IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

street-level research undertaken in Belgrade over a number of years. The
city experienced an abrupt change from centralized to atomized growth as
the result of a decade of crisis and a United Nations embargo in 1992. As
the state and its institutions collapsed, individual initiative led to innovation
in literally every urban domain, from commerce to housing production
and public services. The new, nonregulated structure that emerged
flooded the public realm and, in the designers’ words, ‘‘superimposed a
layer of mutants on the existing city.’’ Mapping the interactions between
nonregulated processes (street traders moving into spaces vacated by defunct
official businesses) and existing city fabrics (the green market or a department
store), Stealth has developed tools to map actors and forces that
previously did not figure in urban design notation. 56
This research into urban genetics focuses on the evolutionary, time-based
character of nonregulated transformations. It is a practice of discovering
the inherent logic of emergent processes, based on the assumption that
the result is often more sophisticated than a conventionally designed one.
Through this experiment, a set of tools and a specific methodology have
been experimentally developed for visualizing, monitoring, and to a certain
extent, predicting spatial and organizational changes over time. Stealth’s
objective, in the longer term, is ‘‘to point out the undiscovered potentials
of specific locations.’’ 57 As the Wild City researchers put it, the city itself
acts like a wild garden, as an ‘‘incubator of new urban forms. The paradigm
of ‘wildness’ emerged through non-planned and scarcely regulated processes.
In the urban domain, these processes feature a remarkable degree
of innovation. They lead to possibilities for redefining institutional participation
in the creation of urban space.’’ 58 Wild City provides empirical
evidence that an adapt-and-provide focus on the adaptation of existing
infrastructures to serve new purposes can work.
Conclusion
Locality 95
The list of challenges facing the design of the places in which we live is
daunting. In chapter 1, I explained that the ecological footprints of cities
appear to be unsustainable. In chapter 2, I described the many indications
that constant acceleration is wearing us, and our institutions, out. In chapter
3, I described the costs we incur for spending more time on the move
than on being there.