[P2P-F] Fwd: Paracity Article

Sun Mar 16 20:43:24 CET 2014

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Eric Hunting <erichunting at gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 12:20 PM
Subject: Paracity Article
To: Michel Bauwens <michel at p2pfoundation.net>

Here's my attempt at a short article introducing the Paracity project. Let
me know if you think it's useful.

Eric Hunting
erichunting at gmail.com

Paracity -- An Urban Organism

http://casagrandetext.blogspot.fi/2014/03/paracity.html

Paracity is a new project of Marco Casagrande which promises to be one of
the first full scale demonstrations of a practical peer-to-peer urbanism.
Taking advantage of a unique situation on the Danshui River Island in
Taipei, Paracity explores a notion of positive urban parasitism, using a
novel, freely adaptive, modular, volumetric structural skeleton serving as
an urban 'backplane' that can subsume otherwise neglected/devalued urban
environments, in this particular case an area prone to frequent flooding.
Based on a fairly large span cubic structural grid made of cross-laminated
timber, this backplane accommodates adaptation and habitation by retrofit,
allowing for several possible tiers of social participation in the habitat
from the high-level peer-managed deployment of the backplane structure and
its key infrastructure elements to the more spontaneous and personalized
retrofit deployment of individual dwellings, industry, and commerce. Here
we see a totally evolvable urban habitat able to almost spontaneously
accommodate any potential change in situation, environmental conditions,
urban and domestic technology, and baseline standard of living without the
strife associated with an anachronistic presumption of architectural
permanence leading to ready obsolescence. This is 'city' as a verb. A
freely evolvable urban organism with a declared evolutionary imperative of
transitioning older urban habitats toward sustainable integration with the
natural environment. A Post-Industrial habitat growing on the compost of
Industrial Age urbanism.

I find this project concept quite exciting because it incorporates many
concepts I have been proposing and exploring for a long time. This is an
urban development concept based on truly 21st century sensibilities,
questioning the dominant presumptions about property, space, the role of
architecture, and the role of inhabitants as creators and managers of their
own habitat that characterize the inherent dysfunctions of contemporary
cities. I have always wondered why cities are not designed with the
practical sensibility of the network/data center--with a recognition of the
simple reality that they persist as an application--an activity--in a
constantly changing medium of hardware and technology. We are no longer
limited by primitive construction technology with no means to adapt. Why
then are cities commonly, physically, designed to dogmatically resist the
constant evolution that is their very life-blood? It is this very
resistance that is the root of their dysfunctions. The modern city is not a
collection of architecture. It is not a physical thing. It is an
epiphenomenon. An attractor to an emergent form, like consciousness is to
the brain and like an operating system is to a cluster of computers.

Paracity's architecture is most interesting in how it lays bare this
paradigm. One might accuse it of being, superficially, a throw-back to the
'plug in' architecture of the '60s, and perhaps this is one of the reasons
for a choice of a more organic primary structural material rather than the
steel frame and concrete systems of the past. But it is more like one of
those transparent 'visible body' models that turns our perspective
inside-out by bringing its urban backplane out into the open as an overt,
visible, architectural feature to be embraced for its bounty of adaptive
use possibilities. This habitat revels in its nakedness and its perpetually
unfinished state.

The personal computer ran into an evolutionary rut at the time when it had
the most diversity of systems architectures, their very deliberate and
often pointless incompatibilities wielded like clubs by corporate interests
vying for monopolistic control of market share. It was the old Industrial
Age mindset abusing a Post-Industrial technology with its quaint notions of
value and fuddy-duddy ideas about how money is supposed to be made. The
industry had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the realization that
market share was, in fact, keyed to interoperability rather than propriety.
That the personal computer existed in a non-zero-sum ecology and made more
profit the more you shared and cooperated. Today we have but a few, mostly
open, mainstream personal computer architectures and more physical
diversity in design, a more rapid pace of advance, and greater potential
for personalization and customization than was ever imagined possible in
the late 1970s and early '80s.

Relegated to an upper tier of peer organization largely independent of the
individual human-scale retrofit use, the modular backplane of Paracity is
not so much an overarching architectural scheme as it is a genome in which
an unlimited number of urban situations can be 'sequenced', expressed, and
evolved. It imposes order and standardization to facilitate its ease of use
and change, but doesn't impose any individual designer's ego over the
aesthetic of the habitat. It is not megalomaniaclemegabuild. It's Lego.

If realized, I think Paracity has the potential to be a breakthrough on
many fronts. The community planned for Taipei promises to be a great
opportunity for exploring peer-to-peer urbanism and the cultivation of a
Post-Industrial culture rooted in the new technologies of alternative
energy, sustainable resource use, urban farming, and independent production
and economy. Being right in the midst of one of the world's most important
and cosmopolitan cities, the catalytic potential is great. It could be an
opportunity for people from around the world to converge on the
experimentation and demonstration of a very new urban lifestyle without the
hassles and hardships of retreating to the remote edge-of-wilderness
locations so many intentional communities are relegated to. And it offers
the prospect of creating a package of systems--a vernacular--that, like an
urban version of OSE's Global Village Construction Set, can be freely
disseminated through the medium of the internet and applied most anywhere.
By virtue of the kind of technology used--the standardization and ready
reproducibility and repurposing of this urban backplane--one could
contribute to this project in many ways from anywhere in the world. This is
most definitely a project to keep an eye on.

-- 
*Please note an intrusion wiped out my inbox on February 8; I have no
record of previous communication, proposals, etc ..*

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