THE POSTHUMAN CITY : Imminent Urban Commons
All Sessions will take place in Room A421, Yonsei University Engineering Building. Schedule to be confirmed.
Signup link: https://forms.gle/nuDnAr1XsbFTjQLK6
For further questions, comments or assistance please contact TA eric.pettersson@yonsei.ac.kr.
Alejandro Zaera-Polo
Alejandro Zaera-Polo is an architect and co-founder of London/New York based Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Maider Llaguno Architecture (AZPML). He graduated from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid with Honors and obtained an MARCH2 degree from Harvard GSD with Distinction. He worked at OMA in Rotterdam prior to establishing first FOA in 1993, and Alejandro Zaera-Polo architecture in 2011, the vehicles where he has developed a successful international professional practice since.
In parallel to his professional activities, Alejandro Zaera-Polo has developed a substantial role within academia. He was the dean of the school of architecture at Princeton University and was the former Dean of the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. He was a Visiting Professor at Princeton University and the inaugural Norman R. Foster Visiting Professor at Yale. He has published extensively as a theorist in El Croquis, Quaderns, A+U, Arch+, Volume, Log and many other international magazines and is a member of the London School of Economics Urban Age project. He has recently published Sniper’s Log, a compilation of his most relevant writings.
The Posthuman City Lecture Series
This research seminar aims to review a series of emerging urban phenomena which are likely to shape the cities of the near future. Many of these phenomena, which gravitate primarily around questions of ecology and technology, defy the customary human-centered approach to urbanism which has been prevalent since the 18th Century, when the Western world became human-centered. The functional classification of land and space, and the idea of community have formed the vertebral spine of urban discourses and planning policies ever since. The urban planning disciplines are primarily conceived around human functions, despite the fact that the crucial issues they need to address—air pollution, rising water levels, drought, heat island effect, deforestation, biodiversity, food security, pervasive computing, social media, automated work, and inequality, to name a few— are primarily driven by concerns that, for the first time in history, transcend human societies and threaten the very survival of the planet. In the Anthropocene, humans have become capable of modifying natural ecosystems, geological structures, and even the climate. It is increasingly difficult to delimit the natural from the artificial. Moreover, urban growth affects mostly non-Western populations. The pressing ecological concerns and the scale of technological development call for the imminent city to urbanize —that means politicize— both ecology and technology. This seminar aims to review the foundations of urban discourse and its tools and address the development of new urban sensibilities and it is appropriate to students interested in engaging with ecological and technological questions as key concerns for current architecture and urban practices.
Seminar Structure
The seminar will take place daily and comprise ten sessions of 3 hours: nine separate sessions addressing individual subjects of Posthuman Urbanism, air, water, energy, vegetation, communication, sensing, mobility, production and recycling, and a final debate on Friday 26th with all members of the seminar. Within every session, 120min will be dedicated to the introduction of the subject, followed by discussion of the topic and related readings.
Session 01: Ecologies 1: Urban Air, Jan 15th. 10:00–13:00 KST
Since the early 20th century, buildings and cities have developed the ability to delimit, filter, and qualify air. However, as toxic emissions continue to rise each year, these abilities are becoming even more urgent and politically charged. While air is a universally needed resource, it is extremely difficult to quantify, visualize, and model. Historically, this has been an obstacle to creating policies regulating its use. Because of cities population densities, attempts to clean air, channel polluted air away from city streets, prevent air stagnation, and improve airflow in urban corridors are central to preserving urban citizens’ rights to this vital common.
Session 02: Ecologies 2: Urban Water, Jan 16th. 9:00 - 13:00 KST
Of the natural resource commons, none is so intimately tied to urban ecologies as water. Cities developed in the proximity of an adequate water supply, and the first urban policies appeared with respect to the use of water. Cities function as mediators between water-dependent organisms —mostly humans— and hydrological cycles driven by the evaporation, condensation, collection, and water flow. Cities alter radically hydrological cycles and clean water supply is becoming increasingly scarce for larger populations. Rising sea levels and extreme weather are having have a massive impact on urban populations as urban waterfronts and riverfronts, traditionally key territories of urban life, become threatened by climate change. Water retention, collection, and treatment systems are important areas of development for urban infrastructures, likely to change the landscape of future cities.
Session 03: Ecologies 3: Urban Energy, Jan 17th.10:00–13:00 KST
The spatial distribution of energy sources, energy processing, and energy demand are a solid basis upon which different urban systems can be studied, historically or parametrically. Urban energy systems have evolved progressively toward highly concentrated forms, often obtained from fossil fuels, for ease of transportation. The development of fossil fuels as an energy source enabled deterritorialization, as portable forms of energy could sustain large and geographically dispersed industrial metropolises.
The recent development of solar, wind, tidal, and ground-sourced energy to power cities without resorting to fossil fuel combustion will profoundly alter future urban structures. The ubiquitous fossil fuel resources will be phased out in the shift towards a reterritorialization of energy.
Session 04: Ecologies 4: Urban Biomass, Jan 18th. 10:00–13:00 KST
The birth of cities was aligned with the ability to increase the productive capacity of land, in order to feed larger densities of people more reliably. Advanced agricultural techniques, animal labor, machines and synthetic fertilizers have kept evolving the relation between cities and their immediate natural environment. As a percentage of surface area coverage, organic matter affects reflectivity, humidity, thermal mass, heating and cooling cycles, water runoff and heat island effects. Cities depend on the synthesis and resilience of life
—human and otherwise. Biotechnologies have developed increasingly effective urban applications, such as urban farming, hydroponics and algae culture with the ability to produce food, biofuels, and urban lighting. Urban land cannot be determined exclusively by functional assignments with respect to human behaviors: its urban capacities will crucially depend also on topography, soil composition, climate, and the bioactive layer of the soil.
Session 05: Technologies 1: Urban Sensing, Jan 19th. 10:00–13:00 KST
Weathervanes and watchtowers, common in traditional urban landscapes, provided citizens with weather forecasting and improved the navigation of increasingly complex urban spaces. Traffic wardens, firefighters, and other watchtower lookouts shared their advantaged sensibility with citizens in order to regulate urban processes. Weather patterns, security systems, and temporal rhythms have historically structured urban communities.
These arcane sensing technologies have since become increasingly artificial, pervasive, and distributed. The proliferation of sensors in urban environments is one of the most defining features of near future urban milieus: cities are experienced and sensed, but crucially, cities become sentient. When these sensors are interconnected they become a collective sensorium, a cyber-physical system. Cities may have to be designed not only according to a human perspective, but through necessary interactions with this nascent artificial sensibility.
Session 06: Technologies 2: Urban Communications, Jan 22nd. 10:00–13:00 KST
While cities have always been characterized by dense communication networks––the postal service, the telegraph, the telephone––current technologies have intensified this drastically, through the combination of pervasive computing and wireless communications. In combination, the World Wide Web and wireless technologies have freed information entirely from physical attachments. The connection of mobile devices to global positioning systems (GPS) has allowed unprecedented opportunity to navigate urban space and engage with fellow citizens, creating entirely new urban geographies in the process.
Some of the most transformative processes triggered by new communication technologies relate to the possibility of sharing services and goods in time, including short-term residential rentals, bicycle and car- share schemes, coworking spaces, and other initiatives based on shared economy. If today’s city is primarily regulated by functional determinations and private property laws, the city of the near future may be shaped by shared ownership. The urbanization of these technologies will open new potentials for architecture to engage with emerging forms of urban culture.
Session 07: Technologies 3: Urban Mobility, Jan 23rd. 10:00–13:00 KST
Technology has expanded the natural capacities of the human body. The origin of cities is inextricably linked to the development of transport systems which enabled the supplies needed to sustain dense settlements. The radical increase in urban density caused by industrialization also multiplied the demand for mobility.
The development of urban transit systems was a crucial tool of urban development in the early 20the century, as cities embraced industrialization as the fundamental mode of economic integration. In the post WWII period, the automobile transformed cities beyond recognition. Today, transportation is one of the most energy intensive activities in the city, and currently accounts for a large percentage of overall carbon emissions and pollution.
In response to these new ecological concerns, unipersonal electromobility, sharing systems and self-driving vehicles and automated logistics are being implemented and are likely to alter urban traffic patterns.
Session 08: Technologies 4: Urban Production, Jan 24th. 10:00–13:00 KST
If the late capitalist city is characterized by the exile of production from the urban core, and the securitization of real estate markets, there are also new technologies for digital fabrication that have since relocated some high- value fabrication activities back to the urban core. The potential impact of the return of digitally enhanced, automatized production to the city indexes the emergence of new urban concerns: the distribution of work and benefits and the re-localization of the production infrastructures within the urban fabric will require new governance protocols for the emerging urban Homo faber. After decades of service-driven urban economies and real estate speculation, emerging fabrication technologies may be able to effectively reindustrialize cities. The so- called Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is enacted by a range of new technologies that fuse the physical, digital, and biological worlds, with an impact on all disciplines, economies, and industries, creating its own urban cultures: makers practice a technology-based extension of DIY activities that intersect with hacking actions remains committed to the physical world, operating according to specific moral principles, and producing distinctive forms of inhabiting and occupying urban space.
Session 09: Technologies 5: Urban Recycling, Jan 25th. 10:00–13:00 KST
The growing scale of urban populations collection has turned disposal, sorting, and recycling of urban waste and biosolids a problem with geopolitical dimensions, with regional and even transcontinental systems set out for treating refuse. The technical cultural dimensions of recycling protocols is substantial and directly impacts citizens and their perceptions of the city. Installing Japanese-style multiple track recycling protocols in contemporary cities appears to be an insurmountable cultural problem, and yet, robotic sorting of solid waste is a real alternative to land-grabbing and polluting landfills.
Human waste is also a subject of increasing attention. A more sophisticated approach to its recycling could have an enormous ecological impact by reducing global dependence on synthetic fertilizers. Waste composting for urban farms on roof gardens, private courtyards, and bioswales appear as the natural destination of human waste on a local, granular urban scale. As Pierre Belanger has stated, “waste is the 21st-century food.”
Session 10: Final Discussion, Jan 26th. 10:00–13:00 KST
The final seminar will addressing all the previous individual subjects such as Posthuman Urbanism, air, water, energy, vegetation, communication, sensing, mobility, production and recycling, and have final debate on Friday 26th with all members of the seminar.
