Rochus Hinkel: Urban Interior

URBAN INTERIOR Edited by Rochus Urban Hinkel

ISBN 978-3-88778-351-8

9 783887 783518 www.urbaninterior.net

{UI}

URBAN INTERIOR

Informal explorations, interventions and occupations

URBAN INTERIOR

URBAN INTERIOR Informal explorations, interventions and occupations Edited by Rochus Urban Hinkel Authors: Suzie Attiwill Kate Church Mick Douglas Mathias Heyden Rochus Urban Hinkel Marieluise Jonas Scott McQuire Jane Rendell Alex Schweder La Malte Wagenfeld

The Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbiografie; detailed bibliographic information is available on the internet at http://dnb.ddb.de 1. print run 2011 © All Rights at Spurbuchverlag, Am Eichenhügel 4, 96148 Baunach, Germany Designed and typeset by Chase & Galley, Melbourne, Australia ISBN 978-3-88778-351-8 Copyright 2011 by Spurbuchverlag.

All rights — including translation into foreign languages — reserved.

No part of the work must in any mode (print, photocopy, microfilm, CD or any other process) be reproduced nor — by application of electronic systems — processed, manifolded nor broadcast without approval of the copyright holder. www.urbaninterior.net

URBAN INTERIOR

Informal explorations, interventions and occupations

Super Akzidenz Grotesk Bold Baskerville Medium Caslon Regular Chronicle Light Garamond Light condensed Mercury Regular condensed Minion Medium condensed Palatino Bold condensed Plantin Extra bold condensed Times 10 Extra bold Akzidenz Grotesk

Author

Rochus Urban Hinkel

Page

Chapter

06

Prelude

—

Jane Rendell Suzie Attiwill

11

Kate Church

27

Mick Douglas

45

Mathias Heyden

63

Rochus Urban Hinkel

79

Marieluise Jonas

99

Scott McQuire

113

Alex Schweder La

131

Malte Wagenfeld

147

— — — —

— — — — —

Intermezzo Urban and Interior: techniques for an urban interiorist Making visible: registering the asynchronous city Situating social contingency: mobility and socially-engaged public art Evolving participatory design: a report from Berlin, reaching beyond Private encounters and public occupations: a methodology for the exploration of public space Oku: the notion of interior in Tokyo’s urban landscape Geomedia, networked culture and participatory public space Performance architecture The porous-city: atmospheric conversations of the Urban | Interior

164

Endnotes and references

172

Author biographies

176

Acknowledgements

PRELUDE Rochus Urban Hinkel Urban Interior is a book located at the threshold between the interior, habitually conceived as the private realm, and the urban, or what is generally recognised to be the public realm. The creative projects in this book aim to overcome the traditional dualism between these domains with projects that focus on the spatial and temporal dimensions of the inhabited, urban environment. Central to these projects is a shared concern with aesthetic, experiential, poetic, political, sensorial, social and technological relations. Urban Interior, as a book of collected essays questions and expands the definition of urban and interior practices and domains by way of informal explorations, interventions and occupations in the public realm.

The individual chapters describe and discuss projects that range from socially engaged practices to phenomenological investigations, from ephemeral phenomena to installation based insertions, from performance based investigations to observation based enquiries, to relational participations and social appropriations. These projects are located in cities around the world, they describe, are embedded, and respond to the particularities of Melbourne, Berlin, Karachi, New York, Seoul and Tokyo, and the contributors to this book include researchers, practitioners and academics from Australia, Europe and North America.

Urban Interior is also the name of a research collective from the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University, Melbourne. It was formed in April 2007 by a group of academics and practitioners who came together to discuss their potential crossovers, in order to build a collaborative and cooperative relationship. The Urban Interior Research Group {UI} is a cross-disciplinary and non-hierarchical collective with members extending from fields of architecture, industrial design, interior design, fashion, landscape architecture, public art and sound. The invited contributors to this book are Mathias Heyden from Berlin, Scott McQuire from Melbourne, Jane Rendell from London, and Alex Schweder La, who is based in New York and Berlin. All invited contributors have shared moments of discussion, exchange and investigation with {UI}. Together we contribute to the exploration of the ideas and concepts that compose what we have collectively identified as the Urban Interior.

Jane Rendell's intermezzo is composed of quotations located before and after each chapter in relation to the concepts and ideas of each chapter, creating a space between different enquiries, as well as making connections throughout the book.

Jane Rendell describes the intermezzo as 'a series of doublesided joints located between the interior spaces of the nine essays comprising the urban texture of the book'. She has helped weave together our shared and disparate concerns.

This publication marks a milestone in the {UI} collaboration over the last four years. It manifests the viability of this research group by bringing a self-establishing process to a point of culmination, which is simultaneously a starting point for future endeavours.

What {UI} has established along the way is that there can be no single definition of what constitutes the urban interior. {UI} also discovered the necessity of leaving the research projects open and diverse, rather than framing one cohesive objective upon which all uniformly agree. The research gathered here is one moment in a continuum of ongoing design practice research and reflection that continues in flux. The space between the urban and the interior is one that continues to unfurl, requiring that one interrogates the productive interplay at the threshold where it is not possible to say whether one occupies a realm of privacy or publicity, a space on the inside or outside, a collective or individual moment. Welcome to the diverse spaces and times that frame for the meanwhile what an urban interior might be, and importantly, how it might work.

The Urban Interior research group {UI} The research collective Urban Interior {UI} came together more by happenstance than by design, that is to say, its members share as many differences as they do similarities. The benefit of this is that we have achieved a rigorous diversity in our research engagements.

Urban Interior has become a space and time in which we can both agree and disagree as we set forth our evolving research positions.

Each {UI} member develops his and her particular research trajectory, while at the same time, sharing within the research group’s interests and investigations between and across disciplines in an interdisciplinary space, which allows us to collectively question the definitions of the design disciplines. While each member works on individual research trajectories, and occasionally collaborates on a project, we primarily exchange thoughts and share ideas,

find common ground, and discover differences in various shared spaces and within the space of this collaborative book. We remain conscious of the spaces in which we choose to gather together, as well as those more or less public and/or private spaces that offer us the opportunity to undertake design experimentation.

In order to exchange, discuss, share and critique our individual and collective projects we have developed several formats and have occupied various spaces over the last four years. We commenced within the productive space of discussion, in various meeting rooms and also sound labs. We have also gathered at informal dinners, around tables where we have shared wine and food and thoughts.

We have shared our ideas and thoughts with others in the spaces of Urban Interior exhibitions such as UI Occupations, at Craft Victoria (2008), Guilford Lane Gallery (2009), and at the State of Design Festival (2009), all in Melbourne. We have presented together at the Occupation Conference at the University of Brighton, England (2009). We have openly discussed our research with peers and stakeholders in five UI Colloquia since 2007 in various locations including the City Library in Melbourne (2007), the exhibition space of Craft Victoria (2008), the Kubus on the Rosa-Luxemburg Platz (by the theatre Volksbuehne) in Berlin (2009), and in the meeting room of Crowd Productions, above a car park tower, in the centre of Melbourne (2009). Since 2007 we have established relationships with academics, researchers, practitioners, artists and other stakeholders in Melbourne and across the world, in particular in Europe and Asia. www.urbaninterior.net

NOTE

A prelude (Lat. praeludium) is a short piece of music, which can be an introduction to succeeding movements of a work that are longer and more complex. The prelude can be thought of as a preface; it may stand on its own or introduce another work. In the context of this publication it introduces ideas, sketches out the process of development, and illustrates the framework of the Urban Interior Research Group {UI}.

Intermezzo Jane Rendell

evissap ton era stnerap ym deedni dnA dna ,yeht lla ti fo elddim eht nI .rehtie evrac ot eunitnoc ,meht ekil elpoep eunitnoc yehT .ecaps elbaiv ylhgih tuo a fo secaps lacol eht :secalp ekam ot nI .dlefi eht no cincip a ro ,edir riahcleehw nepo secaps eht ,klat ew sa gnineve eht ,syenruoj regnol fo yromem eht fo tuo tsoM .daorba stisiv lanoisacco esoht fo hcihw ecaps taht si ereht ,llits dna ,lla fo :nwod nip ot ,erutcip ot lla fo tsedrah si elpoep ehT .snoitaler laicos fo ecaps eht .rehto hcae rof tuo hctaw renroc eht no s’ rehtaf ym erus ekam srobhgien ehT dna thgin yreve ot nward era sniatruc kcehc yehT .gninrom eht ni kcab nward .ni nekat neeb s’klim eht ees ot

ozzemretnI lledneR enaJ

And indeed my parents are not passive either. In the middle of it all they, and people like them, continue to carve out highly viable space. They continue to make places: the local spaces of a wheelchair ride, or a picnic on the field. In the evening as we talk, the spaces open out of the memory of longer journeys, of those occasional visits abroad. Most of all, and still, there is that space which is hardest of all to picture, to pin down: the space of social relations. The people on the corner watch out for each other.

The neighbors make sure my father’s curtains are drawn to every night and drawn back in the morning. They check to see the milk’s been taken in.

Urban and Interior: techniques for an urban interiorist Suzie Attiwill In 1985, buying milk in the centre of Melbourne on a Sunday required some planning. Few places were open in the ‘CBD’ (Central Business District). Few people frequented the CBD on Sundays let alone lived here. Sundays in Melbourne had a deserted, melancholic feel. In 1991, there were only 1,000 inhabitants. Fifteen years later, this had increased to 9,000. Since 1985 I have rented studio space somewhere in/on the city grid of Melbourne and now in 2010 the milk for my tea can be bought from almost any corner 24 hours a day—7 eleven. Studio space is now the difficult thing to find. Along with 7-Elevens and convenience stores that look like 7-Elevens, there are over 1,500 bars, cafes and restaurants. People are also everywhere, everyday—on an average week-day 700,000 people come to the city; with a tidal change in the evening of an extra 223,000 locals and 63,000 tourists. At the beginning of the academic year, 12,000 international students make the inner metropolitan area their home. One can shop all day every day. These statistics come from 2006—fourteen years after the implementation of the planning policy Postcode 3000 to make the CBD a residential address. Industry along the Yarra River has been replaced by river-view apartments. Melbourne has become a place to live and play, as well as work; a destination for social and cultural activities; one of the world’s liveable cities. Future Melbourne (2007)—The City of Melbourne report these statistics have come from—gathers these changes to the city to address the future.

An observed shift is the need for temporal as well as spatial planning demanded by a 24-hour city composed of different programs and activities, ebbs and flows. While Melbourne is not a dense city by world standards, the changes and shifts here highlight the transformation of a city through increasing density of people and how this creates a dynamic of movement. The often-cited fact that for the first time in history the proportion of people living in cities is higher than those living in rural areas coupled with the global mobility of people living in states of transience composes the contemporary urbanising world.

The question of habitation—how to live in a city—becomes critical as life fills the streets. Activities such as eating, drinking and socialising spill out of tiny apartments; the street becomes living space for people who have been displaced. These questions connect with

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the practice of interior design, a practice which addresses the relation between people and surroundings to produce interiors which perform different functions such as living, working, playing, selling, exhibiting and so on. I am interested in the conjunction ‘urban and interior’ in relation to the design of interiors and what a practice of interior design has to contribute to the contemporary city. The conjunction ‘urban and interior’ highlights the relation between interior and exterior conditions without the implication of an existing frame between the two conditions. The idea of urban interior challenges an assumption that interior design necessarily has to take place inside a building and shifts the focus to a relational condition—here the ‘and’ between urban and interior as a question of designing and making the relation. This invites other possibilities for thinking and designing interiors—and the practice of interior design—and brings the sensibility and techniques of interior design to the urban environment. The character of the urban interiorist is introduced here as a propositional figure to focus on questions of practice, techniques and constraints.

Each time I say ‘interiorist’, the word ‘terrorist’ comes to mind and the possibility of terrorising assumptions about interior design.

Urban and Interior Architectural historian Charles Rice writes of the emergence of ‘the interior’ during the 19th century as a concept combining both space and image and with specific reference to the writings of the German intellectual Walter Benjamin. This is a powerful proposition for the practice, history and theory of interior design. It is also compelling in relation to ‘urban interior’ as it gives the conjunction a genealogy (Rice 2007). Benjamin writes of the 19th century domestic bourgeois interior and the 19th century industrial city and the relation between the two; he also writes of the flâneur, a figure who wandered through the urban realm as if it was his living room.

‘The flâneur promenades in his room; the world only appears to him reflected by pure inwardness’ (Theodore Adorno quoted in Fuss 2004, p.13). Rice highlights the interior as a condition of doubleness produced through a relation between space and image, as ‘a conceptual apparatus marked by temporal and experiential disjunctions of modernity’ (Rice 2009, p.132). Here an interior is: produced through an infolding, […] This surface does not produce a hermetic seal against the external world, but rather is activated through the inhabitant’s relation to the city and its world of publicness, business and commerce, and enables a subjectivity and social identity marked ‘bourgeois’ to be supported artefactually. The impressionable

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URBAN INTERIOR surface holds on to the artefacts liberated from the world of commodities and interiorised for the securing of a private life; the surface folds to encase the inhabitant and these collected objects (Rice 2007, p.9).

The ‘collector’ is the figure of the domestic bourgeois interior affected by an urban exterior who attempts to gain control through a process of interiorisation: collecting objects from the outside and transforming them within his private world. ‘In the interior, he brings together remote locales and memories of the past. His living room is a box in the theatre of the world. […] The collector proves to be the true resident of the interior. He makes his concern the idealisation of objects’ (Benjamin 2002, p.19). Benjamin writes of the collector’s motivation as ‘a struggle against dispersion’, as a process of collecting oneself, of composing and stabilising one’s sense of self at a time of seemingly immense transformations (Benjamin 2002, p.211). ‘The indefatigable collector understands that such a fabrication of the interior is a continual process, a set of techniques and practices that ensure the ongoing viability of a self ’ (Rice 2007, p.9). ‘The interior’ here is intricately connected with, and produced through, relations with this outside in a way which attempts to make an interior that is self-sustaining, securing and stabilising. Benjamin’s writing highlights the problematic implicated in this attempt to produce stasis: To live in these interiors was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself in a spider’s web, in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry.

From this cavern one does not like to stir (Benjamin 2002, p.216).

Previous: Suzie Attiwill with Liz Lambrou Urban Interior Occupation Poster Melbourne, Australia, 2008. The poster acted as a catalogue for the Urban Interior Occupation at Craft Victoria. It was distributed around the city while the occupation happened.

Photo: Jacob Walker.

Benjamin’s collector has been referred to as an example of interiorisation which involves ‘contraction’ (Fuss 2004, p.12).

Bringing the exterior into the interior in order to possess and control. Benjamin also writes of ‘the window mirror’ as a process of collecting. Set into window casements, these mirrors reflected the outside inside, pulling ‘the exterior wholly inside itself ’—the street and any activity was captured live by a mirror, brought inside and framed (Fuss 2004, p.12). The flâneur is a different interiorist to the collector—rather than contraction, the flâneur’s technique of interiorisation is one of expansion which pushes ‘the inside out so that the internal expands without limit’ (Fuss 2004, p.13).

While two different ‘interiorists’ and techniques are encountered here, the individual is implicated as central to the production of each interior. The phrase ‘intimate metropolis’ has been used to describe the 21st century city. ‘Our choice of the word “intimate” reinforces the extent to which the modern city is predicated on the concept of the private individual, and on the sanctity of the individual’s inner most

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thoughts and feelings’ (di Palma et al. 2009, p.1). This juxtaposition between intimate and metropolis ‘brings question of subjectivity to the fore, and with it the way the modern city establishes relationship between the individual and collective, its particular versions of community’ (di Palma et al. 2009, p.2). The authors make the observation that this is symptomatic of contemporary culture and add that it is a phenomenon which should not necessarily be assumed as affirmative.

How does the urban interiorist work within this intimate metropolis? Given the collector and the flâneur as precedents cited in the emergence of the interior—it would seem there is great potential.

Working from the inside out is one of the main ways of defining the practice and approach of interior design. The inside here is usually equated with the process of designing from the human out—needs, activities and desires—so that a building for example is designed from the inhabitant outwards. The idea of ‘human-centred design’ is often equated with the aspirations of interior design as a profession. In this sense, the intimate metropolis is a making of the city from an inside-out approach where the personal is privileged. However there is something troubling about this privileging of the individual and subjectivity— especially for the urban interiorist. How does one design for another’s subjective experience? And where is the conjunction with an exterior?

The provocation to think about the techniques for an urban interiorist in the production of an urban interior provides an opportunity to consider other ways of practising and thinking than one which situates the interiorist at the centre of both production and reception. Even the acronym of urban interior—UI, U and I, you and I—complicates ideas and provokes thinking around the relation between individuals and individuals, and collectives as future compositions.

Techniques for an urban interiorist Different techniques produce different relations; different approaches and different motivations also shape techniques. What follows is a collection of techniques and an examination of the different kinds of relations produced with a view to highlighting implications and potentials.

Techniques of inflecting the urban fabric where exteriors become interiors through spatial inversion are readily grasped as an urban interior. The 1748 Map of Rome by Giambattista Nolli and Camillo Sitte’s theories detailed in the City Planning According to Artistic Principles (1889) re-conceptualised the urban fabric as a spatial composition of interiors and exteriors (Sitte 1965). Nolli’s plan is a figure-ground composition of black and white where the white—the inside of public buildings and

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streets—reads as void space and hence as interior amongst the dense black blocking out private buildings. The ‘sculpting of “negative” space rather than the production of a “positive” object’ is often cited as one of the key aspects of interior design (Caan 2010). Sitte’s attention to the qualities and aesthetics of the urban environment makes a relation with encounters and human experience. The built urban fabric is seen as a spatial assemblage of enclosures and openings rather than objectbuildings in void space. Hence the square, forum and agora become spaces which can be inhabited and re-programmed as interiors.

An example of this exploration is a design studio project at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom, which brought interior design and urban planning students together (Farrelly & Mitchell 2008). Titled Interior room: Urban room, the design brief ‘brings together two different realms: the interior and the urban and uses the “room” as a common language or framework’ (Farrelly & Mitchell 2008, p.1). This approach to the urban room is based on the positioning of interior design as a practice which involves responding to a given context whether it is a site, a building or a room and with a focus on activity and the experiential.

The Italian designer and former chair of Interior Design at the Politecnico di Milano, Andrea Branzi extends and loosens up the idea of working within the urban fabric, challenging the privileging of existing space and meaning as the tools for production. He reframes the urban fabric as dynamic and enzyme-like, as distinct from fixed.

The city’s architectural structures, once conceived for specialised functions on the basis of rational and sectional patterns, are now used in a disparate, improper, temporary fashion: it is […] possible to carry out ‘any activity anywhere’. This observation represents a brand-new subject for the Interior Design culture and opens a new season of design experimentation and deeper inspection into the new frontiers of an urban reality that not only needs to be continuously ‘re-functionalised’ in order to give hospitality to unexpected activities, but also witnesses a contamination of the same business, residential and cultural activities. No more as separated environmental realities, but rather as active elements of an enzymatic territory, always changing its function and form (Branzi 2008, p.96).

The shift to questions of function and program as distinct from architectural fabric and site brings different techniques and thinking to hand as a process of interior-making where the equation with room as architectural mould is not implicated as a starting point. Instead energies and forces become part of the composition. The practises of the 1950s avant-garde group the Situationists aimed to transform the stasis of the architectural fabric into ‘constructed situations’.

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ATTIWILL ‘the comrades who call for a new free architecture’ Debord warned ‘must understand that this new architecture will primarily be based not on free, poetic lines and forms—in the sense that today’s “lyrical abstract” painting uses those words—but rather on the atmospheric effects of rooms, hallways, streets, atmospheres linked to the gestures they contain.

Architecture must advance by taking emotionally moving situations, rather than emotionally moving forms, as the material it works with.

And the experiments conducted with this material will lead to unknown forms’ (Situationist Guy Debord quoted in Sadler 1998, p.107).

Techniques such as the dérive and détournement were used to identify and construct situations from existing forms to produce momentary ambiances that were provisional and lived. These ‘constructed situations’ have been referred to as ‘gesamtkunstwerk’—a total work of art (Sadler 1998, p. 105) which is interesting because this term is used in interior design in relation to an interior environment which has been designed in every detail. The interior nuance of these constructed situations is palpable. ‘Each constructed situation would provide a décor and ambiance of such power that it would stimulate new sorts of behaviour, a glimpse into an improved future social life based upon human encounter and play’ (Sadler 1998, p. 105). The Situationist as urban interiorist! There is no evidence in terms of how these constructed situations were made as it seems that none were actualised along the lines that Debord prescribed. The shift however from site and architectural space to situation and construction through a foregrounding of the temporal invokes an urban interior which shifts from one which relies on only on spatial inversion.

Another situationist project was New Babylon by artist-architect Constant Nieuwenhuys. This project proposed interactive labyrinthine structures across cities; a completely internalised space where the ambiance and climate could be controlled as people wandered freely and this in turn would lead to new social relations. While more architectural than the ‘constructed situation’—and hence critiqued by fellow situationist, Debord—this was an attempt to produce an interior environment that was not fixed or static but in a process of perpetual becoming. ‘The ambiences will be regularly and consciously changed, with the aid of every technical means, by teams of specialised creators who, hence, will be professional situationists’ (Ford 2005, p.76). Urban interiorists as professional situationists! Techniques here for an urban interiorist include the idea of producing a structure within which to enable interactivity and responsiveness, with the potential for changing and controlling the climate—very interiorised. There is something of the New Babylon in the ‘continuous interiors’ of malls designed as spaces of ‘individualised-interiorised territory’ (Pimlott 2007, p.10).

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Opposite: Alice Kohler Interior Plan.

Movement and Stillness 2009. Drawings and photographs from Design Strategy 2 in response to the Urban Room design studio. Photos and drawings: Alice Kohler.

URBAN INTERIOR

Italian designer Elena Giunta addresses the concept of urban interior through interior design practice and tools for urban regeneration. Using the title ‘urban interior’, she addresses the idea of temporary inhabitation through user interaction. Urban Interior here is an environmental system composed of bodies (social component—individuals and communities), objects (inanimate actors) and spaces (systems of containers). ‘A semantic and performative interface’ which interacts with and overlays existing space. ‘Each urban place is primarily seen as a field of potential actions […] public space as a relational field’ where users contribute to both production of function and meaning (Giunta 2009, p.59).

As a way of thinking through the potential of urban interior in terms of practice and techniques, as well as an extension of the practice of interior design, I have engaged students with urban interior propositions and invited them to propose different scenarios. Urban Room was the title of an undergraduate interior design studio I offered with colleague Roger Kemp in 2009. The idea of the urban room as architectural fabric together with the question of interior design as a process of interior-making shaped by intensities and forces, spatial and temporal conditions within the urban environment were posed. The first part of the studio focused on developing strategies and techniques for interior-making within urban situations. Two distinct strategies were engaged with as a provocation for thinking about how one might conceive of and design an interior. One addressed issues of site specificity and existing conditions, where the urban fabric informed and shaped the urban condition as an interior one—the exterior architectural fabric like a mould which produced a spatial inversion. The second strategy was one which worked from a situation starting from a middle to make an interior through relations and connections as distinct from using pre-existing structures which enclose an internal space. Before designing, students conducted a situation analysis including observation, analysis and documentation of: public and private space; lighting and light conditions, shadows; materials and immateriality; movements and flows, densities of circulation and stillness; behaviour; sound; historical layerings; urban character; programs and activities such as eating, sleeping, meeting, selling, performing, shopping, public intimacies; 24 hours and 7 days. They were asked to produce interior plans which mapped these forces and in the process highlight areas of activity and movement where the interior potential of the situation becomes apparent as one of intensification. A street vendor selling photographs who marks out the space with chalk disrupts the flow of movement and produces intensities around moments of stillness—a becoming-interior through an orchestration of movements and energies. The situation analysis and interior mapping by Alice Kohler titled Interior Plan. Movement and Stillness observes processes

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of arrangement and formation in response to forces of movement and intensification in the production of an interior. The relations here are not ones of mimesis and representation to create a relation of existing meaning, so much an evaluation of forces and from there a process of interiorisation. The tram wall project On by Sarah Jamieson produces an urban room of thermal conditions. Situated at a street intersection, copper piping is inserted into the urban infrastructure such as public seating and poles around areas where people wait and rest providing a thermal zone of warmth, which is activated by the trams when they come to a stop. The trams act as walls containing this climate

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conditioning momentarily. These are different approaches and interior thinking from those working with the architectural fabric as enclosure.

These ideas were extended in an undergraduate interior design specialisation titled Temporal Occupations as part of a field trip to Berlin in 2009. The idea of temporal occupation was offered as a way of inviting different modes of occupying space than through built form; temporal occupations produce and work the urban fabric in different ways. Students were asked to document a temporal occupation and consider what was being worked and transformed through the occupation and its duration, what shifts in program might occur and how this was done through materials, sightlines and working historical, social and cultural forces. Students considered how their sightings might collectively re-territorialise the urban fabric and how through a provisional composition (an exhibition) create intensification and encounter with another space as well as a way of thinking about the city. An exhibition was described as a temporal arrangement and a fabricated interior (even a world-in-making) into which the participant/ viewer is invited. Archival City by Alice Kohler involved the surfacing of the temporal—a presenting of a past through cutting into layers of posters—and its encounter. Through the insertion of a yellow banana in a Berlin subway, Sarah Jamieson’s Highlight as an act of arrangement, singularises a momentary sensation of yellowness.

Proposition Melbourne is often referred to as an interior city. At one time, you could walk undercover from one side of Melbourne city. The laneways of Melbourne are often noted for their interior quality.

I’m interested though in an interiorist position that does not necessarily rely on the architectural urban fabric. There are different kinds of production, different kinds of relations—interiorisations and implications. Above are a series of techniques for an urban interiorist and figures who engaged with making the conjunction ‘urban and interior’ in different ways: the collector and the flâneur; the professional situationist; the interior design student.

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s identification of a shift from discipline societies to societies of control in the late 20th— from techniques of containment to ones of control—challenges the concept of interior (Deleuze 1990). Elsewhere Deleuze writes how ‘the constitution of interiority is alimentary’ (Deleuze 1988, p.102).

A question of how to make—to constitute—interiors is highlighted and the equation with interior container is ruptured. Techniques of control become a consideration in the conjunction ‘urban and

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Previous: Sarah Jamieson On 2009.

Design proposal for Urban Room design studio.

Images: Sarah Jamieson.

Above: Alice Kohler Archival City Berlin, Germany, 2009.

Design proposal for the Temporal Occupations interior design project.

Photo: Alice Kohler.

Opposite: Sarah Jamieson Highlight Berlin, Germany, 2009.

Design proposal for the Temporal Occupations interior design project.

Photo: Sarah Jamieson.

URBAN INTERIOR

interior’. For an urban interiorist of the 21st century, the curatorial aspect of the collector’s and situationist’s practice is amplified in the making of relations between interior and exterior; the ‘and’ ‘+’ between urban and interior; how they are brought together, by who and how interior/interiority is made/produced/constituted.

There is something about the production of interior/interiority as a process which involves a stabilising of forces—like Benjamin’s collector and his attempt to prevent dispersion. This idea of interiorisation as intensification shifts the focus from existing built fabric to a mode of working within movement, different speeds, different affects and effects. This may be to slow down and stabilise; to enclose and contain through processes of inclusion and exclusion; to produce interiors as a temporary consistency.

The term ‘interiorist’ is the focus of ‘a polemic’ by Michael Benedikt, the chair of Urbanism at the University of Texas. Benedikt makes a distinction between exteriorist and interiorist as two different fundamental orientations and sensitivity to environment. He uses the metaphor of a Russian Babushka doll: the exteriorist attends to the outside of form, the object and its painted form; an interiorist is concerned with the inside of each layer, the concaved surface. The interiorist is sensitive to ‘texture, pattern, colour, style, touch, nearness,

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arrangement, personality, and domesticity, to “charged” objects (the life in inanimate things), to class, and to the power of people themselves—of their clothed, warm, breathing bodies—to transform any environment by their presence’ (Benedikt 2002, p.4). The interiorist attends to the ‘inside feeling of embeddedness’, the specificity of things as produced through relation and proximity—‘seeing the arrayed proximity of things around us rather than their composed shapes relative to each other’ and ‘environmental experience ahead of form making and tectonics’ (Benedikt 2002, p.4). For Benedikt, interiorists can work in outside or inside space; it is more of an attitude and approach, a way of seeing and making. There are also objective interiorists and subjective interiorists, objective exteriorists and subjective exteriorists. Benedikt’s polemic positions the potential of interior design as a practice in the urban realm, while arguing the critical difference of this practice from one of interior architecture (Benedikt 2002, p.4).

While there are qualities that one could pick from Benedikt’s definition as critical to an urban interiorist practice, the intention here is not to find and define a set of techniques or a way of working in advance of the making (as per Benedikt), so much as to display the potential and implications of interior-making as a creative activity which produces difference. The various examples above are not

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provided as a historical lineage for a 21st century urban interior practice, so much as a collection of urban interiors which makes apparent diversity. Perhaps the following words by Deleuze are the most useful tool for an urban interiorist to carry in their tool box for, and when, making the conjunction ‘urban and interior’: The important thing is to understand life, each living individuality, not as form or as a development of form but as a complex relation between differential velocities, between deceleration and acceleration of particles. […] One never commences; one never has a tabula rasa; one slips in, enters in the middle; one takes up or lays down rhythms.

So an animal, a thing is never separable from its relations with the world. The interior is only a selected exterior, and the exterior, a projected interior. The speed and slowness of metabolisms, perceptions, actions and reactions link together to constitute a particular individual in the world. (Deleuze 1992, pp.626 and 628 respectively).

A rhizome has no beginning or end: it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. […] the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, ‘and… and…and…’ […] between things does not designate a localizable relation going from toee the tneone melething eno n wteother b snoand itceback nnoc ehT again, syawbut la toanperpendicular erew rehtonadirection, dna yrotsaeht fo transversal dluoc stcemovement jbo eht ;rorethat pmesweeps eht ot sone uoivbo and the delother lfi revaway, iuq a ;sagstream ninaemwithout suoirav evah beginning hcaorppor a eend ht ethat tacidundermines ni dluoc swoits rra htiw banks esle and ro ,epicks mag fup o espeed cnadnuinbthe a namiddle. ro ,raw fo dluoc ssalgruoh na ;pohs s’ reromra na ,dnas ro ,tsap emit ro ,gnissap emit naem .edam era sessalgruoh erehw ecalp a ro ot nageb sdrow ,yb tnew emit sA ]…[ s’ocraM ni serutseg dna stcejbo ecalper ,snuon detalosi ,snoitamalcxe tsrfi :selat dna defiimar ,sesarhp neht ,sbrev yrd .seport dna srohpatem ,sesruocsid yfael eht kaeps ot denrael dah rengierof ehT ot rorepme eht ro egaugnal s’ rorepme .rengierof eht fo egaugnal eht dnatsrednu

ti :dne ro gninnigeb on sah emozihr A ,sgniht neewteb ,elddim eht ni syawla si fo cirbaf eht ]…[ .ozzemretni ,gniebretni …dna‘ ,noitcnujnoc eht si emozihr eht seod sgniht neewteb ]…[ ’…dna…dna gniog noitaler elbazilacol a etangised ton kcab dna rehbetween to eht ot g nihelement t eno morf The connections one ,noitcand eridanother ralucidnwere eprepnot a tualways b ,niaga of theastory eno sto pethe ewsemperor; taht tnem evobjects om lasrecould vsnart obvious the tuohtiwmeanings; maerts a ,yaaquiver wa rehfilled to eht dna have various sti sencould imredindicate nu taht dthe ne rapproach o gninnigeb with arrows .elddor iman ehabundance t ni deeps pof u sgame, kcip dnora else sknab of war, an armorer’s shop; an hourglass could mean time passing, or time past, or sand, or a place where hourglasses are made. […] As time went by, words began to replace objects and gestures in Marco’s tales: first exclamations, isolated nouns, dry verbs, then phrases, ramified and leafy discourses, metaphors and tropes.

The foreigner had learned to speak the emperor’s language or the emperor to understand the language of the foreigner.

Making visible: registering the asynchronous city Kate Church In Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities (1997) Venice is famously re-presented as multiple versions of itself. So compelling is the landscape of each narrative, so separate is the world each chapter creates—that the listener, Kublai Khan (and indeed the reader) believe they are hearing about entirely different places around the globe. The book’s structure reveals that Venice contains each of these realities and countless others. It also implies that the city does not just exist as bricks and mortar but also as experience and imagination.

Melbourne, like Calvino’s Venice is infinitely manifold—remaking itself for a range of different agendas, experiences and spectacles.

Each of these versions requires different ‘information’ to be revealed, through processes of making visible. These processes are defined as much by what is excluded as what is selected for inclusion. Alongside this, each of us constructs our own versions of the city comprising of a pastiche of collective and individual narratives and experiences.

Imaginings and fictions exist in parallel with the predictable, repetitive or seemingly static. Fixed landmarks of routine journeys through familiar spaces oscillate with sudden change, demolition or event. This chapter considers selected design approaches that seek to ‘make visible’ phenomena and experiences often rendered invisible in the city as a way to engage with and celebrate the multiplicity inherent in urban space.

Simultaneously operating at multiple scales, the city as an urban interior is both a container for transformation (Lynch 1972) and is itself an endless process of change. This ongoing transformation occurs across both the collective and individual scale—drawing from, shifting and reorganising a multitude of conditions and phenomena. Many things inform our conceptualisation of the urban landscape, and our experience of the city’s ‘interior’ is constructed and understood at the scale of the collective ‘public’ as well as at the scale of the individual body and its subjective experiences. In considering the intersection between the body and the city, urban space exists not just as a physical environment but also as a vast collection of these shared and personal impressions, anecdotes and experiences. A city’s space is therefore understood as a phenomenon which emerges from the ongoing (re)negotiation between the constructed environment, urban processes and bodily experience.

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‘The City’ therefore is not a fixed or static notion, or a purely physical locale but rather is continually challenged and reconstituted through the immediacy of our occupation of, and movement through its spaces. These shifts and changes are registered in a variety of ways including the stories we create, and the way drawings, maps, performance and other creative practices re-present the urban condition. Each mode relies on different conceptual and kinaesthetic information sets, and each ‘makes visible’ different aspects of the city’s endless diversity. These modes which register the city are broad and each has the scope to present the city with varying degrees of ‘authority’, subjectivity, fixedness and flux.

Capturing and engaging with the qualities of the intermediate, often invisible phenomena of the city perhaps suggests seeking alternative approaches. This chapter explores the city through considering a range of different tools and practices that seek to record and portray the asynchronicity of the city, which other approaches are unable to depict or, in some cases, detect. Framed within this alternative set of information, modes and applications for capturing and making visible the disturbances to the synchronous city are considered and tested.

The notion of urban interior thereby becomes an act of ‘drilling down’; exploring urban practices which intend to make visible and embrace the capricious idiosyncrasies and singularities of the urban landscape.

This also takes the notion of urban interior, to loosely frame the interior experience of the city—in terms of being physically ‘in’ the city—as well as exploring the sense of being an ‘insider’ with its associated connotations of familiarity. This framing offers a different scale of operation, a zoomed in exploration, and an ongoing consideration of the subjective, temporary and experiential.

On ‘making visible’ A city always exists, to some degree, in the gap between the real and the imagined, abstracted through lines on maps, disembodied in carefully framed photographs, captured through personal anecdotes and momentarily revealed through bodily experience. This combination of repeatable and unique experiences creates an understanding of the city which combines and mixes both its tangible, gritty, idiosyncratic reality and a ‘flattened’ normalised version of itself.

Arguably, as modes which register and help construct our shared understanding of the city, mass-produced mediums and choreographed experiences mediate a particular version of the urban condition in keeping with agendas of reinforcing preferred methods of spatial

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Previous: Kate Church, Urban [Di] Versions, Melbourne, Australia, 2009.

Photo: Ben Landau

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control. Planners, strategists, powerbrokers and politicians use strategic manoeuvres, such as maps and policies to ‘make visible’ an image of the city as a legible and consistent urban vision. As tools these seek to recreate the city as a stable, unified whole. The city that is made visible is presented as a codified and synchronous urban geography through tactics of visual, panoptic and theoretical constructions (De Certeau 1988, p.93). As tools these modes of ‘making visible’ tend to assume a particular authority and social investment, and are often characterised as ‘fixing’ the city in a recognisable and static state.

Yet although these existing systems of spatial control have widespread physical (built) implications, their overall construction of the city as an organised, legible entity fails to account for what writer and academic Bill Hillier (1996) terms the fundamental ‘asynchronicity’ of our lived experience of urban space. This lived experience is categorised by immediacy, visceral affects and fragmentary moments that draw on alternative sets of spatiotemporal information. Thus, understood as constantly shifting and remaking itself, the image of the city as a unified whole is always in tension with our individual daily experiences. A city is always more than the map of itself, more than the sum of its policies or development strategies, more than the stories which exist about it. Are there ways that traditional modes of registering the city can be co-opted to explore this multiplicity and make visible phenomena which are often ignored or hidden?

In this context the term ‘making visible’ refers to a revelatory practice—one which enables things previously hidden or unnoticed to be revealed. This process may occur in a number of ways including through being visualised (literally ‘making visible’) or through broader kinaesthetic experience. Visually speaking, ‘making visible’ may be done through constructing a notational language, amplifying the effects of phenomena or other forms of visual translation.

Experientially, ‘making visible’ suggests changing or interrupting routine behaviours, opening up possibilities and creating different modes of spatial engagement. This notion of considering visual and experiential tools which seek to make visible the hidden processes and fleeting phenomena of the city underpins much of this discussion. These tools are not mutually exclusive and rarely exist in isolation, but rather are filters or lenses in considering possible devices to uncover or reveal that which is often rendered invisible.

Normative communication tools particularly for designers are generally mandated for clarity. Orthographic and isometric drawing conventions offer a collectively understood abstraction device which allows the three-dimensional to be compressed into two dimensions

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for the purposes of ‘making visible’ a design. As a mediated practice, designers rely on this representational system to communicate their ideas to others. In this respect these drawing conventions operate as normative visual tools. To consider ‘normative’ experience is somewhat fuzzier, as even shared experiences of the city remain varied and subjective encounters. Yet citizens navigate urban space through a system of public space which is based on a built semiotic language that guide their movements (such as lights, bollards, pavement treatments, signage and numerous other orientation devices) and therefore feature heavily in our experience of the city’s spaces.

This chapter will consider two broad approaches to the act of ‘making visible’: drawing (primarily visual and cerebral) and walking (primarily experiential and corporeal) and through a series of projects, will consider more specific tools and tactics which attempt to reveal alternative sets of information. This occurs within a wider reflection surrounding the lineage of these approaches and the selected attempts by others to grapple with similar issues in their attempts to engage with (and document) the invisible aspects of the city. Situated within a broader research agenda, this begins to elucidate a range of urban practices that are explicitly aligned with identifying and responding to the transitory and indeterminate aspects of the city.

Marking the city Rather then float above the city in some sort of omnipotent, instantaneous, disembodied, all possessing eye, situationist cartography admitted that its overview of the city was reconstructed in the imagination, piecing together an experience of space that was actually terrestrial, fragmented, subjective, temporal and cultural (Sadler 1988, p.82).

Historically, drawing is perhaps the most common or obvious visual technique we use to ‘make visible’. It is a process of abstraction and of ideas ‘coming-into-being’. For designers, drawing brings our ideas into the world, registering them in a tangible manner and disseminating them to others. Translating ideas intended for a threedimensional built reality into two dimensions relies, among other things, on collective languages of notation and abstraction. While drawing is a common mode of making visible, this discussion considers approaches which ‘make visible’ urban phenomena which are notoriously hard to capture: the intangible, the ephemeral, the experiential and the hidden. In particular it looks at ways in which normative or common notational systems and drawing conventions, such as cartography, may be appropriated or manipulated for this purpose.

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Opposite: Kate Church, Urban [Di] Versions, Melbourne, Australia, 2009.

Photo: Ben Landau

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As a drawing practice, cartography offers a particular way of engaging with drawing and (re)presenting information. It is founded on processes of understanding Cartesian space, of projecting through a pre-given set of conditions, of organising the world into categories and systematically layering information. As a device to ‘make visible’ cartography is powerful in its ability to normalise and make explicit control over what information is included and excluded. Inherent to the act of mapping are operations of selection, collection, classification and simplification. In depicting the infinite complexity of reality, maps construct narratives through the selective portrayal of reality and as such re-define ‘the actual’.

In Western society, cartography is vested with authority and has traditionally been accepted as being objective and accurate. Maps are understood through a geometric relationship constructed between real space and virtual space. This is created via the Cartesian analogy that enables the concept of space to be understood as consisting of a series of points. Maps therefore operate to enable an association of every point in space with a point on the map. Techniques of projection, scale and deformation enable a collective understanding of these abstractions, which over time have come to embody the aforementioned notions of objectivity and fact. It is a practice which, until recently was primarily understood as a quantitative and therefore scientific way of documenting the world. As Western scholarship favoured such quantifiable approaches, maps were deemed both ‘factual’ and ‘truthful’. If we consider many of the world’s conflicts, or even our own domestic property boundaries, we realise just how much can be invested in a line on a map. As social constructs maps are powerful tools for making visible.

Interestingly, cartography is also defined as a craft and an art. These latter positions suggest not only the technical acumen required but also acknowledge the slippery and subjective processes of translation and abstraction. This more qualitative understanding loosely aligns map-making with story-telling. For within each map is the hidden story of these processes of selection and their associated agendas, assumptions and curatorial decisions. As visual stories, maps similarly rely on a language that though easily understood still requires interpretation and—like stories—depict a reality through the choices made of which information to privilege.

The drawing conventions inherent in the notional systems of maps have tended to be used within a codified system of ‘making known’, through privileging legibility and clarity within the documentation process. When used in this manner in urban space, the act of drawing ‘fixes’ the city, offering an authoritative confirmation on shared

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Kate Church, Urban Occupations, Melbourne, Australia, 2009.

Photo: Kate Church

URBAN INTERIOR

assumptions. Thus maps of Melbourne’s CBD are always prefaced through the grid and its associated hierarchy of streets, regardless of what the map is about. This simplified legibility is often difficult to reconcile with the internal logic of being within the city’s CBD. While maps themselves tend to be the ‘finished’ artefact (often disembodied, finite and therefore existing as highly reductive overviews that are out of sync with the bodily experience), the act of mapping suggests an ongoing process of observation and recording with incompleteness inherent to its role. This difference between the object of the map and the process of mapping is an important distinction. Here, the act of mapping is not simply the means through which to produce a completed map, but rather refers to a particular approach to drawing that, although precise, privileges the qualitative aspects of the art of cartography, documenting the unknown, inviting the unexpected and perhaps never aiming to be ‘finished’.

It is a cartographic approach that remains highly attentive to the singularities and disruptions and seeks to capture these ‘glitches’.

As part of the collaborative design research project Urban [Di] Versions (2009),1 a simple drawing machine was constructed which attempted to marry the qualities of precision, selection and ‘authority’ invested in normative maps, with the incompleteness of the process of mapping. The machine was installed off one of Melbourne’s

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hidden laneways in the left-over space between two buildings. The ambition was to ‘make visible’ the phenomena of air movement.

Drawing machines also begin to suggest alternative positionings with regard to both the processes of mapping and the role of the mapmaker. The process of inventing and constructing these tools offers insight into the complex behaviour and interconnectedness of urban processes. The designer/mapmaker/body makes a number of decisions which impacts what is revealed (processes of selection) and at the same time relinquishes the control of the outcome to the processes occurring in the landscape. Unlike completing a conventional map, the mapmaker does not control the linework or composition of drawing beyond determining the spatial conditions (locating/setting up the machine), the temporal constraints (the duration of the drawing) and the responsiveness of the machine itself (sensitivity of the machine’s level of responsiveness and its recording capabilities). Here the body’s relationship to the city is one of subtle choreography; of designing the conditions as opposed to conditioning the design (Tschumi 1983).

In this context drawing machines are devices that enable specific processes in urban space to transcribe themselves. They are designed and calibrated to collect particular spatiotemporal ‘data’ of phenomena occurring within the urban landscape. This ephemeral and changing information is captured (often on a micro scale) and mediated through the notation of the machine; translated into lines and marks; it allows the phenomena an active role in documenting itself.

In the Urban [Di]Versions project a new drawing was constructed each day. Each mapping was unique with the linework capturing subtle changes, as well as overall or broader shifts such as a change of direction or other indirect disruptions. These drawings are traces of fluctuation but may be read as a diagram of relations which occur over scales and times; where global weather patterns and highly localised conditions of disturbance combine. Equally these may be read as temporal mappings: that track data, translating and ‘making visible’ the behaviour and movement of the air.

Another drawing machine currently in development is a movement machine which considers the role of the body more directly. This machine is worn on the body and translates bodily movement in space into linework. This machine more closely addresses the body and its movement through space than its predecessor. While documenting the movement of the body, this mapping process shifts the relationship between the body, the drawing and the machine. Rather than relinquishing control over the drawing, this process directly engages the body in the creation of the drawing. Again considering the quantifiable

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Above: Tania Court, QRioCity, Melbourne, Australia, 2010 .

Photo: Marieluise Jonas Opposite: Kate Church, QRioCity, Melbourne, Australia, 2010 .

Photo: Marieluise Jonas

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aspects of this process, the drawings produced are strangely evocative of the qualities of each short journey. A run as opposed to a meander is easily distinguished, sudden changes in direction or pauses are also evident in the resultant drawing. Coupled with a series of photos of the route, this approach seeks to explore both familiar and subjective urban versions overlaid with information about a singular and unique experience.

In considering this unfinished and explorative process of mapping, the role of mark making—fundamental to any act of drawing— becomes one of destabilising the assumed or authoritative. Unlike the lines on a finished map which intend to ‘fix’ information, these marks become the mode through which exploration is undertaken.

This shift re-casts the line as an agent to agitate less ‘known’ conditions, producing a number of uncertainties that can be enfolded into a broader conception of the city as a less fixed, predictable or singular entity. This approach to the role of mapping potentially requires a reconsideration of the tools used in this cartographic process of ‘making visible’ as well as the role of the cartographer-body.

Roaming the city The ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below’, below the thresholds at which the thresholds of visibility begins. They

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walk—an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it (De Certeau 1988, p.93).

Walking through bill-postered and stencilled laneways, lost in a dead-end space you had not previously known existed, happening upon strange objects adjacent to your regular ‘smoko’ spot, discovering seemingly-forgotten detritus tucked away behind a ledge: the line between coded clues of a scavenger hunt and incidental novelty generated through the city’s urban processes is blurred. QRioCity (2010)2 was a collaborative design project set in Melbourne which intended to enable—and to some degree loosely choreograph—such experiences and explorations, and (as its name suggests) to engender the act of moving through the city with a sense of curiosity, playfulness and wonder.

The project aimed to transform people’s perceptions and familiar experiences of the city through the act of walking—of literally being ‘on the ground’. French scholar Michel De Certeau builds his reading of the ‘text’ of the city through deploying an analogy between walking and narration (Pile 1996, p.225). The act of walking the city he argues, narrates interests and desires that are neither determined nor captured by the system of signification used to codify them, but within which spatial practices develop (Pile 1996, p.225). Being literally on the ground and physically present is the antithesis of the disembodied totalising

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Bridget Keane, QRioCity, Melbourne, Australia, 2010.

Photo: Marieluise Jonas

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overview of many maps or policy documents. ‘Walking the city’ presents alternative experiences which are more fragmentary and rely on different types of manoeuvres and tactics. This constructs an experience of the city, which is made up of short cuts, happenstances and encounters.

Undertaken during a brutally cold winter (by Melbourne standards), QRioCity aimed to transform spaces throughout the city through literally and metaphorically re-coding them. Consisting of coded objects which were stationed throughout the urban fabric, the project sought to construct new links which could be decoded via a mobile phone. As its spelling suggests, the project utilised QR (Quick Response) codes for this purpose. These codes operate in a similar manner to barcodes and the information embedded in the code is revealed immediately through a mobile phone. The phone’s camera takes an image of the code and the decoded information is instantly relayed back to the phone’s screen. This information may include micro-narratives, clues and images, and these are collected in the participant’s phone as they move through the city.

Artists, philosophers and designers have grappled with the movement and experience of changing urban phenomena since the inception of the modern city. Martin Heidegger (1992) discussed the notion of dasein (literally translated, ‘being there’) within his broader theorising about temporality. The influential German philosopher discussed this being-in-the-world-ness as an active engagement with

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the possibilities of the everyday, a notion which underpins much of the intention of the project. Occupying and roaming through urban space is an experience of encounter and negotiation; simultaneously constructing and transforming these spaces, and thereby embedding a particular agency in the individual through their spatial occupation.

French poet, essayist and critic Charles Baudelaire (2007) conflated the French verb ‘flâneur’ meaning ‘to stroll’ with the idea of walking as a mode through which to experience the city as a phenomena. The notion of the flâneur has been adopted by many people—perhaps most famously by the German intellectual Walter Benjamin who saw flâneurie as an important practice of participating in and revealing the city.

For Benjamin the flâneur was an urban tool through which he investigated the relationship between body, behaviour and public space (1999).

From the revolution of the industrial era, the modern city emerged and with it was a fundamental shift in urban space. Fascinated by street life, Benjamin’s flâneur actively participated in the machinations of the city, albeit maintaining a critical attitude to the defining qualities of Modernity: its standardisation, speed and anonymity. Through bodily interaction with the constructed environment, the flâneur occupied the urban space making and remaking an individual version of the city. QRioCity positioned participants as ‘contemporary flâneurs’, their experience of the city was simultaneously both an embodied one and one which was mediated through the technology of the mobile phone—extending the role to include an element of ‘virtual flâneurie’.

Although relatively recent,3 QR codes already share the ubiquity of barcodes. Compared with barcodes, their flexibility is enhanced through not requiring specialised scanning equipment to decode them (this is done through the equally commonplace mobile phone), allowing QR codes to proliferate for diverse uses such as global logistics, e-ticketing, content distribution and viral advertising. The codes themselves are also inherently more flexible than barcodes in that they can be generated to store a wider range of data: text, image and web information.

Barcodes and QR codes are interesting in that they juxtapose their graphic ubiquity with the need to be decoded in order to be understood. In what has been dubbed the ‘Information Age’, this notion that information exists but is somehow hidden behind a standardised code suggests a level of secrecy, of being ‘in the know’, of being an insider. The project aimed to further this juxtaposition by combining the common QR code with this sense of exploring and seeking-out information. This in turn was intended to reveal unexpected events or relationships, suggesting different narratives of the city. This slightly

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‘forensic’ approach required participants to actively navigate the city through the information and objects they encountered along the way.

The routes connecting these points were not predetermined, enabling the spontaneous choreography of multiple journeys to coexist.

De Certeau (1988) identifies the perception of the city as a unified whole as the result of describing it from the point of view of someone disembodied, looking down from above. Tools and practices such as conventional cartography and policy, privilege the alleged objectivity which distance, generalisation and abstraction allow. While an online map was available for the project, only the general area of each station’s location was indicated, meaning each code had to be sought out through an overall attentiveness to the urban environment. The project’s map was therefore not a particularly efficient or useful tool in the traversal of the city. In order to orient and navigate through the project, one had to rely on kinaesthetic ‘data’, careful observation, the virtual information of the decoded stations and chance.

Also dissimilar to a map’s depiction of a route, the project’s coded stations were dotted around the city, creating networks within which there were multiple journeys. Collectively these multiple narratives created through the codes and encoded objects began to shift the hierarchy of the city through the information they revealed and the new connections they constructed. This began to create interesting potentials in terms of the relationship between the body and the city—moving through the city, and the city itself changing.

Baudelaire’s celebration of pedestrian activity as an urban practice along with De Certeau’s portrayal of pedestrians as ‘practitioners of the city’ was distinctively furthered by French writer and Situationist, Guy Debord. In addition to the role of the flâneur, his intention was to invite the unexpected as opposed to just observing it (Sadler 1998).

Debord and his fellow Situationists did this in a range of ways, although one of the best-known methods was the dèrive. Translated as the act of drifting, it is a way of encountering the city without preconception. This deliberate aimlessness draws on the earlier notions of the flâneur, which also focuses on wandering as an act through which to rediscover and reconstruct alternative understandings of the city and the everyday. As an activity, drifting combines both objective and subjective knowledge of the urban condition.

Therefore the dèrive operates as a practice of being in the city, of bodily encounter and an experiential way of engaging with the city’s capacity for the unexpected. Again walking is the primary mode through which this is enabled. The pedestrian strolling aimlessly operates

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differently in the city to someone who moves through it with singular intent. Lack of intent, Debord argued, made the person more open to the unexpected encounters that are possible in the city (Sadler 1998).

While QRioCity participants were arguably not ‘aimless’, they were unsure (in most cases) of exactly what they were looking for or where they ‘should’ be going. This loosely combined both the Situationists’ notion of the dèrive (whereby codes were accidentally or unintentionally discovered) as well as a more purposeful approach similar to the Amazing Race phenomena (which is both a reality TV formula and a popular mass activity organised by corporations and groups). The ‘race’ model adds a level of competitiveness, lateral thinking and physical skill akin to a treasure hunt. For QRioCity, this dual approach allowed participants to ‘dip in’ haphazardly to the project at various points (and similarly leave the project at any point) or invest in the whole set of stations, collecting each one and actively trying to follow the links.

The heightened state of observation required also enacted a different way of looking at familiar spaces. It involved seeking answers and searching for clues, which in turn transforms these familiar utilitarian, hidden or left over urban spaces into a site for treasure hunting.

The active participation also enhances awareness of the city’s idiosyncrasies. Converting Melbourne’s streets into a maze of asynchronous possibilities and creating a new logic whereby detouring, meandering, pausing and searching the city for answers allow the city to be created anew. Hoddle’s grid, Melbourne’s defining geometry, is barely legible and traditional maps bear little resemblance to the world inhabited and moved through.

****** In Invisible Cities the explorer Polo articulates the inherent asynchronicity of the city. In the narrative he weaves these multiple versions and as such, proposes an alternate model for understanding the city, one which acknowledges improbability and idiosyncrasy: […] a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions. If such a city is the most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we increase the probability that the city really exists. So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the cities which, always as an exception, exist.

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URBAN INTERIOR But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve cities too probable to be real (Calvino 1997, p.69).

In Calvino’s book each ‘version’ of the city calls to our attention the simultaneity of intrinsic organisation and unexpectedness inherent in city life. It also acknowledges that broad universal features and urban functions are tailored and re-made continuously. Often the tools we use to make visible the city ‘smoothes out’ or ignore these qualities. This is done in an attempt to present (and support) the assumption of the city as predictable and cohesive. These reduce the experience of the city to a flattened singular experience and the city is represented with Euclidean precision possessing legibility, order and, consequently a certain stasis.

The acts of ‘making visible’ through drawing and walking the city presented in this chapter aim to reveal the hidden aspects of the city, attempting to engage with the conceptualisation of the city as operating within a continuum of change. These modes embrace the fact that the city is never ‘finished’. This suggests possibilities for alternative ways of engaging with these urban conditions, which seek to capture and make visible the hidden mechanisations of urban space. Urban [Di]Versions and QRioCity are two projects which have begun to consider and test some of these alternative approaches to ‘making visible’. As tactics these start to reveal the asynchronous possibilities of the city via embracing the inherent contradiction of urban processes, which fluctuate between order and indeterminacy. By seeking to register this negotiation and embrace the glitches (as opposed to editing them out), the possibilities of the city as multiple, idiosyncratic and occasionally paradoxical, offer different possibilities for both occupation and intervention.

Critical work is made to fare on interstitial ground. […] Critical strategies must be developed within a range of diversely occupied territories where the temptation to grant any single territory transcendent status is continually resisted. erew srood reniatnoc eht ,ksud tA fo gnineercs eht laever ot denepo naissuR fo sderdnuh htiw sweivretni nemow eht ,rehtona retfa enO .nemow aremac eht ot sevlesmeht detneserp selytsriah dna gnihtolc ,serutseg htiw sedoc eht ni ’ytininimef‘ defiingis hcihw tnecer eht fo erutluc lausiv nretseW fo elam naciremA htroN a ,neercs ffO .tsap eerged a htiw namow hcae denoitseuq yb hcihw ecap a ta dna noititeper fo dna noitidua ,weivretni detseggus snrut htiw dlos erew soediv ehT .noitagorretni ,ega ,eman s’namow hcae gniliated stsil ,noitapucco ,sutats latiram ,thgiew ,thgieh .snoitaripsa lanosrep reh fo yrammus a dna

no eraf ot edam si krow lacitirC seigetarts lacitirC ]…[ .dnuorg laititsretni fo egnar a nihtiw depoleved eb tsum eht erehw seirotirret deipucco ylesrevid yrotirret elgnis yna tnarg ot noitatpmet .detsiser yllaunitnoc si sutats tnednecsnart At dusk, the container doors were opened to reveal the screening of interviews with hundreds of Russian women. One after another, the women presented themselves to the camera with gestures, clothing and hairstyles which signified ‘femininity’ in the codes of Western visual culture of the recent past. Off screen, a North American male questioned each woman with a degree of repetition and at a pace which by turns suggested interview, audition and interrogation. The videos were sold with lists detailing each woman’s name, age, height, weight, marital status, occupation, and a summary of her personal aspirations.

URBAN INTERIOR Edited by Rochus Urban Hinkel

ISBN 978-3-88778-351-8

9 783887 783518 www.urbaninterior.net

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URBAN INTERIOR

Informal explorations, interventions and occupations