10th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice, curated by Richard Burdett The 2006 architecture biennale takes cities as its theme, and the dilemmas faced by them as the world’s urban population increases. 50% of the total world population will be urban dwellers by the end of this year, rising to an anticipated 75% by 2050. In so far as cities are comparable, the main exhibition in the Corderie at the Arsenale presents a vast mesmerising presentation focussing on sixteen cities , of which at least half are now mega cities having over ten million inhabitants. Satellite views present whole regions of countries and then continents which seem to have been populated as cities. The exhibition intercuts comparative global information with the city profiles, including transport infrastructure and public/private vehicle ratios, city range described by travel distance, green space ratios, services and commodities, health in terms of life expectancy and infant mortality rates, education and literacy, energy consumption, and economic production. 3d models compare the urban densities of the sixteen cities – London shown as low and compact its density dwarfed by Mumbai and Shanghai. . The exhibition seeks descriptions of urban development through their phenomena – ‘centrality and density’, ‘concentrations and dispersals’ as they are identified in Saskia Sassen’s essay in the accompanying catalogue . The growth of cities is inevitable – in developing parts of the world individuals seek their economic advancement through urban migration. In cities of the developed world inhabitants continue to thrive on their cultural and social possibilities as well as the economic. The distinction between these two descriptive conditions becomes ambiguous as their relative GDPs and outputs show that parts of africa and south america and much of asia and india have economic growth rates at least equivalent and in many cases higher than north america or europe. What links them are global networks which are not only means of comparison but their interdependencies and their sustenance. The urban condition is described through virtual and physical evidence, from business satellite to air flight connections; through the presence of infrastructures on which cities depend and which shapes them - electronic connections which have become simpler to implement than the basic needs of sewers and transport. This constructs pictures of economic and cultural interdependencies in which the paradoxes are manifested of, on the one hand a reduction of global distance in which trade and communication is not dependent on physical space, and on the other hand the individuality of cities, in which their existence comes to depend on viable place making for individuals, and infrastructures and public facilities which start to improve conditions for deprived citizens and equalize their expectancies. 60% of the 11,146,000 population of Cairo lives in informal development. The physical presence in cities remains individual and controlled by certain means of accessibility which is equivalent to the past in how it enables and prevents access, and presents pathologies for the problems of urban society. The cities theme is taken as a demandingly pertinent and cohesive subject in which all architects, urbanists and constructors are implicated. The main exhibition and the responses of the urban research in the Italian pavilion present many unstable swiftly changing environments where the slowness of formal construction is in tension with the organic growth of the shanties and favelas around many of the mega citie. Responsible positions are invoked for what is happening in these mega cities, pressured by their attraction to larger migrating populations and the demands of competitive economic growth. For each profiled city, the corderie exhibition optimistically includes recent architectural projects presented as small strategic interventions - as ‘inhabited infrastructure’. The statements for a citizens charter such as good governance and public space presented in the last room are strategically political and socio-economic, parallelled by individual citizens rights and needs equivalent to the UN’s/WHO’s recommendations. As abstract statements do they present soico-political or physical challenges? The trouble for this exhibition lies on one hand in an understandable desire to avoid previous utopian or heroic urban propositions, and on the other in the translation of its theme to the national responses embodied in the pavilions. The transformation of a site and pavilions made for art exhibitions into national architecture presentations will always be problematic because of a tendency for what is on show to be iconographic resembling itself instead of the buildings and interventions it describes. The most successful were those few national exhibits directly addressing urbanisation either by commissioning architects to make projects on a relevant topic, or where a predominant condition has been tackled. The Irish exhibition ‘SubUrban to SuperRural’ showed propositions by nine young practices on the problem of Irish suburbanisation, where the latent home owning aspiration has encouraged territorial profligacy and the cult of ‘cash crop housing’ in speculative developments. One third of Irish homes are under 11 years old, the population will increase by one third of its size in 25 years, encouraging a ‘super-sprawl condition’ between Cork, Limerick and Dublin, devastating the countryside and destroying the traditional sense of community . The South African exhibition showed projects of the past ten years on the theme of how have South African cities transformed in the aftermath of apartheid? in which imbalances might be redressed through environmental alterations, and the spatial determinacy implemented as part of the implementation of apartheid can be reversed, improving cities without repeating a version of the strategy in a different way. Some Themes The pavilions many not be responding to the questions raised by urbanism or responding with the offerings of slow conventional architecture, yet intended or otherwise, certain themes related to urbanisation and the issues identified by some of the propositions, recur in the pavilions and in the main exhibitions. Almost simultaneously with the Biennale the Venice film festival launched in Europe An Inconvenient Truth – Al Gore’s film about global warming. Meanwhile, London held a Future Cities exhibition to review urban proposals , which in its historicist and optimistic utopian experimentalism, expressed the schism of support for a comparative exhibition of the Biennale type. The architecture implied by this year’s cities theme is as a possible mechanism, a catalyst rather than in the form of abstracted utopian propositions. But how might they be reconciled? 1 Mapping cities The corderie exhibition, and that in the old Italian pavilion on the Giardini site which presents urban research from organisations and academic institutions with several countries’ exhibits, use mapping to manifest the complexity of cities and develop techniques for their development. Cities are recorded statistically and in terms of connections, from GPS and satellite photographty: Panoramic photographic records of 19th century San Francisco by Eadweard Muybridge is paired with a current equivalent byMark Klett with Mark Ludgren, to global circuits in terms of transportation and commodities, or connections which collect people: Virtual mappings relate people to technology: in Real-Time-Rome, M.I.T. SENSEable City Laboratory maps life in Rome as by recording movements related to events in order to visualise daily life. Counter mappings include the British Pavilion’s projection of Sheffield\'s relationship with the world in Martyn Ware’s soundscape 2 Masterplanning Related to mappinng, this is used as a technique for description and with ironic discomfort: Bernard Tschumi’s for the Swiss pavilion proposes ‘flexible landscapes of buildings and gardens’, using expressions which suggest a familiar economic language such as ‘game and strategy’. Whilst OMA-AMO’s review of the Gulf coast maps and explains its physical character and futures through the ironies of its swift growth cities, importing ‘Western modernism’, almost from nothing. The Berlage Institute’s ‘Projecting the city’ proposes ‘fields of operational knowledge’ as an alternative to the discarded previous urban models, seeking to understand the economy of urban form, through research in appropriate representation of ideals and its associative design. 3 Migration The idea of the non homogeneous, racially mixed urban populations and the nomadism of growing cities, using comparisons of native inhabitants. Of New York’s population, 36% were born outside the US and only 35% are non- Hispanic whites. Säo Paulo is the largest Lebanese and Japanese city outside their countries, and the world’s third largest Italian city, with 5% of its current population born outside Brazil, whilst the city is being expanded by indigenous migrant workers from the north east. The swift physical growth of chinese cities such as Shanghai depends on its migrant workers with almost 4 million (nearly one third) registered outside the city. In ‘the Dispersed Urbanity of the Aegean Archipelago’ the Greek pavilion investigates the nature of its island culture –a ‘decentralized centrality’ in the idea of islands linked by an overall nationality and yet varied in their individuality and expanded by the tourist traveller. 4 Density and dispersal Shrinking and suburbanised cities – the proposals for densification of urbanism in Ireland to alleviate the spreading suburbanisation of the rural (see above), and The contrasting dilemma of a citylike Detroit in which the urban centre with its residential population has been shrinking and building density declines, whilst suburbanising sprawl spreads over south Michigan. 5 Habitation The French stylised take on development issues, constructing to inhabit their pavilion for the duration of the Biennale. Except the efforts of repetitive units focussed here on humanised dormitories with a bourgeois take on dwelling, and in which the reality would demand less design intervention, and the metal scaffold system would all probably be cannibalised and sold. This is juxtaposed with the photographic records of housing conditions in many other cities and C Photo Magazine’s inclusion of stacked favelas and the dormitory building in China 6 Sustainability The fragility of ground – investigations into sustainable solutions for natural disasters – The United States exhibition presents the effects of hurricane Katrina on New Orleans, and generic mass housing propositions, whilst the University of Texas at Austin presents meticulous resilience and ecological assessments with connected propositions. Sustainability is also described in terms of how citizens might be sustained through the greening of cities, with the contrasts in proportions of open/green space, and the potential impact on deprived cities of new parks such as the 30 hectare Al Azhar Park in Cairo (almost half of London’s diffuse area of 1,600km2 is open or recreational, whereas Cairo has 1m2 per head.) 7 Occidental aspirations Whether there are specific viewpoints towards city development and whether, if not in comparison, then in aspirations, they are occidentally oriented or even paternalist, so for example a Danish pavilion focussed on sustainable urban development in China, whilst the Korean presented a more knowing and ironic image of intensive development in the citizens individual residential aspirations, but also in the attempts to reconcile old traditions in the developing city, with a textural analysis. The gaps in the exhibitions lie between the architectural propositions and the demands of the cities. In the schemes presented for each city as part of the main exhibition, they suggest the contextualised particular relationship of social demands to the projects, making them specific and appropriate whether residential or communal - for example, housing schemes in South Africa, 100 new schools in Säo Paulo etc., or infra structural - for example, Trans-Milenio Bus-System Bogotá. These are all more interested in social infrastructure of the city or the technique of developing countries as the transience and instancy of the shanties, rather than building technique per se. Venice, Arsenale and Giardini della Biennale 10th September to 19th November 2006 www.labiennale.org

Aus der Ausgabe 11-2006