8 Books, movies, articles

1) "The Forbidden Fruits of Urban Exploration",
an article by Stipo Consult
On their web site here
As a PDF here


My personal reason to look at this:
A consultant firm in Holland boldly proposing to move play out of playgrounds. Children should not need a staged experience of life, instead the challenge is to make cities safe enough for them to play in the real environment. By definition children and teen's view point is related to situationist and flaneurist view of the city because of their drive to explore without and end goal.
This is valuable as it lets young people interpret the world more freely. This is important for everybody.

Quotes:
- "Stipo (urban strategy advisors) created a temporary team especially for Child Friendly Cities, consisting of urban planners, designers, education designers and public space artists"
p.1, The Forbidden Fruits of Urban Exploration

- "Our vision, combined with the basic trends require a new and rich approach. An approach away from the usual short term solutions. Short term solutions like creating places to hang out for youngsters on the edge of the living zone, where they don't bother us - but where youth mostly don't want to be (in Dutch "hangplekdenken"). And short term solutions like the formal mini-playgrounds for smaller children (in Dutch "wipkipdenken"). "
p 6, ibid

images by Helen Lewitt.





2) The Playgrounds and the City, Aldo van Eyck



The design of his playgrounds is bare and minimal. They have no representation but devices to explore spatial relationships. No narrative is put into the children play, no super heroes, no references to iconic figures or places.


Is it too intellectual? They look like Robert Morris' sculptures:



3) "City: Rediscovering the Center"
William H. Whyte

My Reasons to like it:
A great study of social behavior in urban spaces, this book is the collection of Whyte's research. Main point is participation: streets are spaces where interactions not staged by a central authority happen. The ability of individuals to interpret or re-purpose spaces is what makes environments to be places.
Key term: Chance Encounters

William H. Whyte - Social Life of Small Urban Places from Robin van Emden on Vimeo.

Quotes:
- "Now coming of age is a whole new generation of planners and architects for whom the formative experience of a center was the atrium of a suburban shopping mall. Some cities have already been recast in this image and more a following suit."
p.7 Whyte, William H., City: Rediscovering the Center, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA 2009

- "Suburban shopping malls are not the new town centers. They lack or forbid many of the activities of a center: soapboxers, controversy, passing of leaflets impromptu entertainment, happenings, or eccentric behavior of any kind including persistent non buying."
p. 208 ibid


4) "Dream Worlds: Architecture and Entertainment"
Oliver Herwig (text) and Florian Holzherr (photography)


Reasons to like it: More on the positive side, the book describes without judging. It is a study of synthetic spaces, with great photographs made for the book. These are heavily controlled spaces converting free time into a prefabricated consumable product.

Quotes:
"Disneyland is not profitable because of constant inovation, but on the contrary , because it gives consumers what they already know. Again and again, guaranteed: fast food dreams in fantasy worlds and in architectural settings palatable for the masses. "
p. 24 Herwig, Oliver and Holzherr, Florian, Dream Worlds: Architecture and Entertainment, Prestel Verlag, Munich, Berlin, London, New York, 2006

"The demand for artificial paradises is increasing... that the energy that goes into work is transferred from production to reproduction, creating an icon of the new leisure and society: a gleaming bubble in the middle of nowhere. "
p. 139 ibid


5) "The Perfect City" by Bob Thall



Reasons to like it:
Great architecture photography and even more helpful righting. While I enjoyed the New Jersey's photographs or George Tice, I did not find a solid statement in his book. While Thall's statement remind me of my own. He also looks at structures as manifestation of social phenomena.

Quotes:

- "The photographs in this book provide only modest insight into the complicated forces that shape the physical landscape of Chicago or any city... These forces operate too far beneath the surface for a topographical photograph to describe them. But the medium of photography is nonetheless very good at capturing and structuring visual epiphanies and a sense of place."
p, 107 Thall, Bob, The Perfect City, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1994

- "Those children of the 1950's are parents now. And when they think of travel that broadens of expanding their children's horizons of all the cliches parents reconstitute from their own past, the city is central, one of the icons. There is the West. There is the seashore. There is the farm. There is the forest. And there is the city."
p. 7 ibid, essay Peter Bacon Hales, The Museum of the City

6) Calamari Union (1985)
by Aki Kaurismaki





Why I like it:
The city is a stage. A group of thugs named Frank break into restaurants and bars but not to steal instead to serve each other. They live on the street and wander aimlessly, true situationists reacting to the everydayness in absurd manner. Their actual journey is from the working class part of Helsinki to Eira, the affluent part of town but they never make it there.

7) The Red Swing Project

Red Swing Project Documentary from erin harris on Vimeo.

An experiment into altering spaces through introducing 1 new element - a play device. This was carried out in different cities around the world.

8) Candy Chang - Before I Die project

Can be seen here on her web site

Another example of intervention within a space. A vacant house can be worked instead of only photographed.