CONSTUCTIVE
BIOLOGY.
FROM URBAN ACUPUNCTURE TO BIOURBANISM
Marco Casagrande
Ruin Academy, Casagrande Laboratory, and
International Society of Biourbanism - FINLAND
CHAPTER OF BOOK
The crisis of urbanism is analysed as a vital phenomenon that prepares the Third Generation City—its connection with nature and its flesh. The industrial city is, on the contrary, fictitious. The example of the settlement of Treasure Hill, near Taipei, is given. As an organic ruin of the industrial city, Treasure Hill is a bio-urban site of resistance and an acupuncture point of Taipei, with its own design methodology based on Local Knowledge. This ruin is the matter from which parasite urbanism composts the modern city. Urban acupuncture, the Third Generation City, and the conceptual model of Paracity speak to the community that rests in the hands of its own people.
Third Generation City is
the organic ruin of the industrial city, an organic machine and open form of
the mechanical urbanism which has learned to become biological. Ruin is when
man-made has become part of nature. The industrial control has been opened up
in order for the nature to step in. The seeds of the third generation city are
coexisting together with the current industrial urbanism – for example the
illegal collective urban farms and settlements of Taipei.
Nature has only one rule:
existence maximum. It wants the city to be part of the life-providing process.
Now our cities are anti-acupuncture needles in the life-providing tissue.
Urban Acupuncture is a
biourban theory, which combines sociology and urban design with the traditional
Chinese medical theory of acupuncture. As a design methodology, it is focused
on tactical, small-scale interventions on the urban fabric, aiming in ripple
effects and transformation on the larger urban organism. Through the
acupuncture points, Urban Acupuncture seeks to be in contact with the
site-specific Local Knowledge. By its nature, Urban Acupuncture is pliant,
organic, and relieves stress and industrial tension in the urban environment,
thus directing the city towards the organic—urban nature as part of nature. Urban
Acupuncture produces small scale, but ecologically and socially catalytic
development on the built human environment. The Third Generation City is a city
of cracks. The thin mechanical surface of the industrial city is shattered, and
from these cracks the new biourban growth emerges, which will ruin the second
generation city. In the Third Generation City, we aim at designing ruins. The
Third Generation City is true when the city recognizes its local knowledge and
allows itself to be part of nature.
The way towards the Third
Generation City is a process of becoming a collective learning and healing
organism and of reconnecting the urbanized collective consciousness with
nature. Citizens on their behalf are ready and are already breaking the
industrial city apart by themselves. Local knowledge is operating independently
from the official city and is providing punctual third generation surroundings
within the industrial city: urban acupuncture for the stiff official mechanism.
The weak signals of the unofficial collective consciousness should be
recognized as the futures’ emerging issues; futures that are already present.
The city is a manifest of
human-centered systems—economical, industrial, philosophical, political, and
religious power structures. Biourbanism is an animist community structural
system regulated by nature. Human nature as part of nature, also within the
urban conditions. The era of pollution is the era of industrial urbanism – the
second generation city. The next era has always been surviving within the
industrial city, like a positive cancer. The first-generation city never died,
it went underground, but the bio-urban processes are still surviving. The seeds
of the Third Generation City are present. Architecture is not an art of human
control; it is an art of reality - there is no other reality than nature.
Keywords: #urban acupuncture; #biourbanism; #Third Generation City; #ruins; #parasite urbanism; #Paracity; #Local Knowledge; #constructive biology; #Open
Form
CONSTRUCTIVE BIOLOGY
Hardness and strength are
dearth’s companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of
being. Because what has hardened will never win. (Tarkovsky: Stalker)
Architecture is never alone. It needs to communicate with engineers,
site-specific conditions, users, construction workers, physical and cultural
structures, interior- and landscape designers and various authorities. Other
disciplines of art and science are closely linked with architecture and
urbanism, including spatial arts, installation art, environmental art,
scenography, humanistic sciences, civil engineering, and statistics. In
ecologically sustainable architecture the present focus is on the energy
efficiency of the buildings, use of renewable materials and circular economy.
In ecologically sustainable urbanism, including urban ecological restoration,
the main issues are dealing with the reduction of urban pollution, energy
efficiency, material circulation and densification. The development of the
built human environment is mainly dictated by economic speculations and
industrial standardization of urban planning and construction methodologies. Ecological
sustainability plays a secondary role in the development and is often
marginalized into academic discussion or as a marketing or branding tool.
Constructive Biology views
the current and emerging cities as environmentally highly destructive urban
mechanisms, and architectural development in general alienated from natural
life providing solutions - nature. The human-centred urban and architectural
development, as described, disconnects human nature from the other forms of
organic circulation.
Constructive Biology is an
architectonic natural science that studies life providing structures and living
organism, including their physical structure, chemical processes, molecular
interactions, physiological mechanism, development, and evolution. It
recognizes architecture and urbanism as open systems that survive by
transforming energy and decreasing their local entropy to maintain a stable and
vital condition defined as tectonic homeostasis. Theoretical Constructive
Biology uses mathematical methods to formulate quantitative models while
experimental Constructive Biology performs empiric experiments to test the
validity of proposed theories and understand the mechanism underlying life and
how it appears in architecture and urbanism.
The term Constructive Biology is being used within different fields of biological research, for example on bioengineering related to synthetic biology (Prof. J. Keasling, Berkeley, 2009). It is also used as a term in cybernetics as biology motivated by the desire to understand how biological systems actually are constructed by nature and develop over time rather than just to obtain a descriptive understanding. (C. Nehaniv, K. Dau- tenhahn, M. Loomes, MIT, 1999). Literature research will provide more connections to relevant research of different scientific disciplines. However, Constructive Biology as combining the research and findings of biology with the development of the built human environment is a new academic process of architectural knowledge building. We are thinking of a new discipline of built human environment which moves in-between architecture, urbanism, and biology. Additionally, humanistic sciences (anthropology, sociology, cultural sciences, linguistics) are providing tools and knowledge in understanding the human behaviour in the built human environment, in more natural conditions and in-between conditions (for example nomads and un-official settlements).
URBAN ACUPUNCTURE
There is no Urban
Acupuncture without the organic. The scientific dialog in trying to understand
the organic is biology. Urban Acupuncture is not trying to understand the
organic, but instead it must be weak enough to feel it. And the organic feels
the weak. Either it will let it grow, or it will consume it. The official city
is a burden. It is hard, heavy, dead, whipped by fictions. Not much more than
an extended parking lot. The organic is boiling under the thin layers of
asphalt and concrete. Organic matter and organic knowledge. There is pressure
under too. When a crack emerges or when we drill a hole, the organic is
present. We call this Local Knowledge, but it is actually a key to communicate
with the life-providing systems.
 |
| Community garden, Taipei |
We feel the city, we feel
urbanism and we feel collectivity as we feel something living. We feel empathy
for the city because it is full of cracks. We feel empathy and shame on
ourselves. Small cracks on the concrete wall surfaces growing moss, dandelion
pushing through the asphalt, algae in the air-conditioning machine,
grandmothers occupying and farming an idle construction site.
Accident is great. Open
Form is a platform of constructive accidents, constructive anarchy.
Communicative action through collective construction. Construction as a
language. Construction site as the Public Sphere (Habermas). This is not
official, if official means centrally controlled hierarchies. This is common, un-official,
more organic. Un-official collective farm in the official city is urban
acupuncture. This is not place-making or tactical urbanism, but real. Subtle it
emerges (Sun Tzu) beyond the control of the official.
 |
| Treasure Hill, Taipei |
The collective garden of
the anarchist grandmothers is open form. Treasure Hill was open form. It was a
self-build organic community rising from the flood-banks of the Xindian River
up to a hill as a terraced community. The foundations of the houses were based
on abandoned anti-aircraft bunkers of the Japanese army. Retired Kuomingtang
veterans started to live on the hill and to farm on the flood-banks and to
harvest waste material from the surrounding city. The houses were in constant
dialog with each other and with nature, including the voices of the flooding
river, constant typhoons and earthquakes and jungle. They were built with local
knowledge and could cope with the natural elements. They were weak
architecture, which could resist, because they were glued to the site with
organic knowledge. There was no road wide enough for a car in Treasure Hill,
inhabited by approximately 400 households. Treasure Hill lived in a very intime
connection with the river, while the surrounding city regarded the flooding
rivers as something hostile and build a 12 meters high concrete wall to
separate the mechanical man for the organic, absolutely no connection. And so
nature became a fiction to the modern man.
In 2003 the Taipei City Government was destroying
Treasure Hill, which did not appear on the official maps, but was zoned as a
park. If you map the un-official it becomes official. The first three layers of
houses of the terraced community had already been wiped off when we stepped in
the stopped the destruction. The city had also bulldozed away the collective
farms and destroyed all the connections between the remaining houses, like
small steps and bridges, which were the nervous network of this urban organism.
Without this network the remaining houses had become isolated object instead of
being part of a living organism and were left for a slow death.
 |
| Reconstructed farms and community structure, Treasure Hill |
We restarted the farms and reconstructed the steps and
bridges until Treasure Hill was again a living organism, which could start
fighting back. Altogether 200 students volunteered from the local universities
and construction workers started to donate construction material. Soon the
rumours were circulating around the city from the punctual intervention of
Treasure Hill and the work started to gain momentum. Local media started to
report and even New York Times flew in and wrote an article, that this is a
“must-see destination in Taiwan”. These rumours in the city were some kind of
humane energy transmitted from the urban acupuncture point of Treasure Hill.
Because of urban acupuncture the same city government,
which three weeks before was destroying Treasure Hill, suddenly turned their
coats and the commissioners started to recite poems on the hill. Treasure Hill
got legalized and celebrated as the Taipei Artist Village. The official city
was very shallow and broke very fast with rumours. The rumours were connected
to Real Reality (Aristoteles), something which cannot be speculated, while as
the official city is based on speculations. Treasure Hill was showing a way to
towards the Third Generation City, the organic ruin of the official city –
biourbanism as part of nature.
 |
| Paracity, drawing by Niilo Tenkanen / Casagrande Laboratory |
Paracity is a primary
structure for a biourban organism, which is learning from Treasure Hill. It may
be a high-tech slum, because it is using cross-laminated timber, engineered
wood, as the main material for the primary structure. It may also have
environmental technology as its inner organs. But the structure is empty unless
people will occupy it. If offers a three-dimensional spatial grid for
occupation, following the methodology of open form: constructive actions in
dialog with each other and building up collectivity through communicative
construction. Paracity (Parallel City or Parasite City) is organic and
flexible, it can grow and parts of it can die. It can cannibalize itself and it
can harvest material and energy from the surrounding host city. It is a
biourban compost.
Official city is a source
of pollution. Paracity is a biourban healing organism and mediator between the
official city and nature. It is a constructed crack in the city, through which
local knowledge can erupt to the urban surface and fertilize the official thin
layers of concrete and asphalt. It is a platform of accidents. Paracity if
fuelled by constructive biology.
The research grows from a
long line of theoretical, academic and practice works moving in-between
architecture, environmental art, landscape architecture, biology, and urbanism.
Much of the previous and ongoing research has been demonstrated in 1:1 scale
architectural installations and experiments, and they have been presented in
dozens of international conferences and exhibitions, including 5 times in the
Venice Architecture Biennale. The body of work has been awarded by the UNESCO
Global Award for Sustainable Architecture and European Prize for Architecture
among other prizes and awards. Most notable theoretical work revolves around
the thinking of the Third Generation City and Urban Acupuncture. The author is
currently Professor of Architecture at the Bergen School of Architecture in
Norway, Vice-President of the International Society of Biourbanism, founder and
principal of the Ruin Academy in Taiwan and Casagrande Laboratory in Finland.
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