urbanism as housing, housing as urbanism It is difficult to imagine a future for a place with so many people but with so little history. And although the homogeneity of big box style peripheral housing development has generally failed to create anything beyond the dwelling unit itself, can this housing ever be considered obsolete – an urban void ripe for re- urbanisation or renewal – as long as someone is living there? While Secchi’s definition of urban void referred to large-scale, industrial space that had become obsolete (slaughterhouses, steel mills), future urban voids may be these ubiquitous multi-unit apartment complexes that proliferate at the urban-industrial edge – urbanism in waiting. If peripheral collective housing is ever to be anything more than dirty real, urbanism must be more than an afterthought. Evolving settlement patterns have transformed compact cities into dispersed urban regions. Cities are neither ‘dense nor not dense’, each instead having ‘dense parts, empty parts, low parts, high parts ... almost always so big that they’ve fallen apart into fragments’. 5 This results in an urban context that struggles to maintain cohesiveness. Beyond Halifax, housing as urbanism is even more crucial to the health and stability of the world’s mega-cities. Peripheral tabula rasa collective housing developments in Paris, London, Mumbai, Sao Paolo lack context and legibility, and have generally been unsuccessful in creating new areas of urbanism despite high densities achieved. Yet rarely are these clusters the
1 Secchi, Bernardo. Unprogetto per l’urbanistica .Torino: Einaudi. 1989. p96-7 2 “Density without urbanism” is a phase commonly used by New Urbanist evangelist Andrés Duany to criticise recent city-building trends, specifically those guided by principles from the emerging (sub)field of landscape urbanism.‘Matter out of place’ is anthropologist Mary Douglas’s definition of dirt’ as expressed in her 1966 Purity and Danger - an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. Both Duany and Douglas assume the existence of an established order that, when removed, significantly alters user experience (in the case of the city) or perception (in the case of dirt) regardless of the fact that the basic elements are unchanged. 3 Pearson, Norman. City of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, urban renewal study . Dartmouth: 1964. p 96 4 Lefaivre, Liane. ‘Dirty Realism in European Architecture Today: Making the Stone Stony’ Design Book Review 17: 17-20 1989. 5 Koolhaas, Rem. Interview. Cities of Opportunity . New York: Pricewaterhouse Coopers. 2011. p 22 focus of any serious discussion where form – as both partial cause and solution to ongoing housing and habitat-related problems – is considered. The dirty real exhibits a particular morphological language that is recognisable within its respective urban context, suggesting that what is too often seen as inevitable is, instead, a conscious and hostile act of (dis)urbanism. n
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see also: Bird, Geoff, Lily Sangter and Brittney Teasdale.‘Manufactured Slum’. The Coast Weekly. April 14, 2011
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