Urban Fiction Toolbox #1: Urbanism 3.0

by ATR

There is no doubt that the ongoing financial crisis will have a negative impact on spending on urban research. Alternatively, the current impasse of real-estate may present an opportunity for urbanists (scholars as well as practitioners) to contemplate and develop new practices that would enrich urban studies and empower local communities. In this article we present the examples of two Urban Art Interventions (UAIs) that were part of two different research projects carried out in the Helsinki-Tallinn region over the past four years... read more: http://www.presstletter.com/articolo.asp?articolo=2013
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Cityleft - Urbanism 3.0
http://www.cityleft.altervista.org/

City…form north-Europe -> an Urban Fiction

by AgaTino Rizzo

After three months “City…from north-Europe” change skin to become a more complete and independent column dealing with urban culture, architecture, and public space not only in “north-Europe”. Therefore we changed the name in "an Urban Fiction".

Our early issues are still valid: support the making of the PresS/Tletter an international platform, provide a new “oblique” point of view in the current practice of urbanism, for instance.

In UF, however, we will focus also in emergent urban lifestyles, new technologies, new political horizons, and we will try to stimulate a trans-disciplinary debate on urban research.

We are working to structure UF around at least three issues:

1. UF-Kosovo: focus on an emergent European country;
2. UF-City: urban research and practices;
3. UF-Toolbox: new practical, theoretical, and political horizons after the current financial crisis.

Today we have an incredible opportunity to re-think cities and development. The crisis shows even to the most proud architect the limits on conceiving cities as space to be filled (a brutal masculine practice). Therefore we should call for a social involvement. It will be a shift from a scientific professionalism to a fuzzy social practice. That’s the last chance to make urban researchers and practitioners useful for the world.

I hope UF will be able to go beyond cities, perhaps investigating what’s going on in a more than ever forgotten country-side, and pointless rhetoric.

The aim of this space is to create tools capable to affect the most urgent global emergencies: social segregation and economic polarization.

You find UF at this link: http://www.presstletter.com/storico.asp?s=An+Urban+Fiction

* UF is also in facebook (link)

Archipelago City. A trans-national metropolis in the Baltic Sea

by Bauhaus Kolleg IX*

In 2007/2008, the Border Cities Kolleg, facilitated by the Germany-based Bauhaus Dessau Foundation [1], brought together an international group of young planners, architects, artists and urbanists to explore the complex dynamics of trans-national urbanism in the Baltic Sea Region. Within this framework our group came together to consider the cities of Helsinki and Tallinn as a case of self-made trans-national metropolis in EU. Our research tested the notion of an integrated regional identity formation as desired by region makers to determine whether this model, or alternate emergent forms better describe the situation of the Helsinki-Tallinn-Region (HTR). The cross border effects as well as historical pre-conditions manifest in the urban fabric of Tallinn appeared to us as an archipelago of ‘islands’, each with different economic, social, and cultural milieus; segregations overlooked or under considered by city planners and administrators. The model of the archipelago also created an inverse space between these hegemonic ‘islands’ where new inputs can enrich HTR’s diversity. These latter hypotheses were tested in Tallinn through a series of public interventions in May 2008, concluding with a discussion between city planners, architects, art critics and general public. The outcome led to following proposals developed within our program as a series of experimental urban scenarios dealing with Tallinn’s urban structure seen as an archipelago of islands, a social segregation process and new strategies to enable both stakeholders and inhabitants to influence the future of HTR.

Start: a Development Strategy for the Urban Landscape
The project ARCHIPELAGO CITY draws on the structural potentials of the city itself for future urban development [2]. The project uses landscape elements for a determined process-oriented development strategy, tightly linked to the upcoming contemporary planning issue of landscape urbanism theorized especially in North America and more often already successfully practiced in Europe. The project begins with an analysis of the urban fabric looking for specific demands regarding topics such as population density, typological supply of open spaces, hierarchization and stigmatization and structural issues. From this a map of zones with very specific combinations of problems was elaborated as a base on which to develop structural planning process addressing different issues in certain zones. As the most underprivileged urban islands identified through this elaboration fall together with the most stigmatized districts, the qualification of these urban areas to prevent segregation processes within the city seems the most necessary. The proposes of the project, exploring the possibilities of open space programs for urban qualification, uses three scales already existing in the city fabric as points to intervene – big areas with importance on city scale, inner qualification of urban islands, punctual interventions using also temporary strategies in an ever changing cityscape. On the city scale big potentials are stated for the open lands between the two islands of Lasname leading to the cliffs and the abandoned quarry next to it and the abandoned part of extreme natural beauty west of Kopli beach. Both would be in direct neighbourhood to densely populated areas such as Lasnamae, Mustamae and Vaike Oismae and bear the potentials of real improvement for life conditions in these districts when sensitively developed into recreational areas than building plots. From an inner qualification of urban islands with landscape elements should especially benefit areas with weak structures and a lack of identity such as Kopli and Tallinn’s inner areas. Punctual programmatic interventions would use transformation processes in industrial areas to create stepping stones between open space facilities and would temporarily use abandoned spaces indoor and outdoor to widen urban programs and serve as breeding grounds for future inventions. In three zooms into Lasnamae, Kopli and the Harbour area a possible step by step development process using landscape as leading element are sketched out. On an abstract level one can read the proposed new structure of the city as an archipelago of distinctive characteristic islands intersected with big bands and dots of natural or recreational areas and stepping stones of public open space between several units.

Two case of studies

Harbour (Sadama)
Based on the archipelago model of the city structure, the project focused on a singular fragment of the urban form, the Tallinn Harbour (Sadama). A zone where the cross-border effects plays out physically and transitions are taking place due to past and current happenings. The Sadama currently a topic of discourse is undergoing transformations, due to growing economies, dynamicities and requirements of a more open water front development. Presently the welcome gate to the city via the sea for 2 million passengers yearly who are greeted by spas, cheap shopping malls, industrial land, parking lots against the silhouette of a beautiful old city. [//] Over the course of the last years the gaining importance of this piece of the city remains in the custody of multiple owners each with their own agenda for the course of development. The idea of potential development is seen more as a marketing strategy than one of solving the city’s need of an operational shoreline, remaining a brown field between the city and the coast. In this project we explored the possibility of reconnecting a single fragment back to daily city life experimenting with the feasibility of having non-hierarchal structure and not taking into the preconceived notion of a master plan. To see development along lines of different ownership criteria, needs and relation to the city centre, under the light of changing social, political and economic conditions. It is an attempt to extend and re-configure the relationship between the city, the harbour and its user. Dividing the factors making the space into Ownership differences, Un-used spaces, Existing infrastructural lines and Centres of Activity, we decided not to look at them in isolation but overlapped them to give us a probable solution. Putting these elements on the same plane in an abstract manner lead to a possible redefinition of the space by generating a new fabric for the area in question, leaving our interventions to specific points. With effective and strategic development in certain zones of the harbour such as: green spaces for daily usages, public harbour activities along the shore, informal and formal cultural spaces and possible area for mixed housing usages, provided a partial solution to probable rehabilitation of the shore front.

Railway
The project OF ISLANDS AND BORDERS is a strategy for development and protection of areas in Tallinn using the city’s own characteristics. It essentially consists in assuming the “archipelago” structure as an existing quality of the city and taking its advantages to make urban planning, using its elements to work for the city, instead of against. The city’s train station area is the chosen case of study, where big transformations are suppose to take place in few years. This scenario leads to a rapid changing of the railway as an essential way of transportation for the city, and with it, the main train station and the area around it, where the pressure for development is going to be bigger than it is already starting to be now. Next to the train station, we find the Balti Jaam popular market and four small blocks of mixed area. Due to the lack of space, there will be no other option to the transnational space than invading and transforming Kalamaja´s urban fabric. To prepare Kalamaja for this transnational challenge, this project chooses to strength these two in-between areas – the Balti Jaam market and the four blocks, making of them two new islands and using them as buffer zones. These two buffer zones will block the natural way of development and push them into a big and empty rail yard area, where the new transnational space is now going to take place.

Transit. This Too Shall Pass
This project concerns two case studies of urban transformation: Makasiinit in Helsinki and Baltijaam market in Tallinn. These are spaces of transition, emerging in the 1990s during a period of rupture and shifting value in urban form. Located near rail stations, the post-industrial landscape offered great potential for experimentation and appropriation. The Makasiinit district in Helsinki was a warehouse area occupied by cultural producers as a production, exhibition and community space. Markets,concerts and other informal activities became increasingly popular here. The Baltijaam Market in Tallinn is home to an informal market, established in the transitional period following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Here various low priced goods and produce are available through market stalls and indoor spaces. Although located within different contexts, and operating with different patterns and users, several commonalities exist. Both areas grew out of local initiative, desire and necessity, and became important sites to enact culture and negotiate transitions. Now new desires and initiatives -if not necessities- have led to new visions for these places. In the case of Makasiinit, attempts by local users to challenge, and propose a new trajectory were unsuccessful to alter official plans, and users have now relocated to a new site. The future of the Baltijaam market is undetermined, but if the experience of Makasiinit is any indication, the shift promises to be very abrupt and distinct from current use patterns. Within these transitions, there is a significant loss of complexity and vitality in these places, one that cannot be easily replicated. This ongoing project seeks to bring together different perspectives of local users, planners and developers, to make the complexity and potential of both sites visible.

Plug&Plan. A New Model For Urban Centers
How long Tallinn will manage its urban growth without a proper dialogue among its stakeholders, is the question that those involved in planning are posing in the last few years. The regime of deregulation started at the eve of the Estonian’s independency has created several opportunities for economic and urban developments. However, this process is leading to a negative impact on the social structure as well as in the urban structure of Tallinn in terms of public space. From this starting point a project, metaphorically named PLUG&PLAN [3], has been developed. PLUG & PLAN consists of a network of Urban Centers (UCs) located in strategic areas around the city. PLUG&PLAN use this already existing ‘energy’ to enable residents to work together with local stakeholders in order to produce that open and shared knowledge essential in a mature metropolis (PLAN). PLUG&PLAN’s UCs are bound, temporary and easy to install. Bound because each UC addresses the problems of the area where it is located on. Temporary because at the beginning of the process a deadline is fixed beyond which the UCs are moved elsewhere. Easy to install because each UC is an inflated structure with a flexible topology which can fit in almost every urban situation. So far, PLUG&PLAN is a project of dialogue aimed to produce open, shared and updated knowledge still missing element in an otherwise competitive and equitable Finnish-Estonian trans-national region.

* this article has been published extensively in Maja (Estonian Architectural Review) n°4-2008 : “Local planning strategies in the frame work of european spatial policy” by Tomas Jonsson, Sukanya Krishnamurthy, Reinhard Micheller, Agatino Rizzo, Ricardo Santacruz, Filipe Santos de Souza.

Forthcoming Italian version in «Urbanistica», edited by Agatino Rizzo

[1] See: http://www.eu-urbanism-bordercities.de/

[2] http://www.rmicheller.net/archipelagocity.html

[3] http://www.cityleft.altervista.org/neworld/plug.htm

Graffiti is Dead... Long Live Graffiti!

by Michail Galanakis*

Art or vandalism? Creative expressions or signs of psychotic behaviour? The phenomenon of street art – graffiti, tagging, stencil – challenges our rights to public space. Depending on our social and ontological position, graffiti may be perceived as a creative outlet for those people whose oppressed imagination translates via spray-paint into a “voice.” Or it may be perceived as the visual littering of our public spaces, our walls, our cities. Manolis Andriotakis (2005) presents an equally littering source that has been normalised to the extreme: commercial advertisement.

The activities of bigger and smaller corporate capital, the high-rise of multinationals, the fortified civic buildings, the monstrous squares with surveillance cameras and constant policing, all these are the ideal occurrences of public space, while the modest drawings of a youngster are criminal acts, and decrease our freedom. The fact that there are whole areas inaccessible to citizens, and that our activities are monitored, is not oppressive. Oppressive is the youngster with the spray paint or the marker at hand. (Andriotakis 2005)[1]

We can contemplate on the legitimised and normalised docility that urbanites have to live with and the fact that clean and orderly public spaces still pervade the popular discussion on public participation and the right to the city. In doing so, we blindly disregard the colonisation of our cities by advertisements, pacifying consumerism, and soulless accumulation of wealth.

An interesting interpretation of street art is that the “author,” slave to the primordial instinct to territorialise, leaves his mark, pretty much like a dog. It is interesting how discourses about street art essentialise the masculine nature of urban guerrilla art-fare. “Those youngsters” are almost magically stereotyped as young men. Norman Mailer (1974) [2] in an essay he wrote on New York graffiti, talks of his informants; young men in the ghettos of the big city who wanted to break loose from the socio-spatial restrictions imposed on them by colouring the metallic carcass of subway trains. Mailer talks of a long gone era when graffiti and tagging were “shouts” from the ghetto sub-cultures.

Nowadays, street art in its variety can be seen as an artistic form of urban activism. It can also be seen as a “shout” against the individualism normalised and internalised, against the anonymity and alienation of public space and the public sphere. When only the legitimised rights of the state authorities and market interests define public space, a can of spray-paint, a sticker or a stencil, may be one way of protesting. These expressions litter our clean cityscape, they constitute visual noise and worth punitive measures and zero tolerance, for they are the voices of our dormant conscience, our child-like curiosity and our desire to open up closures. These “voices” may get expelled to virtual space, they may be hunted down for they offend our rights to be peacefully muted and passive; they nevertheless insist on reminding us what public space shouldn’t be: claimable by all (to turn on its head a statement by Erving Goffman) [3].

Helsinki 01.01.2009

* Doctor of Arts (Taik)

References
[1] Andriotakis, M. (2005). City Scethes [Σχέδια ΠÏŒλης ]. Athens: Nefelh. (in Greek)
[2] Mailer, N. (1974). The Faith of Graffiti. New York: Praeger. Also check: http://thefaithofgraffiti.blogspot.com/
[3] Goffman, E. (1972). Relations in Public. Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Goffman writes: “[…] public in the sense of being non-claimable.” (Goffman 1972, p.51)

Photo by Michail Galanakis Helsinki, 2009. Photo by Michail Galanakis

Lisbon, 2008. Photo by Michail Galanakis Athens, 2007.

Athens. Photo by Dimitris Theodosis - Menegos, P. & Theodosis, D. (2007). The Street Art in Athens. [Τοιχοδρομίες. Το Street Art στην Αθήνα. Vol.1]. Athens: OΞΥ. (in Greek)

Eindhoven, 2008. Photo by Michail Galanakis

Helsinki, 2009. Photo by Michail Galanakis

City…from North-Europe

by AgaTino Rizzo

This is a new "box" of contents which in the frame of this website will try to open a window on the North-European city. At the same time, this new column wants to achieve quite ambitious targets. continue...

islands lost at sea

Ferries are important devices in the Baltic Sea Region. Short-range cruises as well as cargoes in the last years have strengthen trans-nationals networks, providing workplaces for thousand people, being vectors for innovation, building identity in the Baltic region.

Cities should learn a lot from those devices. Perhaps, metropolises should fear a bit these mini-cities and, and because of that, they should try to establish partnerships to provide physical and social benefits for the urban space.

Many advantages could be achieved by moving further urban developments in these devices: competitiveness, preservation by urban-sprawl-developments of natural areas, a dynamic identity fitting the actual social needs, and a better involvement of private investors in social issues.

A new platform has been developed to investigate this non-urban phenomenon. It is avalaible at this URL: http://www.cityleft.altervista.org/ferry/ferry.htm

Intervention activities

Between Tallinn and Helsinki, a number of bonds are being formed, or enhanced, with the desire to establish an integrated region. but how much has this idea of a region played out in the reality of local inhabitants? Through our interventions we want to find out how much have these ideas relate to the desires and practices of local actors in this region. How do these visions relate, or conflict? what are the implications of either? are there other possibilities?

Metaphorically referring to the alco-tourism phenomenon, all projects feature alco-crates and carts in various combinations and forms. The economic relation is transformed into a social relation to explore this issue.

Our activities:

day 1: Kiosk:

A central base created out of crates as a portable platform, arranged along the lines of flow of people between the terminals at the harbor.

Intent: an understanding of the in between space as a space of relation set up in the the common space used by ferry passengers traveling to and from the city, we will find out what visions there are for such 'in between' spaces, and what kind of relations exist and are desired between the people of Tallinn and Helsinki.

Here we will test the notion of tallinn urban form as an archipelago of islands and in-between spaces. Postcards of the city in this spatial form will be available, encouraging people to understand the various parts of the city in different ways. there will also be a collection of desires of city development, redistributed as labels on water bottles. anyone who contributes a vision will receive another persons vision in exchange.

Gateway: addressing the concept of islands in Tallinn as centripical forces, a gateway made of beer crates will be setup in Tammsaare park between 'old' and 'new' towns. Populations of each 'town' will be tallied, and local users will be questioned about the different character of each space, and others in the city.


Day 2: Tallinn in transition

Visiting three different sites of urban and social transformation in Tallinn, these sites are:

Rottermann district, Balti Jaami Market, Uus Maailm Community.

We will bring elements of each site to the other, to understand the
differences and similiarities. Here we will also collect local users desires, to relate local perspectives to municipal and regional perspectives.

We can consider larger regional implications of development, and whether there are opportunities for regional strategies to address these concerns.

Events of the day will end in a dinner, discussion and video projection at the Uus Maailm district, on the corner of Suur-Amerika and Koidu tee.

Discussion:
what are the quality of these developments, what pressures are driving these, in particular, are there regional pressures? how do these relate to local desires and practices?

how do these transformations relate to developments in Helsinki? are there any useful comparisons and strategies to explore?


Day 3: harbour activation

A series of activities that explore the harbour area as a site of relation between Tallinn and Helsinki.

A beach party and performance in the city centre harbour area will address the relation of the city and the sea.

discussion: what are local desires for harbour development? how do these compare to official plans and regional development projects?


Tallsinki football!!! playing with the idea of ferry as a site of relation, how can this travel be reimagined? what are the goals? who wins? who loses? what are the rules????

Tunnel vision: much discussion has been had about a tunnel between tallinn and helsinki, but what are it's local effects? is it only a distribution access, or are there other ideas? come for dinner and discussion at the proposed site of the tunnel in Viimsi! (please contact us to confirm your attendance and transportation)