In response to your reading of David Harvey's Spaces of Insurgency and Henri Lefebvre's Right to the City, think about and respond to these questions:
1. Why does Harvey create this argument with the political and the personal at either end?
2. What is harvey's idea of the architect / planner's role? How does it differ from Lefebvre's?
3. What is Utopia?
4. How is utopian thinking useful for us? For a construction training school?
5. Why think about architecture, or community, or the urban as process rather than object?
6. What is the role of the 'institution'?
All - here are my notes from our FANTASTIC DISCUSSION on the politics of space. really well done.
ReplyDeletewhat is a city?
company = human being?
now that more than 50% of the world’s population lives in urban spaces, what constitutes urban vs city?
collection of diverse groups and societies that live within its bounds. self perpetuated by institutions to prop up life within that environment.
community: what does this mean?
who’s making the decisions about what that life entails? collective vs select few? architects and planners not the only people creating urban environment.
analogy: abstract notion of a thought vs physical form - thought becomes action through nervous system in body - in city, overall thoughts are turned into reality through institutions / infrastructures
conception of need must pre-condition any architecture
synergy between spheres of influence is manifest as built work which becomes part of physcial fabric of city.
people become products of institutions that outlast individuals.
chicken and egg conundrum: constant feedback loop of you creating the world and the world creating you. human = smart animal. experience + genetics (only ways to guide decision-making)
question the institutions that make us what we are.
the universal?
what are universal qualities that make cities similar - vs elements that make cities unique?
WHAT IS UTOPIA?
brazillia: attempt at utopia. - tabula rasa.
corbu, communism
utopia is an ideal, a goal. any attempt at reality brings in the realities outside the utopia, which brings another set of utopias.
limits in calculus: infinity
can and ideal ever be contained completely in a physical object:?
always a negative space created between material and form - connection / structure that connects concept to reality.
as soon as intellectualized led utopia hits reality - it is confronted by externalities.
pruitt igoe: death of the modernist project.
insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome - EInstein
resilience: testing ideas among multiple groups and ideas vs a singular vision
Economic: power, greed, money - socialism cannot work...
social responsibility vs not is a moral distinction - architects responsibility?
walmart: creates value in a seeming void -
Kind of a follow up to the conversation yesterday...
ReplyDeleteTalking about public/municipal projects in general, really the only time that the community is ever engaged in the design process is at the voting booth "Yes/No to approve xxxx million dollars to build a new high school".
Past this point, the community is very rarely engaged in the design process. The design is left to be decided based on conversations with the local government, who will rarely set foot in the majority of the buildings. This approach has left architecture very sterile and I think has also contributed to the diminished role of the architect in the greater society.
In contrast, there are enclaves of design (harvard/mit/yale campuses) that can be very inspiring and stimulating. Unfortunately these places are very few and far between.
/rant
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ReplyDeletePicking to of my favorite ideas out of the Harvey article:
ReplyDeletePage 63. "The professional architect / planner is, like the rest of us, a cog in the wheel of capitalist urbanization [how different is this from socialist urbanization?] and is as much constructed by as a constructor of that process.
I might argue that those who are part of a system have the greatest ability to cause change, because those who understand a system intimately and from the inside out are the ones who can best identify the system's flaws and dream of improvements.
Page 73. "The act of translation offers a moment of liberatory as well a repressive possibility."
This makes me think of the game of telephone, in which a message is secretly whispered from person to person, traveling along in a circle until it returns home completely garbled. In an architectural sense, why not concentrate on the process of translation as a source of unexpected inspiration, channeling it in positive directions, and enjoying the outcome the way we might enjoy a game?
I also do agree with what Harvey says in the article on page 63. The architects and planners are the same from everyone else, but we have more opportunities to come up with ideas since we have more resources from experience and precedents in the field. I think we have responsibilities to provide those facts to others. We do not want to repeat what happened to Pruitt-Igoe and we can avoid that to happen again since we know what caused the result.
ReplyDeleteI realized that how the position of being architects and planners is very tough and complex. The role of architects is not only designing buildings or spaces but also combining ideas or thoughts from different aspects. We cannot just design spaces what users or designers want. I didn’t really think that politics was always involved in the background for constructing or re-constructing communities.
As what Harvey says on page 72, architects need to translate “the different languages” into “the valued language” which everyone can understand.