[P2P-F] Fwd: Paracity Article

Mon Mar 17 15:54:34 CET 2014

While I see the idea of paracity very interesting,
a few questions arise:

- How will water and sewage be organized? It seems it's up to the
"occupants" to deal with
- It will result in a maze of stairs and access ways. Could be
fun/beautiful, but maybe difficult?
- Would it not result in a lot of dark spaces inside the cube?

But most importantly, I am interested in shedding light on this question:
- How can "organic" "p2p" "evolvable" "adaptable" city spaces be created
where there are no star-architects involved
or where no favorable city-planners are around?

I mean sort of a bunch of individuals decide they want to create such a
structure (let's for simplicity sake assume they have some basic funds for
that...).

I know that especially in Europe industrial areas in neglect / disuse could
serve this perfectly.
How about cities in Latin America, Asia or Africa, where these spaces are
not abundant
(that's where production takes place...)

2014-03-16 14:43 GMT-05:00 Michel Bauwens <michel at p2pfoundation.net>:

>
>
> ---------- 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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>
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