The "as if" Society

What are the possibilities of an absolute public realm in a society where domination is realized through the spatial arrangement of surveillance within the public domain? The answer to this question is what Michel de Certeau has referred to as the battle between “strategies” and “tactics”. According to de Certeau, strategies create and control specifically marked “places” by putting them under the control of the powerful state. In the case of societies under dictatorship, it reveals itself under a centralized government as an internal political orientation, expanding the government’s authority across the country into various spheres of life; a practice of power that has had different players yet mutual goals in all ruling regimes. However, tactics are opposing forces that appear in situations that are not completely under control. In other words, tactics create spaces. Those who use tactics are always waiting for the proper opportunity to perform. And with such moments, resistance is born, enabling the resistant to challenge the rigid organization of the place in order to create a space of defiance. The oppressed cannot escape the scene of oppression; instead, he/she can manipulate it. These tactics don’t need to be political actions. Instead, they could rather be tricks and distortions, threatening the repressive order at an individual level. De Certeau refers to these distortions as the “everyday life” of individuals. In short, people create alternative spaces for their social interactions and engagements. Under such an approach, a society is born in which the missing social nodes are converted into heterotopias where unspoken actions come to play.

TACTICS IN TEHRAN

This proposal investigates the historical deformation of the urban fabric and its socio/political consequences in Tehran, Iran, since the discovery of oil in 1908. The findings are then analyzed to form a series of spatial and tactical arrangements that accommodate the forcefully vanishing socio/cultural activities within forcefully promoted commercial heterotopias of illusion. The merits of the project are based on a formal reconstruction of destroyed traditional urban nodes of interaction such as squares and courtyards by borrowing concepts from the informal “everyday urbanism” of its citizens. This project has selected architectural elements within the urban fabric of Tehran with a historical significance that ties the project to the birth of modernism where civilians’ collective memory of shopping and entertainments reside. This proposal confronts the recent wave of shopping mall developments in Tehran by comparing their current consumerist nature to that of Victor Gruen’s intent when he proposed multi commercial nodes in Master plan of Tehran as nodes of social and cultural attractions in 60s. What is borrowed from this master plan is a network of cinemas that have been abandoned for years after the Islamic revolution of Iran in 1977. Impregnate of vital memories, these buildings are empty structures that can not only revitalize the forgotten experience of public engagement but also act as an archipelago liberated from the anonymity of the city. Therefore, this archipelago resembles the very nature of a shopping mall; a big enclave that is made of many mini enclaves. Each cinema stands for an individual unit (food court, entertainments, retail, hotel, etc) of the mall, which is filled by flexible structures that set the nature of each program inside.

INTERIOR URBANISM

The primary concepts are the formation of an “interior urbanism” in which civilians have chosen to be volunteer prisoners of architecture in their everyday social life and “micro urbanism” where civilians’ covert system of public life is translated into series of multifunctional units converting from a commercial function into a cultural one. In a way, these components act like a camouflage that consciously protects the forbidden urban life of civilians within a promoted system of consumerist mass control; a system we may refer to as a shopping mall. The urban approach of this project is similar to that of O.M Ungers’ “Berlin as green archipelago” on one hand and John Hejduk’s “Victims” on the other. While projects like Aldo Rossi’s “Analogous City” treated the city as a static stage set and backdrop for theatrical life, Ungers provided stability in an unstable scene by treating the city as museum of islands and unlike this stable provision, Hejduk’s victims inject instability into a stable and quarantined city where temporality of the imposed programs oscillate between the roles of contemplation and participation within a walled controlled island.

Finally, this project is to examine the role of a private party in creating an archipelago of privatized lands through elimination of public domain; “rejigging” of such existing behaviors and encouraging an accumulation of interventions as a means of catalyzing change, and demanding a renewed connection to the local political economy seems to be our new way toward a meaningful definition of archipelago; a way that revitalizes the purpose of an “urban archipelago” in a context where the public realm is often under threat.