By LIV NYGAARD

The Non Sustainable Agenda vs The Sustainable Modell
The new oil wealth of Stavanger has produced a building boom and an ambitious cultural shopping cart.The projects include European Culture City 2008, ”In The Box” concert house, Viking Stadium, UiS, New Tou Scene and proposals for a Literature House and a New Rogaland Theater,just to name a few. Lets look in to the sustainability of 3 of these implants.Shopping Cart 1

European Culture City 2008
Lets go shopping… Move to cart. StArt with the last shopping item. European Culture City 2008. Can you recall any of the items, events, tolkens? This is my point, it was not sustainable. It was designed and presented as a Circus, complete with an imported circus director dressed in tiger and leopard jackets,pants and accessories. The leaders of our city created a culture event with no thought, idea or design establishing a sustainability. ”Something is environmentally, socially, ecologically sustainable when it protects, restores or regenerates the environment rather than degrades it. Something is sustainable when it fosters practices, invests in innovation, rather than in reckless short term thinking.”

Cirque Miller rolled into town, blew 350 million kroner on reckless short term thinking, and rolled out. All of the Big acts were imported, French Marionettes floating in the inner city lake, junk yard Praying Mantis floats last seen in Berlin film sets. One million kroner in fire works going up in smoke flounting our environmental code. Her shopping cart did not include or involve local artists on a sustainable scale that would have fostered
investment, growth and create an infrastructure for future art and culture as a result of a well thought out sustainable plan. The circus act not only degraded the local artists, musicians and actors, it directly exploited them.

The World of Folk exhibition illustrates this nonsustainable mind set. The artists were not given a honorarium for their participation. What is quite alarming is that an architect firm was hired to create the exhibition space, a very well thought out village landscape in Norwegian Wood.

 

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After the exhibition was closed, this very recyclable landscape was just disregarded and tossed, no effort was made to recycle or relocate the platforms. Mean while the Norwegian Wood conference was taking place just down the street where the main discussion was recycling and sustainable environments. This pattern repeated itself with the Point of Peace project. Point of Peace occupied Torget in Stavanger center as a commercial adventure, ecasing a sealed in stage excluding the public from entering and all of this was staged under the main title of Peace and Open Port. Again the local artists who were recruted to film and dance, were not paid, as the project went bankrupt. There are other examples of the same pattern. The leadership of Stavanger, while promoting a future renewable energy agenda have not the intellectual capasity to impliment a sustainable plan on the local level. If so, they would not have created a circus veiled as a Capital of Culture. A sustainable plan implies a self organization modell. A self organization modell is not top down management hierarchy. Self organization means that the management committed to guiding the evolution of behavior that emerges from the interaction of independent agents instead of specifying in advance what behavior is. The bottom-up organization model!

A sustainable model would have saved millions of kroner in ineffective administration. Had 2008 decided to investin a self organized and sustainable model and invested in local artists, designers, musicians, a 100 million kroner investment in self organized art units would have produced a revolution in the arts and culture in Rogaland and insured a sustainable future. Instead of no traces, no footprints, no investment in local arts, we would have created a new modell for the arts and sustainability based on participation and self organization. What is the strategy and design logic of a city government that ignores its own artists. The answer becomes very clear.

They were promoting an old time party and entertainment event for themselves and their sponsors. They did not have the design and intellectual tools necessary to create a sustainable investment for the future. The old model is about culture as entertainment and consumption, the sustainable model is about creating producers and responsible citizens, Stakeholders. This requires new tools, new philosophy and confidence and investment in your own people and resources.

 

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Shopping Cart 2  In The Box  Stavanger Concert House
The architecture competition for the new concert house in stavanger reveals a continious pattern. The architecture office Plot entered a project entitled Mille Plateau. Contemporary knowledge underscores that Mille Plateau is a direct reference to the book by Deleuze/Guattari A Thousand Plateaus. Throughout A Thousand Plateaus ”a rhizomatic or nomadic thought forges links or connect between different systems of knowledge-formation and define the conditions necessary to create a sustaninable system.” Plot is a plan, a script. Plot/Mille Plateau was literally placed on the laps of the Stavanger leadership and jury. They did not read it and could not read it and chose In The Box.

When knowledge and a sustainable plan was presented to the jury they revealed that they had no idea about contemporary architecture, philosophy or design. They chose the square, the rectangle over topology and plateaus (links). Topology is defined as dynamic space and is not a metric concept. Topology is tactile. ”Knowing things requires one first of all to place oneself between them. Not only in front in order to see them, but in the midst of the mixture, on the paths that unite them.” This is a defination of topological space and sustaniability, the map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions, it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modifications.” It is not Square.

The concert house Mille Plateau would have had the same effect as the Opera House in Oslo. An attractive out door space where people can mingle, an inside space  linking the outside space. A thousand nonhierarchal interventions creating a milieu. ”Milieu has neither beginning nor end, but is surrounded by other middles,in a field of connections,relationships,extensions and potentials.” The Box, the square the rectangle are abstracts, defined closed space. The Stavanger leadership became peterfied when confronted with a project that required them to think,and learn new milieus. They retreated back to square one and In The Box.

The irony is that Mille Plateau was the choice of the public. The Siddis of Stavanger voted for Mille Plateau in the public competition in the local newspaper. The leaders and the jury ignored the ”self-organization and
emergence of their citizens, for whom the house is being

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built and taxed. The jury forced through two sardine boxes. Is this the hidden genetic code that we have to break in our Stavanger leadership. The Sardine and Fossil syndrome that dominated our consciousness in the last two epochs. Or is it just knowledge and education among our leaders that is in question?

When the jury chose In The Box they cheated and deceived their clients. The citizens gave notice, voted and were ready to embrace a new learning and topology and study of the philosophy of Deleuze/Guattari. It would have indicated a clear paradign shift, an emergent education experience would have manifested itself. We would have indicated that we are moving from a petrified fossil fuel consciousness to a sustainable environmental breeze. When the going gets tough the tough go shopping, always supporting the malls and in the boxes.

 

Shopping Cart 3   Food and Producers   Purchase This Item
There is one shopping cart that promotes an emergent Sustainability. Who would have predicted 20 years ago that Stavanger would be on the map as an emergent industry in food. That we would develop European and world champions in gastronomy, crown several Bocuse D`Or champions and European gold medel winners.Where local artists and architects are engaged to create restaurant interiors that are published in international architectural publications.

The self-organization trigger was the opening of Harry Pepper, the Telephone Operator On His way To Mexico. A local chef, an architect and two artists created the first designer restaruant in Stavanger in 1987. This was a bottom up organization model.The self organization and sustainable model represents a shift from being a consumer to becoming a producer. True participation has all parties determine the agenda, its process and realization.

Away with the old liner model where form follows function and the parts are equal to the whole. The sustainable model: ”the relation of parts to the whole is casual, the whole emerges from the casual interaction between the component parts.”

This new sustainable modell is a Local emergence model. It does not import the Berger King, Ikea, Starbucks consumption practice. It strengthens and fosters local innovation, intelligence and practice..It does not import French acrobats and superficial firework smoke screens.

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It supports the local farmer and fisherman and encourages that their product is genuine, healthy and become the ingredients of a Bocuse d`Or competition. The sustainable model produces public health, art, music and design. It produces Tango Restaurant, Charles & De, Sting, Bøker og Børst,Sjokoladepiken,Food Story,etc.. Form Generation Practice.

Lets just call it the jucy tomato modell. How is it that you can have a jucy tomato on your plate, every plate in the city on any given day. It is only through the complexity of self organization that can serve this.The emergence model is not concerned with how systems are controlled, rather how they evolve, how they learn. The linear, hierarchial, top down organization cannot supply this. The old institution bureaucratic model cannot adminstrate this. The sustainable model insures a new public health art. We in fact have no other choice, when you go shopping, go local, go sustainable, an organic growth will emerge. Cheers to our local restaurant milieu and their services.

 

References:
A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze/Guatfari
A Thousand Years Of NonLinear History, Mauuel De Landa
Hot,Flat and Crowded, Thomas Friedman
Les Cinq Sens, Michel Serres