BORROWED CITY
Thanks to Alberto Iacovoni for this Post about, public space and temporary occupations.
Borrowed City: Motoelastico
by Marco Bruno, Simone Carena, Minji Kim
by Marco Bruno, Simone Carena, Minji Kim
Damdi Seoul 2013
By Alberto Iacovoni
Private citizens use public space for their own personal benefit. We all do it. But some people do it better than others.
A desk for currency exchange in the middle of the crosswalk; the store of metallic profiled elements which extends largely on the sidewalk, where the products are processed and the real shop barely serves as a depot; a linear garden made of recycled containers; a temporary restaurant of which remains only a halo on the sidewalk.
The Borrowed City is a catalog of temporary occupations of the public space in the city of Seoul, illegal but tolerated and negotiated between people leading commercial activities and the community. Result of a research developed by Motoelastico, an Italian architecture office based in Seoul, this book which was also part of the Korean pavilion with an interactive installation at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2014, and has been awarded by the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in 2013, goes far beyond the mere mapping of these activities, but transcribes them in the form of diagrammatic axonometries, and in further decompositions in the elements that constitute them.
By Alberto Iacovoni
Private citizens use public space for their own personal benefit. We all do it. But some people do it better than others.
A desk for currency exchange in the middle of the crosswalk; the store of metallic profiled elements which extends largely on the sidewalk, where the products are processed and the real shop barely serves as a depot; a linear garden made of recycled containers; a temporary restaurant of which remains only a halo on the sidewalk.
The Borrowed City is a catalog of temporary occupations of the public space in the city of Seoul, illegal but tolerated and negotiated between people leading commercial activities and the community. Result of a research developed by Motoelastico, an Italian architecture office based in Seoul, this book which was also part of the Korean pavilion with an interactive installation at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2014, and has been awarded by the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in 2013, goes far beyond the mere mapping of these activities, but transcribes them in the form of diagrammatic axonometries, and in further decompositions in the elements that constitute them.
Thanks to this operation - similar to what happened in the books by Atelier Bow-Wow about Tokyo - the everyday life of the streets of Seoul becomes retroactively a catalog of possible projects, smart and minimal interventions of urban furniture, temporary and interactive performances in the public space. The reality, seen through the lens of the project, becomes a source of strategies and practices for using the public space in ways that are unthinkable starting from the world of the norm and of the project, in a top-down process. It is what I call inappropriately augmented reality translating a term of digital technologies in the context of the project, indicating the possibility to look at common things and the spontaneous and informal practices as potential design acts to transform radically the space of relationships. Some might argue that this is not public space, that a city whose sidewalks and even the crosswalks are used for personal profits and private purposes no longer belongs to the community, not to mention the issues of "urban decorum" that these activities deeply question.
On the contrary, in the spaces of the borrowed city, as opposed to what happens in shopping malls, where the public is swallowed, and controlled by the private, it is the private that extends into the public, highlighting one of the contradictions that are the basis of the same notion of public space, of a space that doesn't belong generically to everyone - and therefore to no one - but becomes the common good of the community.
Each process of identification with a collective space can not occur in fact that through forms of appropriation of a common good, through the transformation in proprius (in latin “for private purposes") of something that belongs to everyone: small actions that transform the spaces of the city in inhabitable places therefore, again, private, since to inhabit in fact, comes from the latin verb habere, to have.
These inappropriate appropriations reveal the fertile nature of this kind of spaces, built through a dialectic between private and public, and their the political nature if we still define with Bauman as politics the "activity responsible for converting private problems into public issues (and vice versa)."
And it is with this unresolvable contradiction that we have to play, if we want to rethink the public city, not as an abstraction imposed from above, but as something that can be built from the bottom, offering to the citizens the possibility of temporary, negotiated, creative and inappropriate appropriations as those described in The Borrowed in the City.
