Singapore ETHiopia Urban Laboratory (SEUL)

SINGAPORE The Singapore ETHiopia Urban Laboratory (SEUL) project is focused on the design and implementation of a New Energy Self-sufficient Town (NEST). It is intended to be a comprehensive concept for rural and peri-urban parts of Ethiopia based on Energy, Economy, Education and Ecology. The town is conceived to be a workshop where its future inhabitants learn to build and develop their own town. The town will offer its inhabitants, from the start, sources of income, professional training and communal urban institutions. The concept for the town embeds principles of energy self-sufficiency and ecological sustainability, and respects Ethiopias cultural heritage and urban traditions. This urban development, in combination with related government initiatives in rural and infrastructure development, will contribute to Ethiopias effort to achieve specified Millennium Development Goals. The SEUL project forms one part of Module VI at the Future Cities Laboratory. FRANZ OSWALD

In Search of the City

SINGAPORE Our joint research concerns the unthinkable. The contradictory mix of opportunity and catastrophe that characterises our urbanized world resists any conciliatory syntheses of thought or method. This is because the city is no longer where it used to be. We have no recourse to a universally applicable urban image, neither as a guiding cultural ideal nor as a model for action or intervention. The city writ small is now at large, everywhere, and we all live urbanised lives regardless of where we live. Rather than providing a firm basis for understanding our place in this world, the city has become a non-local, yet situated nexus of incidents that requires ongoing explanation as to its very definition, constitution, and agency.

This is to admit that the city is contingent and uncertain rather than necessary and secure. Such is the opportunity and catastrophe of our shared urban disposition on the planet. So what does it mean today to investigate urban phenomena that have taken flight, that are in effect ubiquitous and thus nowhere in particular? How are such phenomena to be rendered intelligible to contemporary knowledge if they are neither hidden nor readily visible? And to whom would this knowledge be voiced and whose vision would it represent? To engage such questions demands conjunctive, often improvised modes of inquiry which are weary of the notion that the city is always already there as a fully formed condition to be investigated. It is precisely because the city is irreducible to its constituent parts and cannot be sublimated into an organic whole that it remains under-determined. This means we must be moved by the city, put into motion by the flood of its transformative becomings while learning on the way how to navigate

evidence, not drown in it. To achieve real-time situational awareness of the city as a world dynamic requires potent forward-tracking capabilities that are attuned to tentative links in the making between places, things, subjects, and times of activities instead of casually soaking up data from environments that are opportunely assumed to be unchanging. This means we must learn to recognize and monitor change in place of observing scenery. To ask what changes might the city suffer if we stop pretending that we always have to know where we are calls for a refrain from imposing an available order on our circumstances beforehand, and a willingness to reinstate discovery as a legitimate motive of research. And to brazenly promote discovery as the passion of urban research means to approach our shared condition as collective stories that must still be created, stories that remain to be told in lieu of those that go on about you know where. MARC ANGLIL and CARY SIRESS

Ed Ruscha, City (Liquid Word Painting), 1968; image manipulated by Dirk Hebel, 2006

Buranest
A Personal Reflection
HAMBURG Designing a new town is usually taken as an over-simplification of otherwise complex organic processes of the birth and growth of cities. But when the task of invoking societal and cultural transformations is bestowed on the artefact, in this case the designed a new town called Buranest in the Amhara Region in central Ethiopia, the act of designing becomes a navigation in completely unknown territories, in which one is forced to assume too many strange variables. In the case of Buranest, the decoding of dreams of the future inhabitants, negotiation with unlimited and often unknown stakeholders and continual sieving of outdated physical and environmental data are a few of the variables which demand rich personal and professional experience, examples of similar cases and humble assumptions. Hence the review of such a project which took place in July was often times strained with undefined expectations and complex set-ups of social, political and intellectual exigencies that can pull in different directions. The challenge intensifies when the designed town is supposed to be for un-internationalised Ethiopian farmers as its future inhabitants. From its inception, the design assignment had the multilayered task of initiating complex processes of urbanisation. According to my personal assumptions, the following can be taken as major points that the proposal is expected to address: a) facilitating rural-urban transformation; b) sustainability; and c) inducing hybrid urbanism. Presentations at the July review were detailed and rich. A three-dimensional presentation of the layout of the town, the detailed model of Close I, a simulation of a residential block, a structural model of a dwelling unit, detailed architectural design drawings with material specification, and cost estimate were included. The general frame of sustainability was rigorously covered through the choice of indigenous materials, techniques and sufficient consideration of the local context on site. My personal observations on the culture of using communal properties (infrastructure and space) in contemporary Ethiopian cities leads me to believe that the prevailing rural-ism in the country has dominated urban life, which is characterized by a more individualistic culture of using spaces and infrastructures (less care for communal land/space and infrastructure). The construction of such a culture can be attributed to the sustained state intervention history on the land tenure regime. As cities still suffer from an excessive private-public divide, the proposal from its outset targets to address this prevailing challenge by inducing communality through various invented devices immunising the future full-scale development from some possible anti-urban practices. Rather than waiting for needs and problems to arise in order to programme a response, this proposal analyses and negotiates the issues, then boldly and proactively presents solutions. The design is a proactive stimulus rather than a passive prescription. ZEGEYE CHERENET

In Vitro to In Vivo
And Vice Versa
SINGAPORE SEUL, acronym for Singapore ETHiopia Urban Laboratory, is an experiment. Part of Module VI on Territorial Organization of the Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore, the research is driven by the objective to design and build a new town in a remote region of Ethiopia to counter migration from rural to urban areas. The experiment involves interdisciplinary work relevant to the formation of the built environment. Participating disciplines include architecture, civil and structural engineering, material science, water and waste management, and building construction. Specifically, the investigation amounts to a discourse on method, un discours de la mthode, to borrow an expression by Ren Descartes. How do the disciplines under consideration interact? Where do their potentials and limits lie? In what ways do they affect the production of buildings on site? Accordingly, the research unfolds along three different, yet related methods. The first trajectory follows the principle of in-depth academic work done in a specific field of inquiry and guided by tightly defined objectives, highlighting particular elements while integrating input from supporting disciplines. The second trajectory situates the work in the context of design research laboratories a type of studio workshop setting in which concepts are tested through design, aiming at a synthesis of individual findings from an array of relevant fields. The third trajectory pursues the idea of the construction site as laboratory, with research in situ located in the context of real case studies in practice, from which general principles can be deduced. The three approaches take advantage of the transdisciplinary disposition of the experiment and aim to make connections between theory and practice. Key to the undertaking are forms of mutual relation between in vitro and in vivo research, with design as link and mediating platform between the two. However, this is merely the initial set up. To up the ante, a further parameter bears on the overall undertaking. The experiment accepts limited economic resources as a given within contemporary building practice. The site of the intervention in a developing country, Ethiopia, was selected as representative of an extreme condition, one marked by difficult challenges on the ground. Rather than being set within a culture of affluence and luxury, the work at hand unfolds within the seemingly restrictive framework of a culture of scarcity. Viewed as opportunity instead of problem per se, limitations often trigger unexpected solutions that are more ingenious than those following established standard operating procedures. It is in this sense that SEUL opens up venues of how to do more with less. MARC ANGLIL

Gazette: A news-sheet; a periodical publication giving an account of current events. The gazzetta was first published in Venice about the middle of the 16th c., and similar news-sheets appeared in France and England in the 17th. The untrustworthy nature of their reports is

often alluded to by writers of that period; thus Florio explains gazzette as running reports, daily newes, idle intelligences, or flim flam tales that are daily written. (Oxford English Dictionary). This Gazette is an intermittent publication that aims to capture some

of the more fragmentary or fleeting ideas that arise in the Future Cities Laboratory. Be they idle intelligences, flim flam tales, or genuine nuggets of knowledge, the Gazette curates these ideas in the hope that they can act as catalysts for future research agendas.

FCL Future Cities Laboratory

Gazette
Issue Tags

01
Date

16/08/2011

Territory, Ethiopia, Ruscha, Situational, Becomings, Economic, Rural, Farming, Aging, Gerontology, Japan, Retirement, Recreation, Flim Flam, Stimulus
Editorial Team

Executive Editor, Franz Oswald; Editor, Stephen Cairns; Copy-Editor, Kevin Lim
Fold, Punch, File Published by

FCL Future Cities Laboratory Singapore ETH Centre for Global Environmental Sustainability (SEC) c/o National University of Singapore (NUS) 4 Architecture Drive, 117566 Singapore gazette@fcl.arch.eth.ch

Gerotopia
SINGAPORE While there are many uncertainties concerning the future city, few of its characteristics are more certain than its population being considerably older than today. The project I am developing at the Future Cities Laboratory is an evolution of a doctoral dissertation completed at the ETH Zurich entitled Third Age Urbanism: Retirement Utopias of the Young Old. Currently this involves the development of a research monograph with the working title Gerotopia that documents and theorizes a series of contemporary urban experiments that have emerged as a consequence of one of the key demographic transformations of our time population aging. Conceived of as both a textual and graphical reader, current work on the monograph is focused on manuscript editing and the development of formats of drawing, diagram and information graphic that communicate the various urban novelties that emerged during the research. At a theoretical level, the starting point for this project is the differentiated conception of the elderly introduced by American gerontologist Bernice Neugarten in the 1970s and elaborated upon by British social historian Peter Laslett in the 1980s. Central to Neugarten and Lasletts work is the distinction between two forms of subjectivity (or two stages of life): the Young-Old (or Third Age) on one hand, and the Old-Old (or Fourth Age) on the other. Whereas the Old-Old correspond to the conventional perception of old-age as a life stage characterized by dependence and decrepitude, the considerably larger statistical group of the Young-Old, which emerged in the more developed nations only as recently as the middle of the twentieth century, may instead be characterized by relative independence and good health. To date, the implications of population aging within architectural and urban discourse have been addressed largely through an undifferentiated conception of old-age that has followed the limitations of the Old-Old through the paradigms of care, accessibility and universal design. By contrast, Gerotopia addresses a specific and largely unexplored paradigm of lifestyle product urbanism addressing the needs and desires of a recently formed leisure subject an investigation that opens up an entirely other set of problematics, for example, the emergence of new urban formats dedicated specifically toward combating boredom and alienation as fundamental threats. To a large extent, the radical utopian nature of these experiments is a product of the late freedoms of this group freedoms including those from the responsibilities of adulthood and childhood, and from the limitations of old-age. The investigation of these specific spatial products resonates in particular and unexpected ways with forces and dynamics of the contemporary urban condition such as: globalisation, individualisation, neo-liberalism, securitisation, spatial segregation, and theming. While existing theoretical treatments of this format of urbanism are few, fragmented, and largely bifurcated in nature, Gerotopia is directed toward a comprehensive and contextualised interpretation of this phenomenon exploring the paradoxes of these retirement utopias, and the ambivalence they elicit. DEANE SIMPSON Strip-hospital, The Villages of Florida, USA. The largest retirement community in the world, The Villages is the site of several novel urban formats for the Young-Old. The strip-hospital, for example, challenges the negative association of the hospital as a singular architectural icon through the application of the distributed formal and organisational logic of the American commercial-strip to the programmatic logic of the clinic. Image: Deane Simpson

Senior recreational vehicle (RV) community, USA. Aerial view over Quartzsite, AZ. Numbering between roughly two and three million retirees, the senior RV community is the product of two forms of infrastructure. The first is an immaterial infrastructure of internetbased RV clubs accessed by RV-mounted satellite-internet dishes, which functions as the dominant staging area for the community. The second is the material infrastructure of the American highway network and the various formal and informal parking locations, ranging from the Arizona desert to the temporarily occupied overnight car-parking spaces of Wal-Mart stores. When overlaid, these infrastructures expand upon conventional notions of nomadism by realizing a form of networked urbanism that is as socially dense and

Acknowledgements

Among the reviewers at Review III of Module VIs Singapore ETHiopia Urban Laboratory (SEUL) in July were prominent guests from Ethiopia. They included: Ato Ahmed Abtew, Vice-President Amhara Region; Head, Bureau of Industrial and Urban Development (BIUD); Wro Genet Gebreegziabher, Director General, Regional Urban Planning Institute (RUPI); Fasil Giorghis, Architect/Lecturer, EiABC/AAU, Addis Ababa; Zegeye Cherenet, Architect/Lecturer, EiABC/AAU, Addis Ababa/Hamburg. Review III was intended to offer us from SEUL the opportunity to integrate the views and critical evaluations of our Ethiopian guests into the final working round of the project, as presented in Review IV. This aim was achieved thanks to the dedicated argumentations, the binding statements and the passionate debate by the participants of Review III. FRANZ OSWALD

Photograph of retired couple in window display of photography studio, Huis Ten Bosch, Japan. Once described by Joy Hendry as the theme park to end all theme parks, Huis Ten Bosch is significant as a typological hybrid of the themed park and the residential community one largely inhabited by Japanese retirees. This condition locates Huis Ten Bosch at the intersection of two broad tendencies: the mutation of the theme park according to the demographics of population ageing; and the increasing influence of strategies native to the entertainment-industrial complex in the design of retirement communities, particularly theming and the disciplining of time. Huis Ten Bosch constructs an idealized experience of a permanent vacation to the Netherlands, albeit one conveniently located in the south of Japan. Placing residents in a spatial gap between Japan and the Netherlands, it operates as an experimental setting for what could be described as plastic subjectivities between the figures of the Japanese resident in Japan, the Japanese visitor in the Netherlands and the Dutch resident in the Netherlands. Image: Huis Ten Bosch photo studio