text UC
“Buildings have been man’s companions
since primeval times. Many art forms have
developed and perished…. But the human
need for shelter is lasting. Architecture has
never been idle.” (Walter Benjamin).
Person_ Space _ Time
I have daughters, brothers, nephews, work sites and aspirations in various cities. From
the very start I have been working on a residential solution suited to the new requirements
(which are also my own), attempting to conciliate activity and pleasure. By activity, I mean
both my work and bringing up my daughters, meeting the everyday needs of all of us,
reading, going to the theatre. By pleasure I mean understanding, dreaming, planning,
coddling my daughters, baking bread and making cheesecake, going to the bookshop,
listening to music, making love, seeing my friends, and my friends are scattered all over
Europe and beyond.
I have always lived and worked in the same place. This frenetic society of ours, with its
“fury” for living, thinks that by intensifying activities per unit of time it can prolong the
duration. The privilege (or trap) of certain professions is to believe that work and pleasure
coincide in a single frenzy, and also in a single adrenal orgasm. Combining the
“important” phone call with stirring the sauce and the organisation of work schedules with
slicing the peppers, has always exerted a terrible fascination for me, a delightful sense of
transgression, eluding that call for serious “professionalism” that I’m allergic to. A delirium
of omnipotence chains me to multiple desires, to an incapacity to relinquish roles; duties
and the objective limitations of space and time have led me to draft a project, whereas
what I actually had, was a dream with profound roots.
Art & Architecture in contemporary culture
In western cultures, procreation is no longer synonymous with strength, power and
prestige; the sexes clash, the future is no longer our children but we ourselves…
“Technology makes possible what is impossible for nature: artificial insemination, embryo
freezing, organ transplants, sex changes, stem cel s that can recreate tissues, reanimation
techniques; genetics can predict with a fair degree of accuracy the inevitable emergence
of disease, up to the point that deprives men of the unpredictability of their own death.”
(Umberto Galimberti). Which of us does not, more or less consciously, cherish the hope
that science may make this last little step before our own death? In the sphere of art and
architecture this has had, and continues to have, an importance of the utmost
significance. Brunel eschi built for ever, we do not.
Today the average age of a building in Tokyo is 35-40 years. No Renzo Piano, Jean
Nouvel, Rem Koolhaas or Frank O. Ghery can delude himself that his works may survive
him. No masters any more, but stars. Trust to technology the universal knowledge of their
architecture, its memory for posterity .. and their fame all over the planet.
From Piero Manzoni’s “Artist’s crap” to Body Art, works of art have, like architecture,
ceased to represent us for the future, to represent our need for eternity.
In the age of technology, of massification and globalisation, the web, democracy, the true
and most significant characteristic of the contemporary work of art lies in the
irrelevance of its durability. While the technical reproducibility of the work of art
permits its documentation, memory and duration in time.
Although, if politically correct artists such as Amar Kanwar or Maurizio Cattelan, entrust
their cum_passion and poetics to non-material “perishable” means, such as videos or
wax, we can say that we have entered an epoch in which art and architecture have new
functions in society, despite continuing to represent its hopes, obsessions and raptures.
In contemporary architecture man has ceased to copy nature, to re-mould it, has
stopped shifting its elements around searching for that harmonious re-composition that
has led to the concentration of poetry embodied in the layered architectures of our old
city centres. The constructions were “for-ever”; the Sienese hil s, for example, spawned
buildings made from their own earth, in a slight mutation of form, but not of flavour, odour
or material fabric, representing an extension, an “elaboration” of the territory; thus
creating as in the rest of our country, a harmony of landscape that cannot fail to represent
our sense of “universality”.
It is no longer possible to continue to “mould the earth”, opening up huge gaping
wounds against all environmental logic, to satisfy disproportionate markets of stone and
clay. The concept is extraneous to contemporary culture, and hence an imitation and a
fake, right through to the horror of reinforced concrete, which no longer has any poetry
but only a single certainty: the creation of mil ions of cubic metres of debris, wreckage
which – partly because of the swift turnover of functions in face of the “rigidity” of the
constructs, and partly because of the facility and speed of their decomposition – are
destroying and eating away acres and acres of territory of the world heritage of nature,
culture and beauty, without achieving the sense of “immortality”.
The architect can no longer “model” the territory: he is transformed from a builder to a
designer (creator), he designs, invents shapes, uses the materials he produces. He does
not seek to leave eternal signs on the terrain, except by inventing it (islands, bridges etc.),
he seeks forms that can be built and rearranged and reconverted so that he can entrust to
them mutable and temporary functions for his long and re-inventable existence, through
to the quest for a constant mobility and reconversion.
City_ Time _ Space
Continuous mobility is the characteristic trait of the post modern era.
Movement is no longer sporadic, but it accelerates in step with economic growth.
Technology has made man free to be stable and nomad at the same time. Our society
can no longer be defined as exclusively residential and stable. This is surely the
beginning of a new era. But this new era has an uncertain future. Since 23 May 2007, the
urban population of the world is more numerous than the rural. This trend is continuously
increasing and by 2030, 63 per cent of the world population wil be urbanised. Urban
areas (directly and indirectly through the use of energy) are the principal source of the
gas responsible for the ‘greenhouse effect’.
Countries such as China, India and Korea are experiencing a phenomenal rate of
urbanisation. Cities such as Paris, Mexico City, Tokyo, Seoul and Shanghai demonstrate
the crisis of cities conceived for a stable residential society, while the rest of the
territory (rural areas and small or medium-sized towns) are emptied and impoverished. It
is necessary to reverse this thread. Only the decentralisation of all services can release us
from this magnetic pul that generates mass migration towards the urban centres and the
resultant desolation of the suburbs, satellite towns and slums.
But is decentralisation through the multiplication of metropolitan functions
feasible?
Industrial development has separated work time from “living” time.
Time has become the unit of measure of exchange, the regulator of social relationships, and the
constant object of our thoughts. Instead of living moments, instants, we count them,
terrified of their passing. Time has ceased to be the “liquid” that contains life, and has
become the object of our obsession. Time has become our recurrent fixation. We are
obsessed by it both in daily life and in terms of the phases of life. Age has become an
existential and social discriminator.
Time is the most vital thing there is, it is life itself; but when we perceive it we see it as
dead time. And at bottom we’re happy to see time die. What we’re interested in is there: at
the point of arrival, in the place of the goal to be reached etc. And the fact that such a
place does not exist, or is just an il usion, or is empty, only increases our impatience with
time as time, that is with the time lived.
This whole affair has deeply entrenched roots. It’s no coincidence that modernity is
defined by a philosophy of history that “spatialises” time to the point of eliminating it, or at
least tending to that. Effectively, occurrences, that is the totality of events, large and small
and their repercussions on everyday life, are placed within a frame of reference that
explains them, that gives them a meaning, an ultimate and insurmountable meaning. In
short, they are set within a space that takes them in like pieces of a mosaic, which offers
itself to a gaze that is panoptic, atemporal, or in any case out of time. Thus it is in Hegel’s
“Phenomenology of Spirit”, which celebrates the triumph of self-consciousness that
embraces all time within a single vision, but it was also already thus in the “Apocalypse”
which not incidentally closes with the statement that “time is no more”.
Therefore the problem is: how can we get back the lost time? And not just the time we’ve
lost that one day we possessed, but the time that we have lost because we were deprived
of the possibility of possessing it, of possessing it as a living thing and a thing to be
lived. The idea that dead time, that is purely instrumental time, the time used for moving
around etc, can be restored to us and lived to the full responds to a need that has
become pressing and imperative. (Sergio Givone)
The movement of ideas, information and people has become an integral part of
our existence. Technological development has focused on speed. Travel ing has
ceased to contain life, and has become Dead Time, spent on squalid motorways or on
trains. In a culture that aims to prolong human life through medicine and genetics on the
one side, and fil time units with activities on the other, this is a paradox. To depart Seoul
for Busan (or Milan for Rome) and to be thrown into apnea for 4 or 5 hours is
unacceptable. Shortening distances has physical limits which cannot be overcome by
technology. But if it becomes living time, the travel time, dead time, becomes zero.
Today, transport is principally conducted on tyres. Highways are a continuous line of
voyaging merchandise, people and services, that move with great inefficiency: one
engine, one driver, often the only passenger, are an enormous waste of energy. But,
despite being partial and ineffective, this is connective tissue, indispensable to territories.
Western technological development has to hook up with eastern culture, replacing
“SPEED” with “LIFE”, starting from the basis and from what first stimulated the
development of the territory and is stil a potent symbol of it: the RAILWAY.
AN ALTERNATIVE PROPOSAL: the mobile city, the city of services
Alternative above all in terms of method. There is no way out of the paroxysm of speed,
that concertinas space and makes distances odious (Cacciari). We have to conceive a
new order in which movement is ousted from the unilateral dimension of increasing speed
and instead becomes the mode for a new spatial order in which the territory, like time,
becomes a container for life, diffuse, democratic life, instead of being fracture, the
dichotomy of the Ful and the Empty.
A network of “urban services”: no longer the users moving towards the metropolis,
but the city services that move, going to meet the users of the cities, towns, vil ages
and agricultural centres. A modern, central “network” that is accessible to all, and
renders the territory democratic.
A mobile city, on wheels, organised in railway loops that create a connective tissue:
government departments, administrative functions, offices, shopping malls, hotels,
residences, gyms, medical facilities…etc., at the service of the entire territory.
Unlike the traditional cities, this is a city made up predominantly of services, which are
characterised by a transitory user pool originating from all over the territory. The request
for fixed residence wil instead be a niche demand, and hence the basic services and
facilities wil be limited.
Since it travels throughout the entire territory, it facilitates exchange and fosters the
specialisation of functions, stimulating the competition, development and enhancement of
the local identities, making it possible to perform a number of functions in a delimited
space, and at the same time to move from one place to another. The proposed system
also facilitates synergy between the public and private sectors.
At a lower level, a light metro creates a fast connection along the same direction that the
city moves. For connections to the opposite direction, it is enough to exit, wait until the “
desired zone” arrives and then re-board.
The moving town never stops; the exchange with the territory happens through light
vehicles or shuttles. The shuttle hooks to the town when it reaches the same speed and
then the exchange takes place: the transfer of goods and people. The Hook System wil
also allow the transfer between the different loops. Tapis roulant wil provide fast
pedestrian connection. City parks wil create rhythmic open public spaces which
constitute the necessary dampers to guarantee safety.
The organism is composed of quasi mile-long “modules” divided in various sectors;
given the possibility of substituting modules and varying the types and functions of
operations, this is much simpler and more efficient than demolishing and reconstructing buildings.
Besides a refined technology, the mobile city would use lightweight and resistant
materials, constructed to principles of aeronautic and naval engineering. The macro
structuring would permit the realization of efficient form and be self sustainable with
alternative energies.
The placement of this city is even more powerful : the actual highways.
The choice to progressively use, according to strategic phases, highway thoroughfares,
categorically guarantees every feasibility. The loads carried by ‘the moving city’ are
compatible with the tension values permissible for highway stretches. Only the crossings,
the bridges, wil have to be integrated into the structure or modified tunnels for the
extension of the load, but not for its intensity. There is no impact on the territory as long
as changing knots are used on all of the lines already developed.
Vehicular traffic is progressively confined and thus reduced. In an intermediate
phase an obligatory step wil be the accelerated development of train services, beginning
with the transfer of commercial transport on wheels. Further more, on a reduced scale
commercial, cultural, and service activities can be introduced on the actual railway stock.
The road network would be restricted to short-distance traffic and, in the proximity of the
stations, col ectively managed electric cars/scooters.
Ubi-City can also be used to move as a normal train, in which people can read, sleep,
telephone, work on computers, but also do all that is possible in a traditional city,
equipped with the most advanced technologies: go to government departments, take
training courses, enjoy shows, visit a museum, shop, have a massage, or use any other
type of service a city normally provides. You can stay on the city-train just for the time
necessary to do what you want to do, or you can linger to experience the “metropolis”.
Living on the city-train could be a choice because of work or, for those more nomadic, a
choice for pleasure, inhabiting a structure that offers at every glance, a different
landscape, a different encounter.
Ubi-city becomes a network of services, functional to the activities of the towns and of the
entire territory. Cities freed from services and auto-traffic, revitalized by immediate and
continuing access to the most advanced services, wil all be ‘Centres’, of urban quality,
“the place where everything happens”.
Novelty and revolution of such radical nature can come from the youth and energy of
those countries which have the numbers, the need, and the means to look to the future
with freedom.
Imagine it in Korea. Let us assume a quarter of the actual highway thoroughfares, a
ring of 800 Km, reconverted to a city train which runs at an average speed of 100
km/hour. The proposed route could, at a later stage, be changed. For example, into two
rings that would intersect around Daejon, thus also reducing the traveling speed and
increasing the territory served. If the speed is 100 Km per hour and the circuit 800 km
long , every single section would pass once every 8 hours, three times a day, through all
the Korean cities along the ring and all of the territory in between. Therefore, it would be
possible to work in the mobile city and live in Seoul, Incheon, Ansan, Son-tan and vice
versa. Every city could acquire that covered liveability and freely develop all activities
without being burdened by the need for services.
ECONOMIC CONSIDERATIONS
Within a preliminary analysis, a time series of statistical data would allow to conjecture
which choices the Korean workers might make if asked to decide how to allocate the “life-
time” saved – because of a significant decrease in their commuting time – between more
income and more leisure time. Following the postulates of the neo-classical orthodox
economics, we may approximately estimate the value of leisure time on the basis of the
current average wage in Korea.
In Korea each worker, as an average, works 47 hours per week and 2447 hours per year.
That is considerably more than in any other of the OECD countries and also more than
their contractual “reference time-table” (40 hours), but much less (56 hours) than the
maximum allowed by the law.
The amount of worked hours – high enough, but below the maximum – suggests that firms
enjoy their optimal mix of “costs – output” and the same occurs to hired workers as for
“income – labour time”. But an economy, such as the Korean one, with very (upwards)
flexible time-tables, may lead to erroneous conclusions. Hired workers may be forced, as a
point of fact, to accept a labour time / leisure time mix, overbalanced on the labour time
side. This may be due to a number of reasons, such as moral pressures, a very strong
salary difference between those who go up the ladder and those who do not, rather low
hourly wage, etc. The fact that in the last three years the number of hours actually worked
decreased by more than a 3%, together with increasing wages, shows that as productivity
rises, the Korean hired workers, by means of tough struggles, have achieved that a) these
increases in productivity have been acknowledged and b) Korean workers show they
prefer less working hour in presence of raising hourly wages, contrary to the orthodox
theory (the daily pay of a Korean blue-collar has grown in six years from 11,880 up to
20,080 won). The present structure of Korean time-tables and these recent trends (that, we
should imagine, reflect workers’ preferences) suggests that the time liberated by a
reduction of the commuting time would probably be split in more leisure and more labour
time. As a point of fact, two factors, both present in the Korean economy and in the Korean
society, would act in opposite directions: on one hand the desire of more leisure time, that
would allow an alignment (or at least a smaller asymmetry) with the average figures of the
other OECD countries and, on the other hand, the will, both of individuals and of political
authorities (the latter explicitly declared), to catch up with the per-capita income of the
most developed countries. Under a merely statistical aspect, probably the second one
would show up more clearly: if the time saved from commuting were equally split between
labour and leisure time (or even if the latter prevailed), that would turn out as an increase
in labour time and a decrease in leisure time. This shows how statistics need a careful
reading. Actually “real” leisure time would increase and the “way of life” of Korean people
would definitely improve.
This would be true both for hired workers – who are almost 15 millions, i.e. more or less
2/3 of al employed Koreans (22.27 mil ions) – and for the self-employed (more than 7
millions). But, out of strictly orthodox models, the hired workers would have to cope with
the “real” mechanisms of the labour market, whereas the self-employed could freely chose
the preferred extra labour – leisure time mix, with the only constraint of aggregate demand.
Current Korean GNP equals more or less 1,000 billion US Dollars (which makes Korea n°
14 in the world) and 54.5 billion hours are yearly worked in the Korean economy.
Therefore, each hour produces, as an average, a value added of 18,35 US$. According to
the neo-classical economic theory –if we assume that the marginal figures are not
significantly different from the average ones – this is also the value that is assigned to each
hour of leisure time. According to the data we have, al together, Koreans commute for
10,500 mil ions of hours per year. This leads to an average of 470 hours for each Korean
worker. Therefore, the wellbeing, expressed in monetary terms, that is lost because of
commuting is equal to 193 bil ion dol ars, i.e. nearly 1/5 of the GNP.
The simple equations that follow measure, respectively, the changes in terms of the overall
wellbeing and of the economic growth that would occur reducing the commuting time.
(1) t.w.L = b
(2) j.t.w.L = y
In equation (1) t represents the amount of commuting time saved on average by each
worker in one year (measured in hours); w represents the average income; L represents
the number of workers involved; and b is the change in the overall wel being. In equation
(2) j represent the ratio of the saved time that would be on average dedicated to an
increase of the labour supply and y represents the change in the GNP.
For the moment, only hypothetical scenarios and simulations are possible. First of all, it is
necessary to estimate how much time an average Korean worker could save due to the
realization of this project. Let’s assume (but as we said, this is just a conjecture and the
following a simulation) that half of the Korean workers would be involved and would save
half of their commuting time.). Then – inserting these figures in equation 1) –the
increase of the national wellbeing could be valued in 48 billion US$, equal to
4,8% of the GNP, i.e. one year of economic growth at the “Korean pace”. If the
liberated time were split half in labour time and half in leisure time, the per-
capita income would grow by a 2.4%, (see equation 2)) whereas there would be 120
hours of extra leisure time per-capita a year. Obviously, time saving would regard also the
population that is not part of the labour force, but, as for this, no economic valuation is
possible.
To be able to shift from pure conjectures and simulations to more reliable scenarios, the
most appropriate tool would be a couple of chained questionnaires. The first one to be
distributed to a sample of the Korean population, representative in terms of age, gender,
geographical distribution and kind of activity. The questions would regard the present
commuting time and how, due to its reduction (half an hour, one hour, one hour an a half,
two hours a day, but also 4 or 8 hours once or twice a week, concentrated in one single
day, etc.), each person thinks s/he would divide the “extra-life time” between extra labour
supply time, due to the will of increasing one’s income, and/or more leisure time, adding
how they would split it between all the alternative activities (including inactivity), that are
linked to it. A second questionnaire – based on the outcomes of the first – should be
distributed to a sample of entrepreneurs, asking if and how they would modify their labour
demand in presence of a positive shift in labour supply. Entrepreneurs that supply services
linked to leisure time should be asked how they would react in presence of a positive shift
both in labour supply and in the demand of their outputs.
Inserting in the two equations presented above the statistical processing of the answers to
both questionnaires, would allow us to formulate some realistic hypotheses on the
changes of the aggregate output and of the demand and supply of services linked to
leisure time, due to the decrease of the commuting time. And, all together, on the increase
of wellbeing for the Korean people.
Inserting in the two equations presented above the statistical processing of the answers to
both questionnaires, would allow us to formulate some realistic hypotheses on the
changes of the aggregate output and of the demand and supply of services linked to
leisure time, due to the decrease of the commuting time. And, all together, on the increase
of wellbeing for the Korean people. (Francesco Scacciati)
Just Utopia? Or even folly? What seems to us foolish, even a crime, is to continue to
cement the planet and to keep constructing new cities, without history, based on a
concept of life and needs of a stationary man who no longer exists.