Hacking Logistical Cities
In an increasingly globalizing and urbanizing world, no other entity in North America has been adept at formatting the urban playing field than logistics. The latest typologies to emerge from generative iterations are the corridors, zones, ports, and distribution centers.
What makes logistics so successful? They make, break, and mend the rules. Its rules are not always the explicit, the best are often implicit. Not always positive but powerful in their openended ness. Rules are the inverted, abstracted and extracted image of a city’s actual situation.
Setting up rules is first and foremost a cultural act. In fact, we read cities by their rules. Rules are the infrastructure that link the digital and physical with the social city, connecting quality with quantity and latent characteristics to manifest ones.
Rules, thereby and almost unnoticed, are design instruments. In fact, regarding rules as tools is a valuable urban design attitude. This departs from wielding the ‘wild’ or visionary dreams that clings to control all. Better a move towards a non–fatalistic form of control between freedom and coercion.
Architects and planners also make rules, yet we were never to assume the privileged positions of total urban reprogram. In fact, we are but a discrete set of entities or players exercising agency in the urban playing field-often at the expense of cities. Logistics understands this. Planers realize this. Architects are slow to. Mimicking the action of Derridean difference, ac endlessly defers its agency across the urban infrastructural network.
If architects play but a part, why bother learning the logic of logistics? Because we have yet to fully exercise our agency. Architects bring the variance to the rules. We collect all streaming urban trajectories to synthesize, project and anticipate via deliverance of our intervention A hacker’s mentality is in need; one that is reflexive towards the city, logistics, and all other entities that exercise agency on the indifferent yet reflective spatial material: the program.
Acknowledge and understand the logic of logistics. Impossible to master all the rules. Architects are better positioned to act among the urban landscape of cities. Lessons of the rule making abilities of logistics should be studied if we still aspire to play in the newly emerging landscape: the logistical city.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Program as thesis
the program as code
Program in this thesis operates as the indifferent, open-ended, multi-authored, and unscripted material code or logic to the spatial development of the city. In the past, planning and architecture have coveted it as a righteous tool to maintain their supposedly autonomous disciplines’ intellect and its practices. Such endeavors though have often served to marginalize the public face of these professions and failed at fully exercising their agency. This is due to their lack of anticipation, let alone their lack of recognition of the capacity for other entities to program the city. For every entity that interacts with the program as code brings their town set logic or rule making abilities to the table. The code is self-reflexive of this and reflects it back onto the urban fabric. Thus, program is not completely neutral, as it is has always been under the influence of the last entry of code. If anything, it is more of an impressionable conduit than a container for facilitating the development of the city’s spatial make up. No other entity understands this better than the organizational logistics of multi-national corporations, as they have been most successful into programming the city. As ephemeral as this whole process maybe, program inevitably leaves behind its organizational logic in disparate physical formats of building envelopes, zones, and into the book stacks of codes and property lines. Thus thesis as program concerns itself at the urban scale and its possible implications on the regional level.
the client as player
Outfoxing Urbanism
the brief as campaign.
Wallmart's Logistical Briefing of Vermont
If logistics is the savy and relentless player that is most likely to affect the urban form, than much of its data-driven approach to regional expansion campaigns will be reflected in an checklist itinerary.
First, logistics must confront the limits of his own urban moves and spatial distribution: the various types and routes of its regional/global physical network, energy/fuel costs, distribution radii, and transport capacity.
Second, logistics must anticipate the various rules to be engaged. This is especially true for a densified urban area. Entities at play are much more complex and perhaps better organized in factors such as labor and construction. Besides more explicit spatial rules such as urban planning and land use rules, logistics must also consider implicit rules such as real estate catchment areas and tax rates. If logistics is not adept, their logic quickly breaks down with the scale and density of urban spaces. This is due to the fact that many logistical entities were designed for the greenfield or agricultural parcels at the edge of suburbia. As a result, the logistics of accessing sites and moving goods are complicated.
Second, logistics must anticipate the various rules to be engaged. This is especially true for a densified urban area. Entities at play are much more complex and perhaps better organized in factors such as labor and construction. Besides more explicit spatial rules such as urban planning and land use rules, logistics must also consider implicit rules such as real estate catchment areas and tax rates. If logistics is not adept, their logic quickly breaks down with the scale and density of urban spaces. This is due to the fact that many logistical entities were designed for the greenfield or agricultural parcels at the edge of suburbia. As a result, the logistics of accessing sites and moving goods are complicated.
Third, logistics must make a reconnaissance of potential sites and buildings that are up for play: registered and unregistered properties, empty lots, abandoned properties, brown fields, green fields, drainage basins, landfills, highway spaces, rail depots, grain silos, ports, shipping yards. As logistiscs inventories all of its potential set-pieces, it must be aware of its presence at it steps in to overlapping political-jurisdictional zones. Its goal is to collect all the pieces in play, and use them as bargaining chips as it encounters other entities. If logistics plays its moves well, it can make any overlapping boundaries of contention into mere technicalities as it makes its inroads to the city.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
new working thesis titles and reflection so far...
We all make rules to organize ourselves and others. The essential question though isn't if the rules are just, its knowing when to make, break, bend, and mend them at will. Architects seem to be rather wary of rules and organization but deep down they do appreciate them. After all, how else could they manage such complex generative forms in the their own microcosm digital world? Why not this same attitude be taken to the urban level.
However, the 21st century cities are simply too complex for an architect to be making their own rules. Past ego-centric visionary cities may certainly have been logically robust were but were exclusive of other rule making entities. No entity perhaps better illustrates this than the speed and adept abilities that the logistical operations of multi-national corporations have had on the city. Perhaps the biggest player to arrive in the city, Wall-Mart is already campaigning its own logic into the urban fabric while its trademark PR smile pleasantly awaits in front of bureaucratic lines for admittance. This is not to say that we should stop being visionary or be politically correct in the way we shape our cities. Instead, we are ought to be more cognisant of the capacities of other rule making entities in the design of our cities.
Current thesis working titles:
coding logistics
coding urban logistics
coding conduits
coding conveyance
conduit city
conveyance city
lawless logistics
ruling on logistics
logistical rulings
unruly logistics
logistics and the law
urban logistics
the logistical city
logistics city
hacking logistics
the logistical hacker
hacking landscapes of logistics
the logistical urbanist
the urbanist's guide to logistics
the urbanist’s guide to the logistician
the logistian’s guide to the urbanist
the hacker's guide to the logistical city
the logistian’s guide to the urbanist
the logistician and the city
the hacker, the ubanist, the logistician...
a hacker, an urbanist, and a logistician walk into a bar...
urbanist + logistician = hacker
urban logistical loopholes
lonely logistics
loophole logistics
redisplaced logistics
Many of these working thesis titles inevitably bring up the question of agenda. Is it to make people aware of current urban conditions as part of a rhetorical point that logistics do impact our cities? Is it to amplify or exaggerate latent urban conditions so their different trajectories of the city can be foreseen? If these conditions are anticiapted, then is it this thesis’ position to propose interventions for or against these possible futures?
Perhaps a more radical thesis position is to simply not to propose anything. After all, doing nothing is something but only be suggestive of the architectural agency opportunities. This kind of thesis would act as a digital voyeurism sifting through urban codes and Excell spreadsheets of GIS data but becoming more productive at transmitting this knowledge across the discipline in a visual spatial manner. This seems to be the relative position that Keller Easterling takes in Enduring Innocence. She is not the on-the-ground anti-globalization protester, but she is an activist in her deft and poetic writing that a journalist might have on elucidating the complex globalization issues to bizarre but mundane specificity-hinting at architect’s agency in opportune moments.
For the initial part of this thesis, the agenda is to play both those roles of a deft quantitative and anecdotal observer. However, to design and finish thesis, you need to play the game. The observer will become a player and in a few turns will inevitably inform the designer what kind of player he is.
A few turns will also reveal the implicit and explicitly defined rules of the game. The agenda is to be the analyzer that Easterling was but exercise agency in a more pragmatic and participatory way by anticipating these scenarios in a game full of rules and making design proposals. Beyond analyzing and suggesting the various streams or trajectories that the current urban logistical condition could take, the objective of thesis then is to selectively synthesize or hybridize them into a responsive design scenario.
Another question to ask for this thesis is the 'tone' of the polemic and design to be proposed. This thesis is not the playful but indifferent and sarcastic tone of the late Dutch hypermodernist architectural theories and proposals. Similarly, it is not the techno-bureaucratic approach of a SimCity objective of winning points with the push of a button or import of a cheat code/script. As of now, this is still not well defined due to the lack of context (i.e., site, city, urban demographic) for this thesis to react to. The thesis as a player with all of its attitude will emerge from the research phase. If anything, the tone will be more of unscripted negotiation of Monopoly that deals with various entities (i.e. people, organizations, randomness, or rules themselves).
Having said that, I think it is still use full to refer to the perhaps overly simplistic Dutch logic of dumbing down things and asking pertinent questions like:
Q: What if...we take the same kind of logic that Wall-Mart has and build a city? modify the city?
A: It would look like this.
Q: Great!...but wait, why isn’t this already like that?
A: I dunno
Q: What about other rules? some rules are explicit and implicit, right?
A: Oh
Q: How about zoning, covenants, physical conditions of the site? If you take into account all of these other rules, what kind of city would you get?
A: You would get this!
A: Great!!!
Initial seminar projects such as the 4 panel cave drawings and storage facility were all indicative of broader interest that this thesis has finally come to grips to in the area of logistics and urbanism Not a post-rationalization, but realization that caves were of interest to me because of the overt element of control in the form of rule making that were taking place to create ever so smaller discrete worlds unto themselves. Everything had specific function to be displaced and closed off, only to be forgotten. I tried to visually narrate this at the level of a house starting from a tour of the images and line diagrams of basements, closets, attics and back to the garages. Similarly, investigations into automated storage units was waiting to revealed of the widespread logic of urban logistics. Methods exhibited in these two projects: a visual narrative, cu ration of images, will also be helpful in further developing the gaming techniques and rule-making approach to thesis.
Thus, the first half of the research will be a mix of quantitiave and anecdotal evidence decoding the organizational logic of logistics at the urban scale of a city. GIS mapping will certainly be of help here but equally important are outside sources of city codes, news headlines, gossip columns, and press releases (market, industry, govt). The evidence collected here will slowly start to reveal the implicit logic of logistics and will serve as dialogue for the development of characters to be demonstrated in a scenario. The second half will then be the generation of rules to be in play by the various players in the thesis design. At this stage, a specific site needs to be chosen and the number of players identified.
Outputs for the thesis project include:
+paradigm map
+figure-ground mapping
+logistical brochures
+booklet of urban rules
+site massing models of various zones, envelopes, and bldg. typologies
+3 scenarios being played out in detail from urban sections, renderings, to the urban material language.
Critical Texts/Blogs/Precedents thus far:
Free Association Design (F.A.D.): Product Placement and Cargo Cults
thiswill_this.net
Self Storage Association
Self Storage Self by NYTimes article
Grand Urban Rules
Sub + Plan
Visionary Cities
Reality Properties
The Landscapes of Contemporary Infrastructure
However, the 21st century cities are simply too complex for an architect to be making their own rules. Past ego-centric visionary cities may certainly have been logically robust were but were exclusive of other rule making entities. No entity perhaps better illustrates this than the speed and adept abilities that the logistical operations of multi-national corporations have had on the city. Perhaps the biggest player to arrive in the city, Wall-Mart is already campaigning its own logic into the urban fabric while its trademark PR smile pleasantly awaits in front of bureaucratic lines for admittance. This is not to say that we should stop being visionary or be politically correct in the way we shape our cities. Instead, we are ought to be more cognisant of the capacities of other rule making entities in the design of our cities.
Current thesis working titles:
coding logistics
coding urban logistics
coding conduits
coding conveyance
conduit city
conveyance city
lawless logistics
ruling on logistics
logistical rulings
unruly logistics
logistics and the law
urban logistics
the logistical city
logistics city
hacking logistics
the logistical hacker
hacking landscapes of logistics
the logistical urbanist
the urbanist's guide to logistics
the urbanist’s guide to the logistician
the logistian’s guide to the urbanist
the hacker's guide to the logistical city
the logistian’s guide to the urbanist
the logistician and the city
the hacker, the ubanist, the logistician...
a hacker, an urbanist, and a logistician walk into a bar...
urbanist + logistician = hacker
urban logistical loopholes
lonely logistics
loophole logistics
redisplaced logistics
Many of these working thesis titles inevitably bring up the question of agenda. Is it to make people aware of current urban conditions as part of a rhetorical point that logistics do impact our cities? Is it to amplify or exaggerate latent urban conditions so their different trajectories of the city can be foreseen? If these conditions are anticiapted, then is it this thesis’ position to propose interventions for or against these possible futures?
Perhaps a more radical thesis position is to simply not to propose anything. After all, doing nothing is something but only be suggestive of the architectural agency opportunities. This kind of thesis would act as a digital voyeurism sifting through urban codes and Excell spreadsheets of GIS data but becoming more productive at transmitting this knowledge across the discipline in a visual spatial manner. This seems to be the relative position that Keller Easterling takes in Enduring Innocence. She is not the on-the-ground anti-globalization protester, but she is an activist in her deft and poetic writing that a journalist might have on elucidating the complex globalization issues to bizarre but mundane specificity-hinting at architect’s agency in opportune moments.
For the initial part of this thesis, the agenda is to play both those roles of a deft quantitative and anecdotal observer. However, to design and finish thesis, you need to play the game. The observer will become a player and in a few turns will inevitably inform the designer what kind of player he is.
A few turns will also reveal the implicit and explicitly defined rules of the game. The agenda is to be the analyzer that Easterling was but exercise agency in a more pragmatic and participatory way by anticipating these scenarios in a game full of rules and making design proposals. Beyond analyzing and suggesting the various streams or trajectories that the current urban logistical condition could take, the objective of thesis then is to selectively synthesize or hybridize them into a responsive design scenario.
Another question to ask for this thesis is the 'tone' of the polemic and design to be proposed. This thesis is not the playful but indifferent and sarcastic tone of the late Dutch hypermodernist architectural theories and proposals. Similarly, it is not the techno-bureaucratic approach of a SimCity objective of winning points with the push of a button or import of a cheat code/script. As of now, this is still not well defined due to the lack of context (i.e., site, city, urban demographic) for this thesis to react to. The thesis as a player with all of its attitude will emerge from the research phase. If anything, the tone will be more of unscripted negotiation of Monopoly that deals with various entities (i.e. people, organizations, randomness, or rules themselves).
Having said that, I think it is still use full to refer to the perhaps overly simplistic Dutch logic of dumbing down things and asking pertinent questions like:
Q: What if...we take the same kind of logic that Wall-Mart has and build a city? modify the city?
A: It would look like this.
Q: Great!...but wait, why isn’t this already like that?
A: I dunno
Q: What about other rules? some rules are explicit and implicit, right?
A: Oh
Q: How about zoning, covenants, physical conditions of the site? If you take into account all of these other rules, what kind of city would you get?
A: You would get this!
A: Great!!!
Initial seminar projects such as the 4 panel cave drawings and storage facility were all indicative of broader interest that this thesis has finally come to grips to in the area of logistics and urbanism Not a post-rationalization, but realization that caves were of interest to me because of the overt element of control in the form of rule making that were taking place to create ever so smaller discrete worlds unto themselves. Everything had specific function to be displaced and closed off, only to be forgotten. I tried to visually narrate this at the level of a house starting from a tour of the images and line diagrams of basements, closets, attics and back to the garages. Similarly, investigations into automated storage units was waiting to revealed of the widespread logic of urban logistics. Methods exhibited in these two projects: a visual narrative, cu ration of images, will also be helpful in further developing the gaming techniques and rule-making approach to thesis.
Thus, the first half of the research will be a mix of quantitiave and anecdotal evidence decoding the organizational logic of logistics at the urban scale of a city. GIS mapping will certainly be of help here but equally important are outside sources of city codes, news headlines, gossip columns, and press releases (market, industry, govt). The evidence collected here will slowly start to reveal the implicit logic of logistics and will serve as dialogue for the development of characters to be demonstrated in a scenario. The second half will then be the generation of rules to be in play by the various players in the thesis design. At this stage, a specific site needs to be chosen and the number of players identified.
Outputs for the thesis project include:
+paradigm map
+figure-ground mapping
+logistical brochures
+booklet of urban rules
+site massing models of various zones, envelopes, and bldg. typologies
+3 scenarios being played out in detail from urban sections, renderings, to the urban material language.
Critical Texts/Blogs/Precedents thus far:
Free Association Design (F.A.D.): Product Placement and Cargo Cults
thiswill_this.net
Self Storage Association
Self Storage Self by NYTimes article
Grand Urban Rules
Sub + Plan
Visionary Cities
Reality Properties
The Landscapes of Contemporary Infrastructure
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Space Elevators by Otis'
In 1895, Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was inspired by the spindle shaped Eiffel Tower that he speculated how one could put a "celestial castle" atop as Jack had climbed the beanstock to the Gaint's castle above. The tower would be built from the ground to an altitude of 35,800 kilometers.
Currently, NASA's dream of building such space elevator holds on the principle of earth's geosynchronous orbit. The dream "castle" positioned in geosynchronous orbit would remain over the same spot on the earth. Otis, a major world wide elevator company says that such projects are possible based on current elevator technologies capable of producing transportation systems several miles high.
Technology...There are two area in which recent innovation can make a radical difference, control and transport...Robotics replace laborious, unwieldy process of storage, retrieval, sorting, and reshuffling with smooth movements of frenzied ease that force us to rethink entire systems of classification and categorization....the second innovation is in transport. as more and more architecture is finally unmasked as the mere organization of flows-shopping centers, airports-it is evident that circulation is what makes or breaks public architecture...two simple, almost primitive inventions have driven modernizations towards mass occupancy of previously unattainable heights: the elevator and the escalator. . one moves only up and down, one only diagonally.
At the dawn of the 21st century, a number of advances in vertical transportation's are being made, from cable-less self-propelled elevator systems to Otis’...Odyssey, a small train, platform, or large box that moves horizontally, vertically, and diagonally-literally opening up new architectural potential: to extend the urban condition itself fro the ground floor to strategic points inside a building in a continuous trajectory.
-Rem Koolhaus, Delirious New York
Currently, NASA's dream of building such space elevator holds on the principle of earth's geosynchronous orbit. The dream "castle" positioned in geosynchronous orbit would remain over the same spot on the earth. Otis, a major world wide elevator company says that such projects are possible based on current elevator technologies capable of producing transportation systems several miles high.
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
program: draft
the program.
Program in this thesis is conceived of as the indifferent, open-ended, multi-authored, and unscripted material code or logic to the spatial development of the city. In the past, planning and architecture have coveted it as a righteous tool to maintain their supposedly autonomous disciplines’s intellect and its practices. Such endeavors though have often served to marginalize the public face of these professions and have failed at exercising their agency. Instead, the organizational logistics of giant multi-national corporations, the ants of small self-organized entities, and rapid advancement in digital technology have exercised more agency into programming the city. Having said this, program here is not completely neutral, as it is has always been under the influence of the last entry of code. If anything, it is more of a conduit than a container for facilitating the development of the city’s spatial make up in its various typological building and zoning incarnations.
Program in this thesis is conceived of as the indifferent, open-ended, multi-authored, and unscripted material code or logic to the spatial development of the city. In the past, planning and architecture have coveted it as a righteous tool to maintain their supposedly autonomous disciplines’s intellect and its practices. Such endeavors though have often served to marginalize the public face of these professions and have failed at exercising their agency. Instead, the organizational logistics of giant multi-national corporations, the ants of small self-organized entities, and rapid advancement in digital technology have exercised more agency into programming the city. Having said this, program here is not completely neutral, as it is has always been under the influence of the last entry of code. If anything, it is more of a conduit than a container for facilitating the development of the city’s spatial make up in its various typological building and zoning incarnations.
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