Urban Cursor - Social interaction and play

Urban Cursor is a GPS enabled object by Sebastian Campion, designed to facilitate social interaction and play in public space.

The object, which is shaped as an oversized 3-dimensional computer cursor (pointer), was placed on a square in Figueres, Catalunya during the cultural festival Ingràvid. Here, people could touch it, move it around and sit on it as an alternative to the benches. Despite being removed from its normal screen based environment, the cursor was still in touch with the digital world. Via an embedded GPS device, the cursor transmitted its geographic coordinates to a website. At the website, the coordinates were mapped in Google Maps thereby documenting the cursor's movements in the physical world and making it possible for participants to see how they collectively helped move the object around. 

Questioning the frontier of public spaces

"My experiments are focused on the human presence in cities. How to appropriate public spaces with cheap medium and ephemeral action, questioning the frontier between public spaces and private spaces I use regularly with various techniques with tapes, sealing foil, inflatables and I  propose new shaped spaces (which are grafted onto the existing urban furnitures) that become multifunctional  by people uses, allowing passersby to take the time to sit, watch, children playing, then leave. "

Cedric Bernadotte

Cedric Bernadotte, Urban Interventions photo stream

Individual Borders

"I approached people on the street and asked them to define their own personal border around themselves, while in front of the official one. I offered them a box full of different coloured chalk with which to draw their borders on the street. Most of the 40 participants instinctively defined their personal borders in a public space as a circle around themselves." 

Iris Hoppe, Individual Borders (2003), the movie
Iris Hoppe, Interventions in Public Space

Spaces that could create communal dialogue

 
"... It can be manifested with an architecture grounded in its use by people. One potent point of departure could be the boundaries and adaptation of space. It might be argued that contemporary architecture is a rethinking and perhaps softening of the borders: inside/ outside, individual and public, program and form, physical and virtual... 

Perhaps the oxymoron can represent a productive paradigm; can these binaries (intersections of public/ private, global/ local, artificial/ natural, monumental/ mundane, complex/ simple, symbolic/ pragmatic, fake/ authentic, active/ passive, thickness/ thinness) lead to a duality capable of blurring the boundaries? How can the unexpected interdependency of extraordinary spaces create a communal/ symbiotic dialogue?" 

Kazuyo Sejima has been appointed as Director for 12th Venice Architecture Biennale.

Empowering Everyday Civic Engagement

Urban Atmospheres desires to move towards an improved understanding of the emotional experience of urban life. The single main research challenge is to understand how the future fabric of digital and wireless computing will influence, disrupt, expand, and be integrated into the social patterns existent within our public urban landscapes.

Use, Comfort and Accessibility of Public Space

By thinking about where to put the money, given that it is scarce, and whom and how many people are going to get hold of it, is one of the questions public space has to face.

Hotly debated issue of the maintenance and management of the collective ensembles is in relation to the aspect of safety, but also privacy and comfort. Where these aspects are not properly attuned to one another, vandalism and crime are given a free hand.Therefore the intermediate space is a space or border area where individuals and groups are to flesh out their own relation to the larger whole. It is precisely these areas that intend to be sensitive to vandalism and neglect, intended originally for the emancipation and self-fulfillment of the modern individual.

"I believe the next challenge is public space as concerns of small and medium companies. I think the demand for design is no longer in the minimum operation of housing, but in questioning how to incorporate more resources without squandering them or spending them inappropriately." 
Luis Eduardo Bresciani, Head of the Chilean Urban Development division of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development.

Inbetween mass-housing - open spaces of identity?

In spring 2010 Archis is publishing a book on mass housing by exploring the individual places and their social, political and cultural contexts: "There is something uncanny about traveling to places that continously evoke a common, everyday landscape. Art historian Mark Crimson describes traveling between two cities in the world as a 'means to return home as you inevitably pass through airport, ring roads and similar buildings'. The experience of travel today increasingly feels this way. Modern architecture is everywhere and mass housing, epitomizing the principles of modern architecture and urbanism, has truly become a global phenomenon. The prevailing sense of uniformity among global metropolises nowadays is due in part to continously encountering these large machines for living. Mass housing gained poor reputation in the latter half of the last century. A form of collective anxiety regarding the standardized, excessive character of such large scale structures stigmatized many of the projects. Yet mass produced buildings account for a vast production of the world's housing stock."

Over a billion people today live in the pre-fabricated housing and the number is expected to rise to 6 billion people by 2040. Cities are learning how to build faster, cheaper and higher. At the same time the social structure of these massive pre-fabricated environments shouldn't be left unnoticed. The quantity, quality and variety of areas to gather, meet and socialize - the open space inbetween the mass architecture  becomes the key element for potential habitants. Not only does the open space provide place for gathering and meeting or greenery, it should also be a safe by breaking the tensions of the class system.

I am keen to digg deeper into the book next spring and find future potential for open space in the context of mass architecture by studying from existing housing examples all over the world.

Read more about Archis and its interventions...

The more people around, the less people around

It has been discussed lately that human beings in nowadays society are not considered substance anymore, but a function. Human 'role' in life has become more important than his personality. How does it affect our perceptions of (public) space - space that we share with others? And the way we tend to think and name activities, spaces, people around us?

Man-is-not a tool by Paavo Piik

Man is not a tool.
He may not be.
He is not a tool for pleasure or intimacy

or respect or lightness or boredom
tool for making your work.


He is not for making money,
filling emptiness, teaching, viewing
for self-esteem and self-defence tool.
Because man is not a function.


He has no confessor or a prostitute
or a handhold or a domestic animal
or a wallet or a clown
or a workhorse or a babysitter,
non-critical role of a critic.
At least in it's own mind.


The more people around you,
the less they resemble the people
and the more they resemble functions.


Ergo,
The more people around you,
the less people around you.

source: free translation from Paavo Piik's poetry

Fixed Feature Life?

Fixed feature space is one of the basic ways of organizing the activities of individuals and groups. It includes material manifestations as well as the hidden, internalized designs that govern behaviour of man. One common example of fixed feature space is spatially organised inside of the western house. Not only there are rooms for special functions - food, entertainment, socializing - even the artifacts associated with the activities are related to that specific space. In some standards people who live in a mess are those who fail to classify activities and artifacts according to a uniform, consistent and predictable spatial plan. The internal layout however is quite recent.

Philippe Aries points out in a book Centuries of Childhood that rooms had no fixed functions in European houses until the eighteenth century. Members of the family had no privacy as we know it today nor there were spaces that were sacred or specialized for one function only: "...strangers came at will, while beds and tables were set up and taken down according to the moods and appetites of the occupants". In the 18th century the house altered its form, rooms started to be arranged likely to street and named after its function - bedroom, living room, dining room etc.

Some aspects of the fixed-feature space however are not visible until one observes human behaviour. It is important to note that fixed feature space nowadays acts like a mold into which great deal of behaviour is cast. As Churchill has noted: "We shape our buildings and they shape us".

It has been discussed lately that people do not think of their relationships with other people by kinship or emotions any more, but they have also started to name people by functions.

Futuro house by Matti Kuusia, 1968

Proxemics of Space

In 1957 a doctor named Humphrey Osmond began observing the effects of environmental change on the interactions of patients in a mental hospital in Saskatchewan. From that research he eventually identified two major systems for patterning space. Sociofugal space (gridlike) tends to keep people apart and suppress communication while sociopetal space (radial) does just the opposite. It brings people together and stimulates interaction as routes merge and overlap. Many other researchers followed in Osmond’s footsteps, developing a body of work known as “proxemics” to describe the cultural distinctions between intimate, personal, social and public space. The Hidden Dimension by Edward T. Hall is a classic reference on the spatial aspects of human interaction.