but still, does graphic design and layout prevail over optimizing paper cut-outs?

more or book formats

Image1,2> book-self diagram by deconcrete2010

Image3> standard paper from wikipedia

Published on April 11, 2010 11:47.
Filed under: hybrids

re-relocation

China flashes.

Between 2005 to 2008, 400 peasant families were relocated to brand-new villas in Wuhan. Their former fields were turned into high-rise development, and eviction was payed with a 240-360 m2 three-story villa for each household. [no need to mention the tremendous amount of money earned by the developer in the operation, to afford paying such compensations]

In March 2010, 2 years later, it has been announced that their new homes are to be demolished again. Not because of derelict state at all; spring/summer 2010 season this year just came with the planning of a bunch of new more lucrative high-rise blossoming on-site; quite trendy. Adjacent land price rates at 160 euro/m2, while built apartments are being sold at 600 euro/m2.

Wuhan has a population of almost 10,000,000 souls. But also it has one of the largest gated communities in the world, housing a whole of 200,000 families in free-standing villas. As Neville Mars and Saskia Vendel state in their Chinese version of the American Dream, the gated community has become China’s tried and tested investment model for minimum-risk residential development.

[Image1> Villas to be demolished at Mahu Xincun, Wuhan via china daily] [Image2> Mahu Xincun villas, Yangtse Business Newspaper via crienglish]

Published on April 10, 2010 02:45.
Filed under: forensic destruction

empty your museums

Jana Leo once proclaimed that MOMA as a mall is not bad at all (“el MOMA como mall no está nada mal”).

Far away from market-izing culture, however, an International Summit in Egypt has concluded today with a clear aim: reclaim plundered relics; a Kyoto-like Protocol for returning all antiquities during Colonial lootings. London’s British Museum, Paris’ Louvre Museum or Berlin’s NeuesMuseum face a new future challenge, providing that Egypt, Syria, Peru or Nigeria start to reclaim their own stolen heritage.

Could their vast ersatz-paradises become new empty places to reuse? The empty museum is already an initiative to visualize culture in voids, in an interactive way through virtual reality, focusing more on the pedagogical process than on the object itself. Since one is never allowed to touch anything, and sometimes even fakes are displayed, what should be the point of these antiquities exhibitions?

After the renovation of the NeuesMuseum in Berlin was completed last March 2009, the whole empty building was conceived as a contemporary dance world, before relics moved in again. Choreographer Sascha Waltz guided her performers along the magnificent staircase, turning into living Trojan statues.

[Image1> living statues in a wall with bullet-shots by ddp via focus] [Image2> Choreography at the NeuesMuseum berlin by reuters via morgenpost]

Published on April 9, 2010 03:09.
Filed under: co-optation/zwischennutzung

counterfeit lanes

After asking for some tobacco at the entrance of some tiny old lane in Shanghai, an old couple sitting at the front door in the street lead us to a secret paradise. the lane is hardly 1 metre wide, and overfilled with storaged goods from the neighbours. after some zigzag twists, we arrive to a pretty dark house at the very end.

“Ringed by thickly forested mountains, illicit cigarette factories dot the countryside, carved deeply into caves, high into the hills, and even buried beneath the earth. By one tally, some 200 operations are hidden in Yunxiao, a southwestern Fujian county about twice the area of New York City. Once famed for its bright yellow loquat fruit, Yunxiao is the trade’s heartland, the source of half of China’s counterfeit production.” [Source> Slate Magazine]

Passed the threshold, an old local family is sitting at their dining table, peacefully slurping some noodles inside a heavy smoke cloud. But our goal is the following room, where another old man is sitting at a corner of a black-walled hole. One could never guess, whether the plain black colour comes from the smoke itself or from the heavy layer of dust wrapping traditional subsidized dwellings, dating back from Mao’s China. He is smiling at us, offering his whole stock displayed all over the room, ranging from Cuban cigars to rolling tobacco, of any brand.

“Most of the foreign cigarettes sold in China are thought to be counterfeit or to have been smuggled in. Tobacco smuggling into China is a multi-billion dollar business controlled largely by gangsters from Hong Kong triads. Smuggling and counterfeiting cigarettes are so lucrative businesses that some criminal gangs have stitched their focus from heroin to cigarettes. Rough cut tobacco usually discarded by cigarette makers is used to make the cigarettes. Often it contains floor sweepings, sawdust and a variety of chemicals. Many of the counterfeit cigarette factories are in the rural areas of Fujian and Guangdong provinces. Some have been built underground to avoid detection.

A third of the cigarettes smoked in Britain are counterfeit with 80 percent of them made in China.” [Source> Jeffrey Hays 2010]

[Image above> cheaper tobacco in shanghai] [Image below> Chinese officials destroying counterfeit cigarettes via cnreviews]

Published on April 7, 2010 07:36.
Filed under: unsolicited

viva la farándula

Happy birthday, Gran Via!

Madrid celebrates today your 100 anniversary since you were officially born in 1910, although it took you 99 years to be completed between the first proposal (1855) and your last building (1954).

As a typical result of the late medieval urban fabric, new hygienic and mobility voids urged in many European capital cities; either because of upcoming capitalist consumption or totalitarian military regimes and their parades. Destroying historic blocks for the sake of street-widening was therefore a common issue between 1850 and 1950. Aiming new modes of leisure for an increasing bourgeoisie, Madrid also demanded brand-new boulevards with exclusive boutiques for flâneurs, department stores, space for cars and tramways, cinemas, cabarets and theatres.

Today, writes Saravia, urbanism (in Europe!) cannot afford such operations, except for burying trains underground, and not always. Gran Via made 327 buildings to be demolished, and 32 blocks affected. Most expensive evictions cost an equivalent of 5 euros/m2. The stubborn-nail dwellers at the time were the Jesuits, who did not want to abandon their site; everything was solved when the 1st May 1931 (with a recently proclaimed Spanish Republic) some people set the whole building on fire.

Today, multi-cultural prostitutes, shopaholics, alcoholics and informal snack sellers (hiding their goods inside dustbins) meet next to VIP premiere red carpets. And it is this mix of decadent, tacky and lordly Gran Via, what probably makes most Madrileños choose it as their favourite street.

Still today, a classic spot for 24 h flâneurs; of all kind.

[Image1> Gran Via Madrid 1954 via Mundos] [Image2> demolitions Gran Via adapted from Wikipedia] [Image3> anniversary façade map released in 2010] [Image4> Capitol Building in Gran Via from ucm.es]

Published on April 5, 2010 11:24.
Filed under: homo ludens

standby: for boarding

It was almost without knowing if a piece of land had been added to Venice islands or detached away from them, that The Theatre of the World did appear.

In 1979 Aldo Rossi planned this floating structure as a versatile stage for performing arts. As he explained, “The project for the Teatro del Mondo is marked by three aspects: having a precise usable if not defined space, its positioning as a volume in accordance with Venetian movement, being on the water. Clearly, being on the water is its main characteristic; it is a raft, a boat: the limit or border of construction in Venice”.

This ephemeral wonder lasted until 1980, when it last travelled to the Dubrovnik International Festival. After that, the only wreckage surviving until today is the sphere placed at the top, which has been rescued from a warehouse for the Biennale di Venezia. An on-going exhibition relaunching the theatre, mix of the Shakespearean Globe and the James Adams’ Floating Theatre, will re-float it until July 2010.

“One could look out of the windows, and outside see the passing of the vaporetti and ships as though one were aboard another vessel, and these other ships entered into the image of the theatre, constituting its true fixed and mobile stage.”

[All Images> wikiarquitectura] [Sources> el pais & Biennale di Venezia]

Published on April 4, 2010 10:14.
Filed under: hybrids

balconize

After reading in the pop-up city about julien berthier’s balcon additionnel, and his attempt to reproduce a piece of Haussmann’s Paris in your own house, I come up with the work of Francisca Benitez. She has documented the process of adding informal balconies in Brooklyn, known as Jewish Sukkahs. These huts provide wild-like shelter reminding of the ones used by freed Jewish slaves in Ancient Egypt. According to Judaism, believers should sleep, pray, eat and spend time inside at certain times of the year. However, Jerusalem City banned these informal constructions last year, concerning safety matters, since authorities are not giving licenses any more.

[Image above> balcon additionnel by Julien Berthier] [Image below> Still from Brooklyn Sukkahs documentary by Francisca Benitez]

Published on April 1, 2010 04:30.
Filed under: ersatz