City as Open Work

Eve Blau
selected from the introduction to Eve Blau and Ivan Rupnik, Project Zagreb: Transition as Condition, Strategy, Practice

he enormous dislocations of the postcommunist transition are visibly registered in the physical fabric of Central European cities. Everywhere there is evidence of wild illegal building, abandoned industrial buildings converted into provisional dwellings, living space turned to commercial uses, new skyscrapers and office towers rising among small suburban houses in semi-urban areas with little or no infrastructure. In recent years a literature of transitology has emerged that sensationalizes these phenomena, describing them as urban mutants, infections, and parasitic developments, while celebrating them as the improvised formations of a fluid, anarchic, hybridized, new culture of urban action. It seems clear that the transitional urban landscapes of postcommunist cities radically challenge traditional urban conceptsparticularly of public and private space, property, and useas well as current planning practices. But for all the transgressive excitement of these spontaneous and aberrant (in the European context) urban formations, they actually offer little substantial insight into the complex and multilayered dynamics of urban change or, for that matter, the implications of transition for urban and architectural practices. Precisely because these formations are ephemerallike the condition of postcommunism itselfthey have little potential for self-reproduction. This book contends that if we are to comprehend not only the current modalities but also the future potential of the postsocialist transition for urbanism and architecture in Europe, we need to look beyond the chaos and entropy, and to examine these postcommunist cities with both a longer historical lens and a sharper critical focus. We need to engage the geographical, historical, and cultural specificity of the cities themselves, and to look closely at their material fabric. Most of all, we need to pay close attention to the conditions of practice, the desires, aspirations, and constraints that generated these cities over time. In other words, we need to look backward in order to project forward. As the Viennese philosopher and political economist Otto Neurath admonished at an earlier moment of transition in 1911, Those who stay exclusively with the present will very soon only be able to understand the past. Scientific
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research, Neurath maintained, should provide information not only about social and other orders that already exist in the world but also about orders that may not yet exist. That is the objective of the research presented here: our aspiration is to produce knowledge about cities that has the potential to inform contemporary urban architectural practices and to open them to new forms of innovation and changein postcommunist Central Europe, as well as in cities across the globe that are likewise undergoing large-scale adjustments to expanding urban networks and new forms of polity.
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Generative Dynamics of Transition The first thing the historical lens brings into focus is the fact that transition in Central Europe is neither new nor particular to postcommunism. Central European cities have, in fact, been in transition more or less continuously since the beginning of the modern period. Of course change is a condition of modernity, and most cities have experienced significant change and unsettlement at different times and scales. But in certain parts of Central Europe, transition (which we understand as a state of instability with uncertain outcome, not as the passage from one stable condition to another) has been the norm for much of the twentieth century. Particularly in the cities that began the century in the crumbling edifice of the Habsburg Empire and ended it in the wreckage of state socialism, the transformations (economic, technological, social) associated with modernization were refracted and protracted by enormous political and cultural dislocations into prolonged and recurrent periods of crisis and displacement. What is the significance for architecture and urbanism of this long experience of transition? As the German historian of Eastern Europe Karl Schlgel proposed in 1996, it is something which cannot be fully expressed in terms of schillings or marks, something which is simply invaluable: the ability of cities to cope with the transitional situation, to master crises. The cities of the Central region have been workshops of successful transition. In other words, it is not so much their current experience of transition as their long history of adapting to and creatively engaging instability, that enabled them to endure as cities with vital urban and
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architectural cultures. It is that history and experience that makes the cities of Central Europe key subjects for understanding the urban spatial dynamics and potentials of transition today. At the same time, it is impossible to generalize in any meaningful way about the dynamics of transition in Central Europe before, during, or after state socialism. Just as we are discovering that the Iron Curtain dividing east and west was far more permeable to architectural and urban ideas throughout the Cold War than was previously acknowledged, so we are now becoming aware that urban architectural formations in the cities of communist Central Europe were as different from one another as were their political, economic, and administrative structures, their institutions and cultures, and of course their presocialist histories. Those differences mark their postsocialist societies as well, and are clearly also determining factors in the trajectories that their transitions from socialism will follow. Therefore, if we want to comprehend both the socialist legacy and the postsocialist potential of transition in terms of the city and architecture, we need to ground our research in the specificity of place and time. We need to develop new methodologies for understanding change and difference, methodologies that make it possible to chart continuities and discontinuities, to map relationships between the local and translocal, and especially to understand how urban architectural practices evolve in relation to the evolution of the city itself. These are the tasks we set ourselves in Project Zagreb.
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mutating, multilayered web of administrative, economic, and political structures and relationships. As a result, administrators and other key playersincluding architects and plannersdeveloped modalities of operation on behalf of the city that were strategic, agile, and flexible. They learned how to channel the connectivity of the transterritorial networks of which Zagreb was a part into the city itself in ways that enabled it to grow and to innovate. How did this connectivity and instability play out on the ground? Principally, through architects and planners who developed strategies of architecture and urbanism for creatively engaging the transitional, conditional, unstable, mutable, and open-endedstrategies for absorbing, accommodating, anticipating, and instrumentalizing the state of irresolution. Project Zagreb examines how these strategies, once they are stabilized in built form, become available to practice and capable of generating new strategies and practices that open the city and architecture to change and innovation. Transition, in other words, has clear implications for architecture and urban design. It is a condition that foregrounds practice and enables architecture to play an active, performative role in the formation of the city. It also allows us to understand the city as a project with distinct and often precise formal aspirations. But in the unstable environment of twentieth-century Zagreb, the processes of generating the city transform fixed form into open form, and the city itself into an open worka work that is dynamic and mutable, but also purposeful and coherent. Methods Our objective in Project Zagreb is to understand the dynamics of practice, not to produce a history of Zagreb. Consequently, the methods we employ in excavating the generative dynamic of transition were generated by the need to develop techniques for representing and analyzing conditions that are multiple and unstable, and contingent on a broad range of equally unstable factors. Often we found that historical documentation was missing or unreliable. It became clear to us that traditional methods of historical research were inadequate to the task. We began therefore with the built fabric and an intensive engagement with the existing city, including on-site photography and video recording; discussions with architects, planners, historians, and city officials. We augmented this work with extensive multidisciplinary and multimedia archival research; using historical maps, plans, drawings, photographs, film footage, legal documents, journals, the popular press, and a range of other archival documents, to understand the evolution of the city. By focusing on multidimensional variables (spatial, programmatic, technical, administrative, property-based ownership, legal), as well as the historical particularities of culture, politics, and economics, we examined and
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City as Project (...) In particular, Zagreb offers important insights into two conditions of the contemporary city that are relevant to architecture today. The first, to frame it in the most general terms, is the transnational geography generated by the European Union. The new cross-border networks in Europe raise a number of questions about the role of cities. How do cities operate within these contexts and networks? What transformations are taking place within the core structures of cities? The second condition concerns the rapid rate and intensity of change and growth in cities across the globe particularly in the developing world, but also in the First and Second worldsthat are seriously challenging normative planning methods. How can cities plan under conditions of constant and uncontainable growth? How is it possible for architecture and urban planning to operate effectively and to innovate under such conditions of instability? With respect to both conditions, Zagreb has almost 150 years of continuous experience. Operating within transterritorial city networks and transnational geopolitical structures, the city was enmeshed in a complex, constantly
4 See, Gregory Andrusz, Michael Harloe, and Ivan Szelenyi, eds., Cities After Socialism: Urban and Regional Change and Conflict in Post-Socialist Societies (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass., 1996).

Bibliography for book here 1 See Boris Buden, Ein Transitionsmrchen, springer|in 2/00: Inland Europa.

2 Otto Neurath, Nationalkonomie und Wertlehre, Zeitschrift fr Volkswirtschaft, Sozialpolitik und Verwaltung, 20 (1911): 52. 3 See note 1.

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analyzed transition, as condition, strategy, and practice, through a range of graphic techniques: assembly, mapping, diagramming, layering, animation, projection, analytical modeling, stop-frame photography, and other techniques that make it possible to visualize synchronous and nonsynchronous transformations occurring at different rates in different sectors. One of the most useful analytic tools we developed emerged out of our goal to understand the dynamics of change and innovation in terms of urban and architectural practice. The method we devised was to simultaneously read the city backward and forward chronologically; to start with the present and peel back the accumulated spatiotemporal layers of the built fabric to discover moments of alteration, addition, erasure, misalignment and realignment, etc. A very different narrative from the standard historical reading emerges from such a process. In the reverse reading, action precedes intention. In urban architectural terms, the built intervention or object is encountered before the preexisting condition of the site, and (in effect) without prior knowledge of its authors intentions. In other words, the chronologically backward reading of the urban fabric constructs a narrative that foregrounds actionwhat the intervention or object actually doesrather than what it was intended or designed to do. It thereby reproduces the lived experience of encounter with the built object. This method of reading the city defamiliarizes it, and casts the built fabric in an active role as protagonist in its own making. The reverse reading produces a kind of knowledge that is spatial and fundamentally architecturala form of knowledge that is not contained in written documents, and, most important of all, that highlights departures from the norm and therefore also moments of deviation and innovation. When read across historical timethat is, chronologically forward as well as backwardthe interactive (dialectical) process by which the city is generated over time and through authored urban and architectural projects, becomes clearly legible. This method of reading and analysis brings into sharp focus the role of practice, and of urban architectural knowledge, in the process of generating the city. Transition from Condition to Strategy Generated by modernity, Zagreb was shaped by political transition. Between 1850 and 1991, the city weathered eighteen major political shifts, each accompanied by intense periods of economic instability and almost continuous political realignment and administrative reorganization. How, under such conditions, was it possible for architecture and urban planningdisciplines that are predicated on stability, continuity, and durability, that require substantial capital investment and the ability to take the long viewto operate effectively? How was it possible for the city to modernize,
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industrialize, and grow more than one-hundredfold during that time? Did the permanently transitional environment of modern Zagreb generate new techniques for city making? The answers to these questions, we propose, are embedded in the fabric of the city itself. Close examination of that fabric and its spatial logic, with all its multi-authored and multilayered complexity, reveals the processes by which the condition of transition in Zagreb generated urban architectural strategies for dealing with the continuously unresolved. Those strategies, once implemented, achieve a temporary stability in the production of form that has a logic capable of reproduction, that is open to further innovation, and available to practice. But first we must define our terms. Strategy We define strategy as a highly organized plan of action devised in response to conditions that are unstable or otherwise uncertain, which is both constrained and directed toward the achievement of specific objectives. It is also predicated on contestation, intelligent opposition, and conflict. Strategy must plot a course of action that anticipates a range of possible countermoves. Uncertainty is the fundamental condition of strategy, just as agility is its mode of operation. Carl von Clausewitz, the nineteenth-century Prussian theorist of war, made an important distinction between strategy and tactics. Tactics, in military operations, is an activity concerned with individual acts; it deals with the form of individual engagements. Strategy, by contrast, is concerned with the use and significance of the totality of engagements to achieve the larger objectives of the conflict. Tactics are opportunistic; they exploit opportunities. Strategy is generative; it creates opportunities. Whether or not it is successful in achieving a desired outcome, strategyby imagining, planning, and rationally projecting actions and their consequences onto existing conditionstransforms those conditions into possibilities. It is this projective, creative aspect of strategy that interests us here. In Clausewitzs words, strategy must give an aim to the whole military action that corresponds to the goal of the war. Strategy, then, determines the plans for the individual campaigns, and orders the engagements within them. Because most of these things are based on assumptions that do not always materialize and on a number of other, more specific details that cannot be determined in advance, it follows that strategy must be developed at the battle site itself. In other words, strategy is endlessly malleable, adaptable, and agile. It is also at its most effective when it is formulated on the battlefield, in conditions that Clausewitz describes as friction. We suggest that it is appropriate to adopt the terms of warfare when considering the conditions of Zagrebs
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twentieth-century modernization. Planning in Zagreb was intensely contested at the highest levels and occurred in conditions that can be accurately described as embattled. Regulation plans drawn up at each stage of Zagrebs modern developmentduring the Habsburg Empire, Royal Yugoslavia, and Socialist Yugoslaviawere proposed with the understanding (even expectation) that they would be opposed by the authorities in Vienna, Budapest, or Belgrade. The plans therefore had to be strategic in anticipating and attempting to evade rational opposition. With limited power in relation to those centers, Zagreb had to strategize carefully to achieve its objectives. (...) From Strategy to Practice As we delaminated the historical layers of Zagrebs built fabric, and read them against the regulation plans periodically drawn up by the planning office to direct the citys urban growth, it became clear that the unstable environment of Zagreb made conventional methods of planning and realizing projects impossible for much of the twentieth century. The situation called for more agile and assertive techniques of intervention. It required strategies that did not merely delineate the future development of the urban terrain, but that actually generated the city itself. In short, the situation required strategies that were architectural as well as urban. It required urban architectural projects that engaged the city at the level of the plan and thereby became instrumental, durational, and urban. In this sense, the making of twentieth-century Zagreb was as much an architectural project, as it was an urban project. The architects who built modern Zagreb consistently designed buildings that functioned urbanistically, and transformed the organization and use of space far beyond the immediate context of the buildings themselves. Consistently staging the conditions for future moves, each individual intervention prepared the ground for further interventions. This is a practice based on a concept of the city as an ongoing, open-ended projectan open workin the dialectical sense in which Umberto Eco describes works that combine openness with internal coherence, that are inclusive and in some sense uncontainable, but also composed and integral within themselves. In terms of the city, the open work is a multi-authored project in which each individual intervention is part of a much larger highly strategic and carefully staged plan of action with, often precise, formal objectives. The larger conception of the plan informs each of the smaller authored moves, and the smaller moves impact and modify the larger direction of the plan. As Project Zagreb documents, the challenge of Zagrebs permanently transitional state was engaged by successive generations of architects in Zagreb who developed strategies both for building on specific sites and for generating the
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larger urban conditions that would support and proliferate that construction. Working individually and collectively, with private clients, and the city planning office, they developed strategies for generating the modern city by means of carefully conceived and clearly authored architectural projects. Those projects were not merely tactical; they did not merely exploit opportunities. Instead, comprised of several moves that are contingent and constrained, they created opportunities in circumstances where none had existed. By spontaneously staging the conditions for further actions and strategies, these projects opened the city to innovation and expanded the possibilities for architecture to shape the urban landscape. Practice What are the processes by which architectural strategies evolve into practices? Strategy, as a mode of operation, does not directly translate into praxis. Strategy can be thought but not reified. However, when strategy generates physical form and spacea type of knowledge particular to architecturethat knowledge becomes materially and historically specific. The forms and spaces therefore become open to interpretation, proliferation, and development, and the strategies that generated them become available for application to conditions and contexts that may have little to do with the original context in which the strategy was developed. Through extrapolation (the process by which knowledge produced in a particular context is applied to other contexts) therefore architectural strategies can be said to generate architectural practices. It is clear that we are not dealing here with everyday practices and tactics of resistance, as theorized by Michel de Certeau. Instead we are concerned with the generation of authored form and the production, proliferation, and instrumentation of a form of knowledge particular to architecture. We understand practice here in terms of the sociospatial dialectic described by Henri Lefebvre as the social production of space. Space, in Lefebvres formulation, is neither an object (substance) nor a subject (consciousness), but rather a social realitythat is to say, a set of relations and forms. Space is historically produced and both shapes and is itself shaped by social practice. Spatial structures such as architecture therefore do not merely reflect (or reify) social or political practices. Instead, by shaping the spaces in which social life takes place, they condition those practices. The urban (a condition rather than a thing), according to Lefebvre, is a spatial formation in which the logic of form is associated with the dialectic of contenta condition in which form and content shape and transform each other. The urban, Lefebvre contends, is
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5 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, edited and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, 1984 [1976]), 177178. 6 Ibid., 119.

7 Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. A. Cancogni (Cambridge, MA, 1989), 20.

8 Michel deCerteau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1984). 9 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, 1991), 116.

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therefore a concrete abstraction, associated with practice. By practice, Lefebvre means spatial practice. How does this idea relate to architecture? First, it suggests that architecture is a spatial practice that involves both the generation of authored form and the reception, extrapolation, and interpolation of the operative spatial and formal logic of the intervention into other contexts, both diachronic and synchronic. For example, in the 1930s, Drago Ibler inserted modernist apartment houses in Zagrebs late-nineteenth century Lower Town city blocks in ways that opened the private space of the block to the street, made the interior of the block accessible to circulation and commerce, and spawned a broad range of modernizing strategies for transforming the closed geometry of the city block into a porous open field. In this way, strategies for interpolating modern buildings into the old city fabric generated new practices of organizing and using space in the city. Secondly, this conception of the urban helps us to understand urban architectural practice itself as not only a matter of intervening in the city, but of reading the city in a certain wayas a project in terms of authored interventions and the production and proliferation of architectural knowledge in a specific place over time. (...)
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City as Open Work Transition made it necessary to repeatedly start anew in Zagreb. Each change of government signaled a new beginning in urban policy as well. Often this involved rejection (or at the very least, revision) of previous plans and projects. As a result, architects and planners in Zagreb learned not only to anticipate and adjust to frequent changes but also to instrumentalize change to their own advantage. They developed strategies that engaged the condition of irresolution in which they were forced to operate and shaped it into an open approach to design and to generating the city. We suggest that this approach involves a conception of the city as an open work in Umberto Ecos sense, as not just as a conglomeration of random components ready to emerge from the chaos in which they previously stood and permitted to assume any form whatsoever, but rather as adhering to the internal logic of an integral work. (Significantly, Eco visited Zagreb and closely followed the experiments of artists and architects in the 1960s.) The idea of the city as an open work therefore does not imply either an acceptance of chaos or a celebration of the ad hoc, nor for that matter does it uncritically offer the city up to market forces. Instead it conceives the city as a project that is dynamic and openended, but will always be perceived as a work. We also propose that the concept of the city as project and open work implies the existence of formal aspiration as well as agency and authorship. The case studies presented in
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this volume show that Zagrebs twentieth century evolution was directed by a succession of key actors, many of them architects, who took it upon themselves to advance the urban project of Zagreb. This conception of the city itself as a project is based on the recognition that in order to generate the urban, it is necessary to establish a dialogic relationship between planning and design. The dialogic relationship does not seek equilibrium but instead strives to keep the process of generating the city open to change and the opportunities that irresolution provides. (...) The tool introduced in 2003 to enable urban development in Zagreb is a continuously evolving set of urban rules. These rules conceptualize the urban territory of Zagreb in terms of the formal logic of the existing urban fabric in different parts of the city. They are based on a close reading of that fabric and the logic of its morphology and organization. As form-based rules rather than zoning laws, they allow for development in ways that preserve and proliferate the established order, scale, density, and morphology of the existing fabric. In times of transition, urban rules guard against the vagaries of private property development. What such rules cannot provide, however, is the kind of urban architectural knowledge that is based on practice, the ongoing processes by which the fabric has been generated, and the multiplicity of logics that underlie the forms themselves. In conditions of unplanned urban growth where the built fabric does not conform to a well-defined urban logic, or the intentionality of a plan is absent, the rules can only replicate or valorize existing formal conditions. On the basis of the research presented here we suggest that it is not enough to read the city in terms of the spatial logic of its urban morphology. It has to be read in terms of authored intervention and continuously evolving practices as well. In conditions that preclude traditional methods of planning, practice is both datum and substrate of the accumulated skills, knowledge, and innovations of the generations of architects, planners, investors, city officials and others who over time developed modalities of operating on behalf of the city. (...) Moving back and forth between reading, mapping, and diagramming, the process of investigation parallels that by which the city itself was generated; it is now informing the process by which Zagreb is being planned today. That dialogic process and Project Zagreb itself are presented here in terms of mutually informing historical and design practicesthe city as an open workat once purposeful and coherent, and openended, mutable, and dynamic. Embedded in this notion of practice is perhaps the most important lesson of Project Zagrebthat the most stable and enduring condition of practice may paradoxically be one that anticipates transition and takes advantage of its potentials.
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10 Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis and London, 2003), 118-119. 11 Ibid.

12 City of Zagreb Master Plan 2003: Summary (Zagreb: City Department for City Development Planning and Environment Protection), 17.

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