Soft Urbanization

Project: Shie Urban Fabric (right);  Project: Acconci Studio (left)

To operate in the opposite direction to that it led to enclaves constructed by real estate speculation. The large habitacional condominiums and commercial surfaces circumscribe self-contained and isolated areas. They are reorganized and consolidated spacialities, occupied by rigid structures and programs.

Instead, take the discontinuous, indeterminate and fluid character of the territory to establish new connections. To direct this dynamics to create other space configurations. To activate everything that overflows, that is not taken by constructions and closed programs. What is in the middle, the interval. Against the fence, the inaccessibility, the devices of security, and the large architectural structures: the mechanisms of privatization of the territory.

It is in the intervals that everything occurs. The empty space, the terrain vague, is all but empty. It is where the differences are concentrate, where the diverse multiplies. The emptiness is occupied, dense. It is a field of forces and tensions. Its entropic inertia is only apparent: the dead zone is alive. The interstices and residual spaces are intensification zones.

The space is process, movement, instead of implantation, geography. To activate spaces: actions that happen not on the structure, that are submited to organization. But actions that set in motion and transform. A predominance of the fluid space over the static location. To intensify urban relations and interdependencies: an urbanism in continuous mutation. Soft operations of recombination, creating weak zones. Adaptive and flexible modes of space restructuring. A soft urbanization.

The managing plan eliminates the existing urban conditions, projecting investments, politician-social standards of occupation and controls. It denies the dynamic phenomenon of the urbanization. In contraposition, to propose urban policies based in the instability of the situations to intensify its connectivity, mobilizing the territory. Strategies that hold the inclusion of the indeterminate and the inconclusive.

Project: Carlos Vergara

Reference:

R. Koolhaas, Congestion Whithout Matter, in S.M.L.XL, 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 1995