SARUP’S URBAN EDGE PRIZE STUDIO REVIEW & SEMINAR Spring & Fall 2015
School of Architecture & Urban Planning (SARUP)
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Rethinking the Urban Edge - Within & Without
The city has for long served as the locus of profound change. As a palimpsest constantly made, un-made and re-made over successive generations, its myriad of sites respond to cultural, economic, political and physical transformations over time. Several of these sites occupy prominent place within the urban core, serving as catalysts for the growth of the fabric around them. Others establish critical relationships with the expanding urban peripheries, pre-empting and modeling change at these edges. Indeed, the edges of the city are liminal sites of constant change - radical, accretive, piece-meal and ensemble - and involving the making of infrastructure, architecture and interactions with nature.
In strategically invoking this image of the changing city, SARUP’s 2015 Urban Edge Prize India Studio critically reexamines the concept of an urban edge within the exemplar tabula rasa of Chandigarh (India). Conceived by Le Corbusier as the grand culmination of his urban ideas in combination with the ideals of the CIAM and the City Beautiful Movement, Chandigarh’s visceral urbanity, spatial and formal ordering, and the almost deliberate ‘unfinished-ness’, are among it many provocative qualities. The India Urban Studio specifically engages with a narrative of selected action areas within this carefully legislated urban canvas, stepping vicariously into Corb’s shoes. The urban edge, applied here as a physical boundary, a metaphoric concept, and as a design methodology, serves as a limiting and delimiting component within the changing, global city. It creates (and un-creates) boundaries, forms limiting conditions, expands and shrinks the city, while inducing building morphologies, instigating place definitions and formulating new meanings. Foremost of all, the making of the urban edge promotes innovation in a multiplicity of ways wherein the complexity of the city may be mapped and made.
PRESENTERS
SANGEETA BAGGA-MEHTA is an architect and urban designer with a special interest in the conservation of modern heritage ensembles. An alumina of the Chandigarh College of Architecture-Chandigarh (CCA), and the School of Planning and Architecture-New Delhi, she received her PhD in Architecture from Punjab University-Chandigarh. She is currently Associate Professor at the CCA where she has conducted multiple collaborative student workshops with universities worldwide, including the Bezalel University of Art & Design (Israel), the Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the Technical University at Delft (Netherlands). Her work and these collaborations are centered on the examination of urban landscapes, environmental design and social issues within Chandigarh. Her documentations of the rapid changes in Chandigarh’s urbanity have been presented at international conferences both within India and globally. In recent years, she has worked with the Chandigarh Administration’s Department of Tourism towards developing Tourism Promotion Infrastructure, Facilitation and Awareness Building projects vis a vis modern heritage ensembles in the city plan. She is also member of the Chandigarh Administration’s Heritage Committee, a member of the INTACH, and ICOMOS - INDIA. Prof. Bagga-Mehta is consultant to the Official Dossier preparation of the Trans-national Serial Nomination of the Architectural Works of Le Corbusier to UNESCO proposing the buildings of Chandigarh’s Capitol Complex for inscription.
DONGSEI KIM is an architect, urbanist and educator. He is Assistant Professor at the Department of Architecture at Korea University-Seoul (Korea). His current research focuses on understanding how nation-state borders influence bordering practices and spatial inclusion and exclusion across scales. His research on the Demilitarized Zone of Korea was recently exhibited in the Golden Lion Award winning Korean Pavilion at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale. He has published articles in journals such as Volume, Inflection, and Landscape Architecture Frontiers, and in books such as Crow's Eye View: The Korean Peninsula and The North Korean Atlas. He has taught at Columbia University, Carleton University, RMIT University, Monash University, VUW, and Kyunghee University. He holds a Master in Design Studies with highest distinction from Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD), and an MS in Architecture and Urban Design from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP). Additionally, he holds a 5-year professional B.Arch. (Hons) from the Victoria University of Wellington. He is currently completing his PhD at the University of Melbourne. He is a registered architect with the NZRAB and has been a full architect member of NZIA since 2007.
VINAYAK BHARNE is a Los Angeles based urban design and city planning consultant. He is currently Adjunct Associate Professor of Urbanism at the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California (USC), Lecturer in Landscape Architecture and Heritage Conservation at the USC School of Architecture, and Associated Faculty at the USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture. His ongoing design and research work ranges from new towns, campuses, inner-city revitalization, resort-villages and housing for corporate, private and institutional clients; to urban regulations, policies and strategic advising for government and non-government agencies in the United States, Canada, India, China, United Arab Emirates, Panama, Kenya and Mauritius. His books include The Emerging Asian City: Concomitant Urbanities and Urbanisms (Routledge, 2012), Zen Spaces & Neon Places: Reflections on Japanese Architecture and Urbanism (AR+D, 2013), and Rediscovering the Hindu Temple (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012). A contributing editor of Kyoto Journal in Japan, contributing blogger for Planetizen in Los Angeles, and International Contributor to My Liveable City in India, he also serves on the Advisory Board of the international think-tank Global Urban Development and is on the Board of Directors of the one of Southern California's oldest non-profit organizations -Pasadena Heritage
AMEEN FAROOQ is Professor of architecture, urban design and planning at Kennesaw State University, where he served as Chair of the Architecture Program from 2006-2013. Farooq’s research in urban and environmental design in the early 90s at the Leslie Martin School of Urban Design - University of Cambridge (UK), concluded with a PhD in Urban Design and Planning from the College of Architecture & Urban Planning - Georgia Institute of Technology in 1999. In the mid 80s, he served as local consultant to the World Bank for the historic preservation of the Walled City of Lahore. In collaboration with the Lawrence Lab at the University of California-Berkeley, he also served as consultant to the United Nations to develop and coordinate a comprehensive Curriculum on Environmental Design with a special focus on Energy Conservation for the premiere schools of architecture in Pakistan. At Kennesaw State University, Farooq currently serves as coordinating faculty in the Graduate Program in Architecture, and is actively engaged in developing and coordinating urban design workshops with multiple, global counterparts. In recent years, these have included the Milan Polytechnic (Italy), the Cracow University of Technology (Poland), the University of Aveiro and Lisbon (Portugal), the Bochum University (Germany), and the University of Engineering and Technology (Pakistan)
ANTONIO FURGIUELE is the 2014-15 Research Fellow & Distinguished Visiting Critic at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, School of Architecture & Urban Planning (SARUP). Furgiuele is an architect, educator, and scholar, whose work investigates the histories and theories of architecture systems of information & communication. He has taught design studios and seminars at Pratt Institute, the City College of New York, Parsons, and Columbia University. He is the founding director of the O/S Group, a collaborative design practice based in Brooklyn. He holds a B.Arch. from Syracuse University and a Master’s degree in History, Theory & Criticism of Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
ARIJIT SEN is an architect and vernacular architecture historian who writes, teaches and studies urban cultural landscapes. His research includes studies of South Asian immigrant landscapes in Northern California, New York, and Chicago. He has worked on post disaster reconstruction and community-based design in the Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans and directed public history and cultural landscapes field schools in Milwaukee. Sen’s academic and research background is in architectural history, social, cultural and behavioral analysis of the built environment, and American cultural landscape studies. Currently an Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee with an honorary appointment with the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin Madison, Dr. Sen cofounded the multi campus Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures area of doctoral research. He has served as a fellow at various humanities centers such as the Center for 21st Century Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Center for Advanced Study, University of Minnesota. His grants include a Graham Foundation grant for his book project, a Research Grant Initiative award to study immigrant cultural landscapes, and two Wisconsin Humanities Council major grants for an architectural field school. In 2013 he received the American Association for State and Local History 2013 Award of Merit for that field school. Sen has coedited Landscapes of Mobility: Culture, Politics and Placemaking (Ashgate Publishers, UK, 2013, Jennifer Johung coeditor) and Making Place: Space and Embodiment in the City (Indiana University Press, 2014, Lisa Silverman coeditor).
MANU P. SOBTI is Associate Professor in Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures (blc) at the School of Architecture & Urban Planning, UWM. His research focuses on cross-cultural synthesis, metamorphosis, and change in the architecture and urbanism of globalizing cities. He is author of three publications - the first, a monograph titled Urban Form and Space in the Islamic City: A Study of Morphology and Formal Structures in the city of Bhopal, Central India (CEPT/Vastu Shilpa Foundation, 2003); and two book manuscripts nearing completion - Space and Collective Identity in South Asia: Migration, Architecture and Urban Development (Under contract: I. B. Tauris Publishers- UK, expected completion March 2015), & Riverine Narratives East and West (Under contract: Ashgate Publishers-UK, expected completion Sept. 2015). He is also directing a Public Television Documentary Proposal titled Medieval Riverlogues (currently under review by the NEH) focused on Central Asia’s legendary River Oxus, and is preparing a fourth publication titled The Sliver of the Oxus Borderland: Medieval Cultural Interactions between the Arabs and Persians (Brill Publications, Fall 2016). In Spring & Fall 2015, he is director of SARUP’s prestigious Urban Edge Award, comprising a Chandigarh (India) Urban Design Studio (ongoing, Spring 2015), alongside related lectures, a Spring 2015 symposium and a Fall 2015 Conference.
PRESENTATION TITLES & ABSTRACTS
SARUP’s Urban Edge 2015 Seminar on Resilience and Change
(Re)defining the Typologies of Urban Edges – Present day Chandigarh
Sangeeta Bagga-Mehta
The conception of the city of Chandigarh and its urban edge vis a vis the Edict of Chandigarh, and the Statute of the Land by Le Corbusier reflects upon the idea of the city and its rural hinterland. This reflection of connection (or separation) is posited as a sharp, urban-rural divide - one effectively enhanced by the geomorphology of its landscape and the natural denominators marking its edges. These include the Shivaliks mountains framing the north, besides the two riverine edges – the Sukhna Choe on the eastern and Patiali Ki Rao on its western boundaries. Finally, the gentle southwards slope is met by the zigzag political boundary with the state of Punjab thus defining the southern edge of Corbusier’s grid city. In recent decades, while a series of complex political, economic and socio-cultural forces have redefined these urban boundaries, this has also led to the creation of internal edges and borders. This phenomenon has manifested itself in three distinct ways. First, it has enlarged the boundary edges of the city to include new developments thereby enlarging the Corbusian city. At a second level, this has intensified the links between the Corbusian city and the peri-urban areas. Finally, it has created a larger zone of influence of the city to its hinterland and the creation of new urbanities. In effect, while the Corbusian city respects its sectoral grid, its system of 7Vs, its landscape plan comprising of open sector spaces and so on, a patina of change is perceived and one radically generated by the older edges redefining themselves. How these edges have modified and reinvented themselves over the years while still identifying with the challenges of the city and its hinterland is the focus of this presentation. Furthermore, this discussion examines how the city’s edges have been modulated to accommodate the new developments without compromising with the ideological basis of the city of Sun, Space and Verdure.
Towards Edge Spaces of Productive Inclusivity: A Subversive Act
Dongsei Kim
Edge is where an entity meets the other. This is a space where identities are constructed and defined. Edge spaces can engender regressive exclusivity or productive inclusivity. Equally, whether an entity is either more inclusive or exclusive, can be corroborated by its spatial configurations. These spatial configurations tend to be much more pronounced at its edges. Moreover, our societies are evidencing an increasing number of regressively exclusive spatial edges that expose socio-economic inequalities. Within this described context, this presentation interrogates how spatial design can envision a more productive inclusivity. It interrogates spatial design’s ability to project better alternatives through a series of studio experimentations that examine one of the world’s most impermeable spatial divides - the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) - located between North and South Korea. The presentation seeks to expound how better alternatives can be imagined through engaging the notion of spatial subversions in the design process. Via a series of studio projects, it illustrates how design strategies of spatial subversions can let us break away from the habitual preconceptions we have of edges as instruments of exclusion. It further enables us to project the spaces of reciprocities and hybridizations that bring about productive inclusivity at the edges.
Illusive Edges and Contested Boundaries: A case for Atlanta and Chandigarh
Ameen Farooq
The modern city edge is becoming increasingly illusive and porous as it accommodates the pressures of economic expansion and developments of the twenty-first century. New speedways aligned with disruptive advancements in technology are boundlessly stretching to connect the “post-urban islands” that act as literal city-states. These new man-made boundaries can now be extended to whatever reach one may be able to achieve either by developers or via the political ambitions of city officials for additional tax revenues and economic development opportunities, at times, leaving large tracts of undeveloped or underdeveloped land for future expansion or real estate giveaways. In effect, these pre-planned, cinematic city-states are defining the urban core in new ways. Their newness persistently contests against the systematic expansion and traditionally established spatial geographies of the urban core. Within this background, this presentation draws parallels between Atlanta and Chandigarh where new, micro-urbanities with the notion of ‘live, work and play” are establishing social and spatial boundaries that are at odds with the systematic continuities, urban integrities and historic identities of these two cities.
Urbanism: Provocations From Asia
Vinayak Bharne
Based on findings from his three recent books The Emerging Asian City: Concomitant Urbanities & Urbanisms (2012), Zen Spaces & Neon Places: Reflections on Japanese Architecture & Urbanism (2014), & Rediscovering the Hindu Temple: The Sacred Architecture and Urbanism of India (2012), and recent urban design and research projects in India, Iran, China and the United Arab Emirates, practicing urbanist and professor Vinayak Bharne will offer provocations on the multifarious agencies and forces shaping cities across Asia – from land scarcity to religion and Eurocentricism to extreme economic polarizations. Where do they overlap? Where do they separate? How do such forces expand the practice of urbanism? How do they recast the notion of the city as a physical form and designed artifact on the one hand, and challenge it on the other? Who are the actors and agencies that shape cities beyond the franchised processes of formal planning? Moreover, how can the practice of urbanism expand towards plural and empathetic approaches that stem from the actual social, political and cultural realities of a place?
The Chandigarh Complex: Locating Universal Value
Antonio Furgiuele
Chandigarh is once again vying to be the next UNESCO World Heritage Site. If awarded this unique status it will earn the title of having ‘Outstanding Universal Value’, not as a modernist utopian ideology realized, but as the latest site of global heritage. As India’s first post-independence city, Chandigarh has now developed into India’s wealthiest city, propelling it into the global spotlight of economic prowess. As the city continues to face pressures to address necessities for increased modernization, urban density, and economic development the designation of World Heritage - a unique form of global historical value highlights the contentious forces of cultural nationalism in the face of state development. Chandigarh, since 2006 has made attempts to establish itself as a UNESCO World Heritage Site with significant changes to what constitutes its unique and authentic value: from establishing the entire city as the heritage site (2006), to the city’s Capital Complex (2010), to the recent proposal of its architectural monuments as part of a ‘Trans-border Serial Nomination of Le Corbusier’s Work’, which includes projects in France, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, Germany, Argentina, etc. (2014, in conjunction with Foundation Le Corbusier). The repeated shifts in framing Chandigarh’s ‘Outstanding Universal Value’ offers an important vantage from which to understand UNESCO World Heritage protocols, what confers & legitimates ‘authenticity’ and ‘value’, the historical-material production of heritage, and importantly, the looming local changes for the global City Beautiful.
Discarding Corb’s Shoes: Rethinking Aesthetics and Authorship of Cities in the 21st C
Arijit Sen
This paper offers a critical alternative to the Urban Edge Symposium’s goal of “stepping vicariously into Corb’s shoes” and argues that transforming notions of city and urbanity in the 21st C. necessitates that we “forget Corb’s shoes” —at least initially— as a way to build the 21st Century City. By rethinking authorship (who builds and who designs the urban tabula rasa) and aesthetics (what constitutes spatial and formal ordering) we may challenge the professional hierarchy of architects and planners in the way cities are conceived. The paper engages the concept of the urban edge by pointing towards a novel way of thinking of order and aesthetics as an emerging frontier of urban thinking and architectural design, beyond the narrowly conceived visual and aesthetic culture developed by modernist architects and planners that continue to frame much of contemporary professional work. Using example of events and projects in the city of Milwaukee the paper argues how current practices may force professionals to reevaluate and redefine entrenched concepts of beauty, aesthetics and authorship in the making of urban spaces and cultures. The new city no longer emerges from the plan and sketch in an designer’s office to be deified and preserved for perpetuity; rather it begins with, what the SARUP Urban Edge symposium organizers call, “visceral urbanity,” a concept that requires us to rethink the design process as we know it.
Transforming Ruralities & Edge(ness) in Global Urbanities
Manu P. Sobti
Within the broad purview of postcolonial urbanities undergoing global change, scholars have often examined the mercurial changes wrought on the urban artifact owing to contingencies and conditions germinating from within. Little attention has been invested towards comprehending the transformations of the ‘landscape matrix’ that traditionally held and continues to hold this perplexing field of urbanities. Deploying the interrogation of the ex-urban landscape matrix as a point of departure, this introductory seminar presentation introduces the scenario of a rapidly de-ruralizing landscape between and along the very edges of globalizing cities in the Indian context. It questions if these edges are urban or rural, and evaluates the somewhat un-questioned validity of viewing these edges from within versus without. In setting out a frame of reference, it also views the Urban Edge as a physical boundary and border, a metaphoric concept, and as a design methodology, employing it as a limiting and delimiting component within the changing urbanities of the city. In the face of these imminent changes, what shall be the character of India’s ‘global’ cities in the future decades? Would they be sites of conflict or polycentric zones of tolerated contestations, similar to inhospitable border zones? How would proximal ruralities effect and be affected by globalizing urbanity? What impact shall the accelerated transformation of this predominantly rural urban hinterland matrix have on the political economies of proximal cities and urban centers?