RUBANISM AND URBANISM: ARCHITECTURE’S CHALLENGE OF OUR TIME

30.1/11

Tay Kheng Soon

I feel compelled to enter the discussion. While I appreciate the sentiments and good intentions some have expressed, I have to comment that there is a lot of conceptual confusion in architecture discourse to be cleared up not least because it is derived from certain blind spots due to our self-interest of being beneficiaries of the urban middle class economy we take to be our natural right and reality. Naturally, we tend to think from where we stand. Architecture is thus, for us, a matter of identity making; a matter of appropriate style; of being up-to-date. Architecture has become a consumable; a product like everything else, a style, a personal statement. I therefore urge a more introspective and wider perceptive in order to revitalize the discipline and indeed our life and our purpose.

Our profession has always had a conscience and this makes us vex over the plight of the poor, the disadvantaged and the degradation of environment. But we tend not to question the urban context wherein most of us practice. We believe that urbanism bestows modernity, cosmopolitan culture, intellectual and artistic stimulation and humanistic concerns. We thus equate urbanism with progress itself, civilization and modernity. We urge that through better planning, infrastructure development and social welfare and education for the less privileged believe that eventually everyone will be uplifted. We don’t see a paradigm shift. We find purpose in this for ourselves. And so meanwhile we are critical of the poor management, the corruption and inaptitude of politicians and the bureaucracy but we remain uncritical of the consumption model on which the current developmentalist model of urbanism and urbanity is based. We believe we can do better without changing the paradigm. But we are unconscious of the limits of our ‘criticality’. To be really critical we have to deconstruct urbanism itself. But this would undermine the very plank on which we the middle class are perched. It is thus not easy that is why it is not done.

True, Asia did not have the wealth derived from colonial exploitation when it embarked on the further urbanisation of our cities after the colonial powers left. Though they left politically, they left behind the conceptual and economic system of an urbanized world order based on middleclass consumption and compliance. The radical movements espoused by the communists also failed. Based on this, the “free world”in Asia our cities exploded in size as the poor drifted to the cities. The failure of the various experiments with economic and political autarky justified this. The countrysides were neglected. Their failure was inevitable. The poor flooded to the cities. Globalization was the great new force that became the new tool wielded by the great forces located in the financial capitals of the West. It made the megacity even bigger. Urbanism was touted as the tool to mobilize and coordinate power and trade globally. It benefited the middle classes. The current climate crises signals the moment when a new sustainable system cannot be derived that balances global finance and local environmental priorities. Until this is derived the urban mess and gross inequity that we see distressingly remain a blot on our conscience. Urban and rural unrest will be on the rise everywhere while planet earth reaches tipping point environmental crises. This is the reality. Architecture and human settlement planning has a never before such a slew of challenges. In this light, the obsessions with style and expression seem futile and down-right inmoral indeed.

The key issue that needs to be deconstructed today is therefore Urbanism, urbanisation and urbanity, concepts taken to be inevitable and undeniably desirable. Indeed, mainstream architecture is uncritically premised on these urbanist assumptions Complain as the middle classes will over the pollution, congestion and stress, they are driven by the forces of contemporary hyper urbanisation based on hyper production and hyper consumption. These forces inevitably find expression within the political and popular culture that generates the “politics of fear” ( fear among the middle classes of marginalization and dispossession) and the economics of desire (consumerism in aid of the ‘good-life’ and chic style).

The development model based on hyper urbanism and hyper consumption is therefore where any rethinking has to begin. The rural/urban dichotomy is the starting point of the necessary reconceptualisation. We need to rethink of the city and the as one space and not two. This is the starting point in addressing social, cultural and environmental justice.

Relevant architecture therefore cannot come out of old planning since old planning is premised on urbanism. No matter how innovative or aesthetically creative or even perversely provocative, architecture might be within the urban context today only serves to enhance or even exonerate the urbanist assumption. The reality is all around to see in every mega-city in Latin America, Africa and Asia in the form of the ring of surrounding slums. The phenomenon is the result of the rural to urban drift caused by the systemic failure of the countryside to provide viable life choices. Thus the “urban industrial complex” triumphs living off the cheap labour of the poor and the “Military Industrial Complex” that defends it. This is the unjust system that the rise of the urban middle classes legitimizes unwittingly. “Happy Cities” is the result of miserable countrysides!

My call “Rubanisation”, a term I had to invent is not a Pol Pot proposition at all, it is a call for balanced development; of viable rural settlements and slimmed-down mega-cities, both providing viable life choices for everyone. Rubanism or urbanism is not one or the other. It is both to different degrees where the economy and the politics is supportive of environments conducive for everyone to work, to live, to learn, to play, to farm and to heal. This is the prospect of a whole paradigm shift in perception, planning and therefore architecture.

A new model of how humans should live on planet Earth; living better with each other and with nature is the task of the 21st Century where social justice, cultural justice and environmental justice are attainable for all. It will be democratic because its life support systems are decentralized into Ruban settlements and yet centralised in the big cities where the highest levels of medical research and treatment, the highest levels of academic, scientific and artistic research, production and teaching, where the highest media production, where the highest levels of finance and strategy and the highest levels of technological prototyping and available product choices are all located. A value shift accompanies this change away from the toxic urbanist propositions we uncritically embrace as progress. All this rethink is predicated on the reconceptualisation of the entire physical landscape, the political landscape and the economic landscape all together.

It is clear that even if a zero carbon energy regime is achieved, the depletion of nature and the degradation of the environment cannot be halted without such a value shift towards new and deeper forms of human satisfaction linked to family, community and personal fulfillment and rapprochement with nature.

Asia can only lead in this new paradigmatic change rather than slavishly patterning after the defunct western industrial and consumption model of development and growth if its thought leaders have the courage to break out of the usual mould. This is the greatest task in the “Anthropocene” age we now fine ourselves in. Human actions have by now reached such a level of impact on nature that John Nash’s “game theory” operates. In game theory action and reaction has induced a necessary reaction against reaction. The environment created has now to be responded to. I will talk more about these basic ideas when we have the chance to meet. Meanwhile those of you interested can review the “www. rubanisation.org” website I set up. There is also a short entry on Rubanisation in Wikipedia.

Result :

Problems in Architectural education and practice.