SOCIOPOLIS, PUBLIC ISSUE
Izaskun Chinchilla

Looking at recent architecture, more or less worldwide, it is easy to conclude that sustainability plays very different roles in the design process of different architects. It is a foreign currency, the joker in the Oriental pack or an incorrectly catalogued fetish. We use it, we exchange it, we back it up with arguments, but we have no precise notion of what it is worth or what it is good for. Some have used sustainability as an excuse. That is to say, they have camouflaged poor architectural quality under green premises that have become an absolute argument and a demagogic motive. We tend not to buy books with titles like Green Architecture because they describe buildings that are horribly late-Romantic, nostalgic or technologically inflamed. Other architects timidly use it in small doses as a decorative element within a grand design menu, entirely failing to see that sustainability is not a good vinegar but the whole structure of a diet. In other words, façades festooned with vegetation and roofs covered with flowers and photovoltaic panels are a nice touch but they can never make up for the excesses of a diet rich in saturated fats.

As Vernadsky noted in 1945, 1 the human species has become a demonstrable geophysical force of the first magnitude. It therefore follows that one of the real values that architecture can have in terms of sustainability is precisely to contribute to these two processes of demonstrating and determining the magnitude of human action and its geophysical effects. This being so, we appreciate those architecture and urban design projects that promote the emergence of values and parameters that serve to quantify and verify the sustainability of an intervention.

In the light of this, the Sociopolis project fuels the qualitative and quantitative debate about some of the most determinant parameters for the sustainability of urbanism. One evident issue that the project unveils as a design tool is density. A number of Spanish urban planners have contributed to defining maximum and minimum indices of urban density for the sustainable city. 2 The Sociopolis project's allocation of land contributes to this fixing of parameters by demonstrating that a high density (some 80 homes per hectare) is compatible with quality open space and accessibility to amenities that endow the area with urbanity and centrality.

To carry on with this idea of bringing to light the demonstrable metrical qualities that construct an informed criterion of sustainability, we might recall that Walter Benjamin compared the action of perceiving with the action of revealing/developing. Walter Benjamin presented the acts of the mind as analogous with the camera obscura: a potent and provocative simile that established a relationship between human beings and their environment by way of a kind of photographic image. Taken to their ultimate conclusion as a method of applied thought, Benjamin's premises imply that understanding, ordering and structuring the territory is a matter of revealing the hidden laws that nature, logistics and sociology have embedded in the environment. Like a kind of translation mechanism, the landscaping of the Sociopolis project is, in part, inscribed within this logic. The different plant species produce a double alignment effect. On the one hand, the flora is laid out according to an internal logic in which species, type and appearance propose a set of itineraries that are coherent and significant within the intervention as a whole. On the other, the landscaping is aligned with the existing features; in other words, it is used to bring out the hidden conditions of the territory. Elements such as the presence of moisture, the different qualities of the terrain or the traditional irrigation network are highlighted by the new landscaping, constructing a space that is superposed on the already modified natural environment in the clear understanding that any intervention is simply a new layer, a new sedimenting of social, biological and infrastructural memory on the territory.

The Sociopolis project thus distances itself from the kind of aggressive, steamroller urbanism that is based on autarchic structures which impose themselves on the context with a logic external to it. All too often the configuration of the grids, blocks, axes and trajectories of the general systems is derived from laws of distribution and abstract subdivision. There is a tradition within urbanism and architecture in which design is identified with a logic of distribution. In other words, starting from a defined and delimited plot of land, and the pregnant figure of propriety, planning consists in quantifying the uses to be included and distributing the available space in lots that owe their configuration geometrical to the subdivision of an abstract plot. Even architecture, at the domestic and typological scale, has been understood as the subdivision of a delimited site. Another form of operating, of which the Sociopolis project can be seen as an incipient example, would consider that intervention in a given environment must evaluate its incorporation into a wider context: it must be understood as a partial densification of events in a connected territory and must generate temporary and spatial continuities that support the maintenance of existing natural and social networks or favour these by generating new areas of opportunity.

The Sociopolis project is constructed of units that are heterogeneous in programme and spatial configuration. Each building, designed by a different architect, combines different housing programmes with amenities of various kinds. In other words, more than a conglomerate of self-resembling units it is a hybrid of singular pieces. This fact opens up new possibilities for cooperation. Although in natural ecosystems and in human societies symbiotic relationships occur naturally, these are limited by the relationships of complementarity that can be established in a territory. Thus, the existence of varied functional programmes enables a kind of incentive-led symbiosis to emerge: complementarity ensures that each agent devotes itself to a particular activity and entrusts to the rest the execution of the other tasks on which its survival depends. This collaborative formula can only arise out of diversity, and exists in combination with the natural relationship of commensalism that emerges from the simple fact of bringing together a community of people that simultaneously perform similar activities.

In this project, commensalism and symbiosis produce a kind of scalar reverberation different from that of geometric self-resemblance. In other words, as compared to the classic strategy by which the link between the territorial and the architectural scales was produced by a kind of formal similarity, here the scalar links between city and housing are based on functional cooperation. As a piece of urban fabric, Sociopolis creates mutually beneficial programmatic crossovers between the people who use its museums, its orchard-gardens and its houses, and as a unit of community living, the Sharing Tower creates links between domestic workers, people at leisure and roving cosmopolitans. This clear bond, which ensures that social complementarity operates as a link between different spaces, leaves the rest free: space and form are not forced into spatial congruities.

This is how Sociopolis can construct an effective idea of a density gradient. As against the homogeneous tide of housing that occupies most new developments, a diverse environment is constructed in which the concentration of the residential buildings makes way for an intermediate scale of concentration in the major amenities and for the mechanisms of small-scale urbanization and street furniture that configure the anteroom of the open space. The city of tower blocks is not presented, as in the models of the Modern Movement, as a single antagonistic pattern in opposition to the urban or landscaped open space; instead, various systems of transition are interposed between density and orchard-garden, thus encouraging complementarity. The scalar gradient is articulated in functional steps that serve to structure the size of each architectural element as the translation of its position within the whole and of its own programme.

A proposal frequently encountered in our schools and universities -I imagine most projects and planning tutors will have authorized or discussed several projects based on this premise- is that of attempting to colonize the derelict spaces in our urban cores. From Xavier Rivas to Lara Almarcegui, many voices have spoken out against the functional determinism, the excess of control and the eradication of the wild natural presences entailed in the elimination of these disused plots. In terms of the long hygienist tradition of which we are heirs, it seems difficult to defend a city devoid of natural presence, but in terms of the appreciation of the freedom and flexibility of the contemporary city it seems difficult to defend the assertion that the city's free spaces should be questionably maintained pieces of landscaping. This is what makes a reactivation of the natural areas in the city necessary. Such a reactivation should bring together considerations of environmental quality, programming and spontaneous maintenance and avoid any coercive functional determinism. In this sense, the Sociopolis project promises a new start in investigating the programming of collectively managed free spaces with the conservation of agricultural structures that are rich even from the anthropological point of view.

In this way the fact of inhabiting is made compatible once again with different levels of territorial protection. It is a simplification to think that the fundamental tool of an ecology-conscious urbanism is the absolute conservation of natural spaces and their thematizing as a landscape of identity. On the contrary, real sustainability calls for the creation of new tools for the design of spaces that, being productive, generate suitable environmental quality. It is this sense that the protection of the environment is declined here, with different levels of intensity and different modes of application, producing evaluated landscapes whose maintenance should be grounded in their own generating of activity. In this way, the controversy over the occupation of the orchard-garden is reopened in this project, not from a single fundamentalist posture, but giving a voice to each of the different agents that are to coexist in a landscape of political conciliation.

In fact, this is one of the particularly interesting dimensions of the project. In his Conversations with Students Rem Koolhaas claims that since 1992 the authorities have been coming to architects to ask not for designs for buildings but for proposals on how to use and reuse urban spaces in the most advantageous way possible. 3 This was the start of the long road that has led the most intelligent architects to abandon the article of faith which claimed that architecture solved problems. Since that time, urban problems are no longer solved by architecture; instead, architects propose more or less novel formulations that influence the problematics and cause them to vary and evolve, in a kind of ongoing situation of political assistance. In her PhD thesis No Issue, No Politics the Dutch sociologist Noortje Marres asserts that current policy is not defined by a prior ideological programme but, on the contrary, is articulated around issues in relation to which a position is adopted. 4 If there are no issues, there is no politics. Without the transfer water from the Ebro, anti-terrorism legislation or gay marriage, would there be any politics in our lives? The fact is that I see Sociopolis as precisely this: an issue with which there emerges the possibility that politics can exist, that architecture can provoke a public event.

In this way the Sociopolis project revives the intention initially voiced by the Modern Movement and updated and applied by 1970s urbanism of provoking the emergence of a city in which the public space can accommodate a political and social programme. For those who like to recall the errors of the past, let me refer to that great book We Have Never Been Modern, which shows us, in effect, that where failure has been spoken of, we can speak directly and precisely of a lack of realization. 5 The aspiration to find the face and the structure of the contemporary city that we do not repeat any model whose laws of application are currently in force and do not let ourselves be deterred by theoretical failures that are nothing but unrealized aspirations. Sociopolis reconciles architects to the aspiration of linking up, in a public project, the issues that should construct contemporary urbanism. Enjoy the trip.

Notes
1. Vernadsky, V.I., 'The Biosphere and Noosphere', in American Scientist, 33, p. 4, 1945.
2. López de Lucio, R. (2000) 'El espacio público en la ciudad europea: entre la crisis y las iniciativas de recuperación', Revista de Occidente, pp. 230-231, 2000; Ezquiaga, J.Mª., 'El proyecto del alojamiento: criterios de diseño', Urbanismo/COAM, 30, pp. 18-31, 1997.
3. Kwinter, S., Rem Koolhaas. Conversations with Students, Architecture at Rice 30, 1996.
4. Marres, N., The Issue-Network as a Site of Politics and the Challenge of Making Info-Technology Part of Civil Society, University of Amsterdam, 2003.
5. Latour, B. (1991), We Have Never Been Modern, Prentice-Hall, 1993.