[P2P-F] Fwd: Paracity Article

Mon Mar 17 17:34:09 CET 2014

I guess Matias ( and co ? ) may be on this list too.

I vaguely remember some similar kind of approach he studied for Mumbai
informal settlements,
some kind of scaffolding approach ?

I also remember Eric Hunting sharing, in some past conversations, links to
a ( japanese ? ) assembly system ? ( sorry for being vague, links get lost
in volume of information )

///

A Paper by Matias Echanove

http://www.mmg.mpg.de/fileadmin/user_upload/documents/wp/WP_13-13_Echanove.pdf

*This essay looks at the theoretical meaning and practical implications of
a much used and abused notion in urban planning and development circles,
that of 'informal** settlements'.*

more :

http://urbz.net/

http://urbanology.org/

///

Also, regarding construction with ( pre fabricated ) modules, since
plumbing is being mentioned, although more traditional / centralized / less
participative ,
I noticed
http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/02/features/high-speed-high-rise

On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 3:54 PM, Fabio Barone <holon.earth at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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 ..*
>>
>> P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
>>
>> <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates:
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>>
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>>
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