Factories for Urban Living: Retooling 21st-Century Production
Dongwoo Yim and Rafael Luna
‘It is a milestone clearly delimiting a past period and opening up all possible hopes … In ten years, [your book] will be the foundation of all production and be the first rallying sign.’
— Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier) in a letter to Tony Garnier on first encountering
Towards the second half of the 19th century, Barcelona’s Eixample district (1859) and the General Theory of Urbanisation (1867)2 by Catalan planner Ildefons Cerda had prompted an era of urbanisation and capitalism through the parcelisation process of the grid. New visionary counter models for city and production emerged to provide alternative equitable choices. British planner Ebenezer Howard would initiate the Garden City Movement in 1898 as a vision for a more self-sufficient city structured through an integration of industries, agriculture and cooperative landownership. French architect Tony Garnier would embrace the new technologies of the 20th century through his drawings of
Just as these city models in the early 20th century would project future cities based on emerging industries, technologies and economies from an architectural perspective, our current transition into shared economies, mass customisation and algorithmic autonomous production faces the same potential for a new generation of architectural industrial solutions. This issue of AD re-evaluates the revolutionary spirit of the industrial city as a way of understanding integral values between production and living, circular economies, and the architectural response that can organise a new productive urbanity. In an era fascinated by new technologies and hyperconnectivity, architects face the call to envision a future built environment beyond simple technocratic ideals and into complex hybrid scenarios where infrastructures of production can be repositioned as an architectural problem.
Technological evolutions in energy, communication and transportation have marked transformative epochs for production in the city. These can be categorized into four industrial revolutions that have had a direct correlation between the process of production, urbanisation models and architectural typologies. The First Industrial Revolution took shape in the second half of the 18th century with the invention of the steam engine and the mechanisation of singular labour. Riverside mills would shape cities in England, as new labour would concentrate in these production typologies, causing a paradigm shift from agrarian economies to manufacturing economies and giving birth to the industrial city. The Second Industrial Revolution evolved in the second half of the 19th century with the process of electrifi cation and mass production. The unregulated concentration of factories would corrupt the image of the city through unfi ltered scenes between housing and production, eventually leading to zoning and the displacement of factories away from residential zones. The development of nuclear energy in the mid-20th century advanced the fi eld of electronics, robotics and information technology, leading to automated production in the Third Industrial Revolution. As information technology progressed as a clean industry with innovative models of production, new factory typologies were developed that would challenge the modernist zoning. The current Fourth Industrial Revolution, spawned by the invention of the internet and the process of digitisation through the internet of things (IoT), has had an effect of decentralisation as data becomes more readily accessible. Production evolves into a ‘smart’ process of mass customisation, shared economies, decentralisation and prosumers, shifting back into an urban model where production can coexist with living.
The notion of the meta-industrial city reflects on how production in the 21st century is changing the way that cities are evolving from a consumption-based society, circling back to a deeper relationship between consumer and producer within the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Through architectural mutations of production a new architectural engagement can be present for a social–technocratic–economic shift that addresses a much-needed socially equitable urban model. This issue of AD focuses on answering the call by presenting investigations through industrial grafted typologies that are merging in dense cities, the digitisation of industries, production as a model for social equity, and questioning of modern zoning as a broken, outdated model.
Digitisation of Industry
The digitisation process of the Fourth Industrial Revolution has had the ramifications of not only producing a new virtual economy as a clean industry, but also disrupting traditional industries through new efficiencies and socio-economic agendas. ‘Industry 4.0’, as presented by Tali Hatuka in this issue, has generated concepts for a new ‘industrial ecosystem’, ‘industrial urbanism’ and ‘industrial ecology’ that reflect a new understanding of the economic and physical organisation of industry. Smart cities are moving beyond the accumulation of data for the purposes of management, to an exploration of optimisation of their infrastructure. This has allowed for underutilized areas of the city to transform into new, industrious, vibrant urban pockets through digital clean industries. Traditional industries also have been gradually changing their labour force with the aid of autonomous machines. This condition has engendered post-human architecture dominated by robotics, such as logistics and distribution centres that facilitate urban life.
Production as Equity (Cities of Inequality)
Twentieth-century Fordism propelled a new era of mass production that would sustain a new-found economy of mass consumption. Yet consumption and production represented a dichotomy for the modernist city. Production would be expelled to the fringe areas, which offered cheaper land and labour, while consumption would overwhelm urban centres. As industry moved out of the city, workers would relocate in order to live closer to the factories, disconnecting them from the growing cosmopolitan urban centres. Monoculture factory towns would develop to support labour housing outside of the city, and a disparity between consumption and production would solidify an inequity between the two in relation to culture, education and further opportunities. At the same time, these factory towns and mono-industrial cities lack the resiliency to self-sustain in the case that industry fails or factories relocate. The hyperconnected ‘smart’ industry era of the 21st century has fomented the decentralisation of economies and entrepreneurial power, allowing for some of these disparities to be addressed through self-empowered innovation. Shared economies minimise initial overhead costs, allowing micro-industries to emerge in urban centres through the pixelation of industrial typologies.
Broken Zoning
In 1928, the first International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM) introduced the La Sarraz Declaration3 in Switzerland as an initial manifesto for the modern city to be an economically efficient society – a product of rationalisation and standardisation.Town planning had to follow an order based on the functions of dwelling, producing and relaxation. Functionalist planning would be cemented with the Charter of Athens4 in 1933 after the fourth CIAM, themed ‘Functional City’, offered a solution to organise the then industrial city. This new manifesto proposed an understanding of the city as a value of four spatially separated functions: dwelling, recreation, work and transportation.
The modern model of zoning has persisted as a reference point for cities across the globe. Yet the evolution of industrial development in the 21st century disrupts this model. Denser cities where real estate is too valuable will naturally seek to redevelop industrial areas, challenging zoning codes to be transformed. When separated, distances between the different city functions have become environmental urban problems of congestion and of how to optimise use of fuel, resources and human capital. The emergence of concepts like energy microgrids, farm-to-table movement and neighbourhood fab labs are indicators of a demand for condensing mixed functions and operations within a neighbourhood unit. This calls on a reevaluation of models like the socialist micro-district, or the Maoist
Grafted Typologies
The need to recontextualise production as a part of an urban unit is an imminent problem as cities face supply chain challenges that will require locally produced, locally consumed goods and services. The challenge is the reintroduction of industrial architecture as part of the generic urban fabric. Just as Le Corbusier stated ‘Architecture or revolution’,5 this issue calls upon architecture to reflect on mass-production and mass customisation for a mass urbanised world through the appropriation of industrial elements that can ensure the survival of the factory in the city.
The pressure for production is already evident in dense societies where the hybridisation process between production and living is organically occurring. While architecture has only just started presenting new integrated models for the 21st-century urban factory, neighbourhoods like Seongsu in Seoul have flourished through the promotion of manufacturing as something that holds cultural appeal for tourists and residents, where factories exist within a typical mixed-use urban fabric. Banal modernist buildings are grafted into factories through the assemblage of production elements a
From Post- to Meta-
The urbanisation project catapulted rapid transformations onto emerging markets around the world throughout the 20th century. The increasing speed of development paired with technological innovation in the 21st century has allowed for new urban development to leapfrog legacy industrial and infrastructural networks that were once laid out by the Modern Movement. Cities that served as testbeds for industrial revolutions are also plagued with the path dependency from initial planning experiments, having to evolve through a sequential transition from the negative connotation of an industrial city to postindustrial variations that reflect a better quality of life and seek to evoke an innovative character. Despite the post-industrial city looking to escape the negative connotation of ‘industrial’, industry has circled back to becoming an asset for urban innovation rather than an outcast of the city. As a self-referential process on the industrial city, this issue of AD has been organised through a framework that seeks to lay down the historical background for the metaindustrial city, the role of the factory as a typology in the city, and models for production urbanism. While its contributors have been organised under this general framework, the issue seeks to ask four imminent questions.
