Biourban Acupuncture, Marco Casagrande Publication, Architectural Book, Images

Biourban Acupuncture Book

Treasure Hill of Taipei to Artena, Rome Book – author: Marco Casagrande

page updated 24 Oct 2016 with new images ; 19 Aug 2015

Biourban Acupuncture

Author: Marco Casagrande

Urban Acupuncture is a biourban theory, which combines sociology and urban design with the traditional Chinese medical theory of acupuncture.

As a design methodology, it is focused on tactical, small scale interventions on the urban fabric, aiming in ripple effects and transformation on the larger urban organism. Through the acupuncture points, Urban Acupuncture seeks to be in contact with the site-specific Local Knowledge. By its nature, Urban Acupuncture is pliant, organic and relieves stress and industrial tension in the urban environment – thus directing the city towards the organic: urban nature as part of nature.

Urban Acupuncture produces small-scale, but ecologically and socially catalytic development on the built human environment. Urban Acupuncture builds connections between modern man and nature, composting the industrial reality to become organic. The Third Generation City is the organic ruin of the industrial city. Ruin is when man-made has become part of nature. Urban acupuncture is local knowledge penetrating through the thin layers of asphalt and concrete, tuning the city towards an organic machine.

The 2013 Summer School of the International Society of Biourbanism. On this occasion they also gave us the Ruin Academy space in Artena:

Review by Angelo Abbate:

Marco Casagrande, Biourban Acupuncture. Treasure Hill of Taipei to Artena, Rome: International Society of Biourbanism 2013

Science fiction has always confronted artificial and natural reality. Most of it has envisioned a future that is going to corner and minimize nature, echoing social and philosophical treatises, art, and a diffuse anxiety about mature capitalism, with visions of inhuman cities, robots-like men, and life downgraded to slavery by an impersonal power system.

Perhaps that is not just fiction anymore, the leap into a paradoxical parallel-world having happened already, and we unknowingly living in it – living into the “second generation cities”, as Marco Casagrande says. These cities are ruled by intangible, unreal, and not-human purposes, and grow by systematically destroying those natural geometric patterns and sub-codes that scholars like Christopher Alexander, Nikos Salingaros, Stephen Kellert, and others working in the fields of Evidence Based Design and Biourbanism, are pointing out.

As human beings seem to be educated to feed destruction, exploitation, pollution, and waste of their own habitat, they are dehumanizing themselves.

The metropolis of Taipei, as many Italian dull suburbs, is no exception to this trend. The ones who live and work in accordance with life, such as urban nomads or indigenous communities, are a threat to the system. It wants to “save them from themselves”, checking and adjusting their activities.

Marco Casagrande offers a way out, a therapy for the sickness of our cities, a path to achieve what he calls the Third Generation City.

Cities, to be the fall of the machine, where “the ruin” is the reality produced by nature, that reclaims the artefact. Cities where the nature force takes the initiative, affects the design of industrial society, and becomes co- architect.

The treatment is described by Casagrande as “biourban acupuncture”, reviving the traditional Chinese medicine practice on city scale, in order to trigger purifying and healing processes in the urban organism.

Marco mentions several “needles” of Biourbanism. All of them aim at establishing a contact between the urban collective consciousness and the vital systems of nature. Illegal community gardens in Taipei, and weed growing from cracks in the concrete, are examples of similar needles. Nature can restore wholeness from a single point or node – even the wholeness of our human condition.

Biourban Acupuncture images / information from Finnish architect Marco Casagrande

Urban Acupuncture Taiwan – CICADA

Location: Taiwan, Asia

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