Generic City Research Articles

The Generic city: Rem Koolhaas

Al irse dando las explosiones demográficas (habitantes) La periferia ha cobrado un valor que a pesar de no ser la misma y pura que el centro de las ciudades, se ha hecho camino para que ella se encuentre en un discurso sobre la ciudad y sus componentes más importantes. ¿Qué es realmente lo que pasa después de la ciudad? La periferia o espacios urbanos de delicadas sensaciones. De esto relata Ren Koolhaas con su escrito descriptivo sobre lo que son los nuevos territorios urbanos, las ciudades después de su centro gracias a las explosiones demográficas. La ciudad genérica o esos nuevos territorios, en pocas palabras es eso que se obtiene después de la ciudad que ya no lo es (según el autor)

Labyrinth, Ruin, Junkspace, Monad: dialectical images of the contemporary city

The theoretical presupposition of the discourse developed here is Benjamin’s conception of a dialectical image applied to the experience of the modern and contemporary city. The starting point is that of the radical strangeness between the inner life of the individual and the time of the modern metropolis. In this regard, we compare some verses taken from the third book of the Stundenbuch by Rainer Maria Rilke and Georg Simmel’s essay, Die Großstädte und das geistiges Leben, at the center of which is the Nervenleben as an intensification of the perceptive life typical of the experience of the modern city. We then move on to focus on the theme of the labyrinth analyzed by Benjamin in some passages of the Passagenwerk. In this regard, it is emphasized how the modern city realizes the ancient dream of the labyrinth elevating it to the sphere of language. The experience of the city as a labyrinth is interpreted as a «monotonous wandering», which is not delayed in a senseless roaming. In conclusion, the image of the Generic City and of the Junkspace theorized by Rem Koolhaas is compared, as an image that describes our present in the interweaving of the virtual city of cyberspace with the real city, as an alternative image to that of monad. As a monad, the image of the city still reserves the possibility of experiencing the truth, in a paradoxical gaze that captures the original idea of the city from the inside. This confirms that in the connection between city and monad already underlined by Leibniz “the true has no windows”, according to one of the most esoteric passages of the Passagenwerk.

Narratives of Eastern Mediterranean and Atlantic European cities

We have selected seven contributions for this issue of Spool, four from the Eastern Mediterranean basin (Istanbul, Beirut, Acre and Jaffa) and three from Atlantic Europe (Bodo, Matosinhos and Gafanha da Nazare). Roula El Khoury and Paola Ardizzola address the post-civil war reconstruction of Beirut in Lebanon and reveal how neoliberal models of development resulted in a generic city. Adem Erdem Erbas uses the Istanbul port heritage area in Turkey to showcase how GIS helps to consider underground cultural inventory from a historic landscape perspective within the framework of the conservation plans. Ana Jayone Yarza Perez explores the potential of adaptive reuse evaluation procedure in the Old City of Acre, Israel, as a means to deal with development and gentrification in this World Heritage site. Komal Potdar explores the historical evolution of the old town, cultural geography, and the current state of exclusion and gentrification in Jaffa, Israel. She underlines the need for discourse on socio-spatial analysis and assessment for decision-making processes for urban heritage design. Diego Inglez de Souza and Ivo Pereira de Oliveira reconnect architectural history with social and industrial accounts as a strategy for understanding the relationship between infrastructure, fishing, and urbanisation by studying the emblematic case of Matosinhos, Portugal. Andre Tavares seeks to trace the links between fluctuations in the natural cod resources, the technologies used by fishermen to catch and process the fish, and the development of coastal landscapes and the urban form of the fishing port Gafanha da Nazare, Portugal. And finally, Fatma Tanis uses an interview with architect Daniel Rosbottom from DHDR to provide insight into situated architecture in port cities by addressing a library and concert hall project realised in Bodo, Norway.

Álvaro Siza and Carlos Castanheira’s China Design Museum: Form, Contemporary City and Design Method

Portuguese architects, Álvaro Siza and Carlos Castanheira’s China Design Museum of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou (2012-2018) calls for a problematization of the theme of the “boundary” at different levels. In this essay the project is compared with other relevant works in regards to form, the contemporary city and design method. Formed by two bars and a partly sunken volume enclosing a triangular courtyard, the building is immediately reminiscent of other L and U plans by Siza that question private/public and interior/exterior relationships. After Rem Koolhaas published “The Generic City” in 1994, the Chinese city became the epitome of the contemporary city. Since Siza’s architecture has been discussed in terms of its continuity with the city and tradition, the project of the China Design Museum raises the question: How does Siza work in the Chinese city? Siza and Castanheira’s building is at the same time part of a large campus planned by the well-known local architects Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu/Amateur Architecture, whose experimental approach to drawing and craft skills suggests yet another set of comparisons. To sum up, Siza and Castanheira avoid easy solutions: the siting and massing, scale, spatial organization and material expression of the China Design Museum provide a measure between realities – open/closed, traditional/contemporary, local/universal – that first appeared incommensurable.

AN IMPROVED LOD FRAMEWORK FOR THE TERRAINS IN 3D CITY MODELS

Abstract. The Level of Detail (LOD) concept in CityGML 2.0 is meant to differentiate the multiple representations of semantic 3D city models. Despite the popularity and general acceptance of the concept by the practitioners and stakeholders in 3D city modelling, there are still some limitations. While the CityGML LOD concept is well defined for buildings, bridges, tunnels, and to some extent for roads, there is no clear definition of LODs for terrain/relief, vegetation, land use, water bodies, and generic city objects in CityGML. In addition, extensive research has been done to refine the LOD concept of CityGML for buildings but little is known on requirements and possibilities to model city object types as terrain at different LODs. To address this gap, we focus in this paper on the terrain of a 3D city model and propose a framework for modelling terrains at different LODs in CityGML. As a proof of concept of our framework, we implemented a software prototype to generate terrain models with other city features integrated (e.g. buildings) at different LODs in CityGML.

TO THE PROBLEM OF ENLIGHTENED PLURALISM IN RUSSIAN TOWN PLANNING

The article is devoted to the study of processes in Russian urban planning over the past three decades. This period is marked by the birth and formation of a new city growing out of the Soviet urban environment. The article discusses the three conditional stages of the city after restructuring, exploring their specifi city. The context and features of each of the considered stages are described: 1990s, 2000s. 2010s. The state of the architectural and town planning profession is analyzed, the goals and tasks of which changed in accordance with social transformations. Particular att ention is paid to the typology of constructed objects, the development of the architectural order in the context of a market economy. The innovations at each stage are matched, special events that aff ect professional thinking and design methodology are emphasized. The author explores how the two recognized theoretical models of the city - the collage city and the generic city - were adapted to the post-Soviet reality.

EDITORIAL | ABOUT THE 4TH NUMBER OF SOPHIA, VISUAL SPACES OF CHANGE: UNVEILING THE PUBLICNESS OF URBAN SPACE THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY AND IMAGE

If we take for granted the idea of being in the so-called post-photographic era, the genre that can surely suffer its consequences and show its manifestations is that of architectural photography. Architectural photography no longer documents given that the veracity of what is represented is systematically under suspicion. It is assumed that what is photographed is, at best, an interpretation. Urban photography has lost the fascination it had at the time of the optimistic and utopian configuration of the modern city. Definitely overshadowed that enthusiasm, the exploration of the urban slides towards the transitional territories and the places in transit, where neither the city is a city nor the landscape a landscape. The non-places, the generic city or the third landscape, whatever we may name it, is where the scenery portrays a different ecosystem open to new conceptual and visual narratives that allow us to return to the consolidated city in order to discover something new, hidden behind its prejudices, their stereotypes and their history. In the bland is the substance. We could argue nowadays that what least interest architectural photography is architecture itself. The built object is not an end but a means: a visual resource to talk about its context and its sociological, political and cultural identity. The more critical and conceptual this approach is, the more artistic it becomes in practice. If the gaze is not innocuous and aseptic then it turns out to be truly personal: the author’s questioning look prevails over the distant gaze of the pure depiction. at’s where the emotion and the critical discourse arise. In the contradiction and chaos, the visual artist finds a new order to explain the notion of what was built and that city in transit, tired of its expansion at the rate of speculation and which seeks to withdraw and redefine itself from within, from its consolidated identity. Indeed, architecture photography, empowered by its leaning and artistic grounding, is more interesting when we understand it as a projective tool of an interdisciplinary nature. When the gaze at architecture and the urban is cross-sectional and polyhedral it is when it is certainly useful and effective. Photography becomes an instrument of research and analysis. To understand the complexity of the city and the role architecture plays in it, one must learn how to look at it with a, let’s say, educated and sensible gaze. And we don’t look at it in order to understand it but to transform it. Architectural photography is not an active document but a reactive one; it is the effective instrument of the gaze committed to change. Architecture and the city need to be placed in front of their own visual mirror, in order to feel, listen and recognize each other. [...]

Building the city as a stage, the example of Nantes

At a time when cities try to stand out from one another, the construction of ambiances is brought back to the foreground of urban, social and cultural dynamics in metropolises. With this contribution, we aim at taking the example of Nantes and the Machines of the Isle of Nantes to show the transformations of an industrial territory into a cultural open stage with cultural practices. Indeed, following the shutdown of the shipyards in the 1990s, the city pursued a major cultural policy to make the industrial wastelands attractive. In successive steps, the temporary artistic practices changed urban ones, based on the question of ambiances and their narrative. Favouring the implementation of projects taking place in public spaces, the city became a 360°-urban scene. As opposed to a generic city, Nantes turned urban scenography into a way to single itself out, by accompanying the creation of plots and narratives around its territory. Between artistic experiments and narrative, Nantes thus appears as a stage-city that invites to include user experiences.

On Bigness and the Problem of Urban Form

The term ‘bigness’ refers to large-scale, mixed-use buildings and was introduced into the architectural vocabulary by Rem Koolhaas. Contrary to Koolhaas’s focus on the ‘generic city’ and the Asian context, this essay explores the role that large-scale buildings may play in establishing a dialogue between new areas of urban expansion and the formal and typological characteristics of European cities. By looking at three designs by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron in the light of the early twentieth-century debate on urban design and the skyscraper in Europe, the problem of bigness will be seen as a continuation of a discussion on urban form and type spanning more than one hundred years. Bigness will thus be seen as a tool capable of reworking and even continuing existing urban formal types, even if devoid of ideological and symbolic meaning.

Images of urban China in Cao Fei’s ‘magical metropolises’

This article examines the moving image works of Chinese artist Cao Fei as a response to China’s rapid urbanization and the transformation of its existing urban spaces which are no longer shaped by socialism but instead by what this article considers as China’s engagement with neo-liberalism, including and facilitated by globalization. The urban sprawl of the Pearl River Delta inspired Rem Koolhaas’s writings on the ‘generic city’, which he celebrates precisely for its blandness. Cao herself is from Guangzhou. Yet, in works such as RMB City, Haze and Fog, Whose Utopia, and Hip Hop: Guangzhou, Cao creates what she calls ‘magical metropolises’. This article asks what kind of responses Cao’s ‘magical’ works are to contemporary Chinese urbanization. As part of the answer to this question, it applies four hermeneutic frameworks to analyse the works themselves. The findings from each of those frameworks indicate that Cao’s work not only reflects the current Chinese urban condition, but also participates and intervenes in it in various ways.

The Generic City and its Origins

Bill Hillier, who is now Professor of Architectural and Urban Morphology at the University of London and Director of the Space Syntax Laboratory at University College London (UCL), is well known for establishing the space syntax approach in the 1970s. Here he explores the origins of the generic city, revealing how the economic and social factors that shape cities manifest themselves in a common pattern of a network of streets, which are further analysed by mapping through movement with the aid of ‘space syntax’.

Pudong: The shanzhai global city

Shanghai’s Pudong financial district is known for its spectacular skyline, which Michelle Huang has referred to as ‘a copy of a global city’ – a reading that this article pushes further. What does this ‘copy of a global city’ tell us about the intricate relationships between globalisation, capitalism and urbanity? Whereas Koolhaas proposed the notion of the ‘generic city’ to grasp the future Asian city, this article argues that his reading reifies the conservative premise that globalisation equals homogenisation. Although Abbas’ concept of the ‘fake’ comes closer to what we see emerging in Asia, it simultaneously reifies the problematic idea of an authentic original. Instead, the article proposes reading Pudong as a shanzhai version of the global city: meaning the culture of Chinese pirated, ‘fake’ products. By linking the notion of shanzhai to that of the global city, it aims to recuperate the locality, fluidity and peculiarity of the global city.

Sustainable: the urban model based on high-density, high-rise and multiple, intensive land use: the case of Hong Kong

China is going through one of the most dramatic social and cultural transformations in its
 history. In this speed change scenario, the never - questioned conventions in the western
 architecture have been betrayed. Invention, reinterpretation sometimes even revolution, never
 represent a step further as they did in the XXI century theoretical thinking.
 To engage architectural thoughts with the booming economy could contribute to the definition of
 a contemporary Chinese architecture, far from the generic city, in a society that has evolved
 from pre-modernism to post-industrialism in a short period of time.
 Through the analysis of Hong Kong, and a series of case studies, a conclusion to this scenario
 is sought. Xina està travessant una de les transformacions socials i culturals més dramàtiques de la seva història. En aquest escenari de canvi de velocitats, les convencions mai qüestionades en l'arquitectura occidental han estat traicionades. Invenció, reinterpretació, inclús a vegades revolució, no representen mai un pas endavant com ho van fer en el pensament teòric del segle XXI.
 
 Acoplar els pensaments arquitectònics amb una economia florescent podria contribuir a la definició d'una arquitectura xina contemporània, lluny de la ciutat genèrica, en una societat que ha evolucionat des de la premodernitat al postindustrialisme en un període curt de temps.
 
 A través de l'anàlisi de Hong Kong i una sèrie d'estudis de cas es busca una conclusió d'aquest escenari. China está atravesando una de las transformaciones sociales y culturales más dramáticas de su historia. En este escenario de cambio de velocidades, las convenciones nunca cuestionadas en la arquitectura occidental han sido traicionadas. Invención, reinterpretación, incluso a veces revolución, no representan nunca un paso adelante como lo hicieron en el pensamiento teórico del siglo XXI.
 
 Acoplar los pensamientos arquitectónicos con una economía floreciente podría contribuir a la definición de una arquitectura china contemporánea, lejos de la ciudad genérica, en una sociedad que ha evolucionado desde la pre modernidad al pos industrialismo en un período corto de tiempo.
 
 A través del análisis de Hong Kong y una serie de estudios de caso, se busa una conclusión de este escenario.

Review: Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990

Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990 . Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 24 September 2011–15 January 2012. In his 1994 essay “The Generic City,” Rem Koolhaas wrote: > Postmodernism is the only movement that has succeeded in connecting the practice of architecture with the practice of panic. Postmodernism is not a doctrine based on a highly civilized reading of architectural history but a method, a mutation in architectural practice that produces results fast enough to keep pace with the Generic City’s development. Instead of consciousness, as its original inventors may have hoped, it creates a new unconscious. It is modernization’s little helper.1 This remains perhaps the only really insightful thing ever written on the subject of architectural postmodernism—unless, that is, one also includes the statement from around the same date by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck—an arch critic—when he described postmodernism generally as a meaningless concept “used by blind people who don’t know what’s going on.”2 There was certainly a sense of both of these tendencies—panic and blindness—in the 2011 exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum on the subject of postmodernism. If, as Manfredo Tafuri declared, the deeper function of bourgeois art is “to ward off anguish,” then the visitor could see that anguish bleeding from its very heart in this show.3 Rooms were stuffed full of furniture, clothes, film clips, pop videos, and everything else in an effort to convey the notion of a populist, exuberant, diverse, ironically low-art approach rooted in a feeling of super-abundance. The problem, of course, is that the period being covered by the V&A show, from 1970 to 1990, felt nothing like that back then. Indeed, it now appears in retrospect to have been a relatively homogenous era in terms of urban culture in Western capitalist countries, certainly when compared to globalized conditions today. It was also notable that the architectural exhibits in the V&A exhibition—including the classic …

Brussels: Tracing the agglomeration

The paper explores Brussels and its past territorial makings while, at the same time, explaining the methodological implications of micro-empirical work. It draws on recent academic endeavours such as environmental history, political ecology and the Los Angeles School. It highlights the intricate power-relationships of actors and matters in the shaping of a city. But it has also a very clear connexion with the interactionist Chicago School and the work of AMO, with the organic as well as the generic city, which, both, emphasise the thickness and undetermined character of social relationships, of urban patterns and of the more systemic workings of a city. The paper will thus show how empirical tracings, based on archival research, allow to unveil the macro and to discover, i.e. to follow step by step, the vectors of urban unity without using any theoretical or historical shortcuts.

Delirious Cities and Their Cinema: On Koolhaas and Film Studies

Using contemporary Chinese and Hong Kong cinema, the large body of writing on media emanating from Koolhaas and his atelier, and the headquarters for China Central Television as its primary touchstones, this essay examines the relationship between the current media environment in East Asia and the architectural practice and theory produced by Koolhaas. The paper argues that his virtuoso designs and enormously productive critical work reach an impasse at precisely the moment when his conception of cinema is exhausted and he embraces the increasingly influential theoretical model drawn from digital media. While his notion of the generic city is modeled on the film studio set, with its utterly flexible and ephemeral structures expanded to the scale of the city, and his more recent structures embody the promises of a network society, Koolhaas fails to consider other image-making practices that remain vibrant and rely on diametrically opposed conceptions of the moving image, most notably the documentary-derived cinema of filmmakers like Jia Zhangke.

The Taxonomy of Contemporary Chinese Cities (We Make Cities): A Sampling

AbstractRem Koolhaas famously highlighted the uniformity of Chinese cities with his identification of ‘the generic city’ in the Pearl River Delta in the 1990s. Here Jiang Jun, Editor‐in‐Chief of Urban China magazine, and Kuang Xiaoming highlight the ‘unified diversity’ and complexity of contemporary urbanism through his own system of classification. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Short Stories against Barcelona’s Urban Transformation

The Olympic Games of 1992 launched Barcelona as one of the most fashionable and appealing cities in the world. In preparation for the Games, the city experienced during the 1980s a deep symbolic, political, and architectural transformation which turned Barcelona into a prosperous global city, but also aimed to reconcile this modernization trend with the recovery of her rich historical past and cultural heritage. Fictional narratives set in cities often relive the spaces, streets or characters that have disappeared because of unremitting processes of urban change. Many narratives struggle in this way against the erasure of spatial and collective memory. My article argues that, in the case of Catalan author Quim Monzó, we encounter exactly the opposite. In his short stories written during 1980s and early 90s, Monzó portrays a standardized, almost unrecognizable Barcelona--a “generic city,” to use Rem Koolhaas’ term,--full of characters with no sense of historical past. His portrait contests the official retrieval of the city’s past as it reveals how this recovery has implied the commodification of history and, in a dialectical move, its ultimate erasure. Through Monzó’s fiction, we can observe how history has become another aspect of the cities´ advertisement of themselves as a differentiated trademark in the global market.

An Interview With Jon Cattapan

An Interview With Jon Cattapan

An integrated planning tool for sustainable cities

Nowadays cities are seen as motors for the sustainable development of European regions and are thus of crucial importance for the future of Europe as a whole. Management of complex systems such as cities requires the use of innovative, sophisticated planning tools that can assist in monitoring current conditions and projecting future developments. In this paper an integrated approach is proposed towards the development and implementation of a generic city planning framework that in principle can be applied to any city. The proposed city planning framework is a combination of an information system and a dynamic model, which enables the instrument to be used in both strategic and operational manners.