THE NEIGHBOURHOOD
installation at the Oslo Architecture Triennale, September 2022
If you live in a city somewhere in the world, you are naturally part of a neighbourhood. But what does that truly mean?
Our neighbourhoods are situated within a global stage where climate change, biodiversity loss, pandemics, antibiotic resistance, migration and human development are some of the interconnected challenges faced by all. The dynamic and linked nature of these emergencies will require everyone to look at our systems very differently.
‘The Living Street’ is an exploration of a neighbourhood’s spontaneous or man-made layers. The objective has been to move away from fixed mindsets and predictable understandings of what a neighbourhood means to us. But also to more deeply understand what it feels like to be part of a shared, interconnected space.
We can unfold these urban futures through infrastructural solutions, by studying flows of materials and objects, by learning and developing food chains or by implementing local energy solutions. But can we shift our neighbourhoods into shared ‘lifehoods’ only by rational propositions? We argue there is a need for a deeper level of understanding of our lives, of ourselves in relation to all living things. We are connected in more powerful ways than we recognise and sometimes want to believe. Emotions and beliefs are a fundamental part of existence but they tend to have been forgotten in urban planning and in societal constructions as a whole.
It is time to value things differently. It is time to acknowledge the beauty of sharing time and space for a brief moment. It is time to look at laughter, care, eye contact, generosity and a sudden gift as just as impactful as the constructed environment and sustainable technological solutions we’re currently giving the most focus. It is time to master the concept of fully living together as one breathing organism. And it is time to dare to look beyond money and individual growth.
For over a century we’ve seen urban explorations with the sole objective of increasing a few people’s economic welfare. One might say they succeeded. Global inequalities in housing standards are huge and constantly increasing. How can we test and explore new ways of designing, building and sharing neighbourhoods with new values and co-benefits as the core sentiment? A revaluation where welfare is no longer determined by economy only, but rather by a wider perspective of a meaningful life.
With ‘The Living Street’ we would like to explore a neighbourhood through different flows in both time and space. Through a neighbourhood there is a fluidity of materials and objects, but also of humans, nature and all other living things, of air and water, of cells, mycelium and bacterias. Furthermore, there are flows of invisible notions such as births, emotions, hopes, economy, scientific theories, biological growth and death. We have tried to illustrate a few of these flows to caringly invite to a deeper understanding of all that we create when building future neighbourhoods.
Facts
We are all faced with situational facts. The time and place where we are born is unevenly distributed among us. We can’t demand to live in a specific situation nor request the spacial, social and constructed realities that we will have to deal with. These facts could be seen as the often uneven playing field that we have as a structural foundation for collective imagination and innovation.Writer Susan Sontag wrote “We understand something by locating it in a multi-determined temporal continuum. Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.” Yet, it seems this intense flux is something many of us still don’t want to fully understand, or at least fully register. The multiplex of current facts are tremendously tricky to navigate while constantly changing.
To shed light on some of these facts we could briefly discuss our nine global planetary boundaries, a system and framework based on scientific evidence of human caused Earthly perturbations. According to the framework, "transgressing one or more planetary boundaries may be deleterious or even catastrophic due to the risk of crossing thresholds that will trigger non-linear, abrupt environmental change within continental-scale to planetary-scale systems”. Five of these nine planetary boundaries have now been exceeded (as of 2022).
We all need to place ourselves in relation to these facts and act thereafter. Who am I? What role do I play? What are my responsibilities? And even though these facts and interrelationships might seem too large to handle, to look at them through the lens of a neighbourhood with a scale that is somewhat easier to grasp we could collectively live with the facts we were given.
What if we studied facts from a local perspective with globally open mindsets?
Built form
The oldest archaeological evidence of house construction comes from the famous Oldupai Gorge site in Tanzania. Nobody knows exactly which proto-human species is responsible for the 1.8 million years old tools and houses found at Oldupai, but whoever they were, they predate the modern human species as we know it by a solid one and a half million years.Today, our homes represent a third of our total global emissions on the planet due to the use of finite materials and the amount of energy used to build, maintain, live in and demolish our buildings. Almost every element of the home is derived from fossil fuels, from PVC that makes a window frame, the oil byproducts in wall insulation, to the solvent mixed in the paint on the walls. At present our chances of limiting global temperatures to 1.5ºC are optimistic, we’re closer to 3.5ºC. We need a new relationship with our homes.
We’ve constructed a “throw-away" culture, a way of seeing and using the world, based on transaction and extraction. We are over using materials and to truly care for things has little place in an economy based on brief or provisional ownership and fast replacement. In a housing market that prioritises the generation of capital over living, homes have become consumable too.
However, we don’t construct only houses and buildings in our cities, we also organise and structure nature. Parks, green areas and plantings are heavily designed and created to fit only human needs. For too long we have valued urban nature as cost, not as valuable assets. Recent discoveries have shown that trees are incredible beings, with powers far beyond our imagination. We have to acknowledge and reconnect the true contribution of natural assets in our neighbourhoods.
What if we created an open source framework enabling multiple city actors to collectively invest in urban nature?
Governance
Neighbourhood streets are where acute negative impacts from shared risks are truly felt, but also where commitment for collective change can be generated. They offer all the economies of scale and scope for exploring a deep transitioning approach. In order to meet our carbon targets, collective action is essential at a scale and speed that is effective and maximises impact. The unit of the street can become the initial unit of change for designing and testing a collective response to a regenerative recovery, showing the pathway and developing transferable learning for a larger scale approach. The street is also a potent platform for citizens to themselves take over a public space for the purpose of a wealthier street.Streets and their wider communities are an important factor when altering ideas and concrete projects, creating co-benefits in sustainable settings and quality of life. However, a locally shared vision and strong collaboration within a community is dependent on a certain level of hope, a complex thing to define. If we look at hope as a type of curiosity, we know that it is a notion which has been crushed in modern times and in younger generations through the current education system, conforming every single person to think a certain way and impose limiting beliefs rather than exploring their authentic selves. Hope also seems to be lower in younger generations due to climate anxiety and a feeling of governmental inactivity in response to sustainable work. Hope is an ethereal chain reaction and a human trait, based on very personal and comprehensive ways of thinking and living. It seems that we might be better off focusing on the many small things that create happiness, curiosity and joy and by those actions leveraging hope.
What if we set up local climate transition entities for neighbourhoods?
Nature
Humans have claimed almost every part of the Earth’s nature apart from a tiny bit in the Arctic. We have now even claimed pieces of the moon. Indigenous people know you can’t claim nature, you can’t own nature. They say you can’t own your mother.If we see nature as its own being then nature can be protected as a legal entity. More and more lawyers now argue that instead of viewing nature as property to be owned, we should recognise that it has its own, inalienable rights similar to the ones we enjoy. And that the least we can do is give nature a more central, balanced and equal place in our society.
Through times socio-cultural and economic systems have had a direct impact on land use, land subdivision and land management. Land has been, and still is, the primary requirement for city making. To give space to urban life, agricultural systems have been thrown off balance over the course of the last century with the industrialization and intensification of agriculture. Our relationship with the land has switched from mutually and regeneratively nurturing to solely extractive and ultimately destructive, up to the point of destroying entire ecosystems.
Synchronously we can explore the concept of humans being part of nature in a direct way. We are holobionts and everyone of us walk around with 1,5 kg of other living organisms both on, and inside, our bodies. In a way we are all small biodiverse universes and need to see ourselves as part of a larger system, a new urban biology, where a bacteria, a human, a bug or a bird are all equally important.
What if we built homes based on a relationship of care instead of a relationship of misuse and over consumption?
Economy and time
The last few decades have crystallised the drastic changes we, us humans, have put on Earth following colonialism and capitalism. We have extracted, produced and used more than our planet could tolerate, and we now stand with a wound so large that we don’t know where to start. But there is a missing discussion that we seem remarkably afraid to acknowledge. A discussion around why we felt we needed so much to begin with. The unclear and enormous need for accumulation that seeds our money economy. This perception of being lost in the world seems to be growing among us, while we find ourselves simultaneously fighting against our very own existence.We routinely disregard what emotions are awakened when we think of our children having to deal with a society that feels like it is spiralling downwards, how money and the unchecked pursuit of profit is often the core of destruction, and why some humans seem to have an insatiable need for an unreasonable personal income. In doing this, we neglect a vital source of intelligence that gives precise and lived insight into the purpose and direction of our economies.
In the early 1970s, meteorologist and mathematician Edward Norton Lorenz articulated the butterfly effect in science and launched the field of chaos theory. The effect says that small initial conditions strongly influence the evolution of highly complex systems. In Lorenz’s metaphor, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil could ultimately lead to a tornado in Texas that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. What are the butterfly effects we need to see in our cities today?
What if we identified the butterfly effects we need to see in our cities today?
Souls
Humans are amazing organisms. Some scientists think of us as machines or even algorithms. Our intricate automated bodies not only function in mind blowing ways, but our minds and souls are so vast and so impossible to fully understand that one could say every single one of us walks around with an infinite universe inside our masses of flesh.Rarely do we take the time to sit down and listen to all these universes, hear their stories and their hopes. We are more often interested in understanding how these universes can construct profit and income while being kept stable and safe. What would a neighbourhood look like if we carefully listened to hopes and dreams, if we listened to which fears someone might have or what they would like their city to be like in 100 years time? Normally we construct these spaces under heavily designed workshops rather than in slow philosophical rooms without stress solely focusing on concrete outcomes.
We’ve lost our natural connection to each other, to the notion of non-existing ownership of anything, and to the idea of true democracy as a shared reality we can enjoy together. Now before us is the choice to retrieve this potential we all share. We have to create moments for meaning to construct possibilities and infrastructures that enable everyone and everything to express this natural capacity to imagine, and to share moments for meaning.
By redefining the hierarchy of what matters most, spontaneities of life such as laughter, eye contact, care, and generous gestures, can be considered as important and impactful as the built environment and technological solutions.
What if we created philosophical living rooms for slow discussions about shared neighbourhoods?
The Living Street drawing exhibited at the Oslo Architecture Triennale, September 2022
Projected created by Jenny Grettve & Meggan Collins at Dark Matter Labs.
Economic Spaces is a project belonging to Dark Matter Labs
www.darkmatterlabs.org
Copywrite darkmatterlabs.org
2022
www.darkmatterlabs.org
Copywrite darkmatterlabs.org
2022