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  • CATPC members (from left) Olele Mulela Mabamba, Huguette Kilembi, Mbuku Kimpala, Jeremie Mabiala, Jean Kawata, Irene Kanga, Ced’art Tamasla and Matthieu Kasiama (still from White Cube, Renzo Martens)
  • Matthieu Kasiama with White Cube (still from White Cube, Renzo Martens)
  • Urbanização KM 44-Luanda, Angola
  • I would like to show one thing; which is an exact replica of a presentation OMA gave about a month ago to the mayor of Moscow about the expansion of the city of Moscow. I’m not entirely sure what it has to do with the theme of the conference, but it is a project of planning. Given the extent of the problems that Moscow suffers today, some of the terminology used at this conference, seem like a luxury looking back at Moscow. Nevertheless, given the scale of the operation, the ambition and the extremely tricky political moment in which this project takes place, I think it is an interesting case to present here.
  • One of the themes we have taught there is Megacities; interesting since in a way Moscow is the only Megacity in Europe.
  • Moscow is a Megacity, the most northern Megacity in the world, the only one in Europe and one of the very few Megacities that is not located at the coast. This location indicates that Moscow is the product of deliberate planning.
  • Moscow is an interesting case, it suffers from the same phenomenon that other Megacities have to deal with, but slightly less so.
  • A second interesting aspect about Moscow is that in contrast with Megacities in China, South America or Asia, Moscow is not in a part of the world that is demographically growing. Most Megacities capitalise on a growth explosion in their region. Russia is the exact opposite; a dropping birth-rate, increase death tall lead and declining natural growth particularly since the collapse of the USSR.
  • Since the fall of Communism there is a strange reversal of roles between Moscow and Russia to the point that Moscow registers ever more presently on the radar and Russia disappears from it.
  • According to Forbes Moscow has 79 billionaires replacing New York city as the city with the most billionaires. A strange fact for a country that was, not too long ago, a communist country.
  • The country’s past is an inextricable part of the future.
  • If you would think away that history you would be left with a very bland, aborted, incomplete phenomenon.
  • But given Moscow’s increased importance, given the asymmetry in which Moscow gets an ever larger share of the Russian economy, it starts to develop a much more direct dialogue with the Russian Federation.
  • This ambivalent relationship might change in the near future when a new president is in office.
  • And in conjunction with that relocating part of the Federal government into that extension, moving this employment form the centre to the periphery in an attempt to relief the historical centre of its congestion.
  • In theory there would be room near the Moscow city centre for expansion
  • Historically Moscow has expanded concentrically; one would expect this new expansion to take place in the same way. This would result in an extra 4.5 million inhabitants for Moscow.
  • On average a resident of Moscow cost the state more than any other inhabitant of Russia. Adding the 4.5 million inhabitants to the municipality of Moscow would triple the costs of the state as opposed to keeping them in the Moscow Oblast.
  • Rumour has it that in the last evening before the government went public with the expansion plan the Ministry of Finance interfered and calculated the federal subsidy that would be necessary to make the concentric expansion of the city.
  • Every year the amount of pensioners grows with 28,000 in Moscow; these people don’t actually live in Moscow but the find an administrative reason to stay registered in Moscow and claim the benefits.
  • In the brief of the project we are working on there is a subtle indication that without an integrated project for the region and the city no viable solution can be found.
  • The Moscow region is divided in the city in the centre and the Oblast around. The city has a mayor and the Oblast has a governor. Moscow city answers directly to the federal government and is a black spot within the region it lies in and doesn’t answer to that region, the Moscow Oblast.
  • Nowhere is the difference between the two regions exemplified better. The nearness of the two systems has strange consequences; one of which we have called border shopping.
  • A second side-effect is that it elevates the economic worth of the land in the entire Moscow oblast, thus becoming a cash cow for the Russian government.
  • There is another interesting comparison: the Moscow region is roughly the same size as the Netherlands.
  • The Randstad area, a circle of cities around a supposedly empty, green centre (Groene Hart), is the main centre of population and is surrounded by many other cities and villages.
  • Interestingly if you take a better look at this area of the Netherlands (Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam, The Hague) you see that this Groene Hart is the same size as the city of Moscow.
  • This has disastrous consequences in terms of traffic.
  • The recent discovery of the periphery as a zone of potential value is only a disguised insistence on the priority of and dependency on the centre: without centre, no periphery; the interest of the first presumably compensates for the emptiness of the latter.
  • that all are centres for different airline alliances (Skyteam, Star Alliance, One World)
  • Adding a specific theme to each of the satellites, for instance government, business, industry and education, makes these cities that are in relative proximity complimentary to each other.
  • OMA is currently working on the project and are trying to instrumentalise this relatively abstract notion.
  • A secret metro system named Metro-2 was created for the Soviet government to escape to the periphery in case of emergency.
  • We found that by adding just a little extra infrastructure to this system would create a very fast connection to the satellite airports.
  • It also frames several existing urban isolated conditions
  • several dacha settlements that are currently under consideration for moving
  • Once one would do this and relieve the centre of its excessive substance there is also another perspective that looms. A garden ring envisioned in the 1970’s and mostly realized could be completed now by relieving the historical city centre.
  • Some of the good intentions of the old system may come through in a belated way.
  • It’s probably as plausible as a nuclear scientist giving a lecture about wind mills as it is for me to give a lecture about the countryside. But that is what I am going to do tonight. It’s the first time and I hope you will understand by the end of the presentation why I think it is an urgent subject.
  • It’s by now an enormous cliché that half of mankind lives in the city. And the other half doesn’t.
  • If you take magazines as an expression of popular interest; this is a typical newsagent’s wall in Amsterdam...
  • One of the biggest paradoxes was that the village was emptying, its original inhabitants were disappearing...
  • Obeying all these rules the buildings can also look like this.
  • When at the same time I looked at the Swiss meadow I discovered, I saw a Sri Lankan driving the tractor...
  • It’s totally unwise to announce future books. Hereby my announcement that my next book will be on Countryside.
  • I think that our exclusive and accelerating focus on the city creates paradoxically a situation comparable to the beginning of the 19th century. To discover the new world, mostly coastal areas were mapped and we had to describe other parts as terra incognita.
  • ...but this diagram shows that percentage together with the amount of people who actually work in the countryside. We see in Europe that this is a percentage somewhere between two and eight so almost negligible and you see that in most of the so called ‘backward’ areas of the world – in Africa, India and China – where there is still a lot of agriculture, the figure that doesn’t go below 50%.
  • To actually test and see whether this hypothesis was true, we did a test last week, very nearby in Noord-Holland in a municipality called De Rijp.
  • And here again if we look at this rectangle we discover that only the red was connected to the countryside and white was actually a very contemporary expression, where for example even a famous children’s book author lives who just received the Nobel prize for children’s books in New York or you would find a breast feeding center. And every one of these blue patches is a heritage site...
  • Animal husbandry is increasingly automated. You probably know this, but you probably don’t know how it is done.
  • And of course he is irritatingly dependent on services.
  • You could even say that landscape...
  • And every single action from planting to weeding is specified for the smallest pixel to create the largest possible yields.
  • And the farmer works with spreadsheets, again like most of us.
  • ...that can even be more effective in his absence and that can now be applied to either agriculture, the inspection of farms, and for surveillance and security. So the countryside will be and is partly already a vast and unending digital field.
  • An inspiring sequence of inevitable steps that actually left little space to maneuver.
  • And off course the farmer meets the knowledge worker...
  • ...where the wooden construction is a very welcome signal of the past or of continuity.
  • It’s even to the extent – and this was for us a surprising discovery – of how rural Germany works...
  • The digital and the West of course still have enormous power, but not necessarily economic power or military power, but the power of rules. This is a book I made in a different context about all the rules of the European Union, its 7000 pages.
  • Here you see how software is so fool proof that even illiterates can use it.
  • ...of course taught by the white man to such an extent that a piece of jungle is now a carefully inventoried environment...
  • And also Slavoj Žižek confirms this feeling.
  • I talked about the deep engagement with the digital, but there is also architectural evidence.
  • It’s not only agriculture or life stock, but it’s also server farms...
  • Basically I have an instinct that the countryside will be increasingly a hyper-Cartesian rational order that enables massive whimsicality in the city.
  • Another terra incognita is of course that we have a tabula rasa situation with little information. There are too few people to verify information or narratives on the countryside or the non-urban.
  • It becomes the total subject of speculation as well as the territory of an extreme food crisis...
  • And of course these tragedies are increasingly brought to us to the courtesy of NGO’s that are increasing the need to identifying these problems – so therefore we have land grabs, land change, food spikes and support for small scale farming, seemingly telling us what has gone wrong on the countryside but each of these is obviously not more than a mediated diversion and a PR version.
  • So what we hear from the countryside...
  • ...is on the one hand a simultaneous escalation of an upward trend of many different situations, everywhere and not only in Europe.
  • So the countryside is perhaps so far the most contested and emotive field and we are basically trained at this point to be indignant of workers’ conditions in cities like Dubai, but so far working conditions in the countryside escape us.
  • One further similarity or upward trend in the countryside, and these are series of upward trends which are all closely interrelated, is the market and the market economy, the increase in international tourism and an exact parallelism with heritage sites.
  • ...and re-inhabit the authentic environment of the former farmer and his wife.
  • But there are also a number of downward trends. The number of world languages is declining quickly, as well as the biodiversity, animal diversity, traditional architecture and the arable land per capita. So these downward trends are more gloomy.
  • Therefore the countryside is inhabited by an entirely new population that we have to begin to understand and really deserves to be taken seriously.
  • But you see the same phenomena in Dubai. We looked at these completed buildings and we were unable to detect real signs of life. So we then looked at the second best thing, which are signs of irregularity and these were the signs we could find. For me this is also a sign that, whatever we think of the city, it is true that the density decreases because families simply become smaller and more people live alone. So that is already a phenomenon of thinning, but I would not be surprised that in 10 or 20 years we discover that thinning is actually taking place on both sides. In that sense the city and countryside remain communicating vessels signifying that our current preoccupation with the city is highly irresponsible because I think you can’t understand the city without understanding the countryside. Thank you.
  • I did not assume that anyone in the academic world would ask a practicing architect in the 21st century, given the architecture that we collectively produce, to participate in a conference on ecological urbanism. So, I'm very grateful that you challenge me, but I am also deeply aware that my presentation is defined by this doubt and this condition.
  • Vitruvius, for instance, was completely aware that the sun would cast shadows at different inclinations depending on the orientation of the site, and that his architecture should address these conditions.
  • During the Renaissance, this knowledge was cultivated and further amplified.
  • Also inscribed in Enlightenment were people like Goethe, who effortlessly combined art and science
  • Perhaps the very final outcome of this highly reasonable streak of our civilization is the nuclear power plant.
  • That narrative, however we look at it – religiously or otherwise – is a fundamentally anti-modern one, which insists on apocalyptic expectations.
  • Others were Paul Ehrlich in 1968
  • What we have are two completely opposite strains, both with very eloquent and impressive practitioners. Both ideologies read the same phenomena in completely contradictory terms: one as a line of reasonableness and the other as a line of disastrous manipulation and wrongness. The confusion at the current moment is generated by the tension between these two lines. We are not able to disentangle them or understand when one of the traditions speaks and when the other speaks. This polarity is still operating and has been for a long time.
  • They looked at these areas in great depth and were able to analyze to what extent this climate required specific architectures and planning.
  • What I find touching in retrospect is not only the earnestness of this discourse, but also the conviction that they had relevant knowledge worth teaching. The equivalent of this kind of knowledge today is rather tenuous in our academies.
  • They developed a repertoire of measures, avoiding air conditioning and the trappings of typical Western architecture, and created strange prisons of avoidance.
  • They also created an aesthetic that was able to renew modern architecture, which at the same time was running into issues of Puritanism and unpopularity.
  • I am impressed by the perhaps condescending, but still highly efficient didactic intensity of this kind of effort. Even the simplest words were explained in plausible language.
  • I have since become increasingly involved in researching Africa and the tropics, and have found examples of engineering for Lagos by an East German firm. They seemed to ruthlessly turn Lagos into a modern metropolis, making everything local disappear.
  • Though it appeared completely chaotic, things actually worked extremely well in a process of mutual interdependence. There is a subtlety to this kind of engineering that is not visible at first sight. But if you look over time as the infrastructure decays, you see that it has a certain depth.
  • This joint entity, design and science, was stimulated and sponsored not only by designers and scientists, but also by free-form intellectuals like Marshal MacLuhan and Ian McHarg, a sociologist who, in Design with Nature, wrote one of the most subtle manifestos on how culture and nature could coexist.
  • Fuller was able to show, in diagrams produced for a mainstream publication, how the problems of the world could be resolved by switching military resources into other domains. This kind of clarity doesn't exist at this moment at all. It is the absence of this kind of clarity that makes us so desperate for a degree of coherence.
  • But if you put the events into different zones or categories, a pattern emerges. There are of course many crises, but an explosion of green consciousness as a response to those crises.
  • the spread of computers
  • the first international conference about international environmental issues
  • You see a perverse amplification and intensification of the arguments: seemingly rational, but actually on the apocalyptic side.
  • Scientists like Freeman Dyson relativize the disaster of CO2 levels, saying that actually they could also, in certain areas, have a positive effect. He is, of course, completely vilified for these statements. But this kind of thinking leads perhaps to a school of thought that engineering can finally offer a number of strategies that could help us.
  • We have an energetic crew of people working on the problem, but we doubt their seriousness and whether they have the necessary information at their disposal.
  • "Western consumption is no longer necessary".
  • For those who didn't recognize it, this is a collection of masterpieces by architects in the last ten years. It's a skyline of icons showing, mercilessly, that an icon may be individually plausible, but that collectively they form an ultimately counterproductive and self-canceling kind of landscape. So that is out.
  • The boutique of Ann Demeulemeester in Seoul, for example, covered entirely in green.
  • A question that doesn't seem to be asked is: is it all so necessary? And, do we need more aquariums? We have a kind of Parthenon with a planetarium, a piazza, and a rainforest. I would politely submit that it is not a Parthenon.
  • A single ring of integrated wind turbines would not only generate energy, but would also have additional benefits like the reuse of some of the redundant oil-extraction apparatus, and potentially even generate its own tourism. A single ring could generate more energy than the Middle East currently produces each year.