warehouse
of architecture and research

© photo by Warehouse of architecture and research

“Living Shenzhen” is a research project presented at the bi-city Biennale of Shenzhen-Hong Kong 2019 by WAR and Paolo Santi.
The twelve-screen installation composes an alternative map of Shenzhen, as an homage to Pietro Sartogo’s Roma Interrotta (1978),
one of the first attempts to draw an inductive mental map through multiple personal perception

The method of observation – a means of measurement - can be considered as a means of communication. Subject and object become one and their link becomes the same regulation used. The definition of matter as "process" replaces that of matter as "object" of traditional mechanics. [...] Our own perception changes the reality we are trying to define.

Don Foresta

In 1970 the psychologist Jean Piaget introduced transdisciplinarity as “higher stage of interdisciplinarity”. While the second indicates the simple convergence of a discipline towards a common reference goal, transdisciplinarity defines epistemological integration or progressive unification of multidisciplinary field.
This approach is what allows to identify new horizons of research in these times of technological and mental revolution and perfectly frames Warehouse of Architecture and Research philosophy. Theory alongside practice, dialogue before design. In the Warehouse, a collective hive-mind of documents, books and drawings, the team elaborates architectures and books, exhibitions and furnitures, schemes of urban development and questionable ideas.

WAR’s work is not outlined by a homogeneity of design outcomes rather by a working method that stands behind each of them: transversality and (neo)mannerism, often reinterpreted considering the most recent technologies, media and speculation, are two of the main features of it.

Among several projects, one of the most emblematic and recent experiences is “Living Shenzhen”, a research project presented in the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture (UABB) of Shenzhen-Hong Kong, curated by Carlo Ratti. The project was developed together with Paolo Santi (Computer Scientist, Senior Researcher at the CNR and Science Researcher at the Boston MIT Senseable City Lab) with the precious support of a research group led by Prof. Tu Wei, Associate Professor at Big Data University of Shenzhen.
Living Shenzhen is an attempt to address the gap between the urban planning methods and what urban dwellers desire and need from the city encouraging the fertile intersection between advanced automation and design, following tailored urban-scale projects that make usage of meticulous personal input.

This experimental social research first led in Shenzhen proposes a new method of reading the city and to provide a tool that will allow us to identify what matters to the city’s users, leading to innovation in the urban planning process. The data gathering process, for architects in particular, is usually based on documenting, interviewing, history reading, layering cultural references.
Living Shenzhen proposes to add to our toolbox a data analytics instrument that is able to process people’s behaviour in the cityscape — delivering an authentic perspective in terms of levels of interest and attention — to better understand their needs and enhance architecture’s ability to respond to it.

By gathering relevant data regarding people’s perception and their behaviour in the urban environment, we will be able to overlay on the traditional urban planning layers the urban identity of a place, through a study of the individual’s experience, introducing a top-bottom-top mechanism and leading to innovation in the urban planning process.

People’s cognitive and emotional data can be obtained through a visual preference survey with an experimental use of the advanced existing technology of eye-tracking system.
The research assumes the usage of Big Data Analytics Technology by collecting and sharing citizens’ daily use of the city and its architecture; wearing a pair of smart-glasses will allow to record and capture simultaneously the user’s vision combined later on with his location and other physiological information such as heartbeat and perspiration. Transforming numerous common people into influencers on the design is possible thanks to the use of cutting-edge technology and by turning collected data into a readable visual product.
As a method analyzing people’s cognitive data, the future goal will be to design a platform that brings direct and indirect benefits to all those involved in the process, both as a public instrument to oversee territorial transformations and as an informative opensource about city users’ experiences.

Eye-tracking allows us to assemble unique information based on eye-movement metrics: the number of fixations (number of times an object was observed), the duration of fixation (the amount of time the object was observed) and the sequence of fixations (the order the observer was looking at the objects around him). These objective statistics, with minimum interference by the conductors, will expose the positive and negative experience in the city. This method was first tried in Futian, one of the main districts of the Chinese city of Shenzhen and location of the venue of the Biennale.

Shenzhen has been shaped by the opposition of urban and rural, Urban villages are the result of this co-evolution. Urban Villages are a unique phenomenon of China’s, and Shenzhen’s, urban development and is about erstwhile rural villages that became part of the cityscape through the combined processes of municipal urban expansion and self-organized system of the village area.
Today, due to the rapid urban development, there are several open questions concerning the management of the city and particularly with regards to the urban planning policies of urban villages.

The research explored how the perception of the city changes for an individual that walks in the edges between two morphologically different parts of the city. Participants, five local students and five non-local, were asked to walk freely within a square area (1 km for 1 km), provided with a starting point and an endpoint across the transition areas between urban villages and the rest of the city. The data analysis demonstrated that urban environment affects the way we look and perceive the city and we managed to quantify that.
Though the concept is not new to the history of architecture (Linch, Rossi or Sartogo already proposed a preliminary inductive mental map through multiple personal perceptions), thanks to technology will be able to quantify and categorize architectural elements in association with abstract values like appreciation and interest. Buildings, intersections, parks, and streets will be enriched with layers of information regarding their usage and the attention they are exposed to.

The urban environment that makes up cities must reflect human needs and values, and now it is possible.