Counterpoint

Caroline Bos

Hello
Stranger
Phenomenology and
Topography of the
Megacity
Caroline Bos of UNStudio counters
the city theme of this issue of 3 with
the spectre of the megacity. The very
recent emergence and scale of the Asian
megacity, she argues, requires a very
different architectural treatment to the
European or North American metropolis.
It is one that should be understood
through an experiential approach that
brings to the fore spatial and visual
relations between people, and people and
things, asking, for instance, how so many
strangers can be so visibly at home in
public urban space.

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Hairdressing salon in Nigerian market, 2003

opposite: Colourful, social and at times subversive, street life in
Asia and Africa should not be idealised. Street life does, however,
provide events and makes daily life visible in the megacity.

Men gaming in an old lane while wearing pyjamas, Shanghai,

2000
below: At the time of the Expo 2011 in Shanghai, the Chinese
authorities worked to eradicate public pyjama wearing. But the
intimate apparel, worn while shopping, eating out or playing a
game, provides an incomparable illustration of the extent to which
an inhabitant can feel at home in a megacity.

When considering the contemporary relationship between

architecture and the city, the first thing to note is the significant
emergence of the megacity a new and unparalleled urban
event. Whereas in 1950 New York City was the only urban
area with over 10 million inhabitants, there are now 26
megacities of which only four are in North America and
Europe.1 The megacity cannot, moreover, simply be seen as
just a larger version of the older metropolis. Many classical
metropolitan configurations with a long evolutionary history
in European culture, such as the market square, the church,
and so on are not endogenous to an Asian megacity. This
Counterpoint thus brings a focus on the megacity as a foil to
the main theme of this issue that presents the urban, whether
metropolis or megacity, as a singular entity that is ostensibly
a site for architectural inspiration and experimentation. It
not only acknowledges that the megacity requires a different
interpretation to the European or North American metropolis,
but proposes that we try to understand the megacity first and
foremost through the way in which it is experienced, and
only secondarily attempt to uncover where the architectural
challenge or potential might be located. The subjective
experience is chosen as the key issue because this is the one
binding factor in a vastly intricate system of countless named
and unnamed parameters making up the urban constellation.
The first question that needs to be answered is, therefore: how
are the experiences of the people in the megacity constituted?
In his famous essay The Metropolis and Mental Life
(1903), Georg Simmel defined mutual strangeness as the
essential metropolitan condition.2 In order to survive as
individuals within their oppressive milieu, the inhabitants of

the metropolis seek inner refuge. Resistance, repulsion, even

aversion are the natural state of mind of the city dweller. The
text evokes an endless crowd of hostile individuals shuffling
past each other while carefully avoiding any form of contact
or engagement. Besides being dismal, Simmels portrayal is
also familiar; this is how the Modernist, industrial European
metropolis generally was understood and represented in the
early 20th century.3 Phenomenology was the basis for that
depiction; philosophically, life in the city was addressed by
describing and analysing the subjective effects of moving
through the city on a persons sensory consciousness.4
Studying the experiential quality of the megacity, just as in the
Modernist image, entails a focus on the subjective perceptions
of people in movement.
Today, partly inspired by Bruno Latour,5 I would propose
an emphasis that moves away from social relations and their
effect on the individual psyche towards visual and spatial
relations and their effect on connective faculties. Put concisely,
the phenomenological approach outlined in this essay is less
about social expectations and sociability, and more about
visibility. This visibility involves objects and structures too, as
the carriers and enablers of visual and spatial connections.
The proposed contemporary phenomenology thus addresses
the spatial and visual relations between both people, and
people and things, resulting in what can be described as a
phenomenological topography. The specific factors being
addressed are strangeness and estrangement. The process
of urbanisation has currently resulted in 26 megacities or
megacity regions in the world. Each accommodates huge
cohorts of strangers,6 for if the metropolis is full of people

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Alison and Peter Smithson, Golden Lane Competition, Street-in-the-Air, 1952

With the street in the air concept, the architects Alison and Peter Smithson
wanted to stimulate sociability within the high-rise condition. Due to confusion
as to whether this terrain was public or private, the anticipated liveliness was
never realised. Limited spatial and visual connections and the confined nature
of the streets significantly contribute to the lack of public accessibility that
results in a private terrain.

who are as unfamiliar with each other as they are with their
surroundings, the megacity is infinitely more so. Almost half
of those living in Mumbai, for instance, are (more or less) new
arrivals. This megacity is estimated to have a population of
over 20 million, more than double the size of 20 years ago,
an increase that is mainly due to migration and urbanisation.7
The simultaneous territorial development and the growth of
mobility have resulted in a temporal expansion of the public
territory. The city user regularly spends hours at a time amidst
strangers. This is a global phenomenon that affects megacities
in particular. Yet spending so much time with masses of
strangers in public space has not necessarily resulted in a
proportional increase in urban angst.
People living in the urbanised, professionalised and
monetised world have developed a new sense of being at
home in public urban space, which can be coupled to another,
much older, visceral sense of being at home in a natural
environment. The sensory experience of being in movement
and of spending time in in-between places is as familiar and
recurrent as being in a single place, if not more so. Even,
although difficult to quantify, in some ways this transient
urban space offers greater continuity and stability than other
worklife spaces. The territory between the places that are
privately owned and demarcated for private use, the territory of
transportation, and of public life, is always there, whereas the
constancy of the home and workplaces is being eroded.8 We
can therefore question whether alienation marks the megacity
in the same way as it did the metropolis.
Among the immense differences between the metropolis

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and the megacity, one of the most prominent is that the

crowd image has traditionally been far less bleak in the
latter. Public pyjama-wearing is an indication of the extent to
which the people of Shanghai feel at home in their megacity.9
The informal occupation of public space is something that
characterises life in the megacity and contrasts noticeably
with the metropolitan phenomenology. In todays megacities,
street life, while disappearing or transforming fast, in
those places where it survives is still manifestly diverse,
unrestrained, seditious, vibrant and engaging.10 There is
no anomie in it. Wuhan in 2012 is not at all like Berlin in
1913. The inhabitants of the megacity do not perceive the
looks of strangers as antagonistic, nor do the built structures
surrounding them infringe upon their individuality. This is
helped by the fact that the relationship between the private
and the public is less immutable than in the metropolis, which
is all black and white; the arena for an existential struggle of
individual against mass.
The large amounts of time spent in public space in the
megacity are striated by all manner of visual and spatial
structures. Street life in the Asian megacity, as in its African
counterparts, involves continuous movement, but also
many places where a specific job is carried out in public:
barbershops, tailors, canteens and miscellaneous vendors of
small goods all provide visual and spatial punctuations within
the flow. Thus, many small events occur that provide structure
to the phenomenological topography and that impact upon
the urban experience. In the megacity, with its ambient street
life galvanised by private events and transactions, perception

UNStudio, horizontal diffraction diagram, 2012

Spending much time on the move, the inhabitants of the megacity
experience their environment through ambulatory vision. Other
people and objects cause shifts in focal array, diffracting the
linearity of the Modernist gaze.

UNStudio, slippage diagram, 2012

Mini-events in the shape of people or things disclose moments of
particularity within the flow of continuity.

Street life in the Asian megacity, as in its African counterparts,

involves continuous movement, but also many places where a
specific job is carried out in public: barbershops, tailors, canteens and
miscellaneous vendors of small goods all provide visual and spatial
punctuations within the flow.

UNStudio, vertical diffraction diagram, 2012

The connector-actors of street life broach the vertical. The challenge
for architecture is to provide events that diffract the gaze and
provide visual and spatial connections as the megacity grows taller.

continuously slips from anonymity to disclosure. It is this

slippage that makes the megacity livable. The mini-events are
performed by connector-actors that change the focus of the
observant passer-by. Alain Badiou defines event as a type of
rupture which opens up truths.11 In this context, that means
that the connector-actors orchestrate small phenomenological
revolutions; all of a sudden the anonymity and distancing
vastness of the city is broken up. As we see human life in
close-up, it reminds us where we are; this megacity is, after
all, an everyday place where everyday life is taking place. The
strangers around us are shown up to be just like us.
This perceptional structuring does not play a role in
Simmels account; he, and other authors of the modern
condition describe a sweeping uniformity that is virtually
unbroken by particular details or moments. The Modernist
metropolitan perception is characterised by a linear, forward
flow. Human motion resembles a procession, the gaze is
confined by blank walls that direct and restrict the vision.
The Modernist topography is one of straight lines and limited
perspectives. Unlike in a landscape, people move through it
as if their necks were screwed in place and their eyes unable
to roll; everything is always about only what is straight in front
of them. The reality of ambulatory vision means,12 however,
that the optical array encompasses a vastly wider range.
Visual perception includes being able to move towards things
and walk around them, thereby gaining an all-around view of
objects. The gaze can be focused or widened, continuous or
diffracted. Even without moving the head, the ambient vision
reaches much further than just pictorial depth vision.

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UNStudio, Burnham Pavilion, Millennium Park, Chicago, 2009

below: UNStudios temporary pavilion elaborated on the orthogonal
setup of the city and park grid in response to Daniel Burnhams
iconic masterplan of 100 years ago. Burnhams diagonal boulevards
are extended by three roof openings that frame vertical views of the
city skyline.

The limited perceptions offered by Modernist architecture

also impinged on the introduction of street life in the
architecture of the 1950s and 1960s, even as it endeavoured
to broach the vertical. The street in the air, originally
conceived by Alison and Peter Smithson in 1952, was
intended to bring street life to the tower block, albeit a rather
sedate residential version of it, featuring prams and postmen
and neighbourly chat. But due to the poor visual range it
provided, the envisaged sociability never took off. The narrow
linear horizontality of the modern street, lined by a straight
wall on one side and an inaccessible vacuum on the other,
did not provide adequate ambulatory variations, or vertical or
diagonal connections.
The question now, as we finally arrive at the relation
between architecture and the megacity, is: how can a new
architecture do any better? This necessarily brief examination
of the phenomenological topography of public life in the
megacity has focused mainly on the perceptions produced
by street life. These can be summed up as slippage and
diffraction. Slippage occurs when private moments interrupt
the public flow; diffraction concerns the break of the
visual field away from the linear, horizontal perspective of
Modernism. Slippage lets us discover the human reality
within the crowd of strangers through the events performed
by connector-actors. As mentioned above, these need not take
human form alone. Street life pertains to the relations between
people, but also between people and things, and people and
their environment. Diffraction is the visual mechanism that
enables us to experience slippage; the gaze is allowed to move

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around freely and may fasten to the event taking place in the
distance. The ambulatory vision can equally incur in events
near, far, above, below, across; the spatial environment is
designed to stimulate a full visual spectrum.
The challenge now is to instrumentalise this expanded
perceptual understanding and make it resonate with an
equally expanded urban topography. Architecture can play
a vital role in this. As the megacity is sanitised, expanded
and transformed according to globally normative standards,
street life may survive in a new form, adapting to a changing
environment, as long as its vital mechanisms are recognised
and adequately reworked. New solutions for the structures
within megacities must be based on an approach that is
focused on improving the connections between people and
structures in the city, taking into account changes occurring
through mobility and time. The crux of this Counterpoint
argument lies in the conviction that these new solutions
will not emerge from architects seeking to understand
architecture in structural or megastructural ways alone. The
complex constellation of the megacity must be envisioned
above all through the lens of its inhabitants, making
phenomenological topography the prime consideration for
architectural design. 2

UNStudio, Atrium, Galleria Centercity,

Cheonan, South Korea, 2010
Surrounding the central atrium of the
Galleria Centercity, rounded plateaus
provide light and views both within the
central space and to the exterior. As the
plateaus are positioned in a rotational
manner, they enable the central space
to encompass way-finding, vertical
circulation and orientation, and act as
the department stores main attractor.

The complex constellation of the megacity

must be envisioned above all through the lens
of its inhabitants, making phenomenological
topography the prime consideration for
architectural design.

Notes
1. If the megacity is defined as an urban
agglomeration of over 10 million people, there
are currently some 26 megacities, of which
almost half are in Asia. Source: www.city-infos.
com/megacity/.
2. Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and
Mental Life, Dresden, 1903, trans: www.
blackwellpublishing.com/content/BPL_Images/
Content_store/Sample_chapter/0631225137/
Bridge.pdf.
3. Other famous examples of urban dystopia:
TS Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922; Ernst Ludwig
Kirchners paintings of Berlin street scenes
of the 1910s (see: Deborah Wye, Kirchner
and the Berlin Street, Museum of Modern Art
(New York), 2008; Fritz Langs celebrated film
Metropolis, 1927.
4. Louis Wirth, Urbanism as a Way of Life,
American Journal of Sociology, 1936.
5. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An
Introduction to ActorNetwork Theory, Oxford
University Press (Oxford), 2007.
6. Simmel describes a stranger as the person
who comes today and stays tomorrow his
position in the group is determined, essentially,
by the fact that he has not belonged to it from
the beginning. Georg Simmel, The Stranger,
in Kurt Wolff (trans), The Sociology of Georg
Simmel, Free Press (New York), 1950.
7. Mumbai Human Development Report,
2009: http://passthrough.fw-notify.net/
download/250107/http://mhupa.gov.in/W_new/
Mumbai%20HDR%20Complete.pdf; www.
indiaonlinepages.com/population/mumbaipopulation.html.
8. See, for instance, Richard Sennett,
The Corrosion of Character: The Personal
Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism,
WW Norton & Company (New York), 1998.
9. Gao Yubing, The Pajama Game Closes in
Shanghai, The New York Times, 16 May 2010:
www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/opinion/17gao.
html.
10. Michael Dutton, Streetlife China, Cambridge
University Press (Cambridge), 1998.
11. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans Oliver
Feltham, Continuum (New York), 2005.
12. The term ambulatory vision derives from
JJ Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual
Perception, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
(Boston, MA), 1979.

Text 2012 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images:

p 136(t) James Marshall/Corbis; p 136(b)
Inga Powilleit; p 137 Fritz Hoffmann/
In Pictures/Corbis; p 138 Smithson Family
Collection/Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI,
Dist. RMN/Jean-Claude Planchet/Georges
Meguerditchian; p 139 UNStudio; pp 1401
Christian Richters

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