URBAN TECHNIQUE II / DenCity 2006-2008
DenCity is a qualitative term. Against the ideology of quantities that dominate contemporary reasoning not only in architecture and urbanism, the post-graduate research program „Urban Strategies/ dencity“ tries to find models and parameters that understand and define density in terms of connectedness.
Wolf D. Prix / Mario Coyula-Cowley / Jeffrey Kipnis / Thom Mayne / Eric Owen Moss / Patrik Schumacher
Guests: Sanford Kwinter, Greg Lynn, Rainer Pirker, Max Rieder
Teaching: Matias DelCampo, Robert Neumayr, Reiner Zettl
DenCity
Dencity is a qualitative term. Against the ideology of quantities that dominate contemporary reasoning not only in architecture and urbanism, the course tries to find models and parameters that understand and define density in terms of connectedness.
We are used to perceiving our cities as figure-ground schemes, where every point is described as either building or empty space. From this simplistic opposition spring most of the instruments we use for planning. What is known as designations of areas or master plans suffer from this reductionism and static nature of a description that merely reproduces patterns of landholding.
The figure-ground relation can define only quantities, or at best relations between quantities. Density here is the number of people per area while increasing density means either more people or less area. It comes as no surprise that this is exactly how many people view the world, and as a result, are subjected to very simplistic evaluations of reality. They are afraid of change because this system does not allow for it. It is for this reason that the political climate in many countries has a certain xenophobic tendency; quantitative schemes work with limits and fixed capacities, which might be perceived as threats and are often used as such. In other words, „the boat is full“.
Cities are among the most complex organizational entities we know, and even for the specialists their functioning sometimes borders on the miraculous. They are organized primarily around flows that are the main reason why they exist: Cities are places of exchange where people, services and goods are collected and distributed in a multitude of flows. This is the exact opposite of the figure-ground scheme of traditional planning. This also shows a predominantly liquid nature of urbanity that is characterized more by the processes than by the territory they organize and are organized by at the same time. Various scientific disciplines have been used to model the degree of their complexity. Since chaos theory has shown us order of another kind we are inclined to also use these models for the city. Thermodynamics stresses that non-equilibrium states to postulate action as the tendency of a system towards equilibrium and rather than ending up with a state of entropy as the final outcome the application of this concept for urban phenomena creates cascades of disequilibria that never come to rest. Movement causes encounters that might have an extended duration as connections which give us a totally different measure of density. Connectivity is a potential and a quality. It describes the city as a web of interconnected events within social space that is made up of a multitude of networks. These various cultures can interact more or less freely and peacefully provided the city conceives of itself as a place of negotiation. Dencity is dense because of multiplicity of ecologies that develop their specific populations and are open enough to accommodate non members. The program focuses on techniques of mapping, self-organizing algorithms and parametric modeling techniques.