Hi all,
Been preoccupied with the messiness of life for the past few (months)? Will be leaving for Tokyo on the 25th and below is the original statement (of intent) for my Ong and Ong Travelling Fellowship trip. On hindsight, despite the fact that the proposal is only a few months old, my thoughts have been like a pendulum-swinging to and fro from the initial thinking here. Here goes (might be a bit long lol):
The world is flat, according to Thomas Friedman. In today’s world of high-speed internet, seamless connections and clock-work outsourcing, there appears no boundary to the exchange of information, ideas and skills. Does this spell the end of cities? Will there be a return of suburbia sprawl like during the mass adoption of automobiles? Well, for the most part, the world is not truly flat yet. Even when it is, I would say that cities would even be more empowered than before. It will not just be the culmination of people. On top of it, the city will be the apex of skills, intelligence, creativity and the adaptability powers of people.
Why does one still observe the clustering of specialized trade and/ or people, like silk traders in Florence hundreds of years ago? Is it true that people/ trades tend to gravitate to those with whom they share similarities (in ideas and interests)? Why do designers thrive in Milan? Why do scientists flock to the United States instead of anywhere else? New York and Tokyo are great magnets for creative talents; Singapore is no less efficient/ synchronous in her city activities, but why does the voluntary brain gain not occur here? Is there a tipping point, as conceptualized by Malcolm Gladwell? If so, what can one learn from the tipping points in Tokyo and Shanghai?
Do we create a microcosm like the “Artelligent City”-Roppongi hills (not unlike Singapore’s one-north)? Or is something “organic” emerging from the dense urban Petri dishes? What about historic cities and their handling of these new supplanted functions; can their architecture adapt and transform? How did architecture respond and adapt to the landscape, climate and culture for instance? Are there also ingenious methods available to urban built form?
Is it possible for a hybrid of urban planning and “organic” growth? Can buildings or interventions in the city function like slime moulds? I.e. Following simple “rules” and subsequently developing adaptive, emergent behaviour. In Emergence, the cities were not studied in depth by Steven Johnson. Sidewalks and streets are the apparent crucial elements for human communications but beyond that scale, can one see buildings behaving like ants? One can probably see this phenomenon happening in shophouses of the past. Trades agglomerate along specialty streets but at the same time, do not go on infinitely. At a seemingly miraculous level, the number of goldsmiths stops in equilibrium in Little India. There is a reason why corner coffeshops appear. The capability to allow such a multifarious cacophony of functions makes the old city highly adaptive and reactive to changes. Through simple and economic determinations, patterns emerge.
Do other historical typologies exist in similar cultures? If they exist, find out whether their architectural organization made them adaptive or the converse. Is there a similar genome in all cities (of the past and present)? What are the modern typologies emerging in super-dense urban metropolises? In Tibet, for example, how a city adapts and morphs after the introduction of direct rail access from cities like Beijing while retaining the rooted-ness in the Buddhist way of life.
Finally, longer stays in selected metropolises will reveal insights as to what makes a city attractive to (and be capable of producing) creative, interesting people? What is the tipping point? Is it programming, people, architecture or policies? Do these creative people gather physically as envisioned by Steven Johnson? If so, what kind of places do they gather at?
The selection of places to visit is envisioned to be as wide-ranging in a dialectic-based matrix.
(Some initial matrix of planned, unplanned, modern, historic, natural, man-made to names of cities matrix)
----
The above-mentioned started with a more ambitious note. During the interview with the panel, I reflected and reviewed the methodology. The new proposal is to immerse, observe and document and sprinkled with some reflections here and there. (Inspired by AS in DS, a diary like document of Alison Simthson's (a team10 member) road trips/ drive in her car) The idea here, is perhaps to document how a traveller like me is affected by say technology. (Internet/ mobile phones/ Bullet trains/ Planes etc) Like how she was affected by the advent of the automobile. The other book that inspired was Do Android Crows Fly Over Electronic Tokyo?, a series of short essays on some contemporary issues affecting Japan.
Finally threading to my idea for my dissertation, I began with an interest in the topic of creative cities..Alexander Tzonis wrote an interesting article for Folio (which i will post later).
In short, two issues i m studying with regards to city planning/ urban design/ architecture..
1. Pausibility for bottom-up approach
2. The role of the Internet with the city
Emergence is about the phenomenon where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But for emergence to happen, you need the interaction amongst the parts. In the context of the city, you need the empowerment of individuals to create “these parts” in various forms via their own mix of activity-coupling (work-live), (play-sell) or the environment for them to do so. One cannot will the actual connection-interaction of the people. But as planners/ architects, we have the opportunity to set up environments for these connections.
Maybe sometime later, we will discuss why the physicality of the city is still required for creative processes.. but the key i think is the role of the internet and telephony in the possible success of bottom-up interaction in a top-down reality.
Comments please!
Been preoccupied with the messiness of life for the past few (months)? Will be leaving for Tokyo on the 25th and below is the original statement (of intent) for my Ong and Ong Travelling Fellowship trip. On hindsight, despite the fact that the proposal is only a few months old, my thoughts have been like a pendulum-swinging to and fro from the initial thinking here. Here goes (might be a bit long lol):
The world is flat, according to Thomas Friedman. In today’s world of high-speed internet, seamless connections and clock-work outsourcing, there appears no boundary to the exchange of information, ideas and skills. Does this spell the end of cities? Will there be a return of suburbia sprawl like during the mass adoption of automobiles? Well, for the most part, the world is not truly flat yet. Even when it is, I would say that cities would even be more empowered than before. It will not just be the culmination of people. On top of it, the city will be the apex of skills, intelligence, creativity and the adaptability powers of people.
Why does one still observe the clustering of specialized trade and/ or people, like silk traders in Florence hundreds of years ago? Is it true that people/ trades tend to gravitate to those with whom they share similarities (in ideas and interests)? Why do designers thrive in Milan? Why do scientists flock to the United States instead of anywhere else? New York and Tokyo are great magnets for creative talents; Singapore is no less efficient/ synchronous in her city activities, but why does the voluntary brain gain not occur here? Is there a tipping point, as conceptualized by Malcolm Gladwell? If so, what can one learn from the tipping points in Tokyo and Shanghai?
Do we create a microcosm like the “Artelligent City”-Roppongi hills (not unlike Singapore’s one-north)? Or is something “organic” emerging from the dense urban Petri dishes? What about historic cities and their handling of these new supplanted functions; can their architecture adapt and transform? How did architecture respond and adapt to the landscape, climate and culture for instance? Are there also ingenious methods available to urban built form?
Is it possible for a hybrid of urban planning and “organic” growth? Can buildings or interventions in the city function like slime moulds? I.e. Following simple “rules” and subsequently developing adaptive, emergent behaviour. In Emergence, the cities were not studied in depth by Steven Johnson. Sidewalks and streets are the apparent crucial elements for human communications but beyond that scale, can one see buildings behaving like ants? One can probably see this phenomenon happening in shophouses of the past. Trades agglomerate along specialty streets but at the same time, do not go on infinitely. At a seemingly miraculous level, the number of goldsmiths stops in equilibrium in Little India. There is a reason why corner coffeshops appear. The capability to allow such a multifarious cacophony of functions makes the old city highly adaptive and reactive to changes. Through simple and economic determinations, patterns emerge.
Do other historical typologies exist in similar cultures? If they exist, find out whether their architectural organization made them adaptive or the converse. Is there a similar genome in all cities (of the past and present)? What are the modern typologies emerging in super-dense urban metropolises? In Tibet, for example, how a city adapts and morphs after the introduction of direct rail access from cities like Beijing while retaining the rooted-ness in the Buddhist way of life.
Finally, longer stays in selected metropolises will reveal insights as to what makes a city attractive to (and be capable of producing) creative, interesting people? What is the tipping point? Is it programming, people, architecture or policies? Do these creative people gather physically as envisioned by Steven Johnson? If so, what kind of places do they gather at?
The selection of places to visit is envisioned to be as wide-ranging in a dialectic-based matrix.
(Some initial matrix of planned, unplanned, modern, historic, natural, man-made to names of cities matrix)
----
The above-mentioned started with a more ambitious note. During the interview with the panel, I reflected and reviewed the methodology. The new proposal is to immerse, observe and document and sprinkled with some reflections here and there. (Inspired by AS in DS, a diary like document of Alison Simthson's (a team10 member) road trips/ drive in her car) The idea here, is perhaps to document how a traveller like me is affected by say technology. (Internet/ mobile phones/ Bullet trains/ Planes etc) Like how she was affected by the advent of the automobile. The other book that inspired was Do Android Crows Fly Over Electronic Tokyo?, a series of short essays on some contemporary issues affecting Japan.
Finally threading to my idea for my dissertation, I began with an interest in the topic of creative cities..Alexander Tzonis wrote an interesting article for Folio (which i will post later).
In short, two issues i m studying with regards to city planning/ urban design/ architecture..
1. Pausibility for bottom-up approach
2. The role of the Internet with the city
Emergence is about the phenomenon where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But for emergence to happen, you need the interaction amongst the parts. In the context of the city, you need the empowerment of individuals to create “these parts” in various forms via their own mix of activity-coupling (work-live), (play-sell) or the environment for them to do so. One cannot will the actual connection-interaction of the people. But as planners/ architects, we have the opportunity to set up environments for these connections.
Maybe sometime later, we will discuss why the physicality of the city is still required for creative processes.. but the key i think is the role of the internet and telephony in the possible success of bottom-up interaction in a top-down reality.
Comments please!
10 comments:
If anyone is too free, please use it to read maybe these 3 books
Multitude: War and Democracy in the age of Empire
(Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri)
and
The rise of the Network Society
(Manuel Castells)
and
Out of Control
(Kevin Kelly)
and be inspired!
hmm the internet does not make the world more flat, it exaggerates the preexisting conditions and augments the cycles of growth, economies, society, etc in their pre internet days.
eg, florence silk merchants will not be displaced but become more global in their sales, creating dot.com companies, using internet based consumer feedback and smoothening of logistics and warehousing.
cities have naturally been petridishes of culture and information, where pple go and learn in a face to face in the jacob's sidewalks, a somewhat inefficient way (as compared to the internet). the internet just smoothened the bottlenecks of communication and put a fast forward onto everything, takes out the nation state role for regulation information.
as for the case of singapore, in comparison to world cultures and civilisations, we are still a fledging 200 year old town (we do not have the benefit of a large hinterland) which set itself out to survive based on the economics of materiality and trade. our creativity stops as soon as we make money. that is the aesthetics of asian pragmatism.
even so, there are some great cultural icons singapore produces, like kitchan, sim wong hoo's creative, eric khoo, some leading law firms etc, but they are too diverse in occupation yet too small a niche group to reach a critical mass (in urban planning terminology) to create a impact on the local architecture in the city. as long as the lawyers think comedians are any less talented than them, despite the obvious application of brain power, and our pseudo confucian-liberalist values are continually used to prejudge creativity, its hard to ground them in actual spaces in spore.
for a bottom up endeavour, the internet is a truly democratic realm. but for pple to have a genius loci where they call home to truly encompass these talented pple's worldviews, they must have a place in decision making in their own home, lifestyle, spatial demands.
wuks on his visits shd be able to distil the meaning of these social spaces in shibuya, llhasa, kyoto stripped of their cultural baggages and government civics. in spore we are so caught up with dealing with bureaucracy and established academia that these real issues are difficult to be seen. ur traveling scholarship shd include a visit down to singaporea as well, voted 2nd in the world's most happening party place for dunno wat fuck reason lol.
note
pudong, in shanghai, is setting itself up to become something like msia's multimedia super corridor. a gigantic business complex organised around advanced telecom communication systems, deliberately isolated from the old metropolis of shanghai but yet in close proximity.
hmm. ah che has many points.. ranging from economics, politics to maybe the ingrained culture of peoples.
but as a architect-to-be (or materialist/pragmatist tt ah che wld like to categorise me), i m interested in the following.
eg. automobile change the way cities worked forever. large distances become insignificant almost. some blame modernists etc but some stuff is really beyond the control of planners/ architects. The automobile was INEVITABLE. I would dare say.
The internet not ONLY reduces distances. It is beginning to render physical space redundant. You can have your video conferencing etc. There are virtual worlds created in the image of real worlds. E.g. The Sims, Secondlife etc. People are trading, having sex and making friends in these virtual worlds!Real people can have multiple personas in different virtual worlds. A MP in real life might be a paedophile in virtual life.
I am not interested in technology JAZZING up architecture. Projecting images onto real, different soundscapes in physical space for people. Those, to me, are just cool stuff. Not intellectual, meaningful stuff.
Internet for all its seemingly prowess is still incapable of physicality. Nothing beats REAL sex! (Well, we are not at VR sex yet, think Sandra Bullock and Sly in Judge Dredd) Sorry for digressing. The issue here is the need for face to face exchange for ideas.
One has problems reading long passages (like these) and concentrating on the web. But not so on paper. (Not denying the web is beginning to make us become not-able-to-concentrate on anything.)
For why we still need paper, over here. http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_03_25_a_paper.htm
The challenge is here. What we as architects can think, create and do to supplement the inherent weaknesses for communication and interaction on the net. That i believe, will be the eventual path post-industrial cities will take.
I wld like to thank Ah Che for these exchanges. Internet is well good at making thoughts clear in some ways.
I wld nvr have been able to voice out all these more coherently then posting and then drawing feedback.
hmm the modernists failed in their urban utopia with broad overgeneralisations of trends.
u do realise the futurologists of the internet are intent to build an identical etopia with equal broadstrokes?
no i dun mean to be a spoilsport here. but current extrapolations of the internet and virtuality follows a linear inevitability of tot which is simply an extrapolation of TODAYS trends. the exponential growth of the technology wld mean thousands of concurrent factors acting on one another forming vastly different scenarios.
henceforth the modernists failed to predict even the onset of mass civil unrest erupted in vietnam war, czech 68, los angelas with their cultural backing of WW2. with arguably lesser variables in interaction in a decidedly top down and easier manupulatable world. what happens in this internet age?
the virtual space will react equally strongly on the real space so much so that our physical activities will change with newer unfathomable technologies. certain realities will evolve as the virtual realm evolves.
haha zihao, fell deep into the trap again..
like a skeptical young tay kheng soon..full of ideas but cynical of his own faults inherent in his ideals.
some methods are definitely inherently weak in some aspects, such as forecasting the future from the current world.
inadequate data, missing pieces, the FEAR of boldy predicting the future and falling flat. are the modernists all wrong? broadstrokes their predictions might be, in broadstrokes too we dismiss their overall short of foresight in our hindsight.
we architects are the vanguard of foresight. we turn dreams into physicality. the fear of mistaken foresight because of hindsight will be the greatest folly.
anyway i believe zihao means we should not broadstroke the future. i agree. sure many things happened, vietnam war, cold war lewinsky sucked clinton's cock. well, what's the importance of clinton's cock is to us architects?
same stuff, i brought up internet because from the forseeable present it will have deep impact on humans and their cities. jus like the dying earth will. just like le corb predicting that the automobiles will..
maybe the m16 did in the vietnam war and still impacting our lifes..but to that we have no control..why not forsee what we can and do what we can to influence it? what say you?
aiyoh... as architect... u look and compartmentalise facts and data, and work on them providing the best solutions...
u dun overlook the over importance of architecture over other variables in life and be contrived in the worldview...
we talking the same thing but hooting each other on the extremes... worst
to clarify, zihao was really trying to say the internet will be a inherently bottom up revolution and it will be highly unpredictable to predict its outcome.
on my turn, i wld like to clarify that i agree. but rather than be passive and wait for things to happen. i want to see whether they are happening now...a bit like discovering melting ice and understand why before the entire ice shelf falls off.
imho virtual space has not developed to such an extent that enables it to render physical space redundant, yet the same might not b said of the distant future...
the film 'existenz' painted a scenario whereby the world is not ruled by politicians, capitalists, nor superstars but game designers. imagine an endless suburb where everywhere looks like anywhere, ironically, the ultimatum of individualism since everyone is the king of their own virtual realm. the simulated has finally replaced the real.
ok im digressing from the topic. post-lunch time day-dreaming 8D
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