Sustainable Arenas for Weedy Sociality:
Distributed Wilderness
Sha Xin Wei, sponge & Georgia Tech, email
Maja Kuzmanovic, FoAM, email
keywords: public spaces, mixed reality, colloquial sociality, responsive media, gardens, adaptive systems
Introduction: "The Desert of the Real"
The globalization of markets is accelerating a rapid decrease of diversity in the social, biological and cultural habitats, due to the economic imperative of proprietary interests such as communication technology industries and transnational 'life industries'. Physical public spaces as arenas for a wide range of interaction and social change are losing even their symbolic importance as the global marketplace has shifted from commonly accessible public markets to dispersed and abstract omnipresent networks. Those physical spaces that remain have largely become ornamental simulacra of common living space - voids in our urban space only nominally accessible to the public. In the late twentieth century, city after city built financial or government districts that seem to have a certain vitality during the business day, but transform into vast deserted canyons lined with dead facades after hours. In fact to call the city's voids deserts would do injustice to the harsh vitality of the ancient desert habitats. Wastelands might be a more appropriate name for these voids.
Moreover, there is another kind of wasteland, the wasteland of monoculture. Here we are migrating a term in reverse from biotechnology to the condition of modern urban spaces. Even more fundamentally, the very activities that are acceptable in public have become more and more regulated with the reduction of public, or better, collective urban space to spaces of consumption.
M. Sorkin and others have documented the shopping mall as the principal common space of the turn of the millenium. Shopping spaces are now architected and engineered to maximally elicit and reinforce a radically restricted set of behavior, reducing human inhabitants to as perfect consumers as those simulated in the financial models. However, as William H. Whyte, R. Koolhaas and others have observed, as soon as such shopping spaces are erected, clients, neighborhood inhabitants tend to reverse colonize such spaces and perform non-shopping activities as well in local, socially entropic activity, viz. youth 'malling,' the permanently pesty object of mall surveillance and security. In Atlanta, one can read out an inverse relation between the degrees of social vitality and control in mall spaces such as the east Atlanta mall which is dominated by African-American youth and stays active long after business hours, contrasted with Phipps Plaza, touted as the most exclusive mall in the Southeast, which is a void during much of the day. Such unplanned, interstitial activity points to the possibility of creative, social improvisation within harshly planned environments.
But to be clear, we do not venture a political economic analysis in this paper. It is not economic Reality but the imaginary that we propose to grow in the heart of our cities. How might we do this? By seeding the city's empty spaces with 'weeds,' by cracking the crystal lattice grids of the urban space and filling the cracks with accidents of speech, of unruly, untamed image and animate fabric.
Context: Public Spaces and Multiple Imaginaries
In the era of mass homogenization of branded public spaces around the world, we propose a research into the historied examples of sustainable urban spaces that focusses on dynamics and diversity in social, biological and cultural domains. Examples of such public spaces include community gardens and pocket parks, non-institutionalized plaza and street life, travelling fairs and periodic festivals. By considering such social event spaces, we may discover ways of conducting an alternative economy based on emergent trans-local actions, rather than accepting the generic, mono-cultural approach of the globalized market.
William Whyte, in his Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980) did a landmark study of plazas and street life using time-lapse film, ethnological diagrams and empathic observation. He and his peers tried to understand what made some public plazas vital places and others dead. Whyte and his team discovered that the most basic features that made a public plaza viable were: access to all classes of people, contiguity with the street, food vendors, and adequate seating. One of the most interesting phenomena was that, given the merest opportunity, in a vital public plaza, hotdog stands and other small vendors were able to colonize a place and provide modest clusters of life .
[Images of people accelerating slightly as they step up into Paley Park in New York. (1980, 57)]
In contrast to the spaces such as Seagrams Plaza and Paley Park that Whyte discovered so vital in New York City more than 20 years ago, a survey of public arenas in Europe and North America today reveals a shortage of environments and events that encourage a shared and autonomous experience of culture. The wide adoption of interactive media may satisfy the need for gaming but the need for shared physical experiences and responsive, public spaces often remains unanswered. Digital technology and telecommunications technology have been accused of increasing the isolation of individuals and rupturing local communities. The urbanism that Guy Debord criticized 30 years ago, "isolated individuals ... recaptured and isolated together," has intensified to fill a city with people so massively atomized by mobile communication and ubiquitous computing that it is Tourette's syndrome, not schizophrenia that one could pose as the emblematic dysfunctionalism of the era. Alternatively however, these digital telecommunications technologies could be integrated into existing physical public spaces to sustain the emergence of new forms of creative and shared experiences. We believe that some forms of technological development should focus on the interactive shaping of people's perception of culture, rather than promoting the passive consumption of cultural artifacts. This is relevant for allowing communities to become active participants in artistic processes, becoming increasingly conscious of their role and opportunities in shaping their culture.
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