Two Paradoxes about Moltitude.
by Stefano Boeri

1. Polyphonic Images

When today architects attempt to construct a sufficiently consensual and shared representation of the spaces of contemporary city, this cannot avoid the inclusion of a dissonant multiplicity of points of view.

To describe the urban environment in a convincing, synthetic way, today we most allow space for the voices of multiple subjects and interpretation angles without trying to condense them into a single meta-discourse, a single great narrative.

I believe that if managed with awareness, this dissonance is absolutely necessary to help us approach an understanding of the spatial quality of contemporary city. The polyphonic effect we can achieve by combining multiple viewpoints in a single discourse -a sort of background noise, a basso continuo - is, in fact, that which best resembles the sense of contemporary urban space.

The impossibility of producing a synthetic image of a city without making use of multiple montages and sensory experiences is not only due to the complexity of elements which stand in the physical environment, but is also the outcome of the agility of our viewpoint as city dwellers: our habit of successively using over the course of one single day the multiple identities that we lodge within ourselves.

Indeed, with respect to one and the same space, we can alternately be distracted commuters, curious connoisseurs, passing tourists, or regular occupants. And this plurality of roles activates multiple codes in the signification of space. We often link different and distant spaces -for example a shopping centre and a tourist-oriented historical centre- only because we project the same signifying codes upon them. Conversely, similar and neighbouring spaces sometimes appear incomparable to us, only because we reach them passing through very different perceptual sequences.

The impossibility of producing a synthetic image of the city is also connected with the fact that today the perception range of urban spatial quality is much wider. Today we compose different individual perception experiences within homogeneous bands: veritable editings of perception sequences. And these bands, even more than single static images, are the elements that construct our identity as erratic citizens of the urbanised territory.

2 Atopical Variations and Molecular Differences

The new European urban environments present many of the common features of urbanisation, but are not produced by the growth of new nuclei or by the spread of an urban area in successive bands, rather by the apparently random aggregation of a multitude of solitary urban facts inflected according to a principle of individual over-representation.

Awkward new nebular cities stretched across the surface of territories, invisible to topographic maps, by time enveloping ancient towns, ruled by thousands of ordering principles and deprived of a dominant central location, where a limited range of constructions types, inflected according to recurrent modalities, tests every possible combination.

These territories crossed by a wave of similar but solitary manufactured products, urban environments with completely new forms, invisible to an aggregate, synoptic gaze, host a second paradoxical phenomenon: a sphere potentially heading toward homologation, where new constructions are beginning to overlap and cover up the ancient differences between the city’s various parts.

Over the last twenty years a multitude of building tremors produced as a consequence of the individualistic choices made by families, small firms and clans have run through the offshoots and interstices of south European cities, occupying the countryside, fusing together centres that were once detached and spreading over coasts and valleys.

Cities that no longer have edges, that look today like nebulas dotted with a swarm of buildings standing in isolation or heaped together incongruously. The new urban dimension that has been laid over the top of the modern city, though without cancelling it out, reflects a society where the number of people and forces capable of modifying space has increased enormously.

And this in turn has radically altered the relationship between the principles of difference and variation that had been codified in the texts of urban morphology thirty years ago.

Today the principle of difference no longer acts between big and homogeneous city parts –the nineteenth-century city and the Renaissance one, the public spaces of the periphery and the great industrial zones – but between the individual molecules of an urban organism that has expanded enormously: between the suburban house and the adjoining shopping centre, between the terrain vague and the adjoining block of apartments, between the car wash and the industrial shed with attached residence, between the bypass and the small area of farmland.

In the same way, the principle of variation no longer operates within broad urban sections (as a declining of the individual components of the city block, or of the linear fabric), but through surprising jumps and extemporary solutions among the few categories of ‘urban features’ that make up the emerging city: the variation is reduced to innumerable adaptations that can be assumed – in different territories – by the single-family house or block of apartments or container for a leisure (facility/commercial) undertaking.

 in the contemporary city the principle of variation functions as an internal inflection for each typology of building: the detached houses, the hangars, the shopping centres, the small apartment blocks, the parking lots, the office buildings. No longer an internal inflection of the units of a homogeneous geographical area (as in the past), but an inflection of the distinctive characteristics of a class of constructions haphazardly scattered across the territory.

An excess of versions, then, that does not produce typological inventions and that appears to reflect the need for over-representation of the individual in a society made up of a plethora of minorities, loath to accept unitary and aggregated designs.

A society that has democratically constructed a territory that resembles itself and that the terms of structuralist discourse – with their emphasis on Monuments, Homogeneous Parts and Fabrics – are no longer even capable of describing, let alone govern.

The complexity of the contemporary city, the difficulty to represent it is due to the fact that the new patterns of differentiation and variation have not cancelled the old ones, but they are interwoven within existing ones, making it difficult to decipher the syntax of the new urban dimension.

3 New Combinational Principles

As we have seen, the "grammar" of the new city is built up of many elementary phrases, rather than articulated statements of clearly distinguishable types.

This is the effect of the invasion of a multitude of solitary and agglutinated built objects produced by individual social circumstances that occupy different time-frames, diffused throughout the entire inhabited space and nesting in its folds, constructing new landscapes and modifying the meaning of existing ones. These standardised "urban facts" often derive from an all-pervasive model—like the single-family house in the centre of the parcel, the shopping centre surrounded by its parking lots, the pedestrian historical centre—rather than from a given building tradition or from communicative practices rooted in local history. For this reason it has become increasingly difficult to subdivide the territory into parts which can be clearly distinguished by their form, by prevalent modes of habitation, or by symbolic values.

But a multiple interpretation of the contemporary European city reveals us a territory, which is not chaotic. And this is the third paradox of Europe cities we have to focus.

If we consider the physical change in its contemporary action, if we observe the different ways in which the territories of our extended cities are changing, we can recognise rules, and frameworks, however weak and scarcely visible they may be, in the relationships between space and society.

And we shall thereby understand that the urban European contemporary territory brings together a multitude of individual, non-synchronous tremors within few regular movements -distinct in rhythm, duration and intensity- of material. Each of these regular movements is replicated in different and distant spaces and reveals, in the tension flowing in the physical material and its jolts, a certain specific organisation of the social relations and decision-making processes. The map of these patterns of change thus tell us about some of the recurrent structures of society, and shows us that the change within the contemporary European urban sphere is no longer radiating out from a center or focal point, as more conventional interpretations would seem still to suggest.

These modes of change by homogeneous patterns are transversal and atopical; they involve highly heterogeneous urban landscapes and sketch the image of a fragmented society nevertheless organised and functioning according to sub-systems. A society in which a limited number of powerful sectorial modes of reasoning and a limited number of decision-making sets take in and represent thousands of individual stimuli. What may seem, in the new south European urban areas, to be the limitless juxtaposition of diverse objects, is in fact a complex mechanism produced by the intersection and overlapping of miryad sub-systems which internally are perfectly functionant but often incapable of entering into relationship with one another.

Thus behind the aesthetic chaos produced by the apparently incongruous juxtaposition of monads attentive only to their own individual trajectories, we witness the appearance of an entirely different phenomenon: the excessive power of a few principle of order.

In short, the "syntax" of the new cities consists of few rules of organisation and a multitude of phrases; it is an impoverished language making ever-repeated use of only small parts of its rich vocabulary.

4 Unpredictable Tremors

The European territory is nowadays an extraordinary field of study and experimentation: a palimpsest of heterogeneous environments, where the new urban condition operates as a powerful matrix, meeting less obstacles than elsewhere in spite of the innumerable pre-existing structures with which it has to deal. It is a landscape at the mercy of uncontrolled and eccentric forces, which have undermined many parts of it, but one that is also the cradle of experiences of urban life offering a glimpse of the future. Alongside the chaotic invasion of single-family residences, the geographic imperialism of the great commercial enterprises and the standardisation of historic cities to meet the demands of tourism, we can find highly advanced forms of ethnic cohabitation in some historic centres. In the diffuse city we encounter modes of living that have been freed from functional specialisation and we discover panoramas of unconscious beauty in the random points of contact between historic locations and infrastructures.

It is an original model of the city, different from that of the United States as well as that of Asia, which at times can look disheartening, at others fertile, but always incredibly heterogeneous.

I really think that the new themes for the architecture practice are all there: the capacity to intervene in mechanisms of individual variation, the care of new and temporary community spaces, the attempt to use the economic power of certain building processes to produce a symbolic added value that redeems them from their egotism.

But a new paradigm for interpretation of the emerging city is needed, one that can take the place of the one we have inherited from the sixties.

And this paradigm has to face the new dynamics of Variations and Differentiations and the question of uncertainty. 

One of the major problems that one faces when having to design the future of big urban areas in Europe, is the incredible amount of interlocutors (namely, families, small businesses, sectorial associations…) that today have the financial and juridical means to change the space making the planning process extremely complex, because less predictable. The quantity of solitary scattered objects that today surround all Europe’s main cities is also the result of the democratisation of the decisional process that has made it almost impossible to build certain previsions for the future of a vast urban area.

As we have seen, the dust cloud of massed free-standing buildings that now characterises the borders of the large cities of Europe have risen from an endless repetition of structures with a limited vocabulary of expression.

Yet, this it is not a phenomenon of homologation. This dust cloud is also the product of local societies that have seen a great increase in the number of parties capable of modifying the surrounding spaces, which they do in contravention of every rigid, abstract and indifferent regulations and in defiance of the elite market of "high profile" architecture. Such people, while agreeing to replicate few housing models, are fiercely protective of their individuality.

Penetrating the hybrid fabric of these new landscapes, we can recognise the traces of a society capable of introducing some powerful variation and difference mechanisms into their dominant repetitive and homogenising tendency. A society capable of using a "reduced" building vocabulary to represent, in surprisingly variegated forms, its roots in a specific place out of the many microcosmos that compose it.

From an architectural viewpoint, this means two effects:

first, it means that we must analyse this capacity to individualise a short list of standardised models; second, that this means that we have to erase a tradition of “urban projects” that try fix on paper the future of big territorial portions, thinking that it is possible to fully predict and control the development process. Projects that are founded on the illusory notion of the “context”, intended as a continuos and static spatial dimension. Projects that believe that to determine the development of a territory it is enough just to design all that is within the extremes of the field of observation.

Traditionally, we have been accustomed to thinking that for the creation of a project one must first undertake a thorough work of analysis. This leads to the fact that the architectural projects are often overloaded with enormous responsibilities, derived precisely from this vast analysis of the territory where the projects are to be located; superficial, extensive analyses are transposed into superficial, extensive designs, in which an excess of design (based on the perceived need to design all that which is considered “context”) produces, in the end, ambitious, overbearing hypotheses; in short, useless ones.

We have probably to start from the opposite idea; that it is not possible to anticipate nor predetermine totally the future order of the southern Europe contemporary cities; and that it is instead important to decide a few basic conditions, capable of igniting some evolution processes of the economic and cultural life of the city.

We must develop circumscribed solutions, projects of limited spatial extension, yet capable of generating successive and unpredictable transformation paths.

Autonomous devices which, as in a screenplay, are not related one to the other in a deductive way; we have to predict their single feedback and to establish -by using a kind of stereometric strategy - a better condition for the continuation of the process.

Weimar, 16.10.99