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New application period in the interdisciplinary and international Master Programme Resource Efficiency in Architecture and Planning (REAP) at HafenCity Universität in Hamburg has started. For the fourth time already, interested students of diverse disciplines have the possibility to apply for the ambitious Master Programme REAP . The focus of the REAP course is the claim to assimilate Resource Efficiency in sustainable design of our built environment in a methodical and application oriented way– from buildings to urban metropolitain regions. REAP aspires a multidimensional and holistic approach. Next to the reflection on different physical city structures and, the analysis of diverse involved policy makers will be considered. The main aspects of the REAP Master Programme are in detail: u A holistic approach to Resource Efficiency (in relation to the fields of water, energy, material and noise) - from the scale of a single building to urban infrastructure and up to metropolitain regions u The communication of knowledge about resource efficient technol gies and strategies in consideration of users demand u The acquirement of institutional and legal as well as methodical skills u The reflection on different geografical and cultural conditions u Project- and practice oriented work on national and international level The REAP Master Course targets applicants of diverse disciplines (e.g. architecture, urban planning, geography, civil engineering, law, social-, economic- and environmental sciences) and regions of the world. Applicants should have a strong interest in forward looking technologies and social development in cities. They should be guided by the wish to get involved with sustainable urban structures. The Master Course also offers possibilities of advanced training on university level to people, that are already working in the fields of resource efficient planning and building. The application period for non-German applicants runs over the whole year. They have to apply until July 15th for the following winter semester starting in October each year. The next start of the Master Course is in October 2012. More information: https://www.hcu-hamburg. de/master/reap/
About HafenCity Universität Hamburg (HCU) The HafenCity Universität was founded in 2006 as University of Built Environment and Metropoltain Develop- ment. It is the only University in Europe, that is dedicated especially to research and teaching in the field of built environment and that combines all departments that are necessary to understand and to improve this environment: architecture, urban planning, civil engineering and geomatic.
The Choice of Narrative In ‘The Illusion of Choice’ (25: Identity), Michael Panacci writes about the trend to market Toronto condominiums by borrowing iconography from other, foreign cities. He argues that much of this is a result of the economic situation surrounding the construction of new condominiums, where financing has to be secured prior to construction and all that can be sold is the immaterial idea of a place. While this is an accurate argument, I wonder if there is not more underlying this phenomenon. The fantastic conjuring used to sell real estate could latch onto any number of motifs, so it is curious that there is such a consistent use of other cities in the marketing of new condominiums in Toronto. Is this, perhaps, a particularly Canadian phenomenon? As a former British colony and current neighbour to the United States, there is a long history of imagining Canadian cities from a self-deprecating position, where ‘real life’ happens elsewhere, in the place where perceptions of value are formed. Think, for example, of how differently success in Canada is generally understood compared to international success. Of course, this is a futile point of view: a city imagined as this non-place can never be anything greater than an inadequate, if not fraudulent, version of the places it is looking to for validity. To see the value of our own cities, we have to understand them from the inside out, as specific real places. Panacci goes on to draw connections between the rise of the individual and the one-bedroom condominium unit, arguing that this form of housing “foster[s] an active separation from the public realm of the streets.” He makes an argument for different forms of dwelling, including collective spaces and new types of collective ownership, to counteract this trend and reconnect inhabitants to the places they live. I think this is indeed an important call for change but I would like to suggest that in addition to new “original living options,” we also need to encourage new myths about our cities, new ways of understanding and valuing them for what they are, rather than what they are not. Lisa Hirmer Guelph The making of an identity My earliest indentification with a place was in a village in rural Wiltshire, rudely displaced when I was moved in 1948 to Portsmouth, which had been a target for the Germans in WW2. My new neighbourhood was a bombed-out wasteland, my school was half in ruins and I crossed several bomb-sites to get to it. Homeless people lived under tarpaulins, sometimes sitting around an open fire as I passed by. My memory is of a desolate wasteland, ruins and a lot of misery. When I turned up at the school of Architecture, it was in one of the newest buildings in the city, completely surrounded by bomb craters and derelict town houses. It was like this in 1961 and for quite some years after that. Did this affect my identity? My surroundings had been seedy and run down for years, and had a significant impact on my outlook. I found the manicured residential districts of the USA and Canada too much: I gravitated to the wrong side of the tracks, to working class areas where the scale is smaller and, to me, more reassuring. Whilst working as an architect in the far north, I looked at iconic and emblematic forms as design solutions, discovering as others before me had, that the igloo really is the most amazingly sensible and environmentally fitting design form. Now I’m interested in even older things; very old in fact, ancient monuments and stone circles. There is a timelessness quite discernable in such places. I lose track of time hiking up Silbury Hill, an enormous artificial mound near Avebury in Wiltshire, whose engineering principles are still obscure. It was built 4500 years ago. There are places like this all over the world. It is the balance of things: quintessential purpose, beingness, timelessness, and connectedness that I sense, having gone full-circle, from a child at Stonehenge, our cottage on a ley line which joins all the ancient power spots, (and where the Christians later built churches all called St. Michael), along a straight line to St. Michael’s mount in Cornwall, to the Canadian arctic, and now to the Sami landscapes of Norway. Michael Barton Oslo
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Glimpses of Landscapes from a Car Window Ivan Hernandez-Quintela December 2011
Trying to make something out of the once-a-week trips to San Felipe del Progreso, a rural town two hours from Mexico City, where we’ve been supervising the construction of a
On Hunting In Stephanie White’s article ‘Azulejos’ (24: Migration), White brought me back to Lisbon. Not so much because of what she said, but how she said it – the way she peeled back the layers of the city, like an onion. In Azulejos, White is a hunter. People get hunters all mixed up, and think they are looking for what is rare or elusive – the thing that might give them the slip, and scurry away down some furtive alley if it were not for the hunter’s state of constant awareness. On the contrary, for the hunter, there is too much world, and all of it is clamouring for attention. Nothing rare or elusive here. White sees her quarry everywhere. If she were to make an appearance in Carlo Ginzburg’s great book, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, he would no doubt call her a detective; a job that, one would have to agree, is merely a modern incarnation of the hunter. Her language reveals her true role when she refers to “the sheaf of stencil evidence.” White is looking for evidence, clues; the broken branches on the forest-floor that lead the way to the beast. (And here I am, hunting for evidence of the hunter). What is White looking for? On the surface of it, she searches for stencilled tiles, though they are relatively numerous in Lisbon. Does she then search for something in those tiles that others can’t see, like the professional antique hunters who throng the Parisian flea markets early on a Saturday, their noses diving down amid the bric-à-brac. Perhaps she searches for a slip of a moment in the 18th century, between the hand-drawn (which occupies the attention of lesser hunters) and the silk-screened and lithographed mass- produced products of the 20th. Or else she searches for other, less visible histories: traces of the Dutch East India Company, and of the Portuguese empire, resounding out from the tiles, into contemporary Lisbon. White doesn’t fool me. All this talk of tiles is designed to put me off the scent, and deceive those who hunt the hunters. I know the real story. White is looking for time, hidden in the walls. We are all a bit dislocated, we hunters; always pressing forwards, and trying to discern, on street corners, in tiles, and in malls, a sense that is always just escaping us. * Lisbon for me exists between two faces: that of the immigrant, and that of the old man. The old man has a secret, and he remains rigid in it. Perhaps he will die there. Can you see it? It can be seen in the perfectly ironed shirt, still smelling freshly of starch, in his trousers, which finish slightly too high up the ankle for modern tastes. The space between him and where he lives: a small inch of tired flesh held together by black socks. It can be seen in the erect posture, the face that seems to bend impossibly backwards, away from you, and away from the street. Most of all, it can be seen in the eyes: the fierce pride that seems to live on despite everything. * Lisbon is a world of people waiting: kids against walls, Angolans on curbs, and old men sitting in the squares, carving out tiny circles of space. What are all these people waiting for? Hunters wait. For those waiting, just as for the hunter, no shadow is without significance. Everything may be a harbinger of the prey that we chase: every broken twig, torn leaf, street sign, newspaper, and every stranger holds within it the promise that, just maybe, our time has arrived. When we wait, we attend. Because we do so, we are not fully present; our sense of self is projected forwards to that happy imagined time in which we are united with the object that we await. We live in the future conditional. This waiting, which might seem to deprive the world of all colour, and render it monochrome, with hints of red happiness at the corners, is a condition of us being in the world at all. The kids wait to ride themselves of their youth; the fur on the lip and the wise cracks constitute part of the sheaf of evidence (and how else could you luxuriate in your youth other than by already trying to be rid of it?). The Angolans wait for an opportunity that will enable them to transform this strange life lived in abeyance – not quite at home, but not fully in Portugal. The old men, who remember
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rural community school for a period of four months, I decided to take a sketchbook and pen to draw what I saw from the passenger’s window during all that time spent in
the car. To draw was nothing new, I am in the habit of drawing daily, usually in a coffee shop where I can take my time to do my contemplative urban
the Estado Novo, and a stiffer Lisbon than the world of today, remind me of some lines in Beckett. I am waiting. For what are you waiting? For it to all blow over. For what to all blow over? Life, I am waiting for life to blow over. Like White, the people of Lisbon are waiting in space: hunting for objects that, if they can be recognised, will signal the arrival of the right time. * I keep seeing it – that sense of loss, of uncertainty, that encounters me everywhere. In Lisbon, it crept up on me when I least expected it. In mute arcades, on side streets, down passages that suggest nothing but bare walls and struggling businesses, worlds congregate. Just as sleep, in conditions of oppression, can be a liberation, so concealed spaces in cities can act as a dream, in which one is liberated from a disjunctive present into an impossible past. In these empty spaces, neglected by the Portuguese, time is trapped in a bottle, and left to ferment. I found myself wandering down one of these side streets, one day in Lisbon, and entering a mall. As I climb up the stairs, there is floor after floor of food shops: plantains, ripe and brown, compete for space with fiery-red Scotch Bonnet chillies and dried fish. There are no warehouses for these shopkeepers, and the produce spills out of brown cardboard boxes, just as the cardboard boxes in turn poke out of doorways, onto the course-ways, turning the mall floors into a long extended market, in which the boundaries between the shops are no longer clear. I stopped to speak to one of the shopkeepers; I no longer recall her name. She said she was building a house in Angola, a three- storey dream house. Every cent she made in Portugal went back to Angola, to her family, and into her house. Life in Portugal is a suspended life, which consists simply of building a life elsewhere. At least here, she said, in this mall, I am reminded of home. The mall is a dreamed world, a world that is a function of another, more concrete dream. In the mall, Portugal and Angola enter into uneasy co-existence, with the Angolan shopkeeper depending on the former colonial master for her future independence. She is waiting to live again. She spoke dismissively of the bar downstairs. Every cent must go home (and every cent spent in Portugal, is a cent wasted). The bar is in the basement, and you can hear the shouts and the music as you enter the mall. It is to here that everything flows. The lost, the forgotten, and those that want to forget, congregate here. I drink with two Liberians, who wait on the curb like the Angolans, but not for possibility; they wait for the appointed hour, and they walk to the bar. The stronger you are, the longer it takes you to get there; the bigger the foundations of the dream-home, back home, the longer it takes for you to succumb to its memory. Only it is not home. This bar resembles no bar in Liberia or Angola. It is a bar in Lisbon. And it is not. It is a bar made by a community that is in Lisbon, but it is only uncertainly a part of it. It is there. It is not from there. A lost space, grown ripe and drunk on fermented time, unmoving. * So the old men look, in their small circles in the parks of Lisbon, for a space that will close the gap between the world they know and the world Lisbon is becoming; and so the Angolans, in their shops, on street curbs, search for the concrete possibilities that will mean they are no longer living a life suspended, and can rejoin a now-liveable life in Angola. So White looks, in tiles, for a sense of time that will ground her in the city, and so I look, amongst them all, for a sense of what it is I am hunting for. We people of Lisbon are a type of us all. We keep looking for the answer to time in space, and the answer to space, in time. Joshua Craze Cairo Collective Monuments I was both intrigued and puzzled by Liam Brown’s piece, ‘Ashes: The Urban Dispersal of Earthly Remains’ (26:DIRT). I think of death as extra-ordinarily personal – funerary architecture represents the individuality of the deceased and accommodates the privacy of those left to mourn. Death’s monuments are often built from stone, connoting the solemn if illusory sentiment that the living will not forget the dead. Brown flipped this notion on its head by designing a collective grave where the individual is marked by the slats of a wooden fence, an object that connotes exclusion and will quickly age. It is a public and perhaps harshly real way of commemorating an individual’s life in the urban landscape. Corey Schnobrich Berkeley
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portraits. Still, nothing had prepared me to the flickering images quickly passing through the frame of the car window and how much I had to adapt
my way of drawing in order to capture what seemed like confrontational snapshots between the land, abandoned structures, field machines, and weather conditions.
Pigeons Rusty overhangs and pigeon droppings are so common in cities worldwide that ‘The Pigeons of St. Hubert’ (26:DIRT) can be read as a universal melancholy of urbanity. Speaking of pigeon droppings, the Inca trail guide at Machu Picchu, pointed his walking pole at Mount Huayna Picchu and proclaimed, ‘llama dung – it is llama dung that Machu Picchu was built upon!’ Paleoecologist Alex Chepstow-Lusty’s research near Cuzco revealed that llama dung as fertiliser was the decisive factor that led farmers in the Andes to boost maize production and extend their cornfield terraces up into the poor soil of the mountain slopes. Small pebbles of llama dung, easily collected, transported and strewn on farming terraces, supported human communities for over a thousand years. UNESCO describes Machu Picchu as ‘one of the world’s greatest examples of a productive man-land relationship in history.’ Mediaeval pigeons too were welcomed for both flesh and droppings. Not as famous as Oscar Niemeyer’s modernist dovecote at Praca dos Tres Poderes in Brasilia, 300 surviving pigeon towers near Isfahan reveal our intimate past with pigeons and doves – once 3000 pigeon towers were scattered across the fields. 10-22m across and roughly 18m high, each circular tower held 5000 to 7000 pigeons and produced enough fertiliser to support 18,000 fruit trees. Sophisticated in design with interior arches, barrel- vaulted ceilings, supporting buttresses, checkerboard arrangement of pigeonholes and inclined interior walls, they were efficient and minimal guano factories. The emergence of chemical fertilisers distanced us from pigeon manure and eventually aroused our antipathy to the birds that once contributed extensively to our own existence. Pigeon towers remind me of the columbarium, a building with multiple rows of niches to house cinerary urns. In Latin, columbarium was used originally to describe compartmental pigeon houses [columb: dove]. ‘Ashes: The Urban Dispersal of Earthly Remains’ (26:DIRT) refers to human ashes as dust made sacred, and illustrates, poetically, ash dispersal in the mystic subterranean rivers of Toronto. To many cultures, ash dispersal is not common although in densest cities, ash dispersal in water or gardens has gained some popularity under strong advocacy from local authorities, as a measure to relieve the pressure of land shortage. In Hong Kong where I spent my childhood years, known for skyrocketing real-estate values, crowded living conditions and a shortage of land, traditional burials have become a luxury reserved only for the wealthy. From 1975 to 2009, cremation rate in Hong Kong shot up from 35% to 89%. But today, from what I’ve seen in the local news, the city is also running out of columbarium niches for cremated ashes. Many cinerary urns are temporarily stored in funeral homes, waiting up to a few years for new niches in public columbaria to become available. In some cases, families may choose to send bodies or cinerary urns abroad, particularly to North American cities, to bury. At the same time, construction plans for new columbaria are often met by fierce resistance from local communities, fearing a house of dead nearby may devastate the fengshui and land value of the neighbourhood. The government of Hong Kong predicts that by 2016, up to half of the dead in that year will be ‘homeless’. The government is looking elsewhere for inspirations to resolve the issue. In Tokyo there is the adaptive reuse of old commercial buildings into high-rise columbariums which look like normal buildings. A futuristic columbarium in Yokohama managed by Nichiryoku Co. is a 24-hour facility: an underground vault, multi-purpose rooms and ten viewing areas decorated with various floral backdrops of cherry blossoms, roses, etc. Each cinerary urn stored in the common vault is marked with a unique barcode. To view the urn, each family is given a RFID (radio-frequency identification) card similar to a touchless payment card used for public transit – Hong Kong’s Octopus card and London’s Oyster). When a visitor comes and pads the card in the viewing area, the urn is identified digitally, extracted from the vault and delivered onto a viewing table through a mechanical conveying system. The visitor pays respect at the viewing table with incense, flowers and other offerings. It seems clean, convenient and space efficient – an interesting design prototype for a novel urban ritual of visiting the dead. At first this all seemed absurd. Yet, in a fast-changing world, the odd may become the norm, the norm may fall into disuse, and even objects of disgust can transform into something precious. A return of pigeon manure, once we come up with a systematic method to collect, process and distribute this organic fertiliser, could support urban farms and rooftop gardens in the future. A day will come for the re-evaluation of filthy pigeons. Calvin Chiu Toronto
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A couple of strokes was all I could get into paper before the landscape began to change right in front of my eyes. I even had to shift to a thicker point pen to get the
most out of each stroke since the .005 point I usually used kept bending on itself due to the sudden strokes. What I would focus on would shift from week
Only Entropy A recurring theme in the 26:DIRT is a repeated quote from Mary Douglas: ‘dirt is matter out of place’. Nearly every article suggested dirt is either raw material or is waste and coupled this with some moral commentary. I too was intrigued by Mary Douglas’s quote and wondered if this invocation of matter and place offers two doors – one towards the sensate world of human artifacts and the other towards the abstract world of physics and entropy. It is this latter world that attracted me to so many of these articles. Dirt is the entropic by-product of human or natural processes. For example the ash drift across the prairies from Mount Mazama outlined by Gerald Forseth or the nickel deposit left by a meteorite impact in Sudbury described by Kenneth Hayes are generated by cataclysmic natural events. However, the ensuing dirt or nickel represents a lower energy state. In any physical system there is a tendency to achieve an even distribution of energy, which means a homogenous neutral end-state. Dirt typifies this end state. Dirt in all these processes is a homogenous mix of salt, mineral and crystal. Perhaps our negative reaction to dirt is a reaction against dirt’s inherent disorder. Only when we can sort and separate do we value dirt as it re-enters our ordered universe. The act of separating dirt into its constituent and useful parts requires energy; the need to believe in an ordered universe is re-enforced when we see energy used to convert dirt into something useful. However this belief in order is defied by the presence of dirt and the absence of energy. Dirt is matter out of place. And matter out of place offends our moral sense of order by reminding us that in architecture as with all of human endeavour, the natural entropic end-state is dirt. Paul Whelan Toronto Fitting In Tanya Southcott’s essay ‘Last Housing Standing’ (26:DIRT), while specific to Vancouver, offers insight into a common Canadian urban condition too often ignored. Unlike the tabula rasa renewal programs, policies and actions of the 1960s and 1970s, today’s urban regeneration takes a more messy approach to urban development that can severely disrupt the integrity of traditional housing stock while paradoxically spurring urban regeneration. In a pattern found from Vancouver to Halifax – and perhaps most evident in Toronto – the viability of much of our historic housing stock within contemporary regeneration plans seems to be in question – or, more precisely, not questioned at all. With ever-increasing develop pressures in all of the major city centres across the country, can the traditional single-family house survive? Should it survive? As Southcott eloquently points out, at odds with both time and space they struggle to find a place of permanence in a continually evolving urban landscape. Can single-family homes be more than the residue that results from piecemeal, ad-hoc, contemporary urban renewal and redevelopment projects? The future of single houses in areas of intense urban regeneration seems to be a question of agency. As a home, it sits in a hostile environment. As an element of urbanity, surely there is much to take from it – a form to possibly influence redevelopment, but does it have the capacity to adapt to contemporary functional, spatial and technological demands? Southcott suggests the need for a ‘retention strategy’, yet exactly what would be retained by such a strategy is still unclear to me. In this regard, a retention strategy seems premature. Perhaps some urban ‘soul searching’ is first required to discover just where these fragments may fit, if at all, in the evolving space and program demands in our cities. As an urban condition of partial and incomplete destruction, regeneration and densification of city blocks, the juxtaposition of single-family house and residential tower seems difficult to maintain without an overarching and complete spatial strategy that would ensure a long-term, integrative and mutually beneficial coexistence. Matthew Neville Halifax
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to week. At times it was the presence of man-made structures and the way they seemed protrude from the horizon that caught my attention. Other times
it was the subtle topographical variation of the land that became noticeable thanks to the repetition of elements such as wooden posts.
Dirt pile landscapes In ‘Dirt Piles’ (26:DIRT), Lisa Hirmer refers to these mounds as a by-product of the construction process, posing as a sort of monument to consumer demands. What strikes me about her photo series is the meticulous manner in which most of the piles are cropped out of context. The earthen textures are presented as crisp cutouts flanked by off-white skies. By extending the frames downward, I’d fully expect each fragment to cap a mountainside. The fact that they’re impermanent ‘leftovers’ was an unexpected surprise. Even so, it inspired me to rethink my own surroundings: what if such piles popped up alongside new developments with increased permanency and accessibility? The idea isn’t completely far-fetched. Berlin’s third-highest point, Teufelsberg, is made up of about one-third of the city’s destroyed homes following the second World War, a fact which continues to startle tourists as they stumble upon bits of brick while hiking. Both Teufelsberg and Hirmer’s selective methods of cropping are misleading. But it is this very confusion and ambiguity that sparks curiosity by imagining new ‘dirt pile landscapes’. ‘Soil Horizon’ by Lateral Office also presents dirt in an unfamiliar mode by exhibiting it as a series of vertical extractions, each with subtly varying soil profiles. Since specific patterns can be pinpointed to different regions throughout Quebec, the exhibit reveals a cartography usually buried beneath our footsteps. If we eliminate each specimen’s thoroughly annotated podium, we’re left with dirt piles on a parking lot—the occupation can be likened to the typical wintertime scenario of grey snow mounds plowed into parking spaces. But with sharp-edged earthen chunks, Lateral Office has reinvented the dirt pile. The question remains, however, what sort of ‘dirt pile landscape’ will it inspire? Shannon Werle Dresden / Tokyo Unspeakability The images accompanying John Szot’s article (26:DIRT) about a street art meets new construction experiment are beautiful, strong and colourful. The space is washed in light, with sparse furnishings and art on the walls. Apart from the plywood furniture and the somewhat messy exposed conduits, this looks to be a fixed-up urban loft, a condo most likely unavailable to any of the artists whose paintings adorn the bare concrete walls. The art on the walls, of course, is graffiti – some of it a bit more gritty than you would expect but overall very suitable for an expensive urban loft which could easily be featured in an interior design magazine. It is not clear from the article whether this experiment actually took place. Further online research revealed the images were actually renderings – part of a very well done computer-generated and animated tour of a ‘vandalized’ building which you can watch here: www.johnszot.com/archandtheunspeakable. Most irritating however is how the author talks about the interior design aspect of letting new construction be ‘vandalized’ by street artists, but does not take into account the social or cultural impact such a marriage would have. One can easily imagine the slogans on flyers and full page advertisements in local newspapers and magazines promoting this new loft space as ‘authentic’, ‘gritty’ and ‘real urban’. How real and authentic can ‘vandalism’ be when you agree to let it to happen in order to commercialize it as a design feature? It is hard to imagine that this experiment could take place without any control from the developer. Even apart from potential safety concerns that come with allowing access to a construction site (e.g. missing windows and guard rails), the developer would most certainly want to have some say in the editing process as to who is allowed on site and what can be sprayed on the walls. Would the developer allow vulgar images or hate phrases? Would he allow homeless people to live in the space and use a future bedroom to relieve themselves or light fires? Offering a home for people and then displacing them once sufficient ‘authentic’ art has been produced would be a questionable practice. The article brings up some interesting questions: How far can we go with art? How long can we call something art? When is it dirt? When is it wallpaper? Szot’s project is an interesting challenge to the creation of heterogeneous, original new development. However I would have wished for a more critical approach. Looking at this experiment’s benefit to interior design is not enough. Lisa Dietrich Toronto
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Not too often, traffic or a small accident would allow me to stare longer to one particular view, where I could notice clothes being hung to dry in an almost unnoticeable
wired fence. Under particular weather conditions, it was the encounter of mountains with dark clouds all that seemed to be out there. Getting to
Just stay put and keep quiet In hindsight, the permanent state of the camps had always been impermanence; they were momentary and ephemeral, much like the dust that drove people westwards in the first place. — Joseph Heathcott. ‘Dustbowl Designs’ (26:DIRT)
1. From Roman military encampments to contemporary refugee settlements in South Sudan, all camps share the same passion for order. Notice I don’t mention the inhabitants; it’s the camps that want the clean lines and right angles that push us – strangers huddled together – into community. I remember going to camp as a child. We would set up our tent (well, my parents would set it up), glance with suspicion at our neighbours (the same brand of tent, yes, but where were they from?), and wonder at a world that brings together hundreds of strangers, assembled in a field, in identical tents. My suspicion soon faded amidst the camp activities – making banners, sing-alongs around the campfire, treasure hunts in the forest – and the intense forms of belonging that inevitably accompany the founding of a new community, no matter how temporary. I felt the same sentiment that infuses every bad film about American summer camp: time at camp was a suspension of the everyday world, a magic moment to be held up, bright against a dreary existence. The stronger and more coercive the rules and activities governing the camp, the closer I felt to the people around me. Community here was not based on a shared sense of life – lived histories entangled together – but on a contingent coming together in a field, a contingency that was occluded by the intensity of our need to belong together, and mark this strange field as our own. People held up by banners. If anyone expressed doubt about the magical time we were sharing (rain, cold, tents, mud), they would only have to remember that we were in it together, and that those unlucky souls not fated to go to camp were irrevocably sundered from us. All camps are based on exclusion. Impossible to imagine then that I would spend so much of my life in camps, around camps, thinking about camps. Even more impossible: to realize – at seven years old, in 1989 – that in twenty years there would be six million people in UNHCR camps; that considered globally, there would be twelve million people in a thousand refugee camps, and that the temporary arrangements of the camp have become a permanent fate for millions. 2. Camps exist in the space between things; they are the orderly spaces that hold together the chaos caused by people passing through worlds. During initiation, the youth of the Nuer, a Nilotic people resident in what is now Southern Sudan, used to be secluded from society – the passage from boy to man was a dangerous time of uncertainty, to be spent in camps, away from parents and family. In Purity and Exile, Liisa Malkki’s study of Burundian refugees at a Tanzanian camp, she sketches out a world in which the Hutu who fled Burundi were treated like children without history by the UNHCR; neither Tanzanian nor Burundian, the refugees remained outside national categories, and in so being, threatened them. The UNHCR attempted to create an ideology of the camp, replete with UNHCR banners and parade-ground marches. 3. I can remember the day I went back to camp. 2 March 2011. Militias were attacking army positions just ten kilometres north of where I was staying, and the bodies were piling up in a tent outside my door. That night, I needed a drink, and the only place one could get alcohol was in the United Nations camp. On my way there, I passed thousands of people fleeing south. Once inside, surrounded by containers arranged in a grid system, I sat, incredulous, as five UN employees, seemingly oblivious as to what was occurring just outside, exchanged jokes about ‘Polish sausage’ and planned nights out at the ‘Brazilian Bar’. During the earlier attacks in January, one particularly flippant nurse told me, she had not known anything until she received a call from her mother in New Zealand, who was concerned by what was happening, ‘and so’, she said, ‘I turned on the television, and watched with my mum’. The UN camp in Abyei, a contested area between Sudan and South Sudan, was heavily walled, with watchtowers manned by Zambian peacekeepers every two hundred metres or so. Inside, rigid lines of containers were aligned along concrete paths. UN employees would jog along the camp’s perimeter in the early evening, when the dry-season heat became bearable. There was volleyball and barbeques; I don’t think I would have been surprised if the UN announced they were to have treasure hunts in the forest, if it were not for the fact that their staff almost never left the base. With its mixture of nationalities, I sometimes think it is a miracle that the UN functions at all (to the extremely limited extent that it does, indeed, function). Part of its ability to create an identity for itself, like all camp civilizations, relies on its separation from the
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look at the resulting sketchbook with its series of landscapes, I noticed that independent of their variation, they all had that urgent stroke necessary to
get on paper what quickly would be getting out of sight. It made me think, as the hard urban inhabitant I am, that the condition of drawing quickly these landscapes was
world outside – unlike at summer camp, however, the outside world is precisely where the UN is attempting to intervene. The UN in Abyei felt very much like a summer camp, and had a correlative lack of success in the outside world: people had flings, drank expensive wine and never sat with the local people. Divorced from the world outside, as if on a reality-TV show, the intrepid contestants of UN-World found themselves united: all the talk there was not of Sudanese politics, but of who had slept with whom. Camps create particular types of ties. Their frenetic nature anticipates and acknowledges their temporariness. You can recreate yourself at camp, because you know it is virtually cost-free: summer comes to an end (or your lucrative UN contract finishes), and you are back home, amidst the solid weight of lived identities. Camp is wonderful only in comparison to home; a life lived forever at camp is a life of forced infantilism. 4. Accompanying Heathcott’s article, there is a photograph of children at a Farm Security Administration (FSA) camp in Robstown, Texas. They look suspicious – chastened – and the photograph is ambiguous as to whether they are shrinking from the bright light that pins them to the front wall of the bungalow, or from the photographer. The photograph itself is suspicious. Identical houses run in rigid rows alongside perfectly mowed lawns. Whilst the refugee camps I have visited do not have the same levels of material comfort evinced by the photograph of Robstown, they share a family resemblance. The architects of all such camps try and ensure that they are composed of neat lines and right angles. They are so orderly that, just as when one wanders around American suburbia, the mind always turns to the spectre of chaos that must haunt the minds of the architects to justify such stultifying order, and which, without such order, would spill out and turn it all to dust. UN workers talking to the civilians they are supposed to protect. Chaos. Children wandering off into the woods at summer camp. Chaos. Refugees heading for the city, and the prospect of employment. Chaos. 5. The passion for order in the camp is not simply intended to forge a new identity among its inhabitants; it is to make sure you do not go outside the camp. From summer camps to UN camps, those who go outside are treated with suspicion. Heathcott relates that part of the reason the FSA built camps for those displaced by drought was that they viewed self-built squatter camps with alarm, as an ‘ungovernable landscape full of moral and physical danger’. This is the story of every refugee camp and internally displaced peoples’ (IDP) camp since 1947. The refugee is to remain in camp: don’t work, don’t move – just accept the help we are going to give you. Just stay put and keep quiet. Barbara Harrell-Bond, amongst others, has tirelessly shown how disabling it is to simply receive in this fashion. Dadaab, in north- east Kenya, is the largest refugee camp in the world (though it is actually three camps). It shot into the news recently, as its population almost doubled in a year, rising to 510,000 by October 2011. The UNHCR said there is no more room in the camps, and the media filed endless stories about impoverishment and famine. What was less reported is that refugees are not eligible for humanitarian assistance if they elect to stay outside the camps. The camps make refugees visible – something that sends donor money to the UNHCR via the aforementioned media reports – and means they can be controlled. Dadaab has now existed for twenty years. In return for food handouts, refugees are prevented from building their own lives. Camps, which, in UNHCR-speak, should be an option of ‘last resort’, have created a permanent state of impermanence for millions around the world. 6. Before arriving in an unknown country, I ensure there is a hotel room waiting for me. In the confusion of a new place, white walls and clean sheets calm me. Later, I tell myself, there will be strange tents and street markets; for now, I will safely sink into anonymous oblivion. Camps, for both refugees and the internally displaced, are existentially akin to never leaving the hotel room. 7. The permanent state of the FSA camps, Heathcott writes, was impermanence – ‘they were momentary and ephemeral, much like the dust that drove people westward in the first place’. Today, this impermanence has gathered around it institutions, funding and millions of people who want to begin lives outside the order of the camp. The camp is not a place of politics. You are not able to work or to form communities. Life is given to you. And you wait. Wait for ration cards. Wait for food. Wait for the camp to end, and life to begin again. You wait. Joshua Craze Cairo
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Could I sit calmly and draw them slowly, detail over detail? Or is the rural landscape to broad for our urban eyes used to seeing through glimpses and in fragmented frames?
symptomatic of my relationship to the rural, it was in-between territory that connected two urban conditions I was heading from and into. Could I take my time to actually inhabit those landscapes?
rural urbanism
on site 27 spring 2012
contents
village roots Jason Price Joshua Craze David Murray Sarah Zollinger Miriam Ho
6 10 14 18 20
Village Vogue. Arjen van de Merwe, Malawi 2010 A Sketch for a Tent of the Future, Libya Pool Hall and Barbershop, Vilna, Alberta Barns, traces of rural Nova Scotia Fictional Terrain: Avonlea, Cavendish County, Prince Edward Island
troubled margins Dana Seguin and Christoper Katsarov Luna Corey Schnobrich Jane Wong and Saeren Vasanthakumar Isabelle Hayeur
34 50 82 86
Heritage Village, Markham, Ontario Private Dwelling in Public Space: Living on the Bulb, Albany, California Economic Spatial Trends at the Rural -Urban Border: Beijing Uprooted, a video
land marks Victor Munoz Sanz Louis Helbig Heather Asquith
4 23 28
ResEx: the entropic landscape of the Amazon Basin The Lost Villages on the banks of the St Lawrence Seaway Holland Marsh: the 5-acre plot
the north Louis Helbig Lisa Hirmer Shannon Wiley Piper Bernbaum and Fraser Plaxton
43 45 64 68
Oil Sands Margin notes from Fort MacMurray Vanishing Land: Shishmaref, Alaska Arctic Spine: a programmatic utility corridor, Inuvik
company towns Victor Munoz Sanz
32 36 39
Batawa, the model town Sudbury Incontrovertible Hirshhorn, Ontario, 1956
Kenneth Hayes Terence Gower
discovering the rural Michael Taylor and Nicole la Hausse de Lalouviere Jeff Schnabel Ilona Hay Leigh Sherkin
53 48 72 74
Urban Friends in Rural Places: Copenhagen’s allotments Rural Life with Urban Networks: Hardy County, West Virginia Riots, Religion and Urban Communities: Kentish Town, London Urban Ruralism: food and cities
discovering the urban Lisa Dietrich Thomas Kohlwein
76 79
Village Dreams: Bad Laasphe’s Altstadtfest, Germany Bruck an der Mur, Austria
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projects Ivan Hernandez Quintela
56 58 61
RIA: anticipating ruin in Mexico’s political landscapes Earth House, Glass House, Cave: Naramata BC Askew’s, Salmon Arm, British Columbia
Allen + Maurer Allen + Maurer
other stuff Stephanie White calls for articles masthead
2 87 88
Rural notes, peripheral thoughts on site 28: sound, on site 29: geology, on site 30: ethics and publics who we all are
rural. early 15c., from O.Fr. rural (14c.), from L. ruralis ‘of the countryside’, from rus (gen. ruris ) ‘open land, country’. ‘In early examples, there is usually little or no difference between the meanings of rural and rustic, but in later use the tendency is to employ rural when the idea of locality (country scenes, etc.) is prominent, and rustic when there is a suggestion of the more primitive qualities or manners naturally attaching to country life.‘ —Oxford English Dictionary
this issue editorial thoughts | living in the periphery by stephanie white
The world is more urban than it is rural, migration to cities offers more employment, more opportunity and more social mobility than the small towns and villages in rural hinterlands. However, such towns and villages still hold much of the character and identity associated with national cultures. It is a paradox, but the past, often pre-urban, contains much potent imagery. As well, usually connected with resource extraction, new towns are being designed. Some rely on traditionally centred models, others on network systems, still others on new sustainable distribution of energy and resources. Some, like Kitimat designed in 1965 by Clarence Stein, skipped over both town and city and went straight to suburb. This issue of On Site review began with two things: one was the announcement that there would be a new town built in north-east Alberta to accommodate the thousands of workers and families needed for the oil sands. What was it going to look like? We started a loose project to set out the terms by which one would design a new town in the 21st century, which got bogged down in discussions of whether one should build at all in the oil sands. The other was a visit to the Canadian Centre for Architecture and the George Hunter archives, mostly commissioned aerial photographs of company towns made during the 1950s and 60s. His was an urban eye; his towns sat in a picturesque, rather than an instrumental, relationship with their surroundings. In Hunter’s photographs, raw little settlements ‘nestle’ in their topography, rather than interrupting it. The metropolitan view embedded the peripheral economy and resource-extraction processes into the landscape long before the actual houses and production plants themselves settled into either the landscape or the culture. • If one looks at a small town through a metropolitan lens, it is inevitably found to be crude, or under-developed, or misleadingly nostalgic. The urban gaze tries to recognise its own reality in small towns, which often develop with completely different ambitions. It is possible that rural urbanism is conceived of, enacted and understood in a profoundly different way from metropolitan urbanism. It is not just a smaller version. What would it mean to develop a reflexive lens from the periphery itself, through which we can view settlements in the periphery? This would upset the core-periphery tradition whereby raw resources are extracted in some benighted, but beautiful, hinterland, transported to the core which adds value and then exported back, as consumer products, to the periphery. The past fifty years of decolonisation have been just such an upset, but not, apparently, in the discussion of architecture and urbanism. With the contributors to this issue alone, many of whom grew up in very small places, the core has absorbed them and their energy, much to the benefit of the core, leaving the periphery bereft. Behind the small town/big city discussion of opportunities, there is a darker background. The rural-urban divide is made much of in our political culture, inevitably pitting a powerful conservative rural lobby, against a liberal educated urban critical mass which holds on to most of the media. It is a pathologised
swhite
above: study image from the CCA: George Hunter. Community for Wesfrob Mine,Tasu, Queen Charlotte Islands, BC, 1965 below:Tasu was an iron and copper open pit, an underground mining operation and townsite on the south shore of Tasu Sound in west-central Moresby Island in the Queen Charlotte Islands. This view is of the townsite as seen from the pit, about 1978. The mine was closed in 1985. bottom:Tasu townsite, 2005
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Jody Goffic
dialectical relationship, a war which extends into the centre of government, each side stereotyped and stigmatised. Rather than thinking of the small prairie town, say, as an iconic Who Has Seen the Wind sort of place, increasingly it is seen as somewhere like Meyerthorp: violent and lethal. For any young architect who has gone home, tried to make a go of it in their own small town and came up against boosterish town councils who, when pressed will always seek an architect from the largest city they can afford, rather than anyone local, this is the periphery in action. For those who are sticking to it and making a place for architecture in rural Canada, they deserve our attention. • It has been 50 years since Andre Gunder Frank wrote about dependency and underdevelopment, and Immanuel Wallerstein wrote about world systems theory, in response to the complexity of decolonisation of what was then known as the third world, a peripheral condition certainly, to the first world. The outline of core-periphery relations revealed that the ‘core’, which felt it was the only source of knowledge and power, knew very little about the rest of the world, which knew other things . The sense that there can be any sort of arbitration by any sort of core authority to convey legitimacy, the basic tenet of colonialism, was demolished by Wallerstein and a generation of Latin American theorists of the 1960s. Historically, yes, it happened, but it is not necessary to continue in this relationship. I feel I have to explain this because of the debate over the title to this issue of On Site review – whether to use the word rural , or peripheral . The relationship between town and country is not new; even I’ve been writing about it since the 1980s, however always writing from an architectural periphery: Canada, then western Canada, then outside academia. Nonetheless, in architecture, the periphery is often considered to be dominated by some sort of risible rural vernacular, outside contemporary architectural discourse. The core-periphery relationship, including the semi-periphery, and peripheries within the core, and cores outside both world cities and core economies, the rise of the BRIC (the old semi-periphery), the faltering of the Eurozone (the old core) – the basic relationship of core to periphery is often critiqued today without understanding that at root, it itself is a critique of assumptions of power and hegemony. • Canada has a curious relationship with its hinterlands. Rural is not a word to apply to northern Ontario, that is the bush. Rural Nova Scotia refers to the valley and some of the ocean edges, the rest is the barrens. Rural Quebec is thought of as the Townships, not the Shield. Rural British Columbia consists of small towns in the valleys between mountain ranges, the rest is either the coast or the mountains. Clearly ruralness is habitable land, preferably something to do with agriculture, rather than logging or mining. And despite official city status, living in the rural City of Red Deer is quantitatively and qualitatively different from living in the City of Vancouver, and it is not just the weather. –
‘Andean silletero carrying a European across the Cordillera. from Le Tour du Monde, Paris 1879.’ Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes:Travel Writing and Transculturation . Routledge, 1992
We were once supposed to identify with the effete, bored, idle tourist who couldn’t climb a mountain; the poor sod lugging him was without character, resigned to his task. A basic understanding of civil rights must kick in here: now we consider the silletero, his culture, where he lives, how he lives. To do otherwise is inconceivable. Qualities of the core, our wealthy, literate tourist: controlled, known, exploitative. Qualities of the periphery, our silletero: exotic, wild, lawless, potentially dangerous, exploitable. So, considering the rural as a territory full of history, alliances, geological rhythms, considerable wealth and a powerful sense of independent development misinterpreted by more developed urban cultures, what do we find?
Above and below: the top figure is carried, enabled, allowed and protected by the bottom one.
Calgary, top, and Fort McMurray, below
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My thanks to Jason Price, Kenneth Hayes and Thomas-Bernard Kenniff with whom I discussed this rural/peripheral dilemma.
Brant Ward
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