new Mn'M book produced by IKI @ co+labo Radović
(ed.): Tokyo
Dérive: In Search of Urban Intensities of Tokyo
This volume of visual
essays presents a selection of recordings from Tokyo fieldwork, and fragments
of rich follow-up discussions at Keio University, which were conducted by the team
of experts involved in an interdisciplinary urban and architectural research
project Measuring the non-Measurable - Mn’M in November 2012.
Mn’M Project, which is central to IKI - International Keio Institute for Architecture
and Urbanism, was conceived as an open stage for discussion of urban quality
and the ways of addressing its complexity. The term “measurable” in the title
of the project is meant to provoke. One of the key aims of Mn’M is to
challenge the ruling, unsustainable schism between “measurable” and
“non-measurable”, “textual” and “numerical” in the urban and to,
possibly, address its totality, the Lefebvrian oeuvre. The primary focus
of Mn’M is at two systems of urban phenomena which resist easy, if not any,
quantification - culture and sustainability. That is where, by focusing at
diverse urban densities and intensities, it seeks to advance theories of urban
design and architecture.
Current investigations of
urban densities tend to oversimplify the challenge, by missing to include the
closely related (but not equivalent) themes of urban intensity and by neglecting
environmental and cultural specificity. It is exactly there, within the themes
of urban intensity and cultural specificity, that Mn’M seeks to advance
theories of urban design and architecture.
Methodologically radical,
Mn’M Tokyo fieldwork was inspired by Situationists practice of dérive.
Experimental drifts through urban fabric of Tokyo focused at recognizing,
identifying, engaging and variously capturing and sharing diverse spatial expressions
of urban intensity and, thus, contributing to the much needed, different
thinking about the phenomena which elude all efforts to be captured and
quantified, while, at the same time, making critical contribution to the oeuvre,
the quality of the urban.
Darko Radović
