Sunset at the end of the urban age Valparaiso ’ s struggle for place
urbanism | social form by rodrigo barros
6. THE LANDING. All space is already occupied by the enemy, which has even reshaped its basic laws, its geometry, to its own purposes. Authentic urbanism will appear when the absence of this occupation is created in certain zones. What we call construction starts there. It can be clarified by the positive void concept developed by modern physics. Materialising freedom means beginning by appropriating a few patches of the surface of a domesticated planet. — Programme élémentaire du Bureau d’urbanisme unitaire , 1961. Situationist International
Valparaíso was never founded .1 It discovered itself, ironically, through the process of overlapping layers and layers of social tissue and urban history, a palimpsest that eventually became a city with a very strong and complex character, manifested radically through its built environment. In this city every day at noon the sun works its wonders. Every bridge floats in the air. Every house is triangular, impossible to furnish. Every stairway ends in the middle of the hill: one must go back, or fly. With the sun misery shows itself as misery, and the elevators stop looking like elevators. This is the untruth of Valparaíso. Its untruth is the sun, its truth the ocean. 2
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1 Unlike all other cities in Chile started by Spanish imperialism in the traditional gridiron plan, one of the first and most “primitive” forms of urbanism (ideology of space) inherited and adapted from ancient Roman centuriation. 2 Chris Marker describes the city in the 1963 documentary, Valparaíso, by Joris Ivens.
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