A project with Frans-Willem Korsten and Arda van Helsdingen.
October-December 2006

This project explored our image and idea of the city, and the ways in which these are reflected in urban planning and city life. These explorations proceeded from a series of lectures, outlining a number of premises on the modern city that interrogate the validity of our established paradigms and invite speculation on alternative ways of conceiving city life.

Julien le Roy, Eco Cathedral, Mildam, the Netherlands; one of the excursion venues for the project.

1. The city is nature’s most complex artefact.
Since classical antiquity one of the clichés about the city is that life within it is unnatural, that the city is the epitome of unnaturalness. This cliché is based on the clear-cut distinction between culture and nature, a distinction that has proven to be a powerful tool in the hands of those who have contributed to the global envelopment of capitalism – through opposing human beings to nature, thereby enabling the exploitation of nature by humans.

But there is nothing unnatural about either human beings or the city. To avoid this unnecessary distinction between nature and culture we will be looking at the concept of the lifeworld – or simply, nature. In lifeworld organic and an-organic beings know degrees of complexity and degrees of artificiality. Compared with the complexity of the lifeworld, the city is distinctly a mono-culture. But compared with other artefacts – the city differs in degree but not in principle from, for instance, an ant’s nest – the city is, indeed, one of nature’s most complex artefacts.

2. The city is the paradigm of modern man’s attempt to suppress other life-forms.
Being afraid to die, modern human beings want to make a sceptic space, a space free from any organism that might out-live humans, take them over, or directly threaten their life. Therefore, humans attempt to fortify the modern city against the omnipresent potency of the lifeworld, a potency that shows itself in any piece of wasteland, pile of rubbish or crack in the concrete. Dogs are allowed on the leash, a certain number of pigeons are tolerated – rats, however, are always unwelcome. Being one enormous production and consumption organism, one physically and psychically feeding and defecating body, the city is also a terminating machine. It needs its many parasites, but it will try to destroy any form of life that is anything more than a bearable nuisance.

3. In its present-ness the city is a biosocial potential.
The principle of planning and the passionate force of utopian sketches have created nature’s most complex artefact and biggest monoculture. If we were able to focus intensely and with the utmost sensitively on the city’s present-ness, perhaps we would be able to allow our city’s bodies to open up – to give space to the abundance of life that is currently suppressed. This would imply an intensive collaboration with the lifeworld, the kind of collaboration that would relinquish the idea of working towards possession. One would perhaps even have to relinquish of the idea that “we” will be getting somewhere.

This is simply to rephrase the core-concepts in some parts of the historical avant-garde (most notably in the work of Marcel Duchamp). Their struggle – indeed, the struggle of much of modern literature and art since the seventeenth century – was to find out where life is, and how it is. Which is to say: it is a struggle to find a kind of life that is worth living. The city is the site of this struggle. It can only be waged in its full implications when modern subjects know, intellectually and affectively, how to loosen the barriers between the city and lifeworld – or when they dare to let the lifeworld infiltrate their city-body.

These and related propositions formed the framework for a joint investigation of the city as a cultural paradigm, an artefact, an entity to plan and control, as well as a product of people’s collaborative work, and a space where the abundance of life takes place.

Project work included a series of 6 semi-public lectures, group discussions, reading texts, independent research and individual tutorials. Participants developed their own research within the framework of the project, choosing a subject of their own interest and their own methods of investigation and presentation. Part of the project were close-readings of sites in the city, and two workshops on location.

Arda van Helsdingen (the Netherlands) is a landscape architect based in Utrecht and a tutor at the Academy of Architecture, Amsterdam.

Frans-Willem Korsten (the Netherlands) is a cultural theorist based in Utrecht and professor in Literary Studies at the Rijksuniversiteit Leiden. New areas of research are the literature, rhetoric and law; and the city as lifeworld. Frans-Willem Korsten is also a tutor at PZI.