The end of megalopolis; the rise of the human

If population is expanding and more people moving to urbanised areas, how can governments allow some of these areas to become semi-abandoned or even ignored, resulting in one of the fastest growing urban typologies being the shanty town?

There are natural rhythms to any area, but this abandonment points more to financial reasons; a lack of responsibility that allows easier land to be developed over land that has already had development. Or worse, ignoring these areas until the value gets high, when all the residents get swept away to make way for 'regeneration'.

This can only have knock on implications, which we are seeing in abundance; whole swathes of cities becoming run down with huge areas being inhabited informally, without basic services or official recognition. Good management could stem this tendency: proper and regular investment to services, facilities and amenities.

Differentiating between the megalopolis and the megacity, the former is superceded never having should have come about - a mistake of the mid-twentieth centrury; the latter is the exploding reality, but which has much potential to become a decent living environment.

What is common to all urban typologies and various combinations is the human, which sets a scale. If the nature of types of connections gravitate around human scale, then the linking of these different fragments can be viably and sustainably integrated.

Advertising, politics and architecture

This editon will be a guest piece by Dr Graham Cairns on contemporary visual literacies. 

 

The world of political communication is a realm of controversy, creativity and inevitably at times, a realm of public manipulation. It is a sub category of political science which has given rise to an almost infinite number of publications, studies and research projects aiming at understanding and improving the ability of politicians and political parties to “get their message across”. Given the mediated nature of contemporary culture these studies have primarily focused on visual methods of mediated communication; the TV photo opportunity, the political broadcast and the campaign advert generally being considered the most important.

Given the similarities between political communication in these formats and other more commercially orientated forms of communication, such as advertising, it is perhaps inevitable that a certain cross fertilization has occurred.  What this paper intends to do is draw out this parallel through a brief overview of the development of this relationship, followed by a direct comparison between a standard commercial advert and a recent political image.

It will use a standard advertising methodology of analysis with the aim of underlining its central argument; that that during the past 50 years the techniques used in politics to “communicate” with the public have become, to all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from the techniques used in standard commercial advertising. The images concerned are a typical semiotic advert promoting a branded car and an image of Barack Obama manufactured during the 2008 Presidential campaign. In both examples special attention will be paid to the role of architecture, thus setting up a tripartite analysis of advertising, politics and architecture.

Advertising as Political Promotion

In the first of the images we will discuss we have an advert for an Audi 8 series car placed in an architectural context resonant of Santiago Calatrava’s Lisbon railway station. The car is simply placed in the centre of the image so as to become the focus of the eye and sits in front of the emotive architectural backdrop. In this case we have one referent and one product. Figure 1. According to standard semiotic analysis, the values associated with the referent will simply be transferred to the product in question.

 figure 1 (click to enlarge)

 

In reading the advert the first thing to identify are the anticipated values associated with its architectural referent backdrop; modernity, strength, power and agility etc. (its connoted signifieds) These then are the values directly transferred to the product which, in turn, becomes associated with those same values. In theory, this process occurs automatically whenever a referent is placed next to a product. However, as identified by Judith Williamson back in the 1970s, the process is much more fluid if the product and the referent have some connotative and aesthetic similarity.

In this case this is manufactured in two principal ways. Firstly the colour combinations of the image are coherent; the black car blends naturally with the grey background and secondly, the referent and the product are made to be perfect compositional fits; the organic forms of the architecture wrap around the curvilinear form of the car. Thus, what we have is a standard semiotic advert which uses an appropriately connotative background and reinforces or facilitates the transference of the values associated with that background by ensuring aesthetic equivalence through a combination of colour and form.

However, there is also one more thing the image does; it introduces text which, in this case, invites us “to take a test drive”. This use of text corresponds to what Roland Barthes called anchorage; the introduction of a phrase that adds a layer of meaning or makes a connection that would not be made through reading the image alone; in this case, that we can own the car. The advert thus becomes a classic example of semiotic advertising techniques on a whole series of different but related levels.

These techniques are clearly repeated in the image we will examine next; an iconic photograph of Barak Obama on the campaign trail in the months leading up to his 2008 election victory. Figure 2. In this image the product, in this case Barak Obama himself, is again placed in the centre of the image. Here however, he is positioned in front of two referents; a backdrop of classical architecture and a number of United States flags. At the simplest connotative level he is placed in an architectural setting resonant of values of power, authority and tradition. 

figure 2 (click to enlarge)

Following a standard semiotic reading, these values are directly transferred to Obama through a process of association. However, there is more to it than such a one dimensional semiotic reading would suggest and, to truly understand the logic behind the image, it is necessary to comment on the cultural-political context around it. This image was produced in the aggressive political climate of the race for the White House. Obama was a newcomer to the political scene and whilst this was seen as his greatest asset, his relative inexperience was identified as his Achilles’ heal. It thus formed the basis of most attacks upon him from his rivals, firstly Senator Clinton and later Senator McCain.

This image is a direct attempt by the “marketing team” of the Obama camp to counter these criticisms. By placing him in a backdrop resonant of tradition, power and longevity, they are using the most basic semiotic advertising technique in the cannon to promote their man. However, the architecture chosen is not an abstract representation of power, it also functions as a direct representation of the White House itself. Thus, one can also say that in the context of this image, architecture functions at a denotative level; it refers directly to the seat of US political power and, as a result, places Obama in that seat long before the electorate have made their decision. The image is intended not only to transfer abstract values of power and authority, it is intended to transfer values directly associated with the US presidency.

Following the standard semiotic template however, the marketing team have further reinforced this transference through the typical aesthetic trope of aesthetic coherence. Here it revolves around the colour coherence maintained across all elements of the image. The podium design is a combination of red, white and blue. This is linked to Obama’s blue suit and red and white striped tie which, in turn, aesthetically link him to the US national flag behind. Obama becomes associated with an image of political authority but also the most obvious symbol of US patriotism. Another knot is neatly tied in this strictly controlled promotional image.

Again, to understand the relevance of this it is necessary to understand the political context in which the image was produced; the election campaign of first serious Afro-American candidate who, in addition, was brought up for long periods outside the US and has what for some for some, is an “Islamic sounding name”. All these issues led to his patriotism being constantly brought into question by the political right during the “War Election” of 2008.

In bringing together the final parts of this promotional image however, the organisers of the convention have done one more thing. In the foreground are members of the public holding placards with the campaign slogan “Change”. Positioning these people so that they appear in the shot ensures a textual insertion into the image which functions as a form of anchorage. It thus ensures a perfect balance in the “product image” which is presented as resonant of tradition, experience and authority on the one hand, but does not lose sight of its freshness and presentation as “new” on the other.

What we have then is an “advertising image” that primarily uses architecture to cleverly and skilfully navigate the multifarious issues of the political maelstrom of election campaigning. It is a highly sophisticated semiotic construct that not only uses standard commercial advertising techniques but does so with a level of astuteness that the best advertising executives would be proud of. It is a perfect example of how integrally interwoven advertising techniques now are with political campaigning.

On the job

Between subsistence and sustenance:

The question of why we work taken at face value can seem trite. There is, perhaps, however a more fruitful underlying notion. If we do not supply sustenance, as in mental nourishment, how can we be sustained in any way that is more than mere existence: subsistence. 

The  act of work naturally dominates our lives, but considering  the question of why we work perhaps offers a way to more actively balance the vagaries and vicissitudes against the moments, events or mere joyful happenstance, within or without the workplace, that can address the more important aspects of our being, that will allow us to remain interested in the world around us, and from that draw the required sustenance that we sometimes forget that we need.  

See Id of the Ingenu, November 2010, Loo's and Colomina's - On mediated consumption:
'Experience has the built in notion of chance. If it is true that we can only really control half to three quarters of our outcomes, the other part is relevant. But we usually assume its influence will be bad. Perhaps that smaller part is sometimes actually the most interesting and more important bit that provides path splits and tangents as we meander through life.'
http://idoftheingenu.blogspot.com/2010/11/loos-and-colominas.html 

On human activity

At a recent lecture on planning and urban design at the London School of Economics, with Mohsen Mostafavi (Dean, Harvard Graduate School of Design) and chaired by Richard Sennett, it was good to see continued momentum of acknowledgement of the existing situation of our living environment as a starting point (which seems to be a relatively new phenomenon in the main). However, with all the human activity implicit within that, human activity itself, generally, seems little discussed.

Is it possible that the human is the elephant in the room?

If human activity, with its concomitant implications and necessities, sits at the crossroads of the constituting strands of our living environments, how can human (with plant and animal) activity be made more explicit (and central if the above assertion is true)?

Putting human activity at the centre of consideration is in some ways a conceit; whilst it can be interpreted as an arrogance, indeed a root of the problem that we do not factor in the rest of the planet on at least an equal standing, it is at the same time apparent that an acknowledgement of the necessity of recognising this existing situation leads to more implicit consideration that it is the nature and implications of human behaviour that needs to be mitigated. However, acknowledging the considerations of human activity as central, does not necessarily lead to an holistic representation of our overall living environment, but more of how we may begin to think about living as more responsible human beings.

Actively human

Whist human activity, with its concomitant implications of activity, may dominate the planet, this does not alleviate the need to be responsible for the results and implications of our actions, which is apparently the case currently – therein lies the conceit. Moreover, that is all the more reason why a more harmonious and integrated manner of existence needs to be achieved.

Can there be a place for a renewed sense of altruism; an evolved sense of the civic? If so, what would be the nature of it, and how would it manifest?

There will be no magic or instantaneous solution, more likely a gradual but definite and significant change in behaviours, stemming from an increasing shift in perspective away from that of ignorance and selfish greed as a resultant aspiration of our modes of living.

The diagram below, which is in some ways no more than a platitudinal statement, is warranted by the apparent need that certain basic positions need re-stating.

 

click to enlarge

Some examples of each of the four constituting aspects of our living environments:

- Spatio-physical:

streetscape; building; square

- Spatio-temporal:

transport (infrastructure); development phasing; neighbourhood evolution; daily/ weekly/ seasonal/ annual cycles; time passing/ strolling – realm of the flaneur

- Socio-environmental:

ecology, food, waste, energy, water - more cyclical, less linear

- Socio-economic:

social infrastructure; community; economic activity; bartering; community currency

Interlude

If buildings are merely nested containers of activity - a sequence of envelopes - so merely a series of thin thresholds with different functions: some to divide activities, some to provide acoustic division, some to provide transition and some to provide shelter, the outer shell can be thought of as mid-hierarchy and mid-spatial (between activities happening 'inside' and 'outside'), then the notion of building as an object is dissolved. With activity as first in the hierarchy of considerations, function second, building as ‘object’ sits third, emerges an evolved basis for consideration of how we affect how and where we live.

Social and economic sustainability should be considered as a twin primary strand to more usual spatio-physical based design work of new neighbourhoods, but particularly of regeneration. Human activities and their implications need to be the basis and driver for that spatio-physical design based work that should flow from that socio-economic understanding. Healthy socio-economics is surely the ‘fuel’ and ‘lubricant’ that makes neighbourhoods run smoothly.

Turn around

We often hear the now platitude that ‘half the world live in urban areas’, but this leaves some three billion people in a ‘rural’ situation. Moreover, this is usually portrayed with an underlying tone that being urban necessarily represents progression. But what is the quality of most people’s life in this urban situation? The shanty town/ favela seems to be the biggest growth area of urban typology, when often they go un-recognised by local municipalities, so lack basic utilities and services, and their rights dismissed once areas are ripe for redevelopment. How often does redevelopment become genuine regeneration?

If the intensity of human behaviour at large scales is at least a partial cause of un-sustainable practices, then, rather than trying to explore ways to resolve the exodus to the cities, could we address the issues at cause, rather than try to resolve the symptoms?

Could rural areas become more a focus for consideration, in that they could be a way to:

- stem movement to city, so relieving pressure on physical and social infrastructure;

- take people closer to agriculture rather than inserting that into city;

- provide an alternative to bluntly 'densifying' and making more compact;

- shift the balance between rural and urban towards more cyclical practices and better integration between the two.

Although, the danger is that we just carry existing bad practices to more places.

This is not about ‘down-shifting’, retiring early or escaping the ‘rat race’, but reinvigorating places that currently often struggle to maintain critical mass for basic services and amenities, so that the range of viable places to live is generally broadened.

Conclusion

Whilst exploring innovation through dialectic consideration and analysis of the existing situation, and implications of conceptual utopian ideas is laudable, the utopian alone is dangerous. We are still dealing with the inter-generational deprivation fallout of well intentioned utopian housing estates from half a century ago.

[Ironically, it seems the root of word utopian means non-place: The word comes from the Greek: οὐ ("not") and τόπος ("place"). The English homophone eutopia, derived from the Greek εὖ ("good" or "well") and τόπος ("place"), signifies a double meaning: "good place" and "no place" - Wiki]

The difficulty is really how to get from the existing to the proposed, as viable proposals emerge. But using scales of intervention (time and spatial) as a design tool means living environments undergoing change through gradual morphing including programme and activity, not just from physical (utopian) objectives.

See also:

Id of the Ingenu

June 2010 – Galería FAR; Out in the Country

How to invigorate struggling rural economies

http://idoftheingenu.blogspot.com/2010_06_01_archive.html 

August 2010 – The Art of Nesting

‘Bringing art to the masses’

http://idoftheingenu.blogspot.com/2010_08_01_archive.html

  

Net-working

 - Out and about

We live across wider and wider distances, both in a general and a daily sense; we reside a long way from other parts of our families, and travel further to visit friends, either across town for a meal, or across a continent.

Whilst it is easy to view this as the ‘break down of society’ and lament the loss of ‘traditional community and values’, such an outlook is at best platitudinal, and at worse myopic and sentimental.

 

 click to enlarge

See Id of the Ingenu, October 2010, Helix street: 

‘Even though how we live is shifting, and the traditional idea of community is perhaps less common - where most people in an area work and live there - it is still important that the evolving notion of community is cultivated. We increasingly have a much wider movement ‘net’ with nodes further apart, in that we live, work and socialise in many different areas, so there is a rich nexus of overlaid social ‘nets’ that constitute places. Merely because people in a place have not come from just that locale, does not invalidate it as a cohesive [and valid] arena of activity, it just means we need to acknowledge that evolved sensed of community.’

These wider living ‘networks’, comprised of nodes more spread apart, also means that groupings are less isolated, in that certain aspects of us are plugged into a groups which are further afield. So whilst we may be less integrated from a ‘traditional’ perspective, we are actually immersed in a greater variety of arenas, which is more attuned to emerging social networking sensibilities.  

 

 click to enlarge

As such, places are constituted by nodes made up of parts of a whole distributed across larger space, but each individual place is no less valid, just made up of sub-nodes whose siblings are elsewhere. So the question before us is how do we live as part of this evolved notion of community, and what are the latent tensions and their implications between the typical (accepted traditional) and the emerging living environments, and how do they overlap, as we shift from one to the other?

Further reading

For a more academic take on it, see Urban Design journal 114, spring 2010, p33.

For an environmental angle see:

Lim C J & Ed Liu, Smart Cities + Eco-warriors, 2010, Routledge, Abingdon/ New York

Interlude

If the virtual world and physical world are to engage, as they should, even just from the point of view that we should strive to live in an integrated albeit heterogeneous manner, we need to find an evolved notion of virtual space; current gaming for example is not allowing the virtual realm to develop as a medium to become and fulfil it's own nature. We have merely used it to make a representation of the physical world as an escapist sideshow.

The start of the end

Despite having many areas of vitality, the UK is a dying organism*. But the key question at this crucial point in time is, are the areas of vitality going to continue on their current path to be as parasites, feeding off the dying ‘flesh’ and pushing the country into terminal decline past a point of no return, or can these hotspots of health be enticed to return the whole back to good health?

(* in a way all organisms are dying, but there is healthy and ill. Healthy is more a state of constant renewal)

The end of the end

Fifty years of poor stewardship by misogynistic and selfish mid-twentieth century baby boomers, who (not so) incidentally have also hoarded the family silver, has left key elements of infrastructure: health, housing, education and transport, in a woeful state after half a century of minimal investment, ceding the impossible task of playing 'catch up'.

More fundamentally, the environment, the mandate having been sidelined and ignored in any meaningful sense, may now have passed a point where many options that even recently would have been available to us, have now moved beyond possibility.

There still remains twenty years of draw on health resources in their twilight years, but at least thankfully they are now retiring from positions of power and responsibility to finally allow others through.

The start of the start

These others are those currently in middle age, who will need to form a bridging generation that can peg the decline, but ultimately this can be little more than a stop-gap. At best they can perhaps begin to think, and lay in pathways or some kind of foundational framework so that the current emerging generation, free of infected thinking, can fundamentally re-consider and re-structure a way through our dire situation. Additionally, this middle generation are tasked with supporting the current graduate generation in terms of space to think freely. The beginning is merely to acknowledge that the starting is point is the nature of our current situation.

Our way forward will need to be considered from first principles, and even those need to be well reflected upon first; greed and selfishness at an endemic level cannot be part of the future. A renewed sense of the civic will probably be part if it in some interpretation.

The end of the start

It is necessarily at least a double generational task ahead of us; any less would probably mean we have not cut deep enough and any such solutions would be too superficial. 

On Representation

- Between observation and solution
At the beginning of the third annual series, it is worth noting that series one was observation and series two solution. This series is to be representation; to distil any given situation that we find ourselves living with to a simple diagram allows us to better understand the shifting environment in which we exist.