Code for Hacking Logistical Cities

Logistical Formula to the Expanded Field

more explanations to come...

working polemic

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.

Program as thesis

the program as code

post-fordist program

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

If program is a set of conditions for various entities to respond, we the “client” are more than witnesses or accomplices but active participants.  We exercise varying levels of agency at various turns.  In fact, the client is but a short-cited social-construct of advanced capitalist mythology into consumerism.  We are all players in the game of re-programming the city, like it or not.  Do nothing if you like, but skipping one’s turn in this game is just as much of move that is reflected in the urban fabric.  Within this context, one might think that the player to benefit the most are those with a hacker's relentless mentality of making, bending, breaking, mending, and navigating around all the loopholes of program.  Logistical entities are analogous to this as various types of storage spaces form critical set-pieces for their regional campaign.  This is true, but consider program just as much of an agent as the client.  Over time, program as code inevitably change as it interacts with the players and it becomes impossible for even greatest hacking operation to exist on the the scape.

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.

Total Area of a Logistical Entity (U.S. Wal-Mart) vs. Manhattan

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.

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.

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.

Paradigm Map: Global Logistical Landscapes

Map Title:  Global Technology & Organizational Space, Landscapes of Surplus

Thesis is a projection of a new narrative over the effects that global supply chain logistics will have on the urban landscape.  It anticipates the increasing vastness of network of surplus which will foster a new urban typology.

  

Current trajectory of paradigmatic issues and charting of academic discourse related to the thesis is at hand.  Question for the thesis then is if interests lie in amplifying the potential latent urban conditions of a emerging global logistical landscapes or synthesizing the various paradigms of logistics landsapes
and speculating over trajectories that might result in new kinds of built artifacts.

There is also the issue of scale that has not been decided in this thesis:  a global, regional, urban, or architectural.  It would be ideal if the design proposal capture all these levels at various scales, but it will likely be be an amalgamation of each level.

Next week's program assignment will likely force the issue of thesis interests and scale to be determined.

Paradigm Map: Draft

The paradigm map is a collection of terms, texts, projects, and educational programs. The structure of the map is created by the main terms being in a heavy bold text with the person or persons responsible for the term in italics above the term. The thin text is projects, texts, and educational programs with the same notation for people associated with the projects. The terms and projects are grouped in adjacency to similarity or connecting terms and projects. The proximity of the words show the proximity of the ideas. The map is separated into two parts, showing the distinction between the two theses.

Site as Thesis: Expatriated Caché

Despite prophetic claims of the digital emancipating from the production of material goods, we are still drowning in an overabundance of stuff that spills out of our house, backyards shed, and now to to distant remote sits. Comparison can be made to yesterday's cave dwelling survivals of food preservation and hiding treasures. However, today's post-Fordist culture is still preoccupied with storage, having propped up a wide and loose network of climate controlled caves. Technology may cope with this accumulation, but at best it only serves to facilitate the quick removal and storage of these goods. What then are the potential social-political implications for such nascent infrastructural networks that holds all our stuff?

  notations:

 collections:

 artifact:

DEMO Set

The first assignment was approached as a visual research and design move into polemicizing the notion of caves in architecture. The polemic: humans have been creating their own worlds in cave-like spaces for a long time, but today these kinds of spaces are ever more discrete, temporal, and lacking the kind of open ended connections, interactions and engagement that the original caves had. The case study of this polemic then was looking at how a typical single-family home was organized into spaces of storage: closets, garages, basements, and refrigerators.

4 panels (24x24):

The exercise was also a way to experiment and identify what my preferred visual methods and representation techniques were. Careful collecting, assembling, collaging and layering are part of my strength as generative tools for discussion. However, I have yet to find an effective rhetorical tool for editing or synthesizing topics for the thesis. What has worked in the past studios are gaming, rule making. or writing techniques but the nature of the assignment lacked the kind of reflective feedback system that a typical studio would have had.

Demo Set:

I don’t have any real interest in the topic of a house as a thesis project. However, the exercise and review did reveal topics like the module or the body that might play a role in my broader topical interest. I am more interested in studying eccentric spaces and places that reveal the potential dynamics and limits of a larger ecology. I am also hopeful that my thesis can propose design strategies that enhance, enable, or intervene in these kinds of systems. Summer readings that did influence my interest in this area are by Manuel DeLanda, Sanford Kwinter, and Peter Sloterdijk.