Been very silent lately. Moving from Berlin, settling back in geneva, and reading all the due texts I meant to read has kind of push blogging far from my daily errants.
Still, as the hand-in dates are approaching, I'm again writing a lot, so you can expect new posts on a more frequent basis. To start off this batch of posts, here's a japanese answer to the megacity :http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRsp6DhxLDU
Seeing i am reading a lot nowadays and have some difficulties settling and focusing this reading, i decided to draw a first structure of the theoritical text. It should hopefully develop as follows.
// INTRODUCTION //
Postulate
// THE MEGA CITY & THE NETWORK SOCIETY//
The rise of the Network Society.
The rise of the Mega Cities.
The Space of Places and the Space of Flows.
// DESIGNING THE SPACE OF THE NEW SOCIETY (learning from the contructivists) //
An architecture / urbanism for the R-evolution.
The constructivists thoughts and schools.
The ASNOVA.
The OSA.
What is there to re-use to build the space of the Network society?
Bridging spaces.
// COMPUTATION AS A PLANNING TOOL FOR THE MEGA-CITY//
The city planner of the Mega-City.
The tools of the Mega-Architect.
I a also thinking of postponing the scripting process and developing them in the term of the second process. But I still need to confirm this.
After having gone to Rotterdam to meet some good friends also working on their master thesis. Some important questions have been raised about the scope of the thesis, as well as the output of it.
Hence to clarify this all, you will find hereunder a small text about the position of the thesis and the possible outcome of it. As of now, I wonder if it isn't too wide still and shouldn't be more defined. This text will also certainly undergo modifications, but it shall be my guideline during the research. I'll update it as my ideas clarify.
"Space is the expression of society"- Castells -
// POSTULATE //
The world today has made several steps in the direction of a new revolution : The Informational revolution. M. Castells defines the society living under this reign as the Network Society. Our world is becoming more and more connected every day, on a virtual scale and on a physical one. Travel time and costs are being reduced, and informationnal systems help us communicate with people we haven't ever met. This (r)evolution has a big impact on the notion of place and space, as the virtuality of it is becoming more and more a part of our reality, changing the way we live, move and communicate.
As architects and city planners we need to develop projectual techniques to accomodate those changes, and build an environment representative of today's society. An environment that allows us to combine the space of places to the "space of flows". -Castells-
// RESEARCH //
The constructivist movement was born in a place and time when it was crucial to develop new ideas to accomodate and help build the "new (socialist) society". The ideas they developed during their "short" existence, describe key processes that were to be put in place to "design" the new socialist city. However formal they may seem, they also deeply researched the social impacts of architecture and urbanism. Their movement is also often associated with the Modernism, while it is true both were seeing the city as a "machine", the constructivists (at least the O.S.A) were looking at it as a "social machine" where the moderns were seeing a "economic machine". As a place where humans were to be social instead of produce.
One of Constructivism's main goal was "to establish a scientific architectural and urban creation process, freed from all subjectives and irrational aspects caracterising, according to them, all the previous methods". A. Kopp. However some of them, the best example being Krassilinkov, foresaw the limits of the constructivist's methods and decided to push it further. He scientifically approached the architectural creation process in all its synthetic aspects. By doing so, he put together a "mathematico-graphical" -V. Krassilnikov- approach. This method is the first known architectural method using computation. However it could only be verified 40 years later with the advent of computers.
This project's approach is taken as a grounding point to build further computational methods adapted to today's networked society. Urban methods adapted to the space of flows.
The battlefield for the development of those tools shall be one of the mega-cities, as they are the crystallization of the place where flows "materialize" at their best.
Goal :
develop a computational tool for to help plan the mega-city, looking at methods and ideas developped by the constructivists and re-adapting them to today's issues and concerns. Tools should reflect possible scenarios and help at decision making.
Scale :
(Mega-?)Urban scale
Object of study :
Moscow - Because they represent the new form of city we are building. Therefore the best places to work on the places of flows. They are also the cities facing the biggest challenges, as their growing rate make the current city planning tools the most obsolete.
As for now one question remains to be sorted, what scale shall i restrain myself to?
from Wikipedia.org :
A megacity is usually defined as a metropolitan area with a total population in excess of 10 million people.[1] Some definitions also set a minimum level for population density (at least 2,000 persons/square km). Megacities can be distinguished from global cities by their rapid growth, new forms of spatial density of population, formal and informal economics, as well as poverty, crime, and high levels of social fragmentation. A megacity can be a single metropolitan area or two or more metropolitan areas that converge upon one another. The termsconurbation and metroplex are also applied to the latter. The terms megapolis and megalopolis are sometimes used synonymously with megacity.
In 1800 only 3% of the world's population lived in cities. 47% did by the end of the twentieth century. In 1950, there were 83 cities with populations exceeding one million; but by 2007, this had risen to 468 agglomerations of more than one million.[2] If the trend continues, the world's urban populationwill double every 38 years, say researchers. The UN forecasts that today's urban population of 3.2 billion will rise to nearly 5 billion by 2030, when three out of five people will live in cities.[3]
In 1800 only 3% of the In 1800 only 3% of the The increase will be most dramatic in the poorest and least-urbanised continents, Asia and Africa. Surveys and projections indicate that all urban growth over the next 25 years will be in developing countries.[4] One billion people, one-sixth of the world's population, now live in shanty towns,[5]which are seen as "breeding grounds" for social problems such as crime, drug addiction, alcoholism, poverty and unemployment. In many poor countries overpopulated slums exhibit high rates of disease due to unsanitary conditions, malnutrition, and lack of basic health care.[6] By 2030, over 2 billion people in the world will be living in slums.[7] Already over 90% of the urban population of Ethiopia, Malawi and Uganda, three of the world's most rural countries, live in slums.
In 1800 only 3% of the Global connectedness and local disconnectedness characterize megacities. The level of slums contrasts the global capital building capabilities. This can be viewed as one of the tensions brought about by the globalization of modern cities. In 2000, there were 18 megacities – conurbations such as Tokyo, New York City, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Mumbai (then Bombay), São Paulo, Karachi that have populations in excess of 10 million inhabitants. Greater Tokyo already has 35 million, which is greater than the entire population ofCanada.[8]
By 2025, according to the Far Eastern Economic Review, Asia alone will have at least 10 metacities (cities with a population greater than 20 million), including Jakarta, Indonesia (24.9 million people), Dhaka, Bangladesh (26 million), Karachi, Pakistan (26.5 million), Shanghai (27 million) and Mumbai (33 million).[9] Lagos, Nigeria has grown from 300,000 in 1950 to an estimated 15 million today, and the Nigerian government estimates that the city will have expanded to 25 million residents by 2015.[10] Chinese experts forecast that Chinese cities will contain 800 million people by 2020.[11]
The ten largest megacities, according to this criterion are:
Rank Megacity Country Population 1 Tokyo Japan 33,600,000 2 Seoul South Korea 23,400,000 3 Mexico City Mexico 22,400,000 4 New York City USA 21,961,994 5 Mumbai (Bombay) India 21,600,000 6 Delhi India 21,500,000 7 São Paulo Brazil 20,600,000 8 Los Angeles USA 18,000,000 9 Shanghai China 17,500,000 10 Osaka Japan 16,700,000 Source: Th. Brinkhoff: The Principal Agglomerations of the World, 2006-11-22
Other megacities include:
Rank Megacity Country Population 11 Cairo Egypt 16,100,000 12 Buenos Aires Argentina 16,000,000 13 Kolkata India 15,700,000 14 Metro Manila Philippines 15,600,000 15 Jakarta Indonesia 15,100,000 15 Karachi Pakistan 15,100,000 16 Tehran Iran 13,500,000 17 Beijing China 12,800,000 18 Dhaka Bangladesh 12,750,000 19 Lahore Pakistan 12,700,000 20 London United Kingdom 12,500,000 21 Paris France 12,000,000 22 Istanbul Turkey 11,800,000 23 Rio de Janeiro Brazil 11,500,000 24 Lagos Nigeria 10,200,000 25 Moscow Russia 10,100,000 25 Bangkok Thailand 10,100,000
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