Monu #12 - Real Urbanism

Just when I thought someone couldn't come up with a more disturbing journal cover than the aforementioned Kerb 17 - the folks at MONU found a way to top this in art for the latest issue on 'Real Urbanism'



Contents:
(browse the entire issue on YouTube)

Luxury Space By Jason Lee;
The World According to Mr. Reds By Doreen Jakob;
The Shelter Category By Mammoth (Stephen Becker and Rob Holmes);
How the City of Broad Shoulders Bought its Growth Spurt By Karl Johann Hakken;
Residential Developers and Investors in Central Europe: Boom and Bust By Maximilian Mendel;
Pyongyang in a New Era By Yim Dongwoo;
Casino City State By Rustam Mehta and Thomas Moran;
Solidere, Inc., or Downtown Beirut By Carol Moukheiber;
Real High - The Desire for the Real in Urban Real Estate By McLain Clutter;
Real Creativity: A Case for Ethical Freedom in Architecture By Randall Teal;
Life without Architects - Interview with Magriet Smit By Bernd Upmeyer;
The New York Value Exchange By Joyce Hwang;
Real Big - Interview with Bjarke Ingels By Beatriz Ramo;
Magic Realism - A New Skyline for Rome By Simone De Iacobis;
Business Park De Hoef Revisited 1998-2008 By Arjan Harbers (Topotronic);
Brand New Landlords By Daan Roggeveen and Michiel Hulshof;
Living on the Edge By Bas Princen;
Why should a Developer read Aristotle By Marta Relats;
Unbuilt Rotterdam By ZUS [Zones Urbaines Sensibles];
Rotterdam is a Whore - Interview with Andre Kempe By Beatriz Ramo and Bernd Upmeyer;
To Build or not to Build By MVRDV

From the Monu site:

Just like the "Ideal Woman" on the cover of this issue on Real Urbanism - a sculpture by the Brooklyn based artist Tony Matelli - most of our cities are shaped by a particular set of values that does not necessarily lead to high quality urban spaces, but instead to scary, ethically unacceptable and distorted forms. As the "Ideal Woman", so "Ideal Cities" can easily end up only fulfilling the wishes and dreams of a powerful minority, but neglect the needs of most of the other people. Jason Lee, one of the contributors to this issue, that deals more with "Real Estate" Urbanism rather than with Actual or Factual Urbanism, uses this sculpture in his article "Luxury Space" to display the consequences that can occur when a financially powerful elite develops real estate projects in the city of Shanghai merely to accommodate their consumerist desires.



Cities have been reduced to machines for making and spending money as Stephen Becker and Rob Holmes put it in their piece "The Shelter Category". Especially in Central European countries, where two decades ago the state-controlled economy changed into a market-economy, developers are driven by pure profit rather than by a genuine desire or even awareness of sustainable neighbourhoods and city development as Maximilian Mendel describes in his text "Residential Developers and Investors in Central Europe: Boom and Bust". But blaming only the financial elites and the real estate industry for the prevailing urbanism of mediocrity would be too easy.



For successful urban planning, cities depend on private financing as Carol Moukheiber points out in her contribution "Solidere, Inc., or Downtown Beirut", where a productive collaboration between a corporate and a cooperative party led - although heavily criticised and carried out in a kind of pseudo democratic Berlusconian way - to prosperous results. In the case of Rotterdam, where the municipality actually cares very little about the city, real estate developers seem to be even more concerned about the quality of urban spaces than the city itself, as stated by Andre Kempe in an interview with us entitled "Rotterdam is a Whore".



To halt the process by which the built-up form of our cities continues to be mainly driven by practical concerns such as efficiency, profit, and self-promotion, Randall Teal proposes in his piece "Real Creativity: A Case for Ethical Freedom in Architecture" that architects should become developers themselves. But how many architects would be able and interested in doing that? Magriet Smit, a Rotterdam based real estate developer, explains in the interview "Life without Architects" that she actually tries more and more to avoid working with planners and rather collaborates directly with construction companies as they share a greater understanding of their profession. But to prevent our cities from turning into monstrous "Ideal Cities", as perverted as the "Ideal Woman", all the parties involved that are shaping the cities - the developers, the municipalities and the planners - have to accept their interdependencies, and have to try to understand the different interests of each party and have to dare to navigate into unknown territory as Bjarke Ingels concludes in an interview with us entitled "Real Big".

FLOW: A Competition

Winners of the international competition „FLOW“ arrived via an email today. The european competition is: "... for students in the last two years of architecture, engineer, art, landscape, town planning, sociology and young architects were born after December 31st, 1975 in Europe."



The subject area of the competition is the City of Brussels, covering the port area and the canal in the center of the City: "This competition of ideas aims to enable participants to propose an innovative and daring architectural project which simultaneously envisages the environmental, social, technical and economic dimensions involved. The objective of the contest is to reflect on future new lifestyles and organisations, to prefigure them and to overturn mentalities, which will make it possible to provoke reflections between the private and public sector."

Student First prize: S1 Mutations
School : UNIFE (Italy) Alessandro Bellini, Jacopo Casolai

"The complexity of the problems encountered facing the competition and the dimensional matter of the canal in Brussels, encouraged us to seek out a programmatic approach. This will provide some guidelines disregarding, for the first time, the real architectural intervention.

A lot of documents and open questions involve the European Capital and specifically its 14 km canal: starting from that amount of informations and from the specific FLOW competition's requests we draw up a critical MANIFESTO in ten points. This document underline the canal's points of weakness and possible courses of actions, and suggest a method, called induced mutations, which is able to generate more and more well-framed urban transformations."

VIDEO 1 MANIFESTO from alessandro bellini on Vimeo.

Young Professional First prize: P7 The line
(Deutschland) Marine Miroux, Christoph Hager, Ingo Hüller, Demian Rudaz

La Ligne from Marine Miroux on Vimeo.

Check out all of the entries on the website. I think the idea of the videos as part of competition deliverables are a great idea - as it allows the static imagery to coalesce into a more complete narrative which aids in understanding the specifics.

Smart Wayfinding

A very interesting project spotted on Designboom: "....as part of the lighting plan in montreal, the quartier des spectacles explores the possibilities of light for creating signage and expressing identity. lead by designers ruedi baur and jean beaudoin from montreal architectural design studio intégral, this recent pilot project experiments with projecting light onto the pavement to mark the urban landscape. this intervention, realized as part of the montreal all-nighter, brings together light and graphic design"


:: image via Designboom

The implications of this type of installation in cities is interesting, as it moves away from the static insertion of 'lines and signs' for safety and wayfinding and utilizes the range of urban surfaces for these purposes. Ideas of being able to adjust crossings during peak periods, or announcements of upcoming events with directions on how to get to them. The ideas of constantly changing the surface treatment also aids in keeping drivers on their toes, in effect slowing traffic and giving a significant portion of the streets back to the pedestrians.


:: image via Designboom

The opportunities to continue this onto sidewalks and integrating into the facade treatments, creating a new integrated, smart system of urban wayfinding with a range of possibilities.


:: images via Designboom