Public City in Manifesto: The Formal City IN-FORMED by Public Interest
Oxford, UK – New York, USA [2007]
Type: Book essay
Status: Published
Author: Claudio Vekstein
Other Contributors: Colin Billings
Title: Public City in Manifesto: The Formal City IN-FORMED by Public Interest
Book Title: Rethinking the Informal City: Critical Perspectives from Latin America
Publisher: Berghahn Books (Oxford, UK – New York, USA)
Editor: Co-edited by Dr. Peter Kellet (University of Newcastle) and Dr. Felipe Hernandez (University of Liverpool), UK.
Year: 2007
ISBN: 978-1-84545-582-8
ISBN: 978-0-85745-607-6
Public Formal Excuse
This text exercises a formal structuring of rather conventional definitions and principles in an informal, sometimes misaligned sequence. The construct could be seen as an abrupt manifest of directions in order to more promptly arrive at the certain disciplinary knowledge available to outline an unpredictable, provocative, perhaps at moments, irresponsible, course of action. Because of this embedded formal/informal approach, and depending on the reader’s scholastic position, some might feel a slight bit uncomfortable, sometimes disrupted, or even become offended as a result. While this set of dry, apparently isolated or under-articulated formal propositions are informed by an undisciplined, perhaps inelegant, series of topical anchors and accelerated proliferations, it emerges with the shape of a sudden Manifesto or an urgent course of action, nevertheless representing the position of the author and his committed fellows. The inserted pictures demonstrate without a necessarily direct correlation to the text, part of his work and his specific expertise as a public architect/activist in the field.
Part One: Public-ness
Public
It is of the people, pertaining to the people, belonging to the people; the changing social body of Desire, it must seek new channels and different combinations, forming for every instance, in order for it to manifest itself.
Public Rights
Public rights refer to the concept of the public having access to a universal status, regardless of their economic, social, political, or racial conditions, and to safeguard for the individual against arbitrary use of power by the government.
Public rights also refer to a small subset of values that should be available for implementation by individual, other individuals, or by government. These rights commonly include the right to life, the right to an adequate standard of living, freedom from mistreatment, freedom of religion, freedom of expression, freedom of movement, the right to self-determination, the right to education, and the right to participation in cultural and political life, regarding the well-being of individuals, the freedom of individuals, and representation of the human interest in government.
Public Interest
The public interest describes the common well-being. It is central to the nature of government itself. While nearly everyone claims that aiding the common well-being or general welfare is positive, there is little, if any, consensus on what exactly constitutes the public interest.
There are different views on how many members of the public must benefit from an action before it can be declared to be in the public interest: at one extreme, an action has to benefit every single member of society in order to be truly in the public interest; at the other extreme, any action can be in the public interest as long as it benefits some of the population and harms none. We are all a minority in some capacity, thus, protection of minority rights becomes part of the public interest. But the public interest is often contrasted with the private or individual interest, under the assumption that what is good for society may not be good for a given individual and vice versa.
Public Space
A public space is a place where anyone has a right to come without being excluded or discriminated due to their economic, social, political, or racial conditions. It is a space provided by a depersonalized state authority intended to have democratic constraints. Activities and dependencies from the personal-private emerge into the public sphere through public space: elements of the private sphere have the necessary dimension to become publicly relevant. Public space is the primary spatial manifestation of public rights; its existence is normally the realization of public interest.
Part Two: Activating the Public
Public Politics
Public politics is a decision making process that deals with issues that concern more than a single individual affecting many individuals in a group, convocated by the sense of progress, well being, and livability in the community. Common political issues include poverty, violence, justice, environment, human rights, equality, crimes, and usually focus on the reconciliation of conflicting perspectives or interests. When the desire of politics is to activate the public, it is commonly pursued through public works.
Public Works
An internal improvement or a public work is some constructible object, by which the people, through its government, can improve its urban infrastructure in order to enhance public rights in support of the public interest. Examples of common internal improvements are: airports, canals, dams, dikes, pipelines, railroads, roads, tunnels, harbors. Public works is a slightly broader term; it can include such things as: mines, water purification and sewage treatment centers, schools, hospitals, recreation facilities. Public works require major political agreements, but do not necessarily require majority consensus.
Public Opinion and the Formal
Public Opinion is the aggregate of individual attitudes held by the population. It developed as a concept with the rise of ‘public’ through urbanization, what people thought became important as a measure of political contention. In terms of public opinion there are many publics; each of them comes into being when an issue arises and ceases to exist when the issue is resolved. Public opinion polling cannot measure the public; the mass is a form of collective behavior different from the public.
The Formal acts as an organizing principle of society and in the city; for that it must cast to colonize its members, repress their desires, and give them complexes if it is to function: public opinion provides the required or expected mandate for the city to operate. It provides, for the image of the political agenda, a reactionary sample to the framed set of circumstances for which it is viewed to address. The discrete set of circumstances that it chooses to frame acts as a module, and the sequencing of these modules contributes to the crafting of the “aura” of power.
Due to its systematically regulatory and therefore repetitive nature, it risks becoming cancerous and empty in its attempt to provide the instructions and constructions deemed necessary to generate fullness. The principles of human nature, on the other hand, impose constantly shifting rules on this Formal organism; passage, transition, and inference are among the demands on the artifice of the city. These demands carve niches in the smooth, concrete “aura” of the Formal organism, and create the necessary cracks in the polished, representational image of publicity, to provide for a balanced continuity between the abstract and the actual. Just forcing a unity, creating the illusion of a need for unity, it becomes a desperate principle, and it becomes just a consequence, the mere mode of the Formal.
Public Interest and the Informal
Public interest manifests itself necessarily and actively throughout the formal in the informal layers of the city structure, starting off as a symbiotic tissue that IN-FORMS the formal urban condition. The formal would not survive without the informal, so public interests appear informally in principle every time in the interstices, potentially providing the glue that unites various parts of the formal system. In spite of pointing towards achieving its complete autonomy, the informal does not always reach that because its existence relays on its role of linking formal units together, occupying a dependent structural position in the formal system.
The informal emerges to fill a need because of a failure of the formal system, its inability to meet the meticulous particulars of public interest: the special needs created in the formal, are perhaps fulfilled in the informal system, as a basic negative-dialectic movement that allows recuperation of alienated properties, helping to smooth the functioning of the whole. While the informal urges solutions to unmet needs and alienated conditions, it paradoxically allows participants the opportunity to continue to function in the formal system, responding at the same time to the genuine desire of the individuals within it to band together to accomplish stated goals without the prohibitions of formal restrictions.
Social invisibility, needs and demands rise to the surface as an informal reaction to the abstract machinery and institutions of the formal city. But informal tends to become trapped of the formal (by emulating the abstract machine’s procedures), because of its reactive nature, surrounding it with so much data and accumulated information that it can not be disputed, it just requires to be accepted and “formalized”; eventually overwhelmed by the ridiculous, it emerges as a new abstract machine. Informal could be seen as the paradoxical formalization of the abstract machine.
By being directly supportive of the real world, Formal in itself is just apologetic, reproducing the strategy of the abstract machine by reinforcing the consistencies. But the Informal is not much different insofar as it is just a celebration of the asymmetrical consistencies that it is capable of providing. The Informal alone is in this respect a sort of celebration of the Formal in its dysfunctional mode. It is not effective, its contradictive discourse in defense, or in negative praise of the mere chaos, simply neglects to support the argument that it is trying to deny.
Public Sentencing of the City
With the public sentencing of the formal/informal city, the uninspired, unnoticed, empty layers of information passing on top of one another emerge not as an absurd, but as a symbiotic structure of action from which to render the drama of public space. Sentencing activates public-ness up to the birth of delirium, fusing differences into a situational, structural, phenomenal artifice. These artifices refract rays of immanence back into its soul, more specifically its people: revealing the invisible, hidden, enigmatically complex dimension of the public, resulting in an intensive form of expression of collective human affect and public demonstration.
By sentencing, the art of public demonstration, the symbiotic act of making real the positions of the affected via activation of the cityscape, gains a musculoskeletal body embedded in the city streets through the collection of its verses. Mapping itself sinuously into the public organ, the demonstration follows a balancing path, interlacing the most exalted states of being with menacing feelings, floors wall plazas and roofs frame skies heavy with constellations. These demonstrations are essential elements of the charged public atmosphere; standing to empower the voiceless, struggling to liberate the unseen, constantly seeking the next unknown balance, demonstrating the remarkable human spirit for all to witness.
Public display of affection
P.D.A. is an informal act or manifestation of physically demonstrating affection for another person (or group of people) while in the clear view of others, within a formal setting or in the public space. It is an honest communication of intention. Frequently, this sudden, unexpected behavior is considered to be in bad taste or to be an unacceptable act, an act of public nuisance, and in some places it is even considered criminal.
The familiar (heimlich), friendly, comfortable, expected fabric of the common imagination, becomes interrupted by that which should be kept secret, that which is considered an act of deceit, the concealed, the secretive … suddenly changing the familiar into the unfamiliar (unheimlich), the unaccustomed, the weird, that which should have been kept secret but has been revealed, becoming the uncanny. PDAs violate established customs and norms by making certain what is comfortable left uncertain, and making clear what might otherwise be left ambiguous. These acts of humanity are revolving migrations of the unspoken rules of society.
Individual public display of affection, even though casual, is considered to be impolite, as an exaggerated form of personal expression in disregard of public opinion. But when turned into public manifestations, demonstrations, they tend to be accepted as a massive form of political expression, social content or collective satisfaction, transformation and celebration: these are the potential acts of public architecture.
Part Three: the Public-City
Public Healing through Contagion in the City
The City gets healthy by becoming contagious; the autonomy of the infection emerges, forming a new kind of organism that has its own transformative potential. When coming in contact with the infected carrier, it catches its contagion. Re-formulating the physical/metaphysical engagement and inherence of what public, as a germen, could become materially in the city or into a building, leads to the more fundamental definition of “public-ness” now as a whole possible territory to informing/infecting architecture. These complex territories of public-ness are formed/informed then by the multiplicity of forces that are always embedded and refractive of the dynamic conflict of different localized interests in the urban public grounds. It is the abstract machine when in collision with the impulsive realities inherent the process of realizing public architecture.
Designing the Architecture of Public Works implies serious challenges in both developed and developing countries, so as in Latin America. But specialists in the last ones may pursue extra aspirations in addition to the purely functional endeavors: design should not only be affordable and sustainable in durable and reasonable economic/physical terms, but should also become an instrument for transforming individuals, through their current needs, into a condensed social community, providing a broader sustainable and meaningful sense of healing.
Physical and social healing starts with the public having access to its rights for a universal status, regardless of economic, social, political, or racial conditions. This way healing begins its domino effect: people are equally healed by leaders, professionals and technology, but at a larger scale, entire societal groups are healed because the Public-City extends, not through sympathy, but through generosity, a sense of belonging, of mutual place. The edifices become public, part of the people, pertain to the people, belong to the people, and reactivate local idiosyncrasies and the relevance of the social bond, thus cultivating the civic citizenship.
Public Acts of Architecture or Public City Works
From a building to an infrastructure or a city fragment, public acts of architecture provide the real, comprehensive construct to help localized urban constrictions meet occasional social emergences (public interest), offering to precisely unfold in the situation an embedded (reactive) but at the same time expansive (active/autonomous) fertile architectural/urban realization, a rich fabric of complex texture able to reconcile and surpass the simplistic formal/informal contradiction. When architecture operates not only in materially confined ways, but also in metaphysical, psychological, socio-cultural and political dimensions at the same time, it inexorably immerses itself in the real grounds of the urban complex while trying to become a powerful tool for public enhancement of the city.
Public architecture operates also as an active messenger, migrating contexts and contents from place to place; while we carry messages as individuals (social, cultural, personal), our architecture, even though always trying to be local, carries them as silent but massive migrations of distant social or geographical landscapes that will disappear and reappear intermittently in the work, constantly flashing from one spot to another. Mapping and scratching-out these migratory territories of public-ness in all possible scales is what turns urban constrictions into public releases for the city.
The Public-City thus will perform and demonstrate in its urban design the meaningful essence of healed public spaces, by persistently and precisely articulating the formal/institutional with the informal and intense public life of the people. Social invisibilities, local lore, that which has been forgotten, that wisdom which has managed to survive, the marginalized, the alienated, denied, those not officially recognized or those confronted by homogenization as a condition for their integration, can rise in the design as a form of particular and patient counterpoint to the abstract mechanisms of the city, uniting members in a dynamic, common, renewed health. Healing Works in this respect is a sort of significant cure that reunites the community; the Public-City is the one that initiates the transformation of sick individuals into a stronger, healed community, as a chain reaction, an epidemic that spreads the public healing process through the city. Each member heals another one reverting social disappearances into the manifestation of all the people, the Public, as a construction and built demonstration of dignity towards inclusion, becoming a social celebration, a public display of affection from the city to the people, for collective engagement, communal conquest, and mutual realization.
The almost digital stimulation, for the intensification of the urban relationships in the form of making fragmentary figural constellations, makes its reparatory dance: the formal/informal city, and its associated socio-cultural uncanny, immutably transfiguring into public illumination in the city; emerging smoothly from its interior like in a photographic dark room, calm reappearance of the ordinary turned extraordinary, public architecture and urbanism acting for societal transformation, as an enigmatic, open manifestation of the “Hand of God”, happening right before everybody’s eyes.
– Theodor W. Adorno: Culture Industry, Routledge, New York, 1991.
– Jacques Derrida: Of Grammatology, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland, 1976.
– Gilles Deleuze: Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, Zone Books, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2001.
– Jürgen Habermas: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1989.
– Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, W. W. Norton & Company Inc, New York, 1981.
– Michel Laguerre: The Informal City, Palgrave Macmillan Ltd., Hampshire, England, 1994.
– Stephen Zepke: Art as Abstract Machine: Ontology and Aesthetics in Deleuze and Guattari, Routledge, New York, 2004.