Metropolis

OCCASIONAL CITIES: PARA-ARCHITECTURE, NEW SUBJECTIVITIES AND FLEXIBLE SPACE SEMINAR

Marti Peran

The notion of Post-it City was coined by Giovanni la Varra ("Post-it City: the other European public spaces" in Mutations, 2001) to designate different temporary occupations of public space. Taking this notion, and expanding it to the general concept of Occasional Cities, the project investigates the ways by which subjectivity takes control of the public space for all sort of temporary activities (commercial, sexual, leisure...) in different cities of the world through small "para-architectural" devices that design occasional micro-cities -- which are more explanatory than the ordinary architecture of the needs and subjective imaginary of those individuals who construct the reality of contemporary cities.

When devising an investigation from these assumptions, different departure points and points of view are prioritized:

• Multiple situations overlapping the urban territory beyond the predetermined patterns of architecture and urbanism.
• Public space as a place for ungovernable temporality, as opposed to the progressive determination of the same space imposed by municipalities and the private sector.
• Architecture as an exercise derived from the real exploration of dynamic, cross-territorial processes.
• The enormous potential of the individuals within the city to devise self-managed solutions to confront different wants and needs.
• Intrusive or parasitic actions, or acts of recycling, as strategies of the imagination, and for survival.
• Different "post-it" situations as models of the most elementary political action: the free development of experience in the context of the "polis".
• The contemporary city from multiple situations of urban experience in opposition to that reading encoded within the official skyline.
• A use of public space that allows recognition of the citizen's role beyond the limits of the role of consumer.
• The subject's capacity to react against regulations and legal dispositions that restrict collective and individual liberties.
• The reality of different collectives that suffer varying degrees of marginalization.
• Processes of erosion and/or emergence of public space in different cities around the world.

A summary of all these considerations suggests a conception of the urban context as a palimpsest, where different experiments in, and expressions of, public life are criss-crossed. These situations, which will be mapped in the investigation, demand their legitimacy by occupying public space and, at the same time, they offer a possible use and meaning for sites traditionally disregarded by conventional town planning (peripheral zones, terrain vague, areas liberated from industrial activity.

This seminar / workshop is framed within the project "Occasional Cities. Post-it city and other forms of temporality", an investigative project which fights to defend the nomadic public space, built ephemerally among traditional typologies of public places, by means of occasional appearances, disappearances and uncontrollable reappearances.
This project will be presented as an exhibit at CCCB in 2008.