Sara Davin Omar/Confront
→ Off the Grid
An Antidote to Urbanization
Theoretical statement, 2020
Supervisor: Roberto Gargiani
EPFL
Even though different types of infrastructural grids such as cartesian streets, highways and power lines interconnect urban areas all around the world, these systems have failed to justly distribute wealth and provide good life conditions to all humans. Framed as the counterpart of urbanization, the tell (borrowed into English from Arabic: تَل, tall, 'mound' or 'small hill') is a type of artificial hill that emerged around the Fertile Crescent during the Neolithics. It is constituted of stratified debris of generations of villages perpetually rebuilt on the same site. With the shape of a truncated cone, the tell had difficulties to expand outwards, resulting in duplication of the settlement. In this essay, the tell is framed as the counterpart to urbanization, understood as an ever-expanding habitat-factory situated on privately owned land.
“The Megalopolis of Europe” and the Netherlands in particular represent a highly urbanized land, whose soil in contrast to the tell explicitly became the locus of expansion during Modernity. These artificial entities of land, called polders, constitute a great part of the territory of the country. Polders are low-lying pieces of land reclaimed from water or marshes, and can therefore be understood as colonizing devices intended to manage the flow of water and facilitate the irrigation of crops. This reveals the role of urbanization and its architecture as a sort of rationalizing machine increasing any type of profit-generating production. Against this reading of the Netherlands, a polder appears as a suitable site in which to initiate a project critically addressing urbanization.