Rotterdam Biennale

I got back from Rotterdam yesterday. After visiting the biennale i was a little bit disappointed as i was expecting to see some radical solutions to the open city rather than highlights of the current problems our cities have.

I did enjoy the trip as a whole and the particular highlights were: The Bourneo project in Amsterdam and the similar project in Rotterdam, The Erasmusbrug Bridge and the Cubed houses, which i stayed in for the duration of my trip.

Week 3 - Koolhaus and Kwinter

In his text it seems that Koolhaus is saying that urban strategies do not work because the needs of the city are constantly changing and that any urban strategies may only solve current and theoretical future problems. It can never take full control and provide exactly what the city needs and will continue to need.

I think Kwinter on some level agrees with Koolhaus' text. he agrees that the speed and scale of building is nowhere near the levels needed to meet the demands of the ever growing city in the coming decades.

I think however he goes on to explain what future urbanism should entail. He says 'the new urbanism needs to be flexible and dynamic, where forces are allowed to interact. Soft urbanism should be free of control, free of certainty, predictability and permanence.' What is missing now is a solution on how to implement his theories on soft urbanism into our future city.

Week 2 Lefebvre and Delanda

Delanda talks about how cities first started to grow on a large scale due to innovations in farming and he says that growth was not matched in until nearly 500 years later with the introduction of fossil fuels. With all of the innovations of the last century and constant innovations, is the rate still as large as it used to be or even larger? or have the newest innovations in the world not had a big an impact as farming and harvesting fossil fuels.

He also talks about how monopolisation has always existed but just in different forms. whereas now companies try to monopolise certain areas of the trading market, in the past whole cities where monopolising other cities. By only dealing with 'friendly' cities the were keeping the money circulating within their walls, which helped to aid their growth. I think this touches on Lefebvres text when he talks about the political and mercantile city.

Space as a keyword - David Harvey

Harvey mentions how space cannot only be defined in an absolute sense like area and volume. Space also has an emotional sense to it.

He talks about how in a certain absolute space you can know that people are there, but you cannot know where they are in terms of their relationship to the space as different spaces will stir different emotions in different people dependind on their past experiences and preferences.

He also talks about how Ground Zero is a relational space as well as an absolute space. Due to what happened on the site there is a need to not only respond to the obvious commercial needs of the site but also the emotional needs of the site too.