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Dream Spheres and Urban Development

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When she first told me her apartment complex was off NICE road I thought I heard ‘a nice road’. “Oh, great!” I replied, trying to show enthusiasm for surface pavement, “But what is the name?”

“NICE”, she said again, “The toll road, about 3 kilometers from Electronic City.”

There is a lot of ambiguity in India but I can’t say the same for subtlety, especially when it comes to new development. California County, Wall Street II, Prestigious White Meadows, Dream City…these are just a handful of communities I have come across in the past week.

Like many former British colonies, English street names and districts are common in urban India (e.g. Richmond Town, Frazier Town) but it seems, to me at least, that there might be a correlation between the liberalization of India’s economy and the rise in gated communities that make literal references to lifestyles specific to particular geographies. J. Naigar’s and John Stallmeyer’s excellent works on Bangalore helped me understand the city’s explosive growth, particularly in terms of human population and kilometers of land but neither prepared me for the flood of speculative real estate development I have encountered.

Some highlights below:

-Billboards testimonials. These are particularly popular along Bellary Road, from the airport into the city, but also on any toll road—such as the NICE ring road. These testimonials include a picture of an individual in some expressive gesture, such as a head cocked to one side. “I chose to relocate from _______ to Bangalore, and it was the wisest decision I’ve ever made.” A simple, straightforward affirmation. The logic of someone beyond middle age. It seems to recall Bangalore’s former identity as a ‘pensioner’s paradise’, namely because of the year-round good weather. The word is relocate, but the assumption is retire. Retire and invest.

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-Radio. “Ooh gawd, Shriti,” begins one radio ad I heard approximately every five minutes for one entire weekend, “I’ve missed the real estate expo and now I’m back to driving all across the city looking at places.”

“Don’t worry Ashita, the expo has been extended for one week more!” Like all classic infomercials, we are told to ‘hurry’ because this ‘opportunity’ ‘won’t last.’

Another personal favorite is one in which a metaphor between finding the perfect wife and finding the perfect property is utilized. By doing his research, and refusing to settle for anything less than perfect, the man gets both the woman and the two-bedroom flat.

Or, here are some favorite snippets from the August 23rd real estate section of the Times of India (Bangalore edition):

Toast, Cereals and Conversations: Nitesh Cape Cod is located just off the Sarjapur-Marathahalli Ring Road and within walking distance of leading IT offices.

-Niteshestates.com

Get ready to Start your Second Innings at your Own British Colonial Bungalow (sic): Fresh forest oxygen; Zero carbon footprint

-legacyhomes.in

Innovative aquafront: Where happiness Reflects. Exactly Facing the Lake

-innovativeconstructions.in

-Comment: This is not EXACTLY what I would call a Lake, nor is it exactly attractive.

Neo Bangalore—An Address you can flaunt about

Your property can help you fulfill your dreams, just like your family.

-HSBC

Even since my trip here last summer I feel what was a craze has now become an epidemic. That said, it’s hard to know what is aggressive advertising and what is reality. As an employee working in Electronics City, I’m amidst the target population of this advertising. And yet real estate has yet to become the topic of any lunchtime conversation. So is this ‘Exactly facing the Lake’ this ‘Toast, Cereals and Conversation’ a myth?

Regardless of whether or not Innovative aquafront actually faces a lake the reality of this city is uneven development. Bangalorians often talk about how just 20 years back all this area was scrubland. Aside from being called a pensioner’s paradise, Bangalore was also—and is still somewhat—referred to as India’s ‘Garden City’, an image the real estate industry loves to invoke. But can the legend of Bangalore’s garden paradise peacefully co-exist with the reality of high population growth? Can the city successfully attract people, development, and maintain ‘pristine natural surroundings’?

The directions for getting to my co-worker’s apartment were simple. After getting off the NICE toll road I was to turn left at the petrol station and continue down the winding road until I arrived at ‘Sabah Sunscape’.

 The thing was, after a few hundred yards from the petrol station the road went from paved, to dirt, and then back to paved. We passed cows, pockets of dense forest, and area cleared for future development. We came to a fork in the road. The driver stopped a man in a white dhoti who seemed to be walking without purpose. “Where is Sabah Sunscape?” he asked in Kannada. The man gestured straight with a good deal of indifference. After a few minutes we came to a gate and two high rises. I got out of the rickshaw and walked toward the security station on the other side of the gate and told the guard the name of my friend. He checked the roster and shook his head. No one of that name lived there. After a few minutes of debate we solved the problem. I was at Sabah Sunbeam, NOT Sabah Sunscape. I walked back to the rickshaw. We continued driving until we finally arrived at an even larger gate set between two concrete pillars. We had arrived at Sabah Sunscape.

 Later that night, coming back to Electronics City, I started to wonder what makes a city. If Electronics City does not include electronics manufacturing nor does it constitute an actual city, why does it have the name that it does? Electronics City is supposedly the ‘place’ that put Bangalore in the global marketplace, but for the first 15 years of existence it was considered to be outside the city. Now, Bangalore’s development stretches even further south. Was Sabah Sunscape and its environs really part of this Bangalore city? Historically, Bangalore has always been a low-density city. But that did not mean, I thought to myself, that some gated high-rise apartments located in the middle of nowhere could be part of the city, even if the city boundary will eventually give way and include it. Then again, what right did I, a child of Detroit, have to conclude what is urban and what is not?

Is urban the same thing as city? What is a city anyway?

Sometimes my grandfather likes to tell us about the first house he and my grandmother bought. The street on which the house was built wasn’t completed; they were the first homeowners on the block and because of this, my grandmother got to name the street. She chose ‘Devonshire’ because she thought is sounded very sophisticated.

It’s easy to be cynical of the HSBC quote about family and property, but the fact is that for many people this relationship and its connection to something loosely defined as a dream is very much a reality. Cities are also spaces/places of dreams, or where people go to fulfill something that might be described of a dream. Cities are constantly expanding in order to accommodate all those individuals, all those families, and all those dreams. So, I suppose when I think of it that way I can accept Sobha Sunscape as part of Bangalore and yet, when it comes to the reality of this piecemeal development, these self-contained bio-spheres of swimming pools and tennis courts cropping up in the middle of nowhere, claiming to have the amenities of both urban and suburban life I can’t help but think that these real estate dreams must be destroyed, as the future of the city depends on it.

Oslo Under Construction

Europe has many crane cities (Brussels immediately comes to mind) but, as I pulled into Oslo Sentralstasjon, I wasn’t expecting to see that horizon. Yet similar to many other major cities (e.g. London, Amsterdam, New York), Oslo is focusing on waterfront redevelopment. Also similar, the city seems committed to predominate global waterfront ideologies (e.g. young, successful, urban). In London and New York this is also called gentrification, speculative real estate, gated communities…. But can I assume the same in Oslo?

It’s well known that Scandinavian countries have some of the most expensive standards of living; this is justified because it’s not only the highest standard, it’s theoretically accessible to all. At least, that’s the stereotype. But last night, as I walked out onto the balcony of my temporary apartment—a housing project in the ‘immigrant’ neighborhood of Gronland—and looked at those skeletal structures I couldn’t help but wonder if Norway’s welfaresocialistcapitalist something made this waterfront redevelopment different from, say, Williamsburg.

During my short, 36 hours here, I’ve come to think that just because Norway has some of the highest taxes in the world does not mean it’s any less capitalist, or any more egalitarian than the rest of the world—and the same can be said for their waterfront development projects.

I write this as roughly 30 percent of public sector employees go on strike for the first time in nearly three decades. Roads are shut down, the airport has no security, and I cannot get into the Architecture Museum. The strikes are in protest of the government’s decision to increase public sector wages by 3.75 percent. Although 3.75 percent sounds pretty good to me, union officials argue that this increase doesn’t match average private sector wage increases, which are thought to be closer to 4.3 percent.

Many people I’ve spoken to here say that Norway remains unaffected by the global economic downturn. Maybe that’s why 3.75 percent is offensive. Certainly being unaffected by the recession helps explain why these cranes are active (as opposed to Williamsburg, where they remained static for nearly two years). It also helps explain why Oslo is investing in a second major waterfront redevelopment (Akerbrygge being the first, with an expected completion in 2014)—because there’s a demand for it. Quoting the city’s Master Plan “Recent years have seen a growing preference for dwelling close to the city centre, one reason being that young adults represent a large demand group. This group has less need for large dwellings and outdoor areas than families with children,”(10).

I’m told this waterfront construction includes over 1200 new housing units (this is aside from all the housing construction in Akerbrygge). That is a huge housing increase for any redevelopment project, but particularly huge for a city whose total population is less than a million (over if one includes the metropolitan area). Population projections done by the national government anticipate Oslo’s population to grow from roughly 599,000 (2011) to 786,000 by 2030. This growth is associated with a surge of immigration and children born to immigrant parents. Now, I cannot say this with certainty, but my gut tells me these architectural marvels along the waterfront are not some kind of welcome gesture to Norway’s future citizens.

Also in the city’s Master Plan it is explained: “responsibility for meeting the housing needs of particularly vulnerable groups is delegated to the city districts,”(11). In other words, this responsibility does not fall upon the city itself. I was unable to find any documentation (I’m restricted to English) about what responsibility the waterfront district (I believe it’s Sorenga) feels toward vulnerable groups and inclusive housing policies but, based on my gut response to the aesthetic, I would say very little. Furthermore, I’m uncertain about if and how this fits into my questions about Oslo’s public sector. Do they constitute a ‘class’, a ‘vulnerable group’? If ‘they’ wanted to live along the water could they?

I’m jumping the gun here, I might be mixing my apples with oranges, but I can’t help but wonder what Oslo’s story around class and space might be. Although I just got here, it is easy to see which neighborhoods are under dynamic transition. I’m told to check out Grunerlokka, the ‘Greenwich Village’ of Oslo where ‘the working class has been replaced by people who hardly know anything about manual labour.’ Grunnerlokka is full of fabulous shops, delicious cafes, and is monitored by UNIK—a group of people dedicated to keeping the area unique.  So although every male on the street is on a skateboard, pushing a stroller, or both, it’s pointless to point the finger at the cool, the beautiful, and the hip as the source of the problem.

And the same can be said of developers. A city needs development if it’s to continue as a city. A city also needs wealth if it’s to support things like affordable housing, free school lunches, good health services. However, it’s less obvious how this plays out when each district is individually responsible for housing vulnerable groups.

Redistribution of capital and patterns of finacialization are all phenomenon that cause spatial shifts in cities throughout the world. My guess is that even in a country with a strong social support system, little if any of Oslo’s new waterfront housing construction will be below market rate. Rather, the anticipation is that as the waterfront develops, Norway’s upper crust will move in, which in turn opens housing in other areas of the city. The waterfront will never be Grunnerlokka, just as Battery Park City will never be Williamsburg. That’s okay, different people want different things regardless of being capitalist, socialist, or whatever. But what happens when someone does not have access to spaces and places because of their social, economic, racial, or ethnic position?

The concern I have can be summarized as passive aggressive exclusionary zoning. Not zoning in the sense of residential, commercial, and manufacturing. Zoning as in zoning out classes, races, and ethnicities.

For example, while on a tour through the fjords around Oslo I was continually reminded about how inaccessible the ability to ‘escape’ the city is for many residents. Most idyllic islands around Oslo are privately owned, or are a collection of privately owned summer houses that form a conglomeration of private property. Almost all of them are accessible by private boat only. With no ferries going to these locations, it is impossible to visit, to participate in the pleasures of the city’s most beautiful landscape. Here, I’m reminded of Robert Moses and the New York City beaches—by strategically limiting public transit, beaches that were technically public became private as only people with automobiles could reach them. This is an example of passive aggressive exclusionary zoning.

If a beer and falafel seem expensive to me then I’m obviously going to be a terrible judge of this city’s livability. The city’s plan, as far as urban planning documents go, seems as egalitarian and inclusive as could be. Walking around I note the diversity of the city, that it’s not as pristine as I imagined it to be (a good thing), and that, like many cities, power, money, and utopian dreams of future aesthetics are visible to the naked eye.

View from the train station

View from my apartment

Second major development

View of Akerbrygge from the waterfront

Trying to get into the Architecture Museum

Information:

Oslo’s Waterfront Planning Office

Waterfront Communities Project

Norway’s Department of Statistics

Some Thoughts on Transportation Education II

Every year I watch the Superbowl I’m reminded about what’s wrong with American….every…well, no, let me keep it simple: with American transportation ideology.

I mean our obsession with the car.

Let me be specific. The purpose of every car commercial during the Superbowl is to inspire men to own (and drive) motor vehicles. This inspiration is steeped in American idealism, such as freedom and (masculine) individuality while simultaneously suggesting that by owning a car, you (white male) are also serving a greater cause, for example, your loved ones (read Subaru) or your city (read Chevy).

Take the Chevrolet Sonic….how much money are they spending on their “Let’s Do This” campaign? Remember the infamous bailout of the automotive industry? If this industry needs a few million so that we the consumer can watch cars enjoy leisure activities like sky diving and bungee jumping surely we can put some money into some kind of public transit advertising that involves more than just updating riders as to when service is suspended. Or, at the very least, give some money to the People Mover so they can update their website.

Will public transit ever get enough money to create ads that stir our emotions to the same degree as the motor industry?

“Thank you for riding with MTA” is New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority’s slogan. What car company would ever use such a phrase?  Seduction rarely begins with a thank you; it’s obvious that public transit systems are suffering from low self-esteem, which, as we all know, is a major turn off. Or look at the People Mover’s “WE’LL TAKE YOU THERE!” (note all caps is their choice), somehow, it’s just not as riveting as the Sonic’s “Let’s do this” approach to moving from point a to b. Why? Because while the later suggests that the ride is going to be an experience, the former suggests that, with enough patience, you’ll get to where you need to go.

Do our transit authorities need more money or just better PR?

I think they probably need both, but, more importantly, they need Hollywood. Hollywood needs to make a great film that involves public transit. When’s the last time you’ve seen an American film with a good train scene? The kind that stirs you to abandon your car and take public transit with the hope that, by doing so, something amazing, extraordinary could possibly happen to you (note the movie Speed DOES NOT count). Sure there are some great films that involve train adventure–but I don’t think any of these are American and they usually oscillate between childish fantasy (e.g. taking the train to Hogwarts) and violence (e.g. opening scene from Man Bites Dog). So, what I’m asking, dear reader who is in graphic design, mass communication, advertising, Hollywood, and/or has a lot of money, please make an amazing public transit commercial for Superbowl 2013.

Material Proximity

Where does sculpture end and geography begin? That was the unshakable question that developed in my head during a recent trip to the Noguchi Museum in Queens.

A few days prior, I’d been reading Derek Gregory’s Ideology, Science and Human Geography chapter “Structural explanation in geography,” a discussion of Maus and Levi-Strauss’s elementary methods of structural analysis by way of Gould’s argument that it is not the uniqueness of spatial organization, but the numerous similarities amongst spatial patterns that should be considered. After laying the appropriate groundwork, Gregory asks the following:

“Does this mean, then, that spatial structures are simply a product of a universal way of looking at the world–that their basic forms are no more than the limited combinations allowed by the mind’s inner logic of classification?”(104).

Why do I bring it up? Because visiting the Noguchi Museum did more than answer this (okay, probably rhetorical) question, it rendered it almost entirely irrelevant.

“Sculpture,” said Noguchi, “is about a relationship that has nothing to do with message, but people’s place in the world. It is something to be experienced, not just looked at.” Here, we are confronted with the dilemma of human geography. How do you represent cognitive experience? In other words, how do you reproduce the unreproducible?

Geography isn’t just the visual representation (i.e. mapping) of people and objects in the world, it is about giving structure to it.”The geometry of location is also the geometry of explanation,”(Gregory, 74).

In my opinion, what makes Noguchi’s work so breathtaking is it embodies both the universal and the particular. Although we cannot ‘read’ these objects, they are in many ways a geometry of location and explanation. The sculptures embrace the beauty of chance [1] and horror of deliberation [2]. These are forms that arise from contradiction, not dichotomy and leave us with a hint of a Burkeian sublime.

That sublime is, in many ways, extremely personal [3]. Although Noguchi’s work is most probably described as ‘modern,’ his sculptures and landscape designs do not subscribe to some kind of International Style de-emphasis of place. Unlike his contemporaries, Noguchi doesn’t pretend to eliminate himself from the work. Why? Well, to borrow from Gregory, it is because “Spatial order….reside[s] inside the mind and not inside the landscape,”(104) Or, as Olsson believes, because spatial order can “reveal more about the language we are talking in than about the things we are talking about“(53).

I believe Noguchi recognized that to eliminate the self (i.e. the subject) would produce a formless (i.e. meaningless) object, and let’s be clear, abstraction and formlessness are not the same thing.

In 1927, Noguchi moved to Paris to study with Constantin Brancusi. Although he admired Brancusi’s ability to distill as opposed to reproduce form, Noguchi was wary of Branscui’s prophecy (“You are the generation that begins with abstraction”). During the decades in between the wars, Noguchi continued to embrace portrait sculpture, worked with Diego Rivera on murals in Mexico City, and took advantage of the many place-based commissions he was receiving, like the Associated Press Building Plaque at Rockefeller Center.

His deliberate turn to abstraction occurred after moving to the Poston, Arizona internment camp for Japanese-Americans in May of 1940. It was a voluntary move, Noguchi hoped to improve the experience for internees through the teaching of art. However, his success was limited. In a letter to Man Ray (May 30th, 1940) he writes:

This is the weirdest, most unreal situation–like a dream–I wish I were out. Outside, it seems from the inside, history is taking flight and passes forever.

The following November he left Poston. No longer interested in “message-laden work,” he moved to New York, established a studio in MacDougal Alley, and began working on his first illuminated sculptures.

In 1960 he moved to Vernon Boulevard, Queens in order to be near the marble and stone suppliers. He eventually bought the old photengraving plant which is the now the museum.

Noguchi was a man interested in “how to transform but not destroy,”(Noguchi) the material he was working with. This is, in many ways, also the task of the geographer. In both we see what Levi-Strauss describes as the attempt to establish where nature ends and society begins. While one is perhaps more literal than the other, both play off one another and remind us that yes, perhaps Gould is correct.

[1] He often described his work as “a record of accidents” and would leave a piece alone for years in order to ‘heal’ and allow its beauty to re-emerge on its own. “Let stone be stone” he would say.

[2] At the same time he was also accused of “excessive polish.”

[3] Noguchi was also infamous for keeping his best work for himself, something that infuriated many of his dealers.

Gregory, Derek. Ideology, Science and Human Geography. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1978.

Gould, P. ‘Some Steineresque comments and Monodian asides on geography in Europe,’ Geoform, vol. 17, pp. 9-13.

Olsson, G. ‘The dialectics of spatial analysis,’ Antipode, vol. 6, no. 3, pp.50-62.

Utrecht: Stad Naar Mijn Hart

My encounter with Utrecht has been nothing short of serendipitous. What started as a spontaneous trip to the Schroderhuis (1924) morphed into Rietveld’s Universe and a delightful ode to Dick Bruna.

“Architects aren’t supposed to lower space,” mused Schroder in a documentary reflecting on her relationship with Rietveld. But Rietveld wasn’t an architect in the traditional sense. Coming from a family of furniture makers, Rietveld began expressing space through furniture design with his red and blue chair (1918), a form of primary colors and geometric representation.

The Schroder house was to be an experiment of form (“You have a lot less worry if you keep things simple”) and helped cohere what came to be known as De Stijl, a movement/style based on two almost contradicting ideas: rational abstraction.

Seeing the house in real life, one is immediately struck by  the small scale  and primitiveness of the actual design. This is not the modernism of today–when  we speak of clean lines and smooth surfaces we take things such as central heating for granted. When people like Jan Wils and Rietveld began experimenting with early concepts of modernism they still had to reconcile how to heat a home with large, angular, unadorned windows.

The house looks  like a toy in relation to the streetscape, to the right is an entire block of vernacular Dutch architecture, to the left is a four-lane overpass. In the documentary, Shroder explains that the lot just outside the house was where truckers would often pull over to piss.

Schroder played a very active role in the construction of the house. She and her family moved in before it was completed, testing the livability of the design. Some years later, Schroder and Rietveld teamed up again to try and address some of Holland’s mid twentieth century social housing issues. Like the Schroderhuis, these apartment blocks offer a surprisingly quiet, almost organic alternative to the severity that often associated with early modernism.

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