Exercise 3 (a group collaboration)
Urban Survival Kit – The File
Working individually, and in a team,
gather and edit and organize dependable research material on one of the factors of
CHART III: The Point, The Line and The Plane in a
Subsistence Urbanity and relate that factor to two others on the list,
in order to begin to develop an architect’s version of an Urban Survival Kit.
This
obsessive classification makes an
assumption [
Something taken for granted or accepted as true without proof], and, in a world where the urban populations of the developing world are doubling, it is a naive assumption. The assumption:
Civilization (the culture of cities) will gravitate to larger, more coordinated urban orders, requiring greater scale in each part, even as the coordinating grid that underlies it becomes substantially finer in grain and ever-more dependant on ever-greater degrees of precision. In a world where we depend for our day-to-day life on telecommunications satellites, coordinated by private corporations and governments powerful enough to launch them, we tend to take the underlying network for granted, because – even if we hold its evidence in our hands – we do not see it.
It would be a mistake to assume that urbanism has to become thicker and more hierarchic, more systematic (as we understand systems – as physical infrastructures) over time, in order for it to mature. We understand that cities that rival New York in size now exist, cities where there has been no effective power grid, water supply, or waste management system for a half-decade or more, and we see those cities continue to grow. That is, the network of lines has degenerated significantly, yet life goes on. What we begin to see is a city, not of points in a network of regulating lines over a plane of unregulated existence kept deep in the background, but rather a city of points on a plane, a plane ordered, if at all, by nothing more than the rotting vestiges of a net, a net that no longer serves to mediate the plane. Across vast scales, local knowledge rules.
Water, waste, trade, communications, training... all these go on in an entirely different milieu. These are subsistence settlements on a vast scale, almost unanticipated, and likely to house one in six of the world’s people within thirty years, IF energy shortages and drought do not force much of the population out of the equatorial countries. Add that possibility into the equation, and the numbers will be much higher. Urbanism, for these people, becomes a matter of subsistence, of survival, and not a matter of the coordination of vast technical systems.
What distinguishes these emerging cities from slums of the past is this: they may never have the central infrastructure we expect of cities, and they may be able, over time, to do without it. This may be possible, and it might be successful, because, in place of a physical infrastructure, they can reach a super-infrastructure, a communications infrastructure that could organize the settlement, the community, more fluidly.
We already know of those places in the world where cellular telephone systems have been providing telephone service where no wired service existed, or where it was a failure. We know of semi-rural communities in developing countries that have been able to pick their best market days because the village has a cell telephone and receives text messages of the market prices for their produce; in those places, it becomes possible to bid up the supply, and organize growers. We also know now about microcredit banking systems that have been changing economies in urban, semi-rural, and rural societies (which are becoming, in practice, a continuum, rather than distinct zones of density.)
