UNSETTLED URBANISM
Location: Venice, Italy
Collaborators: Merve Bedir, Sampson Wong
CO-HABITATS, Biennale Architettura 2021
Taking as a starting point the civic protests and mobilizations in Hong Kong, this installation analyses “the city in movement” at a critical moment of protests and uprisings on a global scale, where one can talk about an unstable, restless, and untiring urbanism. In this city, occupations do not only have the aim of sending a message, their intention is rather to cause the immediacy, speed, and effectiveness of relational flows. They organize tactics and experiment with devices, but also with bodies, and they change and repeat on their own accord. There is no place here for heroic plans with the pretense of “saving the world,” the city is of the people and for the people.
Under these circumstances, knowledge is shared and expanded quickly and precisely, technology works because of its capacity to expand social movements from the bottom up, in order to trial, validate, and accelerate them. The city becomes a cosmic space of joint movement, an open and decentralized system which is young, fluid and of undefined form. The city transcends law in order to protect the state of law through acts of solidarity. In this city, the places of institutional power are left like deserted temples, “disbanded citadels;” they are no more than stages. The square is no longer the site of the insurrection, but the shopping centre is.
Here we have three fundamental aspects of a city in movement: technology as an accessibility hub for information, revolving around the use of smart phones, communication apps, and forums; “Be Water” reveals the ways in which the movement of people defines the city and the urban condition; and the analysis of the spaces that are transformed when their use changes with the circumstances, i.e. shopping centers, metro stations, airports, schools, police stations, the house, and the street, among others. Unsettled Urbanism is a call to understand how collective spatial intelligence is produced and the other ways of living the city that emerge.
UNSETTLED URBANISM
Location: Venice, Italy
Collaborators: Merve Bedir, Sampson Wong
CO-HABITATS, Biennale Architettura 2021
Taking as a starting point the civic protests and mobilizations in Hong Kong, this installation analyses “the city in movement” at a critical moment of protests and uprisings on a global scale, where one can talk about an unstable, restless, and untiring urbanism. In this city, occupations do not only have the aim of sending a message, their intention is rather to cause the immediacy, speed, and effectiveness of relational flows. They organize tactics and experiment with devices, but also with bodies, and they change and repeat on their own accord. There is no place here for heroic plans with the pretense of “saving the world,” the city is of the people and for the people.
Under these circumstances, knowledge is shared and expanded quickly and precisely, technology works because of its capacity to expand social movements from the bottom up, in order to trial, validate, and accelerate them. The city becomes a cosmic space of joint movement, an open and decentralized system which is young, fluid and of undefined form. The city transcends law in order to protect the state of law through acts of solidarity. In this city, the places of institutional power are left like deserted temples, “disbanded citadels;” they are no more than stages. The square is no longer the site of the insurrection, but the shopping centre is.
Here we have three fundamental aspects of a city in movement: technology as an accessibility hub for information, revolving around the use of smart phones, communication apps, and forums; “Be Water” reveals the ways in which the movement of people defines the city and the urban condition; and the analysis of the spaces that are transformed when their use changes with the circumstances, i.e. shopping centers, metro stations, airports, schools, police stations, the house, and the street, among others. Unsettled Urbanism is a call to understand how collective spatial intelligence is produced and the other ways of living the city that emerge.