Working in the field of micro-urbanism
Tools and experiences
v1.3

Geir Cock, architect, teacher BAS

Container shelters
When the sun came out in springtime I used to leave my apartment. I walked down a couple of blocks and found myself a shelter between the containers on the quayside. Here I could enjoy my own private space a sunny afternoon, overlooking the harbour, and relaxing with a book in my hand. This was my own city-park, not planned by any architect or regulation, but still one of the highly appreciated qualities in the urban space where I lived my life. This space offers different layers of qualities known to different users. And it just shows how any landscape or man-made townscape is interpreted differently.

Today this quiet action between the containers is prohibited. After the attacks on the Manhattan twin towers all ports worldwide have been sealed off, secured and guarded by fences, and monitored by cameras. All men are possible terrorists, and we have been put under control.

Forces of planning
Events, like the 9/11-attacks or the tsunami in south-east Asia, can influence our lives everywhere. Not because of the pictures we are presented to through television and other media, but because society react by changing strategies. The tsunami-effect might introduce fear of new destructive waves. This again leads to planning to secure ourselves and to protect infrastructure from suffering from such strong forces again. But in the shadow of these major events people live, love, fight and die in their own dramatic lives. These everyday-events are governed by social structures and in a space created without thought for these lives. This is not done out of lack of knowledge, but just as well because the plural society and the small scale development is not recognized as a driving force in the urban or global scale.

Ti-Nan Chi describes this in his “Introduction to Micro-urbanism”. Globally and locally there are forces which are stronger than any master-plan. What is the role of architects planning in such a situation? Are they lost in this chaos or do they find tools to manage?

Chi mentions how forms and design itself can be seductive, and how this not always are the tools to solve basic human needs. In a world where a tsunami can erase 300.000 people from the surface of the earth within hours, or where millions are infected by HIV, leaving only the children behind, new design demands more than creating something beautiful. What are the real needs for people, rich or poor?

Every society is often much more varied and plural than it might seems by first sight. The architect can be an adventurer into these structures and meanings hidden in our surroundings. Just by studying the space of a car in motion or the process of personal dating in front of a computer screen, more and more layers can be unfolded. This can give a better impression of the state of the contemporary world, and most important, the architect can be able to give better physical solutions.

The tools
Chora is a London based group working with tools to manage complex urban challenges. I met the Chora-architect Raoul Bunschoten when I was a student at the Bergen School of Architecture (BAS) in 1996. He introduced us to his both poetic and scientific way of analysing and creating strategies for architectural development. Through the filter of 4 words it was possible to uncover new layers of knowledge, and tell personal stories within a global setting. We worked with him in Iceland on the edges of the urban structure of Reykjavik. This was in an area where there was a conflict between the expansion of the city structure and a valuable nature-resort. Within one week we were able to be architects working for the polar-fox, the Reykjavik-Keflavik Airport link, the huge aluminium-factory, the freshwater-springs and the international artists centre. All these were polarities in a wheel of interests, but still very good fieldwork training for even more complex urban conditions.

I invited Raoul Bunschoten back to Bergen the spring of 2004 to give a workshop together with my own students. This time 4 new words were introduced:

Branding: How does a place present itself?
Earth: The physical appearance of a place?
Flow: What comes in or out? What happens on the site, visible or invisible?
Incorporation: How is the place owned, which laws or rules decides the behaviour on the site?

These 4 words would together give the example of a prototype. A prototype is an accepted way of doing something, either it is a villa with a green lawn, a roundabout or an airport.

The architects role within these settings is to question these prototypes, invent and test new ones, maybe even by combining the existing ones. This is tested in the scenariogame, as 4 participants representing each of the 4 words gather around one table. The game starts as one of them introduces their vision or new prototype. Then the others have to react to this with their theme in mind. This is how a new strategic vision is developed.

In the course City Images, Bergen was the field of investigation. A big map was introduced, and by dropping coloured pearls on the map we could choose random points in the urban structure to investigate further. Within 24 hours several hundred prototypes were collected from around the city, each prototype represented by the 4 describing words. This information was presented on a wall, and an experiment was done when we connected words with similar meaning to each other physically with a thread. Suddenly very different prototypes could be found in the same category, as they i.e. were owned by the same company, or they could have the same physical appearance being a nature resort or a military training-field.

In the scenariogame all these elements were combined with the project the students already were working on in the course. Now they could introduce their plans over the table and test them in the light of their new knowledge.

This was taken further in the course at BAS where I took part as a teacher the autumn 2005. In a workshop in Hamar the students could test these methods introduced in a scale of a town. But this time they were also to co-operate with pupils from the local schools. Together with children and teenagers they did the pearl-dropping on the map, before they went out in the field to gather information about the prototypes represented in the town.

The next step was to present their new knowledge about Hamar in one of the squares in the city. This was also an architectural task, rearranging the square, and by their new tools changing the contents of the prototype “square”. The change could be done only by adding something, and it had to give new meaning to the place.

The branding given to the square was “transit”. People just crossed the square on their way to somewhere else. Some of the locals could tell about better days on the square before they had turned it into the roof of a parking-house, and before they had built the new building facing the square with its green-coloured glass.

The students introduced a new landscape on the square, with elements in a more down to earth human scale, platforms, new materials, wood and textiles, and a gallery of “postcards” from their own fieldwork. The place was turned into a playground with walls to climb and new viewpoints. People found edges to sit down, and when groups gathered there were natural places to speak as for listening. The students had as responsible architects reinvented the square from an urban desert to a city-oasis.

Micro urbanism feat. the study of dynamic processes
Ti-Nan Chi introduces micro-urbanism as a strategy in a world where planners sometimes seem to have lost control, or they might be found in the hands of the wrong people. People are living more and more under conditions where they feel the loss of control. The scale of the processes in their surroundings makes them uncontrollable. People are often reduced to consumers or users. Rarely they get the chance to legally make a change. But changes do take place and might happen in the voids of the urban structure. The leftovers, areas where old industry is leaving, or the huge spaces found connected to road-systems and bridges. Even roofs are voids where people find space to live their lives. The skateboard-generation is a clear example of how urban-space have been reinvented. No-one reads the city more as a landscape then a skateboarder looking for a challenge. After decades living on the edge of what is accepted in the city new parks are being built to offer the ultimate skateboard-landscapes.

But not all actions are visible enough to be turned into an accepted social activity with built facilities. Drug-abuse, prostitution, gay-cruising or more innocent actions are rarely given space through planning. This lack of recognition leads to never-ending conflicts, with people constantly living on the run, or at least on the move.

Only by a conscious recognition of all aspects in urban life will we be able to read the city by all of its contents. Raoul Bunschoten has introduced to me and my students one way to read the complexity of society easier. Through the filter of some very open words we are able to read contexts, movements of energy or objects, physical appearance and the system behind. Students in Bergen are also taught a more open approach to a place, to read its atmosphere or to bring him- or herself closer to the situation through individual actions in the space. Together with the methods delivered from Chora, the students will be able to develop both poetic and scientific tools for working in a large urban scale with the strategy of micro-urbanism.