IDEAS FOR LIVEABLE ENVIRONMENTS AFTER THE LOSS OF UTOPIA

M. Arch. Ozan ÖZTEPE
Istanbul Technical University, Faculty of Arch., Doctorate Programme.

I. MODERNISM AND UTOPIA

The process of change, started from rural to urban which began with the industrial revolution and the process of industrialization, evolved into an unforeseen mass at the end of 20th century. Modernism, which started with the industrial revolution and gained velocity by means of the need to produce mass houses, due to the destructive affects of World War 2 , manifests its predictions about the future by several utopias. Utopias which express ideal society and ideal life, manifested among both economical and social areas at the beginning of 20th century, started to lose their meanings by the end of the century. (Karatani, 1995:16). The collapse of USSR which proposed communist society as the ideal society at 1989, digital revolution, the effects of capitalism on societies, the ground breaking effects of globalism, make it necessary to re-evaluate the social thoughts and the cities which were considered accordingly at the beginning of 20th century. The livable environment ideal of the past utopias and the recent situation contradict with each other. Modernism’s utopias have made heavier and heavier demands upon our cities. As a result, they have grown ever larger, more crowded , more stressed and strained, and more desperately choked with traffic and pollution. It is obvious that we can not continue down this path for very much longer. In this paper, the utopias which are manifested for ideal city and life, in 20th century, will be evaluated under the context of today, and thoughts for reaching a livable environment will be presented.

Starting with the effects of industrial revolution, and gaining a different velocity by means of the destructive effects of World Wars, urbanism has undergone a radical change at the first half of the 20th century. The proposed concepts of modernism, like simplification, saturation and tabula rasa, resulted in the reconsideration of the relations structured by mankind between nature and tradition. The spatial needs of industrialization, integrated artificial additions to the cities which were in their natural pattern of evaluation. The cities which confronted a rapid change under the mentioned context, began to be discussed structurally. A more fundamental critique of attempts to simplify the problem has been offered by Christopher Alexander, notably in his essay “A City is not a tree”, in which he argued that such attemps were based upon a mistaken appreciation of the structural relationship of the city’s elements which typically take the form of semi-lattices. The tree-like structure of most modern plans, from Tange’s Tokyo Bay to Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh, represents a “trivially simple” case of the semi-lattice structure, and one in which “life will be cut to pieces” (Gosling & Maitland, 1984:20). The new cities which are reformed or just appeared completely as a Tabula Rasa, tried to be predicted by means of different utopias, that depend on several images at the first half of 20th century. The design depended utopias proposed by modernism remained away from contextualism, keeping politics and social input behind, and object and image centered.

Under the context of social class separations, disappearance of borders among recent cities, and the effects of technology on daily life; utopia thoughts which are proposed with the intention of claiming ideal society and ideal cities, lost their importance. Many similar plans of Voison plan, which was proposed by Le Corbusier, were constructed in differing scales among the world, under the context of tabula rasa. The intensified urban society which was proposed by Le Corbusier, became the major problem of many cities nowadays. On the other hand Frank Lloyd Wright put the idea of the integration of rural and urban by proposing, in his ideal society who will live in the city he called “Usonia”, giving every family an acre of land. In recent cities due to economical difficulties, suburban areas emerged between rural and urban as buffer zones. Neither Corbusier nor Lloyd did consider new societies’ social or economical issues fairly. The Moving Cities proposed by Archigram in 60’s became real in some sorts by means of telecommunication technologies, rapid progress of transportation systems, and effects of these into daily life. In 1960’s, especially as a result of globalization, spaces on different topographies are becoming more and more similar, by means of capitalism same spaces began to be reproduced on different parts of the world. Distances between cities began to fade virtually with world wide web and other digital innovations. With the effect of globalization, people became nomads in the spaces they live, under the context Deluze put into literature. When generalized, our cities today, became capitalist attraction centers that suffer from social class conflicts, transportation, infrastucture and ecological problems, which consists of suburbs added to its center and near perimeter. We need to develop urbanistic and architectural ideas on these new urban conditions, using information from sociological, economic and geographical sources. Architecture cannot claim to shape the city in its own image. We can only conceive an entire set of relations between the city and architecure when we reject the idea that architecture gives form to the city as its own object.

Today there are 22 megalopolises all around the world. At the outset of the twentieth century, 10% of the population lived in cities. In 2000 around 50% of the world population lived in cities (Koolhaas, 2002: 20). Due to ever-expanding communications network and the immeasurable web of interrelationships they generate, the world has shed the anachronism “global village” and is transforming into the more advanced state of the “metacity” (MVRDV, 1999:55). We will be living realistically and legally in a one-town world for the first time in history.

II. THE LOSS OF UTOPIA

The term “utopia” itself means both a place and a state of things, and it is often difficult to separate the two. Utopia, with its plain meaning, is the place of nowhere, however, ideal images and progressive movements can be formulated by means of utopia . The utopian concept refers to Plato’s proposal that a perfect environment is the result of a perfect society. Thus utopian planning proposals historically have been based upon particular utopian concepts of society, and assumed the creation of a newly mentality in mankind. Most such proposals have adopted rigid geometrical forms. Utopia concept was first put by Sir Thomas More at 1516 as a description of a future ideal society. (Meyerson, 1996:113). Two main traditions on utopia had emerged up until 20th century. While literal utopias construct the desired future under the social context, design utopias operate under the context of spatial organizations.

Utopia is the fiction of perfect society. Utopical thoughts arose in different areas, from Ideal cities to ideal societies; from social and political speculations to science fiction; from realistic novels to cultural movies and television. It became a wide spread idea that utopia which dominated Europe’s dreams for a better future, began to lose its effect. Today, not only the USSR but all utopia fictions seem to dysfunction. This crisis of socialism resulted in the domination of Western capitalist democracies. (Kumar, 2002: 106).

According to Popper the real weakness of 20th century utopias is that they propose the complete regeneration of the society depending on some absolute and rational thoughts. This is the thought that pushes utopia to violence and oppression. According to Popper utopianism is an act that starts with the intension of “producing the heaven on earth” however ends with solitude and returning the world to hell. The most negative aspects of utopia are; the claim of totality, absoluteness and uniqueness.

Although Utopias are technically non-existent concepts, they are described as projects, which present a real utopia image. By mid 20th century, modernism began to spread all around the world and began to fill the cities with real spaces urban images once thought as utopical. This situation reached its peak by the end of 20th century, and utopia, ironically, became real. Today the belief that mankind has the ability to change its environment radically by means of planning, is replaced by the belief that mankind lacks such ability.

III. IDEAS FOR LIVABLE ENVIRONMENTS - DATA DESIGN

Contemporary architecture is an information architecture. Information provides data to architecture in order to produce design models among technology, sociology, philosophy, politics, and phsycal environment. Architect, in accordance with his role in 21st century, should transfer the information, which is of its biggest amount in history, into design in single buildings or environmental scale by means of different design methods. The architect collects information that is potentially structuring, co-ordinates it, transforms it and offers ideas and images for the organization of public life in an endless, seamless system. City today, to a greater degree than ever before, actually is those data sets and is those networks of public equipment through which the data circulates. We all live in an information society.

Every design should be considered with the possessed information of its, in its own context (Tümertekin, 1999:54). Information, which is obtained as objective input, can be transformed into design data by means of diagrams. The diagram is a form of mediator; an external, ‘found’ element, between the object and the subject, which could be used to introduce other themes into a project. The role of the diagram is to generate ideas and to find inspiration in something that is purely organizational, rather than iconographic or metaphorical and to represent a strong, though not yet fully rationalized, conceptual potential. Diagrams offer a new abstraction; unlike the reductionism of an urbanism based on Euclidean Geometry, that is proliferating, unfolding and generative, re-activating public life in urban planning (UN Studio, 2006:32). The search for new forms of ordering principles different from Cartesian geometry. Data design can be described in its general meaning, as, transferring the social, topographical, environmental information about the place, into design data with the help of diagrams or such simplified tools. Several symptoms about place are manifested by means of diagrams. At this point the bond instituted with place is considered as objective as possible. We have to produce diagrams, that are not readily found and they have to be produced in relation with the “place”. The diagram begins with defining its parameters. Defining user categories, for example, in relation to territorial and time-based parameters. Diagrams are made in order to extract parameters for the development of the site; functional relationships, car traffic flow diagram, mass transportation diagram, density of activities etc. The diagrams are tended to accentuate the effects of the interaction between different actors. This relational approach to diagramming generated new insights into the developmental potential of locations in an integral manner. Movement studies are important in determining the composition of a location; analysis of types of movement includes the direction of the various trajectories, their prominence in relation to the forms of transportation on the site, their links to different programmes, and their interconnections.

The information designer organizes a variety of data into structures that coordinate complex systems and processes in a clear way. A major focus of information design is the way in which the viewer links his own insights with the contents of such “data packages”. Data design is therefore, a consequence of an increase in the amount of information available to the public. The emergence of data design represents an important step toward making the public domain – in both a physical and mental sense more “public”. Data design can be seen as a navigation system which, at its best offers insight into the processes that have created our complex society (MVRDV, 1999:213).

- BIO NEXUS OF THE CITY

The relationship between mankind and nature weakened after the industrial revolution. While there are separations between natural and urban environments in our contemporary cities, at a larger scale it confronts global environmental problems. New solutions that strengthen the relation between city and nature should be searched. The balance between urbanisation and ecology is crucial for liveable environments. In comparison to the amount of study which has been carried out on the energy performance of building designs, little has been said on the comparable performance of towns. The ecological connectivity of the city emerges as a dominant consideretion in urbanism. Ecological corridors can re-establish ecological connectivity as an integrated part of the city’s urban fabric to provide opportunities for a rich and sustainable mix of passive and active uses working in harmony with the natural environment. The ecological approach is not one consisting of a hard-and-fast set of design rules that result in a deterministic set of built forms. Variations will be the natural outcome of responding to different site geometries and to the climatical data (Powell, 1999:72).

In general the city is described as the built spaces of its own. A new conception of the city can be described as a city no longer defined by its built space but its absence or empty spaces (Koolhaas, 1993:331). The empty spaces can planned as green spaces or even forests in towns. One kilometer of such forest (a mixture of birch, oak, pine and beech) absorbs 575 tons of CO2 per year. The photosynthesis reaction could be used to absorb the CO2 that is released by the burning of fossil fuels, by cars, by factories (MVRDV, 1999:106). Generally city should bear its meaning vertically while nature should be considered horizontally. The eco-corridors can be designed as vertical spaces even. Eco-corridors will produce a biological network among the city.

The ecological approach addresses the issues of conserving energy in a settlement and of reducing its waste products. The architect must address the issue of the extent of delivered energy embodied in the materials and equipment used in the buildings of the settlements.

Another issue for the bio nexus of the cities is minimizing the power needs. The natural climatic energies of the location should be employed to their fullest. The energy conservation issue that has been dealt with at the building scale until now needs to be thought of at a larger scale -the city. Solar power and wind power should both be considered as essential sources for sustainable energy resources.

- INFRASTRUCTURE TRANSFORMING INTO ARCHITECTURE

Architecture which usually bears over ground construction as object, however, under the context of livable cities, it should consider infrastructure and transportation facilities with engineers. Today infrastructure is an unseperable part of architecture. The shifting fields of engineering, urbanism and infrastructure form some of the most important parameters of architecture (UN Studio, 2006:55). Large urban projects in which ınfrastructure and programmes come together to form a new kind of urban node demand an architectural approach which is radically different from the traditional method of urban planning that is consisted of shifting about disjointed units. Urbanism, infrastructure, transportation and construction are issues that should be considered in accordance.

Permiability is a similar concept with livability. Place, which is an important issue in our contemporary cities, usually increased by vertical structures. Underground presents an important potential for cities new layers. Infrastructure is a contemporary issue which architect should bear responsibility under the context of urban planning.

Today infrastructure concept does not consist of energy lines, water lines, sewage lines, like it was once; highways, land / water transportation, bridges, tunnels, metro stations, ports, airports etc, presents important infrastructure points of the city. In a way infrastructure produces cities sub layers. The infrastructure connects the city in the underground which enables new public spaces. Designing these layers requires the collabration of engineers and architects.

- THE ECONOMICAL APPROACH

Economy can be regarded as the key word for livable environments by most people. The economist J.K. Galbraith has remarked that all of the problems of the city can be solved by the sufficient application of just one thing, and that thing is money. Such a view, of the city as a thing to be improved or cured by financial means, hides the fact that the city is itself a financial device, so important to the national economy that some authorities would regard the latter as little more than the sum of the urban economies it comprises (Gosling & Maitland, 1984:10).

Today’s cities mainly serves as great finance devices. Most starkly in the case of the squatter settlements of the Third World, but also for the most sophisticated proposal for a developed metropolis, the economic context provides a crucial parameter. For most projects this fact simply entails a restriction in resources available to realize ends defined by other considerations. For a few, however, the operation of economic forces itself seems to provide a model for the form of development. Unlike social, engineering or formal models, for example, which can suggest some fixed goal to be realized, this particular source inspires no physical end state, but rather a sense of the city as, above all, a dynamic process. Economy equals to ecology equals to liveable city. The livable environments are not only architectural or engineering problems it is also about finance.

The economical approach requires a physical, social, cultural, ecological equilibrium around the context of economy (Yeang, 2006:12). The macro and the micro economical policies have to be planned simultenously with other diciplines. Every city should be considered economically in its context. While performing this consideration, collaboration should take place with the related disciplines and economic issues evaluated accordingly.

IV. FUTURE CITY

At the end of the 20th century, information has become dematerialized and disembodied. Today, the digital revolution effects architecture and urbanism at all stages. New production techniques and materials are constantly evolving and leading to design innovations (Mitchell, 2000:106). Contemporary architects and urban planners should put their thoughts on the future cities, today.

In general future city can be described in these main points; dematerialization, demobilization, mass customization, intelligent operation, soft transformation. For the future cities space will be evaluated through an entirely modernized vocabulary: no longer is it geometrically composed or visualized but computed, calibrated, assessed, predicted, optimized (Koolhaas, 2002: 268). Since 1990 contemporary practice has been dominated by the revolution in digital technology. Computer generated data can be used to inform the very fabric of building and to re-think our future cities. Complexity and uncertainty are unavoidable terms, which must be accounted for in any hypothesis about the future of cities. The era of the second modernity and of the post-Fordist societies is characterized by uncertainty and indeterminacy. The functions and values of existing urban elements, and radically remake their relationships will change in the future city. The resulting new urban tissues will be characterized by live / work dwellings, twenty-four-hour neighborhoods, electronically mediated meeting places, flexible, decentralized production, marketing and distribution systems, and electronically summoned and delivered services. This will redefine the intellectual and professional agenda of architects, urban designers, and others who care about the spaces and places in which we spend our daily lives (Alison, 2006:7). The industrial revolution forced the separation of home and workplace, the digital revolution is bringing them back together.

According to the new dynamics of the cities in the twenty-first century, new, high-speed, digital telecominications infrastructure will refashion the urban patterns that emerged from nineteenth and twentieth century transportation, water supply and waste removal, electric power supply and telephone networks. Todays public places, towns and cities have to be innovated and reinvented according to the requirements for the twenty first century. New techniques must be invented to allow the architectural imagination to find relevance in contemporary circumstances and to communicate its policy.

V. CONCLUSION

Architecture and urbanism are complex fields of multiple forces. The urban space is basically a social spatial network, an anthropological space, which has cultural and historical dimensions that belong to it. The rigid dogmas of Modernism and standardization have been fundamentally challenged. Sociology, philosophy and urbanism have trained us to see the city as a functional system of relations and links. Architecture is no longer simply the play of masses in light. It now embraces the play of digital information in space according to the requirments of the 21st century.

Urbanism is a challenge facing all disciplines today. The new urban spaces and organizations can be understood only in relation with the technological, economic, politic and cultural developments. The validity of the 20th century utopias, that propose strict solutions and images, should be thought again. After the loss of utopia, in order to imagine the livable cities of tomorrow, thoughts that focused on the process rather than the result, that are more flexible and which do not bear a claim of absoluteness are needed.

Data design has the ability to bring a new approach to contextualism by its qualities like producing design parameters with every kind of information about the place. The bio nexus of the city, bears a vital importance in order to make the post industrialist cities livable again. The cities which became isolated from the nature should be integrated with the nature again. The cities which became increasingly isolated from nature after the Industrial Revolution, should be integrated with the nature again. Infrastructure is an issue, which architects should take responsibility just like the engineers. As digital revolution taken into account, infrastructure will grow parallel to technology. Silicon will be a new kind of steel. Economics should be considered as a basic criteria that vitalizes social, cultural, technological, ecological and political parameters.

All the ideas about liveable environments need physical, cultural, ecological, social and economic equilibrium. Due to the digital revolution, the 21st century cities needs re-thinking in designing, engineering, ecology and economy.

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Keywords:
UTOPIA - DATA DESIGN – INFRASTRUCTURE – ECOLOGY- FUTURE CITY