Between Philosophy and Urban Design: An Incompletable Field

Introduction

Between philosophy and urban design is an expanding, incompletable field; the relationship between philosophy and urban design need not be one where philosophy sits anteriorly to provide immutable concepts that are represented by a design object. This paper proposes that the philosophising event is immanent within the designing act, which can introduce new, unexpected spatio-temporal relations that compel the designer and her/his interlocutors to create new lines of thinking. Designing can produce philosophic dimensions, and even lead to new ways to conceptualise field philosophy itself.

The paper begins with a brief discussion on the use of philosophy when researching about and for design, then quickly moves to discuss philosophising-through-design, which will be further expanded by reflecting on the process of my co-supervision of an urban design PhD where dialogues within led to another way of doing and thinking urban design.

Philosophy and Urban Design’s many relations

Philosophy and urban design are difficult to define. With urban design, one can say it is the intersection of many disciplines such as town planning, architecture, landscape architecture, land economics, social welfare, housing studies, environmental studies, conservation, healthcare studies, etc. Depending on which of the above field is the disciplinary core of a project, the way urban design is defined varies.

Like urban design, philosophy resists one definition. Etymologically philosophia means a love for knowledge. But, the different approaches to questions like what is knowledge, what is knowing, as well as what are the processes that ought to be undertaken to gain knowledge open philosophy to many different specialised fields. For example, the two branches of philosophy – aesthetics and political philosophy – that many urban designers are familiar with can be variedly approached. Some may argue how some urban forms lead to feelings of wellness while other forms led to unpleasantness, are determined prior to social, cultural and political associations. With this interpretation, the love for knowledge is a love for uncovering what is already there. Others may argue that the feelings of wellness or unpleasantness may owe to acculturation within different social, cultural and political milieus. In this case, the love for knowledge may amount to investigating what forces created those particular sets of knowledge about wellness and illness. These different approaches to aesthetics and politics create different schools and milieus espousing different interpretations of the public good and commonwealth.

To elaborate the relationship between philosophy and design, architecture theorist Peter Downton’s writings on the relationship on “research about design”, “research for design”, and “research through design”[1] can be used to help map “philosophy about design”, “philosophy for design”, and “philosophy through design”.

Research about Design / Philosophy about Design

Research about design can be understood as offering explanations for a design object, space or policy’s being. Design history is one example of research about design, however, it is not just a chronological survey of objects and spaces. As design historian John Walker suggests, is also to pay attention to “what is not said rather than to what is said;” operatively, various philosophical concepts can be used to relate the social to the historical.[2]

At first glance it seems design history is developed as a separate field from design.[3] The historian, researcher or philosopher seems to provide a meta account of what has happened or is happening without really any real impact on design. However, on closer inspection, this separation is a contrived one. As Downton noted, “a deontic position about design will not only make claims about what design should be, but will entail, or at lest imply, the way(s) in which design should be practised and taught or learned.” Historical precedents are used to strengthen directions for the future.[4] As such, Research about design is always waiting for its own logical next phase – research for design.

Research for Design / Philosophy for Design

Research for design can be understood as the activity that is carried out during the overall design process “to support designing in whatever way the designer(s) regard as useful.” Downton regards as researching which “informs designers’ ability to choose – perhaps between directions or specific items such as materials.” The general purpose is “to increase knowledge of another field or particular theories within it with the expectation that at least some ideas will be able to be appropriated in a way that will be useful to design and designing.” It is “research to enable design”. One may read philosophy books, websites, journals and attend lectures to guide desired outcomes.[5] A student or early career practitioner may read about public-seating standards needed when designing a plaza that will have X amount of commercial floor-area surrounding it and has Y amount of pedestrian flow. To research for design is then form a “background” from which a designer’s work may spring from with greater ease.[6] Over time this acquired background becomes a set of rules of thumb that a seasoned designer can easily recall.

Using philosophy for design can be very similar to researching for design. One may read philosophical texts just as one reads about public-seating standards; the intention is to extract certain philosophical concepts to enable the production of a certain kind of design. For example, the notion of equality as discussed by some factions of political philosophy may inspire a designer to create a people’s park, which removes all kinds of barriers with the intention that all peoples can come together as equals. Here, the spatial arrangement of the park is considered to be able to embody a socio-philosophical concept. The design is assumed to have some equivalency with its philosophic background.

Downton, however, cautions against overreliance on this background. The assumption of the equivalency between the background and the designed object or space places too much emphasis on the “if… then” structure, something that most designers are accustomed to.[7] “If… then” relies on causation – If “A” then “B”. While this “If… then” way of thinking may expand a designer’s knowledge of design and even socio-moral conventions it does not necessarily increase the designer’s abilities to critically understand the background’s assumptions and biases.[8] We can use our earlier example of the designer who wants to create a people’s park that is open to all to discuss some of the limitations of the “if… then” structure. The assumed equivalency between the political-philosophical concept of equality and the barrier-free park may be encapsulated in the statement, “If barriers are removed then equality among all people is to be achieved.” However, the terms “equality”, “barrier”, and “people” remain unproblematized. For instance, does “people” mean all people regardless of their political creed? If not, and for the purpose adjusting power structures which currently privilege one group and disadvantage another, can the term “equality” still mean for all? Thus, in terms of crafting urban design policies and guidelines, how would we account for the realpolitik of power structures? Are there some strategic barriers, physical or otherwise, that need to be erected/maintained? Hence, how else can we approach the term “equality”?

While research for design and its related activity using philosophy for design are useful and necessary for designers, an assumption that the philosophical concept or exemplar design being researched on can simply reincarnate as the new design object, space or policy lingers on. The messiness and inventiveness of the designing act itself has not been accounted. As Richard Buchanan suggests, the act of designing are not just places where the object is generated, but also “places of inventions” where the reconsideration of problems and solutions begets new problems, solutions and ways of thinking.[9]  As such, can designing be the site of philosophising/philosophy?

Research through Design / Philosophy through Design

It is reasonable to say the act of designing amidst realpolitik drives us to think differently, sometimes anxiously. Here, idealised conceptual models held as the background or cornerstone of a design process cannot be perfectly represented. Concepts are deformed and reformed in a design process.

What is this process where concepts are deforming and reforming? To address this question, one might turn to philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s question of what is thinking. He noted a common understanding of thinking means being able to recognise given concepts, or getting to the truth which is taken as given. This for Deleuze, however, is not thinking but the “model of recognition,”[10] which relies on a belief that a concept can be adequately represented by an object.[11] It presupposes that a concept has a pre-material existence independent of the world and its transformation, and the thinking subject’s task, via meditation, is to bypass all the senses that make the world to get to the concept, the true base.[12]

Countering the model of recognition, Deleuze suggests to think is to think amidst all the senses and forces that underlies the stable world privileged by the model of recognition. He writes,

Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition, but of a fundamental encounter. What is encountered may be Socrates, a temple, or a demon. It may be grasped in a range of affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering. In whichever tone, its primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed.^[13]

Deleuze and his oft-collaborator Félix Guattari use the figure of the “plane of immanence” to elaborate thinking that veers from mere recognition. The plane of immanence itself is not a concept per se; it is rather that Event where new concepts can potentially be made from new connections.[14] The plane of immanence is an Event where “all possible events are brought together and new connections are made and unmade continuously.”[15] Concepts encounter each other, break down into their constitutive forces and recombine anew, continually. Active conceptualisation – thinking – emerges.

Deleuze figures the planes of immanence as the “deeper ground (profond)” that is already within the seemingly stable ground (fond), which concepts, territories and identities are easily identified. Borrowing geological language, the profond is the event that is always ungrounding the stable ground.[16] In this process, concepts, identities and territories are always differentiating from both what they are and what they are not. They bear in potentiæ for more changes. Magma. Immanent change.[17]

When thinking exceeds recognition, philosophising, which at least partially uses the mental faculties, becomes more than simply loving already-founded knowledge. In fact, in this process of ungrounding, Deleuze suggests “everything beings with misosophy,” a strategic pushing away of founded knowledge.[18] Elsewhere, Deleuze, contemplating on his own misosophic relationship with the philosophers who came before him, writes,

I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous. It was really important for it to be his own child, because the author had to actually say all I had him saying. But the child was bound to be monstrous too, because it resulted from all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions that I really enjoyed.[19]

The joy in thinking lies in creation when encountering yet-known blocs of forces, not just in merely recognising the knowns. Philosophy as a critical force of the state of affairs goes beyond evaluation based on established goods and bads; the “critical” is also the creative. “The conditions of a true critique and a true creation are the same.”[20] There is something not conventionally defined as “philosophy” in philosophising. As Deleuze and Guattari write,

The nonphilosophical is perhaps closer to the heart of philosophy than philosophy itself, and this means that philosophy cannot be content to be understood only philosophically or conceptually, but is addressed essentially to non-philosophers as well.^[21]

In urban designing, thought is composed by the auditory forces of the city, corporeal forces of the people we are engaging with on the streets, at design charrettes, at public consultations, the speed and slowness of developments, the graphic forces of drawings and photographs, etc. One may ask, how can the corporeal forces emitting from a neighbourhood representative relate with the materiality of construction sites? And, what kind of theory or concept must be invented to capture some of the intersection of these forces that can escape the conventional political spectrum? An iterative process of writing, reading, drawing, writing on drawings, drawing out writings and readings, etc, ensues, and in this process even familiar concepts are becoming something else.[22]

“Concepts are really monsters that are reborn from their fragments.”[23]

Thinking through design also becomes more than simply loving and applying well-established typologies of spaces and social relations. Sometimes, it is to unground the well-established typologies and concepts, to release them into their constitutive forces, so that design-miscegeny may occur to craft new spatio-social relations and typologies. Sometimes, design-miscegeny itself is the catalyst for philosophising to begin.

Philosophy through design lies at the anxious intersection of stakeholders, critical texts, Pantone markers. SketchUp, policies, spread-sheets, kind as well as dismissive emails, and of course buildings, roadways and plazas. Philosophising is the process of articulating the shifting relations of all these parts, and philosophising does not let go of anxiety.

Another Kind of Urban Design: Subversive Publics

This discussion of philosophy-through-design will be further elaborated through a reflection on the process of my co-supervision of a practice-based urban design thesis by urban designer Jason Ho at RMIT University in Melbourne.[24] The focus will be on how encountering the textual, spatial, material, social and political forces through the research process led to another way of doing and thinking urban design emerged.

Jason’s thesis started as a critique of China’s gated university campuses. The initial intention was to apply the concept-typology of the borderless “city campus”[25] to Jimei University in Sun Cuo Village, Xiamen. To progress, to express the notion of “open to all”, the gated campus must make way for the city campus; Jimei will be rebuilt into the town.

In Jason and my initial conversations on the city campus model, we found more pros than cons. However, on re-examining our criteria for pros and cons a discomfort arose when we noticed our criteria were largely based on urban design literature that championed the city campus model.  Furthermore, the criteria were all drawn from non-Chinese and specifically Western precedents. An eurocentricity espousing the mantra “build bridges not walls” became obvious. Adding to the discomfort, we are also aware the gated campus’s boundary walls expressed a classist ideology of separating the commoners from the scholars, and by extension an exercise of the State’s regulation on the movement of bodies and ideas. At this point we asked, what if the thesis shifted gears and begins to investigate how boundary walls in university towns are being engaged with by people who encounter them daily, instead of judging whether boundary walls are categorically Good or Bad according to fixed political positions?

In his early investigations, Jason found his own grandma very much liked the boundary wall in their gated compound because she found joy sitting behind the wall watching life go by and chatting and passing things through openings in the wall. The wall became like a meeting place for grandma.

After grandma, Jason also interviewed students and people who live and work in and around Jimei University’s boundary walls. One of the people he interviewed and ‘followed’ around for a few days was “Vendor D” who sells food to the students. His restaurant/kitchen is a disused cowshed that is attached to the boundary wall, and the menu is actually mounted on top of the boundary wall so that students can read it. A spatial parasitism is at play.

Vendor D uses a variety of tools – a rope, a tin-can, a long pole, etc – to deliver food over the wall to the students. He also pays some students with food to help him do deliveries to places much deeper inside the campus, to professors, staff and even the security guards who are supposed to keep him out. Sometimes, the guards themselves let Vendor D on to campus to sell his foods, contravening the university’s somewhat strict dietary clock. At dark, hungover students sneaking back to campus may stop by the cowshed for a bite. To that end, Vendor D has become sort of an uncle-figure for some students and even the younger guards.

The material, spatial and socio-economic forces Jason encountered with Vendor D’s engagement with the boundary wall and others whose lives revolve around it express a kind of subversive exchange that engenders another kind of publicness, one that differs from the canonic version of public space. The wall still acts as a spatial separator, but the wider university body including the wall itself, the students, professors and security guards, all become part of Vendor D’s operation, his territory. An interesting thing Vendor D said was that he would much prefer how things are rather than become a “legal hawker” inside the university’s cafeteria. Outside the wall, he is not regulated by the designated eating hours. Vendor D by providing the students with the food they want at the time they want breaks the implemented biopolitics at micro scales.

What Jason and I may know as “good” public spaces may not adequately define the subversive public Vendor D’s milieu is exhibiting. Anxiety ensues. One has to re-evaluate the given equations between certain concepts and their representation. The valuation apparatus itself needs to be remade, no longer according to notions of conventional “Good” and “Bad” public spaces, but according to the atypical relations that constitute Vendor D’s milieu.

Just like Jason and I, one may very well begin a design process by reading theories and trying to apply the concepts to design a space or a set of guidelines. But somewhere in the process of applying those familiar concepts the plane of immanence swells through the calm surface and engulfs the bridge between concept and representation. Everything rolls up and spreads into a field of pregnant with paths. Downton noted, in its Greek-root, theõria has a sense of “active looking”, and is “not a static form of knowledge.”[26] That love for knowledge becomes a love for creating new modes of knowing and knowledge, even a love for un-knowing. Knowledge is a verb. As Michel Foucault writes,

Knowledge is an ‘invention’ behind which lies something completely different from itself: the play of instincts, impulses, desires, fear, and the will to appropriate. Knowledge is produced on the stage where these elements struggle against each other; its production is not the effect of their harmony or joyful equilibrium, but of their hatred, of their questionable and provisional compromise, and of the fragile truce that they are always prepared to betray. It is not a permanent faculty, but an event, or, at the very least, a series of events.^[27]

The canonised knowledge of “publicness” gives away to another kind of public amidst the semi-clandestine activities Vendor D and his interlocutors conduct. Encountering these new alliances and “public” spaces, Jason and I had to pose a series of questions for ourselves and readers: An ethical question of who is “all” when referring to the public. A spatio-ethical question of whether an application of the city campus model would actually serve to disempower some people like Vendor D and even some students whose escape from campus biopolitics depends on Vendor D’s round-the-clock service. At the same time, the spatio-ethical question of whether that wall would do harm to communities in the longer run remains. A thesis about boundary walls can neither find resolution with the city campus model, a colonial import, nor the maintaining of the Chinese status quo for territorial demarcation. This thesis necessarily engages with as many positions in between these two opposites, finding ways to intervene at each step, inventing new concepts to address each intervention.

The abovementioned questions are necessarily conflictual to reflect an expanded understanding of the public as the exchanges of bodies and forces that do not need to always take place within a traditional physical agora. The concept “publicness” is thus opened to questions, inexhaustibly. Publicness necessarily harbours conflict, strife and competing values. The “public” is never resolved into consensus.[28] But it is in this process of opening to more questions that new inkling of conceptualisation – thinking itself – emerges.

Concepts are like multiple waves, rising and falling, but the plane of immanence is the single wave that rolls them up and unrolls them (anew as something else).^[29]

Jason’s thesis initially aimed at producing a handbook of physical typologies that new Chinese universities can adopt. However, after meeting Vendor D and posing for ourselves the abovementioned questions, the thesis began to investigate ways in which designers can elaborate on the fissures that are occurring not just in the territories bound by boundary walls but the boundary walls themselves. As planning theorist Jean Hillier suggests, another way to approach spatial planning is

to understand the striations and territorialisations which impinge space; to trace and analyse the molar and molecular lines along which individuals and groups are located; to understand actants’ desires and the lines of flight which (may) occur; and to deal collaboratively and inclusively with the immediately practical, the immediately political elements which are stirring individuals, groups and communities.[30]

Moving from the telic to the temporary, the thesis acknowledges within the representations of organisation and formal structures (e.g. architectural plans, official development plans, etc) the city itself is unfolding into something new perpetually. Jason’s thesis was no longer trying to prove the city campus model as the right model for Chinese universities, nor argue against the Chinese status quo. His thesis became a collection of experimental workshops he did with students and Xiamen residents, finding ways to differently engage with boundary walls and mapping the city to bring out the fissures, the volatile plane of immanence. These interventions took the form of exhibitions as well as building parasitic structures on the boundary wall to breach (and sometimes reinforce) its identity as bulwark.[31] The boundary wall became a site for dialogue, and acknowledging the production of knowledge need not be proving hypotheses. Here, an action carried out need not solve a problem. As Hillier remarked, an action may be performed to offer simply “an opportunity for creatively experimenting with a range of different articulations of the issues.”[32]

Jason’s thesis was more than a research about boundary walls; the necessarily conflictual positions within it, the experiments that do not culminate into design solutions, instead provided a plan for its readers to conjure up ungrounding themselves. Through engaging with the thesis, thinking begins.

An Incompletable Plan

How can a plan embrace both the experimental or speculative and the practical? To do so may be to creatively forgo the idea of a plan as leading to a well-tempered future. A plan can propose typologies and guidelines, but the same plan can also outline these prescriptions’ artifice and internal instability so as to maintain the necessary strife that also underlies the polis. Whatever urban design typologies that are proposed can be explicitly framed as “temporary respites in an ongoing confrontation.”[33]

A reader engaging with a plan where each proposal includes its unmaking may stutter as s/he tries in vain to reconcile the conflicting materials with a defined future. But it is in stuttering that language – visual, verbal, textual, graphic, spatial or otherwise – enters a “zone of vibration” where ideas “bifurcate and vary in each of its own terms, following an incessant modulation.”[34] It is the stutter that new utterances emerge. The plan expands into multiple futures, and each of these futures can further modulate. Thus, this plan may function like what Roland Barthes calls

a text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions.[35]

Thus, it may just be possible to have an urban design plan which can provide the textual, graphic and conceptual forces that compel its users to anxiously think in the middle of these forces. Thinking in this mode of designing is an expanding, never-complete field. The next step is to unthink the profession in order for it to think.

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[1] Peter Downton, Design Research (Melbourne: RMIT University Press, 2003), 2. Also see Alain Findelli, “Introduction,” Design Issues vol. 15, no.2 (Summer 1999): 2.

[2] John A. Walker, Design History and the History of Design (London: Pluto Press, 1989) 1-3. Also see Hal Foster, Design and Crime, and other Diatribes (London & New York: Verso, 2002) 25. Like Walker, the art critic Hal Foster also expresses the need to examine the links between design and capitalism, especially in today’s political economy. For Foster, it is to “recapture a sense of the political situatedness” of culture. Design history thus need to become a practice which draws on many philosophical fields to examine culture’s situation. The purpose of doing so is to identify power relations with hopes of reconnecting some of these relations in other ways so as to “provide culture with running room.”

[3] Many earlier prominent design historians/theorists are not designers: Nikolaus Pevsner, Sigfried Giedion, Reyner Banham, etc. The reason for this could be because design history is often treated as a specialisation within Art History, and to trained as a design historian one had to be trained in Art History. However, in the past few decades as the architecture discipline began to study itself, to treat architecture not as a beaux ars objects but as a connection point of social, material, economic and artistic forces, more and more designers like Anthony Vidler, Charles Jencks, Manfredo Tafuri, Hélène Frichot and Jane Rendell began writing about architecture from the inside. 

[4] Downton, Design Research, 35. Also see Kenneth Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), 16-30. Architect and theorist Kenneth Frampton’s version of critical regionalism used exemplars to illustrate his point about how locality can both challenge globalism’s hegemonic forces and go beyond cultural reductivism by attuning to materiality and spatial arrangements instead of using obvious symbols and icons. Here, Frampton is basically making prescriptive accounts of design. Here Frampton is basically making prescriptive accounts of design.

[5] Ibid, 17-19.

[6] Ibid, 22

[7] Ibid, 32

[8] Ibid, 33

[9] Richard Buchanan, “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking,” Design Issues vol. 8, no.2 (Spring 1992), 10.

[10] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London & New York: Continuum, 1994), 130-133

[11] Ibid, 137-138

[12] Ibid, 134.

[13] Ibid, 139.

[14] Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press), 37.

[15] Jean Hillier, “Plan(e) Speaking: A Multiplanar Theory of Spatial Planning,” Planning Theory vol. 7, no. 1 (2008), 31.

[16] Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 229.

[17] Deleuze and Guattari’s plane of immanence is developed from Deleuze’s earlier work on medieval philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza in his book Ethics stated that God is Nature (Deus sive Natura) where he means God and Nature are one substance, thereby dismantling the notion that God preceded the world/nature. Spinoza wrote, “That eternal and infinite being we call God, or Nature, acts from the same necessity from which he exists…. The reason, therefore, or cause, why God, or Nature, acts, and the reason why he exists, are one and the same. As he exists for the sake of no end, he also acts for the sake of no end. Rather, as he has no principle or end of existing, so he also has none of acting.” The plane of immanence is like Spinoza’s God where there is no beginning or end, no transcendental power that dictates what the future must be. Rather it is the vitality of the world and life itself that guides permutations after permutations. See Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Edwin Curley (London & New York: Penguin books), Book IV, Preface.

[18] Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 139.

[19] Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 6.

[20] Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 139.

[21] Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 41.

[22] Paul Carter, going against Cartesian notion of thought, argues that there is a tangibility in thinking; thinking is not only at the privy of the mental faculty. He looks at art-making as a way in which thinking occurs, but not only in the reflection, commentary or criticism of art objects, but in the actual making and encountering of the materials that make the artwork/performance. There is “materialised in the making process an intellectual to-and-fro.” See Paul Carter, Material Thinking: The Theory and Practice of Creative Research (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2004).

[23] Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 140.

[24] Jason Ho, Living on the Line: A Search for Shared Landscapes (Unpublished PhD Thesis, RMIT University, 2014)

[25] Examples of city-campuses include The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology where Jason was a doctoral candidate, the various colleges of the University of London, Sydney’s University of Technology, the University of Toronto, Concordia University, the Architectural Association, The Bartlett, etc.

[26] Downton, Design Research, 78.

[27] Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard & Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 202-03.

[28] Planning theorist John Pløger following Chantal Mouffe argues that the notion that a planning program must result in consensus actually suppresses the nature of politics and democracy itself in that this nature is one expressed by necessary strife and conflict. Instead of treating difference from the status quo as antagonisms that must be quelled, one may treat them as “agonisms” which entails a certain respect for competing visions, discourses and values. The indefinite struggle between parties does not have to lead to synthesis, it is seen as leading to opportunities where one is transformed together with one’s opponent. Hence, “to see democracy as agonism means to go beyond the friend-enemy thinking, and seeing the participant one heavily disagrees with or does not understand, as an adversary one can learn something from. This does not require the negligence of interests and power-mechanisms, but the need to respect differences and disagreements radically.” See John Pløger, “Strife: Urban Planning and Agonism,” Planning Theory vol. 3, no. 1 (2004), 71-92.

[29] Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 36.

[30] Hillier, “Plan(e) Speaking,” 34.

[31] Education theorists Eileen Honan and David Bright explored ways to reframe the body of the thesis. They proposed that instead of framing the thesis as being problem solving or having to prove a hypothesis, a thesis can be a text “that practices juxtaposition, collage or montage rather than the propositional logic and well-formed syntactic structure of conventional prose.” As such, the thesis opens up the potential for avenues to be travelled, and sometimes those avenues may not even be explicitly drawn out in the thesis body itself. It is possible that the body of the urban design plan or thesis can be reframed as a space for dialogue rather than a set of directives. See Eileen Honan & David Bright, “Writing a Thesis Differently,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (2016), 1-13.

[32] Hillier, “Plan(e) Speaking,” 34.

[33] Chantal Mouffe, “Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism,” Political Science Series, no.72 (December 2000), 16.

[34] Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel Smith & Michael Greco (London & New York: Verso, 1998), 109.

[35] Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 14.

Interdisciplinarity and Coming Communities

Benedict de Spinoza wrote, “For a free multitude is guided more by hope than fear.” Through the literatures of Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, Nigel Thrift and Spinoza this essay explores how interdisciplinary design practices can produce communities of hope, but not a hope predicated upon an ideal but a hope for change and transformation, a hope to will differentiation.

The ‘Inter’ Condition of Urban Design

Different materials, structures, infrastructures, cultures, policies and potentials constitute a city. ‘Difference’ is a city’s form. However, ‘difference’ can be more than a static collection of things based on binary pairs or variations on a model. In reality difference is also differentiation or the ability for something, someone or some place to become different from itself. Any identity, place or even concept is composed of an aggregate of forces and precisely because they are not given entities, recomposition is more than possible. Any identity, place or concept being in contact with another identity, place or concept will contract forces from that identity, place or concept to restructure its composition. Differing interrelations between things allows for the differentiation within a thing. Recomposition is also the process of differentiation.[1]

A city is an event of differentiation. Differences within a city are never just based on countable differences. As such, if the city has a consistency it is this ‘inter’ condition or inter-relation amongst things that spurs differentiation. How should urban design intimately deal with this ‘inter’ condition? One may suggest it is to act accordingly to the city’s reality. Urban design does not just design a city’s ‘inter’ condition but immanently express this ‘inter’ condition in its own practice. It involves incorporating the spatial, visual and conceptual forces of other disciplines. The disciplinary boundaries of analysis, planning, policy-making, physical design and inhabitation are blurred; the sequence in which one act follows another is constantly changing. With urban design interdisciplinarity exists not just amongst the design disciplines but includes the non-design disciplines and the voices and bodies of the city. Conventional hierarchies and workflows are challenged here.

The ‘inter’ condition allows for an exchange of forces. In terms of rethinking Vancouver’s housing development by way of this ‘inter’ condition it is never whether the artists, designers, politicians, activist-groups or theorists are more correct in diagnosing the state of affairs. Questions pertaining to what forces each participant can extract from other participants and use toward his/her own rethinking should be considered instead. A constant feature of any interdisciplinary practice is that no one discipline’s principles and methods are unproblematically superior. Although, this being said one may still suggest that one discipline may have more to offer for a particular project or a particular part of a project. The keyword is appropriateness and not superiority that resorts to moral claims.

To gauge the appropriateness of a discipline is to find out what sorts of forces constitute that discipline, and knowing what forces to extract from that discipline in order to combine them with other forces from another discipline to produce effects. The bringing together of philosophy and urban design is a commonly used interdisciplinary act. Traditionally, philosophy, because it deals with concepts, is viewed to be anterior to design. A designed place is treated as an example of a certain philosophy that has been distilled into a single concept. However, this binary and hierarchy of concept versus example can be challenged by Michel Foucault’s understanding of philosophy’s function.

Foucault’s works deliberately refuse to prescribe what society must be, despite his political ambitions. His works eschew utopia. So, where is the fit between Foucault and urban design, for having no vision is inconsistent with the term ‘plan’ which conventionally emphasises devising the right means and outcomes. Addressing this charge Foucault points out that society itself (one may infer the city) does not operate upon a defined set of means, more importantly society’s ‘final’ image is unimageable. The means and outcomes must be produced not by plans drafted in isolation but via actual events and engagements. Foucault writes,

It’s true that certain people... are not likely to find advice or instructions in my books to tell them ‘what is to be done.’ But my project is precisely to bring about that they ‘no longer know what to do,’ so that the acts, gestures, discourses that up until then had seemed to go without saying become problematic, difficult and dangerous.[2]

Foucault’s philosophy’s contribution to urban design is not prescriptive. As Bent Flyvberg and Tim Richardson remind us Foucault never intended his philosophy to dictate what our practice should pan out.[3] It is rather how we extract conceptual, textual and poetic forces from his works to recompose our current epistemology, theoretical frameworks, methodologies and methods. An asymmetry exists between Foucault’s concepts and the actions that follow. This is what distinguishes Foucault’s philosophy from more traditional political philosophy that desires clear outcomes. In a conversation with Gilles Deleuze, Foucault says,

A theory is exactly like a box of tools. It has nothing to do with the signifier. It must be useful. It must function. And not for itself.[4]

The actions that follow an engagement with Foucault’s work arise from a “situated action”. A situated action is not just an application of a theory to a posterior example; philosophy holds no superiority here.[5] A designer picks out certain conceptual forces from philosophy in order to combine with those spatial and conceptual forces s/he is already acquainted with from his/her practice. A designer must use Foucault’s works in reality, in actual design-situations. Only through actual usages do new actions and designed-forms emerge. In the actuality of a design-situation one may also encounter other lines of thought, some running smoothly alongside Foucault’s, so breaking Foucault’s apart. Moreover, sometimes the practice of design may force us to rethink the arguments within certain theories. For example, communicating with a neighbourhood’s citizens may reveal unusual power relations that contributes to this neighbourhood’s uniqueness, thus a new theory of spatial planning may be required to understand and ultimately sustain this uniqueness. A strictly Foucauldian mode of approaching power relations for this neighbourhood may not be fully adequate; other lines of thought may be drawn in. Foucault may have to be read alongside Heidegger, indigenous concepts of space as well as the musings of Douglas Coupland. A situated action of design occasions an event of invention and differentiation. Disciplines are interwoven into each other. Within this complex actual design-situation it is not just new places and identities that may emerge, new ways to write spatial planning theory may emerge.

An actual design-situation for urban design involves more than what occurs in a studio. It involves working with actual peoples, places and shifting networks of concepts. Thus, Flyvberg and Richardson suggest that urban design should pay attention to ‘realrationality” rather than normative rationality. They suggest a move away from ideal situations. Designers can shift focus away from ‘what should be done’ and make a “reorientation toward ‘what is actually done’ – towards verita effectuale”.[6] We pay attention to new voices that are emerging in actuality. We decipher what forces constitute these voices and most importantly design new strategies to engage with these voices and forces. These voices cannot be generalised. Thus, when working with a community we have to sincerely ask: Are we trying to make that community see a designer’s point of view, or, are we together with that community designing a new point of view which possibly is yet expressible according to normative categories of place and identity. In an interdisciplinary practice it is less a matter of designing-for and more a designing-with. Designing-with expresses that ‘inter’ condition discussed earlier.

Within an interdisciplinary approach our conventional modes of analysis and disciplinary knowledge are broken don when we encounter unfamiliar groups of forces. When we are designing-with others it is often harder to image an absolute outcome. As Foucault suggests, we often ‘no longer know what to do’ when this mingling happens. However, this not-knowing can be an interesting departure point. In not-knowing we seek out new modes of thinking and acting, we start to communicate with others in new ways to gather information and build new criteria to decipher these information. In not-knowing we begin to build new conceptual and eventually practical frameworks instead of reiterating old frameworks that are colonial in expression.

What can designers learn from painters, and vice versa? How can the acts of painting and installation become mingled with acts of site analysis, typological studies and streetscape drawings, and how will this mingling change the current conceptions of place and subjectivity imagined by urban designers?

Most importantly, we may ask how our existing approaches to design and design thinking are challenged when we hear fellow participants speak in actuality. What new lines of thinking about place and subjectivities are being generated in this actuality that can seem even frightful? The speed at which forces can collide within the actuality of an interdisciplinary design-situation spur us to experiment with thinking and acting on subjectivities and places in ways the comfortable pace of a normative and isolated ideal situation does not foster. We ask: What new places and subjectivities can arise from this not-knowing?

Making Potential Communities
The means to carry out designs of a city are continually changing. We already conduct a variety of exercises to ensure this continuity; the post-occupancy evaluation (POE) is one obvious example. There is a distinction between maintaining this continuity for the sake of achieving an ideal city/citizenry and maintaining this continuity to promote the constant differentiation of place and subjectivity. How a POE is drafted and analysed is important if a city’s complexity is to be sustained. The data gathered from a POE if it is to be put into various redesign acts must again involve the community at hand. The community should be brought into new series of actual design-situations. Critical spatial and social planning reminds us the POE is done not just to see whether urban designers have done a good enough job, but to provide data – voices and forces – that allows for the design of a community in transformation.

Communities are made, unmade and remade. The form and identity of a community is always coming. The “coming community” for philosopher Giorgio Agamben is characterised by a “whatever being”. For Agamben, this “whatever” is tied to what a singularity which is not so much an unchanging entity but a singularity in the sense of something that is ready to become something else. The “whatever being” is thus a being that possesses great potentials.[7]

An important thing to remember about potentiality according to Agamben is that potentiality is never divorced from actuality. While the word ‘potential’ generally denotes something that is set in the future, Agamben locates potentialities in the actual present. Additionally, Agamebn suggest that potentiality is more than something one can predict, it can also be that which is unimageable (unrepresentable). He elaborates, every thought also “exists as a potential not to think,” and every word or sentence written is also the potential not to write.[8] What is written is inclusive of what is yet to be written. However, what is yet to be written does not designate only the opposite of what has already been written, in other words something imageable. Potentiality for Agamben includes something truly unqualifiable and unquantifiable at present but nonetheless is in the present. He surmises:

Pure actuality, that is, the actuality of an act, is pure potentiality, that is, the potentiality of potentiality.[9]

Agamben’s notions of potentiality can be further elaborated through Jean-Luc Nancy’s formulation on writing: “Writing [is] that which does not respond to any model whatsoever of the appropriation of significations, that which opens at once relation and, along with relation, significance itself.” The “message” of this kind of writing is not a “signified”; it is not even a plurality of relativised signifiers, but what Nancy calls “the toward.”[10] What writing offers is the intensive move towards something that cannot be mapped out in advance. What writing signifies is the potentiality of the multiple ways a text can be engaged with. For example, the kind of actions and thoughts that may emerge from engaging with Foucault’s writings is innumerable. Thus, writing is not about locking down the world in textual representation and making prescriptions. Nancy suggests, writing that expresses this “toward” tend forth to a community that resists its own hypostasis.[11] This asymmetrical relationship between writing and action expresses the more profound unimageable potentiality that Agamben speaks of.

Agamben and Nancy’s understanding of actuality to harbour potentiality mainly regards literature and philosophic writings. However, this approach to the unity of actuality and potentiality can be expressed in urban and community design. To design neighbourhoods for a community is not to lock people and place into one identity. To design is to gather new groupings of socio-historical, economical, artistic, textual, spatial, conceptual and cultural forces that may express subjectivities and spatialities yet to come. Urban designers are not fates. In other words, the actuality of a design practice expresses the potential of potentialities and new actualities. It is this point about actuality that connects back to earlier discussions on Foucault’s stress on situated-actions instead of ideal environments for the understanding and making of societies.

In designing a coming community the whole traditional scheme of signification, the equivalence between subjectivity and object, concept and object is challenged.[12] This is especially true when dealing with Vancouver, a field of criss-crossing local and international forces. There will never be a designed building or site that can unproblematically represent a coming Vancouver. Homi Bhabha writes that “identikit political idealism” ignores the reality of history-making which always threatens binary and sequential historiography. The political object of a transformative community is “neither the one nor the other, [it] properly alienates out political expectations.”[13]

So what are the actual signs of a community that alienates out political expectations? Nigel Thrift, in consideration of a vitalist urban life, suggests “temporary articulations of creating/inventing,” which can spur actions and outcomes that destabilise the urban and social fabric in order to reform new modes of being. And, this process of actualising and de-actualising to occasion new potentials perpetually renews itself.[14] Thus, when considering a vital Vancouver identikit buildings and neighbourhoods representing identikit political idealism are of little value. The vital is not something merely postulated but that which is acting. It can be experimentations with physical design conducted together by designers, the citizens and the City Hall. Beyond simple civil disobedience there can be experimentations with physical design conducted together by designers, the citizens and City Hall. Here, micro-zones or temporary re-zones may be outcomes.

In a vitalist city zones are in reality changing their function. The physical designs originally designated by a zoning code can be acted upon differently: Parks built to beautify and pacify a neighbourhood may be used by activists. Service lanes may become outdoor venues for art exhibitions. Neighbourhood cornershops and butcheries as much as three blocks from main arterials become galleries. Houses within residential zones may become gallery spaces where future generations of urban designers may gather. Temporary and permanent structures facilitating explorations on social relations and modes of living are built in backyards. A community’s sense of place and identity is constantly reproduced in its varying engagement with the city’s physical design.

All the abovementioned usages of the physical environment are heterotopias. Places like these are at once inside proper city zones and outside of these zones.[15] The capability of having multiple places exist within a physical boundary is partly made possible by its use that defies alignment with traditional observance of time. As we have seen a house can function as a residence and a gallery at different times. But, this temporal quality of heterotopias is expressed not just through the defiance of traditional observance of work-time. While places designed with utopic visions in mind tend toward the eternal, heterotopias “are absolutely temporal.”[16] What is built may be temporary; they allow new forces in and out of their assemblage hence allowing different futures to potentially emerge.

To sustain vitality a designer recognises his/her physical design as merely providing spatial, material, infrastructural forces to a city or neighbourhood, how these forces are used can be rather open. An asymmetry exists between a community’s subjectivity and the physical design of a neighbourhood. A physical design is an actuality that provides the conditions for the emergence of potentialities.

Community, as Agamben writes, is an infinite series of modal oscillations between actuality and potentiality. The politics of a coming community is no longer a duel between the State and the people. It is no longer setting up communities that are diametric opposites of the State. To do so still abides by the spatial, subjectival and economical zonings desired by conventional and colonial modes of planning. Rather, a coming community’s political object and identity oscillates between what it actually is presently and what it is becoming (its potentialities).[17] More importantly this will to transformation is embodied by the city leaders as well. In a coming-Vancouver our policy-makers will weave the city’s complex forces into their epistemology and methodology. In a coming-Vancouver policy-makers, designers and citizens recognise that within any master plan drawn there are maps and zones yet drawn, and from these potential maps and zones yet-defined subjectivities and places exist.

Worthy life
Potentialities are hopes for changes that may be greater than the designated futures we are too used to. On the subject of hope and society, Baruch Spinoza writes,

For a free multitude is guided more by hope than fear; a conquered one, more by fear than hope: inasmuch as the former aims at making use of life, the latter but at escaping death. The former, I say, aims at living for its own ends, the latter if forced to belong to the conqueror; and so we say that this is enslaved, but that free.[18]

Spinoza’s free multitude, a society guided by multiplicity and change, is that which attends to the living of life, recognising that life is expressed by change rather than by static being. Drawing from Spinoza’s understanding of life, Deleuze writes,

A life is everywhere, in every moment which a living subject traverses and which is measured by the objects that have been experienced, an immanent life carrying along the events or singularities that are merely actualised in subjects and objects. The indefinite life does not itself have moments, however close they may be, but only between-times, between-moments. It does not arrive, it does not come after, but presents the immensity of an empty time where one sees the event to come and already past, in the absolute of an immediate consciousness.[19]

Designers, citizens and government officials must honour this one eternal principle of life. Nigel Thrift and Ash Amin consider change as urban life’s “basic ontology”.[20] Life never follows a single path, telos is not just deferred but kept as an unimageable potential. The telos is unimageable because, as Deleuze writes, each moment in life is capable of folding in multiple forces hence transforming and increasing the potentials that moment of life can open unto. Each moment of life is in fact between what it was and the multiplicities it may become.[21]

Design may tend to life’s only “constant” – its state of change, its becoming. It is not about representing change for designers and their work stand within the changing city and not at the end of history to reflect on the entirety of life. Geographer John Pløger notes, a city’s vitality is a field of forces and not an object that can be put on paper as a graphic or text.[22] Vitality is a city’s formless form. The urban designer recognises this fact. Likewise, those between-times and between-moments Deleuze speaks of will always exist. So, what is design’s purpose if such energy already exists? Design brings these basic existential conditions into attention so that we as a community do not pretend the perfect city can lie peacefully at the end of history; history and precisely time itself is a becoming. This is design’s immanent philosophic act.

How can urban design facilitate greater potentialities for change, rather than forcing allegiance to this or that social category or identikit political idealism? How can the design of urban spaces help spur a life lived for its own ends and hopes as per Spinoza’s free society? These questions cannot be adequately addressed if we keep urban design’s function as merely representational or as strive towards imageable ends.

Design can be approached as an act that opens up possibilities instead of reducing the city to a slogan-like identity. In consideration of change and true community participations, design’s purpose may be geared toward transformations, challenges and play instead of limits. This is why the question of how urban designers may develop new ways to approach the city instead of relying solely on conventional plans and documentations is important. There is perhaps value in including within client presentations plans, drawings and other media elements that challenge the telic character of design. Epistemological and methodological changes are vital.

The ‘right’ city or community, if change and vitality are a city’s formless forms, becomes something irreducible. It is interesting to note that for the Spinoza-inspired Agamben the a coming community’s “ethical” character becomes evident only when it is recognised that “the good is not, and cannot be, a good thing or possibility beside or above every bad thing or possibility, that the authentic and the true are not real predicates of an object perfectly analogous (even if opposed) to the false and the inauthentic.”[23] A coming community’s ethics is formed by the oscillations between different modes of being and thinking, it is immanent in the complexity and conflicts that are present at acts of co-creation, participatory designs and other interdisciplinary exercises. Ethics are guided by actual situations, and situations bring about change in subject and place. Ethics likewise can be reproduced from the contraction and expulsion, the regrouping, of various social, interpersonal, political, spatial, historical and architectural forces. Ethics are eternally in an ungrounding process. The ethical life is here and yet to come.

To plan a community’s identity is to actually find ways to sustain such conflicts and complexity. Thrift gives designers the advice to be ready to “take hold of accidents and slips, [and be] able to draw on skills that can conjure up other wheres.”[24] We plan not for what future communities must be. Instead we plan, design and build groups of forces – political, architectural, spatial, cultural, economical, etc – needed to sustain the potential emergence of communities which place and being is yet-known. Of course, the actual methods involved in carrying out these transformative and potential-bearing acts cannot be prescribed. As we have seen with Foucault and Agamben, the task of philosophy when mingled with design is never to decide which design action is good or bad. There is only the momentary appropriateness of certain groups of forces that, for a certain project (situated-action), express a power to effect change more swiftly. Again, design actions are only to be founded in the actuality of the task, the design-situation.

A city or community’s worth is its potential for change through the recognition, inclusion and sustaining of conflicts and challenges. And these conflicts and challenges are often found(ed) in interdisciplinary design situations manifested in life.

[1] Gilles Deleuze. Difference and Repetition (P. Patton, trans.). London and New York: Continuum. 1994. p.39

[2] Foucault quoted in James Miller. The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1993. p.235

[3] Bent Flyvberg and Tim Richardson. “Planning and Foucault: In Search of the Dark Side of Planning Theory” in Planning Futures: New Directions for Planning Theory (P. Allmendinger and M. Tewdwr-Jones, eds.). London and New York: Routldege. 2002, p.57

[4] Michel Foucault. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected essays and Interviews (D.F. Bouchard and S. Simon, eds. and trans.). Ithaca: Cornell UP. 1977. p.208

[5] Flyvberg and Ricahrdson. P.57

[6] Ibid. p.60

[7] Giorgio Agamben. The Coming Community (M. Hardt. Trans.) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. p.1

[8] Giorgio Agamben. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (D. Heller-Roazen, ed. & trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford UP. 1999. p.215

[9] Ibid. p.216

[10] Jean-Luc Nancy. The Sense of the World (J.S. Librett, trans.). Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press. 1997. p.118

[11] Ibid. p.119

[12] Agamben. 1999. p.208

[13] Homi Bhabha, Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge. 1004. p.24

[14] Nigel Thrift. “Summoning life” in Envisioning Human Geographies (P. Cloke, P. Crang, & M. Goodwin, eds.). London: Arnold Press. 2004, p.85

[15] Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” in Diacritics (16:1, Spring 1986, 22-7). p.24

[16] Ibid. p.26

[17] Agamben. 1993. p.19

[18] Benedict de Spinoza. “A Political Treatise” in A Theologico-Political Treatise and A Political Treatise (R.H.M. Elwes, trans.). New York: Mineola. 2004. p.315

[19] Gilles Deleuze. “Immanence: A Life” in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995 (D. Lapoujade, ed. and A. Hodges and M. Taormina, trans.). New York and Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). 2006. p.387

[20] Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift. Cities: Reimagining the urban. Cambridge, UK: Polity. 2002. p.26-30

[21] Deleuze. 2006. p.388

[22] John Pløger. “In Search of Urban Vitalis” in Space and Culture (9:4, November 2006, 382-399). p.389

[23] Agamben. 1993. p.13

[24] Thrift. 2004. p.97

Archosophy Session 01 (2014-12-11) Summary

The first Archosophy Vancouver session took place on 11^th December 2014. Landscape Architecture firm PFS Studio generously hosted it. We had two speakers – Nena Stanković, an art and film theorist from UBC, and Sean Ruthen, a writer and architect with VIA Architecture. Both presentations dealt with the relations one forms with the built environment. Or, how the built environment is formed from the relations it is implicated within. From the evening’s discussion, the notion of the “unfinished” became one that connected Heidegger and Derrida, but more importantly connected to a question of how the unfinished could enter professional practice (again)?

Of Heidegger, Mies and Libeskind

The evening started with Nena using concepts from Martin Heidegger’s essay Building Dwelling Thinking to read Mies ven der Rohe’s National Gallery in Berlin and Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum, also in Berlin.

To read Mies and Libeskind, Nena introduced us to Heidegger’s use of etymology to tease out buried relations between words. She pointed out Heidegger’s examination of the word “building”. The Old High German form for building is “bauen,” which goes beyond functional construction to include “dwelling”. Moreover, buaen is also related to the German word bin, as in “ich bin” or “I am”. Heidegger thus surmised,

• Building is really dwelling;
• Dwelling is the manner in which humans are on the earth;
• Building as dwelling unfolds into the building that cultivates growing things and the building that erects buildings.[1]

There is thus a call, as Nena suggested, for being aware of how one’s existence is produced by one’s relations to the built environment. This awareness constitutes a poetic[2] mode of living.

What relations should we be aware of? Nena suggests Heidegger’s “Fourfolds” – Earth, Sky, God and Mortals– which he derives from the ancient Greeks’ four primal elements – Earth, Air, Fire and Water.[3]

It is with the Fourfolds that Nena proceeded to produce a reading of how Mies and Libeskind’s buildings allow for a poetic mode of existence to emerge. For example, the glass walls of Mies’National Gallery allow its interior space to be connected to the wider cityscape. Vice versa, one can look into the gallery reinforcing a connection between the inside and outside. For Nena, the gallery’s space (and time) is produced by the elements that surround it. Likewise, Libeskind’s Jewish Museum, for Nena, dispenses with symbolism; instead, space itself as produced by light, shade, micro climatic changes, and geometry to produce a sensibility of the museum.

Mies and Libeskind’s buildings allow the changing of the elements to produce its space. There is thus an incompleteness. And it is with this notion of incompleteness that we move to Sean’s presentation.

Of Derrida and Eisenman

Sean’s presentation on Jacques Derrida picked up from Nena’s. Derrida was a student of Heidegger at one point, and Sean’s presentation also dealt with the overall question of what it means to dwell, to relate to the built environment.

Sean’s presentation largely draws from his recent book review of Richard Coyne’s book Derrida for Architects. Sean briefly talked about Derrida’s take on the concept of aporia, which is pertains to keeping things in perplexity and ambiguity rather than to seek resolution. This is then followed by a discussion of Derrida and architect Peter Eisenman’s collaboration, ChoraL Works, which in its early manuscript and then later book-form, serves as an instigation for thinking for Bernard Tschumi’s completion of Parc de la Villette.

Chora L Works has its basis in the concept of Chora, which Derrida draws from Plato’s Timaeus. The Chora as Derrida understood it is a space from which space(s) emerge, but the Chora is itself without defined conceptual or physical form.[4] Hence, one might suggest the book Chora L Works is not itself a Chora; it is the event of engaging with it that opens up the Chora. It is in this event that we engage in the construction of the bridges between concepts we read and might make and future spaces yet-to-come. To quote Heidegger, “the bridge does not first come to a location to stand in it; rather, a location comes into existence only by virtue of the bridge.”[5] In this sense, there is something architectonic¸ something concerned with making, in this event reading Chora L Works.

It is here that the evening’s discussion moved from a review of Heidegger and Derrida’s philosophical concepts to a more robust discussion about the “unfinished”.

Sean as well as the evening’s audience agreed that what makes Chora L Works interesting is that they are “unfinished”; unfinished not in the sense of there being a defined outcome that was initially planned but unrealised or unfulfilled. Rather, unfinished in the sense that one might draw ways from those manuscripts, paintings and books to think to about space. In the case of Chora L Works it is critical to be reminded it does not instruct designers on what space must result. It is as such different from today’s more prescriptive approach to design that comes in the form of guidelines and instruction manuals.

Of an unfinished question

A key question, that itself cannot be reduced to a single answer, was asked that evening:

• How will the “unfinished” play a role in the urgency of spatio-economic identity politics and climate change that  occupy much of town planning, landscape architecture and architecture practice and academe?

With this question, the course of the Archosophy Sessions seems to be taking place.

Archosophy Session 01 (11th Dec 2014, PFS Studio) - Photo Credit: Derek Deland (2014)

NOTE: Images of the various buildings and parks mentioned in the presentation are not shown to avoid copyright issues.

---

[1] Martin Heidegger (1971) “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” in Poetry, Language, Thought (Trans. A. Hofstadter), NYC: Harper & Row, p.148.

[2] The terms poetic can be traced to the Greek word poeisis, which means “to make.”There is thus a will here to create rather than just exist.

[3] This connecting of dwelling to the primal elements may at first seem reactive. But Nena quickly pointed out to the audience that this is not a call to return to some simpler pastoral world. Again, this awareness is an examination of how these elements changes our relation to the built environment, and how our relation to these elements changes the built environment.

[4] Derrida and Eisenman wrote, “Chora receives everything or gives place to everything, but Plato insists that in fact it has to be a virgin place, and that it has to be totally foreign, totally exterior to anything that it receives. Since it is absolutely blank, everything that is printed on it is automatically effaced. It remains foreign to the imprint it receives; so in a sense, it does not receive anything-it does not receive what it receives nor does it give what it gives. Everything inscribed in it erases itself immediately, while remaining in it. It is thus an impossible surface-it is not even a surface, because it has no depth.” See Jacques Derrida (1997) Choral L Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman (Ed. J. Kipnis & T. Leeser), NYC: Monacelli Press, p.

[5] Heidegger (1971), p.154.

A Lecture to Query Urban Design

Background

This blog-post first appeared as a lecture/ lecture notes to an urban design studio at UBC in early 2015. The class’ focus was Vancouver’s Broadway Corridor, particularly East Broadway which roughly stretches from Main Street to Commercial Drive.

There is an expectation for urban design studios (as with much of the urban design profession) to apply the ‘right’ kinds of typology for various neighbourhoods or streets. Besides the ‘right’ kinds of typology we are also often too eager to prescribe for these neighbourhoods and streets a set of universal principles that are supposed to work from Copenhagen to Sydney to Kuala Lumpur to Vancouver. More often than not, these principles will prescribe the precise character and massing of the ‘right’ building typologies and street morphologies.

With this lecture, I wanted the studio to go beyond the application of those pre-established good building typologies mentioned above. Here, I will not present on what Broadway should be, or even what is good urban design. Rather, I will present three interrelated ways to think about urban design that I hope will help the studio re-reiterate and re-construct the event, the space and the time that is East Broadway. The main gist is to not just see urban design as a tool, but to query urban design itself.

The three ways to query about urban design are:

•  To elaborate urban design as a practice of making connections
• To enquire what creates a location
• To cultivate the habits of a reflective practitioner

#1: Urban Design, a practice of making connections

Where and when is Broadway

All too often we approach a city as just a spatial entity. The things we build in SketchUp and AtuoCAD, even the renderings to illustrate how things might look seem to be locked in an unchanging slice of time. In doing so, we often forget that what conditions space when, in fact, what makes space spatial, what makes space traversable and thus liveable is the element of time itself. (I shall elaborate on this notion later.) As such, to enquire about Broadway is to ask “where” and “when” is Broadway, to probe its spatial and temporal dimensions, to see how its space and time are inseparable.

Let us begin with “where”, the spatial question. A reductive and utilitarian-oriented answer is that Broadway is a 15km east-west corridor linking UBC to Burnaby and beyond. It is the home of the famous B-Line bus that takes students to and fro UBC. The central portion of it, between Yukon and Burrard Streets, is a key economic locale outside the downtown core. But, Broadway is more than this. Broadway cuts through many established neighbourhoods. It also runs through some lacklustre blocks that nonetheless might establish themselves into significant areas one day. It also intersects many north-south streets, some of which have socio-historical importance that rival Broadway. Main Street, for instance, is narrower and shorter than Broadway, but to study the Main-Broadway junction is to necessarily embark on a rigorous examination of Main Street and Kingsway and many other north-south streets in the area. Each of the neighbourhoods Broadway intersects distinguishes its own spatial identity with a unique political, socio-economic outlook. One can see how Commercial Drive and Kitsilano may both have high numbers of university students, but there is also a sense the two neighbourhoods have different socio-political allegiances. To ask where is to acknowledge Broadway as a connection of differences.

How does the temporal dimension factor in this connection of differences? Let us start with a rather simple relationship between time and space. When one travels from Point A to Point B that journey is always conducted over time. But Points A and B, insofar as they exist in time, are not static entities. Person A from Point A may have certain ill impressions of Point B, but in the time it takes Person A to travel to Point B, Point B may have transformed so significantly that Person A will develop favourable impressions of Point B. During his journey Person A might have also read new literature discussing the merits of Point B leading him to re-evaluate his own misgivings toward Point B. And, let us assume Points A and B are two neighbourhoods along Broadway, is it not possible that neighbourhoods and our impressions of these neighbourhoods can change in time? I was told by some Vancouverites who have been here longer than me that Kitsilano was once a hippy, working class neighbourhood; today it has a higher household income than most other neighbourhoods.

From the perspective of space each neighbourhood is different from each other. But, adding in the perspective of time, each neighbourhood is differing from itself (its past and even its present) in time. The process of differing from itself may indeed by slow enough as to be imperceptible, but this process remains perpetual.[1]

A neighbourhood’s present [2] is always connected to its past and future. From a unified spatio-temporal perspective a neighbourhood past, present and future is also interlinked to other neighbourhoods’ pasts, presents and futures. (See Figure #1) To ask “where” is thus necessarily to ask “when”, to enquire how various neighbourhoods are transforming internal and collaboratively/collectively in time.

Figure #1: Diagram showing spatio-temporal connections between neighbourhoods.
This diagram is simplified to just two neighbourhoods for the purpose of graphic representation. Time is chronologised here for simplicity.

A Framework for Making Connections

Urban design is a practice of speculating what the future might become. As discussed above, we look at how a neighbourhood or city’s past, present and future are connected. More precisely, we look at how the past and present can be harnessed into a framework for future transformations. But, it is of utmost importance to remember the past and present do not dictate the future.

What do we mean by the past and present not dictating the future?

• First, the future is never completely chartable: The plan necessarily deviates from itself insofar as the urban condition is not in a bell-jar. Urban design must always make contingencies, fore-planned and adaptively, for the unexpected to add to the rich spatio-temporal fabric of neighbourhoods and cities.
• Second, the future cannot repeat the past and present: Urban design must necessarily resist romanticising the past and even the present.[3] Why? As much as we have tendencies to ‘remember’ our cities as being better before, the past and even present can be fraught with destructive power relations that give rise to inequalities and inadequacies.[4] Often these destructive power relations are well hidden and even appear benevolent. Urban design-ing is to partly critique these destructive power relations, even as they exist within or constitute established urbanism models, so as to begin to craft land-use, built-form, and community development guidelines that can dismantle and rebuild them into spatial-temporal expressions that foster justice (while also making contingencies for the unexpected).

The operative question is:

• What connections are you going to make to foster productive power relations so that different persons, different communities and neighbourhoods can partake in shared and perpetual transformation, while resisting homogenisation and inter/intra-neighbourhood antagonisms?[5]

#2: What creates a Location?

The Case of Heidegger’s Bridge

More often than not a neighbourhood’s identity is framed as not being another neighbourhood, so much so that antagonisms toward those other neighbourhoods develop implicitly and explicitly. This amounts to the act of Othering. Simply put, Othering is placing negative attributes on another entity so as to foster a sense of positive self-worth.[6]

To illustrate this Othering, let me give the curious and sometimes tense relations between Mainland Chinese and overseas-born Chinese[7]. I have personally witnessed ethnic Chinese family friends complain about how the Mainland Chinese are rude, inflating real estate prices, incapable/unwilling to speak English and many other charges. At a recent family event, one of them – a Singapore Chinese who lives half his time in Vancouver, and half in Singapore – mentioned to me that the Mainlanders are destroying the true Vancouver. How does Othering of the Mainland Chinese have a spatio-temporal dimension? This assumption that Mainlanders are destroying Vancouver is based on another assumption, one that believes Vancouver to have “always been like that.” This is to say the location that is Vancouver is treated as a given rather than one that is created and transformed over time.

The claim to a location often neglects that locations are always created and in a process of differing-from-itself. Locations have never “always been like that.” For instance, a mountain is always going to be just a mountain until humankind gives it a name, builds a national park or ski-run on it, and preserves a view of it through view-protection by-laws. The mountain as a location is a creation. German Philosopher Martin Heidegger gives the example of how the construction of a bridge creates location. He wrote,

The location is not already there before the bridge is. Before the bridge stands, there are of course many spots along the stream that can be occupied by something. One of them proves to be a location, and does so because of the bridge. Thus the bridge does not first come to a location to stand in it; rather, a location comes into existence only by virtue of the bridge.[8]

A spot becomes a location because of use and significance. A location is an artifice rather than something that has “always been like that” or “always been there.” A bridge might be built to connect the two closest points on either side of the river. Over time, rest stops may be built on either side of the bridge; these rest stops might become small housing which in turn could become villages that eventually become cities. The rest stops might not even be locations, but at some point of their growth significance is gained and locations take place in time. More importantly, the significance associated with these locations is differing-from-itself. Like spots along a river, junctions along Broadway necessarily change over time as street corners come to accommodate plazas, higher densities, greater pedestrian movement, varying demographics and so forth. From a spatio-temporal perspective, a location has an essence that we cannot wholly represent, especially when we consider its futurity.

Urban design is very much a practice of creating locations. Specifically, we create the guidelines and policies, the framework, for locations to take place. Guidelines and policies are like Heidegger’s bridge, a catalyst for locations to take shape. And very often we make new locations out of existing locations by modifying or emphasising certain traits about these existing locations. For example, by adding wider footpaths across a popular grassy knoll, and re-grading parts of it we begin to identify and rework some past inadequacies so that persons of all abilities may be able to use that grassy knoll. Transformation does not have to denote loss; it can be a gain toward diverse new experiences for more people.

The operative questions here are:

• What are some spots or locations along Broadway that you can create new locations?
• What other locations does a particular location connect up to?
• How does a location connect to its past, and how will its past be transformed?

#3: Being a Reflective Practitioner

From Know-How to Know-Why

Why do we want to ask questions about locations and the connections a location or place has to other places and other temporalities? This question might be addressed by asking why it is important to ask why.

We designers are surely capable of producing results that win our clients’ praises. We know how to employ certain typologies and rules of thumb that prove to meet certain criteria.[9] But we often do not ask why we are choosing certain building typologies other than the fact those we have chosen seem to be a la mode today.

To make urban design more than a technical exercise committed only to repetition, one might have to unravel some of the frameworks that enable or constraint the way we work. And often there can be frameworks we use that we think are liberating and helping us but are in fact inhibiting us. To ask why is to reflect. As educationist Donald Schön suggests, by moving from a tacit, technical knowledge of design toward a more reflective critical process, we have to query why we choose certain normative values over others. We have to also ask why we even want to begin with normative values in the first place.[10]

Likewise, sociologist Michael Crotty noted that it is important to trace out the theoretical (along with political and ideological) perspectives that construct the lens from which we see the world. A theoretical perspective may consist of a set of concepts and theories that are grounded within certain historical, cultural and/or social milieu.[11] Why do we align with certain milieus? What power relations made up of what kinds of productive and/or destructive forces bind us to those milieus? Why should we retain or expel these alliances, and by doing either what might happen? Asking “why” entails asking “what if” and “so what”.

Of course the questions can be endless (as with all philosophical discussions). But, this move toward the “why” requires a certain daringness to reflect on and challenge ourselves, question stagnant loyalties and even some urban design hero figures we had placed on pedestals. By daring to move from simply knowing-how to knowing-why we might encounter forces and voices that were muted due to certain destructive power relations we had previously been aligned with. By making this move we might become more enabled to assess our situation and devise ways to make new alliances, perhaps even create our own models for urbanism. In asking why, we creatively dismantle stale connections so as to produce new spatio-temporal sensibilities.

The operative questions here are:

• What are some of the theoretical, socio-cultural and political perspectives you carry into your studio work?
• What are some of the potentials and limits of these perspectives, and how would you transform them?

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[1] Philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote that difference-from-itself is a more profound mode of difference than two or more entities being different to each other in comparative fashion. Deleuze explains that difference-from-itself or differenciation involves a process of variation which is constituted by internal variations. It is a difference where one thing, person, subject, place or concept varies by becoming different modalities. Difference in this instance is a difference-in-kind. The being (expressible as its identity and substance) of that thing which is differentiating-from-itself is fundamentally changed. It is in the perpetual process of becoming something else. In fact, because of the law of perpetuality, the very instance it becomes something else, it is already becoming something else, so forth. See Gilles Deleuze (1994), Difference and Repetition (Trans. P. Patton), London & New York: Continuum Books. p.39

[2] The “present” is a curious time unit. Whatever is present, at least whenever we aim to articulate the present in language is already becoming its own past as it propels into the future. From the perspective of dynamic time the present is always eluded.

[3] Philosopher Alain Badiou suggested that to think, to philosophise, is to brought to the foreground the political and ideological circumstances that created certain impasses for certain socio-economic groups. Especially, philosophy must discuss and rethink these impasses as they exist in present politico-ideological regimes, the master narrative. He wrote, “The worst thing is not that philosophy is linked to bloody and daring undertakings. For in this case it remains, even when in extreme error, on the side of invention, on the side of the genius of the weak, on the side of a power to come. The worst thing is to link it, purely and simply, to the arrogance and the self-satisfaction of the master in place.” If urban design is indeed a practice that makes visible connections amongst the past, present and future, then it must like philosophy also find ways to untangle past politico-ideological circumstances or power relations that continue to inhibit futures that promote congeniality and justice. See Alain Badiou (2006), Polemics (Trans. S. Corcoran), London: Verso, 2006, p. 72

[4] One need not look beyond the Vancouver Region for examples. West Vancouver’s British Properties is named as such for obvious reasons. And its Anglo-biased past is today manifested as class-based inequalities.  

[5] Neighbourhoods are certainly different, but this difference need not be a source of antagonisms. Different neighbourhoods with different characteristics can work together if we can identify how forces and power relations within and across neighbourhoods can be weaved together to produce shared meanings and uses. We can take a cue from philosopher and psychotherapist Félix Guattari here on non-opposition transformation. Guattari noted that the world cannot be (and was never) predicated on opposites like capitalist versus proletariat, culture versus nature, and even good versus bad. Instead it is about building up relations that function to undo certain injustices, and breaking those relations when stagnation or even regression occurs. Hence, “there will be times of struggle in which everyone will feel impelled to decide on common objectives and act like little soldiers… But there will simultaneously be periods in which individual and collective subjectivities will ‘pull out’ without a thought for collective aims, and in which creative expressions as such will take precedence.” For Guattari, the activist would become like an artist who will admit the “intrusion of some accidental detail, an event-incident that suddenly makes his initial project bifurcate, making it drift [deriver] far from its previous path, however certain it had once appeared to be.” It is to experiment, to discover how to gather up sometimes unfamiliar forces into relations that can combat what Guattari calls the all pervasive “Integrated World Capitalism” which aims to turn everything into a moralised Right versus Wrong. See Félix Guattari (2000), The Three Ecologies (Trans. I. Pindar + P. Sutton). London + New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone Press, pp.52-53.

[6] Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths + Helen Tiffin (1998) Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies, London + New York: Routledge, pp.60-63.

[7] The term “overseas-born Chinese” implies Chinese that are not born in Mainland China. The term is itself paradoxical in that an ethnic Chinese born in Canada or Singapore or Australia would regard him/herself as “overseas-born” and a Mainlander born overseas as “not-overseas-born”.

[8] Martin Heidegger (1971) Poetry, Language, Thought (Trans. A. Hofstadter), New York + London: Harper Colophon, p.154.

[9] Kees Dorst (2006), Understanding Design: 175 Reflections on being a designer, Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, p.64. Dorst wrote that while rules of thumb have served the design professions very well over the centuries, it is still important to notice when we are using them and query why they work for certain circumstances and not others. Putting rules of thumb through an analytical sieve, knowing how the components that make up a rule of thumb relate to each other and how they relate to things external to them will make it easier for us to break them when necessary. 

[10] Donald Schön (1983), The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals think in Action, New York + London: Basic Books, p.50.

[11] Michael Crotty (1998), The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspectives in the Research Process, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, p.3.

CALL FOR PRESENTERS - SESSION #2

CALL FOR PRESENTERS - SESSION #2

Session Theme: Un-Thinking Mixed

The term “mixed” has become synonymous with “good urbanism”. Yet, the term "mixed" is often not explored beyond the obvious. In town planning and architecture, “mixed” usually denotes two or more adjacent land-uses or modes of occupation that do not disrupt each other. It is adjacency rather than mixed as in forces being intermingled to create something new. The prosaic "mixed" is un-mixed. As Slavoj Žižek wrote, “Today’s liberal tolerance towards others, the respect of otherness and openness towards it, is counterpointed by an obsessive fear of harassment.” In this, the conventional mindset of separating out different noise, smells, socio-economies and cultural groups remained intact.

We invite presenters to unthink and rethink the term “mixed”, to question the unmixed within the celebrated “mixed”. To speculate and experiment with ways in which smells, sounds, and socio-cultural functions, and importantly persons, can exchange territorial grounds so that “mixed” may be founded in equity and dialogue rather than adjacencies in strata.

Curation Outline

Two to three presentations per session (approx. 20 to 40 minutes each). Format may include:

• Papers exploring and extracting philosophical themes from existing/proposed design and/or policies
• Structured Workshops with participants breaking into groups to discuss and present their own findings on the session’s theme
• Combination of the above

Venue

To keep the dialogue-nature of these sessions, the sessions can be held on the weekends/ evenings at:

• Pubs/ cafes (quieter ones though)
• Academic Institutions’ small meeting rooms
• A firm’s meeting room

Website

facebook.com/archosophyvancouver

archosophy-vancouver.blogspot.ca

Contact

archosophyvancouver@gmail.com