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Foam-city: a new organic approach in spatial design

Author: Ctlina Ioni Affiliation: PhD candidate, Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism 18-20 Academiei st., 010014, Bucharest, ROMANIA e-mail: catalina.ionita@yahoo.com

Abstract In a context that urges an ecological approach as an imaginative and practical method for addressing cities ... and as a new ethics and aesthetics of the urban (Mostafavi 2010), Sloterdijks observation that there is no outside could offer the premises for the revival of an organic approach to architecture and urban planning current practices. In this paper it will be argued that this would be an interpretation no longer associated with the anatomical similarity but one based on the "thought-image of the foam" imagined by the post-humanist German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. Instead of the embodiment of a static order (the hierarchical socio-economic relationships between people as well as the order in principles of urban space), more and more a city is considered to become, as well as studied and regarded, as an ever changing organism. Charles Darwins famous quote It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change contains an important principle that also applies to cities and seems to be the common belief behind the contemporary tendencies in designing at different scales from Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher's Parametric Urbanism, Vicente Guallarts Sociopolis, Sou Fujimotos view of architecture as something between living together and independently in a relational space, to the Complexcity design patterns of Lee Jang Sub.
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The current nature of the human environment is defined by the fact that nature and human action can no longer be separated, as objects, technology, the embodied self and nature are considered to be all part of a network; a whole that cannot be managed by simple urban planning strategies. The awareness that all people and things are interconnected and that nature is not an untouchably vast and sublime essence outside of us (Latour 2008) is starting to be exposed in the contemporary critique literature. Sloterdijk describes the city as a Foam City: The co-isolated foam of a society conditioned to individualism is not simply an agglomeration of neighboring (partition-sharing) inert and massive bodies but rather multiplicities of loosely touching cells of life-worlds (Sloterdijk 2006). In the urban environment, this foamy model of a complex yet coherent production of space is very well illustrated by the urban informal settlements, organically emerged structures, which host the "ego-spheres" as complex networks. The image of the foam and thinking of the city in terms of relations are not new approaches, as Japanese Metabolists and Archigram extended theories and experiments stand proof. Different from these centralised attitudes, imagining the city's system of relations like an ego-spheres foam structure enhances its adaptability thanks to the emergent capability of associative individualities. Through an organic lens, the emergent state (which is basically seen as an architects work which guides the unfolding of possibilities provided by a computer program based on formulas developed to mimic the natural growth) becomes broader, defining a body of processes that emerges from both physical, social, both real and digital structures, the architecture and the city that emerge from the living conditions. This approach is based on the interconnection between individuals situated in co-isolation (relation) in the "foamy structure" (global whole of the nature and human environment) and opens up new interrogations of livability and bottom up planning in the contemporary architectural and urban planning discourse.

Keywords: city, organic, foam structure, Sloterdijk

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