1. ANÁLISIS DEL MERCADO
1.7 Análisis de clientes y competencia
1.7.4 Competencia
1.7.4.2 Pruebas de desempeño
Although assemblage theory (or its predecessors) was never explicitly mentioned, the way the International Building Exhibition (IBA) Emscherpark (Ruhrgebiet, Germany, 1989-1999) was set up, is a compelling example of what this framework can accomplish in the conversion of post-industrial cities and regions. The IBA Emscherpark was a10-year, 4 billion DM (German marks) project for "a regional policy and planning programme for sustainable ecological, economic and aesthetic renewal for an industrial region made up of over 30 cities that had been exploited to the maximum."43 The
IBA employed a distinct planning process: it provided an "open forum", combining a top-down regional planning approach with bottom-up local initiatives, promoting public-private partnerships,
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and decentralizing planning and design decisions, employing concepts of the post-fordist city.44 The
author attributes its strength and success in identifying a direction for and developing consensus on the overall goal of sustainable ecological, economic and aesthetic renewal, and simultaneously creating a process that facilitated the “assemblage” of many different, conflicting and complimentary projects, ideas, values and actors. A key component was the radical inclusiveness of the process and openness of the organization – and the emphasis on ongoing conversations and discourse over determinate decisions, aided by the 10-year timeframe. The IBA facilitated an understanding of the metabolic processes and geographic conditions in the sense of Ibanez and Katsikis,45including a much
improved understanding of the different scales and roles of different locations. The resultant concrete concept of the “Emscherpark Region” very much looks at the area/region as a metabolic system, a network, in terms of layered and interconnected material, social, economic and ecological processes over time and scales. Made up of 30 cities from 600.000 plus to less than 30.000 residents, the IBA allowed every single location to identify their roles within the larger metabolic systems. The assemblage approach then created a fluid mosaic of ongoing conversations, decisions and measures that were then evaluated, amended, intensified, counteracted etc., providing a forum to critically understand, discuss and implement changes. While the IBA ended officially in 1999, with many successful individual projects, ranging from adaptive reuse to economic and research incubator to ecological restoration to the development of new performative hybrid ecologies, and a contribution to the overall economic, ecological, social and cultural conversion of the region that was overall considered successful, it is noteworthy that some of the processes modeled by the assemblage approach and the IBA and continue beyond its life.
CONCLUSION
Of critical importance is that assemblage does not rely on resolving differences and unevenness (although it also does not exclude a resolution) – it is able to continuously and critically interact with the whole range of actors, networks, materialities and spatialities, processes and values. As such, it may provide an explanatory and enabling process model to reconceptualize city, urbanity and urban space in new ways that empower and activate established, alternative, subaltern, hegemonial and marginalized, visible and less visible actors. Assemblage with its engagement of both the social and the spatio-material (and their relationships) may hold a key to better and more productively understand and act across these domains of human culture to facilitate more socially and environmentally just cities. The efficacy of this key may very well lie in expanding and extending the idea of “being in process with one’s environment”46 as an experiential, social, critical and political
“practice of everyday life”47 that subverts and reimagines the social orders and cultural meanings
inscribed into urban space.48
The assemblage approach suggested here counters the post-political erosion of the urban (public) sphere associated with austerity and resilient neoliberal governmentality49, and counters the
accumulation of capital with an accumulation of the commons,50 suggesting the transformative
potential of the urban field itself. It may well provide the framework that allows to operationalize and implement the findings and conclusions coming out of the theories of city and urbanity as “cyborg” or “hybrid” ecologies and “metabolism”, and may hold the key to empower a wide range of actors to re- imagine and remake post-industrial cities into more socially and environmentally just51 and liveable
places.
REFERENCES
1William Mitchell, City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1996); William
Mitchell, E-Topia (Cambridge MA:The MIT Press,1999) and William Mitchell, ME++.( The Cyborg Self and the Networked City (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2003).
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2 Chris Reed and Nina Marie Lister, Projective Ecologies (ACTAR, Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2014) and Erle Ellis, “Ecologies of the Anthropocene: Global Upscaling of Social-Ecological Infrastructures”. in. New Geographies 6: Grounding Metabolism, ed. Daniel Ibanez and Nikos Katsikis..(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 20-27.
3 Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge. 1991). 4 Eric Swyngedouw, “Circulations and metabolisms: (Hybrid) natures and (cyborg) Cities”,.Science as culture 15 (2006), 2: 105–121 and Eric Swyngedouw and Maria Kaika. “Cities, nature and the urban imaginary,”
Architectural Design. Special Issue: Scarcity: Architecture in an Age of Depleting Resources. 82 (2012), 4: 22– 27.
5 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005); Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet. Dialogues II (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
6 Jason Moore, “Toward a Singular Metabolism: Epistemic Rifts and Environment-Making in the Capitalist World- Ecology”. in New Geographies 6: Grounding Metabolism, ed.Daniel Ibanez and Nikos Katsikis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 10-19; Derek Sayer, The Violence of Abstraction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987). 7 Chris Reed and Nina Marie Lister, Projective Ecologies (ACTAR, Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2014) and Erle Ellis, “Ecologies of the Anthropocene: Global Upscaling of Social-Ecological Infrastructures”. in. New Geographies 6: Grounding Metabolism, ed. Daniel Ibanez and Nikos Katsikis. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 20-27.
8 Eric Swyngedouw, “Circulations and metabolisms: (Hybrid) natures and (cyborg) Cities”,.Science as culture 15 (2006), 2: 105–121 and Nick Heynen, Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw (eds), In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Metabolism of Urban Environments (London: Routledge, 2006).
9 John Bellamy Foster, “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift”, American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 2 (1999): 367 and John Bellamy Foster, “The Metabolism of Nature and Society” in Marx’s Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000).
10 Jason Moore, “Toward a Singular Metabolism: Epistemic Rifts and Environment-Making in the Capitalist World-Ecology”. in New Geographies 6: Grounding Metabolism, ed.Daniel Ibanez and Nikos Katsikis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 10-19
11 Timothy W Luke, “Urbanism as Cyberorganicity” in New Geographies 6: Grounding Metabolism, ed. Daniel Ibanez and Nikos Katsikis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 38-51.
12 Jason Moore, “Toward a Singular Metabolism: Epistemic Rifts and Environment-Making in the Capitalist World-Ecology”. in New Geographies 6: Grounding Metabolism, ed.Daniel Ibanez and Nikos Katsikis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 12.
13 Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Vintage, 1973).
14 Jason Moore, “Toward a Singular Metabolism: Epistemic Rifts and Environment-Making in the Capitalist World-Ecology”. in New Geographies 6: Grounding Metabolism, ed.Daniel Ibanez and Nikos Katsikis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 12.
15 ibid., 12
16 David Harvey, Social justice and the city (London: Edward Arnold, 1973).
17Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984). 18 Raymond Williams, The country and the city (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).
19 Jason Moore, “Toward a Singular Metabolism”, 15 20 ibid., 15
21 ibid., 17
22 ibid, 16 and Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges, ”Feminist Studies 14 (1998), 3: 575-599.
23 Daniel Ibanez and Nikos Katsikis. eds. New Geographies 6: Grounding Metabolism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 3.
24 ibid., 3 25 ibid. 26 ibid. 27 ibid., 6
28 see in particular Nick Heynen, Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw, eds. In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Metabolism of Urban Environments (London: Routledge, 2006).
29 Daniel Ibanez and Nikos Katsikis. eds. New Geographies 6: Grounding Metabolism , 5. 30 ibid., 6
31 ibid., 8 32 ibid., 8
33 Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities, and the Urban Condition (London and New York: Routledge, 2001).
34 Daniel Ibanez and Nikos Katsikis. eds. New Geographies 6: Grounding Metabolism, 6 35 ibid., 8.
36 For an overview see in particular Charles Waldheim, ed. The Landscape Urbanism Reader (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006) and James Corner,“Terra Fluxus” in The Landscape Urbanism Reader, ed. Charles Waldheim (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006).
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37 Mohsen Mostafavi, “Why Ecological Urbanism? Why Now?” In Mohsen Mostafavi and Garett Doherty, eds. Ecological Urbanism (Cambridge: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Lars Müller Publishers, 2010). 38 see e.g. Tom Slater, ”The Resilience of Neoliberal Urbanism”, accessed 3 February 2014.,
http://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/tom-slater/resilience-of-neoliberal-urbanism ; Joern Langhorst, "Re- Presenting Transgressive Ecologies: Post-Industrial Sites as Contested Terrains". Local Environment- The International Journal on Justice and Sustainability, special issue "Urban Post-Industrial Greenspace". Vol. 19, 9- 10, October-November 2014, 1110-1133; Joern Langhorst, “Beyond Urbanisms: Re-Making the Contemporary and Future City“, (paper presented at the annual conference oft he Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (CELA), Baltimore, MD, March 2014).
39Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
40 Colin McFarlane, “Assemblage and critical urbanism” City, 15, no.2 (2011): 221. 41 ibid., 221
42 ibid., 224
43Udo Weilacher, Syntax of Landscape: The Landscape Architecture of Peter Latz and Partners (Basel: Birkhauser, 2008), 104-05.
44 See Patrik Schuhmacher and Christian Rogner, “After Ford”, in Stalking Detroit ed. G. Daskalakis, Charles Waldheim and James Young, (Barcelona: Actar, 2001).
45 Daniel Ibanez and Nikos Katsikis. eds. New Geographies 6: Grounding Metabolism
46Arnold Berleant, The Aesthetics Of Environment (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press,1992).
47Michel DeCerteau, “Walking In The City.” in The Practice Of Everyday Life, ed. Michel DeCerteau (Berkeley:
University of California, 1984), 91-110.
48 See Henri Lefebvre, “Right to the city.” In Henri Lefebvre: Writings on cities ed. E. Kofman and E. Lebas (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996), 63–177; Jean Baudrillard, Simulacres et simulation (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1981); Edward Casey, The fate of place: A philosophical history (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) and Guy Debord, La societe du spectacle (Paris: Editions Buchet-Chastel, 1967).
49 See Tom Slater, ”The Resilience of Neoliberal Urbanism”
50 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 283. 51 See Donald Mitchell, The right to the city: Social justice and the fight for public space (New York: Guilford Press, 2003) and Japhy Wilson and Eric Swyngedouw, ed. The Post-Political and Its Discontents. Spaces of Depoliticisation, Spectres of Radical Politics ( Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).
CONFERENCE: Digital-Cultural Ecology and the Medium-Sized City
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