Atlantis 26 2# urban exploration

ATLANTIS MAGAZINE FOR URBANISM & LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

#26.2 DECEMBER 2015

URBAN EXPLORATION TOUCHING, SEEING & DRAWING THE CITY

From the board Committees 2015

Dear Polis members,

We could not be as visible as we are without the great effort of a lot of active students. With the help of them we can organise excursions, lectures, workshops, drinks and events. The Polis board wants to thank all the people involved for their great efforts and positive input!

We present before you the fourth and last Atlantis magazine of our board year: ‘Urban Exploration’. This issue of Atlantis explores themes on how people comprehend their cities and discusses different ways to know and read the urban landscape. This magazine is the result of another enthusiastic effort of our new and expanded Atlantis committee. Nevertheless, there still room for guest/member articles.

So, please get in touch with us if you wish to share your thoughts.

We are always looking for enthusiastic people to join.

Interested in one of the Polis committees? Do not hesitate to contact us at our Polis office (01.west.350) or by mail: contact@polistudelft.nl

This magazine comes after an eventful quarter at the Department of Urbanism and Landscape Architecture, here in Delft. The October month was occupied with the Urban and Landscape Week, the biggest event of our board year, that had about 160 registered participants. The enthusiastic response from the participants during the workshops, lectures and debates, and a well-attended Polis 25th Anniversary Alumni event added to the positive outcome of the week. We thank all the speakers, guests and participants of the Urban and Landscape Week, and alumni event for making the event a success.

ALUMNI URBAN AND LANDSCAPE WEEK ATLANTIS BIG TRIP SMALL TRIP EDUCATION EVENTS PUBLIC RELATIONS (PR)

Polis board Rakesh Naduvath Mana – President Kim van Doesburg – Secretary Nikita Baliga – Treasurer Daniela Haug – Events Mark Disco – Public Relations Ting Wei Chu – Atlantis

During November, 18 students from the Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape Architecture tracks of TU Delft travelled to Poland with the Polis Big Trip. They visited the cities of Krakow and Warsaw, with a visit to Auschwitz as well. The excursion was titled ‘Opportunity in Conflict’, and the Big Trip committee had organized lectures by the professors at University of Warsaw, relevant to the theme.

There is a section dedicated to this excursion in the magazine, where you can read how these students explored urban Poland.

The monthly international movie night of November took us to the city of Dubai, through a documentary about the making of Palm Jumeirah islands. These monthly international movie nights are student initiatives, where they showcase their country of origin through a short movie related to Urbanism or Landscape Architecture.

Apart from that, Polis also organized a unique preview of the AFFR (Architecture Film Festival Rotterdam) at our Faculty. The event gave an insight into the intent of the festival from its organizers, and also provided an overview on the selected movies.

This issue of Atlantis magazine marks the end of our board year. We would like to thank you for your continued readership and participation in our events. The general body meeting will take place in January, during which the new board of 2016 will be presented. All Polis members are welcome to the general body meeting. Please check our website (http://www.polistudelft.nl/) for the agenda and venue of the meeting.

If you are interested in joining us to organize or participate in any of the future events, please let us know. As always, any recommendation for new events and articles are welcome too.

We wish you very pleasant reading.

Polis board 2015,

polistudelft.nl

Daniela Christine Haug, Kim Van Doesburg, Mark Disco, Nikita Baliga, Rakesh Naduvath Mana, Ting Wei Chu 1

ATLANTIS

Editorial

MAGAZINE FOR URBANISM & LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

Atlantis Volume #26 Are you passionate about urbanism and landscape architecture and would like to contribute? Contact us at: atlantis@polistudelft.nl

I have to admit it, compiling this issue has made me incurably nosy. I can no longer walk past a boarded up building without wondering what lies beyond. I feel like I am looking at the world around me with new eyes. I see a door ajar, I want to walk through it. I think of a city and I crave a book that translates its streets in to poetry. I want to draw to capture my raw reactions to the places I find myself in.

So, my one hope is that this issue on 'urban exploration' has at least some of the same impact on you. We challenge you to think differently about the city and landscape around you. To take up new methods and approaches in your quest for understanding. To seek other sources of inspiration for design. To be creative in how you communicate your ideas.

What is particularly exciting about this issue is the rich array of content from the student body here in Delft, and from the Atlantis team in particular. As well as connecting academia with practice, and provoking inspiration and debate, it is the opportunity that Atlantis provides for students to develop and showcase their work, that is so important. The drawings of Sylvie Chen ('It takes the whole city to switch on a lightbulb', page 39) uncover the complexity of our everyday interaction with the city.

Iulia Sirbu's journey through the streets of the Netherlands invokes and transforms an experience familiar to many of us ('Window Intelligible', page 29). And the team also have some recommendations for films and books to give you a fresh approach to how you understand place ('Exploring through Films', page 27; 'Urban Exploration through Literature', page 37).

But, we also have a range of content from outside Delft too. From stories of Churchill's bath tub and a rallying call to reclaim your city ('Place-Hacking the City', page 5), to powerful manifestos on the significance of walking ('Hit the Streets', page 11; 'Walking as a place-making art', page 13), we hope you find plenty of inspiration in these pages.

Excitingly, the team continues to grow, and we welcome several students and graduates from Landscape Architecture (Marina Dondros, Gaila Costantini and Maria Alexandrescu), Urbanism (Ieva Lendraityte, Angela Moncaleano, Bhavna Vaddadi, Shruti Maliwar and Nagia Tzika Kostopoulou) and the European Masters in Urbanism (Sylvie Chen). In particular I would like to thank long-term team member Alkmini Papaioannou for her incredible work coordinating and finalising the layout of this issue.

We've got a brand new Facebook page, so don't forget to follow us and share your thoughts and comments on the topics in this issue. You can find us at the following link: http://on.fb.me/1YK9P2C. But above all: Touch, look, draw. Stay curious.

Kate Unsworth

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05 19 37 45 3

CONTENTS TOUCHING // 05 PLACE-HACKING THE CITY INTERVIEW WITH BRADLEY GARRETT KATE UNSWORTH // 11 HIT THE STREETS CHELSEa GAUTHIER & gRANT ALLEN //

13 walking as a place-making art Matthieu duperrex // 15 underworld landscapes iulia cristina sirbu // 17 naked urban explorer john mask

SEEING // 19 THE SEARCH FOR BETTER UNDERSTANDING WAHYU PRATOMO & KRIS pROVOOST

// 23 tehran through the lens maryam

behpour

// 27 exploring through films kritika sha & ijsbrand

heeringa

// 29 window intelligible iulia cristina sirbu // 31 swarm

territories

dimitra

dritsa

//

35

revealing

bucharest

bast

drawing // 37 urban exploration through literature kritika sha, ijsbrand heeringa & laura garcia

// 39 it takes the whole city to

swiTch on a light bulb sylvie chen // 41 urban art exploration INTERVIEW

WITh

kuz

won

crew

&

diro

stb

crew

alkmini

papaioannou

polis // 45 when polis goes exploring: international movie night mark disco // 47 big trip to poland: opPortunity of conflict mark disco

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Place-Hacking the City

Reclaiming the public through urban exploration

There's a movement afoot. Groups of people going outside the normal everyday spaces of the city. Asking questions about the parts of the city we dont normally see. What's it all about? We spoke to Bradley Garrett, professor of geography at University of Southampton and committed urban explorer, about how he sees cities, why he thinks we should all explore more and what we, as designers and researchers can learn from this.

Bradley Garrett is a cultural geographer and chair of geography ethics in the economy, governance and culture research group at the University of Southampton, UK. His research interests revolve around heritage, place, urbanity, ruins and waste, ethnography, spatial politics, subversion and creative methods. His doctoral research was a visual ethnography with urban explorers, people who trespass into, and often photograph, off-limits urban spaces. http://www.bradleygarrett.com/

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interview with Bradley Garrett

by

Kate Unsworth MSc3 Urbanism

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Can you start by defining what you mean by urban exploration?

I guess generally urban exploration is the exploration of any parts of the city that are off limits. Abandoned buildings are the classic domain of the urban explorer, but also construction sites, subterranean infrastructural systems, any space that we are normally excluded from on a day to day basis. I pitch urban exploration in the context of place hacking because I feel that what urban explorers are doing on a physical plane is very similar to what computer hackers are doing on a virtual plane. I mean, there are systems that you’re locked out of, you’re not supposed to be able to access, and they’re finding security loopholes and getting behind them to get access to those spaces, whether they’re physical or virtual.

And what do you think urban explorers are trying to achieve through this hacking?

A lot of urban explorers are very resistant to the notion of a community, in the same way that hackers are. So, it’s difficult to pin them all with the same motivation, but I can give you a series of motivations and different explorers will be motivated by these different things. So, for some people it’s very much about understanding particular material histories of the city that are underplayed; you know, rather than see the cabinet war rooms in London, people would want to see the derelict secret cold war telephone exchange that is not a heritage site, but perhaps should be. And then in doing so, and in sharing the photos and here’s a second motivation - that very often sparks a conversation about what’s happening and what should happen with these spaces. And so I think it’s

not just about seeing historical places that aren’t on offer, but it’s also about starting conversations about what should be preserved and it’s about participating in the workings of the city.

I think a lot of people, and here’s another motivation, a lot of people feel very alienated in the modern city, they feel excluded from planning processes, from construction, from dereliction and decay. I mean these are all processes that are taking place around us, but we’re told that we shouldn't have access to those things, that we only have access to what we’re offered, and very often what we’re offered is something we have to pay for.

1. A crane over what is now New Court, a tower of bankers, in the City of London © Bradley Garrett 2. Millenium Mills, a derelict turn-of-the-century grain mill, in East London © Bradley Garrett

So, I feel like whether urban explorers are sneaking in to abandoned buildings or skyscrapers or infrastructural systems, what they’re doing there is they’re forcing participation, they’re making a political claim where they say, we are going to participate in the inner workings of the city, we are going to participate in the conversation about what should be done with these spaces and we’re going to do so whether or not we’re invited. Because more often than not, we’re not invited, and that’s a problem.

“...it’s about starting conversations about what should be preserved and participating in the workings of the city...”

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You suggest that it’s important for us as a society to engage with these spaces and question the access we have to the city, but how does that translate to the everyday person? Do you believe we should encourage everyone to place-hack and explore the city?

Well the short answer is yes. The long answer is I don’t expect that everyone wants to climb a skyscraper over Beijing! But what we should be encouraging is participation in the city. If people feel a desire to get involved in what’s happening in the city we should celebrate that rather than condemning it.

There are places where you see that in practice. Just outside of Milan there’s a town called Brescia, and some urban explorers out there started exploring a sewer system under Brescia, initially to look for the ancient Roman city that had been lost. They were kind of doing this amateur archaeology work, surveying and digging. So, at one point they were caught and the city authorities looked at the situation where they had about 12 people that were so fascinated with the history of their city that they had gone to these lengths to trespass in to it and were doing this work on their weekends, outside of their day jobs and so they just gave them the key to the sewers and said, well you can be responsible for the sewers then.

Now, the Brescia underground is a formal organisation, they got funding to install a glass plate in the pavement so that you can see the ancient sewers running underneath the city. They were brought in to the fold and that seems to me like a far more productive response than what we experience in the US and the UK where these things are consistently condemned as threatening or malicious. And of course this is a self-fulfilling prophecy because if you treat urban explorers like criminals, then why should they care if they break a lock to get in to a place, because they’re already going to be arrested and put in jail. There is a sense of mutual respect that needs to be garnered and, it’s something that we haven’t quite achieved in the US and the UK. In my mind, the more people who explore that aren’t 25 year old guys dressed in black, I think that’s going to be better for the community. It’s like the situation when you see the 90 year old nuns getting arrested at nuclear protests, it just defends the whole thing.

You think: ‘Oh wow! These are real people that have concerns, these aren’t just crusty hippies out smashing things up.’

Could you expand more on why you think urban exploration is so important? For us as individuals but also as a society?

In French, they have different words for a citizen and an inhabitant of the city. And this is a really important distinction because an inhabitant of the city just lives somewhere and is not engaged and doesn't participate and probably is a sort of global, mobile subject, who’s maybe working for a few years to make some money and is going to move on. Whereas a citizen of the city is obviously civically engaged, they’re aware of what’s going on around them. The first thing I should say, is that I don’t feel that London has many citizens any more. We’re being forced in to the role of inhabitants against our will, because we are not invited to participate in these conversations.

“...these are the kinds of everyday explorations that make us feel a sense of place...”

But I feel like the more people explore their city on an everyday level, on a practical, even very simple level, you know taking routes in the tube where you’re not guided, those small kinds of explorations teach us things about the city. If you do that, if you walk through the exit door in the tube, sometimes you find it’s actually quicker. So you see people that start gaining this local knowledge where they’re like ‘ooh, I know the shortcut’, ‘I know which door to stand at that’s going to open right at the exit’. These are the kinds of every day explorations that make us feel a sense of place.

But increasingly, as cities are built, they’re built specifically to force us not to be able to do those sorts of things. And then, it’s seen as transgressive if you do, seen as threatening. And I think that’s problematic.

So the more that we all explore, the more people will realise that this is not just benign, but it’s also very beneficial. It’s creating a citizenry who are actively engaged and aware of what’s happening around them and the by-product of that is that cities become safer.

If you go to Paris for example, there are 180 km of catacombs underneath the city and the cataphiles - the urban explorers who stay in those catacombs, and there are hundreds of them - they’re down there all the time, they’re building rooms, they’re throwing parties down there…I mean it's all illegal but it’s been

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happening for so long in France that the authorities just think, well, we know people are down there but actually, having those places populated means that no one's going to be packing explosives under a building.

Because the people that are using those spaces, the citizens of the city that are using those spaces, would know that that was happening, and they would stop it. The French, as we’ve seen recently, are defiant to the extreme and will defend their city even if it means putting themselves at risk. We could learn from that.

The fundamental problem in my mind, undergirding all of the issues in cities now, is that there’s a lack of trust. That, as citizens of cities, we’re all treated as suspects. That we’re all guilty until proven innocent and that is the narrative that we, as urban explorers, want to turn around. But, the other problem here is the problem of capital. It's that, everything we do in cities now is supposed to be commodified, you know, everything is about spending money. And where someone is not spending money or making money, people are sort of befuddled. Like, why would you be spending your time if it’s not making anyone any money? And, that is supremely disturbing, that we would find anything that’s not producing capital as threatening. But that’s precisely the reason why the pub is seen as non-threatening whereas urban exploration is, because people have a hard time comprehending that notion, that you would just do something for the love of it.

always fixed it for me was going exploring. And to be honest it doesn't require that much effort to find these places. I mean, if people would just be brazen enough to walk into a hotel and try the rooftop door, very often you’ll find it’s not locked. And you know, if you keep it quiet, that can be your little spot that you escape to.

Cities have a long history of people doing this kind of stuff and it shouldn't be seen as something threatening, this is just a continuation, this is what human beings do, we explore, we’re built to explore.

Yes, I’m always amazed, for example when you look down a high street, that it’s all about spending money. It’s almost impossible to spend time in, or explore, the city if you’re not spending money.

3. Down Street Station, perhaps the most wellpreserved of London’s "ghost stations” © Bradley Garrett 4. The West Park Asylum in Epsom, Surrey, one of the Victorian asylums closed down by the Thatcher government © Bradley Garrett

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Yes, it’s true, and this is not the model in other places.

We need to crack this notion that this is normal.

This is not normal! You go to other cities and there’s a public space where everyone will just be hanging out. Where are we going to do that in London? In Trafalgar Square? These are still spaces that are patrolled and secured and it doesn’t feel like a public space.

In exploring the city we’re creating public space. If we go in to that tunnel system and we explore that tunnel system for 6 hours, we can do what we like in there. It becomes a really interesting public space where we can express ourselves.

I remember during various points in my PhD feeling really overwhelmed and frustrated and the thing that

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It’s also interesting to think about how this might be relevant for practice or for design for intervening in the city. What do you think design and research can learn from urban exploration?

Well, my more recent work is on public and private spaces and I’ve been looking at open air public spaces in London that have been sold off to private companies. Very often what happens is that, when private companies take over a public space they start shutting down particular forms of engagement. There will be no drinking here, there will be no begging, there will be no busking, and there will be groups of no more than three that can congregate, because you know, all these things are non-commercial and therefore threatening. And of course, what happens when they impose those kinds of restrictions is that the space dies. It’s just a space for commercial transactions and it’s not a place where you can stay or a space that you can make a place, in geographic terms.

If you look at other cities, like for example Amsterdam, it’s amazing. You go through Vondelpark at 2 in the morning and there are people playing cards, people riding their bikes through there, and also people drinking and busking and doing whatever else they do. This is all part of what makes it, but the park is safe because everyone’s in it and everyone’s using it. So, I think that we need to get over this notion that building defensive architecture is going to make safer cities. Not only does it not make cities safer, but it also makes us all unhappy. I would hope that some of these explorations would open out design possibilities

in more public ways. A similar example is in New York in the 1950s. When they were building some of the first skyscrapers, they always had open air public viewing galleries on the top. The equivalent now is £27 tickets to get to the top of the Shard where you’re behind glass, and when you get to the top, you don’t actually feel a sense of liberation or civic pride that, ‘we as a people built this fantastic building and let’s all revel in the fantastic views that are now available to

“...we need to get over this notion that building defensive architecture is going to make safer cities...” us’. Instead it’s just turned in to a Disney attraction.

So, in this way I think that design has a lot to learn from urban exploration, absolutely.

And what about in terms of learning from urban exploration as a methodology for research, for how we understand cities?

Yes, that’s interesting. I moved to London in 2008 and I had spent the previous 5 years living in distinctly non-urban areas, almost on the edge of the wilderness.

I got this scholarship to do my PhD in London and I had no desire to live in London whatsoever. I did not want to live in a city. And when I moved there and started meeting up with these urban explorers

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who became the project participants for my PhD, they started taking me in to all of these places, you know these tunnel systems and these abandoned buildings, and the thing that struck me right away was that it felt like I was in the wilderness when I was in these places.

There was this wilderness hidden within the city. And actually it was almost more satisfying to find because no-one else knew about it, or no-one else was trying to get there. So, to answer your question, when we started popping out of different manholes and making all of these connections, I realised that I really fell in love with the city and I think it was because I learnt the city from the inside out. I was given a particular kind of knowledge that most people didn’t have, and that was empowering, but it also made me feel that London was my city, that I had discovered on my own terms.

So, as a methodology for how we understand cities and what our starting point it is for engagement, I think urban exploration has a lot to teach us because usually our starting point for engagement is as this distant commodity. Like, this is where I live and pay rent, this is where I shop, spend money, this is where I work and make money. And, there has to be more to cities.

So, what was one of the most important explorations that you’ve had, that most changed how you see the city or most affected you in some way?

There are about 14 abandoned tube stations in London that still have ticket offices and platforms and we had been systematically exploring all of these and a lot of them were in pretty bad condition.

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5. The strip of land that surrounds City Hall in London should be the most common sense public space. But it is all owned by private company More London. It feels like you can do what you want here.

But More London films your every step with advanced camera systems. They will also stop you from filming, taking photos, congregating in groups of more than three, napping, picnicking, loitering and of course protesting, even though none of these things are illegal. Photo © Bradley Garrett 6. The River Effra, now a sewer, in South London © Bradley Garrett

We snuck in to one of the stations and it required going down multiple levels of security through hatches and climbing down pipes, and we got to the bottom and this place, it was closed down before world war two, but it looked like it had been closed yesterday - other than the decades of layers of dust that had settled over everything. And we walked through there and we actually found one of Churchill's bunkers, apparently this was Churchill's favourite bunker that he had during the war. And we found his urinal and his bath tub inside and, of course I lay down in the bath tub and that moment of feeling that very direct, visceral connection with the history of the city was incredibly enticing, feeling like maybe I was the first person to lay in that bathtub since Churchill. It’s probably not the case, but it is fun to imagine, and you could never imagine that in a museum. •

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Hit the Streets!

Urban Ecological Explorations Through Jane Jacobs Walks

Take a moment to view the world you’re in and your role in it. What does this look like?

You may be a designer or a policy-maker planning the sustainability and livelihood of your city.

Or perhaps you are a teacher investing in the futures of youth or an activist on the front lines of a social justice movement. Through our varying roles, our collective impacts interweave throughout a dynamic urban ecosystem. Journalist and urban critic Jane Jacobs, famed for her book Death and Life of Great American Cities, observed these many relationships within the ecology of cities; the interrelated social, environmental, and economic systems. Jacobs states:

by

Chelsea Gauthier

Associate Director at the Center for the Living City

& Grant Allen

Program Director at Jane Jacobs Walk

A natural ecosystem is defined as ‘composed of physical-chemical-biological processes active within a space-time unit of any magnitude.’ A city ecosystem is composed of physical-economicethical processes active at a given time within a city and its close dependencies. --Jane Jacobs, ‘93 forward in Modern Library Edition of Death and Life of Great American Cities

With the support of Jane Jacobs, the Center for the Living City was founded to enhance the understanding of the complexity of contemporary urban life and through it, promote increased civic engagement among people who care deeply for their communities. Our work focuses on providing portals of community engagement through the lens of urban ecology. For this issue on urban exploration, we will focus on one of the Center’s programs, Jane Jacobs Walk.

Jane Jacobs Walks are self-organizing urban explorations led by locals worldwide throughout the year. In the 1993 edition of Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs urges us to “... become interested in city ecology, respect its marvels, and discover more.” Jane Jacobs Walks provide this framework for anyone to lead and participate in a Walk that means something to the individual and community.

The urgency for an urban ecological lens in our design processes Jane Jacobs observed the city as an organic ecosystem, webbed with dynamic interconnections. Her words represent a larger and more integrated understanding of ecology as an 'alternative model for human development'. Renowned urban author Roberta Brandes Gratz, summarizes the essence of Jacobs’s writing as “...truly about understanding how cities work, the importance of observing the city on the ground, and recognizing how everything is connected, always changing, always organic, and much too fluid to be readily reflected in a Plan” (Gratz, 2013). By engaging in a deeper human understanding of cities, the acknowledgement of intricate interconnections can begin to catalyze comprehensive change.

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This recognition of complexity and connection inherent in an urban ecological approach is vital to the wide-ranging approaches of public design, policy and environment practices, and is pertinent to the way everyone experiences our cities. Center for the Living City’s Director Stephen A. Goldsmith, an expert in the field of urban ecology, practices and teaches extensively on the subject. He, among other emerging leaders in the field, is inspired by and incorporates Jacobs’s observations in new pedagogical explorations. The rise of this urban ecological shift in urban planning, design and social sciences pedagogy is necessary and promising for the future of our communities worldwide.

Fostering a Community of Urban Ecologists Every individual within a community is part of the urban ecosystem. Cultivating opportunities for people to explore their cities through an urban ecological lense will involve us "... in ways that go beyond simply understanding concepts that describe the city as a system" (Berkowitz 2003: 9). This is where Jane Jacobs Walk becomes a great case study illustrating an urban ecological approach through on-the-ground urban 11

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explorations. Jane Jacobs Walk invites us all to become urban ecologists through explorations of our cities and neighborhoods. Each walk is an instance to inspire creative responses to the current challenges, questions, and ideas of our time. Walks are self-organized and focus on many areas within the built and natural environment.

Often led by locals or local organizations, these Walks become walking conversations on an array of topics, inviting local experts, community members, and visitors alike to join the urban exploration. Through this, participants are able to experience cities as ecosystems while learning and gaining knowledge of the way people impact cities through activities and development patterns (Berkowitz 2003: 8). For instance in India, Vidhya Mohankumar with the Urban Design Collective, has hosted series of walks around the history of neighborhoods and their development over time. Many of their walks involved conversations of local histories with long-time residents and businesses (Mohankumar 2013). Their Walk participants were of a wide age-group with varying professional backgrounds, which gave interesting perspectives at the end of their walks, where “participants were asked to trace back the route taken through mental map drawings” (ibid).

Walks often provide explorations into the dynamic social systems within cities. For example, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, visual artist Glenna Lang and some of her community colleagues lead Jane Jacobs Walks annually. In a recent interview, Glenna reminisced that her favorite part of the Walks were the chance encounters (Lang 2015). One of her most memorable walks with Michael Kenney, former Boston Globe reporter and freelance writer, was inspired by Central Square’s sixty places of worship within one square mile. This particular walk brought together one of the largest groups of diverse individuals and highlighted the inclusive philosophy behind Jane Jacobs Walk.

Call to Action 2016 marks Jane Jacobs’s 100 year anniversary.

Consider celebrating your community through the lens of urban ecology by hosting or attending a walk! Your walk can focus around any topic; a place you value, fear, or are inspired by. We then urge you to take it a step further. What can you as a group begin to do to preserve, change, or enhance the particular section of the urban ecosystem? See where the conversations take you as you listen and engage with others on your urban exploration to address the pressing issues, questions, and next steps that need to be taken in your community.

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References Berkowitz, Alan R., Charles Nilon, and Karen Hollweg. (Eds.) 2003.

Understanding Urban Ecosystems- A New Frontier for Science and Education. New York City, New York: Springer-Verlag.

Goldsmith, Stephen A. (2014) “Urban Ecology as a New Planning Paradigm: Another Legacy of Jane Jacobs”, in D. Schubert (Ed.) Contemporary Perspectives on Jane Jacobs: Reassessing the Impacts of an Urban Visionary. (pp. 225-231).

Gratz, Roberta Brandes. 2011. “Planners and the Jane Jacobs Conundrum”. Available at, www.planetien.com/node/49100 (April 2013).

Jacobs, Jane. 1993. Death & Life Of Great American Cities, Modern Library Edition foreward Lang, Glenna (2015) Interviewed by Chelsea Gauthier April 29.

Mohankumar, Vidhya. “Windows of Georgetown”. Urban Design Collective. 2013. Available at, http://issuu.com/ urbandesigncollective/docs/windows_of_georgetown-_jane_ jacobs_/17?e=11543008/7450583.

For more information on walks, visit janejacobswalk.org and Center for the Living City, centerforthelivingcity.org • 12

1. "Donde Esta Jane Jacobs" Buenos Aires, Argentina © Carolina Huffmann 2. In Pondicherry, India.

"Speed dating session for participants to get to know each other before the walk" © Aishwarya Rajagopal, Hareesh Haridasan and Devangi Ramakrishnan 3. “Nichole Mossalam, secretary of the Islamic Society of Boston in Cambridge, speaks with a participant in Cambridge’s annual Jane Jacobs Walk” 2013 © Glenna Lang

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Walking as a place-making art The concept of “non-place”, developed by the French anthropologist Marc Augé, is widely known. According to him, airports, parking lots, shopping malls, logistic commodities, highway interchanges and so on are non-places. In other words, they are all attributes of “supermodernity” we cannot refer to as the very here or the very there mode of spatialization, the reason why we cannot speak in terms of “urbanity” of any of them.

We, “Urbain, trop urbain” [in English “Urban, too urban”], believe that practice in the apparently poorest urban spaces always gives us an occasion of “making place”. In brief, to deliver sense beyond the deficit of fiction, beyond the lack of culture and social appropriation. As artists and profane urban scientists, we give the act of walking the chance to be a “space of enunciation”, a notion we get from the reading of The Practice of Everyday Life, by Michel de Certeau.

“Practice the city”, the baseline of our general editorial project, could be defined as an invitation to think about the urban realm in its multiplicity, as a space wherein to act and desire. It is looking for some thresholds, porosities in this “urban, too urban” space.

It is reclassifying the “zone” or the wasteland as places with value, because everything is not planned, because a social and subjective intensity can find its own way of accomplishment.

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Matthieu Duperrex

Artist and philosopher, Co-founder of Urbain, Trop Urbain

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Let us illustrate this concept with the experimental project we led in Toulouse, France. “Periph’Strip” was a two year consecutive artistic walking tour on a urban highway we call in French “périphérique intérieur”, a 35 kilometres long internal three lane ring road (similar to the A10 in Amsterdam). Since the beginning of our exploration by walking along the highway guardrail, in September 2012, the place became an art studio for us and very relevant creations proceeded from it! Conferences, poetical performances with live painting, video mashups, guitar and harp, a tour operated by city bus, an ephemeral exhibition, a short movie… and a narrative mixing writings and pictures, a book published last year by Wildproject editions, simply titled Périphérique intérieur.

The “Periph’Strip” project engaged six urban dwellers, all members of our collective initiative, and together we developed literature, poetry, urban analysis, drawings, photography, botanics, paintings, graphics, all without an assigned plan. These urban walkers (shall we call them Stalkers?) have naturally decided to welcome the landscape of their journey as it comes, to accept its topology as a gift and to free the imaginary, single and shared. To walk along this highway was for them an another way to inhabit their city as nomads.

As they shared their artistic steps, their practices, as their theoretical or aesthetic enunciations, confronted and spread fragments of language along this apparently poor and uncultivated territory, a poetry of the touring emerged. This poetics filled and covered, little by little, the first deficit of fiction of claimed “non-places” which they crossed.

by the society, and takes place inside the in-between of fiction and reality, in this fading frontier. That’s a landscape where literature is possible as a result of our walks, because we are opening by walking a “space of enunciation”.

There is no literal or documental rendering of this experience. That wouldn’t be sensical to us. There are no educated comments, there is no detachment. Even mapping our chosen place would mean betraying it. The living city, the warm city - as the Italian collective Stalker defines it - does not tolerate any top-down language. So, what is making a sign to us, in these new territories, in these wild and nomadic territories? At the edge of the city, there are ruins to be contemplated, but they are not patrimonial ruins.

They are “inverted ruins”, as Robert Smithson (one of the fathers of the Land Art) calls them, as if the ruin were the starting point of an orchestration without master, which leads towards nothing that can be decided: a whole range of possibilities, which our steps only have to cross and to make meaningful. It is as if a geologic strength raised the clues of a period we have to decipher, in our scale. There, just there, can arise the epic landscape of the urban, the one which in this place, as anywhere else, can embark us on the narrative of an adventure, the one which constitutes itself in the sensitive apparatus of the contemporary walker, who is in touch with our urban condition. Did someone say non-place? •

References www.urbain-trop-urbain.fr www.periphstrip.fr

Our narrative goes ahead, crowded and enriched by our interlaced practices and lifelines, which are the narratives of the constitutive moment when a landscape comes to the surface for a little appreciation

https://twitter.com/urbain_ https://www.facebook.com/Urbain.trop.urbain https://instagram.com/urbain_/ http://www.urbain-trop-urbain.net [Tumblr]

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1-2. picture from the project Périph’Strip in Toulouse 3. picture of the périphérique intérieur; 4. picture from the project Périph’Strip in Toulouse 5. sketch from the project Périph’Strip in Toulouse 6. picture from the project Périph’Strip in Toulouse

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UNDERWORLD LANDSCAPES "When I was a kid, I remember my grandfather always taking me on trips to a train station nearby which happened to neighbor a freight train yard. I immediately got fascinated by the atmosphere of the track landscape, the thunderous sound of trains passing by, followed by a complete calm. I’ve been a track romantic ever since […] I find myself drawn to the timeless beauty of the anatomy of the 'Underground Landscapes'."

Timo Stammberger1

by Iulia Cristina Sirbu EMU, TU Delft

Less constrained by the rules of society, less compliant with the commodity of the rules it imposes; we become opened to a different urban experience. We become more receptive for fairy tales and we start outlining wish images and developing skills for exploring the unknown and the mystery. We start imaginatively turning the urban space upsidedown in an inverted relation between built-unbuilt spaces. Thus the cold and unfriendly place that has the power to captivate and segregate everything that found its place there becomes the perfect place for discovery. Filled with stories to be told, the unseen part of the city longs to be explored. We become curious to find its insights and once we find out how valuable they are we are urged to protect them and enhance their values.

Underground structures are vacant places that open up new possibilities for exploration and innovation.

The underground landscape of Berlin is such a space. A non-place with sober, purely functional architecture - transportation, water-carrying and civil defense in the Second World War - it provides the premises to bring together trained participants from different disciplines. Thus, these swallowed places have been reused for socio-economically relevant innovative projects that have led the renovation and redevelopment of the underground world of Berlin. The responsible association with the similar name “Berliner Unterwelten” (“Berlin Underworlds”) succeeded in becoming an example of a mixture of education, knowledge, innovation and entrepreneurship.

At the end of the 19th century, Berlin is pictured as an opened underground construction site as Alfred Döblin relates in his novel “Berlin Alexanderplatz” (1929): “they tore up the cobblestones at the Rosenthaler Platz. So, between then, he walked on wooden boards. Look, they are building the underground railway.”

Besides the subway system, many other subterranean architectural structures still exist today in the city. The Berlin Underworlds Association decided to preserve some of these places and open them to those longing for alternative urban exploration. It is a project that involved different stakeholders; BVG (Berlin Transit Authority) permitted the rental of the “Bunker B”, a historical listed site in the Gesundbrunnen underground station and the volunteer-based association managed to refurbish and reconstruct it without any public funds. Places such as the subways

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Underground structures are vacant places that open

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and bunkers from the Cold War that were designed as multipurpose, escape tunnels dug under the Berlin wall in order to overcome the heavily guarded border, and the subway and sewer system used by those trying to escape the East, are being turned into preserved historical structures which accommodate interactive guided tours and exhibitions.

“We […] set up our 'Berlin Underworlds Museum'. Under this name we were able to take part in the 'Long Night of the Museums' for the first time in 2005. Our exhibition, which is continuously being added and improved, deals with the development of Berlin from an underground perspective. The main focus, however, is civil defense in the Second World War, the effects of bomb war and modern archaeological finds of the twentieth century. Further rooms deal with the removal of rubble from the street in the post-war period, and another with story of a card catalogue of forced laborers that was discovered by members of the association in a forgotten bunker. […] in an additional section of the museum, we have exhibitions that deal with the subjects: pneumatic postal system, brewery cellars and the underground railway system. Additionally we have a large museum archive and many items in storage that have in the past been lent out to other museums and film productions.

The workgroup 'Building, Technic and Exhibition' supports the association’s efforts by recovering and, when necessary, restoring historical technical equipment.”2

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The world landscape is everything around us. It is what we access daily, experiencing it in different ways.

It is what we are emotionally attached to, and what is perceived through previous events. We get used to it in this vertiginous flow of naturally given facts. However, despite this fact our inner landscape awakens the urge for exploration. We want to investigate; to trace out the footsteps of our contemporary world landscape as we know it. Diving under the surface of what we experience daily while bringing a personal touch, cultivates new perspectives upon shaping the understanding of our surrounding environment.

Thus, the exploration of the underworld landscape is a moment to step back followed by a progress or selfdevelopment from having a glimpse of the past. •

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References 1 Stammberger, T., available at http://www.timostammberger.com/ 2 Available at http://berliner-unterwelten.de/

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1-2. Timo Stammberger, Underground Berlin (http://www.timostammberger.com/) 3. Escape tunnels; 4. Bunker from The World War II. A tour through twisting passages and rooms where artifacts from the war can be found; 5. Bunker constructed for West Berliners in case of a nuclear attack. Designed as multi-purpose space, it has connections with sewerage and subway system about which visitors can have a glimpse of; 6. The gasometer bunker in the Fichstrasse.

Photo credits 3-6: Berlinerunterwelten.de

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Naked Urban Explorer

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A modern day “Wanderer” does not need to travel far to learn the world. One can pursue voyages in the City and its Cyber counterpart. An urban-space journey the traveler embarks on, in a two-way interaction through the process of exploring. The combinations of that system are numerous. Mine was through an undressed embodiment.

First came the naked walk in empty late night city streets. The experience is defined by the relation between the state of being totally alone in the street and the inevitable chance encounter with another person on the street or a balcony or a window. A pleasure or a terror, or maybe both.

The continuous tension makes you acute in your observations of people and the morphology of the urban space.

References http://johnmask.tumblr.com/post/118765068443/kanetonponosouarpa%CE%B9-%CE%BA-%CE%B1-r-o-%CF%83-1-concept http://johnmask.tumblr.com/post/118124136293/urbannudism-fragments-of-photos-reflections

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John Mask

Architect, Artist, Urban Nudist

1. (14.3.2015) "Discobolus and graffiti" 2. "Filopappou _ Athens _ Greece" 3. "Naked in the center of Thessaloniki" All photography © John Mask

Then came the social experiment. What would happen if I were to walk naked with a friend on a busy street? Which factors determine the sartorial appearance of one subject in an urban space?

A crash test on a bewildered society. Different identities, explored inside the urban space. Multiple interactions and translations depending on the exponents and the space. Whether that is the physical space or the cyberspace; with the latter one commencing once our walks became online videos.

A different point of view is when nudism is used as a structural element of the art process in the urban space. That is where I examine the history, the content, the special character of each space.

The naked body is a tool to explore. How is a nude statue different from a naked body? All the above indicate the pleasure of being naked in a public place.•

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THE SEARCH FOR BETTER UNDERSTANDING by using different kinds of media we try to dissect the living environment and use the knowledge in our work as architects and urbanists

#donotsettle is Wahyu and Kris: two architects. We are attempting to change the way we see the city. Both originating from a totally different background (Indonesian and Belgian), having grown up on opposite sides of the globe, and practising in an even more distant culture than their own. This unique, and previously unseen, multicultural ensemble results in an original fresh set of eyes in which the city, its architecture and urbanism, is seen. This created an opportunity to learn from each other and start to think more different and global. We would like to share with you here some of our adventures.

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Wahyu Pratomo & Kris Provoost

founders of #donotsettle

"Some just feel the movement, we feel the journey. We always keep moving"

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It started as an escape plan from our architectural design work that grew into a chance to envision a new way of perceiving the city. We went out exploring because we felt eager to witness the constant transformation of the city.

Neither of us have a background in photography. We are designers. With this limited background we went out and brought along simple tools. No expensive set-ups or professional cameras are needed to capture what is right in front of you. All of the following photos were taken with smartphones and pocket cameras. For us it is not about how you take the photo, it is about why you take this particular photo.

To create an extra layer of understanding, we always brought pen, paper, small tripod/monopod and sunglasses.

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Cities are changing, growing larger than they were ever before. This requires a new ambition to redefine urbanism, as we know it. Cities which were developed for this generation need a new meaning and collective ideas.

Our first battlefield was Shanghai. As the largest city and financial heart of China, there is plenty to observe. With nearly 25 million people living in the city, there is no slowing down in sight yet. A huge crowd of individuals and a huge surface of high-rise buildings, this is the perfect context. With a vibrant fusion of old and new, the city is a welcome backdrop in every photo. We learn about city restoration and foresight development at the same time.

A combination of individual interests and common objectives about the city, our explorations were an initiation in understanding the urban fabric populated by millions. We learned about urbanism by discovering and growing knowledge about the environment, informality, infrastructure, alienation, demolition, wilderness, architectural form, (rest)-density, and familiarity in a metropolis.

Cities don’t stand still, they change overnight at high speed. Our explorations form a visual archive of how the city was at the moment. These photographs are our best attempt at holding the current state. It allows us to compare, observe the future evolutions that are bound to happen. We embrace the change and try to understand the facts.

A closer look at our surrounding through moving image Rawness and honesty to tell a story.

The medium of film has long been employed to visualise, document and narrate architectural and urban space. Since the advent of more accessible devices to capture and record these journeys and explorations it has been used more frequently in an

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attempt to develop new ways of experiencing built designs. Consequently we adopted this medium and use YouTube as our platform to share our findings.

We seek to reconcile the disparity between film as architectural representation and as an experiential medium. As with our photographs we care less about the image quality, instead we try to film exciting examples of how user-oriented architectural ‘blogging’ can uncover an entirely new way of understanding the world around us, imbued with a refreshing level of enthusiasm and authenticity.

Why video? We believe this is the most honest tool and kind of media, you cannot lie with any shape, colour, emotion, ambiance or scale. With each exploration only lasting a few minutes, we capture what is perceived and understood easily. We also go for rawness, as that’s the best way to get the viewer to respond. Sketch, paper, sticky notes and handwriting enhance spontaneous understanding of storytelling, which is later translated into truth from across the globe, captured in video. A style that is called Citizen Cinematography. We’ve outlined 6 of our videos to get your started on your own journey.

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1. User Oriented Architecture Vlogging

3. Is Your City A She or A He?

#donotsettle is trying to change the concept of architecture beautification films into a more natural, banal and honest perception, by putting the perspective on the user of the building. Architecture should be about honesty, a thought that is a guiding line through all of our work. How can a short film translate this rational and practical architectural creation into a package that bridges spontaneity with architectural knowledge? “First Time Comes Only Once” becomes a very important meaning as our reaction to the sense of seeing, touching and smelling are all-saying. With this method we are also capable of reconnecting user perception to what architects are trying to achieve in their designs.

Has this question ever come across your mind?

Once, at New York JFK airport there was banner saying: “New York welcomes HER sister cities…”. Is New York a SHE? And how was this decided?

Cities are personified. It has perceptual personality and meaning. With our short compilation, we wanted to expose the gender that people assign to certain cities. We held a little and fun interview of 18 people with 12 different nationalities regarding city’s perceptual gender. Some cities had a certain masculine nature (Dubai, Hong Kong,…) and others were leaning to the more feminine side (Barcelona, Paris,…).

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2. City and Happiness "Bandung was born when God was smiling" - M.A.W.Brouwer Every city has its own representation of a platform to be explored. Rooftops of Hong Kong, Canals of Amsterdam, or the signages in Vienna. Sometimes, however, this platform is also intangible. Bandung (Indonesia) has that certain undefinable feeling. Our video about this city is not necessarily exploring its physical existence. Instead, we were struck by how the redesign of a city hall, so called Alun-alun, turns into a very successful and happy public space.

"And Bandung for me, is not only spatial matters, it involves feeling" -Pidi Baiq

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4. Instagrammable Urbanism Because “Things To Do in Rotterdam”, “Rotterdam Tourist Attractions”, or “Rotterdam Biking Routes” are too mainstream, we created an “Instagrammable Track!”

This is a completely new way to explore any city.

With Instagram’s rising popularity we set out to create a route through the city of Rotterdam outlining interesting photo-ops. We walk, talk, discuss, enjoy the urban environment and have some fun along the way. There certainly is some subjectivity regarding the selected objects, but we were out to find a new perception in exploring the city. Rotterdam was the perfect place to start this, as it is a battlefield of unique architectural shapes fighting for some attention.

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5. City Within The City

As classic as a #donotsettle mini-documentary can get. Within a few minutes we explore the city and overwhelm, inspire, motivate every architectureloving viewer. Covering every corner of the city, we encounter world famous architecture next to perhaps more unknown constructions. If this doesn’t tickle you, we wouldn’t know what does! In Chicago, the city of modernism, we criss-cross the entire surroundings to make sure we saw what we wanted to see: from the legendary Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House to SOM’s Trump Tower. We could basically understand the change of Architecture style through Chicago’s built examples. Enjoy!

Yes, you can even explore an airport! Because city is not only the usual look of a ‘city’ Over the years we became highly interested in airports and airplanes. Better yet, our architecture and urbanism background gave us more value to this perspective. We always carefully research which window side on the plane has the best city views. We also never mind staying for long transit to explore the airport. Even more so, we would go out of our direct route to explore a new airport and try to understand its functioning.

DXB (Dubai) receives more international passengers than any other airport in the world. This turns it into the largest and busiest place on earth at times. This world hub of airplanes has been transformed from solely aviation activity into what is maybe better called ‘City within The City’. Here, everything you would see in the city is housed under a single roof.

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Find us: www.youtube.com/donotsettle instagram.com/donotsettle info@donotsettle.com •

1. #donotsettle covers 2-3. Rawness in storytelling 4. "User oriented architecture vlogging" 5. "City and happiness" 6. "Is your city a She or a He" - student interviews 7. "Is your city a She or a He" - interviews' results 8. "Instagrammable Urbanism" 9. "City within the city" 10. "Architectour"

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Tehran through the Lens:

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the Rise and Wane of the Iranian Modernist School of Architecture in Tehran For this issue of the magazine, we asked Alireza to share his experience about the city of Tehran and his new project. "Under the City’s Skin" is an ongoing project that is aimed at finding parts of the city and its story that is less under consideration.

Alireza Behpour, born in March 1984, has reinvestigated the city of Tehran through his camera.

This young photographer redefines the city, its written history and tries to help revive a part of the history that is partly forgotten by citizens. Here, he discusses the rise and wane of the city in three different eras.

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by

Maryam Behpour MSc3 Urbanism

photography by Alireza Behpour

photographer, Tehran

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The first era: To explore the city, first we need to redefine our understanding of Tehran as the capital city of Iran and a major metropolitan city in the Middle East.

Tehran experienced an intense period of modernist architecture, which was unique in many ways, and contained unique examples of modernist buildings that not too many people outside of Iran are aware of. In fact not many people know that Tehran over the years had accepted so many modernist buildings in itself.

Tehran is a relatively young city with a history of less than 200 years. The modernist buildings of Tehran, which have been subject to mistreatment and systematic demolition for some time, can be considered to have been part of the most significant development in the interpretation of Modernism at the scale of a major city. Tehran, certainly, sources its modernism from the west but due to the very rich & ancient Iranian culture, the school of Modernism found a native meaning in Tehran in the face of two following phenomena:

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• Richness of Iranians in handicrafts, that is artworks with fine details which resulted in some fine-tunings of the western modernism. The fences designed and erected in the modern buildings of 60s & 70s demonstrate this native touch to the modernism. • A pleasant marriage with Eastern Architecture.

And what is so unique about it?

The growth of Tehran from a very small township started with a traditional structure until the 1920s when the Pahlavi dynasty started to re-shape Tehran into a modern capital city. This coincided with the beginning of the modernism era of 1920s.

Therefore the traditional buildings of 1820-1920 soon became a very small part of the capital city which was then grew until 1970s into a major city with modernist buildings of different designs & sizes. This made Tehran a very unique phenomenon in the world as a major city, with a very small downtown of traditional buildings surrounded by an art gallery of modernist architecture.

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"... Tehran became a very unique phenomenon in the world as a major city, with a very small downtown of traditional buildings surrounded by an art gallery of modernist architecture..."

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2nd, The rise: The period of 1960s-1970s is to be considered the climax of the modernist buildings in Tehran. Tehran became the source of inspiration as during this period some famous architects such as Andre Godard, Louis Cahn and Frank Lloyd Wright started to design buildings. Frank Lloyd Wright designed a building for the Royal Family and a Foundation belonging to him trained students who then designed unique buildings in Tehran. During this period one could visit the buildings with designs hand-selected from around western world and customized to better meet the Iranian culture, life style and climate.

3rd, The wane: The post modernism era of 1980s onward never appreciated the wonderful collection of Modernist buildings and architecture. The new architects soon forgot the glory of the 60s & 70s, the buildings were not preserved properly and the value of land in the city boundary soon defeated the artistic value of the Modernist buildings. The buildings of the 1960s-1970s still prevail but an independent expert observer can easily say that the future in Tehran belongs to buildings with no roots either in the West nor the East. It does not even have any roots in the Iranian rich culture which one day forced modernist architectures to bow to the local culture and its fine artifact inspired details. Under such circumstances, we have no choice but to try to salvage surviving structures through recording their existence and showing their splendid beauties. The only way to achieve that is through recording the history in pictures; as words would not be a sufficient tool to convey such an important message.

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Alireza, by taking & collecting pictures of valuable building of 60’s & 70’s and dissemination of related information is trying to encourage the Iranian government and related organizations for a better maintenance of these buildings. He is trying to redefine this part of the urban history and bring that to the attention of citizens; He believes that “people will arise to value it and protect only if they know more about it.” Let us support Alireza for his good intention and wish him success. •

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1,2. A sample of western modern architecture in the west of Tehran; photograph

by Alireza Behpour 3. The money museum; designed by Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation 4. A combination of traditional Iranian art with Metal.

5. The combination of Western modern architecture with details of Iranian architecture 6. Stonewalls looking like a piece of modern art; fences are added recently for better safety 7-9. Examples of modern architecture in different districts; every year many of these buildings are diminished and replaced by new meaningless structures 10. Note the suspended stairs!

11. Solo Modular elevation (C-shaped module)

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Exploring Through Films Top five Movies by

Kritika Sha

MSc1 Urbanism &

IJsbrand Heeringa MSc1 Urbanism

Since the advent of cinema, the ‘city’ has been a focus of silver screen fascination. From the fantastical vision of ‘Metropolis’ and the frantic spectacle of ‘Berlin, Symphony of a Great City’ to exploratory documentaries such as ‘Detropia’, the urban setting has long been a powerful filmic force in its own right.

However even some of the more ‘mainstream’ movies also shine a light and explore the city through their story. The mood and storyline of the plot also greatly influences the way a city is portrayed. Whether it is a dark and gritty drama highlighting the underbelly of cities (‘City of God’, ‘Salaam Bombay’) or a showcase of the best a city has to offer (‘Midnight in Paris’), movies have always had the power to transport the audience into the director’s vision of the city. The selected movies described below capture and express the complexity, diversity and the dynamism of the city, along with making it one of the elements of the entire cinematic experience.

La Grande Bellazza (2013) City: Rome, Italy Lost In Translation (2003) City: Tokyo, Japan Sofia Coppola’s movie, Lost In Translation, presents a love story between two Americans staying in Tokyo played by Bill Murray (Bob) and Scarlett Johansson (Charlotte). Their relationship is fuelled by their feelings of displacement and alienation during their stay in Japan, providing an exploration of complex human emotions, such as boredom and loneliness.

As audience, we followed both characters as they together attempt to discover the city and their own desires. The parallels are clearly reflected in the portrayal of Tokyo from both perspectives. Charlotte’s curiosity fuels the meandering scenes in which she wanders the crowded neon-lit streets and malls and her occasional departures into the peacefulness of gardens and temples in Tokyo. Bob’s endorsement commitments keep him indoors in his hotel, providing him only a view from a window into Tokyo.

It is as much a love story as it is an exploration of tourism and our relationship to the post-modern cityscape.

Directed by Paolo Sorrentino, the movie tells the story of Jep Gambardella (interpreted by Toni Servillo) a one-time bestselling novelist who, being sucked up by the extravagant nightlife of Rome, never seemed to have been bothered to follow up his bestseller. After years of living in abundance, pursuing the loveliest of ladies and drinking the finest of wines, we find Jep celebrating his 65th birthday on a rooftop adjacent to the Roman Coliseum. In the midst of all the fakes and frauds of the Roman elite, Gambardella starts to question his existence; ‘What happened to his life, once so filled with beautiful purpose?’

Gambardella’s search for the beauty of his younger years is exquisitely accentuated by the immortal grandeur of Rome. In fact this picture is not just about a once great writer. Jep embodies the soul of his country. Through some stunning scenery, from the stranded Costa Concordia to the Scala Santa, the onlooker is reminded of the infinite beauty of a country that was once the center of the world. The presentday Italy, so cruelly typified by their former prime minister, is painfully confronted with its past.

La Grande Bellazza not only takes you into a breath taking stroll through one of the world’s most splendid cities, it also paints a wonderfully accurate picture of the modern Italy, and, not entirely unimportant, leaves us with hope for the rebirth of ‘La Grande Bellazza’.

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1. Lost in Translation, Focus Features 2. City of God, Q2 Films and Video Films 3. Salaam Bombay, Channel Four Films 4. Midnight in Paris, Gravier Productions 5. Breakfast at Tiffanys, Jurrow-Shepherd

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Midnight in Paris (2011) City: Paris, France City Of God (2002) City: Cidade de Deus, Rio de Janerio, Brazil Directed by Fernando Meirelles, the film portrays life in the City of God, a favela.

Starting in the 1960s, it begins as a new housing project and its main characters are children and petty thieves; by the end it is the early 1980s, and the slum is a war zone over drugs turf. The story, narrated by Rocket (a boy who dreams of becoming a photographer), focuses on the escalating battle between rival gangs led by the murderous Lil Zé and Carrot.

The favela itself is a central character in the film, which traces its deterioration into anarchic bloodbath: for the 1960s segment, the slum is bathed in a golden light and laughing children kick around a football in open spaces. As Rocket and Lil Zé become teenagers in the 1970s, the streets take on a grey/brown hue. Leaving the favela is shown as going from darkness into light.

By the time the community has sunk into all-out war, the favela is portrayed with the detachment of a documentary as Rocket, beginning to distance himself, shoots the killers with his camera.

Woody Allen’s movie Midnight in Paris begins with the same idea of a man, in this case a screenwriter named Gil played by Owen Wilson, searching for connections with the real world. Bored with his fiancée’s friends and spiteful parents, he seeks inspiration in his own time by drunkenly wandering the streets of Paris.

One night, he is invited into a car that takes him back to the 1920s where he meets his favourite writers and artists, something that eventually leads to a breakthrough in his work.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

The film is set in several time periods, and Paris glows intensely and seductively in every one of them. From its overcast skies and reflective streets which show lovely architectural details and its magnificent landmarks, to the outstanding and beautiful recreations of older time periods, one can't help being seduced, charmed, and inspired to find a way to show what a special place, and consequently what a truly magical film this might be. From the opening montage of lush, picturesque Parisian scenes, the film is a love letter to the city of lights.

The Blake Edwards-directed film Breakfast at Tiffany's, stands the test of time in anyone’s list of classic movies, immortalizing New York. The romantic comedy star Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly, clad in the now-iconic little black dress and pearls, as an aspiring lady who lunches and lives in a subdivided townhouse on the Upper East Side.

Opposite her, George Peppard plays Paul Varjak, a struggling writer who moves into an upstairs apartment due to his relationship with an older woman. Holly, of course, immediately proves alluring, and their romance unfolds over New York City's streets. Based on the Truman Capote novella and featuring iconic music, the movie manages to be zany, sweet, funny, romantic, and poignant - all at the same time. •

(1961) City: New York, USA

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Window intelligible Daily routine in the spotlight

I became a guest of the Dutch society a few months ago. Since then, I have received countless numbers of straight-forward invitations to look inside.

As a stranger, I felt the drive to get acquainted with my new hosts and their environment; to learn their habits in order to become less alienated; to embrace their values in order to join the rhythm; to understand their objectives in order to grasp the dynamics of their society; to wire myself to their network in order to experience the complexity of their system; to know their resources in order to mingle with the spirit that induces their daily motion.

I accepted the invitation.

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Iulia Cristina Sirbu EMU, TU Delft

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Shy, in the beginning, I could not look directly in my hosts’ eyes. Even though the interaction was short or superficial, grasping casual bits of information was effortless when facing a ‘nothing-to-hide’ type of behavioral response. Their attitude encouraged me to become more persuasive in my quest. I came closer and I took my time watching the details. I thus became vulnerable due to my status: an intruder. Step by step, I began questioning this relationship; they were curious about me as much as I was curious about them.

Who was watching who?

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Behind the glazed walls, the spatial configuration of their1 habitats depicts hidden kitchens and large dining places imposingly placed in front of large windows that let in the silence of the green backyards.

Living rooms having a central attraction element - the television. The latter, located in a strong connection to the street, sets out the boundaries between private and public space, the couch being hilariously positioned like a surveillance spot. Through the big windows that facilitate the permeation of the unimpeded coveted daylight, I grasped their sense of style, habits, cultural background, interests and social choice. Undoubtedly, they make their shelters their own by bringing a personal touch but in fact, people are enclosed in the same rough patterns. I continue my journey along the facades trying to pick up the elements that can support or shatter my assumptions.

Big windows and small entrances create the street rhythm; life behind the walls enlivens the street, becoming thus the urban landscape. When biking, the perception of this lively scenery becomes even more dynamic, just like movie frames. The speed of movement unravels them into a sequence. A daily and trivial experience within the public space becomes the element that turns the banal of the city into something exciting and distinctive. Walking at night changes the perception of the urban experience, increasing the awareness of this unexplored part of life in public space. Unedited scenes of everyday life turn into a cinematic experience where the actors are all part of a collaborative show, drumming the urban performance due to their way of living in the limelight.

Suddenly, the walls seem to melt down, blending private lives into public spaces. A new layer of the urban area pops up - the public-private buffer zone which allows you to be both inside and outside, breaking the monotonous street rhythm.

Through my walks, I found myself in the situation to consider the bidirectional entertaining character of this cinematic experience. I started questioning myself - how can this permeability of the street turn into a strategic tool, capable of changing, influencing and improving the individual’s experience on both sides?

What if the buffer space could involve further

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experimentation and interaction regardless of the actor’s position, nevertheless limited by the very transparent nature of the window, which prevents any direct contact between the two types of participants?

Could the new permeable space turn into showcases for live advertisements? How would the ‘living mannequins’ embrace the new transparency and interaction with the deliberate and playful public?

Would such an idea be only a utopian attempt in raising the attention to an alternative experience of the street? Could it change the single functionintended public space?

Or, on the contrary, does it risk being perceived as a method for social control which restricts privacy and ostentatiously steps into private space? And what if such a practice leads to undesirable living spaces, becoming just another dystopian concept? • 30

1. Dutch windows - author 2. Who is watching who? author 3. Permeable space - author Notes 1 general name attributed to the Dutch "hosts"

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SWARM TERRITORIES Decoding the urban fabric through computational strategies

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"The network attack appears as something like a swarm of birds or insects in a horror film, a multitude of mindless assailants, unknown, uncertain, unseen, and unexpected. If one looks inside a network, however, one can see that it is indeed organized. rational and creative. It has swarm intelligence" 1

Swarm intelligence is primarily a term that describes events of interaction between agents. The identity of these agents is fluid, not yet to be defined; any population that expresses qualities of collective dynamics has been used as a case study. What will be discussed here is how the studies of humble organisms, such as ant colonies or bird flocks, can decode and reshape the way that humans behave and form highly complex urban structures. This hybrid field, where technological advances converge with biological concepts, will be approached in two different levels: one that focuses on computational tools and aspects, and one that draws conceptual links between the city and the swarm system, attempting to influence the way that we understand and analyze it as a superorganism.

The concept of swarm intelligence is based on the effectiveness of multiple simultaneous interactions that follow three simple rules: avoidance, alignment and cohesion2. "Look at your neighbor's state, and change your state accordingly", as Steven Johnson describes 3. In a computational environment, these rules are transformed to vectorial relationships that enable a dynamic simulation of the flows. The simplicity of the behavioural rules and the absence of a centralized system of control are key concepts in swarm intelligence: every action emerges from a local level, but these local acts form a global behaviour4.

This logic shatters the concept that a perceptual knowledge of the global, a sense of "seeing the whole" is a necessity for intelligence to emerge.

Through the intrusion of such biological concepts in the realm of architectural and urban design, the urban web can be viewed as an aggregate of highly complex relationscapes, open to dynamic processes of differentiation. As changes in global economy, climate and ecology are reflected in technological advances, there is a necessity for the architect to acknowledge these unforeseeable trajectories of forces and 31

by

Dimitra Dritsa

MSc3 Architecture

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intensities, as well as the potential of the synergetic properties that happen in low-level interactions. The realization that the city cannot be viewed as a stable environment, as a static array of buildings, can be seen as an echo of the poststructuralist thought, and namely of the works of Deleuze and Guattari. This concept attacks the tendency to favour stability over fluidity, a tendency which is so strongly entwined in the Western thought that it is almost not realistic to believe that it can be shifted. In this context, the superorganism of the city is the composition of the fluid relations between its different autonomous networks5.

A computer-based simulation of the urban web using swarm logic could demystify these complex processes.

There has been a strong interest, especially in the study of big infrastructure networks and how these could contribute in the concept of the adaptive city.

All organic or non-organic bodies that shape the daily routine of the urban life have the potential to participate in simulating it: From cars and boats, to pedestrians or bike riders, groups with very different attributes are regularly used as particles with individual movement, that are attracted to certain destinations and programmed to avoid other points of the urbanscape, while retaining the behavioural rules of the swarm. Additional behavioural parameters can be added in the performance of these particles, allowing multiple divisions into subgroups according to commonalities in the quality of their movement.

A network of traffic flows could be simulated as a juxtaposition of subnetworks, allowing each group to keep its characteristics, such as the different times that the group is active. Still, the majority of the studies of urban morphologies, as Michael Weinstock points out6, considers each network as a singular phenomenon, not taking into account possibilities of mutations that rise from interactions. When harvesting data flow, it is crucial to evaluate how the increase or decrease of data in one system will affect the performance of the others, causing them to reorganisze, merge with other systems or even collapse. Sebastian Vehlken explains this process as a sort of "fast forwarding" the process of evolution, in an attempt to grasp the possible futures of the city7.

Apart from analyzing the dynamics of existing urban spatial configurations, the attempt to approach urban systems computationally, through the logic of swarm intelligence, also involves potentialities for geometry generation; a discussion in which simulation itself as a tool has a crucial role. The team of Hyperbody has been involved in the exploration of such computational applications in the past decade: an example is the development of a Distributed Networkcity along the A2 highway, in the Netherlands, that focused on experimentation on urban generative morphologies, using functional units as agents and examining how their interactions could form selforganizing clusters.8 What is particularly intriguing

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in this case is the nature of the agent: while it makes perfect sense to consider humans or cars as the agents of the swarm, the designer might feel an uneasiness when it comes to including in the swarm something abstract, that is not necessarily connected with the conceptual notion of physical movement. In the case of the Distributed Network-city, we speak of functional units, of entities which might be abstract, but have certain attributes and behavioural rules that can lead to study models of urban clusters based on their interactions. The rules are familiar to any scholar in the field of urban studies: functions have a tendency to attract similar functions, and keep a certain distance from other functions. The model of the modern city, so well analyzed by Paul Krugman in his book "The Self-Organizing Economy" can be described by mathematical, location-based rules. As he explains, regarding his study on a simplified modelcity composed only of businesses, "a speciality store likes it when other stores move into its shopping mall; because they pull in more potential customers; it does not like it when stores move into a rival mall ten miles 32

1. Images from the book “Towards A New Kind of Building� by Kas Oosterhuis [NAi Publishers 2011] 2. Swarm Urbanism by Kokkugia @ http://www.kokkugia. com/swarm-urbanism 3. Swarm Urbanism by Kokkugia @ http://www.kokkugia. com/swarm-urbanism

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away"9. In the aforementioned Distributed Networkcity, this spirit is clearly evident; local micromotives are the element that is fuelling the self-organization of the city, letting the global behaviour emerge.

In this case, space can be described as "an environment created by the vector which draws one being towards another, whether it be a living, an organic or an inorganic being."10. Data flows are turned into point clouds, which describe semiformalized domains, not permanent but open to alliances or cohesions. As we move towards a more synthetical rather than analytical approach of using swarm logic, the potential that unfolds as these cohesions are shaped and dissolved is close to the theorization of simulation that Manuel De Landa has attempted: the simulation is the tool to retain an openness towards the realm of possibilities that exists in parallel to the versions of the self that are actualized. There is a "pool of pure potentiality", as Bernd Herzogenrath puts it11, an "infinity of actualizations possible at every instant"; numerous scenarios as well as their iterated runs can be compared, giving an advanced sense of exploring the implications of each possible form in a long-term performance. In the end, the generative urban form emerges from the rules that govern the micro-relations between the agents. Multi-agent design methodologies, thus, revolutionize the notion of the master-plan, proposing the concept of a flexible urbanism and bringing forth the master-algorithm as an alternative12, as Kokkugia propose. The advantage of the masteralgorithm, as it is evident in their speculative redevelopment project for the Melbourne Docklands, is that it does not produce a singular solution, as usually happens in the traditional sequential design processes; instead it remains in a near-equilibrium state, always able to adapt and dynamically reconfigure itself13.

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Beyond the applications of swarm intelligence in computer-based simulations, an intriguing approach

by Steven Johnson shows how we could study the actual interactions that happen between the residents of the city, focusing on how and where do these interactions take place. The street and its elements are at the core of these discussions on social swarming: the sidewalks are the vessel where the choreography of the city inhabitants takes place, where information flows as strangers walk by and learn from each other14.

These local, low-level interactions that happen on the sidewalks enable the emergence of a selforganized order in the city. These remarks should not lead however to a mistaken interpretation of the sidewalkas a physical form that should be favoured; the city benefits from any sort of space that enables local interactions. In this context, swarm intelligence can serve more as a conceptual tool, a socio-cultural analogy that helps us to shed new light on how we understand and intervene in the urban network.

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In the end, there is no concrete answer to the question if a complex system such as a city can be studied through applying the logics of swarm intelligence, without simplifying its processes at a certain degree.

Certainly, when we make the transition from ants to humans, there are differences between the subjects of these systems which cannot be ignored; there is a certain level of consciousness involved in the decisionmaking, that increases the complexity of the social patterns. The top-down mechanisms that are involved in city planning are also affecting these social patterns; though, by observing the humble ant colonies and drawing conclusions from their behavioural patterns, we form an awareness that any top-down decisions from central planning commissions could never substitute the ability of an emergent system to dynamically reconfigure itself. Zoning laws can shape cities, but unplanned demographic clusters will still emerge and reshape the urban network.

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Even by taking into consideration the non-linear agent systems and allow a bottom-up organization to emerge, the evaluation of the different solutions involves a more classical approach of decisionmaking15. One way to involve the city inhabitants more actively in the design of the urban fabric is to integrate interfaces that allow direct participation of the public16. In any case, we have to embrace the realization that the notion of complete control over the behaviour of such complex superorganisms as the city, never belonged to the city planners in the first place; the real choreography of the city will always emerge from below. •

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References 1 Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2004). Multitude: War and democracy in the age of Empire. New York: The Penguin Press.91 2 Vehlken, S. (2014). Computational Swarming: A Cultural Technique for Generative Architecture. In Footprint: Delft Architecture Theory Journal : Dynamics of Data-Driven Design. 10

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3 Johnson, S. (2001). Emergence: The connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software. New York: Scribner.88-89 4 ibid, 74 5 West, R. (2009). Space in theory: Kristeva, Foucault, Deleuze. Amsterdam

Mass., USA: Blackwell Publishers

[etc.: Rodopi. 177

10 West, R. (2009). Space in theory: Kristeva, Foucault, Deleuze.

6 Weinstock, M. (2011). The Architecture of Flows. Integrated infrastructures

Amsterdam [etc.: Rodopi. 180

and the ‘metasystem’of urban metabolism. In ACADIA 2011: Integration

11 Herzogenrath, Bernd. (2010).An American Body-politic a Deleuzian

through computation : Proceedingsof the 31st annual conference of the

Approach. Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press. 48

Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA). United

12 See the site of Kokkugia, http://www.kokkugia.com/swarm-urbanism ,

States: Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture. 51

accessed on10 October 2015

7 Vehlken, S. (2014). Computational Swarming: A Cultural Technique for

13 Leach, N. (2009), Swarm Urbanism. In Architectural Design, 79: 56–63

Generative Architecture. In Footprint: Delft Architecture Theory Journal :

14 Johnson, S. (2001). Emergence: The connected lives of ants, brains,

Dynamics of Data-Driven Design. 43

cities, and software. New York: Scribner.94

8 Biloria, Nimish. (2008) Morphogenomic Urban and Architectural

15 Vehlken, S. (2014). Computational Swarming: A Cultural Technique

Systems. In ACADIA 08: Silicon Skin : Biological Processes and

for Generative Architecture. In Footprint: Delft Architecture Theory Journal :

Computation : Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference of the Association

Dynamics of Data-Driven Design. 62

for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) .United States:

16 Oosterhuis, K. (2006). Swarm Architecture II.In Game, Set and Match

Association for Computer-Aided Design in Architecture. 154

II. Netherlands: Episode Publisher. 62

9 Krugman, Paul R. (1996). The Self-organizing Economy. Cambridge,

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4. Photo by Lucas Felzmann @http://www.wired. com/2013/03/powers-ofswarms/# 5. Population growth studies.

Agile fab workshop 2015, Hyperbody TU Delft 6. Screenshot from the video "Swarm urbanism" by Kenichi Kabeya @ https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=z79S63ZYva4 7. Stigmergic Landscape

by Kokkugia @http://www. kokkugia.com/stigmergiclandscape 8. Swarm Matter by Kokkugia @http://www.kokkugia.com/ swarm-matter

Revealing Bucharest BAST (Sebastian Luca) is a Bucharest based artist, educated in architecture. He explores the city of Bucharest through visual means.

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City of Joy, Dominique

Urban Exploration through Literature Urban exploration. When one talks of exploring a city, one imagines oneself strolling through city streets and alleys, taking in the surrounding landscape like a sponge. Of course when one is an urbanism student, one would also be sketching furiously, not to mention be taking pictures of the pavement.

This is an excellent method for getting first acquaintance with a city, and no professional would argue that it was not absolutely essential for the exploration of a city. But if the object of the exploration is to truly know the city, this will not be adequate. It is inevitable that the explorer will miss crucial aspects to the cities identity, and to truly know a city one has to be more accurate and more thorough in the process of exploration.

For a start, there is a necessity of seeing the city in its totality, which is almost impossible to do from a street level. To do so, maps are necessary. Maps that indicate locations of physical entities, but also less visible aspects such as immigration, car ownership and unemployment. With the use of modern techniques we are able to map almost anything, from economic fluctuations to the most frequented jogging tracks. With all the mapping techniques in the world at our disposal we are able to form a very complete picture of the city as a whole.

Lapierre (1985) Kolkata / Calcutta "When I arrived in Calcutta in 1981, I had no intention of writing anything... The people lived there on less than 10 cents a day. And yet I saw more joy, more compassion, more God-loving than anywhere in my 30 years as a writer. It was an inspiration. So one day I went to a bookshop and bought 10 notebooks and 12 ball point pens and stayed in Calcutta for two years. I knew I had to tell this epic of hope and love and joy."

(Lapierre, 1985)

by

Kritika Sha

MSc1 Urbanism

IJsbrand Heeringa MSc1 Urbanism &

Laura Garcia

MSc3 Urbanism

their perception it would be nothing. We therefore wish to make the case, for an additional method in the urban exploration arena. Literature. The lives and losses of a cities people, immortalized in literary masterpieces, should be an essential aspect in the urban explorers repertoire. No other art form is capable in showing the human relations and emotions, as accurately as literature. Literature enables us to look through the eyes of the individual, follow a tight description and see their city in all its dreadful misery and bewitching glory. So we can truly come to know what a city is and was, to its people.

We have therefore made a shortlist of literary masterpieces, which portray the individual’s relation to the city with stunning accuracy. The featured books consider various cities and place scattered across the globe.

References Calvino, I., (1972). Invisible Cities. US: Harcourt Brace & Company.

But we would argue that this is still insufficient to truly know a city. You see, the most important thing in a city, are its people. The greatness of a city could not be measured by the sum of its parts, but by what it means to its population. Their perception of it, is what defines it. And these people do not perceive the city as a whole, such as urbanists do. They perceive it through the narrow perspective of their day to day life. For them the level of car ownership in a neighboring district, is completely irrelevant. They define their own city. Their views might be narrow and inconclusive, but it is absolutely fundamental to a cities being, without 1. (City of joy, n.d), 2. (Silver Threads, n.d.)

3. (Manhattan Transfer, n.d.)

4. (Invisible Cities, n.d.)

By interweaving impressionistic glimpses from the lives of a French priest, a rickshaw driver, and an American doctor, Lapierre creates a searing vision of the struggle for survival, the flashing violence, and the social and cultural practices of the slum. The book chronicles not only the separation of the wealthy from the poor but the separation of the different levels of poverty, caste divisions, and the differences of the many religions living side by side in the slums. While the book has its ups and downs, both beautiful and horrific, an overall feeling of peace and wellbeing is achieved by the end. Despite facing hunger, deplorable living conditions, illness, bone breaking work (or no work at all) and death, the people still hold on to the belief that life is precious and worth living, so much so that they named their slum "Anand Nagar", the "City of Joy".

By this display of human spirit we are taken on a journey through the city of Calcutta. There are haunting descriptions of the city, seen through the eyes of these slum dwellers, presenting a sometimes a hard to digest truth about our cities.

Carlin, G., & Evans, M. (n.d.). Notes on James Joyce's 'Ulysses' Retrieved October 10, 2015, from http://home.wlv. ac.uk/~fa1871/joynote.html ity of Joy. (n.d.). Retrieved October 14, 2015, from https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Joy Dos Passos, J. (2000). Manhattan transfer. Penguin Group.

(Original work published 1925) Invisible Cities. (n.d.). Retrieved October 10, 2015, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Cities#/media/ File:InvisibleCities.jp Lapierre, D., & Spink, K. (1985). The City of Joy. Garden City, N.Y., New York: Doubleday.

Manhattan Transfer - John Dos Passos (Buch) – jpc. (n.d.).

Retrieved October 10, 2015, from https://www.jpc.de/ jpcng/books/detail/-/art/John-Dos-Passos-ManhattanTransfer/hnum/2039584 O'Toole, F. (2014). Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks: 1922 – Ulysses, by James Joyce. Retrieved October 10, 2015.

Silver Threads. (n.d.). Retrieved October 10, 2015, from https://silverseason.wordpress.com/tag/james-joyce/

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Invisible cities, Italo Calvino (1972)

Manhattan Transfer, John

Venice

Dos Passos (1925)

"Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his."

(Calvino, 1972)

Manhattan "Morning clatters with the first L train down Allen Street. Daylight rattles through the windows, shaking the old brick houses, splatters the girders of the L structure with bright confetti." (Dos Passos, 2000)

Ulysses, James Joyce (1922) Dublin "For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal." James Yoyce to Athur Power (O’Toole, 2014) Besides being an absolute masterpiece in its own right, Ulysses is a marvelous example of a novel which contemplates the modern city life. Joyce was once quoted in saying, that with Ulysses he wanted to "give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book" (Carlin & Evans, n.d.). This is not because Joyce was able to portray Dublin’s buildings and streets in the smallest detail, in fact he did little to describe the physical aspects of the city. What he did do is describe the city’s inhabitants and their respective lives in a bedazzling manner.

What Joyce realized was that the modern world was not to be found within the deeds of the great, but in the mundane day to day life of the small. Ulysses explores the extremities of the mind of Dublin’s citizens at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Manhattan Transfer is a multi-faceted story of the great city of New York, in the early twenties of the last century. The book has many characters, but only one main character, the ‘Big Apple’. The book consist of multiple interwoven story lines, which beautifully portray the cities character. It depicts the lives of the highest society snobs to the lowest dockside bums. With this modernistic masterpiece Dos Passos gives us a wonderfully accurate image of New York, as the live devouring net of strings which it was.

In his novel “Invisible cities”, the Italian writer Italo Calvino does not make reference to any existing city in particular.

He does not name or place theses cities in a specific geographical point. What he does, through the words of Marco Polo, is describe different cities, each one with different characteristics and elements that make them special. As said before, these cities have no place. They also come from the narrative of a traveler, from his experiences, from his point of view. These cities are susceptible to the free interpretation of the reader, they are constantly transforming. They are “invisible”. Is the way we experience the city visible to others? Maybe these cities Marco Polo talks about are invisible to us because we were not there, they are stories, experiences, and explorations. What we can learn from this book is that exploring a city comes from a personal interest and experience and it reflects in how we move, what we do, where we go. We can always share these experiences, but in the end these stories would become like Marco Polo's, invisible. •

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It Takes the Whole City to Switch On a Light Bulb

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In the cities, we never fully see the full image.

From the pavement of roads to the pipelines that supply gas, water, and discharges sewage, a city comprises countless mutual-related connections. Some contribute obviously to the city's operation, while others exist as invisible systems.

As the level of complexity rises, clues of each factor become less traceable. The accumulation of stains on a piece of bricked wall, the nails holding the wooden beams, as well as the gravel forming a texture across a steel frame, articulate a beautiful time-space complex that depicts the dynamics of the living cities.

Through these invisible and untraceable connections, with a simple movement of switching on the light, we're all linked to the whole city! •

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by

Sylvie Chen EMU, TU Delft

1. Imaginary intepretation of the invisible connections within a city. © Sylvie Chen 2. Realistic sketch of a section of a city. © Sylvie Chen

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URBAN ART EXPLORATION

1. Kuz at Graffiti festival in Drama, Greece 2. "Without antenas, Democracy is not working", Raiz Kuz Won Crew 3. Westlandseweg, Delft, The Netherlands 4. "Hip Hop Gathering vol 4" festival in Kavala, Greece All photos © Kuz Won Crew and Diro STB Crew 41

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“Writers” and “non-writers” have a different way of looking at the city. Usually people use the streets and sidewalks for their movement, the public space for their activities and the private buildings as something more intimate. For “writers” everything works as an inspiration, from the moonlight to the level of difficulty accessing a place. We see an awkward traffic node or a rooftop, they see an endless canvas.

We have asked two artists - writers (graffiti and street art) - some basics questions, in order to reach their way of exploring and expressing within the urban space.

interview with

Kuz Won Crew & Diro STB Crew

by

Alkmini Papaioannou MSc3 Urbanism

KUZ WON CREW Why do you like to paint?

I like to color the grey walls around me. It takes me out of the boring routine.

How/ when/ with what criteria do you choose the place to paint? Under which conditions do you usually paint?

I usually walk around the city during day, to find the most busy and attractive spots (parks/ city center/ busy traffic nodes). I also focus on the level of difficulty of the place, concerning the accessibility or the danger of getting caught by the police. It raises my adrenaline and makes it more exiting. I usually paint late at night.

2

I often participate in festivals as well, usually in North Greece.

Do you feel that you make public space your own, while painting on it?

Whenever you make graffiti on a part of a wall, that spot becomes yours. Most of the time, there is mutual respect between “writers” and none should violate your space. So, whenever I cross one of my spots, I feel the tension that I had when I was making it and this makes me feel intimate and proud.

Which is the most representative/ special piece you have made and why?

3

The most special graffiti I have made was during a festival in the city of Drama, dedicated to my two best friends, who were away as sailors for months at that time. I draw an anchor with a 'life ring', which represents our friendship and we have all put it as a tattoo on our skin.

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DIRO STB CREW Why do you like to paint?

The reason I am dealing with street art is to attract people’s attention for important matters. Even 90-year-old people eventually say: “Oh, the boy is right for writing this! His message is correct.”

Although the same people used to call all of us (street artists), scamps.

How/ when/ with what criteria do you choose the place to paint? Under which conditions do you usually paint?

I rarely go around searching for a place. Usually, my eye automatically stops on a wall and I know what I want to write. When I do it I am usually alone. I barely take someone with me, because there is always the danger of been caught by the police, and I do not want to get anyone in trouble. It also has to be later than 01:00 a.m., so that Special Forces are not in patrol.

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Apart from that, light plays an important role in my process. So, I always check the moon before painting.

It is a matter of safety, as very strong light will make you visible on high terraces and then the only way to get away, if you are caught, is to jump from the building. Suicidal, I would say!

Do you feel that you make public space your own, while painting on hit?

It is not necessarily, that I will have to make the place my own. Aesthetics play an important role in that. I always want the owner of the wall to like what I do, even if it is in a public or private space, so that my art will not be erased.

Which is the most representative/ special piece you have made and why?

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I do not have a particular piece on mind. It depends on what everyone feels or what is happening in his/her life. If you asked a week ago, I would show something about friendship. A month ago, something about a girl! We are what is done to us. We are like the seasons that change and we have to find ways for our mental survival. •

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5. "None drowned by swallowing his Ego" 6. Illegal design in abandoned house, Kavala, Greece 7. "We are afraid of scratching the i-phone, but we are not afraid of hurting eachother's souls" 8. "There are words that make you cry and tears that speak... You' ve killed me" 9. Illegal design on a rooftop, Kavala, Greece 10. Diro at the Berlin Wall, 2014, Berlin, Germany 11. Various portraits in Kavala, Greece All photos Š Kuz Won Crew and Diro STB Crew 44

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When POLIS goes exploring International Movie Night

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Together with Polis, we see that our study track gets more and more international students.

Therefore this year internationalization is one of the main points the association is working on. The international movie nights are one of the ways we take advantage of this international environment and explore each other’s cultural background.

With these short movie events we visit a different nationality each time. The topic of the movie night can be architecture, landscape architecture or urbanism related and the event is open to all students that want to broaden their horizon and show interest in other cultures. A hint of these cultures is also given by traditional snacks and drinks served with the movie.

In the series of events we have visited the Java Islands, China, The Netherlands, India, had a screening from #donotsettle, a collaborative event with the AFFR (Architectural Film Festival Rotterdam) and our latest movie took us to the United Arab Emirates with the Dubai islands.

What is most interesting about these events is that after the screening itself we have informal discussions about what we just saw and related topics. In these discussions some people talk about their experience of living there or having visited those places, but others also pose questions which lead to interestings debates, knowledge sharing and personal experiences told by the students.

Overall these movie nights are not only nice social events but they also increase the body of knowledge, opening up new ways of looking at aspects within our professional field. •

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by

Mark Disco

MSc3 Urbanism

1. Film night discussion © Aakarsh Shamanur 2. Map of geographical focus of films © Polis 3. Timeline of movie nights © Polis

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One city, two worlds

Exploring Dubai Islands

Epic Java

Bite of China

The Netherlands from above

January 2015

March 2015

April 2015

June 2015

November 2015

Indonesia

China

Netherlands

India

U.A.E. September 2015

Architecture film festival

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Big trip to Poland Opportunity of Conflict Preconceived opinions of Poland can be grim. It can be seen as a country which is boring, where there is most likely nothing to do, the architecture is stale and repetitive and the history is only negative. Well this is what the excursion tried to tackle! We as organizers saw a lot of potential in Poland. In this journal of the excursion we try to explain how we perceived the cities we visited and try to change your perspective of Poland as well.

This November, Polis organized the annual ‘Big Trip’ to Poland. This excursion was open to all students from Urbanism, Landscape Architecture and Architecture. The guiding theme while visiting these cities was ‘The Opportunity of Conflict’. A bold statement that invited questioning, in order for the students to think critically about how a nation can cope with conflict and its aftermath. In Poland these questions are strongly visible, so with a group of 18 students we explored the cities of Krakow and Warsaw to try and see and understand how they have grasped the 'opportunities of conflict'.

This excursion was organised by Luuk Cornelissen, Mark Disco, Enzo Yap, Lilla Szilágyi Pereira, Niek van der Velde and Annemiek Wiggers. With the financial support of the Delft University Fund (UfD) and overall support by Polis Platform for Urbanism and Landscape Architecture

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Mark Disco

MSc3 Urbanism

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Day 1

Arrival The trip started in Krakow - the ancient capital of Poland and today a UNESCO world heritage site - where we arrived late in the day on the 1st of November. On the way to the hostel we saw an empty and calm city. The 1st of November is a national holiday in Poland: All Saints’ Day. This day is to honor all saints, both known and unknown. Candles and decorations are placed at graveyards all around Poland

for this solemn occasion. The fields of flickering lights were visible even from the plane.

After arriving at our hostel, our feet took us through a beautiful green boulevard to arrive at a great central square which was sadly quite empty, although the strong presence of international tourism could still be felt. We were left with a first impression of a calm and maybe even silent city with an easily readable city pattern and welcoming streets and parks.

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1. Group photo by the Nowa Huta Steel Works (with Trabants!) © Sumanth S Rao 2. Old Synagogue, Kazimierz Jewish Quarter, Krakow. This synagogue was used by Germans during the war by as a munitions store, but has been renovated in recent years and is now a Jewish Museum. Sketch © Loek Vijgen 3. Analysis of the Planty Park that circles the historic city centre, Krakow © Kate Unsworth

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Day 2

Day 3

Nowa Huta

Auschwitz

With some free time in the morning, most of the students chose to go to the Wawel Royal Castle, a castle on the hilltop near the city center looking over the river Wisla. The variety of architectural styles at this castle really struck us as a group. Most of the places were publicly accessible and that gave the perfect opportunity for some students to sit down and start some sketching. The rest of the morning was spent walking among the Jewish district, and other parts of the city. Walking in and about these regions of the city we noticed the ease of the readability of the city pattern. The old city center with its beautiful architecture and the main square with its renaissance market hall felt like the beating heart of Krakow, with the park surrounding it creating a boulevard-like landscape that made it instantly recognizable and iconic.

The afternoon was reserved for a tour of Nowa Huta.

Nowa Huta is a district of Krakow which was built around 1950 as a village on the communist state owned land. The town was built partly as propaganda to show the success of communism. This town relied heavily on the steel factory that was built to the NorthEast. Nowadays this industrial terrain is even bigger than the original village of Nowa Huta was, with its own railways and even traffic rules. Since this whole district was primarily built during the communist era, the architecture is mainly Socialist Realism.

The day began with a group trip to Auschwitz, the infamous concentration camp from the second world war, located only a short bus ride from the city. Here, the atmosphere became a lot more heavy. Of course everyone had an idea of the terrible things that have happened here but what we heard there was far beyond what we had in mind. The involvement of the tour guide with the things she was explaining to us as a group also gave a personal significance to the visit.

As well as hearing stories of everyday life in the camp, we also saw the possessions of those whose lives ended here. Although on pictures it might look impressive to look at the pile of suitcases, actually seeing it in reality, with names and personal data written on each suitcase gives you a heavy heart. Silence fell on the group while everyone was deep in thought. We then went to the last and biggest camp where the train tracks enter the camp. The Soviet Union liberated this camp and used the barracks a short period after the war. After a few years they decided to destroy the barracks leaving only the chimneys. So looking out over the expanse now, you see a field of chimneys which gives an eerie impression of the awfulness of what happened here.

Until a few years back this part of the city had a very negative impression in the minds of the inhabitants of Krakow that didn’t live there. People thought it was unsafe and recommended others to stay away. As we travelled through on our tour we experienced nothing of this unsafe feeling. Today, the physical legacy of the old communistic rule is really visible, but with the removed statue of Vladimir Lenin in the central square it is also clear where the Polish inhabitants stand towards this history.

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Day 4

Arrival at Warsaw This morning was a last chance to pay a final visit to the beautiful city center of Krakow, sketch and hunt for small trinkets/souvenirs to bring home. After this we headed to Warsaw by bus - a 4 hour long journey through the elegant

landscape of Poland, all strips of farmland and small clusters of houses. Arriving in Warsaw at sundown, the day was getting to its end already. The first impressions of this city were made: bigger and busier, slightly harder to read but alive, with people all around.

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4. '30 second sketch’ highlighting architectural details on the Sukiennice Cloth Hall, Krakow © Julian Beqiri 5. Street leading to main square, Krakow © Julian Beqiri 6. Plac Defilad and the Palace of Culture and Science, Warsaw © Mark Disco

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Day 5

Insight from the University of Warsaw Met at our hostel by Professor Adam Ploszaj of University of Warsaw, we began a tour through the city. The professor explained parts of the city and had arranged a guided tour for us at the exhibition of the fifth ‘Warsaw Under Construction’ festival. Here we got a brief impression of what happened with the city and an elaborate explanation of how they rebuilt the city after the bombings of World War II. During the war, around 85% of the city was destroyed by bombing, leaving a lot of structures damaged, some beyond repair but some that could be rescued. Some buildings that were within repair were demolished to be rebuilt again. Reasons for this varied from

implementing new construction techniques, improving the quality of living, improving the aesthetics, stimulating the economy or even implementing new urban design elements. Rebuilding in the historical style - such as in the old city centre - was done via the knowledge city architects had of the pre-bombarded city, paintings and pictures of the city and works of students about Warsaw that were saved despite the bombings.

After this exhibition we had a lecture from Professor Ploszaj’s colleague, Professor Maciej Smetkowski about Warsaw itself. After this lecture and a small discussion we got a continued tour to the university library and the campus area by Professor Ploszaj, pointing out some of the more recent developments along the riverside such as the museum of science and the reconstruction of the embankment.

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7. ’Sketching to the sounds of Chopin’. Throughout the public spaces in the city, benches are installed with speakers that play extracts from Chopin’s Work, as they are here in the Saski Gardens, Warsaw. Sketch © Nerea Basave 8. The re-built historic Plac Zamkowy of Warsaw © Sumanth S Rao

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Day 6

Day 7

Praga district

Rising museum

The morning of the sixth day was free and most people chose to explore the city. After this time in the city we got a tour through the Praga district, guided by a local student of the university that Professor Ploszaj had arranged for us.

The name Praga is derived from ‘fire’ ‘burn’ ‘roast’ which according to the guide was the name of the district because it was initially a forestry area which was burned to the ground to make space for urbanization. Praga is one of the parts of the city that was nearly untouched by bombings and redevelopment of the city after these bombings.

Therefore this part of the city still has the pre-war buildings and classical street furniture here and there.

After the end of communism this part of the city experienced an in-migration from the creative industry with young artists moving to this district.

Our guide was less than impressed at some of the new and expensive residential developments in the area though, bringing the inevitable question of 'gentrification' to our lips.

Our last day of activities started off with various explorations. Some students were in search of wellknown graffiti on buildings, others went to the palace of culture and science. This palace of culture and science is related to the ‘seven sisters’ in Moscow designed by soviet architects. This building was designed by the architect Lev Rudnev with influences of Polish renaissance in a stalinist style. It is a dominating presence on the Warsaw skyline.

In the afternoon the Jewish museum and the Łazienki Park were visited. This park was quite a different experience, giving an out-of-town sensation in a busy and hectic city. The whole group collectively ended the day at the Warsaw Rising museum where the bombing of the city and life in the city during that time was displayed. Another feature in this museum was a 3D movie of the bombed city. Viewed from the perspective of an aeroplane, you are shown a city completely in ruins. Soaring above the city for real the next day as our plane took us home to the Netherlands, you could begin to comprehend the scale of the challenge the city must have faced. A city that has been rebuilt to become the thriving capital city is it today.

Τhe end

Before the trip started most of us had little or no idea about the cities and were curious to see what they were about. Everyone left Poland with a totally different opinion about the cities and possibly even the county of Poland. It was interesting to see how the view of the cities changed from ‘a grim and boring city’ to ‘I’d see myself living here, it’s really nice!’. The contrast between the two places couldn't have been more striking.

Krakow, with its compact city centre, ringed in green, providing the perfect counterfoil to vigorous, in-your-face Warsaw, shouting out its history at every corner, its people coursing through every alley.

This 'Big Trip' was a wonderful example of how urban exploration and physically visiting an area really contributes to improving your body of knowledge. Research only gets you so far, and mostly focuses on the material facts. The immaterial aspects of an environment also contribute to your experience and understanding.

Meeting a new environment face to face makes it easier to relate or compare it with other places you visit whilst building up your frame of reference.

It was a perfect exploration of these places, their history, spirit and a timely reflection on the present. We hope many of you can join us on our exploration next year! •

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Colophon ATLANTIS Magazine by Polis | Platform for Urbanism and Landscape Architecture Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft Volume 26, Number 2, December 2015 Editor in Chief Kate Unsworth

Editorial Team Maria Alexandrescu, Sylvie Chen, Gaila Costantini, Laura Garcia, Ijsbrand Heeringa,

Nagia Tzika Kostopoulou, Shruti Maliwar, Angela Moncaleano, Emmanouil Prinianakis, Iulia Sirbu, Kate Unsworth,

Maryam Behpour, Ting-Wei Chu, Marina Dondros, Gijs de Haan, Ioana Ionescu, Ieva Lendraityte, Francesca Mavaracchio, Alkmini Papaioannou, Kritika Sha, Jelske Streefkerk, Bhavna Vaddadi

Editorial Address Polis, Platform for Urbanism Julianalaan 134, 2628 BL Delft office: 01 West 350 tel. +31 (0)15-2784093 www.polistudelft.nl atlantis@polistudelft.nl Printer Drukkerij Teeuwen Cover image Iulia Sirbu Atlantis appears four times a year.

Number of copies: 500 Become a member of Polis Platform for Urbanism and join our network! As a member you will receive our Atlantis Magazine four times a year, a monthly newsletter and access to all events organized by Polis.

Disclaimer This issue has been made with great care; authors and redaction hold no liability for incorrect/ incomplete information. All images are the property of their respective owners. We have tried as hard as we can to honour their copyrights.

ISSN 1387-3679 Contribute to Atlantis!

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Deadlines for submissions are below.

26.3: 'Energy and the City' (22nd January 2016) 26.4: 'Horizon' (7th March 2016) 53

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