Friday, June 2, 2023

CONSTRUCTIVE BIOLOGY. From Urban Acupuncture to Biourbanism

 

CONSTUCTIVE BIOLOGY.

FROM URBAN ACUPUNCTURE TO BIOURBANISM 

Marco Casagrande

Ruin Academy, Casagrande Laboratory, and

International Society of Biourbanism - FINLAND

CHAPTER OF BOOK

F. Armato & S. Follesa. From Spaces to Places Product#People#City. ISBN 9788833381879. Scientific Publications Committee of the Department of Architecture of the University of Florence (DIDA). Collana Editoriale DSR LAB. Italy

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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CHAPTER OF BOOK

F. Armato & S. Follesa. From Spaces to Places Product#People#City. ISBN 9788833381879. Scientific Publications Committee of the Department of Architecture of the University of Florence (DIDA). Collana Editoriale DSR LAB. Italy

 

 

 

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