Urban Versioning System 1.0
Matthew Fuller and Usman Haque
Illustrations by David Cuesta
The second volume in the series asks the question: what lessons can
architecture learn from software development, and more specifically,
from the Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) movement?
Written in the form of a quasi-license, Urban Versioning System 1.0
posits seven constraints that, if followed, will contribute to an open
source urbanism that radically challenges the conventional ways in
which cities evolve.
ISBN 978-0-9800994-1-6
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Urban
VERSIONING
SYSTEM 1.0
Situated Technologies Pamphlets 2
THE ARCHITECTURAL LEAGUE OF NEW YORK
S ituate d T echnologies Pa m phlet S 2
Matthew F uller an d U s m an H a q ue
I llustrations b y Dav i d C uesta
Published by
The Architectural League of New York
U r b an Versioning S yste m 1 . 0
Series Editors
Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz, Mark Shepard
www.situatedtechnologies.net
S ituate d T echnologies Pa m phlet S 2
The Situated Technologies Pamphlet series explores the implications of ubiquitous computing for architecture and urbanism. How are
our experience of the city and the choices we make in it affected by
mobile communications, pervasive media, ambient informatics and
other “situated” technologies? How will the ability to design increasingly responsive environments alter the way architects conceive of
space? What do architects need to know about urban computing and
what do technologists need to know about cities? Situated Technologies Pamphlets will be published in nine issues and will be edited by a
rotating list of leading researchers and practitioners from architecture,
art, philosophy of technology, comparative media studies, performance
studies, and engineering.
Situated Technologies Pamphlets 2: Urban Versioning System 1.0
Matthew Fuller and Usman Haque (Illustrations by David Cuesta)
Series Editors: Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz, Mark Shepard
www.situatedtechnologies.net
Advisory Committee: Keller Easterling, Anne Galloway,
Malcolm McCullough, Howard Rheingold
Published by: The Architectural League of New York
457 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10022, 212 753 1722
www.archleague.org
info@archleague.org
Pamphlets Coordinator: Gregory Wessner
Digital Programs and Exhibitions Director, The Architectural
League of New York
Design: Jena Sher
Thanks: Kristina Andersen, Jennifer Bajorek, David Cuesta,
Omar Khan, Mark Shepard, Mira Vogel, Gregory Wessner
(cc) Matthew Fuller and Usman Haque, 2008
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons AttributionNoncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171
Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
ISBN 978-0-9800994-1-6
ABOUT THE SERIES
The Situated Technologies Pamphlet Series extends a discourse initiated
in the summer of 2006 by a three-month-long discussion on the Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC) mailing list that culminated in
the Architecture and Situated Technologies symposium at the Urban
Center and Eyebeam in New York, co-produced by the Center for
Virtual Architecture (CVA), the Architectural League of New York and
the iDC. The series explores the implications of ubiquitous computing
for architecture and urbanism: how our experience of space and the
choices we make within it are affected by a range of mobile, pervasive,
embedded or otherwise “situated” technologies. Published three times
a year over three years, the series is structured as a succession of nine
“conversations” between researchers, writers and other practitioners
from architecture, art, philosophy of technology, comparative media
studies, performance studies, and engineering.
www.situatedtechnologies.net
F ro m the E d itors
Almost forty years have passed since New Society magazine published
an article by Reyner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall and Cedric Price
titled “Non-plan: An experiment in freedom.” Launching a frontal assault on then current planning practices in the UK, the authors
asked: “Why not have the courage, where practical, to let people shape
their own environment?”1 This simple idea, entangled within the social
and political upheavals of the late ‘60s, led to the questioning of the
traditional authority of the professional architect as the primary author
of space. The idea that the design of a building is considered complete
when issued a Certificate of Occupancy was contested by the notion that
alterations made by its inhabitants repositioned the design of the architectural artifact as an ongoing process throughout the life of a building.
At the scale of the city, this translated to asking whether 20th century
urban design shaped space in ways that, as Hughes and Sadler suggest,
either “guaranteed freedom and enlightenment” or constituted “a tyranny governing everything from matters of taste to the conduct of
life itself.”2
These tensions have reasserted themselves lately within discourses
surrounding mobile media, communication and information systems
in urban environments, where the various ways we use devices like iPods
and iPhones are credited with enabling ordinary urbanites to take
a participatory role in shaping the placing and spacing of the urban
experience. In effect, these devices have become tools for organizing
space, time and the boundaries around the body in urban public space.
Architecture’s role as the primary technology of authoring space is
called into question by the ability of urban dwellers to enact spatial
relations in ways radically other to the intentions of traditional design
thinking. Further, advocates of “responsive architecture” look toward
embedded sensing and actuating technologies to frame the performance of architecture as open and adaptive to the events and activities
transpiring within it, attempting to build on cybernetic theory popular
in the 60s and 70s. In this pamphlet, architect Usman Haque and media
theorist Matthew Fuller look beyond established precepts and explore
an alternate technology of space making derived from the politics of
“code” itself. In a conversation of sorts between the protocols of Free,
Libre, Open Source Software (FLOSS) licenses and those of spatial
construction (building codes, zoning ordinances), the authors attempt
to map out a quasi-license by which the architecture of the city might
be remade in the manner of FLOSS software, and suggest a series of
constraints by which this license might be manifest in the open, collaborative production of urban space.
The images accompanying the text, created by artist David Cuesta,
attempt to engage the text in terms of a diagrammatic description of
the processes proposed. The authors invite the reader to cross-out, rewrite, and modify both the textual constraints and graphic diagrams as
they see fit, in the spirit of opening up the coding of tomorrow’s cities
in ways that might be truly shaped by those inhabiting them.
Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz and Mark Shepard
6
7
Reyner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall, Cedric Price, “Non-Plan: An experiment in freedom,” New Society, v. 13, no 338, 20 March 1969, pp. 435–443.
1
Jonathan Huges and Simon Sadler, Non-Plan: Essays on freedom, participation
and change in modern architecture and urbanism, Oxford: Architectural Press, 2000.
2
THE AUTHORS
Matthew Fuller is David Gee Reader in Digital Media at the Centre for
Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London. Prior to this he was
Lector in Media Design at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. He is
author of a number of books, including Behind the Blip, essays on the
culture of software (Autonomedia), and Media Ecologies, materialist
energies in art and technoculture (MIT Press), and editor of Software
Studies, a lexicon (MIT Press). He is a regular collaborator with the artists
group Mongrel (http://www.mongrel.org.uk/). Current projects include
“Digger Barley”, a distribution of barley seeds harvested from sites
occupied by land-squatters during the English Revolution. http://www.
spc.org/fuller/.
Usman Haque is director of Haque Design + Research (http://www.
haque.co.uk/). He is an architect who has created responsive environments, interactive installations, digital interface devices and massparticipation performances. His skills include the design of both physical
spaces and the software and systems that bring them to life. He has
been an invited researcher at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea,
Italy; held an artist-in-residence at the International Academy of Media
Arts and Sciences, Japan; and has also worked in the USA, UK and
Malaysia. He has occasionally taught in the Interactive Architecture
Workshop at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London.
David Cuesta (Illustrator) is a London based artist and designer who
has worked extensively in both corporate and creative environments.
He has been exhibited widely in Vancouver, Canada and London, England. Recent projects include work for Sony Playstation, Goldsmiths
University, Margaret Howell, Bamford and John Lewis Department
Stores. David’s work focuses on expressing concepts in varying mediums
through the use of form and space. At present David sits on the Council
of Tate Gallery Members. (http://www.davidcuesta.co.uk)
CONTENTS
12
Preamble
16
Floss and Things
20 Consideration of Design Goals
24 Seven Constraints
24
[1] Build rather than design
28
[2] Materials must come pre-broken
31
[3] Make joints
36
[4] Rubbish is the root of virtuosity
38
[5] Collaborate with collaborators
42
[6] Copying or not copying is irrelevant
48
[7] Property must be invented
52
Legible Notice Requirement
PREAMBLE
Take the separate domains of Free Software licenses and of spatial
construction. Consider each of them as a series of types of entity, composition and relations. What series might be invented to run across
the two of them? This document is a quasi-license. If its constraints
are followed in the production of spatial structures, whether buildings
or more fleeting constructions, you, and others, will be able to make
something new or re-version something already there and you will be
able to express clearly how others can participate or make use of the
work you are creating.
The production of structures to articulate, produce and protect space,
often coded under the disciplinary term “architecture” is arguably one
of humanity’s oldest activities. Countless technologies and legal frameworks have grown along with this process. Formerly one of the most
collaborative endeavors, architecture now often functions in opposition
to such collaboration. On the one hand, it reinforces, and is reinforced
by, whatever accretes as the currently dominant political system, and
some contend that this relationship makes it ineligible as a means for
authentically confronting structures of power.1 On the other, making
buildings is a substantially collaborative effort, always involving teams
and multiple kinds of expertise and decision making. All that may be
required to free up construction is to render its repertoire of collaboration more expansive. Recent social, cultural and technological developments, particularly in the fields of software and electronics, suggest
strategies for productive mechanisms that exist substantially within a
given political framework yet still are able to provide clear indication
of political alternatives. These alternatives in software, Free, Libre and
Open Source Software (FLOSS), are highly pragmatic, doing the work
required of them but also reinventing forms of production in ways that
set up real possibilities for freedom.
Why is this relevant to the making of urban spaces? For the first time
in the history of humanity more of us live within cities than outside
them.2 It is vital to begin to think through how we can become more
consciously involved in their design, production and inhabitation.
While there is a concern about how much individuals can, with good
purpose, affect their environment, it is clear that we are all, collectively, and in ways strongly shaped by the kinds of collectives we form,
having some sort of ecological impact. Therefore ways of organizing
frameworks, in formal or less formal ways, for collectively productive
activities are becoming increasingly important to attend to. A discussion
of the processes through which humans construct cities could appear
to support the argument that there is a distinction between “artificial”
and “natural.” In fact it demonstrates the opposite: just as with any
non-human entity, we collectively construct our ecological and architectural frameworks, and these frameworks tend to overlap with those
of others. These overlaps have consequences. The difference is (or
should be) that we consciously recognize our interdependence and
thus must consciously act upon it.
Architecture, which exists at the very moment when space is defined,
constructed and experienced through activity, is perhaps the most
common shared enterprise of them all. A city is a city if it is lived in;
otherwise it is merely a pile of bricks, cables and concrete. Our interdependence, however, does not mean that anyone is “naturally” dependent
on the current state of cities or societies. The proportion of the earth’s
inhabitants “depending” on systems of neo-liberalism or oligarchy, for
instance, are rather pitiful compared to the amount of natural and
human resources they require to maintain their unabashedly vampiric
positions. Such a situation deserves some regeneration.
In order to develop thinking about such interdependence and collaboration we might as well start from where it is blocked. The architectural profession remains relatively steadfast in a distinction that divides
designers from users, even though technology increasingly provides
grounds for diminishing that distinction, either through networks
(electronic, social, geographical) that provide people with better access
to cross-collaborative tools and multi-disciplinary inputs, or through
responsive building technologies that can place people themselves at
the helm of the configuration/design of their own spaces.
In the eighties and nineties, computers’ impact on the architectural
discipline was in the form of design aids. In the coming decades computers will increasingly be a part of the architecture itself, enabling user-centered interaction systems for configuring environmental conditions. We have already seen systems like those that track movements of
the sun to control louvres outside a building, or movements of people
to adapt light levels inside a building. We have seen “intelligent” devices that monitor temperature to provide us with optimum levels or
even walls that change colour as necessary to complement interior de-
signs. However, innovation in the design and construction of the built
environment of the future appears to be split problematically between
large developers (who have their own particular efficiencies of scale to
optimize) on one hand, and ubiquitous computing technologists (who
are developing the systems that mediate the ways that we relate to our
spaces and to each other) on the other, with architects finding themselves somewhat irrelevant. People-centered architectural interfaces and
responsive building systems are being developed, not by architects but
by computer scientists, designers and artists working independently or
through numerous institutions, with all the historical and commercial
associations that these institutions are party to.
This document proposes that another lesson can be learned for architecture from computing: the way in which software is made. Here, we
want to concentrate on the current most significant mode of software
development—Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS)—steering
clear of ubicomp fantasies that may often obfuscate technological
power structures.
14
15
FLOSS AND THINGS
Free, Libre or Open Source Software has attracted an enormous amount
of attention of different kinds, so its basic principles have become
reasonably well known. However, it seems worth briefly restating them.
The Free Software Definition3 states that free software contains the
following freedoms:
• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose ( freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your
needs ( freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor
( freedom 2).
• The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements
to the public, so that the whole community benefits ( freedom 3).
Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
A number of attempts have been made to transfer such principles to the
making of objects. Often these have been on the basis of plans, recipes,
diagrams and other such “genotypical” information. Examples would
be the Free Beer project initiated by Superflex4 in which a beer recipe
is shared; the self-descriptive Open Cola5; or Ice Cream for Everyone6
which launched the field by doing the same for tasty dairy-based desserts. These projects all use recipes as their prime form of “source.”
In Open Hardware, electronics schematics are shared. A significant and
growing numbers of projects work on these principles. Examples
include the GP2X handheld games platform7, and Arduino8, a hardware/software platform that simplifies electronics prototyping. More
generally, standards consortiums (such as the Deutsches Institut für
Normung, the International Standards Organisation or more ostensibly ad hoc groupings such as the World Wide Web Consortium) work
not with open standards but with standards in the public domain, set,
not unproblematically, by anyone with the time, expertise and resources
to participate. Historically, when structures for sharing inventions and
ideas have been proposed, sharing and mutually improving instructions is usually the mode in which it is done. In 1652 Gerard Winstanley,
one of the “Diggers” of 1649, proposed (as part of his vision for the
development of a post-revolutionary England gone sour) that each
district of the country would have two Postmasters charged amongst
other things with ensuring the even spread of all knowledge “whereby
the commonwealth may more flourish in peace and plenty.”9
The key question here is how such strategies apply or can be modified to
apply to the production of architecture. In architecture there is no substance that is concurrently both “editable source code” (genotype) and
“usable artifact” (phenotype). Though some have usefully argued that
architectural drawings can be considered “source” and therefore it is
the design process that must be opened up,10 one of the most interesting
aspects of open source software is the continuous interleaving of production, implementation, usage and repurposing processes, all of which
can and sometimes must be open—not just an “open design” that then
gets implemented in a closed manner. Most important is to develop a
method through which architecture, the physical conduit for knowledge
and memory, can itself be “open.” Therefore, the UVS quasi-license does
not base itself on the genotype/phenotype split, though the distinction
can be made: we want to see what happens if we work otherwise.
This has specific impact on the role of the architect. It suggests a new
focus on enabling, generating and engaging, adopting a role similar
to the one an operating system designer performs in the world of
software. This does not necessarily confer equal responsibility to all
participants in a system but instead presumes that while hierarchies
formed by experience, skill and aptitude are inevitable, they are not
immutable. Equally, such an approach changes the site of the aesthetics
in architecture to one not of form but of organization.
The aesthetics of organization have yet to be decisively described,
but pointers toward it are already present in current art discussions
in collaboration and participation.11 Indeed, since much architecture
is merely an epiphenomenon of the political, monetary and material requirements of certain dominant fractions of society, perhaps all
such an open aesthetics of organization would tend to do is to render
such processes “democratic.” Nevertheless, what is partially pointed
towards in architectural interaction systems, which can deal with
the practical and functional aspects of environmental configuration,
is that the beauty in urban design might come from the participative
structures of those who create and implement it.
We propose putting together a license for the open source design and
construction of cities. The Urban Versioning System quasi-license is
not yet such a license. At the moment the document is more a dogma
or set of constraints. It’s an oath, a quasi-license, something to chew
on. You can build using these constraints.
C O N S I D E R AT I O N O F D E S I G N G O A L S
A pragmatic first step would be to develop infrastructures that enable
supposed non-designers to participate more closely in the design and
construction process. In some senses, this is already occurring, as the
self-build trend shows. (This Europe-wide phenomenon running over
several decades is characterized by projects which facilitate groups
of occupiers building their own housing.) However, much more can
be done to facilitate the transition. Architects in particular have the
opportunity at this stage to participate in the conversations that take
place with regard to enabling and encouraging good building design
and collaborative practice. “Design-by-committee” is not an adequate
solution to this: such an approach is always limited by approval of the
lowest common denominator—the fact that everyone must agree on
all parts of a design process, or, more realistically, on the way such
legitimizing processes are spun and manipulated by various interests.
More important is to concentrate on widening people’s spheres of
responsibility, and hence motivation, commitment and agency with
regard to the design and inhabitation of the urban environment.
A second approach, conceptually the most complex, would be the
formulation of frameworks for spatial design. This might involve on
one hand the development of spatial “operating systems,” which, as in
computer terminology, would be infrastructure that provides a framework uniting hardware and software in which programs can run, and in
which people can configure and reconfigure their own environments. It
might also involve the development of a “concurrent versioning system”
(CVS) for architecture, paralleling that found in the software industry,
where a CVS is a means by which software developers collaborate.12 A
CVS enables code to be archived and held in a structure of changing
parts for the purposes of use and of further work. Pieces of code and
accompanying comments are held in a “tree” of updated versions. As
more coders work on a project these pieces of code may also go through
a checking and committing process. This allows a project to be both
conservative of its quality, in a state of rapid development when necessary, and able to modularize to incorporate many participants, not
unlike the way cities can grow and adapt.
It might be argued that cities are already developed analogously to the
ways that a CVS aids in the construction of software. This may be so,
unconsciously; however buildings, streets and neighborhoods are still
regarded as static, immutable end-products rather than dynamic states
within a progression. In an architectural context, a CVS would need
to achieve two goals. First, it would enable the processes of development, testing and inhabitation to occur concurrently. Second, it would
provide an infrastructure for different granularities of participation
for each designer/participant. The fact that it enables anyone to be a
co-designer, does not necessarily mean that everyone will undertake
to participate in the design process, just as saying that everyone can be
an artist does not mean that everyone wishes to participate in artistic
practice (or indeed that everything is art). However, it does recognize
that those who do wish to operate in such a mode of knowing, seeing and
doing may have very different skill-sets, intentions and requirements.
A system that encourages people themselves to create their own spaces
and collaboratively build a social space—such a system could be more
efficient, more imaginative and more conceptually “open.” Yet even
this is not sufficient: there is no point in having an “open” design
process that results in a structurally “closed” entity. Architecture that
is produced through an authentically open process is never finished:
there is no distinction between design and inhabitation.
The Urban Versioning System quasi-license proposes the following seven
initial constraints.
SEVEN CONSTRAINTS
[ 1 ] Build rather than design
We propose here a new model for the production of cities, where design
and planning are abandoned in favor of beginning immediately with
building and construction. This new adhocism13 requires us to disregard
any temptation to sketch, to plan, or to model and above all to discard
any desire to “brainstorm.” All these activities can be performed on the
actual materials we wish to build with, while the thought-processes
directly engage with or become the lived-in artifact, articulated at a
1:1 scale. Sketching, pre-planning and feasibility analysis are activities
that function under the assumption that there is a distinct immutable
“design” phase, while planning, as an activity, makes it tempting to
prescribe and for a certain category of participants to proscribe the
activities of others.
Constructing right from the start erodes distinctions between design,
construction, modeling and inhabitation. To design and build concurrently requires simultaneous tenancy. The building is the model. It
enables us to produce real spatial situations we otherwise only imagine, and makes it possible for other people to enter into and critique
what we would have exist in their world. We can discuss with materials not representations of materials, and negotiate around connection
points and the means of connection, rather than proffering a completed
structure as a whole. It is difficult to make things collaboratively without discussion. This doesn’t mean that discussion must only occur
before making.
The problem is that regarding the process of design as distinct from
that of construction has consequences in various areas of city-making.
The first consequence is a basic assumption that building only begins
once the design process is complete. In the area of urban planning,
however, the notion of “completeness” is irrelevant even though, in a
contemporary city, seemingly immutable planning and zoning regulations can become the most important factor in determining how the
city articulates itself. Its regulations are used as a generating algorithm
for the design of individual neighborhoods and buildings, through
polynomial calculations that balance opposing tensions in the regulations. Planning is one of the most sophisticated tools of political power,
determining how city occupants fill in the gaps through proscribed
and prescribed activity. Though beyond the scope of this document, it
must be understood how urban planning, at times via aesthetic restriction, at others through alliances with certain kinds of power, intricately
or bluntly determines the way a city functions.
The second consequence of distinguishing activities of design from
construction, at the level of both neighborhood and individual building
development, is that it places an emphasis on forms of representation
as distinguished from the designed artifact. To design something that
does not yet exist, if we are not to build it at the same time, requires us
to imagine it and represent it, for example on paper, through plans, in
maquette form, or through software simulated fly-through. Design as
representation (rather than production) requires suspension of disbelief. Such speculation, while useful in expanding the boundaries of imagination, can become recursive and self-limiting: real-world constraints
are seen as unhelpful obstacles rather than welcome foundations.
In some architecture schools, students are taught to design drawings
rather than design buildings, and there appears to be a presumption
that construction details can be learnt later on the job. Working on
representations always distances a designer from the thing-to-beconstructed and encourages a tendency to be prescriptive and restrictive,
particularly in the design of buildings, where the design process will
have both microscopic and macroscopic consequences on the ways
that people will eventually conduct their lives within the building.
Urban planning is often a process of two-dimensional geometrical
adjustment of forms portrayed in plan, while god’s-eye-view initiatives
tend to ignore the third-dimension.14 In CAD packages, the design of
three-dimensional space is relegated to the composition of colored
lines on a black background. It is often possible to determine, admittedly more so in a building than in a neighborhood, whether it was designed using AutoCad, Microstation or Vectorworks—such is the power
of representational drawing systems to influence finished product.
Representing prior to building is a means for multiple parties to discuss
what needs doing, for users or clients, construction workers and architects to have a conversation about the same object. At the same time,
such plans tend to predetermine all possible degrees of freedom. Such
pre-specification leaves little room for on-site manoeuvre, and by the
time a building or neighborhood is occupied, all variables of inhabitation have been determined for the inhabitants (apart from occasional
24
25
material or fixture selection which is proffered as the only conceptual
input for future occupants).
A third consequence of separating design from building, within the
profession of architecture, is to emphasize the importance of design,
as if construction were merely an afterthought. Design becomes the
respectable profession. In 1749 Lord Chesterfield, best known for
writing letters, instructed his son to leave the details of construction to
“masons, bricklayers and Lord Burlington,” who helped revive Palladian architecture, “who has, to a certain degree, lessened himself by
knowing them too well.” For anyone interested in the relationship of
architecture to power, the sentence that follows this one, often omitted
in quotation, is noteworthy: “Observe the same method as to military
architecture; understand the terms, know the general rules, and then
see them in execution with some skillful person.”15
An architect feels confident that, if a design has been well thought
out, and well executed (by others, upon whom the responsibility lies
when design and construction are separated), then all problems can be
avoided and the job has been adequately performed. This is rarely the
case, of course, because situations almost always arise during the construction process that demand immediate attention and rectification.
However, when a contractor makes a decision without consulting the
architect, it is seen as an affront at least, and more likely a professional
liability. The problem is that architectural design can often simply be
a process of predicting problems, removing obstacles and resolving
all possible contradictions: the best situation, from the perspective of
such an architect, is to have project documentation that is so complete
that every aspect of the construction process has been articulated and
specified so that the eventual building construction contractor needs
to make no on-site decisions and simply has to follow orders to the letter.
There are two pragmatic resolutions to this dilemma which can be
further explored. The first was raised by cybernetician Gordon Pask
(particularly in association with Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price’s
“Fun Palace” structure.) Here, they emphasized the quality of underspecification.16 The notion of architecture as a system with underspecified goals suggests an architecture that evolves (and which is,
therefore, never “complete”). Apart from making it clear that design
and production are simultaneous activities, this conception also helps
erase any pre-existing distinction between a building and its environment: it presupposes that a building creates an environment (which
includes both our conventional understanding of ecological “environment” as well as all the constituent players, such as its occupants), and
carries on creating an environment as it attempts to specify itself. In
truly underspecified buildings, architecture can’t help but be ecological,
not necessarily for the better, in the sense that all crucial input and
output sources inherently become part of the architectural system.
A second resolution may be found in construction industry data management standards such as BIM (Building Information Modeling), which
describes the geometric, geographic and spatial relationships of a
building’s components. Though relevant to the entire life cycle of a
building, BIM is nowadays predominantly used during the construction phase for sharing knowledge among contractors regarding material
properties and quantities in use on site. Integrated into CAD packages,
BIM can become a powerful tool to unite the processes of design and
construction because components and materials can be specified to refer to actual entities currently on a production line, in transit or already
on-site.
“Industry Foundation Classes” (IFC),17 a building data model developed by the International Alliance for Interoperability (IAI) is another
system of particular interest, being professedly open and vendorneutral. If IFC were extended in the post-occupancy phase to convey
dynamic data such as sensor/actuator states as well as mutable spatial
relationships, this would make it clear that buildings are dynamic, responsive and variable and would encourage the development of robust technological frameworks that unite design, construction and occupancy.18
[2] Materials must come pre-broken
A seamless package is frustratingly daunting when it comes to enabling
others to participate in the design and development of an artifact.
Apple’s portable media player is so difficult to open up that end-users
cannot even easily replace its battery. Though this hasn’t prevented
people hacking the device, it has significantly raised the bar with
respect to the skill level of those who can do so. Meanwhile, even in
the development of open source software there is often a tendency to
delay making source code available until bugs have been smoothed
out or the code is well commented (itself an arduous task). However,
a broken system is usually one that attracts the most attention, in
part because it appeals to others’ desire to “repair” and also because
breaks can enable one to understand better how something should or
could work.
With respect to opening up the urban design/construction process, and
encouraging the reuse and repurposing of architectural artifacts, it is
important to ensure that such structures and systems are released in a
pre-broken condition. This might take one of several forms.
Materials that readily decompose can be said to be ecologically prebroken. Those which rapidly decompose to a basic elemental or organic
state, such as ice, iron, wood and silica rather than complex materials
involving a high amount of adulteration are particularly interesting.
Building with such materials requires constant innovation, replenishment and reconstruction. Ecological considerations aside, they emphasize the ephemerality of architectural constructs and help counteract
the usual architectural obsession with permanence.
Related to this, conscious attention to the Hertzian19 structures of our
neighborhoods will become increasingly important. This is a result of
both the possible physiological effects these may have and the fact that
the electromagnetic territory created and inhabited by our devices,
gadgets and buildings increasingly tends to determine both our personal and spatial relationships. How we confront, construct or hinder
such spatial phenomena will be affected by our ability either to break
such systems or to enter into previously-broken systems.
Both arbitrary and non-arbitrary constraints can be useful but the
truism about rules being made to be broken is an obvious component
of this discussion. Regulations, zoning laws, strictures and even the
quasi-license outlined here would do well to refer to the structural organization of nomic games, in which rules of the game include
mechanisms for the players to change those rules. Peter Suber, original
creator of the gaming system Nomic, describes in “The Paradox of
Self-Amendment”20 how “self-amendment may be accepted as valid
despite the contradiction inherent in it, which may be conceded to exist. . . . This is possible because acceptance is not bound by any formal
logic. If the people and officials in the appropriately complex sense accept self-amendment, despite its contradiction, then their acceptance
validates it.” Elsewhere, Suber says that one of the starting rules of his
game is “deliberately boring so that players will quickly amend it to
please themselves.”21 An architecture that is boring, or that becomes
bored, is desperate for inhabitation and deployment.
Constructions made under the UVS quasi-license are in an important
sense always unfinished, always leaving work to be done or thoughts
about change to be had. Such constructions occur in physical space,
but it is likely that they are also happening in informational spaces and
so setting up the means for their interrogability in such terms is a crucial
dimension of building. If it’s any good, somebody will always find a
way to break into a closed system (either in defiance or as necessity), so
incipient creators might as well provide it in a pre-broken condition.
Materials that are readily repairable, interrogable or hackable can be
said to be pre-broken in terms of their use. Broken structures are not
meant to last. They invite, sometimes oblige, ongoing participation
and contribution. An artifact that is slightly broken holds less danger
of being destroyed beyond redemption during opening than one without obvious entry mechanisms.
30
31
Broken artifacts encourage reuse and repurposing. While non-specialists may feel mystified by technological seamlessness, allowing them to
crack something open helps provide a heightened sense of individual
responsibility and technical audacity. It enables people to participate
at a number of levels, depending on skills, desire and ambition. This relates to the granularity of participation discussed below and facilitates
the reprocessing of existing artifacts as building blocks that transition
between simple and complex states. Failing this, power tools, hairpins
and nail files prove useful in opening things up.
[3] Make joints
Michael Sorkin’s text, Local Code—the constitution of a city at 42o N
Latitude, sets out an imaginary of city building or planning.22 He specifies
what the built pieces (above a certain scalar threshold) of his city are,
and how they might fit together. His story is a science fiction that allows
planning to dream—through the medium of a building code, a set of
constraints that becomes a generative matrix. This generative capacity
of rule-sets is in part what is attractive about a license. It allows the
possibility of imagining means of connection between things. Such
connections in terms of actual constructions are called joints. We understand joints to be not only the things that hold things together but
also the means by which an object connects to its outside and allows it
to dream. We are interested in joints which function as forcing points
of abstraction.
Related to Sorkin’s set of requirements, artist Paul Perry and architect
Maurice Nio set up the project Amsterdam 2.0, a political rather than
spatial constitution which allows 400 cities to inhabit the same territory.23
A person joins one or more cities or societies, abides by their rules, or
lack of them, and takes part in their activities, all the while overlapping
with and bypassing the activities, spaces and codes of the other cities.
In what is currently the United Kingdom, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the chief primate of the Anglican Church, has recently suggested
that Muslims should be able to opt into a moderate system of Sharia
Law as a part of civil law.24 Although the archbishop’s argument is
ultimately for an alliance based on religion as the dominant category
of moral ordering, it is pleasing to see that the multiple city spaces
the writer P.M. described in the practical utopian text bolo’bolo25 have
some adherents. Coming out of the European squatter’s movements of
the 1980s, bolo’bolo attempts to imagine a process of city-formation
and urban life in which cultural and political freedom, predicated upon
autonomy, are maximized. In these four cases, descriptions, rules and
constraints become joints. They describe the conditions of conjunction and differentiation of elements within a wider composition. Whilst
these different rule spaces share the same physical space their overlap
is one that can involve mutual indifference or fascination as much as
conflict. The articulation of the spaces depends upon the development of adequate joints.
In architectural terms then what we are arguing for is not quite a
recapitulation of the non-plan26 but for a polyvalence of organising
principles and processes that make themselves open. In housing,
something of the kind has been argued for by the planning researcher
and activist John Turner 27 and others such as the anarchist architect
and writer Colin Ward.28 In his powerful recent survey of literature
on shanty urbanism, Planet of Slums,29 the urban theorist Mike Davis
makes the useful point that arguments for self-organization are too
easily co-opted and reformatted by powerful developers as an argument
for the removal of regulation, or for arguments for self-sufficiency as
a means of removing housing provision by larger scale organizations
(such as the state). A classic example in London would be the case of
Canary Wharf, where corporate “terraforming”30 imposes itself through
the ruse of freedom to build. Architecture in general is familiar with the
hyperventilation around similarly over-ripe opportunities in China or
Dubai. Turner’s argument (written in the years before the structural
adjustment plans of the International Monetary Fund fed exploding
populations into the mega-cities we see today) is built around the
scale of the individual person, their immediate social relations and
the buildings they inhabit and generate. This provides an important
emphasis, a form of counter-power which always returns to see things
from such a perspective rather than adopting one that is primarily
systemic in understanding.
The joint is a point, conceptual as much as material, at which powers
are mediated and confronted. In architecture, the joint is the part that
conjoins, spreads and transforms tensions. To continue our parallel
with computing, interfaces, protocols, interpreters, compilers and
screens are kinds of joint. Joints are entry points for supporting, contrasting or even opposing systems. Concentrating on the production
of joints presupposes future amalgamation or integration with things,
events and systems that are yet to occur.
A joint does not become the thing that it joins together. Bernard
Tschumi’s roof at Le Fresnoy (a structure that materially preserves and
spatially unites a number of pre-existing buildings) makes a clutter
of housings into a complex, but it does not become them and it does
not subsume them.31 The clamp used to bring two scaffolding poles together has its own character. A joint anticipates and works with what
it expects to connect. The joint makes no final assumptions about the
thing-that-lies-beyond-the-joint, it simply sets up a precondition to
connect to any other entity that can link to it. This is the power and a
measure of the joint’s degree of abstraction.
The joint may also occur in the things that it joins together. Joinery in
wood composes an interlacing of parts, of negative and positive volumes, of slottings and pegs, dovetails and housings. A threshold is not
a joint, a joint draws thresholds towards it. As such the joint is the
structure’s defense against entropy, against simply becoming a pile. In
doing so it allows the structure to conjugate both symmetry and asym-
metry. Asymmetry—of materials and of forces, and where wanted or
found, asymmetry of structure.
The joint articulates the forces and tensions that the structure brings
to bear. Lightweight structures often distribute the function of the joint
across all parts of the structure. Recent work by Olaffur Eliasson and
Einar Thorsteinn in their lacing and overlacing of ribbons of tensed
wood and metal into geometrically intricate inhabitable baskets exemplify this, as do the main parts of Vladimir Shukov’s hyperboloid
steel towers from the early twentieth century. These woven structures spread their jointness throughout their composition, producing
entirely self-sufficient compositions of elements pressing up to and
threading through each other whose only joint is with the earth.
As Manfredo Tafuri states, “spatial entities cannot solve problems
which are not of their scale.”22 What they can do is create new problems that set off resonances in other domains. Because of this, all entities under the UVS quasi-license must have more than one open joint
available at any time. Opening but a single joint at any time will simply
result in ‘chain’ structures. Two, three or more, result in a workable
range of degrees of freedom.
[4] Rubbish is the root of virtuosity
The more granularity an instrument offers, the more capable it is of
proficient as distinct from perfunctory performance, and from there,
of establishing a trajectory of possibility to infinite levels of brilliance.
In this generosity, it also sets up an abundant capacity for incompetent
performance. Equally, in releasing any construction to open development, it must be appreciated that design preciousness can result
in aggravation and disappointment: the entity that you have nurtured
since birth will be manipulated, botched and improved by others in
ways that, if you retain sensations of ownership, might be difficult to
bear. People will, collaboratively, take a design in directions you could
never have imagined, sometimes in ways that you think are utterly
wrong. In order that the constraints associated with ownership do not
tend to impose such heartbreak, objects made under the UVS quasilicense are constrained to preserve a clear pathway that participants
in builds can take from beginner/ introductory/ informal all the way
to advanced/sophisticated/virtuoso participation. This pathway is
constructed of a granular structure of infinitesimal variation.
What this description provides is a way of recognizing that people
make cities. Our habits, daily routes, and the entire matrix of relations
that we compose and leave as traces couple together parts of the city:
make them make sense or fall into disuse, wear parts out or give them
importance. The places we hide, those in which we come together to
learn, carry out transactions, rest, eat and die of boredom, those places
which set out imprisonments or in which we hold the gaze of each other’s
eyes are all to one degree or other formed by people’s obedience to or
agreement with their composition.
We shape buildings, wear them out, erase them and build when this
is necessary. Unfortunately, at present, what constitutes a “necessity”
has a rather limited vocabulary with which to work. The majority of
the population is thus limited to a very passive architecture, a form of
city living that precludes any but the most trivial involvement in the
material constitution of their urban field.
In their set of interviews, philosophers Jacques Derrida and Bernard
Stiegler discuss how different kinds of media allow, more or less, certain
kinds of participation. Their model is the alphabet, suggesting that “it
is hardly conceivable that the addressee of a book could successfully
read it without knowing how to write.”33 Stiegler in particular anticipates that the increasing availability of video, audio and other software
will create a cultural politics in which people classically formatted as
receivers become agents of production. Derrida responds by differentiating between the ability to use something and knowing how it
works, a technical form of knowledge which he might be read to imply
is superior.
Before the thread of their conversation moves away into a more general
discussion of media literacy, Stiegler, the director of an institute heavily invested in the development of novel forms of instrumentation and
software for music (IRCAM) introduces the figure of the virtuoso.
This suggests another way of working with media, where knowledge
of its qualities comes through intimate, long term involvement, practice and experimentation rather than formal or analytical knowledge.
The Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music (STEIM) in Amsterdam34
works with a related rule of thumb: a good instrument allows both for
an elementary entry-level of use, and for the complexity or very sophisticated highly nuanced involvement won through practice.35
36
37
In terms of construction, one of the ways of understanding this imperative is by stating another one: modularity is a must. The question of modularity is related to that of Joints. (But the problem of
the “modular” is different to the 1960s problem of all units having
equivalence and/or looking the same; i.e. it’s modular because you can
choose red/blue/green/orange boxes to plug together—actually this is
a non-choice: think Legoland. Simple forms do not necessarily lead to
a clearer, simplified life.)
Where architecture needs to learn from FLOSS is in another kind
of modularity. Free software projects often have a clear hierarchy
of involvement and ways of making a contribution that require different levels of skills, from the relative beginner to the high-level expert. Firefox automates bug reporting. Linux distributions organize
bugtrackers, software that maps larger or smaller fixes that need to
be made. These might be anything from making a slight amendment
to a printer driver or writing user documentation to more substantial
changes needing the attention of several minds. Modularity in this
sense means arranging the development of a project in a way that
allows productive involvement from large to small scales, from brief
to long term periods, and that, in terms of expertise, encourages participation ranging from beginner to high-levels of sophistication.36
There is a meaningful granularity of participation that drives the most
successful FLOSS projects. Whilst such qualities allow for multiple
kinds of productive involvement, what is often missed in accounts of
these structures is that in allowing for finely granular participation
and incrementally difficult problem-setting, these projects also act as
large scale learning environments. This would be quite a good definition
for a city.
[5] Collaborate with collaborators
One way in which the question of objects and code is often articulated
is that code allows for non-rivalrous use. A piece of software can be
copied as many times as wanted without any loss of quality and without denying anyone else the ability to make such a copy. This is seen
as being a key difference between the world of bits and that of atoms.
An endless amount of processor cycles, storage and network access is
a pre-condition for this digital abundance. Yet rivalry can find itself
played out at many distinct scales.
An interesting consequence of the kinds of collaboration developed in
FLOSS has been that enemies find themselves working on the same
project. Companies who are in at least nominal rivalry with each other
may build their businesses around shared code (examples would be
many of the companies formed around FLOSS), or use the sharing and
development of such code as a way of developing an alternative platform to proprietary software in order to gain market share (such as
SUN and IBM’s support of GNU/Linux).
More notably, those in conflict in other ways may find themselves
working together. Anarchists, for instance, might find themselves contributing to a code-base also worked on by the United States military.
Whilst some programmers see this as a means towards communalizing the intolerable wealth and power of the war machine, making the
military subsidize a freely available resource, others leave projects in
protest. The Free Software Foundation states explicitly that, “You can
use GPLed software to implement DRM, guide nuclear missiles, or
run your own organized crime syndicate—just as you can use it to administer a court, run an animal shelter, or organize your community.”37
Hackers interested in a particular interpretation of Human Rights,
including the Cult of the Dead Cow, have launched alternative licenses
such as the Hacktivismo Enhanced-Source Software License38 which
explicitly precludes the use of software produced under this license
by those deemed to be human rights abusers. Those apparently falling
into this category and thus prohibited from use of the software include
“any national of Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan or Syria.”39
Given the current targets of US political geography and missile systems
the aims of both licenses seem remarkably concurrent.
Whilst FLOSS is often seen as valuable because of its simple pragmatics, it also has something to teach us about paradox. This sensible way
of writing software depends upon a common rational infrastructure
(the focus on the production of code) produced through a voluntarist
version of “from each according to their ability, to each according to
their need.” By establishing this framework it, in paradoxical fashion,
disregards certain aspects of those entities feeding the codebase. That
is to say, anything other than the code produced is deemed irrelevant.
This is a reason for Free Software’s great contribution to democracy
and also its means of subsidizing, by ignoring, injustice. Paradox is a
way of mobilizing disregarded elements in a composition, and as such,
this paradox rests upon another. It is possible that we misrecognise the
name of Free Software, not noticing that it is also about the freedom of
software to grow, to multiply and to improve, regardless of where it
resources itself from. This double paradox of free software is thus that
software parasites the human.
Occasionally, the scalar freedom of software may be in competition
with that of others, or conversely, life parasites upon death, communication builds itself upon the resources of the military. Such paradoxes
are replayed in terms of construction in the interplay between the
static and the changeable, between the learning built into interrogable
technologies and the things that are taken for granted in designed ease
of use. Builds using the UVS quasi-license will shelter and defend, be
nurtured and confounded by the universal provision of this paradox
of collaboration.
[6] Copying or not copying is irrelevant
One “ideal” of the architect, propounded by Ayn Rand’s character
Howard Roark,40 is one in which a single individual espouses a goal
and inflicts this upon all others. Such architecture is produced in three
distinct stages with little interaction between each: first as an archetype
of imagination; second as a set of physical representations; third as a
built structure that is sprung upon the world in answer to all its problems.
Failure in any stage is a failure of the world to allow for perfection.
In contrast, the UVS quasi-license recognizes that the world is constructed by its inhabitants, at every moment of conception, inception
and perception. Any notion of perfection is constantly under flux: it
is multivalent and inherently self-contradictory. This paradox insists
that, in emphasizing the production of public space, it refers to a type
of space that rarely fully exists. When we talk about the public domain,
we understand that the public is not some pre-existing fact. Publics
must be made, indeed publics make themselves, and in so doing publics
make domains that they refer to and through which they are mutually
constitutive. The spatial technologies of such publics weave fluctuating
participation with capacities for organizational coherence.
What can we look to in the field of current software culture’s creation
of space? In Second Life, participants create their environment in ways
determined both by Linden Labs, the commercial deity that controls
the server software and organization, and by the environment they are
born into, determined by previous participants. They can create objects and environments with form, function and behavior. They may
make these available to others in one of two ways, either by selling or
giving them away. In both cases there are two ways in which future
use and modification can be restricted: a constructed object has parameters that determine whether, first, it can be copied and, second,
whether it can be modified. Similar in some senses to the choosable
parameters of a Creative Commons license, Second Life has hard-coded
a framework through which people can inherently share and collaborate while still determining the extent to which others will be able
to make use of their artifacts. One does wonder what might happen if
Linden Labs applied an open source license to its server software (as
distinct to the client, which has already been released as such).
Within the architectural context, though less so in expensive urban
areas due to prohibitive cost, the trend (at least in Europe) for selfbuild homes is on the rise.41 Architects are seen as supplementary to
this process, useful perhaps in advising on legal and structural matters
and creating technical drawings but a bit of a hindrance when it comes
to design, which, self-builders often feel is something that “anyone can
do.” This do-it-yourself (DIY) approach has been popularized, even
pimped, in the UK recently by television shows such as “Designer for
a Day,” “Grand Designs” and “DIY SOS.” These programs chart the
progress of projects undertaken by homeowners or show how design
professionals can advise people in upgrading existing homes themselves.
There are several reasons why people are now willing to take on the
time, energy and stress of self-build projects. With financing easier
to acquire than it has been in the past (at least for self-builders), the
building process is considerably smoother for would-be homeowners.
Meanwhile, self-build projects can be significantly cheaper than developer homes, in part because one isn’t paying the developer’s profit,
but also as a result of government initiatives to partially encourage
this process.42
In self-built construction, end-users themselves are at the helm of the
design process and are able to produce the home they desire (in terms
of style and location) with a personalized layout. This tendency is
encouraged by a general perception that hiring an architect is expen-
sive and fears that the architect-client relationship could be frustrating.
Consumer-friendly builders merchants like Home Depot, B&Q and
Ace Hardware have made it relatively easy for self-builders to hire
equipment or purchase materials directly as they require. Consumeroriented software packages like Home Design by Punch! Software
enable non-designers to produce sophisticated architectural drawings
and layouts, while packages such as SketchUp enable fast and accurate
visualizations. Similarly, the availability of prefabricated building parts
enables quicker, easier construction.
How architects respond to these conditions will have significant consequences on the way that housing and design in general evolve in
the twenty-first century. As people themselves recover prime position
in configuring, organizing and constructing their own environments,
the role of the architect changes dramatically from the professional
idealiser and problem-solver to the possibly non-professional facilitator
of design/construction systems.
One possible response from the architectural profession is to decry the
seeming trivialization of the design process that appears to be encouraged by removing trained professionals from the system. This is in part
a self-preservation instinct, because it is the very livelihood of architects (i.e., people who are trained in the design of space) that is being
threatened. More importantly, argues this response, it is the trivialization of the notion of design itself: if everyone is a designer, then the
designation ceases to have any real meaning. This may well be the case
if you are content to believe in absolute beauty or perfection.
Another response might be for architects to concentrate their skills
on “signature” public buildings, museums, urban planning and other
large scale proposals, where it can be argued that a skill in spatial design
(as opposed to simply form and material design) becomes crucial. We
have already seen that architects become superstars these days for
designing art museums, apartment blocks and office towers. It is possible to anticipate that such buildings will become notable not so much
for their visual novelty but for their admirable structural solipsism.43
A third response, most interesting to us, would take a very different
tack. Rather than shying away from the conceptual difficulties offered
by a system in which “anyone” can be a designer; where “copies” are
as flawless as an “original”; and where preciousness is not a desirable
attribute, architects could embrace these concerns and seek ways to
narrow the divide between the “designer” and the “designed-for.”
Embrace the culture of the knock-off and of improvement.
The architect in this situation is therefore many things, not simply
locatable in a single professional. The architectural force can be a style,
a system, a compositional dynamic, a generative sequence, and/or
someone with a good idea or engagement with the learning of a craft.
The architect becomes a diagramming force, paradoxically both rule
and rule generator determining the axioms that run through the process. Rather than locked into gatekeeping, this figure lets processes
loose, encourages the flow of possibilities and modalities, works in a
specific fashion on particular problems with certain sets of knowledge,
learns and is often taken by surprise through the process.
[7] Property must be invented
Once something is digitized it doesn’t make sense to claim proprietary
ownership of it—it’s a copy. The way in which the film and music
industries have failed to respond to computational and networked digital
media generates a lot of fuss, but should be compared to other areas.
Newspapers, for instance, have begun to make real use of networks in
ways that make sense. What this means is that “piracy,” the sharing of
files and information, should be understood as the background norm, a
de facto standard, even if it contradicts the legal norms we are supposedly governed by. Ways of developing projects, even those that require
significant amounts of cash to go into production, need to take this
into account. To fight against it is perhaps understandable as a ploy, but
doomed. Worse, to pretend it isn’t happening is just silly.
Given this background of developing digital abundance, a number of
attempts have been made to formulate a means of using open source
production as a model for all economic and production activity. Examples abound in the Germanophone political-theory project Oekenux,
which specializes in research on concrete examples for extending
FLOSS models into other forms of production.44 Often such projects
rely on the genotype/phenotype split, where the plans, recipes or instructions for a thing are held in common, while individual realizations of those plans are owned in a wider variety of ways. Much of the
contemporary enthusiasm for “fabbers,” machines used for making
objects via sintering, milling or other techniques often used in rapid
prototyping or mass customization, is driven by the idea of making
“Santa Claus” machines that, given the availability of a blueprint, can
manufacture almost anything. Food printers with inks including
vitamins and other nutrients are also possible, though largely pointless (the stuff really does grow on trees). The UVS quasi-license aims
however to avoid getting stuck in the genotype/phenotype distinction—
in software the code is the thing, and the matter of compiling it or not
is relatively simple. In order to make the parallel work, it is interesting
to see what happens if we refuse to acknowledge the split.
What we contemporarily understand as property is only what has
currently settled out as such. Arguments that property takes on any
particular natural form are unhelpful. Its visible artificiality is what
makes it useful. A historical account of the genesis of different forms
of property, or alternately, the development of the use of the idea of
property to interpret and change social relations, is beyond the scope
of this text. What we encourage is an understanding of property as
plastic, as historically contingent, and as something to be experimented
with or left as redundant. This means that there is no blueprint, provided
by FLOSS or anything else, to work to religiously. It is a given that property is theft. But it is also true that different kinds of ownership, access,
production and development allow for different kinds of relation to
materials—to the methods and techniques by which they may be studied, processed and shaped—and that the social organizations and powers
of the imaginary which form around and through such work establish
abundant possibilities for different kinds of orders that may be formed.
Some sectors of society, such as financial markets and banks, are allowed
great freedom to experiment with forms of property. When these experiments go wrong, such as with recent sub-prime mortgage schemes
in the US and related financial strategies in the UK, society as a whole
picks up the pieces. These are both highly abstracted speculative practices based on people’s needs for housing. Communism, in this case, is a
good thing for the rich. We are not interested in sustaining a solidarity
that only travels upwards.
What we propose here is that the vocabulary of property generated by
capitalism, especially in its neoliberal variants, is too rigid to allow for
invention. In its application it has also proven itself to be incapable
of allowing for a sustainable, let alone fully ecological, relationship
between the societies it orders and the life systems of the planet. In
its application to the context of digital abundance, it has failed on its
own terms, let alone those of the generation of a viable and delightful
digital culture. FLOSS has shown, in the domain of software, a way in
which systems of property may be manipulated in order to set out
a more pragmatic, useful and productive mode of operations. Forms
of property govern access to, shape the use of, and define the ability
to contribute to the sources and sustention of life. As their currently
dominant forms fray they can only be held onto by force. Instead, they
should be expanded upon. This must be done in a way that not only
mitigates against the excesses of capitalism but which actively subordinates it: carefully, violently, melodically.
All UVS builds must open the category of property up to their own
speculative reinvention. These are not predetermined. Only a mode of
construction that is capable of losing the plot is adequate.
For updates and more information, visit the Urban Versioning System
1.0 web site at http://uvs.propositions.org.uk.
Legible Notice Requirement
In order to comply with this quasi-license, the following statement must
be legible on the construction: “This build is licensed under the Urban
Versioning System v.1.0”
1
Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, design and capitalist development,
The MIT Press, Cambridge, 1976
2
United Nations Population Division, An Overview of Urbanization, Internal
Migration, Population Distribution and Development in the World, online at,
http://www.un.org/esa/population/meetings/EGM_PopDist?/P01_UNPopDiv?.
pdf see in particular section II/A/9
3
Free Software Foundation, The Free Software Definition, online at, http://
www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/free-sw.html
4
Superflex, Free Beer, project documented online at, http://www.superflex.net/
projects/freebeer/
5
Documentation of Open Cola is available in a number of places, for example,
http://www.colawp.com/colas/400/cola467_recipe.html
6
Ice Cream for Everyone, online at, http://bak.spc.org/ice/
7
Information about the GP2X platform is available online at, http://www.
gp2x.com/
8
Information about Arduino is available online at http://arduino.cc
9
Gerrard Winstanley, The Law of Freedom in a Platform, 1652
10
Dennis Kaspori, “A communism of ideas: towards an architectural open source
practice,” Archis #3, 2003; See also, The Open Architecture Network, http://
www.openarchitecturenetwork.org/. Kaspori, often in collaboration with artist
Jeanne van Heeswijk, has developed some very significant moves towards a
participatory architectural and planning practice, for instance in the Face Your
World project, which involved hundreds of people over several months in the
redesign of a park in the Slotervaart suburb of Amsterdam, http://www.face
yourworld.nl/. An early text which develops the political reading of architecture and open source software in a useful way is Brian Carroll, Open Source
Architecture, online at, http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0006/
msg00036.html
11
Maria Lind, “The Collaborative Turn,” in, Johanna Billing, Maria Lind and
Lars Nilsson, eds., Taking the Matter into Common Hands, on contemporary art
and collaborative practices, Black Dog, London, 2007, pp. 15–31; see also various
texts in, Marina Vishmidt et al, Media Mutandis, a NODE.London Reader,
Metamute, London, 2006
12
see Simon Yuill, “Concurrent Versioning System.” in, Matthew Fuller, ed.,
Software Studies, a Lexicon, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2008
13
Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver, Adhocism, the case for improvisation,
Anchor Press, London, 1973
14
An exception is Jingwen Wang, Qing Zhu and Qizhi Mao, “The three-
dimensional extension of Space Syntax,” in, Proceedings, 6th International
Space Syntax Symposium, Istanbul, 2007.
15
Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, Letters to His Son on the
Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1749), Project Gutenberg
e-text, online at, http://infomotions.com/etexts/gutenberg/dirs/3/3/5/3353
/3353.htm
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55
16
Underspecification is a powerful means of enhancing the flexibility of archi-
tecture, but also its capacity to interface with developing media environments.
See for example Herman Hertzberger’s Diagoon Houses in Delft (1971).
17
see, International Alliance for Interoperability, http://www.ifcwiki.org/
index.php/Main_Page
18
Extended Environments Markup Language, (http://www.eeml.org/) by one
of the authors, is one attempt to extend IFC by describing the dynamic
behaviour of sensors and actuators.
19
Anthony Dunne, Hertzian Tales, Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience,
and Critical Design, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2006.
20
Peter Suber, The Paradox of Self-Amendment, online at, http://www.earlham.
edu/~peters/writing/psa/
21
Peter Suber, online at, Nomic—A Game of Self-Amendment, online at,
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/nomic.htm
22
Michael Sorkin, Local Code, the constitution of a city at 42o N Latitude,
Princeton Architectural Press, 1996.
23
Maurice Nio & Paul Perry, Amsterdam 2.0, exhibition, Mediamatic,
Amsterdam 2005; See documentation video by Nicola Unger, Amsterdam 2.0
Fragments and Readings, 2006.
24
Rowan Williams, “Civil and Religious Law in England,” published in,
The Guardian, February 7th, 2008 http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/
Story/0,,2254270,00.html
25
P.M., bolo’bolo, Semiotext(e), New York, 1983. See also an interview with
P.M. by Oliver Ressler at http://www.republicart.net/disc/aeas/pm01_en.htm/
26
see, Jonathan Hughes and Simon Sadler, Non-Plan, essays on freedom and
change in modern architecture and urbanism, Architectural Press, Oxford, 2000
27
John F.C. Turner, Housing by People, towards autonomy in building environ-
ments, Marion Boyars, London, 1976.
28
Colin Ward, Housing, an anarchist approach, Freedom Press, London, 1976;
Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward, Arcadia for All, the legacy of a makeshift landscape, Mansell, London, 1984.
29
Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, Verso, London, 2007.
30
Brian Holmes, One World One Dream, posted January 28, 2008 to http://
brianholmes.wordpress.com/
31
Bernard Tschumi, Le Fresnoy, architecture in/between, The Monacelli
Press, New York, 1999.
32
Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, op. cit.
33
Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television, trans.
Jannifer Bajorek, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2002.
34
Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music, http://www.steim.org/
35
see for example, Joel Ryan, Remarks on Instrument Design at STEIM,
http://www.steim.org/steim/texts.php?id=3
36
This is the argument that is put forth in various ways in the following texts
and elsewhere: Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, Yale University Press,
2007; Daren C. Brabham, “Crowdsourcing as a model for problem solving: an
introduction and cases,” Convergence, the international journal of research into
new media technologies, Vol 14, no.1 feb 2008, pp. 75–90; Jeff Howe, “The Rise of
Crowdsourcing”, Wired, Vol. 14 No.6, online at, http://www.wired.com/wired/
archive/14.06/crowds.html; Geert Lovink & Cristoph Spehr, ‘Out-Cooperating
The Empire?’ in, Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter eds., My Creativity Reader,
a critique of creative industries, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2007,
pp.81-96; Cristoph Spehr, The Art of Free Cooperation, Autonomedia, New
York, 2007
37
Free Software Foundation, Busting GPLv3 FUD, online at, http://www.fsf.org/
blogs/licensing/2007-10-18-gplv3-fud
38
Hacktivismo Enhanced-Source Software License, online at, http://www.hack-
tivismo.com/about/hessla.php
39
Clause 12, Hacktivismo Enhanced-Source Software License, ibid.
40
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead, Penguin Modern Classics, London, 2007.
41
James Barlow, Robert Jackson and Jim Meikle, Homes to DIY for: The UK’s
self-build housing market in the twenty-first century, Joseph Rowntree
Foundation, London, 2001
42
For example, in the UK, since 1996, self-builders have been allowed to reclaim
Value Added Tax spent on materials purchased for house building. See, “VAT
refunds for ‘do it yourself’ builders and converters,” HMRC Reference Notice 719,
May 2002.
43
See, Philippe Boudon, Lived-in Architecture, Le Courbousier’s Pessac revisited,
trans. Gerald Onn, Lund Humphries, London, 1972.
44
Oekenux, online at, http://www.oekonux.org/
56
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S I T U AT E D T E C H N O L O G I E S PA M P H L E T S S E R I E S
also available
Situated Technologies Pamphlets 1:
Urban Computing and Its Discontents
Adam Greenfield and Mark Shepard
The first volume in the Situated Technologies Pamphlets Series, “Urban
Computing and Its Discontents” is framed as a discussion by the authors
to provide an overview of the key issues, historical precedents, and contemporary approaches surrounding designing situated technologies
and inhabiting cities populated by them.
upcoming
Situated Technologies Pamphlets 3: Situated Advocacy
A special double issue featuring two contributions selected through an
open call for proposals
Ecologies of Equivalence: On Suspicious Images and Latent Interfaces
Benjamin H. Bratton and Natalie Jeremijenko
Community Wireless Networks as Situated Advocacy
Laura Forlano and Dharma Dailey
ABOUT THE ARCHITECTURAL LEAGUE
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disciplines. Through its lectures, exhibitions, publications and digital
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stimulating work and important issues in contemporary architecture
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The Architectural League is supported by public funds from the
National Endowment for the Arts; the New York State Council on the
Arts, a State Agency; and the New York City Department of Cultural
Affairs. Additional support is provided by private contributions
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For information about becoming a member, visit the League’s web
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President
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