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Landscaping Pavements > Tarde

Originally published in Tarde

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This issue was prepared by Tomás Criado and curated by Ester Gisbert Alemany. Design and edition: Santiago Orrego.

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Editorial note: Landscaping Pavements is the first issue in a series of urban explorations that are part of an ongoing collaboration between Tarde and xcol.org.

Download Zine | DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/RCASX

We, modernist urbanites, tend to have a very strange relation to the streets we tread on as if walking was an act of material oblivion. Indeed, every step seems to push us further away from them instead of bringing us closer to the ground. It’s as if the pavements we walk on permanently disappeared from view: their silent permanence, stubborn smoothness, and standardized sturdiness becoming almost unthinkable. As if they were just there, supporting without mattering much, as well-ordered stages of public life, quintessential furniture of liberal ideas of politics: our contemporary agora! [1] So much so that only children dare to ask: who has laid the streets overnight for us to walk on them? 

The streets and the sidewalks, as we know them, need to be conceived, invented, and installed, and they are permanently under maintenance. Hence, pavements, not just pedestrians, also deserve a genealogy! [2] In fact, they bear in them the imprint of the clean slate of progress and modernity: from their durable materials – tarmac or granite, you name it – extracted from the belly of the Earth to their bulldozed modes of construction as perfectly sealed soils [3]. This is their secret engine, the unrevealed truth, the machinery they conceal, so we don’t think much of them. 

Even if there have been many traditions of incredible technical prowess, creating walkable roads and ways across the globe – The Great Wall of China! The Andean Qhapac Ñan! –  paved streets stand out as a peculiarly modernist infrastructure: the result of early Modern zonification to prevent killings from horse and chariot transit, subject to subsequent endless policing and reforms for the sake of hygiene and decorum. Later on paving, literally, the way for automotion to take the world as a hostage [4].

Their construction has brought about the modern city as we know it and has also partaken in assembling its quintessential walkers: from the need to wear shoes to the compacted ground on which we walk. So much so that the beloved flâneur of Walter Benjamin cannot be thought of but as an infrastructural being, the result of Hausmann’s spatial reordering: nature below, what only experts can access to, culture above, for us to window-shop into eternity [5]. The academic and political centrality of a white, able-bodied male figure standing out for the profound oblivion of the material world that bore its creation is also a symbol of many things that cannot go on, damn urban studies!

In the meantime, Euro-American urbanists seem to have been captured with what Gordon Cullen called ‘townscapes’: a rather peculiar form of landscape design promising visual coherence, orderliness, and organization of “the jumble of buildings, streets, and space that make up the urban environment”[6]. The frenzy of late 19th-century urban modernization laid the grounds for pavements to become everyday, more highly technical endeavors. This is the marvelous tale historian of art Danae Esparza recounted in her incredible book Barcelona a ras de suelo (Barcelona at ground level)[7]: a detailed exploration of the perpetual redesign that the city’s pavements have undergone since the Romans. One of the most salient features being the devoted efforts in the last one hundred years to engineer their durable and stable foundations – compacting the soil, layering insulation materials like aggregate – together with patterning the outer crust, its walkability and grip, in attempts at rendering urban space readable: a legible milieu? Nothing represents this better than the Panot Gaudí, “the hexagonal hydraulic tile he [architect Antoni Gaudí] designed in 1904 in conjunction with Escofet”[8]. As a result of the work of the municipality, together with corporations that have specialized in designing ‘urban elements,’ pavements have become part of a system: one more element of a catalog of products by which a deeply modernist city is perpetually made and remade into a static image of itself, a collage of ready-made building types, their additions and subtractions.

The tensions that these demands generate were apparent in a rare gem of an exhibition, titled Debaixo dos nossos pés (Under our feet)[9], which opened Lisbon’s inner guts to foreground a multi-layered display of pavements from the times of its first inhabitants to the present. The exhibition happened at a time of increasing pressures for urban standardization, not just having city branding at their core but also concerns for accessibility, desperately demanded by disabled and older people for decades. The strange lure and aestheticization of an urban image can also happen at the expense of traditional forms of street-making, pushing aside those who manipulate them. This has become evident in public struggles to keep their early modern ‘traditional’ configuration (calçada portuguesa, a peculiar form of cobblestone-based pattern) and the communities of practice of their soon-to-be-extinct trade (calceteiros), unless turned into World Heritage, a paradoxical fixation to resist a more contemporary fixity?

Ecologically speaking, this fixation is also highly problematic. In his signature process-oriented anthropology, which attends to the dynamic processes of sentient beings’ world-formation, Tim Ingold takes issue with the modernist practice of hard surfacing the earth because it “actually blocks the very intermingling of substances with the medium that is essential to life, growth, and inhabitation”[10].

This is far from being a cumbersome theoretical issue: the European Environmental Agency has been alerting for years of the many problems that sealed soils are bringing to the fore– related to heat island effects and underground degradation –particularly in urban settings[11]. As a consequence, environmentally-minded architects and urban planners have started to uncover ‘the beach beneath the street’: depaving the streets or creating porous sidewalk materials to foster the important underground soil relations essential to life on Earth[12].

Far from being the dirt beneath our shoes, in geography, anthropology, and environmental humanities, the very soils we used to tread on are increasingly becoming a matter of relational engendering with different beings, animating newer forms of social theory and eco-political practice[13]. The world beneath our feet, hence, appears before us as a moving territory with its own history, formed – or even ‘terraformed’ – by a wide variety of beings, from worms and plants to different animals and human groups. 

Perhaps there would be no better way to re-enliven pavements and their politics than to treat them as landscapes in their own right. Not in the early modern sense of the term – used in geography and other cognate disciplines to fixate stable nature-cultural patterns[14] – or in the same sense that still breathes in the notion of townscape mentioned before, but in a new materialist sense: thinking from their complex temporal and spatial material interconnectedness and their ongoing, engendering process[15]. All of a sudden, the streets we walk cease being the same. What appeared static, indeed, moves! Pavements are, indeed, terraformed. This can happen in strange and imperceptible ways as part of the earthly transformation of microbiota or weeds. However, pavements are also ‘being moved’ due to violent capitalist extraction, as it happens in the far-away travels of many of the anonymous materials that constitute the world at our feet, captured landscapes whose origins remain obscure[16].

Holding these two forms of terraformation in tension, treating pavements as landscapes – put otherwise, ‘landscaping’ pavements – might be a way for them to start speaking back. Not as the mute foundations of the present but in their strange temporal mash-ups: between deep and shallow time. Manuel de Landa provides an apt metaphor for this approach to city-making: “About 8000 years ago, human populations began mineralizing … when they developed an urban exoskeleton, bricks of sun-dried clay became building materials, stone monuments, and defensive walls”[17]. A good example of this mineralization, a peculiar form of landscaping pavements, is the city of Rome. But not the classic and boring take that obsessed many neoclassic and fascist architects and artists. I’m thinking here of the fantastic visualizations landscape architect Kristi Cheramie has worked hard to unearth: in them, Rome appears formed as a concatenation of acts of landscaping. The contemporary city is deeply entrenched in the terraformation that the ancient one undertook. A geological entity whose complex boundaries are also those of the very Mediterranean olive oil trade, sedimenting a way of living as well as the mode of circulation that saw its growth and demise [18]. Landscaping pavements enable us to study and dimension the agents involved, their temporal and spatial effects, their material configurations, and their acts of becoming with them [19]. Thus understood, our urban arenas appear as layered compounds, ongoing palimpsests through and through [20]. Conceived in this way, the city, as Francesc Perers calls it in a rather peculiar photo-book on Barcelona’s sidewalk archaeology, turns into “a cohabitation of strata”[21]. 

How could we begin to exercise this landscaping approach when we walk?[22] What exercises could we engage to reconnect to and partake in these underground palimpsests that are also our very mineral and multispecies condition? How do we liberate pavements and inhabit closer to them, entering into newer urban formations?[23

The exercises proposed in this issue wish to propose concrete avenues for this to happen. Following them, perhaps the next time you walk into the streets, walking might just be the beginning of a passionate conversation at the tip of your feet:

What could you tell me, oh, anonymous piece of stone? 

From what quarry do you come from? Who took you from the belly of the Earth? Who broke and dismembered you from the common body of other stones, using what machine? What standard shaped you? How might others resist the corset you provide? How will you let me walk on you when it rains? 

Oh, you macadam, strange collective body, interconnected and singular, strangely one, what life can you also give? How have you been prepared for me to tread you, using what procedures? Under what technical or parliamentary regulations? How could you resist this encounter? 

Oh, you all strange pavements: What life do you also partake of? What new city could we engender, together with the others who could crack you, and make you into their new home?

Online references

[1] Loukaitou-Sideris, A., & Ehrenfeucht, R. (2011). Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space. MIT.

[2] Blomley, N. (2011). Rights of Passage: Sidewalks and the Regulation of Public Flow. Routledge.

[3] Ammon, F. (2016). Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape. Yale University Press.

[4] Norton, P. D. (2008). Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. MIT.

[5] Meulemans, G. (2017). The Lure of Pedogenesis: An Anthropological Foray into Making Urban Soils in Contemporary France. PhD in Anthropology, University of Aberdeen; Domínguez Rubio, F., & Fogué, U. (2013). Technifying Public Space and Publicizing Infrastructures: Exploring New Urban Political Ecologies through the Square of General Vara del Rey. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research37(3), 1035–1052.

[6] Cullen, G. (1961). The Concise Townscape. Routledge. 

[7] Esparza, D. (2017). Barcelona a ras de suelo. Universitat de Barcelona Edicions.

[8] See https://www.escofet.com/en/blog/true-story-gaudis-panot 

[9] Bugalhão, J., Fernandes, L. & Fernandes, P.A. (2017). Debaixo dos Nossos Pés. Pavimentos históricos de Lisboa. Museu de Lisboa.

[10] Ingold, T. (2011: 124). Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Routledge.

[11] See https://www.eea.europa.eu/articles/urban-soil-sealing-in-europe 

[12] Núñez Rodríguez, M. (2015). ¡Bajo el asfalto, los adoquines! Proyecto de investigación sobre los servicios ecosistémicos de distintos pavimentos. Ayuntamiento de Madrid, https://mmmapa.com/portfolio/bajo-el-asfalto-los-adoquines-proyecto-de-investigacion-sobre-los-servicios-ecosistemicos-de-distintos-pavimentos; Baraniuk, C. (23rd February 2024) The cities stripping out concrete for earth and plants. BBChttps://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240222-depaving-the-cities-replacing-concrete-with-earth-and-plants; BitHabitat (2022) https://bithabitat.barcelona/projectes/el-panot-del-segle-xxi

[13] Salazar, J. F., Granjou, C., Kearnes, M., Krzywoszynska, A. & Tironi, M. (Eds). (2020). Thinking with Soils: Material Politics and Social Theory. Bloomsbury.

[14] Wylie, J. (2007). Landscape. Routledge.

[15] Seibert, M. (Ed.). (2021). Atlas of material worlds: Mapping the agency of matter for a new landscape practice. Routledge; Harkness, R. (2017). An Unfinished Compendium of Materials. University of Aberdeen.

[16] Cronon, W. (1992) Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. W.W. Norton and Co.; Hutton, J. (2020). Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements. Routledge.

[17] de Landa, M. (1997: 26-27). A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History. Zone Books.  

[18] Cheramie, K. (2020). Through Time and the City: Notes on Rome. Routledge.

[19] Gisbert Alemany, E. (2022). To do a landscape: Variations of the Costa Blanca. PhD in Architecture. University of Alicante

[20] Mattern, S. (2017). Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media. University of Minnesota Press; for a challenging example, see the Ghost Rivers “public art project & walking tour, rediscovering hidden streams and histories that run beneath our feet”: https://ghostrivers.com/ 

[21] Perers, F. (2017: 131) Voreres. La memòria subtil. Ajuntament de Barcelona.

[22] Mattern, S. (2013). Infrastructural Tourism: From the Interstate to the Internet. Places. https://placesjournal.org/article/infrastructural-tourism/; Kanouse, S. (2015). Critical Day Trips: Tourism and Land-Based Practice. In E. E. Scott  & K. Swenson (2015). Critical landscapes: Art, space, politics (pp. 43-56). University of California Press; Shepherd, N., & Ernsten, C. (2021). An Anthropocene journey. In H. S. Rogers, M. K. Halpern, K. D. Ridder-Vignone, & D. Hannah, Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies (pp. 563–576). Routledge.

[23] Duperrex, M. (2022). La rivière et le bulldozer. Premier Parallèle.

***

This number experiments with a different folding format. Although it starts with an A4 piece of paper and keeps the original A7 form when it is folded, the process of assembling it changes dramatically. The most notorious of those changes is the design of a small foldable gallery by taking advantage of different paper cuts.

Recommended citation: Criado, T.S. (2024). Landscaping Pavements. Tarde, a handbook of minimal and irrellevant urban entanglements, 5. DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/RCASX

Categories
accessibility caring infrastructures city-making functional diversity & disability rights publications techniques & ways of doing urban and personal devices

Naked Fieldnotes. A Rough Guide to Ethnographic Writing

Denielle Elliott & Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer have been for the last years working on a much-needed compilation on the art of fieldnotes, called Naked Fieldnotes. A Rough Guide to Ethnographic Writing. The volume has been recently published by Minnesota University Press.

In their words:

Unlocking the experience of conducting qualitative research, Naked Fieldnotes pairs fieldnotes based on observations, interviews, and other contemporary modes of recording research encounters with short, reflective essays, offering rich examples of how fieldnotes are shaped by research experiences. By granting access to these personal archives, the contributors unsettle taboos about the privacy of ethnographic writing and give scholars a diverse, multimodal approach to conceptualizing and doing ethnographic fieldwork.

As they expound in the introduction:

The practice of writing a fieldnote—­ what goes in, what is left out, who the audience is—­ is a difficult one to acquire, which is belied by the breadth of books and classes that purport to teach novice ethnographers to write fieldnotes. Like any writing, fieldnotes are the outcome of a learned sensibility that can be acquired only through the practice of writing […] This is one of the persistent challenges of teaching ethnographic methods, particularly when most of what students learn about ethnographic writing and fieldnotes is inferred from exemplary ethnographies. Students want prescriptive, generic expectations of what goes into a fieldnote and what a fieldnote should look like, thereby ensuring their writing of “good” fieldnotes; as an index of this sentiment, a few exceptional (p. x)

Growing out of the frustrations we have had as novice ethnographers—­ and that we have shared with our students—­ this collection of fieldnotes is intended to dispel the myths about the charismatic nature of fieldnotes and ethnographers by providing readers with a diversity of techniques, generic experiments, and objects and processes of ethnographic investigation so as to show how research and writing are always shaped by the sensibilities of researchers and the shapes of the ethnographic projects they are conducting. Fieldnotes are always experimental in their attempts to capture that experience. (p.xi)

I very much wish to thank them for their invitation to share one of mine, titled:

Munich, Blind Activism, Participatory Urban Design, November 2015

This note is part of my attempt at doing fieldwork with the Bavarian Association for the Blind and Partially Sighted (BBSB). It captures one of the organization’s in/accessibility explorations of a square in Munich on November 12, 2015. This took place after the square had already been finalized by the city administration, an anomaly in how to involve disabled people in design projects. As the blind activists already knew, the square presented many inaccessibility issues. Doing fieldwork in a very graphic-­intensive field like architecture requires one to think from the visual materials, so when I was handed the promotional brochure, including pictures and renderings, architectural diagrams, and an explanation of the urban intervention, I took a very fast decision: I put away my phone, which I used only to take my own pictures, mostly to remember the details they were talking about as well as the steps, and I opted to scribble on top of the brochure. I followed them for about three hours (from nine in the morning to noon) as they went about different aspects: the tactile differentiation of the creative pavements, the color differentiation of the pavements, and a few other things. My scribbled notes were rather nonlinear interjections, taken at different moments in the brochure. The pictures I took with my phone allowed me to have a sense of sequence afterward.

Recommended citation: Criado, T.S. (2024). Munich, blind activism, participatory urban design, November 2015. In D. Elliott & M. Wolf-Meyer (Eds.) Naked Fieldnotes: A Compendium of Raw and Unedited Ethnographic Research (pp. 59-70). Minnesota: Minnesota University Press | PDF

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accessibility caring infrastructures city-making ecologies ecologies of support ethics, politics and economy of care more-than-human older people publications urban and personal devices

Reassembling Ageing, Ecologising Care?

Upon Patrick Laviolette and Aleksandar Bošković’s invitation, I have written the Anthropological Journal of European Culture’s Editorial Response to Issue 32(1) on Materialities of Age & Ageing.

Reassembling Ageing, Ecologising Care?

Welfare states and market actors across the world have transformed what ageing as a process and being old as an embodied identity might be today, through a wide range of equipment, services and infrastructures. This ‘material’, when not ‘materialist’ drive is the object of analysis of the proposals gathered in AJEC‘s 32(1) special issue, which features different case studies aiming to foreground hitherto under-analysed ‘age-related matters’ to offer conceptual and ethnographic proposals to better understand what the editors call ‘landscapes of ageing and pressing gerontological concerns.’ The backbone of this special issue addresses how ‘material culture’ works in anthropology might be affected by what in other neighbouring disciplines like STS and Ageing studies is being addressed as a ‘socio-gerontechnological’ approach: that is, a joint attention to how ageing is a material process, as well as how materials inscribe or support peculiar meanings or ontologies of ageing.

Drawing from the recent experience of teaching the StudienprojektAgeing Cities: The Crisis of Welfare Infrastructures’ – and particularly reflecting on a field trip where we visited Benidorm and other ageing enclaves in the Costa Blanca (Alicante, Spain) – in my editorial response I wish to take issue with the need to widen this material agenda around ageing bodies and their situated enactments, thinking beyond classic ‘material culture’ objects of study – the home and everyday technologies – and venturing into wider and more convoluted urban arenas, with their variegated scales and material entities. These problematisations, I believe, would force us to provide less metaphorical uses of ecological vocabularies, hence addressing the challenges that these materialised ‘landscapes’ entail for to our conceptions and practices of care: perhaps pushing us to consider the very environmental effects of ageing-friendly modes inhabiting and terraforming, and the new forms of care these landscapes – deeply affecting, in turn, ageing processes — might need?

Recommended citation: Criado, T. S. (2023). Reassembling Ageing, Ecologising Care? (Editorial Response to Issue 32(1) on Materialities of Age & Ageing). Anthropological Journal of European Cultures32(2), v-xii | PDF

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caring infrastructures city-making ecologies of support functional diversity & disability rights publications urban and personal devices

Learning with others about neurodiverse spatial practice > GeoAgenda “Field Trips as Pedagogical Devices”

For the most recent issue of GeoAgenda, the journal of the Swiss Association of Geography, Julio Paulos and Sven Daniel Wolfe have put together a collection of short interventions around the theme “Field Trips as Pedagogical Devices”

The main question they sought to explore was: What are the educational benefits of urban field trips? This special issue of GeoAgenda aims to answer this question through a series of stories, experiences and reflections.

As they suggest in their introduction (p.4):

Field trips are a common unit of study in geography curricula, and they are widely valued for the valuable hands-on learning experiences they provide. Nevertheless, they remain peripheral to most geography curricula. We don’t mean to suggest that field trips should be at the centre of teaching, but that a rethinking of teaching formats outside the classroom, and even within the classroom, is necessary to prepare students for the realities they will encounter once they graduate or leave academia. Field trips give students (and teachers) a vivid, first-hand understanding of (urban) environments. They allow for an exploration of the complexity, diversity, and multiplicities of urban life in a way that cannot be conveyed by classroom instruction alone.

This issue highlights these benefits, but also delves deeper into the issues of reflecting the standards of classroom teaching. In doing so, it calls for a more situated and experimental rethinking of university education.

Upon the gracious invitation of Julio (to whom I’d like to thank here), together with Micol Rispoli and Patrick Bieler we contribute to it with a short piece called:

Learning with others about neurodiverse spatial practice

In early 2020 Micol Rispoli (architect) and Tomás Criado (anthropologist) were working on a design experiment exploring how neurodiverse spatial practice might put architectural design practice in crisis. In previous months they had been engaging with a neurodivergent person and his family. They also had been revising standard architectural approaches to accessible design, in particular with neurodivergent people. But they felt they needed to discuss their predicaments with someone more experienced in these issues. Tomás, then, engaged his colleague Patrick Bieler (anthropologist), an experienced researcher on these matters, to join the conversation.

What follows is the account of a trip to the sights of Patrick’s fieldwork, where we tried to learn together what neurodiverse spatial practice might do to urban design.

Recommended citation: Rispoli, M.; Criado, T. & Bieler, P. (2023). Learning with others about neurodiverse spatial practice. GeoAgenda, 2023/2: 18-19 | PDF

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accessibility caring infrastructures city-making events older people

Studienprojekt “Ageing Cities” > Presentation at the IfEE’s Institutskolloquium on Collective Access

Next Tuesday 19.07.2022 2:30-4pm (CET) please join us for the presentation of the Studienprojekt Ageing Cities by Maximilian Apel, Erman Dinc, Christine Maicher, Adam Petras, Doreen Sauer, and Anna Maria Schlotmann, the wonderful group of people with whom I have had the immense luck to work with in the last year.

In this year we’ve been exploring ethnographically how cities & urban designers are responding to the challenge of population ageing, and how we could understand as ethnographers the social & material transformations underway in their efforts to make ‘ageing-friendly’ cities (check the syllabus of the project)

In this choral presentation we aim to show our findings, searching to answer these questions through specific cases, most of them taking place in Berlin (on variegated issues like intergenerational and intercultural gardens or queer housing projects; the urban activism of the gray panthers; the controversies in public space design, focusing particularly on the conflicts of bike infrastructure; and VR projects to enable urban displacement or travel for older people living in residential care homes).

The picture describes a steep street from Alicante. The left part shows the sidewalk, where an older woman with her walker can be seen from behind. The middle part of the picture displays the bike infrastructures. The right part the street and parking spaces. Framing it from both sides there are 4-storey buildings.

The course has also included an excursion in April 2022 to Alicante, Benidorm and neighbouring urban enclaves in Costa Blanca (Spain). This is a very relevant area because of how ageing concerns have turned, since the 1960s, into a vector of urbanisation in the region – developing into what some geographers call “the pensioners’ coast.” But also, and perhaps more importantly, they have sensitised urban designers from the area to respond to these intergenerational design challenges in different ways. In a joint endeavour with STS-inspired architectural researchers from the Critical Pedagogies, Ecological Politics and Material Practices research group of the University of Alicante, this visit allowed us to explore different approaches to architectural practice where older people have more active roles in the design and management of ageing cities.

In showing all of this we not only wish to tell specific stories, but want to share our conceptual and methodological explorations, and the many questions this process brought about around the contested scripts and the distinctive intergenerational challenges of late life urbanism projects

This will be the last session of the Instituskolloquium of the Institut für Europäische Ethnologie (HU Berlin), which this semester had as a theme ‘Collective Access‘.

Here you could view the video recorded from Zoom
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city-making experimental collaborations games materials multimodal open sourcing

House of Gossip > Open-source game developed by the Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology

House of Gossip is an open-source downloadable game (developed by the Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology of the HU Berlin) that stages and creates the grounds for reflection on conflicts regarding housing and the different viewpoints in a volatile real estate market.

A first prototype of the game was developed – in collaboration with colleagues at the Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (ZK/U) – in a hackathon together with MA students of the Studienprojekt “The only game in town? Anthropology and the housing markets in Berlin” (2018-2019) at the Institut für Europäische Ethnologie (HU Berlin), and showcased in the “Open Form neu denken” exhibition (organized by Z/KU at the Werkstatt of Haus der Statistik in October 25–27 2019). In the last two years we’ve been working on creating a downloadable and playable version of it.

Credits

Game concept (in alphabetical order): Tomás Criado, Ignacio Farías, Lena Heiss, Marie Aline Klinger, Lilian Krischer, Leonie Schipke & Tan Weigand. 

Game art by Vasylysa Shchogoleva

CC BY NC SA 2021 Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology, HU Berlin

Context

Berlin, late 2010s, all across the city real estate is changing hands fast, the market is hot and many are investing, houses are revaluing. As it tends to happen, this situation has at least two different sides:

Scene 1

– “What about this building? Might you have found a good opportunity here?”
– “It indeed looks nice, but have we explored if it’s in good condition?”

– “The architect sent me this report, look, all clear.” – “It certainly looks promising.”
– “It’s time to act fast.”
– “Ok, yes, let’s go for this house!”

Scene 2

– “Hi, how was your day?”
– “Nothing special, yours?”
– “I heard rumours, two neighbours speaking in the corridor: the building is finally going to be bought!” – “Yes, there was a letter in the mail, look”.
– “But… What will happen to us? Will we have to move if they raise the rent?”
– “We have to do something…”
– “But we know nearly no one in the house.”

“When an apartment building is to be sold, every single alarm bell sets off for the residents. In view of the horrendous purchase prices, there is a danger of being displaced by higher rents or even conversion into condominiums.”

Rationale

House of Gossip is  an open-source downloadable game that stages and creates the grounds for reflection on conflicts regarding housing and the different viewpoints in a volatile real estate market. In the game, you will have the opportunity to play either as a resident of the house or as a covert buyer, acting as one of the house’s residents.

In a process where no one can be certain about anything, gossip abounds: In the game you will have to gather information form alliances and find your way to save (as residents) or buy (as the buyer) the house! Think twice about who and when you want to share your information with!

During the course of the game you will repeatedly encounter your neighbours in the stairway to exchange gossip. Your main goal is not just to understand to whom you’re talking to, but also to perform in front of others and form alliances for one of the two competing purposes of the game: Buying or saving the house.

Those who manage to gather the necessary gossips will in the end win the game. Will the house community manage to resist or could the buyer succeed in acquiring the new property?

Download links

The games files can be downloaded here below

Assembly instructions

In order to build your own House of Gossip board game, you will need the following:

● Box A4 size or 23.5 x 31.5 x 3.7 cm
● Paper cutting knife
● Paper cutting board
● Ruler
● Glue suitable for paper and cupboard
● Printing paper (170 g/m2 and 200g/m2 or higher, eco-paper is advised)
● Ink jet or laser printer filled with black ink

  1. Download the necessary game parts:
    ● Game Instructions
    ● Playing Cards
    ● Board/Box and Tokens
  2. Print out the downloaded parts. You can print all part on the 170 g/m2 or higher eco paper, unless other is stated:

○ Game Instructions
It is an A4 double-sided print. Fold it in three parts, following the dashed lines markings at the top and bottom of the paper.

○ Playing Cards
It is an A4 double-sided print. Advised paper thickness for this element is 350 g/m2, but if you don’t have such paper, use the 170 g/m2 or higher eco paper.
Cut the cards following the black markings on the sheet. In the end, you must have cards that are 59 x 92 mm big.

○ Board/Box and Tokens
It is an A4 one-sided print. All the prints, except the file called “HoG_Staircase-Cutout_A4_ENG.pdf” can be printed on the 170 g/m2 or higher eco paper. The file “HoG_Staircase-Cutout_A4_ENG.pdf” should be printed on 200/220 g/m2 or higher eco paper. This will ensure the stability and longevity of the board. After all the parts are printed, do the following:

A. Glue the “HoG_Box-Top_A4_ENG.pdf” file on the top of your box. You can adjust it in the middle if the box is bigger than A4.
B. Glue the “HoG_Box-Top-Inside_A4_ENG.pdf” file on the inner side of the top part of the box.
C. Glue the “HoG_Box-Back_A4_ENG.pdf” file on the outer back part of the box.
D. The files “.pdf” and “.pdf” need to be cut out following the black lines markings, while the dashed line markings are for folding (in order to have an easier folding, you can first use the paper cutter and applying not full, but medium pressure, prepare the paper for folding). For the more detailing step-by-step instruction on the staircase assembly, following the pictures (video, in case applicable).

Categories
city-making more-than-human publications techniques & ways of doing uncommoning urban and personal devices

Uncommoning the city | Hacer la ciudad poco común

Guillermo Fernández-Abascal and Urtzi Grau recently edited the bilingual compilation Coches, humanos y bordillos, aprendiendo a vivir juntos | Learning to Live Together: Cars, Humans, and Kerbs in Solidarity, which has just been published by Bartlebooth. A volume on the conflicts and possibilities of new more or less digital forms of city-making and urban life.

Contribuciones de / Contributions by Ibiye Camp, Brendan Cormier, Noortje Marres, Hamish McIntosh, Simone C. Niquille / Technoflesh, Marina Otero Verzier, Tomás Sánchez Criado, Brenton Alexander Smith, Lara Lesmes + Fredrik Hellberg (Space Popular), Liam Young.

[ES] Viviremos todos juntos, eso es inevitable. Pero la llegada de los vehículos autónomos al entorno urbano plantea otra cuestión urgente: ¿cómo se integrarán estos coches sin conductor en la vida cotidiana? Las industrias tecnológicas y del automóvil que desarrollan estos vehículos también están diseñando el futuro de nuestras ciudades. Sus visiones muestran calles que incorporan tecnologías autónomas y donde los humanos deambulan, despreocupados, por un espacio público donde máquinas automatizadas circulan a alta velocidad. Estas visiones se proyectan en un tiempo lejano, y al hacerlo, ignoran las cuestiones que la llegada de estos vehículos plantean en el futuro inmediato.

En respuesta a tal descuido, este ensayo, y las reflexiones que lo acompañan, exploran los conflictos inminentes asociados a esta tecnología y como estos transformaran nuestras calles, con una hipótesis en mente: el despliegue de la tecnología sin conductor, rápida y disruptiva, no conlleva una solución urbana integrada, más bien plantea preguntas y exige imaginar como responderlas. Este libro identifica algunas, responde a otras y, sobre todo, imagina cómo humanos y maquinas podrán influir en las decisiones sobre el ecosistema urbano, colectivamente.

[EN] We are on the verge of sharing our cities with autonomous vehicles. Recent developments in driverless technologies are having an impact on our urban environment, raising questions about how self-driving vehicles could be integrated into our daily lives. Automotive and technological industries are not only developing the vehicles but also envisioning the future of our cities, a future where streets have seamlessly integrated driverless technologies and humans wander about, unconcerned by the presence of new automated machines circulating at high speeds through public space. These visions skip to a distant time and ignore the issues that these vehicles raise in the immediate future.

In response to such an oversight, this essay and the accompanying meditations explore the conflicts soon to be unleashed by this new technology and the transformation of our streets it will trigger. The current implementations of driverless technology, which are fast and disruptive, do not suggest an eventual integrated urban solution. Yet this book allows us to imagine how humans and cars might collectively influence the urban environment.

In my contribution to the volume I share a provocation on the project of urban unification of ‘smart city’ initiatives: What if rather than trying to contribute to urban unity, contemporary urban planners and designers relearnt, through different techniques and procedures (algorithmic, sensor-based, DIY or otherwise), to be affected by an uncommon city? In other words, the processes whereby cities are treated not as places of homogeneity but of divergence.

Published as Criado, T.S. (2021). Uncommoning the city | Hacer la ciudad poco común. In G. Fernández-Abascal & U. Grau (Eds.), Aprendiendo a vivir juntos: Solidaridad entre humanos, coches y bordillos / Learning to Live Together: Cars, Humans, and Kerbs in Solidarity (pp. 123-130). A Coruña: Bartlebooth | PDF EN & PDF ES