Residence Jan van Eyck Academie

Maastricht is a city where the skyline doesn’t symbolize the profile of progress, but the conflict of urban evolution. It is an ironic chorus line of vacant icons. Sterile chimneys of has-been factories, steeples of silenced faith and extinguished electronic industrial signage weigh on our spirit. Thanks to daylight-saving night kicks in soon, so we are not constantly reminded of this petrified legacy.

The city has lost its saints and captains of industry. If one does rise to greater heights, population takes them down. Society equalizes. Power and knowledge spreads, widens, dilutes. Though our large heritage remains, soon no organization is left to deal with it.

But promise can come in small portions. The former Sphinx signage is lit once again. Lets hope this beacon lures at least three wise men from the east, or any direction for that matter, to share their power, knowledge and treasure.
NOVEMBER 5, 2012

 A café in Istanbul, Amedeo Preziosi, 1850 - 1882
"Not that this idea of the public was actually realised in earnest in coffee houses, the salons and the societies, but as an idea it had become institutionalised and thereby stated as an objective claim."

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jürgen Habermas, 1962, p. 36

Definition:
noun [IN SINGULAR]
1. Physics The minimum amount of fissile material needed to maintain a nuclear chain reaction.

2. The minimum size or amount of resources required to start or maintain a venture:
some of our new industries are now reaching critical mass

>> Though for physics it’s the minimum amount to start or maintain a reaction, in a spatial context of demographic decline, critical mass is the maximum of retrievable quality in the process of sustainable urban design.

For decades the Bundesgartenschau is a tool for programming empty sites and is prototypical for post-event-use.

Stichting Kerkelijk Kunstbezit in Nederland (SKKN), 1977
Federatie Industrieel Erfgoed Nederland (FIEN), 1984
Monumentenwet, 1988
Nationaal Groenfonds, 1994
Boerderij en Landschap, 2008
Infrastructureel Erfgoed, 2015

We always find great numbers of central places of a lower order, i.e. lesser importance and smaller size. Beside them, we find a considerable number of central places that have a somewhat greater importance, a still smaller number of places of a higher order, and only very seldom, places of the highest order… The greater a town is, the smaller is the number … in its respective category. (Central Place Theory, Walter Christaller [1933] p. 58)

Central Park, NYC, USA

Tussen 1821 en 1855 nam het aantal inwoners van New York City toe tot bijna het viervoudige. Naarmate de stad uitbreidde, werden de mensen aangetrokken door de weinige open ruimten, voornamelijk kerkhoven, om even weg te zijn uit het lawaai en het chaotische stadsleven. Central Park is als leegte in de stad mee gepland.

Whether we humans agreed on it or fought over it, the moment we stopped hunting, build a plough to start farming, we declared this earth ours. If we are to invest time in the soil and grow crops, wouldn’t it be a crime, if others would literally reap the fruits of our labour? We’ve emancipated from nature, become less dependent on its whims. We learn, gain experience and we’ve become proficient. We harvest more than needed for household-use. We prosper. We plan our future and cultivate our minds. But we humans as individuals remain frail. As a collective we can protect ourselves behind city walls and assure continuity of our progress. Within these boundaries we condemn the use of violence and encourage the use of the voice of inhabitants. With a social contract, we humans legitimate a level of authority of a state over the individual and surrender some of our freedoms, in exchange for the protection of the remaining rights and share in the distribution of virtue generated by public and private resources. We achieved it with the welfare state.

Jean Jacques Rousseau was born too late. If he could, he would have probably stopped the first person, who declared a piece of land his property. He acknowledges the act of appropriation as the foundation of civic society, but regrets the consequence, namely the birth of economy. The value of land was considered by the physiocrats as primary guarantor of wealth. Adam Smith put it next to the resources labour and capital to accumulate profit. Soil as a material is closely linked to the development of industries, yet the value within the urban context is defined by three criteria only: location, location, location.

Rotterdam 1940, the city was bombed and the historical center with all its facilities and houses were destroyed. With consideration to the personal drama and hardship, it led to a tabula rasa in the heart of the city. Instead of a trauma the void turned into a progressive psychosis. The second largest city of the Netherlands seized the opportunity to reconstruct and model a new concept of society through urbanism. The whole area within the Fire Boundary was expropriated to relieve it from administrative delay. Previous ownership was documented in the Grootboek.

With the restitution previous owners could buy back land to rebuild their stores and offices. Tenants had no right to restitution and were completely dependent on large-scale housing projects. In reality only commercial developers had the financial means to invest in new buildings. Regular shopkeepers couldn’t afford to pay for a new store let alone extra levels for housing. In addition the central axis the Hoogstraat being one of the main shopping streets before the bombing had the highest rates. The property was too expensive to return to.

The large-scale sale of building lots in the centre of Rotterdam to investment companies in the 1950’s, has a decisive influence on todays contradiction between property versus ownership. However the current issues of vacancy caused by the detachment of investment companies to local affairs could not be foreseen. In that era Rotterdam was facing an entire different challenge: the high-speed reconstruction of its centre. The urban development coincided with the rapids of the Second Industrial Revolution and generated an industry of space production. The urban industry flourished and accommodated the construction of the welfare state.

Today society is cornered by a financial world, which has outgrown national borders becoming airborne in speculative bubbles. The exclusion of violence from our boundaries has been reversed. The power of voice is challenged by the violence of finance. On the one hand the global context allows companies to choose the lowest national taxation, on the other hand the ownership of land is still entitled to legal protection against private and public interference. The public still surrenders part of its freedom in favor of financial institutions, but in return these financial institutions are no longer burdened by social concern.

The Dutch Government has recently launched the urban agenda: Agenda Stad. Citizens and organisations nationwide are invited to envision new structures to sustain a future of the Dutch urban landscape. But before we think ahead, we need to question the fundamental structures, specifically: does the contemporary city fulfill common interests? How do we prevent inequality to be cemented into the future? ‘It’s the nasty crust of institutional interest that needs to be broken first’, signals architecture historian, professor Wouter Vanstiphout.
A city is the materialised organisation of society and therefor immobile, but the polis, the body of citizens is immaterial and therefore not bound by location. If an urban center could be mobile, monopolized urban property looses its economic power position, opening up the possibility of negotiation. In addition municipalities still own 75% of all building lots in the Netherlands, which still hold value as a strategic tool for planning. Signs of this urban disruption are found with the shift of focus towards peripheral new initiatives of urban revival.

Property as the financial engine of western society should come first on the Agenda Stad. A government should not just reach out to new city-makers, but also involve landlordism. It could organise public debates about social rules to discuss the terms of responsibility and ownership and reenact the voice over financial violence.

A new promise for stability based on democratic distribution of virtue can be made on the condition, that the design-assignment of future cities also requires the shaping of legislation and reorganisation of society in addition to the shaping of mass.

work in progress 2015

The documentary begins with a menacing cameraview promising a profound plea on urban planning, but after 20 minutes I get frustrated: what about relevant the problems of gigacities? When will the Gehl’s mention the increase of not-haves instead of walkways and bicycle lanes? Let mayors respond to the social shifts between suburb and center instead of blaming the concepts of a ninety year old modern movement. Do they still bear a grudge against their predecessors? Please move on, we have.

The earnest cliché of The Human Scale is a testimonial commercial. Effortless the critical view of the documentary is transformed into a egalitarian consensus. Unlike urbanists think, we the people unsurprisingly have a natural understanding of what a city should be. We all share the same single perspective on the good city life. Es gibt nur gute Menschen in Sezuan.
The most disturbing feature of this citybranding-movie is the conceited use of comparative advertising. The Human scale judges cities on simplified merits of urbanity and burns competitive cities as bad. Even Donald Draper would have disapproved.

NOVEMBER 13, 2013

Goethe's Second-Price Auction
I am inclined to offer Mr. Vieweg from Berlin an epic poem, Hermann and Dorothea, which will have approxi-mately 2000 hexameters.... Concerning the royalty we will proceed as follows: I will hand over to Mr. Counsel B6ttiger a sealed note which contains my demand, and I wait for what Mr. Vieweg will suggest to offer for my work. If his offer is lower than my demand, then I take my note back, unopened, and the negotiation is broken. If, however, his offer is higher, then I will not ask for more than what is written in the note to be opened by Mr. Bottiger. (Cited in Mandelkow [1968], p. 254)

painting: Goethe_(Stieler_1828)

The word polis originally connoted something like a "ring-wall," and it seems the Latin urbs also expressed the notion of a "circle" and was derived from the same root as orbis. We find the same connection in our word "town," which originally, like the German Zaun, meant a surrounding fence (see R. B. Onians, The Origins of European Thought [1954], p. 444, n. 1)

Het Nolli plan, een kaart met de open en omsloten publieke ruimte van Rome, spreekt iedere ontwerper tot de verbeelding. De Leegstandskaarten daarentegen tasten juist het volmaakte stadsbeeld aan. Met een andere blik, toont een leegstandskaart dezelfde potentie als het Nolli plan, mits de lege ruimte ook publiekelijk toegankelijk wordt gemaakt. (Stad.Preparaat [2010] p.84)

“This month we consider Conway’s latest brainchild, a fantastic solitaire pastime he calls “life”. Because of its analogies with the rise, fall and alternations of a society of living organisms, it belongs to a growing class of what are called “simulation games”–games that resemble real-life processes. To play life you must have a fairly large checkerboard and a plentiful supply of flat counters of two colors. (Small checkers or poker chips do nicely.) An Oriental “go” board can be used if you can find flat counters that are small enough to fit within its cells. (Go stones are unusable because they are not flat.) It is possible to work with pencil and graph paper but it is much easier, particularly for beginners, to use counters and a board.

The basic idea is to start with a simple configuration of counters (organisms), one to a cell, then observe how it changes as you apply Conway’s “genetic laws” for births, deaths, and survivals. Conway chose his rules carefully, after a long period of experimentation, to meet three desiderata:
1. There should be no initial pattern for which there is a simple proof that the population can grow without limit.
2. There should be initial patterns that apparently do grow without limit.
3. There should be simple initial patterns that grow and change for a considerable period of time before coming to end in three possible ways: fading away completely (from overcrowding or becoming too sparse), settling into a stable configuration that remains unchanged thereafter, or entering an oscillating phase in which they repeat an endless cycle of two or more periods.” (Martin Gardner, Scientific American 223 [October 1970] p. 120-123)

image: Oscillator, The Game of Life, John Horton Conway (26 December 1937-)

In times of ignorance man tries to map its flaws. Mapping is a tool to confirm the lack of insight. And when a map is made, it is proof of that existence (even rocks along a coastline).

But there is not one map and there is not one existence. So if we were to choose our maps, we might choose our realities. Therefor one could suggest, that in times of ignorance, we should not just choose maps delineating our failure -for example a quantitive lack of inhabitants fuelling our tax system-, but also maps that focus on qualities present, which actually do represent us on a map of the world.

image: chemicals export