wielding with the wild

TBT: urban
D/A: polygenetic

The wild can be best described as a:

"new terrifying word for urban drift...spontaneous emergence of unruly and uncontrollable emancipation of self-organizing social forces from the rigid geometries of socially and behaviorally engineered urban space.”

The wild consists of an intuitive process, often times found in nature, where one can fluidly move between tactical and strategic modes in relation to fluctuating conditions. Examples of the wilding phenomenon in action and studied: a NY Times diagram of people "wilding" in the Harlem Ghetto, the wilding maneuvers of the Vietcong, the Santa Fe Institute of Complexity’s description of computer modeled bottom-up system of organization.

What then is a wild architecture? Instead of calling it architecture, Winter coins the term “polygenetic structures” to describe a hybrid condition of city and architecture. No specific examples are given, only parameters for what it could be: large, complex, and fundamentally open ended and unfinished. Examples that do come to my mind scale up from the street vending cart to the agglomerations of shantytowns, favelas, and slums have formed a relationship with the city. These structures are what makes the urban possible as its continued existence depends on the amount of work, information, and form made available.

As the world continues to urbanize, Sanford Kwinter thinks it becomes imperative for designers to follow in the same logic of how the “wild” self-organizes. How then does one use the logic of the wild to design the urban fabric? Digital technology gets hinted throughout the article with terms like reaching “computational thresholds” and algorithms to aid us in the process. From a legislative point of view, one could see more flexible legal devices employed besides grids, parceling, and zoning systems.

This then leads into my next question of what gives us the right, let alone the assumption, that we can influence such design outcomes with wilding agendas. Didn’t modern planning projects armed with their social sciences of yesterday end in spectacular failures of segregated housing and market driven isolated communities? Winter himself implies this with claims that “less than 5% of this [urban substance] will be designed or planned” in the traditional manner (191). Could the mere intervention of architects disrupt the logic of a truly wild urbanity or would our participation really help this process along?

For whatever reason, Kwinter thinks that the wild can be wielded so that “we will earn the right to call ourselves urbanists again.” What were we before then? Nomads? Dwellers? Villagers? Townies? Suburbanists? Jetsetters? If we were urbanists, then how did we lose this title? Were we ever Kwinter’s definition of urbanists to begin with? Why is it so important a title to reclaim? For him to make such a claim must be more than just a design profession’s intellectual and political justification of existence:

"Today's task is to induce, dare one say grow-these polygenetic structures, or more accurately, to program the systems that enable such structures, in their turn, and at a sufficient wild distance, to assemble themselves… Design today must find ways to approximate, borrow, and transform morphogenetic processes from all aspects of the wild nature, to invent artificial means of creating living artificial environments. We must learn to see design algorithms everywhere we look." (191, “The Wild” from Far from Equilibrium)

Why the necessity to adapt these wilding strategies? Is the wild a more natural, sustainable, or intuitive way for society and designers to function? Does this lead to new possibilities in our design endeavors? Or, is the call for wilding just another one of our knee-jerk Western impulses to impose control or perhaps an anthropocentric urge? Will wilding be more liberating for the rest of humanity than what’s been planned in the past?

Kwinter does imply some imperatives in the article’s footnotes, highlighting the potential for abuse of mis-wielding and misunderstanding of the wild. The scenario presented in the film Blue Thunder is an example of wilding lessons from Vietnam relearned by the government in its helicopter crime operations. In the U.S., apparently the urban is “under siege by laissez-fiare ideology and the new Republican-led feudalism that is striving to shape it (191).” The example echoes warnings by past technology critics of a world fostering totalitarian impulses.

As much as Kwinter calls out to designers to wield the wild, in practice, we architects have little political levers to pull. Even what he is advocating is a strategy, that more planners, urban designers, policy makers ought to listen to. At best we can only wield with the wild by maybe forwarding this article to the second floor.

Links: Far from Equilibrium Book Reviww