by Uriel Kon | Dept. of Architecture, Bezalel

How to conceive ideas of a whole in an age of dislocated entities

image: Phogel

The Israeli city was born, rose and fell during the 20th century. The Israeli city is a consequence of the 20th century. Today, in the midst of an era of Neoliberalism, the Israeli city is busy dismantling the remains of the infrastructure of spatial welfare that built it and its unique story. This deconstruction is characterized by a process of moving from density to sprawl and the disintegration of contiguous fabrics in favor of separate entities divided by new, artificial borders. As we know, the urban ground level is no longer an arena of interactions, but a surface full of obstacles, divisions and discontinuities.

This can be likened to a negative image of Aldo Rossi’s “Teatro Del Mondo”, the floating structure that blends into any part of the Venetian urban landscape, because it carries the archetypical gene of the city. In the case before us, the typical Israeli city of the beginning of the 21st century is comprised of thousands of structures with no typological foundation, floating aimlessly in an a-contextual sea. The city floats without direction as if it has forgotten its own assembly instructions.

One of the great paradoxes is that the city is divided and locked into dislocated objects, while the lives of human beings, according to philosopher Zygmunt Bauman, have become “liquid.” The individual changes from day to day, the nature of human relations changes, daily routes change, beginnings and endings multiply, and the continuous plot of life no longer exists. Such existential fluidity is at odds with the solid, rational and predetermined city, and it is in search of an urban expression that can meet its basic needs.

Modern urbanism, according to urban sociologist Richard Sennet, which was born in Bismarck’s Republic and emulated the functional strategies and structures of the military (and which for the first time gave the city and the lives of the people in it direction and narrative meaning), failed at the task of creating structures that were dynamic and ambiguous enough to be able to give physical expression to the dominant contours of the present era.

The big cities that have been planned or re-formulated in the last century have been planned around a spatial and social narrative aimed at creating a feeling of rational logic and control. The apparatus that developed around this approach, namely the Master Plan (תב”ע), tried to pre-determine, dictate or imagine how a population whose social characteristics were yet unknown, would behave in the space over time. Wealthy societies, according to Sennet, preferred to perpetuate a foretold physical and social set of behaviors, out of fear of disorder and difference. These societies co-opted the urban planner by neutralizing his primary potential, namely to create a space that would be flexible and complex enough that it could embody spatial ideas with timeless qualities. Any relevant urban project in our day must rethink coherent and flexible ways of urban planning. The planner must re-invent the form of representation of the urban space as a culturally layered means of spatial communication, giving the urban narrative a new meaning.

This term,“urban narrative”, is based on the central assumption that cities contain within them a plot that can be identified in the city’s genetics and be compared to the parallel term in the field of literature.

Modern literature from the beginning of the Belle Epoque, and in parallel to Bismarck’s Republic, formulated narrative and formal ideas in the field of prose and at the same time imagined different models of cities. These literary cities allow us to analyze the story of the real city through the conceptual understanding of its great problems and ideas.

Following are examples of  models of the literary cities, in progressing order:

Proust’s City is the city of meaning, the city of the faith in space. It is a Freudian city, a city that was built around the layered memory that builds up out of the urban, literary and psychological experience. In the Proustian city you walk around like in a structured story, structured on the intersection of the real city and the personal-cognitive city.

Huysmans’ City describes the beginning of the feeling of discomfort within the urban structure that was created around satiated society. The hero of his legendary novel “Against Nature” experiences (for the first time in modern literature) the tension between city and country, between aesthetics and the simple truth. Despite his attempts to escape and begin a new life, he returns to the city defeated, because the hero is an absolute product of the city.

Celine’s City expresses the collapse of the 1930s. Fragmentary, disintegrating, partial prose, angry and looking for new dynamics. The cruel Paris ceases to be Celine’s home. He is thrown into the global village in order to search for the narrative of his life. However, it seems that the entire world works according to the same principle. Celine’s city expresses space in Nietzschian terms.

Sartre’s City is a transitional city, a city with existential and typological comfort that does not succeed in stopping the next entropic stage.

Artaud’s City (later Derrida’s city), by the thirties and forties, is already a city of deconstruction, a city of surrealism, the post-modern city. Deconstruction, in the language-space, appears as an exercise trying to restore the innate content of language, archetypical states and the primal dialectic between material and the formulation of form.

Modern literature underwent similar processes as did the modern city. This field generally managed to precede or predict the narrative and structural movements of the city. Through literary analysis one can look critically at the urban enterprise and find new tools for planning and for re-thinking the city.

Some literature of the end of the last century formulated a new kind of city that has not yet been given material expression in the built surroundings. Primarily in authors like W.G. Sebald, Juan Jose Saer, Cesar Aira or Joao Gilberto Noll, the prose of the end of the millennium offers a constructive view that conciliates between the different phases in the development of the city that were already described here. It learned lessons from the exercises in deconstruction, proposes re-interpretations of existentialism, and even draws from Proust’s Freudian vision.

The basic conceptualization of the new literary/urban language is: 1) the neo-contextualization of language/space; 2) creating multi-layered plots; 3) strengthening new liminal articulations; 4) searching for a new form of representation; and 5) creating a space of “ambiguity” as a starting point for a free reading of space.

Philosophers, thinkers, novelists, geographers, sociologists, and urbanists have dealt for many years with the research and conceptualization of the cultural characteristics of the 20th century and its decline. Though they have given considerable attention to the concept of space, their conclusions regarding tangible proposals for real cities remain vague.

On the other hand, architects and urban planners have mostly turned their backs in the last 20 years on the fields of philosophy, sociology and the theory of space. Instead of deepening the theoretical context of the physical act of planning, many academies have chosen to imitate and kow tow to what is done in architecture firms. New architects learn to perpetuate the physical and cultural world in which they live rather than challenge its unacceptable elements. Many architects deal with building objects, each adding to the city an object of his own, neglecting the importance of the yuxtaposition between form and meaning in the architectural act.

The importance of  this topic stems from the attempt to find a new compromise between the theoretical dimension and the urban architectural product. On the Israeli urban level, one cannot think of a subject that is more important than the search for ways to stop the process of fragmentation and urban decadence in the Israeli space, through the attempt to strengthen the innate spatial characteristics of those spaces. Planners must search for physical solutions in order to turn the Israeli urban sketches into real places in which the feeling of narrativity and belief in meaning of space could turn the urban space into a pleasant arena in which we want to live and remain.