Deciphering the Urban Experience
Urban Code: 100 Lessons for Understanding the city
By Anne Mikoleit and Moritz Pürckhauer Mikoleit, A., & Pürckhauer, M. (2011). Urban code: 100 lessons for understanding the city. MIT Press.
Urban Code is an insightful handbook guide of one man’s point of view to the city of Manhattan. It considers the urban environment not from the abstract perspective of an urban planner or architect’s viewpoint; but is through the engagement of an observant pedestrian. In its urban literacy, the content reinforces the precise and odd sightings captured at a sidewalk level- giving the reader relevance to their experience when they, themselves, walk through the urban environment. It is formatted in 100 bite-sized lessons of the city’s truths through observation, and short essays that teaches us how to read the city. Each lesson has icon-like images with drawings, photographs and photo-shoot stills; the lessons aim to teach us how to detect patterns in the relationships between people and the urban environment. Urban Code is undoubtedly a valuable resource to readers who are fascinated and curious about urban life, it is ideal for architect, spatial design, urban planning students and tutors.
The book is collaborated by two authors, Moritz Pürckhauer and Anne Mikoleit. Moritz is a former research scientist at ETH Zurich and is currently practicing architecture in Zurich. Anne Mikoleit is an architect, urban planner and property consultant, educated at the ETH Zurich, École Nationale Supérieure d‘Architecture de Lille, and Technical University of Dresden. The novel won the 2016 Book Awards.
I appreciate how the book decodes the syntax behide the scenes of cities; the hidden interdependence, invisible forces and unwritten laws answer my questions raised in the adopted behaviours in the urban people. My questions, such as, when I ate at a Cafe, I noticed that the barrister was overly concerned about the placements of the chairs outside. She didn’t simply shift it directly under the table as I expected, but she would slightly angle the chair at an ‘open’ and inviting direction away from the table. It was a curious and quick observation, but I realised after reading the second paragraph, ‘ ...choreography repeated daily, chairs of small cafes are turned according to the current path of the sun.’
Now, I realise a movement as simple as the cafe chairs being shifted according to the sun, explains that the sun is a great advantage to businesses - they profit from sun-ripened people who fall prey to consumerism in the pleasure of the sunlight. This book is useful for my research in suggesting a further avenue I could look into of finding modes of observation and engagement in public space. The mass of waste disposal is produced widely particularly in the urban city because there are so many people. Waste is hidden in the corner of the streets, therefore, the mode of observation I can borrow is from the Urban Code book.
The mode I borrowed through the engagement of an observant pedestrian, guided me to explore the hidden spaces within the city to seek for things I would not usually look for - rubbish. It wasn’t shocking for me to find rubbish in hidden areas, but to literally investigate in detail of what I could find in a single place was quite interesting. It was interesting to see that the diversity of food range, which are purchased from many dispersed areas are gathered in the single gutter, rather than any of the other many gutters. Such as a subway cup (Subway is upper Symond Street) shares the gutter with Avachi Fried Chicken packaging (Avachi is on Mid- Queen street). Not only does this show how far packaging can travel, but can also resonate our consumer behaviour with the intersections of flows and networks through culture and material (dispersal and diversity), used within urban space.
