- Typology
- Speculation
- Project
- Parks. No Parks. Glitch. XXX
- Client
- "After this year, we all need a break" writes the German edition of JACOBIN Magazine in the announcement of its 5th issue: "How we can fight for more free time and less work, you'll find out in the new JACOBIN issue." The editors have identified the park as one of the spaces where we spend breaks. And as is always the case, the park doesn't exist - there are just many incarnations of a similar concept - park in the plural: parks. In any case, JACOBIN, namely Jonas Junack, asked us to think about what parks might look like in the future. The result can be seen in JACOBIN No. 5: Pause.
- team c/o now
- Tobias Hönig, Andrijana Ivanda, Markus Rampl, Paul Reinhardt, Duy An Tran
- editorial board
- Jonas Junack
- special thanks
- ...to Christian von Borries, Matteo Trentini and many others for sharing their reflections and thoughts that have been echoed or/and sampled in this work!
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Fig.___© JACOBIN
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Fig.___When people became sedentary, the domestication of plants and animals began. Subsistence farming gave rise to the first gardens, fields and stables. Those who were strong and courageous, but also unscrupulous enough to seize harvests and yields by force, became rulers. They soon no longer farmed or raised livestock themselves but took from what others produced. Their own gardens no longer had to feed anyone. They became parks. The image of their power. And a reflection of the orders they had established. Places for hunting and playing were created. In these landscapes, reserved for the rulers, they were spared the effects of industrialization, far from the emerging big cities and "without worry" (French: "sans souci"). Jewelry farms sprang up in the parks, and Marie-Antoinette had an entire play village built in the park at Versailles. With a shovel of pure silver and buckets of ornately decorated ceramics, she practiced simple living there. When the common people had their fill of the cake, the parks opened to them as well for the sake of peace. Soon public parks became a typology for ensuring recreation on the one hand and disciplining the working people on the other. However, when they began to emancipate themselves with vigor, they occupied the park areas as their own spaces of freedom and expression of their cultures. Euphoric moments found their end in renewed, drastic disciplinary measures. What remained to be ordered was the principle of parks. New paradigms were called: Living, working, leisure, traffic. In between and around them: parks. Residential parks, leisure parks, industrial parks, office parks. Parking garages. City. Country. Acceleration. With the great crises, especially the crisis of the urban, parks became battlegrounds. On May 1, 1989, in a full-page New York Times ad, Donald Trump demanded, "Bring back the death penalty. Bring back our police!" Thirteen years later, the so-called "Central Park Five" to whom that call was made turn out to be innocent. After half a lifetime in prison, they are released. Fukuyama's "End of History and the Last Man" is itself history by then. Negations remain: Work - no work; housing - no housing; leisure - no leisure; traffic - no traffic. Crisis. Crisis. Kriza. The realization that there is nothing natural left on this planet, that even the last corner of the earth is determined by human activity, comes too late. The Anthropocene leads directly to blackouts. Even quantum computers today cannot say with certainty what happened then. At all they hardly give an answer. Glitch, glitch and again glitch. The future hidden in an electronic coffee ground. Computers make no difference: Hominibus; Animalia; Fungi; Virae; Plantae; Chromista; Protozoe; Bacteria. Parks. No parks. The constructed difference of city and country was left in the past. People have chosen to retreat to Humanhabitats (HH), to secure their food with the Farmlands (FL) immediately attached, and to import only the bare necessities through the Infrastructure Network (IN). People are traveling again, not jetting. The world has shrunk to places and ways. What lies in between, people observe only from a distance. There are no more parks. Habitats provide public, communal space that, even without reserves, offers the qualities once attributed to parks. Buffer zones were once established around habitats to re-establish the necessary distance between humans and the rest of the life inhabiting the planet. Here, step by step, those romantic notions that humans had formed over nearly two and a half millennia of a domesticated nature that was nevertheless revered as cosmic truth were disintegrating. In the face of the ruins of these notions, the ruins of the working worlds of yore, the cultures that developed from them, and the first robotic machines that heralded the beginning of liberation from wage labor and thus from the old domination, other, third, hybrid spaces developed. Kitsch glitch: Here, people now encounter themselves. Individually. Communal. Unified and divided. Discussive and wordless. Here they encounter Animalia; Fungi; Virae; Plantae; Chromista; Protozoe; Bacteria. And the glitch. Here things suddenly make sense. Others seem like mere nonsense. Here is not the end of the world. But the beginning of something new.
© c/o now
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Fig.___Our work for JACOBIN has been heavily influenced by the computer game Sim City (1989), which we would not only say taught us more about the city than many professional publications - the referenced publications in the game's manual were, in turn, remarkable - but we would even make the provocative claim that Sim City is the last, great, serious urban model.
Xardox at en.wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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Fig.___Glitch surfaces in the collage refer to Luciana Parisi and Stamatia Portanova's text "Soft thought (in architecture and choreography)", which Christian von Borries introduced us to and behind which, in turn, lies the hope that results of still unimaginable computer performance, which we can only describe as glitches, could one day open up undreamed-of perspectives. Romance is a ticket to paradise. Glitch maybe.
https://flickr.com/people/68716054@N00/ Rosa Menkman], CC BY 2.0
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Fig.___The image shows a nail house in Chongqing, as it can also be seen in the collage. Accoring to Wikipedia, a nail house is a calque of a Chinese neologism "dīngzihù" (literally, "nail household or householder") that refers to either a person who refuses to vacate their home to make way for development, or the home itself. The Chinese term, coined by developers, comes from the fact that these houses stick out like a nail that can be neither extracted nor hammered down.The nail house in Chongqing is representative of any kind of holdout. A holdout it turn is a piece of property that did not become part of a larger real estate development because the owner either refused to sell or wanted more than the developer would pay.
zola aka. Zhou Shuguang (周曙光), CC BY-SA 2.5