The 20-Kilometer University: Knowledge as Infrastructure

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John Phillips, Andrew Benjamin, Ryan Bishop, Li Shiqiao, Esther Lorenz, Liu Xiaodu andThe 20-Kilometer University: Knowledge as Infrastructure

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The 20-Kilometer UniversityKnowledge as Infrastructure

John Phillips, Andrew Benjamin,Ryan Bishop, Li Shiqiao, Esther Lorenz,Liu Xiaodu and MengYan

Abstract

This piece presents the work of academics and architects in a collaborative

venture. It provides an architectural design and a series of statements

towards the hypothetical creation of an unconventional city centre in the

Chinese city of Shenzhen. The idea is to create a linear university that

would run the 20-kilometer length of the Shenzhen Strip: the 20K university.

The contributors outline, in the diversity of their idioms, a complex spatial

condition fundamental to life, and demonstrate new relationships between

knowledge and the city. The design of the proposed ‘open university space’

responds to two simultaneous and interrelated challenges: that posed to

architecture, and that posed to science. The university would embody the

meeting of these at the intersection of the urban infrastructure and the

knowledge infrastructure. The purpose is thus also to develop the notion

of knowledge, embodied in institutions, as urban infrastructure.

Key words

20K university j city j complex ecology j epistemology j infrastructure j

knowledge j urban planning

Introduction

A 20-KILOMETER STRIP passes through areas of Shenzhen thatmanifest diverse conditions of 21st-century urban life. There areareas of concentrated shopping and eating, with tree-lined streets

and wide footpaths, and areas where different elements of a fluctuating

j Theory, Culture & Society 2011 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, NewDelhi, and Singapore),Vol. 28(7-8): 287^320DOI: 10.1177/0263276411428742



population mingle to visit shops, clubs and massage parlors, stopping atfood outlets from every province of China and from the West. A notionalcentral district unconvincingly suggests the spatial centre of control by hous-ing institutional forms of government. Amusement parks bear the tracesbeneath them of Shenzhen’s still recent agricultural history. A CBD drawsattention to the economic purpose of the urban infrastructure, lending amonumental dignity to the seductive heart of urban life, the flip side ofwhich subsists a breath away downtown.

In what follows we present an architectural design and a series of state-ments contributing hypothetically to the creation of an unconventionalShenzhen city centre. Together they outline, in the diversity of their idioms,a complex spatial condition fundamental to life, and demonstrate new rela-tionships between knowledge and the city. The design of the proposed ‘openuniversity space’ responds to two simultaneous and interrelated challenges:that posed to architecture, and that posed to science. The university embo-dies the meeting of these at the intersection of the urban infrastructureand the knowledge infrastructure.

The contraction and expansion of the linear university fits into theexisting forms of Shenzhen’s urban space. It thereby transforms potentialspaces and begins to act upon the given order of existing urban organiza-tions. The university, in league with accidental elements, can play a part ineffecting transformations in the urban infrastructure. At first these willappear small, yet they might always become significant. That is simulta-neously the risk and the limitation. But risk and limitation combine to con-stitute the possibility of any transformation.

Figure 1 Installation at the 2009 Shenzhen and Hong KongBiennale of Urbanism and Architecture

288 Theory, Culture & Society 28(7-8)



Knowledge as InfrastructureThe Complex City

The city today is, as it has always been, a complex place. Humans and non-humans make up its arrangements of relations and parts. But if, asAristotle states in The Politics, ‘a city is composed of different kinds ofmen . . . similar people cannot bring a city into existence’, we are neverthe-less surrounded by barriers built for the preservation of the spatial practicesof ‘similar peoples’, dividing the city into exclusive ghettos of habits, privi-leges, and deprivations.

Cities become the battlegrounds of particulars in dispute: over ideol-ogy (Berlin divided by the wall), over race ( Johannesburg under apartheid),and over religion (Belfast in conflict). All these kinds of conflict continueto dominate the lives of Israelis and Palestinians in an urban theatre thatin many ways epitomizes current conditions and problems. The technologi-cal capacity to move people mechanically at an affordable price and highspeed ^ a great achievement of the 20th century ^ has resulted in furtherkinds of partition, created by dividing land into functional zones.These spa-tial singularities, like intellectual singularities, divide the city and drain itscreative potentials. Is it even possible to maintain both diversity and singu-larity without violent partition?

Shenzhen was created using all the forces of singularities. It was con-ceived as a city of labour, planned as an efficiently zoned city, fulfilling arole of specialization in the global marketplace. Its city form was preciselycalibrated to pursue its function. In this sense, Shenzhen provides a labora-tory condition for a revision of its city form; Shenzhen’s ambitious transfor-mation from the city of labour to a city of culture and creativity lies in areshaping of its space.

Shenzhen is both a 20th-century city and a traditional city. In its tradi-tional mode it places a further layer of singularities derived from manydeep-rooted intellectual traditions in China. This culture formulates a radi-cal divide between intellectual contemplation (dao) and the making ofthings (qi), removing the making of things from intellectualization, andresulting in cities of poor standards of craftsmanship. It conceives realmsof knowledge production as more or less private domains (libraries were con-ceived as places to hide books), perpetuating a protective and connection-based mode of knowledge production. Shenzhen continues the practice ofwalled courtyard spaces that parallels China’s deep-rooted tradition ofsocial formation.

Reformulating Knowledge

Knowledge, as a mental map of the known world, is as much a mirror of ourown conceptions as it is a description of reality; this is highly visible, forinstance, when the conception and act of producing knowledge were domi-nated by the need to wage wars in classical Greece and in Cold WarAmerica. Today, we face a mode of knowledge production that is calibrated

Phillips et al. ^ The 20-Kilometer University 289



to serve the imperatives of the marketplace. The contemporary world argu-ably proceeds under the influence of the intimate union of science and tech-nology, or ‘techno-science’, as Jacques Derrida calls it (Derrida, 1984: 399).The idea of a technoscience ^ the simultaneously scientific and instrumen-tal harnessing of mechanical laws in order to mobilize them with increasingefficiency ^ was already quite evident by the 17th century. Francis Bacon’sNew Organon of 1620 particularly stresses the desirable conse-quences of merging the technological sphere with philosophical science

Figures 2, 3, 4 Current urban conditions in Shenzhen




(Bacon,1999:86).But it isnotuntil the 20thcentury thatphilosophically rigor-ous worries begin to appear. Heidegger’s writings of the1930s present perhapsthemost profoundlycritical ofdiverse responses to themutations of contempo-rary technoscience (under the general rubric of Die Technic). In light of workby Derrida (1984), Jean-Franc� ois Lyotard (1986), Bruno Latour (1987) andothers, it is possible to identify more exactly the crisis in the relation betweenthe reductive complexity of performance models (technoscience) and philoso-phically-oriented truthmodels.This notion of technoscience and its doctrine ofeffectiveness clearly operates in tandemwith the city of labour (housing whatHannah Arendt describes as the society of labourers) to achieve efficiencythrough intellectual andmanual specialization.The dividedcity is therefore ananalogueofthis epistemological form.

One of the most habitual ways of producing knowledge is through clas-sification, seen in the enterprise of encyclopedias in different cultures,designed to assemble and classify the totality of knowledge, and allowingus to construct the world as we know it. While thinking with a structure ishighly effective to organize what we know, it can also produce an effect ofcertainty that reduces knowledge to a pre-determined framework.The intel-lectual framework of universities, as sites of contemporary knowledge pro-duction, consists of analogical institutions of ‘mental faculties’ that couldbe traced back to 18th-century conceptions of knowledge. Thus the impulseover the past few decades to de-classify material in the face of increasedcross-cultural interaction in the global discursive sphere, to unlink certainforms of knowledge from rigid and outdated taxonomies, provides an oppor-tunity to reconsider classification as knowledge traditions and genealogiesengage one another.

Figures 5, 6 Current urban conditions in Shenzhen




In conceiving an infrastructure of knowledge, we argue for a reformu-lation of knowledge that moves by way of a stricture between the complexi-ties of human life and the complexities of the knowledge archive. Insteadof monstrous artifactual systems constructed in the interest of mechaniza-tion and efficiency, we argue for a complex epistemology that aspiresbeyond the crass demands of human interest. Instead of isolated ‘universitycities’ which breed detachment of human life, we argue for a city-basedknowledge infrastructure that can account for the interface of knowledgeand everyday life.

Design: The 20-Kilometer UniversityThe city forms the space to produce, disseminate and legitimate knowledge.The greatest example of the dependency between knowledge and the citywould be the rise of early science and the emergence of the bourgeois cityin Europe. Scientific, literary and artistic ideas were, from the 17th century,moved away from their previous spatial confines of the courts of kings,emperors and popes, towards pubs and cafes in urban centres such asLondon and Paris. This ‘cafe culture’ in these cities served as the 17th-century equivalent of a spatial infrastructure for knowledge production anddissemination. In these cities, cafes continue to play important roles at theheart of innovative cultures.

Working with the unique conditions in Shenzhen, we propose anunfolding of the encircled spaces of universities, and along a strip of thecity of approximately 20 kilometers along the Shenzhen Underground fromLowu to Shenzhen University.

Figure 7 The 20-kilometer line from Lowu to Shenzhen University

Figure 8 An enlarged portion of the 20-kilometer university




Along the 20-kilometer line, we programme the strip with the idea ofa pedestrian ‘open source infrastructure’. The strip contracts and expands,taking different forms as it responds to the urban contexts. The strip islined with teaching and research spaces related to a range of knowledgeemphases (classrooms, meeting rooms, libraries, digital infrastructure, aswell as more specialized laboratories) and basic living facilities (restaurantsand cafes, dormitories, hostels, canteens, laundry facilities); it is alsoprovided with artist studios, cinemas, galleries, nightlife, etc.

This infrastructural framework is non-hierarchical, non-institutional,connective, and social. But it operates ‘outside’ hierarchy and institution asthe excess of the hierarchical institution itself. It serves as a space of circula-tion combined with the capacity and facilities for socialization. It linksvarious fragmented districts in Shenzhen, created with singular purposesin mind and divided by highways and golf courses.

Beyond the Global R&D UniversityThe 20K university differs from the standard model of the global researchand development university as well as that based on the university city, anideal developed in Europe but implemented more thoroughly in NorthAmerica as the university town. The 20K university follows an open-university plan by insinuating itself within the urban context. But if onone side we acknowledge the peculiar history of the city and its agriculturalprecession, then on the other side we need to assess the possibilities andconstraints of the historical university itself, its founding questions, the fal-lible seams of its structure and what potentials remain for its hypotheticaltransformation. And because no project of this kind could be achieved with-out historical analysis, often involving events of remembering and of paleo-nymic invention, it is worth outlining some genealogies of universityformation and their relationships with spatial organization.

Context: The ColdWar Global R&DUniversity

The conversion of military research into university science added tremen-dous impetus to the domination of the research university by research.(Donald Kennedy, former President of Stanford University)

The global standard, on which universities worldwide are organized,emerged in its current form as the Cold War global R&D university. Andit lives on long after the Cold War, trailing many of that era’s assumptionsand desires behind it. This is the university model formed in the globalreach of geopolitics in the post-Second World War era and therefore for thefirst post-national era of education, government, industry and military insti-tutions working in complementary fashion for largely shared ends.

Despite the fact that universities around the globe in the late 20th andearly 21st centuries display a complex heterogeneity largely at odds with




claims to the generation and teaching of universal knowledge, severalcommon-sense assumptions about ‘the university’ as a global, and perhapsuniversal, institution exist. Some of the reasons for this have to do withthe driving forces behind processes of globalization, especially during theColdWar, and the current and continued import of North American univer-sities in the shaping of global institutions in the post-Second World Warera. Because no one and no institution escapes its chronotope, ourcommon-sense vision of the university ^ our generalized view of it ^emerges from specific historical trajectories much related to a strong senseof nationalist agendas, as well as economic, technological and military prior-ities central to the Cold War world the US was attempting to construct,even though the model now lauded on the global stage is indeed post-national.

Increasingly central to this standard view of the university and its mis-sion is ‘research and development’ (R&D) as that which attaches the univer-sity in strategic ways to the nation-state and its goals, as well as to thenational and transnational economy. The shift to R&D of a specific natureindicates institutional variations from the University of Berlin model inte-gral to the US expansion into public, tertiary education on a large scale.The desire to make university education accessible to a larger number ofpeople (i.e. citizens) and to understand this accessibility as part of the com-monweal is also an important attribute of the shared view of the universityand its role in civic society and economy.The marked shift to R&D of a spe-cific nature is not synonymous with ‘pure research’, though it can includepure research. More often, though, the kind of targeted R&D funding pre-dominant from the latter part of the 20th century is antithetical to pureresearch because the domination of audit culture demands knowable andpredictable outcomes that fall outside of the pure research purview.

Prior to the emergence, if not dominance, of R&D in the US, theUniversity of Berlin model held sway, and it explicitly grounded the univer-sity’s project in that of the nation-state. At this time, beginning with theestablishment of the land grant universities just prior to the Civil War, theuniversity’s mission was to produce a well-rounded elite group of future lea-ders versed in the history of ideas and specific national culture.This founda-tional purpose has been and remains of import, but US institutions havetaken, almost from the outset, a more instrumental approach: that is,although the university is meant to instill such knowledge, it should, at thesame time, work for the economic benefit of the nation-state and do sothrough connections to agriculture, technology and commerce. This idea isalready implied by Kant’s late 18th-century proposal for university organiza-tion along a model of the industrial formation and production of knowledge.

The use-function of a university in the United States increased its roleover time as different understandings of its mission and position in relationto the civic sphere changed, culminating in the post-SecondWorld War eraof high science and military research that made it possible for Clark Kerr,as president of the University of California Berkeley, to write in the early




1960s a book entitledThe Uses of the University.The instrumental and prag-matic roles of the institution had become part of the common-sense view.‘Knowledge for knowledge’s sake’ and the role of shaping citizens primarilythrough art, culture and the history of ideas had become secondary consid-erations for tertiary education. With the advent of the Second World War,the instrumental aspects of university-based R&D, especially in the sciencesand social sciences, were mobilized in the ‘total war’ effort through theestablishment of federally-supported research labs. These labs became pre-cursors of massive research projects carried out after the end of the war,leading to a vastly different institutional make-up and project. Some com-mentators, such as Bill Readings, argue that the university in the latterpart of the 20th century ceased to understand its primary role as inculcatorof national culture for the nation-state. The movement required to get tothis place for the university can be found in the collective efforts of science,business, education, government and the military assembled during thewar and then kept in place as a strategic advantage in the newly birthedColdWar that immediately followed the atomic bombing of Japan.

The global R&D university remains the assumed option in universityformation for almost the entire planet. The rapid growth of Asian nationsin terms of building new universities over the past several decades far out-strips those in Europe or North America. Yet the models they rely on havethe trajectory delineated earlier, one that runs from Europe through theland-grant universities in the US to those aligned with industry (such asHopkins and Chicago) to those forged in the frozen fire of the Cold War.To sample where things stand in the current moment, one only needs toconsider the address by the president of the National University ofSingapore to the 1st Asian University Presidents Forum, held inGuangzhou, China, in November 2010, in which he argues that universitiesin Asia are poised to join the ranks of top universities in the world.1

He predicates his assertion on three trends, each of which entailsAsian universities intensifying the conditions of ‘excellence’ that exist forthe global R&D university. These include massive investment in universitydevelopment, growth, building and recruitment at a time when the US andEurope are reducing such funds; the increasing prominence of Asian econo-mies in the global economy; and the increasingly intensive research aspectsof Asian universities. With regard to the final point about research,President Tan cites the investment strategies by nation-states such asChina, Korea and Singapore that indicate a commitment on the part ofeach country toward university-building as nation-building for a global econ-omy. The distance is not great between this assessment and the foundingstatements and general mission of Hopkins, or Berkeley, or MIT. In factthose have been transplanted in the global market as exemplified by NUS’sown partnerships with flagship US universities in targeted areas of researchdesigned to make a global research mark, including formal agreementsand joint degrees with Duke, Hopkins and Yale, and the collaboration




between MIT and Zhejiang University in China through the SingaporeUniversity of Technology and Design.

Blank Space: University Towns, Cities and Islands

The 20K university opens up for further consideration the relationshipbetween the physical and conceptual space of the university. The space thatthe university-as-institution occupies imaginatively and discursively is essen-tially that of the transit site, a way station, a conduit from one moment inan individual life’s bildung to another, but an important and indeed seminalconduit from youth to adulthood. The journey of bildung has a particularnarrative and temporal arc that finds spatial form in the campus university,a liminal site between home and the world. According to a specific interpre-tation of the university, the space of the campus university provides the envi-ronment within which bildung unfolds and reveals the connectednessbetween individual and environment essential to a fully spiritual educationworthy of being labeled as bildung.The campus of the global R&D univer-sity is usually modeled on the North American manifestation of thecampus university, which is rarely located in an urban space. The campusuniversity in the US often evokes the ivory tower, the site of detached,unworldly meditation that is the purview of the scholar as ascetic. Thecampus university in North America occupies a ‘no place’, not urban, ruralor suburban. It occupies a space unto itself, constituted by itself: the univer-sity town.

The university city is altogether different from the university town,though no less romanticized. The university city has the Enlightenment-driven romantic appeal of the tabula rasa, the blank slate. University citiesbear a passing resemblance to the university town model, but one in whichgenetics and family relations show their substantial variations. The asceticisolated dimension of the university town gives way to a more ‘worldly’ andindeed globalized space. It is not isolated in ivory tower contemplation orsmall town coziness. For the university city, the institution is instantiatedas the prime mover of the urban it generates and occupies, as well as theengine of economic growth. It manifests itself as a city tapped into thelarger global economy, aiding that economy, feeding it, and producing forit while also serving the greater good of tertiary education. The universitycity is the direct heir of the global R&D university in its guise as urbanform, urban planning and spatio-economics. The university town neatlygrows in support of the humanity who must dwell in and inhabit a univer-sity and holds a kind of comfortable genteel insularity and inwardness.Conversely, the university city looks out to the globe and grows in extensiv-ities of industry, investment and information intended largely for thosewho exist outside the city’s physical locale and holds a flux-ridden relationto economic forces that lie beyond the city limits. For those who live andwork in the university town, their connections with each other are readilymanifest, whereas in the university city they may have connections with




the university that are once or twice removed, if connections exist at allother than as a site of the global conduit. Factored into the urban planningis ‘knowledge-based development’, a phrase that converts the activities ofscholarship and research into post-industrial economic power such that theuniversity and the city are not so much co-dependent as the latter is parasiticon the former, the relation spatially and actually of a para-site.

The idea of university cities links to science cities such as those foundin Tsukaba, Japan, or Irvine, California, in the USA.The Soviets had thesetoo of course, called naukograds and often built with gulag-enforcedlabour. These were cities designed during or just after the Second WorldWar for specific research-intensive and often high-security projects, such asthe one that birthed atomic weaponry. University cities derive from thismodel: taking a bare spot of land and using an institution with researchagendas to attract interest and financial support. With the science city,though, the research was often very specifically focused and not of themore general range found at the global R&D university. Similarly, fundingfor science cities was almost solely the provenance of the nationalgovernment.

China and India provide two explicit sites in which the university cityflourishes, though not without controversy, and is pressed into the serviceof nation-state demands to grow tertiary education access and indirectly togrow the GDP. Not only do university cities help feed a global economywith their ideas, innovations, products and patents, they also further thebusiness or industry of education in and of itself. In China, the 1999 StateCouncil issued a document about the need to expand university-level educa-tion, with university cities playing a major role in this. Within just a fewyears 60 such sites had sprung up, all operating with various market ratio-nales: student and faculty accommodation on site, multiple universities andinstitutions operating in close proximity, expanding student enrollments,large swaths of cheap land, and a captive audience for goods provided onsite. Funding for these university cities could come from combined govern-ment and private investment.

One of the earliest of these is Oriental University City, located betweenBeijing and Tianjin. It is primarily owned by the Singapore-based RafflesEducation Group but includes investments from the Malaysian governmentas well. Founded in 2000, just after the State Council’s document to generatean ‘education industry’, Oriental University City boasts ‘14 leading universi-ties and colleges with a population of over 36,000 students’ on 3.31 millionsquare meters in Langfang, Hebei (http://www.oriental-university-city.com.cn/index_en.asp). Despite the promising start for such university citiesand a rapid increase in student enrolments, the sites very quickly fell preyto short-term profit advantage-taking with problems arising from illegalland grabbing, general graft, shoddy construction work and, worst of all, stu-dents not staying on site and thus being the entrapped consumer populationexpected by the state and investors alike. Thus a mere five years after the1999 announcement extolling the virtues of university cities, the state put




a halt to many proposed projects while some, such as Oriental UniversityCity, limp along with added foreign capital hoping for long-range returnson investments (Chen, n.d.).

Despite the problems that have plagued university cities in China,India is moving forward with variations of its own. In one particularlyhigh-profile instance, Reliance Industries India through its philanthropicwing known as the Reliant Foundation is planning a world-class universityin Mumbai that will be partnered with the London School of Economics.The venture is led by Nita Ambani, the wife of billionaire industrialistMukesh Ambani, and will use the vast assets, material and otherwise, avail-able through Reliant Industries, the largest corporation in India. They willbe building the universities in currently existing but semi-secluded suburbs.As funding for UK universities hit a crisis point and discussions of pro-posed tuition increases skyrocketed and led to violent student protests, thisjoint announcement by Reliant Foundation and the LSE in October 2010seems neatly timed for the institution to turn its imprimatur and culturalcapital into financial gain.The model clearly derives from, while also modi-fying, the science city as one sees in Irvine, for example, but in this instancewith immediate and direct corporate tie-ins, limited to one mega-companyand with the additional global R&D university cache afforded by the LSE.With the LSE tie-in, this specific university city does not have to make aninstitution ab nihlo, turning the extant institution in one site into a nascentinstitution in another. The institutions that emerge from this alliance willbe but one of the many groups poised to make a run at the private universitysector to meet the demands of increasing need for tertiary education notbeing met by the current university system, and it joins the current fashionfor ITentrepreneurs to leap into the venture capital market of higher educa-tion, but in this instance with the benign face of semi-philanthropicenterprise.

The next step in the university city model can be found in theUniversity Island initiative inaugurated by New York University and thestate of Abu Dhabi, a variation on the theme of the science or universitycity with state and international academic institution partnership. The poetJoseph Brodsky writing of Venice in his lovely prose-poem Watermarksaid the problem with islands is that they cannot grow. It is a beautiful con-ceit but factually inaccurate as the planned cultural and tourist siteof Saadiyat Island attests, where NYU Abu Dhabi has established itselfin the cultural district. The cultural district will house three iconic archi-tectural buildings by some of the usual suspects from the gang of global‘starchitects’, but this time partnering with a different kind of cultural insti-tution of global imprint and status: the museum. One of these is theLouvre Abu Dhabi by Jean Nouvel (which will create interesting impliedechoes with the I.M. Pei desert and colonial-looting inspired pyramid addi-tion to the Paris location) and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi designed byFrank Gehry, hoping to replicate the Bilbao success. A third iconic buildingwill be more homegrown: the Norman Foster-designed Zayed National




Museum. These will be the immediate neighbors of NYU Abu Dhabi,though the island itself will also offer luxury hotels, a promenade, high-end housing, a Gary Player-designed tidal golf course, and a nature reserveto protect sand turtles. The official Saadiyat Island website writes of thereserve in terms that remind us of the harmonic balance achieved by thecampus university and its role within the process of bildung, calling thereserve ‘an unforgettable place where man and environment become one’(http://www.saadiyat.ae/en). The result is a fascinating eco-recreational-edu-cational-cultural assemblage of dwelling, playing, thinking and branding.Although the NYU Abu Dhabi experiment carries signs of the universitycity, it also provides literally a ‘Desert-Island-Discs’ spatial reimaging of theuniversity space and how it might function within the establishment of aplanned cultural and economic quasi-urban formation.

Yet one further manifestation of thinking the university as an imagi-nary and spatial entity needs mentioning in relation to the 20K university,and that is the intelligent or knowledge city, within which the universitywith strategic central planning becomes ‘embedded’. The intelligent cityuses the electro-magnetic realm to embody and amplify the geopoliticalrealm through a reformulation of urban infrastructure. Physical, institu-tional, digital, and human domains and technologies interact to facilitatedaily life and, more importantly, to generate innovation in a knowledge-based global economy. (IT and bio-tech form particularly easy combinatorypractices and supports that can be witnessed in numerous urban areas wish-ing to have ‘clean’ future-oriented knowledge economies.) The embedded-ness of invisible systems, sensors and tracking devices engages inquotidian problem-solving in the urban environment but also and furthercreates a collective ethos of communal intelligence with a common goal ofeconomic progress through the means that sustain and streamline city life.In such instances, as Saskia Sassen has noted, IT is invisibly deployed andcommands the population rather than provides an interactive dialogue withit (http://www.domusweb.it/en/op-ed/open-source-urbanism/).

The university as an institution in such a context plays more towardthe end of innovation and generation of technologies, procedures and ideasintended to perpetuate and extend the urban processes that make its exis-tence productive for state and private sectors as well as supposedly trainingworkers for new economy jobs and civic responsibility.That the same impor-tant nexus of university, business and military R&D constitutes the drivingforce behind the intelligent or knowledge city alerts us to the fact that theinstitution might have changed ^ with its role in relation to citizen-forma-tion and bildung fading into the background if not outright obscurity ^but the general trajectory of the global R&D university birthed in theimmediate post-SecondWorldWar moment remains the one we find in uni-versity cities and islands, as well as intelligent cities.

Derrida draws attention to Heidegger’s claim that the problem of uni-versity teaching after the Second World War is ‘the fact that the sciencesbelong to the essence of technics: not to technics, but to the essence of




technics’ (1989: 169). A science as caught up in the sphere of technics cir-cumvents the historicity, the facticity, indeed the fundamental ontology, ofthe sciences themselves: a science reduced to technology has nothing to sayof its ground or its essence, which, as the famous phrase has it, would benothing technological. As in his Rector’s Address in Freiburg, Heideggercontinues to bring forth his concern with an institutional essence uncon-cerned with spirit, an institutional essence and ethos solely predicated oninstrumentality and the consideration of knowledge as standing reserve.This is the professionalization of the institution (a radicalization of pro-cesses already under way) that he observed with alarm under the NationalSocialists, and it emerged in the form of the conversion of the universityinto a site for making knowledge profitable, which is more or less the expli-cit goal trumpeted by all global research and development universities inthe current moment. In Heidegger’s time, putting all the means of univer-sity-produced knowledge at the disposal of utilitarian ends resulted innationalist, biologist and racist technics. The warnings from Heideggerexemplify those offered much earlier by Von Humboldt’s University ofBerlin blueprint that became the machinery of reproduction for NorthAmerican institutions: namely, that applied Wissenschaft operating solelyfor instrumental ends of profit for the university itself and for the societygenerally can be ruinous if it is not tempered by a sense of what incommon is at stake in its operation and functioning.

The Hypothetical: The 20K University

The university is a (finished) product, I would almost call it the child of aninseparable couple, metaphysics and technology. At least, the university fur-nished the space or topological configuration for such an offspring. It is aparadox that, at the moment when such offspring overflows the placesassigned it, and the university becomes small and old, its ‘idea’ reigns every-where, more and better than ever. (Derrida, 1992: 15)

The university as an archive of archives, having no alternative but to archiveitself, must drag its conflicts, divisions and avatars along with it no matterhow situated spatially, imaginatively, functionally, ideally, it may be.Significant shifts have occurred on the empirical surface and to the apparentstructure of the university: toward applied science; of instrumental means;of R&D for specific goal-oriented ends; the ways in which service to thestate that grants it authority becomes equivalent to economic and militaris-tic service. These shifts, which have dominated the global R&D model ofthe institution for the last 60 years or more, reflect nothing more than thechurning over of embedded institutional self-reflections and self-making.For the university, it has always been thus.

So there remains a need to develop the implications, and to clarify thesense, of the term ‘hypothetical’ when attached to the university.




The hypothetical operates as a hinge between propositional logic and para-ble, between discourse and institution, and between the outside and theinside of what passes for (as well as those who pass through) the universityas we currently experience it. What possibilities, beyond what we alreadyhave today, can the hypothetical offer? A hypothetical university would inthe first place be hypothetical as opposed to actually existing.Furthermore, a hypothetical university would be opposed to anything thatcould be predicated of a university with certainty. Such a university wouldbe grounded both in non-existence and uncertainty, at least in the firstplace. In the second place, the consequential place, the hypothetical univer-sity becomes interesting and problematic. The two conditions, uncertaintyand non-existence, which in classical terms have always tainted the thoughtof the hypothetical, will be regarded as essential complements of the hypo-thetical university. Compared with actually existing universities and againstall the little certainties that constitute them institutionally (the currentlybinding axioms of research, administration and teaching), the hypotheticaluniversity already imposes in principle more demands than a reasonableand pragmatic consciousness would tolerate. In scientific thought, forinstance, it would not do to set hypothetical possibility up against acknowl-edged certainty. It must, rather, be subordinated to it, for where hypotheti-cal possibility applies this would only be in order to subordinate it, in theend, to the acknowledged certainty to which, rationally speaking, the hypo-thetical would always have been on the way. And then much of what washypothetical would have been at length rejected. Against this, in the spiritof the hypothetical university project, we propose to take as essential thosecharacteristics that in fact define the hypothetical: uncertainty, non-exis-tence and, more forcefully still, the quality of being on the way with no spe-cial thought of the arrival.

If not an arrival, then, the hypothetical university perhaps representsa departure ^ one is tempted to say event ^ in the history of the university.The demands represented by the idea of the university-as-a-whole (an obvi-ously tautological phrase), the idea of a coherent architecture, would reso-nate with the demands ^ but also the inevitable relaxation of thosedemands ^ for maintaining a coherent architectonic of knowledge.We expe-rience the university also as the idea of what dwells within it, what enduresboth as legislated procedure as well as custom and practice, and the stratifi-cation of its people: those charged variously with legislating, with keeping,with maintaining, with producing, and with consuming the university(as-a-whole).

The hypothetical university, on the contrary, puts the demandsimplied by the idea of a coherently organized whole ^ a university of parts ^into suspense, perhaps indefinitely. So long as the university remains hypo-thetical, so long as something of the hypothesis has not yet been rejectedor fulfilled, then the university remains shot through with uncertaintiesand with pockets of inexistence. We should not be too cynical about this:yes, it sounds like a description of the student experience if not




the experience of teachers and administrative staff on precarious contractsor tenure track; but so long as we have failed to complete the predicationthat would define the university then it remains possible.

So to say that the 20K university will operate differently from theglobal R&D university is not simply disingenuous, for these are institution-ally realistic strategies. The novel spatial arrangement of the universityresembles its earlier (even ancient) though still contemporary incarnationsmuch more than it deviates from them.The conditions that gave rise to theglobal R&D university, and which it perpetuates, would operate no less inthe emergence and functioning of the 20K university. Primary amongthese would be the indelible marks of globalization, its instituting influenceon urbanism: increasing speed in the circulation of populations, images,goods and capital; rapid growth of urban areas in previously rural or unoc-cupied areas; the spread of neoliberal markets and their (material andimmaterial) practices; and the simultaneous erasing and redrawing of thelines between the private and public spheres.

The global R&D university has a simple core of arts and sciences,with its own clearly articulated hierarchy and satellite professional schools.The 20K university would have neither core nor satellites, but would provideinstead a labile and elastic interface between traditional and new disciplineformation. For example, ecological and environmental enquiries into thepowerful yet abstract notion of nature reveal the operative force of a mythol-ogy at work. From green spaces to garden to forest to global energy supplies,how we understand nature no longer relies on or demands its deviationfrom or opposition to culture. The distinction has long outlived its useful-ness and accuracy. Nature as chaos, standing reserve, distribution, salvation,figure of otherness: we have long designed nature as if it were the innocentsign of the world for artifactual purposes, controls and ends. Many actuallyexisting universities in the current moment understand this and have insti-tuted large research agendas devoted to environmental complexity, such asglobal warming and water access, across a number of traditional science dis-ciplines, if not the social sciences and humanities. The concerns are withopen and contingent, less goal-oriented research. However, such researchstill operates within the larger frames of an institutional audit culture ofaccountability, metrics and performance indicators with quantifiable results.

If Derrida’s arguments about the ancient role of the university con-tinue to apply, and perhaps they are more relevant than ever, then the uni-versity appeals to the notion of the finished product as the site that allowstechnology and metaphysics to co-mingle and procreate, making it a lessfinished product than it might initially seem. The university is both theprogeny of this union and the space that makes the union: a self-producingand self-legitimating entity that receives external authority from thenation-state as well as other powerful organs of society, including specifi-cally its economic and military manifestations, while also generating akind of internalized knowledge reserved from external interference from




its authorizing sources. The key term in bringing urbanism and epistemol-ogy to a union in the university, therefore, would be complexity.

Notes for a Complex Urbanism: 11 Theses

1. The city, present as much as a historical reality as it is an abstraction withindesign, is accompanied by a fundamental originating figure. The figure iscontrol. Control figures, however, in many forms. It marks a locus of conflict.Everything from the design and function of the city wall to the organizationof public space to the incorporation within the city of spaces that are forbidden(palaces, the loci of government and the agencies of government, etc.) becomethe material instantiation of control. They are one version of its figured pres-ence. Control, while ubiquitous, is also the site of fundamental differences.For this reason the response to regulation cannot be deregulation. It must befound within control as the site of different possibilities: different figures ofcontrol.

2. The language of figuration is fundamental. Control, while not having anessential nature, nonetheless forms an essential part of the city. The city is acomplex of activities occurring within time (the temporality of the present)as well as across time (the city as a historical entity). These activities registeras a complex patterning of modes of agency, activity and subjectivization.The question of differing possibilities within urbanism hinges fundamentallyon how the figure of control is construed and constructed.

3. Control is as much a political question as it is one of design. Both the politicaland the city as a domain of design have to engage with the city’s presence asa dynamic process. One modality of control involves pre-given modes of deter-mination. As such, it has to be understood as working within and thus as aprocess that is inherently calculable. (This brings with it the necessity thatthe complex of processes be policed.) Within this setting the figure of controlwill be attributed the status of an origin. As such it would be taken to be cen-tral ^ both literally and as a figured presence ^ to the city’s operation.Activity within the city ^ activity understood both diachronically as well assynchronically ^ would be the expression of its centrality. This figure of con-trol works to control through acts of subordination.

4. Control is this sense involves the already measured and thus the already deter-mined. Regulation would have a unidirectional quality. Urban space wouldhave an inherent simplicity. Line and measure would be simply descriptive.Notions of change, adaptation and transformation could only ever be thoughtin terms of the purely quantitative.

5. What is hidden within the above is twofold. In the first instance it is theinscription within the city ^ an inscription that is also constitutive of urbanspace ^ of that which resists modes of control defined by the enforced pres-ence of calculation, the already determined, the one-dimensional and thequantitative. In the second it is the presence of other possibilities, present asan ineliminable potentiality within the city itself. The second brings with itthe necessity that this potentiality be policed. Control as predetermined




regulation must restrict and continue to restrict the potentiality that inhereswithin the city understood as a dynamic system.

6. Restricting potentiality entails the maintenance of a pre-existing set ofrelations and calculations that plan the city. The continuance of the same ^development and transformation thought in terms of the purely quantitative^ demands the interplay of calculation and the pre-determined. It should beadded immediately that the maintenance of what pertains at any givenmoment is already the maintenance of a set of economic relations, of bordersboth external and internal, already determined conceptions of developmentand sustainability, etc. In other words, it involves holding in place a system ^a system of relations that have a sense of measure and control ^ whose onlysense of transformation, and it would be transformation as adaptation, isgiven in terms of the relationship between calculation and the predetermined.

7. To the extent that one modality of control can be identified with a sense ofcontinuity, and that what continues is a network of activities within whichmodes of policing inhere as ineliminable, allows the question of what anotherpossibility for the city would be like ^ a possibility that is already therewithin the city. Consequently, rather than a utopian vision in which alteritywould be defined by the construction of the ‘no’ place (or the ‘good’ place),alterity would be located in the interplay between the predetermined and itspolicing on the one hand, and potentiality on the other.

8. What is meant by potentiality within the urban can be understood as involv-ing a number of different considerations.Three that are central are the follow-ing: In the first instance potentiality identifies the principle of change asinternal, and thus positions change in terms of openings within the given ^openings that are inherently productive even though the nature of theproduction is not determined in advance. Potentiality, therefore, is linked toallowing. In the second place potentiality undoes the distinction betweeninside and outside where the two qualities are thought to be fundamentallydifferent. The spatial dimension of inside and outside ^ a dimension whoseimposition involves its own naturalization ^ yields its place to modes of rela-tionality. As a result alterity becomes an activity linked to the potentialitywithin modes of relationality. In the third instance potentiality necessitatesforms of movement. To the extent that this movement is defined in terms oftransformation ^ transformation as opposed to adaptation as the latter is theconception of change within calculation ^ then the movement in question,movement as a process, can be rethought as othering. Othering is a conceptionof allowing and transformation that takes potentiality as fundamental.

9. Holding to the centrality of potentiality involves defining a response to thegiven as that which on the one hand assumes that the given is an already pre-sent set of relations ^ economic, social, environmental, national, internationaletc. ^ and on the other that the potentiality for alterity (alterity as the processof othering) necessitates the opening, undoing, interrupting of those predeter-mined relations. Lines that were taken to divide and hold apart will fray,become porous, intricate, knot, etc.




10. Another language of organization ^ differing figures of control ^ becomesnecessary. They work to the extent that they are taken as sites of work: otherloci of activity.

11. Porosity, fraying, knotting, etc. are all ways of redefining relationality thatallow for another economy of lines. In addition, they need to be understoodas modes of thought and design that take potentiality as central and repositioncontrol. Not the abandoning of control, rather its having a different figure: adifference allowed for by its separation from a specific economy of activity.

Issues concerning Knowledge and the City1. Singular/Plural

Shenzhen, as an epitome of the 20th-century zoning strategies, is a peacefuldescendent of more violent zoning practices in the past: the encirclingwalls of social hierarchy in Qing-dynasty Bei jing, the ideological divide inCold War Berlin, the racial segregation in Johannesburg under apartheid,and the religious strife in Belfast. However, the seemingly benign natureof Shenzhen’s city form is also a barrier to its becoming a vibrant and com-plex city; it does not have a place for it.

In the 17th century, when scientific revolution was quietly takingplace in European cities, it was cradled in numerous pubs, cafe houses,and marketplaces as well as tested out in colleges and universities; theyserved as 17th-century knowledge infrastructure that was different fromthe court cultures of earlier eras. These public pubs and cafes became neu-tral and open spaces where people met and discussed, with equal status, cut-ting-edge scientific discoveries and artistic visions, together with mundanetopics and gossips. It was the coming together of knowledge productionand city form, based on the traditional urban fabric with walking as themost important basic scale measure.

Shenzhen lacks a walkable city centre; it needs to search for a form ofcity centre that is best conceived for its current urban conditions.The artifi-cial creation of a city centre in Futian highlights such a lack, and providesonly a symbolic centre. Our proposal of an ‘open source’ infrastructureoffers an opportunity for the development of a real Shenzhen city centrewith meaningful contents: an infrastructure of knowledge production withconscious reflections on both the city form and the nature of the productionof knowledge.

2. Body/Machine

Shenzhen is planned with transportation systems. Human movement, whileculturally meaningful in many traditional cities, is only possible here inmalls and streets of consumption.While this assists the cycles of consump-tion, it limits human and social possibilities in more ways than we realize.Travel in cities has become purely functional, condemned as a zero experi-ence activity in capsules, passively receiving advertising through




personalized television screens. We propose a radical rethinking of humantravel through continuously walkable spaces, paralleling and connecting tothe existing machine-assisted travel.

It is one result of the great urban transformation nowoccurring, which is shift-ing population from densely packed urban centres to thinner and more amor-phous spaces, suburban housing tracts, shopping malls, office campuses, andindustrialparks. Ifatheatreinasuburbanmallisameetingplacefor tastingvio-lent pleasure in air-conditioned comfort, this great geographic shift of peopleinto fragmented spaces has had a larger effect onweakening the sense of tactilerealityandpacifying thebody. (Sennett,1994:17)

The actofwalking is to theurban systemwhat the speech act is to languageor tothe statementsuttered. At themost elementary level, it has a triple‘enunciative’function: it is aprocess ofappropriationof the topographical systemon thepartof the pedestrian . . . it is a spatial acting-out of the place . . . and it impliesrelations among differentiated positions, that is, among pragmatic ‘contracts’intheformofmovements . . . It thusseemspossible togiveapreliminarydefini-tionofwalkingas a spaceof enunciation. (DeCerteau,1988: 98)

3. Concealment/Exposure

Our proposal responds to a persistent feature in the intellectual tradition inChina ^ very different from the Greek intellectual tradition ^ in whichknowledge was often seen to be private. A collection of books was oftenknown as that of ‘hidden books’; education was largely home based; schoolsof scholarship were often inherited on a personal basis. The prevalent wallsbuilt around institutions of higher learning in today’s China indicate thatthere is a contemporary form to this private knowledge tradition. Theappearance of ‘university cities’ in China again reformulates habitually, at agrand scale, the private knowledge tradition in some of its aspects.

The traditional Chinese city endlessly reproduces a multitude of self-centred spaces (imperial palaces, institutions, and residential units); thismultitude of self-centred spaces is private in varying degrees, which doesnot contain a notion of an autonomous public space. In the 13th and 14thcenturies the Mongols found these ubiquitous walls and courtyards to bealien, and forbade city wall-building for almost a century under their rule.

The modern danwei, the walled areas in which work units build theircomplete worlds of live, work and play in 20th-century China, seem tohave reconstituted the ancient courtyard. The danwei was an intriguingdevelopment from an inability to sustain central control in urban develop-ment, and outside the imagination of socialist planners who importedRussian and East European urban planning models; the danwei, seen inthis context, resembled perhaps more closely traditional imperial institu-tions with their protective walls and internal courtyards than those of themodern economy. Similar to shopping malls, the danwei is a kind of




conditional public space. Public space in contemporary Chinese cities seemsalways to oscillate between an over-designed ‘private realm’ and a little-cared-for twilight zone. Strangers do not have a place in Chinese cities.

4. Mind/Body: The Disjunction of Intellect and Labour

To re-engage knowledge and the city is to offer a new chance to reconnectintellect and labour. The traditional Chinese scholarship separates intellec-tual speculation from acts of making things. This is revealed in one waythrough quite distinct notions of ‘dao’ (the contemplation of universal prin-ciples) and ‘qi’ (the making of things) ^ while dao was highly respected, qiwas regarded to be insignificant intellectually.The contemporary manifesta-tion of this tradition could be seen in the lack of interest in making or atten-tion to detail in Chinese cities, with tremendous consequences in the formand formal experiences of cities.

Kaifeng, the capital city of the Northern Song dynasty (960^1127),was three times the size of ancient Rome, with an estimated population of1.4 million people ^ by far the largest urban centre in the world. Locatedstrategically at the meeting point between the early Grand Canal and theYellow River, Kaifeng was a place of great building activities, supportedby technological inventions unparalleled in Chinese history. One of the offi-cial construction manuals at the time, theYingzao fashi, compiled by LiJie in the year 1103, testifies to the scale and sophistication of building con-struction at the time. However, the Yingzao fashi is very different fromVitruvius’ Ten Books of Architecture, the only surviving architectural trea-tise prior to theYingzao fashi. While Vitruvius set out to develop a view ofarchitecture as a technical enterprise as well as a means to beauty and intel-lectual enlightenment, Li Jie was working on assumptions about the signif-icance of colours and forms which had been codified with hierarchies ofpower.

Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition makes important distinc-tions between three types of human activity: labour, work and action. Shewrites that, common to many languages, there exist two etymologicallyunrelated words for what we normally think of as the same activity, ‘thelabour of our body and the work of our hands’. But ‘labour’ and ‘work’ arevery different activities. While a labourer (animal laborans) toils with hisbody to maintain the biological life in line with ‘man’s metabolism withnature’, a worker (homo faber) creates products over and above the subsis-tence of life. Labour is a passive and enslaving necessity, work is born of afree desire for knowledge, beauty and truth. The result of labour is oftenindistinct and consumable, while the fruits of work are lasting monuments^ a tool, a building, a code of law, a system of healthcare, a method of farm-ing, etc. When a thinking person wants the world to know his thoughts,according to Arendt, he must stop thinking and remember the thoughts.He must use his hands to work like a craftsman and leave traces of histhoughts for others to understand.




In Florence in the 15th century, Brunelleschi brought thinking andwork together. Brunelleschi apprenticed in a goldsmiths workshop andthrived in an environment filled with dust of the furnaces, the smell of sul-phur used to engrave silver, and the dirt of cow dung used for making claymolds. His ingenuity in watch-making allowed him to invent hoist machinescrucial for the building of the great dome of the Florence Cathedral, andhis restless inventive spirit gave him courage to build the dome without cen-tring, an ingenious engineering feat at the time. In Brunelleschi, we findan extraordinary creative power that came from a blend of intellectualgenius and mechanical abilities.

5. Sciences/Humanities

One of the powerful consequences of techno-science was the divide betweensciences and humanities in academic institutions.This divide has many cas-cading effects in daily life in cities. It is as if the ivory tower of the universi-ties ^ isolated in campuses and university cities ^ has two communitiesthat communicate poorly with one another. The Chinese saying ^ thedivide between academic disciplines is like the divide between two sides ofa mountain ^ also indicates a contemporary condition prevalent in theChinese intellectual context. The Knowledge Concentration proposal ^tentatively and selectively proposed here as design, environment, control,ecology, money, body ^ provides a framework to examine a central notionin knowledge in more than one way.

This is not to return to C.P. Snow’s old Cold War text about the ‘twocultures’, the sciences and the humanities, but an attempt to provide physi-cal and intellectual opportunities to reflect on the legitimation of knowledgein science, which has become a fascinating subject for both sciences andhumanities. It is important to be in a position to understand the truthclaims of science in historical and cultural contexts.

Our intellectual life is out of kilter. Epistemology, the social sciences, andsciences of texts ^ all have their privileged vantage point, provided thatthey remain separate. If the creatures we are pursuing cross all threespaces, we are no longer understood. . . . In the eyes of our critics the ozonehole above our heads, the moral law in our hearts, the autonomous text,may each be of interest, but only separately. That a delicate shuttle shouldhave woven together the heavens, industry, texts, souls and moral law ^this remains uncanny, unthinkable, unseemly. (Latour, 1993: 5)

Complex EpistemologyKnowledge Concentrations and Sites of Anticipated Transformation

The insinuation of an open university into the folds of existing urban spaceoperates at first like sand in the wheels of the current knowledge economy.But it will eventually help give rise to a new complex ecology in which




knowledge and its infrastructure play essential roles. As economies ofknowledge give way to complex ecologies, new designations are requiredfor diverse activities in learning and research. There’s little point in dissol-ving the basic category ‘science’. It won’t disappear. But if we acknowledgethat no separate or foundational field of science exists, then kinds of evolv-ing knowledge can be regarded as scientific in a new sense. Always withthe utmost rigor, this new science accounts for why knowledge is instanti-ated in conflicts and differences rather than in the ordered progress of ency-clopedic classifications.

A science of conflicts and differences, which identifies as its spherethe relation between the restricted economics of control and the unrestrictedeconomics of chance (accidents, time and death), must acknowledge atleast a prima facie resemblance to already mainstream trends in universityresearch and teaching. But we also insist on its essential difference fromthese current institutional movements. Scientific and mathematical para-digms located in complexity theory as well as developed notions of chaos(as stochastic order), in reference to non-linear dynamics and fluid mechan-ics, work to support various (theoretical if not always practically achieved)models of trans-disciplinary knowledge. This theoretical merging of disci-plines that become porous in their boundaries must be distinguished fromwhat we propose here as an emerging science: of conflicts and differences,of parasitic and immunological relations, of frontiers. The latter aims touncover and to mobilize the laws according to which a domain, whether

Figure 9 Model of preliminary design for the 20-kilometeruniversity in Shenzhen (URBANUS, 2009)




political or epistemological, is established in general through determinedactivities of inclusion, exclusion, destruction, appropriation, legitimationand de-legitimation (and so on).

The gathering of interdisciplinary fields of knowledge under concen-trations suggests a departure from traditional ways of assigning intellectualtasks. Yet no transformation of knowledge can be effective without a histor-ical analysis of formal and institutional trends. For instance, in the Westsince the ancient Greeks, knowledge has been divided up in particularways. Aristotle’s corpus falls into the tripartite division of episteme, poiesisand praxis. These categories still shadow our attempts to think the connec-tions between science, art and technology and politics. A fourth category(faith, devotion, love) is identified variously by metaphysics, theology andpsychology.

Contemporary philosophers like Alain Badiou can still operate accord-ing to divisions that bear a family resemblance to the ancient partitions:the so-called ‘philosophical conditions’ of ‘science, love, art and politics’ inwhich the philosopher must discover each time the contingent rules for hisoperations.

A continuous line connects ancient with more recent conceptions ofknowledge. Yet intervening history complicates matters with more severedistinctions. The division between the humanities and the sciences forcestypes of knowing into well-policed enclosures. Matters are further confusedby the emergence of the human and social sciences and the dispersal of thehumanities into philosophy, art, literature, cultural studies, etc.

We acknowledge that the division between the humanities and sci-ences has in principle been dissolved. Increasingly, interdisciplinary practicein many institutions confirms this. But their elements might now be assem-bled to form parts of an emergent complex epistemology instantiated by cer-tain kinds of knowledge concentration or emphasis: ecology, environment,design and control, with essential concentrations on money and body too.The emphasis each time reflects the situation as it applies to both the realhistorical city and the perceptions by which it is figured and throughwhich it evolves. The situation could never approach the a ‘steady state’ solong as that implies stability in its assemblage (an oxymoronic phrase),but rather it would be marked by the drive to foster its unendingdeconstruction.

A complex epistemology takes as its topic the rapport between mecha-nisms of control and calculation, on one side, and elements of resistance,chance, and lines of flight, on the other. Entropic and stochastic processesoccur in the merging of the sphere of calculation with indeterminate pro-cesses: incalculable events linked to chance, accidents, randomness, delay,detour, wear, destruction, time and death.The potential implied by indeter-minacy not only resists all attempts to eradicate it but it also operates asconstitutive of, rather than as an obstacle to, the locus of control.

Six exemplary cases have been chosen for the hypothetical project,conceived in connection with areas that correspond in preliminary ways to




the kinds of knowledge emphasis. Each concentration gathers and thusforms a cluster of specific issues. But no single concentration is ever to bedistinguished absolutely from the others. On the contrary, the concentra-tions serve to establish and to bring into focus otherwise perhaps obscuredconnections. A given concentration may be associated with an urban sitethat is well positioned to serve as an appropriate urban context for the inter-active development of diverse fields of knowledge. But by situating the20K university such that it passes through these sites, we begin to producea space of knowledge that connects them.The public space of the universitythus introduces each time a means of engagement, and gives rise to a poten-tial for a global public knowledge among localized operations of the globalmarketplace. Spaces of dwelling, leisure and transit that form the arteriallife of the urban ecology are put in touch with spaces of industry, labourand exchange via the active mediation of public knowledge, the complexepistemology.

Mediation plays a fundamental role and should be foregrounded. Oneof the purposes of a university, not already absorbed and destroyed by theglobal R&D model, is to act as a kind of reflecting glass for communitiesnot otherwise able to know how their ways of knowing go, or to see as iffrom outside the operation of their modes of social interaction. Spaces arerequired that allow for the possibility of stepping outside, the better toview, the spaces within which individuals interact. Education at a tertiarylevel can bring to light the ways of learning, of dwelling, of thinking,rather than merely pass on the varieties of knowledge, the consumable con-tents of encyclopaedic classification and skills, that nonetheless form themarketing basis for contemporary institutions.The 20K university mediatesso that every medium (every site of mediation) is offered as a space ofpotential transformation.

The following sites represent a hypothetical projection.The knowledgeemphasis each time implies an indicative starting-point.

1. Huaqiangbei (HQB)

Knowledge emphasis: DesignKey terms: Production, vision, plan, development, execution, analog/

digital art, film, manufacturingDesign: To focus on design is to focus on the figure. Figures of design

inhere both in the planning of a site and in the site itself. They inhere inbuildings, in cities, in scholarly papers, in epic poems, in software pro-grams, in political organizations, in the imagination, in cloud formations,in genetic signatures and in gene mapping.

Inherent in the concept of design is the end and aim of design, thefigure of its destination. The design of a university along 20 kilometers ofShenzhen’s arterial space brings to light a strange law. A complex of detoursalong the way opens linear space up to multiple actual and conceptualfields. Destination no longer waits at the end of the line but must be




conceived as a figure of delay, of disturbance, of deceleration. The figure ofdelay now emerges not as an obstacle against its end but as constitutive ofthe very movement of design.

To focus on design is also therefore to focus on methods (meta-hodos:on the way and on how).The focus on design allows an emphasis on practicalconcerns of planning and knowing.Traditional figures construe design nar-rowly in terms of the productive potential of art and technique. Designinheres also in the general concept of a career (through life, through work,through an evolutionary program).

Huaqiangbei, which houses possibly the largest electronics market inthe region (Digital Shenzhen), is known as well as the centre forShenzhen’s design industry.The role of design in architecture, no longer sep-arable from issues of environmental ethics, can become clearer in urbanspaces like Shenzhen, with its dual condition of long-term agricultural his-tory and short-term urban expansion. But architects in Shenzhen face allbut insuperable paradoxes.

We can have a sense of how things might go in Huaqiangbei by refer-ring to another, already existing, project designed by the URBANUSgroup. The Dafen Art Museum is situated in the Longgang District ofShenzhen, which is mostly known for its industry of kitschy replica oilpaintings. Countless shops line every street, housing workshops for themanufacture and sale of these replicas, which copy existing works of westernand Asian art and their idioms.

The replica industry is one of the chief sources of the area’s economy.Thousands of paintings are exported monthly to Asia, Europe andAmerica for billions of RMB (you’ve probably seen them if you’ve stayed athotels or dined in restaurants anywhere in the world). It’s hardly an issue

Figure 10 Huaqiangbei as a centre of design




of aesthetics. Emblematic of Shenzhen’s reputation for ‘copy culture’, thephenomenon seems beyond the reach of existing critical vocabularies: badtaste, pop art, kitsch, inauthentic, simulated ^ certainly these replicas failto deliver on the established technical criteria of painting, the play of lightand dark merely happy accidents of the lines on some dim image of the orig-inal. It’s more a spectacular display (the aesthetic element) of Shenzhen’speculiar place in the global economy.

But in the midst of this now stands the Dafen Art Museum. Designedas a space that not only aims to foster the production of contemporary artbut also intends to exploit the implicit connections between art practice,dwelling, trade, exhibition and urban design, the museum itself representsa remarkable addition to Shenzhen’s urban fabric. The several pathwaysthrough the building’s public space serve to take its spectators through thecomplex urban mechanics of a city like Shenzhen in microcosm, withspaces that may be used for a variety of purposes: rental, commercial,public, and so on.2 The balance, though, is currently heavy on the side ofthe kitschy copies, because the museum itself remains, in its cavernouspromise of an art world to come, largely empty, while the streets betweenwhich it is sandwiched continue to demonstrate the resilience of Shenzhen’sentrepot replica economy.The situation in Huaqiangbei is similar: groundedon economic demands and market successes, the area nevertheless allowsfor philanthropic as well as aesthetic, technological and scientific experi-ment, and therefore provides a meaningful environment for the design of auniversity.

2. Urban Villages and Parks (Bijiashan Park, Shenzhen Central Park, Lok MaChau Loop)

Knowledge emphasis: EnvironmentKey terms: Imagination, nature, distribution, deposits, built environ-

ment, un-built environment, pollution, urban, context, designEnvironment: To focus on the environment is to focus on intrinsically

disturbing aspects of urban activity. It appears contingently to be related tothe category ecology thanks to growing panic about matters of climatechange, pollution and sustainability. But the issue of the environment (forinstance as that which surrounds and sustains an urban agglomeration)demands concerted treatment as an irreducible though pathologicallyignored element of urban life.

The environment does not only surround us, subsisting in the back-ground, but it is also where the rubbish, the waste products, the used anddiscarded remains of consumption and production are deposited. The ques-tion of what it is that the environment surrounds is put into relief once weconsider the relationships between the built environment, the agriculturalenvironment, and those large or small spaces that remain untended, fallinto disuse, or by their inhospitality to reject the urban infrastructure alto-gether (e.g. mountainous or desert terrains). This inhospitality can appear




in an inverted form, as hospitality, to elements in flight from the urbanorder.

An alternative mode of interaction with the environment contests theoperation of an ecological imaginary in eastern and western environmentalfigures that retain the concept of nature at their centre. We should perhapsallow the concept of nature to fade away entirely in our interactions withthe environment.

Shenzhen rises up as the manifestation of an environmental disloca-tion. Many places in Shenzhen, such as its indigenous farming and fishingvillages, became isolated by its zoning strategies. This alienation deprivesplaces of purposes no longer commensurate with their social and architec-tural forms. They forcefully contrive new, often perverse, permutations ofold purposes: urban distortions paralleling social distortions, like theDafen ‘oil painting village’, the infamous ‘second wife village’ and imagin-able future configurations.

3. Amusement Park District

Knowledge emphasis: EcologyKey terms: Complexity, history, genealogy, categories, division, return,

loss, potentialityEcology: The root term (from the Greek oikos) still underlies modern

conceptions of both ecology and economy. A complex ecology dissolves theopposing categories of nature and culture. This opposition was by the1960s recognized as having limited methodological use at best. Le¤ vi-Strauss, for instance, was already talking of ‘the reintegration of culture innature and finally of life within the whole of its physic-chemical conditions’(Le¤ vi-Strauss, 1972: 247). The human sciences, then, had as their ultimategoal, ‘not to constitute, but to dissolve man’ (1972: 247). Perhaps the catego-ries have little pertinence at all today.

Ecology allows us to account for the historical construction of the dis-tinction as well as to identify any political, economic or institutional opera-tion made in the wake of its residual influence. Idioms of nature writing,in traditions that dominate literary history in the East as much as in theWest, can be put in touch with discourses of bio-power, bio-politics, and

Figure 11 Environment as knowledge in the city




biotechnology, where techno-science is integral to the complex of ecologicalsystems.These connections are intrinsic to diverse industries.The biologicaland the agricultural infrastructures operate in a complex ecology with theurban and knowledge infrastructures.

As popular tourist destinations, themed amusement parks inShenzhen feature strongly as parts of a highly articulate cultural necropoliswhich, through absence, intensifies the demand and potential for interven-tion. Critics like Paul Virilio have identified the intrinsic connectionbetween ecological problems (in the widest possible sense) and a techno-science obsessed with speed and efficiency. ‘Modern science’, he writes,‘having progressively become techno-science ^ the product of the fatal confu-sion between the operational instrument and exploratory research ^ hasslipped its philosophical moorings and lost its way, without anyone takingumbrage at this, except for a few ecological and religious leaders’ (Virilio,2000: 2). The high-speed train system in China, soon to be the largest inthe world, is a case in point. The Shenzhen underground railway system istechno-science as a mode of knowledge production driven by performanceeffectiveness rather than by knowing. By bringing pedestrian areas intothe knowledge infrastructure, the 20K university might offer opportunitiesto mobilize alternative modes of spatial planning and design.

4. Central Business District

Knowledge emphasis: MoneyKey terms: Market, climate change, avant-garde art, speed, electromag-

netic real time exchange, inequality, life style, desire, labour, luxuryMoney: Money, to the extent that it marks the possibility of the circu-

lation of commodities, is a primary force in social cohesion and an indispen-sible factor in exchange. As the starting-point of capital, however, moneyoperates as the lever in its own surplus production. It is also a determiningfactor in the production of knowledge, which inevitably yet imperfectlybreaks down into commodity forms. We are compelled by research funds,budget-related student quotas, and assessment exercises on the values ofteaching and research. All these derive from market-based auditing prac-tices: profit forecasts, expansion/downsize strategies, and customer

Figure 12 Alternative amusement at the Amusement Park District




satisfaction surveys. Just as money fundamentally changes the meaning of(especially avant-garde) art through its pricing, it also shifts the directionof scholarship through citation indexes. Nevertheless money does notdefine the value of these material and immaterial commodities which, asAristotle established, must be defined by the commensurability of thehuman labour that goes into their production: an enigmatic, incalculable,measure. Money only serves as the externalization of that commensurability.Karl Marx insisted that money should be regarded as the commodity intowhich other commodities can be converted. Money is, therefore, ‘the neces-sary form of appearance of the measure of value that is immanent in com-modities’ (Marx, 1976: 188). The question of the ‘convertibility’ of thecommodity stands alongside its immanent value, the enigmatic measurethat renders the various kinds of human labour commensurable. Moneytherefore operates in a quasi-mythic way by which, as Ovid puts it, ‘bodiesare changed into other bodies’ (Metamorphoses). In general, the technicali-ties of transformation ^ including ultimately the incalculability of values ^require mobilizing in critical ways.

5. Luohu/Golf Courses

Knowledge emphasis: BodyKey terms: Life, western medicine, Chinese medicine, stem cells,

interactive cell communities, passivity, sexuality, sports, philosophy, reli-gion, hybrid care

Body: Urban golf courses ^ the inevitable yet too obvious symbol ofspatial injustice in cities ^ are particularly noticeable in Shenzhen becausethey serve not only the affluent in China but also Hong Kong where land

Figure 13 Concerning different functions of money




is in short supply. Nevertheless, the urban golf course, with its evident, evenspectacular, dissolution of the urban/rural divide (though China tradition-ally has relished the paradox of such dichotomies in its gardens and minia-tures) might give itself up to the thought of urban transformation. Atransformation, or metamorphosis, describes what happens when a body ischanged into another body. Perhaps this should be the foundation of studyin the 20K university, whose purpose merges the aims of transformation inknowledge with those of the city itself. But the body ^ the site of differenceand of sometimes mysterious, sometimes determinate change, of ages andphases, of crises and ultimately birth and death ^ is such a fraught conceptthat it’s as difficult to grasp what is said about it as it is to define thething itself. The distinction between bodies and languages remains unclear.Beyond the biological body (and there’s no reason to identify this as the pri-mary or literal sense) the corpus and the corpse belong as much to otherpertinent idioms: in the classroom, the teaching body, the tome (cut awayfrom the whole); in science and philosophy, atoms (the un-cuttable) fromwhich bodies are said to be formed, the bodies of language; in politics, thebody-politic, the subject and object; and so on.With regard to the biologicalbody, however, the extent to which biology has pioneered the field of immu-nological protection and defense deserves attention. Immunological princi-ples suggest that a body of whatever kind must become vulnerable toattack, must render itself passive to a dangerous extent, before any event oftransformation can occur. It is probably for this reason that the fault lines,

Figure 14 Public sports grounds at Lowu Dis




civic weakness and urban failure, provide the starting-point for a universityproject.

NotesThis article represents in edited form the work of several contributors, who in fol-lowing the aims of a project for a complex epistemology have collaborated in bring-ing the essentially multi-authored piece together. Some of the documents werefirst exhibited together as part of the URBANUS Group’s installation, ‘The 20KUniversity: Knowledge as Infrastructure’, at the 2009 Shenzhen and Hong KongBiennale of Urbanism and Architecture. The following pieces have been incorpo-rated in whole or in part into the current presentation: ‘Notes for a ComplexUrbanism: 11 Theses’, by Andrew Benjamin; ‘Beyond the Cold War University’,by Ryan Bishop; ‘The 20K University’, ‘Sites of Anticipated Transformation’ and‘Issues Concerning Knowledge and the City’, by Li Shiqiao and Esther Lorenz;‘Complex Epistemology’ and ‘Hypothetical University: Categorical, Disjunctive,Hypothetical’ by John Phillips, who also edited the document. Artwork is byLiu Xiaodu and Meng Yan of URBANUS Architecture and Design, who havekindly supplied all images for this article.

Liu Xiaodu and MengYan were instrumental in bringing the project to fruition inthat they produced the extensive installation, a scale model of parts of theShenzhen Strip (which is where the 20K university would be situated), runningacross the length of a wall at the 2009 Shenzhen and Hong Kong Biennale. Theinstallation incorporated sections of the texts published here either as video mono-logues or as written sections. In their corporate identity as URBANUS they havebeen involved in many architecture design and urban planning projects.Completed works range from culture and education, office, mixed use, renovationand regeneration, residence, interior design, landscape, to urban design andresearch projects. Founded in 1999, URBANUS is now based in Bei jing andShenzhen, and is recognized as one of the leading forces among China’s designfirms. It was featured as one of the ten global ‘Design Vanguards’ byArchitectural Record in December 2005, and has been awarded several architec-ture prizes.1. President Tan’s full address can be found at the following website: http://www.nus.edu.sg/president/pdf/forum.pdf (accessed 30 November 2010).2.This and other ‘urban interventions’ are documented in Xiaodu Liu et al. (2007).

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Andrew Benjamin teaches at Monash University. His main area of interestis philosophical aesthetics. Within that domain the areas on which hiswork concentrates are painting and architecture. He has written more than17 books and numerous articles in the fields of continental philosophy andaesthetics. He started his career as a Lecturer in Philosophy at theUniversity of Warwick, UK, where he was later Professor of Philosophyand Director of the Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature. Hehas also been Visiting Professor of Architectural Theory at ColumbiaUniversity and Visiting Critic at the Architectural Association in London,and Professor of Critical Theory at the University of Technology, Sydney,Australia.

Ryan Bishop is Professor of Global Arts and Politics at the WinchesterSchool of Art, University of Southampton, and publishes on critical theory,literary studies, urbanism, aesthetics, military technology, and art. He isco-author with John Phillips of Modernist Avant-Garde Aesthetics and




Contemporary Military Technology (Edinburgh University Press, 2010) andedits the Theory Now series for Polity Press. [email: [email protected]]

Li Shiqiao is Weedon Professor of Asian Architecture, School ofArchitecture, University of Virginia. He researches in contemporary urbanand architectural theories in Asia. His writings have appeared in manyinternational journals and his books include The Chinese City (London:SAGE, forthcoming), Architecture and Modernization (Beijing, 2009) andPower and Virtue (Routledge, 2007). He has practised architecture inLondon and Hong Kong and has taught at AA School of Architecture,National University of Singapore and The Chinese University of HongKong. He practised in Hong Kong from 1995 to 2000 and was co-founderand consultant of BHSL Design from 2002 to 2007.

Esther Lorenz is a registered architect with an education from TU Grazand TU Delft, and she has practised urban design and architecture in theNetherlands, Australia and Austria. In her research work and teaching sheinvestigates cultural issues in regard to contemporary cities and architecturewith a focus on socio-cultural sustainability, space perception, and the inter-section between media and architecture. She has been invited lecturer andguest critic at academic institutions internationally and she has exhibitedin the HK-SZ Bi-City Biennale in 2007 and 2009 and at the 11th VeniceBiennale of Architecture in 2008. She is currently Assistant Professor atthe School of Architecture, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

John W.P. Phillips teaches in the Department of English Language andLiterature at The National University of Singapore. He writes on aesthetics,critical theory, deconstruction, literature, military technology, philosophy,psychoanalysis, and urbanism. He is currently writing on immunologicalstructures in science, poetry and politics.

Xiaodu Liu is a founding partner of URBANUS. He has taught inTsinghua University and worked as a project architect in an Americandesign firm. He co-founded URBANUS in 1999.

Yan Meng is a founding partner of URBANUS and is an architect licensedin New York state. Prior to establishing URBANUS he worked withBei jing Yongmao Architects and Engineers, Brown/Bills Architects, Kohn,Pederson Fox Associates, and Meltzer/Mandl Architects in NewYork City.




The 20-Kilometer University: Knowledge as Infrastructure

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