VeniceSuperBlog

At the Biennale’s "Shaping the City" workshop on Wed 6 Sept 2006 with Ricky Burdett, Saskia Sassen, Richard Sennett, a coterie of city Mayors (Venice, Bogota, Johannesburg, for example) and urban experts/public agency representatives, the Venezuelan speaker (a public administration official, Caracas, pop. 4 million inhabitants) Hernandez talked about the country’s recent "democratic revolution" based on civic participation, of Mayoral and local agency initiatives to find houses for people who’ve "been living in containers for 40 years" (especially in the north of the city), of shopping malls becoming "governing places", but beyond that the need for other kinds of public meeting spaces, of "retrofitting the barrios" to make the city more human-centred, of alleviating the sewage problem affecting the river and drinking water in this capital of ‘little Venice’. (see also photographer Nelson Garrigo’s vivid work Blood Building in Elena Foster’s astutely chosen C-Photo exhibition in the Italian Pavilion (Giardini).

But amidst this wave of positive measures have come two upstaging activities: firstly the Venezuelan President Chavez expropriated key industries - paper and oil valve companies, and then the Mayor (Juan Baretto) has overshadowed that, controversially upstaging with President by decreeing the expropriation of two golf courses - green lungs used by the wealthy - and 300 rent controlled houses. These new retroactive terms drive the rich away and affect the security of 500,000 rentee families. Is he really interested in democratising public space? The Urban Think Tank (architects Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner) who designed the Gimnasio Vertical at the entrance to a barrio and free to all residents (where crime has gone down by 45% since it opened) featured in the Caracas display in Ricky Burdett’s exhibition argue that this land should not and cannot be built on.

This scenario begs the question: will these kinds of political metasystems and retroactive policies, not just in Caracas but affecting small local industries (farming, fishing - see the Taiwanese Pavilion), citizens and migrants to cities globally, ‘eat up’ these smaller actors on the world stage and in the process sacrifice human legacies?

This Biennale does not (cf. Odile Decq) make me worry that architecture is not as present in the Arsenale displays as in the past. I have no sense that architectural vision has been denied in any way. The theme Ricky has explored is necessary space for reflection. The Biennale is is a well overdue and at times poignant reminder that non-divisive relational spaces designed by multidisciplinary architectural teams are what urban societies need and deserve for their peace of mind and sustainability. Its global scope and pointing up of the complex relationship between architecture, urban design and social dynamics asks for social awareness on a ‘big picture scale’, that we open our eyes to global processes affecting cities and urban and would-be urban dwellers. Behind the beguiling ‘veils’ of video imagery lies further potential to consider the paradigm shift from the equation that says rampant urban growth = only megastructures to the possibility of the city in a garden, with landscape and urban design reconciled as they urgently need to be on a better level.

What price "democratic revolution"? The quality of urban architectural mediation is a complex, time-based, synergistic process and should not be compromised by retroactive (and - as the US Pavilion’s exhibition on New Orleans well reminds us - vastly inadequate federal support to maintain the city’s levees/city-wide civic and emergency facilities in the past) and acts of destructive social engineering. In all too stark and glaring contrast to all the laudable initiatives of urban design savvy Mayors, public agencies and transport bodies involving the architectural community across the world, those global politicians (Bush, Chavez etc, an intermidable list of ‘operators’) who only think of their own grandeur and not the bigger, humanitarian and sustainable picture of urban society in flux, and ‘practice’  ‘government-lite’ according to their own rules have truly lost the plot.