U
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Paulina Lenoir
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contents
introduction.........................................p.1
literature review....................................p.2
design precedents....................................p.12
conclusion...........................................p.21
bibliography.........................................p.22
i
Capitalist Systems impose homogeneous rhythmic patterns to which
people unwittingly conform. The time-tabled organisation of these
systems does not allow for people to exert their individual
rhythms: Every person has an individual rhythm and pace.
How can “mobile arrangements” of work based on individual rhythm
and skill sustain themselves within the ecosystem of an urban environment?
1
Capitalist Systems create monotonous, standardised patterns in people’s behaviour, through a linearity of production and consumption which means that the people who follow unwittingly conform to structures that are not
in sync with their individual rhythms. But these routines are so close that they become familiar to the extent that
they are invisible, therefore often lacking analysis. Which means that it then becomes difficult to transform or
modify them. This essay seeks alternative rhythms to the structural organisation of Capital, and proposes that
every person has an individual rhythm of work and that there are ways of being efficient without regulating those
rhythms. Through the investigation of work and living patterns in a city and finding the holes within the perpetual
system of production-consumption, it is possible to discover modes of living/working autonomously within an
urban environment. This essay aims to explore the ways in which this is possible.
2
According to ‘P.M.’ (1983), the anonymous author of Bolo’Bolo, in the Stone Age and the years preceding civilisation we led nomadic lives sustained only by a few hours of ‘work’ per day. Most of the day constituted in ritual,
storytelling, etc. and our rhythms were not regulated by external organised structures. The beginning of agriculture meant we had to be sedentary and brought forth more regulated and organised rhythms of living.
“Three thousand years of civilization and 200 years of accelerated industrial progress have left us with a terrible
hang-over.” (P.M., 1983, p.5)
With Industrialisation came an even more rigorous order and structure in praise of speed. The need to produce
quickly for profit created an uncontrollable acceleration that affected our rhythms of living. Automation for instance created a standardisation in production according to speed and efficiency. These machines of repetition
produce at ever-increasing speeds which consequently affect the pace of a society. The accelerated pace of
capitalist societies then imposes a certain rhythm on cultures, communities or individuals that might work on
slower or different rhythms. This creates a distance between people and the material culture in which they are
immersed due to the disconnection from production and consumption and the underlying purpose behind the
creation of those objects.
“You spend your time to produce some part, which is used by somebody else you don’t know to assemble some
device that is in turn bought by somebody else you don’t know for goals also unknown to you.” (P.M., 1983, p.6)
This fragmentation alienates people from their work and from their material surroundings. The objects that compose the environment of cities, such as cars, dictate the pace of a society and the interaction of people to the
object while they rarely even understand how they function. This means that the control of the interactions with
the objects that make up our everyday lives is out of our hands. By not understanding our material environment
we relinquish the control of the everyday. Therefore we cease to be the starting point for determining our surroundings, the objects we need and how we interpret them.
3
“The difficulty which we all face, as users of all the things, products, or whatever, that are provided by professions
other than our own, is that we are tied by our experience as consumers of products to accept them, and not
ourselves, as the starting points of our thinking when asked to define our needs.” (John Thackara, 1988, P.222)
In some cases those consumer objects invade cultures and contexts where they are incoherent. The imposition
of these objects stops certain communities from transforming at their own rhythm in the way that suits their rituals
and perception of time and relationship to their environment.
“Before the industrial Work-Machine colonized the actual Third World, there was poverty. “Poverty”: that means
that people possessed few material goods and had no money, though they still got enough to eat and everything
they needed for that way of life was available. “Wealth” was originally “software”. Wealth was not determined
by things and quantities, but by forms: myths, festivals, fairy tales, manners, eroticism, language, music, dance,
theatre, etc. (It’s also evident that the way “material” pleasures are perceived is determined by cultural traditions
and conceptions.) The Work-Machine has destroyed most of the wealth aspects of this “poverty,” and has left
misery in its place.” (P.M., 1983, p.13-14)
That means that people, communities and cultures which have rhythms that are not in sync with the rhythms
of the ‘industrial Work Machine’* (as P.M. calls it in his book Bolo’Bolo) are immediately marginalised and considered as ‘unproductive’ and ‘inefficient’, and are useless to the capitalist society. This pressure to become a
productive part of the ‘Work Machine’ eliminates cultures with a different relationship to their material surroundings, who may not be rich in capital but in poetry, by controlling the accidental, destroying improvisation and the
unpredictable.
In Oaxaca in the south of Mexico, textiles are an intrinsic part of the indigenous cultures. The process of weaving
4
is integral to the identities of different communities and individual members of the community. (Rene Bustamante
2009) The process is slow in relation to industrial production and the rhythm of work depends on the person who
is creating the textile. Each symbol that is after embroidered on the fabric is representative of the person who will
wear it, their stories, and their poetry. In San Pedro Cajonos families of silk weavers are in charge of an entire cyclical process which includes overseeing the growth of larva from the stage of eggs until they become butterflies,
then using the cocoons to create thread, threading the waist loom, weaving a ‘rebozo’ , dying it and finishing the
details. This relationship to their work allows them to have a full understanding and spiritual connection to what
they are doing as well as their own rhythm of making. They can relate to, observe and understand the process
from egg to fabric, as well as the life cycle within the process. Unfortunately the amount of people who are working in this way is decreasing, and its mostly due to the inability to ‘keep up’ with the accelerated pace of Industrial
Production. Automatic, standardised production processes accelerate the pace of work, making ‘slower’ rhythms
hard to maintain and hard to desire for the younger generations of indigenous people.
“To crush the peasant rebellions and the growing independence of craftsmen in the towns, they introduced the
factory system. Instead of foremen and whips, they used machines. They dictated to us our work rhythms, punished us automatically with accidents, kept us under control in huge halls. Once again “progress” meant working
more and more under still more murderous conditions.” (P.M., 1983, p.4)
The factory of Vitale Barberis (Italian industrial textiles company) works in a completely different way from the
weaving workshops in Mexico. Machines have taken over the labour of producing textiles and the physical interaction between the workers and the machines in the factory is minimal. The machines work automatically to
a measured time and standardised rhythm. It becomes difficult to understand the way the machine is working
because of its speed and accelerated rhythm and the disconnection from it. There is no more space for intuition,
and unpredictability in this automated work. Everything is measured and if there is a mistake it is fixed back to its
intended state. There is no space for contingency and work and consumption are fragmented. The textiles in this
case are made as William Morris (1884) says in Textile Fabrics ‘primarily for sale, and only secondarily for use.’
5
“If we had been left alone we might not be much further now in a material way than we were five hundred years
ago… But we would have gone only a direction that suited us. We would have gone ahead very slowly, and yet it
is not impossible that we would one day have discovered our own substitute for the trolley, the radio, the airplane
of today. They would have been no borrowed gadgets, they would have been the tools of our own culture, suited
to us.” (Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, 1977, p.16)
In In Praise of Shadows Jun’ichiro Tanizaki compares Japanese and western cultures through an exploration/
observation of their relationship to shadows. He vividly paints the picture of the difference in material culture
between the two by portraying the effect of western production’s infiltration on the Japanese material culture
which has its own intrinsic qualities, tempo and perception/conception of time. Through describing a Japanese
traditional house and how to furbish it, Jun’ichiro shows the incoherence of western ‘gadgets’ within a Japanese
home. As the Japanese aim to capture shadows in their material surroundings, western ‘gadgets’ often reflect
light. The contrast in these elements show how the products of western industrial mass consumption are imposing relationships to material that are not coherent to specific cultures, in this case Japan. Destroying many
traditional cultures by rendering the material environment uniform and homogenous because of acceleration for
efficiency.
“We believed that the assembly line and standardisation would make the world a better place, yet along with
efficiency came a dehumanization of work.” (John Thackara, 1988, P.3)
This dehumanisation of work is due to the uncritical praise of speed in industrial mass production. “after 1868…
Japan set about catching up with the West. To create a modern capitalist economy, the Meji government imported the Western clock and calendar, and began promoting the virtues of punctuality and making the most of time.”
(Carl Honore, 2004)
6
The clock, tic-toc, tic-toc. Initially used by monks in Europe as an instrument for measuring time to regulate
the length of prayers, the clock was then ‘adopted by tradesmen and mechanics’ (John Thackara, 2005) and
brought to cities to give every city their own time to regulate activities by. This linearity of time helped regulate
various activities in order to control the rhythm of societies. Time was no longer cyclical, based on events and
on bodily perception but it became linear, based on meeting tasks at a given rate regardless of certain natural
circumstances. This made it easier to create structured time-tables of cities. It gave a greater social order and
control over schedules of whole societies. According to Carl Honore (2005) in order for rail systems to work different cities and greater areas had to synchronise their clocks so that by 1911 most of the world was on the same
clock. When days are broken down into hours, hours to minutes, minutes to seconds, work becomes based on
efficiency within a given time. The “shift towards paying workers by the hour, instead of for what they produced”
meant that “every minute cost money, business found itself locked in a never-ending race to accelerate output.”
In Praise of Slow That means that the productivity of a person is measured by their speed in completing specific
tasks per hour, which automatically discards any possibility for a diversity of rhythms to be able to be a part of
this system of work. And reversely the people who conform or push themselves to meet these expectations are
not acknowledging their individual pace.
“By making daily schedules possible, clocks held out the promise of greater efficiency —and also tighter control… In the absence of accurate clocks, life was dictated by what sociologists call Natural Time. People did
things when it felt right, not when a wristwatch told them to… When mechanical clocks began springing up in
town squares across Europe, the line between keeping time and keeping control blurred further.”(Carl Honore,
2004, p.22)
This shift from Natural Time to regulated time meant that we were no longer going at rhythms determined by us
but by an external system. The clock meant that activities could be regulated to make ‘the most out of time’ which
led to ever increasing speeds of productivity and a different conception of efficiency. The optimising of efficiency
7
creates a uniformity in the way people should work, which does not acknowledge that each individual has their
particular pace and understanding of the work their doing. Work that is time based, having to meet certain expectations in the fastest way possible, does not allow space for diversity of rhythms and unpredictability. Behaviours
and social norms such as punctuality only came up after the implementation of a clock based system. This leads
to a term Lefebvre, in Rhythmnanalysis, describes as dressage, which means to conform your bodily rhythms to
external structure and rhythms. The relatively recent shift to real-time enabled by internet connections, that allow
for transactions to occur in the speed of light rather than the speed of the post-office, has put an even higher
pressure of acceleration.
“Industrial Capitalism fed on speed, and rewarded it as never before. The business that manufactured and
shipped its products the fastest could undercut rivals. The quicker you turned capital into profit, the quicker you
could re-invest it for even greater gain.” (Carl Honore, 2004, p.23-24)
Through rhythm we are able to study the structure of societies and how we exist and function within them.
(Geographies of Rhythm) In Rhythmanalysis Henri Lefebvre critiques the every day life in modern capitalist
society through the study of rhythms. He analyses our conceptions of time, and the opposition between ‘natural
biological and social timescales.’ “Lefebvre spends much of his time critiquing official and capitalist rhythms
and the ways in which these rational and calculative rhythms impose themselves over the rhythms of the body.”
(Geographies of Rhythm p.118) To live and work within these standardised and measured rhythms of linear time
often leads to a disconnection from a personal conception of time, an elimination of unpredictability, ultimately
discarding intuition from the everyday life. There is no time to connect with our actions. Zeruvabel argues that
(1985: 2) ‘through imposing a rhythmic “beat” on a vast array of major activities (including work, consumption
and socialising), the week promotes the structuredness and orderliness of human life’. (Tim Edenser, 2010, p.7)
The problem is that we are often not aware of the order imposed on us by the dominant rhythms of a Capitalist
Society, because they are so close to us that it becomes difficult to see, which means that we often relinquish
control over our rhythms unknowingly.
8
The synchronisation of opening and closing of shop stores, the traffic lights, speed limits, traffic jams and time-tables of work, create rhythms based on the structural organisation of cities and schedules of production/consumption which all lend to creating repetitive behavioural patterns (Geographies of Rhythm, 2010). How are we
controlled by them and how can we break out of it?
The repetitiveness of the every-day create ‘spatial rhythms’. In Geographies of Rhythm, Monica Degen gives
the example of the regeneration of El Raval, (a marginalised area within the city of Barcelona) to show how
‘an analysis of sensory rhythms in urban public places reveals the various and contested ways in which place
experience is created, controlled, consumed, or commodified’. The regeneration of El Raval helps visualise the
contrast between different spatial rhythms, what they are related to and how. El Raval was a condensed working
class area and host of the textiles industry in the 17th century, then at the end of the 19th century, when the industry moved out, empty factory buildings transformed into the homes of many Spanish migrants who turned the
spaces into non-licensed residencies, known as the vertical slumsª (because of their adaptations to the roofs of
the buildings). In the 20th century it became Barcelona’s red-light district because of its location near the harbour.
By the end of the 20th century the red-light district had deteriorated due to social changes, and it was left as an
even more marginalised area of the city, due to the disorderly behaviour of the people who inhabited it.
“From an urban planning perspective this was an area that had been largely untouched by the organising power
of modernity.” (Monica Degen, 2010, p.26)
So the regeneration of the area was an “attempt to control and sometimes erase what were considered negative
and unruly urban rhythms.” (Monica Degen, 2010)
It started with the building of a contemporary museum and a square consisting of large grey concrete and glass
homogenous spaces. Uniformity offers an organising power to attempt to control rhythms of public spaces. At the
beginning the open spaces were once again appropriated by the people of El Raval by re-interpreting them for
playing and skating, families gathering and having picnics when the museum closed, homeless people moving
in with their cardboard boxes etc. To control these ‘unruly’ behaviours from coming back and encourage con-
9
sumerist rhythms, the government organised late nights at the museums, along with festivals and events in the
plaza and area. Although this did change the rhythms of El Raval some of the rhythms that coincide in the area
still pertain to a time before modernity. This became a characteristic of the area, people were attracted to the
diversity of rhythms that could be found there. Due to its isolation from the ‘modernised’ Barcelona, the area kept
some of their more traditional ‘forms of sociality’ which included the use of chairs in shops for the customers to
have a conversation while waiting to be attended probably by the producer of what they waited to attain.
“We contain ourselves by concealing the diversity of our rhythms: to ourselves, body and flesh, we are almost
objects.” (Henri Lefebvre, 1997, p. 20)
Although there are imposed and very dominant rhythms within a Capitalist Society there are forms of resistance
to these rhythms, including asylum seekers, squatters, ‘freegans’, and the slow movements to name a few. From
them we can learn where the cracks in this system exist and how it is possible to live of and within those cracks,
and therefore be able to break from imposed rhythmic patterns, and social classification according to production.
One of the most relevant resistance to the accelerated rhythm of Industrial society is the Slow Movement. The
slow movement arises in different forms, slow food, slow design, slow travel, slow living, slow cities (CittaSlow)
etc. It is not about being slow, but about going at your own pace, having control over your rhythms and deals with
cyclical processes of production. Deciding when and how to carry out your activities.
“Being Slow means that you control the rhythms of your own life. You decide how fast you have to go in any given
context. If today I want to go fast, I go fast; if tomorrow I want to go slow, I go slow. What we are fighting for is the
right to determine our own tempos.” (Carl Honore, 2004, p.16)
The Society for the Deceleration of Time is a European society based on the principles of the slow movement.
They hold conferences and organise different activities in order to help ‘decelerate’ pace of cities. One of the
10
The Society for the Deceleration of Time is a European society based on the principles of the slow movement.
They hold conferences and organise different activities in order to help ‘decelerate’ pace of cities. One of the
activities they carried out one day was to time pedestrians in town centres and stop them if they were passing
the ‘speed-limit’ (50 metres in 37 seconds or less) to ask why they were in such a hurry. After their response
they made them walk the 50 metres again but this time accompanied by an intricate tortoise marionette which
evidently caused them to slow down. This made the people who were initially going fast re-think their haste and
possibly question where it comes from. (Carl Honore, 2004)
“The Decelerators use a German word—eigenzeit—to sum up their creed. Eigen means “own” and zeit means
“time.” In other words, every living being, event, process or object has its own inherent
time or pace, its own tempo giusto.” (Carl Honore, 2004, p.38)
But individual pace and rhythm is modified and becomes lost, even forgotten, within a context of structure and
control which is embedded in the architecture of everyday life in a city.
11
d e s i g n
a n a l y s i s
12
moving walkway/travelator - urban landscape
fig.1
In 2002 Paris inaugurated a high-speed walkway in Montparnasse Metro Station. It started by operating at
12km/h but as people struggled to keep balance at this speed they slowed it down to 9km/h. The high-speed
walkway promoted saving 15 minutes per week, a total of 10 hours per year.
This walkway exemplifies the embodiment of a praise of speed in urban environments. It reinforces the desire to
go faster and constantly “save” and “cut” time. The object imposes an accelerated rhythm and pace in the urban
landscape and fortifies the automatic and monotonous behavior in everyday routines.
The high-speed walkway serves as a reminder to go fast, one could imagine walking next to it makes you feel
like you are running late or behind. The speed of the journey makes it difficult to observe and be aware of the
surrounding environment. This sort of object therefore encourages passive repetitive behaviors focused on calculative efficiency rather than on instict, or natural time.
13
speedbump - urban landscape
fig.2
Speed bumps are a way of controlling the speed of vehicles in an urban landscape. As an object for deceleration
and slowing down pace, the speed bump shows how it is necessary to control the speed of cars to avoid accidents. Frustration felt by not being able to go at the desired speed in traffic can lead drivers to want to accelerate
in emptier streets but the bump is a way of controlling that haste to make sure that the roads are safe.
As certain spaces and objects in the urban landscape reinforce speed, others force deceleration.
But it is never designed for people to go at a pace decided by them, the urban environment is full of a calculative,
rationalism to ensure orderly behavior.
The architecture of the city is thereafter transformed to control possibly unruly behaviors that arise due to the
interaction with new gadgets, objects and machines. The grey, uniform typology lends a repetitiveness in order
to be easliy recognisable.
14
playtime - jacques tati
fig.3
Playtime by Jacques Tati is a film that critiques the effect of the construction of a society built on reinforcing
consumerism and efficiency. The film portrays how homogenous spaces create repetitive behavioural patterns,
synchronised movements and rhythms. It also shows how disconnected people have become to their material
surroundings in a city by introducing a character that sees everything as if for the first time. The urban environment becomes unfamiliar and ridiculous as one is able to start to see and analyse the monotonous behaviours
that its objects and architecture provoke.
15
slow car - jurgen bey
fig.4
The Slow Car is a mobile workspace designed to go at a maximum of 25 mph. The idea comes from the observation of the average speed of traffic and the frustration felt while driving a machine to a quarter of its potential
speed. This project, although still a prototype, brings to awareness how everyday objects control the time and
pace of a city and their counter-effect. The desire to go faster manifested in a car ends up being reduced to an
imposed slowness that is traffic. Cars are machines that have a limit of speed depending on their motor, but are
regulated as well as limited by the speeds imposed by urban planning and traffic. The slow car provides room for
reflection and observation in the journey. It changes the perception of the time used for traveling from one place
to the other and the activities undergone within that space and time. It is no longer about getting from A to B but
also about the journey itself, as in this mode of transport one would become able to connect to it.
Mobile workspaces would allow people to collect information as they go along, making the path as important as
the destination. It proposes a nomadic mobile architecture, with the visual language of a small building/room.
16
‘day-by-day’ - mischer traxtler
fig.5
The day-by-day rug is designed in such a way so as to portray the individual rhythm of each artisan’s working process through a pattern. There are several elements that make up the visual diary of work such as the
colour, the thickness of the lines and the size of the ‘pixels’. The pattern shows exactly how many days it takes
each person to complete one carpet, and several aspects of each working day. This means that the rhythmic
process of the worker is embedded in the visual language of the object. It is therefore possible to have a perception of the time undergone to create the piece by interpreting the visual map of work. Furthermore it becomes possible to distinguish the rhythm of work between different people who are working on the same thing.
It does not regulate the rhythm of the person but visually measures it.
In a society structured on increasing task-related efficiency it becomes difficult to distinguish differences in
pace between people, or the difference is so great that it marginalises certain individuals. Work is measured
on efficiency, and therefore often discards the learning process. Because it only becomes about achieving
something in a certain amount of time, so the way of getting there is often disregarded as long as you are able
to achieve the task within the given amount of time. But it becomes interesting to analyse the differences in the
relationship to work regarding the time of each person. The rug shows the differences in the labor of each day,
and the rhythm of different people, as the pattern is created depending on different aspects of the work during
the day.
Although on one hand measuring can become dangerous if used with intentions to regulate/control, in this
case the difference in each workers rhythm is celebrated as it makes each piece unique.
17
VERY LARGE BIKE (VLB) - dunne and raby
fig.6
The communal form of transport is based on the individual skill and rhythm of each person participating. It is an
anarchic and autonomous form of transport as there is no leader; everyone involved contributes to the best of
their ability. The children and the elderly tell stories, chant and entretain to encourage those cycling and those
who are able to, pedal. This is an example of an object that is organized according to different people’s rhythm
within an activity.
If an object by design functions in an anarchic way could that then influence the politics of its environment?
Rather than the object being developed in response to the politics of its surroudings, certain objects like the Very
Large Bike could propose alterior politics to the ones of their surroundings.
18
disobedient objects
fig.7
“But autonomy is also attained in the daily workings of individual lives by means of many small Promethean disobediences, at once clever, well thought out, and patiently pursued, so subtle at times as to avoid punishment
entirely... I would say that there is good reason to study the dynamics of disobedience, the spark behind all
knowledge.” (Gaston Bachelard, Fragments of a Poetics of Fire 1961)
The umbrella movement in Hong Kong is a protest for democracy. Following the government’s dissent towards
verbal protest and debate, some students gave continuity to the issue through the use of umbrellas. Umbrellas
are an everyday object and historically have been used as shields during protests as well.
As daily objects are turned disobedient they form their own architecture of objection within the city. What is interesting to consider is the ability for quotidien objects to disrupt control, and imposed rhythms if transformed to
use in distorted way.
19
transient embrace -Karmen franinovic
fig.8
“As we walk through the city we produce space through the kinaesthetic rhythms of our bodies. However our
movements are limited, directed and guided by the spatial design and contents of our urban surroundings. Walls
direct our movements of body, values conduct our movements of thought. Can we reconstruct the space of urban
flows as we enact it?” Franinovic (2006)
Karmen Franinovic’s work focuses on public and urban spatial perceptions, rhythms and behavioural patterns.
The ‘Transient Embrace’ is a project for a public spaces that works “like a sieve” rendering “fast passage of
crowds through the space difficult”. By introducing a sort of modular spatial system that reacts to the people
who pass through and the interactions of the people within the space, Karmen’s goal is to filter the haste, and
automatism experienced while walking through urban spaces. As people would have to pay attention to their surroundings to get through the space, the sort of labyrinth pushes a more mindful interaction with the environment.
It serves as a sort of blockage for the accelerated pace in cities. Her idea is that of “morphing architectures” by
people shaping and transforming the space as they pass by.
These morphing architectures are supposed to provoke the accidental and eliminate passive behaviors by proposing a challenge in transitional spaces.
“Direct encounters and interaction with urban inertias, challenge not only established spatial practices, but sedimented behavior structures and social relations as well. By moving the focus from passive use and consumption
of public space and social values, to modes of active transformation of the information/matter of which urban
space is composed, we mobilize the city on the molecular level.” Franinovic (2006)
20
conclusion
Efficiency has taken over most of the daily interactions, architecture and objects in an urban context. After the
introduction of the clock, society has been based on more rigid structures and systems. As a consequence, we
have lost control over determining our individual pace and interpretation of time; the diversity in our rhythmic
patterns has become diffused. As Lefebvre (1997) points out, it is through rhythms that we are able to study the
structure of a society, as well as defeat it.
“the city has long been ordered according to the instrumental rationalities of economy; its spaces and movements ordered scientifically and functionally to facilitate efficient production and consumption. The modernist city
is thus often theorised as colonial, where technologies of planning and architecture come together to build new
societies and indoctrinate citizens within the spatial confines of rationally planned towns.” (Tim Edenser, 2010,
p.114)
These objects and architecture that compose the urban landscape dictate the pace of the people inhabiting it.
We relinquish our control of the everyday due to our disconnection to and lack of understanding of our material
surroundings. Every person has an individual rhythm which is often concealed, contained and limited by these
external structures, systems and time-tables within an urban environment. The familiarity of urban routines,
spaces and objects make it difficult to be aware of how we conform our diverse rhythms in our daily lives. Design
can help transcend the controlled rhythms imposed by the urban environment and capitalistic system by serving
as a tool to bring awareness to how and where we are succumbing to imposed rhythms, questioning everyday
life in a city, and the possibility of living autonomously by exagerating or distorting daily movements to make them
kess familiar. By transforming the quotidien object it is possible to affect spatial organisations and go beyond
rationality, bringing elements of uncertainty, surprise and discovery into everyday life in a city which would consequently make space for and celebrate multiplicity in rhythms.
21
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films:
auweia (1989) Ilha Das Flores, Island of Flowers. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qspymI_v_Lg&feature=kp (Accessed: 2014)
ECAL (2014) ECAL “Delirious Home” - Milano 2014. Available at: https://vimeo.com/90425702 (Accessed: 2014).
Ed Rosie (2009) Waste Not Want Not - A Freegan Documentary. Available at: https://vimeo.com/4423506 (Accessed: 2014)
Lloyd Alter (2009) Slow Car. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMashOlzwfE (Accessed: 2014).
Modern Times (1936) Directed by Charlie Chaplin [Film]. New York City: United Artists.
My Dinner With Andre (1981) Directed by Louis Malle [Film]. New York: New Yorker Films.
Playtime (1967) Directed by Jacques Tati [Film]. Place of distribution: France.
shieldsfilms (2008) Meet the Freegans. Available at: https://vimeo.com/4553108 (Accessed 2014)
WDROTV (2014) Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse. Available at: https://vimeo.com/37089032 (Accessed: 2014)
websites:
BBC NEWS (2003) Walkway propels Paris metro into future. Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3001182.stm (Accessed: 2014).
Choy K. (2014) Ka5. Available at: http://ka5.info/prospectus.html (Accessed: 2014).
Cittaslow (2014) Cittaslow UK aiming to improve the quality of life in towns across the UK. Available at: http://www.cittaslow.org.uk (Accessed: 2014).
Franinovic, K. (2007) Karmen Franinovic : Projects. Available at: http://www.zero-th.org/ProjectsKarmen.html (Accessed:
2014).
DesignMuseum (2012) UMK. Available at: http://www.unitedmicrokingdoms.org/anarcho-evolutionists/ (Accessed: 2014).
Mischer’traxler (2014) mischer’traxler day by day rug. Available at: http://www.mischertraxler.com/projects_day_by_day.
html (Accessed: 2014).
Passing Clouds (2009) Passing Clouds. Available at: http://www.passingclouds.org (Accessed: 2014).
Proofflab (2013) PROOFFLab. Available at: http://www.proofflab.com (Accessed: 2014).
R-Urban (2015) R-Urban Wick: R-Urban. Available at: http://r-urban-wick.net (Accessed: 2014).
Slow Japan (2009) Yukkuri Mura. Available at: http://slowjapan.wordpress.com/2009/08/04/yukkuri-mura/ (Accessed:
2014).
The Long Now Foundation (2014) The Long Now Foundation Fostering Long Term Thinking. Available at: http://longnow.
org (Accessed: 2014).
V&A (2014) Umbrella Movement Victoria and Albert Museum. Available at: http://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/disobedient-objects/
umbrella-movement (Accessed: 2014).
Vitra (2007) Vitra Slow Car: Design: Jurgen Bey. Available at: http://www.vitra.com/en-us/magazine/details/jurgen-beyslow-car (Accessed: 2014).
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images:
fig.1 Spsmiler. (2005) Parisian High-speed walkway. Available at: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Parisian_highspeed_walkway.jpg (Accessed/downloaded: 2014).
fig.2 Lenoir, P. (2014) Speed Bump [Photograph].
fig.3 Screenshot of Playtime (1967) Directed by Jacques Tati [Film]. Place of distribution: France.
fig.4 Vitra Edition. (2007) Slow Car. Available at: http://www.vitra.com/en-us/magazine/details/jurgen-bey-slow-car (Accessed/downloaded: 2014).
fig.5 Mischer’traxler. (2014) Day by Day Rug. Available at: http://nodusrug.it/en/rugs_collection_tab.php?ID=DBDAY (Accessed/downloaded: 2014).
fig.6 Evans, J. (2012) JASON-Bike-420x560. Available at: http://www.unitedmicrokingdoms.org/anarcho-evolutionists/
(Accessed/downloaded: 2014).
fig. 7 Sun, B. (2014) OccupyHK_UmbrellaSing_BeckySUN. Available at: http://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/disobedient-objects/
umbrella-movement (Accessed/downloaded: 2014).
fig.8 Franinovic, K. (2006) Transient-Embrace. Available at: http://zero-th.org/TransitEmbrace.html (Accessed/downloaded: 2014).
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