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Cities and Urban Corners

TEXT

Manuel de Sol-Morales Cities, corners Exhibition Organiser

A wide range of faades and people are found on corners, which produces innovation and stimulation. The Cities, Corners exhibition will show how the idea of corner extends beyond the purely geometric to become a vitalising principle and a genuine metaphor for the city.

A city is composed of different classes of people; similar people cannot bring a city into existence.
Aristotle (Poltics)

hen I was asked to organise an exhibition on cities, I straight away thought that there was no point in putting on yet another commonplace show of urban problems infrastructure, housing, the suburbs, renewal, etc. Nor did I want a technocratic approach, speaking, for example, of flows, mutations, reflections or margins. Rather, I would present cities by means of something quite concrete, material and tangible, something that placed more value on the senses than abstraction, much more on the political than the mechanical. Then I thought of the figurative interest of corners and of the status of corners as a paradigm of urban, architectural, civic and cultural diversity. Cultural diversity is a fact of city life. In the contemporary world in which over 80% of the population lives in towns and cities (and the rest will not be long in joining them, as the only way to guarantee their economic and social progress), cities are fantastic machines making it possible to transform solitude into exchange and ignorance into progress. In order to present cultural diversity, therefore, there is no need to conjure up a mosaic of exoticisms, but simply to present cities as the place of mixing and exchange, a plural and contradictory place par excellence, far removed from the over-simplistic or systematic reductionism we so often engage in. This exhibition will present cities as crossroads of culture, communication and exchange, of construction and territory. In keeping with the cultural diversity axis of the Forum, the exhibition aims to present cities in their physical specificity, in spite of the fact that they are both a cause and consequence of economic globalisation. It wants to present them as geographical, social and economic crossroads while at the same time highlighting the angularity with which architecture materialises them. Nowadays we sometimes see cities as areas of flows and abstract, purely dynamic relations, without any significant substance or position, as a pure phenomenon of mutation, movement, ephemeral borders almost independent of their physical support and political life. But this technocratic illusion ignores the fact that, at the same time, and precisely because they take shape as collective

Carlos Bosch

spaces, cities are the place where there is the greatest opportunity for difference, acceptance, justice and passion. For more than a century, squares and streets have been the models of public spaces in relation to which a more desirable urban space has been debated, planned and compared. Underlying this is the hypothesis of peaceful civility and institutional urbanity. The square as a central celebrative and symbolic space, and the street full of shops or where people can go for a stroll, are images that conjure up an idea of a civis offering identity, trade and organisation. But the city, which is certainly a complex system in continual transformation and also, sometimes, a unanimous, participatory, more or less sponsored, concentration, is the place of difference and friction, of forced or fortuitous agreement, of permanent tension and conflict. The intersection of people, constructions, movements and energies is the citys reason and strength. Corners are the original model for it. Street corners express the nature of the city as a meeting place, a place of superposition and conflict. Cities are brought into existence by the

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Seen from the sky, all cities are more or less irregular arrangements of blocks and streets. But as we see them on the ground, as used and remembered by each citys inhabitants, they are sequences of crossings and corners, meaningful points and symbols of the citys variety and extension. Above, a birds-eye view of El Eixample in Barcelona, with the spaces created by the four chamfers, which is the most characteristic image of the layout designed by Ildefons Cerd. Right, Ciutat Meridiana in Barcelona, an example of the outskirts of a city. On the facing page, La Plaa dels ngels, between the former convent of Els ngels and the Barcelona Contemporary Art Museum. The square as a symbolic space is one of the elements of a civis characterised by identity, trade and organisation. On the previous page, the Olympic Village area and part of Torre Mapfre.
Dani Codina

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In every urban form, the way the streets cross each other is the fundamental feature which we retain as our picture of the city. The urban fabric is usually a flexible, dynamic organisation of space so that activities and people can intermingle with each other.

multiplication of corners and, as a whole, by grids of crossroads. In the global network of flows and relations, the big cities are the crossroads where these are condensed and linked together. The diversity of faades and people found on corners gives rise to innovation and stimulation. The corner, therefore, is a metaphor for the city, in that it constitutes a project stemming from diversity. In that it is not the idea of order that makes the city, but the idea of difference, of conflict, of consensus, the corner is its elementary and exemplary component. Difference plus coincidence is the definition of corner. It is also the definition of city. In every urban form, the way the streets cross each other forming crossroads and corners is the fundamental feature which we retain as the picture of the city. The urban fabric, after all, needs to be a flexible, dynamic organisation of space so that activities and people can intermingle with each other there. The crossroads with two points of reference provides a greater wealth of opportunity, which is that little bit extra required to produce meaning. Just as the first economic surplus was at the origin of culture and civilisation, so the superposition of the virtual axes at a material point makes the corner the origin and the ferment generating urban diversity. Through the Eixample district of Barcelona we are well aware of the importance of corners. The space created by the four chamfers a magnified version of the traditional crossroads with its square corners is the most characteristic image of the layout designed by Cerd. The major part played by the turns, the categorical presence of the shops and balconies along the 20 metres of oblique faade, make up an urban fabric marked by the repeated rhythm of the rhomboidal chamfers. As much as, if not more than, an arrangement of blocks and streets, the Cerd Plan has made a city of corners. Seen from the sky, all cities are more or less irregular arrangements of blocks and streets. But as we see them on the ground, as used and remembered by each citys inhabitants, they are sequences of crossings and corners, meaningful points and symbols of the of the citys variety and extension. And this applies as much to the big cities as to the smaller towns, to both the densely and the sparsely built-up areas, to the junctions of the major avenues and to the crossroads of rural pathways. The chamfered corners of a district such as the Eixample, the corner shop or the caf or the tobacconists on the corner in any local neighbourhood, the singular and publicity-seeking building, or the suburban interchange station, concentrate the activity and the image of an entire area and thus become a place of social exchange corners. But constructing a corner is also a matter of reaching agreement between two fronts that have to coincide. Their meeting can take place in an exemplary or an unfortunate fashion or perhaps it will not take place at all but the construction of a corner is always a worthy exercise. And this applies to architectural construction as much as to any other constructive trade. A problem with the corner the car-

Gasull

penters used to say, drawing attention to the fact that the difficulties in assembling a door, a table or a window arise when it comes to getting the angle joint right. The architecture of corners is an example of matching differing faades and also of the merit of turning this agreement into a permanent, symbolic object. Perhaps that is why nowadays we are rather inclined to miss them. The Paradise on the Other Corner that Vargas Llosa predicted will perhaps lead to the Man on Pink Corner of whom Borges spoke. And we would understand why Morton White spoke of street-corner society and why Baudrillard philosophised about corners as places of imagination and feeling. Also Italo Calvino has written that cities do not explain their past, but contain it, like the lines on a persons hand, on their street corners. If we were only to see the contemporary city as a virtual field of flows and systems, of visible economic relations and hidden social relations, we would miss out corners. The boring outlying areas with their houses strung out in rows, the suburbs with their segregated and solitary blocks of flats, the downtown areas deserted at night and at weekends, the technology parks and the leisure, shopping and business centres autistic and remote, do not have corners. In the neo-liberal city, where open territory and compact construction unevenly share domination between them, the functional authority of networks and services would not be sufficient there is also a need for the strategic and symbolic presence of corners, the social architecture of the territory. The big young Asian and African metropolises, already marked as the product of globalisation with their acres upon acres of poor dwellings, cannot transform themselves according to conventional urban layouts, but they can, by contrast, with suitable intervention, become singular points of accent and

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Cities grow by accumulating exchanges personal, social, economic and political exchanges; exchanges of people and goods. In the photo, Hong Kong.
Christian Maury

reference. They have motorways running through them and they have clusters of skyscrapers in the centre, but they do not have corners. This exhibition will show how this idea extends beyond the architectural and the geometric and how, in cities of the most varied forms, we can recognise, on different scales, the idea of the corner as a vitalising principle. It will display, with spectacular and direct materials, the evidence of this fact through the cities of today. It will show scale models, films, drawings and photographs to bring the corners alive. It will also show how, on a global scale, in the geography of urbanisation right across the world, cities are due to their image and their function corners of the networks of global interdependence. The biggest emerging metropolises are huge global corners where migrations and activities, transport and capital flow and cross each other. The presentation of some of the main examples of such cities (in South Asia, Latin America and countries where the dominant culture is Islamic) continues the reflection on urbanisations position as a crossroads. It is a matter of interpreting how the continuously growing megacities draw their strength and character precisely from this position as global crossroads. It is, therefore, a horizontal and geographical perspective on the worlds current urban condition which, also incorporating the permanent aspects of urban history, is aimed at getting people to think about the virtues of intersection, even promiscuity, as goals of any city project. Some of the exhibitions main messages will be: 1) In spite of the large number of problems that accumulate in them, cities are the permanent establishment that humanity has provided itself with in order to help it to progress. In the globalised world, cities are the main receptacle of cultural diversity. 2) Cities themselves are made up of exchanges in their origin and grow by accumulating more exchanges. Exchanges of people, of goods, of flows. Voluntary and involuntary exchanges. Personal, social and economic exchanges. And political exchanges.

3) At certain times the social spaces of the city concentrate these exchanges. Road junctions, street crossings, interchanges materialise the flows. 4) Corners are the visible forms that architecture gives to this network of intersections: a difficult and worthy exercise representing the complexity and richness of urbanity. Without good architecture, there can be no city. 5) The idea of corner is a universal idea. In all cultures, the passage from tribal to social organisation adopts the corner and the grid as a principle of settlement. The cities that have been founded have always repeated, from antiquity to the present day, the principle of a network of corners. 6) The speeded-up metropolises of the third world like the suburbs, rich or poor, of the first world are territories without corners, without physical or social intersection. They are, however, the places with the greatest potential and future demand. 7) The tendencies towards the segregation of functions, towards the creation of themed territories, towards the autonomy of the residential ghettoes (both rich and poor), must be offset with the aid of new territorial corners supporting the free and contradictory interaction of people and interests. Indifference and difference make for an open city. 8) On a larger scale, the urbanised world is also a network of corners in which the major metropolises stand out as corners of the global system of flows and exchanges. The big cities are crossed by transports, migrations, business. 9) But the corners of capital are not those of the people. Nor those of movement, or those of communication. 10) Urbanity cultural diversity is not a matter of agglomeration or dispersion. It is a matter of interdependence. A matter of the density of crossroads, of more and more corners. These are the slogans. What counts, however, is what we shall see next summer in the metal box of the Forum Convention Centre.

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