PLAY in the CITY: Parkour and Architecture

As part of the coursework M.Arch program I was required to write a research paper.



I was motivated to explore ways in which emergent fringe activities take the urban initiative and use old space in new creative ways. I belived that these activities are very powerful creative forces within our cities... I just didn't know why...



Reading Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, i discovered a beautiful quote:

“…Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears,
even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their
rules absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and
everything conceals something else…Cities also
believe they are the work of the mind, or of chance, but
neither one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls.
You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy
wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of
yours…or the question it asks of you, forcing you to
answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx”

(Calvino 1974, p44)

These PLAY activities that we see emerging in the urban environment are powerful tools that reveal the desires and fears of urban actors. They reveal shortcomings and conflicts that arrise from our design, procurement and management practices, and they involve all urban players (public, commerce and governance) in a virtual space where these desires and fears can be iterated. The place of play.

So read it.. and then go off and run amok... but be conscious of what you are saying when you play, and be conscious of the dialogue that you are entering into, with both the architecture, and the other urban actors around you.'

Many thanks goes to Mirko Guaralda for his support and supervision this semester.

Peace

PLAY!

Here is my literature review, written for an upcoming QUT research paper about Parkour and Architecture. In it the concepts of play and unregulated ludic activity are explored, and parkour is described as a highly accessable form of play that is very dependant upon the urban context. Existing research proposals which have not yet been conducted are then explored.

view it here...

...and then go outside and play in the street!

KNOT THEORY

Love it.. An archeo-mathematical view point of Dsankt's Urbex

mediating between messy emergence and ordered evolution

Venturi in 'learning from Las Vegas' writes that Italian architecture has the ability to mediate between the 'vitruvian and the banal', 'fine art and crude art...the contorni and the duomo, the portiere's laundry across the padrone's portone, ... See moresupercortemaggiore against the romanesque apse'. Venturi sounds dissapointed that '...naked children will never play in OUR fountains and I.M. Pei will never be happy on Route 66.'

Using Bachman's definitions of four types of emergence, I find it interesting to entertain the possibility of multple methods overlaid. Indeed, this will be inevitable as people comission different architects who consider emergence and it's effects on architectural design differently. A heteropia of emergence in action.

Venturi makes an interesting proposition... how can this be mediated, allowing for coherence in the urban milieu? If only there was a text called 'learning from Italy'...

I'm determined to read some Rossi at the suggestion of Riccardo Rizzali. I find his thoughts about monument interesting, presenting a very ordered 'type' which may also contain pointers from within a uniquely Italian context.


This mediation will probably play a significant role in my final year design.. I'm anxious to see what form it will take.

I'm also determined to read more Ruskin.

Being critical about emergence

Reading this chapter, I was able to put all the readings about emergence, complexity, evolutionary and adaptive discourses. I had been struggling for some clarity for a while.

A few months ago I wrote this article trying to lay out for myself the variety of different discourse. I had been criticised by peers when trying to converse about complexity and design, my peers finding it difficult to find consistency in the dialogue. I don't think it was necessarily my fault... it's just that the discourse suffers from a lack of criticality generally when it comes to what certain terms mean. evolution and emergence both have a variety of connotations and semiotic 'baggage' which accompanies them. THis makes critical discourse very difficult to engage in.

This article by Bachman allocates these discourses into four categories: wicked, messy, ordered and natural. ALthough this doesn't clear the discourse, it allows an alternative way of looking at the variety of materials which regard complexity and the built environment.

...Although I am sure that Christopher Alexander would take offence with being categorised as messy: it does make the dialogues of complexity a little easier to navigate.

microplexes - a study in emergent urbanism

I found this on emergenturbanism.net and found it very informative, drilling deep into potentials of interpreting emergent urbaism in the context of biology, social networking systems, and computer optimisation.

Discussing the work of Mathieu Helie:

Through this model Helie attempts to show how policy can reduce its predictive role in projecting growth through costly, speculative infrastructure investment, and reduce its organisational role in dictating precisely how growth occurs. The outcome, or so he claims, is sustainable growth based on dense urban form. It’s not without its complications however, as these kind of models are essentially behavioural models for planners and contain ideological statements about policy. They are also still simplistic.

But by building software models with these kind of growth rules, where policy acts like instructional DNA as opposed to the agent of a total, centralised vision, we can analyse how self-organisation can create urban environments with different connectivity properties to our contemporary cities and compare those differences.

SLUM UPGRADING examples in Brazil

SLUM UPGRADING in Sao Paulo has begun to reap some rewards. This report shows how changes in the approach to a new somewhat 'emergent' policy has moved it from political and well meaning rhetoric to actualisation.

http://citiscope.org/2010/no-excuses-slum-upgrading

Parkour Park In Denmark

Sweet as!, although for me it begins to take Parkour out of the public realm as soon as boundaries for these activities are created, and the appropriation becomes more standardised. I feel the same-way about skateboarding, in that when specific spaces begin to be created for these actions... then it looses something. Instead of responding to the environments, the environments respond to the repertoire of actions... and the initiative and the action of appropriation which is at the heart of the discipline becomes a little lost.

Another Abstraction to the Digital Realm

This really cool bit of software development allows the participant (intended for the use of landscape arch students) to use the insurgent techniques of 'part' of guerilla gardening in order to explore new landscape typologies and contexts.

http://www.designundersky.com/dus/2010/2/25/ludic-guerrilla-gardening-drone-warfare.html

I have some concerns though. Firstly, why do we need to abstract Guerilla Gardening, just like we have done to the Co-Adaptive Architecture movements of the late 70's and 80's.

Secondly, how can Guerilla Gardening work when it is removed from the real social and urban structures which it relies so heavily upon? Guerilla Gardening fails when it fails to generate committment and 'cultural investment' by participants... primarily because guerilla gardens... like any garden, requires to be maintained if it is not to go from productive intervention to smelly community eyesore. The real (un-hyped) Guerilla Gardening movement stress approaches to management, community involvement and is much more of a semi-candelstine activity than you would think.

The Guerilla Gardening movement in Brisbane that was initiated by 'Swaggie' (not by any means the only instance of Brisbane guerilla gardening) saw an initial involvement of over 100 participants in the streets of West End... but participation quickly fell to a committed 10-15 people. There was a very substantial amount of top-heavy administrative work required, and the particpants who were involved on a 'digger' level were often from outlying areas travelling to be part of the activity for the novelty or because they believed in the idea. After about 4 months of co-ordinated digging, bombing and planning the 'Swaggie' GG movement ran out of steam. This was despite the very best of intentions to develop local contacts, get press recognition, develop a 'leadership structure' and generate local involvement. Guerilla Gardening as a sustainable movement, needs to be able to be sustained by the participants on a community level and not an adminstrative one. And it needs 'vested interest'.
Plus.. the semi-subversive nature which this 'game' removes accounts for about 75% of the enjoyment in Guerilla Gardening... why would you want to do that?

In short.. I think Guerilla Gardening is a much deeper concept than this game might portray, and it has many more wide ranging possibilities for it's employ, beyond the education of landscape architecture students. It also has a lot more serious constraints that need to be negotiated...

So will Guerilla Gardening take the route of Co-Adaptive Urbanism?... or will people put the effort in to make it happen???... we shall see...

West Oakland: Upscaling Neighborhood, or Reviving Industrial Hub? | Planetizen

conflict over appropriation/organic models of development and top-down authoritative approaches here:West Oakland: Upscaling Neighborhood, or Reviving Industrial Hub? | Planetizen

Zoning for Food Trucks | Planetizen

Zoning for Food Trucks | Planetizen

DAN HILL on EMERGENT URBANISM

In response to DAN HILL on EMERGENT URBANISM on the City of Sound Blog I wrote the following, relating to where I want my thesis to be directed towards this year.

Ground Up communities can be exclusive without the interventions of top down planning. Natural organisms do not develop into complete homogenity. The contestation of space - in Derridean thought as in nature - is essential for the development of community, and it's character, and will exist, weather we enter into a techno-driven planing model, the traditional authoritarian model, or a grass roots evolutionary/system theory model.

I too find the trend in the last 20 years to limit the discourse of emergent urbanism to 'apps' and input driven parametric designs frustrating.
I find recent projects like SenseableCity's work and even the GRL; clever and entertaining and they do provoke further dialogue... but since Cedric Price's Fun Palace, I am still struggling to find significant haptic enabling of urban community beyond the constraints of the configurable home or the exclusive efforts of various sub-cultures, which require either the circumvention or peaceful disobedience of restrictive stereotypes/policy to enable them to express ownership or appropriation of space.

Surely we can develop methods for 'exploiting' (I hate that term, I hope you can understand it in this context) these placemaking practices for the development of new urban models. There's 20 years of literature and experiements to support it and there's plenty of precedent that we can use to 'market' it (again, a sensitive term - please take it out of it's contemporary context) to both authorities and corporate administrators of public space alike.

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Urban Wilderness Action Center » Blog Archive » Quiet Within the Noise

I noticed this event through a freinds' facebook page and thought I'd contribute to the debate.
My own contribution (consisting of a surprisingly unbalanced anti-social approach) is awaiting approval from site admin but my comments regarding divergent assumptions on the part of a small collection of participants of the event are here:

Urban Wilderness Action Center » Blog Archive » Quiet Within the Noise: "It is interesting to observe the different culturo-social definitions which people are placing on the term ‘wilderness’. An interesting read on the divergent attitudes to ‘landscape’ is IMAGINED COUNTRY; SOCIETY CULTURE AND ENVIRONMENT by John Rennie Short. In it he addresses the concepts of Wilderness versus City versus Landscape, and then conducts Historo-cultural case studies in ‘English Novels’, The ‘American “Western”, and Australian Landscape Painting.
The qualitative and political connotations we attached to our definitions of an Urban Wilderness will greatly effect the outcome and methods we pursue to achieve it."

The Eclectic Alliance

Jane Jacob and Christopher Alexander had quite revolutionary views of the city, similar to the new urbanism movement that is developing more momentum now. In this Planteizen article (here on planetizen) the link is discussed between the social views and ideals of 3 groups are discussed:
*western films depicting the urban hero
*the ideals of Jane Jacobs in the 60's
*and New Urbanists in the turn of the millenia.

I point out that there are other groups which perform active roles that run parrallel and conplimentary to Jane Jocobs' and New Urbanist thought. The KravMaga movement, and some other martial arts movements through history have arisen out of a desire for social justice, peaceful streets and safe neighbourhods. Many other sub-cultural cliches also have extremely open and interactive adgenda's despite the negative stereotypes which they so often seem to attract.

Jane Jacobs', Christopher Alexander, New Urbanists, Martial Artists and Fringe-Sub-Cultural Groups make a Beautiful Eclectic Alliance.

While you are there, be sure to read many of the other interesting articles on Planetizen. I recommend subscribing to their newsletters :)

Recycled Public Space Architecture

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/02/ruins-of-electric-train-turned-into-terribly-cool-amusement-park-in-lima-photos.php?campaign=th_rss#ch01