made up urban spaces

Via the BLDGBLOG I’m learning that the Liverpool Biennial is running an international exhibition entitled MADE UP, celebrating the power of artistic imagination. As part of its catalog Geoff Manaugh wrote an essay on the notion of made-up cities, challenging the assumption that everyone who lives in a city knows what it is like to be urban. His post is a brilliant collection of arguments about what constitutes a city.

If Urville, the ultimate example of urban fantasy lives up to the architectural standards of most modern metropolis but is completely devoid of character, can a truly urban experience be architected without the need for a massive agglomeration of buildings? Understanding of these two extreme exercises may lead to better ideas on how to design the cities of the future. Certainly it would seem this exercise is important as we are making important mistakes in building current cities:

…we have perfected the art of the anti-city—that we have made up anything but truly urban environments. Dubai, for instance, is famously difficult to navigate on foot, requiring a ten minute car ride down six-lane motorways, complete with frequently lethal U-turns, simply to get to the hotel across the street. The city has a sum total of eleven pedestrian bridges—and twenty-five percent of the world’s cranes.

Perhaps Ciudad Gálvez, born from the imagination of photographer Oscar Guzmán is obsessed with transportation because it desperately tries to create ways for people to find it. We must conclude that architecture without content can’t be urban.

In my post slums of hope I suggested that slums (as another form of urban organization) had their own virtues:

the new urban paradigm may very well be based on the high-density of these slums. Places where humanity takes precedence over the material world, where luxury has nothing to do with the riches of the world, but with the knowledge on how to live a good life.

The argument presented by the BLDGBLOG depicts these slums as radically unplanned spaces with far too much content, in opposition to Dubai where the lack of content is masked with perfectly planned spaces. Other examples of perfectly planned cities may not look like cities at all:

many of the largest cities in the United States today are simply hypertrophied suburbs—they are boomburbs. [...] What these boomburbs have, in lieu of historic centrality and international name-recognition, is a flexible legal and financial infrastructure. They have water rights boards and waste disposal networks, even local schools and sales tax—and though they don’t necessarily have mayors (though some do), they have “landscape management” committees and homeowners associations. These are cities made up less by buildings than by tax codes and the law.

The quintessential American suburb may not look at all like Urville, which has embraced architectural landmarks as an important symbol of urbanism; but it’s eery how both spaces are devoid of the busy sidewalks that urban planners recognize as a healthy characteristic of authentic urban spaces.