the book

Happy new 2010!
We're now preparing the book and all the students have received an e-mail with some info and instructions - if you haven't please contact me. The deadline for your contributions is January 10.
/Magdalena

Malmö Voices, dialogue with Christer Larsson #3

KED and Tove Helene asks, in question 3
Does she speak Arabic?
This question is related to my reaction when you presented us to one of your young colleges, working with the migrant communities in Malmö.
And I asked; does she speak Arabic? A question you said you have thought a lot about afterwords. In a lecture at Harvard this spring an Indian researcher said that the global quality of a city is to be measured on how she (the city) treats the migrant. Our students have been exploring Malmö and done discoveries in this field, they have visited Paris and done comparative studies and observations. I asked one of our students to enter into this question to you, and she wrote (before we travelled to Paris):

I see the numbers, where are the facts?
Visiting Malmö through the internet, I got to know that people from 171 different nations live in the city. These people represent almost 40 % of all ”malmöers”. Getting to know Malmö by diving in to the world of statistics, I understand that ”new malmöers” are representing 12 - 60 % of the population in every township. At least 38 nations are represented in each township by more than 10 persons. Centrum got inhabitants from 94 different nations. The nation that is biggest represented in one township, is Irak with 2881 persons.
Encircling the city of Malmö and being a visitor that see all the different townships by foot, by cycle, by buss, I find expressions of different social layers, different life situations and different ways of living. But, I can’t see, and I cant stop wondering, where does the diversity, richness and potential of all the new malmöers come to expression?
By using Knut Eiriks formulation “ Does she speak Arabic?”, I wonder...
”Where is her cultural treasure expressed?”
”How is her cultural treasure expressed?”
”When is her cultural treasure expressed?”

So our dear friend Christer; Can you elaborate on your thinking, your planning strategies, your innovations end explorations into the migrant, the stranger, as a force in
the appearing Malmö?

Christer Larsson answers
It is a tricky question and can´t been answered so precise, I mean we have a lot of positive effects from foreign cultures in Malmö. A lot of new restaurants, a lot of new shops etc, many of the small shops has been closed if not immigrants decided to run it. We also have a lot of cultural events and I also believe that the Malmöer have been much more open minded than before.
We have a big challenge in our comprehensive planning, one idea is to engage all the citizens in the process so how is that possible, one way is to reach the younger people through f ex new media. We know that there is a lot of thing going on in music and media and will try to find and engage them. Malmö has also been famous fore the rap-music f ex Timbuktu.
Integration is really a difficult issue and the key question is the labor market, it so essential that all people will have the opportunity to have a daily work to be integrated and learn the language.
I also believe that it is a long process of hard work in many issues at the same time and it´s not easy. My goal is that Malmö should be a multicultural and cosmopolitical city in a positive way, we will see. One way is to combine special planning and social economy, f ex to work with connections engagement and dialogue in our Dialogue-PM, you can see this PMs on our web.
We mustn´t forget that our welfare was created by immigrants during the 60ths were we had a lack of workers in Europe´s industry and needed to import Italians, Yugoslavs etc, don’t forget that.
I also suggest that you goes to Möllevångstorget next time, it is an exciting square with a lot of commerce.

#7 / charging the landscape with new energy

The new energy is first and foremost your own research and discoveries, and positively you can read them together as systems of informational exchange (G. Bateson). What you do in your projects is in fact to charge the landscape. Ask yourselves; "What is my discovery?" How can a new interpretation of the landscape penetrate the linear understanding of development? How can resistance be transformed into an offensive, as a necessary deviational act. As we discussed related to the offensive and creative understanding of vulnerability? How do you prepare the landscape for future potential impacts, how do you open for new types of dynamics? Adaptation to climate change has obvious become a key challenge of this image at large (The COP 15 is very soon taking place in Copenhagen). A quotation from Mathias et al, introducing a contrary logic, can underline this charging of Malmö with new energy: "Through a series of evocative actions the hidden qualitative layers of the site is examined. In this way the monoprogramatic appearance of the site is questioned".
And to end this charger with Borges: "Almost immediately, reality collapsed at several points - the truth is that it wanted to give way ".

PDF charging the landscape with new energy

KEU

#6 / vulnerability

Architecture and planning interacts with a wide range of disciplines. As an architect you need to get an overlook, an understanding of the dynamics in fields far outside our own discipline. How to get there? We already, by keeping updated on the news, know too much about climate change, injustice, financial crisis, poverty and wars to be touched by it. Only rarely something floats up, an image, a story, and moves us. We know too much and it does not exist. But in the undercurrent of this flow of information it is possible to find people, experts on their field, researchers, humanitarian workers and artists that lend their eyes and voice to for us invisible people. You have all done discoveries on the web, and we have shared with you our findings through the tests we have introduced. These observations and findings can bring the dynamics of wast theoretical fields and actions within range, opening up for a possible cartography of vulnerability – a discovery.

PDF vulnerability

You will get an introduction on the theme vulnerability at 09.00 Wednesday november 18, in lille auditorium. We will have supervision both days. There will not be a new assignment, the theme is introduced to inform and evaluate your projects. I am looking forward to see you all!
Kjerstin

The walk as a method and an artistic practice

A work-shop by publik, autumn 2009.

How do we approach a space? How do we make research of a specific place in the best way? What kind of impressions and experiences create the sense and the character of a certain place? How do we physically experience places? How do our own body, experience and personality influence our experiences of the new places that we explore?

With this workshop we aimed to make a research on Malmö as a city through the walk and the walk’s forms and methods. The students have been working together in teams where they together have been given an area of research and chosen a theme for their research. As a starting point they have uses the area of research on a walk and represent it in their own chosen format.

By this workshop the students have tried out their ideas and tested them on reality by using the walk and thereby choosing an optic to see the city through. Here you can see the different results of the groups works.


Background knowledge

By the beginning of modernity and the rise of the cities a new term was made for a specific group of men that walked or strolled around in the city. They were given the name ‘flaneur’. A person with a certain self-consciousness who had time and peace to just walk around and watch the life of the city and the ever changing character of the city – and thereby stood out of the mass but at the same time was the quintessence of the city. The perfect flaneur combined empathy and distance. Often the persons were writers or artists who would depict their experiences in text and pictures. The movement is the essence for the flaneur and his strolling through the city in contrast to the life of the city that he moves through that constantly haste by him. This gives him the possibility to voyeur the city but also to take it in on his own conditions.

Concurrently with the rise of the city sociologists, theorists, artists, urban scientists and city-planners have found a profound interest and core research material in the space of the city and the changes as well as the urban population way of taking over the space of the city. Important to mention is the French theorist Michel de Certeaus thoughts in his book ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’ where he analyses how people as individual has a need to create his or her own rolls and rituals in a mass-society such as the city. So when the citizen goes against the planned paths in the parks and makes her own ruts by walking across the lawn she takes in the place in her own way and creates her own rules.

Today many artists still use the walk as a method and an approach for an artistic practise. Here plays the artists personality an important roll for the outcome of the artwork. This becomes clear in the choice of frame or thematic the artist wishes to present. One of the most important and contemporary artists using the walk, as a method is the Mexican based artist Francis Alÿs. He has been doing his city walks in a lot of cities such as London, Mexico City, Jerusalem, Copenhagen, Berlin and Lima – just to mention a few. Before doing his work he first walks the city where he research for the character and the special sphere of the city. Then he sets a certain complex of problem in play of that specific place and often combined with an existential and self-referring approach. As for instance his walk through Mexico City where he pushed a big ice cube, which due to the high temperature quickly became smaller and smaller. This doing for no reasons points at mankind’s ever lasting wondering around with no goal. The walks of Francis Alÿs are afterwards turned into videos, photos, drawing and paintings.

The workshop is made by publik – a Danish organisation producing contemporary art for public spaces in Copenhagen since 2005. publik initiate and produces temporary art projects that has a debating and researching approach towards the boundaries of today’s public spheres. www.publik.dk

Nis Rømer and Johanne Løgstrup

PROJECT REMINDER

Now is the time to guide yourself towards interesting positions in the Malmö mind field.
You have been deep into the chosen themes and assignments, and you have done discoveries on journeys in the net and by slow walks through two cities. You have seen two large exhibitions on how the architectural community reacts to questions asked in different scales and on different topics. You have been visiting dynamic small cultures on the web and in backyards of Paris and Malmö. Constantin from AAA (in the garden of Paris) and the small text “loosing control, keeping desire” introduced the notion becoming for us. In our interpretation it reads as a very beautiful notion related to what your concepts can actually open for.
Related to all the information on every level that we now have on Malmö, we think it is important that you guide yourself (with our kind assistance), smart and daring into a position that relates to what is in the making, what is becoming, to what deserves a breakthrough.
It is your own discoveries that you have to nourish. Repeat to yourself what informs your project and try hard to establish your own position. This position must be a real desire on your behalf to carve out, or farm out, so to speak. This also goes for your deeper study in the chosen sites. Be aware of what has impressed and informed you in the larger scale, and relate to all your discoveries when encircling the new urban legend and codex – on site.
You don’t have to solve everything on the site – but you do have to “hit the right dynamics with traces to follow” as we stated in Imbedded Information. Ask yourself what you introduces on site, in time, and what this may open for.
You have worked individually in the studio, and that implies that the studio has 19 possible new openings to an understanding of the appearing Malmö.

Your work can be conceptualized and concreticised in many ways. But there should always be an interesting line between your research, your concept and back again to new research.
Our total library that partly is on the City as Biotope blog is in this way and open field of exploration for you all. The same is all the texts you have had as guidelines and discoveries from teachers and in found papers and guest texts. If you re-read this documents now, after your journeys we think you will make some new discoveries.

Knut Eirik (after a small talk with Kjerstin and Gisle)

#5 / points of departure

The term Points of Departure used as a planning tool is an invention made by 70°N/D&U for the competition entry Excentral Park - Edge Dynamics, in the Nordhavnen competition, Copenhagen 2008/-9 - (though used by others with partly different meaning; - e.g. Henry Lefèbvre in Urban Revolution, as a theoretical starting point for analyzing urban conditions; taking real life as the point of departure, (Lefèbvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Volume One)).

The intention of the PoD is to confront the recent processes and ideas on urban planning and the strong belief in making long-term and rigid images of urban development structures. It is an attempt to define urban planning as something more than urban design. By creating and defining the Points of Departure we are investigating and looking for entries to a process and a project that contains a sort of otherness, -but which are strongly connected to the situation and the landscape. The PoDs could represent an open attitude to the imbedded information there is, and lift the importance of weak voices and small cultures.

PDF - Points of Departure

Reminder: put a parisian comparison + your point of departure on the blog before Thursday!

Paris program

Reminder: Monday October 19 we'll start our Paris excursion outside the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, Trocadéro, at 10.00. We'll meet at the stairs at the garden side - hopefully in the morning sun.

NB! See PDF - Paris for intro and more details!

#4 / dynamics of small cultures + review #3

KE is looking forward to see you all at the review on asignment #3 elasticity at 09.00 Wendesday October 14, in lille auditorium, continuing Thursday. (Please post the assignments at Thuesday)

Dynamics of small cultures is the next theme for the studio. Knut Eirik will give a short introduction to the theme and present the fourth assignment: What informs your project at 12.00 Thursday October 15, in lille auditorium.

PDF dynamics of small cultures (nb! two pages)

The dynamics of small cultures introduces an awareness both related to expertise, unknown voices and voices usually unheard of. The interior of this notion demands a new type of observation and definitely it demands a vibrant cartography, or a (personal) rhizomatic library, leading up to the notion what informs your project. The asignment 4 also contains the journey to Paris and possible comparative studies on Malmö and Paris. Up to the 5th asignment, Points of Departure, after Paris, we want you to charge the aspects that are important in your Malmö City Reader and address how they will inform your project and your next step.

KE+K+M

After supervision

It is interesting to see how you begin to enter the mind field of Malmø in different scales, spanning from the territorial scale to the urban design scale, from strategic to concrete projects. As I discussed with some of you, the challenge when it comes to scale is to find a useful scale for the phenomenon that you want to explore and then hit the right abstraction level for the scale that you choose to work in. Many of you have also started to encircle and focus on specific themes so as cultural diversity, infrastructure, water, agriculture, urban growth or energy. I recommended further reading for some of you and I will post everything here so that the whole group gets the same information, you choose what you think is relevant to look into for your own work.

The EU Water Framework Directive
Breathless coastal seas
WWF: Baltic Ecoregion Programme
Documentary on cod fishing in the Baltic Sea

Some of you have asked to get the texts from mosaïc::region as a document, the text is in Swedish, but you can use Google Translate and get an approximate translation into English or other languages.

Journal: MARG – byen under press
Book: Water Urbanisms, ed: Bruno De Meulder & Kelly Shannon
ISBN 978 908 5066 729
Article: The planetary gardener, portrait interview with Gilles Clemént in ‘scape 2007#2

And for the ones working in the transition zones between the city and the agricultural land; a quote from the article Journey through the Picturesque (a Notebook) by Iñaki Abalos & Juan Herreros in LANDSCAPE URBANISM (AA manual 2003)

The dissolution of the opposition between nature and artifice on every scale requires a programme of works that is nothing less than the rediscovery, through architecture, of the contemporary human position in the world. “Areas of impunity” are precisely the zones where, as an exception, we find this ambiguous condition imprecisely defined as public or natural space. They are formerly degraded zones, endowed with a new urbanity by the gaze of new social subjects. Look at the wasteland beyond the outer suburbs; look at the way almost all the emerging forms of socialization have been constructed in them (although – or precisely because- they are degraded territories). We are tempted to ask whether they might contain a metaphoric model, or whether it is possible to think of it of their complement, de–edification, given that the term” wasteland” embodies a fascinating concept: land that has lost its attributes before the approach of the city, that is sterilized as the occupation proceeds, but also given a transcendental role in its new context. We ask ourselves whether architecture could be constructed the same way.

Kjerstin

A Farm for the Future

Perma culture - natural elasticity. We'll watch the films together in Bergen next week. Here is part one of five:

#3 / elasticity

Any system of nature and culture is in reality based on interaction and dynamic. It is therefore easy to argue that a planning method that is going to handle such dynamic systems has to be elastic and dynamic. This in opposition to a more traditional, linear and hierarchical planning regime, that to a far extent is built up on simplification and limitation.

PDF - elasticity

Encircling the Dynamics of your Malmö findings

When Rem Koolhaas was invited to lecture on and debate on sustainability at Harvard earlier this year he wondered why he was invited on this topic, as an architect representative for one of those forces that has brought us into this disturbing global situation – the architects. He went back to his days at AA and told the audience about the hands-on attitude of the teachings at the department of Tropical Studies in the sixties related to this topic, as an example of forerunners in this field that could have been much more appreciated (this is our interpretation)
In Aftenposten yesterday Ingunn Økland addresses the lack of continuos debate on the Norwegian oil exploitation with Stavanger as its epicenter, and she sais: “At last the Litterature Festival Kapittel dare to direct a critical searchlight on the near surroundings, in fact the Oil City Stavanger”. Here she discusses that the critical phase in the oil industry poses a problem with freedom of speech!
Does the Exhibition in Louisiana bring a new, observant, critical and daring agenda to our table. We are now eagerly going through your blogposts on Imbedded Information and sending our comments to all of you – its in the making. We look forward to see you in Malmö.
KE+K

Malmö findings

Introducing five sites in Malmö:

The five sites in Malmö are immensely different in terms of time and space, and are characterized and shaped by different historical events, different labour activity, different inhabitants and cultural influence. Seen as future comings, the sites have different prosperity, as landscape for urbanization, recreation, or production.

PDF - Malmö Findings

Aerial views of the five sites:
Västra Hamnen - littoral urbanity
Möllevången - dynamic of small cultures
Rosengård - gardens of urban delight
Ringvägen - périphérique transition
Sege å / Toarp - emotional ecology

M+G

The walk as a method and an artistic practice - by publik

How do we approach a space? How do we make research of a specific place in the best way? What kind of impressions and experiences create the sense and the character of a certain place? How do we physically experience places? How do our own body, experience and personality influence our experiences of the new places that we explore?

By the beginning of modernity and the rise of the cities a new term was made for a specific group of men that walked or strolled around in the city. They were given the name ‘flaneur’. A person with a certain self-consciousness who had time and peace to just walk around and watch the life of the city and the ever changing character of the city – and thereby stood out of the mass but at the same time was the quintessence of the city. The perfect flaneur combined empathy and distance. Often the persons were writers or artists who would depict their experiences in text and pictures. The movement is the essence for the flaneur and his strolling through the city in contrast to the life of the city that he moves through that constantly haste by him. This gives him the possibility to voyeur the city but also to take it in on his own conditions.

Concurrently with the rise of the city sociologists, theorists, artists, urban scientists and city-planners have found a profound interest and core research material in the space of the city and the changes as well as the urban population way of taking over the space of the city. Important to mention is the French theorist Michel de Certeaus thoughts in his book ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’ where he analyses how people as individual has a need to create his or her own rolls and rituals in a mass-society such as the city. So when the citizen goes against the planned paths in the parks and makes her own ruts by walking across the lawn she takes in the place in her own way and creates her own rules.

Today many artists still use the walk as a method and an approach for an artistic practise. Here plays the artists personality an important roll for the outcome of the artwork. This becomes clear in the choice of frame or thematic the artist wishes to present. One of the most important and contemporary artists using the walk, as a method is the Mexican based artist Francis Alÿs. He has been doing his city walks in a lot of cities such as London, Mexico City, Jerusalem, Copenhagen, Berlin and Lima – just to mention a few. Before doing his work he first walks the city where he research for the character and the special sphere of the city. Then he sets a certain complex of problem in play of that specific place and often combined with an existential and self-referring approach. As for instance his walk through Mexico City where he pushed a big ice cube, which due to the high temperature quickly became smaller and smaller. This doing for no reasons points at mankind’s ever lasting wondering around with no goal. The walks of Francis Alÿs are afterwards turned into videos, photos, drawing and paintings.

With this workshop we aim to make a research on Malmö as a city through the walk and the walk’s forms and methods. You will be introduced to various artist strategies in this field. We will take you for a walk. You will be put into teams working together to make up a theme for an area of research. You will use the area of research on a walk and represent it in your own chosen format.

By this workshop we wish you to try out and test your ideas on reality by using the walk and thereby choosing an optic to see the city through.

PROGRAM
Monday 21st. of September
Place: Konferensrummet, Kommendanthuset, Malmöhusvägen 5,
See map

10.00 Welcome, introduction to us, publik.
10.30 Talk on art in public space
11.00 Talk on publik
12.00 Lunch
13.00 Introduction to Francis Alÿs work ’Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic.’
14.00 Presentation of the project of research for you to work on. You will be divided into groups.
14.30 End of day.

Tuesday the 22nd of September
Place: outside the main entrance of the Central Railway Station, Malmö.
11.00 Walk at Malmö Harbour.
12.00 Lunch (bring your own)
15.00 End of day

Wednesday and Thursday 23rd and 24th
You work on your project and come up with an idea and an approach.


Friday 25th of September
Place: The café SMAG at Malmö Konsthall. S:t Johannesg. 7

11.00 -15.00 Consulting and discussion with the different groups.

The workshop is made by publik – a Danish organisation producing contemporary art for public spaces in Copenhagen since 2005. publik initiate and produces temporary art projects that has a debating and researching approach towards the boundaries of today’s public spheres. www.publik.dk

Nis Rømer and Johanne Løgstrup

Walking in Malmö

To prepare for experiencing Malmö you can read Michel de Certeau, Walking in the City from The Practice of Everyday Life (L’invention du quotidien) - let this be your travel reading!

de Certeau, who had degrees in philosophy, literature, history and theology besides being a Jesuit, here writes about the difference between the voyeur and the marcheur (watcher / walker), between reading the urban text and writing it. On how reality, a city street as well as a text, is invented, interpreted and recreated by the practioner:

"To be lifted to the summit of the World Trade Center is to be lifted out of the city's grasp. One's body is no longer clasped by the streets that turn and return it according to an anonymous law; nor is it possessed, whether as a player or played, by the rumble of so many differences and by the nervousness of the New York traffic. When one goes up there, he leaves behind the mass that carries off and mixes up in itself any identity of authors and spectators. An Icarus flying over these waters, he can ignore the devices of Daedalus in mobile and endless labyrinths far below. His elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was 'possessed' into a text that lies before one's eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god. The exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive: the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more."
(...)
"The ordinary practitioners of the city live 'down below', below the threshold at which visibility begins. They walk - an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban 'text' they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other's arms. The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognized poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility. It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness. The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations od spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other."

from Walking in the City, Part III - Spatial Practices, The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel de Certeau, pages 92-93

Looking forward to see you at Louisiana on Sunday!
yours
G+M

#2 / imbedded information

Imbedded Information is the theme for the studio September 15. to 16. Kjerstin and Knut Eirik will give a lecture on the theme on Tuesday morning. Then we will present the second assignment: Encircling the Malmö dynamics and having dialogues with you the rest of the day. Wednesday starts with a small lecture on The City under Pressure and is followed by continuos dialogues on the assignment. Gisle has urged you to start The Malmö discoveries. We will appreciate that each of you present one such finding, or discovery, on Tuesday.


PDF Imbedded Information

Malmö voices

Yesterday Kjerstin and I was eagerly present in a large auditorium at The Polar Institute, with researchers, planners and politicians discussing Tromsø as The Knowledge City. Eva Engquist, Prorector at The Malmö Høgskola appeared on a television screen in front of the crowd.
This gave us the opportunity to discuss Malmö experiences in a kind of bird on the wire fashion, if we keep in the terminology of your latest posts on the blog – we discussed with a televison set.
Eva Engquist summoned up in this way: Malmö is representative of a half-big European city, as a study object Malmö is interesting in a larger European perspective , then different from the Scandiniavian cities as we know them, in our interpretation. We think this is a statement that has an undertext that can be really interesting to explore.
Ps we are diving into your posts on the blog.

Kjerstin and Knut Eirik

some mapping reminders

In the PDF you'll find some of the references, terms, expressions, names etc from yesterday's mapping/observation lecture.

rhizome summarize

Here's the quote from yesterday's rhizome lecture/discussion, from Introduction: Rhizome, A Thousand Plateaus (Mille Plateaux) by Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari:

Let us summarize the principal characteristics of a rhizome: unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even non sign states. The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple. It is not the One that becomes Two or even directly three, four, five etc. It is not a multiple derived from the One, or the to which One is added (n+1). It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills. It constitutes linear multiplicities with n dimensions having neither subject nor object, which can be laid out on a plane of consistency, and from which the One is always subtracted (n-1). When a multiplicity of this kind changes dimension, it necessary changes in nature as well, undergoes a metamorphosis.
Unlike a structure, which is defined by a set of points and posistions, with binary relations between the points and biunivocal relationships between the positions, the rhizome is made only of lines: lines of segmentarity and stratification as its dimensions, and the line of flight or deterritorialization as the maximum dimension after which the multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis, changes in nature. These lines, or lineaments, should not be confused with lineages of the arborescent type, which are merely localizable linkages between points and positions. Unlike the tree, the rhizome is not the object of reproduction: neither external reproduction as image-tree nor internal reproduction as tree-structure. The rhizome is an antigenealogy. It is a short-term memory, or anti memory. The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots.
Unlike the graphic arts, drawing, or photography, unlike tracing, the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight. It is tracings that must be put on the map, not the opposite. In contrast to centered (even polycentric) systems with hierarchical modes of communication and preestablished paths, the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchichal, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automation, defined solely by a circulation of states.
A plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end. A rhizome is made of plateaus. Gregory Bateson uses the word “plateau” to designate something very special: a continuos, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end.

best
G+M