LATENCE IN THE CITY: GAPS IN NOVI SAD

LATENCE IN THE CITY: GAPS IN NOVI SAD

Link to download the publication: Latency in the City

This publication is the result of research that resulted from the collaboration of two teams: the Center for New Media_kuda.org from Novi Sad and the architectural couple Analog from Zagreb (Dafne Berc and Luciano Basauri). The research was started within the three-month program of the artists' stay in Novi Sad, organized by Center_kuda.org and the Institute for Culture of Vojvodina and in cooperation with the Academy Schloss Solitude from Stuttgart. As part of this program, architects Dafne and Luciano visited Novi Sad in early 2012.

The cooperation arose from the need to continue research continuity on the issues of the urban state and development of Novi Sad, which is a topic we dealt with in 2010 within the project A(u)ction - register of Novi Sad spaces between personal interests and public needs. While the goal of that project was to thoroughly diagnose all those places where the city of Novi Sad as community creaks, with "Latency in the City" we wanted to show on a selected group of spatial problems what theoretical and technical apparatus is necessary to have as a basis for thinking about the future. , bearing in mind the complementarity of professional urban approaches (institutional or not) with the perspective of citizens and users of these spaces.

Despite the many possible research paths that were opened by the A(u)ction, the topic of the new research arose independently, from the authentic first impression of the visiting researchers about Novi Sad, and that is the impression of the city panorama when crossing the Freedom Bridge. The view of the topography of the city on the river becomes the basic geomorphological spatial coordinate for the visitors, from which the unlocking and interpretation of the rest of the city start. That first impression led to the knowledge that many valuable and still undeveloped spaces in the city are just below the Danube and form a system of voids, together with the river as an eternal void. This gap constitutes the basic geographical identity of Novi Sad, which led to the view that artificial urban micro-gaps within the urban fabric should be considered valuable precisely because of their undevelopedness because they communicate something of that natural constant inside the urban space.

In that way, the initial hypothesis crystallized: that the development of the urbanity of Novi Sad is hidden in keeping these areas from being built. The adoption of such an attitude shifts the focus towards those interventions that concern, above all, the availability of selected locations, increasing the quality of urban space, and establishing various practices of active use of these spaces by citizens. Because, urbanity lies in those categories, and not in the construction of bare residential and business capacities.

However, even such an approach does not guarantee the right solution for our gaps, because we must not forget that the city territory is an extremely productive resource. Whether built or unbuilt, it must be used as fairly as possible and accessible to as diverse groups of citizens as possible. Therefore, we have approached a complex diagnosis of selected gaps that, for example, the market itself cannot set, because it is guided by limited indicators - profit and ownership. Therefore, if the construction of valuable urban space is necessary, it should be carefully programmed according to the processes and needs of the entire urban metabolism. Because in order to understand the gaps, it is necessary to understand the city first.

Therefore, the goal of this publication is to change the perception of selected gaps in the city, precisely to question the perception of these locations as empty. And that is the most common case when it comes to institutional dealing with such locations, either at the faculty or in the urban planning institute. In that sense, we offered a model of the research base that could also be further developed through more participatory planning, ie. user participation within the existing informal regimes of using selected gaps. The establishment of such a planning practice in Novi Sad is yet to come.

 

Latency in the city: Gaps in Novi Sad

Publisher: Center for New Media_kuda.org, Novi Sad

Year of publication: 2012

Authors: Luciano Basauri, Dafne Berc, Aleksandar Bede

Design and prepress: Luciano Basauri

Translation from English: Đorđe Čolić

Proofreading: Predrag Rajić, Aleksandar Bede, Dafne Berc

Press: Daniel Print, Novi Sad

Circulation: 300 copies

CIP - Cataloging in the publication of the Matica Srpska Library, Novi Sad

ISBN 978-86-88567-05-3

COBISS.SR- ID 276070919

Unless otherwise noted, all content in this publication is licensed as Copyleft. The rights for the used photographic material are reserved by the authors of the photographs and the institutions from which the material originates.

This publication was published as part of the artist exchange project between the Schloss Solitude Academy in Stuttgart and the Center for New Media_kuda.org in Novi Sad, which is implemented in cooperation with the Institute for Culture of Vojvodina and supported by the Provincial Secretariat for Culture and Public Information.

 

We thank Branislav Lučić, Miroslav Živković, Đuro Đukić, Nenad Šeguljev, the Archives of the City of Novi Sad, and the Initiative for the Social Center for allowing the use of their photographic material.

 

About the authors:

Luciano Basauri is an architect from Santiago de Chile. He completed postgraduate studies at the Berlage Institute in the Netherlands after studying architecture at the Universidad Central de Chile, where he worked as an assistant until he arrives in Europe.

Dafne Berc is an architect from Zagreb, currently a doctoral candidate at the Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya in Barcelona. She completed postgraduate studies at the Berlage Institute in the Netherlands after studying architecture at the University of Zagreb, where she taught until 2012.

Since 2007, Basauri and Berz have been running Analog, an organization for design and research in the extended field of architecture and urbanism. Their work was published in Život umjetnosti, Zagreb; Man and Space, Zagreb; Oris, Zagreb; SPAM-Roulotte, Barcelona / Santiago de Chile; Materia Arquitectura, Santiago de Chile, among other professional journals as well as in Unfinished Modernizations: Between Utopia and Pragmatism, UHA, Zagreb and Tourism, Dispersion, Camouflage, merz & solitude, Stuttgart.

Aleksandar Bede is an architect from Novi Sad. He completed a master's degree in architecture and urbanism at the University of Novi Sad. He is currently pursuing a doctorate in urban planning at the University of Iowa in Venice. He deals with local cultural and urban policies and cooperates with the Center for New Media_kuda.org on these issues.