Transport infrastructure seems to have a repelling nature when it enters the heart of a city, yielding voids in the adjacent urban fabric. The scale and speed of the regional connections it prioritizes are in opposition to the immediate needs and desires of the local scale that it severs. Air pollution, noise pollution, visual and physical barriers often lead to entire areas being neglected.
When these transport lines double as municipal boundaries that delineate one neighbourhood from another, the severity of their impact is intensified and inherently brings to light any nesting socio-cultural divide. “By emphasizing the question of transport, contemporary urbanism isolates people from each other, preventing them from using their energy for genuine participation. […] ‘For in fact one doesn’t live somwhere in the city; one lives somewhere in the hierarchy.’”(Heynen 1999)
But infrastructures can also be flexible and anticipatory, as Stan Allen explains, “they [can] work with time and [be] open to change.” “What seems crucial is the degree of play designed into the system, slots left unoccupied, space left free for unanticipated development.” (Allen 1999) The use of viaducts not only allows roads and railways to adapt to irregularities in terrain and accommodate existing conditions but also provides a useable ground plane where exactly this type of ‘unanticipated development’ can be realized.
There is a both a need and an opportunity in this vacant ground plane to mediate: mediate the needs for vehicular efficiency above with pedestrian curiosity below; and mediate the differences on either side of the boundary. Neglected space can become the new common ground, a space of play. The curious situationist who breaks out of routine will find these places and will enjoy their nature. He is in fact, not so rare as he once was, and could be called a ‘modern urbanite’, and we have not been giving him the credit he deserves- providing too many rules and worrying too much about the dangers of vacant space.
“The ‘modern urbanite is a self-assured and exploratory individual… extremely mobile,’ who no longer sees his home as his individual universe. The city dweller exploits the entire landscape; therefore an extreme differentiation in various densities and cultures is more to his benefit than an endless supply of identical singe-family dwellings.” (Palmboom 2005)
The dynamism of the vacant landscape in the city in fact becomes his ‘stomping ground’, and we might be surprised to see how enjoyable a space it might become. The Massvlakte, for example is an area in Rotterdam that Adrian Geuze describes as having been taken over by ‘creatures’. An artificial dune, 25- meter-high, is accompanied by a uranium ore terminal, a sludge basin, experimental wind turbines, a trout farm etc.- all industrial elements that also have naturally repelling properties. But, “despite the absence of special provisions and the lack of PR, the city dweller has discovered this area. The Maasvlakte has been taken over by mass recreation,” (Geuze 2005) and it is this sort of initiative and resourcefulness that can be relied upon if appropriation is welcomed.
New Babylon was conceived of on similar grounds, as a “dynamic labyrinth that is continually being restructrured by the spontaneity and creativity of its inhabitants. These people lead a nomadic existence based on a continual rejection of convention.” (Heynen 1999) The priority was public, collective space where the individual could ‘construct situations’ in any manner he pleased. It was a new kind of public space, a new kind of meeting place, one demanded by the socio-cultural differences that they saw existing in a social hierarchy. The element of play provided an alternative forum around which everyone could relate- it was the foundation of a new culture.
“Public space is the area where people meet each other, and this means that it is the area for play. Without public space, [Constant] argues, no culture is possible. The forum in classical times, the market squares of the Middles Ages, and more recently, the boulevard- these were the places where cultural life developed.”(Heynen 1999)
Though only a conception, the ambition to provide new kinds of places to develop cultural life indicates a certain urgency for their realization in a real urban context. To house a plurality of individuals and a multitude of experiences in a common space evokes optimism in the simplicity of a provided framework both New Babylon and at the Maasvlakte in Rotterdam. Sola-Morales calls it weak architecture: “Weakness is the architectural manifestation of the condition of contemporary culture.” (Solà-Morales1995)
This simplicity could be applied to the leftover spaces underneath, between and adjacent to the transport viaducts within the city. The architecture of these spaces should be minimal. It should aim first to connect, then to provide program in a manner that respects and refines the existing condition without taking over. It should not be iconic in the form of a landmark, but in its weakness- “that strength which art and architecture are capable of producing precisely when they adopt a posture that is not aggressive and dominating, but tangential and weak.”(Solà-Morales 1995)
Despite their inherent problems as barriers, urban viaducts have this capacity to serve as connecting zones at the ground plane below. These are spaces with the curious property that they don’t exist on an official map, it’s only by first-hand encounter that their sectional qualities are revealed and an open, vacant space discovered. They are a sort of refuge in the city for what Foucault would call ‘other spaces’.
“The other space is different from the oikonomia of the oikos and different from the politeia of the polis debated on the agora: heterotopia is the other of the political and the other of the economical. [This] sacred space probably comes closest to what we commonly describe as the ‘cultural sphere’: the space of religion, arts, sports and leisure. […] It introduces a third realm between the private space of the hidden and the public space of appearance.”(Dehaene and De Cauter 2008)
They are unofficial and in between, straddling both municipal boundaries and clear divisions of social class and culture. But, as previously mentioned, there is opportunity here to mediate these differences, and within these zones of ‘hidden appearance’ the boundary of a thin line can be better understood as a wider binding seam where a common ground of can operate as a zone of exchange.
Heterotopias offer both this common ground and the prospect of mediation through a special notion culture. As in New Babylon, Heterotopia as a place of free time is also the place of informal discourse- the sacred Greek theatre for example, as the place to address the conflict between oikos and polis (Dehaene and De Cauter 2008), or the prison between right and wrong. As a place of ‘hidden appearance’ then it also becomes a place of ‘hidden debate’- an unofficial forum and as such welcomes as walks of life.
“Heterotopias, these worlds of ‘hidden appearance’, are the experimental terrains where ‘special societies’ gather their forces to maybe one day break ground in the full daylight of the ‘space of appearance’.”(Dehaene and De Cauter 2008)
With social and cultural goals rather than economic or political, a programmatic freedom exists that encourages the informal appropriation seen in New Babylon. It caters to the multitude of people and situations, the chaos of both only adding to its benefits. One can imagine a multitude and variety of atmospheres similar to the experience of the Situationist Dérive (Debord 1958), where opposing environments ‘détourned’, broadcast entirely new results in their alchemic reactions resulting in pleasure and excitement: an event to be shared.
When residential neighbourhoods are divided by the overwhelming presence of transportation between them, their inhabitants need events that can be shared. While the viaduct forms a boundary and establishes difference, the ground plane offers a space of exchange that can be seen as the common ground to host “a practice engaged in time and process- a practice not devoted to the production of autonomous objects, but rather to the production of directed fields in which program, event and activity can play themselves out”(Allen 1999) through inventive program, and self-organization. This heterotopic space of mediation might be interpreted as Vesica of program, where the sharing of a common event might transcend the socio-cultural differences and repair the local relationships severed by the overwhelming scale of infrastructure. Through programmatic difference the urban project will aim to link and serve.
“Today, the anti-economical, infra-political logic of heterotopias makes them potentially the contemporary sanctuaries of ‘the multitude’[…]. The engaged spaces of conviviality and selforganization, the ritual spaces of mourning and feast that preserve the decorum of life, the bohemian liminal spaces of imagination, the reflective spaces of commentary, study and critique, the holiday spaces of skholè and play- all these places that make up the ‘third sphere’ besides, outside and in between the public (political) and the private (economical) sphere, realize heterotopia’s binding role within the polis.” (Dehaene and De Cauter 2008)
WORKS CITED
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Debord, Guy. "Theory of The Dérive." Situationist International Anthology (Bureau of Public Secrets), 1958.
Dehaene, Michiel, and Lieven De Cauter. "The space of play." In Heterotopia and the City, 86-102. London & New York: Routledge, 2008.
Geuze, Adriaan. "Accelerating Darwin." In The Artificial Landscape, by Hans Ibelings, 254-256. NAi Publishers, 2005.
Heynen, Hilde. "Architecture as a Critique of Modernity." In Architecture and Modernity, 148-219. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Wiley-Blackwell, 1991.
Not Bored! "Review of Henri Lefebvre's "The Production of Space"." Not Bored! #30 (Not Bored!), 1999: 65-76.
Palmboom, Frits. "New Concepts: Landscape and Metropolis." In The Artificial Landscape, by Hans Ibelings, 271-273. NAi Publishers, 2005.
Solà-Morales, Ignasi de. "Weak Architecture." In Differences: Topographies of Contemporary Architecture, 57-71. MIT Press, 1995.