1.

The Ideal City and the participatory process

MIC _ My Ideal City

Diagnosis of a former concept: from the real city towards the ideal city
Sara Marini, Iuav University of Venice

Breakdowns
The My Ideal City research project aims to construct ideal city scenarios for four real cities that meet the needs of their citizens. As the definition of its title suggests, it is based on the short circuit between terms and questions investigating the implementation of instruments used to observe and therefore plan a city. The acronym MIC My Ideal City could be seen as a spur to breaking down, and therefore diagnosing a former concept, that of the ideal city. The 21st century has experienced a series of important changes in this regard, also seen as the legacy and new projections of what was termed the Short Twentieth Century. The first change in direction concerns the nature of the visions, which is invalidated by the support used to design or write the ideal city, once fixed on paper, and now a virtual reality. The immaterial means of construction of the city demands a kind of concealed author acting as a translator, as an intermediary between citizens, their prefiguration, the real city and the design. The second aspect that distinguishes the Renaissance perspectives and 19th-century sections laying bare the infrastructures under construction in towns and cities from modern representations of the city-machine, an aspect that might give us food for thought, is the decline in the relationship between vision/construction, the extreme synthesis of real/unreal. Though the first term of this apparent dichotomy fades into the concept of utopia, the second asserts its pivotal role by demanding a review of the instruments involved in its planning. Ideal and real seem to be profoundly distant in a society and a time that many have deemed incapable of planning (or projecting into the future) as in the 2009 Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art, whose homage to reality and its scenes veered between a documentary and voyeuristic approach. At the same time, on the international scene, we are witnessing a multitude of consultations, conventions and seminars aiming to pre-define the time and geography of the future: Le Grans Pari(s) (2008), Audi Urban Future Award. Building a Vision for 2030 (2010), London 2050, Barcelona 2050. This also leads to the third factor characterising the recent rediscovery of the ideal city, implicit in the my in the title of the European project. The experiences leading to reflections on the future of territories multiply the directions of response, often using the instrument of participation in different forms. Thomas Mores Utopia led to vaguer designs where the author either remains unknown in favour of diffused authorship or represents a collective vision. The concept of the ideal city appears to evolve towards a collective city imposed on real data and on the micropolitics of possible desire. From ideal islands in imaginary territories to visions close to reality, cities promising to be alternatives to ordinary scenarios, to the frequently tin-pot dreams of newly founded cities denying the restlessness emerging from reality, to the recent consultations constructing visions to forestall change in order to save the real city: today they all
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MIC _ My Ideal City seem to have meet the response or correspondence of a request that is diffuse yet weak in terms of its implementation tools, for a city to be constructed beginning with a single anonymous microcosm.

MY
The individual, freed from the standardization of the modern movement, draws daily new realities, asserting his/her own micropolitics of desire. The self-affirmation of the individual on the ground takes place on one side on the basis of a daily transformation denouncing a lack of long-distance gaze on things, with the crushing of the collective that seems to have erased the projective capacity of the desired; on the other side, the ecological, territorial, economic, and symbolic crisis of the city as a system calls for a new awareness and a shared planning that goes beyond simply individualism. Therefore, My represents the tension between the individual actions and practices, and the possibility to work out new possibilities for collective actions and practices. From the "liquefaction of society" often examined by Zygmunt Bauman in his studies to the information bomb", we have witnessed the multiplication of metaphors and reflections aiming to represent a society that has shattered into multiple microcosms. This multiplication no longer corresponds to a single image imposed by an author but to a myriad of perspectives bearing symbols of a post-industrial society documented in Andy Warhol's work. Vito Acconcis work, for example, encapsulates the friction that has developed between the public and private spheres. In Personal Island (1992), an installation constructed at Zwolle (Netherlands) and Park up a Building and House up a Building (1997), works attached to the outside walls of the Centro Galego de Arte Contempornea in Santiago de Compostela by lvaro Siza, this American architect expresses the desire of the individual for space in the form of an island that replaces the political and social connotations of Mores island with playful environmentalist notes, and mocks the over-exposure of the private realm that simultaneously superimposes itself on the public space in his Spanish installations. Contemporary architectural research and theories have brought forth a translation for My in the rise of a renewed smallness interpreted according to different geographical contexts and assumptions (Atelier Bow-Wow, Rien Korteknie e Mechthild Stuhlmacher). Although it clearly contradicts the bigness promoted by Rem Koolhaas, it too has re-emerged from a complex past. Unlike existenzminimum it is propelled by an extreme search for solutions with minute dimensions that are designed to be purpose-built, site-specific and to stand apart in order to connect with their contexts, also in a critical sense, and with their clients or even better with their users. In these experiences small becomes a synonym for the promotion of the space of the individual as a unit participating in a complex design that does not seek deliberate isolation or reiteration but resembles the description in Archizooms No-Stop City project: a discrete yet not autonomous atom. Smallness also requires greater attention to be paid to construction, a direct relationship between technology and form, drawing attention to details both in architectural and social terms and highlighting the citys neglected possibilities and places. But in terms of planning instruments, My implies sensitivity to so-called microstories and the rethinking of the participatory approach to constructing cities. Basically, we are witnessing the re-emergence of the conflict between generalisation and specificity in form, or rather, the translation of the crisis of mass production and its evolution into weak diffused yet multi-sided forms, into urban layouts or into architectural projects has yet to leave a clear track.
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MIC _ My Ideal City Forty years after De Carlos request for a more participatory vision for future architecture, his words still hinge upon unsolved issues such as the equation of form and function, the reasoning of conventions, the failure to respond to behaviour and conflicts. And his text still bears the traces of the persistent ambiguity implied by the term Ideal, often associated with Utopia, and of its role when speaking of a project whose etymology originates in the Latin projectum, meaning throw forth. "Participation exists when everyone intervenes to the same extent in managing power, or - even better - when power no longer exists because everyone is directly and equally involved in the decision-making process. You will probably object that Im describing a utopia. A fair objection because participatory architecture is utopian; however, it is a realistic utopia and that makes a huge difference." (De Carlo 1973)

IDEAL
Ideal and real can be conceived as split, dichotomous terms that act on different levels: the first seems to assume a negative meaning, based on its proximity to the concept of utopia, while the second holds a position so strong to become objective and preventing a critical look, design, and practices. Nevertheless, it is exactly the presence of an ideal understanding of contemporary cities, their representation through a discursive regime done of possibilities and opportunities, that makes possible to act on, change, and reassemble, the perspectives of urban development. The "urban" reasoning of the ideal city springs from two key images: the Ideal City (1479) panel attributed to Luciano Laurana and Thomas Mores Utopia. By referring to these two constructs we cause various facets of this term to emerge along with derived meanings: while Laurana's painting contains the representation of a concept which served as a reference for the construction of real cities like, for example, the main square of San Giovanni Valdarno, the book by the English Humanist projects the construction of an ideal world into the sphere of the imagination. in Utopia (1516), a dialogue with the explorer Raphael Hythloday, Thomas More invents an ideal counter-society, in opposition to contemporary society, in the closed world of an island. While Laurana's painting contains a partial perspective of the city whose limits and boundaries remain unknown, More constructs his new world in the microcosm of an island, playing with the possible paradoxes suggested by the expression used as the title of the work. The word "utopia" comes from the Greek "ou-topos" meaning "in no place" or rather, in the world of ideas, "everywhere" (from the Greek "eu-topos", "in every place" - Violeau 2009). This brief appraisal of the two works allows us to recognise the planning tools capacity to accept the positive impulses generated by major change as well as the possibility of being bound by existing conditions. By recreating the planning tools used to construct the ideal city as well as the process involved in adapting them for the purpose of orienting change we can understand how Renaissance perspectives, 19thcentury cutaway views revealing the infrastructures under construction in various cities, and representations of the modern city-machine all lead to a current kind of reconciliation between literary and drawn constructions. Grattacieli farebbero paesaggio se fossero cos (Skyscrapers would make a landscape if they were like this) is the text that Carlo Scarpa used for the title of one of his pencil drawings on paper dated 1972. The scene depicted shows a sequence of tall buildings, repeating the same type of skyscraper. Architectural structures shown in different sizes or probably with differences determined by perspective, rotated and surrounded by dense vegetation. The volume has a
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MIC _ My Ideal City sloping side produced by the articulation of the floors, while the remaining sides, which are orthogonal to the ground, are mainly windowless. A considerable way up the opposite side to the sloping side - it is impossible to figure out at exactly what floor from the drawing - is a deviation that seems to wish to turn into a raised plaza. The presence of this open space is reflected in the design of the two adjoining sides: removal of materials, openings, use of different materials all alter the uniformity of the two surfaces. The landscape brings to the forefront one of the skyscrapers and, just behind it, between the other architectural presences, the intense insistent pencil line presumably traces dense vegetation. Several lines in the sky allude to the existence of a surrounding environment and lightly sketched insubstantial figures are revealed. In the distance, a flock of birds in flight recall another vision, another idea of city. In his Ville contemporaine (1922) Le Corbusier melded the outline of the buildings with that of an airplane. In both visions, large-scale architecture is repeated, serial; in Scarpa's drawing the differing faades and rotation of the objects creates a scenario based on variation. The city imagined by the Swiss architect is a succession of repeated skyscrapers, all with the same faade, laid out on a regular orthogonal grid. In Scarpa's drawing, the skyscrapers with their different faades participate in the definition of the landscape while the only common aspect of the buildings in Le Corbusiers vision is their huge scale, a giant presence that frees up the ground. Scarpas drawing affirms that skyscrapers may create a landscape provided that certain conditions are met. The oblique wall of the tower provides an occasion for the space of the volume to encounter the empty space of the sky above and the vegetation below while containing the specification of the living spaces, the measure of its internal articulation. In the sloping plane, Scarpa brings together two extreme approaches to creating a city. Only the anomalous condition of the surfaces not orthogonal to the ground can reveal the succession of floors that transform the gigantism of the building. This work affirms the possibility of making landscapes by constructing worlds suspended between the ideal and the real where large and small have a specific raison dtre and position. Seen in the context of architectural history, Scarpas spatial interpolation provides a rare occasion for bonding. Usually imaginary landscapes take shape thanks to the intensification of the microscopic and the exasperation of the macroscopic as described in Le Corbusiers work and as is often the case in the fables and experiments of visual arts. The two scales are sometimes rather simplistically associated with the desire to construct an object, on the one hand, and the desire to give rise to a monument on the other. But extremes, even of scale, are tangent to each other and can easily exist within each other as shown by the short film made in 1977 by Charles and Ray Eames architects, designers and directors. Power of Ten is a documentary that takes the viewer from the infinitesimal to infinity in the space of ten minutes. Using a succession of time and spatial scales to the power of 10, the camera zooms out from a picnic in a Chicago park to the edges of the universe then back in towards planet earth to explore the subatomic particles of the human body. The journey reveals the similarity between the microworld in space and in anatomical tissues. This work by Charles and Ray Eames unites two dimensional extremes usually used in architecture and planning as symbols of antithetical imaginary worlds thanks to a moving view giving rise to overlaps and reverse shots. While Scarpa rotates the skyscraper, creating a hypothetical rotation of the object, to express its housing nature, the two American authors take us on a journey of discovery into the relations between infinite spaces and infinitesimal visions. The need to anticipate events announced as epoch-making climatic upheavals is a sign, on the one hand, of the absolute centrality of the real city as a minimum condition of survival, and, on the other, the influence of CAD tools has led to the rediscovery of long-term projections with a wide spatial range. It seems that the origins of the rediscovery of
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MIC _ My Ideal City imagined paper cities and the pivotal work "Utopia" lie in scenarios intended to safeguard the real city. The static drawing is no longer equal to the task of describing change also because change is open, dictated not so much by ideal constructions as by natural concomitant causes. An exhaustive description demands a text that runs parallel to scenarios communicating different visions and supporting the narration of temporal and spatial leaps.

CITY
The city as a place of living and sharing, back to the centre of attention, calls for a review of methods and tools that manage its transformation. Decision makers, political movements, and common citizens, newly talk about participation to reduce the distance between the individual and the collective and between the ideal and the real, criticizing and dismissing forms of design aimed at accommodating superimposed, hetero-normative, meanings of living together in a contemporary city. The form and construction of the city as space of the ideal developed over time, beginning with single microcosms and in non-existent worlds built in the imagination, and ending today with a drawing of a kind of archipelago in movement in the sea or land hosting it. Basically, the ideal now seems to be safeguarded by each single reality capable of proclaiming itself such and of requesting its own logical evolution. After islands the next step involved defining alternative cities to ordinary scenarios: from the garden city, the city imagined by the modern movement, Taliesin, Broadacre City right up to Arcosanti, these are just some of the possibilities planned in response to real input. Some of these experiences came into being not as new worlds but as appendages to the urban system, suburbs with a different DNA dependent on the existing centre, while others took shape on the side, creating anomalous bubbles, refuges from givenness that do not even in this case produce changes and transformations because they are basically oriented towards reality. The end of the last century saw the reproposal of new dreams or new occupations in altered forms of urban arrangements as in Dubai or the Venices constructed in different locations world-wide and narrated in Diller and Scofidio's Chain City, where the role of virtual communication instruments has become absolutely central. Echoing primitive constructions, like Neolithic circles, newly founded cities may be based on simplified designs that are only legible by satellite, or, reproducing scenarios that can only be experienced after a long journey, they are structured using possible film shots and views expected by tourists/citizens. These realities of alteration and dislocation narrate the fracture characterising representation in the contemporary world: on the one hand, the real city requiring more flexible designs, shunning the imposition of static lines and demanding tensors, guidelines for development or attention, on the other, the ideal or virtual world flows beyond its limits and imposes its own low definition rules of perception on real models like a videogame construction tool. The project for a city in the new century responds to the need for forms of ideality, substantially re-inventing its nature of projection by means of orchestrations, consultations and debates transporting real data into the near future. No longer a single author striving to describe the changes necessary nor a single planner intent upon the definition of new models of city, the implementation of the real city project demands a plurality of visions, comparing them and requesting multidisciplinary teams to read reality, decodify and guide it, finding answers in it and imposing new points of view. These visions must refer to a precise time-point in the future; they must not merely respond to a current datum but
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MIC _ My Ideal City succeed in predicting its evolution while supporting the complexity of the system rather than reducing it to a simplified explanatory design. In this case too, representation data, in particular the breakdown of maps into layers, regulates the operative procedures and the restitution of possible approaches. One of the greatest incentives for the acceptance of complexity is the ecological crisis and the resulting climatic and environmental upheavals. The economic crisis demanding concerted powers and appeals to a sense of community seems to outline a similar scenario to the one experienced in the 1970s, bringing to the fore approaches to the real merely touched upon at the time. The city project once more focuses on issues such as "project process", "order and disorder", "open systems", concepts mainly applying to landscape design and extending from it to plans covering the entire city. In this situation the landscape of architecture seeks other paths made of primitive, hybrid, green worlds that are sometimes nave or incomplete. Fleeing the mere metric dimension in order to privilege the glorification of time and the removal of its barriers and ethos, it produces temporal deformations and constructs scenes where ideal and real strategically exist side by side in a continuously changing flux.

References
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