Ontwerp Contrast - jelkkruk.com

Speed in Cities, cities in speed

on the relationship between mass and individuality in cities

We are about to present you our project for this weekend, which deals with the interaction between the mass and the individual. Our theme was SPEED IN DESIGN. The subject we were dealing with, was speed in cities. Dealing with this speed, there are a few possibilities. If you can not control it, either you get run over, either you have to ignore it and thereby not benefit from it. But if you can control speed you can benefit from it. Than you can ride it.

Cities provide you with the potential to live as efficient or at least as fast as possible. This is because cities are steadily expanding and becoming denser, bringing along an innumerable and continually increasing amount of options to choose from in a decreasing period of time. We noticed that to keep up with this development, the "living speed" continually has to be increased and as a result might get more superficial. Since every very moment the amount of options increases, the speed of choosing has to be increased as well. A question we could ask is "should we base our city on competition?" We will not try to answer that question, but we noticed that the competition-based city exists and considered it related to the principle of "the survival of the fittest" on which life in general is based.

This weekend we tried to produce a model reflecting the elemental principles of a city. The main reason to live in cities appears to be the big amount of possibilities, what one is free to choose from, no matter they damage or heal us and no matter they are good or bad. In that way the characteristic of a city is freedom. This freedom exists by favor of an incredible amount of contingent choices. As a result a city necessitates tolerance, since people will try to fulfill their personal wishes independent from the needs and desires of others. This again unties the individual from his social environment and causes anonymity, forcing the "individual" to excel more to affect the effect (attention) he longs for. So with the increasing speed we get an endless number of options, blurring out our identity. By this we can find ourselves lost in a world of unlimited choices.

Having reached this point you can wonder what is the relationship between mass and identity, and maybe find out it is the same. Without a mass one can not have an identity, since the personal combination forming your "individual identity" evokes images by referring to the memories of the spectator, based on his personal experiences in history. This means that the identity of an individual is based on identities of others, who can be seen as "the mass". If there is no mass you can not be equal or similar but neither you can be different, eliminating the structural basis of an identity.

Since every person has walked a different path in life, there is no one having the same memories (references) as another, causing everyone experiencing the "identity" of someone in a different way. The fact that your identity depends on the identity and the experiences of others, brings about the misunderstanding of individuals who are really different. It also implies that the identity you have never is experienced the same, making you impersonal and thereby (a part of the) mass.

With this in mind we can observe how we find our place in society and we can notice that by finding our place we set the limits of our personal space, and thereby we are captured. We are captured by our own personal space. In other words: we choose our freedom, we choose our identity. Hereby the identity of a single person depends on the strength of the individual.

The other side of this anarchistic medal is very pragmatic and might seem to be contradictory. Thefulfillment of our wishes makes us as individuals long for speed. In order to create the immense amount of possibilities (freedom) every single person depends on the other. What the first one produces is used by the second. Or maybe we should turn it the other way around: what is benefited from by the first, should be created by the other. The individual needs the mass and the mass needs the individual. This implies that freedom must be very well organized to operate thoroughly.

To make wishes come true we need to connect needs to fulfillments and fulfillments to needs. In order to interconnect needs to fulfillments we need infrastructure. People need to be transported; goods need to be transported. To keep up with the acceleration of speed in cities infrastructure must be optimally modified, to get the world within our reach. For the optimal relationship of speed and fulfillment of personal needs we have to find a balance between (personal) experience (how does it feel) and efficiency (how long does it take).

Our model consists of both an anarchistic part and a controlled part. The "chaotic" or anarchistic part represents freedom and is based on individuality, while the controlled part is designed for a mass orientated society. If the anarchistic component dominates, the city will not function. If we try to control the city the freedom disappears and terminates the citiy's reason of existence, as a result of the bennefits of freely initiated processes.

So we find a city as an outweighed balance between freedom and control. In order to organize the freedom a well operating machinery is necessary. This machinery should enable to increase the speed of choice, to increase the speed of living. The effect of speed allows one to increase the number of personal choices one can make in a given period of time, but on the other hand it decreases one's personal space. We can see the sunglasses in this collage as a filter. This filter protects us from the huge amount of possibilities we are not able to oversee, by simply blocking a specific range of possibilities to reach us. In a certain way this filter is very strong related to our personality. The question whether the personality forms the filter or the filter forms the personality will not be discussed here. However the sunglasses in this collage represent the border of your personal space. We wonder if we could do without this filter, or if this filter enables us to live.

The question is "if we achieve better infrastructure, does rationality increases while we get less emotional?" And with this question we leave the architect and the planner with infrastructure as the most important tool for the heavy task to organize freedom.