Urban Prosthetics: City as Organism Ivan Hernandez-Quintela
A
lthough any attempt to define “The City” would seem contradictory, as definitions attempt to capture the essence of things into a set of established concepts stated in a clear language and the city by nature is never stable, constantly adjusting, always in the making, and would therefore require a constant re-defining, I would like to, if not define it, view it as an organism – a set of organs, each with a specific function connected to other organs with their own specific functions, where they depend on an interconnectivity to one another. Some would say that to think of the city as an organism is limiting, for organs have pre-established functions and established connections with other organs, making the organism incapable of adapting quickly enough to exterior forces, and that a more accurate definition would be a complex web of systems, made of other systems, where each system can have its own logic of adaptation and connection, and can therefore react and adapt in much more complex and unexpected ways. But when I think of a system I cannot think of how to directly intervene in it, how to operate on it. Instead, when I think of organs I can think of prosthetics to attach to them, as if I were a surgeon making incisions into the body of the city. It is important to first differentiate between corrective prosthetics and extensive prosthetics. A corrective prosthetic is meant to restore, to reestablish the organ’s original function. Its purpose is to correct a malfunction of the organ. The organ requires the prosthetic to function as it should or used to, like a pair of seeing glasses which give its users 20/20 vision, the average sight of a human eye. On the other hand, an extensive prosthetic recognizes the organ’s function, but is not limited by it, it does not try to correct it but rather aims to improve it. It attempts to offer a new function to the organ, an extra function. The organ does not require the prosthetic but benefits from it. With it, it is capable of functioning beyond itself, like a microscope or a telescope that offer the human eye the capacity to perceive beyond what the human eye can distinguish alone. With this in mind, I have opted to invade the city with a series of projects I call “Urban Prosthetics” that attempt to become extensive rather than corrective, opening up new possibilities for the city to interact and provoke its inhabitants. The Urban Prosthetics project does not attempt to “heal” the city as if there were something specifically
41
wrong with it, or as if the city were ill, but instead tries to equip it with tools of engagement that will facilitate everyday inhabitants to interact and adjust public space to his or her particular spatial and temporal needs. As in the martial art of Aikido, where a small contender learns to use the force of his opponent to generate his own force, the Urban Prosthetics borrow their operational logic from existing informal structures in order to infiltrate themselves efficiently into the established mechanics of the city with the goal of embedding these even further. Within informal settlements, one can find certain conditions that encourage the continuation of informality: do-it-yourself methods of construction, open-ended structures that allow material to be attached or replaced, programmatic flexibility that allows one thing to be used in different ways. With this in mind, I inserted Urban Prosthetics into the city only to “abandon” them almost immediately to allow any inhabitant to alter and adjust them– to appropriate them. By working with the existing informal conditions, the Urban Prosthetic structures, as in aikido, turn informality not against itself, but towards itself, not to negate it and try to control it, but to spread its conditions, making informality contagious – towards an architecture that is open to alteration, adjustments and misuse. What I imagine is a city invaded by small informal structures that begin to alter its most immediate context by making the inhabitants in that location active participants of their surrounding context, a sort of urban acupuncture that operates at a local level but where similar invasions can
Aikido, Ivan Hernandez-Quintela