["Signs for Naturalized Areas", from Windsor, Ontario's Broken City Lab; the signs were installed in the summer of 2009, after a city workers' strike left various vacant lots unmowed and teeming with accidental plant communities.  The emergent flora were apparently commonly viewed negatively, as a symbol of the political conflict surrounding the workers' strike; the project aimed to invert that understanding, and suggest that citizens might instead view them as "wonderful additions to [the] urban landscape”.]

“Signs for Naturalized Areas” strike me as particularly interesting in light of my post from last week on “hypothetical signs”, as, like both the Hypothetical Development Organization and Gökçeoğlu’s mayoral campaign, these are also an example of signs-as-(landscape)-architecture.  The difference here, though, is that while both the HDO and Gökçeoğlu’s photoshops used signs as a means for publishing an architectural proposal — a story about how a place might be constructed differently — Broken City Lab used signs to advertise an extant but hitherto invisible quality of the landscape. These signs reveal, rather than inventing. (It is perhaps not a coincidence that the artists working in landscape utilize this mode of operation, while the HDO and Gökçeoğlu, working with buildings, operate in the other.)

[An image from Mehmet Ali Gökçeoğlu's mayoral campaign.]

This past summer on Places, Rob Walker, one of the artists behind the “Hypothetical Development Organization”, penned a brief history of architecture fiction and discussed the even-briefer history of that organization.  (The Hypothetical Development Organization was, if you are unfamiliar with it, a brief initiative which produced “hypothetical futures” for each of ten selected sites in New Orleans, with the proposals unbound “by rules relating to commercial potential, practical materials, or physics”.)  My favorite thing that Walker does in the essay is tracing the essential vein of weirdness that links the fiction produced by the Hypothetical Development Organization to the ordinary and common development signs that inspired the project:

“One day I went for a routine walk. My wife and I live in Savannah, GA, in an area that’s mostly residential, but interspersed with commercial and public buildings. It’s a nice stroll to an excellent bakery, my bank, a convenience store, the main branch of the public library.

Our neighborhood is the sort that people describe as “transitional,” and some of the property, both residential and commercial, is vacant. On one nearby commercial structure, vacant for the four-plus years we’ve lived in the area, I noticed a sign during this particular walk. You’ve seen similar signs, and I’d seen this one probably a hundred times, without ever really thinking about it. It was a rendering of a development, a future, involving a small, empty building. It suddenly struck me that, given how long this sign has been here, what it depicted was, at best, a hypothetical future — and arguably a fictitious one.

Since whenever this sign was first posted, the real estate market has collapsed, the old go-go economy has evaporated, and as it happens this building has been put up for sale. Any development that may take place some day would depend on someone buying it, and on what that party might want to do. Until then, it’s just another empty building that happens to have a sign on it. The disparity between the rendering and reality is considerable: In the rendering, in fact, the actual extant structure has been folded into a much bigger building, which in point of fact exists nowhere besides that rendering. In real life, it’s a vacant lot.

It further struck me that there are vacant buildings much like this one, with no definitive future, all over town — all over lots of towns. In a sense, then, our city streets are full of fiction, or something very much like it. The stories, mostly visual, are told in the form of colorful signs attached to drab or neglected structures, presenting speculations about how the very same physical place might look in some unspecified future. The abandoned office tower could house airy condos. The long-shuttered auto shop might morph into a gleaming boutique. The factory built for some bankrupt enterprise will, perhaps, burst with life again, its cheery mixed uses enjoyed by stock-image people representing a cross-section of pleasant citizenry. Sometimes these ideas are punctuated by the name of a development company and its Web address. But the story flows mostly from the beguiling picture, showing what could hypothetically happen, right here.”

This seems both fantastic — recognizing the strangeness of ordinary things examined closely — and exactly right to me — recognizing the fundamental similarity in genre between Archigram and Forest City, regardless of the massive differences in how they work within that genre.

It also reminds me of the story of the Turkish real estate agent Mehmet Ali Gökçeoğlu, who we read about in Emre Alturk’s contribution to Al Manakh 2, “Dubai, Copied and Pasted”.  You might say that, like Walker, Gökçeoğlu recognized something of the unrealized potential of the development sign as a fiction.  And, also like the story of the Hypothetical Development Organization, Gökçeoğlu’s story indicates the power of telling stories not as “a series of words”, but through “plans, schematics, models, renderings”.

Unlike Walker, though, Gökçeoğlu was not satisfied to let his pictures simply tell a story.  He ran for office on them:

“In January 2009, Mehmet Ali Gökçeoğlu, a local real estate agent running for mayor of Cesme, Turkey, publicized his campaign throughout the town in billboards and pamphlets.  His vision for the future of this Izmir borough was to make it the Dubai of Turkey, literally.  The imagery he deployed constituted aerial pictures of this touristic peninsula, fashioned with many projects previously proposed for Dubai including; an identical replica of the Palm Island, along with a tower of independently rotating floors to be the tallest in the world; a yacht marina, similarly to be the largest in the world; and an UFO shaped restaurant hovering meters above the ground.  It wasn’t long before the ‘most eccentric campaign of the elections’, as it was called by the media, made it to the national newspapers accompanied with snide remarks.  The imagery of the campaign circulated via email for weeks.  Eventually Gökçeoğlu wasn’t even close to securing the candidate post in his party — the ruling Justice and Development Party.  Enjoying a brief media attention, the campaign lived a short life in the absence of an endorsing sheik, money, public support, legislative basis and tax policies to attract desired foreign investment, or any substantial program for that matter.

There is hardly much to take seriously about the campaign.  But, wildly unfounded as it is, it does bring two things to mind.  First of all, it is striking that it caught a wide public attention at all.  Gökçeoğlu’s vision would have hardly found any audience beyond the small crowd that he is probably able to gather in a political rally, if it weren’t for the images.  It took him a — probably cracked — copy of Photoshop, some images pulled off the net, some hours of labor, and a modest capital to render this speculative agenda visible and palpable, thus mobilizing more attention and reaction…”

[Also on Places, the second installment in Mimi Zeiger's "The Interventionist's Toolkit" looked at the Hypothetical Development Organization as one of a series of "posters, pamphlets, and guides" occupying one niche in the world of "Provisional, Opportunistic, Ubiquitous, and Odd Tactics in Guerilla and DIY Practice and Urbanism".  (This niche is not unrelated to the nascent genre of the urban field manual.)  In BLDGBLOG post entitled "Urban Hypotheticals", Geoff Manaugh both describes the Hypothetical Development Organization and discusses more generally the potential uses and abuses of such speculative architectural projects.]

[Photographs from Christoph Engel's series "Exterieur", which explores the sort of cryptoforested terrain vague which the urban field manual might excel in operating in.]

Issue 14 of the Magazine On New Urbanisms, “Editing Urbanism”, is out.  Brian Davis, Brett Milligan, and I co-wrote a piece in that issue, “Urban Field Manuals”, which argues that the humble maintenance manual — a document which is, in an architectural context, typically slapped together at the end of a project in an inevitably futile attempt to arrest the effects of material degradation on the completed architectural object as long as possible — might be hybridized with the similarly prosaic field guide to produce a new kind of architectural document (the field manual), describing procedures and possibilities rather than prescribing forms:

In considering novel urbanisms, it is important not only to investigate new urban processes and kinds of organization, but also to re-evaluate the methodologies by which we intervene in urban systems and spaces.  The traditional tools of the urbanist are the capital project and the contract document; the capital project originates with a major initial capital investment by a party other than the designer (usually either a public agency or a private investor), while contract documents are used to define the terms of production and maintenance of a capital project. Neither of these tools are obsolete in a condition of “editing urbanism”. However, we propose that another, often-ignored tool may be of greater use: the maintenance manual.

Today’s urban maintenance manual is typically a dull and even banal document; whether it is produced by an architectural team for a built project or a planning department for a zoning code, it is typically explicitly aimed at preserving the status quo within the urban environment.

Its form, however, offers the opportunity for new kinds of urban engagement. Rather than prescribing set geometries for an urban territory or drawing up master plans for the delineation of new neighborhoods — as is done in traditional urban practice — the maintenance manual can be used to describe procedures and reactions to be performed in response to shifting urban conditions. In this sense, the maintenance manual offers urban editors a dual opportunity to increase focus on adaptable, opportunistic strategies, and to expand agency in shaping the city from the typically limited set of actors (such as professional designers, developers, and local politicians) to anyone who can read, interpret, and apply the instructions found within a manual.  It provides a format for instructions to edit the city, block-by-block, landscape-by-landscape.

The full piece — which illustrates the potential of this approach by developing the outline of such a kind of document through cataloging a succession of contemporary urban projects, ranging from Santiago Cirugeda’s Recetas Urbanas to the work of Grassroots Mapping to the recent output of the New York City government, aligning them with a series of working modes we call “the bureaucratic retrofit”, “the subversive”, “the diagnostic”, “the jerry-rig”, “the readymade”, and “the mycorrhizal”  – can be found in MONU 14, which is available here.

[Brett has a post up at Free Association Design which, among other things, goes into further detail on those working modes.]