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As the first of this series of reports on urbanism, I asked Shiuan-Wen Chu to report South Africa (Johannesburg).
In the suburbs of Johannesburg, each property is enclosed by a wall with full of security-devices, and the whole of the residential district is also enclosed by a wall with security guards. That is to say, urban space is enclosed like a double box-in-a-box. In order to make this spatial enclosure, they exploit walls or golf course which normally exist in every city, but also they invent various security-devices, and moreover they establish a kind of social system by security companies. In fact, she told me that security is the fastest-growing sector in the South African economy. What is interesting here is this enforcement of spatial articulation by enclosure was caused by disappearance of social articulation by the abolition of apartheid. Because of the disappearance of the institutional articulation, residential territories moved radically. But at its conclusion, we can say the spatial form of enclosure indicates that the social articulation still remains between whites and blacks. Here, we can recognize one of the limits of articulation or fragmentation of urban space, even with the parentheses of the very special context of apartheid.
At the same time, these residential districts become theme parks full of historical icons. This means that post-modernism of the 80's still demonstrates its ability in a commercial realm as seductive signs.
However, I think this two phenomena, spatial enclosure and theme park, don't exist only in Johannesburg. Looking back to urban space in Tokyo, for example "Venus-Fort", a new shopping mall targeted for young women in Odaiba bay-area, is a totally black-box with Italian streets and blue sky inside, where spatial enclosure and theme park come into existence even at smaller scale. "Venus-Fort" may be literally a Tokyo-version of the "fortification" in Johannesburg. While society is getting borderless and seamless, not only seen in the abolition of apartheid, maybe this enforcement of articulation of space can happen in any city.
While various new media like IT come up, spatial media like architecture or cities are somehow being contingent. I think, however, it indicates the enormous power of spatial media that the spatial form of enclosure exposes a social articulation which still remains between whites and blacks even after the abolishment of apartheid. Nevertheless, it is also true that it is not allowed to revolutionize the social system by providing a new spatial image, which is called a modern process. Maybe in this delicate interdependence, I think the potential of spatial media today exist.
In this series, I intend to speculate on urban spatial form and its condition through reports on present phenomena in various cities. This is like a relationship between a function and a graph in mathematics. It is an experiment to examine which function (urban condition) makes which graph (urban form) through cross-referencing observation of cities. The functions are, for example, capital logic, regulation, desire for better life, and also physical context like geography. The graph is, for example, the schema of spatial form like enclosure shown in this report. Even if conditions are the same between two cities, their forms may be organized differently. Or even if conditions are seen totally different, the same spatial form may be organized. Or if a proper value to each city (for example, proper geography) is substituted into a variable (allowed width in a condition), a part of the variables becomes constant and the spatial form may be transformed. In order to find out this relationship between functions and graphs, we maybe have to observe not only generic characteristics common to cities but also specific ones proper to them. Or this may be to find out relationships between the generic and specific in cities. To summarize this operation, I would like to put a tentative title: "Urban Form and Condition in Specific Cities".
While the potential of spatial media seems getting somehow decreased by the emerging of various new media, I nevertheless would like to find out the possibilities of spatial media in urban space as its concrete form.
profile
Akio YASUMORI
Architect and Urbanist. Born in Tokyo, 1972.
Doctoral Candidate in Tokyo Institute of Technology, writing a thesis on Urban Voids in Tokyo
Works= "Tokyo Suburb Void Map", "LA Surface Urbanist's Catalogue&Tutorial"iHunch 1999, BiAjetc.
1998-99 the Berlage Institute, Netherlands
1997 Member of Team Made in Tokyo
1997 First Place in "Future Indivisual House" competition, Harima Science
Garden City (collaboration)
1996 Kazuyo Sejima Prise in the 6th S~L International Competition (collaboration)
1995 Second Place in the 5th Design Grand Award for Architectural Students in Japan
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