ICC

Date: January 16 (Sat.)-February 28 (Sun.), 2010

Comments by the Artists

"City of Permanently Shifting Center"
KARASAWA Yuusuke + MATSUYAMA Takashi

Comment on the work

In his book titled "The Self-Organizing Economy," Nobel-Prize-winning economist Paul KRUGMAN builds a mathematical model and offers his own explanation on how a capitalist mechanism self-organizes within space. He describes the process in which the synergy of the spatial economy based on capitalism converges from its initial condition of fair and equal circumstances to a massive center in a time-based process. In other words, he explains via mathematical simulation how the mechanism of self-reinforcing capital leads to unfair consequences in the space known as a city. In particular, it is an intrinsic description of an urban mechanism that creates divides; economically vibrant centers on the one hand and desolated backlands such as slums and suburbs on the other. In this installation, we interpret this self-enforcement mechanism of capital (In KRUGMAN's previous literature, he called it the "self-organization" mechanism, using terminology used in a science of complex systems.) and propose as geometric models and mathematical models the methodology for slowly deconstructing and controlling the spatial self-organization that creates urban disparity. We then created an urban model that describes the relationship between ever-changing dynamic centers and backlands, and presents a new type of urban planning related to self-organization by presenting this model as a city-building program and control system.

Of the screens projected on the wall, the screen on the right projects geometry (a type of zoning like the Manhattan grid) on a city with multiple centers. This urban geometry two-dimensionally fills up the relationship between the multiple centers and its surroundings. The closer it is to the centers, the smaller the density. The farther out you go to the surroundings, the larger the density. Because the urban geometry consisting of multiple centers and its surroundings change dynamically, the centers shift constantly. The relationship between the centers and surroundings then switches, which is the biggest characteristic of this urban model.

According to KRUGMAN's analysis, the initially equal geographical conditions of cities (counted as the spatial distribution of the number of firms) converge on multiple centers after a certain amount of time, which then creates desolated backlands. In other words, in the process of time-based economic activities, cities - even if they are initially on an equal footing - are always polarized into a certain number of economically vibrant centers and desolated suburbs as time passes, which expands and fixates the divide. In this installation, the computer simulation we use is similar to that used by KRUGMAN to explain the model of the divide's fixation and expansion. We then use the results to present a new urban model that rectifies the divide; one that insists that the moment the urban divide is fixated - in other words, the moment that a clear divide appears between bustling centers and desolated suburbs - the centers shift, completely new locations are defined as new centers, and the mechanism of the divide falls apart.

On the screen on the left, the three-dimensional chart's time axis shows the simulated results of the degree of the ever-changing economic accumulation of cities. The chart shows how a city continues to change dynamically or how urban centers continue to shift due to the process of the shift of centers in terms of urban geometry - displayed on the right screen - to other locations the moment the degree of economic accumulation in the centers reaches a certain figure (the threshold where the divide is fixated if it progresses any further).

This urban model describes a specific system of urban planning based on a completely new way of thinking about cities controlling the invisible self-organization process. The object you see is a cutaway by time axis of this dynamic model.

Exploration in Possible Spaces - Toward the Construction of a Continuous Situation

To present possible spaces is nothing other than predicting the future. All corners of our cities have been dominated by universal space based on the static Cartesian orthogonal coordinate systems submitted by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in the mid-20th century. And we have yet to obtain a construction method for cities exceeding modern cities. The Exploration in Possible Spaces presented here is about how to newly present the concept of space exceeding universal space that continuously employs until today as a theory comprising mainly of architecture and cities (this can be called "Symbol of Space" following the example by Henri LEFEBVRE.) After a radical search for new symbols of space, the face of the next architecture and city will be revealed.

The global spread of universal space in the 20th century filled cities with massive chunks of concrete of similar proportions, and was infinitely used repeatedly by architects and urban planners with the unwavering confidence in Cartesian coordinate systems being the base of construction and urban planning. We can see the most prominent example of the Cartesian grid-based zoning in Manhattan, New York. In his book titled "Delirious New York," architect Rem KOOLHAAS describes the Manhattan grid as follows: "the land it divides, unoccupied; the population it describes, conjectural; the buildings it locates, phantoms; the activities it frames, nonexistent." Here, a bold observation is made that the ultimate plight of the city New York is the Cartesian, universal Manhattan Grid, and that the cluster of skyscrapers is merely an illusion. In reality, this kind of analysis by and large applies not only to New York but to most cities in the 20th century.

In the mid-1970s, an architectural movement broke out conspiring to rebel against universal space. That was the postmodernist movement in architecture. Experiments on how to fill symbols of space with symbols and how to create diverse systems were pursued. But we could say that what appeared as results were simple chaos of symbols, systems and space. In the social circumstances we live in today, we cannot affirm the dry and tasteless universal space covering the world nor are we permitted to return to postmodern architecture that rebels against it. What we can do in this age where we enter a phase that is neither modern nor postmodern may be to find invisible, potential logic comprising cities and create cities and architecture based on that logic.

Potential logic comprising cities: What we attempted with this exhibit is to focus on the self-organizing mechanism of spatial economy underlying cities and to build a mechanism for controlling that system to find the plight of possible cities differing from cities based on the modern, universal Cartesian grid. There, we can see the surfacing of a paradoxical situation where the dynamic grid - built to resist self-organizing systems - continuously and non-universally splits up space and is yet not completely irrational. We can see the new spatial condition known as the Continuous Situation. The Continuous Situation is the new art of space born from the information-age society. The study of modern complicated networks attempts to express this spatial model in diverse ways by incorporating the graph theory and others. A striking example of this is the mathematical model on a network called the Small-world network (WS model) by Duncan J. WATTS, Steven H. STROGATZ and others. This model is being updated to a dynamic model by its successors. From an infinitely repetitive universal space to individual space through dynamic change: The symbol of space for our time is changing from universal space to foreign space. This may be the time for us to pursue - in the true sense of the term - how to physically cut down and scoop up this changing concept of space, and change it to the role of surrounding architecture and cities by using various methodology.