"Looking for the other space among cities, ships and dreams" by Solvita Krese
Translated by Uldis Brūns
With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made from desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.(1)
So, while sitting in a shady garden, the young Venetian traveller Marco Polo announced in one of his fabulous stories about cities to the grey-haired Kublai Khan, after the Khan had invited him to describe what he’d seen in the vast expanses of his mighty empire. The cities described by Italo Calvino aren’t built from metal and bricks, but from ideas and feelings. They are fantastic, enchanting places, where things are not always what they seem. A city hanging in a spider’s web above an abyss; a city where there is sky instead of land; or a city which has its golden double underground. Utopian visions, describing places which don’t really exist.
Many centuries have passed since 1516, when Thomas More wrote his Utopia, a captivating story of an island, created through his imagination, where he describes the ways and socio-political situation of its society - yet the concept of the utopian city continues to gnaw at people’s minds. This is highlighted by Orson Squire Fowler with his idea-led vegetarian utopia Octagon City in Kansas (1856), Ebenezer Howard and his planned green metropolis Garden City (1902) or Henry Ford with his new type of workers’ city, Fordlandia, established in the Brazilian jungles in the 1930s, as well as by inventor and visionary Richard Buckminster Fuller with his flying city Cloud 9, which he hoped to encapsulate in gigantic geodesic spheres. Ideas for utopian cities were also born under the wing of totalitarian ideology - like Albert Speer’s futuristic embodiment of Nazism in the planned reconstruction of Berlin, or in the innovative solutions and visions of the Russian avant-garde in communist Russia. Modernism, too, was infatuated with utopian cities. This is shown by Le Corbusier’s sketches of vertical garden cities, as well as Broadacre City (1932), which followed as Frank Lloyd Wright’s response to his famous colleague’s challenge, and also Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia, one of the rare utopias which was actually constructed on a large scale. Scientific achievements and new technologies have also significantly affected city visionarism – the planned creation of a completely enclosed city in Alaska called Seward’s Success (1968), where climate control was to be provided, and the smart technology guided city Sungdo, which is still taking shape in South Korea.
Probably for many of us our childhood drawings from long ago have been stored somewhere and haven’t been looked at for ages, drawings where we can sense the contours of utopian cities, the silhouettes of strange buildings, flying trams, ice-cream rockets and rainbow bridges. The drawings, however, have remained on paper, like the many far greater unrealized visions of utopia. Even though one could also assert that the failure to realize great ideas is often more convincing than minor successes, and even their influence is much more noticeable.
Art critic and writer Rachel Weiss has expressed the opinion that the 20th century marked the "end of utopia", but didn’t, perhaps, declare the "end of the utopian imagination."(2) On the contrary – it could be maintained that utopian visionarism as a concept and a way of thinking has returned to critical discourse. Often enough, in searching for utopia, we see its inverse side – dystopia – a place which differs from our dreams, which is misunderstood, exchanged, sold, forgotten, ruined, mangled, false and superfluous.
Assuming that a city doesn’t inhabit just a spatial dimension, but that it is also a network of a variety of social, political and personal streams, we can practice utopian thought as an impulse, desire or everyday positive programme, hoping to draw reality closer to our dreams.
It seems to me that Riga, too, as the European Capital of Culture can be listed within a kind of category of utopias. An unprecedented euphoria in the cultural environment and overabundance of cultural events has created a joyful and confident feeling that at last everything here is as it should be, or as we would like it to be. It’s as if the city had been loaned the clothing of a princess for a year. And what’s to happen afterwards? Will it be possible to change anything in the trajectory of development in the cultural sphere, or will there be a painful return to reality, where culture is usually the last in line at the cash desk? My utopian city, for example, is unimaginable without a contemporary art museum. What’s so utopian in this wish? A museum like this is an absolute necessity for present-day society and as such can be found in nearly all European capital cities. But the path to a contemporary art museum in Latvia brings to mind one of the stories told by Marco Polo, where determined fellow travellers, thinking that they are moving forward, arrive back at the same place that they started out from, again and again.
It’s no coincidence that the Survival Kit festival this year is taking place at the former Boļševička textile factory and Vāgnera Hall which has been empty for years now. The Boļsevička building has been mentioned as one of the possible sites for the development of a contemporary art museum, and the silent Vāgnera Hall is a reminder of the need for an adequate concert hall in Riga. The museum and concert hall are becoming significant components of the survival kit of Riga as a cultural city.
It was a natural decision to bring in curator Aneta Szyłak, the head of the Wyspa Institute of Art, to help create this year’s festival. She has been instrumental in developing the critical cultural space at Gdansk’s former ship building territory, organizing the annual Alternativa international art exhibition and implementing a number of other activities which assist in the battle for harmonious environmental transformation that is respectful of the locality, as opposed to the large-scale, often ill-considered projects of property developers, which purely serve business interests.
But maybe we ought to search for today’s utopia in the intermediate zones, in alternative, marginal territories that interrupt the usual flow of everyday buildings and normality, injecting otherness into monotony and the quotidian. Michel Foucault, in a lecture to architects in 1967, came up with a new concept, calling such places heterotopia, which, translated literally, means "another place".
We can contrast heterotopia as a "another place" with a "non-place"(3), which has become an inescapably dominant component of the public space, the surrogate architecture of the omnipresent supermarkets, transit areas, and waiting rooms or "junk space"(4). Conversely heterotopia is often based in societal groups that are united by common interests, and who develop alternative forms of collectivity. This derives from the presence of a specific totality of social relationships in a concrete location. As soon as the interaction between these social relationships and the physical space ceases, the heterotopia disappears. In this way, unique garden allotment communes get wiped off the Riga map, and the clusters of creative communities and wonderful cultural initiatives disappear. It seems that a similar fate awaits also the Lucavsala garden allotment and eco community micro-utopia, which exist in parallel with the life of central Riga and are hidden away in the centre of the city, successfully fulfilling the function of being green lungs for the city, but which will, most likely, end up in the hands of an energetic investment company or land developer, and will be transformed into housing for some profitable multifunctional building.
But I’m glad that new utopian visionaries and activists have cropped up, who are attempting to transform empty Riga buildings into cultural islands. Freeriga is a surprising civil activity movement which emerged about a year ago during the Survival Kit 5 festival, and has now become a player worthy of note in the development of the city. It has marked out a number of new heterotopias on the city map, such as the cultural platform Brasalona in Gaujas iela, and the culture point in Līksna iela 26, and elsewhere.
Referring back to the grandfather of ancient Greek urbanism, Hippodamus, and the division of the utopian city space into a triad – the public, private and sacred space - and transferring it into today’s terminology, we can assume that the present-day third space which is neither political/public, nor commercial/private, is a heterotopia which could most accurately be defined as a cultural space, where art, spirituality, entertainment and sport reside.(5)
One could maintain that heterotopia begins to function when people manage to create a break in their traditional time flow. And it may, possibly, be easier to identify this not as a space, but as a dimension in time and, in contrast to "everyday architecture", it could be defined as "holiday architecture"(6). Let’s dare to say also that many heterotopias have been translated from the event to the building (museum), from time to space, from a transient moment to the permanence of place.
Heterotopia as an exception, as a form which is vital and in uninterrupted movement, helps to preserve the city’s stability as a self-organizing system. It introduces a dynamic into the linear and planned urban logic, and promotes a link-up and transition between different urban, spatial and social paradigms.
We can imagine a vision of the city in which the harmonious co-existence of differing heterotopias, side-by-side, not only celebrates the diversity of the world, but helps to stave off authoritarianism and makes individual utopias possible. The city would only have to gain if Lucavsala was left to its residents, Zaķu sala to its bird colonies, and empty buildings were transformed into cultural islands which would allow environments of unspoilt nature and alternative culture to exist in the centre of the city.
It’s with good reason that Michel Foucault compared a heterotopia to a ship, which is ...a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself. He then continued: In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.(7) That’s why it’s worth imagining a city on which you’d like to get on board to head off on a journey, just like the audacious seeker of adventure, the seafarer Marco Polo.
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(1) Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1974), p.44.
(2) Rachel Weiss, "Utopiary" in Thinking Utopia. Steps into Other Worlds, eds. Jorn Rusen, Michael Fegr, Thomas W. Rieger (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005), pp.190–204.
(3) A term coined by French anthropologist Marc Augé which refers to locations of transience that are not significant enough to be regarded as "places".
(4) A term coined by architect Rem Koolhaas which refers to the residue of mankind, useless architecture that intensely pollutes the world.
(5) Lieven de Cauter, Michiel Dehaene, "The space of play. Towards a general theory of heterotopia" in Heterotopia and the City, eds. Lieven de Cauter, Michiel Dehaene (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 91.
(6) Mary McLeod, "[Everyday and "other" spaces" in Architecture and Feminism, eds. D. Coleman, E. Danze and E. Henderson (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996)
(7) Michel Foucault, "Des Espaces Autres" in Architecture / Mouvement / Continuité (October 1984)