VI. The Smart City: The Other Side of the World
Before the smart city project started, I had planned a holiday with family to New York. Although I was excited about the prospect of leaving London to relax, recharge and explore what the big apple had to offer; I had a newfound excitement to look at the city through ‘smart city lenses’. Given that I was on the other side of the world away from my team, this felt like the perfect opportunity to flex my image-making skills as a form of visual research, to generate evidence of and communicate my lived experience (Rose, 2015). This medium of research helps to convey a meaning that would otherwise be missed using text alone. This reminded me of a beautiful TED talk I watched a few years ago about pen pal communication between a London and New York without words. This beautiful project has been documented through a website and a book.
Tuesday: I arrive in New York at 7pm (midnight New York time). Exhausted, but trying to beat jetlag I watch TV and surf the net, planning my week’s activities.
Wednesday: Home to a museum that “fuels creativity, ignites minds and provides inspiration” visiting the Museum of Modern Art was paramount (MoMA). MoMA's exhibitions were vast, spanning 5 floors with installations, video and art. On the4th floor, I was drawn to the New Monuments exhibition that looked at the future of buildings in terms of shape, purpose and material. The conceptual buildings hung, drooped and oozed mimicking their material, the unpredictable effects of the process of creating them, but most interestingly reflected the political climate of the time. The hanging city reflects the warfare of the Vietnam War, feminism, the oozing designs feminism. What would our possible world be made of? What do we want it to reflect? The monuments use materials not only for efficiency, but to add a new layer provocation.
New Monuments Exhibition - Hanging Cities of War
New Monuments Exhibition - Oozing Cities of Feminism
On the 3rd floor, I explored the Taking a Thread for a Walk exhibition - a suspended macrame knot sculpture creating a woven textile exploration, featuring combinations of natural and synthetic fibres.
Thread installation
On a plaque nearby, its creator was quoted: “just as it is possible to go from any place to any other, so also, starting from a defined and specialized field, can one arrive at a realization of ever-extending relationships … traced back to the event of a thread.” This piece felt so poignant, echoing the literature of Haraway and Ingold using threads and metaphors of cats-cradles to represent the infinite relationships between seemingly unrelated things.
Thursday: After our group discussions and speculation about the juxtaposition between new and old, abandoned and repurposed spaces and visible vs. hidden, I thought it important to visit one of New York’s most prominent monuments - the 9/11 Memorial Museum.
Outside National September 11th Memorial & Museum
Re-designed World Trade Center Station
9/11 Memorial with freshly laid roses
When I saw these roses, something Chris said last week popped into my mind - tiny monuments. Despite the atrocity that happened here 19 years ago, the names that surround the repurposed space act as a memorial, and each rose I saw a woman place stand as a tiny monument representing loss, hope and simultaneously the pain and beauty of death and renewal. Being in this repurposed space gave me time and space to reflect. Where was I when this happened? I was 11 and just got home from school to see a plane crash onto a tower on the TV. Where was Edward Francis Maloney III? Where are his family now? Without this repurposed space, I may have never known he existed or peeked into his life. As Kidd writes, “Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.”― Sue Monk Kidd (2001).
Friday: As I moved around the city my eyes couldn’t help but dart between towering skyscrapers. I found myself looking up a lot until I saw steam rise in front of my face. I looked down to see the heat from the subway escaping through a grate. It brought me back to our project. I knew about New York’s famous subways, but what else was down there? It turned out the ‘concrete jungle’ is a city built on water.
A plaque at Two 5th Avenue to remind city dwellers of the waterways that once were
Under Manhattan's streets lie the remnants of one of New York’s 101 lost waterways. Once one of its largest, Minetta Brook used to wind through Lower Manhattan’s farmland before being paved over in the 1820s. For centuries, it was visited by Native Americans for angling due to its abundance of trout. In the 1600s, Dutch settlers arrived along with their slaves, who were eventually emancipated, making the area home to one of New York's first African-American settlements. As the population increased, the large roads surrounding it were renamed to reflect its people.
However, as Manhattan became more metropolitan, Minetta Brook became an inconvenience to city planners and developers, and in the 1820s, it was physically buried using land from nearby hills, and eventually paved over. Its past was overwritten.
This trip was eye-opening. Although these experiences were outside London, it was beneficial to look to other cities for perspective. It showed me just how intertwined the themes of time, space, nostalgia, memory, loss and monuments really are, and the dangers created when a community has no way to embrace them. A few weeks ago, I was unsure about Dunne and Raby’s cone that referred to a preferable world. I didn’t understand how the decision on what a preferable world was could be made without bias. I now understand that a preferrable world is one that gives its citizens freedom and space to feel, whether the emotion is positive or negative. It adds rather than taking away, bringing us closer to a sentient city.
As always a trip gives you the chance to be open and gain a new perspective, but too much time away opens up thought to the objects, customs, processes and uniqueness of your home that you come to miss. I’ll go back to London jet-lagged, but with new stories to tell.
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