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CounterpointCaroline Bos
Hello Stranger
pHenomenology and topograpHy of tHe megaCity
Caroline Bos of UNStudio counters the city theme of this issue
of 3 with the spectre of the megacity. The very recent emergence
and scale of the Asian megacity, she argues, requires a very
different architectural treatment to the European or North American
metropolis. It is one that should be understood through an
experiential approach that brings to the fore spatial and visual
relations between people, and people and things, asking, for
instance, how so many strangers can be so visibly at home in public
urban space.
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When considering the contemporary relationship between
architecture and the city, the first thing to note is the
significant emergence of the megacity a new and unparalleled urban
event. Whereas in 1950 New York City was the only urban area with
over 10 million inhabitants, there are now 26 megacities of which
only four are in North America and Europe.1 The megacity cannot,
moreover, simply be seen as just a larger version of the older
metropolis. Many classical metropolitan configurations with a long
evolutionary history in European culture, such as the market
square, the church, and so on are not endogenous to an Asian
megacity. This Counterpoint thus brings a focus on the megacity as
a foil to the main theme of this issue that presents the urban,
whether metropolis or megacity, as a singular entity that is
ostensibly a site for architectural inspiration and
experimentation. It not only acknowledges that the megacity
requires a different interpretation to the European or North
American metropolis, but proposes that we try to understand the
megacity first and foremost through the way in which it is
experienced, and only secondarily attempt to uncover where the
architectural challenge or potential might be located. The
subjective experience is chosen as the key issue because this is
the one binding factor in a vastly intricate system of countless
named and unnamed parameters making up the urban constellation. The
first question that needs to be answered is, therefore: how are the
experiences of the people in the megacity constituted?
In his famous essay The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903), Georg
Simmel defined mutual strangeness as the essential metropolitan
condition.2 In order to survive as individuals within their
oppressive milieu, the inhabitants of
the metropolis seek inner refuge. Resistance, repulsion, even
aversion are the natural state of mind of the city dweller. The
text evokes an endless crowd of hostile individuals shuffling past
each other while carefully avoiding any form of contact or
engagement. Besides being dismal, Simmels portrayal is also
familiar; this is how the Modernist, industrial European metropolis
generally was understood and represented in the early 20th
century.3 Phenomenology was the basis for that depiction;
philosophically, life in the city was addressed by describing and
analysing the subjective effects of moving through the city on a
persons sensory consciousness.4 Studying the experiential quality
of the megacity, just as in the Modernist image, entails a focus on
the subjective perceptions of people in movement.
Today, partly inspired by Bruno Latour,5 I would propose an
emphasis that moves away from social relations and their effect on
the individual psyche towards visual and spatial relations and
their effect on connective faculties. Put concisely, the
phenomenological approach outlined in this essay is less about
social expectations and sociability, and more about visibility.
This visibility involves objects and structures too, as the
carriers and enablers of visual and spatial connections. The
proposed contemporary phenomenology thus addresses the spatial and
visual relations between both people, and people and things,
resulting in what can be described as a phenomenological
topography. The specific factors being addressed are strangeness
and estrangement. The process of urbanisation has currently
resulted in 26 megacities or megacity regions in the world. Each
accommodates huge cohorts of strangers,6 for if the metropolis is
full of people
Men gaming in an old lane while wearing pyjamas, Shanghai,
2000below: At the time of the Expo 2011 in Shanghai, the Chinese
authorities worked to eradicate public pyjama wearing. But the
intimate apparel, worn while shopping, eating out or playing a
game, provides an incomparable illustration of the extent to which
an inhabitant can feel at home in a megacity.
Hairdressing salon in Nigerian market, 2003opposite: Colourful,
social and at times subversive, street life in Asia and Africa
should not be idealised. Street life does, however, provide events
and makes daily life visible in the megacity.
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who are as unfamiliar with each other as they are with their
surroundings, the megacity is infinitely more so. Almost half of
those living in Mumbai, for instance, are (more or less) new
arrivals. This megacity is estimated to have a population of over
20 million, more than double the size of 20 years ago, an increase
that is mainly due to migration and urbanisation.7 The simultaneous
territorial development and the growth of mobility have resulted in
a temporal expansion of the public territory. The city user
regularly spends hours at a time amidst strangers. This is a global
phenomenon that affects megacities in particular. Yet spending so
much time with masses of strangers in public space has not
necessarily resulted in a proportional increase in urban angst.
People living in the urbanised, professionalised and monetised
world have developed a new sense of being at home in public urban
space, which can be coupled to another, much older, visceral sense
of being at home in a natural environment. The sensory experience
of being in movement and of spending time in in-between places is
as familiar and recurrent as being in a single place, if not more
so. Even, although difficult to quantify, in some ways this
transient urban space offers greater continuity and stability than
other worklife spaces. The territory between the places that are
privately owned and demarcated for private use, the territory of
transportation, and of public life, is always there, whereas the
constancy of the home and workplaces is being eroded.8 We can
therefore question whether alienation marks the megacity in the
same way as it did the metropolis.
Among the immense differences between the metropolis
and the megacity, one of the most prominent is that the crowd
image has traditionally been far less bleak in the latter. Public
pyjama-wearing is an indication of the extent to which the people
of Shanghai feel at home in their megacity.9 The informal
occupation of public space is something that characterises life in
the megacity and contrasts noticeably with the metropolitan
phenomenology. In todays megacities, street life, while
disappearing or transforming fast, in those places where it
survives is still manifestly diverse, unrestrained, seditious,
vibrant and engaging.10 There is no anomie in it. Wuhan in 2012 is
not at all like Berlin in 1913. The inhabitants of the megacity do
not perceive the looks of strangers as antagonistic, nor do the
built structures surrounding them infringe upon their
individuality. This is helped by the fact that the relationship
between the private and the public is less immutable than in the
metropolis, which is all black and white; the arena for an
existential struggle of individual against mass.
The large amounts of time spent in public space in the megacity
are striated by all manner of visual and spatial structures. Street
life in the Asian megacity, as in its African counterparts,
involves continuous movement, but also many places where a specific
job is carried out in public: barbershops, tailors, canteens and
miscellaneous vendors of small goods all provide visual and spatial
punctuations within the flow. Thus, many small events occur that
provide structure to the phenomenological topography and that
impact upon the urban experience. In the megacity, with its ambient
street life galvanised by private events and transactions,
perception
Alison and Peter Smithson, Golden Lane Competition,
Street-in-the-Air, 1952With the street in the air concept, the
architects Alison and Peter Smithson wanted to stimulate
sociability within the high-rise condition. Due to confusion as to
whether this terrain was public or private, the anticipated
liveliness was never realised. Limited spatial and visual
connections and the confined nature of the streets significantly
contribute to the lack of public accessibility that results in a
private terrain.
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continuously slips from anonymity to disclosure. It is this
slippage that makes the megacity livable. The mini-events are
performed by connector-actors that change the focus of the
observant passer-by. Alain Badiou defines event as a type of
rupture which opens up truths.11 In this context, that means that
the connector-actors orchestrate small phenomenological
revolutions; all of a sudden the anonymity and distancing vastness
of the city is broken up. As we see human life in close-up, it
reminds us where we are; this megacity is, after all, an everyday
place where everyday life is taking place. The strangers around us
are shown up to be just like us.
This perceptional structuring does not play a role in Simmels
account; he, and other authors of the modern condition describe a
sweeping uniformity that is virtually unbroken by particular
details or moments. The Modernist metropolitan perception is
characterised by a linear, forward flow. Human motion resembles a
procession, the gaze is confined by blank walls that direct and
restrict the vision. The Modernist topography is one of straight
lines and limited perspectives. Unlike in a landscape, people move
through it as if their necks were screwed in place and their eyes
unable to roll; everything is always about only what is straight in
front of them. The reality of ambulatory vision means,12 however,
that the optical array encompasses a vastly wider range. Visual
perception includes being able to move towards things and walk
around them, thereby gaining an all-around view of objects. The
gaze can be focused or widened, continuous or diffracted. Even
without moving the head, the ambient vision reaches much further
than just pictorial depth vision.
Street life in the Asian megacity, as in its African
counterparts, involves continuous movement, but also many places
where a specific job is carried out in public: barbershops,
tailors, canteens and miscellaneous vendors of small goods all
provide visual and spatial punctuations within the flow.
UNStudio, slippage diagram, 2012Mini-events in the shape of
people or things disclose moments of particularity within the flow
of continuity.
UNStudio, horizontal diffraction diagram, 2012Spending much time
on the move, the inhabitants of the megacity experience their
environment through ambulatory vision. Other people and objects
cause shifts in focal array, diffracting the linearity of the
Modernist gaze.
UNStudio, vertical diffraction diagram, 2012The connector-actors
of street life broach the vertical. The challenge for architecture
is to provide events that diffract the gaze and provide visual and
spatial connections as the megacity grows taller.
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The limited perceptions offered by Modernist architecture also
impinged on the introduction of street life in the architecture of
the 1950s and 1960s, even as it endeavoured to broach the vertical.
The street in the air, originally conceived by Alison and Peter
Smithson in 1952, was intended to bring street life to the tower
block, albeit a rather sedate residential version of it, featuring
prams and postmen and neighbourly chat. But due to the poor visual
range it provided, the envisaged sociability never took off. The
narrow linear horizontality of the modern street, lined by a
straight wall on one side and an inaccessible vacuum on the other,
did not provide adequate ambulatory variations, or vertical or
diagonal connections.
The question now, as we finally arrive at the relation between
architecture and the megacity, is: how can a new architecture do
any better? This necessarily brief examination of the
phenomenological topography of public life in the megacity has
focused mainly on the perceptions produced by street life. These
can be summed up as slippage and diffraction. Slippage occurs when
private moments interrupt the public flow; diffraction concerns the
break of the visual field away from the linear, horizontal
perspective of Modernism. Slippage lets us discover the human
reality within the crowd of strangers through the events performed
by connector-actors. As mentioned above, these need not take human
form alone. Street life pertains to the relations between people,
but also between people and things, and people and their
environment. Diffraction is the visual mechanism that enables us to
experience slippage; the gaze is allowed to move
around freely and may fasten to the event taking place in the
distance. The ambulatory vision can equally incur in events near,
far, above, below, across; the spatial environment is designed to
stimulate a full visual spectrum.
The challenge now is to instrumentalise this expanded perceptual
understanding and make it resonate with an equally expanded urban
topography. Architecture can play a vital role in this. As the
megacity is sanitised, expanded and transformed according to
globally normative standards, street life may survive in a new
form, adapting to a changing environment, as long as its vital
mechanisms are recognised and adequately reworked. New solutions
for the structures within megacities must be based on an approach
that is focused on improving the connections between people and
structures in the city, taking into account changes occurring
through mobility and time. The crux of this Counterpoint argument
lies in the conviction that these new solutions will not emerge
from architects seeking to understand architecture in structural or
megastructural ways alone. The complex constellation of the
megacity must be envisioned above all through the lens of its
inhabitants, making phenomenological topography the prime
consideration for architectural design. 2
UNStudio, Burnham Pavilion, Millennium Park, Chicago, 2009below:
UNStudios temporary pavilion elaborated on the orthogonal setup of
the city and park grid in response to Daniel Burnhams iconic
masterplan of 100 years ago. Burnhams diagonal boulevards are
extended by three roof openings that frame vertical views of the
city skyline.
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Notes1. If the megacity is defined as an urban agglomeration of
over 10 million people, there are currently some 26 megacities, of
which almost half are in Asia. Source:
www.city-infos.com/megacity/.2. Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and
Mental Life, Dresden, 1903, trans:
www.blackwellpublishing.com/content/BPL_Images/Content_store/Sample_chapter/0631225137/Bridge.pdf.3.
Other famous examples of urban dystopia: TS Eliot, The Waste Land,
1922; Ernst Ludwig Kirchners paintings of Berlin street scenes of
the 1910s (see: Deborah Wye, Kirchner and the Berlin Street, Museum
of Modern Art (New York), 2008; Fritz Langs celebrated film
Metropolis, 1927.4. Louis Wirth, Urbanism as a Way of Life,
American Journal of Sociology, 1936.5. Bruno Latour, Reassembling
the Social: An Introduction to ActorNetwork Theory, Oxford
University Press (Oxford), 2007.6. Simmel describes a stranger as
the person who comes today and stays tomorrow his position in the
group is determined, essentially, by the fact that he has not
belonged to it from the beginning. Georg Simmel, The Stranger, in
Kurt Wolff (trans), The Sociology of Georg Simmel, Free Press (New
York), 1950.7. Mumbai Human Development Report, 2009:
http://passthrough.fw-notify.net/download/250107/http://mhupa.gov.in/W_new/Mumbai%20HDR%20Complete.pdf;
www.indiaonlinepages.com/population/mumbai-population.html.8. See,
for instance, Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The
Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, WW Norton
& Company (New York), 1998.9. Gao Yubing, The Pajama Game
Closes in Shanghai, The New York Times, 16 May 2010:
www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/opinion/17gao.html.10. Michael Dutton,
Streetlife China, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge), 1998. 11.
Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans Oliver Feltham, Continuum (New
York), 2005. 12. The term ambulatory vision derives from JJ Gibson,
The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates (Boston, MA), 1979.
Text 2012 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 136(t) James
Marshall/Corbis; p 136(b) Inga Powilleit; p 137 Fritz Hoffmann/In
Pictures/Corbis; p 138 Smithson Family Collection/Centre Pompidou,
MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN/Jean-Claude Planchet/Georges Meguerditchian; p
139 UNStudio; pp 1401 Christian Richters
UNStudio, Atrium, Galleria Centercity, Cheonan, South Korea,
2010Surrounding the central atrium of the Galleria Centercity,
rounded plateaus provide light and views both within the central
space and to the exterior. As the plateaus are positioned in a
rotational manner, they enable the central space to encompass
way-finding, vertical circulation and orientation, and act as the
department stores main attractor.
The complex constellation of the megacity must be envisioned
above all through the lens of its inhabitants, making
phenomenological topography the prime consideration for
architectural design.
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