DEMOS

This year’s Architecture Biennale is an interesting one. Go to the main exhibition, and what you will see is not architecture. Instead of fetishizing architectural drawings and models (of which a clear example would be the New London Architecture exhibitions,  “a place where everyone - professionals, politicians and public - can find out and get involved in what is happening to their city” Get involved? Rather, the endless models scream: just look in awe and shut up!), curator Ricky Burdett has decided that it is the city we need to be concerned with – and hence, with urban governance. Therefore, instead of scale models, we see graphs and stats on city life and mobility; instead of architects’ portraits, we are fed satellite images; instead of wacky architectural proposals, we see strategic interventions that are to increase the sustainability and quality of city life.

Arguably, this is a great step forwards. I am more than willing to believe that the long-term improvement of urban and inter-city public transport, the creation of new parks on reclaimed wasteland, the provision of new schools and neighbourhood centres are ultimately more relevant than the next high-tech office park or star-designed opera house. So, great.

Yes, but. There is something missing. In this narrative of statistical analysis and effective urban leadership, the 20-odd global cities in the exhibition almost merge into one. Whether it is Bogotá, or Shanghai, or Genoa, the strategic urban project rules. We don’t see cities, but A City: the City of Strategy. The vantage point is from high up – satellite images rule, as does the provision of park acreage for the population. The street counts only as proof of effective intervention, and the people as users of well-planned services. At some point this becomes odd. Sure enough, the California High Speed Railway might become important if it would be approved in 2008 and then finished by 20XX. But, meanwhile, why ignore the fact that people themselves are turning central LA into a place more densely inhabited than Manhattan? Why ignore citizens’ initiatives, protests, movements?

The Biennale clearly chose to start with projects, not with people. So, while we got spared the happy combination of developer and star architect as primary movers and shakers of urban space, they are replaced by benign city governors and planners – not by people, their lives, their aspirations.

This effectively negates the agency of people over places. People are to be provided for (with bike lanes, schools, revitalised city centres…) – and if not, as the Biennale’s story on Johannesburg suggests, urban doom (crime, sprawl, pollution) will await them – and nothing they could ever do about it, those poor, passive sheep.

Burdett seemed to have become so enthusiastic about the potential of the project that he had to sideline the everyday practices through which people deal with their city, whether it is well or badly managed. In awe of strategy, he ended up ignoring the tactics through which, in different cities in different circumstances, people without the high-up vantage point get by through persistent cunning and less or more joyful subversion.

Thankfully there is more going on at the biennale. Apart from the main exhibition, there is the rich and unwieldy fringe of pavilions, providing less totalising narratives. For example, the French have given their ‘palace’ if not to the ‘people’ then at least to a bunch of unshaven students to do something more than just put stuff on display. Sure thing these guys have read their Lefebvre – they are no longer concerned with abstract representations of space or even with planning it, but chose to live it, inhabiting the place and inviting the public to come in and live it with them. Very 1968: within the palace, join the party and play, which within this Biennale is refreshing.

And - one last example - the Estonian pavilion takes the concept of tactics to another level. Could tactical spatial behaviour of individuals and groups be scaled up and provide an alternative narrative on the city? They use the latest in mobile telecoms to think about new forms of joint spaces. Watch their spaces.

So, hats of for Ricky Burdett for thinking beyond ‘mere buildings’. But hopefully, in two years, people and the cities created by their many tactics might rule not just the Biennale’s margins, but also enliven its very core.