Jens

Jens has worked with methods to free the possibilities of the city for many years. He is co-founder of Supertanker and the latest initiative is CiTyBee that we prototyped in 2012 in Hedehusene. The result here is several new local initiatives or offshoots, as we like to call it. He is a trained as an architect, but has also worked with visual arts and theater.

He’s very fond of “the local” as the starting point to discuss the city’s dynamics in different contexts. If he was not in Hedehusene in 2012, he was in Oslo, Helsinki, Vienna, Venice or Paris to present CiTyBee and discuss the possibilities of the city. Read more on the personal blog: Urbanizit

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Oslo Presentation

A blog – urbanizit.wordpress.com – went live in 2011 with stories in and about the city. Many of these stories was presented in Oslo in november 2011 and discussed in a masterclass under the theme “Activism in Architecture” along with Lisa Fior from MUF

(This presentation is with notes and maybe more interesting than the others…)

Urbane Brakzoner og Trøffelsvin

This Report from 2006 – in Danish – describes some of our earlier inspirations in Supertanker. Some became part of our network (Citymine(d)) others didnt live up to the expectations (Vauban). The title means: Urban Brackish Zones and Truffle Pigs.

Spatial Agency – Other Ways of Doing Architecture

Spatial Agency – Other Ways of Doing Architecture is the book based on the network of the same name. Supertankers contribution to the network was chosen to be part of the book.

Hovedgaden 1 & 2

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Urban Mapping in Hedehusene

This report – in Danish – was done after the mapping we did in Hedehusene spring and early summer 2012. It is a rather thorough report and next time we will publish shorter Zines that are easier to produce and distribute. The report is good if you want to get to know the small town of Hedehusene.

Phase 3: Offshoots

In the third phase we facilitated concrete actions based on the new localised ideas and networks. In this case the idea was to make an incubator for local projects in the empty train station. One of our actions was to design and build a module for the old train station that had a number functions.

A bench

A table

A stage

Our idea was that the flexibility of this design makes it less finished and more open for new ideas and discussions.

We did some practical things that made the Station function better like building a common storage

Some local musicians passed by and noticed the bad acoustics in the biggest room in the station – it used to be the waiting area. We made a large acoustic curtain that improved the discussion “climate” in the building.

We tried out a number of ways to use the building with local people; a cinema evening

Eating together

DJ Dr Jazz pLayed some of his records. This was also a test of the new acoustic curtain to see if it improved the possibility to play music there. It did.

Finally we organised a number of public meetings that discussed the use of the building so far.

As a result of the meeting and the prototyping before that, the building is slowly coming alive with a formal association, a local theatre group setting up their plays and more music arrangements.See all the photos here

In the third phase we also worked with the langauge that is used to talk about the local community. In our case we discovered the word offshoots which was used to describe a number of actions in the community like:

The many additions to the self build houses or how you move into an existing old factory building.

A new curated walk was organised to discuss the offshoots in the community and formalising the use of that word. We also choose to use the word offshoots to describe the third phase in the CiTyBee process:

Concrete spatial actions: either building and taking space in a visual and functional way but also changing the way we talk about space. Offshoots are ongoing changes to what is already there. Always leaving little seeds of imperfection that makes it open to new stories, discussions and offshoots.

Phase 2: Dialogue

The second phase starts with a public meeting where the map shows often conflicting interests or different views on the same place. This is our way of making the dialogue more constructive – to make people know about other peoples views and disagreeing in a civilised way.

We work out the important issues of the community and start seeing some patterns of possibilities. The dialogue and further stories are also taken to the streets in curated walks. People are free to join in and it usually leads to new stories.

A second public meeting is set in a place central to the local community – here it is a garden that used to belong to a old factory. We opened the garden for experiments before the meeting – inviting people to come with their ideas. Being, building and discussing it in the actual space makes the discussion about space more concrete.

For the actual meeting people would discuss new ideas and form networks around these – Or just build something themselves – for themselves.

Out of this second public meeting evolves a number of new localised networks and ideas.

Phase 1: Stories

In the first phase we get around town with our Street Kitchen so we can offer a drink or a bite – thats always a good way to make people stop and talk.

We write keywords on temporary signs or Street whiteboards and start to make the discussion about space more visible and part of space.

If there is a market or a public event we set up the street kitchen along with a map of the city. This usually makes people talk about memories, local conflicts and favorite places.

We print out stickers with keywords and stick them on the map. This documents the previous stories and encourages people to comment on these.

Urban Mapping

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Urban Mapping is a result of trying to imagine an ideal way of taking mapping to a more active and catalysing level. In many ways it is no longer possible just to talk about mapping since the mapping part is just one of several elements. Below is a number of inspirations in the “food chain of ideas” for “Urban Mapping” (which again became the frontrunner for CiTyBee)

One inspiration was the story by Borges where he talks about the Chinese emperor who wants a map of the country that is so precise that it becomes a 1 : 1 map where traces still can be found today.

A Universal History of Infamy* (Penguin 1984), its
title is “Of Exactitude in Science”

In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of
the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such
Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.

Another inspiration was Lefebvre and his talk about Maps as “Instant Infinity” – see the quote here on the Polis Blog

I went to a conference, Moving Maps, at the EPFL in Lausanne in 2011 where among others Bruno Latour and Carlo Rotti presented. They were both inspiring but in very different ways.

The presentation of Latour was in french and I didn’t understand much (and a friendly person told me that understanding french might not even help) but it made me read his text “Give me a gun and I will make all buildings move”. In the text he argues for a more dynamic representation of architecture since drawings or 3D animations didn’t really show the dynamic process of buildings. He compares the architect with a juggler and the text really applies to the urban scale and “Moving Maps.”

Carlo Ratti and his presentation on Smart Cities with sensors everywhere made me write a short text that argued against his fascination of technology and instead “just being in public space using the best sensor for the rich sensory and emotional diversity of the city: ourselves and our senses”

The contact to EPFL in Lausanne led some inspiring talks with André Ourednik who wrote a text on “Urban Heterostasis” that tries to see the balance between the “hands on” mapping and the power of technology. He also sees his thoughts on Heterostasis as the (only) alternative to – I guess – the Starchitect way of designing the city.

In urbanism, the only alternative practice to heterostasis is the would-be “esthetic” tyranny of the architect, of the drawer of Sforzinda, of the builder of cities in the (social) desert, of the egocentric demiurge only eager to gather fame in the service of dictators. Urban heterostasis is everything except that type of urbanism. Heterostasis is the open possibility, for all the inhabitants of a city, to play the role they are able to play in producing a desired urban space.