“The future is but the obsolete in reverse” (Vladimir Nabokov, Lance, 1952)

This post – whose title recalls Robert Smithson’s seminal essay Entropy and the New Monuments – tells the experience of the DPU summerLab in Rome, and of its landing into the reality of what we called the Occupation City. 

The New Monuments, Smithson says, are no longer for remembering and learning about the past but rather for helping forgetting a future which is dissolving because of Entropy and Obsolescence. Rome is a city of Old and New (or renewed) Monuments whose role has always been to drive a trend, either visible or hidden, formal or informal, in the urban development of their time. As last year’s strolling exploration, we navigated through these Monuments and the images of the city they wanted to portray when built, and through what they represent today. We started from Corviale, the swan song of the Modernist utopia and its monumental re-signification through the informal occupation of its one kilometre long fifth floor, originally supposed to host never-implemented services and shops. We passed on the Tiber River, through its monumental banks and bridges and its population of gypsies in provisional shanty towns. And by the Roman Walls and the non-catholic cemetery which has colonised their back. And we entered the Campo Boario, neoclassic Monument to the industrial production (of meat), abandoned by the Municipality and become a living collection of people – now Kurdish and Italians but once also Palestinians, Gypsies, Ukrainians – and the stories of how they landed there.

Part of Corviale's fifth floor and its informal housing.

A conversation with the leader of the Kurdish Community in Campo Boario.

Campo Boario and its open and multicultural square constituted a paradigmatic space for our investigation in Porto Fluviale, the squat-occupation we have been working with, today undergoing a process of opening up toward the surroundings exactly through the transformation of its central courtyard in a public square.

The galaxy of squat-occupations is a network of New Monuments, buildings whose re-significations through the (anti-entropic and anti-obsolescing) act of occupying have become the spatial manifestations of the current housing crisis in Rome. Porto Fluviale is one of those. Abandoned many years ago after serving as deposit for weapons and then for uniforms for armed forces, the building, still property of the Ministry of Defence, has been occupied in 2003 by the Coordinamento Cittadino Lotta per la Casa (one of the Social Movements leading the Struggle for Housing in Rome), in its endeavour to concentrate the Struggle on the restitution of otherwise idle and abandoned publicly-owned fragments of the city to the use of the citizens. Both the words use and citizen though are at stake in the political vision of the Movement, and the project of the new piazza challenges both concepts.

The entrance toward the courtyard (photo by Gamar Markarian)

The courtyard of Porto Fluviale (picture by Maria Rocco)

So far, the courtyard has been the centre of the community life and the spatial element that more than anything else has helped fostering throughout the years a sense of collectiveness and everyday life sharing. The day 80 families (about 250 people) from different nationalities – mainly Italians, Ecuadorians, Moroccans, Peruvians, but many more – broke into the building from one of the main gates, Porto Fluviale started undergoing a deep transformation. Its three floors got transformed into houses facing both internal and external side of the C-shaped building, with the dark distribution corridors marked by the rails once used to move the materials around the floors and to the service-lifts. The housing units search for the light vertically, thanks to the widespread use of self-made mezzanines built to reach the level of the big windows whose basis is at 2.50 meters, so to have the possibility of a view toward the outside or the courtyard.

The inner distribution corridor.

The space of a housing unit from the mezzanine.

In spite of the constant risk of eviction (the building is part of a plan through which the Municipality is trying to sell out a number of former barracks to private developers) the community have recently voted to keep the main gate open during the day so to let the people from the surroundings feel free to enter. The process started a couple of years ago opening a tearoom on the ground floor, and went on with the transformation of many spaces, that were once residential and now have become an assembly room, a bicycle workshop, guest rooms (where a group of participant was kindly hosted) and new rooms for skill-sharing activities.

All the talks and the interaction between the community and the participants to the workshop have been driven by the idea of this new space, focus of both worries (in terms of security) and dreams (a finally redeemed image) for its inhabitants. What mostly struck us, in the assembly, was a sentence that sounded more or less like this: “we don’t want to open all the gates and make the new square become a place of passage and circulation like all the other squares around the city: this would simply replicate the current experience of the city, whose public spaces are meant for the capitalistic consumption”. The new square sets aside any capitalistic logic and wants to be the place where to experiment new activities and ways of exchanging and paying back the services that the community will offer. The square is meant to be the place where new alternative lessons can be taught and more lessons have yet to be learnt, where pro-active citizens can meet and exchange their experiences, where the use-value of space takes again over the exchange one.

A moment of the assembly.

The participants’ works helped unpacking, de-codifying and portraying the neo-marxist vision come out from the initial assembly with the inhabitants and their leadership. They highlighted hidden potentialities of the new square, possible ways of portraying its many identities and stories, latent contradictions intrinsic to a project of a piazza that is open to everyone but chiefly to whom is willing to enter: what if the space opens all its three main gates and its sides become totally permeable as already happening for the tearoom? How to open a gate to show something that is other without the risk of losing this otherness itself? How does openness combine with the need for security? And which declension can the term security acquire in the transition toward a post-capitalistic urban space?

The final presentation of the works.

In spite of these open questions, in Porto Fluviale the DPU summerLab has met a community with a complex past and witnessed its will to write a different future. Through the act of occupying the otherwise obsolete Monument Porto Fluviale, its community has inverted the entropic process it was undergoing. Porto Fluviale represents a re-use of a Monument, re-use that though goes beyond a simple notion of renovation or change of use, of retrofitting to accommodate new functions. The piazza calls for a use that is totally new, crafted outside the logic of the capitalistic development and then yet to be discovered. A use made possible through means of occupation, that though, today, leads to question the appropriateness of the verb occupying itself, as remarked by one of the participants to the workshop. Spaces such as Porto Fluviale had their inception through the act of occupying but their raison d’etre nowadays lies in the even more political action of producing space: should we stop saying ‘Porto Fluviale Occupation’ and naming it simpy for its current essence ‘Piazza del Porto Fluviale’?

Many thanks to our local collaborators, Francesco Careri and Laboratorio Arti Civiche – whose preliminary work and constant insights made our workshop possible and cheerful – and warm greetings to all the inhabitants of Porto Fluviale, thanks for such a delightful week together.

It has long been argued that urban design is a variegated practice in search of a discipline, caught between – on one side – design practitioners and academics searching for a specific role in investigating the complexities of urbanism and in designing spaces that enable social justice and produce alternatives towards engagement and participation and – on the other – the reflexive, critical and ethical rediscovery of architecture, planning and design. Recent literature speaks a lot on this ethical turn and exhibitions are mushrooming. Such processes are particularly relevant to the complexity and contradiction inherent in contemporary cities and contested geographies of the Global South. These challenges are as much about process as they are about form, but such legitimacy requires serious intellectual engagement to provide the appropriate conceptual tools for dealing with the kinetic circumstance of cities in developing countries.

I was always attracted and fascinated by the Foucaultian ontology captured by his intricate reading and its now omnipresent usage in different field of studies. Innovative, provocative though impenetrable, his thoughts are profoundly challenging praxis and everyday life. Particularly fundamental to my research and architectural interests has been his notion of Dispositif to depict and investigate the relationship between spatial production, design and the exertion of, and response to, power. The dispositif serves as an aggregate source to (re)calibrate design (architectural and urban) discourse as both a way to define an interpretive perspective over the contemporary challenges of urban design, as well as to enrich the practice of development practitioners dealing with the spatial manifestation of injustices, complex urban challenges and spatial transformations in the global south.

For Foucault the Dispositif (apparatus, in its english translation) is: “[…] firstly, a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions–in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements” (Foucault, 1977: 194).

The capacity to become the device of connection between heterogeneous elements is the Dispositif’s first important behavioural feature. The dispositif has the key capacity to concurrently act as the apparatus of multiple connections and take on multiple behaviours simultaneously to achieve this multiplicity. A dispositif is then something able to bring heterogeneous elements together in an identifiable assemblage: the city as a whole and its peripheries (both spatial and conceptual) might be considered as assemblages on their own, a heap of negotiated knowledges, whose clear picture is difficult to render because of the convergence of multiple narratives and absence of a cohesive one.

In September 2011, the Development Planning Unit held its inaugural summerLab, structured as a six-day immersion into a scenario of contested urbanism in Rome. This new initiative attracted students and practitioners from Italy, Switzerland, Canada, France, Germany, England, and Malta and was developed in partnership with Roma Tre – Laboratorio Arti Civiche and Francesco Careri.

The specific case, grounded in the Metropoliz occupation, dealt with two adjacent sites, each containing derelict factory buildings, occupied by squatters in early 2009 in an attempt to both secure a home within the peripheral urban limits but also to actively resist pressures from market and authorities to force them into a marginalised and ‘invisible’ status. The two sites were divided by a two-meter high masonry wall, pierced in only one location by a gated opening which allows some degrees of interaction between the first nucleus of Metropoliz – a very heterogeneous population of migrants from all over the world – on one side and the Roma people on the other one: the Roma joined the occupation later carrying with them both their political potential and social stigmaThis wall has been the central investigative focus and catalyst driving the design proposals of the DPU summerLab, which aimed to deconstruct it along with its historical evolution, revealing its traced impressions, its daily uses, its permeability, and its wounds. It was a dispositive to counter-act – to profane in Giorgio Agamben’s words (Agamben, 2007).

What the Rome summerLab wanted to devise was a counter-dispositif that, while accepting and somehow endorsing the persistence of the wall, could highly improve the cycles of transaction within Metropoliz as well as between Metropoliz and the greater city. The peripheries of the city can be read as archives, made through uneven cycles of destruction and growth: the groups were asked to shape their counter-dispositifs looking at these archives, and the summerLab itself dove into those, confronting the vast variety of unofficial transformations in Rome, searching for clues and traces in several occupations, understanding their logic and functioning. This was done while also, hopefully, trying to play a role in de-coding and re-coding them, exactly through the counter-dispositifs: in other words, trying to deterritorialise and re-signify the wall(s).

Metropoliz is characterised in fact by a lack of visibility and fortress-like presence for protection and defence. The guard post and letter-boxes seem to hint at what the gates conceal: communal principles and multi-cultural axioms which need to remain somehow hidden to survive. The participants grasped the intrinsic nature of the (emergent or official) housing landscape of Rome as an agglomeration of states of exception, where a different concept of citizenship is springing out from their segregration itself.

A possible counter-dispositif was devised by a project that identified a strategic point along the wall as the locus of its disassembly and expansion into a zone of mediation and meeting. By opening up the wall and transecting it with an extended covered space, scaled to facilitate social interaction, the intervention revealed new potentials of integration and mutual understanding. This newly created zone, by provocatively exaggerating the thickness of the wall and inverting its meaning from that of blockade to pathway, served as a counter-dispositif to generate new processes and dynamics not with the prescription of, but rather with the potential for, social progress and political cohesion: a “Solomon’s garden” which would begin, paradoxically, with the initial ‘privatisation’ of one space, carried on by one of the inhabitants who could play the role of mediator between the two sides and between them and the BPM leaders. The incipit of a pathway that in the next stages could expand toward the two sides, implemented by the inhabitants themselves. Putting in relation heterogeneous elements the counter-dispositifs produce a fertile ground for interacting and write new common discourses.

Common discourses that are at the moment still being written thanks to the idea of two movie-directors along with the research group Laboratorio Arti Civiche (who helped us running the summerLab). After we left a new counter-dispositif has been put in place: using materials that were leftover on the site, the inhabitants have built a rocket that will soon depart toward the Moon. Metropoliz is at the same time departing and landing point of this science fiction journey, which have involved both sides stimulating new behaviours, alternative visions and higher level of interaction and exposure toward the surroundings.

DPU summerLab was certainly fertile in deconstructing a timely design reflection on some elements of “periphery”, both spatial and conceptual, while the complexity of the urban assemblage in making such spaces a literal archive depended as much upon what is subtracted (closure, cesurae, isolation, partition), or destroyed (cycles of adaptations and creative destructions) as upon what is added (habitations, meanings, etc) and moreover develop translocal fluxes and economies of habitation and identities. Elaborating on the potential of dispositif and counter-dispositif as architectural/design gestures enable a kind of mutual witnessing of how such spaces are imagined and operate the space and the city as a whole, discovering and playing the possibilities through which occupants become and act as urban residents which insists on the divergent aspirations and practices to intersect among each others and from the internal to the external (at different scales) without the availability of a “common language” or from the whole city perspective. Metropoliz per se beyond being a visible space of struggle, occupation and marginalization morphed as fractal space that existed between consolidated urban patterns and mega-transformation projects. Their rediscovery and re-signification as “actually existing urbanisms” but also as distinctive, though interstitial, urban discourses could potentially generate a particular understanding of the city itself.

In a way, using Latour’s words, getting closer to the facts in a renewed empiricism and praxis to be able to deconstruct the real apparatuses of the complex neoliberal conflictive derive that this presupposes at different scales: the contested nature of transformations, the strategies of morphing and re-morphing urban areas as conceived as resistant, formalized or informal practices and experiences of individual and communities and the role and agency of design as creative but not only physical dimension of transformation and then moving away from facts. Thus, design is simultaneously the production of physical form, the creation of social, cultural and symbolic resources and also, critically, the outcome of a facilitative process in which enablement, activism, alternatives and insurgence become central ideas.

An earlier version of this article written with Giorgio Talocci and
Andrew Wade, appeared in ABITARE
Image credits DPU Summerlab participants

References:

Agamben, G. (2007) Profanations, Jeff Fort (tr.), Zone Books
Foucault, M. (1977)“The Confession of the Flesh” interview. In: Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings (ed Colin Gordon), 1980: pp. 194-228.
Latur, B. (2004) Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern, Critical Enquiry, Vol. 30(2), pp: 225-248.
Shatkin, G., (2011) Coping with actually existing urbanisms: The real politics of planning in the global era. Planning Theory, Vol. 10, pp: 79-87.