October 10, 2003
Theorizing the 'Facts' of the Contemporary City: Interview with Mark Gilbert
By Nader Vossoughian
Recently, I found myself in Vienna’s Museum Quarter, in the library of the Architectural Center. It a place where I love to read, write, and (sometimes) sleep, if only because it seems like the only library in Europe open on weekends. While there, I was paging through a recent issue of Umbau, a journal of architectural theory and urbanism published by Vienna’s Technical University, and I came across a very impassioned text on the subject of Rem Koolhaas and urbanism.The author of the piece, Mark Gilbert, was blunt in his assessment of Koolhaas. As he writes in the opening paragraph, “[a]moral and pragmatic, [Rem Koolhaas] dismisses leftist concerns for collective good and derides nostalgia.” I was immediately taken by Gilbert’s candor, so I read further. Koolhaas, he observes, “busies himself with the issue of reception, preferring to address the constructed identities… that abound in the city today.” Gilbert continues: “Koolhaas proposes that decentralization will be the urban process that will free the city from historically defined spatial interrelations.”
In the concluding pages to the text, Gilbert proposes an alternative of urbanism rooted in a notion of “social facts.” "What exactly does he mean by a “social fact”?" I asked myself. I wrote him just this question, and, as you will find below, he responded in kind with a series of very illuminating statements.
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Q. In your essay "On Beyond Koolhaas: Identity, Sameness and the Crisis of City Planning," you make the provocative claim that thinking about cities in terms of their "social facts" might prove a more fruitful model for urban planning than the "post-city" philosophy espoused by Rem Koolhaas. Do you think you could elaborate on what you mean by "social facts"?
A. Maybe the best approach to the notion of facts would be to reflect upon its conceptual genesis. The ideas arose in response to Koolhaas’ contention that the generic city is – or would be – everywhere the same, and that the ahistoric “post-city” represents a radical rupture in the production of urban space. I believe instead that a city can transform radically without losing its essential identity. For me, understanding and defining this identity gives us a way of comprehending the city. I try to move away from semiotically-conditioned conceptions of identity – such as Barthesian signification, which is about constructing meanings through the projection and reception of symbols, images, and signs – in favor of notions that are rooted in the performance of the city; that is to say, in how the city constructs itself.
In this sense, facts are the constitutive building blocks of the city. Wittgenstein’s famous assertion that the world is the totality of its facts precedes and parallels the idea that the city is the totality of its facts. Of course, Wittgenstein sought to delineate the structure and limits of philosophical language, and urbanism is something different; more material, more dynamic, and certainly “dirtier”. But it seems fair to ask the discourse of urbanism to analyze pragmatically its constitutive structure.
How then would I define these facts? Facts are the social constructs that codify and spatialize social practice; they take on many forms, most of which are rooted in the banal actualities of everyday life. Property laws and real estate are facts. Zoning laws are facts; so are building codes. Financial practice and tax law are facts. Building technology, material availability, and the organization of the construction industry are facts. Financial practice and tax law are facts. Political empowerment and economic corruption are facts. Local rituals, taboos and hygienic standards are facts. Social distribution and neighborhood development are facts. The built environment is a fact. The list is long, the point being: the urban facts of a city are its set of collective rules, agreements and habits that specifically mediate between spaces and social practices.
How can the notion of the city as fact help to facilitate the making of urban form? Ultimately, a factual urbanism does not offer recipes and methods for creating form. Instead, it offers a model for seeing the city as a systemic process. Different players have different agendas for the development of the city, and fact-based urbanism helps foreground these discursive conflicts of interest.
One potential embedded in a successful, fact-based urbanism would be that of resistance; resistance to global capital. Now, this is not a call for bans on development or a nostalgia for community. Rather, the challenge is to find processes which allow for the comprehension and counter-balancing of different facts and interests – and not just those embodied in the capitalist market.
Q. So the approach to urbanism you seem to be calling resembles the position espoused by the Dutch office MVRDV. As Bart Lootsma has observed, MVRDV’s “datascape” methodologies attempt to spatialize those invisible rules and codes that give our civil society its order and coherence. Am I right in drawing this comparison?
Second, when you call for an urbanism based upon the idea of “resistance,” are you deliberately invoking Kenneth Frampton’s writings on critical regionalism? How would you assess Frampton’s position, his view that vital forms of regional architecture can help offset the effects of globalization?
A. On the basis of his essay “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance”, it would seem that Frampton is more interested in the question of representation than he is in problem of systems. His idea of the arriere-garde proposes the use of local characteristics as a “middle way” alternative to the sort of architectural composition based upon the glorification of technology or the scenographic use of historical forms. When he touts the ability of „critical regionalist“ architecture to resist capitalist hegemony, he refers explicitly to its formal traits -- how it offers aesthetic strategies for making alternative forms. In my opinion, Frampton’s idea of the local simply never offers a decisive definition of what context really is. Devoid of any specific and identifiable criteria for defining context, we can only rely on aesthetic judgment to determine what is authentically local; even issues of materiality and construction are understood as problems of representation, not as problems of systematic production.
What interests me, however, is the idea of the city as systemic and historical process. The site consists of its facts, and there is no authentic or inauthentic choice in its development (contra Frampton), only possible and non-possible strategies as defined within the discursive conflict of interests that accompany any project. This is not to say that there are no good and bad results, or even desirable and less desirable results. It is to say, rather, that the issue of formal authenticity is not the avenue of resistance within a fact-based notion of urbanism. The resistance arises first and foremost at the level of the discursive conflict of interest (an idea I talked about a moment ago), not at the level of representation; resistance is the question of the interested interpretation and the weighing of the site’s facts. A fact-based urbanism does not guarantee a better or more equitable city, it simply means that a system for the perception and weighing of all interests – local and global - is conceivable (although not necessarily present).
Any idea of a fact-based system of negotiation brings us to MVRDV. In my opinion, through his quite masterfully argued essay “What is (really) to be Done?: The Theoretical Concepts of MVRDV,” Bart Lootsma is able to place the work of MVRDV in a much clearer context than the group has yet done for themselves. Lootsma firmly elucidates the benefits of a world that can be parameterized by statistical data, as well as pointing out some of the difficulties of this approach. He argues that the benefit of data is its property of (apparently) objective description of a site, which can be used both as a basis for interest group negotiations as well as a starting point for the projection of the future results of negotiated agreements. For Lootsma, the drawbacks of data-driven negotiation in our age of universal urbanism are, first, that the sample area is difficult to define, thus rendering questionable the validity of data at hand, and second, that the society of rational, consensual democracy is far from universal, making fairly negotiated agreements difficult to achieve and well-nigh impossible to carry out. Yet, despite these drawbacks, Lootsma is more than optimistic that such a statistically-based planning strategy offers a progressive and effective ideal for planning the future world.
While there is much of virtue to be gleaned from Lootsma’s text, it contains some very basic problems that need to be addressed. On the one hand, there is the extreme positivism upon which the approach is grounded; on the other, there is the rather simplistic, deterministic role of time and the developmental dynamic that the approach embodies.
In order to function, MVRDV’s approach is dependent (I believe) upon the sort of quantifiable data that statistics describe, and relies upon the assumption that the facts required to project and plan are measurable. Now, although I have drawn from early Wittgenstein’s great logical treatise (The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus), I share with Popper and the later Wittgenstein (the Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations) significant doubts that our intercourse with the facts which are the world can be completely, mathematically, and verifiably described. Plainly said, all (meaningful) data – so I would argue -- are facts, but not all facts are data. The belief that emotions can be adequately described through elections or opinion polls is simply misled. Against scientific positivists like Rudolf Carnap, I would argue on the contrary that our built world is not a mathematical-scientific construct.
Of course, many facts, such as population density or yearly sunshine, are quantifiable; many others, such as property laws, are institutionalized. Yet many facts resist positivistic description. Some, such as unplanned or unplannable multi-functionalty, exist more in the realm of ritual than in the realm of data. For example, how many functions does a Japanese tatami room fulfill? Some important urban phenomena are difficult to quantify, as they are contingent upon irrational and unpredictable human factors. Traffic engineers have had insurmountable difficulty modeling traffic jams, as their inception is often caused not just by human accidents, but by other flow interruptions that occur below the threshold of an accident. Numbers are important, but they don’t describe everything. I live and work in Vienna, a city where intrigue and relationships are salient and decisive facts in the planning and realization of the city. How do we quantify intrigue? It is highly unsatisfying to think that the urban world, or even any specific site, could be reduced to quantified data.
The problem with the positivism that is implied in Lootsma’s text is not only one of verification and measurement, but also one of determinism and origin. If I recall correctly, it was P.S. Laplace who claimed that, given the correct location and velocity of all particles in the universe, he could predict the course of the future. This may have been the reason that he escaped beheading in the revolution. This sort of scientific determinism, which datascapes clearly recall, conceives of the world as both knowable and linearly predictable. Yet, thinking since Eisenstein and Heisenberg has not only thrown our knowledge of the world in doubt, but it has also shown us that it is deeply non-linear. Even if we could know the facts, we can’t know where they would ultimately lead us. Our world, our individual and collective behavior, is based upon the workings of the past, but mapping them, even completely, cannot honestly tell us where we would go. We are much too complex for that.
It is important to reiterate what the idea of the city as a totality of facts is – and isn’t. It isn’t about architecture, it is about urbanism and site. As Jean Attali cogently states, architecture and urbanism “belong to different orders”; this notion of facts attempts to describe the constituent basis of urbanism. 
It deals first and foremost with conditions, evolutions and potentials, not with the methods of their embodiment which would be architecture. The notion of a fact-based urbanism is not prescriptive; it cannot offer recipes for producing city form or even individual buildings. It offers a conceptual framework for understanding the city as a complex, historic, yet unpredictable spatial system whose facts are real but not always measurable. When we engage only those facts of a site that are quantifiable, we are potentially missing out on extremely important aspects of the urban world that might be the cause of trajectories wholly different than what numbers would predict. The city is an historic, ongoing and often irrational process. What MVRDV is doing is useful, but it is important that we do not mistake data for the city. It they are not: what datascapes produce is a significant and interesting approximation, but not the real thing.
Mark Gilbert is Assistant Professor for Design and Theory at the Vienna Technical University. He is a practicing architect and the founding principal of m.gilbert architektur in Vienna, Austria.
Posted by agglutinations at October 10, 2003 05:42 AM