"Hybridity in Urban Form : Representing the AndAnd"

excerpt from paper abstract to be presented at Aga Khan Award for Architecture Knowledge Construction Workshop in Vancouver, 27-28 February 2009:

This paper argues that our cultural-historic-social bias for categorization, for bounding, for demarcation and for assuming a static place-ness [urban form as noun] produces a limiting notion of space, experience, and urban subjectivity. The AndAnd is a framework for representing the city as a layered, multi-scalar, synthetic, and enmeshed condition [urban form as verb]. Inspired by the writer Zadie Smith’s recent lecture “Speaking in Tongues,” this research agenda seeks to represent the Dream City in every city.

“[Dream City] is a place of many voices, where the unified singular self is an illusion. Naturally, Obama was born there. So was I. When your personal multiplicity is printed on your face, in an almost too obviously thematic manner, in your DNA, in your hair and in the neither this nor that beige of your skin—well, anyone can see you come from Dream City. In Dream City everything is doubled, everything is various. You have no choice but to cross borders and speak in tongues.” –Zadie Smith, "Speaking in Tongues" lecture at the New York Public Library December 2008

In the introduction to her book Organization Space, Keller Easterling writes about the difficulty architects have thinking in verbs, “Architects are typically more fluent in descriptions of activity and relationships that result in artifacts and forms within conventions that favor the designation of site as a single entity. We are most comfortable with nouns rather than verbs…” She suggests an expansion of terms that “describe spatial organizations with active parts, temporal components, or differential change.” Geology is a good example of this: a glacier can be measured, quantified, located, observed, experienced, as a thing [noun] in the world. At the same time, the glacier is a system in flow [verb] that changes over time and is acted on by a complex set of conditions.

I adopt Easterling’s challenge and in addition provoke architects and critics to look to other disciplines that have acknowledged the synthesis of disparate things, the this and that of Zadie Smith’s Dream City. For example, from the field of Linguistics, bi-dialectalism, which is the possession of two or more mutually intelligible dialects, is acknowledged and protected. From the fields of Political Theory or International Studies we can observe changes in the relationship of nationalism to the statehood.

The AndAnd is a proposal for a framework for the theorization and representation of built form. The example of Thames Town demonstrates the resistance to the categories of ‘universal’ and ‘indigeneous.’ And so we must endeavor to exploit a more synthetic language that embraces the complexity of built form. This formidable challenge has already been recognized by Frederic Jameson, “The problem [of contemporary ‘mapping’] is still one of representation, and also of representability: we know that we are caught within these more complex global networks … yet we have no way of thinking about them, of modeling them, however abstractly in our mind’s eye.” The key to the AndAnd framework is the synthesis of the noun and verb: the relationship of the bounded, static and scenographic, to the fluid, enmeshed and multi-scalar. From such a framework, fuller notions of space, experience and urban subjectivity can be understood.