Back to the Future
Competition of urban inventions: The would be city - episode Galați 2050
Finalist
Team: Alex Axinte, Cristi Borcan (studioBASAR), Alec Bălăşescu - sociologist, Dorel Ruşti - naturalist, Ana Vlad and Adi Voicu - film directors
Location: Galaţi, Romania
Year: 2011
“To my endless satisfaction, at about three and a half, we saw Galaţi in the distance, but when we saw so many towers and buildings, which rise from the water and shine in the sun, all built in stone, we were amazed and we said it’s enchanted. Two hours later, our boat was anchoring into the harbor, among various sizes of merchants’ and fisherman’s boats, which gave the impression of an intense commercial activity. It wasn’t long until we started wandering, each of us on its own, through this vast city, whose streets show a great bustle of people and are crammed with countless shops. The most amazing thing in this place is the quaint tangle between the city and the Danube waters, which show all over the place through various canals, swamps and water meadows.” (Anonymous traveler - Traveling on the lower Danube, Galaţi 2050)
Plan of Tenochtitlan City, Aztec Empire
“The city is bigger than Sevilia or Cordoba; the main streets are very wide and straight; few of those and all of the secondary ones are half dirt half water, and are navigable for canoes” (Hernan Cortes - extract from the letter addressed to king Carol V, with the occasion of entering Tenochtitlan at 8 November 1519)
Ulysse remet Chryseis a son pere, Claude Gelle (aka Lorraine) - 1648, oil on canvas
” I know only the two harbors at sunset painted by Claude Loraine - that are in the Louvre and where are juxtaposed two extremely different ambiances - that can compete in beauty only the map of the Paris Metro” “ (Guy Debord - “Introduction a une critique de la geographie urbaine”, 1955)
Potential Vegetation Galati Area
“The floodplain of the Danube had a very important role in the general economy of the nature and a great influence over the clime and the vegetation of this area” (Grigore Antipa - “The flooded area of the river Danube, Its current status and the means to capitalize it” 1910)
A Soft Manifesto
The change or the disaster, the modernization or the fall, where triggered by the water and by the economical and military interes of the regional powers to control it. The Danube had always dictated the destiny of this city. After the WW2 bombings, Galati becomes a Victim-City, destroyed almost entirely and sporadically reconstructed after the soviet planning model. The new Galati of the ’50s denies the river and start to behave like a generic city located almost anywhere on the territory of Socialist Romania. Once the giant Kombinat has been built in the ’60s, it becomes the main city engine, the river going in the background. Today, Galati city shares the similar fate of other new towns, they expire.
After a great part of the forest has gone, the Romanian were brothers with the open fields. The rivers and the sea where not among his closest relatives. The waters where either borders controlled by others, or sources of miseries and floods. The proving of the essential bond between the nation and the water, the Danube and the Black See, had an important role in the process of accounting the national territory.
As the treatment phobias stands for repeatedly engaging the object of the phobia, we are confronting Galati city with one of the dangers that, recently, it seems that it’s afraid of: the water. We are transforming a danger (the flooding) into a potential (irrigate) by using the water as infrastructural element, emergent, superimposed to the existing logic of the city.
The integration of the the river into the city has 2 components:
Galati - a habitat of damp and slops
Gradually transforming the city into a water permeable environment, by penetrating the urban tissue with canals, slops, damps, meadows or reeds, that are supporting the urban agriculture, the production of energy, loisir, sports and transports. We are proposing the re-naturalization of the Garden City of the ’50s by the capitalization of the river.
Galati - a Bauhaus on the river
Using the existing infrastructure of steel and ship production we vision a specialized university nucleus, an International Arts and Crafts School that will offer artistic and technical specializations.
Back to the Future formulates a provocation of a wet infrastructure, lost in the process of human conquering the river Danube, by which we envision the gradual regeneration of the physical and moral background of the city, as an alternative to uncontrolled growth, favoring urban intensification, local-ism and building up a stronger community.
You can watch the movie Galati 2050:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iri-S522Ntg