DERIVE MINDSET

FROM COMMUNICATION TOWARDS INCLUSION

Social network, Peer2Peer, open source, crowdsourcing. Just few years ago these words were unknown to most of the population. Nowadays they stand and stay on the stage of a wide and transversal debate, which starts from the internet, going way beyond it. Actually it doesn’t make much sense talking about ‘virtuality’. Even the ‘virtual reality’ appears obsolete. It refers to something that simulate reality, following abstracted and extrapolated dynamics and rules on a track that just mimic what we perceive as ‘real’. ‘Virtual reality’ is called as well ‘parallel reality’. This parallelism tells about of course about faithful representation, but as well detachment, separation. The fact is the ‘virtual’ is not anymore. It already emboides fractions of actuality and reality itself.
Blogs and social network are becoming very important spaces where communities can gather around. But if before the debate was limited in a communicative dimension, nowadays there are several examples in which this limitation is going to be overwhelmed and replaced by a more propositive and affective dimension.

PERFORMANCE SYNDROME AND URBANISM OF SPECTACLE

The media of the blog appears to be limited and inconvenient for traditional design practise. The main arguing is that a post can not deal with details, compromizing basically the ‘final result’ of the design strategies. But perhaps, as a way to communicate a urban practise proposal, what has to be argued is the concept of ‘final result’ rather than the blog post. Talking about an eventual inclusive design strategy, the approach meant to produce a ‘final result’ (that could be a masterplan, a strategic project or whatsoever) is not inclusive at all. At least not in the process itself. Most of the debates around it born dead. The ‘final result’ annihilates the debate on feasibility of the punctual solution proposed, mostly on the base of economic affordability and appeal of the presentation itself. That is basically marketing. Debord would call it urbanism du spectacle.
In a masterplan any weak point is equal to failure that compromise everything. All the research, all the design process and the esperiments disappear beneath the ‘final presentation’, careless of all the eventual important topics and ideas brought on stage. In a final presentation, any further debate collapses in a judgment as much final and as well definitive. Conversely, thanks to the active role of the reader, in this blog the weak points, intentionally put on discussion, embody inclusive gaps where the debate can enter and establish dialectics among blogger (designer) and reader (community).

RISK NEGATIONISM 

Inhabitating an environment, whether pretended to be called ‘natural’ or ‘anthropic’, implies to deal as well with risk factors. Traditionally, within urban context the approach is mostly ‘negatively defensive’. First, defensive for actions assessing danger events are meant to resist against attacks by external disturbances, whether being natural, social or other kind. Negatively, on second thought, because the task is to hide the risk and make its presence disappear to perception, for a certain psychological safety. This negationism towards the presence of natural threats in a built environment implies only determined stakeholders being aware of conditions and actions, while the rest is involved and engaged only when the threat turns into attack. On the other hand is possible to find examples where risk is turned into a feature. In Venice the ‘acqua alta’ phenomenon is constantly under sight control by anyone. And when it happens everybody knows what to do because is something usual and constantly influencing the experience of the city. When the water level raises temporary pathways and door barriers are put in place to preserve houses from flooding and to let possible accessing the streets.
Design process should not hide the environmental dynamics but conversely make them accessible in terms of awareness and phenomenology to inhabitants who can have their own statements about, relate to and then interact with their context.

INFRASTRUCTURES NARRATIVE AS IDENTITARIAN ELEMENT

Urban population need constantly to relate and establish connections with the environment they inhabit. The practise of landmarking could be the clearest example. Usually focusing on this kind of identitarian craving coverges to built places, rather for open spaces. At the same time, though, there’s a whole constant interest in those spaces, mostly trails, roads or other infrastructural elements. Despite their appearence of non-built and non-designed palces, they give space for several identitarian practises and activities, beside the usual of connecting different places.
The infrastructural heritage could become a powerful canvas where a narrative of the past could be rediscovered, and expectations for the future be developed.

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EXCERPT FROM STALKER MANIFESTO

ACTUAL TERRITORIES – They constitute the built city’s negative, the interstitial and the marginal, spaces abandoned or in the process of transformation. These are the removed lieu de la memoirs, the unconscious becoming of the urban systems, the spaces of confrontation and contamination between the organic and the inorganic, between nature and artifice. Here the metabolization of humanity’s discarded scrap, or nature’s detritus, produces a new horizon of unexplored territories, mutant and by default virgin, that are for Stalker “Actual Territories.” The term “actual” indicates the process in which space comes into being. The “actual” is not what we are, but rather that we are becoming, that is to say the “other” that becomes other (Foucault). Such territories are difficult to render intelligible and therefore projectable, because they lack connections to the present and therefore are extraneous to contemporary language. Their conscious presence cannot come about by direct experience, they are to be physically witnessed rather than represented. The archive of experiences is the only form of mapping possible for these “Actual Territories.”

ENTERING THE TERRITORIES – Perceiving the discarded territories, in completing such a route, between that which is secure, quotidian, and that which is uncertain, generates a sense of dislocation, a state of apprehension. This altered state induces a perceptual intensification unexpectedly giving the space a meaning, making “everywhere” a place for discovery, or instead a dreaded place for an undesirable encounter. The gaze becomes penetrating, the ear becomes keen to every sound.

CROSSING THE TERRITORIES – On foot establishes an unmediated experience, allowing for a more dynamic reading. A nomadic research, a mode of capturing the act of crossing without regimentation, ratification or definition of the object examined, so as not to prevent its becoming. Crossing is for Stalker a creative act, that means creating a system of relations within the chaotic juxtaposition of time and space that characterizes “Actual Territories.” Crossing means composing in a single conscious parcours the strident contradictions that animate these spaces, in a search for unedited harmony. Crossings and making crossings, inducing into the perception of the actual because it can become diffused into the general consciousness, while avoiding, however, banalizing its linguistic meaning.

THE STALKER MANIFESTO | http://digilander.libero.it/stalkerlab/tarkowsky/manifesto/manifesting.htm