CounterpointCaroline Bos

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pHenomenology and topograpHy of tHe megaCity

Caroline Bos of UNStudio counters the city theme of this issue of 3 with the spectre of the megacity. The very recent emergence and scale of the Asian megacity, she argues, requires a very different architectural treatment to the European or North American metropolis. It is one that should be understood through an experiential approach that brings to the fore spatial and visual relations between people, and people and things, asking, for instance, how so many strangers can be so visibly at home in public urban space.

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When considering the contemporary relationship between architecture and the city, the first thing to note is the significant emergence of the megacity a new and unparalleled urban event. Whereas in 1950 New York City was the only urban area with over 10 million inhabitants, there are now 26 megacities of which only four are in North America and Europe.1 The megacity cannot, moreover, simply be seen as just a larger version of the older metropolis. Many classical metropolitan configurations with a long evolutionary history in European culture, such as the market square, the church, and so on are not endogenous to an Asian megacity. This Counterpoint thus brings a focus on the megacity as a foil to the main theme of this issue that presents the urban, whether metropolis or megacity, as a singular entity that is ostensibly a site for architectural inspiration and experimentation. It not only acknowledges that the megacity requires a different interpretation to the European or North American metropolis, but proposes that we try to understand the megacity first and foremost through the way in which it is experienced, and only secondarily attempt to uncover where the architectural challenge or potential might be located. The subjective experience is chosen as the key issue because this is the one binding factor in a vastly intricate system of countless named and unnamed parameters making up the urban constellation. The first question that needs to be answered is, therefore: how are the experiences of the people in the megacity constituted?

In his famous essay The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903), Georg Simmel defined mutual strangeness as the essential metropolitan condition.2 In order to survive as individuals within their oppressive milieu, the inhabitants of

the metropolis seek inner refuge. Resistance, repulsion, even aversion are the natural state of mind of the city dweller. The text evokes an endless crowd of hostile individuals shuffling past each other while carefully avoiding any form of contact or engagement. Besides being dismal, Simmels portrayal is also familiar; this is how the Modernist, industrial European metropolis generally was understood and represented in the early 20th century.3 Phenomenology was the basis for that depiction; philosophically, life in the city was addressed by describing and analysing the subjective effects of moving through the city on a persons sensory consciousness.4 Studying the experiential quality of the megacity, just as in the Modernist image, entails a focus on the subjective perceptions of people in movement.

Today, partly inspired by Bruno Latour,5 I would propose an emphasis that moves away from social relations and their effect on the individual psyche towards visual and spatial relations and their effect on connective faculties. Put concisely, the phenomenological approach outlined in this essay is less about social expectations and sociability, and more about visibility. This visibility involves objects and structures too, as the carriers and enablers of visual and spatial connections. The proposed contemporary phenomenology thus addresses the spatial and visual relations between both people, and people and things, resulting in what can be described as a phenomenological topography. The specific factors being addressed are strangeness and estrangement. The process of urbanisation has currently resulted in 26 megacities or megacity regions in the world. Each accommodates huge cohorts of strangers,6 for if the metropolis is full of people

Men gaming in an old lane while wearing pyjamas, Shanghai, 2000below: At the time of the Expo 2011 in Shanghai, the Chinese authorities worked to eradicate public pyjama wearing. But the intimate apparel, worn while shopping, eating out or playing a game, provides an incomparable illustration of the extent to which an inhabitant can feel at home in a megacity.

Hairdressing salon in Nigerian market, 2003opposite: Colourful, social and at times subversive, street life in Asia and Africa should not be idealised. Street life does, however, provide events and makes daily life visible in the megacity.

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who are as unfamiliar with each other as they are with their surroundings, the megacity is infinitely more so. Almost half of those living in Mumbai, for instance, are (more or less) new arrivals. This megacity is estimated to have a population of over 20 million, more than double the size of 20 years ago, an increase that is mainly due to migration and urbanisation.7 The simultaneous territorial development and the growth of mobility have resulted in a temporal expansion of the public territory. The city user regularly spends hours at a time amidst strangers. This is a global phenomenon that affects megacities in particular. Yet spending so much time with masses of strangers in public space has not necessarily resulted in a proportional increase in urban angst.

People living in the urbanised, professionalised and monetised world have developed a new sense of being at home in public urban space, which can be coupled to another, much older, visceral sense of being at home in a natural environment. The sensory experience of being in movement and of spending time in in-between places is as familiar and recurrent as being in a single place, if not more so. Even, although difficult to quantify, in some ways this transient urban space offers greater continuity and stability than other worklife spaces. The territory between the places that are privately owned and demarcated for private use, the territory of transportation, and of public life, is always there, whereas the constancy of the home and workplaces is being eroded.8 We can therefore question whether alienation marks the megacity in the same way as it did the metropolis.

Among the immense differences between the metropolis

and the megacity, one of the most prominent is that the crowd image has traditionally been far less bleak in the latter. Public pyjama-wearing is an indication of the extent to which the people of Shanghai feel at home in their megacity.9 The informal occupation of public space is something that characterises life in the megacity and contrasts noticeably with the metropolitan phenomenology. In todays megacities, street life, while disappearing or transforming fast, in those places where it survives is still manifestly diverse, unrestrained, seditious, vibrant and engaging.10 There is no anomie in it. Wuhan in 2012 is not at all like Berlin in 1913. The inhabitants of the megacity do not perceive the looks of strangers as antagonistic, nor do the built structures surrounding them infringe upon their individuality. This is helped by the fact that the relationship between the private and the public is less immutable than in the metropolis, which is all black and white; the arena for an existential struggle of individual against mass.

The large amounts of time spent in public space in the megacity are striated by all manner of visual and spatial structures. Street life in the Asian megacity, as in its African counterparts, involves continuous movement, but also many places where a specific job is carried out in public: barbershops, tailors, canteens and miscellaneous vendors of small goods all provide visual and spatial punctuations within the flow. Thus, many small events occur that provide structure to the phenomenological topography and that impact upon the urban experience. In the megacity, with its ambient street life galvanised by private events and transactions, perception

Alison and Peter Smithson, Golden Lane Competition, Street-in-the-Air, 1952With the street in the air concept, the architects Alison and Peter Smithson wanted to stimulate sociability within the high-rise condition. Due to confusion as to whether this terrain was public or private, the anticipated liveliness was never realised. Limited spatial and visual connections and the confined nature of the streets significantly contribute to the lack of public accessibility that results in a private terrain.

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continuously slips from anonymity to disclosure. It is this slippage that makes the megacity livable. The mini-events are performed by connector-actors that change the focus of the observant passer-by. Alain Badiou defines event as a type of rupture which opens up truths.11 In this context, that means that the connector-actors orchestrate small phenomenological revolutions; all of a sudden the anonymity and distancing vastness of the city is broken up. As we see human life in close-up, it reminds us where we are; this megacity is, after all, an everyday place where everyday life is taking place. The strangers around us are shown up to be just like us.

This perceptional structuring does not play a role in Simmels account; he, and other authors of the modern condition describe a sweeping uniformity that is virtually unbroken by particular details or moments. The Modernist metropolitan perception is characterised by a linear, forward flow. Human motion resembles a procession, the gaze is confined by blank walls that direct and restrict the vision. The Modernist topography is one of straight lines and limited perspectives. Unlike in a landscape, people move through it as if their necks were screwed in place and their eyes unable to roll; everything is always about only what is straight in front of them. The reality of ambulatory vision means,12 however, that the optical array encompasses a vastly wider range. Visual perception includes being able to move towards things and walk around them, thereby gaining an all-around view of objects. The gaze can be focused or widened, continuous or diffracted. Even without moving the head, the ambient vision reaches much further than just pictorial depth vision.

Street life in the Asian megacity, as in its African counterparts, involves continuous movement, but also many places where a specific job is carried out in public: barbershops, tailors, canteens and miscellaneous vendors of small goods all provide visual and spatial punctuations within the flow.

UNStudio, slippage diagram, 2012Mini-events in the shape of people or things disclose moments of particularity within the flow of continuity.

UNStudio, horizontal diffraction diagram, 2012Spending much time on the move, the inhabitants of the megacity experience their environment through ambulatory vision. Other people and objects cause shifts in focal array, diffracting the linearity of the Modernist gaze.

UNStudio, vertical diffraction diagram, 2012The connector-actors of street life broach the vertical. The challenge for architecture is to provide events that diffract the gaze and provide visual and spatial connections as the megacity grows taller.

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The limited perceptions offered by Modernist architecture also impinged on the introduction of street life in the architecture of the 1950s and 1960s, even as it endeavoured to broach the vertical. The street in the air, originally conceived by Alison and Peter Smithson in 1952, was intended to bring street life to the tower block, albeit a rather sedate residential version of it, featuring prams and postmen and neighbourly chat. But due to the poor visual range it provided, the envisaged sociability never took off. The narrow linear horizontality of the modern street, lined by a straight wall on one side and an inaccessible vacuum on the other, did not provide adequate ambulatory variations, or vertical or diagonal connections.

The question now, as we finally arrive at the relation between architecture and the megacity, is: how can a new architecture do any better? This necessarily brief examination of the phenomenological topography of public life in the megacity has focused mainly on the perceptions produced by street life. These can be summed up as slippage and diffraction. Slippage occurs when private moments interrupt the public flow; diffraction concerns the break of the visual field away from the linear, horizontal perspective of Modernism. Slippage lets us discover the human reality within the crowd of strangers through the events performed by connector-actors. As mentioned above, these need not take human form alone. Street life pertains to the relations between people, but also between people and things, and people and their environment. Diffraction is the visual mechanism that enables us to experience slippage; the gaze is allowed to move

around freely and may fasten to the event taking place in the distance. The ambulatory vision can equally incur in events near, far, above, below, across; the spatial environment is designed to stimulate a full visual spectrum.

The challenge now is to instrumentalise this expanded perceptual understanding and make it resonate with an equally expanded urban topography. Architecture can play a vital role in this. As the megacity is sanitised, expanded and transformed according to globally normative standards, street life may survive in a new form, adapting to a changing environment, as long as its vital mechanisms are recognised and adequately reworked. New solutions for the structures within megacities must be based on an approach that is focused on improving the connections between people and structures in the city, taking into account changes occurring through mobility and time. The crux of this Counterpoint argument lies in the conviction that these new solutions will not emerge from architects seeking to understand architecture in structural or megastructural ways alone. The complex constellation of the megacity must be envisioned above all through the lens of its inhabitants, making phenomenological topography the prime consideration for architectural design. 2

UNStudio, Burnham Pavilion, Millennium Park, Chicago, 2009below: UNStudios temporary pavilion elaborated on the orthogonal setup of the city and park grid in response to Daniel Burnhams iconic masterplan of 100 years ago. Burnhams diagonal boulevards are extended by three roof openings that frame vertical views of the city skyline.

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Notes1. If the megacity is defined as an urban agglomeration of over 10 million people, there are currently some 26 megacities, of which almost half are in Asia. Source: www.city-infos.com/megacity/.2. Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life, Dresden, 1903, trans: www.blackwellpublishing.com/content/BPL_Images/Content_store/Sample_chapter/0631225137/Bridge.pdf.3. Other famous examples of urban dystopia: TS Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922; Ernst Ludwig Kirchners paintings of Berlin street scenes of the 1910s (see: Deborah Wye, Kirchner and the Berlin Street, Museum of Modern Art (New York), 2008; Fritz Langs celebrated film Metropolis, 1927.4. Louis Wirth, Urbanism as a Way of Life, American Journal of Sociology, 1936.5. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to ActorNetwork Theory, Oxford University Press (Oxford), 2007.6. Simmel describes a stranger as the person who comes today and stays tomorrow his position in the group is determined, essentially, by the fact that he has not belonged to it from the beginning. Georg Simmel, The Stranger, in Kurt Wolff (trans), The Sociology of Georg Simmel, Free Press (New York), 1950.7. Mumbai Human Development Report, 2009: http://passthrough.fw-notify.net/download/250107/http://mhupa.gov.in/W_new/Mumbai%20HDR%20Complete.pdf; www.indiaonlinepages.com/population/mumbai-population.html.8. See, for instance, Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, WW Norton & Company (New York), 1998.9. Gao Yubing, The Pajama Game Closes in Shanghai, The New York Times, 16 May 2010: www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/opinion/17gao.html.10. Michael Dutton, Streetlife China, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge), 1998. 11. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans Oliver Feltham, Continuum (New York), 2005. 12. The term ambulatory vision derives from JJ Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (Boston, MA), 1979.

Text 2012 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 136(t) James Marshall/Corbis; p 136(b) Inga Powilleit; p 137 Fritz Hoffmann/In Pictures/Corbis; p 138 Smithson Family Collection/Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN/Jean-Claude Planchet/Georges Meguerditchian; p 139 UNStudio; pp 1401 Christian Richters

UNStudio, Atrium, Galleria Centercity, Cheonan, South Korea, 2010Surrounding the central atrium of the Galleria Centercity, rounded plateaus provide light and views both within the central space and to the exterior. As the plateaus are positioned in a rotational manner, they enable the central space to encompass way-finding, vertical circulation and orientation, and act as the department stores main attractor.

The complex constellation of the megacity must be envisioned above all through the lens of its inhabitants, making phenomenological topography the prime consideration for architectural design.

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