Table of contents for N. 114 in Topos

“But if there is a sense of reality, and no one will doubt that it has its justifications for existing, then there must also be something we can call a sense of possibility.”ROBERT MUSIL: THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES A fringe is not a clear-cut case of either-or. Neither is it an edge that abruptly terminates or a seam that self-embraces the end of something. A fringe is fuzzy, scraggy or frayed and shapes the transition of one to the other in its own, unorderly if not messy way. Fringes are an exercise in surface enlargement that offers a maximum of mutual exposure and contact to adjacent spheres. They provide a zone of transition, a short-distanced difference, an in-betweenness charged with opportunities. So, this should lead us somewhere in a magazine…

The physically peripheral parts of larger cities that are traditionally considered suburbs have attracted considerable attention and generated lengthy debates over the years, and no less so during the current environment of global uncertainty and crisis. Notwithstanding the rich seam of research and diverse policy initiatives oriented towards ‘the suburban’, historical debates continue over the nature and character of suburbs. Of particular concern today is an apparent dependence of the urban core on the ‘outer city’ to alleviate the growth pressures on major cities and accommodate overspill of residents where housing is unaffordable in the centre. A recurrent observation is that the assumed purposes of suburbs or what policy expects of them does not always sufficiently reflect the needs of existing residents and local populations. Although the reasons for this…

Urbanes Land · City of Bits · Territoria Spugna · Ag glomération · Rete Urbana · Suburbia · Tussenland · Dritte Stadt · Periphery · Desakota · Hipercité Afte rsprawl · Ex-Urbia · Peri-urban Area · Citta Diffusa · Ville Éparpillée · Drosscape · Zwischenstadt · Metropolització des Territori · Horizontal Metropolis · Ciudad en Red · Seamless City · Polycentric Urba n Network · Edge City · Hyper Sprawl · Functional Urban Region · Ciutat de Ciutats · Urbanes Land · City of Bits · Territoria Spugna · Agglomération · Rete Urbana · Suburbia · Tussenland · Dritte Stadt · Periphery · Desakota · Hipercité Aftersprawl · Ex-Urbia · Peri-urban Area · Citta Diffusa · Ville Éparpillée · Drosscape · Zwischenstadt · Metropolització des Territori · Horizontal Metropolis ·…

“How can we build elastically and produce open structures so that the architectures created are suitable for as many possible future worlds as possible?” topos: Dear Mr. Hofer, you are the artistic director of IBA’27, before that you worked as an architect for the Swiss architectural firm Archipel. The website of the office displays a quote that caught my attention: “For us, the city is a living space that is constantly transformed by changing needs, political demands, economic processes and cultural images.” So my first question is rather obvious: What are the current needs, political demands, economic processes, and cultural images mentioned in the quote? What is changing our cities at this time? ANDREAS HOFER: We are in a process of social transformation. Right now, everyone talks about coronavirus –…

At the fringes of the city of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, the land and its people are undergoing a process of becoming urban. This represents a fundamental shift from generations of nomadic, pastoral living toward a sedentary, urban culture. In this process, inhabitants are faced with new sets of adjustments that, as nomads, they never had to address. As nomads, they typically clustered in family groups, far away from others to prevent their herds from mixing. In the city, they live in proximity to strangers, leading to new shared responsibilities beyond their own family. Ownership and the demarcation of land requires negotiation on borders, levels of control, and the articulation of private, semi-public, and public territory. The placement of infrastructure such as pit-latrines and electric cables affects others, and so the pragmatics…

BIBLIOGRAPHY Beauregard, Luis Pablo. “La sequía deja al descubierto una iglesia sumergida en México.” El País (October 20th, 2015), https://elpais.com/internacional/2015/10/18/mexico/1445204891_469060.html. Curtis, Adam. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. United Kingdom: BBC, 2011. Clément, Gilles. Manifeste du tiers paysage. France: Sujet Objet, 2004. Jasso Peña, Alejandra & José Octavio Sosa Hernández. El Convento Dominico de Tecpatán: un sitio en el corazón zoque de la Sierra Norte de Chiapas. Mexico City: Escuela Nacional de Antropología, 2010.…

Like many of my generation I grew up with a Marklin model railway, which besides its moving parts allowed us to play with an imagined, self-built landscape at the manageable scale of 1:87. One of the most creative imaginations that many of these train sets inspired was the juxtaposition of urban and rural elements. The electric trains meant that central urban railway stations and their surrounding urbanity were situated within mere seconds of villages, steep mountains and valleys (which were key to having as many tunnels and bridges as possible). It appears that many of these train sets effortlessly achieved Kurt Tucholsky’s ideal of having “the Baltic Sea in the front, the Friedrichstrasse in the back”. In reality of course, the high frequency of train service, a beautifully designed rail…

Last November the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, announced that the Greater London Authority (GLA) and the London Assembly will leave their current City Hall home near Tower Bridge and relocate to The Crystal building in the Royal Docks in east London. While the downriver move was triggered by the urgent need to find savings as London’s regional government faces an immediate ?0.5 billion tax deficit due to the pandemic, it was also billed as an opportunity to drive forward the regeneration of the ‘Royals’. The Docks sit at a strategic intersection between the city and the Thames Estuary within a cluster of so-called Opportunity Areas, defining a growth corridor with the potential for more than 250,000 new homes and 200,000 new jobs over the next 25 years. The new…

Plane Solid benches made by Grijsen of Lower Saxony in Germany are also called “floating benches”, as they appear to float a few centimetres above the ground. This look together with the rounded corners give the robust benches an almost playful and yet calm, discreet appearance. The manufacturer's excellent craftsmanship is evident in the way the individual pieces of wood are put together, because this street furniture seems to be made from a single piece of wood. These benches were used, for example, in the redesign of Frondenberg’s market square, a town with around 21,000 inhabitants in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia: “People needed to be able to see where Frondenberg’s town centre actually begins and ends,” says planner Susanne Weihrauch. This was achieved not only through the use…

“We were thinking about new ways to analyze the fringe conditions. What we found was that we couldn’t take a purely morphological approach. We had to use other tools to understand the cultural and spatial practices of people who were living in those landscapes.” topos: For our first question I’d like to jump right into the urban fringe. How do you understand it? You argue that the characteristics of openness and diversity, which are hallmarks of the metropolis or the big city, are also present in suburban areas. How can the urban fringe, how can suburban spaces support these characteristics? GEORGEEN THEDORE: In the places where I’ve been working in recent years, like Northern New Jersey, the Detroit Metropolitan area, and Nassau County on Long Island, the urban fringe is…

Cities are estimated to need 200 times more land than they actually cover to provide themselves with what they consume. An area up to 1000 times larger than that is needed to absorb the emissions produced in cities. These “shadow surfaces” are situated in rural areas. The ability of rural areas to handle the effects of growing cities is under significant stress in Europe's Nordic countries, in Bulgaria, Romania, eastern Germany, Portugal, Greece, Spain, Italy, Croatia and in the central regions of France. Urban links to population decrease in rural areas Some rural areas may even enter into a “vicious circle of decline”. Those who move away are usually young. Although there is a high number of instruments at all regional levels in Europe to address this, they rarely succeed.…

The urban fringe is not necessarily a ‘bad’ version of the city. Much criticised, it’s potential has long been misunderstood. It is the area outside of the wall, outside of planning control and outside of the spatial limitations and higher costs of central urban areas. The most important potential of the fringe area is as a place with freedom to experiment with new forms of living and working and with new modes of agricultural and industrial production. In this article we put forward an idea for the urban fringe of Berlin as a Metropolitan Ecotone between the built-up area of the city and rural Brandenburg. As an area of experimental multifunctionality and partial self-sufficiency, the Ecotone, the urban fringe, is the new urbanity. It is a form of thinking landscape…

The contemporary logic of supply chain manufacturing sews various bizarre threads through the continents of the globe. A plant for wrapping flight meals is built in location A, for the market in location B, while workers are brought from location C. The plane’s seats are manufactured on continent I, while the inflammable fabric is woven on continent II but stretched over those seats on continent I again and so on.1 Even though this aspect of the globalized world is commonplace by now, the still ongoing pandemic has rendered certain parts of these networks more visible than they would typically be and reminded us to what extent these fractal-like chains structure our lives. The primary infrastructure enabling these ‘chains’ to remain linked is the densifying network of international logistics parks and…

High-quality, carefully planned and manufactured street furniture can contribute to making cities more liveable and attractive, and to enlivening public space. In the last few years, but especially during the pandemic, it has become clear that cities need to provide a better quality of life for their urban residents. This means that they should be designed specifically for their inhabitants, that there need to be more open spaces where people can relax, and more space for slow forms of transport. This means reducing the number of cars on the road and leaving more space for pedestrians and cyclists. Simultaneously it's important to bring more greenery into the city and optimise existing, publicly accessible green spaces, squares, promenades and streets where traffic has been reduced. These areas need to be equipped…