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g l o b a l i z a t i o n

a n d n e w u r b a n

c o n d i t i o n s

g u s t a v o r i b e i r o

People around the globe are more connected to each other than ever before. Information and money flow more quickly than ever. Goods and services produced in one part of the world are increasingly available in all parts of the world.

International travel is more frequent. International communication is commonplace.

http://globalization.about.com/

The Era of Globalization is fast becoming the preferred term for describing the current times. Just as the Depression, the Cold War Era, the Space Age, and the Roaring 20's are used to describe particular periods of history; globalization describes the political, economic, and cultural atmosphere of today.

http://globalization.about.com/

mature industrial economy

post-fordism

late capitalism

privatization

liberalization

deregulation

informational economy restructuring

information technology

network society

network enterprise

restructuring from 1970s onwards

from mass-production to flexible production

from fordism to post-fordism

from economies of scale to economies of scope

major divide in the organization of production and markets in the global economy

diffusion of information technology

uncertainty caused by the fast pace of change in the economic, institutional and technological environment of the firm by enhancing flexibility of production, management and marketing.

lean production – automation of jobs, suppression of managerial layers

Manuel Castells 1996

Politiken 2. section – Mandag 22. november 2004

Tegnestuefusion

”Arkitema og AA arkitekter A/S fusionerer. De to århusianske tegnestuer har begge filialer i København og bliver under fællesnavnet Arkitema til landets største tegnestue med cirka 230 medarbejdere og en forventet omsætning på cirka 145 millioner kroner. Fusionen er motiveret i den global økonomis udvikling, som peger på, at millioner af mennesker i udviklingslandene vil få et velstandsløft med behov for masser af nye boliger og offentlige bygninger.”

6.148 billion

world population 2001

By 2030, two out of three people will live in an urban world, with most of the explosive growth occurring in developing countries.

1950: New York + 10 M

2015: 21 cities + 10 M

Asia and Africa, now more than two-thirds rural, will be half urban by 2025.

Never have urban populations expanded so fast. "Humanity has not been down this road before," write urbanists Peter Hall and Ulrich Pfeiffer. "There are no precedents, no guideposts."

m e g a c i t i e s

Megacities with populations of 10 million inhabitants or more:

1950: New York, 12.3 million.

1975: Tokyo, 19.8 million; New York, 15.9 million; Shanghai, 11.4 million; Mexico City, 10.7 million; Sao Paulo, Brazil, 10.3 million.

2001: Tokyo, 26.5 million; Sao Paulo, 18.3 million; Mexico City, 18.3 million; New York, 16.8 million; Bombay (Mumbai), India; 16.5 million; Los Angeles, 13.3 million; Calcutta, India, 13.3 million; Dhaka, Bangladesh, 13.2 million; Delhi, India, 13 million; Shanghai, 12.8; Buenos Aires, Argentina, 12.1 million; Jakarta, Indonesia, 11.4 million; Osaka, Japan, 11 million; Beijing, 10.8 million; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 10.8 million; Karachi, Pakistan, 10.4 million; Manila, Philippines, 10.1 million.

2015: Tokyo, 27.2 million; Dhaka, 22.8 million; Bombay (Mumbai), 22.6 million; Sao Paulo, 21.2 million; Delhi, 20.9 million; Mexico City, 20.4 million; New York, 17.9 million; Jakarta, 17.3 million; Calcutta, 16.7 million; Karachi, 16.2 million; Lagos, Nigeria, 16 million; Los Angeles, 14.5 million; Shanghai, 13.6 million; Buenos Aires, 13.2 million; Manila, 12.6 million; Beijing, 11.7 million; Rio de Janeiro, 11.5 million, Cairo, Egypt, 11.5 million; Istanbul, Turkey, 11.4 million; Osaka, 11 million; Tianjin, China, 10.3 million.

United Nations Population Division

It is this distinctive feature of being globally connected and locally disconnected, physically and socially, that makes megacities a new urban form.

Manuel Castells 1996

g l o b a l c i t i e s

The spatial dispersion of economic activity has brought about an expansion of central functions and in the growing stratum of specialized firms servicing such functions… These conditions… shifted the point of gravity in the industry away from the large, mostly American, transnational banks that had once dominated the industry toward major centers of finance.

Saskia Sassen 2001

Firms can deliver highly specialized services to individual clients through network arrangements which allow a large service firm to contract specialized suppliers and consultants to produce service. This becomes a version of just-in-time and just-in-place production/ delivery made possible by the fact that the large global service firm can count on networks of specific specialized firms…

Saskia Sassen 2001

The concept of global city does not refer to any particular city, but to the global articulation of segments of many cities into an electronically linked network of functional domination through the planet. The global city is a spatial form rather than a title of distinction for certain cities, although some cities have greater share of these global networks than others. In a sense, most areas in all cities, including New York and London, are local, not global.

Manuel Castells 2004

p a r a d i g m

Formerly the dominant forces were separation and specialisation, the struggle for clarity, and the reduction of the world to calculable proportions, now we talk about simultaneity, multiplicity, uncertainty, chaos theory, networks, hubs and nodal points, interaction, the hybrid, ambivalence, schizophrenia, space of flows, cyborgs, and so on.

van Toorn

the predominance of flows, deformations and dimensional and dynamic heterogeneity within the urban structure of advanced capitalism puts into question the static spatiality, homogeineity and constancy of urban form in time that once characterised urban structures and planning methods.

Alexandro Zaera Polo

the generic city

The contemporary city is like the contemporary airport – “all the same”? Is it possible to theorize this convergence? And if so, to what ultimate configuration is it aspiring? Convergence is possible only at the price of shedding identity. That is usually seen as a loss. But at the scale at which it occurs, it must mean something. What are the disadvantages of identity, and conversely, what are the advantages of blankness? What if this seemingly accidental – and usually regretted – homogenization were an intentional process, a conscious movement away from difference toward similarity? What if we are witnessing a global liberation movement: “down with character!” What is left after identity is stripped? The Generic?

Rem Koolhaas 1995

c i t y

pearl river delta

spatial system without a name

area: 50,000 km2

pop: +50 million

CITY OF EXACERBATED DIFFERENCE © (COED©) The traditional city strives for a condition of balance, harmony, and a degree of homogeneity. CITY OF EXACERBATED DIFFERENCE ©, on the contrary, is based on the greatest possible difference between its parts – complementary or competitive. In a climate of permanent strategic panic, what counts in the CITY OF EXACERBATED DIFFERENCE © is not the methodical creation of the ideal, but the opportunistic exploitation of flukes, accidents, and imperfections. Although the model of the CITY OF EXACERBATED DIFFERENCE © appears brutal – to depend on the robustness and primitiveness of its parts – the paradox is that it is, in fact, delicate and sensitive. The slightest modification of any detail requires the readjustment of the whole to reassert the equilibrium of complementary extremes.

Rem Koolhaas

FLATNESS © The spatial condition of FLATNESS © is a direct result of the… MARKET © (where mountains are flattened into horizontal surface, to be consumed by development).

Rem Koolhaas

SCAPE © An (exploded) mountain, a highrise, and a rice field in every direction – nothing between excessive height and the lowness of a continuous agricultural/light-industrial crust, between the skyscraper and the scraped. SCAPE © , neither city nor landscape, is the new posturban condition, the arena for a terminal juxtaposition between architecture and landscape, the apotheosis of the PICTURESQUE ©

Rem Koolhaas

c y b e r c i t i e s

h y b r i d

The town is the correlate of the road. The town exists only as a function of circulation and of circuits; it is a singular point on the circuits which create it and which it creates. It is declined by entries and exits: something must enter it and exit from it.

Deleuze and Guattari 1997

Broadly speaking, the diffusion of ICTs into urban spaces seem to be involved in trends towards fragmentation, sprawl, suburbanisation, individualisation and a withdrawal of social and political interchange from physical spaces into mediated spaces.

Graham and Marvin 2001

act on information

pervasiveness of effects of new technologies

networking logic

node: concentration + dispersion

Castells 1996

city as a communication device

cities as sites for information exchange

i m a g e c i t y

i n f o r m a l

This tussle between legality and liminality, between the master plan and the moment is a conflict between different sets of visions, or images, of the city. One emerges from the panopticon of the state and the monocular vision of economic or industrial rationality, which renders space an empty template devoid of lived experience, memory and contingent acts of living, subservient to the imperatives of administration, commerce and production.

Others emerge from the many provisional acts of exploration and redefinition that residents enter into, in the process of transforming the city into something that makes space for the infinite variety of their lives, habits and desires.

Raqs Media Collective 2003

b a n g k o k

Bangkok gets 300,000 new citizens a year due to immigration (legal and illegal) and migration from rural areas

http://www.2bangkok.com 2003

The population of Bangkok has practically doubled in the last 20 years

Estimated at 12 million

p l a n n i n g ?

Development not unplanned, neither is it haphazard

c o n n e c t i v i t y

s p e e d

f l o w s p a c e s

networked infrastructures (expressways, freeways, railways, airports, the internet, etc.) can be described as superimposed systems, which displace conditions of spatial continuity, proximity in conventional (pre-modern) urban structures (such as streets and squares) and constitute new topological relationships embodied in flyovers, access ramps, toll ways, etc. linking well-off suburbs, gated communities to the CBD (central business district), shopping malls, entertainment zones, and which prioritize certain connections for certain groups.

c o n n e c t i v i t y

s p e e d

f l o w s p a c e s

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Agency Responsibility Reporting to

BMA Bangkok Metropolitan Administration Local Government & Transport Interior

BMRDC Bangkok Metropolitan Regional

Development Committee Planning Cabinet

BMTA Bangkok Mass Transit Authority Bus Operations Transport

CCCERC Committee to Consider Construction Planning Cabinet

of Elevated Roads over Canals

DOH Department of Highways Highways Transport

DLT Department of Land transport Regulation Transport

DTCP Department of Town and Country Planning Planning Interior

ETA Expressway and Rapid Transit Authority Expressways & Mass Transit Interior

HD Harbour Department Ports Transport

LTPC Land Transport Policy Committee Planning Cabinet

LTCB Land Transport Control Board Planning & Regulation Cabinet

MRTA Metropolitan Rapid transit Authority Rapid Transit Cabinet

OCMRT Office of the Committee for the Management of Road Traffic Planning & Coordination Cabinet

PWD Public Works Department Local Roads Interior

SRT State Railway of Thailand Railways & Highways on Railway Land Transport

TPD Traffic Police Department Traffic Management Interior

Gomez-Ibanez 1997

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r o a d s

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Obsolete transport infrastructure: Increments and improvements on the existing transport infrastructure have lagged behind this accelerated growth the in economy and in the population of Bangkok.

The transport infrastructure has been difficult to expand due to the fact that the network of primary roads follows mostly the original system of canals.

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817 new cars a day

However, new roads have increased 1% during the same period despite of the fact that 70% of the transportation budget have gone into road construction and maintenance. 10% is for mass transit and the other 20% for administration cost.

http://www.2bangkok.com/ 2003

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r i b b o n

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Lack of Secondary Roads

Bangkok needs new minor roads connecting with major roads to break all the dead ends.

Only 6% to 9% of the area of Bangkok is covered by roads.

Ribbon development with areas inaccessible by secondary roads.

http://www.2bangkok.com/ 2003, Ipland J 2001, Rabibhadana A & Duangwises N 1997

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p o l a r i z a t i o n

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b y p a s s

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It’s no longer possible today to establish some form of continuity, wholeness or totalization, because it will be immediately obliterated by the system itself.

And it’s in the absolute detail of things that you ought to be able to find the energy to smash the totality.

Jean Baudrillard

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e n v i r o n m e n t

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2002: 4.79 million reg. vehicles

Bangkok City State of the Environment 2003 UNEP http://www.rrcap.unep.org/reports/soe/bkk_2004_chpt02.pdf

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1985: 3,260 tons solid waste/day

2002: 9,472 tons solid waste/day

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sewerage: 2.5 million cubic meters/day

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land subsidence = 1 meter [1978-2003]

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g l o b a l – l o c a l

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…infrastructure networks and their access points… tend to “warp,” “stretch” and “compress” the natural and social spaces and times of our daily lives, based on who is enrolled into the networks and who remains physically or technologically disconnected.

Rather than one network being “bigger” than another it is simply longer or more intensively connected. In this sense a network must always remain continuously local, as it inevitably touches down in particular places.

Bruno Latour

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modern societies cannot be described without recognising them as having a fibrous, threadlike, wiry, stringy, ropy, capillary character that is never captured by the notions of levels, layers, territories, spheres, categories, structure, systems.

Bruno Latour 1997

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Architects condemn plan to close Cambridge school

David Pallister
Monday November 29, 2004
The Guardian

A group of Britain's leading architects today describe as "an act of extraordinary folly" proposals to close Cambridge University's much-respected department of architecture because it has failed to meet the university's research standards.

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/artsandhumanities/story/0,12241,1361902,00.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1361750,00.html

References

Castells M., (1996) The Rise of the Network Society. Massachusetts: Blackwell.

Castells M., (2004) “Space of flows, space of places: materials for a theory of urbanism in the information age.” In S. Graham (ed.) The Cybercities Reader. London: Routledge.

Douglass M (1998) “East Asian urbanization: patterns, problems, and prospects.” http://iis-db.stanford.edu/pubs/11907/Douglass.pdf

Douglass M (2000) “Mega-urban regions and world city formation: globalisation, the economic crisis and urban policy issues in pacific Asia.” Urban Studies, volume 37, number 12, November 1

Graham S, Marvin S (2001) Splintering urbanism. London: Routledge

Hanrou, H & Obrist, H O (1997) Cities on the Move. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje

Koolhaas, R (2004) Content. Tashen.

Koolhaas R et al (ed.) (2001) Great Leap Forward. Cambridge MA: Harvard Design School

Koolhaas, R. (2001) Mutations. Actar

Koolhaas, R. (1995) “The Generic City” in R. Koolhaas & B. Mau (eds.) S, M, L, XL. New York: Monacelli Press.

Kvorning, J. ( 2002) “Restrukturering og byidentitet.” In S. Riesto (ed.) Europæiske Byer i en Global Era. Copenhagen: Mijøministeriet. p, 50 – p. 57.

Maas, W. (2002) Five Minutes City: Architecture and Immobility. Rotterdam: Episode.

Maas, W. (ed.) (1999) Metacity/Datatown. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers.

McGrath, B (2003) “Bangkok: liquid perception.” In N. Boyarsky and P. Lang (eds.) Urban Flashes of Asia. London: Wiley-Academy, Architectural Design 78-85.

Polo, A. (1994) “Order out of chaos.” In J. Woodroffe, D. Papa and I. Macburnie (eds.) , The Periphery, London: Wiley/ Architectural Design, 24-9.

Ribeiro, G. (2002) Bangkok: Informal Space. In P. D. Mortensen & H. Ovensen (eds.) Byforskningens Rum – Fields of Urban research. Copenhagen: Kunstakademiets Arkitektskole.

Ribeiro, G., Heitmann, C. (2002) “Chiang Mai Transit.” Arkitekten, number 26.

Simons R, Hack G (2001) Global city regions: their emerging forms. London: Spon Press

Webster D (2000) Financing city-building: the Bangkok case. http://iis-db.stanford.edu/pubs/11894/Webster.pdf

Webster D (2002) On the edge: shaping the future of peri-urban East Asia. http://iis-db.stanford.edu/pubs/20031/Webster2002.pdf

Websites

http://www.2bangkok.com/

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/21stC/issue-2.4/sassen.html

http://www.megacities.nl/

http://www.megacities.uni-koeln.de/

http://www.megacitiesproject.org/perlman.asp

http://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/couro2.html

http://globalization.about.com/