Due to poor health, the famous sociologist Richard Sennett was unable to attend the Mosurbanforum, and instead of his interview with political scientist Yekaterina Shulman, their solo performances on the theme of the city took place in the Zaryadye Concert Hall. Sennett lectured on Skype, and Ekaterina Shulman personally. Here is a digest of both.
Richard Sennett
Richard Sennett is a renowned sociologist and urbanist. He is known to the Russian reader for his books translated into Russian on the sociology of the city "The Fall of a Public Man", "Corrosion of Character", "Flesh and Stone: Body and City in Western Civilization." At FUF-2019, he presented his new book “Building and Dwelling. Ethics for the City”.
Richard Sennett began his speech with the fact that the city as a whole consists of two concepts: ville is the city itself as a collection of buildings, cite is how people use the space around buildings. There is a certain gap between the building and the residence. Is it ethical to build a commune behind a fence? “I think not,” said the sociologist. - You should not avoid people who are not like you. Ethical action - the destruction of the commune "(the commune in the book" Flesh and Stone "- a medieval urban area, usually associated with one or another corporation, often walled and impenetrable to other communes. In this case Sennett means the gettization of the modern city by economic means - L. K.).
The lecture consisted of three parts: "Open and closed city", "Relations of form and function", "Climate change".
1. "A closed system is multiplication, an open system is synergy"
People want to live in comfortable conditions and structures, but sometimes this is not fair to others. Let's try to answer this ethical question with the help of the concepts of open and closed city, - suggested Richard Sennett. - I am in favor of open cities. Open cities are those that were in the past, closed cities are those that we have now. An open city is characterized by a high quality of life, but at the same time the risk of uncertainty. For ten years I taught urban studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). There I observed specialists from Microsoft. Typically, Mycrofosft operates in closed systems, but these people at MIT wanted to think outside the box. They came up with the idea of an open experiment where you don't know what you will get as a result. It seems these people never slept. We must apply this open experiment method to cities. My book is about this. The closed city is added. You take a building, multiply it by ten, and supposedly develop the city. This is what they did in the USSR, this is what Le Corbusier did. You work like a machine. Closed systems are multiplication. An open system is synergy when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Unfortunately, we do not use this principle in the city. We need synergy, not replication.
2. We must break the link "form - function"
The second thing I want to talk about is the relationship of form and function. Let's take office buildings. People buy them for certain characteristics. But the shape of office buildings is often not adaptive. Or another example: in China in the 1990s, there was a policy of "One family - one child." Now the population is aging, so two or three children in a family are desirable. But previously built houses have a rigid structure. It is cheaper to demolish them and build new ones than to renovate them. And if there is no such rigid connection between form and function, then life can change painlessly. In the desert, in the city of Masdar, roads were built for electric vehicles with large batteries, but last year they learned how to make small cars. The closed system "form - function" can become obsolete. Obsolescence must be taken into account in design. A deterministic inflexible environment leads to poor quality of life and increased anxiety. A high quality environment is flexible.
Cities with an open urban environment are more porous in terms of interconnection between parts. In closed cities, boundaries are very tight, and our task is to ensure porosity. For example, in New York, there is a street in Westside, on one side of which Latin American quarters and Harlem begin, on the other a quite prosperous area, and next to it is the generally rich Upper Eastside. Once I made a project for a market in the center of one of the districts, but that was a mistake. It was necessary to place it on the border of two districts. We also need to be smart about road planning to increase the porosity of cities.
3. "You won't bury your head in the sand like Trump."
Now at the UN I am working on climate change. All cities are different and react differently to climate change. For example, in New York it is necessary to build fortifications to protect from bad weather, from the ocean. And in Moscow, the aquifers are depleted, and it will be necessary to transport water to Moscow for 500 km. It wouldn't work for another country, but in Russia it is possible. In China, they will use less cars, and in Moscow they will start heating houses with heat pumps. (Addressing the viewers of the Mosurbanforum - L. K.). You are a young audience, so you will learn to get by with less, you will not despise energy savings and hide your head in the sand, like Trump.
Summing up, Richard Sennett said: “I tried to describe the relationship between buildings and places. People live the way they shouldn't. In closed cities, form is associated with function. In open cities, the link between form and function is less rigid. An example of flexibility is the three-quarter buildings proposed by the architect Alejandro Aravena. We must increase the porosity of cities, open the borders within the city, as we opened the borders of states within Europe. We have to save energy, for example, working at night, many people even like it. This is how we will approach climate change responsibly.”
Ekaterina Shulman
“Closed systems are a recipe for evil. What does it mean to be open? "
The political scientist began her speech by referring to a previous speaker. The main thoughts of Sennett, Shulman summed up, are the opposition ville / cite, the less rigid connection between function and form, and climatic changes.
“Sennett encourages us to step out of our comfort zone and start saving energy. Russian people are hardly ready for this. He does not want to leave the comfort zone, because he thinks that he has not yet got into it. In any case, closed systems are a recipe for evil. This is a prison, an army, a monastery, a special service, a hostel in a private school for gifted children.
“What does it mean to be open? It means moving freely, seeing others and being visible. Our time is fast. The main characteristic of resource flows is that they are liquid and liquid. There are four types of resources: people, money, goods, information. People and goods are moving fast. Our time differs from the past in the ease of movement of people, the ease of movement of financial means, information and mass culture. Previously, poor people almost could not move at all, since it was expensive (remember the literature: the absence of a carriage, their own departure - it was a drama). Public transport appeared only in the middle to the end of the 19th century and greatly simplified matters. The mass tramway in 1920s Moscow changed life. This is how Ekaterina Shulman answered the question about openness.
Women after forty-five kind of dissolve
She further analyzed the flow of people in Moscow. “According to the data of telephone operators, 25 million people move within Moscow per day. Many of them make unnecessary movements through the center. But at the same time, there is an opposite tendency: people begin to move less. An interesting fact: after forty-five women seem to dissolve for trade, stop consuming goods. Two-thirds of the population does not go anywhere or use anything. In principle, it is good when people do not travel, which means that they can get all the services within the area. Again, the delivery and online trading system works for immobility."
We assume that cars are evil: they continue to be the main source of air pollution. We live in a country where the consumption of cars is high and the common good - clean air - is not available. This happens in all countries of the second world, where there is no clean air and good water, although you can buy everything. The higher the pedestrianization rate, the lower the number of accidents. There are more road accidents in Moscow than in European cities. Only Rome is an exception, it can be compared with Moscow in terms of the number of incidents on the road. Therefore, the authorities are trying to restrict motorists, owning a car is expensive and inconvenient. Therefore, it is encouraged that the person sit still.
The employment system has changed. Not all people go from the outskirts to the center to work, many work remotely. But those who do not leave the area not only spend the night in it, they want a park, a cafe, listen to lectures, so it is necessary to improve the quality of the environment. If this trend is brought to the horizon, as the authors of the sci-fi cartoon "WALL-E" do, then a picture appears: people on carts, they cannot move independently and only drink drinks through straws.
A tall candle in the void is the worst type of building, it is a portal to hell
“What are the consequences awaiting us? The first is de-urbanization. Judging by the data of telephone operators, people leave Moscow for the Moscow region and for other cities, more often to the south. They don't necessarily become reclusive - hikikomori who don't want to see anyone, shoving pizza under the door. They just leave. But this will not be a mass practice. In the 21st century, only the Internet speed is growing rapidly, while viscosity is observed in other processes. In the twentieth century, transformations were much faster and more terrible. If you cannot make a war and quickly cut out a certain stratum, perhaps that is good,”the political scientist said.
“Simultaneously with leaving Moscow, there is an opposite tendency. People continue to move from the countryside to the cities: to Moscow, Petersburg, Krasnodar. The question is, is it necessary to increase the density of Moscow? Compared to India, everything is not so scary here. This flow cannot be stopped artificially in a democratic state. The main thing in cities is to avoid the ghettoization of poor areas. A tall candle in the void is the worst type of building, it is a portal to hell. Dense high-rise buildings are even better than a lonely tower. These empty courtyards, terrible entrances, lack of infrastructure - this is a closed system. There is nothing to say about the fire hazard of the skyscraper. God forbid to build new districts in this way”, - Ekaterina Shulman warned.