Informality, Enhanced

Why is it that so many of the people out there studying/analyzing/writing about new urban trends, new technologies, new social configurations, etc. are either well past or fast approaching midlife?

xxx

Watching academics (or worse: bureaucrats and business gurus) try to keep up with the frenetic pace of our present-day spatial, cultural, social, etc. milieus can be a sad sight. Pro Thinkers struggle like parents or marketeers or morning TV hosts to stay current and swank and therefore (allegedly) relevant.

They are quick to embrace buzz working concepts, and just as quick to dump them.

xxx

To make matters worse, even regular people like you or me have a hard time upholding concepts, just like we do keeping relationships, tastes, personal aims, political allegiances and attention spans. We consume our concepts like we consume our everydayness.

xxx

The problem is that a number of these concepts could actually be useful and significant. They are unfairly — even irresponsibly – deemed tired, passé, fizzle; superficially exhausted and then dumped.

xxx

One of the poor bastards in this bunch is the notion of "informality". After a brief, guilt-driven stint of Western academic and media focus on the subject, at the moment informality sounds as old and worn as French Theory. Something to roll your eyes over.

xxx

I don't want to redeem anything or anyone here. I just don't think ideas should be treated as disposable objects. Ideas always linger and creep back up when you least expect it.

It's only fair that we're tired of hearing the same stuff from the same people, over and over again. OK. But that doesn't mean that everything that needs to be said has been said.

xxx

Right now, more than anything else, I have some basic, intuitive, poorly-shaped questions. I guess they're mostly questions for myself (given my comment track record on this blog):

- Can anyone actually pin-point "informality"? Or is the notion simply elusive and any attempt at this futile?

- Is the concept itself inadequate? Particularly considering there isn't an actual divide between formal and informal, that they are both the same thing: reductive categories that try to organize and make sense of functional and active by-products of our (Modern, global) development schemes and efforts.

- Do we really have to keep opposing the "informal" to the Western-developed-organized-etc.-etc. or can we maybe start understanding it as a mirror modernization, as the crooked limb of Modernity or its bad twin?

- Instead of considering it an absence of logic, can we accept informality as a logic in itself, with controls and hierarchies and orders and struggles and changes and growths?

- If we want to emphasize the historical breach and inequality of modernizing processes, why not simply try to analyze and describe how unequal types of development are crashing up against each other and invading each other as a result of globalization, instead of making it an Us vs. Them thing? There is no Us vs. Them. We've all been smeared.

- Beyond aesthetics, isn't informality ugly (scary even) because it reveals too much about our dirty, insecure, two-faced Modern selves?

- How about picturing an enhanced version of the informal? One that isn't primitive or picturesque or exotic, or at least not in its entirety. One that is inextricably related to whatever happens elsewhere: interconnected, active (sometimes aggressive), efficient and significant in its own right. One that we need not pity or fix, but understand.

Would anyone like to take a shot?

(Photo by Pablo León de la Barra. José Rojas at House of Gaga in Mexico City. From the Centre for the Aesthetic Revoluction).

Networked Urban Politics

"Participation is war. Any form of participation is already a form of conflict", says architect and activist Markus Miessen, following Chantal Mouffe: "It is very important to envisage the task of democracy in terms of creating the institutions that will allow for conflicts between adversaries." Mouffe, a Belgian political theorist, has theorized on the notion of a "conflictual consensus", in which only a minimum common aim (democracy, equality, justice, etc.) needs to be settled and agreed upon within a society. The means for reaching this aim and even the meaning of the aim itself, on the other hand, can and should be disputable.

Miessen is more concerned with the spatial effects and possible materialization of these conflictual consensuses, particularly by way of everyday urbanisms: "When participation becomes conflict, conflict becomes space. Re-inserting friction and differences into both the scale of the institution and the city bears the potential of micro-political forces that render conflict as practice. In this context, participation becomes a form of non-physical, productive violence. Micro-political action can be as effective as traditional state political action."

- - -

Technologies that enable participation have become a staple of contemporary life, overcoming distance, economic limitations and even political constraints. Teens in Ciudad Neza are glued to their cell-phones just like their counterparts in Midtown Manhattan (though they might be planning a stickup instead of a cocktail soiree). ICTs have become so important to the functioning of societies that mobile phones are being handed out by governments along with food stamps and the One Laptop Per Child project seems demure compared to the aggressive downward pricing spirals of the netbook market. Today, 24/7 global connectivity is closer to practical reality than to some outlandish fiction.

- - -

From the nineteenth-century barricades to the revolts of 1968 to the social disruptions of the early 1990s, The Street was always an ideal escape valve for urban tensions and the preferred site of high profile (spectacular) political and social demonstrations. The Street was the perfect set for frictions. But if, as we’ve said before, The Street has systematically been loosing relevance, doesn't it make perfect sense that The Web take its place in this sense too?

- - -



The political perceptions and consequences of The Web and networked urbanisms differ intensely according to specific geographical contexts.

Here in Spain — not quite the First World, but still — there is a bubbly enthusiasm over new technologies and the promise of what they might deliver: salvation from impending economic fallout, a new dawn of proactive citizenship, gaining a steadier foothold in the Developed Nations club (after the brick-setter, real-estate-speculator and tour-guide triad has been widely acknowledged to be a flop as far as development schemes go), etc. Lethargic institutions, burned-out public universities, covetous town halls and ailing private companies are all eager to jump on the digital bandwagon here. The government is lending money for laptops, funding mediateques and data centers, talking Citizenship 2.0, etc. Hopes are high and the atmosphere is cheery, but approaches remain largely superficial or are limited to insiders, specialists and bureaucrats.

This is not the case in the Third World.

- - -

My browser is stuffed with Tehran bookmarks. Just like Cuban bloggers sneaking into Havana hotels to post their thoughts and opinions on the web or massive reactions to government corruption cases prompted by unofficial on-line reports in China, web activists and connected common-folk in Iran are opening channels for a new understanding of urban (networked) politics — proving at the same time that networked urban realities are far from being pretty or easy to grasp. The Street (Web) resistance that is shaking Iranian cities along with our reductive and jaundiced perception of Iran (Remember the days when thanks to George W. Bush — and to a lesser degree, Sally Field — Iran rarely evoked something other than a helplessly closed and traditional society?) is one of those events that change people’s gut perception of history in the making. But there is an additional element here. Like the Obama election or the global response to the Swine Flu affair, the unfolding of these fundamentally urban episodes and our reactions to them cannot be separated from the presence of digital technologies.


(Photos from Flickr user misterarasmus. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

Where is The Digital?

Digging into the Where archive, I found Brendan asking himself:

As the internet becomes increasingly ubiquitous and reality moves toward the virtual, the emergent Cyberspace will almost certainly take on an urban form -- though it remains to be seen whether it will lean more heavily on the physical or virtual world. Either way, geography will become less and less binding as cities learn to connect in ever more complex ways, and we will likely come to understand urbanism as something very different from what it is now.

Only a couple of years later, we're already there. Maybe it's time we started thinking of ways to answer these questions. Here go my two cents:

1. Marshall Berman's All That is Solid Melts Into Air is a double ode to Modernism and The Street. The Modernist Canon includes Dostoyevsky and Joyce, of course, but also Jane Jacobs. Urban vitality is supposed to culminate Modernism. Despite Jacobs and her followers (sometimes because of them), today The Street keeps loosing ground, through stale, celebratory urbanities. The Street is not only displaced or attacked anymore; it is manicured, mercantilized, neutered, over-regulated. Today, The Street is no longer The Street. The Street is The Web.

2. The Web has not only added to Modernist/Urban Canon. It is constantly reworking and dissolving it. The Web Canon is nothing like the usual Canon. The Web Canon is not about authorship. It is about the dissolution of Authorship, swaying back to a wilder communal mode or spirit (or rather a bunch of different communal modes and spirits bumping against each other constantly). (This is one of those eras of cultural dispersion we're entering, like the days of oral tradition or pamphleteering or independent broadcasting). What is Canon one day is forgotten the next. Some Canon never makes the cut, until it does. The Canon swallows every Canon before it. The Canon is The Web itself.

3. Anything cyber — cyberspace, cyberpunk, etc — reeks of Future Anterior and has a bit of that nostalgic (conservative) retraction from reality, even when dreaming up alternative realities. Incursions into cyber-whatever (Second Life urbanisms, virtual reality, etc.) are as much the future of The Web as digital renderings, parametric design and Dubai are the future of architecture and urbanism. Depending on where you stand, this means either everything or close to nothing.

4. Even when embracing and exploiting and dwelling on The Digital, any Networked Urbanism should recognize itself as deeply entrenched in everyday, physical, political, social and cultural realities. It should also acknowledge that it has significant, explicit, lasting effects on these realities.

5. I don't think geography has become "less binding". On the contrary, it's probably only starting to reveal its complexities. This is a matter not only of physical geography or distance we're talking about, but also of political and cultural geographies and distances.

6. The Web Canon might seem Western, but it's definitely not.

7. In one of the hundreds of Web Canon Classics (someone should start collecting them), Kevin Kelly discusses the production and spreading of digital content. He states that the impact of digitization will likely be most significant not in the Developed World (despite the abundance of resources, technical knick-knacks and gadgetry) but in the Third World, in areas that are practically bookless, or at least don't have an Amazon branch.

Something similar might happen with Networked Urbanisms. In the Developed World, Networked Urbanisms' potential might very well fade out under the weight of control and commercialization. The Kindle and the iPhone are the McMansions of Digital Urbanity. Networked Urbanisms could certainly profit from the chronic instability, forced flexibility, selective implementation, DIY and everything-up-for-grabs mindset, creative reuse and living-off-scraps culture of Third World urban realities as much as it already does from its pools of skilled tech workers, cheap manufacturing and shady practices like piracy and copyright infringements. The “digital breach” doesn’t necessarily follow the North-South divide.

8. The Plaza Meave is a huge semi-formal electronics bazaar in the heart of Mexico City’s Centro Histórico, or Historic Quarter. It’s a piece of urban infrastructure straight out of Sci-Fi: an anonymous, damp, smelly and seemingly innocuous building where people hawk and hustle pirated software, stolen or scavenged electronics, tuned hardware, abandonware, orphaned technology, and any random techno-spoils you can imagine. The market often spills over onto the street, and the tech stands mix in with food stalls.

9. I hate the “digital skin” metaphor. There is no such thing as an ICT blanket that just comes and covers or supplants “traditional” urban dynamics. If you’re going to use the usual cheap organicist metaphor, why not say “digital lymphatic system” or something like that?

10. Most of us are too quick to associate technological change with the brave and the new. But to me, one of the most interesting aspects of the digital onslaught is the novelty with which it feeds the past into the present and therefore the future. The Digital has an uncanny historical bent. It allows for and thrives on richer, more intense and diverse readings of the past. We are unburying the marginal, the secondary, the almost forgotten, the populist, the failed, the ephemeral, the quaint, the curious, the quotidian, the small, the foreign, the frilled, and so on and so forth, and inserting everything into our steady and active forward marches. The Angel of History doesn’t have to fly with its back turned to the future anymore. It can just gaze at the past on its iPod.


(I don't remember if I got the photo from Flickr or from Mark the Cobrasnake. If it's your's, please let me know!)

Urban Afflictions. An Interview with Hilary Sample (Part Two)

Urban outbreaks: SARS 2003

Urban outbreaks: A/H1N1 2009

Following up on our interview with Hilary Sample on the subject of global health crises in urban contexts, we've moved from the backdrop of her research and the specific responses she's studied to a more speculative perspective on the issue. If you haven't read the first part, scroll down or click here.

Where: You've identified a combined research/corporate drive behind the Biomed City phenomenon (those of you who haven’t, go download and read Hilary’s short essay on the BMC here). Due to current political and economic events, we see a tendency towards a heavier and more direct government involvement (particularly in the U.S., but in other places as well) in the different areas that are the backdrop for BMCs: economic policy, health care and infrastructural development. Do you see this affecting the nature of the BMC? For the good or for the bad?

Hilary Sample: We can look to Singapore as an example of the government-driven development, specifically in the Biopolis project. The masterplan was designed by Zaha Hadid, which had an extensive landscape and programmatically included a lot of public functions, along with connection to the subway system-extending it into the Biopolis. Subsequently not much of the public components have been built, but the project continues to grow with frequent announcements of new corporations renting space. It is a private interest project supported by the government. Singapore’s government does not place any restrictions on scientists working with stem cells, and this is one factor driving the brain gain and science boom in Singapore. Interestingly, universities such as Johns Hopkins, which have space problems at their campus rent space in the Biopolis. In this case, we see branding of health taking on new structures.

In the United States, it seems difficult to think that the private sector would begin to support innovation in terms of adopting a clear social agenda with respect to urban health development, even though there are tremendous needs and opportunities to rethink the way our cities could function with respect to health. The current moment does seem like an opportunity for government action, not only in terms of providing access to a better health care system, but for a complete reframing of the idea of health, at least in this country.

I think this could be supported by both Federal and city governments and inspire private developments. In my opinion, we need radical change in the way health care is promoted and in the physical spaces in which treatments and care are given. I’m interested in how architects and designers can rethink the city as we know it and develop new systems and forms that are civic, not just expanding the existing hospital building by adding to it. The image of the hospital from what it used to be has become unrecognizable. Hospitals are often referred to as cities in their own right, but in my opinion, they take the worst situations from cities as their examples. We need new paradigms, especially with the super hospital being developed as a mega-scaled building.

Biopolis, Singapore

W: Another revealing aspect here is the geoeconomic breach one perceives between "prepared" and "unprepared" cities. With the exception of China, maybe, BMCs are apparently limited to developed countries. At the same time, the cities that are most vulnerable and more exposed to health threats of this nature are those in underdeveloped countries. What do you think?

HS: Largely, I believe this is true; we have a huge division between prepared and unprepared cities. But the idea that Third-World cities are always unprepared or that First-World cities are prepared isn’t always the case. The SARS outbreaks showed us this exact problem. For instance, Hanoi — one of the poorest and least developed cities in terms of urban health developments — actually had one of the best responses to the SARS epidemic. It was the first city to get a hold on the spread of the virus. They basically did this by isolating all SARS patients to two hospitals on the outskirts of the city. In Beijing we saw the construction of a hospital in 8 days.

I wouldn’t say it is a regional trend, but in this one instance it shows that at a local level spatial practices worked well. I don’t think we can say it is an either or situation. The SARS virus was identified through the collaboration between many scientists in many different countries. The virus itself spread quickly, but so did the effort of scientists to find an answer, which relied on a spatial network of laboratories and governing agencies. The spatial organization of both are extremely important.

W: Do you think a different version of the BMC could arise in cities that don't have the funds or the resources to build huge hospitals and research centers? Maybe one that opts for networked, flexible, mobile infrastructures that could be deployed whenever and wherever needed, including the poorer cities of the South?

HS: This has been the subject of a graduate research seminar I taught at Yale called Design and Disease. An amazing feature of our interconnected world is that we are learning more and more about situations of impoverishment, poor health, and the lack of establishing life-sustaining infrastructures.

In the seminar, the students made a kind of index of building types in cities around the world, looking at hospitals from Hong Kong to Soweto, pharmaceutical companies (Roche vs. Novartis in Zurich) and the performance of architecture.

One of the most surprising instances we learned about is in Soweto. The Bara Hospital sees more than 2000 patients a day, with a large population of AIDS/HIV patients. It claims to be the largest hospital in the world, but this is a hospital that has been built within an aging British Army barracks, and in the context of limited access to resources, including electricity. Here a complementary support system would be a good option to support what little infrastructure and physically working buildings there are. So maybe flexible and mobile structures are more economical or efficient when you have nothing better, but really what all cities need are both permanent and mobile health support.

New York City is an example that has both some of the leading hospitals in the world, but also significant mobile infrastructures, from asthma vans to PODS (points of dispensing systems in the event of an epidemic). It’s significant that cities with permanent, large-scale buildings also have equally and burgeoning mobile systems, suggesting that both are truly needed. But how can we make these decisions as designers? In my opinion, it all comes back to the practice of understanding how cities perform at the most detailed level, and examining the diseased city is essential. Mapping activities of urban disease is essential.

Baragwanath Hospital, Soweto, South Africa

W: This last outbreak in Mexico generated an enormous amount of activity on the Web: everything that we’re starting to grow used to now (real-time reporting on Twitter, constant updates on Google News and recommendations delivered directly from institutional web pages) but also some fascinating tools we really hadn’t seen before (I’m thinking of the Google Flu Trends project). Do you think we will see more alert systems, diagnostic means, protocols, open-source and web-based strategies in the future, or, we could say, a “smarter” response strategy?

HS: We see scientists working with a kind of virtual epidemiology, and they’re doing this more than any designer or spatial planner. For instance, I have a case in mind in which researchers studied a hypothetical outbreak of smallpox in Portland, Oregon, trying to identify social trends in an urban disease situation. The study included specific maps of the transportation infrastructure, and looked at how people moved in the city. This is an extraordinary spatial analysis that would be a powerful tool for architects, planners, and designers. Portland is a city that has made interesting urban decisions tied with how to better access its health-care infrastructure, including the Portland Aerial Tram designed by AGPS.

By comparison, there are actually very few studies or projects that I have seen looking at the contagious disease in cities by designers. I can think of two important works that shed light on the SARS outbreaks. The first is the “SARS Atlas” by Fabrizio Gallanti and Francisca Insulza published by Domus in 2004, which indexically mapped disease hot spots in cities. The other is Julie Rose’s essay in Log, a description of the urban spatial shifts that SARS produced in Hong Kong.

The spatial and social consequences of a disease reveal the performance of a given city. With the recent 2009A/H1N1 outbreak, just five years after the SARS outbreak, it seems likely that we are going to see more frequent events of this kind. In the end, if hospitals fail in an actual emergency, then suddenly subways are empty, people are in their cars or at their family’s house in the suburb, the city fails, the economy fails and it takes years to recover. The way we design our buildings and cities should be rethought to include social spaces that work.

W: This last question is probably more abstract (even emotional), but I think it's just as relevant in terms of spatial effects. I would like to discuss this recurring issue of fear, not only in terms of the outbreaks themselves, but regarding measures taken to deal with crises as well. You mentioned something about this regarding the resistance some of these public health projects have met in cities. It’s interesting to see how these developments might generate suspicion in themselves and cause a stir, like a high-security prison or a nuclear plant probably would.

There is also a whiff of mid-century paranoia about the whole situation, the fear of the looming dangers of density and the city core (you mentioned that many of the projects are built in secluded and distant locations). In Mexico City lots of people actually fled for cities nearby over the weekend when the crisis was announced. What do you think of all this?

HS: There is no question that fear, like the virus, is an epidemic. And it does seem like urban disasters are on the rise, Katrina, SARS, 9/11. There are patterns that we can now begin to study and understand, which would in turn affect the way we design both buildings and cities. In general there are two trends emerging regarding what we’ve been discussing here:

First, the building-up of the urban core with super hospitals and biosafety labs, new transit connections between these centers, and the location of research laboratories within the city rather in remote suburban parks. In the U.S. many developers in the sector are abandoning the model of suburban corporate park in favor of building in the city. Some cities have begun to build their own biosafety labs. Some of these laboratories test deadly viruses, like the Boston case we mentioned before. Ultimately, it winds up being housed in a non-descript building sited within a hospital district, but the surrounding neighborhood is considered to be a low-income area. This raised many questions at the time of its construction.

The second trend, which we see mostly in South East Asia, is the building of remote hospitals, far from the city core, with architectural renderings that show them surrounded by green spaces.

In the end, both of these urban strategies are driven by fear.

It isn’t surprising that people fled from Mexico City; this was the same reaction in Beijing during the SARS outbreaks. How people react to crisis is unpredictable, and so, at least for designers, it seems we can only study what has already occurred. Again, here I think that the most significant spatial studies are being developed by scientists or artists, not architects or planners.

In 2005, researchers Nina Fefferman and Eric Lofgren, examined the video game "World of Warcraft” and the introduction of a virtual virus within a controlled environment. The virtual virus quickly and unexpectedly corrupted the virtual world, and learned that there were many similarities between the virtual and real life scenarios.

Christain Nold, an artist, has been working on a bio-mapping project that tests emotional responses of individuals in urban contexts. These studies result in maps that give us a whole new geographic perspective of the city. What I appreciate about this study is that we see a range of emotional responses that correspond directly to the built environment. Again here there are lessons to be learned about the performance of our constructed environments.

Protest against biosafety lab, Boston

W: Thank you so much Hilary, it’s been great talking to you! I think we’ve covered a pretty good spectrum. Now let’s hope our Where readers out there have more to add to the discussion.


(Maps courtesy of Hilary Sample. Photo from Flickr users askpang, srippon, and steph ps. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

Urban Afflictions. Global Health Crises in Metropolitan Contexts. An interview with Hilary Sample

Ice cream and influenza. Mexico City

The global crisis unleashed by the 2003 SARS outbreaks seemed all but forgotten in most parts of the world, until the threat of a global pandemic resurfaced in the media (old and new) only a few days after the appearance of a mysterious, unknown and presumably deadly virus in Mexico City. In a crazy turn of events, the megacity was practically shut down and brought to a standstill for days, with consequences that we are only beginning to come to terms with.

What have we learned from these massive public heath crises that are a product of our interconnected, now predominantly urban world? How are governments, institutions and organizations (at the local, national and global scales) reacting to these crises in terms of urban policies and design? We’ve asked Hilary Sample, Assistant Professor at the Yale University School of Architecture and partner of mos, to comment on these issues, taking her upcoming book, Sick City, as a point of departure.



Where: First of all, can you give us some insight on the subject of your book, Sick City? What exactly would you say is a "sick city", or a "healthy city" for that matter?

Hilary Sample: Sick City is a book project that began during the SARS outbreaks in 2003. I became interested in the sudden, urban shifts that took place as a result of the outbreaks while I was living and teaching in Toronto, and examining the post-event effects. The book is not only about SARS, it starts with SARS as the first major global health crisis event in the 21st century, but also focuses on other urban crises; looking at the problems and solutions that result from contagious disease situations or threats, from hurricane Katrina to AIDS. Essentially, I was interested in the unpredictable events that were not malevolent causes, and the urban remedies.

The SARS outbreaks became true public crises in March 2003, within weeks, if not days, of the start of the Iraq War. The media focus in North America was practically concentrated on the war up until the SARS outbreaks, which became a focal point of news coverage in Canada, and it seemed to me that this divide between terror and disease was significant in its own right. Each would have (and has had) a great effect in terms of socioeconomics, health and urbanism. It was interesting to see the difference between the U.S.’s concern regarding terrorism and Canada’s concerns about the spread of SARS. There is no question that war is so devastating because of its physical consequences, I think, but in the moment, disease outbreaks are no less significant, though the aftermath is usually subtler and as a result seems less significant. Still, the consequences of a disease like SARS have had major urban effects, such as the development of the Biomed City (we get into this further on in the interview).

In the terms of the book, a sick city is one that has undergone an unexpected change as a result of disease; a city whose life-sustaining infrastructures have been affected beyond their intended performance. The book also looks at the governance of world health, the agencies and foundations doing this work and the development of the health headquarter building, a new typology that emerged in the twentieth century, which defines the way worldwide health is organized. (An early paradigm is Le Corbusier’s Ministry of Health and Education building, in Rio de Janeiro.) Sick City looks at building types associated with health and examines their performance. It’s a kind of loop, looking at the sick city, its sick buildings and the organizations that renew and restore the city, and then looking at buildings that are meant to facilitate urban health.

Reforma Avenue. One of the main (usually crowded) throughfares in Mexico City.

W: What is your reaction to the current 2009 A/H1N1 flu affair? Where do you see our cities standing compared to the first SARS outbreak in terms of being prepared (or not) for this kind of public health crises?

HS: Disease is unpredictable, but there are social and spatial patterns that emerged with SARS and are emerging again now: school closings, hospitals restricting access to only the sick or even designating parts or entire hospitals for the infected, scanning at the airport. The big question will be how these events are handled and what they look like.

With SARS, everything happened so fast that hospitals, for example, were closed or cordoned-off, wrapped in yellow tape, limiting entrances, looking more like a crime scene than a hospital. These instances caused more fear and panic than were probably necessary; keeping individuals from going out in public, from doing normal activities like eating out or taking public transportation. This fear and resistance to going out in public has significant economic impacts on a city. Compounded with a weak global economy, this will raise new challenges to the operation of public health facilities. In the U.S. and Canada, there has been a great push to build new research space in cities for the purpose of identifying contagious diseases to pollutants.

Super Hospital. Birmingham, U.K.

W: Can you give us some examples of how these global health crises are changing our cities in terms of urban design and infrastructures? I imagine that certain building types (hospitals, quite obviously) would be almost immediately affected.

HS: The hospital is our most contested urban building type today. Unlike any other building type within the last fifteen years, hospitals have been the site of significant urban trauma, form war or terrorist targeting, to takeovers and quarantines. At the time of the SARS epidemic, the hospital was the place where most of transmissions of the disease occurred, as the virus often spread to health care workers, other patients and visitors. In the aftermath of Katrina, in New Orleans or Galveston, many hospitals closed and remain closed.

At the same time, we see different types of hospitals on the horizon, a new breed of “super hospitals”.

We see this idea of the super hospital establishing itself in the U.K., and plans are under way for this type of development in Montreal. There is a project under construction in New York City, the East River Science Park (ERSP), which is really anything but a park. It is a research institution that is being built adjacent to one of New York City’s most celebrated hospitals, Bellevue Hospital. Unlike its counterpart in Toronto, the ERSP has little space dedicated to the public. Toronto’s MaRS project, an addition to the original 1913 Toronto General Hospital building, includes a public atrium which links into the rest of Toronto underground system, a public auditorium, and even a food court. The hospital became too costly to repair for use as a hospital, and now has been renovated and added to for office and lab space. It really acts as a place for meeting in the city.

Even though both projects are being built by the same developer (not coincidentally) they are fundamentally different: MaRS promotes an exchange between the public and the user, where ERSP has strict entry controls and checks. Here we see the difference in mindset between the US and Canada, one city affected by 9/11 and the other by SARS. One would expect the opposite kind of spatial response — a prophylactic situation emerging where germs had been spread — but in fact Toronto’s MaRs development has public spaces and links to both the Toronto General Hospital and the Toronto underground system and subway.

SARS: Yesterday's news?

W: At an even larger scale, another extremely interesting concept in Sick City is the idea of the “Biomed City” you mentioned earlier. What exactly is a BMC? Does it actually exist somewhere, or is it only hypothetical?

HS: In the book, we see the BMC as a 21st-century urban paradigm emerging from New York, to Toronto, to Singapore. The term has been adopted by various cities, where certain areas — and in some cases entire cities — are adopting this “brand”, placing an emphasis on health and its industries as the new economic driver of the city. One interesting thing to note is that in cities less prosperous, such as Buffalo, New York, the health-care industry is now the largest employer in the city.

In response to the SARS epidemic, Toronto reworked its most visible hospital and introduced the program of rentable office and laboratory spaces dedicated to health research in the downtown urban core. Typically, this kind of work space was only seen in suburban corporate parks. With BMC strategies, we see unlimited configurations of health and work spaces converging.

In Toronto, there has been an all-out effort to build civic buildings at that heart of the city and the U of T, both of which converge at one corner of the city, with new buildings largely built of glass, emphasizing a literal transparency, housing new spaces for health research. There were three reports written after SARS in Toronto, all of which cite a lack of transparency in the health system. Certainly building transparent buildings doesn’t indicate that a city will be better prepared, but it does demonstrate that research related to health is no longer being done in opaque and distant locations.

The sites of these outbreaks are typically the city centers: this is where the capacity for care, research and a quick response is needed. New York, Toronto, Rotterdam, Beijing and Boston, among others, have all built their own biosafety laboratories, which means they don’t need to rely on sending disease samples to national labs and wait for a response. These tests can be performed in the heart of the city. The development of these labs — some of which house lethal viruses — has been strongly contested, particularly in Boston.

W: It’s really interesting to see how all of these factors you mention have resurged in the Mexico City outbreak: problems with lack of transparency and coordination, as well as the issue of immediacy and speed (since Mexico did not have the capacity to identify the new strain, it had to send samples of the virus to Canada and the U.S. before it could be properly detected, delaying the response for days).

HS: This reflects the importance of establishing critical life-sustaining infrastructures (hospitals, research laboratories and mobile care) that should all be available in any urban environment. After the SARS outbreaks, the cities that thought they were the most “prepared” in almost every case found short comings. Many of these cities had major plans on the drawing board, but I have no doubt that in the aftermath of SARS gave them an even stronger and urgent reason to update the city. I don’t think this suggests that we should adopt an emergency urbanism attitude towards designing in the city, it would not be practical to design for full-blown pandemics, but as we’ve seen in the trend of medicine to look to prevention, design can facilitate new methods of spatial organization. I think this is particularly true at the site of the hospital, and the way the general hospital and specialized hospitals are organized in the city today.

Riding the subway in Mexico City

W: We’ll keep discussing these and other issues (including government involvement, networked responses, flexible infrastructures, and the gap between prepared and unprepared cities) in the second part of this interview. Stay tuned. In the meantime, you can download a PDF version of "The Biomed City" from the Actar blog.


(Photos from Flickr users amegally, pvcg, seth trotman, zverina.com and eneas. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

The Image of the (Failed) City : Spillover

After years of being off the radar, Mexican border cities are finally making headlines in the U.S. again. Violence and vice "spilling over" from Tijuana or Laredo or Juárez into the wholesome and "safe" American Southwest is the latest (and paradoxically also one of the oldest) of foreign menaces pointed at by the media. What Fox News won't tell you though, is that the root of the systemic degradation that is tearing Mexican bordertowns apart, both from a contemporary socioeconomic perspective and in terms of historically entrenched factors, actually lies on the American side of the border. The spillover is nothing but a backlash.

The last massive wave of americanización (extension of U.S. power and influence into Mexico) to hit the border before the signing of NAFTA in 1994—and by then it was the entire country, not only the border—came with the National Border Program (Pronaf) of the 1960s, a top-down planning and urban beautification initiative promoted by local elites in Ciudad Juárez with the support of the federal government. The Pronaf was supposed to improve urban conditions and to "integrate" border cities—that already back then were experiencing important demographic growth and a general lack of urban services—to the national development scheme. Paradoxically, the "failure" of the program to establish a national industrial base and generate a strong local supply was the key factor that opened the border cities to other alternatives: most importantly, the establishment of the first foreign-owned maquiladoras.


The Pronaf expected to correct the blatant economic asymmetries of the settlements on the Mexican side compared to their U.S. counterparts. Even more so, the promoters of the programs were convinced that it was time Juárez and other cities emulated the success story of the Sunbelt, with an all-in-one, triple-whammy formula that would compress the hundreds of years of frontier settlement, exploitation and industrialization, and (sub)urbanization of the American experience in a single program and in a couple of years.

The Pronaf made way for the transit between State-run planning to privatization of public space and the distortion or clouding of (dubious) political strategies. It brought a new notion of "regeneration" to the border: instead of the typical idea of providing infrastructure and social housing, it pushed policies inspired in a twisted "tradtion", an imaginary vernacular, seeking to attract the bustling suburban middle class with its visions of pastoral comfort, easily digestible culture and a blind confidence in the power of a consumerist urban economy. New Urbanism, Mexican style.


The creation of the Pronaf coincides with the start of a decline and "restructuring" period in the global economy, with all of its political repercussions and its visibly negative effects (particularly in cities). Mexico too was going through an extremely delicate period, when the "Mexican Miracle" started to fade, and with it the illusion of political and social stability. (By the way, this is pretty much what I'm going to be writing about in my new blog: Mañanarama. Go see.) In Ciudad Juárez, the Pronaf had already sown the seed of a development formula that had departed from the traditional protectionist, import-substitution and government-led development scheme of the rest of the country. Even though its architecture wanted to demonstrate a strong confidence in the future and an even stronger loyalty to the regime, the Pronaf only offered empty gestures. Behind the facade of an age of abundance, the program was already moving the pieces in the structure of the cities where it operated; this reorganization would leave and indelible mark in their urban futures (or present, viewed from today): maquiladoras, land speculation, self-constructed slums, urban violence, the dominance of the private sector, the monetization of space... In terms of policy formulation, concerns over the image of the city began substituting the concerns over the city itself.

In my final Juárez post, I will move on to see how the "failed" program of the 1960s gave way to the perversely successful "informal" strategies of the following decades, and how the current mess Juárez and other border cities have sunken themselves into is not accidental. This isn't a case of policy miscalculation (certainly not an absence of policy) but simply an exacerbation of a strand of urban development, in good deal imported from the U.S., twisted slightly and taken to an extreme.


(Photos from a Ciudad Juárez Promotional Leaflet by the PRONAF (1960). The projects and sketches are all by architect Mario Pani. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

The Image of the (Failed) City: Third World Imagineering

Although El Paso del Norte (the gate to the North) was an old colonial settlement, Juárez only became a city proper and really began growing after the American Southwest had. Juárez —like the rest of the Mexican border cities— is a product of the twentieth century. Like many other fronterizo towns, Juárez grew as a sort of a joyride appendix to its cross-border counterpart, El Paso, during Prohibition.

In Mexican bordertowns, the centro, the city center, isn’t really a center. As Daniel Arreola and James Curtis have noticed in their fantastic book on urban archeology and border building culture, titled The Mexican Border Cities: Landscape Anatomy and Place Personality, “the most evident discrepancy between these cities and others within Latin America is that their shapes are abruptly truncated along their northern edges by the international boundary.” Juárez was split in half by the border and extended in half-moons starting at the international crossing. The centro has traditionally catered to U.S. consumers, particularly the tourist districts located alongside the border. Visitors from El Paso cross over to Juárez and find themselves surrounded by the materialization of their narrow expectations, of their prejudices, their romantic idealizations and their cheap tastes—all turned space.

Mexican border city tourist strips are heirs to Prohibition-era architectural follies: brothels topped by red windmills, bullrings, racetracks, and fancy casinos that popped up in the flat, dusty settlements. Along with the “dirty” buildings came paved roads, waterworks, bottling plants, distilleries, warehouses, curio shops, restaurants and basic service-oriented infrastructures. The Great Depression and Nationalist reformism seemed to put an end to the era, but the border vice economy gained strength with the outbreak of WW2. Contraband flourished across the border thanks to war rationing, and thousands of soldiers training in El Paso found relief in the Juárez tolerance zone, one of many "boystowns" scattered on the outskirts of border cities.

Anyone that’s heard anything about Mexican bordertowns knows of the “Black Legend”, these depictions of border cities as wannabe Sodoms and Gomorras. But for every great period of “immoral” development there has been an official attempt at “cleansing”. In colonial times local cattle drivers asked for tax breaks and special treatment in order to deal with Apache threats (turns out many of the ranchers themselves were filibusters and cattle robbers, and the “Apache” menace was as vague and misleading as any of the Wars on Terror we’ve grown used to). In the years of the Revolution local bosses held staged fights between bandits and local authorities while cashing in on drug deals and gambling. Moralist crusades forbidding kissing in public were launched by authorities that owned speakeasies and bordellos.



The most spectacular of these ersatz improvement operations and urban makeover schemes (and, for that matter, the grossest failures) were the nationalist rescue campaigns of the Cardenismo in the 1930s and the Sin City-to-Pleasantville expectations of the 1961 National Border Program (Pronaf).

In 1935, President Lázaro Cárdenas declared gambling illegal, declaring open war on casino owners, mostly foreigners known as the “border barons”. The government seemed determined to reclaim its role as an active urban arbitrator. A couple of casinos were turned into public schools and handful of hotels were removed to give way to working-class neighborhoods. The idea was to come up with a number of concrete, eye-catching, straightforward urban measures that could speak for themselves: exemplary measures. But in truth, the deep structure of the uneven development in Juárez and other border settlements remained untouched by Cárdenas: the economic free zone that left the region dependent on American supplies and consumers. “Mexicanizing” the border could only go so far…

The Pronaf followed this rich heritage of image-driven urban policy, but took things a step further. It was a beautification and industrialization initiative sponsored by the federal government and led by Antonio J. Bermúdez, a former mayor of Ciudad Juárez, that was supposed to "rescue" Mexican border cities from the evils of their historic dependency on their U.S. counterparts. Some of the troubles outlined by the program included the commercial imbalances that forced local consumers—described as being held "captive" by American retailers—to cross the boundary in order to cover their basic needs and the seediness brought about by vice tourism. The program was supposed to remedy the situation through an "integral" planning venture, one of the earliest to be implemented in the country, and possibly the first that equaled improvement with beautification, concentrating on the physical aspect of cities. The Pronaf was divided in two phases: first it would focus on land acquisitions, refurbishing border entry gates, building new cultural and tourist landmarks, creating incentives for private investment, and promoting cities through a series of urban marketing campaigns. In the longer term, the Pronaf would build American-style malls (the first ever to be built in the country) and industrial parks, all administered by the government.

The program lasted only four years, and the second phase never came. The program failed miserably at dignifying and beautifying. Still, the Pronaf is the most important direct planning precedent in terms of the definition of Ciudad Juárez's current urban character and structure. If you’ll bear with me here, I’ll let you in on the secret as to why. Just stick around for the next post.

* To go to the first post of this series on Ciudad Juárez, click here

(Photo source: OAC).

The Image of the (Failed) City

With all due respect to Mr. Raymond Chandler, everyone knows Tijuana is Mexico. In fact, Mexico itself is turning into something of a Great Big Tijuana. Tijuana has gone from nasty spot on the National Conscience to pin-up city for the postculturally advanced. The term tijuanización, or tijuanization, became popular in the 1930s, as a slur against whatever had become Americanized and thus uglified. Tijuana, nonetheless, has turned its ugliness into an asset. (If you don’t believe me, just do a search on this blog for Teddy Cruz).

This is not the case of Ciudad Juárez, though, the oldest of the Mexican border cities. No one refers to Juárez as CJ. Juárez is Tijuana without the sites. Ciudad Juárez has to be the most infamous of Mexican border cities (it doesn’t get much worse than that). Throughout its history, the town had thrived on a seedy reputation, but in the 1990s Juárez found itself overwhelmed by an apocalypse-now, scarier than fiction whirlwind: bodies of hundreds of murdered women dotting its barren outskirts, sprawling slums (sardonically nicknamed Cartolandias, Cartonlands, with a distinctively Disney ring), extralegal radioactive waste heaps and random killings at narco-clubs and midday drug-related violence. Common knowledge has it that the city is one big wreck; consumed by rampant corruption, poor planning, environmental degradation, and social fracture.

Robertos Bolaño’s 2666—which Time magazine named “best book of 2008” (I myself described the novel as “ball-grabbing”)—has recently put Juárez in the limelight:

The city was very poor, with most streets unpaved and a sea of houses assembled out of scrap…they discovered rail lines and slum soccer fields surrounded by shacks, and they even watched a match, without getting out of the car, between a team of the terminally ill and a team of the starving to death, and there were two highways that led out of the city, and a gully that had become a garbage dump, and neighborhoods that had grown up lame or mutilated or blind, and, sometimes, in the distance, the silhouettes of industrial warehouses, the horizon of the maquiladoras. The city, like all cities, was endless.

Local authorities and planners have been dealing this sort of bad press (usually it’s less exquisite) for quite some time now. A couple of years ago, Juárez’s Tourist and Commercial Development Secretary launched a “Juárez Presentations Network”, a tour of promotional talks and events, as the latest of a long chain of strategies to revert the city’s “bad image”. The campaign was to present “the best of the town” in order to attract tourists by highlighting Juárez’s “values” and “cultural attractions”. For city leaders, Juárez’s main problems are conveniently reduced to a perception issue. The image of the city—not in the classical sense, in terms of readability or spatial recognition proposed by Kevin Lynch, but in terms of more recent, superficial, “urban marketing” trends—has become the pet cause and the focus of practically every policy instance.

This obsession with the image of the city has become evident in all sorts of urban actions, that range from the absurd confiscations of banned videogames that fail to show the “true values” of the city, to the serious and cynical discrediting and blaming of the families of murdered women and various social organizations for “promoting a degrading vision” of the city. What is most disturbing and revealing, though, is that this visual consumption strand of local urban policy is actually deep-rooted, that it has been at the center of planning in Juárez for decades. In my next couple of posts I’ll try to untangle the logic behind this focus and shed some light on the reasons for the supposed failure of urban “rescue” efforts in the city.


(Photo from Flickr user detritus. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

Grand, Gai Paris

Ten years ago I was eighteen and living alone (off of my parents) in Paris. Ah… youth, treasure only gods may keep… Anyhow, Paris was a dream city; not the darkish, seedy Baudelarian urban dreamscape, or even the fleeting Benjaminian fancy. New Millenium Paris for me was a fleshy and flushed Disney-musical-featuring-Julie-Andrews kind of day to day rêverie: absurdly lovely and innocuous. I remember early morning strolls and limestone and birds chirping and leaves turning red and buttery pastries that literally melted in your mouth. Since I was eighteen, I had to feel alienated too, so I wore black all the time and grew my hair long and put on a sullen face every time I went out. I listened to Fiona Apple and sat on bridges alone for hours till my ass froze. That was pretty much it.

I guess for the untrained eye it’s really difficult to notice how Paris can be alienating. First, just because it’s so f-ing beautiful. Second, because central Paris is caught up in a solipsistic detachment that only fluctuates between the gentle, romantic silliness of Amélie Poulin and the voluptuous, tragic silliness of Juliette Binoche in Trois Couleurs: Bleu. Third, because for all of its rocking political heritage, Paris seems convinced it has done enough for the improvement of mankind, content with milking the glories of yesterday and keeping the nasty spots well hidden under the rug. Those daily demonstrations on the Place de la République were just a great big hoax to me, particularly when my famille d’accueil kept a picture of the long-lost family country estate hung over their kitchen table, and they excused themselves for how rundown the street had become since all those “blacks” moved to the neighborhood, or when friends they had over for dinner tried to convince me that the very best thing that could’ve ever happened to us Mexicans would have been to spare Maximilian and remain a French protectorate. Never mind the horrid soirées rallye, pure pre-revolutionary pop.

Paris is patrician, classist, and reactionary to the pretty core, and Parisians know it. It has to be one of the most seamlessly segregated cities in the world. So, even though M. le Président’s call for a “Grand Paris” has tinges of boldness, the plot to make metropolitan Paris (tout compris, meaning the burning banlieus too) more sustainable, livable and equal by way of architectural and infrastructural Grands Travaux amounts to little more than Sarkozy trying to get his game back after loosing the title of young, brazen, charming guy-in-charge to Obama, or simply following Barack's lead of announcing great things and then scaling back. In the long run, marrying Carla Bruni might have a greater impact on the collective conscience of the French.

It's not that the proposals are necessarily poor or perverse in themselves. It's not that green belts and vegetable growing buildings and "urban substance stimulatrors" and techno-infrastructural corridors and a polycentric café-centered urban culture are necessarily bad things. Heck, some of the proposals are indeed quite poetic (even explicitly, calling for "poetic" tram-oriented transport to complement high-speed transit). It's just that in Paris, poetry is more than often a trap.

Despite Roland Castro's and the rest of the teams' good intentions, even the grandest of urban desgin schemes wouldn't be enough to pull Paris together. Not by a long shot. More than an urbanistic version of Paris je t'aime, what planning in the city needs is a François Bégaudeau-type urban antihero. The genius of Entre les mures is that it demonstrates that good intentions never cut it. There are no truly appalling conditions shown in the film. No poverty porn. The setting is a decent, modern, clean, multiculty high school (no graffiti or obtuse racial prejudice or vicious decay one can fight against and prove oneself against and overcome. This is no Stand and Deliver, certainly not Dangerous Minds), and the students are clearly well fed and surprisingly well-dressed. The teachers seem to be doing pretty okay too. Still, there is an unbreachable divide between the two groups, growing deeper by the minute as the movie rolls on. The kids find it impossible to cope with life, and the teachers can't do anything about it. Nothing. They are left to themselves, to their false yearnings and comings of age and their fake (urban) tribal belongings and their sense of needing something else but not knowing where to find it or even where to start looking. We're not faced with a purely outward, practical, spatial, functional problem here; but rather an all-encompassing malaise, a case of cultural exhaustion. It's not only that Paris is broken and divided: the real problem is that it's children are lost.

Slums‘R’Us

Go figure, but the “feel-good movie of the year” is apparently Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire. Things must really be down when the filmic fairytale of choice has a sprawling slum built on a dump as a backdrop, when its protagonists are two poor little buggers turned orphans after their mom is clubbed to death in the middle of religious rioting, and when its highlights include mobsters blinding a kid with acid to earn bigger beggar bucks, caste prejudice, underage prostitution and a full-body dive into a brimming latrine. Sweet!

So where’s the feel-good? I guess part of the movie’s success at the box office has something to do with a lingering taste for the exotic. People seem to love Slumdog’s blasts of color, frantic pace and raw spurts of life; they agree that “slums never looked this cool”. Yes, the Third World keeps filling the promise of a relentless lust for life, an irrational drive that keeps the poor folks south of the equator going, even when faced with dire conditions and painful obstacles. What “westerners” don’t realize is that all this seemingly exuberant vitalism has little to do with joie de vivre and is actually a crude survival strategy.

Slumdog is a watered-down version of the slumsploitation genre that grew popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s, revealing the violent drag of Parisian banlieus, digging into the favelas of Rio and hovering over vecindades in the outskirts of Mexico City. Aside from the continental displacement (the sizzling streets of Mumbai and the swollen alleys of its informal appendix, Dharavi) the most notable shift is from the dominant dark undertone of the previous films to a cut-up, fast-track mode where darkness is reduced to “spice” and sideline for a puerile plot the masses can relate to: good guy vs. bad guys, rags to riches and love (and money, let’s not forget) conquers all.

As for the urban milieu, which even in slumsploitation flicks has a relentless and sobering presence, Slumdog reduces it to scenery, a collection of common places and fundamentally passive container. Even when the dogs turn to kings standing on the thirthy-somethingeth floor of soaring skyscrapers built on the margins of their rundown birthplace, viewers have no idea of how this massive urban change came about, what it means or how it relates to the squalor. And no one (outside of India) cares, really. It just seems to be part of the slums and the exotic “catching up” to the West. Part of the charm of the “escape” is that in the end we are confirmed that we know best and that our ways still hold their power and value (even at times like these, when the developed world’s own sense of power and value is failing). It’s actually funny, because in reality the First World appears to be falling closer to the Third, as global dynamics dissolve boundaries and hierarchies and everyday life gets messier, and connections with the “faraway” and “underdeveloped” reveal themselves closer to our own doorsteps that we ever thought, and the divide between city and suburb and exurb and slum is disappearing in both North and South.

The only feel-good I got from Slumdog was M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” playing in the background. The song succeeds were the movie fails: in dressing up the contradictions and the piercing realities of the “underdeveloped” in a way that hits “developed” sensibilities without them even knowing it. Despite the fact that M.I.A.’s song immediately makes you want to smile and dance and enjoy the bustling creativity and rhythm this beautiful big-eyed brown-skinned girl from some faraway corner of the world has to offer, the minute you start the music leaves you with this weird aftertaste, this nagging realization that there’s something you’re missing, something you don’t quite understand, something that’s not completely right. The track, with its infectiously charming yet chilling kids-gunshot-cashregister chorus, is the type of “friendly dirt” that actually makes you think.


(Photo from Flickr user marcusfornell. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo. M.I.A. portrait by Napoleon Habeica, from babybabybaby magazine)

A call to (urbanist) arms

The new year is a perfect excuse to picture ourselves starting over. This year in particular promises to be cathartic, with the end of the Bush era and probable (if only temporal) end of freewheeling capitalism and impending social disasters and the dawn of Obama and everything else that’s cooking these days.

With all the doom and excitement building up, I find it really difficult to concentrate on architecture or urbanism. It just seems daffy worrying about how pretty or ugly buildings are, and simply frustrating having to remind myself of how ineffective and near-sighted the usual strands of planning and urbanism are in times of crisis, how thinking about place and space always seems to fall back to second or third tier when emergency sets in.

It’s quite difficult to justify a focus on architecture and urbanism at times like these, particularly when the “disciplines” (the general sets of understandings, and tools and consents encasing practices) are so terribly stuffed with vagueness, superficiality, piecemeal solutions, and detachment.

But just when I’m about to get depressed again, I whisper to myself, “for new social relations there must be new space and viceversa…,” and then, like after reciting one of those little bedtime prayers that never failed to keep me safe and sound and sleeping like a log when I was a kid, I feel better.

Lefebvre takes me back to Mayakovsky too, with his beautiful bald head and crazy eyes and his poems and drawings of the city dissolving onto napkins and paper bags at the same time Petrograd itself was dissolving into rubble and smoke and chaos and newness. And Lunacharski singing of the days when the streets were filled with the roar of politics and revolution and urbanism.

Or in a somewhat more contemporary and much less boisterous tone, Gottdiener, confirming that:

“Just as other commodities, (space) represents both a material object and a process involving social relations. Unlike other commodities, it continually recreates social relations or helps reproduce them…it is, therefore, simultaneously material object or product, the medium of social relations, and the reproducer of material objects and social relations.”

So maybe, just maybe, its a good time to start thinking and talking explicitly of urbanism and architecture again, as the fundamentally social and political endeavors they are.

Resolutions

City stuff to consider in 2009 :

- Urban crises as a prelude to the whole-hog global meltdown

- The downfall of retail urbanism

- Cities as shock therapy

- A switch from the urban explosion of the last century to a wide range of urban implosions, shrinkages and infra-urbanizations

- Suburbia as wasteland and promised land

- Urban politics make a comeback

- Urban rite makes a comeback

- Shift from urban contemplation to urban action

- Small is beautiful, but only with a big mindset

- Think urban sub-unit

- The downfall of multiculty (diversity is recognized as vital yet inextricably conflictive)

- The city and the web come together

- Connected sprawl

- Urbanity detached from lifestyle

- Urbanity reattached to survival strategies

- Luxury deadspace

- Productive squatting

- Protomodernist revival

- The “developed world” dissolved

- “It’s a small world,” on crack

- Tercermundismo

- Technodisurbanism

- Technocumbia

At least we won’t be bored.