A - NEW - URBAN - ERA
HOW AND WHY THE PROGRESS OF A DIGITIZED ECONOMY EMBODIES A NEW URBAN CULTURE WHICH ENABLES OPEN AND DIVERSE PLATFORMISATIONS OF EVERYDAY LIFE FOR A KNOWLEDGE BASED SOCIETY.
I. THE NETWORK SOCIETY
The majority of urban life and its footprint in western cultures is primarily structured and driven by economic forces. With the beginning of the industrialisation in the 18th century, the rural depopulation and the radical extension of cities to accomodate as many people as possible in an equal and lifeworthy arrangement of space, the urban society started to live out a pattern of routines integrated in systematically ordered structures.
These structures which persists till today, find their origins in the economic idea of a fordist society inbetween massproduction, massconsumption and leisure. Since then everydaylife is seemingly layered in systematic patterns determining work and life cycles inbetween efficent periods of production and consumption. This is where cultural life is subordinated to economic systems and the way of life is thereby consequently preconcepted by economic structures. Structures that have been deposited as templates in urban design to efficiently enable 9-to-5 life rhythms.
Since the rise of the post-fordist economy [1] in the 1970s its mass costumization and global expansions through outsourcing and offshoring the range between work and leisure periods started to emerge into a decentralized owing network. On micro as well as on macro levels the so called network-society [2] has found its economic advantages in individual, variable and flexible distributed temporalities [3].
The distinctions between production, consumption and leisure periods are no longer seperated from each other by the substitution of common industrial production methods with automated systems and by integrating digital tools in every part of our daily life.
In fact the digitization of everyday-life spreads economic values in every branch of societal fields. This primarily itself reestablishing and improving network subsequently enables the integration of versatile digital production types into cultural life, which, sooner or later, will enable completely costumized, automated and demand-optimised production types.
The main part of our "works" will therefore change from manual work to the control and renewal of digitized processes, which can be done anytime, anywhere. As a result the temporalities of everyday life within urban structures are losing their rigid layers as we had them in a fordist period transforming into a variable interconnections between time and space.
[1] Post-Fordism is the dominant system of economic production, consumption, and associated socio-economic phenomena in most industrialized countries since the late 20th century. Changes in the nature of the workforce include the growth of labor processes and workflows relying on information and communication technologies and digital labor.
[2] Network-Society is the expression coined in 1991 related to the social, political, economic and cultural changes caused by the spread of networked, digital information and communications technologies. The intellectual origins of the idea can be traced back to the work of early social theorists such as Georg Simmel who analyzed the effect of modernization and industrial capitalism on complex patterns of affiliation, organization, production and experience.
[3] Temporality is the state of existing within or having some relationship with time. Like spatial position, temporality is an intrinsic property of the object.
II. A NEW URBAN PATTERN
Following the observation that most urgently, the ‘digital’ requires attention to the space and time of everyday life in order to attend to the ways the co-production of space, people, and the digital coalesce, the question rises, how space and its architecture can physically react to the digital change in societal space-time configurations.
By refiguring the structure of urban life not as a juxtaposition of singular temporalities as we constructed them in fordist times but as merging dynamic platforms that provide interconnected networks for multiple temporalities to collide, the urban structure would transform into a system of platforms. This would open variable, divers and flexible time-encounters which enables and supports uneven and varified patterns of routines in urban space.
Hägerstrand (1970) reflected: "We need to rise up from the flat map with its static patterns and think in terms of a world on the move". When the idea of interconnectivity is reflected on an architectural level in the same way as postfordism is reflected in a post-fordist economy the outcome would be an urban pattern with 'highly incessant permutations' (Hägerstrand, 1970) - creating and opportunizing new ways of interconnected living agendas - resulting in new intersections of exchange and encounters - embodying a new globally distributed culture.
In this regard the matter of space is not anymore oriented towards the use of specified rigid programs as i.e. conventional offices nowadays pretend to be - rather unfolding the opportunity of an aménageable system of platforms that allows movement and existence to take ground as a complex undetermined entanglement of bodies within space. In other words not bodies which are just moving through a predetermined space-time relation within 9-to-5 temporalities but actually having the spatial and time opportunities to navigate within undetermined space-time relations.
The way we use digital networks and platforms today to provide a user friendly as well as a democratized, aménageable and accessible structure is to be assumed as an non-physical exemplary and should thus be reflected in physical structures of urban life.
Instead of industrial cities we must build bases for urban societies which is supporting an evolving knowledge society [4]. As the evolution of digital platforms indicates the sociotechnical relationships between citizens and cities, we need to ask how “platforms are changing urban sociospatial practices and services” (Lee, 2020).
The idea of the present-day knowledge society is based on the vast increase in data creation and information dissemination that results from the innovation of information technologies. This is increasingly addressed as ‘platform pivot’ and ‘platform urbanism’ - as the manifestation of smart city narrations, and as digitally enacted everyday urbanism as it enters and shapes socio-spatial experiences and daily urban lives, beyond the scope of city halls and public discourses (Barns, 2019).
[4] A knowledge society generates, shares and makes available to all members of the society knowledge that may be used to improve the human condition. A knowledge society differs from an information society in that the former serves to transform information into resources that allow society to take effective action while the latter only creates and disseminates the raw data.
III. SPACE FOR SOCIETAL SELF-TRANSFORMATIONS
One method for the platformisation of urban life could be the scenic unfolding of spatial constraints in unintentionally provided open access spaces - in other words: space which is not dead-finished in its design rather opportunizing various terms of use in different times.
Instead of manifesting a flat time-space grid as we are used to in western cities today which turns space into rigid function-placeholder with economically driven ulterior motives, temporality itself could be developed as a three-dimensional space structuring medium, or in other words, designing time-space encounters as a coordinated complex of spatio-temporal rhythms which creates its own capacity of internal organisations and expansions. This is to begin to think through space-time as a continous happening within time and not as a sequence of seperated programs; to think temporality not just time which entails a spatiality that is ‘atopical’ [5].
Space should be less the already existing setting for stories but being produced through the interaction between time, bodies and space, giving humans as much as possible opportunities for unexpected - and not determined - happenings to take place. Space in fact is more an eventful and unique yet never ending and expanding happening that creates in its best cases a series of memorable situations. Space has more to do with doing than knowing, practice than representation: Space is less a matter of ‘how accurate is this?’ than of how intense interactions between bodies and materialized environments can happen through the act of narration (Donald, 1997).
"The unexpected as well as the production of surprise within a high degree of spatial posibilities can be seen as an aspect of creativity and as a chance for innovation and is therefore something of high value. In particular within the avantgarde segment of the architectural and urban discourse where novelty (and certainly innovation) is in general a desired ambition. Also richness in possibilities tends to come or correlates with a high degree of entity [6] since space gains significance by the complexity of its physical appearence. A design with strategic ambiguities, might also thereby possess additional virtuality[7] and thus provide unexpected actualisations." (Schumacher 2019).
This ends up in a spatial theory of platformisations giving a digital advanced society the abilities of complex interwoven architectural spaces to instruct as much as it can inspire with the aim to facilitate societal self-transformations. The raw material of social life, the importance of encounter zones for humans, can therefore hardly be over-emphasised.
[5]
(from Medicine) A hereditary disorder marked by the tendency to develop localized immediate hypersensitivity reactions. Here to be understood as a positive property of space creating reactions.
[6]
Entity: Something that exists apart from other things - having its own independent existence.
[7]
Virtuality is the quality of having the attributes of something without sharing its (real or imagined) physical form.
IV. A THREESIDED INTERPLAY: THE SPACE, THE DIGITAL AND THE USER
By backtranslating social achievements of digital platforms concerning accessibility, interconnectivity and orientation into the physical, the so constructed urbanity has to be seen as an anti-systemic toolkit (Escobar, 2017) that designs a pluriverse containing public pluarility with open access markets and discourse platforms. A world where many free and autonomous worlds are possible - and in fact a world that might open so many new opportunities by enabling a diverse network for exchange. A toolkit that is driven by architectural openess and flexibility which can be experienced as a synergy between digital user interfaces and physical user experiences -influencing each other by the rule of natural separation.
The way we use space corresponds to the way we use digital platforms - every click - every step - opens a new scene and therefore multiple opportunities to act and react to the natural and human given surroundings.
References
Alison, Blunt (2020): The 'living of time': Entangled temporalities of home and the city
Barns, Sarah (2020): Platform Urbanism, Negotiating Platform Ecosystems in Connected Cities
Castelfranchi, Cristiano (2007): Six critical remarks on science and the construction of the knowledge society
Certeau, Michel de (1984): The Practice of Everyday Life
Escobar, Arturo (2017): Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds.
Graham, Mark (2020): Regulate, replicate, and resist - the conjunctural geographies of platform urbanism
Hägerstrand, Torsten (1970): What about people in regional science?
Lee, Ashlin (2020): Mapping Platform Urbanism: Charting the Nuance of the Platform Pivot
Lefebvre, Henry (1991): The Production of Space
Miller, David (1995): Citizenship and Pluralism
Schumacher, Patrick (2020): The Future of Architecture - Spontaneous and Virtual
Pirone, Maurilio (2021): Platform Urbanisation as a Battlefield
TRIVIAL - DIGITALISM
‚Being global, Being prime, Being equal, Being unterritorial, Being unlimited‘
Can Architecture breath? Wolf D. Prix would say - ‚Yes!‘ - Yes, it can breath in the same way as words do and its shape can change like clouds do. This believe was necessary in order to capture every imaginable dynamic movement in built space over the past decades. Patrik Schumacher is right when he says we live in a complex dynamic world today. Everything and everyone is moving within a big system of data driven networks. Being part of a network rather than being cut off seems to be logic and rentable in every part of our life. In fact our world has never been connected in so many ways as today - in micro as well as in macro scale we have the capacaties of knowledge that allows us to operate as protagonists on mother earth and even touching the endless universe (for better or for worse).
These achievements mainly happend by digitalisation of everydaylife. Digital tools are conquering our environment in all areas. By now cultures, infrastructures and economics are build on it as life is build on air and water. This increasing self-evidence of digitalism calls the inescapable question what comes after? How can a post-digital era look like? Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Lab and Wired Magazine, stated back in 1998:
„Computers as we know them today will a) be boring, and b) disappear into things that are first and foremost something else: smart nails, self-cleaning shirts, driverless cars, therapeutic Barbie dolls. Computers will be a sweeping yet invisible part of our everyday lives: We‘ll live in them, wear them, even eat them.“
This prediction finds its truth today. There is a shift in the focus of attention and discussion from the handling of digital media into a more anthropological orientation to the reality of life and the associated incorporation of the possibilities of digital information processing into the things of daily life. More and more systems are learning to work userless - working in an invisible virtual background beside us by following scripted rules. Our digital life seems to have become trivial. Of course not for erveryone.
Our World is still separated and it should be a global political agenda to unify our personal interests in order to deal with global crysis.
Once there is an equal digital system tolerated and accessible by everyone, we can start to quantify and redistribute energy in unterritorial proportions. In other words growing up in a global system - which can only be processed and driven digitally - the mentality of people will finally lose its limited
thoughts of nations and borders. This could reorder social behaviours as well as open up complete new dynamic driven strategies for our all common daily life.
As architecture always mirrored cultural life - depending on political movements, technological progress and life mentalities - its social impact in physical order of time and space is indisputable. Nevertheless there is no universal answer on how to react to contemporary movements. There is no general ‚style‘ like Schumacher claimed ‚parametricism‘ or lately ‚tectonism‘ to be. Its interesting to animate peoples behaviour by digital agents in order to design space but what happens to these spaces after years when behaviours changed? How can i reuse that space? Its seems to be everything but not sustainable. Even peoples behaviours are too complex and unpredictable. This type of formalism doesn‘t create constructive systems. It seems to be freezed rather than being able to breath or to adapt to a forever-changing society. The idea of discreteness and digital materials (which is still a paradoxon itself) might be a first step towars a new understanding of contemporary constructed reality. More general the idea of considering buildings not as an object but as a constellation of parts that can be reassembled and extended seems to be capable for development. A constructive framework that appears unfinished on the one hand but works as a placeholder for all types of architectural and natural add ons. There is definetly a movement in giving nature space in buildings as well as to build with sustainable materials. By redefining the parts of architecture biotechnology is becoming a great field to research in. It don‘t has to be a self-growing wall but maybe a material that is able to ‚breath‘ and to generate a natural habitat not only for humans but als for micro-organism, plants, animals, etc. Not to forget our digital system which is invisible implemented but organizing not only our daily life but also these types of biological processes.
Probably man‘s greatest achievement, besides a global trivial digital system as a link and control system, would be to reconstruct nature and keep it in balance with his own consumption.
References:
(1) Nicholas Negroponte / Beyond Digital / Wired Magazine / 1998
https://web.media.mit.edu/~nicholas/Wired/WIRED6-12.html
(2) Gilles Retsin / Discrete Assembly and Digital Materials in Architecture /
2016 http://papers.cumincad.org/data/works/att/ecaade2016_221.pdf
(3) Gilles Retsin / Bits & Pieces: Discrete Architecture / SciArc Levture / 2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfWrPd2Klv8
(4) Mario Carpo / The Second Digital Turn / Talks at Google / 2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVerq5DSdKU
(5) Patrik Schumacher / The Digital in Architecture and Design / 2019
https://www.patrikschumacher.com/
(6) Manuel De Landa & Graham Harman / The Rise of Realism / 2017
(7) Wolf D. Prix / Yes! / ongoing