Cycles of succession: nature - urban ABSTRACT. Public spaces have been under a lot of pressure in the late decades as a lot has changed in the traditional understanding of the city and its function. This paper argues that public space is about sharing, community, and thus duration and tradition, continuance and belonging. To rebalance exaggerated mobility and denaturalization of our surroundings nature is rediscovered as a fraction, an element detached and redesigned in order to connect us with archetypes of the past. At the same time, a new kind of wilderness emerges where city and artificial landscapes are shrunk. Urban spaces are webbed to a narrative version of nature where time, duration, memories and projections are the tools in order to achieve a sense of belonging and community. Resilience, as a main issue for the design of public space, becomes the key in order to achieve continuance and ultimately preserve our presence.

KEYWORDS. public, duration, belonging, wilderness, nature

Polyxeni Mantzou* _ Xenofon Bitsikas**

* Democritus University of Thrace Department of Architecture, Library Building, Kimmeria 67100, Xanthi Greece.

email: pmantzou@arch.duth.gr Telephone: +306944843085 ** University of Ioannina Department of Fine Arts and Art Sciences, University Campus, 45110 Ioannina

Greece. email: xbitsika@uoi.gr Telephone : +306946538586

1. Expelled

Understanding our relation to nature through the construction of narratives and storytelling tools is an old habit. In the beginning, Adam is part of an Eden that he cannot perceive as something separate to him. At that point, the concept of nature doesn't yet exist, as all is one. And then, gradually, he is distanced from it, at first as he is treated in a privileged manner, and he is given the honor to name and thus to possess all that surrounds him (Foucault, 1997. 42-5) and later, as he becomes completely dissociated since he is expelled and at the same time, enforced to obtain conscience of himself, as unity and difference, and of his condition.1 This separation of the subject from what is already there, is a very long and stimulating process that has been lasting throughout the centuries. But it is also a very complex and full of twists and turns process that habitually intertwines yet again what has previously been meticulously parted and distanced.

Our cities and its public spaces are always subject to change and pressures for transformation, because it is not only its function that evolves but our understanding of it as well. This paper argues that the main characteristics of public space include sharing, community, and thus duration and tradition, continuance and belonging. The coexistence of the natural to the artificial urban can take many forms of expression. Historically, the natural was the vast, uncontrolled, undefined, inexorable extension that progressively has been tamed, controlled, defined and explored up to the point that is has lost all of its principle

attributes. The artificial urban that was understood as a spot in the vastness of the natural has itself become a vast ocean that surrounds natural islands, fragments of the nature of the past. To rebalance exaggerated mobility and denaturalization of our surroundings nature is rediscovered as a fraction, an element detached and redesigned in order to connect us with archetypes of the past. And then, at that point an inversion occurs as the urban is shrunk and the residual wastelands obtain a new kind of naturalized wilderness, making possible the coexistence of different moments layered and webbed and the prospect of future encounters of these alternate poles of the dipole.

Fig. 1.

2. Socialized

As Hannah Arendt has pointed, the existence of the public realm and the expected transformation of the world in a community of things that gathers people and connects them are based completely upon the aspect of duration. That is to say, if the world is going to include a public space, this public space cannot be built only for one generation and be thought only in relation to the living people: it has to exceed the temporal space of the life of the mortals. Without this transcending to a sort of earthy immortality, no politics, in its original meaning, no common world and no public space is possible. The common world is the space that we enter when we are born and we leave behind us after we die. This common world, the public space is what we share with those that came before us and those that will come after us. (Arendt, 1958. 55)

Continuance and prospect are important issues as public spaces have to be conceived in time, not as short cuts of a moving picture but rather as perpetual sequels. It becomes thus significant for the process of design to use the past and the memories of the site as a source of inspiration in order to achieve new relations and to prolong already existing relations. Accumulated narratives and stories, relate, that is, speak about, but at the same time, connect and interact subjects to space through the insertion of time. It is through history and continuance that it becomes possible to design anticipating change and evolution, focusing less on, final forms as forms can never be finalized. (Berritzbeitia 2007. 179). But even more importantly it is through related narrations that the sense of belonging becomes possible, because as the anthropologist Marc Auge has pointed out, non place is differentiated from place, due to the lack of history, identity and relation. (Auge, 1995. 83) Of course, functional narratives presuppose legibility, that is, capability of recitation, interpretation, decipheration. (Czerniak, 2007. 215) Design has to work upon the possibility of comprehension of its references and relation to its narratives, so that continuance can be possible. But it is not only legibility that is important for continuance. Czerniak, mentions another important aspect to take under consideration, that of resilience. Resilience is understood as “the ability to recover from or adjust to change that may perceived as “good” or “bad”(ibid 215-6), “to adjust in the face of challenging conditions” (ibid 216).The aspect of resilience is of extreme importance as design has to acknowledge the site’s history and dynamic but at the same time it has to be able to prepare the site for unforeseen developments. It is thus, necessary to assure constancy but at the same time permit change, to combine openness and armoring, to make possible change without dilution.

When history, identity and relation exist, when duration is present, there are no cutoffs and design is not understood as a production of still frames; then public space, common world and community become possible.

3. Crowned

In recent times rapid and generic changes have been observed in the development of urban fabrics. Public spheres have been emptied from the traditional public sector and frequently they are transformed to an undifferentiated space of transportation in the so called Generic City that Rem Koolhaas describes. (Koolhaas, 1995, 1248-64) The Generic City is no longer constructed in consonance to an overly-demanding public space but rather to a residual space. Public spheres are perforated from the continuous movements of people, materials and information. Movement is in this case the key to understanding. Not only transportation becomes crucial but also movement designates fluidity, a lack of

permanency and fixedness. Public spaces are pressured and frequently abandoned as there are no possibilities for community but solely for connection, temporary linkage that doesn’t allow the sense of belonging. The Generic City offers transitory non-places that are not only non-places but are also places of nobody, they forbid and ban any possibility of belonging and of identification.

As the city extends its limits, everything is urbanized. Nature is surrounded by manmade constructions and therefore denaturalized. Lars Lerup’s Stim and Dross and Alan Bergers’s Drosscape are expressions of this transformation of the future to a continuous construction, a constant flow and movement of people and things that makes impossible to monitor and perceive the surroundings as a landscape, as it is more the material for a landscape that has not yet been -if it is ever to be- established. The perception of the anthropogenic, the manmade in contrast to the natural is completely changed. Nature becomes in this context less natural and more noticeable than the artificial urban, which is everywhere and which is entrenched and assimilated. The manmade becomes natural to the contemporary subject’s eyes. The comprehension of all that surrounds us as potential material, as object of design, as site of construction, makes our position singular and almost uncanny. Everything responds to us and to our creations, the city becomes an enormous mechanism, capable of devouring everything at its reach and reaching everything that can be devoured. Nothing is fixed as this metabolic procedure transforms constantly the disposition of spaces.

As a complementary and equilibrating tendency the landscape issues are now more than ever in the center of the architectural interests. There seems to be a proliferating and deep need to create a new and strong relation to this fractioned nature contained within the cities. This is a rediscovered nature appreciated, respected and understood as part of the daily routine. The so called Nouvelle Nature that Girot pointed out is not the same as the old nature, shrunken, devastated and tamed under the pressure of the expanding artificial ground, this new nature’s purpose is to sharpen our senses and reconcile us with our surroundings through the emergence of a sense of belonging. This Second Nature that Andrian Geuze proclaims is equivalent to a second chance as well. A full of

Fig. 2.

character and magnetic attraction, field instigating new possibilities for as yet unknown colonizations. (Geuze, 2010.40-2) And it aspires in doing so, not by imitating the nature of the past but by assimilating its separate and unique condition. But nevertheless, this new nature connects us to the historical tradition of the city, that is, as an island floating in an ocean of nature, through an inverse image, that of an island of reconstructed nature floating in the ocean of artificial, manmade surroundings.

The human subject is placed at the center; everything seems to respond to it, its needs and its priorities. Nature is not only tamed and dependant, protected and conserved, designed and constructed by mankind but in a paradox way interiorized.

4. Overthrown

The distinction between artificial and natural is based on an acceptance influenced by the shifting condition of our surroundings. Jose Luis Pardo has defined as natural that that is exterior and prior to us. Nature has to be prior and posterior to us, has to be independent and distant to mankind. (Pardo,1992. 83) In this case, it

becomes evident that nature is a dynamic perception that is dependant of the context and that cannot be designated and described accurately without taking under consideration the specific space and time conditions. In order for something to appear as natural it has to be usual, ordinary, part of our everyday surroundings.

Mankind has without doubt colonized the earth. Even in the few corners of earth where there is no occupation and immediate man doings, there is always an obvious process of demarcation or measurement. The concept of virgin nature becomes therefore more metaphor than reality. (Geuze, 2010.42) Jean Baudrillard has commented on this metaphor when analyzing Biosphere 22, an artificial paradise where everything natural is preserved and where all is purified, finding similarities between this

restricted experiment and the real future. (Baudrillard,1995. 130-7) Biosphere 2 converts Biosphere 1, its prototype from reality to possibility, nature is just an option. (Mantzou, 2000.14) The illusion of a virgin nature is a powerful imagery but it is unavoidably limited to that, to an image, an iconic approximation which is drained and cleared of all those originally unquestioned attributes, such as wilderness, vastness, unpredictability, danger and becomes now a representation of itself, a mimic, a model. And as nature is depicted as accumulated images, consumable and destined to recreation and tourism, in other words, a sterilized version of the virgin nature of the past, which becomes a commodity, the urban fabric is also transformed.

Fig. 3.

Transformations of the demographic facts as well as of the prominent productive sectors lead to shrinking cities, voids, wastelands that trigger alterations of urban organizations. The circle seems to close; deurbanized areas, abandoned and characterized as “landscapes of contempt” become wild uncontrolled and unpredictable areas that assume the attributes of the virgin nature of the past. But this wilderness resonates with fear-filled connotations, as it is a process that is not under control and appears as threatening although it can also be understood as the becoming of a new nature, the true nature of the city, wild, uncontrolled and unpredictable. (Rink, 2009. 276) Only in the case where wilderness comes as a result of shrinkage related to urban restructuring, it is seen positively and it is accompanied by adjectives such as “controlled” or “cultivated”. (ibid) And then again the circle goes on and on, but in layers like a spiral, because the wilderness of the wastelands is often the scenario for a renatularization, a second chance for the nature that works like a tool that allows the domestication of the wild urban residuals. Dylan Trigg (Trigg, 2004) suggests that decaying sites conflate the past with the present and presence with absence and in this state, they challenge our linear understanding of space and time. Parks and green spaces are in many cases the apparatus used in order to tame these wild urban wastelands by transforming them to ecological reserves, to pieces of a nature long lost and greatly missed. The wilderness of the decayed urban, the uncontrolled and unpredictable nature of the city is domesticated by the insertion of fractions of virgin nature.

5. Once more

All in all, nature is always present. Its presence is unavoidable as it is through nature that we are defined. Our cities are islands that expand and colonize nature

Fig. 4.

up to the point that it becomes withdrawn and sterilized, confined and annulled, but then, our cities regenerate the concept of nature and nature finds way to colonize and tame the rising wilderness of these urban landscapes of contempt. Wastelands on one hand, and constrained, guarded nature on another, are both ruins, ruins of the manmade, the artificial, the civilized and ruins of the natural, the untamed, and the wild, now packaged as a left-over and denaturalized. Time, past, present and future, become of great importance for planning urban spaces. Design can only seek to work with layers of time, understand the past and decipher what forces led

to the configuration of the past circumstance, and design the present for the future insisting on legibility, relation, belonging and resilience. Legibility is of course, a prerequisite and at the same time a consequence of relation, of identification, of empathy that the designer can only up to certain point achieve. The sense of belonging, the history, the narratives that are shared, and the stories that are common can on one hand, only be triggered by sensible design but on another, can surely be eliminated by careless design.

Change is constant, but change, if resilience is succeeded, doesn’t imply dissociation and obliteration of what was. Resilience is a factor that determines the possibility of continuance and thus, relation, history, belonging and community. Resilience as a central issue in design of urban spaces has to be constructed upon comprehension of the past but as well, upon openness about the future. Understanding the size of the forces exercised upon public spaces and the complexity of its anticipation and management is essential. Even if we can foresee the successions between mandmade, urban wilderness and fractions of virgin nature, interchanged and alternated, it is almost impossible to manage its continuance if resilience and openness are not sought specifically through the design. It is evident that design is always about situations and not about forms but this is an even more decisive aspect in public space. To achieve resilience and openness it is necessary to work with time, with history, with the narratives and the sense of belonging. This is a cyclical process. And of course, to work with time and for time, to include duration and continuance, to become open and resilient, is to assure permanence and finally presence. Presence not in the quality of a long-lost immortality, but presence through the others, presence for those gone and presence through those that will come. This is the ultimate function of public space.

Fig. 5.

Notes 1 Adam and Eve obtain consciousness of their nudity only once the primordial sin is committed. After that they see themselves for the first time, the see that they are nude and they try to hide. This is a primary act of separation from the whole, an act of recognition and withdrawal at the same time. 2 Near Tuscon, Arizona, in the desert, a geodesic structure of crystal and metal contains miniaturized all the climates of the planet. This experiment initially planned as an instrument in order to study various methods of control of the environment has failed his originals purposes, but is a paradigmatic structure of duplication and sterilization.

Legends

Fig. 1. Rene Magritte, the human condition

Fig. 2. Ulrich Konings & Ilse Maria Konings Architekten, Diversity – Field Study. International Architecture Exhibition: La Biennale di Venezia 2000

Fig. 3. Joao Pedro Vale, tree

Fig. 4. Has Haake, Calligraphie 89

Fig. 5. Robert Smithson, Yucatan Mirror Displacements (1–9), 1969

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Biography

Polyxeni Mantzou (1969) is an architect graduated in the School of Architecture N.T.U.Athens (1994). She has a PhD in Architecture titled: The use of audiovisual media as modificators of the architectural space (School of Architecture E.T.S.A.Madrid, UPM, 2000). She is an Assistant Professor of Architectural Design in the School of Architecture, D.U.Thrace. She is Teaching Stuff (2007-10) in the Postgraduate Course of the Department of Fine Arts and Arts Sciences of the University of Ioannina and also in the Postgraduate Course: “Graphic Arts - Multimedia”, Thematic: “Art and Communication in Graphic Arts” of the Hellenic Open University (2008-12). Director of the Visual, Electronic and Audiovisual Applications Lab in the School of Architecture DUTHrace (2005-2011) and member of the research group Hypermedia. Her research field is mainly oriented at architectural design and new technologies. Coordinates and has participated in research programs investigating how new technologies affect the perception of space and the creative process; the implementation of interactive installations in urban spaces; and the use of architectonic interfaces in public urban spaces. Her architectural work and projects has been awarded, published (in catalogues and magazines) and exhibited, and grand part of these has been constructed. She has published in scientific magazines and in the proceedings of international conferences on issues related to new urban spacialities; responsive interactive environments; new media and spectacle strategies in architectural spaces. She is correspondent in Greece for the international journal Compasses. Architecture and Design.

Xenofon Bitsikas (1963) is an artist graduated from the School of Fine Arts of Athens, Greece. He has a PhD in Fine Arts (School of Fine Arts, University Complutense of Madrid, 2000). He is Associate Professor at the Department of Fine Arts, University of Ioannina, and Deputy Head of the same Department. He is Teaching Stuff and coordinator (2006-12) at the Thematic: “Art and Communication in Graphic Arts” in the Postgraduate Course: “Graphic Arts - Multimedia”, of the Hellenic Open University. His work was awarded and has been exhibited and published in Greece and Europe. Lately, he has been working on the concept of the limit and its relation to the spectator, considering the artwork as α two-way transitorial space, redefined by both artist and spectator. His field of research and academic curriculum is focused

at questions of systems-mechanisms-tools used for structuring space with a specific side interest on matters of new media and spectacle strategies. He has published in scientific magazines and in the proceedings of international conferences on issues related to art, new media and responsive interactive environments.