LEUPHANA team 269

1. #269 SIGNIFICANT DETAILS >>>>>>> OPEN CITY
OPEN CITY
As with all tangible things, the products we use every day -- as well as the environment we inhabit
-- are often offered to us in a narrow window that prevents us from seing them as part of a bigger
picture.
Yet, however beautiful and suggestive the poetic image of the invisible hand of the free market
system may be, in practice one of its tangible effects is out alienation from our total environment.
In modern society the creation of most consumer products has migrated not only from our localities
to places away from our cities, but often even farther, to other continents. As a result, the
complexity of production -- the complexity of our lives -- seems to have separated us from a simple
organic relationship to the physicality of the products we use -- and in general from the visible
matter -- as an essential part of the environment we live in.
In cities, even the former market buildings are regularly threatened. One thinks of Les Halles of
Paris and their iconic Balthard's iron structures, famed not only at the geographic center of Paris,
but also pulsating heart of the city and documented through Zola's novel among other, culturally
significant places but dismantled or displaced far away from the cities centers... often to be replaced
by commercial compounds, such as the « forum des Halles » in the epicenter of Paris, but which
does not live up to the expectations conveyed by the word « forum » in terms of sociability. Many
markets of London, New York, and Eastern Europe are often threatened by developments projects
that require their destruction. It is often the fierce resistance of the local communities that saved
them from being teared down.
As an further step, one of the answers to our new habits is even to replace traditional shops by
vending machines, with all the added values in term of 24h 7 days/7 accessibility, but quite
obviously at the cost of a complete loss of any social interaction...

2. Some retail projects however, far from the usual and not sustainable supermarket model, have made
use of existing abandoned plants, and respect the industrial history of the city..However, how
interesting they may be, those enterprises are still based on the societal model of consumer's
society...
Some of the pressing questions we are currently faced with then include: "How can we expect
people to understand these complexities and be actively involved in them, feel ownership and take
responsibility? And does the synthesis of our complexity and alienation find a direct mirror in how
we feel about our cities?” [1]
We could not multiply examples, and did not choose the most appealing photos but some
expressing current issues as well as the ability of sometimes simple ideas to change the face of the
city and our daily urban experiences.

3. Of course, one of the answers resides in architecture. This
black (in contrast to the red-brick and white painted adjacent townhouses) single-family but
intergenerational house, with some activity/office space at the basement level,, is made of a simple
form, and built for a budget significantly lower than the average price per square meter, in spite of
a conception that integrates sustainability (choice of the materials and construction process, and
maintenance and energetic issues for years to come.. ).
A good example of response to the community concerns is this real estate development project,
implying the erection of 6 stories buildings, detached from the streetline, in an environment of
family houses of 2 stories at most. Initial plans created a fierce opposition by the existing
inhabitants, the project was then amended to create as many units, with the same maximum height,
but in a much more contextual fashion, and the developer eventually admitted that in the
redesigning process, some new terraces could be created toward the roofs of the existing houses in
compensation for the higher density, and that following the pattern of the streets gave some cachet
to the buildings.
This is an isolated intervention, that can certainly foster life in the neighbourghood, but then what
about the connection beetween areas, and the enhancement of a pleasant and smooth pedestrian
mobility in the «legible city» ?
Some of the possible approaches to address these questions include a variety of interesting
initiatives where design irrigates the city. We do not think here of the concepts of "capital of design"
or of venturous and bold design gestures, but of those micro scale interventions, when for example
the form of a passageway is reinvented in order to gently insert new streams into an existing pattern.
The newly created one, modest in proportion to the neighbouring buildings, is relevant by its
usability, the pertinence of the signaletics and moreover, reveals itself at night. Here the
implications of the "24 hours city" are adressed by clever lighting design. (Ill. following page)

4. Transforming former plants (or docks warehouses,etc... ) into apartments is nothing new, and
widely branded successful developments have changed entire areas of cities, making them some of
the most attractive and much coveted, thus not quite affordable anymore.... There is another way for
inhabitants to litteraly reclaim parts of the city: sometimes, such as in this beleaguered areas,
abandoned plants are first «assaulted» by groups of illicit occupiers, and through a negociation
process, it eventually happens that they are able to settle legally in a portion of the building, start its
renovation, whereas vast parts of the building remain available for potential activity development.
Such examples are harbingers of new trends towards more empowerement of the inhabitants.
Eventually, the "open design" movement promotes a shift from the traditional passive consumer to
an active owner, who is involved in the process of creation, production and adaptation. A design
process which is open, where the end product is the result of an iterative process, similar to the
software releases in the development of open source software. When we decide to transfer this open
design approach to the urban context, can we really become the creators of the open source city ?

5. The mission of the "social creatives", engaged it this new approach, is to connect people to social
issues through artistic expression. Some such projects include painting and drawing on walls, i.e.
the creation of so called public murals and the transformation of dustbins.
An interesting approach to this idea of creating visible matter in the city as art, in fact of tinkering
and creating and making our cities our own is the Social Creatives project, whose initiator Faris
Basharahil calls this kind of work “legal vandalism for a good cause.”
"We do legal vandalism. A picture speaks a thousand words. A motion is a thousand pictures. An
emotion to a thousand motion. What we do is not just to paint but to spread emotions to one
another. We hope to make society more colourful both visually and emotionally,” in the words of
Faris Basharahil, the Founder and Director of Social Creatives, a non-profit social enterprise, which
promotes community art. [2]
1] http://watershed.co.uk/opencity/think-pieces/think-piece-2/
[2] http://www.thecity2.org/stories/community-created-street-art