AUTONOMY & AUTODIGESTION

Autonomy & Autodigestion maps a counter history of ‘autonomy’ in architectural production. While the word ‘autonomy’ has been interrogated since the 1970s as an ideational vehicle to reform the boundaries of disciplinary fields, it was also, during the same period, used to popularize an ecological and libertarian way of living and acting in the city and to herald ‘autonomy’ or independence from the grid of urban supplies. What we call ‘digestive autonomy’ in the context of this study harkens to some extent back to a grass-roots mentality and a pastoral iconography, but also implies an existential separation of the individual from the centralized system of supplies.

The concept of autonomy in art and architecture is commonly linked to Emil Kaufmann, Rudolf Wittkower, Colin Rowe and most usually Peter Eisenman. The 7 manifestos for Autonomy & Autodigestion, nevertheless, document alternative uses of the word ‘autonomy’ as related to the recirculation of resources in urban environments and the function of the building stock as a digestive device. This collection marks the demise of nature as an indeterminate field of its own and its subsequent translation in terms of resources and their exploitation.

Seven types of cities are composed and “semi-invented” from fragments of real spaces. These cities, presented as manifestos, are not located in a singular geographical location. Although invisible to our perception, they are not imaginary. They grow within our existing urban sphere and constitute a by-product of our culture and daily practices. They are real, raw, dirty and contested territories or emerging urbanization. 

You might ask; is ‘digestive autonomy’ a radical form of urbanism? Our answer is quite straightforwardly, yes. 

The images address how citizenship becomes an active agent to reclaim the city, to overturn growing inequality created by climbing real estate values, and to apply creative ingenuity in the use of local resources, in seizing, squatting, communising and taking ownership of urban space. The bottom-up nature of the projects and the empowerment of local voices through the formation of federations speak to a quiet and slow upheaval against the masterplan, the urban grid and the distribution of power through authoritative networks. They speak of a social insurgency against the city plan as an authoritative control mechanism over cities, bodies, ecologies and atmospheres.

Beyond the level of inequality and social justice, nevertheless, ‘digestive autonomy’ is a radical space, and a radical urban formation. It speaks of a city emerging from within the very fabric of the grid, an alternative localized organization; you might call it a seed, a juncture, a focal point, rising from the roots or the radix (as the etymology the word ‘radical’ suggests) of the city’s texture, from the inner workings of the city itself. This new formation is not a grid or network superimposed on the city’s form, but rather a spatial federation, an emergent byproduct of urban processes and daily practices. It questions the structure of our urban fabric and thus our social fabric, as well as the distribution of power as it is expressed spatially in the urban sphere. 

The collection of projects focuses on realized living experiments projecting material autonomy within the context of urban areas and thus contributing to the offspring of new economies and self-sufficient islands in the city, detached from the centralized grid of authority and control. The wall documents a larger disciplinary transformation in the twentieth century for self-management, citizen participation in the making of cities, and the rise of a new environmental autonomy in the form of a synthetic naturalism, where the laws of nature and metabolism are displaced from the domain of wilderness to the domain of cities and buildings. 

GARBAGE CITY | MANIFESTO #1: Garbage City is a phantom city; one that we cannot see or we do not wish to see. First, Garbage City grows out of the metropolis and exists as a secondary invisible layer enmeshed in the urban fabric. Second, Garbage City is an unintentional city that sprawls on the cheap land surrounding developing capitals and is informally built up from masses of obsolete materials. Garbage City, however, is not a fiction. It is the byproduct of a city that grows without control and beyond our sight. It encroaches through the urban fabric to the blank lands surrounding cities; it invades the water and even the air we breathe.

The term “garbage housing” was adopted in the late 1960s by the British pioneer of “garbage architecture” Martin Pawley.  Pawley translated the laws of nature and metabolism, in a logistical and operative statistical game, by suggesting the immediate reuse of the leftover materials from global consumption. Perceiving buildings as an interface of global resources, Pawley proposed that consumer byproducts be fed back into the loop of production as new building materials. With his various writings on “garbage architecture,” Pawley merged two predicaments of the time, the housing crisis and excessive waste flows, hoping to salvage two crises by feeding one into the other. The aspiration was that as natural systems recycle their wastes, by-products of urban environments might as well be recycled. The term “Garbage Housing” was conceived of as solidly confrontational to a vast and urgent social problem, namely the solid waste crisis, which called for resolutions in a national level concurrently both in the UK and US by 1966 the US National Academy of Science. 

In the past decades, garbage is no longer an issue that relates solely to quantity. It now also relates to the intricacy of the waste matter and its material composition. Electronic waste, known as e-waste, is the largest growing industry of waste in a global scale. Electronics recycling becomes an excruciating task that requires a new type of intensive manual labor reportedly exported to Asia and prison houses. The process of “purging” indestructible waste has given rise to “para-economies” on a global scale. Heaps of accumulated obsolete matter are exported out of western metropolis and lived by a population charged to level the affinity of waste to capital. Recycling waste to money is as much a subject of theoretical analysis as a factual constituent of capitalist production. Waste needs to go away; and this very process of purging, transporting and carrying into oblivion all that is worthless is utterly profitable.

Similarly, the Great Pacific Gyre in the North Pacific Ocean is a by-product of social reality. Wasted fragmented materials coagulate and manifest islands, cohering from a soup of waste to cell-like locales, places that exist beyond our perception of urban daily life. These emergent Garbage Cities now force us to delve deeper into the geochemical affinities between capital and excrement. 

MICROBIAL CITY | MANIFESTO #2: Most revolutions start from the streets. The one, however, called for by the projects listed in Microbial City, does not begin in the streets nor in public demonstration, but from the inner city: the domestic interior of the urban fabric. To battle the highly structured detritus of metropolitan imagination, a radical urban practice can start from the house and the way of inhabiting the land. Microbial City suggests that we may effect change in the city as a whole, through tactical changes in small pieces—islands of habitation taken “off the grid” of energy supply. 

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, amidst the wake of dense environmental debates over pollution, the overpopulation of the earth, global catastrophe and the social role of science and technology, tinkering with biology – or managing the living matter of humans, animals and plants-- was examined as an alternative and radical model of urbanization. At the time, political radicals learned how to milk a cow rather than how to fire a gun. The cow’s excrement could be used as an engine, in order to produce methane. Essentially the cow was a tool that would enable the city’s resident to detach from the grid of energy supplies and the authoritative mechanisms of the state. At the time, biotechnic research brought close two fields that have been considered as disjunctive or irrelevant: high technology, in the form of microbial management and material conversion, with rural life, in the form of living in proximity with nature. 

The Ecological House built by the Street Farmers in 1972 was not only a house, but also a manifesto. Through the recirculation of all resources, it announced a radical urban reconstruction that would proceed by ripple effect from the domestic sphere to all the city’s fabric. The process of building a house was in many aspects as a reactionary social practice that spoke of a new urban vision, reconstructing the city from the inside little by little.  Thirty years later, this type of research by group of radical leftist urban provocateurs, has been taken up by the  Philips Corporation to produce an experimental probe for a domestic ecosystem that challenges conventional design solutions to energy, cleaning, food preservation, lighting and human waste. If our world is at present in a state of disturbed equilibrium, the planning of sustainable cities and environments may in fact dwell in biological processes, which are less energy-consuming and non-polluting.

DEGROWTH CITY | MANIFESTO #3: Degrowth City is the physical counterpart of capitalism’s decline in the late twentieth century. It is the city’s periphery, niche, obsolescence, decay and abandonment; it is the leftover urban space that no longer serves any purpose and lies lifeless like a carcass. As Julia Czerniak has pointed out, Degrowth City is "formerly urban." It is a city of past glory whose urban character has devolved radically due to economic, demographic and physical change. 

Degrowth City is the materialized junkspace of the defunct idea for unstoppable progress and economic growth. It is the sum of urbanization that we do not know what to do with. When faced with the urgency to revitalize Degrowth City, the architect and the urbanist is confronted with   anxiety and melancholy. There is a sense of emptiness to realize that the empire to which we have laid all hope is nothing but a powder of formless ruins and we are only left with fossils of a past that cannot be reassembled. 

To deal with such conditions of de-urbanization and urban wilderness, we might need to consider practices of removal, demolition and destruction. The subtraction of buildings is as important as the making of buildings, yet it is an unexplored and unwanted field of inquiry and practice. In uninhabited rustbelt areas, buildings often become toxic and harmful; they are literally a source of pollution. Could we learn how to destroy them instrumentally little by little? Could we conceive other forms of occupation with non-humans to further the use of these sites and prevent their demise? 

In the 1970s, several years before Detroit’s urban blight and the emergence of the term “rustbelt,” the Street Farmers suggested to plant the streets of London and release cows as a practice of radical urbanism against the authoritative mechanisms of the state. Orchestrating destruction was a creative act for the group that explored the aesthetics of erasure and unbuilding. At the same time, the Italian Radicals announced an urbanism of “counter-design,” with Allesandro Mendini’s King Kong, defying the city and the city’s plan. They proposed a vast unbuilt grid, with pieces of nature, animals and plug-in ports to power-up and create immaterial environments. Along these lines, the economic theory of “degrowth” questions today the limits of growth and the idea of linear progress imposed in all aspects of production and daily life through the channels of capitalism. The material ramifications of persevering growth, only serves the growth of capital itself, rather than the making of cities of urban environments.

As Ursula Le Guin recently pointed out, the power of capitalism seems insescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Power, nevertheless, can be resisted and changed by humans. Resistance and change often begins with art and imagination, and this is where architecture and urbanism comes in.

ISLAND CITY | MANIFESTO #4: Island City is an independent enclave growing within the city; it is internally governed and detached from the grid of urban supplies. We can describe this island as a microcosm of the city as a whole, a microcosm, nevertheless, administered on a different set of laws, rules and systems of thought and production. For Island City, blockage and seclusion from the surroundings is critical to its identity. The territorial demarcation of boundaries enables material and spatial organizations that would not have been probable in the open field. 

If you have read William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, you quite lucidly see how a closed system --  whether it is a territory, an ecosystem or a social system-- produces its own output and regenerates it as input, and starts to behave unpredictably derailing from the system’s original goals.  In the book, a group of young people are cast away in an island, but the case of walled cities, like the City of Kowloon, is strikingly similar. Walled communities are social experiments as well as spatial experiments; they are new worlds within which elements, materials, people, information and behaviors need to be packed and reorganized in new ways.

Island City is established without permission, without any authorized planning or design process; it is the self-constructed and autonomous space of its dwellers. As such, it is non-homogeneous and unique, often related by many to chaos, poor infrastructure and crime. Island City, however, does not mean disorder. In Island City, the condition of blockage enables the production of spaces by using what is available on the spot. Blockage becomes peculiarly productive, as it induces an unforeseen development of material constitutions within the island; the living laboratory.

RESOURCE CITY | MANIFESTO #5: Resource City starts with the disclosure of the earth image to the public eye in the 1960s, which constituted a profound rupture in human imagination. Previously a fictional reconstruction of cartographic imagination, the complex reality of the famous Earthrise series taken by Apollo 8 revealed the anatomy of the planet and set in an outward perspective human evolutionary expansion. Earthrise, nevertheless, was not simply a visual rupture in collective imagination; it had a profound impact in our understanding of the planet as one body, a unitary interconnected system with finite resources, which needs to be managed. Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, published the image of the earth to announce a new mindset: “access to tools.”  The logistics of redeploying of global resources, information management and classification of goods were no longer analytical tools, but also propositional tools; logistics and statistics helped to document and therefore reconstruct the world in a different order.

Buckminster Fuller, John McHale, and Ian McHarg played a seminal role in formulating this discourse, explaining ecosystems with parallels between the earth and human processes. A physiological diagnosis of planetary resources was precisely the agenda of Fuller’s “World Design Science Decade,” which took cognitive analytical form in McHale’s The Ecological Context. Through systemic management, the totality of the earth could or should serve as a stage of action, envisioning a new empire and reasoning backward to a colonial and empirical modality.

The projects in Resource City point the origins of a common observation today: Our planet is becoming one city by means of increasing urbanisation. Along these lines, architecture and urbanism is fused with biology, policy, ecology and governance. No part of the world remains unaffected by the cumulative impact of human activity. Through complex processes of exploration, habitation, cultivation, transportation, consumption, and surveillance, the world is governed and designed not just by vision, but also by tools. 

COMMUNE CITY | MANIFESTO #6: Commune City is an experiment in living; it is a flexible non-urban organism continually changing and evolving, empowered by citizenship participation and detachment from the mechanisms of the state, both in terms of power as well as in terms of law. Unlike Island City, Commune City is not walled off from the urban fabric by means of a physical barrier, but by means of distance. It is the effort to reinvent civilization afar from the urban center and to create a self-sufficient living laboratory, an autonomous unity able to sustain itself, cut off from the main urban networks.

Commune City is able to defy urban mainstream production by recycling its waste, producing and distributing its energy and by achieving a new equilibrium as a social and natural system. As a laboratory, Commune City needs to produce its own language, by defying law and institutionalization and by inventing an autonomous system of new policies, as well as an autonomous system of energy.

In AD’s cover ‘Autonomous Houses’ in 1976, Commune City appears under the umbrella of ‘autonomy’ both to popularize an ecological and libertarian way of living and acting as well as to herald ‘autonomy’ from the grid of energy supply as a political statement against consumerism and capitalism. Clifford Harper’s “Visions,” drawings of collectivized gardens, community workshops and autonomous terraces, giving visual foray to environmental autonomy as a tool for political liberation; the visions were published in the book Radical Technology edited by Peter Harper, who later became the Director of the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth, UK, along with Godfrey Boyle and the editors of Undercurrents magazine.

The communities that Harper proposed in the 1970s harkened back to a grass-roots mentality and a pastoral iconography. The contemporary landscape of similar communities needs to reconcile previous notions of rural environmentalism, including farming and localism, with the instrumentalized regeneration of resources via technology demonstrating in many respects technological supremacy.

In biology, ‘autonomy’ refers to a system’s organic independence and self-governance, a notion that has been transferred to the urban sphere to advance the idea of a collectivized lived space, un-rooted from its urban context. Commune City is like a restored Garden of Eden and a real-time habitation experiment where architecture, systems theory and human biology blend together in the hope of radical social reform. 

DO –IT-YOURSELF CITY | MANIFESTO #7: Do-It Yourself City is the messy and fuzzy imprint of occupation on the urban fabric; or better stated, the city as it has been seized, deformed or transformed and lived by its inhabitants. Do-It Yourself City does not only call for participation, advocacy and active citizenship in spatial production; it also calls for partially relinquishing control in the design process of cities and environments. 

If we recall the work of John Habraken in the 1960s, Bernard Rudofsfky’s Architecture Without Architects, the PREVI project (Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda) in Peru in the early 1970s, and most recently, Elemental’s Quinta Monroy, the spontaneity of civic occupation has fostered architects’ interest in vernacular and informal settlements at several moments historically. There is a substantial legacy of “plug-in” structures, incomplete unfinished frames waiting for individual occupation, or a legacy of “incrementalism,” as recently described by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The aspiration in the genealogy of these projects is the defiance of uniformity and the complexity of a non-homogeneous textural grain, emerging from numerous personal choices and living patterns. Do-It Yourself City is semi-controlled and semi-organized; it offers a board game on which life unfolds and diversifies, yet still laying along a defined territory of action. 

With vast regions of the urbanized world built in slums, Do-It Yourself City is our contemporary obligation to face; it is the reflection of the multidimensional nature of urban space and the unpredictability of life. The architects and planners who have engaged with questions of informality, time and the right of forming the city, deeply believe that architecture can serve as a framework for social transformation. At the same time, they share a disposition for design processes rather than objects and defy determinism in design thinking. They resist the “architect’s hand,” and the modernist ethos of the master plan.  Behind the curtains of Torre David, they ask us to witness the reinvent the architect’s identity and to expand our perception of design authorship. In these new conditions of incremental urbanization, the architect can only be an editor, a thinker, a tinkerer and a critic of physical resources and ideas.