City as Heart(s)

“As a biologist, I see cities as living organisms. Pulsating bodies made up of new and dying cells and kept alive by the people flowing through their arteries. Cities grow, swell, change shape, absorb and eject. This is not about cities with a heart, but about cities as a heart; pumping oxygen and fresh blood into the greater metropolitan areas.”
- Jacqueline Cramer, minister of the Environment and Spatial Planning

Hearing these words at the closing speech of Morgen/Tomorrow – the International Urban Planning Congress held in Amsterdam – one may travel into the memory of “The Heart of the City”, theme of the 8th International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM VIII, 1951, Hoddesdon, England). Today, as then, it was an important moment where urban planners and architects from all around the world gathered to discuss the City as a living liveable centre (core/cuore/coeur). Still today it has a fundamental role in the balance of the expanded new (Open) City.
As an Open City enthusiast, Kees Christiaanse speech alerted to the present status of worldwide metropolises, dealing with the multiple layers of their multicultural heritage: “The enemies of the open city are the open city itself”. Thus, the coexistence of ethnic communities which do not communicate with one another (the favelas of São Paulo and the city of Jakarta were examples given) and rather just inhabit in the same metropolitan structure it is a phenomenon that must be surpassed by city government. Exploring deeper the Netherlands point of view on the Open City, Zef Hemel’s (Substituting the canceled speech of Anastasia Volynskaya’s) presented his “Free State of Amsterdam” speech in a cheerful tone of positive aura upon Planning, as described by his nine “Amsterdam Principles”. The focus on the city of Amsterdam continued in the afternoon workshop “Urban Governance and Liveable cities”, where Maarten van Poelgeest (Alderman of Amsterdam for Town and Country Planning) and Hessel Boerboom (Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations) could reveal a bit of Amsterdam projects for the future.

City and Revolution
Nevertheless, the motivation for the congress was to pay a tribute to Floor Wibaut, Amsterdam’s alderman on the beginning of the 20th century and an important city enthusiast and city revolutionary. Inevitably, thinking on the city of tomorrow is also to respect and learn with the past and its examples. Is also to think how extraordinary events, like war and revolution, have such a great impact on the city. This link was made through the emotive love-liberty imagery of the streets of Amsterdam led by the Paris 1968 Uprising that were shown as an appetizer before the beginning of the speakers’ presentation. So the question was posed… Throughout the world of today, ”Who are the new Wibauts?”

As an attempt to answer this question at this second day of congress positive cases of city revolutions worldwide were presented, namely Chicago (USA), Pittsburg (USA), Mumbai (India) and Tirana (Albania) (There were presented more city study cases in the afternoon workshops (being held simultaneously): Helsinki (Finland), Malmö (Sweden), Hamburg (Germany) and Freiburg (Germany)).

On a Chicago community study case, La Donna Redmond presented a revolutionary project involving the Food System Movement. Following a personal motivation (On a very tender age, La Donna Redmond’s son was diagnosed with several food allergies), La Donna was involved and it is still fighting for the implementation of a Soul Food System, searching for a perfect agricultural policy (there is an easy access to all kinds of fast-food but the essential vegetables are not available, unlike what we’re used to in European grocery stores) that affects the values of her community: “Revitalizing Soil is revitalizing Community”.
Pittsburgh was presented as a former flourishing industrial city that faces an identity crisis that has its roots in the 70’s. To address the uncertainty and loss of value of his community, speaker Michael J. Madison pointed out the importance of finding icons for the future, in order to put citizens in love with their city again (‘Let’s go Steelers!’ is the slogan for the Pittsburgh American football team, in a clear relation with the city’s past heritage).
The Mumbai case-study was presented by P. K. Das, an architect-activist that struggles against the shrinkage of open space, brought a vision of the City from a democratic planning perspective: “Open space is a metaphor for democracy.” His demand for designing collectivity was also part of the main CIAM agenda more than 60 years ago, in order to enhance public spaces and act in comprehensive planning. The positivism of this case relies on reclaiming public spaces performed by P.K. Das, a victory over the the total apathy of city government.
Tirana, the last example, gives us a completely different vision upon the citizen’s public space appropriation. Public space was a tangible expression of the communist and previous regime, that late fell in 1990. Ten years later, when Edi Rama became city major, the people of Tirana still had a strong negative feeling towards public space. This was leading to an abusive private appropriation of the City. Starting with a low-budget project, in a period where words were meaningless, Edi Rama used color as an instrument of politics, involving the community into refurbishing the (previously damaged) city façades (for more info visit T.I.C.A). Other projects that emerged where all led by a single leitmotiv: “Beauty intimidates (Albanian) people. (…) So the only answer is to build and invest with quality.”

The purpose of this congress was to review new factors of worldwide global urbanization. These were mentioned at the conference: waste, water, food, mobility and ICT. In the case-studies shown above there is a general conception of “the Revolution(ary)” as key to make cities go through deep change, into development and growth, into the future.

In Paris: Invisible City Bruno Latour and Emilie Hermant invite us to look at the city of Paris from a rather unusual perspective, what is usually not showed in social theory studies, to look at a city and try to unveil all the layers that constitute its life, to try to understand the several levels of complexity and their existing and possible intersections.

A city is more than the urban or social environment. That is to summarize what this study tries to show, discussing a metropolis like Paris. Complementary to that, this study also exemplifies the main concepts of Bruno Latour’s theory of actor-networking analysis of the social (explained in his book Re-assembling the social, introduction to actor-network-theory), meaning: picking an object and starting to unveil all the layers like peeling a onion, one after the other, and see where the layers intersect, where they combine, but also where they diverge. Only when we take account of the totality of layers unveiled all together in one flattened perspective instead of a hierarchical one, can we achieve a full understanding of the object we intend to study. Flattening the perspective also means assuming the point of view of the insider according to Latour, and not anymore the scientist who detaches himself from the object. On the contrary, he must be fully embedded in it to fully understand it, to fully acknowledge what the object is made of and how it functions.
The city seems to be the a perfect field to experiment with this methodology by its inherent complexity. Of course this also means that we are facing a job never to be completed but this also seems to be the case every time we debate the city, what it was, is and especially what it will be in the future, where all, or almost all the possibilities are still open. This was the time frame chosen from the conference entitled, “Tomorrow, international urban planning congress” that took place in Amsterdam last 1st and 2nd of October.

Bruno Latour approach seems useful, and the example of his study of Paris even more so, because the whole structure of the conference seemed to go into the same direction, that is, identifying the layers that constitute the problems of the city (planning from a political view, food policies, energy, definitions of urbanity), etc and by discussing them to see where they interact, where and how they establish links of interdependency. The conference wasn’t premised on Latour’s theory. It is not an exercise of it, nor do I intend to discuss the several problems this theory can bring to the analysis of a city, or any other object. The analogy here serves merely to point out the absolute need to try to understand the phenomenon of “urbanity” in the most complete way possible. This seemed to be the main concerns of those who organized this conference.

Now, I can only speak for what happen in the first day, the day I attended it, but the structure of it was common for both. In the morning several lectures and in the afternoon the program was divides between workshops (that were in fact mini-conferences where debate was promotes) or excursions, at the end we all gather again in the main building for a final lecture. If in the morning we all shared the same program, in the afternoon we had to chose what to attend, thus our experience of the conference were all different, just like it’s how our experiences of a city are different, depending on how we look at it.
The lectures, some more interesting than others, all seemed to have in common the assumption that the city is more and more where the future will happen, since we all know that already today, the majority of the world’s population live in it or close to it. The city more and more acquires an autonomous status, a political autonomy that obliges us to look at it through the concept of the “city-state” as it was the case in the ancient world. Eric Corijn (from Brussels open University and Cosmopolis research centre) discussed this perspective elaborately by tracing a history for the city back to the nineteenth century, with the industrial revolution re-shaping the city, introducing new problems, like anonymity which re-structured what was understand as “community”. Today it seems we are also in need of re-structuring some concepts associated with the city.
Increasing city autonomy also means the city’s subsistence must be re-thought, as Tim Lang (from London’s City University) remarked when discussing the issues of food policies, the city has always been a parasite in the sense that it is not able to produce all food it needs within its own territory, and it never will, but a more sustainable city is one that is able to produce more within its borders, to sponsor local production instead of importing most of its needs from far away. This goes for energy and water as well as for food.

One final word about the afternoon and specifically about the workshop I attended. We could chose from 6 different topics, from energy, sustainability, communication, and I’ve chosen the one called “Informality”, a concept discussed through 3 different examples: Latin-America with projects from the Supersudaca, Medellin with Alexandro Echeverri and Mumbai with P.K.Das. In the three examples “informality” were directly linked to the built environment and the need to improve it or to change it, but through considering the potential of “informality,” working with it and through it. The discussion had a very peculiar turn, the public struggled with the notion of absolute informality, the absence of rules, in other words how to merge planned elements with the spontaneous nature of these areas, and how to introduce elements that can connect to the anarchy but at the same time not disrupt it. The city also has an informal side to it, that what wasn’t planned. Concluding we can say we should deal more with time and not only space, or time ‘in’ space, how space is being penetrated by time and how space can allow time to be part of it. Time is of the essence when we consider future space.

Only two years after the pioneering, arty visions of food production in cities featured in 2007 exhibition Edible cities at NAi-Maastricht, we can say that today urban agriculture is considered as an important feature in architecture design and urban planning. And that it’s a fashionable topic too. 
’In the past if you were proposing to put gardens on top of your buildings, you were considered as crazy. Now you’re considered crazy if you don’t’, said architect Andre Viljoen, one of the speakers at the Foodprint symposium, hosted by Stroom, Den Haag on June 26.

Carolyn Steel

Integrating food production with urban activities might sound strange, but in fact cities are always shaped after the type of food system feeding them. 
Author of the influential book Hungry City, Carolyn Steele explained that the first cities were born in the so-called ‘fertile crescent’ in order to manage the surplus of food production in the surrounding countryside. In pre-industrial cities the wealth of the city was linked directly to the wealth of its countryside: Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s fresco ‘Allegoria del Buon Governo’ represents the ‘good government’ as a balance of city and countryside. 
In pre-industrial cities food production had to be located in proximity to urban settlements – as German economist Heinrich von Thuenen formalized in his 1826 model. But after the introduction of railroad transportation, and the introduction of industrial processes in agriculture, food production started to progressively disconnect from cities, which in turn could explode in size and population.

The consequences of this phenomenon were summarized by John Thackara, culture critic and ‘collaborative innovation’ promoter. The so-called ‘green revolution’ – i.e. the application of industrial methods in food production, massive use of chemicals in production, preservation and transportation, and a concentration in the retail model – had destructive consequences on health, energy consumption, water management, etc. Interestingly, Thackara’s point of view on what has to be done tries to divert from the mainstream discourse on sustainability. Instead of focusing on purely technological equipment (solar panels, windmills, hybrid automobiles, etc.), Thackara believes that 95% of future ‘green’ economy will be occupied by different ways of social organization. 

Furthermore, Thackara added that we don’t have to invent anything: these different types of organization and business models are already here. For instance, in the US there are many successful examples of community-led urban farms.

Will Allen

One of them is Growing Power Inc. promoted by former professional basketball player Will Allen. Started in 1993 to help African American teenagers in a poor area of Milwaukee to find jobs producing food for their community, today Growing Food Inc. is a flourishing business with 36 full-time employers, many farms across the US and 2 million dollar/year revenue. 
Allen uses low-tech organic farming techniques easily accessible to any community in the US, even the poorest. But his farms are nevertheless very productive. ‘Everyone can have really high yields’, explained Allen, ‘all you have to do is grow your soil’. So composting and vermicomposting are the most important activities of Growing Food Inc. 
Apart from the impressive techniques used by Allen’s farms, it’s important to point out the impact of such activities on poor communities in the US: every year more than 2500 people volunteer in these farms. 

In the US urban agriculture is somehow helped by different concurring factors. Lower urban densities, the real-estate crisis, and a lack of public control make it relatively easy to access land and self-organize (and sometimes even necessary to do so).

Debra Solomon, Katrin Bohn and Andre Viljoen

In Europe urban agriculture is a different story. Higher densities, hyper-organized and hyper-controlled spaces, and high land values make growing food in cities more difficult. Architects and artists engaged in food systems are nevertheless finding new spaces. 

Debra Solomon is an artist whose practice is focused on ‘food, food culture, and cultures that grow our food’. Her works use food as a way to produce and share knowledge on food processes and connect cultures through the collective practices of growing food, selling products and cooking. 

Solomon’s practice meets its spatial dimension in the work of architects Katrin Bohn and Andre Viljoen. The London-based architects started working on the concept of urban agriculture 15 years ago, when the idea of growing food in cities may still have looked crazy. Analyzing the experience of the Cuban ‘periodo especial’, they developed the idea of Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes (CPULs): urban green infrastructures bringing together spaces for leisure, production, oil-free transportation and wild areas. 

Bohn, Viljoen and Solomon are now starting a project in Schilderswijk, a multi-cultural area in The Hague. Their goal is to map opportunities the area has to offer in terms of food production and food-based social cohesion, and to intervene on urban space to facilitate social and productive flows.

Similarly, artist and professor Nils Norman and permaculture expert Menno Swaak are intervening in a park in The Hague. They apply permaculture techniques in bringing together food production, ecological intensification and education. 

Urban agriculture is not anymore a niche idea. Techniques and solutions are now widespread among the design community, and the city council’s planning departments started to show interest in these topics too. Will urban agriculture maintain its grassroots and self-organized character while becoming an ‘official’ practice?

(all photo’s via Stroom’s Foodprint blog)