011 ON the way (literally)
get ready, urbophilia is about to change gear
I
For a couple of weeks now I was searching ways to explain why this post of urbophilia was late. And, because of that, my delay was getting even longer. Instead of the promised (loosely) two week intervals, my previous post is now 23 days old!
After a quite straightforward process of sharing some of my consolidated ideas, established and published work with you (which I intend to continue), we will be entering a new phase with dynamic, with sometimes even live transmission of raw contents, as produced. That is going to bring us all into some uncharted territories, potentially instigating the fusion of ideas and realities – as encountered, as experienced, as thought, as felt. These posts will not only contain, but they will be veritable attempts (essai) to communicate both (re)search (process) itself and emergence of the findings, or what might look like findings – in (almost) real time. The structuring of what might be impossible to structure was never meant to be simple. But, as experiences from my Keio Measuring the non-Measurable, Mn’M research project amply confirm, the very processes of hypothesising, conceiving, conceptualising, formulating the findings, or even the ways of facing difficulties, might be(come) the most interesting, fertile and rewarding moments in research, often leading to hidden treasures. They even have the power to redefine what research is, what it could be, and should be (about).
So, as I have found myself in trouble trying to communicate what exactly the next urbophilia step was going to be, I was getting late and then – last evening (11 May 2024 to be precise) I have accidentally deleted all of my Substack material! Everything that has already been posted and, even worse, all ready and near-completed drafts and sketches were gone. There is a recent back-up in our base (a week or two away from where I am writing this entry) and my quite old-fashioned, brutally analogue ways (see below) are quite resilient but – I was about to get even slower, unacceptably late.
And then, instead of total frustration, a strong sense of freedom came over me! The timing of my digital ****-up was, actually – perfect!
At least for the time being, everything that I will be sharing with you has to be baked anew, fresh, from ingredients which are at hand, in me and with me, which are emerging in front of me, which are me, along this journey. That FRESHNESS is what I wanted to explain, but lacked words, what our forthcoming steps at the urbophilia path need to be about!
To start with and occasionally to get back to is our urbophilia@substack ON WORK folder. It contains most of what we have done so far:
INTRODUCTION, and a full set of ”ON” explorations:
ON sensibility,
ON words (+ wood),
ON thinking cities – as if people matters
ON complexity (of the human and the urban),
ON method – complex approaches to complex phenomena, and their exclusion,
ON subjectivity (and how to include it in urban research and practice),
ON sensuality (and fully lived, thus fully human realities),
ON essayistic sensibility (or – how to communicate the findings) and, an
Before proceeding, I wish to thank the subscribers who have sent (or, in one precious case, told me) comments about their urbophilia experiences so far. PP, a master photographer whose work I had a pleasure of incorporating in one of my recent publications, has gracefully praised the contents while pointing at the problem with length of 000-010 essays – especially when it comes to mobile phones (the comment which I have also interpreted as – in this era of short attention spans).
Yes, in the overall scheme of urbophilia, the task of those long(ish) 000-010 essays was to create an overall atmosphere and bring in understanding of what this project wants to be, including hints of directions, of what it might become. Those essays had to lay the foundations, and, thus, they had to be in that particular form. They had to communicate that the matter with which we deal simply is – complex, irreducible, that it has to support (various degrees of) lightness (sometimes a heavy lightness, as in Kundera, Perec, and Calvino), the lightness which, I hope, is about to start taking over – as my actual journey (towards you, with you, towards the aim of this project) takes off. Thus (while urbophilia was never addressed to those whose have no time for thought), the forthcoming changes may address that problem, too.
The urbophilia subscriber who has contacted me directly is an experienced colleague, architect and urbanist ZT, who wrote before (and was mentioned in essay 005), whom I knew, whose projects I respect (but have never had a fortune of working with). Z has described his perspective at urbophilia as that of a “practitioner ... thus a craftsman”. What we are about to start will certainly be entering the realm of production of space, the very raison d'etre of anything that wants to be architecture, urban design, urbanism, the concreteness which it has the capacity to transcend.
As hinted when I wrote about Kengo Kuma’s masterful material thinking ON words (+ wood) in his two projects which, “despite their totally opposite locations (periphery/ centre), sizes (small/huge), use (private/public), aims (intimate/global), presence (modest/grandiose), [...] communicate the oneness of sensibility. That oneness is in the ethos of wood which makes Murai Museum and Olympic Stadium in Tokyo talk the language into which this initiative needs to be translated. That juxtaposition is deep, cultural and historic, retrospective and prospective, future-orientated meditation in wood.” We should be returning to that theme here soon, in 1:1 scale.
III
Thus, after our opening urbophilia 000-010 series of posts, the moment to re-set our path has come. I expect the frequency of our communication to increase. In parallel to occasional full essays, there will with more, shorter, variously formatted, both written and visual, pointed entries, sometimes very brief, even simply … CUT! … (perhaps to be continued) …
