The sign in the foreground:  What is a grassroots approach to a neoliberal, post-socialist republic?

Zone of Opportunity along the mile long section

Sketch scenarios, the future of The Monumental Core

INSTANT CITY / MEGA PROJECT

The execution of monumental vision and the production of new public space

New Cities are erected at speeds that far exceed initial demand or need for public space.  The result?  Public space is either non-existent or overwhelming until density reaches a critical mass.  This thesis proposes an infrastructural intervention for the interim – a catalyst for city life through a re-design of the public realm—the barometer of health for the city.

New capital city and former soviet republic Astana, Kazakhstan, was realized in just under a decade.  Its remote location and extreme climate in combination with a transitory, uprooted population, and lack of adequate public infrastructure has resulted in a vast, empty core at the heart of the city.

Monolithic, and disconnected buildings support the notion that the needs of the people (perceived as a passive mass) are secondary to prominent individuals and political figures.  This city of monuments has prioritized image over spatial relationships and has produced a series of follies rather than functional buildings and public space.

This thesis proposes a re-configuration of the public realm through new layers of density – the draping of a public surface over a neoliberal foundation.

More specifically, the proposal seeks to:

1. Transform the axis from predominantly mono-functional to multi-functional use with the creation of permanent and transitional program.

2. Carve out, or sever, the uninterrupted horizontality of the site to create spaces scaled for a variety of human activities, individual and collective.

3. Link isolated, object buildings and monuments with a protected, pedestrian-oriented public infrastructure.

4. Create vistas within vistas to shift focus from the state to the people who comprise it and define its values – highlighting the multiple publics of Astana and encouraging a citywide coexistence.

5. Accommodate flexibility over time, including the need to support daily practices, periodic routines and episodic citywide events.

The thesis challenges the role of the planner, architect and urban designer, in the ongoing global economic crises.  Ultimately, this is not only an idea for public space issues in Kazakhstan, but a template for resolving the compromised public realm of new cities world wide.

Construction of a city center on hold, Sunnyvale, CA

Recent global phenomena and by-product of the economic recession:: The unfinished project.

Around the world, the construction of new buildings has halted, and these edifices, or “monuments to failed investment” remain erect in various forms of completion/annihilation.  Many are just the foundations, or cleared and surveyed landscapes, that have become the voids of well-established urban fabrics.  Others are the secured and inaccessible construction sites, severed and obstructing desolate parts of a city.  New York (and Boston?) are keeping running tabs on these arrested developments.  See Curbed NY for the city’s latest count.

In the US, the unfinished project is often a building or two.  And while Las Vegas probably has the largest conglomeration of these domestic paused developments right now, what happens in Asia…where the building of cities occurs at speeds comparable to single building construction here?

Existing Ordos south of the river, New orthogonal superblocks of Ordos City North of the river

Main arterial view, Ordos City

AlJazeera documented Ordos City, China in this November video segment.  It is an entire new city that stands built, yet empty.  A ghost town pre-inhabitation.  This is a pattern, though, that isn’t too unlike the empty spaces of Dubai and Shanghai.  Dubai’s Burj Khalifa opened this past week with loads of available office and hotel space and people wondering if it will ever be fully occupied.  I visited other places entertaining similar ‘on hold’ scenarios: New Songdo City, South Korea and Astana, Kazakhstan.  A view down an arterial road in Ordos makes me think of identical views across central Asia and reveals that city building today hasn’t changed much over the last 50 years.

Astana, Kazakhstan

Does this mean that cities around the world are rethinking their once audacious building agendas as large-scale projects have been consequentially delayed, halted, or cancelled?  This pause in city building presents an opportunity for a deliberate and thorough investigation of the built realities of the past decade’s experimental construction era.  It also begs for a realistic and sensitive vision on how to proceed once the gears of progress begin to turn again.

The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. -T.S. Eliot

The travel concludes….(momentarily?)  I return to the Bay for the last edition: Thesis 2010.  It is a time to recoup, regroup, and build new computers for rendering.  Stay tuned for the grand exhibition and lecture, to be posted.

In the meantime, Burj Dubai, now known as Burj Khalifa, opened its doors today.  Props to the tallest tower team back in Chicago …roughly six years ago.  See more.

Pre-new city hiking in Putrajaya, Cyberjaya, and the Multimedia Super Corridor, I stumble upon more new cities and competitions being held in and around Kuala Lumpur.

There is a ‘Name a Township’ contest for a new development, an intelligent city, being planned in Selangor Science Park 2, Bukit Baja, Sepang.
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Contest parameters:

The name of the township must portray the following attributes:

- Intelligent Technology

- Urban Contemporary Modern Living

- Integrated

- Strategic Location

P/S: Do exclude ‘cyber’ in your suggestions, we know you are more creative than that.

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I tried to submit ‘untested city,’ entrants must be Malaysian citizens.

Chance encounters w/the elevated landscapes of Guangzhou, near Zhu Jiang New Town

Spent the past week exploring events/meeting urban enthusiasts in and around the Pearl River Delta (PRD).  Roughly ten years ago, Koolhaas (and the GSD) recognized this region of China to be the generator of the “city of exacerbated difference” (Project on the City).  He referred to city building as an opportunity to engage in urban design at many different levels and through a variety of different cultures.  A decade later, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong have continued city building at a rate and scale that deserves further investigation.  In a sense, they have been completely transformed, re-imagined, and re-appropriated by a new population.  Within the last ten years, Hong Kong’s northern territories are infilled with new towns, Guangzhou is constructing a new city axis and public attractor weighted heavily with what LA architecture critic, Frances Anderton, raises as “architectural excess” and Shenzhen has a burgeoning new art’s district (the Overseas Chinese Territory, or OCT) inhabited by (basically) returning expats.  The delta region, due to its unique location geographically, economically, and politically, is the leading model for new cities in China.  I set out to the Shenzhen/Hong Kong biennale, themed “City Mobilization,” to find out if the fruits of this labor are applicable to a wider venue abroad.

Landscape urbanism mediates sporting venue and housing in the OCT, Shenzhen

At the opening day activities, Shenzhen/Hong Kong Architecture and Urbanism Biennale, Shenzhen’s Civic Square, main venue

Biennale theme: City Mobilization

Tessellated  urbanism, subdivide surface realized.  Saw works in-progress in the PRD, including Zaha Hadid’s Guangzhou Opera House (pictured), SOM/Smith+Gill’s Pearl River Tower, and OMA’s Stock Exchange in Shenzhen.  See flickr for more.

On the Pearl River