*Ruminative Adam Greenfield essay has Gothic High-Tech and Favela Chic oozing out of every digitally repurposed cranny.
http://urbanscale.org/2011/09/30/week-39-on-space-as-a-service/
(...)
"But in most of North America, any movement in this direction would clearly be cut short by the laws and, equally, the conventions that govern land use. We just don’t live this way here, and this understanding is strongly reflected in the regulatory apparatus that governs use of spatial resources — to the point that some folks listing their spare rooms on AirBnB are almost certainly in technical violation of their leases or HOA charters.
"Compare this to East Asian land-use practices, which tend to do a better job of exploiting available space qua space. My favorite bar in Shinjuku is an unmarked room on the fifth floor of an older commercial building; our old “mansion” in Ebisu supported apartments, offices, and various freelancers and niche businesses (including a light manufacturing shop and at least one out-and-out brothel).
"Or consider the Korean “city of bangs,” tantalizingly described in Jaz Choi‘s papers, in which commercial buildings are shot through with spaces that are subdivided into cells generally rented by the hour, and which function as platforms for various forms of socialization and conviviality. Here again, we see short-term use coupled to the idea of a private life lived out in public, generating an all-hours, street-level vitality that’s seemingly slipped away from most North American downtowns.
"A further instructive example, this one European, might be Kunsthaus Tacheles, the squatted former department store in the Mitte district of Berlin. Until its shuttering earlier this year, Tacheles supported the widest possible array of creative activity; unimpeded by any sort of regulation, the single structure functioned as a mothership for dozens of ad hoc artist’s studios, workshops, performance spaces, restaurants and bars.
"Anyone who ever spent so much as an hour on the grounds of Tacheles will remember a few things about the place: its energy, of course. The way it encouraged (and rewarded) curiosity. The multiple modes in and through which you could engage it and the people who made it what it was. The point isn’t that every place can or should be reimagined as a graffiti-bedizened hive self-managed on anarchist lines — though a boy can wish — but that particularly intensive mixed use gives rise to a vivid and resonant micro-urbanity that has to be experienced to be understood.
"Beyond the other benefits we’ve called out, it’s this classically metropolitan sense of living in a vibrant nexus of round-the-clock activity — whether generated by commercial or noncommercial means — that we’d like to underwrite in whatever it is that we wind up designing. We are, of course, exquisitely sensitive to the notion that deeply-seated practices of urbanity can’t simply be willy-nilly transplanted from one place to another. But maybe there are tactics and insights that can be gleaned.
"This might mean explicitly designing structures to support rapid transition between states of use — think of the highly adaptable shed Atelier Bow Wow built for the BMW Guggenheim Lab earlier this summer — or advocating for the careful relaxation of zoning regulations so the kind of adaptive genius we’re interested in can emerge from the bottom up. It’s our bet that the latter will prove to be a more useful model than the former over the long run…but, hey, why not let a hundred flowers bloom?
"Of course, the same process that unlocks whatever potential a building may have for intense, heterogeneous utilization can also permit otherwise interstitial spaces or pieces of urban infrastructure to be repurposed for active use. Here’s an old favorite, Shibuya Underpass Society — a restaurant and club built in the space under a railroad trestle.
"There’s a quality of contingency, of the temporary autonomous zone to most of these examples. Tacheles lived in a years-long state of abeyance, before finally being shut down this year. Co-Lab was only possible (or of interest to its financial backers) precisely because it squeezed some last increment of revenue from a place that was already due to be dynamited. While it somewhat unaccountably retains the name, Shibuya Underpass Society inevitably relocated to more permanent quarters, and its site has long since reverted to type. But we’re not sure any of this is necessarily a bad thing. Maybe what we ought to be trying to evoke, in any potential reframing of metropolitan experience, is precisely moments of intensity.
"4. Together, these suggest a requirement for some thinking about the minimal intervention necessary to establish occupancy of a place.
"This sense of contingency implies that, although you might be interested in devising spaces so that they support multiple kinds and levels of use, you certainly don’t want to spend a whole lot of time switching between them. Since we’re looking to achieve a quality of lightness and suppleness in our use of the available urban fabric, whatever measure we come up with ought not require anything beyond a minimum of physical reconfiguration.
"How little might it take to express a temporary claim on space, recognizably and consistently? I think of picnic blankets, Raumlabor Berlin’s super-lo-fi chairs, or the blue tarps Nurri documented in her Tokyo Blues project.
"It needn’t necessarily take even that much; one of my best-ever memories of Seoul was the time I watched two ajushi turn the stoop of a closed bank branch in Insadong into their living room for the space of a few hours, using nothing more than a go board and their styrofoam noodle cups...."
