Weak Work:

Andrea Branzi's "Weak Metropolis"

and the Projective Potential
of an "Ecological Urbanism"
Charles Waldheim

In his introduction to the Ecological Urbanism conference,

Mohsen Mostafavi described ecological urbanism as both a

critique of and a continuation by other terms of the discourse
of landscape urbanism. Ecological urbanism proposes Uust
as landscape urbanism proposed over a decade ago) to multiply the available lines of thought on the contemporary city to
include environmental and ecological concepts, while expanding traditional disciplinary and professional frameworks for
describing those urban conditions. As a critique of the landscape urbanist agenda, ecological urbanism promises to render that dated discourse more specific to ecological, economic,
and social conditions of the contemporary city.
Mostafavi's introduction suggested that ecological urbanism implied the projective potential of the design disciplines
to render alternative future scenarios. He further indicated
that those alternative futures may place us across various
"spaces of disagreement." These spaces of disagreement span
the range of disciplinary and professional borders comprising the study of the city. Any contemporary examination of
those disciplinary frameworks would acknowledge that the
challenges of the contemporary city rarely respect traditional disciplinary boundaries. This realization recalls Roland
Barthes' formulation on the various roles of language and
fashion in the production of interdisciplinary knowledge:

Andrea Branzi, et al., "Masterplan

Strijp Philips, Eindhoven," model
view (1999 -2000)

This reading suggests that ecological urbanism might reanimate discussions of sustainability with the political. social, cultural. and critical potentials that have been drained
from them. This shift would be particularly apt as the design
fields presently experience a profound disjunction of realms
in which environmental health and design culture are opposed. This historical opposition has produced a contemporary condition in which ecological function, social justice, and
cultural literacy are perceived by many as mutually exclusive.
This disjunction of concerns has led to a situation in which
design culture has been depoliticized, distanced from the
empirical and objective conditions of urban life. At the same
moment, increased calls for environmental remediation, ecological health, and biodiversity suggest the potential for reimagining urban futures. Among the results of this disjunction
of intellectual and practical commitments has been that we
are collectively coerced into choosing between alternate urban paradigms, each espousing exclusive access to environmental health, social justice, or cultural relevance.
Homi Bhabha used his keynote address at the conference
to frame the ecological urbanism project in temporal terms,
arguing that "it is always too early, or too late, to talk about
cities of the future."In so doing, Bhabha locates the ecological

Interdisciplinarity is not the calm of an easy security; it begins effectively when the solidarity of old disciplines breaks down-perhaps
even violently, through the jolts of fashion-in the interests of a new
object and a new language. 1

In reading the new language proposed by the ecological urbanism initiative, the subtitle of the recent Harvard conference on the subject, "Alternative and Sustainable Cities of
the Future," is equally telling. This construction indicates
the linguistic cul-de-sac that confronts much of contemporary urbanism, constructed around a false choice between
critical cultural relevance and environmental survival. The
conference title and subtitle further signify disciplinary fault
lines between the well-established discourse on sustainability and the long tradition of using urban projections as descriptions of the contemporary conditions for urban culture.
ANTICIPATE

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114

.-~.

Archizoom Associati, "No-Stop

City" (1968-71)

urbanism project in a complex intertwined dialectic between

the ecologies of the informal and the relentless reach of modernization. Bhabha maintains that one is in effect always
working with the problems of the past, but these problems
appear differently in new emergent contemporary conditions.
Thus the project of ecological urbanism, Bhabha insists, is
a "work of projective imagination." 2
It is in those terms, as work of projective imagination, that
the urban projects of Andrea Branzi might be found relevant
to the emergent discourse on ecological urbanism. Branzi's
work reanimates a long tradition of using urban projects as
social and cultural critique. This form of urban projection
deploys a project not simply as an illustration or "visionbut rather as a demystified distillation and description of
our present urban predicaments. In this sense, one might
read Branzi's urban projects as less a utopian future possible
world than a critically engaged and politically literate delineation of the power structures, forces, and flows shaping the
contemporary urban condition. Over the past four decades,
Branzi's work has articulated a remarkably consistent critique of the social, cultural. and intellectual poverty of much
laissez-faire urban devt::lopment and the realpolitik assumptions of much urban design and planning. As an alternative,
Branzi's projects propose urbanism in the form of an environmental, economic, and aesthetic critique of the failings of
the contemporary city.
Born and educated in Florence, Branzi studied architecture
in a cultural milieu of the Operaists and a scholarly tradition of Marxist critique, as evidenced through speculative urban proposals as a form of cultural criticism. Branzi first
came to international visibility as a member of the collective

Archizoom (mid-1960S), based in Milan but associated with

the Florentine Architettura Radicale movement. Archizoom's
project and texts for "No-Stop City" (1968- 71) illustrate an
I
urbanism of continuous mobility, fluidity, and flux. While -~ -- {
1"N o-Stop City" was received on one level as a satire of the British technophilia of Archigram, it was also viewed as an illustration of an urbanism without qualities, a representation of
the "degree-zero" conditions for urbanization. 3
Archizoom's use of typewriter keystrokes on A4 paper to
represent a nonfigural planning study for "No-Stop City" an~ --_
ticipated contemporary interest in indexical and parametric
representations of the city. Their work prefigured current attention to describing the relentlessly horizontal field conditions of the modern metropolis as a surface shaped by the
strong forces of economic and ecological flows. Equally, these
drawings and their texts pointed toward today's investigations of infrastructure and ecology as nonfigurative drivers \ '
of urban form . As such, a generation of contemporary urban- , '-~
ists have drawn from Branzi's intellectual commitments. This "
diverse list of influence ranges from Stan Allen and James
Corner's interest in field conditions to Alex Wall and Alejandro
Zaera Polo's concern with logistics. 4 More recently, Pier Vit- ~
torio Aureli and Martino Tattara's project "Stop-City" directly
references Branzi's use of nonfigurative urban projection as a form of social and political critique. s Branzi's urban projects are equally available to inform contemporary interef ts
within architectural culture and urbanism on an array oC -topics as diverse as animalia, indeterminacy, and genericity,
among others.
As a deliberately "nonfigurative" urbanism, "No-Stop City" --renewed and disrupted a longstanding traditional nonfigu;-~-~

P.V. Aureli and M. Tattara/Dogma,

"Stop City," aerial view (2008)
Typical plan, forest canopy (2008)

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Ludwig Hilberseimer (with Alfred

Caldwell), bird's-eye view of
commercial area and settlement
unit (c. 1943)
Ludwig Hilberseimer, ''The City in
the Landscape" (1949)

rative urban projection as socialist critique. In this regard,

Branzi's "No-Stop City" draws on the urban planning projects
and theories of Ludwig Hilberseimer, particularly Hilberseimer's "New Regional Pattern" and that project's illustration
of a proto-ecological urbanism. 6
Not coincidentally, both Branzi and Hilberseimer chose to
illustrate the city as a continuous system of relational forces
and flows, as opposed to a collection of objects. In this sense
the ongoing recuperation of Hilberseimer, and Branzi's re~
newed relevance for discussions of contemporary urbanism
renders their work particularly meaningful to discussions'
of ecological urbanism. Andrea Branzi occupies a singular
historical position as a hinge figure between the social and
environmental aspirations of modernist planning of the postwar era and the politics of 1968 in which his work first emerged
for English-language audiences. As such, his work is particularly well suited to shed light on the emergent discussion
around ecological urbanism.
Branzi's 1993/94 project Agronica returns to his interest
in the relentlessly horizontal spread of capital across thin
tissues of territory, and the resultant "weak urbanization" that
the neoliberal economic paradigm affords . Agronica represents the potential parallelism between agricultural and
energy production, new modalities ofpost-Fordist industrial
economy, and the cultures of consumption that they construct,? More recently in 2000/01, Branzi (with the Domus
Academy, a postgraduate research institute founded in 1980s)
executed a project for Philips in Eindhoven. These projects
returned to the recurring themes in Branzi's oeuvre with
typical wit and pith, illustrating a "Territory for the New
Economy."s
Andrea Branzi's intervention in the ecological urbanism
conference was timely in that it followed a presentation by
Andres Duany. That the ecological urbanism agenda could be
found relevant to a cultural and professional breadth of urban

thought spanning from Andrea to Andres is accomplishment

enough, considering the relatively narrow confines within
which debates in contemporary urbanism are often described.
Branzi's primary contribution to the proceedings consisted
of a keynote lecture featuring a surreal video anthology of
his greatest hits of "weak urbanism," accompanied by a Patti
Smith soundtrack. This montage of four decades of urban pro jection offered a visual manifesto of sorts, proclaiming "weak
urbanization" as a medium of environmental and cultural relevance. Branzi prefaced his prepackaged multimedia mashup
with a brief introductory text prepared for the event (read in
Italian with simultaneous translation by Nicoletta Morozzi)
proposing seven suggestions toward a "post-environmentalism."9 These points succinctly framed Branzi's longstanding
call for a conception of contemporary urbanism as a field
of potentials, shaped by weak forces and spontaneous programmatic eruptions. Branzi's seven "suggestions" (reprinted
in this volume as a "New Athens Charter") offer a surreal and
nonlinear set of propositions simultaneously accounting for
and celebrating the failings of the contemporary city.
Branzi's "weak work" maintains its relevance for generations of urbanists. His longstanding call for the development
of weak urban forms and nonfigural fields has already influenced the thinking of those who articulated landscape urbanism over a decade ago. Equally, Branzi's projective and
polemical urban propositions promise to shed light on the
evolving understanding of ecological urbanism and its potential for reconfiguring the disciplines and professions responsible for describing the contemporary city.

Andrea Branzi, et aI., "Agronica,"

model view (1993-94)

_"V_

ANTICIPATE

118

119

> Archizoom Associati, "No-Stop

City" (1 968- 71)

Andrea Branzi, et al., "Masterplan

Strijp Philips, Eindhoven," model
view (1999-2000)

1 Roland Barthes, "From Work to Text,"

Image Music Text, translated by Stephen
Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977),
155.
2 Homi Bhabha, " Keynote (Footnote),"
with Rem Koolhaas and Sanford Kwinter,
Ecological Urbanism Conference, Harvard
Graduate School of Design, April 3, 2009.
3 Archizoom Associates, "No-Stop City.
Residential Parkings. Climatic Universal
Sistem," Domus 496 (March 1971): 49-55.
For Branzi's refiections on the project,
see Andrea Branzi, "Notes on No-Stop
City: Archizoom Associates 1969-1972,"
Exit Utopia: Architectural Provocations
1956- 1976, edited by Martin van Schaik
and Otakar Macel (Munich: Prestel, 2005),
177-182. For more recent scholarship
on the project and its relation to contemporary architectural culture and urban
theory, see Kazys Varnelis, "Programming
after Program : Archizoom's No-Stop City,"
Praxis, no. 8 (May 2006): 82-91.
4 On field conditions and contemporary
urbanism, see James Corner, "The Agency
of Mapping : Speculation, Critique and
Invention," Mappings, edited by Denis
Cosgrove (London: Reaiction Books, 1999),
213 - 300; and Stan Allen, "Mat Urbanism:
The Thick 2-D," CASE: Le Corbusier's
Venice Hospital and the Mat Building

Revival, edited by Hashim Sarkis (Munich:

Prestel, 2001), 118-126. On logistics
and contemporary urbanism, see Susan
Nigra Snyder and Alex Wall, "Emerging
Landscape of Movement and Logistics,"
Architectural Design Profile, no. 134 (1998):
16-21 ; and Alejandro Zaera Polo, "Order
Out of Chaos: The Material Organization
of Advanced Capitalism," Architectural
Design Profile , no. 108 (1994) : 24-29.
5 See Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino
Tattara, "Architecture as Framework:
The Project of the City and the Crisis of
Neoliberalism," New Geographies, vol. 1
(2009): 38- 51 .

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6 Ludwig Hilberseimer, The New Regional

Pattern : Industries and Gardens, Workshops and Farms (Chicago: Paul Theobald,
1949).
7 Andrea Branzi, D. Donegani, A. Petrillo,
and C. Raimondo, "Symbiotic Metropolis:
Agronica," The Solid Side, edited by Ezio
Manzini and Marco Susani (Netherlands:
V+K Publishing/ Philips, 1995), 101 - 120.
8 Andrea Branzi, "Preliminary Notes for
a Master Plan," and "Master Plan Strijp
Philips, Eindhoven 1999," Lotus, no. 107
(2000): 110-123.
9 Andrea Branzi, "The Weak Metropolis,"
Ecological Urbanism Conference, Harvard
Graduate School of Design, April 4, 2009.

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