The Kinetic City
“Cities are comprised of two components occupying the same physical space. The first is the Static City. Built of more permanent material such as concrete, steel, and brick, it forms a two-dimensional entity on conventional city maps and is monumental in its presence. The second is the Kinetic City. Incomprehensible as a two-dimension entity, this is a city in motion––a three-dimensional construct of incremental development.”
So writes Rahul Mehrotra in an essay entitled “The Static and The Kinetic,” an article which hopes to illuminate an oft-overlooked view of the urban environment. The Static City, as Mehrotra writes, has long been under the scrutiny of architects and urbanists worldwide: it is an obvious target for graphic documentation and analysis. Its name reveals much of its nature: it is a city of monuments, of permanence, of Architecture. The Static City is innately physical: it relies on the overtly tangible for its representation and reproduction. Its most well-known depictions lie in analyses performed with centuries-old technology: for example, Nolli’s planametric figure-field drawings of Rome, which describe public/private space as a two-dimensional solid-void cartographic diagram. This view of the urban, however, understands the city in question if were emptied of its populous, skeletal remains of its former self.
In contrast, Mehrotra posits the Kinetic City as a new lens with which to view the contemporary urban environment. The Kinetic has always existed, in flows and ebbs which engulf the tired Static, yet the Kinetic has strangely eluded formal investigation until the turn of the twenty-first century. “The Kinetic City is temporary in nature and often built with recycled material: plastic sheets, scrap metal, canvas, and waste wood. It constantly modifies and reinvents itself. The Kinetic City’s building blocks are not pieces of architecture, but spaces that hold associative values and that support their residents’ lives and livelihoods.” This conception of the city lies well outside the bounds of Nolli’s maps, and, perhaps more importantly, outside the focus of traditional architectural discourse.
Technological innovation (or lack thereof) may well contribute to the Static’s historic predominance and the Kinetic’s absence: armed with the meager pen and paper, architects have been largely unable (or unwilling) to document the temporal, that which is not classified as “Architecture.” As Mehrotra continues, “Architecture is not the ‘spectacle’ of the [Kinetic] city, nor does it even comprise the single dominant image. […] Here the memory of the city is an ‘enacted’ process––a temporal moment as opposed to buildings that contain the public memory as a static or permanent entity. Within the Kinetic City, meanings are not stable; spaces [are] consumed, reinterpreted, and recycled. The Kinetic City recycles the Static City to create a new spectacle.” With Mehrotra’s words, we see a new awareness: architecture is only a component of the contemporary urban environment, and exhaustive analysis of the Static alone cannot hope to describe its intricacies. As Mehrotra writes, “The Static City, […] dependent on architecture for its representation, is no longer the single image by which the city is read.”3
Perhaps it is no coincidence that our understanding of the Kinetic City––its ebbs, flows, intangible compositions and immaterial spectacles––comes at a time when new and unconventional technologies for architectural and urban analysis abound. The profession’s understanding of the urban shifts dramatically with the Kinetic, from the planametric solid-void relationships found in Nolli’s map (grounded in the technology of pen and paper), or the rigid indexical linguistic analysis of Robert Venturi’s manifestoes (which hinge on a static, semiotic interpretation of the city), to an analysis which harnesses hyper-contemporary means of documenting our ever-changing environs. Most importantly, this new investigation negotiates with the arrow of time; it does not hope to understand the urban as a stoic entity, devoid of life, devoid of change.
Indeed, to intervene successfully within contemporary urban contexts, architects must turn from traditionally accepted notions of what exact the city––and indeed, Architecture––is. Recent publications bring such inventive conceptions of the city within the scope of architectural discourse today: Mutations, a collection of essays documenting urban phenomena and published in association with Rem Koolhaas’s Harvard research studio, presents a multitude of data (charts, graphs, diagrams, photographs, and video stills) documenting security surveillance in shopping malls, international shipping routes, and networks of manufacturing centers around the globe (just to name a few), all in an attempt to unpack a contemporary urbanism increasingly influenced by immaterial forces. Increasingly, as Mehrotra describes at length, the city is not architecture––it is time, data, experience, subjects which defy age-old conceptions of the term "Architecture." Very little of the metropolis's contemporary composition relates to permanence, and very little of its contemporary composition can be understood by antiquated methods of documentation and analysis.
The profession’s ability to adequately record and articulate these new phenomena rests almost entirely on its embrace of technologically advanced and innovative methods of representation. The tools known to architects of the twentieth century no longer adequately equip architects of the twenty-first. Ever more, the term “Architect” describes a profession increasingly interested in the analysis of patterns, data, experience, and other immaterial facets of the urban condition.