Marjetica Potrc
What will the future city look like, in their vision? It will be a city of strong, small neighborhoods, not a metropolis. Here, shared space – community space – is more important than public space. The emphasis is on collectivity and a new culture of living, as well as the preservation and protection of the local culture and the local knowledge. Cities are redefined into smaller sustainable territories organized on the local level. New allegiances are forged as local communities connect with the world and with each other on their own terms. In an age of local collaborations, sharing ideas and practices with the world is essential.
Today, after the financial crisis of 2008 and the Occupy movements of 2011, this vision matters more than ever. In 2007, I saw the exhibition Design for the Other 90% at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York. The cover of the catalogue showed an African woman drinking from a puddle of muddy water using specially designed filter that looked like a simple straw. The title of the exhibition implied that I, as a visitor to the show, was part of the 10 percent. I was reminded of this last year when I came across a photo of an Occupy Wall Street protester holding a poster saying “We are the 99%.” And I was surprised at how rapidly our sense of which world we belong to had changed – in only four years.
That said, I believe that people who live in stressed conditions can develop the tools they need for transforming their communities and their environment for the better. By doing so, places of crisis become places of hope. For me, the communities I worked with in Caracas and in Amsterdam are just that. They articulate a new culture of living that other communities, in seemingly more stable environments, can learn from in the search for a sustainable existence.
The Local, the Small, the Independent
Is this vision merely a utopia, or is it a credible reality for the future? And if it is a credible reality, then it is possible to transform society from below. What role do politicians play? Today, even the current right-of-center British government is talking about “a ground-breaking shift in power to councils and communities” – a phrase you might sooner expect to hear from Hugo Chavez. But beyond making such strange bedfellows, this enthusiasm for the local pushes us to redefine the meaning of such terms as “social innovation” and “sustainability,” which have been clouded by the neoliberal discourse and hijacked by neoliberal practices that cater to a vanishing middle class.
With the lost promises of modernism, the hopeful equalizer, the focus now shifts to the local, the small, and the independent. We see this in the European Union with the decline of the social state and the decentralizing of the nation state. At the same time, the world is experiencing a backlash against globalization and looking for solutions to the questions posed by climate change. It is in this context that we need to understand the potential of small-scale territories (the local) and social architecture (communities).
What does self-sustainability mean after the disintegration of twentieth-century modernism? What does it mean to live “off the grid”? How much can individuals contribute to the world by doing just that – by following local sustainable principles, or attempting to live a self-sustainable existence? The construction of the world from below, from the bottom up, must be seen as a viable, even crucial, paradigm that contributes to our knowledge in essential ways. In fact, we are already living with this paradigm, as witnessed in numerous examples like the Transition Towns movement (transitionnetwork.org). We need to learn from community-based projects and be inspired by them; they are a vital laboratory of human coexistence.
Rural vs. Urban Culture, Community Space vs. Public Space
It is often said that Caracas is, in fact, two cities in mutual conflict: the formal city and the informal city – modernist Caracas in the valley and the barrios that dominate the surrounding hills. Beyond the topographical differences and different architectures, the roots of their conflict are found in their different cultures: one urban, the other rural. In other words, if we ask the question, “Which comes first, culture or architecture?” – the answer must be: culture.
The urban culture of Caracas has produced a modernist architecture, which celebrates the public space. The rural culture has produced a barrio architecture, where community space prevails. While the people who live in the barrios are in fact the same people whose labor built the formal city of Caracas – and so are well acquainted with the urban culture – they have insisted on constructing their neighborhoods in their own way. Their rural culture consists of small-scale, self-built neighborhoods, which form village-like communities. The barrio residents prefer to live in a city of communities and not in the modernist city of individualism. When I lived in Caracas in 2003, I encountered many prejudices against the informal city, including the notion that barrios are chaotic, unmanageable structures. But what I saw was that barrios are in fact highly regulated structures, only the regulations are oral ones, negotiated through discussion, while the formal city is guided by written regulations. I also saw libraries and hospitals in the barrios, only it is not possible to tell what they are from the fronts of the buildings; typically a doctor’s office was located in someone’s home. Perhaps the most striking thing I experienced was the lack of any permanent public space. The alleys we walked through were a temporary shared space and the control over them could change unexpectedly. Over the decades when the modern city was being built in Caracas, the rural culture of the Caracas barrios endured and proved resilient to changes and shocks from the outside. This rural culture is also resistant to the neighboring urban culture.
Unlike the experience of the Caracas barrios, where the rural culture was not essentially about cultivation of food crops – although on my visit there in 2003, I saw the timid beginnings of an urban agriculture – in the on-site participatory project The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbor the rural culture begins with food. In the New West district of Amsterdam, where I collaborated with the Dutch collective Wilde Westen, the rural culture in the middle of this modernist district was celebrated in a community garden and community kitchen. Although the garden abounded with fresh vegetables, which became part of the meals prepared by the gardeners, the real value of the community garden was symbolic.
Ritual and Place-Making
One of most striking things I learned from The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbor was the importance of ritual for the community that cared for the garden. Their community functioned as an organism: they worked on the land together, and working together became a ritual, a rite of transition, through which they were intuitively reclaiming their community, their neighborhood, and their city. They worked on the land not only to grow food for themselves, but also to “ground” themselves; they had been living in a state of continual migration – first migrating from their native countries and then being forced by redevelopment to move again.
Many of the residents came from a rural background and were familiar with vegetable gardening, and they also valued community and sharing. The two community spaces – the garden and the kitchen – fulfilled their desire for a shared space. In fact, the success of both spaces and the vibrant activities associated with them exposed the emptiness of the public space in the neighborhood. This public space was clearly not performing the task it was intended for, while these new community spaces were operating very well. Becoming engaged in the creation of a shared space was, for the residents of the neighborhood, an act of place-making. Discussions about the role of space in cities – in general and with regard to public space in particular – can easily turn into abstract debates, so it was refreshing to be reminded how crucial place-making is for any group that seeks to be recognized in the larger society. Space matters. The place-making of the community that formed around our garden was, in fact, an assertion of their determination to participate in the city – to be included.
A Vision of the Future City
Both the ritual of working on the land and place-making point to the city as an intuitive, unplanned organism. Through their involvement with the garden and the kitchen the residents of New West began the process of making the city they lived in their own. They began to reimagine the city from below by practicing self-organization. In my view, the unprecedented success of community gardens in both Europe and North America points to the desire of local residents to rebuild their cities from the bottom up.
This new sense of ownership of the space combined with an emphasis on community values rather than every-man-for-himself individualism became the basis for the residents’ vision of the kind of city they desired: a city of villages where community space is more important than public space. In this sense, their vision matches the culture of living in the Caracas barrios. Both groups celebrate community space and both use rural culture to build their desired environment.
Rural culture was pushed to the side in the twentieth century’s emphasis on urban culture and the city. Is it possible that today the rural condition is a catalyst of change for societies in transition?
The Relational Object
For residents, the dry toilet in Caracas and the community garden in Amsterdam were relational objects; each was a catalyst of change not only for their neighborhood, but also for the city. We know that if you want to bring change to society, it is not enough to talk. The relational object is what matters.
The Artist as Mediator
Dry Toilet and The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbor were successful projects because they were collaborations between many individuals who came together from different disciplines and backgrounds. A diversity of knowledge is crucial in “redirective practice” – a collective action that demonstrates the process of cultural remaking. Today, there are many reasons why the sharing of knowledge is necessary, but perhaps the most important is that, still haunted by the lost promises of modernism, we feel that the world must be reconstructed. The success of participatory projects is a frank acknowledgment that we live in cities in transition, where the culture of living is being redefined.
Artists have an important role to play in this process. They can bring an “outside the box” perspective to communities under stress. Working in collaboration with residents, they help to envision and realize a project that will serve as a catalyst of change. The artist’s role and the meaning of art changes as the culture changes. Art is a living practice. In contrast to the object sculptures that were erected in modernist public spaces in the second half of the 20th century, the community garden of The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbor developed in a shared community space. Here again, if we ask, “Which comes first, culture or art?” – the answer must be: culture. When the culture changes, so does art.
Today, when I speak about my on-site projects, I describe myself as an “artist-mediator” who views art as “a medium of expression where the individual and culture come together.” In other words, in my work, art’s role is to mediate and help envision a project that articulates a new culture of living. Speaking generally, art mediates our relationship with the world. More specifically, it can mediate the relationship between the residents of a neighborhood and the city they live in – I am not talking only about mediation between, for example, residents and local authorities, but also mediation between residents and the envisioned city that reflects their culture.
In this light, the dry toilet in Caracas and the community garden in Amsterdam are both relational objects that can by used by the people in these communities as tools for changing their culture of living. By reaching out to a community in a shared endeavor, the artist and art become engaged in social processes that aspire to transform society from below. Along the way, the artist loses the aura of individual authorship and art loses its objectness.