Superfluous Landscapes (Tom Nielsen, 2002)

space and culture vol. 5 no. 1, february 2002 53-62
©2002 Sage Publications

Urban Heterogeneity

• The continuous growth and expansion of the urban areas has created greater differences within them.
• It has become increasingly difficult to decide where the city starts and where the country ends.
• Covered inner-city shopping areas, new city centers with opening hours, gated communities, and business parks are characteristic examples of enclaves, but most of the newly built urban substance seems to form autonomous units. In this process, both the enclaves and the areas taken up by the infrastructure necessary to support them become more and more prominent and visible.
• The concrete matter of the city will always exceed the ambitions and attempts to control and shape it, and it will always have features that cannot be exposed in the representations that planning has to work with.

The Return of Excess Matter

• Bataille (Georges Bataille) worked from the 1920s until his death in 1962 on what he called a heterology, a way of seeing things that was based in the idea that all systems excrete something, that homogenization has its limits, and that the world has to be understood as having both high and low parts.
• Bataille’s idea of heterogeneity as a part of the homogenization process provides us with a position from which the superfluous landscapes can be thought.

Urban Excess

• The superfluous landscape is not a stable entity; rather, it must be considered as part of an ongoing transformation process on a material level. During the course of time, the unseen and undeveloped parts of the urban field are incorporated into the known, planned, and controlled side of the city.

The Flow of the Superfluous Landscapes

• Horizontality designates the pre- or nonarchitectonic space, the space where the material in no way has been erected or organized but exclusively is influenced by the force of gravity and the ongoing processes within the material itself.
• In the superfluous landscapes, time is experienced directly as a change in the material structure, which makes them different from the urban enclaves modeled after the theme park and in which the time always is the same and the decay is withheld by large investments of energy.

Excess Space as Public Space

• Public spaces because they are accessible for all, and alternative because the activities that take place there (e.g., skating, alcoholism, skateboarding, rappelling, graffiti painting, bonfires, horsebackriding, prostitution, jogging, creative driving and parking, motocross, camping, tai-chi, skiing, and walking) are different from the ones taking place in the primary public space in the urban enclaves.
• In the designed spaces, the primary public life is framed in a controlled, themed, and scripted event space, with the mall and theme park as the dominant models of new urban developments (Crawford, 1992).
• The way that people use the superfluous landscapes is a way of consuming them. This consumption is a part of their transformation process, and the understanding of the way they are used (and not used) is central to the conception of them as excessive.

Consumption of the Excess Material

• When the material excess of the urban development cannot be homogenized or brought to proper use inside the existing urban system by the specific economy of planning, then it must be spent when returns as unwanted and unused material resource. It must be consumed as an urbanspace but with no productive or rational objectives.
• So the idea here is to voluntarily let oneself get overrun by the developments that lead to the massive constructions transforming and extending the city, as well as by the unforeseen spaces and situations that these constructions result in.