ARUN HAZARIKA
Integrating the fragmented city by autocatalytic block in the Landscape: Conceptual ideas for hybridization of shopping spaces within existing landscape in Carugate, Milano
Author: Arunjyoti Hazarika
Phd in Architecture and Urban design, 27th cycle | Politecnico di Milano
Key words
Urban fragmentation, Infrastructure, landscape, globalization, shopping
Abstract
Commercialization and shopping are often criticised in both public and political debate, as well as in academic urban literature for producing spaces that are not entirely public and its distortion of the ‘true needs’ of the masses through commercial manipulation. This article tries to understand the urban fragmentation of cities both physically and socially due to negative impact of globalisation and other economic forces, and explains how shopping spaces can be a new catalyst in integrating fragmented urban spaces by intelligently composing and compressing different programs within these blocks that is closely related to the city. Moreover, the article tries to seek the possibilities to integrate shopping with infrastructure and landscape which can become a new node for intermodal infrastructural junction of future cities and it also questions how shopping spaces can become new centrality for multiplicity rather than an isolated object in the urban landscape.
Fragmentation of cities
Today our cities are fragmented due to various reasons. May it be political, geographical, social or economic but ‘Sprawl’ is a term commonly used to describe the scattered condition that represents a crisis in the traditional ‘city’. There is ‘placelessness’ or loss of identity which are becoming common in our perception of cities. Social fragmentation again leads to a less homogeneous society with an increased focus on security, and the formation of social ‘enclaves’ (Beck 1992). Various urban researchers on territory and urban planning have pointed out how heterogeneous infrastructural developments based on economic priority of a place or region has resulted in physical fragmentation of our cities. Infrastructural construction is like surgery within the city for the future development. But within this process of surgery there are wounds and scars which can be compared to residual spaces adding to the process of fragmentation. And with time some of its scars/spaces might heal (urban regeneration), and some scars/spaces might deteriorate from existing situation.
The American architect and author Albert Pope delivers in his book Ladders1 one analysis of how fragmentation of the city occurs (Pope 1995). As a result of modernization and globalization, certain elements in this infrastructural system are prioritized; certain streets are upgraded to highways, creating accessibility for certain parts of the city to distant locations at the expense of neighboring urban areas. It results in the isolation of some local areas and local street-systems, often physically cut off from the surrounding city and neglected for being less economically attractive. This uneven distribution of accessibility leads to variation in the volume of public life and in the degree of social control in public spaces, ultimately resulting in a defensive withdrawal by certain social groups from the social and public space of the city.
The urban landscape is ‘fragmented’ into disconnected enclaves and dead-end streets, and privileged spaces are established outside the continuous public ‘arena’ represented by the homogeneous urban grid. The privileged enclaves in the fragmented city, the shopping centers, gated communities etc. are not only the end result of this process but they are, according to Pope, also partly responsible for the fragmentation of the underlying collective space of the city by supporting the development of prioritized infrastructural systems.
Shopping- Integrating fragmented cities
Is there any way by which new urban transformation or developments can somehow integrate our fragmented cities? An important research has been done by the book The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (Chung, Koolhaas et al. 2001) on importance of idea of shopping in integrating the fragmented cities. To give a sort perspective on what the book tries to say: shopping is everything. Shopping as phenomena and metaphor increasingly encompass our environment, new public buildings in the city adopt the spatial principles of shopping, and most planning and architecture is either a product of, or inspired by shopping2. It traces the conditions for the dominant role the retail program has in the city, and how it, rather than accelerating fragmentation, actually works as an integrating force, binding seemingly incommensurate urban elements together in new urban form. According to McMorrough3, under modernism, shopping was synonymous with the shopping mall. The mall was located outside the city and was considered to be an inward-looking and self-contained enclave in the suburb, with no interest in its surroundings. After the fall of modernism shopping is no longer contained within designated zones, but takes on a ‘revolutionary’ potential for programmatic integration across the strict divisions of the modernist city. Shopping according to McMorrough3 (2001a: 201), has been so successful as a strategy for the city, that it no longer makes sense to separate urbanity from shopping, and the criticism of shopping that is present in parts of urban academic literature, and the call for resistance against commercialization of the urban space, has become irrelevant.
So the perspective of shopping could be changed from a closed inward typology to an integrated programmatic urban function that can accommodate different programs with fluidity between public movements and infrastructural junctions. Intermodal station placed directly within the shopping mall or vice versa can change the dynamics completely. So our stations can have new urban typology. These new typology will inherit the programs and inner machinery of shopping. So shopping rather than urban fragmentation can bring new urban cohesion, acting like glue between new urban developments.
Autocatalytic block in the Landscape
Autocatalysis is a chemical term used to define catalysis of a reaction by one of its products. Autocatalytic block tries to expresses an idea that how can shopping space already present or newly integrated with multiple activities can bring a social and economic reaction in a particular place and shopping itself act as a catalyst to drive fragmented city in this case Carugate, Milan, to a more connected and integrated community. Together these linear autocatalytic blocks connected to the present and future infrastructure within the territory can bring a network of spaces that has intelligent composition and compression of different programs needed by the city to bring urban cohesion.
Designing of shopping malls always remains a debate for architects and planners, who think its designs, are based on standardized procedure where spaces are strongly regulated by economic benefits and they produce privatized space rather than public space, and most of the time it is categorized as an ugly building. These preconceived notions can be changed and shopping malls can be viewed equally like other important public buildings such as art museums, library, theatre hall etc. The quality of urban and public spaces provided by shopping areas could be diverse and house multiple activities and public gatherings. The new shopping spaces could be designed with the keywords: Multiplicity, flexibility, adaptability, alternative form, domesticity.
Autocatalytic block in the landscape tries to define an idea of combining functional activities such as offices, shopping areas, habitable spaces with natural landscape of agricultural field present in that area. It also tries to hybridize some forms and encloses different spaces into one linear mass that becomes a tangent to the current system of infrastructure. The main block is being lifted above from the ground in columns and the ground space is used for parking. The earlier shopping and commercial areas form an ugly facade for the city of Carugate and it brings a visual discontinuity. Now the new idea for this ugly facade is to think of ‘River of landscape’ that brings an importance to the open space and tries to adopt the visual continuity of agricultural fields that is already present in the urban fabric of the area. The old system was too mutilated and creates visual disturbances and thus dividing the system of urban mobility. Also by proposing an extremely linear block that contains literally everything needed for the small city creates a community in itself. By having such kind of linear blocks in the surrounding nearby cities will create a network of hybridized shopping spaces that could become important nodal point for public interaction.
Urbanism has always sustained functionalism based on efficiency as its central value, with results that were, almost invariably, the application of sectarian policies instead of actions reflecting the diversity and complexity of urban demands. So the public spaces that we perceive in the globalized city have changed dramatically in the past decades. Public spaces or civic spaces are more contained and have character of meeting points around the city. Here shopping complex forms an integral meeting point for public. But for architects and urban designers shopping mall has no character and it cannot be considered an important building that can perform as an important public nodal point. So I assume by hybridizing4 key elements of public spaces and other functions, architectural forms there is a possibility to improve the current image of ugly shopping malls and it could become more connected to the city become more sensitive to the context.
So the proposal tries to link different fragmented city with the concept of shopping as a civic spaces hybridised with formal and informal, architectural and social aspect of public life in a much wider context. It is a system of linear blocks that will be the container of future needs of the cities and can be adaptable to the new changes in the global economic conditions. Its adaptively, contained environment, working with the landscape of agricultural fields makes its state of being as autocatalytic block in the landscape that catalyse the public activity in the area and also improve the frontal part of the city and give new meaning to the idea of shopping.
Notes
1. Albert Pope, Ladders, Princeton Architectural Press (January 1, 1997)
2. Text from Harvard Design school project on the city 2, Guide to shopping, Taschen, New York, 2002
3. John McMorrough, city of shopping, (2001a: 201),
4. Harvard Design school project on the city 2, Guide to shopping, Taschen, New York, 2002
5. From Lessons on Hybridization by Fabrizio Zanni at Politecnico di Milano on Doctoral course on architecture and urban design XXVII