Improbable spaces: Signs of the future city in a university project
Timon Beyes, University of St Gallen
Christoph Michels, University of St Gallen
Sabine Poralla, University of St Gallen
It is as if, through the crevices of the city and the cracks of its edifices, light were always seeping in, illuminating the lines of its becoming other. (Rajchman 1998, p. 26)
In October of 2005, 850 newly-enrolled students entered the city and the University of St.Gallen, Switzerland, to start off their studies of (mostly) business science, economics, law or international affairs. Before enrolling for the "regular" seminars, however, the first week in their new surroundings might have turned out somewhat unexpectedly: They were asked to conceive of and visualize a city of the future, "FuturoPolis", within five days.
Under the auspices of the architect Daniel Libeskind and supported by an interdisciplinary group of academics, architects and artists, the student teams set out to draft constitutions for tomorrow's urban society, develop working assumptions about the future city, bring these assumptions to life in an artistic way and coordinate the final assemblage of FutoroPolis. A large wooden structure designed by Libeskind served as aesthetic point of departure, i.e. "raw" material to be worked with.
Our paper will discuss and reflect upon both the processes and the results of the FuturoPolis-project. Having been responsible for (and thus part of) the project, the empirical material is based on our field notes, the students' work as well as insights and observations from colleagues and guests that have partly been collected in an edited volume recently published (Beyes et al. 2006).
Conceptually, we will make use of a socio-spatial as well as an aesthetical perspective (as if these two could be easily held apart…). Drawing upon writings of Henry Lefebvre (1991), Edward Soja (1996) and Michel Foucault (1991) - conceptualizations of space that grapple with “the play between desire for order and the need to reach what escapes it” (Liggett 2003, p. 38) -, we will take a closer look at the spatial practices of organizing "for" FuturoPolis. Moreover, and following Jaques Rancière, envisioning a city of the future through transforming an architect's artefact calls for an aesthetic perspective that broadly refers to "the distribution of the sensible that determines a mode of articulation between forms of action, production, perception and thought" (Rancière 2004, p. 82). Seen this way, aesthetic practices and forms might inscribe themselves into "policed" spaces, producing dissent and thus enabling politics. However, what can be said, thought and done within both cityspace and the spaces of business universities often does not resemble the “level playing field for social contestation” that enables social transformation through aesthetic experience (Amin and Thrift 2002, p. 152).
Thus, the aim of our paper is, firstly, to make a contribution to the blossoming research on spatial and aesthetic concepts as ways of knowing and reflecting upon processes of organizing (Dobers and Strannegard 2004). Secondly, and related to Rancière's notion of the distribution of the sensible as producing the modes of perception for participating in a common world, we will use the example of FuturoPolis and the city of St.Gallen to inquire into the role of (business) universities for the possibility of engaging with the city to come.
References
Amin, Ash and Nigel Thrift (2002), Cities. Reimagining the urban, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Beyes, Timon, Holm Keller, Daniel Libeskind and Sascha Spoun (2006), Die Stadt als Perspektive, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz.
Dobers, Peter and Lars Strannegard (2004), 'The Cocoon - A Travelling Space', Organization, 11 (6), pp. 825-848.
Foucault, Michel (1991), 'Andere Räume', in Karlheinz Barck, Peter Gente, Heidi Paris and Stefan Richter (eds), Aisthesis: Wahrnehmung heute oder Perspektiven einer anderen Ästhetik, Leipzig: Reclam, pp. 34-47.
Lefebvre, Henri (1991), The production of space, Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing.
Liggett, Helen (2003), Urban Encounters, Minneapolis, US: University of Minnesota Press.
Rajchman, John (2000), The Deleuze connections, Cambridge, US and London, UK: MIT Press.
Ranciere, Jaques (2004), The politics of aesthetics, London, UK and New York, US: Continuum.
Soja, Edward W. (1996), Thirdspace. Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, Oxford, UK and Malden, US: Blackwell.