A|Um Studio with Marta Caldeira, VISIBILITY, UIA Celebration of Cities International Competition entry, Portugal, 2003 A|Um Studio’s UIA Celebration of Cities competition entry suggested that one could map a city to identify places of delay or acceleration of urban activity over time and, through this map, locate ‘acupuncture’ points in the city to open up flows and networks, converting zones that might be dangerous, arrested or frozen into areas of interaction.
Cities have many temporal registers, areas of history that appear and disappear, dissipating in structures that materialise as temporary or permanent walls. One of the most important capacities in the city is found in its temporary structures: that of the self-modification of meaning, that of intelligent material. The structures go from uncharacterised points to bright spaces of invention: exhibition galleries of diverse themes, experimentation places, meeting points, and so on.
A concept of urban systems in relationship to collective agency and intelligence was developed in this project on several scales. A ‘healthy city’ – an ideal agglomeration – is a condition born and developed through both the real and imaginary inventions of its inhabitants. All the participating agents in a city are immediate beneficiaries of urban evolution, and answer to time. Each contribution is unique and indispensable in the feedback loops of ongoing change. A ‘diseased city’ exists when citizens can no longer act as individual agents. Examples may be found in any urban situation that emphasises only unilateral or dual understanding of the environment. In such a case it becomes necessary to create new situations that render visible this individuality within the collective. The concept of marginality, for instance, is part of an urban mode of thought that is inclusive and, by nature, is engaged with the reconceptualisation of city edges. Any discussion of limits evokes not only what is exterior to the self, but also the integral internal elements of the city.
Nodes that exist in a marginal situation – in less safe areas, in less visible hours – establish their high visibility as pavilions, reinforcing relationships of connection with other temporalities, dissipating their initial condition as marginal concepts. A network of different nodal points was generated by mapping the city of Lisbon, Portugal. New points were discovered between points of great visibility – one temporal condition in the city – and their opposite: places where individuals experience a profound distance and remain invisible to the total urban system. Capturing the ‘acupuncture’ points, zones of visibility, formed by centres of influence, identified the ‘acupuncture’ points as three time cycles: night visibility (yellow), constant visibility (blue), and transition/mixed visibility (green).
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