Explorations in Urban Design: An Urban Design Research Primer 9781409462644, 9781409462651, 9781409462668, 9781472407894, 2013041847

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
1 Investigating urban design
Part I Philosophical Approaches
2 The role of risk in urban design
3 Deconstructing and recalibrating urban design in the global south
4 The politics of space production: the case of Macau, China
5 Urban design in the realm of urban studies
6 Place-temporality and rhythmicity: a new aesthetic and methodological foundation for urban design theory and practice
Part II Process Investigations
7 Mixing methods / theorising urban design process
8 Link and Place – bridging stakeholder divides
9 Actor-network theory coevolution framework for urban design
10 Unlocking policy documents: policy analysis in urban design
11 Smart cities, social networks and the Internet of Things
12 Environmental masterplanning: defining an integrated approach
Part III Physical Explorations
13 Urbiculturalism, understanding the patterns of place
14 Space syntax as interdisciplinary urban design pedagogy
15 Thinking systems in urban design: a prioritised structure model
16 Explorations in generative street layouts
17 The relationship between density, built form and design
Part IV Propositional Experiments
18 London short stories
19 The siting of writing and the writing of sites
20 Design as research and research as design: mega-plans and mega-projects in Karbala and Hong Kong
21 Crafting a methodology for urban design in development: between research, pedagogy and practice
22 An evidence-based approach to designing new cities: the English New Towns revisited
Part V Performance Enquiries
23 Public space as lived
24 Historical exploration/explanation in urban design
25 The problem of scale
26 Urban design as a tool in urban conservation, and urban conservation as a tool in urban design research
27 Does urban design add value?
28 A personal postscript
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

EXPLORATIONS IN URBAN DESIGN

To Barbara and Rafael Carmona

EXPLORATIONS IN URBAN DESIGN An Urban Design Research Primer

Edited by MATTHEW CARMONA

ROUTLEDGE

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2014 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

&RS\ULJKW © Matthew Carmona and the contributors 2014 0DWWKHZ&DUPRQDKDVDVVHUWHGKLVULJKWXQGHUWKH&RS\ULJKW'HVLJQVDQG3DWHQWV$FWWREHLGHQWL¿HGDVWKHHGLWRURIWKLVZRUN All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data $FDWDORJXHUHFRUGIRUWKLVERRNLVDYDLODEOHIURPWKH%ULWLVK/LEUDU\ The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Explorations in urban design : an urban design research primer / [edited] by Matthew Carmona. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ,6%1KDUGEDFN ²,6%1SEN ²,6%1HERRN ²,6%1HSXE &LW\SODQQLQJ&LW\SODQQLQJ²5HVHDUFK,&DUPRQD0DWWKHZ HT166.E97 2014 ¶²GF 2013041847 ISBN 13: 978-1-4094-6264-4 (Kbk)

Contents

List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgements

1

Investigating urban design Matthew Carmona

ix xvii xxv

1

PART I PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACHES Using theory and critique to understand urban design processes and outcomes and the rationale, purpose and nature of urban design 2

The role of risk in urban design Iain Borden

15

3

Deconstructing and recalibrating urban design in the global south Camillo Boano, Melissa García Lamarca and Andrew Wade

25

4

The politics of space production: the case of Macau, China Paula Morais

35

5

Urban design in the realm of urban studies Pushpa Arabindoo

47

6

Place-temporality and rhythmicity: a new aesthetic and methodological foundation for urban design theory and practice Filipa Wunderlich

59

PART II PROCESS INVESTIGATIONS Focusing on the normative and ‘potential’ systems, tools, procedures and networks that shape the outcomes of urban design 7

Mixing methods / theorising urban design process Matthew Carmona

77

8

Link and Place – bridging stakeholder divides Peter Jones

89

9

Actor-network theory coevolution framework for urban design Tse-Hui Teh

101

10

Unlocking policy documents: policy analysis in urban design Antoine Zammit

111

11

Smart cities, social networks and the Internet of Things Andrew Hudson-Smith

123

12

Environmental masterplanning: defining an integrated approach Aurore Julien, Ian Hamilton and Ben Croxford

135

PART III PHYSICAL EXPLORATIONS Through a range of analytical studies in which the form and configuration of space is examined as the physical ‘product’ of urban design and the container for use and flows of resource 13

Urbiculturalism, understanding the patterns of place Terry Farrell

147

14

Space syntax as interdisciplinary urban design pedagogy Sam Griffiths

157

15

Thinking systems in urban design: a prioritised structure model Kinda Al-Sayed

169

vi

Explorations in Urban Design

16

Explorations in generative street layouts Stephen Marshall and Mark Sutton

181

17

The relationship between density, built form and design Graciela Moreno and Philip Steadman

193

PART IV PROPOSITIONAL EXPERIMENTS Studio-based research and pedagogical investigation using design process and creative speculations to reveal responses to defined urban problems and problematics 18

London short stories CJ Lim

209

19

The siting of writing and the writing of sites Jane Rendell

219

20

Design as research and research as design: mega-plans and mega-projects in Karbala and Hong Kong Matthew Carmona

231

21

Crafting a methodology for urban design in development: between research, pedagogy and practice William Hunter and Anna Schulenburg

249

22

An evidence-based approach to designing new cities: the English New Towns revisited Kayvan Karimi and Laura Vaughan

261

PART V PERFORMANCE ENQUIRIES Examining through direct and indirect anthropological investigation, stakeholder enquiry, and historical study, how places perform through use and time Public space as lived Quentin Stevens

277

24

Historical exploration/explanation in urban design Michael Hebbert

287 Contents

23

vii

25

The problem of scale Adrian Lahoud

26

Urban design as a tool in urban conservation, and urban conservation as a tool in urban design research Elisabete Cidre

311

27

Does urban design add value? Matthew Carmona

319

28

A personal postscript Matthew Carmona

331

Bibliography Index

viii

Explorations in Urban Design

299

335 361

List of Figures

1.1 1.2

Urban design knowledge The three fundamental research characteristics

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8

Researching mobile automobile experiences in London’s Limehouse Tunnel Bluewater shopping mall Shoes on sale at Gatwick airport Appropriating the city as a space of play (courtesy of Wig Worland) Critiquing urban space The city of civilisation The city of raucous music Schouwburgplein, Rotterdam, designed by West 8 (courtesy of Jeroen Musch)

17 17 18 19 19 21 21 22

3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6

Jurubatuba São Paulo The Red River Proposed Red River Project Contested urbanism framework Contested urbanism, Brazil UMM housing movement Redefining the notion of scaling up in Dharavi (Cociña, Montgomery, Pasta, Pinzon, 2012)

26 27 27 29 33 34

4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5

Macau’s political status and state projects from 1557–2049 Key political events and treaties in Macau’s development Leal Senado Square in 1915 (photograph by M. Russel) Macau’s urban transformation (i) 1889 diagrammatic outline of the Macau peninsula and (ii) map by António Heitor from 1889 (in Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa) Leal Senado Square in the 1960s (i) 1927 and (ii) 1980 diagrammatic outlines of Macau peninsula Macau traditional Chinese housing, ‘Pátios’ (i) Illustration of the statue of Governor Ferreira do Amaral in Ferreira do Amaral square in the 1970s (photo by Carlos Dias) and (ii) its removal in 1992 (photo by Nuno Calçada Bastos) Leal Senado Square in 2010

36 36 39 39

4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10

3 7

40 41 42 43 44 45

5.1

5.2 5.3 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8 6.9

7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4

Approaches to regional urbanism in urban design pedagogy. (i) Using new urbanism to rethink the Seattle region, Charrettes and design studios at the Department of Architecture, University of Washington. (ii) The Harvard Project on the City led by Rem Koolhaas exploring his architecture of bigness. (iii) Extreme Urbanism: an inter-disciplinary studio at the Graduate School of Design to rethink the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Rescaling the urban. Seine Métropole: Paris, Rouen, Le Havre. Proposal for le Grand Paris by Antoine Grumbach & Associés. © AGA Alternatives for typological urbanism within a comparative framework as illustrated by l’AUC, Paris. © l’AUC Fitzroy Square, September 2005, ‘Freeze-time’ photography project Fitzroy Square social practices, Summer 2005, ‘Freeze-time’ photography project Taxonomy of place-rhythms according to dominant spatial attributes Place-rhythms temporal attributes Taxonomy of place-rhythms according to aesthetic temporal attributes: (i) concerning regularity / temporal structure; (ii) concerning sensorial and affective forms of expression Place-rhythms diaries Photographic album extract: societal place-rhythms, collective and individual, spring/summer and autumn/winter Twelve-hour spectral diagram combining travel and social place-rhythms, autumn weekday, Monday 31st October, 2005 Place-score extract, where societal place-rhythms are juxtaposed, summer weekday, Monday 5th September, 2005 Canada Square at Canary Wharf, (i) often criticised as simply corporate (ii) but also a space of relaxation, culture and fun Urban design process: a place-shaping continuum London’s renaissance spaces small and large, new and refurbished: (i) Festival Riverside (ii) Swiss Cottage Community Gardens (iii) GMV Village Square (iv) Somerset House Courtyard The typical sub-processes of urban design Trafalgar Square, (i) yesterday and (ii) today, continually shaped through time

8.5 8.6

The concept of ‘Link and Place’ (Jones and Reynolds 2012, Figure 1) Gaps in conventional planning (Jones et al. 2007a, Example 11) A five-by-five Link/Place street classification matrix (Jones et al. 2007a, Example 6) Link/Place categorisation of part of the London Borough of Hounslow street network, using a five-level Link/Place matrix (Jones and Reynolds 2012, Figure 3) Using Link and Place as a guide to streetspace allocation Contrasting design solutions on streets with different Link/Place characteristics (Jones et al. 2007a, Example 51)

x

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51 52 55 63 65 66 66 67 68 70 71 72

78 82 84 87 88 91 92 92 93 95 95

How Link/Place planning and design functions relate to different professional interests The design kit (i) scale map and (ii) blocks/acetates depicting different design features A design group working on their preferred street design, Bloxwich, West Midlands

96 98 98

9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 9.7 9.8

Finding existing network relations Designing new nonhuman actants Nonhuman actants interessement human actants Designing coevolutions of nonhuman actants from the first interessement Coevolved nonhuman actants interessement with human actants Workshop to interessement nonhuman actants with human actants Polyculture Water Reuse Communities Remove and Transform to Resource

106 106 106 106 106 107 108 108

10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4

112 113 116

10.5 10.6 10.7 10.8

Textual analysis within a wider research methodology based on a mixed methods approach Comparing similar phenomena inferred from policy documents (adapted from Krippendorff 2004: 94) (i)–(iii): The apartment block culture, including internal and gated developments Three-floor-plus-penthouse and underlying semi-basement flanking two-storey terraced houses in the locality of Attard Content analysis of design-related terms – extract from DC07 Category analysis – extract from DC07 Category analysis for the analysed policy documents The refined product analytical framework

116 117 118 119 120

11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5 11.6 11.7 11.8

London’s Twitterscape (Neuhaus 2011) Twitter languages in London (Cheshire and Manley 2013) The CityDashboard online interface The iPad City Wall Banksy, panoramic capture of urban space Connecthings – Strasbourg Mapping the crowd Emotiv Neuroheadset

124 125 127 128 129 130 131 132

12.1 12.2

Masterplan sustainability strategies developed in context Developing the environmental masterplanning strategy

141 142

13.1 13.2 13.3

Shaping London, book cover Shaping London woodland and trees drawing London’s urban villages

148 149 150 xi

List of Figures

8.7 8.8 8.9

13.4 13.5 13.6 13.7 13.8

Straightening docks diagram London’s railways London’s layers Patterns of power Power triangle

14.1

Space syntax network analysis in axial and segment modes: (i) axial integration radius-n, Barnsbury, London, (ii) segment-angular choice radius-n, central London area Elementary observational techniques in space syntax (Grajewski and Vaughan 2001): (i) ‘gate counts’ of people and vehicles in motion, (ii) snapshots of movement, rest and encounter Axial lines (i) describing an urban block and (ii) translated into a graph Rockingham Street area Sheffield c. 1850 illustrating three syntactic distance concepts: (i) angular weighting, (ii) topological weighting, (iii) metric weighting

14.2 14.3 14.4

15.1 15.2 15.3 15.4 15.5 15.6 15.7

A prioritised structure model for urban design consisting of four design filters Evaluating the four growth iterations against the spatial properties of Barcelona and a randomly generated structure Binning data for correlations; storing data and spatial configurations in two overlapping grid reference layers and selecting the highest values in a third higher-resolution reference layer A neural network model applied to Barcelona, using normalised spatial measures of choice, integration and connectivity as factors and form-function attributes as response variables Responses for form-function estimated by applying the trained and validated ANN model Extracting 3D characteristics of the form-function responses as predicted by ANNs 3D variations on the target estimated volumetric outcome as defined by the designer

16.1 16.2 16.3 16.4

Relationship between structuring program and resultant pattern NetStoat simulation of the generation of a street network The nine network types tested Nine network types tested (i) All-span, (ii) All-grid, (iii) Micro-tree, (iv) Traditional, (v) Hierarchical, (vi) NeoTrad, (vii) Linear, (viii) Ruralgrid, (ix) Patchwork 16.5 Details of networks in figure ground format, illustrating street frontage (i) Traditional, (ii) Micro-tree, (iii) Linear 16.6 Length of roads relative to number of roads 16.7 Number of junctions, relative to number of roads 16.8 ‘Nodegram’: proportion of X-junctions, T-junctions and culs-de-sac, for a range of networks 16.9 Distribution of values of road network length, for 50 simulated networks 16.10 Identification of apparent emergent clustering of ‘high street spines’

xii

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152 153 154 154 155

158 161 162 166 171 173 174 175 175 177 178 183 184 186 187 188 188 188 189 189 190

17.1 17.2

17.7 17.8 17.9

Archetypal urban patterns, based on pavilions, streets and courts (Martin and March 1972: 36–7) Relationship between number of storeys and FSI for courts, streets and pavilions (Martin and March 1972: 36–7) Study areas and calculations (aerial views courtesy of Google Earth) (i) East Side, Manhattan, (ii) Ensanche Cerda, Barcelona, (iii) Taikoo Shing, Hong Kong, (iv) Ulitsa Butlerova, Moscow, (v) Franklin Park, Chicago, (vi) Orange, Los Angeles The case studies against key morphological variables Relationship between number of storeys and FSI / GSI. East Side, Manhattan and Ensanche Cerda, Barcelona Relationship between number of storeys and FSI / GSI. Taikoo Shing, Hong Kong and Ulitsa Butlerova, Moscow Relationship between number of storeys and FSI / GSI. Franklin Park, Chicago and Orange, Los Angeles Relationship between number of storeys and FSI for cut-off angle of 450 Relationship between number of storeys and FSI for cut-off angle of 600

200 201 202 203

18.1 18.2 18.3 18.4 18.5 18.6

Discontinuous Cities, London SE1 to EC4, 2007 Discontinuous Cities, London SE1 to EC4, 2007 The Nocturnal Tower, London EC1, 2007 The Nocturnal Tower, London EC1, 2007 The Globetrotter, Any Public Square in London, 2007 The Globetrotter, Any Public Square in London, 2007

214 214 214 215 215 216

19.1

Elina Brotherus, Horizon 8 (2000) Spring, The Wapping Project, London (courtesy of the artist and gb agency, Paris) Jane Rendell, Les Mots and Les Choses (2003) Material Intelligence, Entwistle Gallery, London (courtesy of the Entwistle Gallery) Lucy Leonard, The Textile Reading Room (2002) (courtesy of Lucy Leonard) Fiona Sheppard, The Stolen Kiss (2005) (courtesy of Fiona Sheppard) Sophie Handler, The Twilight Zone (2008) (courtesy of Verity-Jane Keefe) Nathan Coley, Black Tent (2003) (courtesy of the artist and Haunch of Venison Gallery, London) Jane Rendell, An Embellishment: Purdah (2006) Spatial Imagination, The Domo Baal Gallery, London (courtesy of David Cross of Cornford & Cross) David Roberts, Beth Haim (2009) (courtesy of David Roberts)

17.3

17.4 17.5 17.6

19.2 19.3 19.4 19.5 19.6 19.7 19.8

20.3 20.4

Karbala, the old city and its shrines The initial five conceptual strategies: (i) Ring City (ii) Compact City (iii) Linear City (iv) Satellite Towns (v) Orchard City Three refined strategies: (i) Radial City (ii) Renaissance City (iii) Revised Linear City The Preferred Hybrid Plan

195

196 198 199

221 221 222 223 225 226 226 227 233 235 240 241 xiii

List of Figures

20.1 20.2

195

20.5 20.6 20.7 20.8

The WKCD international competition winning scheme The range of proposed cultural and entertainment facilities for the WKCD The climatically adjusted park under the proposed ‘iconic’ canopy A new place in Hong Kong with a critical mass of arts, cultural and entertainment facilities

243 244 245 246

21.1 21.2 21.3 21.4

Informal settlements such as this in Mumbai, India, call for new thinking on urban design Junior researchers ‘enquiring’ and documenting a community in Bangkok, Thailand A community design charrette unfolds in Bangkok, Thailand Maps drawn by community members illustrate a mixture of current development, individual and collective desires, and obstacles The revolving and overlapping nature of moments and operational modes Map of the Dharavi slum in Mumbai, India This community-led proposal adopts an activist (resisting) approach to urban design The documenting of open spaces in Dharavi, Mumbai allows for questions about the scale and feasibility of various interventions to be addressed

250 252 253

21.5 21.6 21.7 21.8

22.1 22.2 22.3 22.4 22.5 22.6 22.7 22.8 23.1

The walk from the main train station to the centre of Harlow New Town shows that the lack of provision for walking has forced people to create their own pathways to the town centre The central areas of three historically grown towns (top) compared with three New Towns (bottom) A comparison between the streets of historically evolved towns (top) and New Towns (bottom) Land use patterns in the centre of Skelmersdale New Town Pedestrian movement flows observed in the New Town of Skelmersdale Spatial accessibility analysis of the initial layout for the City of Masdar: (i) global spatial accessibility and (ii) local spatial accessibility Space syntax analysis of Harlow New Town Evidence-based design process applied to design an urban extension to Harlow New Town

23.5

Studying people’s uses of public space requires analysing their proximity, orientation and posture in relation to buildings, street furnishings, movement spaces, and each other. Swanston Walk, Melbourne (i), (ii) Close bodily engagements with the urban landscape. Visitors at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin Regulatory signs which indicate the scope of how people would like to use public spaces: (i) Antigua de Guatemala, (ii) Berlin, (iii) Hong Kong A family escapes a sudden rain shower on an artificial beach installed during summer on the main square of Vaihingen an der Enz, Germany A reinterpretation of public space: Reclaim the Streets, Melbourne

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23.2 23.3 23.4

253 255 257 258 258

264 265 266 268 269 271 272 273

281 282 283 284 285

24.1 24.2

289

24.3 24.4 24.5 24.6

Study tours of the Urban Design Group 1983–2013 London figure-ground on the wall of the former Holborn office of Koetter Kim architects (courtesy of Pushpa Arabindoo and Koetter, Kim & Associates (UK) Limited) Manchester ‘built in a day’ in plasticine on figure-ground (courtesy of Luca Rudlin) Manchester figure-grounds for 1774, 1824, 1924, 2006 (courtesy of David Rudlin) Chesterfield urban design history summarised (courtesy of URBED) Brentford, London, figure-grounds for 1874 and 2010 (courtesy of URBED)

25.1 25.2 25.3 25.4 25.5

Tripoli, Lebanon, showing the site of the Tripoli Fair and Exposition Tripoli Fair and Exposition, parabolic arch Tripoli Fair and Exposition, national hall and satellite Tripoli Fair and Exposition, concert shell Tripoli Fair and Exposition, aerial view

302 303 303 304 306

26.1

Copenhagen, where sustainable heritage and urban design combine to enhance quality of life for visitors and tourists alike Porto, the ultimate value of high quality public realm. A place for people Camden Town is a historic district of London, but one that has been allowed to be incrementally re-shaped over time to appeal to two particular communities of users (the young and tourists)

26.2 26.3

27.1 27.2

27.3 27.4 27.5 27.6

The new General Gordon Square in Woolwich, London has transformed a derelict degraded space into a vibrant hub of multicultural life Places such as Bloomsbury in London show how an investment in good urban design can produce both enduring use values for residents and passers-by and lasting streams of profits, rents and capital value growth for owners Revealing London’s mixed ‘high street’ corridors through mapping retail and office use (data from the Cities Revealed Landuse Dataset) A typical London high street: a thin crust and invisible hinterland (Fiona Scott) Densities of activity across the day in 13 London public spaces Newhall, Harlow, a carefully coded development combining a traditional street and block framework with varied contemporary architectural design

290 291 292 293 295

312 314 316

321

322 324 325 326 328

List of Figures xv

List of Contributors EDITOR Matthew Carmona is Professor of Planning and Urban Design at UCL’s Bartlett School of Planning which he headed from 2003 to 2011. His research has focused on processes of design governance and on the design and management of public space. He was educated at the University of Nottingham and is a chartered architect and planner. Matthew has published widely in the areas of urban design, design policy and governance, housing design and development, measuring quality and performance in planning, the management of public space, and on design and planning processes in London. His books include: Capital Spaces (2012); Public Places Urban Spaces (2010), Public Space: The Management Dimension (2008), Urban Design Reader (2007), Measuring Quality in Planning (2004), Delivering New Homes (2003), The Value of Urban Design (2001), Housing Design Quality (2001), and The Design Dimension of Planning (1997). He is Director of The Bartlett’s Master of Research (MRes) Inter-disciplinary Urban Design.

CONTRIBUTORS Kinda Al-Sayed is a Teaching Fellow on the MSc Advanced Architectural Studies and the MSc Adaptive Architecture and Computation at The Bartlett. Kinda is an architect and artist by background and started pursuing scientific research in 2006. Her main research focus area is complexity modelling of urban dynamics although other areas of interest include modelling creativity and knowledge in the design process, and modelling behavioural dynamics in physical and cyber spaces. She has also worked on human-computer interaction on an urban scale and on modelling crime-space relationships in London. Pushpa Arabindoo is a lecturer in Geography and Urban Design at UCL’s Department of Geography, and a co-director of the UCL Urban Laboratory. She trained in architecture and urban design before completing her PhD in Planning at the London School of Economics. Pushpa’s empirical research involves ethnographic investigations of urban transformations in the Indian city of Chennai, ranging from slum evictions and middle-class politics to ecological imaginations. She has also been probing the interdisciplinary nature of urban studies and its tenuous link with allied disciplines from the arts, humanities and engineering through her engagement with the MSc Urban Studies programme at UCL. Camillo Boano is Senior Lecturer in the Development Planning Unit, UCL, where he directs the MSc in Building and Urban Design in Development and co-directs the UCL Urban Lab. A qualified architect with an MSc in Urban Development and a PhD in Planning, he has over 18 years of experience in research, consultancy and development work in South America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and South East Asia. As an academic interested in practice, Camillo combines interests

in critical architecture, spatial production, transformations, urbanism within the exceptional circumstances of disasters, conflicts and informality. More recently his work has been directed to the reconstruction of design through dissensus, calling for a deeper reorientation between politics and aesthetics, and drawing on the theoretical constructions of Lefebvre, Foucault, and Rancière Iain Borden is Professor of Architecture and Urban Culture at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Iain is also Vice-Dean for Communications for the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment. His wide-ranging research includes explorations of architecture in relation to cities and public space, film and photography, critical theory and philosophy, and human bodies and spatial experiences. He has authored and co-edited a range of books including Drive: Journeys through Film, Cities and Landscapes (2012), Bartlett Designs: Speculating With Architecture (2009), Skateboarding Space and the City (2001) and InterSections: Architectural Histories and Critical Theories (2000). Elisabete Cidre is Senior Teaching Fellow in Urban Design and Director of Undergraduate Programmes at UCL’s Bartlett School of Planning. Elisabete’s research, practice and teaching interests focus on: urban design (policy, practice and education), urban heritage conservation, public space and place making, and on reflective learning practice and procedures in built environment academia. Her PhD in Town Planning & Urban Design looked at planning for public realm conservation in the World Heritage cities of Portugal. Elisabete was educated as an architect and urban designer in Portugal and as a planner in the UK. Ben Croxford is Senior Lecturer and Director of the MSc Environmental Design and Engineering at UCL’s Bartlett School of Graduate Studies. His research is focused on air pollution and more recently on how low energy buildings are actually being used. Ben has been involved in air pollution research since joining The Bartlett in 1994, firstly developing air pollution monitoring equipment and focusing on outdoor air pollution in the street, using carbon monoxide as a proxy. More recently his research has focused on energy use in buildings with papers on topics as varied as the cost benefit of renewable energy systems to secondary glazing for churches. Currently he is monitoring a TSB Retrofit for the future home, investigating how the occupants are learning to live in a low energy house. Terry Farrell is Visiting Professor at the UCL’s Bartlett School of Planning. As the Principal of Farrells, Sir Terry is considered to be the UK’s leading architect-planner. He has been responsible for a continuing stream of major award-winning buildings and masterplans including Greenwich Peninsula and Regent’s Place in London and Kowloon Station in Hong Kong. Current projects include strategic masterplans for Park Royal and Old Oak Common together with Earls Court and Convoys Wharf, all in London. Sir Terry is a Design Advisor to the Mayor of London and Design Champion for the Thames Estuary. Alongside his project work, he maintains an active portfolio of scholarly enquiries and has published widely from this work, including Shaping London, the Patterns and Forms that Make the Metropolis (2010). Melissa García Lamarca is a graduate of the Building and Urban Design in Development MSc (2009) and in 2012 Melissa was a Teaching Fellow at UCL’s Development Planning Unit. She has a BA in Geography and Economics from McGill University (2001) and a Graduate Diploma in Community Economic Development from Concordia (2003). Melissa has worked and xviii

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taught in the field of organisational and urban sustainability for over a decade and is currently a PhD student at the University of Manchester’s School of Environment and Development researching the institutionalisation of insurgent claims in urban development. She is a regular contributor to Polis, a collaborative blog on cities. Sam Griffiths is a lecturer in Spatial Theory and Urban Morphology at UCL’s Bartlett School of Graduate Studies. He has taught space syntax on the School’s MSc Advanced Architectural Studies programme since 2009. With an academic background in urban history Sam is interested in the potential of space syntax as an interdisciplinary domain for built environment and design research. He has published on various aspects of space syntax theory and methodology and has a research interest in the historical spatial cultures of suburbs and industrial cities. From 2010–12 he was the Editor of Urban Design International. Ian Hamilton is a researcher at the UCL Energy Institute in the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment. Ian’s academic work is focused on energy use in the urban environment. His research has included investigation on the impact of energy efficient interventions in the domestic stock; analysis of temporal and spatial energy use within the urban environment and its impact on the local climate; the impact of occupant behaviour on energy use; domestic stock energy use modelling; and, the integration of renewable energy into the urban form. Ian is the module tutor for the Environmental Masterplanning module on the MSc Environmental Design and Engineering. Michael Hebbert is Professor of Town Planning at UCL’s Bartlett School of Planning. Michael is an Oxford undergraduate who specialized in pre-medieval history before undertaking a PhD at the University of Reading that explored the history of modern planning theory. He is a founder-member of the International Planning History Society and edits its affiliated journal Planning Perspectives; it is dedicated to putting past and present into perspective, which is how he approaches the task of urban design research. He has published widely in many areas, including his seminal work on London: London, More by Fortune than Design (1998). Andrew Hudson-Smith is a Reader in Digital Urban Systems and also Director and Deputy Chair of UCL’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at The Bartlett. With a research focus on location based digital technologies he has been at the forefront of web 2.0 technologies for communication, outreach and developing a unique contribution to knowledge. He is author of the Digital Urban Blog – http://www.digitalurban.org – and his contribution to knowledge and outreach in the fields of digital geography, urban planning and the built environment have been wide ranging, and have featured widely in the international media. Andy is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

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List of Contributors

William Hunter is a Teaching Fellow at the Bartlett’s Development Planning Unit. William is a trained architect and urban designer with international experience in New York, Zurich, London, Mumbai, Istanbul, and throughout Southeast Asia. He has worked for Studio Daniel Libeskind, Foster & Partners, and Heatherwick Studio and is now researching alternative urban development strategies in the Global South. His interests revolve around the processes of contested urbanism, critical regionalism, spatial politics, and critical design praxis.

Peter Jones is Professor of Transport and Sustainable Development in the Centre for Transport Studies at UCL. He has researched extensively into public attitudes to travel behaviour and lifestyles, the development and effectiveness of transport policy, more holistic street planning and design, and methods of public engagement, and has been involved in advances in survey methods, project appraisal and data analysis. Peter is a member of the Independent Transport Commission, the Urban Design Panel of the Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation, and the Mayor for London’s Roads Task Force. Aurore Julien is a Teaching Fellow at UCL’s Bartlett School of Graduate Studies. Aurore has 12 years’ experience as a sustainability consultant with a specialism in green and energy efficient building design. She has been working on a wide variety of projects, ranging from schools, hospitals, offices, residential developments and masterplans in the UK and internationally. She now teaches Environmental Masterplanning at UCL and is a freelance consultant and doctoral researcher at the UCL Energy Institute. Her academic research interests relate to energy saving behaviours and energy security, and urban sustainability. Kayvan Karimi is Senior Lecturer at UCL’s Bartlett School of Graduate Studies and Director of Space Syntax Ltd, a UCL knowledge transfer company that specialises in providing strategic, evidence-based advice on architectural and urban design, planning, transport and property development. Kayvan has worked on a wide range of research and consultancy projects, including: strategic city planning, city centre redevelopment, urban conservation and urban regeneration, large-scale urban masterplanning, slum regeneration, large-scale commercial developments, public realm design, pedestrian movement planning, and complex building projects. Adrian Lahoud is a Reader at UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture and Director of the MArch Urban Design. Adrian’s research focuses on questions of scale. His PhD thesis ‘The Problem of Scale: the City, the Territory, the Planetary’ proposes the emergence of scale as a spatial, epistemological and political problem. Prior to this, he guest edited a special issue of Architectural Design titled ‘Post-traumatic Urbanism’, exploring the relationship between crisis, conflict and the city. His curatorial practice with the collective ‘N’ has been exhibited internationally, most recently in the Gwanju Design Biennale and the Prague Quadrennial. In 2012 he was named as guest curator of the Think Space cycle of architectural competitions. CJ Lim is Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture and former Vice Dean (International). CJ’s designs focus on multi-disciplinary innovative interpretations of cultural, social and environmental sustainability programmes including recent award winning eco-cities for the Chinese and Korean Governments, and ‘Virtually Venice’ commissioned by the British Council for the UK pavilion at the 2004 Venice Architecture Biennale. He has authored 11 books including Smartcities + Eco-warriors (2010) and Short Stories: London in Two-and-a-Half Dimensions (2011). He is Founding Director of Studio 8 Architects. Stephen Marshall is a Reader in Urban Morphology and Planning at UCL’s Bartlett School of Planning. His principal research interests are in urban morphology and street layout, and their relationships with urban design, coding and planning, and other urban formative processes. Dr Marshall has written or edited several books relating to urban design, including Streets

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and Patterns (2005), Cities, Design and Evolution (2009) and Urban Coding and Planning (2011). He was Chair of the journal Urban Design and Planning from its inception (2007) until 2012 and is now joint Editor of Built Environment. Paula Morais is a Teaching Fellow in Urban Design and International Planning at the Bartlett School of Planning, UCL. Paula is currently finishing a PhD on contemporary urban public space at The Bartlett where she co-founded and then coordinated (until October 2011) the China Planning Research Group (CPRG). Presently she is also a Research Officer at the London School of Economics (LSE) for the EU-FP7 URBACHINA research project looking at sustainable urbanisation in China. Trained originally as an architect at the University of Porto, Paula has worked in several architectural practices, including her own in Lisbon with Bernardo Falcão de Azevedo. She is a board member of Architects Sans Frontiers and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Graciela Moreno is a Teaching Fellow at UCL’s Bartlett Faculty of Built Environment and was the MArch Urban Design Coordinator and History and Theory tutor between 2008 and 2012. She has also taught at undergraduate level at The Bartlett and on the Bartlett School of Architecture Summer School. She holds a DipArch from the ETSA (Seville) and an MArch in Urban Design from the Bartlett School of Architecture. She is currently pursuing her PhD at the Bartlett School of Graduate Studies which follows her principal research interest in the area of urban form and structure. She has worked as an urban designer at SOM and Terry Farrell and Partners. Jane Rendell is Professor of Architecture and Art in UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture and, until recently, Vice Dean of Research. Jane is a writer and architectural historian, theorist and designer, whose work explores interdisciplinary intersections between architecture, art, feminism and psychoanalysis. Her authored books include Site-Writing (2010), Art and Architecture (2006), and The Pursuit of Pleasure (2002) and she is completing a new book on transitional spaces provisionally titled May Mo(u)rn. She is co-editor of Pattern (2007), Critical Architecture (2007), Spatial Imagination (2005), The Unknown City (2001), Intersections (2000), Gender, Space, Architecture (1999) and Strangely Familiar (1995). Anna Schulenburg is a Graduate Teaching Assistant on the MSc Building and Urban Design in Development at UCL’s Development Planning Unit, from which she also graduated. She is an architect with over 10 years of practice experience and previously taught as design tutor at the University of Nottingham. Anna has worked on projects in Burkina Faso, South Africa, the UK, the US, Germany and Hungary where her projects have focused on participatory design and building solutions with communities, and on social sustainability, education and heritage projects. Her research interests include urban informality, low-income housing interventions, social innovation, and the role of urban design for social transformation.

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Philip Steadman is Emeritus Professor of Urban and Built Form Studies at UCL’s Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, and Research Fellow at the UCL Energy Institute. Philip studied architecture at the University of Cambridge, and has taught at Cambridge, the Open University and UCL. His research has been diverse but has included a body of work on the morphology of buildings and cities, especially in relation to their use of energy. He has published many books, including: The Geometry of Environment (with Lionel March, 1971); Architectural Morphology (1983); The Evolution of Designs: Biological Analogy in

Architecture and the Applied Arts (1979 and 2008); and Vermeer’s Camera (2001). He is presently working on Building Types and Built Forms. Quentin Stevens is a Reader in Urban Design at UCL’s Bartlett School of Planning. Quentin has degrees in architecture and planning and is currently based at RMIT University in Australia researching visitor behaviour around contemporary public memorials. He has held major grants from the Australian Research Council and Germany’s Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and is author of The Ludic City: Exploring the Potential of Public Spaces (2007) and Spaces of Engagement: Memorial Design, Use and Meaning (with Karen Franck) (forthcoming); and co-editor of Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life (2006) and Transforming Urban Waterfronts: Fixity and Flow (2010). Mark Sutton is a Research Fellow at the University of Sussex. Mark divides his time between the university and CERN where he works on the trigger for the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. He has extensive experience working with, and implementing, simulation frameworks for both the generation of physics processes and the behaviour of detector systems and the flow of information within them. Tse-Hui Teh is a lecturer in Urban Design and Planning at UCL’s Bartlett School of Planning. Hui was conferred her PhD from the Department of Civil Environmental and Geomatic Engineering at UCL. She has a Master’s degree in architecture and urban design from Columbia University and an architectural degree from the University of Technology Sydney. Prior to becoming an academic she worked professionally in Sydney. Her current research interests develop the content and theoretical framework of her PhD and she is currently investigating the retrofit of dry sanitation and water reuse in London, the retrofit of micro-energy generation systems and urban spaces that improve wellbeing. Laura Vaughan is Professor of Urban Form and Society at the UCL Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, where she teaches on the MSc Spatial Design: Architecture and Cities. She studied Environmental Design at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem and she has an MSc Advanced Architectural Studies and PhD in Architecture from UCL. Since joining UCL in 2001 Laura has used space syntax in a series of multi-disciplinary research projects to study the relationship between micro- and macro-scales of urban form and society, focusing on a range of critical aspects of urbanism today including on town centre adaptability and socio-spatial segregation. Her work addresses the inherent complexity of the urban environment both theoretically and methodologically Andrew Wade, after graduating from the MSc Building and Urban Design in Development programme at UCL’s Development Planning Unit, was appointed Postgraduate Teaching Assistant. Previously Andrew studied at the McGill University School of Architecture in Montréal before coming to the Development Planning Unit. He has critically investigated planning and development issues in New Orleans, São Paulo, Cape Town and Hanoi and during 2012 acted as a travelling faculty member for the International Honors Program ‘Cities in the 21st Century’. Filipa Wunderlich is a lecturer in Urban Design at UCL’s Bartlett School of Planning. Her research has focused on placetemporality and the rhythmicity of everyday urban places, on walking and the urban design process, and on public space xxii

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quality and performance. Filipa is an architect urban designer and was educated at the University of Porto, the Technical University of Delft and UCL from where she holds a PhD. After completing her PhD she worked as a Research Associate exploring public spaces in London as a result of which she co-authored Capital Spaces: The Multiple Complex Public Spaces of a Global City with Matthew Carmona (2012). Antoine Zammit completed his PhD in planning and urban design at UCL’s Bartlett School of Planning in 2013, where he was also a Postgraduate Teaching Assistant. He is the founding architect and urban designer of the Malta-based practice studjurban, having worked on projects in Malta, Italy and the Republic of Ireland for the past 12 years. He lectures in spatial planning and urban design at the Faculty for the Built Environment of the University of Malta and is actively involved in urban design debates through his engagement within the Maltese Chamber of Architects and Civil Engineers, the Malta Environment and Planning Authority and the Urban Issues Work Group of the Architects’ Council of Europe.

List of Contributors

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Acknowledgements

Many thanks to all my colleagues who have contributed to this book. Their enthusiasm and willingness to participate sustained the project (and me) from start to finish. Also particular thanks to the Dean of The Bartlett, Professor Alan Penn, for financially supporting the colour production of the book, and to Val Rose and all at Ashgate for backing the project so wholeheartedly. Matthew Carmona London

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com

1

Investigating urban design Matthew Carmona

This introductory chapter sets the diverse contributions contained within this book within a wider context and establishes a simple framework through which urban design (and other) research projects can be compared. The chapter begins with a brief examination of urban design as a subject for investigation, setting out the somewhat mongrel nature of the discipline and the importance of crossing disciplinary boundaries in order to address its ‘wicked’ problems. Three key questions are asked and answered – Why is research in urban design important? How do we conduct urban design research? and How should urban design research be used? – before the structure of the book itself is explained.

INTRODUCTION Researching Urban Design Multiple overlapping and sometimes contradictory definitions of urban design exist. For the purposes of this book, urban design is simply and broadly taken to mean: the process of shaping places for people. In other words, urban design is ultimately about place (new and old, physical and social) and about all the processes that, for good or ill, intentionally and unintentionally shape it for its users. Through research, ‘explorations in urban design’, the title and subject of this book, focus on understanding this field of human endeavour.

The origins of urban design as (more narrowly) the ‘intentional’ activity of shaping places for people, and the contemporary use of the term ‘urban design’ to describe the process, have quite different origins. The former, of course, has ancient roots. Thus conscious hands have been shaping urban form from the very earliest of civilisations around the world: in the Middle East, Europe, Africa, East Asia and in Central and South America; all consciously shaping very particular sorts of places for people. The term urban design, by contrast, is much more recent, although contrary to many published accounts was in use well before conferences at Harvard in 1956 and the University of Pennsylvania in 1958 popularised it (see Chapter 24). Forshaw and Abercrombie (1943: 20), for example, were certainly amongst the earliest users of the phrase, using it in their hugely influential County of London Plan, whilst other terms in widespread use in the early twentieth century – city design, town design, townscape, civic design, urbanisme (in France), or Stadtbaukunst (in Germany) – had similar (or identical) meanings. Indeed the postmodern ideas reflected in works such as Gordon Cullen’s ‘Townscape’ or Jane Jacobs’ ‘Death and Life of American Cities’ are arguably far closer to what urban design quickly became (a critique of Modernist urbanism) than the still Modernist predilections of the organisers of the 1956 conference who are thereby sometimes credited with having coined the term. Yet despite its pedigree, and in more recent times its increasingly prominent role in public policy across the globe,

as a field urban design has remained much smaller than the closely allied professional fields of real estate, architecture, planning, and landscape architecture,1 and some have argued that it has struggled to develop as a serious research arena in its own right. However, when one brings together the sorts of multi-disciplinary researchers who either centrally or tangentially engage with the field, as is done in this book, it is clear that a wide array of research is being conducted of direct significance to understanding the urban forms, conditions, practices and processes that urban design seeks to address. Researchers with an interest in urban design can (and do) draw from a rich seam of methodological and epistemological approaches, combining them together to address the range of problems and contexts that require an urban design response. To explore urban design as an inter-disciplinary research field, this book brings together a wide range of researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds – architects, planners, geographers, engineers, environmental scientists, historians, and so on. The collection reflects the range of approaches to researching the field, illustrating them through actual research projects. Sometimes the contributions focus centrally on particular methodologies whilst others cut across approaches, or focus on particular research problems, with methodological insights revealed as a by-product of the substantive discussion. All reveal something of the process and problematics of research in this area, but also their application to the sorts of complex real world problems that form both the substance and endlessly stimulating challenges faced by researchers and practitioners in urban design. The book does not offer a comprehensive guide to conducting research in urban design. Instead it is a primer, intended to: first, inspire users who are grappling with urban design research problems but who need inspiration to move from idea to methodological approach; and second, through the work of one of the world’s largest and most active urban design research groups at The Bartlett, UCL, to demonstrate problems and approaches within the subject 2

Explorations in Urban Design

that span the arts, sciences and social science dimensions of the field.2

A Mongrel Discipline Urban design has variously been criticised as a tool of neoliberalism, a movement without social content, historicist and nostalgic for traditional urbanisms, value free, too focused on ends rather than means, and even the handmaiden of global capitalism. This for a discipline which the professionals involved in its delivery are more likely to describe as being focused on the creation of useful, attractive, safe, environmentally sustainable, economically successful and socially equitable places. Either something is going dramatically wrong or there is simply a gulf in understanding between those approaching the subject from different intellectual traditions, or between those devoted to understanding and critiquing the urban realm and those focused on changing it (through policy and practice). Urban design is in fact a mongrel discipline that draws its legitimising theories from diverse intellectual roots: sociology; anthropology; psychology; political science; economics; ecological, physical and health sciences; urban geography / studies; and the arts; as well as from the professional or applied theories and practices of: architecture; landscape; planning; law; property; engineering; and management. Indeed, wherever it can. In this position some have long praised urban design as an integrative force, deliberately straddling and helping to connect the silo-based disciplines of the past (Bentley 1998: 15), even praising its intellectually incomplete yet responsive status as an asset, helping it to ‘compete and survive’ by staying relevant to academia and practice (Verma 2011: 67). Others, however, bemoan the ‘vagueness’ of urban design as ‘an ambiguous amalgam of several disciplines’ (Inam 2002: 35), denounce it as too mundane and orthodox, obsessed with the perceived eternal truth of its prescriptions and not enough with their wider social and environmental consequences (Sorkin 2009: 181),

larger and longer established academic disciplines. The diminutive size of the discipline may also explain why Marshall (2012: 267) finds ‘that urban design is at least part pseudo-scientific’. He argues, for example, that many of the underpinning works of urban design are scientifically robust in themselves, but there has been a tendency to uncritically adopt them into the fabric of the discipline without adequately testing their validity in different circumstances, or against alternative hypotheses. The need, he argues, is ‘not just for more and better science, but more specifically [for] more systematic verification and critical assimilation of scientific knowledge

within urban design theory’. Yet, with a relatively small pool of researchers to call upon and a bewildering array of research avenues to pursue, it is perhaps understandable that individual avenues only progress slowly with attention constantly focusing on new rather than old lines of enquiry. For Marshall (2012: 268) urban design needs to be fortified from within, rather than (as others have argued) effectively abandoning it to more developed knowledge fields outside the discipline which may have little to say about its primary preoccupation with how to actively shape place for the better. This argument is further developed in Chapter 7, where it is suggested that the process of urban design represents an

1. Investigating urban design

or accuse it of suffering an intellectual ‘anarchy’ in the absence of a dedicated intellectual core of its own (Cuthbert 2011a: 94). Critics of the latter type often reject urban design as a free-standing field, and instead see it as a sub-set of something larger. In this respect spatial political economy (Cuthbert 2006); urban studies (see Chapter 5); urban planning (Gunder 2010); sustainability (Sorkin 2009); and architecture (Koolhaas 1995) have all been cited as likely candidates. But, if one accepts that urban design is already a distinct field of practice, as seems evident by the spread of universities around the world with programmes dedicated to the education of urban design professionals,3 and if, as many have observed, urban design addresses some of the most complex and fundamental of urban problems, then it seems improbable to deny at least the potential for a distinct intellectual tradition. Equally, given its comparatively small size as a discipline, albeit one with ancient roots, it is hardly surprising that urban design draws much of its substance from the larger and longer established disciplines that surround it. Thus, just as the ‘professional’ activity of urban design developed to fill the gaps between the sorts of professional remits outlined above; as a focus for academic enquiry, the case can equally be made that urban design occupies key interstices between

Figure 1.1 Urban design knowledge 3

irreducible core for intellectual enquiry and policy / practice innovation in the discipline. Whatever the focus of enquiry, today, knowledge about urban design exists: Ȉ First, as a focused amalgam of core knowledge and practice pragmatically drawn from other fields, both professional and intellectual, as conceptually represented in Figure 1.1 Ȉ Second, as a distinct and evolving field that has added to, worked over and given new meaning to this borrowed knowledge and practice through: A. Fashioning it together into a singular and tolerably coherent field of knowledge (broadly the field articulated in such works as Moudon 1992, or more recently Carmona et al. 2010 that provide an integrating overview of the subject). B. The generation of new knowledge around what is unique about the subject and practices of urban design.

THE POWER OF RESEARCH Taking an Interdisciplinary Perspective Whilst borrowing analytical techniques from elsewhere, in different ways most of urban design’s acknowledged foundational texts, the work of Jane Jacobs, Gordon Cullen, William Whyte, Christopher Alexander, Kevin Lynch and Jan Gehl, amongst others, fall into category ‘B’ of the second group of knowledge. However, although new knowledge for the discipline is continually generated (and borrowed) as a feed into category ‘A’, considerable discord is often apparent between those representing different traditions within the field.

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Explorations in Urban Design

Most obviously this occurs between those taking a critical social sciences perspective on urban design, and those hailing from practice-based, particularly design, backgrounds. Thus the literature is replete with critiques of design-led approaches to large-scale development, dismissing such perspectives as physically deterministic or simply irrelevant when placed alongside less subjective and ‘more certain’ socio-economic or scientific considerations (see Kashef 2008). In their defence, large numbers of well-documented grand projects (and arguably much of the built output of the Modern Movement) have been incorrectly promoted on the basis of their social benefit, when such benefits turned out to be largely illusory (Knox 2011: 49–52). Both perspectives are equally troubling, the first advancing a space-less (political economy) perspective, challenging the very notion of urban design itself, and the second a place-less (physical / aesthetic) vision for a phenomena that will always be rooted in both place and space. In reality physical form will impact decisively on the socio-economic potential of space, just as the socio-economic context should always inform any adopted design solution. Equally, neither will determine absolutely the outcomes; as Biddulph (2012) argues, urban designers should not be misled into believing they are simply applied social scientists, equally, they should temper their tendency to normative thinking with a deep awareness of ‘the interpretive and very political nature of the context in which they work’. The conundrum therefore concerns how to reconcile these understandings, bringing both social science and design (as well as other) perspectives to bear on the analysis of urban design in order to move beyond partial views of the territory. One answer may be through the power of research that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries. The built environment is a notoriously siloed field of professional and academic endeavour (see Carmona 2009). Yet it is in the realm of urban design where many of these remits

meet: the physical dimension of planning, the space shaping nature of architecture, the local impacts of infrastructure engineering, and so forth. By its nature, therefore, urban design should be particularly suited to practice approaches that transcend disciplinary confines. As a research arena it is therefore both multidisciplinary, in the sense that urban design is practiced (and researched) by professionals from different backgrounds; and interdisciplinary, in the sense that through engagement with complex urban problems from contrasting disciplinary perspectives, new knowledge is generated and then shared across disciplines. The research and research approaches reported in this book are clearly multidisciplinary, but many also show the power of interdisciplinarity, reaching beyond lone disciplines to address the sorts of ‘wicked’ problems that characterise urban design (see below). For example, using social science methods to understand particular design problematics, or combining our right side (of the brain) ‘designerly ways of knowing’ (Cross 2001) with left side science-based analytics.

Choosing the Right Approach(es) Whilst this is not a research methods textbook, as an exploration of urban design as a research field it is important to briefly consider three key questions: Why is research in urban design important? How do we conduct urban design research? and How should urban design research be used?

Urban design is of this nature, despite its sphere of interest – the public and private built environment – impacting profoundly, for better or for worse, on the estimated 3.5 5

Investigating urban design

This is an important question because if research in a subject does not seem important then either we already know (or think we know) all there is to know about it, or we believe it to be so unimportant that it doesn’t justify the time and effort required to find out more. Such subjects are ‘dead’ or at least moribund as they have stopped developing, confirming the critical importance of a viable research-base for a discipline to prosper. This does not mean that the resources available

Ȉ First, the questions being asked are often not straightforward, they are ‘wicked’ in nature, meaning they are difficult to identify and frame, let alone address (Rittel and Webber 1973). As Marshall (2012: 268) nicely puts it: ‘Cities are not rocket science – they are more complex than that’. Ȉ Second, the processes being examined typically focus on the vagaries of human actions and are therefore subject to continual change and varied interpretation as, in essence, they are unpredictable and poorly understood (unlike the laws of physical science). Ȉ Finally, even when answers are secured to such research problems, they simply represent a snapshot of experience that continues to vary from place to place and over time. As such, even when research is done, there is not always a clear line to product, policy or practice and therefore to impact, making funding harder to justify.

1.

Why is research in urban design important?

within the many hundreds of viable academic disciplines listed in Wikipedia4 will all be the same. In the UK, for example, the five research councils dealing with science and medical research together have roughly ten times as much budget as the two that deal with arts, humanities and social sciences (within which funded research on urban design largely, although not exclusively, fits). In part this reflects how society (and the market) values knowledge in different areas, but it also reflects the nature of the problems being investigated, how established a discipline is, and perceptions of the potential impact of research in that arena. Of course medical and scientific research is comparatively expensive to conduct, requiring long time frames and expensive equipment, but there is also an element of the unknown with much non-science research:

billion people that live in cities. Moreover, as this number relentlessly rises, processes of urban growth and change also continue relentlessly, often on the basis of flawed and outmoded knowledge about the local and global influence of such change, and about the potential to do better, socially, economically and environmentally. Yet this potential value of urban design is poorly understood by politicians, the public and industry, in part because of the rather intangible nature of many of its impacts (Carmona et al. 2002a: 64–5). By way of example, investing in an anti-obesity pill would seem to deliver a tangible and direct benefit from a single clearly defined product, with clear knock-on commercial benefits. By contrast, designing the built environment to encourage us to do more exercise and not to get fat in the first place, seems infinitely more complex, involving numerous interconnecting elements, diffused responsibilities, and difficult to trace impacts. It is difficult to make the case for research in such areas, let alone to get action once the research has been done. Yet the benefits from a better designed built environment are potentially huge, as is the power of urban design research to understand it, and this, in part, explains why the discipline has continued to grow and prosper over the last 50 years, and most particularly over the last 20. This has been a period of rapid growth of the discipline in universities, in academic journals, as a focus or sub-focus of learned groups and societies, and, as a subject for academic research, from Masters’ dissertations, through PhDs, to funded research programmes and researchbased practice. All these things are necessary to give credibility to a discipline, and their development will be gradual rather than rapid. In this respect, urban design has been in an evolutionary phase, emerging slowly into a mature discipline (Moor 2006: 15–16), with all the birthing pains (is it, is it not; should it, should it not be; a discrete discipline) that contemporary debates between commentators reveal (see above). But perhaps this is inevitable for a mongrel discipline that, to truly live, has had to emerge from in and amongst the traditional territories of the far larger and 6

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longer established disciplines – professional and academic – that surround it.

How do we conduct urban design research? A wide array of valuable books of direct relevance to urban design explore the mechanics of research methodology: generically (e.g. Blaxter et al. 2001); in the social sciences (e.g. Denscome 2003); as architectural research (e.g. Groat and Wang 2002), through the study of environment-behaviour (Zeisel 2006), in planning (Gaber 2007) with a focus on particular outputs such as the preparation of a dissertation (e.g. Farrell 2010), and so forth. Urban design transcends each of these, and many more, encompassing four grand families of research methods: Ȉ Scientific method: based on logical, systematic and measurable evidence, gathered through empirical investigation, and focusing on a search for truths that can be tested with methods, particularly experimental ones, that are reproducible. Prediction, analysis and testing of pedestrian movement or traffic flows represents a case-in-point, for example observing behaviours before and after an intervention. Ȉ Social science methods: focus on the study of human social phenomena, including economic and political concerns, with methods ranging from ‘positivist’ approaches akin to scientific method based on the notion that social phenomena are predictable and verifiable, to ‘antipositivist’ approaches, that reject empiricism in favour of the interpretation of social phenomena and understanding their significance for those involved. Broadly, the former favour quantitative methods including statistical survey methods and social network analysis, whilst the latter favour qualitative approaches such as ethnographic study, interviews and discourse analysis. Ȉ Humanities methods: sit at the interpretive end of the positivist / antipositivist spectrum, using approaches

based on critical analysis, speculation, and historical research. In contrast to scientific method, therefore, they do not seek final truths about phenomena, but instead explore their context and meaning in the light of particular theoretical or philosophical positions and interpretations. Ȉ Design methods: focus variously on the process and methods of design and on speculation through design and research-led design practice. Like scientific approaches, they often use experimentation (real and imagined) to explore research problems, but, unlike scientific method, start from an agreed premise that multiple conflicting solutions are possible. Whilst researchers often stick within these broad categories, and arguments are frequently and dogmatically made for the superiority of one approach over another, increasingly the complexity of contemporary urban problems are leading to the pragmatic decisions to adopt what works, and to mix methods, particularly within, but increasingly across, these

Although each of these fundamental characteristics of research may be represented as dichotomous alternatives, in fact they are continua. A project might begin, for example, with analysis of secondary data in order to frame later primary research, and may combine methods that draw from 7

Investigating urban design

Ȉ Research evidence – primary vs. secondary: the types (or balance between types) of evidence (or sources) investigated can distinguish research projects. Primary research collects or generates original data, whether through surveys, interviews, design processes, experimentation, and so forth, whilst secondary research relies on existing sources of data, analysing and interpreting them to reveal new insights. Ȉ Research knowledge – subjective vs. objective: the character of inquiry is determined more than anything by the nature of the knowledge it generates. Positivist, empirical and grounded research largely deals in objective knowledge, focusing on uncovering or examining facts or truths. Antipositivist, relativist and speculative research, by contrast, is more often concerned with perceptions, views and abstractions, and deals in subjective knowledge that can never ultimately be right or wrong. Ȉ Research journey – inductive vs. deductive: the nature of the research journey from inception to completion is determined in large part by its approach to theory. Deductive research moves from the general to the specific, typically starting with theory and testing it through gathering evidence. Inductive research, by contrast, moves from specific evidence or observations and moves to the general, including the generation of theory.

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Figure 1.2 The three fundamental research characteristics

categories. Thus rather than categorising research projects in urban design by the branch or branches of methods from where they hail, it may be more useful to refer to three fundamental characteristics of research:

or generate subjective and objective forms of knowledge. As research in urban design will be found at all positions along these continua, the representation of projects and methods discussed in this book along the three continua and in relation to each other can help to classify them (Figure 1.2). This framework will be returned to at the start of the five sub-sections of the book in order to introduce and unscientifically relate the varying contributions discussed therein.

How should urban design research be used? Because ultimately research is of little value unless it advances our knowledge of a particular discipline, the final question returns to the issue of why research in urban design is important. By its very nature research should be ‘cutting edge’ in the sense that it is generating new knowledge or information about a subject. This, however, does not imply that every piece of research will be paradigm changing, or even immediately useful in practice. Instead, much research in urban design will reflect on particular dimensions of professional practice, policy or design, with a view to incrementally improving, although not totally recasting, them. Other research will be more purely academic in nature, perhaps adding to larger critiques of the urban situation, reconceptualising urban design in whole or part, or applying blue skies design thinking to a particular place or problematic. Potential ‘clients’ for urban design research will therefore hail from four key groups: 1. Other researchers, both in urban design and in cognate and non-cognate fields; 2. Practitioners, ranging across the design and other built environment professions, and including those involved in financing, delivering and managing the urban environment; 3. Policy makers, both professional and political, and the interest groups who influence them; 8

Explorations in Urban Design

4. The users of the urban environment, who ultimately are the recipients of any changes to the built environment, whether or not informed by research. Research in urban design will be equally valid whether intended to directly inform practice or focused primarily on academic debates. Neither form of research is intellectually superior, although in all cases it is vital to think about what the potential impact of the work is likely to be. In this regard theoretical work will be most powerful if, perhaps over time, it also informs practice. Equally, practice-related research will be more rigorous and incisive if it draws from, and feeds back into wider academic debates. Amongst other issues is how researchers express themselves. Urban design concerns real world issues of great relevance to society, so tying up arguments in jargon and opaque language will rarely help to get key messages across. To offer just two examples, the first, arguing the case for a city of intense sensory stimulation, from the architectural end of the urban scholarship spectrum: Everything must communicate with everything. … This is ƒ†‡’‘••‹„Ž‡„›–Š‡•‘‘–Š’ƒ”ƒ‡–”‹…†‹ơ‡”‡–‹ƒ–‹‘‘ˆƒŽŽ urban and architectural / urban subsystems and by infusing further order via the employment of associative logics that …‘””‡Žƒ–‡ –Š‡ †‹ơ‡”‡– •—„Ǧ•›•–‡• ‹ ™ƒ›• –Šƒ– ƒ‡ –Š‡ representations of each other, facilitating inferences from the visible to the invisible or not yet visible. The urban dweller should be able to read and navigate the Parametric Metropolis just like the natives of the Amazon read and navigate their jungle. The second, from the urban geographical end, critiquing the impact of a contemporary street design trend on those with disabilities: Shared space can be characterised as ‘disembodied urban design’ that fails to capture the complexity of corporeal

form and the manifold interactions of bodies-in-space. The disembodied understanding of the interactions between bodies, space, and movement, propagated by shared space design, (re)produces both existential insecurity and ontological uncertainty amongst certain categories of users.

THE BOOK The Structure and Contributions

9

Investigating urban design

Whilst recognising and accepting that different traditions exist with the study (and practice) of urban design, this book explicitly advances an interdisciplinary view of the subject, and its exploration through research. This is not a claim that every chapter within the book crosses disciplinary boundaries; they don’t. The Bartlett at UCL, from where the chapters are drawn, like every major research-led faculty of the built environment is made up from specialists and deep specialists in their fields. Thus, whilst The Bartlett is structured according to disciplines (see http://www.bartlett. ucl.ac.uk/, also Chapter 28) and much research is explicitly disciplinary in nature (see, for example, Chapters 3, 10 and 17), this includes research challenges that lend themselves to multi-disciplinary examination, with different researchers

1.

The danger is that such language (and the equivalent illegible graphic representations used by some on the architectural wing of urban scholarship) limits the impact of important research to a small body of those who are already ‘in the know’, whilst throwing up barriers to the vast majority who are not. Rather than a barrier that is rarely crossed, the boundary between theory and application should be permeable and diffuse, allowing researchers and practitioners to cross one way and back again with relative ease. Ideally, so should the boundary between research and practice, with researchers thinking carefully about how to frame and disseminate their work in order that it informs key academic debates whilst also, where appropriate, informing policy and practice. Language will be a key part of this, as will the vehicle chosen for dissemination. Publishing in high quality international refereed journals is vital to test the rigour and efficacy of research, but such articles are rarely read by the practitioners and policy makers needed to turn ideas and evidence into reality. A final point follows from this. Just as the practice of urban design is endlessly diverse and fascinating, so too is the subject as a research field. In a subject with design at its heart, it will be important to bear in mind that there is no single truth in urban design, i.e. no normative urbanism or set of principles and prescriptions that will apply everywhere. Equally, there will be no single right answers in urban design research, even in the most positivist and purely scientific of its pursuits. Baxter et al. (2010: 14) have written that research ‘is a social activity, that can be powerfully affected by the researcher’s own motivations, and values. It also takes place within a broader social context, within which politics and power relations

influence what research is undertaken, how it is carried out, and whether it is reported and acted upon’. Instead, the application of knowledge to context and / or through the crucible of design process will mean that diversity, subjective choice, and intelligent application of knowledge are key. Unfortunately, this has not always been the case, and the literature is replete with attempts to dogmatically define global critiques and / or prescriptions for urban design, for example in discussion of public space (Carmona and Wunderlich 2012: 287), or to assertively shackle urban design within the confines of one or another of its neighbouring academic fields (see above). Such attempts do little to advance the urban design cause as, in effect, they deny the potential for pluralistic urban design thought, just as surely as attempts by the established professions to hijack urban design for their own would undermine the very essence and vitality of this essentially mongrel, and thereby complex and open, discipline.

exploring allied problematics from their own disciplinary perspective (see, for example, Chapters 14 and 15). Other projects are explicitly interdisciplinary, with approaches and knowledge from different disciplines drawn together to confront a particular project or problem (see, for example, Chapters 7, 13, and 21), and this work includes crossdisciplinary studies in which researchers draw on knowledge fields from beyond their own to facilitate the explanation of complex urban problems (see, for example, Chapters 6 and 18). To present and structure this diversity of research in urban design, the book is divided into five parts, each of which addresses a particular meta-approach to urban design research. These categories deliberately eschew disciplinary classifications, which, as argued above, are profoundly limiting when it comes to urban design. The grand families of research methods – science, social science, humanities and design – are also avoided on the basis that so many research projects in urban design transcend these. Instead, the categories reflect the predominant approaches to urban design research specifically: Ȉ Philosophical approaches: using theory and critique to understand urban design processes and outcomes and the rationale, purpose and nature of urban design; Ȉ Process investigations: focusing on the normative and ‘potential’ systems, tools, procedures and networks that shape the outcomes of urban design; Ȉ Physical explorations: through a range of analytical studies in which the shape, configuration and growth of space and built form is examined as the physical ‘product’ of urban design and the container for activity, uses and movement; Ȉ Propositional experiments: studio-based research and pedagogical investigation using design process and creative speculations to reveal responses to defined urban problems and problematics;

10

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Ȉ Performance enquiries: through direct and indirect anthropological investigation and stakeholder enquiry, these investigations examine the nature of space-in-use and other performance dimensions. Although chapters are positioned within one or other category, in fact the projects they explain often span more than one; philosophical exploration followed by physical modelling, for example, or process and performance analysis combined. The categories are not hard and fast but instead offer a useful aid to thinking about urban design research and the relations between conceptually different approaches. In total 32 different authors have contributed, coming to the subject from a diversity of backgrounds and intellectual traditions. Each section includes a slice of this diversity that is also reflected in the varying character and writing styles of chapters. Each chapter concludes with ‘tips for researchers’.

The Audience The intention in writing this book has been to enthuse and inspire urban design researchers, not to baffle them or turn them off with the inevitable complexities of the discipline. Such an approach, it is hoped, will help to overcome the problems associated with the sometimes obscuring technical and specialist disciplinary ‘languages’ (referred to above) in which researchers from across the diverse urban design field are frequently immersed and which, at their worst, undermine interdisciplinary working. Whilst this book may sometimes be challenging, both in content and language, every effort has been made to ensure that the latter never needlessly obfuscates the former. The book is intended for everyone from the informed MSc student about to embark on their first significant urban design research project, to PhD students immersed in methodological and conceptual complexity and needing to come up for fresh air, to academic and practice-based

researchers investigating and comparing the available and appropriate methodological paths. Urban design research as a subject is little written about, whilst projects, when published, often appeal to, and talk to their own group of insiders, already immersed in the language, methods and understandings of a particular line of enquiry. I hope this book will open this up, and together the contributions will reveal the complexity, excitement and importance of contemporary urban design research.

ENDNOTES 1

In the UK, for example, the RICS (property professions), RIBA (architects), RTPI (planners) and Landscape Institute (landscape professionals) have 159,000, 28,000, 23,000 and 6,000 members respectively, compared with 1,000 in the Urban Design Group.

2

See Chapter 28 for a brief discussion of the origins of the book.

3

In 2012 70 universities with urban design programmes were listed on just three English language websites: http://www.udg. org.uk/universities, http://www.udg.org.uk/universities, http:// www.gradschools.com/search-programs/urban-design/masters.

4

In the Wikipedia list of academic disciplines urban design is not listed as a standalone discipline, but is instead tacked on to ‘Urban Planning’ under the larger category of ‘Architecture and Design’, within the meta-category of ‘Professional and Applied Sciences’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_disciplines).

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11

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com

Part I

Philosophical approaches

Using theory and critique to understand urban design processes and outcomes and the rationale, purpose and nature of urban design

This category includes research projects that use theory and critique to understand urban design processes and outcomes and the rationale, purpose and nature of urban design. Five chapters are included in this section of the book representing quite different approaches to the subject’s philosophical underpinnings. Whilst all the authors draw from rich and overlapping seams of literature, French philosophy to contemporary urban critique, there are many ways to understand and utilise such theory. Pushpa Arabindoo’s contribution (Chapter 5), for example, draws from a reading of contemporary debates in the urban design literature to critique the position of the discipline itself and to make a particular argument about its position relative to another discipline, urban studies, to which, she argues, it should be better aligned. By contrast, whilst Filipa Wunderlich’s ideas and analysis (Chapter 6) begin with theory borrowed from a range of related (e.g. aesthetics) and unrelated (e.g. music) disciplines, this is used to define an empirical research programme that generated new knowledge of direct relevance to the field of urban design. Similarly, whilst Iain Borden in his chapter (2) shows how theory can be used to speculate in a loose and layered manner on concrete urban problematics, such as risk, for Camillo Boano and colleagues (Chapter 3) similar literature is used in a very different way, to develop new insights and research methodologies suited to a particular, but often ignored context (at least in the urban design literature), spaces of the global south; in this case through carefully structured and repeated testing and refining of ideas in the studio. The different chapters indicate how this type of work can draw from primary and secondary sources, and feature different degrees of subjective and objective enquiry. Characterising all, however, is a journey from theory to explanation in a deductive manner; exploration of which that may include concrete proposals or methods, loose speculation, or perhaps more and different theory. In the case of Paula Morais’ chapter (4), for example, whilst she 14

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draws from a political economy perspective to throw light on a very particular local research context – Macau in China – the research exhibits both a grasp of secondary historical sources and contemporary accounts gathered in the field in order to make judgments about the complex and somewhat intangible subject of identity and belonging. Philosophical approaches to understanding must be at the heart of any subject that situates itself within (in whole or in part) the social sciences and / or humanities. Of course theory has an important part to play in much of the research discussed in this book, and is not the exclusive domain of the studies included in Part I. Nevertheless, in explicitly adopting a theory-first perspective, these studies provide new insights through the application of theory to question or hypothesis, and on this journey can and do take many different directions, some more uncertain than others, whilst drawing on many kinds of knowledge. Lines of enquiry in this realm are almost infinite and the examples here give just a flavour of the rich investigations that are possible and that continue to exercise urban design researchers. Matthew Carmona

2 The role of risk in urban design Iain Borden

Referring to my own work on cities and urban space as well as to the work of French philosopher Henri Lefebvre concerning the social production of space and the role of everyday life, this chapter argues that urban design research is far more than a process involving built environment professionals such as planners, architects and urban designers – and that it must instead encompass all of the disparate practices, ideas and experiences which the many different kinds of public have of urban space. With examples from a wide range of urban practices – from skateboarding and automobile driving to urban boundaries and design processes – the chapter shows how the constant reproduction of space creates a constant layering, complication and negotiation of city places, and how urban design research can create a speculative, uncertain and forward-looking kind of knowledge.

INTRODUCTION Urban design is often thought of as the product of urban designers – of individuals or small groups of people, their thoughts, designs and actions. Another main theme has been a focus on the products of urban designers: the designs which they produce and the spaces and projects they help to construct: from public squares and plazas, to parks and streetscapes, to local spaces and smaller scale urban interventions.

Yet, while the products of urban design may appear to us as a finite set of objects made by a few people – this is, after all, what we overwhelmingly see in the city around us – urban spaces can also be understood as the traces of more fluid practices and flows of money, power, interactions and ideas. It is important, then, that urban design is not seen only as a set of things, or solely as the province of designers, or that urban space is not only viewed as the surface or apparent physical qualities of that space.

EXPERIENCING LIFE For my own research, nearly all my studies – whether focused on fifteenth-century Italian piazzas, twentieth-century British housing and domestic conventions or on today’s alternative street-based urban practices – are all in some way concerned with how we experience our lives today (Borden 1995: 93–105, Borden 1999, Borden 2000a, Borden 2000b, Borden and Rendell 2000, Borden 2001, Borden, Rendell, Kerr and Pivaro 2001, Borden 2007, Borden 2011 and Borden 2012). This in part derived from the work of the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, and in particular his consideration of the social production of space and with the importance of the everyday qualities and conditions of urban life (Lefebvre 1984, Lefebvre 1991a, Lefebvre 1991b and Lefebvre 1995). Questions which then arise from these kinds of consideration are: How

is urban space constantly being made and re-made? How do we encounter urban space? How might we inhabit our houses and relate to our family and friends? How do we experience city streets and how might we voice our critiques? These are the kinds of enquiries which drive my work, rather than the physical objects of study (urban squares, housing, cars etc.) themselves. Second, in order to undertake this research I often, although not always, work with an intersection of theories, philosophies and other more abstract ideas in relation to real places, practices and events. Through this cross-correlation of the theoretical and the real comes, I feel, a more critical and inquisitive understanding not only of urban designs but also of different experiences of these places. For example, in the InterSections book which I co-edited with Jane Rendell (Borden and Rendell 2000), projects are interpreted according to a range of different theories and meanings: psychoanalytic, iconographic, semiological, gendered, political, racial and so on. Essays look at everything from modernism, seduction and texture, to more everyday buildings, spaces and representation, ranging from the hotels of Las Vegas to the films of Jean-Luc Godard. My own essay explored how different kinds of urban boundaries may repel, seduce or subtly challenge the pedestrian as they go about their lives. These kinds of interpretation work to de-stabilise urban designs, showing how meanings are always provisional. They show that urban projects operate in many different ways, in terms of design but also through ideas, ways of inhabiting spaces, and the way in which people interact with each other. Third, in order to undertake this research in a practical sense I make frequent use of all manner of research materials, from the more usual academic sources of books, articles and primary data in archives and official sources to less common sources such as popular magazines, films, music, internet forums, etc. I also often make great use of my own personal experiences – perhaps not foregrounded in the final writings, but certainly when framing questions 16

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and intuitively checking what I am seeking to argue. This was very much the case for my study of the history and practice of skateboarding (Borden 2001). In the absence of almost any of the usual academic sources (no refereed articles, official data, municipal records or even secondary histories) the work was instead based largely on an extensive analysis of skateboarding magazines, videos, DVDs, internet sites and other materials related to skateboarding subculture, as well as on a number of interviews and direct field observations. Other things which I drew upon greatly were my own personal experiences as a skateboarder over many decades and, much more explicitly, a direct engagement of skateboarding with the theoretical and philosophical work of Lefebvre. The resulting book is consequently quite different from many academic historical studies, and is produced from an intersection of evidence, facts and objects against more speculative ideas, thoughts and theories as well as with words, images, sounds and mappings. Following on from this last point, audio-visual material can also often be of great value – not only as source material, but as ways of interpreting and presenting views on urban spaces and design. I often take photographs and short movie clips, for example, not only to record public spaces but to express a quality or idea of how those spaces might feel or be perceived. These formats are particularly useful when trying to research the experience of urban designed spaces – that is, not how these spaces were created and constructed but how they are used, perceived and constantly reproduced by urban citizens. Film and photographs, it seems to me, have a particular role to play in exploring, depicting and presenting qualities of urban designs that cannot be so easily expressed in codified forms of spatial representation, such as words, drawings, diagrams, maps, etc. (Figure 2.1). For example, this is one of the reasons why, in my most recent work on automobile driving as an experience of cities and landscapes (Borden 2012) I make very extensive use of movies as a way of exploring, evidencing, interpreting and speculating on the nature of this urban practice.

Figure 2.1 Researching mobile automobile experiences in London’s Limehouse Tunnel

RISK AND URBAN DESIGN

Figure 2.2 Bluewater shopping mall 2.

blend of wide concourses, historical styles, variegated colours and playful light. On marbled floors stand public sculptures, while atop high walls sit neo-classical cornices boasting figurative friezes and poetic inscriptions (Figure 2.2). Yet while such malls are – for many people today – ideal places in which to shop, are they really good urban design? For, on deeper inspection, it is apparent that they offer few of the qualities of real cities, none of the vitality, dynamism and downright unpredictability of the full-on urban experience. 17

The role of risk in urban design

I turn now to illustrate these kinds of research in relation to a consideration of risk in relation to urban design. One predominant tendency within urban design and public space has been to minimise risk – that is, to provide places in which risk has been all but removed. These are spaces of safety and certainty. On the other hand, however, much of the joy of public spaces comes from their surprising qualities, from the fact that we do not always know them or the people they contain. Here, the tendency is to allow or even encourage risk, to create places of uncertainty and surprise. This, then, is an essential tension in urban design and public space – whether to remove risk and so erase danger, or to tolerate or even encourage risk and so enjoy the unexpectedness of our cities and fellow citizens. Predominant among spaces which tend to remove risk are large shopping malls, which increasingly provide not only myriad shops and parking, but also such facilities as cinemas, food courts and even the occasional rock-climbing wall or tennis court. Many, such as the UK’s Bluewater development designed by Eric Kuhne & Associates and opened in 1999, even offer architecture of an apparently high quality, with an artful

Rather, as internalised, controlled, safe and sterile arenas – cleared of all litter, detritus and ‘undesirable’ people – malls suggest that we are only citizens in so far as we shop or consume. Malls insist that we know what we want, and we know where to find it, that we do not want to be truly surprised, or to take risks of any kind. Malls also bring with them political curtailments, for they propose that we are happy to be provided for and to yield our individual powers and rights to the private concerns of the mall and its managers. As evidence of this asymmetry of power, consider that nearly all malls continually film and photograph their visitors, but simultaneously ban these visitors from using cameras or videos. More specifically, in 2005 Bluewater’s managers decided to exclude any visitors wearing face-obscuring hoodies or baseball caps, as well as groups of five or more who were not there to shop. Furthermore, it is not only shopping malls which are like this. Museums, galleries, railway stations and airports are all increasingly becoming shopping opportunities. To give but one example, BAA, the owners of many British airports, currently make more money from retail than from landing fees. Economically speaking, international airports like Heathrow, Gatwick and Schiphol are shopping malls with runways attached, while train stations such as London’s St Pancras similarly transform their public concourses into grand retail opportunities – they are part of that process by which public and semi-public spaces are seemingly all becoming places of consumerism (Figure 2.3). So there are indeed risks here – the risks of losing sight of what a vital civic arena could and should be, and of losing sight of richer goals to which urban design should surely be aimed. So although these are not perhaps the kinds of risk that one would normally think of as being, well, risky – they are still important. The risk of the city-as-shopping-mall is that public space becomes only for consumerism, that our bodies become passive and sedentary, that we consume only by purchasing, and that political rights and critical thoughts are replaced by docile citizens and accepting minds. The risk 18

Explorations in Urban Design

Figure 2.3 Shoes on sale at Gatwick airport

is that we design an urban realm which is bland, superficial and directed only at the selling and purchase of shiny products.

Playing with Risk How then might our public spaces be different? Above all, we should realise that space is a social phenomenon. Urban space, as Lefebvre has argued, is not given to us by God, nature, scientists or design professionals, but is produced by all of us (Lefebvre 1991). Space is produced socially, and is dynamically constructed out of the things, actions, representations, ideas and experiences that we have of it. As a result, we all make the public realm and the public realm makes us. But what does this mean in practical terms? Perhaps the most obvious way people can have new public spaces which suit their own needs and desires is simply to go out and make those spaces. These kinds of activities are numerous and varied, from simple economic activities like boot-sales and church fairs, to artistic acts like busking and street performances, or the various guerilla-like tactics of parkour or urban exploring. In short, this is about not working or buying, but more occasional and playful forms of selling,

Figure 2.4 Appropriating the city as a space of play (courtesy of Wig Worland)

2. The role of risk in urban design

performing, marking or moving. If children can play, why not all of us? To take this a little further, consider one of the most pervasive forms of play in cities, that of skateboarding, which is now practised by millions of skateboarders in just about every country world-wide and which readily demonstrates many of the questions posed by a truly risky public space: who owns the public realm, who has the right to use it, and with what kind of actions and attitudes (Borden 2001)? After an earlier history involving both surf-related cruising and more commercially-driven skateparks, from the early 1990s onwards skateboarders have increasingly explored city streets, office plazas, public squares and a myriad of semi-public, semi-private spaces such as outdoor staircases, benches, window ledges, museum entrances and shop forecourts. Disaffected by the harshness of main streets and by the glossy displays of malls, skateboarders have transformed cities into their own stimulating play space. This street skateboarding appropriates any element in the urban landscape, seeking to use otherwise banal bits of cities as places to assert alternative meanings and actions. It creates uncharted routes through the city, reconfiguring buildings into sets of smaller elements, and recomposing space through variable speeds and times (Figure 2.4). This, therefore, is a very different kind of urban experience to those of, for example, shopping, walking or looking. In skateboarding the practitioner’s own body becomes alert with senses of touch, hearing, adrenalin, rhythms, balance and movement. Here then, the dissatisfaction with streets and malls – which both repel the human body and turn it primarily into an instrument of vision – is confronted by a newly invigorated body, one which is multi-sensory, adaptable and alive. Most importantly, unlike many of the purpose-built skateparks in which some people think skateboarding should be confined, these appropriated skateboarding places are often public, existing in the semi-official, semi-private zone of city streets. As a result, embedded in skateboarding’s

Figure 2.5 Critiquing urban space 19

public actions are implicit critiques of what public space is and how it should be controlled. For example, skateboarders variously suggest through their actions that architecture can be a set of micro-spaces and not just grand monuments and public squares, that we can produce not only things and objects but also bodily desires and energies, that the purpose of public space is for uses rather than exchange, that one should be able to use the public realm regardless of who one is or what one owns, and that the way we use public space is an essential factor in who we think we are (Figure 2.5). Now, there are of course potential risks associated with activities like skateboarding, including bodily harm to both practitioners and other city dwellers, the perceived threats they pose to conventional modes of behaviour, the physical damage they might cause to the built environment, the noises they make, and the general anti-work, anti-consumerism attitude which they often seem to promote. To deal with the most obvious of these first, the actual damage caused by skateboarding is frequently over-stated – very little damage occurs to benches and ledges for example, particularly if they are actually designed to withstand skateboarding rather than to repel it. And in over 25 years of researching skateboarding, I have yet to find a single example of a skateboarder actually colliding with a fellow pedestrian – no doubt this does happen, but compared to, for example, the thousands of pedestrians killed annually by motorised traffic, this is surely not an insuperable problem. Of course, skateboarding should not be allowed in all places at all times – skateboarding in an office plaza during commuting times, or on a train platform, or down the middle of an urban freeway, or for hour upon hour amid a quiet residential enclave are not good things to encourage. On the other hand, there are enormous benefits from encouraging activities such as skateboarding within particular public contexts. For example, skateboarding and similar activities help to stimulate active young people who are not watching television or trying to download pornography, but who are outside in the fresh air. By taking the risk of skateboarding 20

Explorations in Urban Design

in public, skateboarders are able to do something physical, which requires independence, which enables them to meet other people, and which can even be entrepreneurial in the way skateboarders often initiate, for example, professional teams and clothing companies and create innovative artistic representations. Indeed, one could argue that for young men and women there is no better public activity than skateboarding. And so by us taking the risk of allowing skateboarding to occur, and by skateboarders themselves taking the risk of moving in this way, we can have cities in which these citizens are more healthy and are more open to real urban spaces than are, for example, many of our television-fixated and computer game-obsessed teenagers. And even for those who do not skateboard there are other benefits. We get healthy, independently-minded fellow citizens; we get something vibrant to look at besides shop windows and adverts; we get strange sounds and colours in our streets; and, above all, we get something different, something which we might not expect to have encountered in the public realm. If we are prepared to take the risk, these are our rewards: the unpredicted, the alternative, the surprising ways of living in cities.

Designing for Risk But how can we design or manage urban spaces to allow for such risks? On the one hand, we can do this by simply creating a multitude of different spaces which conventionally make up the public realm. That is, not just shopping malls but also traditional neighbourhood parks, old industrial buildings turned into bars and restaurants, public meeting spaces, unusual bridges, Ferris wheels and so forth. But even here we need to be careful. In many propositions for public space we often find an underlying model of urban life that rests firmly on the ancient Greek notion of civilisation as the art of living in cities: the art of painting, sculpture, music, theatre, galleries, opera, grand public squares. In such versions of public space, while there is often

Figure 2.7 The city of raucous music

Figure 2.6 The city of civilisation

The role of risk in urban design

21

2.

the occasional nod to commonplace everyday life and even the appropriation of space, a certain model of polite society frequently permeates. Such public space is, above all, the city of public squares, gentle wanderings, spoken conversations and square-side cafés. It is the city of latté coffee, Sunday papers, designer chairs, fresh pasta and tactile fabrics (Figure 2.6). It is not, however, the city of all the disparate activities that different people actually do in varied city spaces. This, then, is not the city of shouting, raucous music, running, sex, demonstrations, subterranean subterfuges. It is not the city

of intensity, of bloody-minded determination, of getting outof-hand; nor is it the city of cab ranks, railway arches or street markets; nor is it the city of monkish seclusion, crystalclear intellectualism, strange oppositions, or ephemeral art interventions (Figure 2.7). In design terms, many architects and other designers have taken these kinds of ideas on board, from Cedric Price, Archigram and Herman Hertzberger to NATO, Nigel Coates and Bernard Tschumi, and to Jan Gehl, muf and Lars Spuybroek/NOX. To explore but one project in a little more detail, Adriaan Geuze and West 8 have created a provocative public space in the Schouwburgplein in Rotterdam (Borden and McCreery 2001: 36–43). The main composition is a large square divided into different surface textures such as perforated and box section steel, timber and rubber. More importantly, this composition encourages different activities, such as football on the timber, roller-blading on the epoxy and, of course, the walking that criss-crosses wherever people wish, but particularly along a long rubber strip. Overhead, spotlights on giant crane-like angle-poises respond either to coins inserted by visitors, or to a preprogrammed random sequence – in this way the spotlights spasmodically energise the square, creating another

Figure 2.8 Schouwburgplein, Rotterdam, designed by West 8 (courtesy of Jeroen Musch)

indeterminate layer of light and colour. Those using the Schouwburgplein thus do what they wish, their actions being at once subtly encouraged, high-lighted, guided and flexibly accommodated. The park is a kind of informal game, a playground for movements and experiences (Figure 2.8). Here the designers have taken a risk – not perhaps in the design itself, which was quite well understood from the start, but in letting those using the space do with it, within certain constraints, as they themselves wish. They have created a kind of multi-purpose board game, in 22

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which we ourselves as urban citizens are pieces on the board, free to make up our own rules and actions. The risk of the Schouwburgplein is in letting users act in uncertain ways.

Difference and Risk Where does this leave our understanding of the public realm and risk? Above all, new kinds of public realm can be designed not just to make us more efficient consumers, but to encourage us to use all of our bodies, to make us physically, mentally and artistically

healthy – these are public spaces which stimulate actions and thoughts, which encourage new attitudes to the world around. Using design to stimulate people – but without trying to wholly determine their actions – means that we take risks with our fellow citizens, accepting that we should let the public realm not only reflect but encourage the widest possible range of positive human actions and qualities. There are of course different kinds of risk involved with designing such public spaces. On the negative side, there is the possibility that these public spaces might become dangerous centres of drug-taking or crime. Alternatively, such spaces, particularly more artistic or conceptual ones, might be castigated by the public as a waste of money. They might soak up economic and other resources or, worse still, might not be used at all. On the other hand, there are also huge positive benefits to be made, risks which pay off massively in terms of culture, community involvement and even economics: urban residents who are alive in mind and body to the utmost of our capabilities, emotions and stimulations. In this way, we can have public spaces which are different to the shopping mall, museum or conventional urban plaza; these create new uses by members of the public, and new understandings of what the city might be all about; they involve the community and help bring in new skills

different speeds, moments, memories or events. This means allowing some people to go faster on pavements than the speed of the slowest pedestrian, it means allowing people to hang around in parks or spend night-time hours underneath freeway fly-overs, skateboarders to use office plazas on weekends, and people to do things outside of the conventional time patterns of the daily sleep-work-rest cycle, or the weekly and annual work-weekend-work-holiday. It also means letting people remember private thoughts as well as national events, and respond to local actions and moments and not just global trends. And the fourth kind of difference is the experience we have of spaces, the way we approach our cities and architecture. We need spaces in which we encounter otherness and sameness, where we are at once confirmed and challenged – and this comes from not being certain, from not knowing everything around us, from a degree of surprise and the unusual as we go about our everyday lives. Otherwise we too are erased from view, removed from the square, censured from ourselves, denied the right to the city. We need a city which we do not know, which we do not understand, which we have not yet encountered, which is simultaneously, strange, familiar and unknown to us. This is public space which is always a surprise, a unique place, a stimulation. This difference requires the risk of not always knowing what lies around the corner.

RISK AND KNOWLEDGE 2.

Before ending, it is worth adding one final thought, which concerns the kind of knowledge which is created from this kind of research. In particular, it is important to realise that this sort of research does not always produce a conclusion as a stable kind of knowledge. My work is often a kind of contemporary history, but it does not always stop at the usual historical concerns with providing a narrative, description, explanation or description. Rather, this urban design research can also be quite speculative or projective in nature, throwing 23

The role of risk in urban design

and work; and they can create spaces of substantial duration, yielding results long after they were first constructed. Above all, then, we must realise in urban design that public space – space that is truly public – acknowledges four kinds of difference, four alternative ways of making public spaces which are not the same but variable, alternating and unusual. These differences are all about risk-taking, about allowing for the uncertain, unpredictable and not-whollyprogrammed to occur. The first of these differences concerns ourselves as human beings, accepting that people of different backgrounds, races, ages, classes, sexuality, gender and general interests all have different ideas of what public space is, and that they subsequently use and make their own places to foster specific identities as individuals and citizens. This difference requires the risk of recognising that we are not all the same, and even that we ourselves might not be quite who we think we are. The second kind of difference is physical, visual and designed, and means realising that designed public spaces should not all look and feel the same. Beyond the square, piazza and avenue, cities need hidden spaces and brutally exposed spaces, rough spaces and smooth spaces, loud spaces and silent spaces, exciting spaces and calm spaces. Cities need spaces in which people remember, think, experience, contest, struggle, appropriate, get scared, fall in love, make things, lose things and generally become themselves. This difference requires the risk of having true diversity in our city spaces, and that these spaces should encourage, tolerate or withstand – not exclude or repel – all that people do and feel. The third kind of difference is about times, allowing for certain parts of the city to be used differently at various moments of the day, week or year. And it is also about different kinds of time itself, for we need times that are slow and times that are fast, times that are linear and times that are cyclical, times given by our bodies and times controlled by machines. This difference requires the risk of not always wearing a watch, not always measuring in minutes and seconds, of allowing

out questions as much as answers, and suggesting challenges as to how we might design and live differently now and later. It is also then a kind of knowledge which evolves between and across many seemingly disparate research projects but which, in fact, also share one thing in common: urban design research always ultimately contains within it a utopian impulse which critiques the present in order to, hopefully and just maybe, improve the future. This too is a kind of risk, as it does not always sit easily within certain academic or disciplinary fields or boundaries, but surely it is a risk worth taking?

TIPS FOR RESEARCHERS: Ȉ Consider how your own personal experiences and observations might be included in your research. Ȉ Use images and other visual materials not just as evidence or factual illustrations but as ways of interpreting and rethinking your subject matter. Ȉ Use critical theory and philosophy not just as substantiations of your interpretations, but as a more creative and speculative engagement between theory and your objects of study. Ȉ Do not lose sight of the ‘big picture’ in the detail of your research – regularly remind yourself of the most important and fundamental issues you are tackling.

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3

Deconstructing and recalibrating urban design in the global south Camillo Boano, Melissa García Lamarca and Andrew Wade

This chapter presents a methodological approach inspired by the various critical, continental approaches to deconstructing and recalibrating urban design in the context of development in the global south. After discussing the need to recalibrate urban design in terms of more complex understandings of informality; ‘slum’ as theory and as praxis; the notion of ‘worlding’; and the existence of a multiplicity of urbanisms, the chapter highlights the importance of the theoretical constructions of Lefebvre, Foucault, Agamben and Rancière for our urban design research agenda. Its academic and practicebased application is elaborated through a brief discussion of the Building and Urban Design in Development (BUDD) programme at The Bartlett. These conceptual understandings serve as a basis for (re)calibrating urban design research and practice, defining a new interpretation of the contemporary challenges of design at the urban scale that encompasses the complex interactions and actors involved in the ‘production of space’.

INTRODUCTION In Understanding Cities: Method in Urban Design, Cuthbert (2011b) seeks to move beyond the content and technical aspects of urban design to explore more theoretical considerations, specifically how to think about what to do with urban design. In his critique of the lack of a rigorous

heterology – or meta-methods that organise thinking in urban design – Cuthbert echoes his past work (Cuthbert 2003, 2006, 2007) by arguing that, as a discipline, urban design continues to lack an explanation of itself that legitimises its actions and processes (see Chapter 1). This critique of urban design as a discipline is reflected in how the term is defined and explained: often by what it is not, or as something ‘in between’, for example: between planning and architecture, or between the city and the building (Cuthbert 2007: 181–2). While some recent writings have started to tackle the topic (Gunter 2011, Goonewardena 2011) there have been limited attempts by urban design ‘theorists’ to locate the discipline within larger scientific debates. Instead its connections to science have emerged by adopting planning’s rationalist approach and architecture’s focus on functionality and form (Cuthbert 2011b). Furthermore as its methodology, in the mainstream, lacks a holistic analysis of the political, economic and social context in which it operates, urban design often suffers the same ‘silent complicity’ as architectural projects vis-à-vis the agendas of the politically and economically powerful (Dovey 1999). In this way it can be used as a tool for those with power to legitimise entrepreneurial forms of governance (Harvey 1989a) with urban design simply drawing a veil over emerging social and economic inequalities (Hubbard 1996). These points hint at the need for research and practicebased approaches that unpack mainstream urban design

Figure 3.1 Jurubatuba São Paulo

and recalibrate it, with a more critical focus on building more socially just and sustainable cities, both in theory and in practice. Such an action is of even more importance when considering urban design in the ‘global south’ – itself a contentious term1 – where unique challenges of designing the urban realm are intensified by postcolonial legacies and economies of rapid growth but inequitable distribution, often simplified through the popularised notion of a ‘planet of slums’ (Davis 2006). With pressures to achieve global city status, megacities seek to emerge as key nodes within an exclusive global network while simultaneously addressing high degrees of informality, urban poverty and unresponsive 26

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governance (Figure 3.1). This further inflates the agenda of urban design, imbuing it with increasing responsibility and urgency. It also provides an increasing potential to proactively build conceptual strategies for equitable and empowering development at the community and city-wide levels. Such an approach to research is key, in our opinion, as it provides a critical structure through which to ground urban design in the realities of practice, particularly in relation to the complex, ambiguous and flexible jerry-built city of the global south. Urban design in this sense is more theoretical and imaginative in nature than much practice with its focus on the form, shape, structure and coding of public space (Carmona 2009, 2010, Carmona et al. 2002, Talen 2011) and its tendency to imagine and model the ideal city (BUDDlab 2012). Acknowledging the emphasis in mainstream urban design discourse on people and place, our research in urban design centres on inserting space back into the discussion, embedded in the complex and dynamic reality that characterises the global south. Developed through teaching and practice-based approaches, this draws from the radical and political understandings of the work of four critical, continental approaches to deconstructing and recalibrating urban design in the contested context of ‘development’. Our research thus seeks to contribute to the call for a recalibration of the geographies of authoritative knowledge (Roy 2009a, Mukhija 2011) and to respond to the provincialisation of urban theory (Parnell and Robinson 2012).

WHY RECALIBRATE URBAN DESIGN IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH? Beyond questioning urban design’s status as a discipline and the need for recalibration in general (see, for example, Chapter 5), the specifics of geography and context mark a fundamental entry point that is at the core of our praxis. Since urban design is a discipline grounded in the UK,

Figure 3.2 The Red River

Figure 3.3 Proposed Red River Project

the US and Europe, apart from colonial experiences, the context of the ‘global south’ is rarely considered. Instead the global south is perceived as ‘an unmapped space that is integrated into dominant forms of knowledge as the “other”, that which does not fully conform to known templates of urbanism’ (Roy 2011a: 9). Foucault (1986) discussed the notion of the ‘other’ as heterotopia or ‘other spaces’ that accommodate the deviant and house the ‘other’; spaces

Primarily the domain of political economists and social scientists, the subject of informality has recently seen a revival in attention in mainstream architecture as well as in geography, urban studies and critical literature. Informality has been viewed in myriad ways since its emergence as an established term (Hart 1973) and is now conceptualised as ‘a state of exception and ambiguity’ or as ‘a dynamic that releases energies’ (Roy 2009b: 8, Balmond 2003: 343). It may be described as a mode of production of space defined by ‘the territorial logic of deregulation’ or ‘a survival strategy and, as such … a way of evading or manipulating power’ (Roy 2009b: 8, Fabricius 2008: 5). While these definitions span a wide territory, the latter two demonstrate a linkage between an end state and their formative processes through the apparatuses of power (Boano et al. 2010). 27

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Informality and the Notion of ‘Slum’ as Theory

3.

that serve to segregate and allow mechanisms of control in a society (Allweil and Kallus 2008). Mainstream approaches to urban design in the global south integrate this ‘other’ into dominant forms of knowledge by not considering the political, economic and social context, tending rather to employ a technocratic Modernist approach stemming from enlightenment beliefs around progress, development and growth. Projects focus on final form over process, and society is seen as a homogenous, consensual player. One merely needs to look at Zaha Hadid’s Kartal Project in Istanbul, Foster and Partners’ Masdar Project in Abu Dhabi, or the Korean-Vietnamese Red River Project in Hanoi for illustrations of how this unfolds in practice (Figures 3.2 and 3.3). It is therefore fundamental to take into account several key elements in the process of recalibrating urban design in the global south: informality and the notion of ‘slum’ as theory, the process of ‘worlding’, and recognising the existence of a multiplicity of urbanisms and in particular the concept of contested urbanism.

Similarly the past few years have also witnessed academics returning to use the term ‘slum’ with a renewed fervour, reshaping it to ‘fit the new capitalist conjuncture and the spatialities proper to economic and cultural globalisation’ (Cavalcanti 2008: 996). Rao (2006) believes that ‘slum’ best captures the spatialities of historical processes exemplified by contemporary cities. She draws on Davis (2006) and UNHabitat (2003) to suggest movement from an understanding of slum as population and terrain to ‘slum as theory’. While acknowledging semantic difficulties associated with the use and abuse of slum, there is ‘a broader theoretical interest in analysing the term “slum” in a normative sense to gain visibility for certain histories and the landscapes of politics and action that they imply’ (Rao 2006: 228). Roy (2011b) similarly supports her claim by outlining an idea of a subaltern urbanism as a way of theorising the slum. With the megacity becoming a metonym for underdevelopment, Third Worldism and the global south, Roy recognises the need to develop an insurgent and alternative narrative where resistance and informalities become symbols of the new urban struggle and the ‘slum’ its icon (Arabindoo 2011). Defined by their lack of formal infrastructure and a concomitant absence of security, slums represent the informal urbanisation that has swelled megacities and, to an extent, driven their peri-urbanisation. Not simply marginal, the slum has become a form of urban infill that has expanded to occupy the various interstices of the multicentric megacity, creating new spatialities. Transformations occur in terms of the different morphologies and tensions that at the same time acknowledge the extraordinary resourcefulness found in everyday life and the innovation-led adaptive capacities of the urban poor.

‘Worlding’: Overcoming the Global / World Cities and Megacities Binary In order to move towards a deeper contextual understanding, a recalibrated urban design must also move beyond the global 28

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or world city discourse; the oversimplified term offering an authorised image of city success that misleadingly ascribes characteristics of parts of cities to the whole (Robinson 2002). As a counterpoint, authors starting with Roy (2011a) have proposed the concept of ‘worlding’, a term that seeks to recover and restore the vast array of global strategies of urban development used to enable cities to enter global networks of economic exchange. Rather than characterising global or world cities in a hierarchical manner, another way of ‘inter-referencing’ cities from a ‘one worlding’ perspective might characterise how the production of urban space occurs through reference to models of urbanism that include those that hail from the global south. ‘Worlding’ also provides a way to move beyond the other binary created between global cities and megacities, where the latter incorrectly ascribes to the whole those parts of the city that are lacking in facilities and services, perpetuating ‘colonial paternalism’ (Robinson 2006: 5). Robinson (2006: 126) instead advocates the need to understand cities as ordinary rather than ‘other’ and to develop ‘creative ways of thinking about connections across the diversity and complexity of economies and city life’. A recalibration of urban design involves a postcolonial analysis of informality that disrupts the formal/informal binary used to reproduce, albeit at a different scale, the division between global cities and megacities (Varley 2010) as well as between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’, global north and global south. In this way urban design must ask itself if it is providing a development alternative or a form of alternative development (McFarlane 2004).

A Multiplicity of Urbanisms and Urbanism as a Contested Process Beyond mainstream urbanisms (Shatkin 2011) ‘other’ urbanisms rooted in alternative social dynamics might challenge the vision, legitimacy and authority of master planning, pushing the emergence of different worlding strategies into different

(RE)CALIBRATING URBAN DESIGN DISCOURSE FOR THE GLOBAL SOUTH Taking the above concepts into account as the fundamental characteristics to integrate into a re-theorised understanding of urban design in the global south, we now elaborate four core conceptual threads with a focus on (re) calibrating urban design discourse. Such an approach should not be conceived simply as a theoretical conceptualisation, rather it is intended as a provocation, pushing debates towards an alternative analysis within the discipline of urban design.

3.

Lefebvre’s Production of Space Figure 3.4 Contested urbanism framework

is fundamental (BUDDlab 2009). We use the notion of ‘contested urbanism’ (Boano et al. 2010) to depict the hegemonic and technocratic discourses that often sit behind top-down interventions that lack meaningful participation, and to focus attention on the politics of urban transformation that systematically exclude many urban dwellers (Figure 3.4). Urban design interventions functioning in this context must therefore be responsive and locally grounded activities, with an understanding of scale and strategy, moving out of the simplified vision of building and architecture as commodified objects (Boano, Hunter and Newton 2013).

Since its English publication in 1991, Lefebvre’s The Production of Space has had an extensive influence on the way in which the knowledge, experience and practice of architecture is understood, especially through his critique of the perception of space as fixed, immovable and passive. Lefebvre (1991: 26) states ‘(social) space is a (social) product’ beyond its intrinsic physicality, and explores it through a triad of interconnections: spatial practice (perceived space), representations of space (conceived space) and representational spaces (lived spaces). One of the key contributions of Lefebvre for our work is the conception that space is ‘produced’ not by a single person but rather 29

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locales. Recognising that there are a myriad of relationships between the built environment and how it structures and is structured by social life is key for such a recalibrated approach to urban design. Understanding this multiplicity of urbanisms reinforces the need to also understand the political, economic and social dynamics at play within the urban fabric when acting as a design practitioner. For our work, conceptualising urbanism as embedded in a web of contested visions where the production of space is an inherently conflictive process, manifesting and also producing and reproducing various forms of injustice

‘through a complex set of overlapping societal agencies: the representational, the economical, the phenomenological, the conceptual, the spatial practice of the individual [and] the collective practices of the political’ (Till 2009: 126). Lefebvre (1991: 361) also discusses the role of the architect in the production of space. For him the architect places himself in his own space and has a ‘representation of this space’ in the ‘subjective’ space of graphical representations. He criticises the idea that ‘objective reality’ can be attained by those methods of representation. This abstract or ‘conceived space’ is meant to be ‘true’; that is ‘any plan, to merit consideration, must be quantifiable, profitable, communicable and realistic’ (Lefebvre 1997: 144), whilst planned or ‘idealistic’ spaces are dominated by other ‘mode of production’ forces, namely, capitalism (Lefebvre 1991: 360). The notions of production and the act of producing are the unifying terms of his spatial thought (Lefebvre 1991: 15–16). Thus space is simultaneously the end-result of production and the context of production, setting its conditions. The logical form – in distinction to ‘substance’ or ‘reality’ – of social space is ‘encounter, assembly, simultaneity’ (Lefebvre 1991: 101). This idea opens up a way to understand Lefebvre’s project of ‘spatialising the dialectic’, where everything is assembled: ‘living beings, things, objects, works, signs, and symbols’ (Lefebvre 1991: 101). In this context the multiple nature of space is not (just) a description, but a precise theoretical argument, and so if space is logically and formally a multiplicity, there can be no way to properly conceptualise or represent it in simple terms, through one single plane of analysis. The adoption of this Lefebvrian dialectical approach to urban design allows a conception of the social production of space not only based on social relations, structures, and representations, but also in the context of complex local realities. Investigation of such local materialities repositions space as always specific and unique.

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Foucault: Tension between Power and Knowledge According to Foucault (1986) the tendency to see time as dynamic and developmental and space as relatively fixed arose in Western thought during the second half of the nineteenth century, a conceptualisation that continues today. He noted no reason to presuppose that our existence as social and historical beings is more important than our spatial one. Without aiming to dismiss a historical-genealogical nor a social imagination, our approach to recalibrating urban design is grounded in Foucault and Lefebvre through their three fundamental concepts of human existence: the societal / social, the temporal / historical and the spatial / geographical. Soja (2010: 70) posits this as a ‘triple dialectic’, where our individual and collective existence often emerges in a polarised and unequal manner. Central to our work is Foucault’s (1967: 24) notion that ‘space is fundamental in any exercise of power’, and that it is inconceivable that we ‘leave people in the slums, thinking that they can simply exercise their rights there’. Foucault suggested that architecture, although an inherently political act, cannot by itself liberate or oppress. In order to realise liberation, technicians of space must align their ‘liberating intentions … with the real practice of people in the exercise of their freedom’ (Foucault 2003). Such a Foucaultian emphasis on spatiality allows for an opening into a field of enquiry ignored by the dialectic of history: power. The contestations that emerge when the fragmented, mobile and conflictive nature of The Production of Space is made explicit open possibilities to move directly to postcolonial literature using the paradigm shift offered by Said (1994: 47): an ‘invigorated sense of looking at the struggle over geography in interesting and imaginative ways’. Said developed his imaginative geographies drawing on Foucault’s enquiries into micro-technologies of power and social control as a mode of dominating and governing the political

subject and as a pathway for enabling resistances reminiscent of the relation between coloniser and colonised. Urbanism in the global south is an ambivalent space where this duality is produced by both oppressive and liberating spatialities.

Agamben: Topology of Urbanism (Inclusion / Exclusion)

Jacques Rancière is one of the most important and original contemporary French philosophers, only recently popularised in the English-speaking world. Rancière (2000: 215) posits that a ‘society is represented as being divided into functions, into places where these functions are exercised, into groups which are, by virtue of their places, bound exercising this or that function’. Such a ‘politics’ avoids the assignation of groups and even the maintenance or modification of the rule of law; rather it institutes a ‘police’ order where no one needs to speak anymore because the government has already responded and everything has been put into place. For Rancière, true politics in its very essence is constituted by disagreement, or dissensus. Any dispute over the common space of the polis implies a disruption of the status quo or police order. In such a context, the state avoids the disturbance of politics by naming phenomena and assigning them to their 31

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Rancière: Design as Politics

3.

The work of Giorgio Agamben outlines a spatial approach to understanding the urban dynamics of contested spaces and territorial partitioning (Boano and Marten 2013). Agamben (2005) makes the paradoxical assertion that today the state of ‘exception’ is the rule when elaborating a theoretical template for the existence of a realm of human activity not subject to the rule of law. The legal production of the ‘state of exception’ appears as an imperative to colonise life itself, signalling the dissolution of meaningful political action as well as the qualification of subjects independent of the common application of the law; which in the state of exception is rendered null. Furthermore, Agamben stresses that, with time, this realm of lawlessness has become spatialised through the figure of ‘the camp’, highlighting the inherent spatial qualities bred from exception. When joined with the Foucaultian (1979) notions of power and knowledge, Agamben openly admits that exception has transcended the camp into the wider world (Agamben 2005, Giaccaria and Minca 2011). Indeed there is a great potential to extrapolate this discussion as a lens through which to describe the larger urban realm which, Agamben suggests, is often shaped by processes of exclusion and control that in the modern metropolis give rise to extreme forms of urbanism (Agamben 2009a, 2009b). Agamben’s theory can thus support more than an identification of spaces of exception and can explain them within a larger context, where these spaces are not just a symptom to be catalogued but also a systemic type embedded in everyday urbanism. Agamben also identifies a key feature in Aristotle’s thoughts, namely the notion of ‘existing potentiality’, or

being capable of resisting one’s own potentiality: ‘The greatness – and also the abyss – of human potentiality is that it is first of all [the] potential not to act’ (Agamben 1999: 181). Existing potentiality therefore contains the power of negation, or the freedom to resist. This ‘impotentiality’ is at the root of human freedom in that the power of freedom and human action rests on the capacity to not act on every potentiality. Understanding this is fundamental to bridge theoretical domains with specific socio-spatial elements. Considering peripheral places as archives, mapping their spaces, and digging into their layers to write their stories can help in understanding how such spaces are actually produced, by which actors, and through which relations of power. This is not simply an effort to understand the past in order to forecast possible futures, but is a statement of their central importance in understanding cities, both in the global south and elsewhere (Lefebvre 1984, 1997); for these areas and their daily realities have a right to be ‘other’ while at the same time partaking in the destiny of the urban whole.

‘proper places’ in the established order, thereby de-politicising them (Dikeç 2002). This reflects Rancière’s thoughts on urban poverty and marginalisation. Thus ‘slums’, marginal areas and low-income communities are included in the state order by their exclusion. Their territories, their histories and their society are homogenised and categorised to legitimise interventions, which are typically participatory ones. In turn, this co-option of the participatory process to replicate and strengthen the established order takes place in marginal communities that differ significantly from formal areas of the city (Frediani and Boano 2012). In Rancière’s approach, this is not a question of politics: ‘the inclusion of the excluded’ is the wrong way to think politically about the issue as even exclusion from formal power is a form of inclusion in the police order. Politics, therefore, is not about identifying the ‘excluded’ and trying to include them. Politics proper is to question the ‘given’ order of the state that seems to be the ‘natural’ order of things, and to question the whole and its partitioned spaces (Rancière 1999).

APPLICATION THROUGH BUDD: IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE Consciously or not, views of the urban realm are shaped by the discourse of urban design in the global north. The MSc Building & Urban Design in Development (BUDD) programme at The Bartlett recalibrates thinking on urban design in two broad ways: by embedding our work in the rich theoretical base of Lefebvre, Foucault, Agamben and Rancière, and by conducting multiple action-oriented research projects in London, continental Europe and in the ‘megacities’ of the global south. By conducting action-oriented design research in Mumbai, Istanbul and Bangkok, as well as in London (e.g. Elephant and Castle, Enfield and Shoreditch), commonalities and disjunctions are traced that often contradict the perceived binary urban categories of north-south, formal-informal and 32

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global-mega. In this way the vital importance of comparison in urban design is stressed (McFarlane 2010) as is the need for the researcher to view them in an interdisciplinary manner, applying the ideas above to diverse socio-economic and geographical contexts. The philosophical underpinning of our research and teaching embraces the inherently political nature of space, contestation and dissensus in its production, revealing the lines of power and agency that are written and rewritten in cities. Students begin to understand and investigate how space is produced and reproduced, often with unanticipated consequences, by understanding the constraints and influences on those producing it, and through analysis of events, controversies and moments of spatial problematisation. They grapple with reconciling this critical approach to urban design with the realities of market-led transformation represented not only by capital driven neoliberal plans, but also in the everyday realm where diverse socio-economic practices unfold within multi-functional space. Central to this methodological apparatus is the active partnership with local stakeholders such as urban activism groups, cultural associations, universities or nongovernmental organisations. These are encouraged in order to question the established context and propositions developed in the confines of studio projects and on extended research field trips (see also Chapter 21). The research is conducted through a ‘design map’, or a conceptual defining of design (in development) as an attempt to creatively understand, in a specific time and space, the transformative potential of an intervention. Such a definition of design, while provisional and instrumental, carries a twofold obligation related to processes and outcomes. On the one hand it is meant to facilitate a comprehensive imagination of transformations and changes. On the other it implies a practice that aligns the collective will and the voices of traditionally marginalised individuals with the public interest. Design is thus not merely viewed as a specialised, isolated, and object-driven aesthetic discipline, but rather an

applied to practice through the BUDD programme, thus seeks to analyse and then synthesise – or deconstruct and recalibrate – urban design as a contextual, responsive, and ultimately empowering practice.

TIPS FOR RESEARCHERS:

Figure 3.5 Contested urbanism, Brazil UMM housing movement

ENDNOTES 1

…‘™Ž‡†‰‹‰–Š‡†‹ƥ…—Ž–‹‡•‘ˆƒ†‘’–‹‰–Š‡Ǯ‰Ž‘„ƒŽ•‘—–Šǯ as a categorical neologism, this terminology serves to locate ‘—””‡ƪ‡…–‹‘•ƒ†’”ƒ…–‹…‡‹–Š‡•–”‡ƒ‘ˆŽ‹–‡”ƒ–—”‡–Šƒ– sees the shift of urbanising populations, urban tensions and innovative forms of resistance from the global North to the global South as a new theoretical and practical focus (Roy 2011a, Robinson 2006, 2002).

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action re-conceived as inclusive, alternative, and divergent. By identifying what design ‘is’ or ‘can be’ also serves as a flexible means through which to investigate architecture in a context of contested development, and how this confronts disciplinary bias and distorted visions of the urban realm (Figure 3.5). In building a knowledge base of cases across the world, the BUDD programme engages in south-south as well as northsouth trans-localities to triangulate urban design principles that engage with issues of scale (Figure 3.6), participation, spatial justice, and the politics of space and the physical manifestations of the political economy embedded in the city. This practice allows urban design to investigate new territory with a broad understanding of ‘… the role played by the aesthetics and politics of space – i.e. “the urban sensorium” … in producing and reproducing the durable disjunction between the consciousness of our urban “everyday life” … and the now global structure of social relations that is itself ultimately responsible for producing the spaces of our livedexperience’ (Goonewardena 2005: 55). It is this combination of the aesthetic and the political that reveals the depth of influence of urban design, and which acts not as a benign product of development, but as a contested channel through which corporations, governments and urban inhabitants are involved in the shaping of space. Our research approach,

3.

Ȉ Identify and analyse discursive and non-discursive elements in order to decipher the implicit nature and production of space, through its rhetoric, through its policies, and with its actors. Ȉ Represent and deconstruct physical and nonphysical elements that are present, ‘mapping’ the visible and latent with the intention of uncovering opportunities for design optimisation. Ȉ Explore present potentials, social practices, and material / immaterial spaces in a realistic yet future oriented manner. Ȉ Develop design alternatives, especially in extreme cases of polarised visions that threaten local parties, through a continuous engagement with the conflictive nature of the (re)production of space(s).

‹‰—”‡ͣǤͦ‡†‡Ƥ‹‰–Š‡‘–‹‘‘ˆ•…ƒŽ‹‰—’‹Šƒ”ƒ˜‹ȋ‘…‹Óƒǡ‘–‰‘‡”›ǡƒ•–ƒǡ‹œ‘ǡ͢͢͠͡Ȍ

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Explorations in Urban Design

4 The politics of space production: the case of Macau, China Paula Morais

interests of all dominant political regimes of both Portugal and China (Fernandes 2006: 2). For China, the territory was an open door to the foreign world, in particular a way to the West. The Portuguese motivation was primarily based on the profits of maritime trading until the nineteenth century when it came to an end due to the opening of China’s ports to international trade and competition from Hong Kong. As a result, Portugal’s interests in Macau started shifting from mercantile to politico-diplomatic ones (Fernandes 2006: 1) and to urban development as a means of economic success (Morais 2013). The territory’s political status, however, was often uncertain as Portugal’s presence was incessantly questioned by China. As a result Portugal had to explore ways of affirming its existence. Urban space was critical in this affirmation as a means to protect a clear state identity, which in turn sustained economic and political strategies. However, during this period the INTRODUCTION Chinese demographic majority, through their very presence, The strategic location of Macao on the Chinese territory, and continued to project the sense of a ‘Chinese city’ requiring the special relationship established between the Chinese and that the Portuguese cultural identity be firmly expressed in Portuguese authorities favoured an important interchange the spatial structure of the city, with the making of its urban ‘ˆ Š—ƒ ˜ƒŽ—‡• ‹ –Š‡ ˜ƒ”‹‘—• Ƥ‡Ž†• ‘ˆ …—Ž–—”‡ǡ •…‹‡…‡•ǡ form, first and foremost, a political statement. This, however, technology, art and architecture over several centuries. was a constant negotiation as there was never an ‘absolute ruler’ in the territory making its planning and development ȋͥ͢͠͠Ȍ an extremely flexible affair. In this constant negotiation, Since 1557, and until its handover from Portuguese to Chinese designs inevitably intertwined, and the resulting urban space sovereignty in December of 1999, Macau has served the reflected a combination of Portuguese and Chinese design The research from which this chapter draws explores the history of Macau’s production of space and the politics of territorial identity over the period from 1557 until 2009; a period defined by territorialisation (1557 to 1987) which aimed primarily at securing the Portuguese presence in the territory in the face of challenge by China, and was followed by processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, both driven by the post-1987 capitalist economy and globalisation. This chapter, however, focuses largely on the period of territorialisation in which the spatialisation of a Portuguese cultural identity was particularly evident in the production of public space. In short, this chapter explores urban design through a prism of cultural and political economy, in this case utilising the historical case of Macau.

traditions in a unique and polysemic space (see Figures 4.6 and 4.10) (Morais 2013). The results are now recognised globally by UNESCO World Heritage status, awarded in July 2005. In short, Macau’s uncertainty called for a constant reinvention, flexibility and strategies for the development of the territory which aimed to secure the Portuguese presence through the means of spatial identity until the SinoPortuguese Joint Declaration of 1987. These conditions produced a unique urban setting in Macau, which helped to underpin Deng Xiaoping’s policy of ‘one country, two systems’ in defining Macau as a Special Administrative Region (SAR) that ultimately (in 1999) integrated this territory into China with its very different society, culture and politico-economic structure (Mendes 2011, Fernandes 2006: 1). Since then, however, the Pearl River Delta Region (PRD) has witnessed an exceptionally fast economic development that in turn has fostered accelerated urbanisation. In fact from 1987 onwards Macau had been experiencing an incremental spatial erasure with the city’s urban form undergoing a severe transformation characterised by a strong densification and homogenisation such that the territory is becoming less distinguishable. Furthermore, Strategic Spatial Planning for the new Pearl River Delta (PRD) Mega City-Region defines a 9+2 City Region directed at ‘building 36

Explorations in Urban Design

Macau political system Macau as ‘Chinese Imperial Territorial Concession’ Macau with ‘Restricted Autonomy’ Macau as a ‘Portuguese Territory in Chinese Land’ Macau as a ‘Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China’, SAR

Time 1557–1849

1849–87

1887–1987

1987–99 1999–2009

2009–49

Spatial order project Spatial strategies and †‡Ƥ‹‰…‘–‡š– the territorialisation ‘”–—‰—‡•‡ƪ‡š‹„Ž‡—”„ƒ‹• project Sino-Portuguese foreign ”‡Žƒ–‹‘••‹‰‹Ƥ…ƒ…‡‹ urban form Unique spatial setting – UNESCO world Heritage award in 2005 the deterritorialisation ƒ…ƒ—ƪ‡š‹„Ž‡—”„ƒ‹• project Accelerated urbanisation, •’ƒ–‹ƒŽ‡”ƒ•—”‡ǡ†‡•‹Ƥ…ƒ–‹‘ and homogenisation; public narratives of loss the reterritorialisation Macau planning law and project masterplan – in study phase PRD Mega City-Region Strategic Spatial Planning New Macao/Zhuhai metropolitan area re-scaling

‹‰—”‡ͤǤ͡ƒ…ƒ—ǯ•’‘Ž‹–‹…ƒŽ•–ƒ–—•ƒ†•–ƒ–‡’”‘Œ‡…–•ˆ”‘ͥͥͧ͡Ȃͤͩ͢͠

1557 1849 1887 1928 1937–45 1966–67 1987

1999

Founding of Macau – according to Chinese scholars in the 14° and the 36° Year of Ka Tcheng [Jiajing] of Ming Dynasty (1535–1557) Portuguese Governor Ferreira do Amaral attempt for independence – Macau •–‘’•’ƒ›‹‰Žƒ†”‡––‘Š‹ƒƒ†‡š’‡Ž•Š‹‡•‡‘ƥ…‹ƒŽ• ‹‘Ǧ‘”–—‰—‡•‡ ”‹‡†•Š‹’ ƒ† ‘‡”…‡ ”‡ƒ–› ȋ”ƒ–‹Ƥ‡† ‹ ͤ͞–Š ’”‹Ž ‘ˆ 1888) Renewal of Sino-Portuguese Friendship and Commerce Treaty Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) and World War II (1939–45) – Macau claimed neutrality ‘12-3’ Incident and PRC agreement in 1967 Sino-Portuguese Joint Declaration of the Government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Government of the Republic of Portugal on the Question of Macau Handover of Macau to China in December 1999 – Macau becomes a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of PRC

Figure 4.2 Key political events and treaties in Macau’s development

context provided the inspiration for an exploration of the cultural and political economy dimensions of urban design utilising the historical case of Macau. The chapter explores part of this work, from a primarily Portuguese perspective, and demonstrates the power of viewing urban design through a cultural / political lens.

THE THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK

37

The politics of space production: the case of Macau, China

In short, Macau is an extremely complex entity, making it difficult to understand through one single perspective or discipline. Hence an interdisciplinary and mix-methodology approach was adopted to understanding it. Theoretically, this study combines notions of place-making with understandings from anthropology and urban studies and their relation to globalisation studies (ideas of territorialisation, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation) as a conceptual framework for analysis. It explores the question of the production of space in relation to cultural identity and the forms of its territorialisation in the service of the state’s political and economic directions. Qualitative methods were favoured, combining spatial, morphological, analysis and ethnography encompassing onsite observations and in-depth (semi-structured) interviews. This was combined with extensive analysis of primary and secondary sources, narratives, documents and maps from both Portuguese and Chinese sources. Through these means two key dimensions of the history of urban transformation focused the study, the political context and the physical spatial forms of the territory. Inevitably the economic, socio-cultural, planning and governance dimensions also featured prominently in the analysis. Macau’s history also needed to be understood in the context of globalisation as the territory was defined by the international milieu and affairs since its foundation, which had a profound impact in the production of space.

4.

a coordinated and sustainable world-class city-region’ that includes re-organising the spatial structure into three new metropolitan areas: i.e. Guangzhou/Foshan, HongKong/Shenzen and Macao/Zhuhai (Guangdong Provincial Government, Macau SAR and Hong Kong SAR 2009). This process is further enforcing an accelerated integration and territorial re-scaling in the name of global economic competitiveness. The result is that Macau’s distinctive urban form as ‘a frame for everyday socio-cultural relations is fading in the name of the homogenising forces of local, regional and world-scale capital accumulation and state re-scaling’ (Morais 2013). The result is that Macau’s history can be defined by three main spatial orders and state projects. First, territorialisation, exerted by the Portuguese administration from 1557 but particularly evident in the period framed by the 1887 LusoChinese Friendship and Commercial Treaty until the SinoPortuguese Joint Declaration in 1987. These processes aimed primarily to secure the Portuguese presence against a questioning Chinese state. This long period was followed by a period of deterritorialisation running up to the handover and beyond, and later by a process of reterritorialisation driven by the reconfiguration and re-scaling of forms of territorial organisation as the PRD new urban-region becomes a hinge for China’s global economic competitiveness. Both processes respond to the larger processes of a capitalist economy and globalisation (Figure 4.1). The remainder of this chapter, however, focuses largely on the territorialisation project. Until the first bilateral treaty – the 1887 Luso-Chinese Friendship and Commercial Treaty – the question of sovereignty and the true status of the territory caused continuing tensions and difficulties between the two powers and came to be known as the ‘Macau question’ (Saldanha 1996, Fernandes 2006). This conflict and ambiguity came to be reflected in the territory’s historiography with its origins in the different perspectives and analyses, of the Chinese and Portuguese (Figure 4.2). The complexity of the

How Does Urban Design Fit Into This?

and ‘construction’ of urban space (and their relation) helps to clarify the relationship between society and space, and the nature of urban design as a reflexive process involving intention, cause and effect. As the productive forces and the experiences of users can derive from different cultural values, analysing processes of space production alone will be insufficient. As such the study of Macau is part of a wider project – a work-in-progress at the time of writing – that aims to analyse both processes of ‘production’ and ‘construction’ of urban space in which Macau provides an ideal case study because of its complexity, notably its acute plurality and flux, which are defining characteristics of contemporary globalisation. Macau must also be understood as the outcome of a complex production of multiple agents (Cuthbert 2005: 223–34, Lash and Urry 1994, McLoughlin 1994, Saunders 1989, King 1984, Castells 1983, Lefebvre 1991a) and as a situated place in the lives of its residents with their own feelings and aspirations, as urban design is for and about people (Carmona et al. 2003). Arguably, at a time of ‘perceived flux and instability individuals need a strong sense of belonging in order to anchor themselves in civil society and to identify with and accept the legitimacy of their political institutions’ (UNESCO 1999: 7) – thus space has a role to play in this identification process. In the case of Macau the significance of territorial place and identity, as enabler of residents’ support and political identification, is clearly stated in the policy of ‘Loving the Motherland and Loving Macau’ which was adopted by the MSAR government and the Mainland in order to encourage national integration in support of China’s larger project of creating a harmonious society.

Urban design is ‘a form of – and contribution to – placemaking … it is for and about people, and the significance of place’ (Carmona and Tiesdell 2006: 1). Places are centres of meaning for individuals and these can span from the home to the neighbourhood, to the city and region, and to the level of the sovereign state (Tuan 1977, 2007: 179). At the territorial level urban space is an instrument to identify and locate relations of knowledge and power – both analytically and politically – as the territorial unit is the spatial scale of sovereignty and of the state (Tewdwr-Jones and Allmendinger 2007: 12, Rabinow 1982: 271–2, Foucault 1980: 148). The study of Macau revealed the power of urban space in spatialising territory and that space matters! In particular it revealed that urban design is not arbitrary, but constitutes the interface between the political economy of the state and the urban form of the territory (Cuthbert 2005). Part of this is the enforcement of a particular cultural identity through space that gives rise to a sense of identification and belonging for the residents of Macau. In this regard there is a fundamental difference between the ‘social production of space’ and the ‘social construction of space’. The first is understood as the ‘process responsible for the material creation of space’ combining ‘social, economic, ideological, and technological factors’; the second as the experience of space through which people’s social exchanges, memories, images and daily routines transform it and give it meaning (Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga 2003: 20, Low 2000: 128). In brief, space becomes place. Urban design and planning are therefore ‘processes of social production responsible for shaping the environment, encoding it with intentions and aspirations, uses and meanings’ (Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga URBAN DESIGN AND TERRITORIAL IDENTITY 2003: 20). As such, the design of space mediates between IN MACAU 1557–1999 state intentions and public needs, not in a purely geometrical or spatial sense but in terms of being the ‘equipment for Macau belongs to China. The Westerners merely have leased the working in’ (Heidegger 1927 quoted in Gorner 2007: 43), place and live there. How can we tolerate their regarding Macau where the two meet. So understanding both the ‘production’ as something of their own? (Ermida – the Viceroy of the Two 38

Explorations in Urban Design

Guangs’ memorial to the throne in 1732, in Zhupi Yuzhi 1723–1735: 75)

‹‰—”‡ͤǤͣ‡ƒŽ‡ƒ†‘“—ƒ”‡‹ͩͥ͡͡ȋ’Š‘–‘‰”ƒ’Š„›Ǥ—••‡ŽȌǡƒ‡šƒ’Ž‡‘ˆŠ‘™ Portuguese cultural identity references were already well expressed in the main civic square at the time, both in the buildings and in the traditional cobblestone pavement

Time 1557–1640 1640–1849

1927–49 1949–87 1987–99

Peninsula km 3.4

Total resident population 400

12.500

3.4

12.500

30.000

3.4

30.000

157.175

5.2 5.8 6.5 to 7.8

157.175 188.896 355.693

374.737 241.729 437.455

1999–2009 7th period of erasure 9.3 427.400 544.100 Note: Census information originally obtained from a compilation of Macau Census history including the islands of Taipa and Coloane, in Cónim et al 1998

Figure 4.4 Macau’s urban transformation

domain. It also saw large investments in the harbours via land reclamation (Figure 4.5). The fourth period started in 1927 which saw the beginning of a spatial

‘compression’ when China’s Civil war broke out and Macau’s population rose rapidly due to the resulting migration influx that was later aggravated by the Sino-Japanese War and World War II. 39

The politics of space production: the case of Macau, China

1849–1927

Peninsula morphological periods 1st period of founding and early settlement 2nd period of consolidation of the citadel ͟”†’‡”‹‘†‘ˆƒƥ”ƒ–‹‘ƒ† expansion 4th period of compression 5th period of decay and recovery ͢–Š’‡”‹‘†‘ˆ†‡•‹Ƥ…ƒ–‹‘

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Portugal’s aim to establish a clear sovereignty was dependent on making a territory that was clearly identifiable, hence contributing to the maintenance of the power of one group (the Portuguese) over another (the Chinese) (Figure 4.3). This territorialisation project was highly dependent on the spatialisation of a Portuguese cultural identity in which urban design and planning were instrumental. During this period Macau experienced a series of rapid urban transformations marking seven specific periods (Figure 4.4): the first period set the ‘founding and early settlement’ of Macau that was based on the building of temporary housing, religious and military structures that gradually become more permanent; the second period refers to the ‘consolidation of the citadel’ that entailed the strengthening of the previous structures and the building of new civic, religious and military fortifications that clearly delimitated the territory of the Portuguese from the neighbouring Chinese settlement. A third phase saw territorial ‘expansion and affirmation’ that started unofficially in 1846 and continued officially after the 1887 Sino-Portuguese Treaty. This process began the destruction of the citadel walls and the merging of the two settlements with the expansion of the Portuguese territory into Chinese

‹‰—”‡ͤǤͥȋ‹Ȍͨͨͩ͡†‹ƒ‰”ƒƒ–‹…‘—–Ž‹‡‘ˆ–Š‡ƒ…ƒ—’‡‹•—Žƒ ƒ†ȋ‹‹Ȍƒ’„›–א‹‘‡‹–‘”ˆ”‘ͨͨͩ͡ȋ‹‘…‹‡†ƒ†‡†‡

‡‘‰”ƒƤƒ†‡‹•„‘ƒȌǤŠ‡†‹ƒ‰”ƒ•Š‘™•–™‘ƒ‹…‹”…Ž‡•–Šƒ– correspond to the Portuguese citadel and Chinese village of ‘‰Ǧž–Šƒ–ǡ’”‹‘”–‘ͨͤͩ͡ǡ™‡”‡†‹˜‹†‡†„›–Š‡…‹–ƒ†‡Ž™ƒŽŽ•

This trend lasted until the foundation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. Urban transformation was relatively smooth during this period, marked by the completion of substantial public infrastructure (i.e. sewerage and road paving) and by two key symbolic attempts to affirm Portugal’s power in the placement of statues of Governor Ferreira do Amaral and Coronel Nicolau de Mesquita in two of the main squares in Macau (Figure 4.6, also see Figure 4.9) (Pina-Cabral 2002: 75–7, Fernandes 2000: 461). The fifth period was a time of urban ‘decay and recovery’ after the Second World War, and it was only in the 40

Explorations in Urban Design

1960s, largely due to the new gambling and entertainment industry concessions, that the territory’s economy began an upturn. This period of slow recovery lasted until the early ’80s with major projects that included the strengthening of connections from Macau peninsula to the islands of Taipa and Coloane through two main bridges with the intention of fostering further development (Figure 4.7). At the start of the 1980s and after the 1987 Treaty, rapid changes started to occur marking the opening of a sixth period of ‘densification’ until the handover in 1999. At present Macau is defined by a period of strong economic growth, which

‹‰—”‡ͤǤͦ‡ƒŽ‡ƒ†‘“—ƒ”‡‹–Š‡ͩͦ͡͠•Ǥ‡ƒŽ‡ƒ†‘•“—ƒ”‡ ‹•…‘•‹†‡”‡†–‘„‡–Š‡…‡–”‡‘ˆƒ…ƒ—ƒ†ƒƤ‡‡šƒ’Ž‡‘ˆ physical space polysemics and of openness in its ability to host both cultures, for example the celebration of China’s national day with a monumental archway and Portuguese colonial power via the statue of Coronel Vicente Nicolau de Mesquita (right) ™Š‘•‡…—”‡†–Š‡ƒ””‹‡” ƒ–‡‹ͨͤͩ͡ƒ†•‘’”‡˜‡–‡†–Š‡ Chinese regaining the peninsula

Public Space and the Spatialisation of a Portuguese Cultural Identity Whilst Macau was characterised by a plural society, in fact the Chinese constituted the large majority of the population; about 95 per cent between 1887 and 1987, with the Portuguese declining from 6.7 per cent in 1889, to 2.4 per cent in 1927

41

The politics of space production: the case of Macau, China

Ȉ The political-economy context was defined by an ambiguous political status quo and a free-market economy in which the Chinese held the private

In the latter regard, the division of public administrative power and investment capacity created a system that required continuous negotiation for development amongst the two different ethno-power structures. So, in spite of the primary intention to build a ‘Portuguese identity’ urban design was intrinsically linked to this negotiation process and fused design cultures into a polysemic space (ambiguous with multiple meanings e.g. see Figure 4.6) (Nietzsche 2000, 1872, Lynch 1960), that also reflected an open and plural society. Within this context, the character of the territory became fixed in space and highly identifiable (Smith 1986: 1) and with a strong sense of individuality, whilst notions of ‘difference’ are still present in the official discourse of Macau: ‘A World of Difference, the Difference is Macau’ (http://www.macautourism.gov.mo/en/).

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in turn has enforced accelerated urbanisation leading to a process of severe ‘spatial erasure’. Because the territory’s physical border with the mainland – the Barrier Gate – was inflexible, territory had to expand by land reclamation and densification. The result of successive phases of development was therefore that between 1557 and 1999 the original peninsula coastline extended from 3.4km2 to 5.2km2. Within these confines, the urban form of Macau originated from three fundamental factors – an ethnically divided political-economy, a plural society, and a flexible planning which involved Portuguese and Chinese design cultures – all highly interrelated:

investment capacity and the Portuguese the public administrative power. Ȉ The plural society originated mainly from large population flows during the golden age of trading (sixteenth to nineteenth centuries) and during the twentieth century, largely due to the surrounding political instability. Ȉ Whilst Portuguese urbanism generally entailed a strong adaptation to local contexts, with diverse spatial patterns created across the globe (Portas 2005), the case of Macau was of an unusual nature as its ambiguous political position led to uncertainty and increased flexibility in the territory’s planning to explore new development strategies.

‹‰—”‡ͤǤͧȋ‹Ȍͩͧ͢͡ƒ†ȋ‹‹Ȍͩͨ͡͠†‹ƒ‰”ƒƒ–‹…‘—–Ž‹‡•‘ˆƒ…ƒ—’‡‹•—Žƒǣ–Š‡ͩͧ͢͡†‹ƒ‰”ƒƒŽ”‡ƒ†›•Š‘™•–Š‡‡™”‡…Žƒƒ–‹‘’Žƒ outlined by two main areas, the Outer Harbour and new Industrial Zone in the north (large red circle – f) delineating the development ‘ˆ–Š‡’”‡˜‹‘—•Š‹‡•‡ƒ‰”‹…—Ž–—”ƒŽƒ”‡ƒ•‡ƒ”‘‰Ǧžȋ˜‹•‹„Ž‡‹–Š‡ͨͨͩ͡ƒ’ȌǤŠ‡ͩͨ͡͠†‹ƒ‰”ƒ•Š‘™•–Š‡˜‘Ž—‡‘ˆ†‡•‹Ƥ…ƒ–‹‘ –Šƒ––Š‡’‡‹•—Žƒ‡š’‡”‹‡…‡†ƒˆ–‡”ͩͤͩ͡ǡ‹…‘–”ƒ•––‘–Š‡—”„ƒ‹•ƒ–‹‘Ž‡˜‡Ž‹ͩͧ͢͡ƒ†™ƒ”†‡…ƒ†‡•ǤŽŽ–Š‡”‡…Žƒƒ–‹‘ƒ”‡ƒ•‘ˆ–Š‡ ͩ͢͡͠•ƒ”‡‘™—”„ƒ‹•‡†–‘ƒŽƒ”‰‡‡š–‡–‹…Ž—†‹‰–Š‡ͩͥ͡͠•Žƒ†ƤŽŽ‘ˆƒ‹ƒ ”ƒ†‡ƒ›ȋŽƒ”‰‡”‡†…‹”…Ž‡Ȃ„Ȍ

and just 0.6 per cent in 1980 (Cónim et al. 1998). So if urban space was ‘socially produced’ and ‘socially constructed’ (Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga 2003), for a long time there was an inherent tension at the heart of these processes as the intended production of a state identity by the Portuguese administration was inherently disconnected from the constructions of the majority of its Chinese public. This context led to a spatial coexistence of different design cultures: the Chinese housing and religious structures (the 42

Explorations in Urban Design

temples) reflected their own design culture and Portuguese design was expressed in the civic, military and religious buildings (the churches) and in a few villas located mainly in the old citadel area. The result was that Chinese housing structures dominated the built environment, largely constituted from the traditional housing fabric of ‘Pátios’ (or ‘Wai’ in Chinese) (Wang and Cheong 2010) (Figure 4.8), whilst the Portuguese administration imposed streets, squares, urban infrastructure and an overall urban form designed in

Monuments as Symbols of Power In 1940 statues of the Governor Ferreira do Amaral and Coronel Vicente de Mesquita, the military heroes who established the

In reference to [telegram] 78 SEC, I inform Your Excellency that Macau has witnessed in the course of its history a repetition of events of a socio-political nature. Thus, it is also witnessed very special facts concerning statues, as observed in [telegram] 36 ‘ˆͤ‘˜‡„‡”ͩͥͥ͡ƒ†ȑ–‡Ž‡‰”ƒȒ͡‘ˆ͢͡ ƒ—ƒ”›ͩͥͦ͡ǡ from this Government. The installation of the statue of Cristo Rei referred to in 1 SEC was not followed through and its pedestal ™ƒ• ƒŽ•‘ †‡•–”‘›‡†Ǥ  ˆ‡™ ›‡ƒ”• ƒ‰‘ǡ Ƥ‰—”‡• ‘ˆ Š‹‡•‡ ‡ thrown to the ground under the horse of the statue of Ferreira do Amaral were also removed. The statue of Coronel Mesquita, hero of [Fort] Pantaleão on Chinese territory, was also initially 43

The politics of space production: the case of Macau, China

the Portuguese tradition. Leal Senado and Ferreira do Amaral squares, in particular, represented fine examples of how Portuguese cultural identity was spatialised – and how public space was instrumental in this territorialisation process (Figure 4.9). Public spaces were powerful symbolic references at the territorial scale hence assisting in the production and maintenance of a state identity, in the image of Portugal.

4.

Figure 4.8 Macau traditional Chinese housing, ‘Pátios’

autonomy of the territory in 1849, were placed, respectively, in the Ferreira do Amaral and Leal Senado squares. Amid World War II these statues symbolically represented Portuguese sovereignty and reinforced the status quo, not least the neutrality of Macau. Both statues were later brought down as ‘excessively colonialist symbols’ as declared by the ViceDirector of the PRC State Council’s Office for Hong Kong and Macau Affairs in 1990 (Pina-Cabral 2002). In fact the statue of Governor Ferreira do Amaral (Figure 4.9) was removed as late as 1992 (now located in Lisbon) whilst the Coronel Vicente de Mesquita statue was placed in Leal Senado and lasted only until 1966 when a public uproar in the ‘12–3’ incident amidst the period of the Cultural Revolution in China brought down the statue. The statue was later replaced before the handover by an armillary sphere that represents the Portuguese discoveries, also found on the Portuguese coat of arms (Pina-Cabral 2002: 77) (Figure 4.10). If Leal Senado and Ferreira do Amaral are the most prominent examples of this symbolic projection of image, then the public monument honouring the 400 years of Portuguese presence in Macau would have been a third, if it had ever come into existence. This monument ‘that never was’ was cancelled following pressure from the PRC as revealed in a telegram from the then Governor of Macau to the Overseas Minister bemoaning a decision to delay its construction (Goncalves Pereira 1995: 61, Pina-Cabral 2002: 128):

‹‰—”‡ͤǤͩȋ‹Ȍ ŽŽ—•–”ƒ–‹‘‘ˆ–Š‡•–ƒ–—‡‘ˆ ‘˜‡”‘” ‡””‡‹”ƒ†‘ ƒ”ƒŽ‹ ‡””‡‹”ƒ†‘ƒ”ƒŽ•“—ƒ”‡‹–Š‡ͩͧ͡͠•ȋ’Š‘–‘„› ƒ”Ž‘•‹ƒ•ȌȋŽ‡ˆ–Ȍƒ†ȋ‹‹Ȍ‹–•”‡‘˜ƒŽ‹ͩͩ͢͡ȋ’Š‘–‘„›—‘ Calçada Bastos) (right)

meant to be placed at Portas do Cerco. Due to Chinese pressure the idea was abandoned and later was placed near the Leal Senado where it stayed. I fully agree with the opinions expressed in Your Excellency’s 78 SEC but the matter has to be carefully considered and we have to wait, as Your Excellency says, for a more opportune moment. Right now, it is not easy to tell when –Š‹•™‹ŽŽ„‡Ǥȋ‡…”‡––‡Ž‡‰”ƒˆ”‘ ‘˜‡”‘”‘ˆƒ…ƒ—‹ͩͦͦ͡Ȃͧͤ –‘–Š‡˜‡”•‡ƒ•‹‹•–‡”‘ˆƒŽƒœƒ”ͩͦͥ͡Ȃͧͣǡ•‡–ƒ†”‡…‡‹˜‡† ‘ ͥ͡ ƒ”…Š ͩͦͧ͡ǡ ”‡ˆ‡”‡…‡ —„‡” ͩͥ Ǣ ‹ ‹ƒǦƒ„”ƒŽ ͢͢͠͠ǣ͢͢͢Ȍ The history of Macau’s squares and monuments provides evidence of how the production of public space was a political project primarily aimed at assisting the spatialisation of a Portuguese cultural identity; its territorialisation.

territory became ‘an autonomous community in the heart of China’ (Saldanha 1996) whose political-economy, society and urban form evolved following negotiated conventions between China and Portugal that ultimately gave rise to a polysemic space. Urban space played a fundamental role in this, assisting the Portuguese to re-affirm a political status CONCLUSION quo and securing its presence in the territory particularly through the design of public space. From 1557 to 1999 Macau developed as a distinctive territory; Today Macau’s distinctive urban space is being relentlessly a place with a unique identity, context and society. The erased and replaced by new highly dense structures leading 44

Explorations in Urban Design

‘†ƒ› Ž‹ˆ‡ ‹• †‹ơ‡”‡– ƒ† –‘ ‰‘ „ƒ… is impossible. I do not like the tall buildings, the density and the scale. (Interviewee in Macau: Chinese born in Macau)

The politics of space production: the case of Macau, China

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This mass elimination of the characteristic urban space will constitute a loss not only for the territory’s identity and its citizens but also for the political economy of Macau for which it has been a critical asset. This is to be profoundly regretted when, as the research has shown, public space has been so important as an expression of the political and cultural values of Macau, that have been so clearly demonstrated through the city’s history (Morais 2013). Ultimately this ‘place loss’ may impact on the stability of the territory’s unique ‹‰—”‡ͤǤ͡͠‡ƒŽ‡ƒ†‘“—ƒ”‡‹͢͠͡͠™ƒ••–‹ŽŽ…‘•‹†‡”‡†ƒ‡›”‡ˆ‡”‡…‡‹ƒ…ƒ—ǯ• society and culture, threatening the ‹†‡–‹–›Ǣ‘™™‹–Šƒƒ”‹ŽŽƒ”›•’Š‡”‡’Žƒ…‡†ƒ–‹–•…‡–”‡”‡ƪ‡…–‹‰–Šƒ–ˆ‘—†‹–Š‡ ‘”–—‰—‡•‡‘ƒ–‘ˆ”•ǤŠ‡‡†—”‹‰’‘Ž›•‡‹…‹†‡–‹–›‘ˆƒ…ƒ—‹•ƒŽ•‘”‡ƪ‡…–‡†‹ future success of China’s integration policies – ‘Loving the Motherland and the lanterns celebrating China’s Mid-Autumn festival Loving Macau’ – which is in turn based to a general homogenisation. If this work, but also in the wider public and on the idea of parallel affiliations with continues, very soon Macau will be no institutional reactions (e.g. UNESCO, local and national identity, namely the different to many other places in China. ICOMOS, and local NGOs) that have ‘one country, two systems’ (Morais 2013). In the end, urban design (as was Furthermore, as another part of the been extensively covered by local and research to which the above discussion international media (Morais 2013, 2009): the case in Macau) is situated within complex multidimensional political, relates revealed, its citizens are being progressively de-contextualised from ˆ–‡” ͩͩͩ͡ –Š‡ ‡š–‡”ƒŽ ‹–‡”‡•–• ƒ”‡ economic and cultural contexts that place and as a result are experiencing stronger than the local, so there is ultimately determine the form it a ‘sense of loss’, something that is an annihilation of the culture of takes and the uses it is subject to. cutting across all cultural groups. accommodating international interests. Understanding these dimensions, as the research from which this chapThese narratives of loss are evident, not There is an incremental destruction. only in the numerous public accounts (Interviewee in Macau: Portuguese ter is drawn is attempting to do, represents an important stepping off collected by the author’s ethnographic born in Macau)

point for the study of urban design. The combination of an interdisciplinarity perspective and a mix of research methods to address these issues represent perfect companions on this journey to understand the complex production and construction of urban space.

TIPS FOR RESEARCHERS: Ȉ An historical spatial political-economy perspective can help to understand complex urban contexts – cities are not disconnected from the past and some answers are only revealed through history. Ȉ ‘Official’ accounts of the city are not always consistent with the everyday life experiences of urban residents, thus analysing the ‘social production’ and ‘social construction’ of space is essential. Ȉ The creation of the city is a political act, sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit but always informed by culture and economy. Understanding the complex interaction between the three and how they impact on urban form remains a key challenge for urban design research.

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5

Urban design in the realm of urban studies Pushpa Arabindoo

Debates in the twentieth century questioned the endurance of urban design as a coherent discipline with many choosing instead to locate it rather conveniently in the interstices of architecture and planning. For some the discipline exhibits a continued preoccupation with aesthetic formalism that has triggered a general dissolution of the idea of the social. Many scholars, for example, have long made a plea for an alternative social imagination of urban design, in the process reorienting it towards social sciences. While the central argument of this chapter to situate urban design and urban studies together as cognate disciplines might seem to endorse this trend, there is a departure here, as the attempt is to generate an urban knowledge that can offer a counter-narrative of contemporary cities, mobilising a new space of critical intervention. Such interactions can help to decipher the rapidly urbanising, boundless landscape where, by shifting the attention from design to a focus on the urban, the resulting recombinant urbanism emphasises not only the rescaling of the urban but also rethinking its postmetropolitan form through the emergent landscape of regional urbanism. Using examples from pedagogy as well as practice this chapter argues that the tools and techniques of this recombinant urbanism facilitate a never seen before spatial imagination and potential new theories of visualisation; all with significant implications for research.

INTRODUCTION Despite Cuthbert’s (2010: 444) timely reminder that urban design is a trans-historical process as old as cities and civilisation, and if anything, ‘urban design invented itself’, recent urban design debates have ironically featured a heavy dose of scepticism over its endurance as a coherent discipline generating its own knowledge (Schurch 1999). Confronted by such doubts over its ability to function as a field, practice or profession, many scholars have commonly argued for its repositioning where it can be informed by other disciplines beyond the bravado of ‘just design’ (Verma 2011). Notwithstanding the risk of fracture from the diverse knowledges, it seems that the only way out for urban design is to borrow from other primate disciplines, an approach that has characterised the fate of contemporary urban design (see Chapter 1). Thus, through much of the twentiethcentury urban design found itself conveniently located at the interstices of architecture and planning, coming across either as an extension of architectural imagination or as the physical consequence of state planning policies. In this position outcomes have too often represented a commodified version of aesthetic formalism characterised by a general dissolution of the idea of the social. Responding to the need for an alternative social imagination of urban design, scholars

such as Cuthbert (2007) and Verma (2011) have emphasised the need to disentangle it from the traditional confines of architecture and planning, specifically recommending its reorientation to social science. In this sense, at first glance an argument for situating urban design alongside the cognate discipline of urban studies might seem to be similar to such convictions that an engagement with the social sciences is central to legitimising urban design. While this might be the starting point of the chapter, it signals a departure as well. For, such a repositioning is not just about strengthening urban design but also about generating a new urban knowledge that can offer a critical counter-narrative of contemporary cities. This chapter argues that by repositioning urban design alongside the allied discipline of urban studies, the push is not merely for a socially defined understanding of urban design but a more meaningful recognition of the urban condition as both a social production of form and an inherently spatial process. At a moment when social sciences, particularly urban studies, are taking a spatial turn, it seems that there is an opportunity for urban design, which fundamentally is about the production of space. This way, one does not reduce urban design’s preoccupation with space to one of determinism or fetish but allows it to partake in the socio-spatial dialectic in a more useful manner (Soja 2003). On the other hand, in spite of the decidedly spatial imagery of the urban studies narratives, the focus of such texts has been on subjectivities defined by class, race, gender, language, ethnicity, religion, identity, and nationality with little influence of the broader trends in architecture, urban design and planning. As two closely related realms of studying the city, what is being offered here is the forging of a productive working interface between two ‘fields’ where urban design and urban studies resonate together to mobilise new spaces of critical intervention though a new genre of ‘interactionist urbanists’ (Lin 1995). There are epistemological and methodological challenges attached to the production of this proposed ‘recombinant urbanism’, and these are 48

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explored in this chapter.1 Such a gesture shifts attention from design to a focus on the urban, emphasising the need to rethink and rescale the urban in a more challenging manner between the local and the regional/global. The application of recombinant urbanism tools to this postmetropolitan (see below) phenomenon is illustrated through an examination of the emergent landscape of regional urbanism, briefly considering examples from pedagogy and practice. They help set up a critically effective framework, avoiding the placeless generalisations sometimes associated with the design and planning of regions.

RETHINKING THE ‘URBAN’ Although academic concern for the city is as old as the city itself, urban studies as a specific intellectual endeavour emerged in the early twentieth century when a variety of disciplines from the social sciences came together to outline powerful theories explaining the trends of urban society. Most of them were beguilingly simple models underlining not so useful paradigmatic pervasiveness that deflected ‘attention away from the project of analyzing the full diversity of urban forms, generating instead a series of unproductive debates regarding the intellectual significance of particular cities’ (Brenner 2003: 206). The problem also lies in the fact that by being both the where and the what of study, the city is marked by ambiguities which undermines the endeavour of urban studies. Bogged down by simple dualisms that remain rigidly fixed on either/or dichotomies or binary logic, urban studies finds itself constrained by simplistic invocations of theorising the city with much of this work remaining uncritical and impractical (Soja 2003). Widely seen as a restless discipline, urban studies, in contrast to the narrower focus of urban design on the design of cities, seems to be caught in the trap of studying almost everything in society under the rubric of the ‘urban’, not to mention the ‘extraordinary slipperiness of the urban

Regional Urbanism RESCALING THE ‘URBAN’ The interaction of urban design and urban studies produces a new kind of recombinant urbanism that can potentially not only restore the hard won objectivity of urban social science, but also decipher the rapidly urbanising, boundless landscape. To gain a precise understanding of what the urban

To many, regionalism is an ambiguous term which at best means thinking bigger. Decades of association with the planning discourse has led to a narrow understanding of the region as something that is simply larger than the city, a scalar expansion from the urban. However, a body of urban studies scholars (primarily from the LA School) have recognised an ongoing radical reorganisation of regional space, referred 49

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is today, how it manifests itself and what it could become, first of all, this recombinant urbanism needs to reconceptualise the urban question as a ‘scale question’ (Lefebvre 1976 cited in Brenner 2000), one that is still a challenge within urban studies. Most Marxist scholars view the urban as an entirely accidental and random choice of geographical scale. Moreover, everyday scalar terms such as local, urban, regional, national, and global are considered as static entities representing distinctive socioterritorial processes (localisation, urbanisation, regionalisation, nationalisation, and globalisation) (Brenner 2000). On the contrary, these scales ‘cannot be understood in isolation from one another, as mutually exclusive or additive containers; rather they constitute deeply intertwined moments and levels of single worldwide sociospatial totality’ (Brenner 2000: 369). In this context, it would be too simplistic to understand the urban as a self-defined scalar entity. Instead, we need to allow a multiscalar articulation of the urban. Thus, the local, regional, national or global are not distinct spatial fixes but a scalar flux where the urban is continuously rescaled from the local to the global in a condition of planetary urbanisation (Brenner and Schmid 2011). Specifically, regional re-territorialisation stands out actively as a crucial geographical arena illustrating this process of rescaling. This is where urban design offers an extraordinary opportunity for spatialising urban studies, providing exemplars in terms of rethinking the forms of the urban, particularly through the new emergent landscape of regional urbanism.

5.

phenomenon itself’ (Brenner et al. 2011: 226). As urban studies has come to imply an all-embracing ubiquitous research on cities, the need for a new form of critical engagement becomes obvious, through which urban studies and urban design can become more relevant to the larger project of critical urban theory. The kind of critical urbanism that is being called for is not just about addressing questions concerning the articulation and possible disarticulation between capitalism and urbanism (Goonawardene 2011). Instead it is one that doesn’t remain critical theory but overcomes it in practice (Brenner 2009). To achieve this, it is essential to rethink our basic assumptions regarding the object and site of our research, the ‘urban’. It begs a move away from the city as a bounded and homogenous entity to a focus on the urban as a point of formulation for widely divergent and dispersed processes. In the case of urban design, this requires a specific shift in thinking in terms of the urban rather than design, as the urban has remained a passive backdrop instead of something that is constitutive of subjectivities and socialities (Rutland 2008). But as Keil (2003) reminds us what we refer to as the urban is a complex, multiscale and multidimensional process where the general and specific aspects of the human condition meet the city/urban as a distinct object of critical urban research. And this is perhaps where urban design and urban studies together can play a pivotal role in clarifying the complex yet ambivalent relationship between social relations and the production of space as they engage (theoretically and empirically) with the plurality of the urban in acknowledging the multiple spatialities that define the essence of the city.

to generally as a city-region and more specifically as the postmetropolis (Soja 2000). The resulting new regionalism is not an alternative to a focus on cities but a radical reshaping of the urban in what is now clearly a process of regional urbanisation. While metropolitan urbanisation occupied a singular scale, regional urbanisation is definable at multiple scales, from the local to the global through a peculiar scalar convergence occurring in the growth of regional cities (Soja 2011). As concepts of city and region merge and blur challenging conventional views of what constitutes the urban and the non-urban, there is uncertainty regarding its empirical reality. Urban studies scholars (at least some of them) acknowledge this new regionalism as a specific cognitive interest, but struggle to provide a more concrete understanding of its spatiality. For, even though the region can be a true life space (Lynch 1976), in general, major elements of the urban are not clearly legible to most people at this scale, thereby leading to a misconstrued understanding that it cannot constitute part of the urban experience. But, contrary to Soja’s (2009) assertion that urban design is trapped in a scalar warp, this chapter contends that the much needed clarity of regional urbanisation comes from an urban design embedded spatial imagination where the urban as both form and scale is deconstructed and reconstituted to reveal the social geography and changing built environment of the postmetropolis, an aspect that has been well explored by urban design, both pedagogically and through practice. Lynch (1976) is perhaps one of the earliest scholars to set a precedent as he outlined suggestions for experiencing the sensory quality of the region through a glossary of different tools including a spatio-temporal mapping of sub-landscape typologies, detailing its ambient characteristics through the use of images and indices. In spite of these clear-cut recommendations, it must be acknowledged that, within the realm of planning, managing the sense of a region has tended to get bogged down by techniques that do not go beyond the lamentations, artistic conceptions, exhortations, and overblown, unrealistic site plans. As a result, the region 50

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has often been perceived as a coarse-grain extended version of the urban, producing inexpressive, fuzzy renderings of the regional habitat. Over the years, several urban design studios in different North American universities have addressed the challenges of the American metropolis and metropolitan regions. Kelbaugh (1997) provides a good overview of a decade of urban design based studio charrettes conducted by the University of Washington to bring greater coherence to the Seattle region. Emphasising the use of three-dimensional graphic tools of urban design to understanding, designing, planning and developing the region, these workshops have tried to develop a typological understanding of critical regionalism by reinstating the neighbourhood as a unit of the region. More recently, the urban design programme at Graduate School of Design, Harvard University has introduced a three-year studio exercise speculating about alternative futures for the Mumbai Metropolitan Region. This is quite different from the landmark Project on the City studios lead by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas which sought to rethink the urban scale through a blatant ‘architecture of bigness’ discourse. The pedagogical thrust of the current studio is towards a collaborative approach with other (non-architecture) programmes including the Harvard Business School, Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Law School whereby urban design is employed to provide a more nuanced inter-disciplinary understanding of the socioecological dimensions of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (Figure 5.1). From a practice-based perspective, a good illustration of this effort is the Le Grand Paris project, a state-led initiative to rethink Paris not as a city but as a region, using approaches that neither seem like bland planning strategies nor can be seen simply as large-scale urban design. Initiated in 2007 by the then French President Nicolas Sarkozy to produce a new political vision for Paris, Le Grand Paris was also meant to create a new paradigm for urbanism. What is notable is the characteristic urban design approach adopted in this restructuring of the relations between the city and

of the postmetropolitan condition. They demonstrate a profound shift in methodologies that clearly suggest the kind of recombinant urbanism that this chapter has been proposing by bringing together epistemological

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its region. Ten teams of international architects were commissioned to create an imagined community, a set of social relations, an economy and an institutional framework that operates in and through a multiscalar reorganisation

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Figure 5.1 Approaches to regional urbanism in urban design pedagogy. (i) Using new urbanism to rethink the Seattle region, Charrettes and design studios at the Department of Architecture, University of Washington (top-left). (ii) The Harvard Project on the City led by Rem Koolhaas exploring his architecture of bigness (bottom-left). (iii) Extreme Urbanism: an inter-disciplinary studio at the Graduate School of Design to rethink the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (top-right)

and methodological aspects from the two realms of urban design and urban studies. The resulting new consensus of urbanism is not without challenges. It highlights a complex, changing, non-local and mixed socio-spatial reality that is the urban, even as concerns about the hierarchical nature of spaces and intensified polarisation at all levels cannot be ignored (Enright 2012). Nevertheless, this approach has facilitated a renewed spatial imagination of the region, exploring issues in the form (literally) of the social, economic, cultural and political. It not only revamps the inherited cartographies that have long underpinned urban investigations but also radically reconfigures the urban as they clarify the topological and typological characteristics of regional urbanisation (Figure 5.2). Urban design is used effectively to redraw the morphology of the region, not merely as a pattern-making exercise but to grasp in the same object the micro-scale detail of everyday situations as well as the strategic territorial scale of the metropolitan region as a whole. While it risks exposing the ground for territorial reappropriation and speculation, these schemes to a large extent recast our imagination of the urban landscape making crucial connections across scale between the local and the regional, providing an immediacy and physical congruity to an otherwise non-decrepit zone of urban wasteland.

Figure 5.2 Rescaling the urban. Seine Métropole: Paris, Rouen, Le Havre. Proposal for le Grand Paris by Antoine Grumbach & Associés. © AGA

NEW EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL TOOLS One reason why some scholars in urban studies view urban design with suspicion is (in their view) the latter’s prioritisation of the visual, based on an assumed aesthetic consciousness that is supposedly bereft of more pressing social, economic, cultural and political issues. For social scientists, this is a superficial preoccupation easily favouring the marketisation and commodification of the built environment. If social sciences have any kind of engagement with the visual, it is purely methodological with little acknowledgement of its ability to mediate and constitute social relationships. Rooted in this prejudice, urban studies 52

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scholars have been quick to reject the instrumentality of urban design in the field of urbanism, deliberately reducing its core epistemological basis emphasising typological and morphological knowledge as a mere methodological or even less, a classificatory exercise. This seemingly rigid and fixed toolkit is of little use to urban studies’ persistence in deciphering the city as text, signs or representation, on the basis that such an approach is more dynamic and fluid. Only a few such as Zukin (1987: 144) acknowledge that urban morphology could possibly not only resolve the methodological disagreements between neo-Marxist, neo-Weberian and mainstream analysts but also integrate cultural and economic analysis showing ‘how the spatial and built environment concretizes, transmits, and transforms

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involving the production of maps and diagrams as not mere graphic representations of the urban plan based on a limited sense of a pattern language. Instead, it would be helpful to acknowledge its approach to city-making where its suggested typological and morphological intensification of the region can provide a useful epistemological framing for urban studies. As l’AUC, one of the ten teams involved in the project clarify, the use of typological (and morphological) diagrams is not to reinforce the old formula of a classificatory order but to generate an ‘urbanism of substance’, maximising the intensity between local, metropolitan and global conditions (2011: 105–9). Its preoccupation extends beyond the formal to the sociocultural addressing the scale of the post-metropolis as not just a mere plan but grasping simultaneously the microscale detail of everyday situations as well as the territorial scale of the region as a whole. While the ten urban design schemes of Le Grand Paris could be criticised as a state-sanctioned,

5.

the city’s constituent social interests’. But for many, the inherent reliance of urban design on maps and diagrams is seen disparagingly as a process that involves the reduction of the urban landscape to a strictly codified set of regulations and guidelines. This is because of the suspicion with which urban studies and social sciences in general view the process of mapping as expressions of power/knowledge. While it would be too naive to assume that the world can be truthfully mapped using scientific techniques that capture and display spatial information, there is no point in dismissing urban design for failing to reveal the truth of the landscape. For, the alternative for the social sciences, to seek refuge in a positivistic domain like GIS can prove to be equally situated and value-laden as urban design mapping exercises. This is perhaps why it might be useful for urban studies to take a closer, less critical view of projects like Le Grand Paris if only to better understand the urban design led process

commercial cartographic initiative, practices of urban design have, in the past, shown a sensitivity to accommodating alternative viewpoints through counter mapping, challenging equally well the self-referential nature of such proposals claiming accuracy of the urban condition. This compels one to rethink the typological and morphological exercises of urban design as not only methodological but as epistemological and ontological practices that allow us to address quite effectively the more complex question of what is the ‘urban scale’ by literally reassembling the urban. Empirically, the kind of mapping employed by urban design is a good alternative to what is popularly employed in urban studies – GIS, setting up a practice which Kitchin and Dodge (2007) recognise as not just a narrow understanding of spatial representation but also the pursuit of representational solutions (not necessarily pictorial) to solve relational, spatial problems.

stunting creative expression, alternative visioning, debate and, ultimately perhaps, innovation in the built environment (Moore 2013). Thus, it is quickly dismissed as an instrument of urban entrepreneurialism and competitiveness abetting the creation of suspect imaginaries and the production of global relational geographies (McCann 2008, Peck and Tickell 2002). While this is harsh and a tad unfair, urban design’s conviction in stories about best places can seem romanticised and even privileging the ‘city of superlatives’ (Beauregard 2003). Developing the hybrid space of recombinant urbanism proves useful in this context where applying urban studies’ critically reflective lens of comparative urbanism effectively tempers urban design’s boisterous search for excellence and helps avoid the narrow paradigmatic circumscription of bestpractice driven initiatives (Figure 5.3).

Implications for Research

URBAN DESIGN IN URBAN STUDIES

Reflecting on what he considers as the existential problem of urban studies, Katz (2010) recounts how a persistent, depressing narrative of urban crisis poses a dilemma for urban studies as a field. He calls urgently for a viable counternarrative that does not naturalise public failure as the master narrative of urban history. Desperate for success stories that could be assembled into a coherent tale of progress and hope, he is at the same time aware that one cannot completely ignore the challenge of urban decline and failed urban policies. It is in the pursuit of this impossible space that this chapter suggests the development of a recombinant urbanism that brings together the essential elements of urban studies and urban design. The enthusiasm of the latter to do good and solve urban problems can be infectious and a good antidote to the cynicism of the former. For instance, urban design optimistically relies on best practices to provide a trenchant critique of current practice and develop better systems which, on the other hand, is considered with scorn by urban studies as something that is saddled with normative assumptions

If urban design is criticised today for being atheoretical (see Chapter 1), it is in large part because its intellectual modesty is frequently mistaken for insubstantial theory. Critics are unreasonably mercurial in owning or disowning it, fixated as they are on a transient and superficial understanding centred around its aesthetic currency. Many believe that if it is to develop a guiding sensibility in explaining the wide array of urban transformations, it needs to be rooted in a deeper ideological reflection borrowed from other disciplines, particularly the social sciences as the latter’s counter-influence could possibly offer impressive insights into understanding the city (Verma 2011). Socialising urban design, however, is not as easy as it seems. Many social scientists outright condemn urban design as a particular form of capitalist urbanisation (Hubbard 1996). Rattled by the discomfort of urban design in dealing with the intense sociopolitical critique inherent in theories derived from Marxist analysis, they are uncertain as to whether urban design can deepen, extend and transform our understanding of capitalist

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5.

Urban design in the realm of urban studies

55

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Figure 5.3 Alternatives for typological urbanism within a comparative framework as illustrated by l’AUC, Paris in a matrix of the twentyƤ”•–…‡–—”›’‘•–Ǧ›‘–‘ Metropolis. © l’AUC

5. Urban design in the realm of urban studies

57

structurations of urbanisation. Even though their suspicions are justified, their confident positioning within the realm of urban studies to seek answers to the still unresolved urban question is not reassuring either. The broad field of urban studies might provide the much-needed theoretical thrust in understanding our cities, but most of it tends to polarise itself in potentially unproductive ways. It seems that social theory of cities alone can never be a chimeric search for the essence of the urban (Keith 2000). Given that the production of space has important materialities, it might therefore be useful to bring a distinctively architectural understanding of form, type and spatial configuration into the theory of social space (Lehtuvuori 2012). This chapter provides this critical injection through arguing for a recombinant urbanism produced by situating urban design and urban studies together. Urban design here is not a mere applied dimension of urban studies, but one that can re-examine the forms of the urban in a Lefebvrian sense as we ask what is urban about cities and rethink the genealogy of the urban as a complex, multiscalar condition. As the urban question is redefined as a scale question, we find that this is something urban design undertakes quite comfortably as recent engagements reveal its uncanny ability to rescale deftly from the local to the global to address postmetropolitan challenges. In the case of urban studies, this simultaneous turning inside out and outside in of the urban meddles with its traditional understandings of what is urban, suburban, exurban, not urban, etc. Urban design, on the other hand, has adapted more successfully in reconstituting the urban as seen in recent examples to rescale major metropolitan cities such as Le Grand Paris. This is achieved by including aspects of social analysis into the design process alongside conventional urban design techniques involving a visual array of representation. In fact, the typological and morphological emphasis of urban design clarifies the regional scale in what could otherwise have remained as mere outlines of an abstract plan. While these proposals are not without challenges, they exemplify useful aspects of a recombinant urbanism produced at the 58

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interface of urban design and urban studies. They are also a belated reminder of something that both urban designers and urban studies scholars have ignored for quite some time now – Lynch’s (1976) seminal observation that our senses are local but our experience is regional.

TIPS FOR RESEARCHERS: Ȉ Rethink the urban, particularly as a multi-scalar flux from the local to the regional and the global, stepping away from the urge of a spatial fix. Ȉ Explore the possibility of key urban design techniques such as typological and morphological investigations as not a rigid analytical tool-kit but one that is elastic and clarifies the flexibility of the urban scale. Ȉ Expand on the interdisciplinary nature of urban design ‘teams’, extending outside of the realm of design-allied consultancies to include urban studies scholars, i.e., geographers, sociologists, economists, anthropologists, etc. This will involve some reconsideration of how the epistemologies and methodologies of the two realms influence and inform each other. Ȉ Adopt a more critical position in the pursuit of best practices accounting for not only the design side of the narrative, but also the social, economic, and political dimensions, through a less paradigmatically driven comparative approach.

ENDNOTES 1

Šƒ‡ȋ͜͜͞͡Ȍ†‡•…”‹„‡•ƒ†‹ơ‡”‡–‹†‘ˆ”‡…‘„‹ƒ–—”„ƒ‹• where he splices together varying strands of urban design identifying urban actors who recombine elements to create conceptual models of the city at various scales to strengthen its ’‘•‹–‹‘ƒ•ƒ‡‡”‰‹‰Ƥ‡Ž†‘ˆ‡“—‹”›Ǥ

6

Place-temporality and rhythmicity: a new aesthetic and methodological foundation for urban design theory and practice Filipa Wunderlich

This chapter critically examines urban design theory, and argues that if it aims to inform practice and inspire and support novel responses to present-day spatial and social problems, it needs to address three dimensions: include a review and critique; reveal aesthetic preference(s); and disclose a methodological perspective. Focusing on the aesthetic dimension, it is argued that urban design theory and practice are still dominated by a notion of visual and static modernist aesthetics. This hinders methodological innovation; is out of step with new interdisciplinary debates about everyday life and sensing the city; or with emerging new objectives within the urban design discipline, planning and social sustainability agendas, for example those concerning the acceleration of cities and the impact on quality of life. In response to this, the research underpinning this chapter proposed an alternative temporal aesthetics, where the sense of time and the sensorial and affective rhythms of society, nature and physical space take central stage.

INTRODUCTION Theory and Practice in Urban Design: Questioning its Foundations and Opening up a Temporal Perspective In urban design, theory and practice are closely related. Urban design is a critical and analytical field of studies as

much as a propositional one, where critique and analysis feed into creative design processes and products. Urban design combines reflection and critique, with analysis, interpretation and creativity when producing new forms of urban socio-spatial environments. As such it is informed by both the social sciences and arts and humanities fields of study and experimentation. Urban design theory has a unique relationship to practice. Its role is not simply to raise awareness and inform approaches, but also, and importantly, to inspire and to provide a rationale and support for innovative responses to the present-day spatial and social problems in cities and its urban environments. In this context, there are at least three characteristics that one would expect to find in urban design theory. First, any theoretical approach to the design of the urban socio-spatial environment would need to be critical; reflecting upon the state of the art (Marshall 2012). Second, it would need to be informed by an underlying engagement with aesthetics (broadly defined as our sensoriemotional experiences) (Wunderlich 2013) and reflect in particular on what influences a sense of quality in the urban environment (Carmona and Sieh 2004). Third, it would need to be methodological and purposeful to enable it to influence practice, ultimately fostering change and innovation in design products, practices and delivery processes. What distinguishes urban design theory from other social sciences and humanities theory (e.g. within urban human

geography, anthropology and other urban critical studies), are the latter two aspects – its aesthetic foundation(s) and the methodological perspective(s). These are innately related and it is here where urban design theory and practice meet. The aesthetic perspective of urban design sets the field for the discourse, determines the selection of problems and opportunities that urban design responds to, and also, and most evidently, informs the nature of urban design propositions. The propositions will in turn be responding to a set of analytical, interpretative and representation design practices that are directly influenced by the same aesthetic preferences. Therefore, if urban design theory wants to influence practice and fulfil its objective to restore spatial and social harmony and effectively foster interaction and affective engagement through design creativity and innovation in the space of the city, then it needs to be aesthetic and methodological.

The Critique: An Obsolete Aesthetics In the majority of influential urban design theory texts to date, the triad of: review and critique / aesthetic perspective / methodological stand are unevenly combined. Some studies are inherently critical or theoretical without overtly integrating and building upon previous research in the field; others only reflect on analytical research; and others again, tend to be largely aesthetic and propositional. Another shortcoming of current urban design theory and practice in this regard is that it suffers from the long-standing limitation that place aesthetics are too often viewed in purely visual and static (motionless) terms. The focus on this type of aesthetics is deeply problematic in a number of ways. First, it stands in the way of methodological innovation that aims to find adequate responses to new sets of urban problems that affect cities today (as opposed to three or four decades ago). Second, it detracts urban designers from engaging more fully in the interdisciplinary debate on urban issues, and, third, it is at odds with shifts in planning and sustainability 60

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agendas that emphasise a more holistic approach to the urban environment and its social, perceptual and temporal dimensions.

Hindering methodological innovation Urban design theory and practice have long privileged the physical dimension of place (see Chapter 5), including in their applied analytical methodologies and place-creation strategies. As a hangover of the Modern Movement, practice has been deeply rooted in Kantian aesthetics which emphasises the notion of art and the sublime as a transcendent beauty that is exclusive to the art object, selfexpressive and to be observed from a distance. Urban space analysts and designers typically also focus on visual, and motionless spatial beauty whilst physical materials, objects, and form are still the dominant elements in urban place analysis and design. This conventional approach to the design of places in the city has meant that for many years design practitioners have analysed and responded to urban spaces in a largely formalistic manner and the design process has seen little innovation in its methods of analysis, representation and interpretation of the urban reality. An established set of representations such as the figure ground map, the land use map, the elevation, the conceptual diagram and the overall masterplan are persistent as the prevailing means of communicating design, accompanied by hand sketches and photorealistic images. These methods are often used to record motionless features of the space and express aspects of their articulation and overall visual aesthetics. They reflect an approach to urban space as an object to be examined; that is, an object that is observed and measured from a distance. In this process, the urban design practitioner assumes the role of the doctor, and through a brief examination of the patient and a standard set of analytical processes, endeavours to understand and respond to the malfunctioning or unrealised potential of urban places.

There are of course alternative forms of analysis and communication by design that have been rehearsed in academia (Thiel 1961, Lucas and Romice 2008, Lucas 2009). However, they remain at the margin of what is the usual set of practices adopted in the process of analysing and designing urban places. In practice, by contrast, practices are often characterised by a fixed set of methodological approaches and modes of representation that represent their ‘product’, whilst their adoption of more scientific analytical processes helps to shield them from the charge of subjective engagement with places. On the other hand, such approaches discourage a wider debate or exploration of the nature of aesthetics in urban space, and inhibits creativity and innovation, which are essential ingredients in the design process. For example, one important aspect that is commonly overlooked is the issue of one’s sensorial engagement in places, and the associated subjectivity over time in terms of how places are perceived as urban social, spatial and cultural milieus. Seldom have urban design practitioners recognised and responded to the city as a sensorial, transient and temporal phenomenon, even though these essential attributes of the urban condition are debated across other social sciences. Considering these attributes as part of urban design theory and practice is ever more important when factors such as user experience, health and wellbeing are taking front stage in both planning and sustainability agendas as indicators of urban quality.

Third, the dominant visual and static aesthetics that prevail in the realm of practice is at odds with current agendas and directions of urban design research that explore social, perceptual and temporal dimensions of urban environments (Carmona et al. 2003). It also fails to link with the wider shift in planning and sustainability agendas where the user’s happiness, health and general wellbeing become more and more centre stage and are taken as principal indicators of quality in the urban environment. 61

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Second, the obsession with the visual and morphological is hindering urban designers reflecting on and responding to new emerging interdisciplinary debates which have a different aesthetic focus and that identify new sets of issues and perspectives on the city and the quality of built environment. As such they may miss out on relevant contemporary discourses that focus on the importance of place in everyday life, considering emotional affect, sensoriality and time.

Out of line with the shift in planning, sustainability and urban design agendas

6.

Hindering a comprehensive response to the interdisciplinary debate

Interpretations of place as practice and process (Seamon 1980, Massey 2005), and performative space (Thrift 2003, 2008) have been established from within urban critical theory, along with other geographic accounts, which in equal measure, draw on elements of space, time and everyday life (De Certeau 1984, Lefebvre 2004, Sennet 1990). The significance of senses of time in the process of thinking and shaping urban places has also long been acknowledged, and much has been said across the human and social sciences on the significance of time and everyday life in the production of urban space. Most recently the work of Lefebvre on ‘time, rhythm and everyday life’ (2004) has steered interest on the politics but also the phenomenology of time and everyday life in urban space (Massey 2005, Thrift 2003, 2008, Ingold 1993, Wunderlich 2013). Recently, also, there has been a revived interest in the senses and the urban environment that is shaping research in the field of sensorial urbanism. The debate is headed by the International Ambiences Network1 where the focus has been on the alternative senses and the city (Pallasmaa 1996, Howes 2004, Zardini 2005): places and atmospheres, soundscapes (Augoyard and Torgue 2004, Bull and Back 2003), smellscapes (Barbara and Perliss 2006, Diaconu 2011), touchscapes (Classen 2012), and ultimately, place temporal depth; that is how sensorial and emotionally affective events shape unique and meaningful atmospheres through time (Wunderlich 2013).

There is a growing concern about the acceleration of cities and how this affects people’s everyday life. Whether it is daily commuting versus social activity patterns, or the sensorial experience of urban spaces; time and speed in the city is recognised as having an important impact on the social identity and sustainability of neighbourhoods and urban spaces (Knox 2005, Parkins and Craig 2006, Wunderlich 2010, 2013). Environmental planners have already started to research aspects of urban social time, speed versus gender, life-style, and changes in individual and social life patterns and their relationships to the physical forms of the city (Bianchini and Greed 1999, Bonfigliogli and Mareggi 1997). For their part transport planners and morphologists take an interest in travel-rhythms and time-corridors versus density and complexity of use (Hägerstrand 1975, Pred 1977, Penn 2003). Urban designers, however, are behind in addressing these concerns, whilst urban design would greatly benefit from understanding the role of soft attributes of places and their atmospheres, in particular how senses of time are shaped in urban space and how they impact on health, wellbeing and happiness in the city. Key urban design texts have in the past touched upon the sense of time, temporality and rhythm as a potential research topic for urban place design, albeit briefly and sometimes concealed (Giddeon 1941, Jacobs 1961, Lynch 1972, Norberg-Schultz 1980, Jackson 1994). The sense of time as an explicit theme of research has only recently been introduced to urban design studies (Isaacs 2001), and its relationship to the everydayness of urban places, the sense of place and design remain virtually unexplored. Nevertheless, as mentioned above, there is a renewed interest in the temporal and perceptual dimensions of urban design and the social performance of urban spaces (Gehl 1987, Madanipour 1996, Bosselman 1998, Carmona 2003). But little of this research is offering insights into how to approach a place’s sense of time and its temporality explicitly through design.

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The Opportunity: An Alternative Aesthetics – Not About Space but About Time In the light of the above, there is a need to challenge the established visual and static aesthetic foundations of urban design, and consequently review the focus and scope of urban design research and practice altogether. Reflecting the idea that it is more important what happens in spaces than what one finds there, this requires the inversion of the urban design perspective, looking at urban design not from a spatial but from a temporal perspective. For example, rather than focusing on the spatial (and visual) beauty of space, urban design should look at the temporal beauty of urban places, as they are sensually and emotionally perceived by urban dwellers. Today there is an increasing interest in the power, sensoriality and affect of timescapes on everyday life (Lefebvre 2004, Massey 2005, Crang 2001, Thrift 2003). The geographical notion of space as only a physical entity is disputed; instead, space is discussed as ephemeral, sensorial and performative. Urban design research needs to catch up with this trend and contribute to these changing perspectives in order that they might inform practice. The quality of people’s temporal and sensorial experience in urban spaces is directly linked to their sense of time and the perceived rhythmicity of places (see Wunderlich 2013) and urban design topics such as placemaking and urban identity can be approached by examining the urban sense of time, place-temporality and rhythm. For urban designers to capitalise on these temporal understandings, urban design research needs to advance its understanding of the temporal aesthetics of place. In particular, to deliver quality temporal experiences in urban space urban design must review its ways of analysing, designing and delivering urban spaces. With reference to the urban design theory triad that was introduced earlier – review and critique, aesthetics perspective and methodological stand – so far this chapter

has critically examined urban design theory in the context of disciplinary and interdisciplinary discourse and detected a need for a change of perspective on the aesthetics of the urban place. The following section will focus on defining a new aesthetics under the notion of place-temporality and rhythmicity, and offer methodological insights on how this can be approached. The first part is dedicated to aspects of expression, discussing the sensoriality, performance and aesthetic significance of place-temporality, and four principal experiential attributes – the sense of time, flow, soundscape, and rhythmicity. These attributes characterise place-temporal aesthetics as akin to music. The second part looks at aspects of the spatial and temporal expression of time in urban space and its constitutive rhythms, and discusses particular ways in which these can be analysed, represented and interpreted in order to catalyse responses through design.

PLACE AND RHYTHM, A TEMPORAL AESTHETICS AKIN TO MUSIC

The vivid sense of time The sense of time varies depending on the individual, and both the social and the spatial settings. It can thus be influenced by personal experiences and particular states of mind; however, and most importantly, it is inter-subjective (collectively perceived) and place-specific. Indeed extensive observational research in four London places – Piccadilly Circus, Oxford Street, Regent’s Park and Fitzroy Square – revealed that time is place-specific, distinct from place to place, but most importantly, associated with a temporal aesthetics that is sensorial and performative but also affective and meaningful. In the first two spaces their scale, density of movement and social and spatial complexity are associated with acceleration and stress. In the latter two urban spaces, the sense of place has a clarity associated with attributes such as slowness, quiet, calm, order and safety. Fitzroy Square in particular was perceived as an urban place of temporal aesthetic significance (Figure 6.1). There, the unique architectural and natural setting and the high level of urban social complexity gave rise to a vivid and contrasting sense

The Attributes of Place-Temporality

6. Place-temporality and rhythmicity

In the city, senses of place, time, rhythmicity and wellbeing are intrinsically related. The sense of time varies from place to place; and to this sense of time is associated a different and unique sense of place-temporality. This place-temporality is not an intellectual understanding of time but is instead an aesthetic experience. It involves the immediate and the sensory, and a feeling, or, a ‘certain affective quality’ (Duffrene 1973, in Silverman 1975: 464). It is a meaningful (both sensorial and emotionally affective) appreciation that defines our relationship to an urban place. Extensive empirical research has revealed that four sensuous attributes and meaningful experiences define this temporal aesthetic experience (Wunderlich 2013):

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of time. Observations, ethnographic interviews and placespecific writing studies (see below) over a 12-month period confirmed that people, living, working or passing-by this square, experienced a similar distorted sense of time. Urban places, such as those studied, each possessed a distinctive sense of time generated by their particular experiential and performative character, that further distinguishes them from other spaces.

of spaces and express aspects of its social and cultural identity (Thibaud 2003). Through repetition and resonance they define and enhance the experience of place-temporality in urban space. At Fitzroy Square aesthetic assemblages of recurrent and resonant sounds of social activities, movements and interactions with space, and of the cyclical events of nature, juxtaposed in a single location, define the aural experience of place-temporality.

Sense of flow

Rhythmicity

There is a direct relationship between a unique sense of time, the experience of flow, and the vibrant set of orchestrated temporal events and practices one is drawn into when visiting an urban place. Csikszentmihalyi suggests flow is a quality and experience that is inherently rewarding (1988: 30). In fact, in urban space the experience of flow is attractive and nurtures a sense of comfort and satisfaction. Consider, for example, places where one may seemingly lose a sense of time, immersed in activities like strolling through a market, roaming around a town centre shopping, or relaxing in a local park. Fitzroy Square is characterised by a typical place-flow, defined by the particular flow practices that recur and are collectively experienced throughout the day, the week and the season. These activities and tempos are not choreographed, they simply unfold in a synchronised and effortless manner making up the ‘Fitzroy place-ballet’, as did Jane Jacobs’ ‘street-ballet’ (1961).

Not only the soundscape but the overall sensorial experience of place-temporality is rhythmic and resonant, expressed by the orchestration of everyday temporal patterns of events in urban place (Wunderlich 2007, 2013). The temporal dynamics and patterning of social space by routines of everyday life has been acknowledged by a range of scholars (Hagerstrand 1975, Pred 1977, Buttimer 1976, Jacobs 1961, Seamon 1980, Zerubavel 1981, Lefebvre 2004). It is important to note that everyday social life is linked to physical space and the natural environment, which are both temporal and rhythmic entities in their own right. Place temporal milieus are therefore hubs of recurrent and synchronised stimuli of different kinds: everyday social routines, patterns of movement and other sensory practices, circadian and seasonal cycles of nature, and visual and haptic patterns of physical space. A multiplicity of rhythms can be sensed and tangibly engaged with in urban space. These rhythms are place-specific and unique in the way they vertically relate to one another, in other words, how they superimpose temporally.

A vivid soundscape The soundscape of an urban place plays a major role in the perception of temporality in everyday urban spaces. Observations of various places with vivid senses of time in London suggested that it is the hi-fi soundscape that characterises urban place-temporality. In hi-fi soundscapes ‘frequencies can be heard distinctively’ (Schafer 1977: 43) and foreground and background sounds can be identified (Wrightson 2000: 2). The acoustic colourations offer significant information about the physical nature and scale 64

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As in Music In some places the interrelation and superimposition of rhythms do not result in a cacophony of temporal events, but instead resemble what could be described as a ‘symphony of events’. As in music, groups of unique place-rhythms imbue urban spaces with a temporal structure, metrical order and pulse. As a result, they organise time, and set and characterise

the perceived tempo of a place. Also, as in music, placerhythms are both sensorial and emotionally affective. They shape aesthetic rhythmical continuums and offer sensorial and meaningful temporal distinctiveness to urban places. In this way, they shape the timescape of urban places, and define the unique aesthetics of place-temporality with a sense of pattern and rhythm, a sense of balance and resonance. Place-temporality is a quality aesthetic experience similar to the aesthetic experience of music. It similarly offers a vivid and distorted sense of time, the experience of flow, a vivid soundscape and rhythmicity. Also, it is perceived through all senses, involves performance, and imbues meaning to urban spaces. In this regard, place-temporality, as a meaningful phenomenological experience, has parallels to the understanding of ‘art as experience’ and ‘art form’ (Dewey 1934, Barthes 1985) (see Wunderlich 2013 for further exploration of this perspective).

together with their careful study and planning. Methods may include comparative case-studies, personal experience records, introspection, lifestories, interviews, observation of artefacts and the generation of design, cultural, historical, interactional and visual texts. Fitzroy Square was the subject of extensive fieldwork and ethnographic studies of this nature to uncover its temporal aesthetic attributes. As already mentioned, the square is a vibrant civic space, an everyday social space with a distinct physical, natural and sociocultural rhythmic profile, where a rich set of regular interweaving rhythms can be perceived (Figure 6.2).

Uncovering Place-Temporality through Place-Rhythmanalysis

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Ȉ Mapping the sense of time and the sense of flow – Place-specific writing practices utilising on-site 65

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The experiential attributes of this square, its slow tempo, its everyday typical flow patterns, its vivid soundscape, and its apparent rhythmicity, made Fitzroy Square an ideal case for exploration (see Wunderlich 2013). The qualitative analysis of the square involved a number of methods that are key in the process of urban place-rhythmanalysis:

6.

Fieldwork research on place-temporality and rhythmicity in urban places requires an understanding of urban analysis and design as a qualitative exploratory practice. It necessitates methodological innovation and the integration of phenomenology into the analytical and design processes. Such qualitative research involves an ‘interpretative and naturalistic approach to the world’, studying things in their natural settings in an attempt ‘to make sense of, or to interpret phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring them’ (Denzin 2000: 3). This is based on the idea that ‘meanings of events, actions and expressions’ are not given facts or ‘self-evident’ and that they require ‘some kind of contextual interpretation’ (Have 2004: 4). The qualitative researcher is ‘a multi-tasking profile – the bricoleur – and his/her choice of practice is pragmatic, strategic and self-reflexive’ (Denzin 2000: 4). Qualitative site based research may require various empirical methods

Figure 6.3 Taxonomy of place-rhythms according to dominant spatial attributes

Figure 6.4 Place-rhythms temporal attributes

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moments of the day for two weekdays within each of the four seasons of the year. The relevant observations needed to be performed rigorously during these times to allow comparison.

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Using these methods, the place-rhythmanalysis itself focused on three key aspects: spatial expression; temporal expression; and temporal representation of temporality and its place-rhythms. The mapping of the spatial and temporal expression of place-rhythms responded to two different taxonomies of place-rhythms. The first concerns the dominant spatial attributes of place-rhythms. With reference to Lefebvre and Zerubavel’s principles for temporal organisation it divides place-rhythms into social, natural, and physical; each divided into numerous sub-categories (Figure 6.3). The second concerns the dominant temporal attributes of place-rhythms (Figure 6.4). The focus here is

6.

personal narratives by the researcher and conversations with regular users to capture the way time was experienced in situ. Ȉ Mapping soundscapes – Audio and video recording of soundscapes at specific times of the day, week and season, and their representation as spectrograms (visual representations of spectrum frequencies and the duration of sounds) to identify unique acoustic colourations of particular moments and their frequency of occurrence and duration. These could then be mapped in relation to observed everyday events and social practices. Ȉ Mapping urban place-rhythms – The mapping of placerhythms required careful planning upfront. To start with, the spatial scale and perspective for observations and recordings needed to be established. Also, the time-scales for observation were fixed to three

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on the singularity of place-rhythms’ temporal performance, the number of events that constitute it, and their relationship in terms of duration, intensity and accentuation, in other words, their temporal articulation pattern. It further includes their sensorial and affective shape; that is the way place-rhythms induce unique sensorial and emotional experiences, as they unfold and group over time in one space (Figure 6.5). The spatial expression of Fitzroy Square place-rhythms were recorded through: Ȉ Place-rhythm diaries, which are useful ways to record rhythmic social practices and other natural and physical rhythmic events, capturing them in writing as they unfold (Figure 6.6); Ȉ Photographic albums which grouped representative rhythmic events under the triad of social, natural and physical (Figure 6.7); and Ȉ Other kinds of diagrams of social and travel rhythms. To understand the temporal expression (organisation and aesthetics) of the Square’s place-rhythms, other analytical and interpretative tools were also used, such as:

The different methods of observation and techniques of analysis and representation outlined above define an analytical 69

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Figure 6.6 Place-rhythms diaries

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Ȉ Surface patterns diagrams, which deconstruct the architectural elements in building facades and the public realm pattern; Ȉ Place-rhythm spectral diagrams, where the pattern of natural events and social practices is mapped in analogy to musical spectrograms (Figure 6.8); and Ȉ Place-scores, which, akin to musical scores, are the means of superimposing place-rhythm spectral diagrams over time in order to identify patterns of resonance or conflict (consonance or dissonance) and to express how these shape sensorial and affective temporalscapes during a period of time (Figure 6.9).

Figure 6.7 Photographic album extract: societal place-rhythms, collective and individual, spring/summer and autumn/winter

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This chapter makes the case that the delivery of a comprehensive urban design theory that is closely related

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CONCLUSION

to practice requires a triad framework based on critique, an aesthetic preference and a methodological robustness. It argues that visual and static (motionless) modernist aesthetics still dominate urban design research and practice. This out-dated notion of aesthetics is hindering methodological innovation and comprehensive responses to new interdisciplinary debates about everyday life and sensing the city, or to new emerging objectives within urban design and related disciplines such as those associated with the acceleration of cities and its impact on the quality of urban life. In recognition of these shortcomings the chapter has proposed an alternative perspective on aesthetics focused on

6.

framework for place-rhythmanalysis, through which urban place-temporality and rhythmicity in urban space can be addressed. Beyond their analytical purpose, these types of studies are expressive forms of representation that can support and even inspire the design process through encouraging a critical and creative design processes.

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the temporal dimension of places, including their sensorial and emotionally affective attributes over time. It provided a brief overview of how to perform place-rhythmanalysis, a new methodology for analysis and research in urban design encompassing innovative methods of analysis, interpretation and representation. Implicit in the discussion is the promotion of a temporal aesthetics for urban design research and practice,

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demonstrating that the sense of time in urban space can be tangibly approached. It makes the case that a change of perspective on the aesthetics of urban space and the environment is required, and that this has the potential to open an era of new discoveries with regards to the methodologies and means of representation we use for urban analysis and design.

TIPS FOR RESEARCHERS: Ȉ Consider urban place design not as ‘what you find in places’ but ‘what happens in places’; in other words, consider design as performative, sensorial and emotionally affective. Ȉ Do not reduce your studies to visual and material forms but consider shifting your focus to tempo, pattern and experience. Ȉ Use visual and analytical illustrations in creative and interpretative ways to represent aesthetic perceptions. Ȉ Consider your own and other people’s multiple senses as a means of collecting meaningful data.

ENDNOTES 1

Set up originally by the group URM CNRS 1563 (Cresson and Cerma research groups).

6. Place-temporality and rhythmicity

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Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com

Part II

Process investigations

Focusing on the normative and ‘potential’ systems, tools, procedures and networks that shape the outcomes of urban design

This work encompasses research projects that focus on the normative and ‘potential’ systems, tools, procedures and networks that shape the outcomes of urban design. Six chapters can be found here exploring both processes within urban design and the larger processes of place-shaping that is the ultimate purpose of urban design. Whilst many of the chapters in this book touch on ‘process’, in one way or another, distinguishing the chapters in this section is the foregrounding of process in a diversity of ways so that process is seen as an objective reality, to be investigated, understood, and reported and / or theorised. The chapter of Ian Hamilton, Aurore Julien and Ben Croxford (12), for example, is centrally concerned with the environmental masterplanning process that the authors have developed following their own research and pedagogical practice, identifying what are, for them, the key dimensions of a sustainable development process. My own chapter (7) is particularly wide ranging, with a focus on the urban design process at large, although, rather than stemming from a research programme that aimed specifically to explore that process, the theory of a place-shaping continuum that emerges, developed as a byproduct of research with a very different focus, exploring contemporary critiques of public space. In some senses, this demonstrates the power of addressing research with an open mind, as not only is it likely to illuminate the questions you are seeking answers to, but it may also address a few that you were not. Andy Hudson-Smith’s chapter (11) is similarly wide ranging. Thus whilst my own chapter dealt with the creation of the physical and social spaces of the city, his exploration of a range of recent projects in the field of smart cities, does much to map out the exciting research space of the virtual city and its interface with the city’s physical fabric through successive projects focusing on particular technologies, networks, flows of data, and products. Together these reveal a hidden, but nonetheless equally real and concurrent set of processes

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shaping the way the city is used and the functionality it offers its users. Peter Jones and Antoine Zammit’s chapters (8 and 10) are more specific (although both are part of much larger bodies of work), focusing on particular processes in urban design. Respectively these are: the processes of street design and urban planning and how a better process can help to balance needs that are sometimes seen to be in conflict – street as movement space and as social place; and the process of planning policy, its articulation and use, and how this impacts either positively or negatively on built outcomes (the latter demonstrating the particular value of careful analysis of secondary source material in this field). Each of these chapters, so far, has followed a more or less inductive approach to understanding process, although TseHui Teh’s chapter (9) reveals that this need not always be the case. For her, the starting point for the work was how insights from the dual theories of Actor-network theory and Coevolution, together, could help to understand the position of urban design in the larger networks of actors responsible for shaping cities; theories tested, in this case, through the interaction between urban water cycles and urban form. Together the chapters in this part demonstrate the diversity of process investigations, but also how fundamental they are to the study of urban design, both in itself, and in relation to other processes that shape the city. Despite this, such studies are relatively infrequent, perhaps because processes may seem to vary so profoundly from place to place and in the light of the infinitely diverse physical, stakeholder, and socio-economic / political contexts within which urban design occurs. There is clearly much scope for more work in this area. Matthew Carmona

7

Mixing methods / theorising urban design process Matthew Carmona

Through the medium of contemporary public space, this chapter explores one attempt to understand the process of urban design in a holistic manner, by examining the historical and contemporary context for public space creation and the entire process of space generation and regeneration in London. The research adopted a mixed method approach focused on a single city case study. The chapter discusses the use and utility of mixing methods, before illustrating this with the London research and the theory of urban design process to which the work ultimately gave rise.

INTRODUCTION Few urban design interventions are subject to analysis that compares outcomes with processes of delivery. Rarely are urban design projects exposed to post-occupancy review in the way that buildings are, and almost never is a systematic view taken across the entire process of creating or recreating places. Banerjee and Loukaitou-Sideris (2011: 275) argue that although some see design as a ‘glass box’ process, completely explicable and capable of understanding and refinement, more often it is viewed as a ‘black box’ phenomenon, obscured by the fathomless complexities and depths of the design imagination. They conclude that the reality is likely to lie somewhere between, in other words, ‘explicable but fathomless’.

This plays into a key critique of urban design, that its obsession with finished product marginalises its understanding as ‘an on-going long-term process intertwined with social and political mechanisms’ (Inam 2012: 37, see also Chapter 5). Nowhere is this more apparent than the noticeable obsession (particularly in the US) with the latest ‘urbanisms’: post urbanism, landscape urbanism, new urbanism, everyday urbanism, ecological urbanism, temporary urbanism, tactical urbanism, etc. These trends seek to neatly package favoured physical forms with prescribed social and/or ecological content and philosophical meaning, but often end up in circular debates about narrowly defined style and aesthetics. The reporting of urban design in the UK is little different, with the press (popular and professional) focusing on high profile ‘projects’, and typically reviewing schemes just before completion, omitting discussion of use or serious debate about development process, and focusing instead on image. The result is a series of crude judgements about the quality of urban design, based on limited evidence and an almost entirely cursory and image-based view of projects: that they are iconic, corporate, pastiche, etc., without a full understanding of the design, development and political processes that gave rise to them, how they are used and by whom, the manner in which they are managed and why, and so forth (Carmona and Wunderlich 2012: 5) (Figure 7.1).

eye of the press, but also to the un-self-conscious processes of urban adaptation and change that continuously shape the built environment all around (Carmona et al. 2010: 72).

MIXING IT UP Research funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) explored these concerns. The research lasted two and a half years from late 2007 to early 2011 and adopted a mixed methods approach, focused on a single city case study.

Mixing Methods

Figure 7.1 Canada Square at Canary Wharf, (i) often criticised as simply corporate (ii) but also a space of relaxation, culture and fun

Yet, arguably, it is exactly these ‘process’ factors that determine how places are shaped and which, if studied, might provide an irreducible core to the study and practice of urban design. Moreover, these processes relate not only to the sorts of self-consciously designed schemes that catch the 78

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‘Mixed methods’ are increasingly common in social science research for reasons implied by an alternative less popular term for the approach: pragmatist paradigm (http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimethodology). In other words ‘what works’ is more important than the ‘purity’ of the approach taken to the research, and researchers can pick and mix particular methods depending on the nature of the problems to be investigated; most particularly addressing questions that don’t sit comfortably within a wholly quantitative or qualitative genre (Armitage 2007: 3). Creswell and Piano Clark (2006: 5) offer the most comprehensive discussion of mixed methods and reveal that such approaches focus ‘on collecting, analysing, and mixing both quantitative and qualitative data in a single study or series of studies’. The approach is based on the premise that using quantitative and qualitative approaches in combination will provide a better understanding of research problems than either approach used alone. Although sometimes used interchangeably, Creswell and Piano Clark (2006: 12) argue that mixed methods can be distinguished from ‘multimethod’ research that instead utilises multiple methods on one or other side of the qualitative / quantitative divide, without ever transcending it. The project discussed in this chapter utilised both multiple

qualitative methods, and quantitative study and is thereby both mixed and multimethod. Whilst the basic aim of all such approaches is to improve confidence in the robustness of research by selecting and comparing evidence from different sources, six key rationales (adapted from Mason 2006) for taking such an approach can be identified:

Ȉ Pragmatism and rigour are not always happy bedfellows; Ȉ Integration of data and findings from very different methods may be difficult; Ȉ Superficial use of methods is a danger of in-expert use; Ȉ Reporting mixed methods can be elongated and therefore challenging.

1. Adding depth and breadth to analysis of a problem; qualitative research, for example, adds real life depth to a big picture quantitative study; 2. As a means to address allied related questions or the connecting parts or layers of a particular question that are analytically distinct with their own internal logics; 3. To triangulate different sources of evidence in order to improve the accuracy or validity of findings; 4. To exploit the strengths and overcome the weaknesses of contrasting methodologies (e.g. the de-contextualised and reductionist nature of quantitative methods or the unrepresentative and overly-contextualised nature of qualitative work); 5. To harness the creative tensions between methodologies and the potential for new insights that may result; 6. To opportunistically exploit whatever data sources are available that might provide insights into a particular problem.

Whilst these are all challenges that can be overcome, Brannen (2005: 12) warns that data collected from different methods cannot simply be added together to produce a unitary or rounded reality or truth. Instead, mixing methods implicitly accepts that there is no single reality, and that in gathering evidence we need to remain cognizant of how the evidence was derived, its strengths and shortcomings, and thereby its explanatory value when compared to other sources of evidence.

Ȉ Examines the complex dynamics of a particular context, New York; Ȉ Utilises different empirical methods – participant observation, informal interview and documentary evidence – to support an argument; Ȉ Builds theory from the particular case with the explanatory power for wider application. 79

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Ȉ The purity and focus of each sub-method may be lost in the eclectic mix;

Groat and Wang (2002: 347–55) link the use of mixed research methods to the conduct of case studies through which a particular setting or circumstance is investigated holistically using a variety of data collection and analysis tactics. Indeed, they argue that many scholars in the built environment have gravitated to the use of case studies, precisely to marshall the benefits of applying different research techniques to one or more real life contexts. Thus they cite Jane Jacobs’ (1961) foundational study of New York urban vitality as a classic case study because it:

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For researchers in urban design dealing with the sorts of ‘wicked’ multi-dimensional problems and contexts discussed in Chapter 1, each of these rationales will be relevant. Yet whilst mixing research methods undoubtedly offers significant advantages for urban design researchers, research methodologists are quick to point up the potential downsides of such work (Cameron 2011 98–9). These include:

The Explanatory Power of Case Studies

Yin (1994: 37), in perhaps the most widely read case study text book, argues that such work is ideally suited from which to generalise theory, despite the arguments of some that single or small numbers of case studies can never be representative of wider phenomena. This is because the in-depth analysis they require allows the development of theory that can then be tested elsewhere through other case studies or alternative empirical investigations. However, as a further key benefit of such work is the insight it can provide into the particularities of place, it is vital that this is not lost in any attempt to generalise to a broader stage. Jacobs’ Death and Life of American Cities offers perhaps the definitive example of striking a balance between illuminating the particular context studied and advancing theory that has since been tested and re-tested elsewhere and is now broadly accepted, globally. In other words, the findings bore wider generalisation as the phenomena studied were in many ways typical of other settings (Zeisel 1994: 67). This is also the case with the project discussed in the remainder of this chapter in which London formed the single city case study from which wider theory is drawn.

The Capital Spaces Project The process of research in urban design is often unpredictable, as often as not revealing unexpected insights and taking researchers in directions that were not at first envisaged. This was the case with research that aimed to explore why high quality public space is increasingly an aspiration of public policy whilst the same spaces are routinely criticised in the academic literature on a variety of counts: that they are privatised, homogenised, commercialised, securitised, exclusionary, and so forth. To explore this seeming disconnect and because these critiques relate to both the production and ongoing stewardship of public spaces, a methodology was devised to explore the multiple processes of designing, developing, using and managing public space and the aspirations, 80

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influence and experience of the full range of stakeholders at every stage in this urban design process. Whilst the research revealed considerable insights into the validity or otherwise of the public space critiques in a London context (see Carmona and Wunderlich 2012 for a full discussion), it also (as a byproduct) revealed a new model or theory of the urban design process. The research involved a short preparatory phase followed by a substantive empirical phase.

Preparatory phase The preparatory work involved a detailed literature review and analysis of London-wide and national policy, facilitating a better understanding of public space debates and of the historical context for public space in London. A Londonwide survey enlisting the help of London’s 33 boroughs was undertaken to map new and substantially regenerated spaces completed across London since 1980.

Substantive phase The substantive phase began with an impressionistic onsite survey of 130 of these spaces in ten boroughs across central, inner and outer London. The survey allowed an initial assessment against the critiques of a substantial slice of London’s new and regenerated urban spaces, whilst to facilitate a more detailed analysis a typology of spaces according to form, function and rights and responsibility was generated. Within the single city meta-case study, 14 mixed / multimethod local cases formed the core of the research. These were chosen to explore the diverse range of contemporary spaces captured in the typology, including stories where the public space failed (either as a space or to be built at all). The approach allowed a full understanding of the ‘context for’, ‘process of creating’, and ‘outcomes from’, each study and encompassed processes and experiences of space design, development, use and management. Each local case involved:

With multiple local cases, and multiple analytical techniques, it was important to individually document the story of each space before attempting comparative analysis between the cases. The data was analysed quantitatively, where appropriate (e.g. the user assessments) and qualitatively using standard techniques of data reduction, display, analysis, and deduction.

THEORISING URBAN DESIGN PROCESS The discussion that follows presents briefly the generic model (or theory) of urban design process that emerged from this work, illustrating it through the specifics of the London case (see Carmona 2014 for a more detailed discussion). The model is summarised in Figure 7.2 where urban design is represented as an integrated place-shaping continuum through time incorporating, first, two key contextual factors: the history and traditions of place which in multiple ways continue to exert their somewhat intangible influence on projects from one generation to the next; and the contemporary polity, the policy context through which the prevailing political economy is directed (or not) to defined design / development ends. These contexts influence, second, four active placeshaping processes: (i) design and (ii) development – shaping the physical public realm for use – and (iii) space in use and (iv) management – shaping the social public realm through use. 81

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Analysis to deduction

During this process the value of approaching urban design research problems through multiple directions via a mixed methods approach was confirmed in two ways. First, when compared against the critiques of public space, the different methods sometimes revealed conflicting results. The impressionistic survey, for example, seemed to confirm the public space critiques, whilst the more detailed and rigorous local case study work quickly nuanced these initial findings and ultimately challenged the academic critiques (Carmona and Wunderlich 2012: 280). Second, careful triangulation of the results from the different analyses allowed connections to be made between the different forms of data to suggest process relationships that, on the basis of individual methods, may not otherwise have been revealed, at least not so forcefully. Ultimately this inductive empirical process facilitated a re-theorisation of urban design process.

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Ȉ Policy context – understanding the policy and guidance framework of case study boroughs. Ȉ Stakeholder narratives – stakeholders involved in the design, planning, development, and on-going management of each space were interviewed to capture views from development, design, regulatory and political / policy perspectives. A narrative approach was employed, with stakeholders invited to tell the story of their involvement with spaces. Seventy such narratives were subjected to detailed comparative analysis to reveal the collective stories of each case. Ȉ Popular debate and analysis – narratives were supplemented by analysis of views and reviews from the popular and professional press. Ȉ User assessment – to gauge the success of each space from a user perspective, interviews were conducted with a sample of everyday public space users, broadly reflecting the user profile of spaces. Six hundred and fifty interviews were undertaken across the 13 ‘built’ local case studies (one case remains unrealised). Ȉ Time-lapse observation – how each space is actually used (as opposed to perceptions about use) was evaluated through time-lapse photography. The results were mapped and the photographs analysed in order to build up a complete picture of use. Ȉ Character assessment – detailed analysis was undertaken of each space through analysis of historical maps and detailed contemporary analysis of the physical structure and features of each space.

Figure 7.2 Urban design process: a place-shaping continuum 82

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Each encompasses complex sets of aspirations and practices that together are decisive in determining public space outcomes. Third and finally, a set of power relationships between stakeholders operates like a lens, focusing the processes of urban design in different directions and in diverse and inconsistent ways, and decisively moulding the nature of outcomes in the process.

Arguably, it is these characteristic processes of ‘place’ and how they vary from one city to the next that, along with the particular natural context, determines the nature and qualities of place. In London the ‘London-way’ defines a dominant political economy of place (neoliberal long before neoliberalism was invented) whose impact on the physical city and on processes of development has been, and remains, profound.

Contexts for Urban Design The processes of contemporary polity The continuum begins with the history of place. Urban design is situated in both space and time, but how we act today is shaped by an accumulated history of experience and practice, by established ways of doing things that change only very slowly and that are still (despite globalisation) very place dependent, and by the fact that real innovation in design is rare. This means that any urban design process begins long before contemporary development proposals are dreamt up, and these in turn build upon a very long history that continues to inform processes of change through to today. The creation and recreation of public spaces in London represents a casein-point.

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Almost 2,000 years of history has left London with an immense heritage of public spaces across the city, although for the last 350 years at least the development processes that shaped them have changed very little. In these processes large landowners and powerful developers have typically taken the lead, guided by market opportunity, a light-touch regulatory process and a fragmented state that has often been reluctant or incapable of investing directly in the infrastructure of the city itself. This way of doing things stretches like a hand through history, defining a particular ‘London-way’ (Carmona 2012) that continues to characterise place-shaping processes in the city.

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The historic processes of place

Yet, even in the most stable of societies, the process of urban design will evolve over time reflecting changes in society, the economy and the prevailing politics; overlaying the historically defined processes of place with a characteristic contemporary polity. The period from 1980 to 2012 is a casein-point. From the late 1990s onwards London’s urbanism, just as its politics, embraced a third way, with the state taking a stronger role in the provision of high quality public spaces, whilst typically still looking to the market to take the lead. This period of ‘urban renaissance’ contrasted sharply with the pre-1997 period (and particularly with the 1980s), with policy helping to refine and direct the natural place-shaping predilections of London as encompassed in the London-way. Whilst the new spaces of the 1980s, such as those at Canary Wharf and Broadgate, were shaped largely by private innovation (and everywhere else by public neglect), the spaces of the urban renaissance have increasingly seen a public hand at work, as a promoter, partner or provider. During this period policy was shaping the dominant political economy and in doing so was more actively shaping the built environment. The combined result saw a flourishing of public space projects in London during the period (Figure 7.3), with in excess of 230 projects recorded across the city since 1980 (most after 2000). The influence of contemporary polity – the politics, policies and resulting political economy of place – represents the second key context in the process of urban design.

Figure 7.3 London’s renaissance spaces small and large, new and refurbished: (i) Festival Riverside (ii) Swiss Cottage Community Gardens

(iii) GMV Village Square (iv) Somerset House Courtyard

The Processes of Urban Design

processes constitute urban design. In fact there are four key place-shaping processes: design, development, space in use and management. These begin with design, yet despite the foregrounding of the term in the very notion of ‘urban design’, the other processes are equally important in determining how the built environment is shaped.

Within the contexts provided by historical place-based modes of operation and the contemporary policy-influenced political economy, the analysis of public spaces in London demonstrated that a series of more immediate place-shaping 84

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Shaping through design A range of factors dictated design strategies for public spaces in London with design providing the means through which aspirations for public space were mediated and strategies defined to create spaces for use. Looked at holistically across the 14 public space case studies, this generic process of ‘intentional’ design within the larger urban design or placeshaping process was sometimes empiricist in nature (drawing from precedent, analysis and experience) and sometimes rationalist (following a pre-determined path towards a set of idealistic goals) (Lang 2005: 380), and often a mix of the two. Each process, to greater or lesser degrees, addressed five related but distinct agendas: 1. Establishing an agreed vision for positive change; 2. Making and fixing the trade-offs between public, private and community interests; 3. Balancing design innovation with empiricist prescription; 4. Creating economic value to underpin the development and social goals; 5. Shaping the design vision to regulatory and other constraints.

Shaping through use Through intervention-focused processes of design and development, places are shaped and re-shaped ‘for use’ in a deliberate and largely pre-conceived manner. This, however, is not the end of the urban design story. Instead, literature old and new demonstrates how concurrent processes of everyday use and management continue to shape places long after those who originally created them have departed. But, given the risks and unknowns associated with development, multiplied by the uncertainties associated with humancentred activity per se, how new public realm will actually be used can never be entirely predicted. Even, post-completion, after a distinct use profile has emerged, it will continue to be subject to the on-going flux of the modern city (Hack 2011) with its potential to change patterns of use, and therefore urban design outcomes, over time. As a consequence the impact of space in use on the character and quality of spaces stem from a ‘natural’ (rather than conscious design) process, ‘unknowingly’ shaping and reshaping the nature of urban places. Observing the ‘built’ case study spaces identified that process of use shapes place in a number of ways, through: 1. Place defining activities that vary from space to space and across time; 85

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In some of the most widely used event-sequence models of the development process (e.g. Barrett et al. 1978) design is conceived of as a transitory phase within a larger wellordered process of procuring projects. By contrast, the public space case studies in London had in common that there was no common development process, and that the development process itself could be seen as a phase within the larger on-going process of place-shaping or urban design. For each space the line-up of stakeholders, the leadership, and the power relationships were different, although design remained a common and constant (as opposed to transitory) means through which schemes were negotiated and renegotiated over time, with problems – financial, regulatory,

1. Leading and coordinating complex stakeholder relationships; 2. Marshalling resources from public and private sources; 3. Navigating planning, highways, heritage and other consent regimes; 4. Negotiating quality across scales of intervention; 5. Garnering community support.

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Shaping through development

contextual, market, etc. – typically requiring a re-design in order to progress. Design and development processes are therefore typically integrated and iterative in nature. Despite the variations in practice, five common sub-processes were apparent:

2. The patterns and profiles of human association they stimulate; 3. The sorts of amenities fronting space that use supports; 4. Continuous processes of adaptation as patterns of use change; 5. Appropriation by different groups for different purposes over time.

Shaping through management Left to their own devices, the ‘natural’ but unknowing processes of use will continue to shape and re-shape the experience of place. Rarely, however, is urban space left to its own devices as almost all space (to a greater or lesser degree) is managed; in London, more often than not, by those (public or private) interests who developed it. The research suggested that these processes may give rise to small scale, typically incremental, physical changes in the public realm: new street furniture, signage, repairs, planting, etc.; but are just as likely to give rise to more significant social or ‘space in use’ changes: in the way spaces are occupied and used, in traffic flows, in the profile of users, in the occupancy and use of surrounding buildings or parts of them, in policing, and so forth. Individually, such interventions are ‘self-consciously’ designed and deliberate in intention, but the impact on placeshaping at large – on the larger urban design – will often be unconsidered and only ‘unknowingly’ effected; operated as they are by a series of specialist or technical operators which, in the public sector at least, typically work in silos (Carmona et al. 2008: 19–22). Five place-shaping management processes were observed: 1. Setting long-term funding / investment in place; 2. Design and delivery of everyday stewardship routines; 3. Curating place through (appropriate) organised activities; 4. Controlling behaviour and activities through implicit and explicit means; 5. Eventual revitalisation or redevelopment. 86

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Power Relationships From a detailed examination of London’s processes of public space creation and recreation it was possible to map out common parts of a continuum of place-shaping. But threading through the sub-processes of this larger urban design is a final common dimension relating to how each stage is shaped by the power relationships between the different players involved. This notion is well documented in the literature that typically posits greatest power in the hands of those with the resources to actually deliver new development; the developers and investors. Historically this has also been the case in London, power that has sometimes frustrated other players (Hebbert 1998: 75–7). But that is not the whole story, particularly in a context of varied ownership: of the 13 ‘built’ local case studies just three were led and delivered by private developers acting in isolation, one by a state owned private company, one by a private / public partnership, one by a private / social enterprise partnership, five by the public sector, and two by charitable trusts. In fact the case studies demonstrated that how public space is shaped and re-shaped depends on six factors, each representing a particular stakeholder group: 1. The aspirations, resources and determination of those who own the space, whether public or private; 2. The aspirations, powers and skills of those with regulatory responsibilities and their willingness to intervene to secure particular ends; 3. The aspirations, skills and sensibilities of designers; the scope given to them by the first two stakeholder groups (above), and their awareness of the needs and aspirations of the last three groups (below); 4. The aspirations of communities and their ability and determination to influence the work of the first three stakeholder groups (above); 5. The aspirations, resources and abilities of those with long-term management responsibility for the space;

6. The manner with which public space users engage with spaces and, through their use, define and redefine the nature of each space over time. In London, the relationships between these groups vary significantly between developments. Moreover, a common distinguishing feature of urban design seems to be that generally it involves a larger range of stakeholder groups than many building development projects and that the influence wielded by even the same stakeholder from one place to the next can vary significantly. Thus whilst power relationships decisively influence outcomes, there is no ideal set of power relations and power shifts across time.

AND ULTIMATELY, A THEORY OF PROCESS

processes to knowingly and unknowingly shape place (Figure 7.4). Thus it is not just design, nor even development processes that shape the experience of space, but instead the combined outcomes and interactions between: Ȉ Design – the key aspirations and vision, and contextual and stakeholder influences for a particular project or set of proposals; Ȉ Development – the power relationships, and processes of negotiation, regulation and delivery for a particular project or set of proposals; Ȉ Space in use – who uses a particular place, how, why, when and with what consequences and conflicts; Ȉ Management – the place-based responsibilities for stewardship, security, maintenance and ongoing funding.

It is further argued that there is need to understand the creation, re-creation and performance of the built environment across four interrelated process dimensions, self-consciously and un-self-consciously using design

Figure 7.4 The typical sub-processes of urban design

Moreover, this is not a series of discrete episodes and activities as we often attempt to understand them from our siloed standpoints, but instead a continuous integrated process or continuum from history to and through each of the placeshaping processes of today and tomorrow; sometimes focused on particular projects or sets of interventions (design and development) to shape the physical public realm for use; 87

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Ȉ Informed by its historical place-based modes of operation; Ȉ Set within a contemporary polity or policy-influenced political economic context; Ȉ Defined by a particular set of stakeholder power relationships.

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Following the research, it was hypothesised that the story of public space (as a surrogate for urban design) cannot be grasped without understanding the full range of influences that act together to shape the process, and thereby the outcomes of public space development projects. Thus, whilst there is a need to understand and critique urban design in terms of its normative outcome-based intentions, to fully theorise and influence it we need to understand it as a process:

and sometimes on the everyday processes of place (use and management), shaping the social public realm through use (see Figure 7.2). This is ‘urban design’. Not a physical intervention in pursuit of narrow project outcomes nor a set of normative design objectives, not a particular style or trend-based ‘urbanism’ or a constrained response to a borrowed intellectual construct; and certainly not a rejection of the very notion of urban design per se because of its still evolutionary, mongrel, or simply ‘difficult’ nature (see Chapter 1). Instead, urban design represents an on-going journey through which places are continuously shaped and re-shaped – physically, socially and economically – through periodic planned intervention, day-to-day occupation and the long-term guardianship of space (Figure 7.5). The investigative power and rigour of mixed methods research focusing in-depth on a single city was necessary to understand this fathomless but ultimately explicable complexity, revealing the connections necessary to make sense of it and in the process suggesting a model for further intellectual enquiry and policy / practice innovation in urban design.

TIPS FOR RESEARCHERS: Ȉ There is much sense in being pragmatic about the choice and mix of research methods, what works is more important than methodological purity. Ȉ No research methods are intellectually or morally superior to others, all have their strengths and weaknesses, and good research recognises and makes these explicit. Ȉ Mixing methods can help to substantiate or compensate for known weaknesses in individual methods. Ȉ Generalising from individual or small numbers of case studies is just as valid as generalising from scientific experiments, both require testing through replication and application before confirmation can occur.

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Figure 7.5 Trafalgar Square, (i) yesterday and (ii) today, continually shaped through time

8

Link and Place – bridging stakeholder divides Peter Jones

The design of urban streets has often been dominated by solutions that meet the needs of motorised traffic and the perspective of the highway/traffic engineer, with little consideration of other street activities or of the contributions of other professionals such as urban designers. This chapter sets out a more comprehensive approach to urban street planning and design which recognises equally the movement (‘Link’) and locational (‘Place’) functions of urban streets. It describes the development and application of various aspects of this approach, with its roots in a European project involving both academics and practitioners from a range of disciplinary backgrounds. It shows how the approach can lead to a more holistic process of urban street planning and design, and can facilitate dialogue and joint working among a range of professionals with different interests, as well as providing a basis for productive engagement with local businesses and the general public.

INTRODUCTION The professions which have the greatest impact on the appearance of urban streets are usually the highway/traffic engineers, whose main focus has traditionally been on facilitating the movement of road traffic. The resulting engineering solutions have commonly resulted in streets that are, from a pedestrian perspective, unattractive and

dominated by traffic, with little consideration for the visual appearance of the street or the kinds of street environment that is created. The urban designer may try to argue for the creation of a more inclusive street design, based on urban design principles, but he/she often finds it difficult to engage with traffic engineers or to ensure that due consideration is given to the non-traffic functions of urban streets. This is partly a question of language, but also an imbalance in methodology: traffic requirements can be quantified and monetised in a way which makes it easier to justify their demands being met, and there are typically identified funding streams to pay for road ‘improvements’. This chapter describes a recent approach to urban street planning and design which recognises the diverse functions that urban streets can play; it provides a basis for a balanced dialogue among the different professional groups, and one which also facilitates engagement with members of the public and the business community. The basic concept was developed within the EU ‘ARTISTS’ project (Svensson 2004) that comprised a consortium of academics, consultants and city employees from several European countries, with backgrounds in architecture, engineering and city planning. The project involved an extensive debate and exchange of ideas between the various disciplines and professions, to identify different concepts, perspectives, terminology and methodologies, followed by agreement on a common framework leading to case study applications in several

cities, including London. It combined academic and practice perspectives. The approach is based on the simple notion that urban streets do not only cater for vehicle movement but support a diverse set of activities, which can be broadly grouped into two main categories: Link/movement and Place/destination related. This classification can be applied to an entire street network and replaces the traditional traffic-dominated classification that views streets as ‘district distributors’, etc., and where traffic and ‘place’ activity are in conflict, rather than being viewed as complementary and adding to the richness of city life. The chapter first discusses the conventional traffic engineering paradigm, which shapes the ways in which problems are perceived and solutions are developed and assessed. It next introduces the concept of ‘Link and Place’ and explains how it can be used to classify an urban street network. It illustrates how this information provides a guide to street design, in particular by providing an indication of the appropriate balance between Link and Place activities along a particular street. The following section describes how the approach provides an inclusive framework for encouraging dialogue between different professions with an interest in the street, giving some practical examples. Then the chapter presents a case study in which the Link and Place approach underpinned a successful street design public engagement exercise in a situation where previous efforts by local traffic engineers to redesign the street had been highly contentious and strongly rejected. Finally, the chapter considers how urban designers might embrace and build on this approach.

THE CONVENTIONAL TRAFFIC ENGINEERING PARADIGM The skills of the highway/traffic engineer have been developed over centuries, with their remit to cater for growing volumes of wheeled – and subsequently motorised – vehicle 90

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traffic which made use of tracks and lanes that were more suited to movement on foot and by animal. This required engineers to develop skills in road base and surface construction, in road geometry, drainage and bridge design and more recently in traffic management. The emphasis originally was therefore on ‘improving’ existing highway infrastructure to accommodate the needs of a growing volume of faster and heavier motorised vehicles. Engineers were never expected to consider the full range of functions that streets serve – beyond making limited provision for vehicle parking and loading, and providing for the movement of pedestrians along and across streets that carry higher pedestrian flows. This remit has only recently been challenged. Traffic engineering skills also provided a major input to the early development of urban transport planning as a profession. This more strategic approach to catering for movement in cities was necessitated by the rapid growth in car ownership, which could not be accommodated through piecemeal improvements to existing road sections or junctions, but required major investment in new transport infrastructure. Initially dominated by proposals for extensive networks of urban motorways, it soon became evident in European cities that it would not be possible to accommodate unrestricted car use without substantially destroying large parts of the existing city fabric. So thinking moved on to other ways in which the increasing demands for urban movement could be accommodated, through better public transport systems and enhanced networks for cycling and walking, to the substitution of physical mobility by ‘virtual’ mobility. Jones (2012) has characterised this broadening of perspective as taking urban transport planning beyond its initial ‘vehicle-based’ paradigm, in a series of steps which first reformulated the primary objective to being one of catering for the movement of people, not vehicles (tripbased paradigm), and then broadening again to providing accessibility to goods and services, both physically and virtually, and generally reducing the need to travel (activitybased paradigm). While, at a strategic level, catering for the

movement of cars is seen as being only one of many objectives of urban transport planning, at the level of street design it still tends to dominate thinking – this broader conception of the function of cities has not filtered down to this level. Hence, for example, traffic engineers still tend to focus on maximising vehicle flows, rather than maximising person flows through a street network. There is also a traditional emphasis in the various branches of engineering on assessing problems and solutions in quantitative terms: is the bridge of sufficient strength to carry anticipated loads? Or can this junction accommodate expected traffic volumes? This has been coupled with a quantitative approach in transport appraisal, which seeks to justify investment by monetising the various costs and benefits of road improvements. Both are very different to the more qualitative and holistic approaches often associated with urban planning and urban design.

THE ‘LINK AND PLACE’ URBAN STREET CLASSIFICATION What is ‘Link and Place’?

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network). Link users may travel by a variety of modes, from private car or truck through to bus, bicycle or on foot. Their primary requirement is for a continuous, linear path through the network, with minimum disruption and a seamless connection from one street to the next, from the beginning to the end of their journey. In general, Link users are seeking to minimise travel time along each section of street, and have only a secondary interest in the street itself – although the local street environment may influence route choice. In contrast, as a Place, a street becomes a destination in its own right: somewhere of economic, social, cultural and/or architectural importance, where a variety of activities occur on or adjacent to the street. A Place user is someone wishing to make use of certain facilities that are provided for on or alongside that street, and he/she will usually access these facilities on foot. While such people are normally classified as ‘pedestrians’, they are not passing through the area as a Link user would – they are spending time in the area, and may be carrying out a wide variety of activities (e.g. shopping, working, eating, talking, waiting, or resting). Such typical high street activities are described in Jones et al. (2007b). However, not all of the traffic and transport-related activities observed on urban streets are part of that street’s Link function. There are also some types of Place-related activities that are directly connected with traffic and transport, and occur within and adjacent to the carriageway. For example: loading/unloading; parking by employees, customers, residents, etc.; and buses, trams and taxis stopping to drop off/pick up passengers. Such activities

8.

Since the urban street network is viewed primarily as a road traffic network, it is also classified and designed as such. Terms such as ‘primary distributor’ and ‘secondary distributor’ are commonly used, but with a recognition that some streets also perform ancillary roles such as shopping streets or tourist destinations. The approach underpinning ‘Link and Place’ recognises that there is a wide and varied range of activities to be found on urban streets, which can be grouped under one of two broad types of street functions: ‘Link’ and ‘Place’ (Figure 8.1). As a Link, each street provides a conduit for the through movement of people and vehicles; it forms an integral part of the whole urban street network and may support other, more specialised, urban transport networks (e.g. bus, HGV or cycle

Figure 8.1 The concept of ‘Link and Place’ (Jones and Reynolds ͢͢͠͡ǡ ‹‰—”‡͡Ȍ

would not be required if the street had no Place value. The principles behind, and the application of, ‘Link and Place’ are set out much more fully in Jones et al. (2007a). This recognition of the dual function of most urban streets can be found in other publications, drawing on the ARTISTS work, but with slightly varying terminology. The UK Government’s Manual for Streets (DfT and CLG 2007), for example, refers to ‘Movement and Place’ as does the London Roads Task Force report (TfL 2013). The recognition of the Link and Place functions of a street, and the wide variety of activities that streets may support, results in a more comprehensive and complete consideration of the street than would traditionally be addressed by a combination of a conventional Road Plan and a Land Use Plan. Indeed, the case can be made for developing comprehensive urban Street Plans, as illustrated in Figure 8.2. This is something that would fit much more comfortably with the remit of the urban designer.

‹‰—”‡ͨǤ͢ ƒ’•‹…‘˜‡–‹‘ƒŽ’Žƒ‹‰ȋ ‘‡•‡–ƒŽǤͧ͢͠͠ƒǡšƒ’Ž‡͡͡Ȍ

The Link/Place Street Classification Matrix

‹‰—”‡ͨǤͣƤ˜‡Ǧ„›ǦƤ˜‡‹ȀŽƒ…‡•–”‡‡–…Žƒ••‹Ƥ…ƒ–‹‘ƒ–”‹šȋ ‘‡•‡–ƒŽǤͧ͢͠͠ƒǡ Example 6)

Conventionally, the urban road network is classified along only one dimension, primarily reflecting the importance of its traffic movement function. The twin concepts of ‘Link’ and ‘Place’ provide the basis for developing a

more comprehensive, two-dimensional street classification, which explicitly recognises the importance of the nonmovement functions of urban streets. Here, in principle, every kind of urban street can be represented by a cell within

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a two dimensional matrix. An equal number of Link and Place categories are first defined, which reflect the relative importance of each function. For example, the Link categories may make use of an existing road classification

metropolitan area, a ‘6 × 6’ matrix may be more appropriate (as has been trialled in London), while the street network in a small urban area may be adequately reflected using a ‘4 × 4’ matrix. These two dimensions are independent, covering both extreme cases of urban motorways (i.e. I–E) and pedestrianised regional shopping areas (V–A), as well as streets catering for both significant Link and Place activities (e.g. a traditional main street would be classified as II-C). In practice, additional factors are taken into account when classifying streets, such as the predominant type of land 93

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system (e.g. from principal routes down to local access roads); while Place categories may reflect the size of the catchment area for activities associated with that street (e.g. for shops and services) or the cultural or heritage significance of the buildings fronting that section of street. This approach is used to generate the kind of street classification matrix shown in Figure 8.3. Here a ‘5 × 5’ matrix has categories ‘I to V’ to represent Link functions (strategic to local) and ‘A to E’ for Place functions, with a total of 25 cells covering a wide range of street types, from major arterials down to residential cul-de-sacs. For a large

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use as a component of the Place description, and any modal priorities (e.g. if part of a major cycle network). Once such a matrix has been defined, an entire urban street network can be divided into discrete sections according to their varying Link/Place category levels. Within this, however, the designation of some street sections may need to vary by time of day (peak/off-peak), day of week (market day vs. other days), and season (tourist vs. non-tourist), with corresponding differences in design requirements.

incorporated into the highway maintenance contract so that, if the Link or Place function of a street section changes (e.g. due to changes in bus routes or the addition of a major new retail development), then the Link/Place designation of that section is automatically reviewed and modified.

Application to the London Borough of Hounslow’s Street Network

The agreed Link/Place designation for each street section in an urban area – together with sub-layer information on transport modal mix, land use and building characteristics – provides a guide to deciding on an appropriate design solution for that section; in particular the balance that should be struck between the needs of Link and Place users. It provides a rationale for different treatments in different contexts. Most Link and Place-related street activities require an allocation of space, or capacity, for that activity to take place safely. Here we can think of a spectrum of provision, from ‘minimum’ to ‘desirable’. For example, in the UK installing a bus lane requires a minimum 3 metre carriageway width, but the desirable width would be 4 metres or more. Similarly, on the Place side, we can identify minimum and desirable sizes – and numbers – say, for the provision of on-street seating in a major shopping street; recognising that the ‘footprint’ of many Place activities, such as people sitting, is greater than the physical space taken up by an object such as a bench (Jones and Palfreeman 2009). While at desirable levels of provision each activity would normally have its own dedicated space, at minimum levels of provision it may sometimes be possible to share space, either by mixing activities (e.g. bus + cycle lane), or by allocating different time slots for activities within the same area such as when part of the carriageway is used as a peak period bus lane and as an off-peak loading bay. By summing the space requirements for the relevant Link and Place activities it is possible to identify total Link and total Place requirements

Figure 8.4 illustrates the application of a 5 × 5 Link/Place matrix that was developed by the London Borough of Hounslow as it was implemented on one part of its street network. The Link categories, 1 to 5, are represented by the inner colour, and the five Place categories, A to E, by the outer colour. This representation gives a quick visual sense of the varying Link/Place functions of different streets across the network, and was developed as part of a highway maintenance scheme (Jones and Reynolds 2012). The Link classification of each street section was largely based on an existing Borough road hierarchy, but this value has been boosted in some places to take account of streets with heavy bus or HGV flows, or where the Link function of the street has increased since it was officially designated (e.g. due to increased traffic levels on roads around Heathrow Airport). By contrast, the local authority did not have an agreed Place classification for its street network and this had to be developed from scratch. This was achieved at workshops involving representatives from the various departments of the council (see below) in which a set of principles was agreed, such as: a street section with a junior school in it should have a ‘neighbourhood’ status level. These principles were then applied across the network. Ultimately, the rules for determining the Link and Place function of each street section were codified and 94

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THE STREET CLASSIFICATION MATRIX AS A GUIDE TO STREET DESIGN

Figure 8.5 Using Link and Place as a guide to streetspace allocation

Link and Place – bridging stakeholder divides

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in the street cross section at minimum and desirable levels of provision. In urban areas in countries such as the UK, where most busier urban streets were developed before the major growth in car ownership, it is rare that there is sufficient space (in cross section) to provide for all user needs at ‘desirable’ levels of provision, but there is usually scope for accommodating more than minimum levels of provision, providing some degree of ‘discretionary’ space. It is here that the Link/Place designation for a particular street can provide a guide as to how that discretionary space should be allocated between the relevant Link and Place activities on a particular street. The principle underlying this process is illustrated diagrammatically in Figure 8.5. The top left hand part of the figure shows how, in cross section, the space available is more than required to meet minimum Link and Place needs, but insufficient to cater for desirable levels of provision. Below this is a different way of representing this information, in the form of a ‘trade-off triangle’. The two axes show how much of the street width is being used for Link or for Place-related activities. In the extreme, all could be allocated to Link (e.g. urban motorway) or to Place (e.g. public park), but usually a balance has to be struck. The triangle shows that in this example, the available space lies between the minimum and desirable levels. On the right hand side is a simple

representation of a Link/Place matrix, with the proposal that where Place importance is higher than Link importance, then more of the discretionary cross sectional space should be given to Place activities, and vice versa. What this might mean in practice is shown in Figure 8.6. Here we see two streets of similar width that are very different in appearance. It is proposed that these differences can be explained and justified by the different roles that they are playing, in terms of their Link and Place functions. In the left hand example, the Place function (B) is relatively more important than the Link function (III), so most of the discretionary space is given over to Place-related provision (parking and loading, median strip with high quality lighting, greenery). Conversely, in the right hand example, the Link function (II) is much greater than the Place function (D), so Link requirements take precedent, beyond meeting minimum Place requirements. There, the peak period bus lane caters for parking and loading requirements during offpeak times.

ENCOURAGING PROFESSIONAL DIALOGUE One of the greatest practical benefits of working within a Link and Place framework has been the ability it has provided to work constructively and creatively with a wide range of professionals on street planning and design issues. It provides a common language for dialogue between disciplines and professions, and helps to highlight the important contributions of different professional groups. How Link and Place facilitates this is illustrated in Figure 8.7; here the combination of Link and Place, and Planning and Design, defines four spheres which bring together at least four main professional groups, each with a unique role to play. In addition, there are many other more specialist groups that naturally align with one or more of these primary groups, such as highway and lighting engineers with traffic engineers.

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Figure 8.7 How Link/Place planning and design functions relate –‘†‹ơ‡”‡–’”‘ˆ‡••‹‘ƒŽ‹–‡”‡•–•

During the development and testing of the Link and Place approach (Jones et al. 2007a), trials were carried out on different parts of the Transport for London Road Network (TLRN). At that time, relationships between TfL and the London Boroughs were often poor, with the Boroughs concerned that TfL was only interested in the traffic functions on their network and not with the needs of the local residents and businesses along the routes. By engaging Boroughs in a dialogue about the planning and design of the TLRN in the context of Link and Place, the process became much smoother and the debate more constructive: the Boroughs acknowledged TfL’s role as custodians of the Link functions of their streets, while TfL officials acknowledged the Boroughs as having a primary interest in championing the Place functions along the TLRN. It also led to consideration of a wider range of factors within the street design briefs than would traditionally have been

ENGAGING THE PUBLIC IN STREET REDESIGN

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One of the main benefits of adopting the Link/Place approach that became evident during local applications has been the strong intuitive appeal that it has for a wide range of stakeholders, including the public and local businesses. This has led to the development of an interactive street design workshop exercise, using a combination of physical and computer-based design aids, which has proved very successful in finding acceptable design solutions on more contentious parts of the urban street network (Jones and Thoreau 2007). The exercise has three stages and was developed in conjunction with the ‘DISTILLATE’ project (May 2009), funded by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. Participants typically include local residents and business owners, local politicians, and representatives of interest groups (such as cycling, disability and environmental organisations). First, participants are given a briefing about the study area (typically an arterial urban street), including details of the current conditions (e.g. traffic and pedestrian flows), intended functions, and the full range of Link and Place problems experienced (e.g. congestion, traffic accidents, economic problems of local businesses and footway conditions). They are then invited to add any problems they feel need addressing and to discuss how they would like to see the area develop and improve in the future, particularly from a Place perspective. Agreement is then reached on a set of minimum design requirements, both for Link and Place. These requirements include any regulatory requirements and local policy priorities, and typically include: minimum lane widths for through traffic, the number of bus stops and pedestrian crossings, and the provision of public seating and disabled parking places.

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included, such as improving public realm and addressing personal security issues. Another example of the benefits to be derived from engaging in multi-profession dialogue using this framework comes from the application of the Link and Place classification in the London Borough of Hounslow, in the context of their highways maintenance contract (previously mentioned). In order to develop and apply the Link/Place matrix, the Borough brought together a wide range of professionals from within the organisation, including those responsible for highway and traffic engineering, transport planning (including bus and cycle network planning), land use planning, urban design, development control and heritage, environmental services and community policing. Local politicians were also kept informed. Two workshops were held with this wide ranging group of professionals, the first to agree a set of principles for defining the Link/Place matrix and to assign street sections to each cell; and the second to review draft maps that had been drawn up (similar to Figure 8.4), to see whether these accorded with the local knowledge and professional judgements of those around the table. This process went very smoothly, and it proved generally easy to reach agreement on the designation of each street section. But the wider benefit of this exercise was that it brought the professions involved closer together and meant that they now better understood each other’s roles and responsibilities. Together they now had a shared understanding of the functions of each part of their street network. So, for example, if a planner was negotiating with a developer, he/she now had a clear understanding of what kinds of improvement they would like to see funded on that street – and, whether the development would alter the street’s designation and hence its design requirements.

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Figure 8.8 The design kit (i) scale map and (ii) blocks/ ƒ…‡–ƒ–‡•†‡’‹…–‹‰†‹ơ‡”‡–†‡•‹‰ˆ‡ƒ–—”‡• 98

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Next, participants are divided into design groups where they are provided with a large scale plan of the street segment and the adjoining area, typically at a scale of 1:250, and a box containing a series of coloured acetates and blocks depicting a range of different Link and Place design features that could be provided along the street (e.g. parking bays, bus lanes, seating), also at the 1:250 scale. The scale plans show only the minimum necessary constraints (e.g. protected kerb lines at junctions), as shown in Figure 8.8. Each group is facilitated, and can draw on the help of a traffic engineer and an urban designer, when considering options. Each design group is tasked with developing a street layout that satisfies the minimum requirements that were agreed at the start of the session, but they are free to use the remaining space as they wish, to accommodate the group’s aspirations for the area. In addition to deciding on the total number of street design elements of each type that they would like to see provided, the groups have considerable freedom to decide where the design elements should be located along the main street – or in adjoining side roads (Figure 8.9). Once the group has agreed on its preferred option, the blocks and acetates are replaced with stickers of the same colour, shape and size, in order to provide a permanent record of their proposals. In addition, comments and sketches

CONCLUSION

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The Link and Place approach has proved very successful in providing a more comprehensive awareness of the multifunctional nature of most urban streets, and offers a common basis for dialogue among the different professions and between professionals and the public. Unlike the conventional approach, it is not vehicle-dominated and explicitly recognises and takes into account the wide range of Place-related functions that streets perform. At the same time, it is not antivehicle, since it safeguards the needs of Link users and those requiring parking and loading space; it recognises that the Link requirements have to be balanced against a wide range of other needs that have equal legitimacy. What this means in practice is that optimal design solutions will vary across the urban street network, in response to differences in the Link/ Place designation of each street segment, and local constraints such as the overall street width. The introductory section of this chapter noted an imbalance in the treatment of vehicle and non-vehicle street users in many streets, which is partly attributable to the dominance of the conventional, one-dimensional road classification and the primary role of the highway/traffic engineer, and partly to the lack of quantification of Placerelated requirements. The Link/Place approach overcomes the first of these problems very successfully, and has changed the culture of street planning and design in authorities where it has been implemented. By setting out Place requirements more explicitly and rigorously, it also provides a starting point for addressing the second issue (i.e. lack of quantification and monetisation) – which is likely to require further significant research involving urban designers, traffic engineers and economists.

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(e.g. on how a new public space might look) are included on the maps. The format of the exercise provides people with plenty of flexibility and encourages creativity. The box (shown in Figure 8.8) incorporates different potential design elements, and so encourages people to consider the different features that they might incorporate (e.g. cycle parking). As the blocks and acetates are at the same scale as the map, participants can easily see for themselves whether there is space to accommodate particular combinations of design elements, and the physical format enables people to easily move the blocks around, and to pass them from one person to another. Finally, each design option is entered into a GIS-based computer program, developed in conjunction with Buchanan Computing, which displays the street layouts that the groups have developed, both in the coloured block format in which they were developed, and in the corresponding legal regulatory line marking format. This is presented on a large screen for discussion at a subsequent stakeholder meeting, and can be edited online. The outcome is then refined by the traffic engineers and put forward for formal public consultation. Two trials of the method have been carried out in the English West Midlands. Both proved highly successful, with the designs developed by the groups receiving very high levels of public support in their respective formal public consultation exercises. They have subsequently been implemented with minimum objection – in situations where previous proposals to reallocate street space had encountered strong local opposition. In both areas the local councillors and professionals involved have been very pleased with the outcome, and one of the authorities is now using the method more widely in areas where contentious situations are encountered.

TIPS FOR RESEARCHERS: Ȉ Become familiar with the concepts, terminologies and methodologies of the various professional and disciplinary groups with an interest in urban street planning and design. Ȉ Use workshops and facilitated discussion groups to explore different perspectives and to develop common ground. Ȉ Identify the policy and practitioner context in which the research is intended to have impact. Ȉ Trial the concepts and methods that the project develops in different contexts, in order to test their robustness and effectiveness, and their relevance to different interested groups.

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Actor-network theory coevolution framework for urban design Tse-Hui Teh

The actor-network theory coevolution framework inspires a methodology that gives the urban design researcher and practitioner tools to enable them to join together and go beyond the existing approaches to urban design. Actornetwork theory coevolution describes an ever changing set of relations that can be strategically manipulated in order to resolve the ‘problematisation’ generated by the urban designer in relation to other actants. This formulation of the urban designer and the urban design process frees urban design from being the work of artists, visionaries, or the slaves to societal norms, but instead positions urban design as an actant, equal to all other actants, in the process of defining and changing urban form.

INTRODUCTION Actor-network theory coevolution is a useful framework for urban design research and practice because it allows a tracing of the confluence of material, biological and social influences that form urban areas. This allows the urban designer a way to understand and articulate the complex entangled processes in which they intervene, and which is different from three main approaches to urban design: the perceptual, the social and the utopian. This alternative understanding of the continual formation of urban areas can be seen as not only

linking together these three approaches, but also including other elements that influence urban formations such as flows of resources, climate, and ecology, that are not considered in these models, but have been shown to be an integral part of the way people modify their environments and create urban formations. Additionally it moves the urban designer away from the contemporary focus on the space between buildings to one in which all the components of the urban environment can be included. Actor-network theory coevolution acknowledges that urban areas are under continual transformation and also shows that this transformation is not arbitrary; it is based on the given social and material conditions of past and present existence and its particular trajectories of change. Therefore this framework gives urban designers the ability to conceive and propose ideas of transformation grounded in an understanding of reality as a set of relations between many things that have trajectories of change embedded within these relations. This particular way of understanding relations between the material, biological and social, places the urban designer on an equal footing to all other actants that create urban areas; neither a utopic or artistic visionary nor a prisoner to societal norms. Through this nonhierarchical inclusive understanding of urban actants, it can create alternative arenas for participating in the design and change of urban areas.

ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY COEVOLUTION Actor-network theory coevolution joins the insights of two complementary approaches to understanding phenomena in the world: actor-network theory and coevolution. Both approaches are relational, but their respective disciplinary origins: science and technology studies and biology, alters the focus on what things are related and the timescale in which the relations are.

Actor-Network Theory Actor-network theory emerged from science and technology studies in an effort to understand how new scientific knowledge and technologies come into being, are disseminated and reproduced. Moreover it is also concerned with understanding how breakthroughs and innovations happen. Through their ethnographic work, the three main proponents: Bruno Latour (Latour 1993, Latour 2005), John Law (Callon and Law 1982, Law 2004) and Michel Callon (Callon and Law 2005, Callon et al. 2011) developed a new ontological stance which proposed that there was a symmetrical influence between humans and nonhumans in shaping the phenomena we perceive in the world. This symmetry meant that the world was no longer divided into the human (social) and nonhuman (natural) realms of understanding, but the two are instead seen as being joined and created simultaneously. In other words changes in society would have the simultaneous effect of changing the technological, biological and material world, vice versa, and so forth, in a never ending circulation of altering relationships. This point of view concurs with utopian urban designers such as Le Corbusier, CIAM, Ebenezer Howard and Frank Lloyd Wright who believed that building new forms which gave people new amenities would also build new societies. However while designers share some of this understanding of the world where the material and the social affect each other, the articulation and implementation of these ideas have 102

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been rather naïve because it concentrated efforts on altering the material without applying an equal amount of attention to the processes of social change that the material change presumes. They believed building the new urban forms would be sufficient to force society to change. However this was not the case. Tower blocks inspired by Le Corbusier and CIAM or the dispersed urbanism influenced by Howard and Wright were not the transformative social successes that were imagined (Anthony 1966, Fava 1975, Forsyth 2012, Graham and Marvin 2001, Soja 2000, Richman 1974). The actor-network theory approach also describes the forming of new scientific knowledge as a process of creating material and social change in the world. This makes it analogous to many processes, including the process of realising designed material change, a field which includes urban design. Callon (1986) elaborates four different stages of how relations between actants alter and stabilise into new configurations: problematisation, interessement, enrolment, and mobilisation. Problematisation marks the beginning of the process and is initiated by a human actant whose general aim is to alter the world in some way, this could be to generate new knowledge or it could be to solve other matters of concern such as how to make roads safer (Latour 2000). Following problematisation is interessement when the initial actant aims to interest related actants to participate in a new set of relations. In the case of road safety, due to the fast speed of the vehicular traffic, this would include drivers, pedestrians, the police, the configuration of the road, the material form of the road, the area beside the road, the weather conditions, and so on. At this point actants redefine themselves relative to each other and the initial problematisation gains new dimensions, some of which may eventually bear no relation to the initiating problematisation and become other network formations. Enrolment is when actants have realigned themselves into a probable new configuration. For example, the physical form of the road may gain a series of humps to force drivers to slow down. The size of the humps would be determined by

The concept of coevolution relates to the stage of problematisation because it explains how different problems arise or

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Coevolution

persist within the existing network of relations. Coevolution is a concept that was first described in biology which showed how organisms evolve particular traits in response to each other. For example in the problematisation of how orchids and pollinators can increase the efficiency of pollination and the reliability of food sources for different insect species, it was noted that ‘… the structure of the flowers of Orchids and that of the insects which habitually visit them, are correlated in an interesting manner …’, ‘… species with a short and not very narrow nectar are fertilised by bees and flies; whilst those with a much elongated nectar, or one having a very narrow entrance, are fertilised by butterflies or moths, these being provided with long and thin proboscides’ (Darwin 1877: 30 quoted in Thompson 1994: 25). In other words different orchids and pollinators had coevolved their structures to suit one another to achieve more efficient pollination and ensure reliable food sources. The relationship between these two things is entwined such that a change that occurs in one necessitates a change in the other. These changes have a sense of simultaneity, hence the term coevolution, rather than evolution which may be a response of one living organism to a singular event. This concept of coevolution has since been applied to a plethora of other fields including socio-technical systems (Geels 2005, Shove 2004), sociology, and economics (Gual and Norgaard 2010). In appropriating coevolution from biology that looks at the relations between different species, it has been shown that people’s practices, ideas and values have a coevolving relationship with the technologies around them. For example Geels (2005) shows that the changing practices of personal cleanliness in the Netherlands from 1850–1930 were marked by a simultaneous change to the water provision system. The new piped water system made it easier to access water for cleaning, at the same time there were campaigns to encourage people to clean more, and the soap industry was burgeoning. All these different material, biological and social elements coevolved together to transform values, practices and the materials of personal cleanliness. Similarly, Shove

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the chassis of the vehicles using the road, the continuity of the hump by the needs of other road users such as motor or bicycle cyclists, and the distance between the humps by the rate the motor vehicle can accelerate and decelerate. When they enact their new configurations, mobilisation is achieved. This would be when a road is constructed with the relevant speed humps, drivers use this road, and then slow down because of the speed humps. At this stage the problematisation of road safety due to fast vehicular speed is resolved because of the slower speed of the vehicles due to the speed humps. Finally if this new relation remains constant over time, stabilisation occurs. When a particular configuration is stabilised, it can also be seen as an actant in and of itself. Moreover, when it becomes an unquestioned part of a network, it can also be seen as a ‘black box’ (Latour 1999). For example, speed humps are now an accepted road safety measure, and there are codes written to identify when and what types of speed humps should be installed to achieve certain types of road safety. These codes are devoid of the context in which it was developed and are thus a ‘black box’. At this stage the human and nonhuman interactions that formed the code are no longer apparent, and only the input (fast vehicular speed) and output (slower vehicular speed) can be easily identified. Each stage: problematisation, interessement, enrolment, mobilisation, and stabilisation, is dependent on the preceding stage, but its processes are entangled as there is a simultaneity of different problematisations, interessements, enrolments and mobilisations that actants define and are defined by. Actants are usually entangled in multiple networks all of which can be changing simultaneously. However, to be identified as an actant, implies a level of stabilisation within the networks.

(2004) shows how the washing machine coevolved from a regime of hand washing; through to machines that imitated the functions of hand washing; altering people’s trust of the washing machine; to the current simplification of the cycles of the washing machine that now bears no resemblance to the regime of hand washing from which it was developed. The washing machine is now a ‘black box’ which is the accepted form of clothes washing, but most people using the machine do not know how it washes, nor how much water or energy it uses, nor would they be able to fix it easily should it break down. These coevolution histories of technology and society show that problematisations arise from existing network relations and they continue to coevolve due to new problematisations that arise from the changed network relations. Thus understanding current network relations and the areas where these relations are more or less stable can start to identify areas of change given a particular problematisation. However in these examples, this insight was only brought to bear on the network relations between technology and society. Actor-network theory shows that relations between actants are not limited to technologies and society, but are instead multifarious. Therefore by joining these two relational frameworks, new networks and actants can be understood as arising from existing relational conditions; furthermore the actants that can be identified as affecting the network are infinite and their influence equal. The actor-network theory coevolution framework can then be used to investigate the stability of the relational effects of different network configurations. This can be used to reveal coevolution pathways as well as areas of abrupt and rapid change to network relations. This framework can be applied to any network relations, not just the investigation of urban areas. However this chapter will show an example of one method of how this framework was used to explore different coevolution pathways for urban design, based upon the problematisation of the urban water-cycle in London.

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URBAN DESIGN CONCERNS Urban design concerns itself with proposing interventions in the formation of urban areas. There are many urban design ideas, but in this research they were broadly categorised into three main concerns: the perceptual, the social and the utopian. All three centre on improving the quality of life for people living in the urban environment, but often prioritise one component over others for improving that quality. The perceptual proposes ideas that make the urban formation more beautiful and satisfying as a human experience through the organisation of the materials that form an urban area. This can be done through building details, landscaping, building mass, monuments, promenades, street layout and lighting. For example Rob Krier (1979) advocates the replication of the particular architectural qualities of historic public places that have a long history of being popular spaces for people to visit. This could be open spaces defined by buildings of a particular proportion and homogeneity of architectural character. Rowe and Koetter (1978) on the other hand write of enriching the people’s experience of the city through palimpsests of different types of urban fabric providing a visceral experience of distinctive and at times competing ideas of urbanism through which the city has been built. These ideas concentrate on improving the material experience of the urban area for individuals. The social concentrates on making urban places more liveable through the collective experience of the city by creating spaces conducive to greater social interaction. This view point was started by Jane Jacobs (1961) in reaction to urban transformations that were happening in her hometown of New York City in the 1960s where great swathes of fine grained tenements were repossessed to make way for large apartment blocks of social housing and highways. Jacobs argued that unlike the new social housing blocks, Greenwich Village in New York City where she lived was a pleasant and vibrant urban environment because it contained a fine grain

ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY COEVOLUTION URBAN DESIGN One way in which the actor-network theory coevolution framework has been used in urban design research, is to investigate how the urban water-cycle interacts with urban form in London. This interaction is of interest because the urban water-cycle in London needs reconfiguration in order to improve aquatic environments, cope with flood 105

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provided the stepping stone to the formation of suburban areas, which have been blamed for a growing sense of individual entitlement. This has led to a degradation of both a sense of community and ecologies due to the dependency of private transportation, individual consumerism and the overuse of chemicals in home maintenance (Fava 1975, Robbins and Sharp 2008a, Robbins and Sharp 2008b). CIAM’s ideas led to housing tower blocks, which were blamed for providing an arena for gangs to develop and social disintegration (Richman 1974). Unfortunately, the material change was easier to achieve than the social change, and the material change failed to engender the anticipated social change that it was supposed to. This is because the utopian ideas were not based on an understanding of how the material and the social were intertwined; instead it was a rejection of both. In some cases the material form prevented the desired social interactions taking place, and in others spaces were co-opted for very different social changes than had been envisioned. By using actor-network theory coevolution, it is possible to articulate the relationships between the material and the social and therefore create ideas which are based on existing social and material relations that are altering now. The changing relations which are desired can be amplified by designing new material relations that reinforce or make easier these behaviours, thereby stabilising a particular alteration to the network.

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of individual buildings containing a mix of uses where many people could interact safely. She identified short city blocks as enabling pedestrian movement and hence greater social interaction. Similarly Lynch (1984, 1960) identifies different urban elements that aid people to orientate themselves in the city and places that are gathering points needed for social experiences for people to enjoy the city. Hillier (2007) on the other hand argues that the street patterns of urban form engender particular social interactions and that places of high connectivity are better than those of low connectivity because a high connectivity of streets correlates with a high connectivity of social interactions. Despite the different urban elements that each of these urbanists choose to concentrate on, all of them identify how the elements that they describe improve the urban experience through facilitating greater social exchange. Utopian ideas, by contrast, are based on the argument that both the societal and the material conditions that exist are inadequate to improve the quality of life for people and therefore both need to completely change, either by creating new urban areas, or by demolishing large parts of the existing city and building a new type of city with new built forms offering new types of social engagement through altered spatial configuration. Some utopian urban design ideas did blend both material and social change, for example Ebenezer Howard’s (1998 [1898]) proposal for garden cities ‘To-morrow: a peaceful path to real reform’, not only suggests an urban form which mixes the town and the country, but also proposes a social mix and ideas of economic reform. Similarly, the Athens Charter by Le Corbusier and the Congress Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) (1973) identifies that the city is more than the material manifestation and also proposes change in the arenas of the work day, leisure, traffic regulation and historic preservation. It also called for cities to be considered in relation to their regional influences. However what was created from these utopian ideas for urban areas were mainly physical visions for the built form, rather than parallel social reforms. Howard’s garden cities

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‹‰—”‡ͩǤͥ‘‡˜‘Ž˜‡†‘Š—ƒƒ…–ƒ–•‹–‡”‡••‡‡–™‹–Š human actants

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risk, and secure adequate supplies of freshwater resources for the growing number of inhabitants living in the city. By viewing the urban water-cycle through the ANT coevolution framework, the urban water-cycle becomes not only made of water, air, and energy from the sun, but also comes to include pipes, pumps, washing machines, toilets, meters, professional people, citizens, policies, trees, geology, animals and so forth. 106

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All these things shift, transport and change water, thus they are a part of the water-cycle. This conceptualisation of the actants in the network which formulates the water-cycle shifts the investigation from hydrological and energetic equations, to investigating the relations between all these various things, how these relations are formed, how they are changing and how they may be transformed in the future (Figure 9.1). This leads to an iterative methodology, which first investigates from the human perspective, the existing relations between things that form the urban water-cycle and how it might also change given the problematisation of imagined extreme water scenarios of flood and drought. In this case, this was done through interviews, group discussions and photographic diaries. The analysis of this data shows areas where network relations between actants are multiple, strong and resilient

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Actor-network theory coevolution framework for urban design

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to change, as well as relations that are various, weak and adaptable in different circumstances. Concentrating on relations that are various, weak and adaptable, the second investigation transforms these actant relations by inventing nonhumans that might stabilise the new types of relations that are forming within the existing network. This was done through suggested policy changes and through the design proposal of new physical objects, both of which alter the water-cycle to improve either aquatic environments, conserve freshwater resources or cope with flood risk (Figure 9.2). The third part of the methodology takes these new nonhumans back to the original humans from which these network relations were generated to see if any was interessement generated by these new nonhumans (Figure 9.3). At this point, mobilisations of new networks generated by the original discussion were also captured. These mobilisations were analysed to see if they reinforced the coevolutionary possibilities of particular various, weak and adaptable network relations.

The interessement from the new nonhumans were then analysed to see which ones formed more new relations. These nonhumans were then further transformed incorporating these new relations (Figure 9.4). Finally, these new nonhuman actants were then introduced to humans, some of whom had participated in the previous stages of the research project and some of whom who had no previous participation (Figures 9.5 and 9.6). These results were then analysed for the development of interessement relations. Using this methodology that was generated from the actor-network theory coevolution framework it was found that despite centuries of piped water distribution and waterborne sanitation, there were coevolutionary pathways to change the urban water-cycle of London. The two pathways with the most interessement were ‘Polyculture Water Reuse Communities’, and a ‘Remove and Transform to Resource’ dry sanitation system. These two pathways would also generate significant shifts in the urban form of the city. ‘Polyculture Water Reuse Communities’ (Figure 9.7) entailed creating a new type of infrastructural public space from what are currently private rear gardens of residential buildings. This area would be made into a collective water treatment, aquaculture, urban farming and recreational area. Water towers hosting solar and wind energy technologies were also suggested. These renewable resource towers would both signal the presence of a new type of communal infrastructure to the community and broader public, but also aid in the pressurised distribution of a new water network from the onsite water treatment and provide a source of renewable energy. The urban transformation for the ‘Remove and Transform to Resource’ (Figure 9.8) dry sanitation system was more nebulous, as some of this infrastructure could be hidden underground, in lakes, or in existing parkland. The most visible public transformation of this new infrastructure would be from the collection of the human wastes which would include collection points from the buildings and new vehicles

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on the street. There would also be a change to the health of aquatic environments flowing through urban areas through a reduction of water abstraction. The most noticeable reconfiguration would be in the private bathroom where a new toilet infrastructure requiring new practices would be installed. Neither of these two urban designs could have been anticipated without the understanding of the changing network relations occurring at present between actants. These urban designs respond to the perceptual, social and utopian ideas of the people whom it would affect. The urban designer is one human actant equal to all other actants in this process of interessement within the changing network relations.

CONCLUSION

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Actor-network theory coevolution is a framework that investigates the networks of entanglements between the material and the social giving equal value to all actants in the network. It identifies areas of intransigence as well as places of change. Furthermore by using design to form new actants from the changing relationships, it can be used to project and test different types of transformation to both material and social relations in the future. The new actants that gain the most interessement from other actants within and without the existing system indicates

standing, urban designers are better able to respond and incorporate public sentiment into their design proposals. By using design and an iterative process of research exploration, the actor-network theory coevolution framework also extends actor-network theory and coevolution from an analytical tool creating observations about the world, to enabling propositional speculations to be tested for their validity as possible reconfigurations of the urban environment. Actor-network theory coevolution is a powerful framework that gives the urban designer a broader formulation of what forms an urban settlement as well as a method to approach its reconfiguration.

TIPS FOR RESEARCHERS:

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Ȉ Know your problematisation. Ȉ Identify the human and nonhuman actants that create and can reconfigure the problematisation. Ȉ Use (or invent!) a set of methods that allows you to probe the relationships between actants. Ȉ Find the relationships that are coevolving. Ȉ Test these coevolution trajectories through interessement of new actants.

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the likelihood of their enrolment and mobilisation for change in the world. This insight is useful for both urban design research and practice. Within this research example, this is where the process of iteration stopped. However it is conceivable that the network could continue to be investigated through to stabilisation and the next coevolution to a new configuration of material and social networks and so on by causing material and social adaptations. This method, tied to the actor-network theory coevolution framework forms an approach to urban design research that equally considers the social and the material and takes into account historic changes and present practices to find what could happen in an urban area given these trajectories. This ties together the divide between the perceptual, social and utopian approaches to urban design and gives each approach equal consideration in understanding the network. The perceptual is understood as the material influences; the social, the influences of everyday practices and cultural values; and the utopian as the ideals that people would like to achieve. By tying these together in one framework urban designers are able to articulate ideas grounded in an understanding of how the social and material influence one another, as well as the ideals that are valued by society. With this under-

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Unlocking policy documents: policy analysis in urban design Antoine Zammit

It is widely accepted that policy analysis is useful both as a stand-alone analytical process and in conjunction with other analyses as part of a wider research methodology. Such an analysis is particularly useful when it is undertaken both quantitatively and qualitatively. The quantitative component of policy analysis is a content analysis, which also contains an inherent qualitative component. It is a living process that is most effective if it starts out by considering the entire policy document and subsequently develops through different stages of refinement. ‘Term’ categories may be established using a previously defined theoretical framework, and further analysed statistically. The qualitative component of the policy analysis in turn demands an in-depth policy discussion that studies the context, spirit and language of the terms found within the policy document. Adopting such a comprehensive analytical process enables the refinement of the theoretical framework, which then becomes an analytical framework having a greater utility for urban design practice.

INTRODUCTION An analysis of policy-making tools is important in urban design research since it provides the context for the development management process, which is grounded within planning policy and guidance (Carmona 2007). Punter, Carmona and Platts (1994: 200) argue that precisely

because policies lie at ‘the basis of development control decision making’ and constitute the main source of reference for applicants and architects submitting a development planning application, ‘an analysis of the content of the plan at “face value” is entirely appropriate and useful’ (Punter, Carmona and Platts 1994: 200). The discussion below forms part of a broader research study carried out by the author for his PhD (Zammit 2013). Taking the island of Malta as a case study, the research questioned the role of development management in delivering urban design quality. Using a mixed four-stage methodology comprising both quantitative and qualitative research tools, it developed ‘process’- and ‘product’-related analytical frameworks that respectively assess key themes within the development management process and the quality of urban design outcomes on the ground. The textual analysis thus fits into a wider research methodology that is based on a mixed methods approach, which centres on the premise that ‘the use of quantitative and qualitative approaches in combination provides a better understanding of research problems than either approach alone’ (Creswell and Plano Clark 2007: 5). Creswell and Plano Clark discuss two possibilities in this approach: Ȉ The integration of both methods within a single study; or

Ȉ Sequential multiple studies, wherein each study is carried out and documented individually but follows a defined logic. In this respect, the textual analysis comprises a single study with inherent quantitative and qualitative components. This analysis together with subsequent studies within the wider research methodology effectively become multiple studies within a sequential logic wherein the textual analysis helps to refine a theoretical framework that later informs subsequent stages (Figure 10.1).

DEVELOPING A METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK Numerous authors (Bryman 1988 cited in Silverman 2001, Wilkinson 2004, Yin 2009) discuss how any research methodology must be grounded within a clear theoretical framework. ‘Urban design quality’ may be explained in terms of physically defined properties measurable through such a framework, which may be termed a ‘product framework’ since it is used to assess urban design as a tangible product in its own right. The criteria within the theoretical framework are extracted and collated from academic literature sources, in this case including: Carmona (1996, 1998 and 2005), Carmona et al. (2003), Hubbard (1994), Plater-Zyberk 112

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(1994), Punter (1990 cited in Thomas 1997, 1999a and 1999b) and Madanipour 2006. These were supplemented by a range of professionally oriented studies, notably the ‘Impact’ criteria identified by CIC (2002), the Building for Life questions/criteria identified by CABE (2008) and design principles identified in Vancouver’s RS-5 Design Guidelines (CoVPD 2004). Collating these authors’ observations, it may be observed how the shift in the literature’s emphasis, from architecture to urban design considerations, has resulted in more objective considerations that transcend the more controversial subjective issues of architectural design. Punter (2007) has further illustrated how UK government design guidance and planning policy were built upon such principles, citing

DETR and CABE’s (2000) By Design seven qualities of a successful and welldesigned place – character, continuity and enclosure, quality of the public realm, ease of movement, legibility, adaptability and diversity. The latter criteria effectively synthesise many academic contributions and establish a solid framework that may be used in the urban design assessment of individual developments, as illustrated in Carmona et al.’s (2001) pivotal study, The Value of Urban Design. For Punter and Carmona (1997: 90), an appropriate discussion of context demands a wide definition that incorporates ‘the visual, social, functional and environmental dimensions, particularly linking broad townscape and public realm concerns’. This translated, for the purposes of

According to Punter et al. (1994), a textual analysis is useful in order to establish: Ȉ the design approach adopted within policy documents; Ȉ general design content, or design policy coverage (via a content analysis); and

Ȉ the raison d’être and expression of design policies (via a qualitative analysis). As Hesse-Biber and Leavy (2006) argue, this analysis may be considered as a hybrid process that combines quantitative and qualitative approaches, rather than being either one or the other. The derivation of patterns common to all documents (to assess whether there is an inherent underlying logic linking them together) may be further considered as the formulation of abductive inferences (Krippendorff 2004). This implies that, rather than limiting its attention to the comparison between documents of individual term frequencies, the analysis is concerned

with the comparison of ‘similar phenomena inferred from different bodies of texts’ (Krippendorff 2004: 93 – Figure 10.2). This is made possible through the establishment of common categories (reflecting document patterns). Statistical sampling procedures are therefore also carried out at the level of these categories, not at the level of the individual terms.

Quantitative Data Analysis – Content Analysis On the basis of Norton’s (2008) definition of content analysis as the reduction of the total content of a document into a set of categories, the content analysis of policy documents is carried out from 113

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Quantitative and Qualitative Components of the Analysis

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the research reported here, into a theoretical framework of general urban design objectives, subdivided into ‘Townscape/Visual’ (TWN/VIS), ‘Architectural’ (ARC), ‘Public realm/ Social’ (PRS), ‘Sustainable’ (SUS) and ‘Spatial/Perceptual’ (SPP) categories. As the authors also contend, it is important for design policies to be based on urban design principles that are nonetheless ‘elaborated with a relevant set of more detailed design considerations or criteria’ (Punter and Carmona 1997: 90). In this spirit, more specific indicators (the majority of which are performance criteria) were added to the urban design objectives, each of which could be scored, during the research, individually within a designed pro forma. Importantly, the chosen architectural design considerations did not relate to stylistic issues. This was done in order to avoid the potential pitfalls of subjective interpretation in assessing quality.

first principles and is based on the entire documents’ content, as opposed to pre-set criteria or a pre-defined pro forma as used by Punter et al. (1994) and Carmona (1999). Document terms are listed together with their corresponding frequency as ‘textual units’ or ‘character strings’ (Krippendorff 2004). These terms are the recording units (Frankfort-Nachmias and Nachmias 1996), that is, the indicators of the analysis. The analysis includes frequency testing, measuring the occurrence of terms, and a categorising process that organises terms within similar umbrella-type groupings, or defined categories, which are the urban design objectives formulated from the product framework. These steps effectively comprise the data-making aspect of the entire analysis, by reducing the significant initial text volume into a manageable and relevant framework that may also be analysed using standard statistical techniques. HesseBiber and Leavy (2006) discuss the process of ‘quantizing’, or the creation of variables from qualitative data that are subsequently coded and analysed statistically. In turn, this process may also refine the product framework with the addition of specific indicators that are specific to the local context, as discussed in the concluding section. The final step of the content analysis comprises the statistical sampling procedures for the codified variables (the categories), which allows ‘making replicable and valid inferences’ (Krippendorff 2004: 18) from the analysed policy documents as discussed above. The Chi-Square test is useful to test hypotheses concerning the relationships between categories and trace the presence of common patterns within the findings. Silverman (2001) and Krippendorff (2004) further argue that two important requirements of content analysis are replicability (related to reliability) and validity of research. This is made possible since the analysis of all the policy documents follows one method, using the same framework and categorisation technique; this allows the drawing of common inferences from the pool of policy documents. Ultimately, the true test of a content analysis is ‘the validity 114

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(or invalidity) of the analytical constructs that inform their inferences’ (Krippendorff 2004: 89–90). These constructs may be applied within the analysis of other texts, further increasing the analysis’ utility and replicability. In spite of the advantage of computers in the quick processing of significant data volumes in a systematic manner, Krippendorff (2004) cautions about the limitations posed by Computer-Aided Text Analysis, arguing that a content analysis cannot rely exclusively on computers. Computers merely execute a given task within a defined context; they cannot understand or interpret it. This requires significant human input and calls for a number of qualitative considerations that should be integral with the quantitative process (Creswell and Plano Clark 2007); such considerations are necessary for a full and proper understanding of what lies behind the terms in question, in order to (after Krippendorff 2004): Ȉ draw inferences from the texts being analysed; Ȉ understand the particular context units of the terms (and the drawn inferences); Ȉ filter and refine the list of terms; and Ȉ assign categories to the terms in recognition of their context units.

Qualitative Data Analysis – Policy Discussion Wilkinson (2004) and Silverman (2010) argue that a textual analysis cannot happen in terms of a stand-alone process limited to the counting of term mentions that occurs independently of understanding of the context. Taken in isolation, term counts are meaningless. The context of these terms may contain qualifications, such as adjectives, which might be noteworthy considerations that would emphasise a term’s importance, or alternative terms may be used to convey the same meaning of a specific term not used explicitly in the document (Punter et al. 1994, Norton 2008). The best way to analyse such context is by reading through the given text

(Punter et al. 1994, Prior 2004) – a process that is essentially qualitative (Krippendorff 2004). Establishing relatively few but exhaustive term categories decreases the number of variables and reduces the variations between terms, making it easier to analyse statistically. At the same time, however, this simplification process could place terms into the same category in spite of there being significant differences between them. Silverman (2001) discusses the danger of defining a rigid ‘conceptual grid’ that, in spite of being a robust framework, could make it inflexible and hard to deviate from. He argues that not all terms and concepts are classifiable and may be placed into neatly defined, formal categories. This further reinforces the need for a qualitative backup to the quantitative exercise.

MALTA – INTRODUCING THE CASE STUDY

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Heavily undermined between 1969 and 1988 by a laissezfaire speculative development context and the absence of any planning legislation (Aquilina 1999), planning in Malta reached an important crossroads in 1992 with the advent of a Development Planning Act (DPA), closely modelled on the UK’s Town and Country Planning Act, and the establishment of a central Planning Authority (PA), which later became the Malta Environment and Planning Authority (MEPA). Today planning is again at a crossroads. Planning discourses have been dominated by issues related to landuse and construction, evidenced by the spirit and remit of the main policy documents approved since the Authority’s inception. These documents exist within a defined hierarchy, commencing at a national level with the Structure Plan for the Maltese Islands (GoM 1990) that provides the strategic guidance to seven subsidiary local plans for defined conurbations within the islands, with the detailed, largely building-oriented Development Control Policy and Design

—‹†ƒ…‡ͧ͢͠͠(DC07; MEPA 2007) at the bottom. These nine documents were analysed within the textual analysis.

A number of concerns have been levelled at current plans and planning polices in terms of their effectiveness from an urban design quality point of view. The local Chamber of Architects and Civil Engineers, the Kamra tal-Periti (KTP) has remarked that existing plans and policies, such as the current local plans, are negatively impacting on urban design quality, specifically ‘[b]ecause they have not been considered from a holistic urban design viewpoint’ (KTP 2008: 2). At a more detailed level, documents such as DC07 ‘shackle rather than promote creativity, innovation, and quality’ (KTP 2008: 2) through the prescriptive and restrictive nature of policies and guidelines. Pace et al. (2010) similarly argue that the available policies and documents have not been conducive to good urban design, evidenced by the (often) low-quality residential stock that is available on the market. Many of these private developments are internal and gated developments, having a poor outlook onto the public realm (Figure 10.3). In some cases, the policies themselves have been detrimental to the built environment, notably the relaxation of building heights and the indiscriminate allowance of three-floors-plus-penthouse developments replacing two-storey terraced developments within the new local plans (KTP 2007 – Figure 10.4). This has resulted in the proliferation of the apartment block residential typology both within inner areas and at development edges. The modularity in the design of such blocks is the result of literal interpretations of the prescriptive quantitative criteria present within DC07 policies and guidelines. A planning reform, initiated in 2010, which was accompanied by a number of amendments to the Planning Act, established a stronger plan-led approach of the discretionary system. This is evidenced by the greater regard given to plans and policies throughout the development management process. There also appears to be an overadherence to policy, accompanied by an increasingly quantitative rather than qualitative approach. The MEPA reform has therefore raised serious questions about the nature and adequacy of these planning tools. The more

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central role given to plans and policies implies the need for a discussion about the nature of these tools, which to date have not included any specific urban design literature produced by MEPA.

A TEXTUAL ANALYSIS OF CURRENT MEPA KEY POLICY DOCUMENTS The threefold scope of the textual analysis undertaken by Punter et al. (1994) (see above) translated into the following research questions:

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Ȉ What design considerations are present in current policies within the main policy tools? Can the developed product framework be useful to assess these considerations? Ȉ Where present, what is the nature and coverage of the design policies and are they adequate from an urban design perspective? Ȉ How are design policies expressed? Are they sufficiently clear and specific or otherwise?

The content analysis was carried out by considering the entire policy documents, which were obtained in digital (.pdf) format and assigned as a primary document in Atlas.ti (version 5.6.3) for

a general document word count (using WordCruncher). The results were then imported into Microsoft Excel (creating a Word C PD Matrix) for initial collation and two refinement processes were subsequently carried out prior to data analysis. Although more laborious,

considering the entire document allows for a more comprehensive picture, filtering through all the possible terms within the documents being analysed and arriving at a list of solely design-related terms. This list was then matched with the product framework developed from 117

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Content Analysis of the Policy Documents

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the literature review, so as to enable a categorisation of the terms via a Category Analysis. The category analysis examines the general orientation of the document being studied, by grouping like categories together. The terms were categorised using categories established from the product framework (see above), and with two additional categories (one directly related to quality, ‘QTY’, and another for important planning process-oriented and quantitative terms, ‘PLN’). The categorisation reduces the variables 118

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for analysis. The category of a term was determined after reading and evaluating its context within the policy document. This is critical, since viewing a term in isolation could imply a categorical association that might not match the actual document context within which it would have been written. The same term may fall into multiple categories, given a different context. Such context is noted within an accompanying term description, as exemplified by an extract from the content analysis of one of the assessed policy documents, DC07 (Figure 10.5).

The accompanying descriptions constitute a further qualitative undertaking in this analysis, illustrating (through the depth and detail of this description) the importance of certain terms over others, apart from the term frequency. The nine policy documents vary significantly in length, making it unfair to compare the frequency of individual terms in each. Rather than focusing on term frequency, therefore, a comparison was made of the proportion of categories between documents. This is particularly relevant since a term having a low frequency might still be significant if an entire policy is written about such a term even if the term itself was only mentioned, say, only once or twice. This is a qualitative consideration, again highlighting the importance of the qualitative component of the textual analysis. There are also some very important terms with low frequencies. Grouping into categories therefore provides a more balanced distribution in order to extract the ‘genetic make-up’ of each document (Figure 10.6).

Document Refinement The content analysis contains two refinement stages, employed to summarise, simplify, or reduce the volume of records obtained from the body of texts (Krippendorff 2004). The initial refinement process involved the removal of elements such as numbers,

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Ȉ Pairing up of singular and plural terms and closely related or interchangeable terms (e.g. ‘landscaped’ and ‘landscaping’), unless the term context was very different. Ȉ Correction of typos and addition of term frequency due to terms being omitted from the results because of such errors.

Ȉ Removal of terms/references that were not designrelated, that is, removal of terms according to the context unit and their resulting term frequency. Ȉ Pairing up of terms depending on body of text/ context if and where applicable (e.g. ‘urban’ and ‘design’ paired to ‘urban design’). A number of more specific paired instances could be more meaningful than their single term counterpart, e.g. ‘visual impact’ rather than ‘visual’.

Data Analysis The category analysis carried out for each of the nine policy documents clearly revealed how the focus of all nine documents revolves around two main categories, ‘Townscape/Visual’ (seven documents) and ‘Architectural’ 119

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definite and indefinite articles, conjunctions, pronouns, prefixes and terms located within captions, contents, headers and footers. All analysed terms were therefore located entirely in the body of the main texts. A subsequent refinement process was carried out such that only design-related terms (in terms of both direct design references and terms having strong architectural and urban design implications) were retained. This involved:

Ȉ H1: significant relationship between policy documents on the basis of design categories

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(two documents). ‘Public realm/Social’ considerations also ranked highly, classifying as the third category in seven documents, whilst the ‘Quality’ category ranked last in five out of nine documents (Figure 10.7). A statistical cross-comparison of the design categories present within the policy documents was carried out by means of the Chi-Square Test. The Research Hypothesis (H1) and the Null Hypothesis (H0) were defined as follows: Ȉ H0: no relationship between policy documents on the basis of design categories

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H0 was tested, and depending on the p-value that was obtained, was accepted (if p-value > 0.05) or rejected (if p-value < 0.05). The ‘Likelihood Ratio’ measured the association between two categorical variables using maximum likelihood, making it a very robust estimator. A p-value of 0.054 was obtained, which implied no association, meaning that there are no significant changes between the documents. This is most likely due to the dominance of the ‘TWN/VIS’ and ‘ARC’ categories, although the low p-value reflects the large variations between the percentages for each design category.

Qualitative Analysis of Policy Documents The structure plan is formulated on three major goals, one of which is to ‘radically improve the quality of all aspects of the environment of both urban and rural areas’ (GoM 1990: 22),

contrasts sharply with the quantitative standards that are unequivocally expressed and prescriptively formulated within the policies. This could in turn justify why MEPA’s Planning Directorate and decision-makers might give greater regard to quantitative aspects in assessment and decision-making, mirroring similar observations in the UK by Carmona (1999: 23) that ‘criteria perceived as easily measurable and therefore more objective’ are generally preferred.

POLICY ANALYSIS – CONCLUSIONS

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From the above discussion it may be observed that there are a number of parallels between the quantitative (content) analysis and the qualitative analysis of the policy documents. A content analysis of design-related terms in these documents, reinforced by Chi-Square tests, revealed the prevalence of townscape/visual and architectural considerations rather than public realm/social, sustainable, spatial/perceptual or quality considerations. A further in-depth qualitative analysis confirms the quantitative analysis, clearly illustrating that the documents lack a clear urban design strategy and vision. Issues of ‘quality’ and ‘urban design’, established at structure plan level and reiterated in Part 1 of DC07, are largely absent at local plan level. They are also absent from DC07 policies/regulations, which are mostly quantitative in nature, in spite of having qualitative policy explanations. Furthermore, any qualitative considerations are expressed using general, ‘motherhood’ terms. The textual analysis refined the product framework by adding a number of important indicators specific to the local context to the framework originally developed from theory, and by further amending another four indicators present within this framework (Figure 10.8). The refined product framework could then be applied within the subsequent case study analysis, wherein urban design quality was assessed in relation to a number of chosen developments

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man-made and natural environments. The translation of these objectives into the subsequent local plans is however missing, with the seven policy documents focusing purely on land-use and development-related issues. In the local plans’ site-specific policies, wider quality-related and urban design criteria, principles and considerations of a spatial nature are not explicitly defined but form part of other policies, most notably policies dealing with specific areas, including designated areas, new opportunity areas and sensitive areas. The preambles of a number of local plans state that ‘[e]xplicit detail on a “street by street” basis should not be expected and is not given’ (MEPA 2002: 1). This is additional proof of the void in policy-making at the intermediate neighbourhood and street scale. Similarly to the structure plan, the main objective of DC07 is ‘to promote the creation of high quality development, which is visually attractive and appropriate to its surroundings’ (MEPA 2007: 1). The document does start out positively, focusing on urban design, and directly referring to and following on from the structure plan objectives. However it progressively becomes negative and often restrictive, reflecting the fact that a number of positive qualitative considerations within the policy explanations subsequently disappear from the policies per se, thus tending towards a negative, quantitative focus. Although the Introduction to the document discusses the importance of achieving ‘both the qualitative guidance and criteria and the quantitative standards’ (MEPA 2007: 3), the two parts are not given equal weight, which goes a long way to explaining why planning officers on the island tend to only quote policies rather than the spirit behind them. Rather than translating into individual policies in the document’s subsequent sections, the urban design concepts remain as generic principles, of a ‘motherhood’type, often vague, open-ended, and non-committal, and utilising terms such as ‘amenity’ and ‘bad neighbourliness’, ‘appropriate’ (visually) and ‘adequate’, ‘enhance’, ‘in harmony’ and ‘in keeping’, ‘proper’, ‘satisfactory’ and ‘suitable’. This

utilising a scoring mechanism based on the categories and indicators. The product framework worked in tandem with a second analytical framework, developed with regard to the development management process and also tested during the case study phase of the larger research project. Ultimately, through correlation testing within the case studies, the two frameworks provided complementary qualitative and quantitative results regarding the relationship between urban design quality (as a physical product on the ground) and development management (as the process leading to, or precluding the achievement of, such quality). A textual analysis is useful as a study in its own right and may be carried out in respect of a whole range of planning and urban design guidance and policy-making, as well as other documentation that may be submitted as part of a development planning application process, such as design statements. There is, however, a wider scope for policy analysis that may be beneficial for studies that examine, amongst other matters, the planning application process, planning and design policy formulation, or attitudes towards policies and processes. The application of textual analysis to design policy can also be useful in helping to refine future policy or guidance aimed at shaping design review processes. Through the study of design policy an important two-way relationship is established between policy and design outcomes. The latter is, to a large extent, a tangible result of the policy framework, but understanding outcomes should also inform future policy. Because of this, policies remain truly relevant to both current and future design practice, and understanding them remains an important research priority.

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TIPS FOR RESEARCHERS: Ȉ For most effective results, both quantitative and qualitative analyses should be carried out on policy documents. Ȉ Successful policy analysis depends both on searching for the right terms and on placing them within the correct term context. Ȉ Categories, rather than individual terms, should be analysed – this ensures an analysis of phenomena rather than simply a comparison of individual terms. Ȉ Choosing fewer but exhaustive term categories decreases the number of variables, however it is often necessary to deviate from a conceptual grid given a term’s context. Ȉ Policy analysis must be based on a framework, which may be developed from theory but which should be flexible enough to be refined through the analytical process.

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Smart cities, social networks and the Internet of Things Andrew Hudson-Smith

Data, its collection and analysis is central to our understanding of place and space. The city is becoming a series of sensors, providing streams of information relating to its occupants’ movements and use of space. These data streams, largely via the rise in the Internet of Things and social networks, are changing the way we view the city. At the heart of this is the local scale fabric of the city, building the backbone of a city’s data infrastructure and joining up the data feeds via location. From its core functions, through to insights on the emotional level about how we perceive space, data is opening up new research directions for understanding the city and new tools for its analysis – the smart city.

INTRODUCTION In 1965, Gordon Moore predicted in his paper ‘Cramming more components onto integrated circuits’ that integrated circuits would eventually lead to such wonders as home computers – or at least terminals connected to central computers, automatic controls for automobiles and personal communications equipment. These circuits are increasingly weaving themselves into the city and the fabric of urban form. Batty (1997) predicted by the year 2050 everything around us would be some form of computer, computerised

highways are in prospect and smart buildings are almost upon us. Arguably the prediction by Batty, defined under the term ‘Computable City’, is already nearing fruition. Places and spaces are increasingly becoming connected with mobile communications valued at an addressable market value in smart cities, transport, utilities and intelligent buildings amounting to $67.1bn by 2020 (GSMA 2012). In this context the term Smart City has become synonymous with how well a city is performing in the current climate of mobile applications (apps), data streams and social networks. As Caragliu (2009) states, it has been introduced as a strategic device to encompass modern urban production factors in a common framework and to highlight the growing importance of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), social and environmental capital in profiling the competitiveness of cities. Yet it is wider than this, at its heart is the definition of place and space, allowing a view from the micro individual up to the macro collective of how a city operates. The smart city is one of a smart citizen and smart design whereby the environment senses, streams and adapts to the data. In this chapter I explore the digital network of the city, how social networks are shaping urban design and how connecting everything via an ‘Internet of Things’ has the potential to transform not only our understanding of the city but also its future shape and form.

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BIG DATA Every day we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data – so much that 90 per cent of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. This data comes from everywhere: sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, purchase transaction records, and cell phone GPS signals to name but a few (IBM 2013). This data can, compared to traditional data sources, be defined as ‘big’. Cities and urban environments are the main sources for big data, every minute 100,000 tweets are sent globally, Google receives 2,000,000 search requests and users share 684,478 pieces of content on Facebook (Mashable 2012). An increasing amount of this data stream is geolocated: from Check-ins via Foursquare through to tweets and searches via Google Now, the data cities and individuals emit can be collected and viewed to make the data city visible. This not only aids our understanding of how urban systems operate

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but opens up the possibility of a real-time view of the city at large (Hudson-Smith 2013). Almost all the main social network providers allow access to data feeds via an Application Interface (API), allowing data to be collected or mined; these APIs are key to the current ability to make sense of these growing streams of data. One of the most popular current social networks is Twitter, created in 2006 the network now has 500 million registered users with over 340 million tweets made daily (Twitter 2012). Twitter allows users to send a message up to 140 characters in length which can contain links to other web based content, user name and a user’s location. At The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) we have developed a variety of techniques and toolkits to mine and track this social network data. Part of this research is an emerging ‘Bigdata Toolkit’ (http://bigdatatoolkit.org) that allows the systematic mining of tweets and other social media feeds within a set radius of a location. This allows us to map, not only the

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density of tweets, but also to collect the text for sentiment analysis or further data linkage. Figure 11.1 illustrates a sub section of a map charting Twitter activity in London in which Soho represents the peak of activity with various transport hubs and urban centres identifiable.

Collecting Big Data Application Interfaces are often limited – many social network services do not allow you to simply collect all

the output. The ‘Twitter Streaming API’, for example, is a capability provided by Twitter that allows anyone to retrieve at most a 1 per cent sample of all the data by providing some parameters (Morstatter et al. 2013). Running multiple cloudbased servers can increase the percentage of tweets collected, and, depending on the number of servers operated, millions of tweets can be collected in a short period of time. These can be viewed as a sample of the Twitter sphere and thus used for analysis of the city. Systems such as the big data toolkit are opening up the ability to collect social media, via cloud125

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and space, it is the citizen, or as Correia and Wünstel (2011) define them, the Smart People (social and human capital), that are key to the concept of smart cities. At the current time crowd-sourced data is dominant when compared to infrastructure style feeds. Transport data is still in many cities closed off, owned by private companies and not part of any data store or live feed. A similar position exists on energy usage, general utilities and wider city logistics systems. Public data, by contrast, is increasingly being opened up but private companies are for either logistical or commercial reasons slower to open up feeds and share data. However, the public, mainly via mobile technology, are tagging and sharing data to such an extent that participatory sensing allows crowd sourced datasets to replace the traditional view of city based information sources. Putz (1994), for example, noted in the paper ‘interactive information services using world wide web hypertext’ that although most World-Wide Web servers … we can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, today perform primarily as hypertext file servers, there is an pulsing cloud of data. This is over and above the well- increasing trend towards more dynamic information services established electromagnetic radiation, crackles of static, where custom documents are assembled and delivered to radio waves conveying radio and television broadcasts in a user on request. The Internet has of course transformed †‹‰‹–ƒŽ ƒ† ƒƒŽ‘‰—‡ ˆ‘”•ǡ ’‘Ž‹…‡ ˜‘‹…‡ –”ƒƥ…Ǥ Š‹• ‹• ƒ since the 1990s into a largely dynamic system with a myriad new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and of feeds and data. The current smart city can arguably be discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly compared to the Internet in 1994; it is starting to form into a dynamic information service but most current aspects are detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street. standalone units, not connected to the network or linked The smog of digital data we are emitting is growing, so with in any meaningful way. Location is one potential key to this text analysis and data increasingly being tagged with our linkage, once linked to a location this data can be merged location, we are rapidly moving towards the point where we with any other data feed or stream. can obtain a real time view of the city. This might encompass collecting not only the more traditional data sets such as Viewing City-Wide Data transport, air pollution and building energy use but also personal data, giving us a real-time census of the population At the forefront of city based data providers is the Greater in a city. Such tagging raises numerous ethical considerations London Authority (GLA) and The London Data Store, but with suitable safeguards in place for data sharing it opens perhaps viewed as an early city hypertext server. With onup a new view on who, where and how people are using the going development as part of a European-wide Smart Cities urban spaces of the city. While the discussion of smart cities project known as iCity, the Date Store has stimulated over and smart places often focuses on the wider concepts of place 70 mobile applications linking to the 500+ datasets and a based servers, to professionals in the built environment field. The collection of social media is more than just text and location; it also includes username, time and any pictorial or media link. By linking the collected data to text analysis systems it is possible to determine the language of a tweet, allowing the demographics of an area to be quickly determined. Figure 11.2, for example, details the language of the city extracted from over three million tweets using Google Translator software. The grey foundation of the map is formed from the majority of English tweets. Other nationalities in order of the most to least prolific include Spanish (white), French (red), Turkish (blue) and Arabic (green) and other nationalities. As Hill (2008) notes in his article on ‘The street as a Platform’:

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Smart cities, social networks and the Internet of Things

Figure 11.3 The CityDashboard online interface

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combination of the 27 real-time live traffic and transport data feeds (GLA 2013). Through these feeds we have created a CityDashboard (Figure 11.3) (http://www.citydashboard. org) funded by JISC and the National Centre for Research Methods. The dashboard collates and simplifies over 20 live feeds from air pollution through to energy demand, river flow, the FTSE and the number of buses in service. The dashboard extends to other cities in the UK, including Birmingham, Brighton, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds and Manchester and in many ways provides a glimpse of the availability of feeds from city to city. Of these, London is by far the most comprehensive version with data updated every two seconds. Such data has the potential to impact policy and the management of a city and a version of the dashboard has been converted into an iPad display wall for the Mayor of London’s Policy Office. Designed around 12 iPads, each with its own data display, both live and historic, the dashboard is an early example of collating and visualising data feeds to provide a view of how a city is currently performing for policy makers, in this case the Mayor of London. Figure 11.4 illustrates the iPad Wall, created as part of a GeoSpatial Data Analysis and Simulation project known as TALISMAN. TALISMAN is a node of the National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM) and is funded through the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) as part of a strategy to improve the standard of research methods across the UK social science community. The iPad wall develops the concept of viewing live data but is aimed specifically at policy makers. The Mayor of London is able to gain an overview of the city as well as being able to ‘tap’ a screen for the last 24 hours of data.

THE INTERNET OF THINGS As Batty and Hudson-Smith (2012) argue, cities are becoming their own sensors at their most elemental level, as their physical fabric is being automated in ways that enable us to 128

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Figure 11.4 The iPad City Wall

monitor their performance and use. These streams of data arguably require a new skillset and new insight into the operation and role of urban design. This is of particular note for street furniture and the small scale urban fabric that is forming the backbone of the connected city via the Internet of Things (IoT). A term attributed to the Auto-ID research group at MIT in 1999, the Internet of Things denotes the idea that in future every object will have an online presence (de Jode et al. 2012). Information from usage rates and proximity through to ambient temperature can be collected using sensors linked to IoT, combined with location and time attributes it moves from the hyper-local view of the sensor through to the macro scale of an urban system. IoT is still in its infancy with systems ranging from Xively (https:// xively.com/) and an array of numerical data through to Tales of Things (http://www.talesofthings.com) and its narrative based take on objects. It is however estimated that over six billion objects will be connected to the Internet by 2015 (Anita Bunk 2013). Of these objects a central number will be objects relating to streetscape from singular components through to local areas with data viewable according to any number of attributes; the most important being ‘time’.

Figure 11.5 Banksy, panoramic capture of urban space

Tales of Things

Smart cities, social networks and the Internet of Things

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Tales of Things was developed as a means of tracking the history of any object over time via Near Field Communications (NFC) or simple barcode (QRCode) technologies. Funded by the Digital Economy Research Councils UK it can be viewed as a mix of the Antiques Roadshow,1 eBay and Facebook, where items are able to communicate their past and allow current history to be recorded. Such tagging and scanning opens up the ability to track the full life cycle of an object; from production through to ownership, resale and ultimately to waste. The project has partnered with Oxfam to explore the concept of tagging second hand objects which provides a glimpse of a future whereby every item is connected, via its ownership and location, providing a new layer to the city’s infrastructure, a layer that includes history. In addition to tagging objects for Oxfam the system has also been used in the concept of ‘pop up shops’ with a focus on exploring the future of retail. The link to the Internet of Things expands the boundaries of the normally bounded unit into the

surrounding space. It changes the way we think of space in terms of both configuration and time. One example of this is illustrated in Figure 11.5, representing a scan of a tag placed on a wall in London’s Camden Town. The wall, next to the Roundhouse event venue in Camden, was once host to one of the most notable Banksy paintings – The Chambermaid. Painted over by Camden Council, scanning a tag, placed on the wall by a local resident, loads up a panoramic view of the wall circa 2007. This ability to scan a tagged item in the city allows anyone with a mobile phone to pan around the actual location and view an historic capture of the space. Tales of Things is currently being used by the GLA to tag a number of items across London, including trees, buses and theatres and now a customised version of the application has been developed, using the Tales of Things API. It builds on work in collaboration with Norwegian transport company, Kolumbus, the public transport company for Rogaland county, Norway. Tales of Things has been utilising Kolumbus’ already existing QR codes to allow passengers to leave stories for one another. When a passenger visits one of Kolumbus’

Figure 11.6 Connecthings – Strasbourg

more than 4,000 bus stops they find a QR code which when scanned with a Tales of Things app on a Smartphone will not only link them to timetable information, but also allow them to leave a message on the bus stop. Each stop contains a unique code, so the timetable information and tales are site specific. Through Tales of Things, passengers can leave messages about experiences they have had in the area, anecdotes about places they are going, leave a message for a loved one or maybe leave a treasure trail for friends. Each of the bus stops is also able to tweet when a message is left, allowing street furniture to communicate its usage to the wider world.

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A number of content providers are providing similar services, but without the social or historic focus. The largest of these is Connecthings (http://www.connecthings.com), a company providing NFC mobile services to major cities in Europe and in Brazil. Thousands of NFC tags have been deployed around cities aimed at delivering content on transport, events, shopping and tourism. The company also provides integrated offers such as touristic and shopping passes, implementing NFC-enabled ticketing and couponing systems. Figure 11.6 illustrates the Connecthings system, with QRCode and NFC tags providing information on transport links in Strasbourg.

Figure 11.7 Mapping the crowd

CITIZEN SCIENCE

Volunteered location sharing is similar in nature to adding location to your social network traffic; it allows a new generation of data miners and data scientists to collect and map location, expanding the view of how we not only

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With the almost ubiquitous mobile phone ownership in urban areas ‘the crowd’ is becoming both a provider and user of data. Many crowd-sourced applications are still in prototype stages but with the ability to ask a crowd to share

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their location as they move across a city, they have core implications for urban monitoring and management. Figure 11.7 details a live capture of crowd-sourced location Applications such as Tales of Things rely on crowdsourcing, data during the Lord Mayors Show in London in 2011. The or citizen science. As Haklay (2010) states, aggregated data of all participating visitors is used to create a using citizen science can take a form in which volunteers real-time overview of the crowd density at an event location. ’—– –Š‡‹” ‡ơ‘”–• –‘ ƒ ’—”‡Ž› •…‹‡–‹Ƥ… ‡†‡ƒ˜‘—”ǡ •—…Š ƒ• Organisers can subsequently use the system’s output to identify ƒ’’‹‰‰ƒŽƒš‹‡•ǡ‘”ƒ†‹ơ‡”‡–ˆ‘”–Šƒ–‹‰Š–„‡–‡”‡† potential hot spots before they turn into hazards. Situations Ǯ…‘—‹–› •…‹‡…‡ǯ ‹ ™Š‹…Š •…‹‡–‹Ƥ… ‡ƒ•—”‡‡–• ƒ† can thus be defused by sending visitors location-based advice analysis are carried out by members of local communities so either via a push notification or SMS text (SIS 2013). they can develop an evidence base and set action plans to deal with problems in their area. Measuring Emotions

use space and place but via additional information, how we perceive space. The measurement of happiness, emotions and well-being in space is an emerging field but one that is central to urban design. One example is the research project at the London School of Economics ‘Mappiness’ (http:// www.mappiness.org.uk). Mappiness is an iPhone application that asks users at random points during the day the extent to which they are feeling happy. The application associates each response with key spatial and environmental indicators using the GPS location data. As the authors (MacKerron and Mourato 2013) state, they calculate the habitat type at each reported point location into nine broad habitat categories used in the UK National Ecosystem. Using data from Weather Underground, which collates data from 280 weather sensors across the UK, they link each response with weather conditions reported by the station nearest the response location at the moment nearest the response timestamp. They also calculate whether it was daylight at the response date, time and location. Finally, the application allows the user to record a sample of sound and it takes a picture of their location. The application has over three million users and is an example of extracting new sources of information using mobile devices. The mapping of emotions opens up our ability to explore how we actually feel about our built environment. Applications such as Mappiness are, of course, subjective. Our levels of happiness depend on a wide range of factors rather than simply our environment. The process of asking a question of how we feel in turn introduces a bias to the answer. The next step is the use of crowd sourced devices that monitor our emotions in the city, allowing us perhaps finally to understand the nature of design in the creation of place and space. In the science fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick 1968), and the subsequent 1982 film, Blade Runner, a machine is used to test whether an individual is human or an artificial replicant. Known as the Voight-Kampff, it measures bodily functions such as respiration, ‘blush response’, heart rate, and eye movement 132

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Figure 11.8 Emotiv Neuroheadset

in response to emotionally provocative questions (Sammon 1996: 79–80). Outside of science fiction, these emotions can be captured and recorded using brain imaging technologies such as electroencephalography (EEG). Once confined to hospitals and specialised laboratories, these are now available as a low-cost peripheral that attaches to a laptop computer, encouraging its use in many research contexts outside of the clinic (Mavros et al. 2012). At CASA we are working on a variety of projects using consumer level EEG headsets, such as the example illustrated in Figure 11.8. Thus PhD research by Panos Mavros is exploring how various types of urban space make us feel. By monitoring participants with the Emotiv Neuroheadset, emotions can be tracked as the users walk through the city. Consecutively another emerging project – Creating and Exploring Digital Empathy – is developing techniques to enable the communication of empathetic

TIPS FOR RESEARCHERS:

feelings via the digital network. This represents a promising area for future research.

Ȉ Aim for a ‘research in the wild’ approach, actually going on site and trying out new research ideas and methods. Ȉ Treat the city as a living lab. Ȉ Have a strong online presence, blogging and tweeting is key to getting the research used and seen by the public at large. Put all your research online and make short clips for YouTube. Ȉ Explore crowd-funding options such as KickStarter for small innovative projects.

CONCLUSION

ENDNOTES 1

A popular BBC programme focused on appraising and valuing antiques.

11. Smart cities, social networks and the Internet of Things

The rise of social networks communicates our moves towards what can be defined as a digital personhood. We are increasingly communicating and streaming digital data about ourselves. Coinciding with sensor networks being incorporated into the city’s infrastructure and the ability to collect big data, we are creating a new digital domain in the field of built environment research. This domain is one of a deeper understanding of the city. Creating a smart city via social networks, smart citizens and the Internet of Things. For researchers in urban design, this hidden, yet very real world impacts increasingly decisively on how the spaces and fabric of the city are created and managed, and, rather than a separate domain of research, it is increasingly vital that those interested and responsible for the physical and social fabric of the city, become equally interested in this hidden fabric as well. The two exist side by side, as do the research problems and opportunities to which they increasingly give rise. This is a rich source of future research and innovation, as some of the projects and products briefly discussed in this chapter demonstrate.

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Environmental masterplanning: defining an integrated approach Aurore Julien, Ian Hamilton and Ben Croxford

In this chapter we outline the approach we use to research and develop environmental masterplans. Our concept is to identify and understand the contextual base through which sustainability objectives are then established. This process involves bringing together project actors and community stakeholders into a challenging and creative charrette environment. The practical application of the approach is through the development of multi-objective and integrated environmental strategies to achieve sustainable masterplans.

INTRODUCTION In recent years there has been an increasing number of ‘socalled’ sustainable, environmentally sustainable, or eco/green masterplans. Such developments promote a general ethos of sustainability through their design and, often, the provision of new or novel technologies. Neighbourhood developments that follow the principles of sustainable development, or more specifically environmental sustainability (i.e. those with a greater focus on the environmental aspects of sustainable development) are referred to using a wide range of designations. The relatively recent growth in literature relating to the design of sustainable neighbourhoods and cities has spawned a range of terms so wide that it has been referred to as ‘bewildering’ (Roseland 1997). Developments are

often characterised by ideological principles or descriptions such as those of ‘new urbanism’, ‘smart growth’, ‘eco-villages’, ‘eco-cities’ (Roseland 1997), or ‘urban villages’ and also to a variety of criteria that define them as such. Here, we rely on the concept of sustainable development as coined by the Brundtland Commission, in its 1987 report, Our Common Future, with its core principle of ‘sustainable development’, defined as meeting ‘the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (WCED 1987), combined with a concern for the ‘triple bottom line’: people, planet and profit, or: social, ecological and economic well-being (Rogers and Ryan 2001).

SUSTAINABLE NEIGHBOURHOODS Criticisms of the ‘Sustainable’ Neighbourhood Approach Although the principle motivations behind developing environmentally sustainable development are seldom challenged, new developments that respond to such concepts are often criticised in the media and academic press. In this first section of the chapter we provide an analytical review of these criticisms before going on to hypothesise about the causes of such criticisms. Understanding these factors will

progress our understanding of sustainable neighbourhood design, and possibly aid its delivery.

Practical execution failures Whilst in principle the concepts of sustainability may be carefully defined and entirely appropriate at the start of a project, in practice implementation often faces practical setbacks. In this regard some point to technical glitches or to equipment failing to deliver on its potential. In other cases projects fail to deliver on the targets or objectives that they are meant to due to changes in costs, funding streams, or the conflicting interests of developers. In the context of new urbanism, for example, developments which initially included mixed use and housing diversity too often omit these elements at construction, leading to solely residential developments (Talen 2000). Even an often quoted exemplar of sustainable urbanism, Hammarby Sjöstad in Stockholm, began with a target to achieve 50 per cent rentals to owneroccupied apartments which was later pared back due to costs of construction and reduced incentives (Bulkeley, Broto and Hodson 2011). Environmental sustainability can even be forgotten altogether. In a review of urban villages, Biddulph notes that ‘Issues of environmental sustainability have received less attention, with only one development … containing any specific features to reduce the environmental impacts of the particular housing scheme’ (Biddulph, Franklin and Tait 2006). This is striking, given that the concept of urban villages, focused on delivering ‘well designed, mixed use and sustainable urban areas, with a sense of place and community commitment’ (Biddulph et al. 2006). Whilst implementation failures should be separated from the legitimacy of underlying precepts (Talen 2000), failings in practical execution need also to be understood and addressed.

Use of greenfield land and transport Some argue that there is a tendency to propose ‘sustainable neighbourhoods’ on land which is unsuitable for such 136

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purposes, and even that green agendas are used to promote the development of land which should otherwise not be developed. In the UK the recent national ‘Eco-towns’ agenda was vehemently criticised by various activists and the press because of the locations proposed for many such developments that, they argued, would cause car dependence, use large amounts of countryside, damage landscape, impinge on wildlife habitats and exacerbate flooding (BBC News 2008a, BBC News 2008b, Louise Gray 2009, Michael McCarthy 2008). Again, similar concerns are voiced in relation to the earlier drive for urban villages (Biddulph et al. 2006) and against the new urbanism movement, which has been accused of generating ‘more suburban sprawl in a slightly denser form, still too low in density to support mixed use or public transit, and still focused on the development of greenfields at the urban periphery’ (Krieger 1998). Infill development locations, critics argue, are more appropriate for such schemes, but are typically bypassed in favour of more marketable greenfield locations that can accommodate the building of small town fantasies in otherwise pastoral settings (Talen 2000).

Social homogeneity, gentrification and elitism One of the most frequent reproaches to sustainable neighbourhoods is that they tend to be uniformly occupied by high or middle-income populations. Perhaps a striking example in this context is that of Hammarby Sjöstad. Indeed social critics argue that instead of proactively addressing the existing problems of socio-economic segregation in the city of Stockholm, Hammarby Sjöstad is re-enforcing it through being ‘packaged as a self-contained upmarket residential development’ (Bulkeley et al. 2011), leading to a resident profile that has been described as ‘homogenous’ with average incomes that are the highest in the local district (Andrea Gaffney, Huang, Maravilla and Soubotin 2007). This is clearly necessary in order to afford apartments that are comparable in cost to those in the inner city and with very high management charges (Andrea Gaffney et al. 2007).

In relation to new urbanist developments, Talen (2000) points out that ‘From the academy, analysts generally have nurtured a vigorous contempt for new urbanism’, their most persistent critique centring ‘on the elitism and homogeneity of new urbanist development’ (Talen 2000). Similarly, Masdar, the zero-carbon settlement in the UAE has been referred to as conceptually utopian, whilst ‘what Masdar really represents, in fact, is the crystallization of another global phenomenon: the growing division of the world into refined, high-end enclaves and vast formless ghettos where issues like sustainability have little immediate relevance’ (Nicolai Ourousoff 2010). Whilst aspiration behind such projects may frequently include the need for diversity, implementation realities make this difficult to achieve (Talen 2000).

Non-reproducible, expensive experiments

An Exploration of Underlying Causes Whilst the extent and legitimacy of such criticisms can be debated and will vary from project to project, a number of common causes underpinning such criticisms can be identified.

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Whilst building design and urban form are recognised as important in reducing the environmental impacts of neighbourhoods, it is also widely recognised that individual lifestyles and behaviour play an important role in determining such impacts (Dietz, Gardner, Gilligan, Stern and Vandenbergh 2009). For example, in BedZED attempts to reduce the ecological footprint of inhabitants were spurred on by additional management initiatives which aimed to ‘encourage lifestyle choices that result in additional footprint savings’. These include the development’s transport plan and approach to food sourcing (Barrett, J., Birch, Baiocchi, Minx and Wiedmann 2006). However, monitoring the development after its completion found that the average BedZED resident had an ecological footprint of 4.67 global hectares (equivalent of 2.6 planets) and only marginally less (about 15 per cent) than the UK average of 5.45 global hectares per person. The reasons for this are given as a combination of external factors to the project itself, including the fact that shared services are not within the development; the use of consumer goods; and relying on jobs and infrastructure external to the site. It is also recognised that BedZED residents fly an average of three times the local average, no doubt reflecting the relative wealth of the residents, and perhaps even a rebound effect of the money saved from reduced bills (Chance 2009). None of these were (or perhaps even could be expected to be) addressed in the development of the original project objectives.

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The high cost of green developments is often raised by critics. For example, Morad and Plummer (2010) argue ‘There is little dispute that the financial cost of developing an eco-town will be enormous, so there must be sufficient public financial backing’. The cost of a BedZED (zero-carbon home in London), for example, is 20 per cent higher than the average price of a home in the same area whilst the construction costs turned out to be 30 per cent higher than expected (Sustainable Cities 2012). Similar concerns have also been raised in relation to Hammarby Sjöstad (Andrea Gaffney et al. 2007). This high price tag can be partly justified by the experimental nature of these early eco-developments which are often referred to as ‘experiments’ (Nicolai Ourousoff 2010, Morad and Plummer 2010, Johansson and Svane 2002, Mail Online 2006). But this raises questions over deliverability and the associated commitment of policymakers, particularly in a difficult economic climate (Moore and Bunce 2009). At the same time the experimental nature of these developments is valuable, providing a test bed for designers and developers to start to address the challenges of the development process that will inevitably require significant changes to the way private developers procure development.

Lifestyles and behaviour – the search for a sustainable lifestyle

Definition, scope and boundaries

Reductionist sustainability indicators and metrics

Although there appears to be agreement about a general definition of sustainable development, there is no consensus about what makes a neighbourhood sustainable or how to measure the sustainability of urban form (Garde 2009). Whilst this is likely to include a limitation on emissions and an optimal integration and balance between environmental, economic and social aspects of sustainability (Šijanec Zavrl and Tanac Zeren 2010), matters that can be considered in relation to sustainable neighbourhood design are potentially very diverse and wide ranging. In such a context, conclusions about whether neighbourhood projects are sustainable or not will differ, depending on what is included or excluded from any definition. In such a context, projects need to be assessed, at least in part, based on the objectives they are attempting to address. Thus if the overriding goal is to lower energy consumption, then evaluating success based on social mix may not be entirely appropriate.

In an attempt to pinpoint the sustainability performance of masterplans and neighbourhood designs, a number of standards, measurement scales, sets of criteria, benchmarks or rules are used. This includes an increasing number of assessment systems that address the broader context of sustainable design in neighbourhood contexts (Kyrkou and Karthaus 2011). Some of the systems currently being applied worldwide include the US Green Building Council’s LEED for Neighbourhood Development; in the UK, BREEAM Communities; and SPEAR developed by Arup; and the Japanese CASBEE-UD. The one-planet living standard, based on the idea of eco-footprint, was used for BedZED and Masdar, whilst other developments, such as Hammarby Sjöstad, have used a selection of benchmarks or indicators, relating to factors such as energy consumption, emissions, greenspace and urban form. These tools, in the wider context of sustainable development, ‘can be invaluable to policy makers as they can be used to understand various natural and human systems and summarise a large volume of information to non-experts thus simplifying the decision making process’ (Gasparatos, El-Haram and Horner 2009). They help to integrate the diverse issues affecting the progress towards sustainability to a small set of numbers, or to discrete, understandable targets. They also help designers, developers and other actors to monitor and understand their achievements and to communicate those to the wider public. Yet it is impossible for these tools to cover all aspects of sustainable design, given their complexities and the inherent contradictions discussed earlier. For example Garde (2009) after reviewing early LEEDND projects, pointed to the exclusion of affordable housing as a requirement, the tool’s lack of flexibility, its high emphasis on location characteristics and its relatively light stress of green construction and technology issues.

Balancing conflict and constraints Whilst our knowledge in relation to the environmental impact of buildings is relatively developed, similar information at the urban-scale is far less developed (Kyrkou and Karthaus 2011), reflecting the complexity of the task. At this scale design solutions proposed to address some sustainability objectives may be contradictory in the light of others. For example, urban density and compact development may reduce car use, energy consumption and emissions (Talen 2000), but this may be counteracted by higher consumption of goods and other resources in such areas. Thus some research has shown that the higher standards of living present in central areas, together with the easy access to and availability of goods and services can generate substantially higher per capita carbon loads than are generated in suburban areas with a lower standard of living (Heinonen, Kyrö and Junnila 2011).

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Gasparatos et al. (2009) propose that such tools are inherently reductionist as they do not, and cannot, cover all the issues impacting on sustainability in a comprehensive manner. Moreover, they argue, further elaboration and refinement will not achieve that aim, which instead would require the adoption of a diverse range of metrics, together with a knowledge of their limitations and the assumptions underpinning any such sustainability assessment tools. Similar issues will be applicable in the context of neighbourhood design.

AN ENVIRONMENTAL APPROACH TO MASTERPLANNING

Therefore, to address the major barriers to sustainable development first requires a capacity for insight and integrated working in order to properly consider the wide range of viewpoints and the complex context impacting on sustainability objectives.

Defining Sustainability and Identifying Context-Based Themes

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The starting point for beginning the design process is to define what might be referred to as ‘green’, ‘environmentally sustainable’ or any other term that is used to define the new development in terms of its sustainability. Our understanding of ‘sustainable’, based on the Bruntland definition, transcends the physical features of place; it embodies the natural bio-physical and climatic features, the socio-cultural interactions of human activity, and wider values and ethics of environmental protection. The act of defining sustainability objectives also fits with the concept of context-sensitive design which we see as a fundamental part of sustainable development, both physicality and socially. An environmental approach to masterplanning is, therefore, one that uses context as a basis for opening the development dialogue to define and prioritise objectives. The range of project actors involved in the development process (such as planners, architects, engineers and developers) may have differing understandings of what is meant by the sustainability agenda, and it is therefore

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What is apparent from this review of sustainable development at the urban scale is that although there are numerous drivers behind the actions that attempt to create a ‘sustainable place’, the framework within which goals are defined and shaped is failing. A key question that has occupied our research and pedagogy in recent years has therefore been the search for an approach to sustainability, through environmental masterplanning, that is able to address the limitations presented above. Based on our work, we outline an approach that seeks to move towards an ideal of sustainable design. A successful approach is likely to be one that acknowledges that a variety of viewpoints exist over the nature and challenges of sustainable development, meaning that context and pragmatism is key. Plans are rarely developed in isolation, and many goals for neighbourhood design will represent a synthesis of context and ideals. A study of the barriers to sustainable building in England found that the most frequently cited issue for not achieving broad sustainability was ‘oversight’ in that key sustainability objectives were simply overlooked (Williams and Dair 2007). Other commonly recorded issues included:

Ȉ No sustainability objectives being required by the client; Ȉ A limited purview, because key objectives sat outside the scope of the development team; Ȉ Trade-offs between objectives; Ȉ Objectives being restricted by regulators; Ȉ Objectives that cost too much or that are untested.

important that its definition, scope and boundaries are established at the earliest stages of a project. The risk of this approach is that there will be dilution of ambition, but the alternative may be lofty goals that are unattainable within the particular context. This approach creates a challenging but perhaps more creative setting within which to begin the development process. The practical nature of environmental masterplanning means that objectives are often defined under a set of themes or categories. These are used to organise different aspects of ‘sustainable’ design, and more practically to try and delineate tasks and identify specialists and scope of work. These themes are identified under sustainability frameworks such as for example Agenda 21, and in many of the sorts sustainability indicators previously discussed (e.g. BREEAM or LEED). They focus on areas that include: Ȉ Ȉ Ȉ Ȉ Ȉ Ȉ Ȉ Ȉ Ȉ Ȉ Ȉ Ȉ Ȉ

Community engagement Health and quality of life Economy and employment Transportation and accessibility Energy supply and demand Water resources and sewerage Wildlife and biodiversity Food Agriculture Recreation and open space Land use and amenity Urban design and architectural character Heritage and culture

This is by no means a comprehensive list, and many other issues will depend on the site in question, for example issues associated with riparian erosion, site contamination, brownfield development, and community space regeneration. The definition of such themes, and identification of those which are included, or excluded, is an important step on the

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road to establishing appropriate site-specific sustainability objectives. Within the brief, in addition to identifying the local issues, there is often a desire to ‘achieve’ a recognised standard of sustainability; a rating. The use of such metrics is fraught with difficulties (see above), but the desire to use them is widespread. They provide a ‘comparable’ standard between designs, foster a competitive ethos, and recognition of efforts to deliver better than the ordinary. So, despite our reservations with regard to coverage of such systems, they can provide a helpful stepping-off point from which to establish theme objectives for development, so long as they are not used simply as a ‘tick-box’ exercise. Whilst such metrics may form one of the components that constitute the objectives for the project, the adoption of a wider range of objectives can help in achieving a more holistic approach to sustainable design. We therefore propose that a small, flexible steering group be established that will ascertain the definition and themes appropriate for the project context. The steering group will need to include actors with a sufficient understanding of the sustainability agenda and actors who have access to the authority to approve the sustainability objectives for the development. The role of the steering group should be to: 1. Ascertain and agree the terms and definition of ‘sustainable’ in relation to the project, and its scope; 2. Establish a list of themes that correspond to the definition adopted; 3. Propose objectives which respond to the scope already agreed.

Confirming Objectives and a Working Brief A common approach to developing the objectives in the field of urban development is through a charrette, a collaborative process through which experts and non-experts interact in

Figure 12.1 Masterplan sustainability strategies developed in context

Developing Strategies to Achieve Sustainability With a brief set and a direction given, the next step in the process is to begin developing options that can be used to 141

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designers with technical experts, and technical experts with creative and social challenges. The process requires feedback to all those involved and offers a forum through which opportunities and constraints, objectives and priorities are refined. Great care must, however, be taken to avoid disengagement, both within the project actors and with the wider-stakeholders. The charette process can help in reviewing and confirming or revising the sustainability objectives previously proposed, now informed by local issues and stakeholders. It will provide the basis from which to develop a working brief from which project actors can develop strategies for the development of a site, and, as the brief is better informed, it will increase both ‘buy-in’ and the ability to meet ‘real’ sustainability objectives.

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an open environment that enables creative development of design visions and options. In leading up to the charrette, the project actors must undertake a process of describing their brief and objectives, along with the opportunities and constraints that a development strategy should address. The process then provides the opportunity for the actors to present to the wider stakeholders these initial concepts, and thus begin the two-way dialogue. The purpose is to provide the experts a chance to engage with the wider-stakeholders in developing concepts and for non-experts to have an opportunity to offer visions and opinions on proposals. This approach is widely used in the USA and Canada and has been found to ‘broaden the knowledge base [and bring forward] new understandings and perspectives’ (Sutton and Kemp 2006), with the expectation that this can improve the relationship between the existing community and the design and development team. Above all, the charrette is an activity of discourse. Within this setting, development clients are faced with community voices,

Figure 12.2 Developing the environmental masterplanning strategy

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The reality is that a completely sustainable neighbourhood is an ideal. ‘Today’s reality is to strive for cities that are progressively more sustainable, with those entrusted with the overall responsibility for city planning, development and management able to offer only incremental approaches towards this ideal’ (Burnett 2007). This echoes the words of Bramble (in Blassingame 1998), who, speaking to the first national conference on sustainable development, argued

TIPS FOR RESEARCHERS: Ȉ A critical view and understanding of the shortfalls and limitations of the current approach to defining the sustainability of masterplans can help to broaden the scope of information used when exploring the issues surrounding sustainability. Ȉ Using a theory of environment, or context, firmly situates investigations within the realm of local issues, constraints and opportunities and can offer insight into what objectives can be met through an environmental masterplan, and thus what the ‘true’ sustainability might be. Ȉ Research through pedagogy can provide a valuable means to develop and test ideas in the class.

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CONCLUSIONS – MOVING FORWARD

there is no end to this quest: ‘There is no perfect state of “sustainable development”. Small successes will lead in the right direction’. Therefore whilst a development may strive to be sustainable, almost inevitably it will fall short in some area or other. This chapter has therefore argued for an open framework within which to identify and develop a definition of sustainability and themes and objectives for development that are responsive to ‘real’ world issues and thus have a higher probability of achieving a higher degree of sustainable success. We propose an approach that uses a concept of ‘context’ to set out the challenges and opportunities to which project stakeholders must react and a charrette process, where technical and design studies are presented, discussed and challenged by the project actors and communities, in order that the context is fully understood and addressed. This process is best served by an issues oriented approach, where the interaction and conflicts between issues are identified and meaningfully considered during the process of building a comprehensive set of development strategies.

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attain sustainability objectives. At the options stage, the design and engineering process is one of distillation, which begins by identifying preferred designs, techniques or technologies. During this time more information is gathered and objectives are refined, thus influencing the choices made about whether to pursue a given strategy. The options are not developed in isolation. This initial stage is also the point where options are set in relation to one another and influencing factors are discussed. For example, a proposal to increase the biodiversity of a site through the use of extensive greenroofs and how this may influence the storm water runoff attenuation, and so forth. Figure 12.1, for example, shows how the development of a waste and energy strategy can be set in relation to each other. The common practice is for each strategy to be developed by the respective experts (project actors) and brought together during project meetings for discussion. Crucially, the strategies should be ‘over-layered’ or set out as a continuation of a charrette-like activity, this approach provides a setting for the constraints and opportunities to be both visualised and the boundaries described (Figure 12.2). Importantly, this process also enables the monitoring of the project with regards to sustainability objectives, facilitates the on-going management of priorities, and offers regular points at which to re-assess both.

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com

Part III

Physical explorations

Through a range of analytical studies in which the form and configuration of space is examined as the physical ‘product’ of urban design and the container for use and flows of resource

These projects encompass a range of analytical studies in which the shape, configuration and growth of space and built form is examined as the physical ‘product’ of urban design and the container for activity, uses and movement. The five chapters in this part of the book use a variety of analytical methods to achieve this, and have different reasons for doing so. They are united in that their stepping off point for understanding the city is its physical structure and how this changes over time. The chapters can be grouped in two further ways. First, and most straightforwardly, the tools with which researchers analyse the city. Thus whilst three chapters in this part use specific computer models to either analyse the existing built fabric, or generate it anew, Terry Farrell (Chapter 13) and Graciela Moreno and Philip Steadman (Chapter 17) rely on simple observations of the existing urban fabric to make their arguments. Terry Farrell, for example, draws on his 40 years of professional practice and combines this with historical research to continually question the way cities work. In doing so his approach is less explicitly ‘methodological’ and is focused instead on his own creative analysis as a reflective practitioner to conceptually pull the city apart before reconceptualising it as a series of layers in a manner that allows us to more clearly understand the connections. Graciela Moreno and Philip Steadman also focus on understanding the parts of the city, but in their case drawing on the more clearly defined methods and tools of urban morphology. In doing so they draw on and deductively test the seminal work of Martin and March in order to explore their interest in understanding and calculating density. In Chapters 15 and 16, respectively, Kinda Al-Sayed and Stephen Marshall and Mark Sutton discuss the computer models they use to generate urban form and the relation between this and design processes. Kinda Al-Sayed returns to systems-thinking to propose a prioritised structure model which aligns design to a set of defined spatial and formfunction preferences in order to generate urban form through 146

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an experimental design process. Stephen Marshall and Mark Sutton also use technology to generate form, in their case through a network simulation tool which grows layout structure according to a set of street-based rules. The chapter from Sam Griffiths (Chapter 14) brings us to the second means to group the chapters in this part of the book. Whilst his chapter explores the potential and use of a further, highly developed, computer model – space syntax – for understanding, analysing and generating space, the argument is that it is the social logic of space, rather than its physical composition that underpins its generation, and therefore, also, this highly developed form of analysis. In this it can be grouped with Terry Farrell’s chapter in which the patterns identified reflect directly on the socio-political context of the city. By contrast, whilst the ‘patterns’ explored in the other chapters (whether street patterns or density measures) clearly have social implications, the stepping off point is the generation of physical structure rather than understanding the social impact on form. Together the chapters reflect and bring up to date a proud history of urban form analysis that dates back in ‘modern’ times to Camillo Sitte (writing at the end of the nineteenth century), and before him back into antiquity. In such studies there is a strong tradition of objective analysis of forms and types (although subjective judgement of those types also comes into play), and a tendency to seek out and analyse exemplar environments as either the basis for primary analysis or in order to establish criteria as a feed into various urban models. Physical explorations sit at the heart of the urban design canon. The chapters in this part demonstrate how such analysis continues to draw from its roots and at the same time seek out new and innovative methods of exploration. Matthew Carmona

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Urbiculturalism, understanding the patterns of place Terry Farrell

In this chapter I review, from a reflective practitioner’s perspective, the ways in which research across a broad range of interdisciplinary perspectives can support and enrich our urban explorations in a city such as London. This runs contrary to the dominant practices that shape our cities where specialist practitioners spend too little time understanding the city, and too much time imposing their own particular perspective from the closed silo of their limited ‘professional’ understanding. Focusing mostly upon transport systems, I will begin by discussing the layers and patterns within this city and the need to fully understand the natural evolution of cities generally in their growth and development. From there, I will use my work on London to support my case for looking at cities as a network of layered systems.

INTRODUCTION As an architect-planner, practitioner and explorer through practice of our places and cities over the past 40 years, and as one who has constantly engaged with the form, shape and history of the city – highlighting both the natural and manmade and addressing the many layers that inform it as a place – I have over time gained an understanding of the ways in which a city develops naturally rather than within an imposed ideal. This process is close to ‘Urbiculture’, involving

stewardship and working with the existing, rather than imposing abstractions and ‘ideals’. It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the „—•Š‡•ǡ™‹–Š˜ƒ”‹‘—•‹•‡…–•ƪ‹––‹‰ƒ„‘—–ǡƒ†™‹–Š™‘”• …”ƒ™Ž‹‰ –Š”‘—‰Š –Š‡ †ƒ’ ‡ƒ”–Šǡ ƒ† –‘ ”‡ƪ‡…– –Šƒ– –Š‡•‡ ‡Žƒ„‘”ƒ–‡Ž›…‘•–”—…–‡†ˆ‘”•ǡ•‘†‹ơ‡”‡–ˆ”‘‡ƒ…Š‘–Š‡”ǡ and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us … There is ‰”ƒ†‡—”‹–Š‹•˜‹‡™‘ˆŽ‹ˆ‡Ǥȋƒ”™‹ͨͥͩ͡Ȍ For me, nature is an inspiration and the natural form, which may not seem to have any grandeur in terms of a city’s evolution, does have many parallels. The above quote from the final chapter of Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’ describes how the tangled bank has its own order and that nature’s evolutionary order – where the birds, the leaves and the insects all work with each other in an extraordinary way to create life on our planet – is similar to the development of cities which are comprised of such elaborately constructed forms, each very different from each other, yet dependent on each other, in a complex system. There is most certainly grandeur in this view of cities. Indeed, when I was an urban design student, we were presented with two compartmentalised approaches, two

separate streams – the ‘design’ part of the urban design course and separately, the ‘planning’ side of it, and we students were somehow meant to join the two up. Fifty years on there is still no reconciliation – the two disciplines continue to speak different languages, have two different approaches and two different cultures and often two separate educational streams. I see them as different processes, not necessarily different professions, and part of continuums of connectivity rather than hard-edged separations. The activity of ‘design’ generally requires authorship and originality, it’s close to art, it’s close to making things. On the other hand, the activity of ‘planning’ is a very different kind of activity. It accepts the world as it is, as a starting point. And more often than not, it has a perception that after dealing with what is and all the influences, the outcome could be quite different to something solely physical. In other words, it is not a design activity. It could be that one manages to persuade people to travel differently, or one manages to persuade people to live in different parts of the town, to change housing habits, and that is part of planning and yet you don’t necessarily see it as physical in its manifestation. Yet the designer is taught to need a different, tangible, outcome. A product. With the different approaches, even amongst professions, that should and can collaborate to shape our cities, there are varying methods to tackling urban problems. A perceptive author, Philip Ball, wrote about the difference between planning and architecture:

Figure 13.1 Shaping London, book cover

expresses the idea that when the city is analytically observed there are layers. Initially it was natural, a landscape, and now there are streets, villages and buildings, and it is only in these layers that the city can be interpreted. The research underpinning the book attempted to understand London in this way, although the layered analytical approach it advances might be applied to any city. The remainder of this chapter shows how.

It is scarcely surprising that, since the major preoccupation of urban planners is with the DESIGN of cities, they have generally attempted to analyse city forms in terms of their ‘™‡ơ‘”–•ǤŠƒ–‹•–‘•ƒ›ǡ–Š‡‘”‹‡•‘ˆ—”„ƒ’Žƒ‹‰Šƒ˜‡ UNDERSTANDING LONDON tended to focus on cities in whose form the guiding hand of Š—ƒ†‡•‹‰‹•…Ž‡ƒ”Ž›†‹•…‡”‹„Ž‡ǤȋƒŽŽͥ͢͠͠Ȍ How do you begin to plan a city like London? What is its relationship to the ideal city? Is the ideal city something you The cover of my book, Shaping London – The Patterns and can physically manifest or is the ideal city a good place to live? Forms that Make the Metropolis (Figure 13.1 – Farrell 2010) Peter Ackroyd, one of London’s great narrative historians, 148

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Figure 13.2 Shaping London woodland and trees drawing

The natural terrain is comprised of the green infrastructure of hills, the main rivers and tributaries, and tidal flows, among an array of other landscape features. The patterns of

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The Layered City

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has argued that London never really formed a theory on its planned form, that it has never been driven by coherent philosophy, and that it has simply grown in an organic fashion, opportunistic and haphazard, as the market-led. ‘Yet every building seems part of a general pattern, of a general will to exist in this shape and in no other’ (Ackroyd 2000). A common thread through my practice and research has been the realisation that there are underlying patterns to both the natural and the manmade terrain. Understanding and accepting these patterns is critical to our understanding of urban design.

layering among the manmade fabric are time-based episodes of different periods and different cultures. These layers are often compiled in wave patterns, sudden bursts or groupings of growth or change, constantly shifting throughout time. As urban researchers, we must peel back these layers, acting as archaeological detectives to uncover the history of a city – a history that ultimately informs us of how we arrived at the present. In this sense, we need to analyse the layers so that we can understand the childhood of the city at the same time as we are looking at the grown-up character and personality of the adult. Without an understanding of a city’s unique evolution, from its landscape and parklands, to its transport infrastructure, to its residential growth, we cannot hope to understand what is there now and how to move forward, to grow, change or improve what we have. London has had a complex evolution, particularly in terms of its transport infrastructure. The most critical component of infrastructure planning is the consideration of our needs now, but also in the future. It is about adding to existing networks in a way that complements current functions and expands the connectivity of the city as a whole. I have focused much of my work throughout my career on London, allowing me to gain a thorough understanding of its development, both past and present. The key to understanding London is to recognise it as a natural city, collectively planned over time by many hands working with the natural forms, yet with no grand, overarching and superimposed design, plan or geometries. Much like the natural evolution that Darwin describes, London’s growth and development has, and must continue to occur naturally, unforced, and lightly guided by the human hand (Figure 13.2). A woodland, just like any city, town or village, is in its own way an interactive and collective entity. The shape and form of the individual tree cannot be considered in isolation. It always adapts, adjusts, and evolves to its context. The relationship between British settlements and nature has not been entirely accidental, with a city like London growing out of a group of villages like Mayfair and Chelsea

Figure 13.3 London’s urban villages 150

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(Figure 13.3). However, it is important to stress that the relationship between the natural and London is not just an evolutionary one whereby a grouping of rural communities were transformed over centuries into a world metropolis – it is also a cultural one, reflected in the traditions of an agricultural economy which has transferred into the modernised industrial city. One of these traditions that has shaped the iconicity of London is its landmark objects/icons that are very different to other world cities where familiar icons are buildings (the Opera House in Sydney, the Eiffel Tower in Paris). London’s iconic symbols are of a small, more utilitarian scale. It is quite often familiar street objects such as the telephone box, the mailbox, the red bus, the black cabs that set London apart and form part of the brand. They give London a unique personality that differentiates it from other major cities around the world. This points to a traditional concern for the design of the street utilities that surround people at a pedestrian level. These small yet distinctive cultural identities typify London’s uniqueness and maintain its staying power as a cultural icon. It is these subtle approaches to city planning that form London’s distinct identity and continue to distinguish it to this day – allowing the city to evolve organically yet implanting a street based vernacular that defines its overall character. Although the black cabs, red

phone boxes and double-decker red buses are unique to London, it is the evolution of the city as a layered network of interactions that characterise London more than anything. All of its modes of transport function as a cohesive unit, operating at strength when required, and compensating for each other when one component is down. For example, when the tube closes, the army of night buses emerge. The network syncs itself between modes creating different layers, not only for the transport system, but for the city as a whole.

Shaping London

The case of air capacity

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All these individual aspects of the London transport network have been integrated with each other to create a comprehensive functioning system, within and between each mode, for maximum efficiency and operations. In this we must not ignore the importance of air links to the larger transportation network. Certainly, we must examine internal and external transport functions of a city, with air connections serving an integral role in being the origin and arrival points for major journeys to and from the city. Indeed, London has come to an important point in its air transport development strategy where the city must address the overwhelming need for more air links and terminals to remain competitive in today’s highly interconnected world. Often, these overhead systems are not considered as part of a city’s overall transport strategy, but they are critical to its functioning and are often the starting points of further exploration and interaction through the urban fabric. Taking air transport as an example then, its future development in Britain, and London specifically, should not attempt to replicate the immense scale of airport development in China or the hit-and-miss experimentation that occurred in early British industrialisation. These methods will not work here effectively in our democratic, historically well-settled, postindustrial age. Air links are just one part of our transport systems – by looking across the range of existing and committed transport system investments I came to the view that a networked approach to these systems, and an evolutionary rather than revolutionary approach to aviation provision in particular

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My approach to understanding urban problems, particularly in the context of London, is rooted in a deep understanding of its history and the patterns that it gives rise to over time. This approach is illustrated in Shaping London, a work I recently completed with the goal of capturing the messy complexity of the present whole of the city. Providing a view based on my own personal observation, the book reveals patterns of behaviour, past and present that tell us how a city works and how it fails. Because London has evolved over the course of the last 2,000 years, it is a very complex entity that is often difficult to discern, and is therefore a useful case study. Britain’s infrastructure genius, with London being a defining example, was in adapting – incrementally and pragmatically – the benefits of inventions usually much more than the inventions themselves. It is not the inventive hardware of civil engineering projects on their own, but the software, the planning integration, their part in the larger network of systems that was the key to what prevailed. Indeed, this was the case with all of London’s networks of infrastructure systems. The industrialised water transport of canals and docks were products of experimentation and step-by-step integration into a network of related patterns of use, re-use and pragmatic application. So it was with rail – London’s mainline stations were originally built as goods stations outside the city core – when subsequently it was learnt that the main trade was passengers not goods,

and so the answer was to invent the Underground Railway (eventually re-using Brunel’s invention of a tunnelling shield from the failed Rotherhithe tunnel). But the Underground grew, and connected, and grew again to keep evolving today with new computerised card ticketing systems. It is still a live evolving project with, in more recent years, Victoria, Jubilee and now Crossrail all adding to and enriching the system.

might provide a better alternative solution. Specifically, the UK’s well matured existing network of other transport systems in road and rail and also the addition to these networks of high speed rail and other considerable rail improvements will re-balance all the potentialities of the total system. My personal conviction is therefore that in the end an evolutionary networked system approach to London’s airport capacity will obviate the need for new mega projects. Because of this, grand gestures of closing major airports and building giant new hubs (as is currently proposed in London) must only be considered in the light of looking first at what currently exists, and how that can be better utilised. Such projects never were how London did things, and they will be too grandiose, too costly and too risky for the city now.

Bottom-up and incremental approaches Urban problems in London must be solved through a bottom-up, dynamic systems approach to city making. This has happened before, and must continue to happen into the future. When the automobile was gaining in dominance, we quickly learned that the car must be radically tamed to be integrated and adapted to the town planning realities, and we now have approaches like congestion charging and pedestrianised streets, and investment in the reinvention of the tram, more underground rail, and even cycling was reinvented with the ‘Boris Bikes’ as part of a comprehensive, integrated networked solution that has evolved pragmatically without grand projects. Again, this goes back to the idea of natural growth with only a hint of help from planners. I think London does actually have the key to city planning, because there is order, but it is not the order of geometry or what you might call design – although, man can shape natural forces. Perhaps it is possible then, that the best town planner is one that works with the city and understands the city, almost like a garden, and works with it so what it does do naturally is what he helps it to do, rather than what he or she has laid down externally to say ‘this is how the city should be’. London is indeed an 152

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Figure 13.4 Straightening docks diagram

organic city, and therefore is a model for all cities. It shouldn’t be the city of a designer’s ideal, it should be the city as it is and also how it replenishes itself. One of the greatest examples of natural organic growth in London is on the River Thames in the Docklands. This great feat of human engineering spans the seventeenth to mid-twentieth centuries. The development of the Docklands came about as the demand for docks increased in London’s quest to become the centre of a great empire. The British used incremental organic growth to straighten the Thames over time (Figure 13.4). By doing it incrementally they could experiment and each time they did another dock they would do it bigger and better. In fact, if they had built it all at once, they could have never anticipated the size of the ships they were trying to get into the area. And so there is a certain advantage in not building idealistic cities, because if you build a city ideal for 2014, in 50 years’ time it will no longer be ideal as cars, ships and planes would all have changed. The Docklands is a fascinating example of this and of the ongoing planning of cities today. Thus whilst the ships have long gone, that part of the Thames is still being planned as if the great ships were still there, with tall bridge clearances and tunnels that can never connect both banks in an urbanistic way. It is very much part of the British and London psyche that when you experiment incrementally, it seems to work. This was also the case with the development of the underground rail network. The first underground rail line was the Circle Line, which was built initially by digging up the street and putting the railway right underneath the street (Figure 13.5).

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What many people do not know is that they took the opportunity then to put sewers and water pipes under the same streets so that the roads became almost like buildings with multiple storeys of things inside. However, as time passed, Brunel perfected at Rotherhithe a tunnelling system to build under the Thames (see above) that was then translated for use in the development of deep underground

‘Tube’ rail lines for rail passenger transport. This avoided digging up roads, and the need to compensate businesses and residents along the route, and freed the network to develop in a much more dynamic way. As the tube rail system allowed the network to develop independently of the surface street network, it initially brought about mapping problems that were overcome with the breakthrough of the London tube 153

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Figure 13.5 London’s railways

Figure 13.6 London’s layers

map design, which provided an abstraction that attempts to relate what happens on the surface to the underground. And so wayfinding, visual mapping and branding became stop by stop the basis of networking and systems building.

London’s Order Compared to New York and Paris, London is a nongeometrical, ‘unplanned’ city. Yet it is interesting that the underlying order is actually very strong in London. If one looks at, for example, the layers in central West London, one sees an order with government between Whitehall and the Embankment, the aristocracy originally located between Knightsbridge and Whitehall with their different palaces, 154

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Figure 13.7 Patterns of power

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Figure 13.8 Power triangle

or Canberra – nonetheless London’s political ordering can be ‘read’ clearly in streets and buildings. After the drastic changes of the industrial era, often with little regard for the existing fabric, there has been a great shift towards expressing and working with the real order of London.

This shift began in the 1970s when local communities fought large motorway projects and the accompanying destruction and change – in other words technology and industrialisation stalled in its presumed ‘rights’ to alter the city regardless. The regeneration of Covent Garden, for example, was largely led by 155

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then a class gradation of upper to middle class. Between the railway stations and the canal – the two industrial highways in London – one sees the working people who historically walked to their work place and also lived amongst all the pollution because that’s where land was cheap (Figure 13.6). These are most certainly patterns, but they are not patterns resulting from the hand of the designer; they are layered patterns of landscape and the continuous feedback of what man built in stages and how this then fed back and shaped the city. Essentially, it began with the river, the Thames and its banks and the contours down to the river. Perhaps most surprisingly, and largely unrecognised, is the grand order of government at the heart of London that is mostly hidden underneath the surface, and understated (Figure 13.7). British governance expresses itself in London as a collaged triangulation. This set piece assembled the historic elements of power, yet did so in a way that demonstrates how organic gradualism and evolutionary growth can achieve a structured pattern over time. This is illustrated in Figure 13.8 which shows the three public spaces – Parliament Square (church and state), Trafalgar Square (the people) and Buckingham Palace (the monarch) – that explains these relationships. With no written constitution, no grand capital city plan like Washington,

the local community and business owners and provided a successful model for many other parts of London. This shift to a ‘concerned’ urbanism not dominated by technologically driven ‘grand projects’ is one that begins by looking at what and who is there; an urbanism that works with the grain and the people living within it. The public began to realise the value of what the city had and a period of regeneration through conservation and consultation followed.

CONCLUSIONS Like a gardener, an urbiculturalist has to help what is happening naturally rather than imposing an abstraction or theoretical order. That help however must be underpinned by a strong measure of research, whether historical, social or economic (or lateral into other fields), not only to help understand the ever changing city, but also as a driver, a springboard, for creative solutions that work with the grain of the place, rather than against it. Urbiculturalism is at the core of such practices and describes a skill base required by all those involved in shaping the built environment. It embraces governance and politics, as well as ownership and the stewardship of land, putting ‘place’ high in the order of cultural achievements. Place, in our cities, is a true constant, outliving the people who live there.

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The combination of being the centre of government and a great metropolitan city gives London its own unique identity and challenges. However, the changes in London that have taken place recently have been by the community of all of London. In essence, the metropolis is a social creation; a great accumulated work. ‘Better as the giving birth of peoples in labour than as the gushing stream of genius’, as Victor Hugo so elegantly put it, adding that these past achievements were the work of many hands and ‘the accumulation of centuries, the residue of successive evaporations of human society, briefly as a kind of geological formation’ (Hugo 1993).

TIPS FOR RESEARCHERS: Ȉ Start by drawing, drawing the relationships of the city can be a powerful way of uncovering the hidden order in ‘natural’ cities. Ȉ Urbiculture requires a holistic approach to the city, to understanding it across our traditional silos. Ȉ Research also, should not have to be a silo, it can flow from and be an integral part of everyday practice as a critical part of how the inquisitive and reflective practitioner addresses the city. Ȉ Be patient, understanding the underpinning structures and processes that shape a city can take many years and grows out of a direct engagement with that place, through practice and / or research.

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Space syntax as interdisciplinary urban design pedagogy Sam Griffiths

As a theory, space syntax does not always seem directly applicable to urban designers, and as a category of design ‘tool’ it can seem unnecessarily complicated and reductionist in its outlook. This chapter draws on the author’s experience of teaching the theory and methods of space syntax to students with backgrounds in architecture, urban design and other disciplines to advance a holistic view of space syntax as an open-ended ‘mode of enquiry’ involving a dialogue between theory, method and empirical research. It can help urban designers identify and develop the ‘right questions’ through a substantive process with research, analysis and reflection at its heart.

INTRODUCTION Many architecture and urban design courses around the world now provide an elementary education in space syntax as part of their core curricula. This number is set to increase further now that the dedicated space syntax software package Depthmap (Turner 2011) has become open source.1 Yet while there is a general acceptance among urban designers that there is a legitimate role for empirical study in providing a knowledge-base, the relationship between research and design remains problematic. Space syntax specialists have become accustomed to handling practitioner questions along the lines of ‘what can space syntax do for me?’ In response,

one is usually required to address two principal concerns: firstly, that space syntax aspires to replace design creativity with crude quantification and secondly, that acknowledging space syntax is somehow to preclude engagement with other perspectives – not least because to the non-specialist its methodology can seem rather esoteric. The starting point of this chapter is to regard such concerns as entirely legitimate but to suggest that a fuller engagement with the theoretical principles of space syntax reveals the method to be more open-ended (and open-minded) with regard to its contribution to the design process than might be assumed from a passing acquaintance. A sceptical reaction might typically be provoked by the analytical claims made for the aesthetically appealing but highly abstract nature of space syntax’s characteristic visualisations of urban structure that inevitably feature in many ‘introductory’ presentations (Figure 14.1). However, the perception of space syntax as a technique for producing powerful visualisations of the network structure of urban street systems can serve to marginalise a more holistic emphasis on space syntax as a specialised but nonetheless non-exclusive mode of enquiry for exploring urban form as a social phenomenon. Several studies by experienced space syntax researchers address the necessity of maintaining a critical approach to space syntax analysis in the light of the increasingly sophisticated software available (Hanson 2001, Vaughan et al. 2007, Dursun 2007, Conroy Dalton

Figure 14.1 Space syntax network analysis in axial and segment modes: (i) axial integration radius-n, Barnsbury, London, (ii) segment-angular choice radius-n, central London area

et al. 2008). In pedagogical mode, however, it is imperative not to intimidate users by parading complicated software applications but rather to stress how space syntax can help users to think critically about their designs as interventions in the spatial organisation of a society. Such a pedagogy emphasises the value of a social theory of the city that can be tested at the design scale (Hillier 2008).

THE FUNDAMENTALS OF SPACE SYNTAX More than Just a ‘Toolkit’ The key theoretical-methodological statement of space syntax is Hillier and Hanson’s 1984 work The Social Logic of Space. The fundamental thesis is that ‘space’ should never be regarded as a passive, somehow pre-social ‘environment’ but rather as the empirically accessible manifestation of an abstract idea (society) embedded in the material world. This 158

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‘logical space’ encodes a particular form of social organisation (syntactically) but does not simply ‘map’ or ‘reflect’ it, in any straightforward sense, not least because society-in-space is said to be both concretely spatial (i.e. morphological) and transpatial (i.e. conceptual-semantic) in nature. Of course ‘space’ itself is not materialised as such but conceived as a ‘relational system’ of intrinsically ‘relational’ elements (Hillier 1998: 37). The totality of this system of relatedness Hillier and Hanson refer to as a ‘spatial configuration’. A key Hillier and Hanson statement is that the configurational arrangement of the built environment (i.e. inhabited space) materialises how societies ‘overcome’ the existential problem of the discrete location in (physical) space of the individuals who comprise that society (Hillier 1998: 236). Hillier and Hanson’s work is rooted in the Durkheimian tradition of sociology which means it takes the coherence of society or ‘social solidarity’ as one of its fundamental questions (Durkheim 1984, Lukes 1973, Giddens 1978). A key Durkheimian concept in this respect is the objective reality

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but it is perhaps less common to foreground this aspect in an applied field such as urban design where the distinction between understanding how society is, and envisioning how it could or should be, lies at the core of the discipline. Hillier and Hanson’s point is that since space can never be ‘desocialized’ then it is necessary for designers to understand how social ideas become spatialised in society. To do otherwise is to increase the risk that prevailing (but unrecognised) normative ideals are simply projected onto a design solution without a sufficient understanding of how space itself ‘speaks back’. The effect of this might be to inhibit design innovation. For example space syntax case studies of post-war housing estates in the UK suggest how rather abstracted notions of ‘village’ and ‘community’ were used in the creation of a large number of superficially contrasting design schemes, few of which managed to realise anything recognisable as ‘village communities’ (Hanson and Hillier 1987, Hanson 2000, Hillier 1973, 1988, 1996a). Hillier and Hanson explain this by arguing that many postwar architects unwittingly accepted the normative assumption of naïve social psychology that projects man as a fundamentally territorial (i.e. asocial) animal. They claim that this assumption tacitly justified the increased separation of the public and private realms in a design paradigm of ‘enclosure, hierarchy and repetition’ that was ideologically hostile to the very idea of the historical city in which dense street networks afforded multiple scales of interface between public and private domains. There are, of course, no shortage of competing theoretical perspectives on the social theory of space but from a space syntax perspective the danger of distinguishing too categorically between ‘theory’ and ‘methods’ is that, regarded primarily as ‘tools’, the analytical techniques become less powerful because their use is less reflexive and less experimental in regard to what they can say about the social world in which they are practised. This is why Harvey (1973: 11) regards any categorical separation between philosophy and methodology as being ‘artificial’. Ironically, such a category error certainly informs Soja’s (2001: 2) dismissal of

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of ‘social morphology’ as a structuring agency that extends beyond the individual subject. Durkheim contrasted the ‘mechanically solid’ (i.e. social solidarity achieved through ritual performance) mode of social reproduction’ in traditional societies, as he saw these, with the ‘organically solid’ (i.e. social solidarity achieved through the division of labour) organisation of modern societies. In this Durkheimian spirit Hillier and Hanson propose that the space of a given society becomes structured morphologically (or ‘configurationally’) in the material world, which is irreducible to its physical dimensions, sufficient to reproduce itself over time. Space is therefore said to be a ‘function of the forms of social solidarity’ (Hillier and Hanson 1984: 22). ‘Space matters’ not because it is a container or reflection of social ideas but because it is a social idea and therefore possesses agency to make social things happen. ‘Space syntax’ itself refers to the ‘morphic language’ of space, which is distinct from a natural language in that it does not possess semantic ‘meaning’ (as signifying words do) but is the mode of ‘description’ through which society materialised in the world becomes intelligible to human beings. In this respect it is also said to differ from a mathematical language in that space-syntactic descriptions are encoded in the material world (for example in the structure of a city) rather than in an immaterial (for example Euclidean) dimension (Hillier and Hanson 1984: 45–51). Space syntax then, is an empiricallyderived configurational ‘pattern language’ and in this sense its quantitative descriptions are ‘non-discursive’, in that they are able to express complex relational schema which cannot ordinarily be expressed through natural language (Hillier 1996a: 4). This syntactical approach shares some unexpected common ground with the recent interest of social theory in the ‘non-representational’ aspects of social life (Thrift 2008). At the urban and regional scales, these space syntax ‘descriptions’ can be represented through ‘axial’ and ‘segment maps’, of which more later (see Figure 14.1). Scholars in non-applied fields will not find the explicitly sociological basis of a research methodology surprising

space syntax as a naïve ‘modeling tool’ – a critique that rather implies the design scale simply does not matter theoretically; a position with which space syntax practitioners (and urban designers in general) would do well to avoid complicity.

Natural Movement and Movement Economy Space syntax asserts the primacy of ‘linking the physical city to the human city’ through the mediation of the spatial configuration of built form (Hillier 2005, Hillier and Vaughan 2007). This is because of the effect of spatial configuration on patterns of movement and encounter which, Hillier argues, (re)produce the social by creating the possibility for ‘virtual community’ (Hillier 1996a: 6, 186–9). Importantly, ‘virtual community’ does not refer to the movements or ‘interactions’ in themselves (see Giddens 1984: 64–8 on ‘co-presence’) but to the configurational properties that become associated with them. Drawing on a body of research conducted by the international space syntax research community,2 Hillier (1996a) integrates two new perspectives on the city into space syntax theory – the theory of ‘natural movement’ and the theory of the ‘movement economy’. In the theory of natural movement Hillier proposes that the spatial configuration of the urban grid itself produces ‘attraction inequalities’ that privilege some urban spaces over others for movement on a ‘probabilistic’ basis, prior to any consideration of land-use ‘attractors’ (Hillier et al. 1993). The theory of the movement economy proposes that land uses benefitting from a high rate of movement cluster in such favourable locations at a premium cost, while those that require less movement situate themselves at relative positions in the network. Whereas high-movement spaces that characterise urban centres tend to be more generative of diverse social relationships (for example of exchange), residential areas tend to be more conservative in the sense that they will conserve existing relations, with less chance of strangers meeting locals. Hillier differentiates between ‘foreground’ and ‘background’ networks of urban space that 160

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produce emergent intensities (i.e. centres) of movement at all scales in the urban grid (Hillier and Vaughan 2007, Hillier 1999). Because natural movement is relative to scale Hillier prefers to speak of centrality as being ‘pervasive’ in urban space (Hillier 2009). In this sense centrality in space syntax theory is differentiated from theories of the polycentric city which tend to focus on movement attractors or ‘hubs’ at the higher end of the regional hierarchy, somewhat in isolation from the morphological properties of the urban system as a whole. The implication of the theories of the movement economy and natural movement for urban design are profound in that planning regimes based on attractor models are brought into question by the proposition that movement is primarily a property of spatial configuration. Movement, in other words, is the cause, not the consequence of the presence of land-use attractors. Where land-use attractors benefit from movement-rich locations they create a mutually re-enforcing ‘multiplier effect’ (and vice versa where they do not). The ability of space syntax methods to help predict both vehicular and movement rates at the design scale is a powerful technique at the disposal of urban designers (Karimi 2012). The increased usability of GIS over the last decade has made the empirical evaluation of movement economy theory more straightforward. Essentially syntactical measures can be added as a layer to any other sort of data that can be georeferenced at street segment scale, including movement-rates and land uses and tested statistically for their explanatory value. The degree of methodological complexity possible here need not deter urban designers experimenting with space syntax techniques as part of what Hillier calls the ‘deployment of intuition within a field structured by reason’, developing the skills needed in relation to a particular urban design problem (Hillier 1996a: 410–12). Space syntax is primarily concerned with understanding cities, it is less concerned with spatial modelling per se. The emphasis on movement as the ‘link’ between the physical and human city puts space syntax research firmly

people is to make an important methodological step that does not assume the intentionality (i.e. goal-orientatedness) of how people inhabit cities that compromises the key source of knowledge for most urban planners.3 Like the analytical measures, observational techniques are not a given, they may well need to be developed for a particular study (see Chapter 21). Familiar ones used in space syntax analysis include the snapshot, the gate count, the trace (i.e. following individuals) and the moving observer (i.e. count-as-you-walk) (Figure 14.2). Performative aspects of social practice, what Lefebvre (1991, 2004) refers to as the ‘rhythms’ of everyday life cannot, of course, be reduced to epiphenomena of spatial configuration but they could usefully be brought into dialogue with the sociological arguments in The Social Logic of Space. 161

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in the tradition of Jane Jacobs and her concern with the relationship of built form and human activity as the basis of social and economic life in cities. Methodologically it builds on the famous Chapter 22 of Death and Life of Great American Cities that draws on the information theorist Warren Weaver to propose that cities are systems of ‘organized complexity’ (Jacobs 1961: 564). The research ethos of Jacobs is also detectable in the value placed on both quantitative and ethnographic (i.e. qualitative) observation of people in space syntax methodology. The reasons for this are threefold, firstly as a source of hypotheses about ‘how cities work’; secondly, as a source of concrete social data that can inform, critique and discriminate between different modes of syntactical analysis, and thirdly because to observe

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Figure 14.2 Elementary observational techniques in space •›–ƒšȋ ”ƒŒ‡™•‹ƒ†ƒ—‰Šƒ͢͠͠͡Ȍǣȋ‹ȌǮ‰ƒ–‡…‘—–•ǯ‘ˆ’‡‘’Ž‡ and vehicles in motion, (ii) snapshots of movement, rest and encounter

For urban designers the emphasis on observation in space syntax also declares a particular normative emphasis in that to observe street life is to acknowledge that it is less the source of the ‘problem’ than of the ‘answer’. It follows that Hillier shares with Jacobs a view of the city that is fundamentally optimistic. For both thinkers, as for Durkheim, the city was less a site of conflict (as in the Marxist tradition) so much as a site of exchange and ritualised resolution between different kinds of people – hence the characteristic space syntax emphasis on the quality of public space (Karimi 2012). Both urbanists view the problems of the modern city as arising from a lack of understanding as to ‘how cities work’ that can be put right with good theory, systematic observation and empirical analysis to inform design understanding and policy making. This perspective differentiates space syntax from the arguably ‘pessimistic’ tradition of urbanism stemming from the late Victorian reformers and inherited by a generation of urbanists and planners from Howard to Abercrombie, Mumford and Buchanan who saw the city fundamentally in terms of a problem to be solved, typically by the imposition of ordered (architectural, legalistic or bureaucratic) systems onto built environments that had developed, they believed, on a disastrously laissez faire basis. Arguably, these approaches sometimes conflated questions of urban structure with questions of environ162

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Figure 14.3 Axial lines (i) describing an urban block and (ii) translated into a graph

mental quality and the search for ‘ideal’ urban forms. Hillier, by contrast, argues that urban structure cannot be understood by analogy (whether with biological organisms, psychological traits or machines) but should be studied on its own terms as a complex materialisation of social morphology.

Why Axial Maps are Special Things The ‘axial map’ in space syntax is defined as the longest and least set of lines that cover all continuous open space in an urban environment (Hillier and Hanson 1984: 90–92). It is intended as the simplest representation of an urban street network that it is possible to make – thereby excluding data pertaining to traffic management, road width and shape. A configuration of axial lines such as those in Figure 14.3 (i) can be translated into a graph, as in Figure 14.3 (ii), in which all the spaces that can be connected by a

straight line are represented by a node and the intersection between them as an edge. The road network is therefore represented topologically, as changes of direction, rather than by intersections at road junctions. The resulting graph is the underlying analytical model used for all space syntax analysis. Figure 14.3, for example, describes relations of symmetry between spaces a, b and c, in a manner that can be quantified mathematically (Hillier and Hanson 1984: 93–4). A space syntax graph might be justified to show the depth of the system from any given space. A properly drawn axial map will always minimise graph depth at a given resolution of analysis – meaning that the number of nodes should always be kept to a minimum. The full method is set out in Chapter 3 of the Social Logic of Space. All that is needed to get started is a plan, tracing paper, a pencil and a ruler – a calculator is helpful but not necessary for elementary analysis.

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directly addressed within the study itself. The value of space syntax as a methodology is largely dependent on how well the techniques are honed in the light of the research question – which, of course, is not the same thing as manipulating the representation in order to ‘guide’ the analysis towards a particular result. A common question asked by users drawing their first axial map is – ‘what is the axial line?’ There is a little ambiguity in the literature – the Social Logic of Space does not really theorise the axial line beyond its property as the simplest representation of the street network – therefore the line ‘just gets through’ the vertices of buildings. However, further work in the field revealed the cognitive importance of the axial line as a representation of the structure of inhabited space (Penn 2003, Bafna 2003). Here the axial line is regarded as a line of sight, a conceptualisation that is further developed in Conroy Dalton’s notion of syntactical representations as ‘embodied diagrams’ – that is as reductions that capture something of how human beings inhabit space (ConroyDalton 2005, Vaughan et al. 2007). Theoretically one could legitimately argue that all possible axial maps of a given area (across scales) are subsets of the same fundamental axial map. Formally speaking they are ‘scale free’ objects (Carvalho and Penn 2004) but in research terms it is usually impractical for an axial map to describe both very large and very small scales of urban space in the same model. Axial maps must be generalised consistently at the scale of analysis that a given study is conducted and in a manner appropriate to the research question, but between different scales of analysis some variability is to be expected. In this respect an axial map is epistemologically unlike a road-centre line network. It is a radical representation of architectural space as arising from the visual and kinaesthetic properties of the human body. In practice increasing computational power that has made the syntactic analysis of whole urban regions possible demand the use of road-centre line layers since they are too big to be produced manually. Ideally such data needs to be converted to the underlying

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Academic arguments have taken place over whether the axial map is truly ‘objective’ (Ratti 2004a, b, Hillier and Penn 2004). The arguments concerned whether the methodology is capable of producing consistently identical maps, although were largely resolved computationally by Turner’s algorithm (Tuner 2005) which demonstrated that it is possible to produce an objectively consistent axial map computationally. To my mind, however, this argument – important though it is to establish in principle – is in fact not the point in practice. Experience of teaching students soon shows that it is possible for slight differentiation to appear between axial maps that could both be classed as accurate. However, if the resolution at which the drawing is to be made is consistent and the principle of least and fewest lines is rigorously adhered to, then these differences should be trivial. The difficulties that arise in the production of an axial map are a product of its strengths as much as its weaknesses as an analytical method. This is because the proper way to draw a base ‘fewest line’ map is intimately tied up with what questions the designer-analyst wishes to ask of the urban space – particularly with regard to the proper resolution of the analysis – for example, should door recesses and street furniture be included, how should a huge traffic intersection be modelled? There is no absolute answer to these questions because they depend on what it is the individual researcherdesigner wishes to find out. For example, if the relationship between seeing and going in a restricted urban site is being explored then it is appropriate to include those objects that obstruct movement at the micro-scale. If, more typically, the question regards movement at the urban scale then such detail is unnecessary – the guiding rule is always to keep the axial representation as simple as it can be. Consistency is everything – if the internal routes of dense housing estates are modelled in one area of an axial map and not in others then the results of the model will be skewed – but it would be a perfectly valid decision to exclude such estates if the primary concern was trans-urban movement so long as the limitations of the model with regard to housing estates were

axial representation algorithmically or through a scaling up of Tuner’s algorithm (currently too computationally expensive and difficult to accommodate to large urban scale map layers). Needless to say such work is fraught with difficulties and at the time of writing has not been satisfactorily resolved – (though see Dhanani et al. 2011). More recently, the development of angular segment analysis4 has, in some respects, displaced the primacy of the axial map in space syntax urban analysis (Hillier and Iida 2005; Hillier, Yang and Turner 2012). Segment analysis is computed on the extent of angular differentiation of road segments between road junctions and different sections of road and it allows for a finer-grained analysis of the configurational properties of urban space. It is also computationally nearer to roadcentre lines in breaking continuous lines at road junctions. Road-centre line data can be converted into a segment map since, de facto they share many of the same properties (see Turner 2007b). However, a road centre line should not be conflated with an axial map which remains the fundamental representation linking all urban scale theory and analysis in space syntax methodology.

‘WHAT MEASURES SHOULD I LEARN?’ Having successfully drawn an axial and/or segment map the next question often regards the particular ‘measures’ that should be processed and brought to the data. It is a question that those involved in space syntax research have traditionally sought to avoid answering too closely. The reason is a concern to avoid reducing space syntax analysis to a series of hard and fast metrics that can be ‘applied’ to achieve definite results, regardless of the particularity of the research context. Having said this, it is perfectly reasonable, almost 30 years after the Social Logic of Space was published and given the amount of research in the field, for users to request greater guidance in the use of particular syntactical measures that are likely to be the most useful. 164

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For urban scale analysis the two key measures are ‘integration’ and ‘choice’ (Hillier and Iida 2005, Hillier et al. 2012). ‘Integration’ is similar to ‘closeness’ in mainstream graph theory and associated with ‘to movement’ to a particular configurational ‘destination’. Integration measures the extent to which one space is ‘close’ to another space within all spaces in a specified network radius. One would expect the relatively closest space to all others in the system to constitute some kind of centre and be a source of natural movement, while the relatively most segregated space would probably be residential, characterised by a relatively low level of movement. Again this is only a starting point. Where an urban centre is found in a relatively segregated location there are likely to be particular historical, cultural or administrative or other reasons to explain this. The idea of space syntax research is to understand how cities work, not to assign universal meanings to particular measures. ‘Choice’ (similar to ‘betweeness’ in graph theory) measures the extent to which one space rests on a path between two other spaces, relative to all other spaces in the system within a given network radius – it is associated with ‘through movement’ between (graph) scales. Choice is less well understood than integration, mainly because its widespread use is more recent and associated with segment-angular analysis. Like integration it has to do with the structural properties of urban form that make cities intelligible (centres will usually be high choice places) but it is more useful than integration in understanding the scale dynamics of urban growth processes (Hillier, Yang and Turner 2012, Al-Sayed et al. 2012, also Griffiths 2008). The work of Hillier and his colleagues suggests that choice is intimately bound up with structuring the geographical scale at which urban-like space emerges. From what has already been said it should be clear that a value of space syntax is that its methods are not restricted to any particular scale of analysis. Within any graph at any resolution of analysis it is possible to look at how measures of integration and choice calculated at relatively local radii relate to those calculated at relatively larger (‘global’)

CONCLUSION This chapter has sought to present space syntax as a form of urban design pedagogy that is fundamentally open ended, explorative and interdisciplinary in nature. It has 165

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social theory in general (Urry 2007: 54–60). Distance is, in other words, ambiguous and relative with regard to its social context. The absence of sustained reflection within the field on space syntax’s own normative positioning (though see Psarra 2009, 2010) means some common misunderstandings are likely to recur. For example, it has become commonplace to note an often scarcely concealed normative assumption that the areas of a street network coloured red by syntactic analysis (indicating a relatively accessible or ‘integrated’ area) are ‘good’ and those coloured blue (indicating a relatively inaccessible or ‘segregated’ area) are ‘bad’. Such an assumption reduces the analysis of the social complexity of urban structure to a geometrical abstraction that justifies Soja’s comment about fetishising surface appearances (Soja 2001). It does not take much reflection to suggest that integration and segregation are an aspect of all urban structures and that the question of whether they are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is not only logically erroneous in itself (how can a graph representation be good or bad?) but also suggests a point of view on what the analysis is trying to achieve with the analysis that has probably been insufficiently articulated, bringing us back to Harvey’s point about the separation of theory and methods that was raised above. Analytically speaking, space syntax epistemology deflects charges of spatial or environmental determinism in a simplistic cause and effect sense by arguing that the social agency of the spatial ‘variable’ is restricted to its probabilistic effect on patterns of movement and the effects of these on land uses. It has nothing to say about individual behaviours or what these patterns might ‘mean’ in semantic terms (Hillier 1996a, 2011, 2012, also Till 2012).

14.

scales. For urban designers this is a quality of the highest importance since it permits analysis of the configurational properties of a particular local site within a range of urban contexts. Two particular measures, ‘synergy’ (r-squared of local and global integration) and ‘intelligibility’ (r-squared of connectivity and global integration) are well established in axial analysis as being indicative of the extent to which the local configuration of the urban grid is structured accessibly in relation to the system as a whole (Hillier 1996a: 170–75). Such analytical procedures help in understanding how local interventions may have far reaching (global) implications in terms of changing the movement affordances of a spatial configuration and similarly how large-scale interventions might affect the local sites. An aspect of space syntax methodology that is a perpetual source of error and interdisciplinary misunderstanding arises because of how distance is theorised. Most geographical and planning-based approaches to urban questions use metric distance (i.e. metres, kilometres) usually conceived in terms of a Euclidean grid space as the standard unit of measurement. An important proposition of the syntactical approach is that such an epistemology has little to do with how space is experienced ‘on the ground’ (i.e. in network terms) and in fact has rather more to do with what makes life easier for bureaucrats (and academics). Currently there are three distinctive modes of distance or ‘distance concepts’ in space syntax: topological (changes of direction – principally deployed in axial analysis), angular (straightest line – principally deployed in segment analysis) and metric (network distance in metres) (Figure 14.4). Measures of integration and choice can be calculated in all modes but only topological and angular measures have found to be useful in predicting movement, implying that metric distance tends only to be important at a highly local, rather than systemic level (Hillier and Iida 2005). Despite the apparent complexity of syntactical distance concepts the ability to look at urban space in a variety of ways forces a rethink of what is ‘close’ and ‘far away’ which has radical implications for urban design and

ͤ͡Ǥͤ‘…‹‰Šƒ–”‡‡–ƒ”‡ƒŠ‡ƥ‡Ž†…Ǥͨͥ͡͠‹ŽŽ—•–”ƒ–‹‰–Š”‡‡ syntactic distance concepts (showing three segment-angular ƒƒŽ›•‡•™‡‹‰Š–‡†„›†‹ơ‡”‡–Ǯ†‹•–ƒ…‡‘†‡•ǯƒ–˜ƒ”‹‘—•‡–Ǧ ™‘””ƒ†‹‹Ȃ ”‹ƥ–Š•͢͢͠͡Ȍǣȋ‹Ȍƒ‰—Žƒ”™‡‹‰Š–‹‰ȋ–‘’ǦŽ‡ˆ–Ȍǡ (ii) topological weighting (bottom-left), (iii) metric weighting (top-right)

argued that contriving to divorce space syntax methodology from the theoretical agenda set out in Hillier and Hanson’s theory of the Social Logic of Space and developed through subsequent theoretically-informed studies is to risk many of these qualities and serves to inhibit a more productive engagement with other theories of the city. Where space syntax is regarded as little more than a tool for accessibility analysis, then it resembles a niche, instrumental, knowledge domain that is fundamentally limited in its explanatory scope. Yet space syntax is neither a black box methodology nor a closed-shop as a field of architectural enquiry. Like any other mode of research it is better at some things than 166

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at others but, properly understood, its range is considerable – not least in providing descriptions of urban form at the design scale. Preferable to viewing space syntax as a toolkit is to recognise the opportunity it provides for an unusual nexus between the concerns of urban designers and the range of other disciplines concerned with the built environment.

ENDNOTES 1

Details of the open source community are available at: https:// github.com/SpaceGroupUCL/depthmapX and http://www.bart lett.ucl.ac.uk/graduate/research/space/research/ucl-depthmap.

2

For an overview of the work of the space syntax community the best starting point is the bi-annual symposium: http://www.

TIPS FOR RESEARCHERS: Ȉ Engage with space syntax as a theory of urbanism in order to use the analytical tools creatively and critically. Ȉ Approach space syntax with an intuition about how an urban place or design scheme works and use the methods to explore your intuition. Ȉ Interpret space syntax analyses (or ‘descriptions’) of urban structure through an iterative process of contextualisation with other datasets.

spacesyntax.net/symposia/. 3

A point made by Julienne Hanson in her lecture to MSc Advanced Architectural Studies students ‘Why observe?’

4

See Figure 14.1 for an example.

14. Space syntax as interdisciplinary urban design pedagogy

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15 Thinking systems in urban design: a prioritised structure model Kinda Al-Sayed

As a response to an increase in urban complexity, systemsbased approaches are becoming more instrumental as a means to facilitate thinking about urban areas. What they lacked, however, was a mechanism by which an analytical description of urban complexity could be translated into a usable synthetic description. For this purpose, a prioritised structure model of design thinking is outlined in this chapter. The model aligns design to a set of spatial and form-function preferences in which preference is given to spatiallydetermined variables over other quantitative and qualitative criteria. The application of the model is explored in a design experiment where design is informed by laws that are thought to govern historical urban growth patterns. It is concluded that systems thinking can support design reasoning, and that this is particularly valuable in urban design where dependencies between variables are often too complex to solve intuitively.

INTRODUCTION In recent times, the exploration of urban design has witnessed a divide between research and practice. Researchbased approaches build on analytical methodologies to construct explanatory models of urban phenomena. Practicebased approaches are explorative and assumption-based. Any attempts to bridge the research / practice divide faced

significant challenges. On the side of scientific research, rigour is prioritised, and little regard is given to the uncertainty and ambiguity inherent in design as a human cognitive activity. On the side of design practice, creativity is the essence of any design process and scientific reasoning is typically only used to post-rationalise aesthetically-driven decisions. The problems that result from adopting either approach without reference to the other have potentially significant implications on the quality of urban design and triggers questions of the type; why do we need science in design? Can science provide more definitive answers to design? and if so; is knowledge-based design counter-creative? How does science play a role in informing or restraining creativity? What type of mechanism is needed to convert an explanatory reading of architectural phenomena into a synthetic and yet creative design approach? These questions deal with many terms that are in themselves subject to a broad spectrum of research in both sciences and arts. A term like creativity, for example, has been historically challenged in artificial intelligence (Boden 1990) which instead views creativity as going beyond what is new or aesthetically spectacular. The disciplinary divide on such a basic and fundamental term as creativity undermines communication between sciences and arts and makes the unpacking of such questions a very challenging mission. The adaptation of complexity to serve in design reasoning, for example, has been a subject of extensive research across

different scales (Alexiou et al. 2010). On the scale of cities, it requires a careful understanding of the complex composition that makes the built environment and how such composition can be rebuilt through a linear design process. As a starting point, there is a need to carefully frame the ‘problem of cities’ before tackling the ‘problem of design’. Research on the science of cities has a long history that spreads over the last century with quantitative research becoming increasingly visible over the past three decades. One of the first calls for thinking systems in cities was that of Jane Jacobs (1961) who made the assertion that cities are similar to biological systems in their organised complexity. Her intervention paved the way for understanding cities as complex systems. Since then, engineering and scientific modelling approaches have continued to shape the landscape of the discipline. Theoretical frameworks, such as Space Syntax (see Chapter 14) were focused on the network structure of space and the social logic inherent in its representation (Hillier and Hanson 1984), whilst others were more concerned with the patterns embedded in urban raster images1 (Ratti and Richens 1999), or with mixing biological and geographical knowledge to focus on allometric scaling laws in urban systems2 (Bettencourt et al. 2007, Batty et al. 2008). Whether in urban design or simulation modelling, practice-based approaches were, by contrast, on a divergent path in their exploration of city making. Due to the practicality of their work and limitations on time and resources, decisions were made in direct response to problems on site and on the basis of professional expertise. Computational modelling that supported these efforts adapted different scientific theories and models to urban planning needs (Wu and Silva 2009), mostly developed to simulate cities with the building block as the elementary component of these systems. With few exceptions (Duarte et al. 2007), simulation models were predominantly based on assumptions with little account taken of actual urban patterns, whilst methodologies varied depending on the computational models used (Parish and Müller 2001, Stanilov 2003, Batty 2005, Derix et al. 2012).3 170

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Due to the complexity of the field, studying cities as physical artefacts, as processes, and as hubs for economic and social life was handled differently across these domains whilst any focused methodologies faced significant challenges (Webster 2008). Some theorists took a sceptical stance claiming that universal models ignore singularities, human experiences, and often fall into the trap of scientific reduction (Vesely 2004). For example disputes about the validity of representation, the capacity of static descriptions to explain processes, and the accusation of spatial determinism were particularly rife against Space Syntax (Ratti 2004). Difficulties in isolating variables and ruling out dependencies and interdependencies were increasingly featured in complexity research as key criticisms against simplified modelling approaches. Along with this also came questions about the usefulness of any assumption-based simulation approach. The adaptation of computational models to explain and simulate cities, for example, was mostly based on agglomerations of urban blocks in which there is a clear disregard for street networks as arteries for commuting from all origins to all destinations. Attempts were made to grow streets rather than blocks (Parish and Müller 2001), however, the mechanism used was predominantly based on repetition and subdivision in the street elements without accounting for the network properties of the generated grid. Uncertainty continued to be a major issue in urban simulation models where estimates of population density play an important role in setting assumptions. The focus in all these modelling approaches was therefore on producing city-like physical features without making it clear how actual historical growth patterns and form-function relationships inform modelling. This particular problem demands careful consideration in relation to the emergent social and economic behaviour that shapes city complexity if we are to avoid alienating computation models from real urban life. Of interest is how to evolve urban form in such a way as to build on the analytical and explanatory descriptions of urban

A PRIORITISED STRUCTURE MODEL FOR URBAN DESIGN Given the apparent complexity in urban systems, a structured approach is valuable to address the challenges posed by urban design. Any such structuring should be based on a prioritisation model that gives preference to certain variables over others. For the model to be substantiated, it needs to be

based on the fundamental functioning mechanisms of cities, whilst a theoretical proposition about such prioritisation should take into account the ‘generic function’ of movement that is viewed in Space Syntax as the engine that drives cities’ movement economies (Hillier 1996b). The fundamental function of movement in space was highlighted in Hillier’s proposition for a model that narrows design possibilities

15.

Figure 15.1 A prioritised structure model for urban design consisting of four design ƤŽ–‡”•ǤŠ‡Ƥ”•–‹•†‡–‡”‹‡†„›•’ƒ–‹ƒŽŽƒ™•‘ˆ‰”‘™–Šƒ†‰‡‡”ƒ–‹‘ǤŠ‡•‡…‘†‹•ƒ ˆ—…–‹‘‘ˆ–Š‡”‡Žƒ–‹‘•Š‹’„‡–™‡‡•’ƒ…‡ƒ†ˆ‘”Ǧˆ—…–‹‘†ƒ–ƒǤŠ‡–Š‹”†‹•”‡Ƥ‡† by other non-spatially determined quantitative criteria (i.e. environmental measures). ƤƒŽƤŽ–‡”‹••—„Œ‡…––‘†‡•‹‰‡”•ǯ‹–‡”ƒŽŽ‘‰‹…ǡ”‡ƒ•‘‹‰ƒ†“—ƒŽ‹–ƒ–‹˜‡…Š‘‹…‡ 171

Thinking systems in urban design: a prioritised structure model

growth, an idea that follows Alexander’s early work on analysis-synthesis in design (1964) and more recently was revisited by Penn (2006). To take things a stage further and embrace design in the study of urban complexity, this chapter presents a synthetic description of Space Syntax to inform problem definition and conceptual design development. For this purpose a knowledge-based model is devised to aid urban design decisions. The modelling approach will be associated with a reflective account to identify the boundaries between evidence-based rationality and designers’ internal logic or reasoning. The model outlines a prioritised structure of design thinking,4 where prioritisation is assigned based on the historical development of urban structures and where space is seen to trigger economic activity and its associated formal manifestations. The model enables the generation and evaluation of spatial structures and the prediction of formfunction attributes, as well as testing the application of science to design. It explores the boundaries of rationality between empirical knowledge and human creativity (Simon 1957) and in so doing questions the validity of a structured approach to maximising certainty about design decisions and to reducing constraints over creativity.

by means of three design filters (Hillier 1996a), where the ‘generic function’ is regarded as the first design filter that makes spatial structures accessible. Following the application of the generic function, the second and third design filters are applied to shape the exact features of design solutions by means of qualitative criteria that is determined by cultural descriptions of individual and communal identity. Hillier’s model remained theoretical, even though Space Syntax was being used as an evaluative tool to test design decisions (Karimi et al. 2007). For a better engagement with design as an activity during the conceptual development phase, the prioritised structure proposed in this chapter was devised to narrow design possibilities by means of four design filters (Figure 15.1). The first set of design filters define the generative spatial laws of urban space; here represented by segmental street networks. These laws were extracted from the historical evolution of urban form. The second set of filters depend on the first set to estimate formfunction attributes from the temporal state of the spatial structure. The third set is not directly related to space but is determined by other types of quantitative criteria such as environmental and lighting measures. The final set is then qualitatively determined by designers or users to further shape design solutions. However, given foreseen difficulties in fully automating a design process, a designer is required to tune the data and select applicable evaluation measures. For that, while the first three design filters can be applied as separate stages, the designer’s role will be required throughout the process in order to shape the design features.

AN URBAN DESIGN EXPERIMENT To explore the application of the prioritised structure model to urban design, an experimental approach was followed. The process involved generating a hypothetical urban grid

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and defining form-function attributes. This was enabled by building a knowledge-base to evaluate generative spatial structures and to encode empirical data into non-linear predictive models. While the next two sections outline this approach, the subsequent section explores the impact of creative variations on the predicted outcomes of modelling. In exploring the boundaries of certainty and uncertainty, the experiment unveils the role of designers in adapting knowledge to explore new forms of creativity.

Generative Variations and the Geometric Filter In search for local rules of growth in urban form, early Space Syntax experiments (Hillier and Hanson 1984) presented a generative pattern of organisation on the local scale of an urban area. The experiments led to the realisation that longer lines tend to continue whilst straight and shorter lines stop earlier to form near-right angles (Hillier 2002). The process was identified as the ‘centrality and extension’ rule. This simple rule is implemented here to govern the generative growth mechanism while allowing for a margin of randomness in the growth patterns (Figure 15.2). The structures produced present varying syntactic properties. The syntactic properties can either be defined as the topological configurations of an axial map or the geometric configurations of a segment map (see Chapter 14). An axial map is a scale-free representation of the longest and fewest lines of sight that cover all spaces in a street layout. The segment map is a broken description of the axial representation where each segment element between two street inter-junctions is considered as a separate element in the network. The segment network is based on geometric properties of angular turns between each segment and the other (Turner 2000). To judge the urbanity of the generated structures, four invariants that were previously extracted from mapping historical growth will be considered as criteria for urban pattern recognition;

15. Thinking systems in urban design: a prioritised structure model

Figure 15.2 Evaluating the four growth iterations against the spatial properties of Barcelona and a randomly generated structure. Š‡‰‡‡”ƒ–‹˜‡…‘†‡‹•™”‹––‡‹”‘…‡••‹‰ȋ ƒ˜ƒȌǤ’ƒ–‹ƒŽ–”—…–—”‡•ƒ”‡ƒƒŽ›•‡†—•‹‰‡’–Šƒ’ȋ—”‡”͢͠͡͡Ȍ 173

‹‰—”‡ͥ͡Ǥͣ‹‹‰†ƒ–ƒˆ‘”…‘””‡Žƒ–‹‘•Ǣ•–‘”‹‰†ƒ–ƒƒ†•’ƒ–‹ƒŽ…‘Ƥ‰—”ƒ–‹‘•‹–™‘‘˜‡”Žƒ’’‹‰‰”‹†”‡ˆ‡”‡…‡Žƒ›‡”•ƒ† selecting the highest values in a third higher-resolution reference layer

1. The shortest angular path in the system is revealed as a semi-continuous set of long lines. 2. Self-organisational behaviour leads to the formation of patchwork patterns, where clusters of dense structures distribute leaving similar physical distances in-between. 3. Local and global angular depth5 fits a log-normal statistical distribution.6 The distribution differs from that of random networks in that it shows a higher degree of skewness (asymmetry). 4. Urban axial systems exhibit high intelligibility and synergy7 between the local and global scales. The first three invariants were identified in Al-Sayed et al. 2010, Al-Sayed et al. 2012 and Al-Sayed 2013. The fourth invariant was observed by Conroy Dalton (2001). What is yet to be investigated is whether these invariants can be a natural product of a local generative rule. After generating four growth iterations, the structures were evaluated using the invariants and compared to an urban region in Barcelona and a randomly generated system. To evaluate against invariant 1, choice [SLW], a segment length weighted measure of the shortest angular paths across the whole street network, is calculated. A structure that has the highest 10 per cent values is then extracted and evaluated. The structure’s continuity is evaluated by measuring its normalised cumulative total depth values. Total depth is also 174

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an angular-based measure based on the sum of angular turns taken to reach any segment element in the street network. A normalised reciprocal of this measure defined as segmental integration can help estimating the potentials for a street segment to be a destination in the urban system. To evaluate against invariant 2, metric mean depth analysis (MMD) is calculated. The measure here simply represents average physical distance from each street segment to the neighbouring segments within a metric radius of 1,000 metres (Hillier et al. 2007). Relating to invariant 3, the distribution of angular integration is evaluated using a KSL8 test to check whether the values of angular integration follow a lognormal distribution. In addition, the degree of skewness is compared to random and real systems; skewness being a statistical measure for asymmetry in the distribution of values. Considering invariant 4, the R2 coefficients of axial intelligibility are compared. Intelligibility is an axial graph measure that represents the relationship between streets that have high connections to other streets (connectivity) and streets that are more integrated in an axial system. The evaluation measure of choice indicates that iteration 3 performs better than iterations 1, 2 and 4 (see Figure 15.2), whilst calculating MMD for different radii does not identify clear patchwork patterns in the background network of any of the three variations. On the basis of the KSL test, iteration 3 fits best with a log-normal distribution, it also reflects a well differentiated structure (Skewness = –1.46). Moreover, when

differentiation that approximates actual urban structures. In sum, iteration 3 presents a more intelligible structure than other iterations (despite failing to get close to the configurational properties of a real urban structure) and was therefore suitable for the second stage in the design experiment.

Figure 15.4 A neural network model applied to Barcelona, using normalised spatial measures of choice, integration and connectivity as factors and form-function attributes as response variables

of Barcelona or even to a random system. Considering these findings, iteration 3 is the most favourable as it presents an optimum foreground structure that conserves physical distance and angular turn costs. It also presents a structural

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considering the part-whole structural unity, the structure of iteration 3 is more intelligible than other iterations and reasonably similar in terms of synergy values. Yet, all three iterations present less competitive structures when compared to the deformed grid

In this part of the design experiment, the configurations of street spaces were given a priority role in defining formfunction attributes of urban areas. Form attributes include building height and density as well as street width. Functional attributes relate to the overall retail and commercial zoning of the associated areas. To arrive at a robust description of the relationship that couples street spaces and form-function variables, nonparametric methods were used9 to minimise assumptions with regards to probability distributions. To enable the relationship between street structures and urban form and function to be mapped, a spatial aggregation technique called the pixelmapper was used (Al-Sayed 2012). Using this method, data was binned in two overlapping polygon layers and was further projected against a third polygon layer with higher resolution to preserve the accuracy of representation (Figure 15.3). This level of abstraction enabled

15.

Figure 15.5 Responses for form-function estimated by applying the trained and validated ANN model. The spatial network measures of iteration 3 were used as factors in the ANNs

A Supervised Machine Learning Approach for Forecasting Urban Form and Function

the extraction of generic mechanisms that are thought to govern the localised organisation of urban complexity. The pixelmapper was used in modelling space-form-function relationships, suitably adapted for use in the context of design. For the purpose of nonparametric modelling, a feedforward Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) model was devised for encoding urban dynamics. ANNs consist of layers and neurons that simulate human learning and are used in many scientific fields for classification and prediction (Openshaw and Openshaw 1997). To build a knowledge base for the nonparametric model, empirical data on the spaceform-function attributes of Barcelona and Manhattan was fed into a multilayer-perception ANNs. The spatial measures of the urban systems were entered in an input layer and empirical data on form-function attributes was entered in an output layer (Figure 15.4). A simple model architecture was chosen due to the limited number of inputs (3) and outputs (4). Along with the inputs and outputs, the ANNs model architecture included one intermediate hidden layer consisting of three hidden nodes. The hidden layer stores activation functions that define the weights and biases needed to capture the relationship between inputs and outputs. For the input layer, three spatial measures were used as factors: normalised choice (NACHslw), segment length weighted; normalised integration (NAIN); and aggregate connectivity per 1,000 square unit (Connectivity1000). The three spatial measures were chosen to capture the global and local properties of the network, although before using the continuous variables as inputs in the ANNs model, their values were normalised to avoid the effect of different network sizes. For the normalisation, a lognormal probability function was used to map the values to the range [0, 1].10 The responses were a mix of continuous variables running in regression mode (Block density per 1,000 metric square) and ordinal variables running in machine mode (commercial activity, street width above 30 metres, high-rise above 35 metres). The performance 176

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of the model was assessed using different accuracy and sensitivity measures for ordinal responses along with the correlation coefficient R2 for continuous responses. After assessing the cross-validated estimates, the model was found to yield strong prediction and accuracy rates for the Barcelona case. The trained ANNs were tested on Manhattan. The test results confirmed the ANNs to be good predictors of formal and functional attributes, qualifying the model to be used in the design experiment. For this purpose, the ANNs model was devised to serve in predicting the form-function attributes that correspond to the topological and geometric properties of iteration 3 (see Figure 15.2). Using the pixelmapper method to define the approximate features of the urban space, the attributes of the solution space were then defined within that resolution level (Figure 15.5). The street width response was estimated directly from the NACHslw values and further informed by the ANNs predictions. Whilst the estimated attributes were fully automated, this was subject to the accuracy of the ANNs model and the possibility of detecting thresholds in the spatial measures. In this process, the nonparametric relationships were subject to the correctness of data and the scale of representation, where scale was identified as the metric resolution of the pixelmapper grid. To produce a smooth representation of the target spaces, positive values for ordinal responses were replaced by their correspondent probabilities.

Exploring Design Variations to the Target Spaces The process identified thus far could be fully automated given that all the measures are quantified, validated and generalised. There are limitations however in the precision of description and to the optimum resolution at which space can best capture form-function relationships. In particular, for the purpose of developing a flexible design methodology, orthodox definitions of spatial attributes might be avoided. For example, functional constraints defined here

15.

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Figure 15.6 Extracting 3D characteristics of the form-function responses as predicted by ANNs

‹‰—”‡ͥ͡Ǥͧͣ˜ƒ”‹ƒ–‹‘•‘–Š‡–ƒ”‰‡–‡•–‹ƒ–‡†˜‘Ž—‡–”‹…‘—–…‘‡ƒ•†‡Ƥ‡†„›–Š‡†‡•‹‰‡”ǤŽ‘…•ƒ”‡•Š‹ˆ–‡†Ž‘…ƒŽŽ›‹†‹ơ‡”‡– directions 178

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The design approach presented here builds on a theoretical model and a design experiment established in Al-Sayed (2012). The theoretical model was based on the preferential 179

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CONCLUSIONS

role of space in defining urban form and function whilst other quantitative and qualitative criteria were assumed to come at later design stages to further shape the features of design solutions. In this design approach, three filtering processes were followed to explore the application of the theoretical prioritisation model on design. This work presents a knowledge-based urban design system, where design thinking is structured in such a way as to consider a functioning space as a priority for a sustainable design solution. In evaluating, decoding and encoding urban systems the intention was to adapt designs to reconstruct the natural organised complexity that cities evolve in time despite the intentionality embedded in planning interventions. During the design process, the nature of semi-definitive scientific knowledge together with the ambiguous design activity were explored and were found not to constrain the creative role of designers. Through the gradual move from certainty at the problem definition stage to uncertainty in defining the design solution, the boundaries between objective knowledge and a designer’s subjective reasoning remained nebulous. It is concluded that despite attempts to present knowledge as a solid product of pure rationality, in practice; scientific knowledge is often subject to the constructs of representations and measurements. This should not prevent designers from acquiring scientific knowledge or deter scientists from exploring creative solutions to analytical problems. By exchanging roles, both scientists and designers could explore new creative dimensions to knowledge. Where scientific knowledge supports design reasoning – particularly as it relates to understanding urban complexity – it should not limit the creativity of the designer. Scientific awareness can empower design reasoning, allowing designers to exploit the margins of uncertainty and sculpt new forms of urban spaces.

15.

for commercial activities were intended to describe an overall property of a zone mainly on the ground level rather than a precise functional type of the identified building blocks. At this stage, the third set of design filters were not considered given that their inclusion would require multidisciplinary expertise. Instead, to proceed with the design experiment, the ANNs responses were systematically modelled to translate the image pixel data into a 3D form (Figure 15.6). The procedure followed at this stage is not restrictive and the designer is free to adjust the overall height of buildings, the resolution at which this translation is performed, and the blurring and smoothening of pixel data. The process and design outcomes will then vary accordingly, with the ANNs responses acting to ascertain the first steps towards the 3D definition of formal and functional attributes without implying a definitive materialisation of such attributes. Following this process, variations to the apparently rigid 3D orthogonal design outcome were presented (Figure 15.7). In this process exploitation of the degrees of uncertainty that associate estimated responses may lead to interesting variations to the proposed design solution. While buildings could grow in all directions, street level could also vary on the Z dimension. Blocks could exhibit different densities and overlap at different storey levels, and functions could mix accordingly or could be programmed to trigger new formal relationships. Designers at this stage are free to let their sense of aesthetics and their design conjectures shape the volumetric features of the design. The possibilities rendered through such variations reveal that even within the limitations of plausible models, there is much scope for creative explorations.

TIPS FOR RESEARCHERS: Ȉ Technical frameworks need to be flexible to accommodate uncertain and ill-defined design problems. Ȉ Computational modelling of urban phenomena can help with understanding the processes of design synthesis. Ȉ Explore scientific methods to identify new creative approaches that challenge the current urban design approaches. Ȉ Beyond being a source of inspiration; science can also support and substantiate reasoning, hence, it is useful to incorporate scientific method in design process.

dependencies; that required a careful understanding of the mechanisms that make urban complexity. 4

Ǯ’”‹‘”‹–‹•‡†•–”—…–—”‡‘ˆ†‡•‹‰–Š‹‹‰ǯ‹‰Š–„‡†‡Ƥ‡†ƒ• ƒ—”„ƒ†‡•‹‰ ‘†‡Ž–Šƒ–•‡‡•–‘ˆ—ŽƤŽ•’ƒ–‹ƒŽ…”‹–‡”‹ƒƤ”•–ǡ ƒ†–Š‡‘˜‡•–‘ˆ—ŽƤŽ•’ƒ–‹ƒŽŽ›Ǧ”‡Žƒ–‡†…”‹–‡”‹ƒ‘ˆ—”„ƒˆ‘” ƒ†ˆ—…–‹‘ǡƒ†–Š‡ƤƒŽŽ›†‡ƒŽ•™‹–Š‘–Š‡”–›’‡•‘ˆ—Ž–‹Ǧ objective criteria (such as environmental and lighting measures).

5

Local and global depth are measures of angular distance in the street network where streets that have higher cumulative angular values in-between will gain higher depth in turning ˆ”‘ ‘‡ •–”‡‡– –‘ –Š‡ ‘–Š‡”Ǥ Š‡ Ž‘…ƒŽ ƒ† ‰Ž‘„ƒŽ ƒ”‡ †‡Ƥ‡† within a metric radius; local depth is calculated for each street element within a smaller neighbourhood that is adjacent to it, global depth is calculated within larger neighbourhoods that might go up to the scale of the system as a whole (radius n).

6

Log-normal distribution is a probability distribution of a random variable whose logarithm is normally distributed.

ENDNOTES

7

R2 …‘‡ƥ…‹‡– „‡–™‡‡ š‹ƒŽ ‹–‡‰”ƒ–‹‘ ƒ†‹—• ͞ ƒ† ‰Ž‘„ƒŽ axial integration.

1

’‘••‹„Ž‡†‡Ƥ‹–‹‘‘ˆƒǮ”ƒ•–‡”‘†‡Ž‘ˆ—”„ƒˆ‘”ǯ‹‰Š–„‡ 8

KSL test: the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test is used to decide if

a two-dimensional grid (such as digital image) storing urban

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attributes in its pixel data. 2

Studies into allometric scaling laws in urban systems traditionally examine how variables change with population size.

3

Unlike parametric models, a nonparametric model is one that …ƒ‘–„‡’ƒ”ƒ‡–‡”‹•‡†„›ƒƤ‹–‡•‡–‘ˆ’ƒ”ƒ‡–‡”•Ǥ

The computational framework proposed by Derix et al. (2012) is

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between the systems under study. Here the particular use of log-

to tackle urban design problems on a local scale through utilising

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normal distribution.

rules. This approach uses computational modules for heuristic •‡ƒ”…Š ƒŽ‰‘”‹–Š• –‘ Ƥ† ‡ƒ”Ǧ‘’–‹— •‘Ž—–‹‘• ˆ‘” —”„ƒ design problems. The implementation of these modules is left to designers to explore, allowing for hermeneutic dialog between the designer and the machine, thus no prioritisation is proposed ˆ‘”™Š‹…Š’”‘„Ž‡•–‘ƒ’’”‘ƒ…ŠƤ”•–Ǥ –Š‡ˆ”ƒ‡™‘”–Š‡”‡‹• no reference to a city-to-city learning approach as more emphasis is placed on the role of planners, and beyond design intentionality, there are no assumptions about a natural ‘”‰ƒ‹•ƒ–‹‘ –Šƒ– ‰‘˜‡”• †‹ơ‡”‡– —”„ƒ ˜ƒ”‹ƒ„Ž‡• ƒ† –Š‡‹”

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distribution. 9

Explorations in Urban Design

16

Explorations in generative street layouts Stephen Marshall and Mark Sutton

This chapter explores the possibilities for generating urban layout structure based on street networks and in so doing provides a demonstration of a network simulation tool – ‘NetStoat’ – which ‘grows’ layout structure according to a set of street-based rules. By controlling different street types and their relationships, we can generate urban layout in a structured way, but without a fixed plan. The chapter explores what urban layouts could arise, given different input parameters, testing a range of urban street network types, such as ‘traditional’, ‘hierarchical’ and ‘neo-traditional’, based on different combinations of rules of connection and frontage constraint. Sample results demonstrated include metrics of network length and the emergence of ‘high (main) street spines’. The exploration provides insights into the structure and dynamics of the layouts that arise, pointing towards future application of street-based rules for generating urban layout.

INTRODUCTION Urban design and planning aspire to fixing desired urban forms in advance, while maintaining flexibility in the face of change over time. Historically, fixity and flexibility have often been seen as stereotypical opposites, with the organic incrementalism of Patrick Geddes or Jane Jacobs pitched against the top-down master-planning of Lutyens or Le

Corbusier. More recently, the idea of generative codes has emerged to offer the enticing prospect of combining both: of generating an urban form whose desired order is built into the rules, rather than an overall fixed plan (Alexander et al. 2008, Mehaffy 2008, Marshall 2009, Marshall 2011). Here, the term ‘generative’ is taken to mean a situation in which the rules in some way are targeted or ‘tuned’ to generate desired overall properties in the overall final outcome.1 The question becomes how to link the rules (program) to the final layout (pattern); and how to know what the rules should be in order to generate the desired end-product in a context where the rules are applied incrementally by many hands. One way to address this is to use trial and error, on the ground. Another way, pursued here, is to use simulation, which, while based on simplifying reality, allows attention to focus on key parameters which can be modified and tested at will, with urban layouts of any size generated, and simulation run as many times as desired to produce any number of quantitative results. To that end, this chapter provides a demonstration of a network simulation tool – ‘NetStoat’ – for generating urban layout structure based on street networks. The simulation ‘grows’ layout structure according to a set of street-based rules and by controlling different street types and their relationships, we can generate urban layout in a structured way, but without a fixed plan. The aim was to explore the possibilities for what urban layouts could arise, given different input parameters, based on the structure of the street layout.

Street-based rules are significant for generating urban layout since streets form the backbone of urban layout structure, and are traditionally regulated by explicit codes or rule-sets. While codes based on ‘road hierarchy’ have been implicated with the kind of suburban loop and cul-de-sac layouts that are often criticised by urban designers, codes could also be applied to generate street-grids of the kind favoured by urban designers. Moreover, if we can vary the ‘genetic code’, we could generate different kinds of grid. The chapter reports on work carried out at the Bartlett School of Planning, as part of the SOLUTIONS project (http: //www.suburbansolutions.ac.uk/). That project addressed the peripheral expansion of settlements within a scenario of a relaxed planning regime with no fixed target plans. While the simulations allow detailed quantitative analysis, the focus of this chapter is the exploratory aspect in a more qualitative sense: what are the different types of growth. The intention is to provide a feel for the dynamics of working with ‘programs’ rather than fixed ‘patterns’; and hence the potential for ‘generative urbanism’ based on street-based rules. The chapter first briefly contextualises the simulation of street networks, before setting out key attributes of the NetStoat tool. It goes on to discuss the simulation test results, insights and conclusions.

SIMULATING GROWTH OF STREET NETWORK STRUCTURE The desire to visualise and/or quantify the effects of incremental urban growth is of ongoing interest to urban designers and others who wish to better understand urban dynamic processes, whether for relating past urban growth to future consequences, or predicting the outcome of cumulative incremental interventions in the absence of overall master planning. Of specific concern here is the desire to anticipate the effects of the street layout rules that we put in our design 182

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manuals, since changing individual rules can profoundly affect the overall form and functioning of urban areas. For example, in the UK, the post-war switch to frontage-free main roads, discouragement of minor access roads from directly accessing main roads, and discouragement of crossroads (4-way priority junctions) led to the creation of suburban layouts criticised for the loss of mixed use high streets (main streets), disjointed (impermeable) layouts, a proliferation of culs-de-sac, collectively associated with carorientation and ‘disurban creation’ (Marshall 2005). If we are to keep the flexibility of street-based codes, while better tailoring these to today’s urban design needs, then it becomes important to test the consequences of different codes on overall layout outcomes. There are many preceding traditions both of urban simulation, which seek to experiment with layout growth in silico, or in the ‘digital laboratory’ (Koenig and Bauriedel 2009, Batty 2009); and simulation of transportation network growth (Xie and Levinson 2009). However, only a minority of these feature explicitly the detailed level of individual streets and associated frontage development (e.g. Erickson and Lloyd-Jones 1997, Semboloni 2000, Koenig and Bauriedel 2009). Moreover, these existing precedents typically lack attention to the way street networks are actually designed by means of specific layout rules, such as road hierarchy, including connectivity and frontage constraints. Hence there is a clear prerogative for simulating the growth of urban layout based on such explicit street rules.

‘NetStoat’ Simulation Tool The research involved the creation of dedicated software in the form of a Network Simulation Tool, NetStoat, which generates urban street networks, displays the growth of networks, and calculates a series of statistics relating to these networks.2 The instrumental features of NetStoat are the creation of the road network in a random-incremental manner, whereby

‘attached’ to roads at different levels. Two distinctive features of NetStoat are: (i) the distinction of different street types by level; that are (ii) organised in a hierarchy according to the property of arteriality, by which all top level roads (and the set of all roads down to any given level in the hierarchy) connect up in a single contiguous network (Marshall 2005).

Programs – input variables

Figure 16.1 Relationship between structuring program and resultant pattern

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sides. This could correspond with, for example, a 10km by 10km grid. The boundary roads are at the top level (level 1; or ‘A’ roads) and all subsequent roads or streets are laid out in an orthogonal manner, such that all roads or streets are straight, or turn at 90 degrees; and all junctions are rightangled. This is clearly a simplification, but is a reasonable simplification in the present context, that is, the creation of network structure on the periphery of urban areas where a superstructure of main roads already exists and where subdivision of land and orthogonal road junctions is common. All roads are allocated a level in the hierarchy; roads may connect to each other by different rules according to level; and urban development may be

16.

each iteration of the program adds an additional road (or set of roads) to the network incrementally, according to certain rules, but with random elements. The random elements include the location where the next road is generated, and other factors such as the kind of branching, probability of frontage development, and so on. The random nature of the generation is intended to simulate the way that specific increments of development, while resulting from rational acts of will – ‘planned’ by individual actors – nevertheless appear ‘random’ from the point of view of the system, and not under control of any overall master planner. The NetStoat environment starts with a square of 1,000 × 1,000 unit

For any given simulation run, input variables include: (i) number of levels in the hierarchy; (ii) ‘separation’ (spacing of roads); (iii) structure (tree, grid or ‘span’); (iv) proportion of roads at each level; (v) degree of branching; (vi) maximum size of block subdivided as grid; (vii) development present or not; (viii) access constraint or not. Here, the ‘structure’ variable relates to the formation of routes by tree, span or grid structure, and is illustrated in Figure 16.1. The figure draws attention to a fundamental distinction between pattern-forming programs and the patterns themselves and shows that repeated applications of tree or span algorithms can (ultimately) create grids. The span structure is typically, in effect, the default for a strategic connected network: a road link ‘spans’ from one point to another. Hence in the NetStoat simulations, the default is the span structure applied from the top level down, which can be switched to ‘tree’ program or grid-formation

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program at the lower levels in the hierarchy. In particular, it is possible to simulate an incremental addition of a tree pattern or the subdivision of an existing rectangle into a grid of small squares. Various other elaborations are included in the program. These include constraints to stop trees straggling across main roads; the ‘upgrading’ of low-hierarchy to higher hierarchy roads; and allowing development to take place along roads of specified level in the hierarchy. Manipulation of the set of input parameters allowed a range of different programs to be created in order to simulate a variety of kinds of layout (see below).

Patterns – output graphics and statistics The output of NetStoat consists of a graphic display of the generated urban layout, together with a set of output statistics. Figure 16.2 shows the NetStoat simulation of the generation of a typical street network; in this case where all roads are generated using the ‘span’ structuring logic. NetStoat output statistics include: number of roads at each level; lengths of road at each level; number of junctions of each type (T-junction, crossroads) and culs-de-sac; average distance across network; length of frontage development; and area of development.

From the general list of possible input variables (see above), three key parameters were selected for particular attention when creating discrete alternative types for testing: 1. Access constraint: on or off; by level. Access constraint ‘on’ means roads may only join roads of equal or adjacent level: for example, level 1 roads may only connect to level 2 roads; not level 3 or 4 and so on; 2. Frontage development constraint: on or off, probabilistically, by level. Frontage constraint ‘on’ represents the kind of control found in many modern road layouts whereby only those roads lowest in the hierarchy – access roads or streets – are allowed to have frontage development; 3. Micro structure network structure: span, tree or grid (Figure 16.1), probabilistically, by level. While the default strategic structure is ‘span’, this control either allows the span structure to continue down the whole hierarchy, or for micro scale grids or trees to arise only for a specific level or beyond. The probabilistic parameters distribute how the probability is distributed between the available options so that any relative fractions are available.

Nine network types tested Nine layout types were devised in order to test a variety of types of network that might be of interest to contemporary debates about alternative urban layouts. These nine types are shown according to their key input variables in Figure 16.3, and explained in more detail below.

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NetStoat was used to test alternative network types, by configuring the different available parameters to implement different rule programs and then simulating their growth, then calculating the properties of the output patterns. The testing involved an iterative component, where the input variables could be ‘tuned’ to target desired kinds of pattern used for demonstration purposes. This process shows that it is possible to generate any manner of network types using random-incremental processes – whether more or

Key test parameters

16.

Testing Alternative Network Types

less hierarchical, more grid-like or tree-like patterns. In addition, it is also possible to automatically vary parameters to study how the properties of the resultant patterns differ incrementally as these parameters change.

Network type Hierarchical NeoTrad RuralGrid Patchwork Micro Tree Linear All Grid All Span Traditional

Access Constraint Yes Yes Yes No No No No No No

Frontage Constraint Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No No No No

Micro structure* Tree Grid Span/grid Tree/grid Tree Tree Grid Span Span/tree/grid

* Where intensively developed, trees and spans may emerge as grids, as per Figure 16.1.

Figure 16.3 The nine network types tested

The first three layout types are ‘pure’ structures included to give the clearest impression of the effects of differences in micro-structure: these are ‘All-span’, ‘All-grid’ and ‘Microtree’. Next we have three types that typically feature in contemporary debates about street layout structure. The ‘Hierarchical’ type is intended to represent conventional modern road layouts; the ‘NeoTrad’ type represents the recent neo-traditional aspiration to have more grid-like layouts but where the main roads are still kept as frontage-free and with access constraint; whereas the ‘Traditional’ case has neither access constraint nor frontage constraint while having a mix of grid, tree, and span structuring at the micro level. Finally we have three types devised specifically for illustrating possibilities for expansion of development into peri-urban areas. The ‘Linear’ type is intended to represent one kind of model whereby development is focused along a main street that acts as a public transport spine. This has neither frontage constraint nor access constraint, such that main roads are in practice frontage streets with many side streets directly off them. The micro-tree structure is invoked, but with a depth limitation (i.e. the number of steps of branching off the main road) that leads to a corridor effect, with local ‘griddiness’. The ‘RuralGrid’ type represents a matrix of local street grids extending through the country186

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side, but kept clear of the main roads. The ‘Patchwork’ type represents a case where development is in the form of scattered pockets of land locally laid out as trees or grids; again there is no frontage development along main roads. The nine types are illustrated by means of example patterns in Figure 16.4 and samples visualised in ‘figure ground’ format are shown in Figure 16.5.

Outputs Figures 16.6 to 16.8 show some sample charts illustrating properties of those patterns generated by NetStoat illustrated in Figure 16.4. The patterns illustrated are in this case merely single specimens, intended to represent the general kind of structure that can be created by the given program. Figure 16.6 shows the general and obvious relationship whereby the more roads added to the network, the greater the network length. But across this general relationship, variations can be seen: the more ‘griddy’ layouts tend to the upper left, indicating greater length per road; while those networks with more trees are to the lower right. This reflects the fact that the micro-grid structure fills a whole block of a given size with a grid of roads (horizontally and vertically), whereas a micro-tree may only generate a few straggling branching routes that only ever partly fill a block. Figure 16.7 shows a diffuse generally positive relationship between number of junctions and number of roads. This shows that the ‘griddier’ layouts (to the upper left) have more junctions per road than the more tree-like layouts (to the lower right). Finally, Figure 16.8 shows the distribution of networks according to proportions of 4-way, 3-way junctions and culsde-sac, shown on a triangular ‘nodegram’ compared with a series of example street patterns (from Marshall 2005: 101, 136–9). Here we see the more tree-like networks to the lower left (indicating presence of culs-de-sac) and the more gridlike networks to the lower right (indicating the presence of 4-way junctions). This also demonstrates where the simulated networks lie in relation to actual networks (although network

16. Explorations in generative street layouts

Figure 16.4 Nine network types tested (i) All-span, (ii) All-grid, (iii) Micro-tree, (iv) Traditional, (v) Hierarchical, (vi) NeoTrad, (vii) Linear, (viii) Ruralgrid, (ix) Patchwork 187

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size for the simulated networks is much greater, hence we should not be surprised to find more extreme values).

INSIGHTS INTO DYNAMICS OF GROWTH

Figure 16.6 Length of roads relative to number of roads

Through the model we have seen the simulation of network growth, and the calculation of the properties of patterns arising from different programs (rule-sets). This shows that the simulation tool can model network types that are relevant to urban design debates. But we now turn to address more specifically the generative aspect and the dynamics of how programs generate those patterns.

Emergent Patterns and Predictability

Figure 16.7 Number of junctions, relative to number of roads 188

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When undertaking multiple runs of a given program, clearly there will be some degree of variation in output statistics for the different patterns arising. Yet, despite each pattern being different, it is still possible, or even likely, that typical values will arise, for any given output variable. For example Figure 16.9 shows the distribution of the variable ‘road network length’ for a given program, for 50 runs. The chart shows a cluster of values in a relatively narrow band: 96 per cent of all cases fall within the range 325+/–25. This suggests – for this

Figure 16.8 ‘Nodegram’: proportion of X-junctions, T-junctions and culs-de-sac, for a range of networks. The blue dots are the nine test networks simulated by NetStoat ȋ ‹‰—”‡ͦ͡Ǥ͢ȌǢ–Š‡•‡ƒ”‡…‘’ƒ”‡†™‹–Šƒ”ƒ‰‡‘ˆƒ…–—ƒŽ•–”‡‡–‡–™‘”•ȋ”‡††‘–•Ȍƒ† ƒ‹š‘ˆ†‡‘•–”ƒ–‹˜‡ƒ†’”‘–‘–›’‡‡–™‘”•ȋ‘”ƒ‰‡†‘–•Ȍȋƒˆ–‡”ƒ”•ŠƒŽŽͥ͢͠͠Ȍ

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Figure 16.10 shows the final (bottom right) network from Figure 16.2 with an increased scale, and highlighting the apparent clustering of streets in ‘local high street spines’ – that is to say, areas where there is a cluster of more closely spaced side streets along a main street. In this case, of course, there was no deliberate programming to 189

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Emergent High (Main) Streets

16.

given program at least – that despite the random nature of the growth of the network, it is likely to generate a typical outcome in terms of this parameter. A similar effect can be seen for other programs and other parameters. For some programs and some parameters, the outcome of the simulation may be reasonably predictable, even in a random-incremental scenario: that is, in the absence of overall planning. In this scenario we cannot necessarily predict where any individual road will go, or whether a particular land use ‘cell’ will be built up or not, but we will have a reasonable expectation of how many cells will be built up, approximately how close they will be to each other, how connective the network will be, how compact the overall built up area will be, and so on. In other words, this gives encouragement that, even in the absence of master-planning (fixing target layouts in full detail in advance) it is reasonably likely that a given kind of stable form would arise.

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simulate ‘local high street spines’. This suggests that local high street spines are emergent – one might say naturally arising – even without deliberate intention.3 If it turns out that ‘local high street spines’ are considered a desirable feature of urban structure, then it can be seen that this need not be created as a deliberately designed feature but could be created generatively, using street layout rules based on a randomincremental ‘spanning’ program, with the appropriate boundary conditions 190

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rather than via conventional masterplanning.

Complexity and Unpredictability The simulations have shown that it is possible to generate a variety of urban layouts using only programs (rule-sets specifying elements and relationships), with no explicit target patterns, and yet create a variety of recognisable patterns – possibly desired patterns. However, this should not mask the fact that these

simulations were developed specifically to demonstrate the possibility of such patterns arising from rule-sets, and indeed ‘tweaking’ or ‘tuning’ the rulesets precisely to achieve such patterns (e.g. something resembling a traditional semi-regular urban grid). What has not been discussed here is the extent of the unpredictability of outcomes in the absence of such tuning. In some cases, unexpectedly regular street patterns emerged. However, for each set of parameters which generates nicely ordered urban patterns such as the ones reported here, there were more – many more – sets with starting conditions from the available parameter space that did not work out this way. Instead, these resulted in outcomes that looked dysfunctional or unlike real street patterns. Indeed, the experience of using NetStoat has shown the complexity of the interaction of the variables in generative layouts. It is not simply about taking one parameter, such as density or ground coverage, and watching the outcomes as we vary such parameters up or down. With the complexity of interactions of many variables, we cannot know in advance what the outcomes will be, unless we can test them and find reasonably predictable, stable relationships between certain kinds of program and certain kinds of pattern: for example a program that would reliably generate a concentric form, or a tree, or a grid.

These factors reinforce the need for testing of codes (programs) if these are to be used generatively, before adoption in design manuals; in addition a balance will need to be struck between which rules are included in the manuals and which are left to the designer’s intuition.

CONCLUSIONS

Explorations in generative street layouts

191

16.

This chapter has demonstrated the exploration of urban layout structuring through application of a network simulation tool – NetStoat – to model the growth of street network structure, and hence demonstrate the potential of generative street-based layout. This exploration provides a link between previous scrutiny of street layout conventions and ‘static’ network structure (Marshall 2005) and the dynamic processes of urban formation and emergence (Marshall 2009) via specific instruments such as generative codes (Marshall 2011), while pointing ways forward for future research and application. From a research perspective, NetStoat is distinctive in explicitly featuring hierarchy and arteriality. This has allowed the generation of (some) plausible road network structures, demonstrating the ability to generate and test target alternatives, and experiment with the development of new structures. This also gives insights into the dynamic nature of structuring – and the relationship between program and pattern – as well as the evaluation of properties of the generated patterns. We have seen how it is possible to create and distinguish traditionally recognisable network types using key parameters relating to local street-based rules. In this case, the essence of ‘network type’ is encoded in the program (ruleset) rather than the pattern and in this regard the research has identified the ‘span’ as a structuring component distinct

from the creation of a tree or a grid. Three key operational parameters (access constraint; frontage development; and tree, span or grid structure) were able to generate significantly different structures, useful as recognisable alternative ‘test types’. There are some preliminary lessons gained from insights arising during the simulation process. The exercise suggests that there is not a binary opposition or polarisation between top-down and bottom-up processes. Rather, we can have a mix of designed features at any level (from fixed grids or trees down to the level of designing individual streets) and also ‘laissez-faire’ at any level (where either the macro or micro structure could be left to its own devices, and generate, for example, emergent ‘high street spines’). Indeed, a basic rule of thumb emerges here: if you know what outcome (pattern, structure, property) you want, you may as well design it; if you don’t know what the optimal specific outcome is, but only what the elements and relationships should be, then you may as well build those elements and relationships into a program or code, without having an overall target design. Put more concisely: fix (only) what you definitely know you need, at any particular scale and let the rest ‘work itself out’. This may possibly look obvious in hindsight, but it is not always obvious a priori when faced with the choice of apparently polarised alternatives of topdown and bottom-up. As it stands, the research reported herein can contribute towards developing and testing future rules for network structure for improving future urban simulation models and future street design manuals. Further testing is necessary on the quantitative and statistical side to test the ranges of probabilities for a given program generating desired patterns, to determine what level is the most effective level for topdown and bottom-up, and what would be the fewest or best rules to generate the desired combination of flexibility and fixity of form.

TIPS FOR RESEARCHERS: Ȉ Be prepared to undertake new kinds of research – such as new software development – in order to tackle the problem at hand – in this case, exploring generative and emergent effects. Ȉ Be aware of the advantages of simulation, and the ability to systematically undertake large numbers of runs generating arrays of quantitative results, albeit at the expense of some simplification of what is being modelled and visualised. Ȉ Be focused on the critical features or instrumental parameters to represent and test, that which existing methods are not addressing. Ȉ Be alert to unanticipated outcomes – not just what you are looking for, but other things arising.

ENDNOTES 1

The term ‘generative’ may be distinguished from (i) ‘incrementalist’, where the overall outcome is not foreseen; or (ii) ‘emergent’, where increments may not be purposive and where the outcome is not necessarily positive.

2

The NetStoat software was programmed using c++, and linked to the Root software application for output statistics and histograms (http://root.cern.ch/). A technical description of the NetStoat software tool is available from the authors.

3

Š‹•‡ơ‡…–•‡‡•–‘ƒ”‹•‡’ƒ”–Ž›†—‡–‘–Š‡™ƒ›–Šƒ–•–”‡‡–•ƒ”‡ laid down in an order that means the earlier streets are more likely to gain more side streets from them than later ones, with some positive feedback. Moreover, the apparent clustering may be no more than a random distribution that simply appears clustered to the eye, but is in fact random. These explanatory aspects invite further exploration in future research.

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17 The relationship between density, built form and design Graciela Moreno and Philip Steadman

The study of urban morphology is both a research arena in its own right, and a key dimension of the urban design canon. Its study can provide valuable insights into city growth processes, as well as into the contemporary design process and the larger processes of city planning. Using Leslie Martin and Lionel March’s (1972) three generic built forms (courts, streets and pavilions) and three essential variables in urban morphology (urban fabric, the block, and building form), this chapter analyses areas of six different cities and compares density values expressed as Floor Space Index, Ground Space Index, and number of storeys. The results show that increases in density depend on many factors and, for example, that one value of Floor Space Index is not necessarily more ‘efficient’ – in a narrow sense – than any other. A more precise morphological analysis allows us to have a better understanding of such measures that are so favoured in regulation, and to understand their impact on urban design.

MEASURING MORPHOLOGY Urban morphology is a complex field whose primary concern is the structure and growth of urban form. An understanding of this structure, its elements and the patterns found at different levels such as at the street/block, plot and building level is essential to urban design. There are three main approaches to analysing urban morphology. The ‘Italian

school’ focuses on the typology of buildings and streets and everything that determines the form of the city. The ‘English school’ takes a geographical approach and works from the ground plan rather than on the building scale. It differentiates between three elements: streets, parcels and buildings which are related to each other and are represented by maps that explain the city form. The ‘French school’ considers the city and its physical form to be a result of socio-economic relations and takes a bottom-up approach to urban layout. The three morphological approaches relate architecture to urbanism but using the results in design is not as easy as one would think. This is because there is a tendency to see morphology as a series of typological templates rather than a means to develop a way of thinking. This chapter aims to throw further light on the morphological components and networks that cities are made of through analysing and critiquing some of the basic tools used to measure and articulate morphology. In this regard there are intrinsic relationships between the standard morphological components that describe the urban fabric such as mesh size, block size, frontage, and so forth. There are also other variables related to the volume of built space which can be just as important for understanding the urban fabric and which have been widely adopted in zoning and other regulatory processes. These include Floor Space Index (FSI – gross floor area / total site area1), Ground Space Index (GSI – building footprint area / total site area), and Open

Space Ratio (OSR – open space / gross floor area). However, despite their widespread use, these measures are poorly understood in relation to their impact and the typologies they give rise to. The research reported in this chapter clarifies this relationship a little further.

Floor Space Index The classical definition of Floor Space Index is: ‘the ratio between the total floor area and the total area of the plot’. Despite this apparent simplicity, its use in practice can be very complex. The origin of the concept is probably in the criticisms of the 1916 Zoning Ordinance for New York. In the 1920s Raymond Hood, as a response to the problem of traffic congestion in midtown Manhattan, proposed replacing the existing buildings with towers surrounded by wide streets. The proposal set up a limit on volume based on street frontage2 – for each foot that the building was set back from the plot line, the building could be a fixed amount higher. After a long period of study and public debate, the 1916 Ordinance was replaced by the Zoning Resolution of 1961 (http://www.nyc.gov/), including provisions for the city to offer developers a higher FSI in exchange for public space in new developments, the primary concern being to get more light and air in to the city as the density increased.3 The system is based on a calculation that has effectively to do with FSI. At its simplest, Floor Space Index is a way to measure the relationship between floorspace and site area and an instrument to describe the density or urban built form. This relationship between building density and urban form has been of wide interest, although it is important to bear in mind that there are many other variables that are equally important and that need to be addressed at the same time in urban design in order to achieve a satisfactory result from a planning point of view, and in terms of the design outcomes. As an example, taking the Floor Space Index (FSI)

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as a variable, we could establish the following relationship: Q = (At – AB)/ At, where: At – area of study (m2) AB – total area devoted to blocks (m2) Q – the total space devoted to roads, public open spaces and gardens. Therefore, for one floor: FSI = 1–Q, and for n floors: FSI = (1–Q) × n. Ground Space Index (GSI) is the ratio between the footprint of the built form and the total area of the plot and is closely related to FSI; having the same value for a singlestorey building. The cut-off angle is also an essential parameter when talking about density, FSI and GSI as it describes how far buildings are placed apart. It is the angle from the bottom of the facade of one building to the top of the facade of the „—‹Ž†‹‰‘’’‘•‹–‡ȋɄ‹‘—”…ƒŽ…—Žƒ–‹‘•ȌǤ

Martin and March A range of mathematical and geometrical analyses have previously addressed this topic, particularly concerning the relationships between building height, FSI, and ground coverage. Martin and March’s 1972 study is perhaps the most famous of these, memorably simplifying traditional built forms and the complexities found in real urban textures to just three main archetypal forms: courts, streets and pavilions (Martin and March 1972). In this famous study the authors examined the impact of geometry on the relationship between the number of storeys and the FSI for their three forms (Figure 17.1). Keeping constant the cut-off angle and the depth of the building as the number of storeys is increased, for the pavilion forms the FSI reaches a maximum value and starts to decrease after that. For court and street forms, however, the FSI increases approaching maximum values asymptotically (Figure 17.2).

Figure 17.2 Relationship between number of storeys and FSI for courts, streets and pavilions. Plan depths, storey heights and …—–Ǧ‘ơƒ‰Ž‡•ƒ”‡‡’–…‘•–ƒ–ȋƒ”–‹ƒ†ƒ”…Šͩͧ͢͡ǣͣͦȂͧȌ

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To understand these sorts of relationships it is useful to compare Floor Space Index in different cities analysing at the same time the morphology and existing urban fabric of those examples. Thus different combinations of Floor Space Index

17.

Figure 17.1 Archetypal urban patterns, based on pavilions, streets and courts. Black represents buildings. The street forms are ’ƒ”ƒŽŽ‡Ž„Ž‘…•‘ˆ‹†‡Ƥ‹–‡Ž‡‰–Š™Š‹Ž•––Š‡„—‹Ž†‹‰•…ƒ„‡Ž‘™ terraces or high-rise slabs, depending on their dimensions. The ’ƒ˜‹Ž‹‘•ǡ‹ˆŠ‹‰ŠǦ”‹•‡ǡ…ƒ„‡–‘™‡”•ȋƒ”–‹ƒ†ƒ”…Šͩͧ͢͡ǣͣͦȂͧȌ

and ground coverage will show a variety of different built forms. As an example, the impression of some cities (or the centres of those cities) being very dense is not correct. In São Paulo (except for solely residential quarters) building rights are divided between two levels: a basic and free level with a FSI of 1 and a maximum level that has a FSI which varies from 2.5 to 4 depending on the zone (Wilheim 2004). The highest zoning presents buildings between 20 and 25 storeys but a FSI lower than the density we could find in large parts of Manhattan, at 8, and much lower than the urban part of Hong Kong Island, at 13.5.4 Adopting the same simplified archetypes as Martin and March (March 1972: 95), we searched for real cases according to three variables essential in urban morphology: urban fabric, plot and typology, choosing sample areas from the following cities: Manhattan, Barcelona, Hong Kong, Moscow, Chicago and Los Angeles (Figures 17.3 and 17.4).

Figure 17.3 Study areas and calculations (aerial views courtesy of Google Earth)

(i) East Side, Manhattan Ϗͨ͢Ǥͣͦ͠Šƒ FSI = 2.64

 Ϗ͠Ǥͤ —–Ǧ‘ˆˆƒ‰Ž‡ȋɄȌϏͣͤO 5 floors

(ii) Ensanche Cerda, Barcelona Ϗͨ͢Ǥͣ͢͠Šƒ FSI = 3.21

 Ϗ͠Ǥͥͣ —–Ǧ‘ˆˆƒ‰Ž‡ȋɄȌϏͤ͡O 6 floors

(iii) Taikoo Shing, Hong Kong Ϗͥ͢Ǥͣ͢͠Šƒ  ϏͩǤͥ͢

 Ϗ͠Ǥͤͥ —–Ǧ‘ˆˆƒ‰Ž‡ȋɄȌϏͧͤO ͩ͢ˆŽ‘‘”• 196

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(iv) Ulitsa Butlerova, Moscow Ϗͨ͢Ǥͣͦ͠Šƒ FSI = 2.64

 Ϗ͠Ǥͤ —–Ǧ‘ˆˆƒ‰Ž‡ȋɄȌϏ͢͢O 6 floors

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(v) Franklin Park, Chicago Ϗͧ͢Ǥͥͩ͢Šƒ  Ϗ͠Ǥͩ͡

 Ϗ͠Ǥͣ͠ —–Ǧ‘ˆˆƒ‰Ž‡ȋɄȌϏ͢͠O 3 floors

The relationship between density, built form and design

(vi) Orange, Los Angeles S = 27.232 ha  Ϗ͠Ǥͨ͢

 Ϗ͠Ǥͤ͡ —–Ǧ‘ˆˆƒ‰Ž‡ȋɄȌϏͩO 2 floors 197

The sample areas are not intended to be representative of those cities as a whole, but serve instead to illustrate a range of possibilities for urban built form, and in particular provide examples of courts, streets and towers. Thus the same size study area was chosen in each of the six case studies (26 hectares) and an average number of floors was calculated for each selection. With those values, together with the footprint of the built form, we were able to calculate the Floor Space Index and Ground Coverage in all cases.5 Following Martin and March’s work, we represented the relationship between Floor Space Index and number of storeys and plotted FSI and the number of storeys for a range ‘ˆ˜ƒŽ—‡•‘ˆ–Š‡…—–Ǧ‘ˆˆƒ‰Ž‡ȋɄϋ͝͡0, 300, 450, 600, 750) whilst taking a constant value for the building depth averaged from the buildings in the study area. Knowing the overall FSI, the average number of storeys, and the standard building depth for the case study area, we were then able to derive a purely –Š‡‘”‡–‹…ƒŽ˜ƒŽ—‡ˆ‘”–Š‡…—–Ǧ‘ˆˆƒ‰Ž‡ȋɄǯȌƒ•–Š‡˜ƒŽ—‡–Šƒ––Š‡ angle would have if the buildings were all equally spaced. Of course they are not, which is why we get a difference between the angle as measured from representative typical buildings and this theoretical ‘mean’ angle, but representing the values obtained from the previous calculations will give us a new value for the cut-off angle, a theoretical mean value that would only be possible if the angle was kept constant throughout the site. We also calculated the space devoted to roads (Q)6 and this relationship with FSI and number of storeys.

UNDERSTANDING DENSITY The Six Case Studies The sample areas from Manhattan and Barcelona (Figure 17.3) present a common pattern with grid layouts in both cases. The urban fabric for both cities comprises courtyards but with very different dimensions.7 The upper east side of Manhattan has rectangular blocks with avenues and streets 198

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urban fabric i)

block*

building form court

East Side, Manhattan, rectangular grid closed New York ii) Ensanche Cerda, square grid closed court Barcelona iii) Taikoo Shing, – open pavilion Hong Kong iv) Ulitsa Butlerova, – open street Moscow v) Franklin Park, rectangular grid open detached Chicago house vi) Orange, branching / open detached Los Angeles tree-like house * Closed blocks are those surrounded by roads with no public access to any existing interior space.

Figure 17.4 The case studies against key morphological variables

perpendicular to each other with different widths and functions. The buildings have two different heights. By way of contrast, blocks in Barcelona are square and the streets have the same dimensions in both directions. These parts of the two cities contain medium rise buildings (six floors) with central courtyard form. The case study areas in Hong Kong and Moscow (Figure 17.3) are made up of high-rise blocks, pavilions and streets. Both are urban areas with high density and green open spaces. The height of the towers in Hong Kong is 29 floors while the heights of the buildings in Moscow range from six to 16 floors (we took 10 floors as an average). Both layouts create large areas of open land that are devoted to communal facilities. The areas in Chicago and Los Angeles (Figure 17.3) consist of detached houses in low-density urban areas. The houses are single-storey and the open space is divided into small parcels of private and individual green space. The sample area from Chicago presents a rectangular grid layout of streets while the one in Los Angeles is a ‘branching’ or ‘tree-like’ street layout with dead-end roads. For the calculations we used two and three storey ‘pavilions’ as models.

The first conclusion that we reach after representing each of the six cities in graphs is that they bear out Martin and March’s analysis of built form. The sample areas from Manhattan and Barcelona correspond to ‘courts’ and the example from Moscow behaves as a ‘street’ with the curves for the different cut-off angles always approaching a maximum value. The samples from Hong Kong, suburban Chicago and Los Angeles, however, correspond to the third generic built form, ‘pavilions’ or freestanding towers with the FSI reaching a maximum value, after which it declines. To understand further we need to look in more detail at the graphs.

Manhattan and Barcelona Our area of study in Manhattan had a FSI of 2.64, much lower than the highest density area in Downtown Manhattan where FSI varies from 10 to 15 (for instance, the Rockefeller Centre, with 70 storeys, has a FSI of 12). Here the curves for the different cut-off angles become closer to each other as the angle increases, which means that at higher angles the increase in the cut-off angle (placing buildings closer to each other) raises the FSI more slowly than at low cut-off angles; indeed similar blocks in other areas of Manhattan of 16 storeys in height have a typical FSI of 6.8. The FSI is considerably higher as the building height increases while the Ground Space Index decreases to half of the previous value. Representing the number of storeys and the FSI obtained from the calculations of our area of study, the graph (see 199

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Understanding the Evidence

17.

Figure 17.5 Relationship between number of storeys and FSI / GSI. East Side, Manhattan and Ensanche Cerda, Barcelona

Figure 17.6 Relationship between number of storeys and FSI / GSI. Taikoo Shing, Hong Kong and Ulitsa Butlerova, Moscow

Figure 17.5) would give us a mean cut-off angle of 480, higher than the real one (340). The difference between the two angles is due to the fact that 340 is not the actual value throughout the site as avenues and streets have different widths. The curves for the Barcelona blocks are similar to the Manhattan blocks and correspond to those for Martin and March’s ‘court’ form. However, the curves in this case, for the same cut-off angles, are higher than the ones for Manhattan. That means that for similar cut-off angles and numbers of storeys, the Barcelona blocks result in a higher FSI. Our area of study presented a FSI of 3.21, higher than the Manhattan example, although the percentage of open space and area for roads is very similar between the two cases: 0.46 in Barcelona and 0.47 in Manhattan. The cut-off angle we obtain from the graph is 480, higher than the real one (410); so the difference 200

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between them is lower than the previous example due to all the streets having the same widths.

Hong Kong and Moscow In Hong Kong our area of study had a FSI of 9.6, very high but still lower than elsewhere in the city. There, at low cut off angles (below 300–350), increasing the building height would give a reduced Floor Space Index. Furthermore, at high cut-off angles (above 600) increasing the building height increases the Floor Space Index initially, but further increases lead to a reduced Floor Space Index. A small change in the cut-off angle in those cases (above 600) will result in a greater increase of FSI than at low angles, although increasing the building height will always result in a reduced Ground Space Index (see Figure 17.6).

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It is worth mentioning that the Walled City of Kowloon in Hong Kong (a 2.6 hectare development demolished in 1993/4) had one of the highest FSI values ever achieved in a residential urban area. Originally the site of a Chinese fort, during the 1960s and 1970s construction in the area went unregulated, and most of the 350 or so buildings were built very poorly with almost no utilities. Because apartments were so small, space was maximised with wider upper floors, caged balconies, rooftop additions and an informal network of staircases and passageways formed at the upper levels. On the ground floor there were dozens of alleyways with poor lighting and drainage, most just 1–2m wide. In 1987 it was estimated that 33,000 people resided within the Walled City.

In the Moscow case the built form corresponded to the street type, although comparing it to the Manhattan case reveals that despite the two having very different urban forms, they both exhibited FSIs of 2.64. In Moscow, however, the curves for the different cut-off angles are further apart suggesting that the angle is lower in Moscow. Indeed, as the cut-off angle becomes steeper, the plan becomes deeper.

Chicago and Los Angeles In Chicago our site had a FSI of 0.91, much lower than the highest FSI in the new planned districts of the CBD where they reach 12, or even that of a standard Chicago courtyard building of 16 storeys where 8.6 is common (Steadman 2013). 201

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Figure 17.7 Relationship between number of storeys and FSI / GSI. Franklin Park, Chicago and Orange, Los Angeles

‹‰—”‡ͧ͡Ǥͨ‡Žƒ–‹‘•Š‹’„‡–™‡‡—„‡”‘ˆ•–‘”‡›•ƒ†  ˆ‘”…—–Ǧ‘ơƒ‰Ž‡‘ˆͤͥ͠

In this case the Ground Space Index was 0.30, which is quite high and reflects the fact that these are single-family houses of few storeys. This is close to the sorts of densities proposed by Frank Lloyd Wright in his Broadacre City suburban model in which Wright envisaged that each family would be given a one acre (4,000 m2) plot of land, outside of which transport by automobile was necessary (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Broadacre_City). In Broadacre an FSI of 0.80 was proposed, almost identical to the FSI of 0.82 in the Los Angeles case. As in the Chicago example, this is much lower than can be found in the Los 202

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Angeles CBD, where FSIs reach 13. In this case the Ground Space Index is 0.41, higher than in Chicago where properties in the case study are generally an additional storey.

Bringing it all together Superimposing the six case studies on the same graph for cut-off angles of 450 (Figure 17.8) and 600 (Figure 17.9), we see a key departure from the theoretical studies of Martin and March. In the first case, for a cut-off angle of 450 and for the same number of storeys, court forms (Barcelona and Manhattan) provide the highest FSI, that is to say, more floor

17.

area for a given land area, than streets (Moscow) and pavilions (Hong Kong, Los Angeles and Chicago), which have the lowest FSI. This corresponds with Martin and March’s built forms where, compared to the court forms and the streets, at a given cut-off angle and building height, the pavilion or tower form will always lead to a lower FSI and GSI. However, when we repeat this for a cut-off angle of 600, a different order occurs. The sample from Moscow has a higher FSI than the one from Manhattan (and if we repeated the

calculation for a cut-off angle of 750, the sample from Moscow would have a higher FSI than Barcelona). This happens because our six cases do not have the same plan depth, storey height and cut-off angle as those in Martin and March’s experiments. For example, Martin and March’s continuous arrays of courts are not like the courts separated by streets in the real world examples from Barcelona and Manhattan, as they did not allow for vehicular routes, which inevitably distort the outcomes.

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‹‰—”‡ͧ͡Ǥͩ‡Žƒ–‹‘•Š‹’„‡–™‡‡—„‡”‘ˆ•–‘”‡›•ƒ†  ˆ‘”…—–Ǧ‘ơƒ‰Ž‡‘ˆͦ͠͠

CONCLUSIONS Most practitioners believe that it is only by building higher that higher densities can be achieved. But, as this study shows, increases in density will depend on other factors as well. If, for example, we observe the three examples with a similar GSI (Manhattan, 0.4; Moscow, 0.4; Hong Kong, 0.45), the sample from Hong Kong has clearly the highest density and also a higher number of storeys. The samples from Moscow and Manhattan, however, have the same FSI value, despite buildings in the selected Manhattan area being lower than the ones in Moscow. Building form is therefore an essential component in both generating and understanding density. According to Martin and March ‘the court form is seen to place the same amount of floor space on the same site area with the same condition of building depth and in approximately one-third the height required by the pavilion form’ (Martin and March 1972: 38). Their findings showed that the courtyard was thereby the best performing urban type in terms of efficiency in site coverage by providing high densities with fewer storeys than either streets or pavilions. By contrast, the research reported in this chapter shows that whilst this may often be the case, it is not always so, and that there is no specific building form that makes the best use of land. Instead, many parameters have to be taken into account, whilst the appropriateness of different densities will anyway be affected by a range of factors that were not even considered in this study, such as environmental behaviour norms, land uses, subdivision between the public and private realms, and so on. There is no ‘optimum’ density or ground coverage. Instead there are ranges of possibilities, which have different merits and demerits depending on the context and situation. The examples analysed in Chicago and Los Angeles, for example, are neighbourhoods with a low population and low FSI. In those cases, the GSI is high and the dwellings have few storeys. On the other hand, most informal settlements in

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places such as Mumbai also have a low FSI, but accommodate huge populations. The studies described in this chapter relate research firmly to practice. They attempt to show how a line of investigation initiated by Martin and March over 40 years ago continues to offer a framework within which to study new design priorities. Martin and March developed an interest in quantitative relationships between building forms, heights, areas of sites, and road widths that has extended to urban forms and densities with serious implications for urban design. However, as the six case studies show, real buildings do not correspond exactly to Martin and March’s archetypes and within the same area of study, plan depth can vary and the cut-off angle is hardly ever kept constant, even on different sides of the same building. Despite this, Martin and March’s analysis and results represent a valuable approximation to reality and a starting point for many of the ideas put forward above. Morphological studies of this nature can therefore give great insights to designers in terms of building layout, form, use and composition, on any given site at any density and for any type of building. Thus when the designer is asked for a specific design to satisfy certain performance expectations, an understanding of morphology and its application to any given context can help to generate design solutions well before any stylistic preferences are considered. Urban morphology, in this regard, is not a set of design rules, but instead a knowledge base from which designers can launch design investigations and explore spatial possibilities in order to refine their design solutions. Unfortunately, in the arenas of urban design and planning, the lack of morphological investigation leads to a crude understanding of density, amongst other factors, leading to crude regulatory processes. A more sophisticated approach to built form controls would help to deliver developments of higher design quality and the creation of a more diverse (and less standardised) city. This should start with an understanding of urban morphology.

TIPS FOR RESEARCHERS: Ȉ Martin and March’s method of analysis can be used to examine the theoretical relationships between Floor Space Index, Ground Space Index, number of storeys, building depth and cut-off angle. Ȉ By plotting these variables for areas within cities it is possible to gain greater understanding of their particular morphologies. Ȉ Comparisons between developments in different parts of cities, or across different cities, can reveal the ranges of typological options that are available to urban designers. Ȉ The contemporary use of morphological tools is little researched and offers many fruitful avenues for investigation.

ENDNOTES 1

Also variously known as Floor Area Ratio (FAR), Plot Ratio, Floor Space Ratio (FSR), or built potential..

2

Street frontage refers in this context to the measurement made in the perpendicular direction, back from the street front (http://www.skyscraper.org/).

3

In fact the public space that was created in this way was often not well designed and sometimes had no public access. In 1969, the New York City Planning Commission asked sociologist William H. Whyte to study park and plaza use and help draft a comprehensive design plan to improve New York City’s open spaces. His study, ‘The Street Life Project’, produced a set of urban design guidelines for the city that have been widely used in New York and other cities ever since. In 1971 the New York ‘‹‰”†‹ƒ…‡™ƒ•ƒ‡†‡†–‘”‡ƪ‡…–•‘‡‘ˆŠ‹•Ƥ†‹‰•Ǥ

4

Manhattan, 5th Avenue 1035, District 8. Hong Kong, Central Grandview Garden; residential building with a podium (Density Atlas, MIT, 2011).

5

For the calculations we have followed Steadman’s representation of built form units based on Martin and March’s types but

form along one edge and an L-shaped form along two edges. If these respective units are repeated they recreate Martin and March’s arrays. The adjacent Ls join together to enclose courts (Steadman, in press). 6

Q is described by a linear function.

7

In the case of courtyards, increasing the building height would lead to a decrease of daylight therefore we kept the interior cut‘ơƒ‰Ž‡—…Šƒ‰‡†ˆ‘”–Š‡…ƒŽ…—Žƒ–‹‘•Ǥ

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square sites on which sit a pavilion form at the corner, a street

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…‘•‹†‡”‡† ‹ ƒ •Ž‹‰Š–Ž› †‹ơ‡”‡– ™ƒ›Ǥ –‡ƒ†ƒ ’”‘’‘•‡•

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com

Part IV

Propositional experiments

Studio-based research and pedagogical investigation using design process and creative speculations to reveal responses to defined urban problems and problematics

In this part of the book can be found studio-based research and pedagogical investigation using design process and creative speculations to reveal responses to defined urban problems and problematics. Five chapters are included, revealing a diversity of approaches to such investigations. Perhaps the most clear cut (or at least traditional) proposition-based chapter is my own (Chapter 20) in the sense that the chapter reports on two urban design projects that explore two different ways of engaging with propositionbased research; first where the process of actually designing is in effect the research method – research as design – and second, where the process of designing is the focus for investigation – design as research. The researcher here is engaged in the sort of urban design process that would be readily recognised as such by urban design practitioners, but using the process of design as a means to tackle wicked problems, both relating to particular urban situations and inherent in the process of design itself. My chapter can be contrasted with Jane Rendell’s (Chapter 19) which, whilst equally propositional, uses a less familiar medium to engage with the site, writing. Thus instead of designing projects for sites, the approach uses personal and academic writing and associated physical / artistic interventions to both understand the nature of emotional engagement with place, and, in turn, to stimulate deeper connections to those places. Through a sequence of project discussions, the chapter shows how this is done. Transcending text and physical proposition is the work of CJ Lim (Chapter 18) that combines place proposition and story telling as a means to explore the role of meaning and symbolism in the built environment. In his own words, ‘the urban designs depict a vision of the city that is immoral, anarchic, and unscientific’ but in so doing brings the uniquely visionary, creative and questioning eye of the architect to bear on urban problems. These first three chapters, stemming from personal (or collective) propositions based in good part on personal experience, interpretations, beliefs and aspirations (supported 208

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to a greater or lesser degree by data and analysis) bring a strong subjective perspective to bear on urban design research. The penultimate chapter (21) from William Hunter and Anna Schulenburg might easily have been placed in the second ‘process’ part of the book as here a process for urban design is articulated, particularly as it relates to the fundamentally different contexts of the Global South. Indeed the chapter reports on a structured and theoretically grounded analysis of process, but one derived from the pedagogy of the urban design studio and associated collaborative fieldwork, and refined through the speculations of successive student projects. It is followed by Chapter 22 from Kayvan Karimi and Laura Vaughan which moves furthest away from the subjective design model, and instead advances evidence-based design as a method, in their case based on space syntax analysis. This, they argue, is directly applicable to both research and practice as a means to understand what works and why, before applying that knowledge – through intuitive design and other processes – to contemporary urban problems. Together the chapters demonstrate the power of propositional work in all its guises and media as a means of understanding, shaping and encouraging engagement with place; as a means to explore the various processes (real and imaged) that are part of this; and in order to speculate on the past, present and future potentials of place, perception and design. Matthew Carmona

18

London short stories CJ Lim

Combining place and fiction my recent project London Short Stories takes well-known institutions, epochs and lifestyles from a series of sites across the city and renders them fantastic in a string of architectural short stories. The medium is an intersection of paper assemblages and text, occupying a liminal territory where familiar characters find themselves in unexpected environments and places transform into active protagonists. The short stories explore whether narrative retains any relevance to modern architecture and urban design and if so, how meaning and symbolism can be incorporated into the built environment, offering us ways to reinvent ourselves and especially our perspectives on new environments. The urban designs depict a vision of the city that is immoral, anarchic, and unscientific.

INTRODUCTION London Short Stories investigates the reinvestment of narrative form in the design of architecture and urbanism, depicting a London that is peopled with both real and fictional elements from a variety of sources. In the acquisitive nature of collage, the urban spatial research projects appropriate ideas, tropes and characters from pre-existing critical thinking in the fields of architectural representation and narrative structure. The short stories explore whether narrative retains any relevance to modern architecture and

urban design; and if so, how meaning and symbolism can be incorporated into the built environment. The modern age has been an unkind chapter in the history of narrative architecture and urban design. In pre-secular times, it was not unusual for buildings to be constructed of and around narrative – the proportions, alignment, size and decoration of the great Egyptian temples and tombs were determined by metaphor, not utility, while the Doge’s Palace in Venice, with its Bridge of Sighs, Porta della Carta (Document Gate), Scala dei Giganti (Giant’s Stairwell) and winged lions, is as much an assemblage of anecdotal vignettes as building. Circular and cruciform plan forms, once steeped in mystical and religious significance, are now merely unfashionable shapes. Today’s built environment presents such a poor receptacle for story that Arata Isozaki felt compelled to publish drawings of his Tsukuba Centre in Tokyo as ruins, immediately after its completion in 1983, in order to imbue it with a fictional life beyond the building’s conventional existence. Roland Barthes (1977: 79) comments in Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives that ‘narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative. All classes, all human groups, have their narratives, enjoyment of which is often shared by men with different, even opposing, cultural backgrounds. Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it

is simply there, like life itself’. It is therefore significant that buildings, as physical repositories of and monuments to human culture, now rarely signify anything beyond their quotidian function.

THE FALLACIES OF LINEARITY The creation of a building and urban design is generally perceived as a linear process. Appraisal of a client’s needs is followed by the development of a brief; a concept is then established, around which a design evolves though drawing and modelling. Soon after, the principal intentions described in the drawings and models become frozen as technical and contractual considerations assume prominence, culminating in an inhabitable structure via the agency of a builder. The brief is the beginning, the design the middle, and the building the end. However, it is equally valid, and indeed commonplace, for brief to follow building, for instance when extant urban fabric is repurposed to house new functions, or for design to precede brief, for example in the case of the geodesic dome. Design is by nature iterative; beginnings and ends are found where we choose to locate them. The linearity of the building is also challenged by Beatriz Colomina in her book Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (1996), who contends that the physical building is just one of many possible modes of architectural representation. She argues that the site of architectural production has moved from the built environment to other media such as film, photography and journalism. Drawings, specifications, photographs, models and texts all are manifestations of a single platonic archetype, and any one of these manifestations are as representative of the architecture as the physical building. In other fields, the dismantling of sequential narrative as dogma is well established, perhaps illustrated most viscerally in the cut-ups and fold-ins of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Inspired by Dada experiments of the 1920s, Burroughs 210

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and Gysin applied the techniques of collage to text. Burroughs (1961: 105–6) describes the cut-up method thus: ‘Take a page. Like this page. Now cut down the middle and cross the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4 … one two three four. Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it says much the same thing. Sometimes something quite different’. The cut-up technique is a potent rejection of linearity, demonstrating how the juxtaposition of aleatory elements can lead to original and surprisingly coherent outcomes relying on imagery and poetic association. However, the rare instances of recombinant epiphany derive their potency from an obligatory mass of barren white noise, leading Burroughs to employ cut-ups only as an intermediary stage of composition in his later work rather than in their unexpurgated form.

The Reader Reborn In 1967, Roland Barthes’ (1977: 146) landmark essay, ‘The Death of the Author’, declared the independency of a text from its author, empowering the reader to distil a unique and personal reading from a multiplicity of layers and meanings: ‘We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the AuthorGod) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’. The liberation of a work from an authoritative voice has proved to be double-edged. As a society, we have become accustomed to having information spoon-fed to us, and for culture to entertain rather than inform – film has become synonymous with the ‘high concept’ movie in which a story’s premise can be condensed into a single tagline, while the novel has been reduced to the ‘unputdownable’ beach read. Consequently, we have lost the patience and facility to develop a critical understanding of a work with any intended ambiguity or invested subtext.

This cultural drift is even more pronounced in the field of architecture where perception of a building rarely extends beyond its superficial appearance. With the disappearance of signified meaning in contemporary buildings and the obsolescence of meaning in buildings of antiquity, our ability to read architecture has completely atrophied, if we are in fact aware that architecture can be read at all. Despite the rich imaginative conjecture that thrives in schools of architecture, the intention to implant buildings with meaning is increasingly uncommon. When it does occur, it is often the equivalent to the high concept movie, exemplified by projects such as Libeskind’s Manchester Imperial War Museum in which the building is composed of three interlocking shards that seemingly derive from a shattered globe – a seductive opening statement but, at the same time, a one-liner.

The Storyteller as Architect

Current forms of architectural representation reveal a dichotomy of purpose. The primary form of architectural drawing, produced by the majority of professionals in 211

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The Architect as Storyteller

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The city as protagonist appears periodically in literature and film. Noir, for example, has become almost synonymous with Los Angeles and the writings of Chandler, Cain and Ellroy. Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, the German silent film of 1927 directed by Walter Ruttman, portrays a day in the life of the German capital. As a medium with intrinsic chronological progression, film lends itself easily to plot structure, yet there is no strong narrative thread to the city symphony, perhaps to maintain the focus on the city itself, rather than its inhabitants. Instead, Ruttman links themes and perspectives using Soviet montage techniques, suggesting spatial connections that would be impossible in a conventional narrative. Peter Ackroyd classifies his magnum opus on London as a biography, insisting that we should regard the city as ‘a human shape with its own laws of life and growth’. Like Ruttman, Ackroyd (2000: 2) elects not to follow a chronological sequence in London’s story: ‘Contemporary theorists have suggested that linear time is itself a figment of the human imagination, but London has already anticipated their conclusions. There are many different forms of time in

the city, and it would be foolish of me to change its character for the sake of creating a conventional narrative’. Similarly, in Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino avoids a conventional sequential structure in his paeon to the city of Venice, playing out the prose poem through a series of urban descriptions recounted to the Kublai Khan by the explorer Marco Polo. When asked by the Khan whether he will repeat the same tales to his people, Calvino (1974: 135) echoes Barthes, explaining that there are as many versions of a tale as there are listeners, via the proxy of Polo, ‘“I speak and I speak”, Marco says, “but the listener retains only the words he is expecting … it is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear”’. Other authors have used architecture as a framework for their stories, the most obvious example being George Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual (1996) which uses the device of an imaginary Parisian apartment block, 11 Rue SimonCrubellier, to structure his work; Perec pictures the building with its façade removed, behind which there are 99 rooms set out in a ten by ten grid, each of which is designated a chapter describing the stories of the rooms’ inhabitants in connection with a central puzzle. Like any other character in a novel, architecture and urban design assume the role of protagonist when the plot of a story is unable to unfold without its intervention. The cathedral of Notre Dame, for example, is key to a number of episodes in the life of Quasimodo – the hunchback is first introduced as a child at the cathedral’s foundlings’ bed; he becomes deaf after being made the Notre Dame’s bell ringer, claims sanctuary at the top of the bell tower on behalf of the gypsy girl Esmerelda, and finally takes refuge within its massive stone walls when besieged by a mob intent on his death.

practice, still follows the triadic system of plan, section and elevation. While these orthogonal forms of representation are well suited to the task of relaying information for construction or fabrication purposes, they possess no qualitative or phenomenological intelligence. That is not to say that they do not describe and proscribe the occupation of space – Robin Evans (1997: 56) points out that ‘if anything is described by an architectural plan, it is the nature of human relationships, since the elements whose trace it records – walls, doors, windows and stairs – are employed first to divide and then selectively to re-unite inhabited space’. Nonetheless, the codification of construction drawings is designed to prevent ambiguity or multiple interpretation by using a strict and abstract system of notation. Walter Benjamin (1988: 84–90) goes as far as to say that ‘the most essential characteristic of the architectural drawing is that it does not take a pictorial detour’. The early deconstructivist paintings of Zaha Hadid or the Chamberworks drawings of Daniel Libeskind exploring the parallels between music and architecture, tell a different story. As Lebbeus Woods (2008) comments, drawing is a mode of thinking: ‘there are ideas and feelings that can only be expressed in drawn form. We might imagine, if we look at the caves of Lascaux, that drawing came before writing and was, in its narrative making of marks, its source’. What both types of architectural representation have in common, and what distinguishes them from a fine art drawing of a building, is that the subjects constitute a projected future. Whether that future is realised or not is not necessarily significant in this respect. Evans (1986: 7) comments, ‘Drawing in architecture is not done after nature, but prior to construction; it is not so much produced by reflection on the reality outside the drawing, as productive of a reality that will end up outside the drawing’. The key point established is the conjectural nature of architectural drawing – an alternative future patterning of space and its occupation is advanced that, due to the real potential for its reification and the contextual surroundings, 212

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cannot be considered wholly fictive. In the case of more fantastical propositions where there is no intention of realisation, divergence from the status quo is magnified with a concomitant inflation of the proposition’s fictive quotient. On the one hand, this might lead us to question the legitimacy and place of ‘paper architecture’; on the other, a case could be made that the breadth of the disjunction frees us to consider changes in spatial practice that could be truly transformative. Geoff Manaugh (2009: 17, 19), futurist and author of ‘BLDGBLOG’, is convinced of architecture’s narrative potential: ‘architecture, as a discipline, can itself be used to tell stories. In fact, some of the most interesting student work today comes complete with elaborate plots and story lines, supplied for no other reason than to explain why a particular building should exist or require designing. These stories very often exceed today’s mass-market fiction in imaginative strength’. Regrettably, the most common vehicle of architectural conjecture is the computer render; produced for mass consumption, the photorealistic image is capable of reaching and convincing a wide audience of a proposition’s validity. Its strength, however, is also its weakness – so plausible is the image at simulating reality that no ‘reading’ or interpretation of the architecture is required or demanded. In its own way, it is as much a fait accompli as the architecture it represents, frozen in time against a perfect and eternal blue sky. As Neil Leach (1999: viii) writes in The Anaesthetics of Architecture, ‘the intoxication of the aesthetic leads to an aesthetics of intoxication, and a consequent lowering of critical awareness. What results is a culture of mindless consumption, where there is no longer any possibility of meaningful discourse’. Drawing and modelling, whether physical or virtual, are not the only means of representation available to the architect. Text is an often-overlooked tool in the description of architectural propositions and when used, tends towards the explicative rather than the expressive. The written word is usually limited to specification and the justification of design decisions rather than contributing to creative or conceptual

design. An exception to this tendency is the giving of names to buildings, either formally by architects and developers, or informally by the general public. Sobriquets such as ‘The Shard’, ‘Falling Water’ and ‘The Flatiron Building’ are powerfully suggestive, ascribing meaning and qualities that may or may not be espoused in the architecture that they are projected on. The prima facie reason why architecture and narrative are considered irreconcilable is that buildings do not unfold over time in the way that films or novels do. Space nevertheless contains temporal associations, most obviously in the architectural promenade in which spaces gradually reveal themselves to a mobile observer. Architecture also has the capacity to transcend the physical, encoding poetic sequences into its fabric – the ‘Danteum’, Terragni’s rewriting of the Divine Comedy in architectural form, for example, does more than illustrate Dante’s work; it translates the poem’s structure and metre into spatial proposition. The question is also not necessarily how to inculcate architecture or architectural representation with temporal elements; a rapprochement can be equally reached by viewing conventional narrative in less sequential terms, focusing more on the descriptive than the prescriptive.

A ROMANCE OF MANY DIMENSIONS

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In his eponymous novella, Edwin A. Abbott created the twodimensional world of ‘Flatland’ (1992), whose inhabitants consist of lines, points and polygons. Subtitled ‘a romance of many dimensions’, Abbott’s story, written in 1884, is both a mathematical treatise on dimensional perception and a satire examining Victorian sexuality and the class system. Taking a cue from this work, each of my own ‘short stories’ begins life as a two-dimensional sheet of paper. The paper is then cut, inscribed, folded, and fused into a narrative, occupying a territory that is both real and surreal; cardboard cut-outs are spliced and woven into yarns with shadowy nuance to

partially occupy the third dimension. Using paper, carbon and glue as ingredients, the stories construct a sequence of improbable marriages between reality and fantasy, laced with a healthy dose of myth and locational specificity. Collage has been chosen for this work to take advantage of the medium’s inherent plurality – pieces of a collage or assemblage are only ever half-assumed into their new context, bringing with them a wealth of connoted meaning from their original time and place. We usually expect objects to exist in a singular location, but the elements in a collage or assemblage oscillate between existences like Schrödinger’s Cat, presenting a flexible vessel in which the reader is encouraged to deposit their own historical and cultural montage. Like the artwork described in Abbott’s Victorian satire, London Short Stories is set in different time periods of London, intentionally locating themselves in the liminal territory between fiction and architecture to provoke an engagement between the reader and their two-dimensional counterparts occupying the depicted city. They are neither illustrated texts nor captioned images; the collages represent a network of spatial relationships, and the text, which splices genres such as science fiction, magical realism and the fairy tale, a thread that links some of the nodes of that network together. The stories encompass a democratic urban beach housing over Blackfriars Bridge (Figures 18.1 and 18.2); a retelling of the ‘Three Little Pigs’ at Smithfield in the form of a porcine tower built from straw, sticks and bricks for meat packers (Figures 18.3 and 18.4); and the ‘Globetrotter’ suitcase, a temporary urban construction representing a historic patina of the theatre’s voyage through London (Figures 18.5 and 18.6). The giant suitcase stands unattended along the Thames Path at the end of Clink Street. A crowd gathers, pondering its significance. The case measures eight metres long by four metres wide and is the height of a small two-storey house. It possesses no windows or doors, so is unlikely to function as a residence. There are no seams to the leatherlike material that covers the case, and no animal that could give up a hide of such proportions. The protective corners

‹‰—”‡ͨ͡Ǥ͡‹•…‘–‹—‘—•‹–‹‡•ǡ‘†‘͡–‘ͤǡͧ͢͠͠Ǥ The Summer Bridge is occupied by a beach, on which beach huts jockey for position with deckchairs

‹‰—”‡ͨ͡Ǥ͢‹•…‘–‹—‘—•‹–‹‡•ǡ‘†‘͡–‘ͤǡͧ͢͠͠Ǥ  …‘–”ƒ•––‘‹–•—”„ƒ•—””‘—†‹‰•–Šƒ–ƒ”‡•–”ƒ–‹Ƥ‡†„›•‘…‹ƒŽ mores, the democratic nature of the urban space is unmistakable 214

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‹‰—”‡ͨ͡ǤͣŠ‡‘…–—”ƒŽ‘™‡”ǡ‘†‘͡ǡͧ͢͠͠Ǥ”‡–‡ŽŽ‹‰ ‘ˆ–Š‡ǮŠ”‡‡‹––Ž‡‹‰•ǯƒ–‹–ŠƤ‡Ž†ǡ–Š‡•–”—…–—”‡‹•‘ˆ•–”ƒ™ǡ •–‹…•ƒ†„”‹…•ƒ†”‡†‡Ƥ‡•–Š‡—”„ƒƒ–—”‡‘ˆ–Š‡•‹–‡

‹‰—”‡ͨ͡ǤͤŠ‡‘…–—”ƒŽ‘™‡”ǡ‘†‘͡ǡͧ͢͠͠Ǥ’’Ž‡ •…‡–‡†ƒ‹”ƪ‘™•–Š”‘—‰Š–Š‡•–”ƒ™„ƒŽ‡™ƒŽŽ•ǡ…ƒ”‡••‹‰’‹‰ carcasses and sleeping meat porters

Figure 18.5 The Globetrotter, Any Public Square in London, ͧ͢͠͠ǤŠ‡ Ž‘„‡–”‘––‡”‹•†‡’‘•‹–‡†‹—”„ƒ’—„Ž‹…•’ƒ…‡• with no suggestion of the enchanting spatial wizardry that will dramatically unfurl from its interior

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spatial wizardry that will dramatically unfurl from its interior. The Globetrotter, which takes its name from its form, is a peripatetic stage that opens up and reconfigures depending on its locale and designated function. At midmorning, a stage crew arrives. With the aid of pulleys, winches and a phalanx of powerfully-built men, the

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and handle which are made of hard tanned leather make the object immediately recognisable as a Globetrotter suitcase, and bear evidence of wear in scuffs and abrasions. Adhered to the surface of the case are labels, as one might expect to find on a piece of luggage. A man in the crowd reckons that the case is approximately 12 times larger than a conventional piece of luggage, the same ratio by which Lemuel Gulliver dwarfs the miniature race of people he encounters in Swift’s Menippean satire, but London is no Lilliput and this is no literary fancy. Unbeknownst to this group of observers, the globetrotter is always transported in the early hours of morning under the cover of darkness. Carried on an articulated lorry, it is deposited on unfamiliar ground, sometimes on its base, sometimes laid flat, with no suggestion of the enchanting

‹‰—”‡ͨ͡ǤͦŠ‡ Ž‘„‡–”‘––‡”ǡ›—„Ž‹…“—ƒ”‡‹‘†‘ǡͧ͢͠͠ǤŠ‡–‡’‘”ƒ”›—”„ƒ…‘•–”—…–‹‘…‘•–‹–—–‡•ƒŠ‹•–‘”‹…’ƒ–‹ƒ‘ˆ the theatre’s voyage through London and other urban locations around the world

case is opened and the components extracted. Due to the manifold ways in which its basic structure can be rearranged and the flair with which the crew works, the installation of the theatre is a spectacle in itself. Open and upturned, the Globetrotter has manifested as a pop-up cinema, catching commuters unaware to tarry at the spectacle of light coalescing to tell a story instead of resuming their evening journey home. Other times, the suitcase remains shut, operating as a bandstand or a stage for ceremonial addresses. Most often, however, the case is seen standing on its base with 216

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its lid, housing a lighting rig, projecting out to cover a stage. In this guise, it has hosted community meetings, operettas, weddings, plays and gallery openings. In each instance, the reordering of public space appropriates the spatial and textural characteristics of its host environment, whether employing a Georgian terrace as a theatrical backdrop, lamp posts as struts or street furniture as props, a process that sublimates the familiar into the uncanny. An intricate system of reflectors soften the light according to mood, operated by skilled lighting designers who deftly cope with, and capitalise

on, the country’s mercurial changes in weather and cloud cover. In former times, the public spaces of London themselves constituted a vast theatre, from Punch and Judy shows in the square to Shakespearean plays performed on floating barges to crowds on the banks of the Thames, or more bleakly, the real life travails of beggars and itinerants with no walls to conceal their personal dramas behind. Contemporary London is not only a different time, but a different place, purged for the most part equally of vagrants and serendipitous amusement. The Globetrotter is therefore a welcome anachronism, eschewing digital slickness for steampunk styling’s; its mechanics are redolent of Pugin’s Daguerre-type Diorama at Regents Park where a rotating arena and elaborate reflected lighting would transform a flat painting into a three-dimensional environment of wind, light and atmosphere. Where such mechanics were synchronous with Victorian Britain, however, many of these contrivances, rediscovered by the Globetrotter, have a newfound power to beguile and confound twenty-first century audiences.

CONCLUSION

TIPS FOR RESEARCHERS:

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Ȉ Urban propositions need not just be drawn, narrative can provide a powerful means to explore the city and present visions, and can be combined with illustration to further articulate and reinforce the story. Ȉ The building blocks of fiction and writers have inspired generations of urban designers to engage with real and imaginary sites as springboards for the imagination. Ȉ Urban design should inspire engagement between the inhabitants and the city, presenting a flexible vessel in which the inhabitants deposit their own historical and cultural montage.

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In an urban milieu where context and the genius loci of a place have become subsidiary to economic and political considerations, reducing space-making to pre-determined programmes and their formal manifestation, the act of binding architecture and urban design into the story of its inhabitants can bring a new relevancy to the built environment, projecting, but not predicating, the rules of its occupation. London Short Stories demonstrates that architectural representation need not be a neutral tool or mere picture of a future building or a city, that drawings and models have a direct influence on the conceptual development of a project and the generation of form, and

that there are alternatives to the reductive working methods of contemporary built environment practice. Slowly, urban notions derived from literary theory and literature are gaining traction; and such work has inspired a generation of architects and urban designers to engage with real and imaginary sites as springboards for the imagination. Structurally and thematically, London Short Stories also bears resemblance to Bernard Tschumi’s The Manhattan Transcripts (1976) and Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (1978). Indeed the application of narrative techniques to extant urban forms explores contemporary and topical issues of the future of cities, by looking at how spaces in literature help shape the relationships between humans and their shared environments. The ultimate argument is that literature can offer us ways to reinvent ourselves, and especially our perspective on the environment, depicting a future of new urban wealth taking into account physical and social wellbeing, community empowerment, waste and energy management, and the sustainability of our urban spaces.

19 The siting of writing and the writing of sites Jane Rendell

This chapter is a textual weave of voices produced through the practice of site-writing as a form of teaching and research. It brings four pieces of my own together with four works produced by my students, to suggest new urban methodologies: firstly, by combining image and text to produce variations in spatial relations; secondly, by exploring the architectural qualities of storytelling; thirdly, by blending of personal and academic writing styles to create different subject positions; fourthly, by investigating the interaction between material and psychic states; fifthly, by articulating the interactive relationship between writing and designing; and finally, by examining how writing responses to specific sites can propose innovative urban genres. It demonstrates how, by drawing on the emotional qualities of interactions between subjects and sites, techniques of spatial writing have the potential to reconfigure the relations between theory and practice, research and design in contemporary urbanism.

INTRODUCTION My interest in the relation between site and writing is located at the intersection between teaching and research. In 2001 I set up a course called ‘Site-Specific Writing’, where, keen to bring spatial skills into the reading and writing of theory, I asked design students to consider their dissertations as part of a site-specific practice. As a trained architect, but also, at

the time, coming from a role as Course Director of an MA in the Theory and Practice of Public Art and Design at Chelsea College of Art, I wanted to explore the potential for writing to be inserted into sites as installations, and to examine how such texts could make places to meet readers. In my work I was experimenting with how the structure and processes of writing might relate to those of a site, and at the same time how the material, historical and cultural qualities of a site could be transposed into writing: how writings might be sited and sites written. In 2003 I came up with the term ‘critical spatial practice’ to describe projects located between art and architecture, and the standpoints theory offered for playing out disciplinary definitions (Rendell 2003: 221–33).1 I developed this concept further in Art and Architecture, in which I examined a series of projects located between art and architecture – defined as critical spatial practices – since they both critiqued the sites into which they intervened as well as the disciplinary procedures through which they operated. I argued that such projects can be located at a triple crossroads: between theory and practice, art and architecture, and public and private, and I was keen to stress three particular qualities: the critical, here I proposed that the definition of the term ‘critical’, taken from Frankfurt School critical theory, be extended to encompass practice – particularly those critical practices that involved self-reflection and the desire for social change, that sought to transform rather than to only describe (see Geuss 1981); the

spatial, drawing on the work of Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre, I made a distinction between those strategies that aimed to maintain and reinforce existing social and spatial orders, and those tactics that sought to critique and question them, defining the latter as ‘critical spatial practices’ (see Lefebvre 1991a, de Certeau 1984); and the interdisciplinary, here I was most interested in practices which desired to transgress the limits of their particular disciplinary procedures and that explored the interdisciplinary processes at work in between them (see Kristeva 1997: 3–21, 5–6, Bhabha 1994: 163, Mitchell 1995: 80–84). I ended Art and Architecture arguing that since responses to art and architectural works happen somewhere – they occur in situ – then criticism must itself be a form of situated practice. The desire to work with variations in voice to reflect and create spatial distances and proximities between work and critic, reader and text, became the motivation for SiteWriting, a collection of essays written between 1998 and 2008 which question and perform notions of situatedness and spatiality in critical writing (Rendell 2010b). While geographers have been developing new modes of placewriting,2 and art critics exploring the practice of criticism as a way of performing artworks (see for example Butt 2005: 1–19, Jones and Stephenson 1999), architectural and urban criticism has appeared slower to experiment with different writing forms.3 The take up of writing as a potentially active form of spatial practice has been more vibrant in the area of design research, especially the strand that works with the critical and interdisciplinary methodologies of fine art practice.4 It is here that site-writing is probably best situated, suggesting as it does, that conducting urban research through writing offers more than analysis and description. Rather by working with the complexities offered by overlaying critical responses to sites through the interlocking matrix of positionality, spatiality, subjectivity and textuality, writing can operate as a form of spatial proposition. Reflecting on the work of art-architecture collaborative muf, critic Kath Shonfield posed the following questions: 220

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‘How do you develop a city-wide strategy when you are fascinated by the detail of things? And how can you make something small-scale in the here and now if you are driven by the urge to formulate strategic proposals for the future?’ Arguing that muf’s work could be ‘expressed in the formula d/s = DETAIL/STRATEGY’ Shonfield’s (2001: 14–23, 14) framing of the micro-macro interactions of muf’s design processes might be characterised as part of what has been called ‘the spatial turn’,5 the same could be said for my term, ‘critical spatial practice’. However, it has become increasingly clear that the tactics and strategies – ambient, ambulant, direct, DIY, instant, insurgent – to name but a few, of a more recent phase of urbanism has set the tone for a nuanced exploration of temporality, the need to include both the fleeting event as well as the patience required to ride out the long duration of planning. This is where site-writing comes in as a practice which aims to activate the relation between subjects and sites, politically and emotionally, on a personal and therefore intimate note, but with the potential to set ripples floating out into the more extensive cultural context of urban theory and practice – spatially and temporally.

LONGING FOR THE LIGHTNESS OF SPRING When Jules Wright asked me to write about Spring (Figure 19.1), a work by Elina Brotherus she had commissioned for the Wapping Project in London (Rendell 2001), I found myself turning to three short texts I had written concerning three sites – two remembered and one dreamed.6 ‘Moss Green’ described a derelict house in the green belt where in early March we found photographs of a brave new world of modernist high-rise housing. Just after the autumn equinox, just after her death, I dreamt of the home of my Welsh great aunt. ‘White Linen’ recalled this dream, while ‘Bittersweet’ remembered a spring visit to an abandoned cork factory in Catalunya where we found the names of colours scattered over the floor.

‹‰—”‡ͩ͡Ǥ͡Ž‹ƒ”‘–Š‡”—•ǡHorizon 8 ȋ͢͠͠͠ȌSpring, The Wapping Project, London. Chromogenic colour prints on Fuji Crystal Archive paper. Mounted on anodised aluminium and framed (courtesy of the artist and gb agency, Paris)

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‹‰—”‡ͩ͡Ǥ͢ ƒ‡‡†‡ŽŽǡLes Mots and Les Choses ȋͣ͢͠͠Ȍ Material Intelligence, Entwistle Gallery, London (courtesy of the Entwistle Gallery) 221

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Brotherus’s Spring was composed of two installations: a video triptych, Rain, The Oak Forest and Flood, in the boiler house at the disused pump station, and a back-lit image Untitled, showing a pale grey Icelandic sky over lava covered in moss, reflected in the water tank on the roof of the Wapping Project. A work that anticipates spring, Spring opened in Wapping just after the autumn equinox in the northern hemisphere. I made associations with Brotherus’s work based on formal similarities, the texture of moss and division produced by horizon lines, as well as tone and colour. However, it was my own fascination with the backwards gaze of nostalgia and Brotherus’s interest in anticipation and longing as emotions that somehow looked forward, which provided me with three positions from which to consider her work within the temporal, spatial and material aspects of yearning.

For an expedition to Seoul, as What is the Colour of Memory? (April 2002), each text was translated into Korean and accompanied by its ‘object’: an album of photographs found at the ‘Moss Green’ house, a white linen cloth, and the word ‘bittersweet’ found in the cork factory. The texts were translated back into written English from the Korean audio recordings for their journey to Los Angeles as The Voice One Cannot Control (November 2002).7 When the work changed location again, this time moving to the Entwistle Gallery in London as Les Mots et Les Choses (March 2003), (Figure 19.2) the three objects were re-inserted, sited in the slippage in language produced through translation and displacement. In Les Mots and Les Choses (1966), translated into English as The Order of Things (Foucault 1992), Michel Foucault explores the ordering of relationships between different cultural elements, for example, those that are real, those that represent, those that resemble, those that can be imagined. Between words and things, between writing and speaking, between one place and another, this site-writing is a two-way inscription, dreamed and remembered, of sites written and writings sited.

THE TEXTILE READING ROOM Š‡ ‡š–‹Ž‡ ‡ƒ†‹‰ ‘‘ ȋ ‹‰—”‡ ͩ͡ǤͣȌ ‡˜‘Ž˜‡† ˆ”‘ –Š‡ analysis of an antique kilim that I inherited from my maternal grandmother who I lived with intermittently during the years ’”‡…‡†‹‰Š‡”†‡ƒ–Š‹͢͠͠͠ǤŠ”‘—‰Šƒ‡š’Ž‹…ƒ–‹‘‘ˆ–Š‡‹Ž‹ I extended ideas about the ability of textiles to embody personal history into questioning the concept of the architecture of Š‘‡Ǥ‘–Šƒ–ǡ–Š‹‹‰ƒ„‘—–ƒ•’‡…‹Ƥ…’‡”•‘ƒŽ–‡š–‹Ž‡ǡŽ‡†–‘ using the textile as a way of thinking about architecture and deconstruction. In this way, the dissertation itself became a textile construction where three books were worked around three –‡š–‹Ž‡•Ǥ‹–Š–Š‡Ƥ”•––™‘„‘‘•ǡ–Š‡–‡š–™ƒ•ƒ”‡•’‘•‡–‘ǡƒ† reworked the absent textile, and with the third text/textile pair, I produced a cloth that developed ideas in the text, to produce a re-working of all three books and the site for reading them. Š‡Ƥ”•–„‘‘™ƒ•ƒ…Ž‘•‡”‡ƒ†‹‰‘ˆ–Š‡‹Ž‹–Š”‘—‰Š‹–• embodied personal history, including extensive recording of its wear and mending. The second was a collection of texts that followed and extended my studio work where I was using a programme and methodology derived from analysis of my grandmother’s mending to make a textile/architectural intervention into my own home. The third book explored ideas of textile thinking through examples from art and literary theory. Here the textile was a tablecloth / index that was wrapped around the three books binding them together in its folded form. Each entry and page reference was embroidered onto the cloth in reverse so that the process of the stitching was revealed on the front of the textile in the loose threads that are looped across the letters and between words, so that they appeared both newly formed and at the same time cut loose, as if cleaved from some other place. When unfolded the cloth produces the architecture of the Textile Reading Room in the form of the site for reading the three books ƒ† ‹ –Š‡ ”‡…‘Ƥ‰—”ƒ–‹‘ ‘ˆ –Š‡ –‡š–• Š‡Ž† ™‹–Š‹ ȋ‡‘ƒ”† ͢͢͠͠ȌǤ

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‹‰—”‡ͩ͡Ǥͣ—…›‡‘ƒ”†ǡThe Textile Reading Room ȋ͢͢͠͠ȌǤ Detail showing the index of some of the words in this work. Carbon paper print, embroidery thread, linen cloth (courtesy of Lucy Leonard)

The pedagogical frameworks for architecture students to produce site-writings – in the form of artefacts, books, installations, performances, scores, websites – have mainly occurred in the postgraduate courses at the Bartlett School of Architecture. The briefs I have devised, such as ‘SiteSpecific Writing’ and ‘The Reading Room’ introduce the idea that writing and reading are spatialised activities or practices that take place. The texts produced are often designed constructions – spatial in form and architectonic in structure – as in Lucy Leonard’s Textile Reading Room described above. Concepts are generated, places imagined and artefacts emerge as constellations of images and words. In the MArch Architectural Design, where students are also producing an architectural project in parallel to the dissertation, the two processes – designing and writing – can inform one another, as Fiona Sheppard describes below in relation to her project The Stolen Kiss.

An ambition to understand my role, as architect, in the design of sensations, underpins my year’s work. Mixing genres, combining aesthetics with seduction, narrating whilst theorising, to create a proposal, which aims to debate aspects of psychology, •‡•ƒ–‹‘ǡ ƒơ‡…– ƒ† †‡•‹”‡Ǥ Š‡ ‹‹–‹ƒŽ –”‹Ž‘‰› ‘ˆ ”‡•‡ƒ”…Š ƒ––‡”Ǣ –Š‡ Š‹•–‘”› ‘ˆ ‡–‡” –Š‡ ”‡ƒ– ƒ† Š‹• ™‹ˆ‡ ƒ–Š‡”‹‡ ™‹–Š ƒ†”‹‘”‰ ƒŽƒ…‡Ǣ ƒ ‹˜‡•–‹‰ƒ–‹‘ ‹–‘ ƒ Ƥ”•– ‹••Ǣ ƒ† –Š‡”ƒ’› ™‹–Š …‘—’Ž‡•ǡ Šƒ˜‡ ƒŽŽ †‹˜‡”•‹Ƥ‡† –‘ ƒ……‘‘†ƒ–‡ a broad proposition, constructing moments of emotions in space.

Š‡Ƥ…–‹‘ƒŽ•–‘”›‘ˆŠ‡–‘Ž‡‹••‹•„ƒ•‡†—’‘–Š‡Ž‘˜‡ triangle between Peter, Catherine and her lover, Villim Mons, all of whom are respectively grasping for said kiss, that most elusive of treasures. The story occurs over the course of a week, the events themselves played out in scenes. These scenes depict ƒ”…Š‹–‡…–—”ƒŽ ‹–‡”˜‡–‹‘• ™‹–Š‹ –Š‡ ’ƒŽƒ…‡ ƒ† –Š‡ ‡ơ‡…–• they evoke. The proposal is manifested in three forms: Firstly, ‘Preparations’ – a textual reader introducing the history, theories and design ideas behind each intervention. Secondly, ‘Exploration’ – the story of The Stolen Kiss, played out in scenes. Each scene is introduced by a letter from Catherine arranging a rendezvous 223

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THE STOLEN KISS

19.

‹‰—”‡ͩ͡Ǥͤ ‹‘ƒŠ‡’’ƒ”†ǡThe Stolen Kissȋͥ͢͠͠ȌǤ‡–ƒ‹Ž•Š‘™‹‰‘†‡Žˆ”‘–Š‡†‡•‹‰’”‘Œ‡…–ȋ…‘—”–‡•›‘ˆ ‹‘ƒŠ‡’’ƒ”†Ȍ

with her lover and is followed by a sequence of images showing design intent and evidence of occupation. Each scene is constructed using a triptych of theories: the structure of the •…‡‡ ”‡Ž‹‡• ‘ ‡‹‰Š–‡‡–ŠǦ…‡–—”› ‡–‹“—‡––‡ ƒ† •‘…‹‡–›Ǣ –Š‡ intentions of the scene are based on theories of relationship –Š‡”ƒ’›Ǣ–Š‡†‡•‹‰‹•’‹”ƒ–‹‘ƒ†ƒ…‘”’‘”‡ƒŽŽ‘…ƒ–‹‘ˆ‘”‡ƒ…Š ‹–‡”˜‡–‹‘•–‡•ˆ”‘ƒ‹˜‡•–‹‰ƒ–‹‘‹–‘ƒƤ”•–‹••Ǥ ‹ƒŽŽ›ǡ –Š‡”‡‹•ǮŠ‡‘†‡Žǯȋ ‹‰—”‡ͩ͡ǤͤȌ™Š‹…Š‡•–ƒ„Ž‹•Š‡•–Š‡•‡•…‡‡• in spatial relation to one another, establishing viewpoints for the observer to locate each occurrence: a three dimensional map ‘ˆ‡‘–‹‘ȋŠ‡’’ƒ”†ͥ͢͠͠ȌǤ8

SHE IS WALKING ABOUT IN A TOWN WHICH SHE DOES NOT KNOW The title of this site-writing (Rendell 2005) references an artwork by Sharon Kivland and an essay by cultural geographer Steve Pile. Kivland’s She is walking about in a town which she does not know (1997) consists of two c-type photographs, from archive images of Anna Freud and Marie Bonaparte, and a glass panel engraved and silver-mirrored with a street map of the spa town Marienbad. In her book Hysteria, which weaves together Dora’s story and her own, Kivland explores Sigmund Freud’s discussion of his analysis of Dora’s second dream (Kivland 1999: 177–86).9 Dora begins her own description by stating ‘I was walking about in a town which I did not know. I saw streets and squares which were strange to me’ (Freud 1953).10 The interpretation drawn out by Freud was that the town in Dora’s dream was most probably a German spa town whose photographs she had seen in an album sent by a potential suitor (Freud 1953: 95–6). To explore how repressed elements might make themselves known, Pile turns to Freud’s own experience of the uncanny, prompted by his sight of prostitutes in a town he did not know (Pile 2001: 263–79, see also Freud 1955: 217–56, referred to by Pile).

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The English word uncanny is a translation of Freud’s term unheimlich, which he sets in opposition to the heimlich or familiar setting of home. For Freud, the uncanny is not a precise concept, but rather encompasses a wide range of feelings from slight uneasiness through to dread and outright fear. Not necessarily a property contained within an object or place, the uncanny is rather an aesthetic condition produced at the threshold of interchange between a subject and that object or place. Experienced as a palpable presence of the strange within the familiar, the uncanny can be understood in psychoanalytic terms as the return of the repressed, as the surfacing of buried childhood memories, including the unexpected recall of the mother’s body, also described by Freud as déjà vu (Freud 1953: 339–628, 399). When I was asked to write an essay for Elles sont passées par ici a curated exhibition of seven artists due to take place in Loguivy de la Mer, Brittany, France, the artworks were not yet in existence. In their place I was sent a map and photographs of the small fishing village in which the artworks were to be installed as well as the artists’ written statements and visual proposals. I used my encounter with these representations to create a fiction, structured as a walk through the sites in which the artists intended to locate their projects. In combining the map and photographs of the site with words from the artists and those of my own, I invented a subject, a mermaid maybe, half-woman-half-fish, who arrives in a town which she does not know and in passing through finds that it feels familiar yet at the same time strange – uncanny perhaps. The coastal location provided an opportunity to reverse the gender and position of the siren – this mermaid hears a voice calling to her from the land. The site-writing is located then on a threshold between land and sea, as well as exterior and interior spaces, drawing upon the imagination to anticipate the artworks while at the same time writing a narrative that presents a site returning though memories not quite forgotten.

In both the PhD in Architectural History and Theory and the PhD by Design at the Bartlett School of Architecture, students explore the creative potential of writing as a form of architectural and urban design practice and research. This can occur by developing new methods for history, theory and criticism where intellectual concepts might be communicated through different writing genres and voices, weaving intimate fictions with more academically positioned arguments. Here imaginative scenarios created by intersecting fact and fiction, the personal and the public, construct the starting point for design propositions, as Sophie Handler discusses below in relation to her urban curating work with older people in London’s borough of Newham.

dance by twilight, exploring notions of liminality and risktaking in older age while Resistant Sitting was an alternative street furniture guide for pensioners that mapped out the informal sitting spots used by older people where formal public provision for sitting is lacking, exploring notions of ’•›…Š‘Ž‘‰‹…ƒŽ”‡•‹•–ƒ…‡ƒ†ƪ‡š‹„‹Ž‹–›‹‘Ž†‡”ƒ‰‡ǤŠ‡’”‘Œ‡…– was accompanied by a commissioned cushion, produced by artist Verity-Jane Keefe, that temporarily formalises one of –Š‡•‡ƒŽ–‡”ƒ–‹˜‡•‹––‹‰•’‘–•ȋƒ†Ž‡”͢͠͡͡ȌǤ11

THE FLUID PAVEMENT

‹‰—”‡ͩ͡Ǥͥ‘’Š‹‡ƒ†Ž‡”ǡThe Twilight Zoneȋͨ͢͠͠Ȍȋ…‘—”–‡•› of Verity-Jane Keefe) 19.

TO MISS THE DESERT To Miss the Desert (Rendell 2003: 34–43) is a site-writing I produced for curator Gavin Wade in response to Nathan Coley’s Black Tent (2003). Black Tent (Figure 19.6) had developed out of Coley’s interest in sanctuaries in general but particularly the evocative and precise description of the construction of the tabernacle given in the Bible.12 Wade had read a piece of my writing, where I questioned whether it was possible to ‘write architecture’ rather than to ‘write about architecture’ and so he asked me to ‘write a tabernacle’. I felt

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Š‡ Ž—‹† ƒ˜‡‡– ‹• ƒ •‡‹ǦƤ…–‹‘ƒŽ ’•›…Š‘Ǧ‰‡‘‰”ƒ’Š‹… novel on ageing that explores people’s changing physical and emotional relationships to the urban environment in older age. Set in Newham, one of London’s youngest boroughs, the novel addresses the ordinary, everyday realities of growing old in the city, in an environment where funding priorities and formal design provision tend typically to be directed towards youth. Based on an extended research process in pensioner lunch clubs, dance classes and partnered shopping trips across Newham, this novel is in two formats – a Large Print version for public access (returned to circulate in a mobile library in Newham for local consumption) and a small print annotated version (with footnotes) for an academic audience (contextualizing the thinking behind this research-based novel). A series of spatial propositions at the end of the novel, from the sublime to the absurd, suggest alternative ways of laying claim –‘–Š‡—”„ƒ‡˜‹”‘‡–‹‘Ž†‡”ƒ‰‡ȋƒ†Ž‡”ͦ͢͠͠ȌǤ For her design PhD several of the propositions were realised as live projects. The Twilight Zone ȋ ‹‰—”‡ͩ͡ǤͥȌ–‘‘ƒͥ͠Ǧ’Ž—• dance class from the routinised setting of a Monday morning …‘—‹–› ŠƒŽŽ –‘ ƒ Ž‘…ƒŽ ’ƒ” ˆ‘” ƒ ͩ͠Ǧ‹—–‡ •‡‹Ǧ‹ŽŽ‹…‹–

‹‰—”‡ͩ͡Ǥͦƒ–Šƒ‘Ž‡›ǡBlack Tentȋͣ͢͠͠Ȍȋ…‘—”–‡•›‘ˆ–Š‡ artist and Haunch of Venison Gallery, London)

that the text in the Bible had already written the tabernacle, so I decided to write Black Tent. Black Tent consisted of a flexible structure, a number of steel-framed panels with black fabric screens stretched across them, and smaller ‘windows’ inserted into them. Black Tent moved to five sites in Portsmouth reconfiguring itself for each location. My essay echoed aspects of Black Tent with each of its five sections composed around a different spatial boundary condition, such as ‘around the edge’. Yet in order to critique Coley’s choice of sanctuary as a specifically religious and Judaeo-Christian one, my choice of spatial motif was the secular sanctuary of home.13 Like the squares, the voice of my text was two-sided, setting up a dynamic between private and public sanctuary. One remembered a childhood spent in various nomadic cultures in the Middle East. The other adopted a more professional tone by taking texts from construction specifications I had written when designing contemporary sanctuaries – a series of community buildings for different minority groups.14 A few years later, for another project, an exhibition entitled Spatial Imagination, I selected ‘scenes’ from this essay and reconfigured them into a text three by four, in response to the grid of a window, where I wrote the word purdah on the 226

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glass in black eye liner. The term purdah means curtain in Persian and describes the cultural practice of separating and hiding women through clothing and architecture – veils, screens and walls – from the public male gaze. This twopart text installation An Embellishment: Purdah (Figure 19.7) responded to the window as a boundary condition, articulating the interface between inside and outside, one and another.15 Rather than making a judgement on the veil, An Embellishment: Purdah wishes to show how things seem quite different depending on where you are. From inside the gallery and outside on the street – by day and by night – the work changes according to the position occupied. Sometimes transparent, at other times opaque, revealing then concealing, this embellishment or decorative covering invites the viewer to imagine beyond the site s/he can see. In my own site-writing, drawing on Howard Caygill’s notion of strategic critique, which he argues shares with immanent critique the capacity for discovering or inventing the criteria of critical judgement in the course of criticism (Caygill 1998: 34, 64, 79), I have suggested that with his/her

‹‰—”‡ͩ͡Ǥͧ ƒ‡‡†‡ŽŽǡAn Embellishment: Purdahȋͦ͢͠͠Ȍ Spatial Imagination, The Domo Baal Gallery, London (courtesy of David Cross of Cornford & Cross)

responsibility to convey an experience of the work to another audience, the critic occupies a discrete position as mediator and that this situatedness conditions the performance of his/ her interpretative role.16 Gavin Butt has argued for something very similar when he ‘calls for the recognition of an “immanent” rather than a transcendent, mode of contemporary criticality … apprehended within – and instanced as – the performative act of critical engagement itself’ (Butt 2005: 1–19, 7). This view is echoed by other critics from feminist and performance studies who also take issue with the tradition that the interpreter must be neutral or disinterested in the objects, which s/he judges; they posit instead that the process of viewing and interpreting involves ‘entanglement in intersubjective spaces of desire,

projection and identification’, and that ‘interpretation is … a kind of performance of the object’ (Jones and Stephenson 1999: 1–10). For a module entitled ‘Theorising Practices/Practicing Theory’, taken by students on the MA Architectural History and MSc Urban Studies, participants are asked to write sites rather than to write about sites – this encourages a textual approach to architectural history that involves questioning the situation of the researcher him/herself, and the invention of new writing methodologies which allow for memories and dreams to enter the space of urban research, as David Roberts outlines in the following account of his concrete poems.

19. The siting of writing and the writing of sites

‹‰—”‡ͩ͡Ǥͨƒ˜‹†‘„‡”–•ǡBeth Haimȋͩ͢͠͠Ȍ (courtesy of David Roberts) 227

BETH HAIM

INSIDE OUT

‡–Š ƒ‹ ȋ ‹‰—”‡ ͩ͡ǤͨȌ ‹• ƒ ™‘” ƒ„‘—– ”‡…‘‡…–‹‘• Ȃ ƒ forgotten history with its source, forgotten books with their inspirations, a forgotten language with its roots, and a forgotten home with its foundations. It is comprised of a set of postcards based around thirty-six gravestones from the Old Velho Sephardic Jewish cemetery in Mile End. Each photograph of a grave has an accompanying poem, constructed around a piece of archival text aiming to convey a dual reading of the space by connecting forgotten archives to experiential accounts. Inspired by both phenomenological texts and formal arrangements of Ladino poems, it uses the spatial and material composition of the stones to trigger a voice and structure the narrative. The language and typography are obscured using Derridean methods to create blurred portraits and incomplete histories. The poems are constructed as Benjaminian montages, dense palimpsests on the threshold of understanding, to provoke intrigue and engage the reader. The postcards were delivered to students living in a former Jewish old people’s home that surrounds the site, inhabitants of a building that had lost touch with its history. Each student received one postcard with a connection to one stone. The numbered poems reveal the location of the tombstone, hinting at a fragment of history, providing clues to a lost past. Wrapped and beribboned, the reader engages in a symbolic act of unwrapping history, untying connecting threads, linking them to the haptic experience of touching the stones and sparking a conversation between the viewer, the stone and their shared Š‹•–‘”›ȋ‘„‡”–•ͩ͢͠͠ȌǤ17

The usual typology for a university scientific laboratory building is to position the research laboratories and experimentation on the inside of the plan, at the interior of the building, and the ‘writing-up’ spaces where the research team develop their scientific findings for presentation in peer-reviewed journals, on the outside. In order to question this spatial division and explore new architectural possibilities and social relations for scientific research, architects Hawkins\Brown, for their new Biochemistry building at Oxford University, decided to inverse the usual spatial configuration, to turn things inside out. To place the laboratories on the outside of the building means that the internal processes of scientific research are made visible to others who might just be passing by. To locate the writing-up spaces on the inside of the building around a central atrium allows the process of scholarly analysis and interpretation to be rearranged around a communal space of potential interaction. I was struck by the inventive proposition at the core of Hawkins\Brown’s design for the Biochemistry building – an inversion of the normative layout of the programme. In order to draw attention to the innovative qualities of this architectural gesture I attempted to perform the spatial inversion textually (Rendell 2010a). The piece of ‘sitewriting’ that emerged opens up the hidden and often private early processes of laboratory experimentation and concept development by revealing them through the more public face of the later research phase of writing-up. To do this I decided to display the opening and closing pages of a scientific paper from a refereed journal on the outside. When the pages are turned and then opened by the reader, they reveal a series of hand-drawn sketches by a biochemist, specifically Professor David Sherratt, a senior scientist and laboratory leader in the Department of Biochemistry, and one of the commissioners of the new building. Looking at these diagrams, hidden within the folds of the book, provides the reader with a chance to see material which is usually not published, and so aims to turn the research process inside out.

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CONCLUSION

Ȉ Choose a site whose spatial configuration allows for the invention of new modes for presenting arguments in textual form. Ȉ Draw on your site’s material and cultural conditions to provide clues for unusual approaches to the structure of your writing. Ȉ Consider whether your site research can be presented from different points of view, so requiring the inclusion of a range of voices. Ȉ Find ways for your writing to enter the site as interventions, installations, or events. Ȉ Bring words and images together to enhance the existing qualities of a site, hint at its history, and suggest alternative futures.

19. The siting of writing and the writing of sites

Reflecting on this textual weave of voices, my own and my students’, produced through teaching and research, and on the process of creating spatial texts which combine architecture and urban design with theory, I cannot help but notice a number of themes that connect my own site-writing practice to the interests palpable in my students’ work: firstly, an exploration of the materiality of the visual and spatial processes which combine written texts and images; secondly, a development of the particular spatial and architectural qualities of storytelling; thirdly, a blending of personal and academic writing styles to develop multiple voices and different subject positions; fourthly, an investigation of how physical journeys through architectural spaces work in dialogue with changes in psychic and emotional states; fifthly, an articulation of the interactive relationship between writing and designing; and finally, an examination of how responses to specific sites can pattern the form as well as the content of texts, generating new genres for architectural writing based on (auto)biographies, diaries, guidebooks, letters, poems, stories and travelogues. Taken together, I suggest that these spatial writing practices, rather like a pattern of ripples unsettling a fluid surface, have the potential to reconfigure the relations between theory and practice, research and design, in existing urban methodologies. They do this by prioritising the emotional qualities of interactions between subjects and sites, and the role writing can play in creating subtle but meaningful responses to existing conditions, while also hinting at past actions and alternative futures.

TIPS FOR RESEARCHERS:

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ENDNOTES

9

Sharon Kivland, She is walking about in a town which she does not know (1997). The work is reproduced in Kivland 1999. For a

1

I later consolidated and developed the concept of ‘critical spatial

longer discussion of Kivland’s work and ‘She is walking about

practice’ in Rendell 2006. Since that time, the same term has

is a town which she does not know’, in relation to déjà vu, see

been taken up by individuals such as Judith Rugg in her seminars at the RIBA, London, from around 2008; Eyal Weisman to describe activities as part of the ‘MA: Research Architecture’

2

11 The Twilight Zone was funded by the RIBA/ICE McAslan Bursary

Marcus Miessen to identify the ‘MA: Architecture and Critical

2006 and Resistant Sitting was funded by the RIBA/ICE McAslan

Spatial Practice’ launched in 2011 at the Städelschule, Frankfurt.

Bursary 2008.

See for example the work of Caitlin DeSilvey, Hayden Lorimer, There are of course exceptions: see for example Stead and Stickell 2010 and in particular the work of Hélene Frichot, Katja Grillner, Sarah Treadwell, and Linda Marie Walker. See also the journal

4

–Š”‘—‰Š†‹ơ‡”‡– ‹†•‘ˆ ‡†‹ƒ•‹—Ž–ƒ‡‘—•Ž›ǡ ˆ‘”‡šƒ’Ž‡ǡ Minster (1998), an installation in The Tate Gallery Liverpool in

See for example Macleod and Holdridge 2005, Barrett and Bolt

Barley 1999: 78–81. 15 See Jane Rendell, An Embellishment: Purdah (2006) Spatial

See the work of cultural geographers who argued for the role

Imagination, domoBaal contemporary art, London with an

space plays in shaping social relations as part of the critical

associated catalogue essay (Rendell 2005: 34–5). For a longer

postmodern discourse of the 1990s, for example Harvey 1989b,

discussion of this installation see Rendell 2010b: 103–9.

These texts entitled ‘Moss Green’, ‘White Linen’ and ‘Bittersweet’,

16 For a discussion of the politics of spectatorship see, for example,

Eco [1962] in Bishop 2006: 20–40 and Bishop 2005: 13, 131. 17 The poems from ‘Beth Haim’ will be published by Copy Press next

architecture, colour and memory.

year with the working title Slab. See www.davidjamesroberts.

For a longer discussion of this installation see Rendell (2010b:

com/textworks/slab (accessed 2 September 2012).

The narrative behind The Stolen Kiss is currently being translated into a novel by Fiona Sheppard. The associated design project was tutored by Peter Szczepaniak and John Puttick (Unit 22) and exhibited at 11 Flirts, Art Museum of Estonia, Tallinn Architecture Biennale, September 2011. The model has since been acquired by the permanent collection of the Art Museum of Estonia, May 2012. The Art Museum of Estonia is located inside Kadriorg Palace, the original setting and inspiration for The Stolen Kiss.

230

places of refuge outside state control. See Coley 1997.

Pedro Gadanho.

150). 8

and Schlieker 2006. 13 Coley’s interest in sanctuaries has been related to their role as 14 Coley’s work has examined the representation of architecture

had been written in 2000 as part of an unpublished essay on 7

through his practice. See for example Herbert 2004: 35–7, 36,

Actar, Barcelona/New York, and the magazine Beyond edited by

Massey 1994 and Soja 1989. 6

12 Nathan Coley’s fascination with places of religious worship runs

Candide, based at RWTH Aachen University and published by

2007 and Smith and Holly 2008. 5

Kivland, see Freud 1953: 1–122, 94.

at Goldsmiths College of Art, London; and most recently by

Mitch Rose and John Wylie. 3

Rendell 2010b: 179–93. 10 For Freud’s account of Dora’s second dream, referred to by

Explorations in Urban Design

20

Design as research and research as design: mega-plans and mega-projects in Karbala and Hong Kong Matthew Carmona

This chapter reflects on the use of design as a research method, and on the designerly ways of knowing that underpin such approaches. Whilst some controversy exists around the relationship between design and research, this chapter argues that design can be both a research method – research as design – and a focus for research itself – design as research. The arguments are illustrated through two major urban design projects, in Karbala (Iraq) and Hong Kong. In these I acted as both a designer and a researcher, immersed in the larger design / development team. Research of this type can be hugely valuable to both the local urban design process (offering perspective and rigour) and also for the larger insights it offers of more general application to knowledge about design and development processes.

DESIGNERLY WAYS OF KNOWING It has been argued by some (e.g. Lawson 2002) that the very act of designing the built environment, whether by architects, planners, landscape architects, engineers, or urban designers is a form of research as it involves problem definition, evidence gathering, analysis and critical thinking, and, eventually, problem solving. If seen in this way, then unlike scientific research: there is unlikely to be a single or ‘right’ answer to many problems; instead of roots in objectivity and rationality, a design process might equally value the

subjective, intuitional and creative; and, rather than working through a logical more or less linear process, design might equally start with proposition as analysis and could jump to and fro between these stages many times during the course of a project. Duffy (2005: 1), however, has argued that: ‘Design’ is not ‘Research’ and never can be. Nor is ‘Research’ the same as ‘Design’. For him, whilst the first always involves processes of ‘imaging’, ‘presenting’ and ‘testing’ a specific proposition for design, it does not always encompass the essential qualities of the second, namely the developing and testing of particular hypotheses. An RIBA enquiry into architectural design broadly agreed with this stance, arguing that even though the outcomes of a building design process might be original, if the knowledge generated is not produced in a systemised manner, not communicated in a way that allows the generation of knowledge to become explicit, it cannot qualify as research (Till 2007: 3). This, however, does not discount the validity of design being used as a method within research where design processes are used to address clear research objectives, nor the potential for research (of any method or type) to inform design. As Zeisel (1984: 226–7) comments ‘Carrying out a research project and designing an environment are similar in that both invent new ways to see the world around us.

Research invents organizing concepts; design arrives at plans for future settings. Yet even these differences can be artificial: designers clearly develop concepts, and some researchers arrive at plans for the future. … [The] real skill, then, is to be able to use the most appropriate tools, whether they come out of the tool kit traditionally called “research” or the one called “design”’. In his seminal contribution to the extensive literature on research methods, Nigel Cross (2006) argues the case for a distinct field of research based on design as a method. Cross writes of a key insight ‘that if we wanted to develop a robust, independent discipline of design (rather than let design be subsumed within paradigms of science or the arts), then we had to be much more articulate about the particular nature of design activity, design behaviour and design cognition. We had to build a network of arguments and evidence for “designerly ways of knowing”’ (Cross 2006: v). Others have made a similar case stretching back to the 1960s when arguments began to be made about the importance of understanding the process of design, with analysis of architectural method featuring strongly in this early work. Archer (1979: 17), for example, argued that designers think and communicate in ways that are distinctly different from scientific and scholarly ways of thinking and communicating but are nevertheless just ‘as powerful as scientific and scholarly methods of enquiry when applied to its own kinds of problems’. Since then the field has expanded exponentially and now extends across multiple design fields and problematics. In the discipline of urban design, this move to accept design method as a legitimate research methodology has not always run smoothly, particularly when the creative processes of design became confused, even hijacked, by the technical and pseudo-scientific approaches of systems thinking during the 1970s. Christopher Alexander, for example, having been an early innovator in the field, using computer science to rationalise the processes of urban growth and form (e.g. Alexander 1964), quickly became disillusioned and rejected the whole field publically (Alexander 1971), although his 232

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own work continued to use the act of designing as a primary research method, including his influential New Theory of Urban Design which was developed using teams of students to generate urban form from simple local rules. Design methods potentially extend to many avenues of investigation in the built environment, covering: design thinking, the processes of design, the tools of the designer, professional practices, ways of learning, participative practices, user responses, technological performance, and design experimentation. Whatever the focus of design-based research in urban design, two fundamental types can be envisaged: Ȉ Research as design, in which the act of designing seeks to address a defined research problem or problems, the resolution to which will be pursued through the design process and the proposition or propositions that emerge. Here the researcher is immersed in the design team, in effect as designer. Ȉ Design as research, in which the very act of designing becomes the focus of research, rather than necessarily the problem or problems that the process is seeking to address. Here the researcher may be part of the design team, but may equally be a detached outside observer of the design process. Drawing from examples in which I was directly involved, these contrasting roles are each briefly explored below.

RESEARCH AS DESIGN, KARBALA MEGA-PLANS In 2008 I was invited to prepare a masterplan for the postwar rebuilding and development of Karbala in Iraq by the International Centre for Technical Research (ICTR) and their clients, the Iraqi Government. I worked with private consultancy UDS1 throughout the process.

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aspirations within the city through stimulating debate and dialogue with the intention of ultimately understanding the components of a sustainable strategy for future growth. Understanding the contemporary urban situation therefore represented a first critical stage in the project for a city that had been neglected, war-torn, and only subject to the crudest of planning for many years. A future studies research method was used; a body of loosely related research approaches that broadly forecasts the future based on postulating possible, predictable and preferable scenarios for change in society, the environment, governance, the economy, or indeed any aspect of the human and natural world. In 233

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dedicated locations for commercial activities and green space provision and remains largely unimplemented. Today, close to the old city, owners have increasingly divided plots for housing, whilst elsewhere illegal houses and shelters have been built on many public spaces and green areas. Large scale overcrowding exists, as do a series of major but ad hoc plans for new development and infrastructure including an airport, main line railway and station, resort destination on lake Razzaza (north west of the city), new industrial zone, power station, a small satellite town, and a green environmental protection belt to shelter the city from the desert. The primary goal of the project was to explore complex local needs and

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Karbala is located approximately 120 km south of Baghdad and is a holy city and one of the most important cities in the Islamic world. Its population is estimated to be around 700,000 within a city that is almost rectangular in shape and measures approximately 10km by 3km with a historic city centre of a little over 1 sq km that contains the shrines of Imam Hussain, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, and his half brother Abbas. The northern half of the city has dense tree planting and fertile agricultural land whilst the southern half borders a vast desert though the soil is suitable for agriculture if irrigation is provided. Karbala attracts more than 10 million pilgrims per year, and this periodic influx of pilgrims has a major effect on open spaces, accommodation, and roads and services, particularly in the old city that can barely accommodate the number of pilgrims who come for each ritual. The old city is an organic complex of residential and commercial buildings surrounding the shrines (Figure 20.1), and beyond these major expansions of the city had occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century during the Ottoman governorate of Iraq, during the 1970s when new districts of prefabricated housing were added close to the shires, and in the 1980s with expansions into the desert. A plan of 1990 included wide streets and central locations for amenities but lacked

this respect, whilst future studies draw on many academic methods and foci for study, there has been a long tradition of futurology within the urban domain that draws from both the arts and sciences (even science fiction) to explore potential urban futures (Hunt et al. 2010); particularly, in recent years, those associated with urban sustainability (e.g. Rogers et al. 2011). Through envisaging contrasting development futures for Karbala, a series of urban scenarios were generated and used to stimulate local debate. Each scenario prioritised different outcomes within a series of strong physical visions, but in doing so reacted to the same extensive local socio-economic and environmental survey information that had been collected on the ground for the project,2 and which defined a critical set of opportunities and constraints. Initially, five scenarios were produced and tested. These were subject to detailed technical analysis and stakeholder consultation with key political decision makers, religious authorities, civil society activists, heads of local government departments, key professional unions, and the general public, and, following review of the outcomes from the analysis and consultation, led to three scenarios being refined and developed in more detail. After further consultation, these second stage scenarios were distilled into a final preferred masterplan.3

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Ȉ

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The Design Scenarios The first five scenarios all envisaged a considerable growth in the city but on the basis of different political-economic drivers and infrastructural investments (Figure 20.2): Ȉ Ring City: a low-density expansion of the city based on an unfettered market guided only by the construction of a major ring road circumventing the city. This scenario facilitates the creation of new commercial and industrial areas in an ad hoc manner, takes advantage of low peripheral land prices but requires a 234

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Ȉ

high initial investment in road infrastructure and has little or no relation to the historic city structure or to precepts of sustainable growth. Compact City: envisages a more interventionist state, restricting development within the existing city boundaries, but within this, largely leaves development to private individuals and small-scale developers utilising the 50,000 undeveloped plots that were distributed by the pre-war administration. Higher density development is proposed to accommodate the population increase including the development of upper floors on existing buildings and the intensification of the old city. It reduces travel and land take, albeit at the expense of far higher central land values. Linear City: directs major development to the northwest and south-east of the existing city based on rerouting the planned heavy rail to create two (rather than one) new stations at either end of the city, and establishing an efficient new rapid tram system to connect the two stations together. The scenario requires a very active state and significant investment in public transport, leading to mixed densities and a relatively condensed population. Satellite Towns: retains the existing city as it is and focuses on the development of two satellite towns adjacent to Karbala. In this scenario the existing city footprint accommodates the current population and its increase for several years whilst the two satellite towns are developed by major developers as semiautonomous eco-towns along garden city principles. Each satellite town would include its own attractions and amenities, but with the danger that Karbala itself would be undermined, not least from the outmigration of richer inhabitants to the new towns which would remain as satellites only. Orchard City: a solution based on an enhanced agroindustry. At present development in the northern

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(ii) Compact City

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(iii) Linear City

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(iv) Satellite Towns

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(v) Orchard City

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(iii) Revised Linear City

orchards, next to the city centre, is restricted by policy protecting agricultural land. This option proposes the creation of agricultural land to the south of the city (in the desert, irrigated from Lake Razzaza) and selective development to the south of Karbala in the form of a city extension. With strong economic benefits, and much needed accommodation close to the shrines, the new agricultural land will also protect the city from sand storms.

(ii) Renaissance City

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From the five initial highly conceptual scenarios, three equally radical but more refined and developed scenarios were created – Radial City, Renaissance City and Revised Linear City – leading eventually, and after further analysis and consultation to a Preferred ‘Hybrid’ Plan taking on elements of each of the previous schemes (Figures 20.3 and 20.4). This plan sets the shrines and old town at the centre of the city; proposes an ‘orchard’ park close to the shrines as a natural resource for pilgrims and local amenity and development

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around the old town into a series of identifiable quarters; a new mixed-use business district around the proposed railway station to the east; regeneration of the existing city footprint on the basis of the existing street pattern but overlaying it with a new system of main streets, squares and parks all designed to facilitate a new public transport system; and three new fully connected eco-towns for future expansion, with other land protected by a greenbelt around the city and new farmlands to protect Karbala from the desert. After submitting the preferred plan to the Iraqi Ministry of Municipalities and Public Works, in 2009 the work was used (by others) to inform a final city plan for adoption and implementation. The futures based design research that had informed the work was critical in allowing the authorities, through systematic inquiry, to understand the Karbala context and to discuss with local stakeholders the range of possible future directions for the city. It elicited new knowledge, not just that inherent in the various plans themselves and all the data that informed them, but also through the use of the various outputs from the process to test and tease out key stakeholder opinions in a context otherwise fraught with practical difficulties about how to plan the city. Thus through a design based method a systematic inquiry had been launched that itself both created knowledge and solved (or at least attempted to solve) the multiple complex design / planning problematics of Karbala. In this manner conceptual and creative design-based research can be a powerful force for exploring the most ‘wicked’ of urban problems (see Chapter 1). In particular such approaches allow those who use them to move above and beyond the confounding complexity of the survey data, and the technical, political and resource constraints that can too easily come to define such processes and that have the potential to tie researchers (and practitioners) up in knots before any productive work actually occurs. Certainly the insights from a design-based research process can contribute to the sum of human knowledge across urban scales, from that of the individual building up to the city scale, and beyond. 242

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But design itself can also be a subject for research, indeed much design methods research focuses on the processes of design – the designerly way of knowing – rather than on the outcomes. A second example, this time from Hong Kong, helps to illustrate this.

DESIGN AS RESEARCH, HONG KONG MEGA-PROJECTS In 1999 the then Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region called for the development of an Arts, Cultural and Entertainment district in Hong Kong. Following the announcement, in 2001 an International Concept Plan Competition was launched to invite conceptual designs for a 40-hectare part of the West Kowloon Reclamation. The competition aimed to promote Hong Kong as the premiere centre of arts, culture and entertainment in Asia, whilst the government brief for competition entrants suggested that the resulting district would be developed with reference to the competition winning scheme. The West Kowloon site provides one of the last great opportunities to create an architectural landmark of unmistakable distinction at the centre of Hong Kong’s metropolitan area on its famous Victoria Harbour. The task was therefore to create a development that would immediately enhance Hong Kong’s status and be a magnet for visitors from around the world as well as a natural focus for activities in the city. In 2002 the first prize went to a team from Foster & Partners and UCL’s Bartlett School of Planning with local partners, Nonometric Design & Planning. I led the UCL sub-team. Following the competition win (Figure 20.5), in 2003 the government in Hong Kong called for consortia to develop detailed masterplanning and development proposals based on the competition winning scheme for the proposed West Kowloon Cultural District (WKCD). In 2004, five consortia submitted proposals, including one formed

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by developers Cheung Kong Property Ltd and Sun Hung Kai Ltd with lead designers Foster & Partners. I acted as advisor to the team on planning and urban design matters alongside an extensive range of specialist consultants, and was therefore able to observe the whole design process from within. Space does not permit a full discussion of the design of either the competition winning or consortia proposals here, but in sum they encompassed three key elements:

Ȉ A diverse mix of uses – with an unrivalled critical mass of cultural and entertainment uses at their heart (Figure 20.6) to form a distinct new urban cultural quarter in three clusters. However, whilst the competition winning proposals comprised a total Gross Floor Area (GFA) on site of 695,000m2 – a figure driven by aesthetic volumetric factors – during the subsequent post-competition phase of the design, the GFA was doubled as commercial delivery factors

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came to the fore with the addition of substantial new residential development in a series of new high rise residential towers in the Eastern Gateway area. Ȉ A clear urban structure – incorporating a permeable urban form with a diversity of spatial experiences, a continuous promenade along the waterfront, a sequence of high quality public spaces, a legible route connecting the major ‘public’ uses, and good connections to the surrounding streets and facilities, all mediated in a deliberately non-traditional continuous mega-structure. By Hong Kong standards this suggested an urban form that was low rise and low density and topped by an extensive urban park, contrasting deliberately with the dominant podium and tower block forms of Hong Kong. Instead the proposed form was ‘layered’ horizontally with different uses and movement systems across its different levels. Ȉ Landmark architecture – to establish the public significance of the development. A great canopy over the complex was proposed as a signature architectural feature designed to be highly visible from Hong Kong Island and Victoria Harbour but also providing protection from inclement weather (e.g. typhoons); an adjusted microclimate for the sheltered spaces; an inside/outside sensory experience with the canopy protecting an all year around park (Figure 20.7); and a strong image of iconic potential.

Cultural facilities Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI) Museum of Design (MOD) Children’s Interactive Museum (CIM) Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) 2,000-seat Lyric Theatre 800-seat Drama Theatre 400-seat Experimental Theatre Art Exhibition Centre (AEC) Artists Village Xiqu Centre (theatres, academy and gallery) School of Design Creative Industries Centre Public Art programme Culinary School University teaching facilities

Entertainment facilities 10,000 seat Major Performance venue (MPV) 5,000 seat Water Amphitheatre Book City Black Box Performance Spaces Media Gallery 360 degree cinema Multiplex cinemas Programmed street ’‡”ˆ‘”ƒ…‡ƒ…”‘••–Š‡Ƥ˜‡ piazzas Restaurants and cafes Extensive retail Markets 30 hectare public parkland 2km Waterfront Promenade

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unrivalled opportunity to understand design processes at this scale and international profile, in effect through embedding an ‘academic accomplice’ (myself) within the design team; both directly participating in and observing and critiquing the design process from the inside.

Reflections from an Academic Accomplice Following technical assessment and extensive public consultation, major concerns were expressed over the cost; the nature and purpose of the canopy; the value of such a significant new cultural district to the city; the extent of the non-cultural uses proposed (to cross-subsidise the cultural ones); the reclamation of the harbour for development; and, most significantly, over the size of the single-packaged development that the proposals of the various consortia gave rise to. Whist Foster’s eventually triumphed in 2011 with an unrelated masterplan, the earlier process provided an 244

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The original proposals attempted to capture and reinforce what makes Hong Kong special, and in a significant way reinforce that sense of place. If built, WCKD certainly had (and still has) the potential to place Hong Kong on the world stage as a premiere venue for arts, culture and entertainment (Figure 20.8). For this ‘academic accomplice’ however, a number of inter-related lines of reflection that became apparent during the course of masterplanning the competition-winning and subsequent consortium projects

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were of greatest interest. Although space does not permit their exposition here (see Carmona 2006), from these it is possible to draw the following conclusions about large scale international masterplanning processes:

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Ȉ Whilst the experience began to hint at how dominant Western urban design principles might be re-formulated – at least in Hong Kong – it was not possible to draw robust new principles from this one experience alone. It was possible to reconfirm that urban design norms and principles are culturally specific, and the seeming ‘truths’ often preached in the mainstream Western urban design literature should be questioned and rigorously tested in different contexts before being applied. Ȉ In an age of globalisation and globe-trotting ‘starchitects’, contemporary international design projects can best capture a sense of local distinctiveness through their response to site and context and the resulting

urban form, rather than through their detailed architectural expression. Ȉ A new public space tradition is developing in Southeast Asia where none existed before, and this is often very different to that in the West. The financial power and delivery know-how of the private sector is being used to deliver this, requiring that creative means need to be devised to safeguard the long-term public interest in these new ‘public’ spaces, whilst still encouraging private investment in the new public realm. Ȉ In such circumstances, delivering an economically viable development solution is highly compatible with, and will usually be a pre-requisite to, delivering a high quality functional and deliverable urban design solution. Ȉ Power relationships within the development team do not follow a standard model, and may even vary at different times within the development process;

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nevertheless urban design considerations come to the fore when and if long-term value factors are considered. Ȉ International urban design competitions are highly resource intensive; increasingly it may be that only the best resourced and politically adept design and development teams are able to successfully compete at this level. As the first conclusion suggests, it will always be difficult to draw universally robust and enduring conclusions from just one quite specific, even unique, project. Nevertheless, immersion in projects of all scales and sizes can allow researchers to gain key insights into fundamental issues with broader application both locally, and in terms of 246

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internationally transferable urban design practices. Such methods demonstrate the value of researchers engaging directly in the urban design process in order that their reflections about the design process can be informed by first-hand experiences, and not just by the detached secondhand reflections of others, or the remote, and sometimes ideologically clouded, literature.

CONCLUSION Returning to Duffy’s (2005: 1) assertion that ‘“Design” is not “Research” and never can be. Nor is “Research” the same as “Design”’, the discussion in this chapter suggests that this

TIPS FOR RESEARCHERS:

perhaps over-simplifies the true picture. In fact designing can be an integral part of a research process, either in isolation, or together with other methods in the sciences, social sciences and humanities. Indeed, there are likely to be many ways in which the designer’s way of exploring the world and its problems can offer valuable insights that will be quite different to those that other researchers bring. In this way the researcher can either contribute directly or work with others to impose this designerly way of thinking on urban problems. In closing we can therefore confidently amend and extend Duffy’s declaration as follows:

Ȉ Fully integrating yourself into a design team can maximise your knowledge of processes, giving you the inside-track on debates and decisions, but can also undermine your ability to make a detached assessment of the experience. Different research projects will require a different balance of perspectives. Ȉ For full time researchers, engaging with projects can be a valuable experience, getting you out of your comfort zone and giving you insights that detached researchers are unable to obtain. Ȉ Find ways to make notes / observations as the project commences and save evidence of key project developments. A project diary can be a useful approach. Ȉ Design can be particularly powerful when counterpoised with other research methods that offer a more straightforwardly scientific perspective on the problems at hand.

‘Design’ is not ‘research’, although exploring ‘design as re•‡ƒ”…Šǯ‘ơ‡”•ƒŽ‡‰‹–‹ƒ–‡ƒ†‹’‘”–ƒ–Ƥ‡Ž†‘ˆ™‘”Ǥ‘”‹• ‘research’ the same as ‘design, although ‘research as design’ can provide a powerful means to address urban problematics. In other words, whilst the vast majority of design process in urban design (as elsewhere) will not involve or be the subject of research processes, if appropriately constructed with focus, rigour, and intent, the process of urban designing can quite legitimately be used to explore some of the city’s most wicked research problems whilst also providing a focus for research itself (see Chapter 7).

ENDNOTES

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Collected by ICTR.

3

More properly, an urban design framework.

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The UDS team was led by David Chapman.

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Crafting a methodology for urban design in development: between research, pedagogy and practice William Hunter and Anna Schulenburg

the global south, where the contestation over land security, access to basic resources, and shelter compound the struggle for a right to the city. Urban design has been characterised as a practice that aspires to ‘create the feedback loops between the different forces that were independently moulding the built environment’ (Mehrotra 2012) and in this respect has been seen as the bridge discipline that could influence or at least align with policy in a more dynamic fashion than, for example, planning. Thus whilst some have argued that urban design has been consumed or commoditised for decades into a version of ‘big architecture’ by the controlling arm of private capitalist development, it may equally now have re-emerged as that comprehensive ‘field that includes new approaches that deal with the peri-urban and regional scales, including infrastructure and its relationship to places, people and natural systems’ (Mehrotra 2012), in essence prioritising the city, people and landscape over buildings. INTRODUCTION Along these lines, something unique happened at the It is about how we equip the new generation of planners, Royal Institute of British Architects in 1999. That year the architects, and urban designers, both in the global north and RIBA Gold Medal was not given to an individual, but to an •‘—–ŠǡŠ‘™™‡‡“—‹’–Š‡–‘‡‰ƒ‰‡™‹–Š†‹ơ‡”‡–…‘†‹–‹‘• entire city – Barcelona. In accepting the award, the architect –Šƒ–”‡“—‹”‡…‘’Ž‡–‡Ž›†‹ơ‡”‡–‘†‡Ž•‘ˆ’”ƒ…–‹…‡ǤȋƒŠ—ƒŽ Oriol Bohigas outlined an urban manifesto aimed mainly at the future of Barcelona, but arguably also related to ‡Š”‘–”ƒ‹ƒ‹–‡”˜‹‡™™‹–Š†‰ƒ”‹‡–‡”•‡ȋ͢͢͠͡ȌȌ cities throughout the world. His charge, as reprinted in the There are large challenges facing the discourse and practice Architectural Review in September 1999 carried the title of urban design, especially in its relation to development in ͡͠ ‘‹–• ˆ‘” ƒ ”„ƒ ‡–Š‘†‘Ž‘‰› and stressed themes There are large challenges facing the discourse and practice of urban design, especially in the global south where questions of land security, access to basic resources, and social marginalisation compound struggles over the right to the city. Hence there is an imperative to reconstruct a new methodology for spatial production through the critical deconstructing and juxtaposition of urban design discourse with that of development. This methodology provides a principle-based framework for thinking about, and acting to re-shape, urban processes in a manner that seeks to forge a clear and useful bridge between design research, pedagogy and practice. Though grounded in a theoretical approach, the process of testing and adapting this methodology through studio projects and fieldwork in collaboration with communities has been critical.

Figure 21.1 Informal settlements such as this in Mumbai, India, call for new thinking on urban design

of public space, amenities, and identity and concepts like commonality, coordination, and governability. Drawing attention to the political praxis and historical citizendriven syntax that dictates city development however, Bohigas reverted to arguments on aesthetic quality, deeming architecture as a ‘prophecy for the city’ and ‘architecture as project of the city’. To his credit, he was questioning what kind of architecture this might be, although did not critique the use of architecture as a means in itself to address urban questions. By promoting architecture as a form-driven apparatus for city making, Bohigas largely ignored the relationship between political and social forces that arguably control, or certainly underpin all urban development considerations, in so doing falling into the trap of determinism. Furthermore, his framework was clearly situated in the global north, and thereby failed to acknowledge the contexts and challenges facing development in the global south where the notion of urban design is largely absent in the institutional and practical sense and where different urban trends are surfacing. With increased urbanisation and the 250

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challenges of informal settlements in the developing world and the capacity it holds for igniting re-thinking about how cities develop, there is an opportunity to reconstruct a new methodology for urban design in development (Figure 21.1). In addressing the pressing urban issues facing the developing world in the twenty-first century, a truly reconfigured urban methodology can only be unlocked following a critical deconstruction and juxtaposition of urban design discourse against the rhetoric of development. Subsequently this might best be understood through transcription, first, into the pedagogical arena with the training of informed reflective practitioners and second into the operational modes of critical urban practice. Such a methodology has been pursued through the theoretical and practical work conducted during the MSc Building and Urban Design in Development (BUDD) at The Bartlett, a course whose own trans-disciplinary nature, simulated studio projects, and international fieldtrips contribute to the education of new urban actors through a reconfiguring of approaches to urban design processes (see also Chapter 3).

JUXTAPOSING THEORETICAL DISCOURSES Perhaps the most fundamental and certainly the first urbanistic paradigm that emerged from the global south was that of ‘Human Settlements’. At its heart this approach saw ‘man in totality – in work, in play, at home, and in relationship with nature and the environment. Its objective is to ensure the spread of development efforts – the quality of life – to the people. The major components are to promote productivity, through spatial considerations, and public service delivery systems, for human welfare’ (Carlson 1976: xvii). Concerned foremost with humanity and the production of space, the Human Settlements paradigm dealt with the transformation of natural and man-made environments, an act firmly linked to the realms of architecture, urban design and planning and

followed by a framework of definitive ‘moments’ (design episodes) illustrated alongside key ‘operational modes’ (types of action) that provide an interpretative guide for practitioners in taking a critical stance on how they enter into and manoeuvre through design and development processes (spatial and non-spatial). Together they outline a way of thinking about urban intervention processes that seeks to reassemble previously deconstructed notions of development and design discourse and forge a clear and useful bridge between research and practice. Though grounded in a theoretical approach, the process of testing and adapting this methodology through studio projects and fieldwork in collaboration with communities has been absolutely critical.

Conceptual Principles and Aims

Inclusive, trans-disciplinary and divergent This definition speaks to both process and outcomes. It is intended to facilitate a comprehensive imagination and investigation of changes and transformations and implies a practice that aligns with public interest; the collective will and voices of traditionally marginalised individuals. Urban design should not merely be viewed as a specialised, isolated, and object-driven discipline, but should instead be re-conceived as a field whose processes and outcomes are ‘inclusive’, ‘trans-disciplinary’ and ‘divergent’: Ȉ It should be inclusive in that the process should focus on and welcome input from the multiple local factions 251

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For any design methodology to be digested at both the levels of academia and practice, it should follow a clear and concise definition of design, one underpinned by a set of defining principles and aims. Here, ‘design in development’ is conceptually defined as: ‘the programmatic attempt to creatively strategize in a specific time and space, the transformative potential of just and inclusive critical interventions’.

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thus making it clear that ‘urbanism is about development and development is about urbanism’ (d’Auria et al. 2010). The approach sought to challenge pre-existing paradigms and principles of normative, regulatory-driven architecture, urban design, and planning, building upon the failures of Modernism and by doing so replacing outdated frameworks that could no longer offer a clear mechanism for development, especially in the global south. Human settlements thinking distorted prior concepts, reconfiguring and (re) introducing new elements into a framework influenced by and also influencing the diverse practices and knowledge that increasingly focused on the rapid and schizophrenic urban tendencies of the global south (d’Auria et al. 2010). However, after reaching universal acceptance through global institutional adoption, the framework inevitably became the subject of criticism and debate. Yet, the rooted values and principles of a multi-disciplinary and holistic outlook are still central to crafting new methodological thinking that combines development discourse with that of design processes. Such thinking inherently embeds a social, economic and political perspective on urban design research and practice, and naturally leads to a practice of urban design that fosters the idea of inclusive environments through recognition of the diversity in cities and the need to renegotiate power dynamics in such situations. This conception has roots in emerging critical urban theory which places emphasis on ‘the politically and ideologically mediated, socially contested and therefore malleable character of urban space’ (Brenner 2012). This theory ‘involves the critique of ideology (including socialscientific ideologies) and the critique of power, inequality, injustice, and exploitation’ (Brenner 2012). Characterised by an antagonistic and holistic reach, critical urban theory represents a fundamental shift beyond mainstream and older urban theory, implying that there are other potential forms of urbanism. The methodology that emerges from this consists of a number of core conceptual principle-driven aims. These are

Figure 21.2 Junior researchers ‘enquiring’ and documenting a community in Bangkok, Thailand

and individuals that would benefit from collaborative efforts leading towards an intervention (Figure 21.2). Ȉ The process should likewise carry a trans-disciplinary ethos where professionals with varied technical and social knowledge converge on a problematic and work together. Ȉ And it should be divergent in that it is based on a critical analysis of the forces that shape the process, avoiding a status quo treatment of a contextual situation and therefore offering a truly opposing vision of how development could unfold.

Refusal, curiosity and innovation Identifying such root principles of urban design allows exploration of the discipline within the milieu of contested development while confronting any disciplinary bias or confusion. Along with the triad mentioned above and whilst being mindful of the cautionary argument against urban design as mere form-driven practice, we consider the dialecticism between the physical and the symbolic. Beyond the rooted outcomes of our tangible actions, it is imperative to acknowledge the broader implications of our roles as urban practitioners. Questioning such factors as identity, typology and scale (impact) indicates a move towards a genuine spatial agency, one that feeds on the corporeal and the figurative. In 252

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this way the tangible act gives way to, or serves, a deeper more transformative societal cause. The writing of noted feminist and social activist bell hooks is interesting and useful here. She draws from a series of reflections on transformation as a process of ‘rupture’ from dominant ideologies and discrimination that emphasises scale of the individual emancipation, collective action and structural changes (hooks 1990). To simplify her work for our purpose, two aspects are of relevance; ‘refusal’ and ‘curiosity’. This echoes Foucault’s own moral triad of ‘refusal’, ‘curiosity’ and ‘innovation’; where refusal means to not accept as selfevident the things that are proposed to us, where we need to be curious and analyse and know because we cannot accomplish anything without reflection and understanding, and where we need to innovate and seek out in our reflections those things that have never been thought or imagined (Dean 1994). For hooks the aspects of refusal and curiosity are positioned with rebellion and perhaps with critical caution and troublemaking (hooks 2000). If we apply these principle aims to urban design practice: Ȉ Refusal can signal a psychological and structural repositioning of the way certain social groups are treated Ȉ Curiosity can be seen as an act of recognising diversity and letting go of assumptions that prevent solidarity Ȉ Innovation can point to tactical coalitions concerned with implementing a creative and critically alternative rethinking.

Dissensus To briefly take these principles further, the methodology we are professing looks also to Rancière’s concept of ‘dissensus’ as a key element (see Chapter 3). This is a mechanism through which to generate strategic coalitions in a certain time and context in order to address the causes of marginality. Similar to the idea of ‘rupture’ stemming from a reading of bell hooks, dissensus provokes a disruption in the order of things. It highlights new subjects and connected heterogeneous objects

that can challenge the perception and the representation Such a position aims at revealing dissensus along the of cultural identity and hierarchical forms (Rancière and lines that ‘this connectedness does not signal a homogenous Corcoran 2010). unity or a monolith totality, but rather a contingent, fragile coalition, building in an effort to pursue common radical libertarian and democratic goals’ (Rancière and Corcoran 2010). Reconstructing an aspect of urban design on the basis of dissensus might point to instances of deliberation in the process of design that contests consensus and builds on ‘conflictual participation’ (Miessen 2010) rather than an idealistic version of participation. Conflict here is not to be seen as a form of protest or provocation, ‘but rather, as micro-political practice through which the participant becomes an active agent who insists on being an actor in the force field they are facing’ (Rancière and Corcoran 2010) (Figure 21.3).

Participation Figure 21.3 A community design charrette unfolds in Bangkok, Thailand. Student researchers observe and guide community members of all ages to map out their settlement

Participation is typically seen as a virtue and its relationship with design has been explored in a variety of ways in theory and practice. Thus, especially in the context of urban development, the involvement of users has been supported as a means to 21.

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Figure 21.4 Maps drawn by community members illustrate a mixture of current development, individual and collective desires, and obstacles. Everyday focal points and concerns serve as a ‘critique’ and catalyst for contextual and resident-driven action

produce more responsive outputs. As such, participatory design initiatives have often addressed issues related to the physical properties of intervention, consulting residents about the appropriate characteristics, qualities and positioning of physical improvements. The approach has been championed because of perceived social and institutional benefits, because engaging users in the process of design facilitates a sense of ownership, and because it is seen as an effective and costefficient mechanism to enable design interventions to be responsive and well maintained. However, this instrumental approach to participation has also been criticised for addressing only the results of urban problems, whilst leaving the root causes in cities of the global south unchallenged. Nevertheless, despite the debate, if carefully constructed in its aims and procedures, processes of participation can and should serve as a basis for actions that lead to transformative intervention (Figure 21.4).

A Guide for Action: Moments and Operational Modes of a Methodology Together, the consortium of principles and concepts above establishes the necessary underlying value system for a methodology of inclusive urban design with the potential to encourage transformative practices through unbiased design processes. To link this value system with applicable actions, we will now illustrate a guide to distinguishable, yet overlapping ‘moments’ and alternative ways in which practitioners can operate within the design process.

Moments Within an overall methodology, the process of design within a development rationale can be conceived and organised through the framing of four moments: ‘retrospection’, ‘description’, ‘possibility’, and ‘activation’. Though distinct, these are not mutually exclusive, and while they may appear to signal a sequential procession, the nature of each is defined

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on the basis of what occurs during that moment rather than when the moment occurs in a design process. Identifying this framework of moments seeks to offer practitioners a capacity for locating themselves within a design process at any given point in time and in order to clarify their position and enhance their potential to act appropriately in the midst of known and unknown challenges: Ȉ Retrospection, entails looking backwards in a contemplative manner where effort is placed on recognising components of a situation in order to decipher the implicit nature and production of space. The objective is to understand how a situation or present condition was constructed. Ȉ Description, involves efforts of further classifying, representing and explaining the physical and nonphysical components that embody a situation. Analysing the present condition and its visible and latent qualities can reveal windows of opportunity and particular entry points for strategic capitalisation. Ȉ Possibility, acknowledges those places of opportunity where transformation is capable of existing and defines an exploration that hinges and expands on present potentials and social practices in a critical manner. It is based on feasible interpretations as well as adaptive designerly insight. Ȉ Activation is the obligatory stance, especially in situations where polarised visions threaten local contingents, to instigate challenge through a continuous dialogue with the conflictive nature and dynamism of the production of space. Interaction in this moment is at its most heightened. Naturally the thresholds between these four moments are not always as straightforward as the distinctions suggest. In reality processes are revolving (Figure 21.5). Practitioners continuously backtrack as well as fast-forward, both types

Figure 21.5 The revolving and overlapping nature of moments and operational modes. Š‡‡–Š‘†‘Ž‘‰›‹•†‹”‡…–‡†›‡–ƪ‡š‹„Ž‡‹ƒƒ––‡’––‘…ƒ’–—”‡ƒ”‡ƒŽ‹–›Ǧ„ƒ•‡† spectrum for strategic design thinking and action

This notion of acknowledging opportunities and identifying applicability

Ȉ Refraining, recalls Giddens’ explanation that ‘agency means being able to intervene in the world, or to refrain from such intervention, with the effect of influencing a specific process or state of affairs’ (1979). When applied to design, the concept of ‘refraining’ might

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Operational modes

has links to our creative imagination and the potential of craftsmanship (to exude skilful mastery) and leads us to the methodology’s modus operandi. Similar to the grouping of moments, there is a multiplicity in the ‘operational modes’ employed by designers and termed here as ‘refraining’, ‘enquiring’, ‘critiquing’, and ‘resisting’:

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of manoeuvre brought on by internal or external forces. This resurrection and reconfiguring of information sets is inherent in design and development processes and these evocative moments are designed for the capacity to build upon one another. It suggests that if we critically ‘slow down’ our actions to think more strategically about where they stem from and where they are meant to lead us, we might uncover and better comprehend opportunities for identifying entry points and the successful applicability of interventions.

seem foreign as it suggests that a practitioner should consider restrained actions, or not intervening at all. This follows a caution against object-driven responses to problems, in order to avoid being complicit with dominant systems (economic, political, professional) in favour of prioritising collective claims. It could be seen as a consistent humility following critical discovery. Ȉ Enquiring, means employing a particular way of thinking, communicating and reflecting that articulates and explores windows of opportunity. By questioning the status quo of conventional practices and force factors through the embracing of imagination and craftsmanship skills, actors (students and practitioners) can render the invisible visible. This exposes potentially catalytic interventions and collectively-derived design proposals to situations of uncertainty, instability, and uniqueness. Ȉ Critiquing, calls for the acutely opposing deployment of imagination and craftsmanship skills in order to question and understand the complexities of contested situations. This convictional and reflective process offers options of speculating, mobilising, and demonstrating the potential of design alternatives that

contribute to inclusive transformation. In this sense it can be conceived of as a balance between the physical and symbolic, where alternative manifestations might unfold next to a direct and complementary rhetoric. Ȉ Resisting, directly responds with the intent of reducing unjust domination. It entails taking full advantage of imagination and craftsmanship, perhaps even a level of sacrifice. In this instance, there exists a condition of possibility in which design becomes an emancipator (in the bell hooks sense as noted earlier) using critical skill sets and collaboration to promote opposition through feasible alternatives. It collectively questions spatial production not as objective provision, but as a strategic arena for accommodating the convergence of struggle, policy and the future. Of course situations do not always afford us the luxury of time and resources. This framework should therefore serve as acknowledgement that actions have particular traits that can be advantageous to a process in more intriguing ways than a conventional sequence of moments and modes that offer less flexibility in addressing major challenges of practice and development.

ADOPTION FOR DESIGN RESEARCH, PEDAGOGY AND PRACTICE By accepting that actions have particular advantageous traits, then we may also accept that each action has a particular outcome. If these principles and operational modes of design can be extracted in a representational, symbolic and autonomous manner, then their validity for wider application enhances. By validating this broader worth, these principles and modes can serve as legitimate design research approaches in the sense that they are ‘signs of a design attitude that tries to break away from the design constraints of the more common design practice 256

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and from the constraints of scientifically correct usage and interpretation of data’ (Janssens 2012: 161). As research is as much about experimenting as it is an attempt to answer a problematic, the principles and modes established here recognise degrees of inaccuracy in design processes. They address this expected inaccuracy by allowing flexibility and movement as one would approach a project, through operations that can be refined and used over and over again. The deliberate universal language used to define the set of principles and operational modes helps to secure the methodology’s reach within and beyond urban design, through concepts that relate to systematic research by way of forging critical rigour and ‘poetic drive’ (Wang 2002: 105). Kant’s idea of poetic drive is what sets designerly thinking apart from other forms of research and ways of testing these methods. In design education, studio environments have a potential to be a ‘highly effective venue for exploring agency and fostering stewardship, especially through a pedagogy that invites students to take action in places and with populations underserved or even unaware of the potential benefits design can have on their environment’ (Crisman 2010: 32). In our own courses, we champion the incorporation and relationship between simulated studio projects based on live (real), challenging cases in collaboration with local actors and subsequent parallel field-based projects. Here, the digesting and application of the design in development methodology comes to fruition, first introduced and investigated in the studio where an extended timeline allows students to come to terms with methodological complexities, then tested on the ground in contested situations (Figure 21.6). Rather than focusing on a conventional design brief, project processes usually begin from an angle of retrospection where the mapping of actor relationships and physical urbanism highlights the quantitative and qualitative attributes of a particular context. Following the enquiring through mapping phase, the simulation deepens into a descriptive socio-spatial analysis hoping to ground the investigation in

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the perspective of the community and the challenges facing their daily lives through creative and loose interactions or what Nabeel Hamdi (2010) refers to as ‘serious games’. Inherent in this pedagogical approach is the formulating of a reflective interpretation of transformation at various

scales, which places emphasis again on the adoption of working theory and the notion of agency. In this instance, the methodology serves to help students locate various entry points linked to the design challenge (Figure 21.7). If this phase is explored and controlled in a critical manner, 257

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Figure 21.6 In this map of the Dharavi slum in Mumbai, India, red lines dictate the imposing sector divisions of the Dharavi Redevelopment Plan on the dense urban fabric, while the yellow lines represent a more realistic and community-driven vision of new area delineation (see also Figure 21.7). The process of mapping planned divides gives immediate stimulus for an alternative ‘possibility’ to emerge

Figure 21.7 This community-led proposal adopts an activist (resisting) approach to urban design. To highlight the resulting impact ‘ˆ–Š‡Šƒ”ƒ˜‹‡†‡˜‡Ž‘’‡–Žƒȋ•‡‡ƒŽ•‘ ‹‰—”‡͢͡ǤͦȌǡ”‡†Ž‹‡•ƒ”‡Ƥ”•–Ž‹–‡”ƒŽŽ›’ƒ‹–‡†‘–Š‡‰”‘—†ƒ†„—‹Ž†‹‰•™Š‹Ž‡ community members paint alternative paths that show a more thoughtful and appropriate area frameworka

Figure 21.8 The documenting of open spaces in Dharavi, Mumbai allows for questions about the scale and feasibility of various interventions to be addressed. Thinking in a patient yet proactive manner enables an incremental approach to development that is in keeping with grounded realities and allows communities to progress and upgrade at a manageable pace

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TIPS FOR RESEARCHERS: Ȉ Do not accept the status quo, as it may not offer the potential for a truly transformational and inclusive vision to unfold. Ȉ Welcome input from a diverse selection of collaborators, both professional and non-professional. This will lead to informed knowledge exchange. Ȉ Refrain from assuming the solution to an urban problematic needs to be a physical proposal. Ȉ Think slowly, yet strategically, and critically locate yourself within a process. This will help determine the potency of your actions. Ȉ Adopt a method of enquiry that is flexible enough to reveal truths, and that can be refined over time based on understanding its faults.

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the determining of possible appropriate strategic proposals will become much clearer. Outcomes may vary to include schemes for addressing housing typologies, the public realm, as well as social programmes, but their design typically addresses the challenges and physical and temporal character of informal settlements. Such abstract exercises have great value in understanding situations, although there is no substitute for being on the ground, confronting the sometimes overwhelming realities of development in the global south, including bureaucratic institutional politics, resource depravation and social exclusion. Fieldwork experience in such a developing context thus serves as the ultimate platform of praxis where theory, methodologies and tools are acted upon (Figure 21.8). Students encounter a multitude of surprises and are forced to reconsider their ethical and professional stance in the face of cultural nuance, but are significantly better equipped to do so through the prior questioning of positions and values that lead to design interventions which are ‘capable of distinguishing between progressive and regressive social change’ (Zimmerman 2009: 166). The methodological framework we have set out originated as a response to the sorts of complex conditions rife in the global south where particular skills and approaches are required. However it is also intended to evoke a broader recalibration of urban design research and practice that can assist individuals and teams as they undertake such work through projects, either conceptual or in the field, anywhere.

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An evidence-based approach to designing new cities: the English New Towns revisited Kayvan Karimi and Laura Vaughan

This chapter introduces an analytical study of New Towns in England, aiming to provide a deeper, evidence-based understanding of their planning as well as their social reality. The core methodology of the study is based on ‘space syntax’, which uses configurational analysis of the spatial network to investigate the performance of urban systems and their socio-economic attributes. The chapter scrutinises the major flaws of the English New Towns and proposes an explanation for why they are not functioning as well as their historic, evolved counterparts. The study provides lessons that could be used for re-designing and re-shaping New Towns in the UK and elsewhere.

THE CHALLENGES OF BUILDING NEW TOWNS Urbanism is confronting remarkable challenges today. Current statistics show that over half of the rapidly-growing world population lives in an urban environment. Rapidly-growing cities of the developing world, from China to the MiddleEast and South America, are building at incredible rates. In Shanghai alone, several dozen new towns have been planned to accommodate an average of 800,000 by 2020 (Grootens and Hartog 2010). The most common answer to all these challenges, at least in the fastest-growing part of the world, is building more cities and building them from scratch.

Whilst building cities from scratch has become unprecedented in terms of its speed and magnitude since the middle of the last century, it is not a new phenomenon and has been with us from ancient times. The biggest change has been that rather than evolving relatively slowly, these settlements develop rapidly as a systematic method for coping with population growth. The resulting settlements experience different fortunes, and a large number of them struggle to compete with their older, organically grown counterparts. A fundamental understanding of the causes of the failure of previous generations of planned settlements is not only essential for the upgrading and regeneration of existing new towns, but is fundamental for developing the new towns of tomorrow. This chapter studies a large sample of English New Towns in order to understand why so few of them have succeeded in their aims. A preliminary survey of measurable factors such as property values and commercial activity shows them significantly weaker in comparison to similarly sized towns dating from earlier periods, and a review of social conditions and indices of multiple deprivation ranks these towns at the bottom of the leagues of towns and cities in the country (Gardiner 2004). As they have a relatively common socioeconomic profile and development history, we propose to analyse whether the relative failure of the New Towns is also bound up with their planning and detailed design.

SPACE SYNTAX: THE CORE METHODOLOGY FOR THE STUDY OF NEW TOWNS In order to have a more objective understanding of the New Towns, and to compare them with other city types, space syntax, a set of methods and techniques for the analysis of spatial layouts and linking them with human use, can be used in conjunction with other methods (see Chapter 14). An understanding of how the public realm, shaped by urban form, can create the potential for encounters and copresence between different types of social groups, is essential to achieve a more nuanced understanding of cities and settlement patterns, since only thus is progress made from the common assumption that communities are defined by their spatial boundaries. Many years of space syntax research have shown that in complex societies containing many and varied communities, public space has a different role to play than a straightforward correspondence with the society that it contains. Rather, the urban environment can be structured so as to better enable encounters between different social groups, both spatial and transpatial (Vaughan and Arbaci 2011). The primary space syntax technique involves urban grid analysis to reveal patterns of spatial accessibility. In this method all publicly accessible spaces in the urban system are mapped with a network of intersecting ‘axes’, which represent the major alignments of visibility and movement in the city. The map can be analysed further, using computers and graph algorithms to establish the relative ease of reaching one point of the system to another. This configurational analysis of the urban system, translated into a diagram (showing the most accessible spaces in red and least accessible spaces in blue; or from dark to light in a greyscale image), creates a clear image of the hierarchy of urban spaces, and the patterns of potential movement and use in any urban system. Underlying the image are numerical values, which are used to make statistical analysis of spatial/social relationships.

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The important role of spatial accessibility in urban settlements has been widely documented (Hillier, Penn, Hanson et al. 1993, Hillier 1996a). Previous research has shown that urban areas are largely shaped by patterns of pedestrian, cyclist and vehicular movement. Previous studies using space syntax methods also demonstrate that patterns of movement are, in turn, strongly influenced by the layout of the ‘movement network’ – the way that the system of roads, walkways, squares, and open spaces is joined together. Knowledge of the patterns of spatial accessibility is therefore valuable because these patterns help forecast movement patterns that cannot be observed directly; and in this regard spatial accessibility can be measured in different ways. If the patterns of accessibility are calculated in respect to the whole system, for instance the entire layout of a town, the analysis is called ‘global accessibility’, and if these patterns are calculated within a defined locality, it is called ‘local accessibility’. Further analysis that considers route segments provides a finer detail understanding of the spatial system.

COMPARING THE ENGLISH NEW TOWNS In the UK, the term ‘New Town’ refers predominantly to the towns which were developed after the Second World War under the New Town Act of 1946. This Act allowed the government to designate areas as New Towns and introduce development control functions to be handled by New Town Development Corporations. Three generations of the towns were built between 1946 and the late 1970s. The initial concepts behind modern New Towns emerged in the beginning of the twentieth century from urbanists such as Ebenezer Howard and Raymond Unwin, who developed the idea of Garden Cities. Garden Cities were a social experiment in community building that paradoxically proposed a ‘rational’ plan for a ‘utopian’ form of urbanity, providing in one place the best that the city and country could offer.

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and town centres (Figure 22.1), together with characterless streets and impoverished residential areas. Thus, as a charity official based in one of the New Towns commented, their ‘high density large estates with poor amenities, mainly designed for the car not the pedestrian are turning into breeding grounds for petty crime and drug abuse’ (BBC 2002). Even on the relatively successful Milton Keynes, Jonathan Glancey of The Guardian writes: ‘For all its greenery, cycle tracks, pedestrian paths, bridleways, ospreys, millions of trees and 800 species of moth, the car here is king, queen and all princes … Just where is that town centre?’ (Glancey 2006). A statistical comparison among all local authorities of England, using Indices of Multiple Deprivation (IMD), indicates that almost all of the New Towns are at the bottom of national league tables, with the exception of those located in a particularly wealthy region. Even more revealing is the result of comparing the IMD for the New Towns with that of their own counties: in most cases they are significantly more deprived than other settlements in the area (Gardiner 2004). Despite the statistical limitations of such comparisons – and the fact that the New Towns were from the start inhabited by a relatively large proportion of socially deprived inhabitants – these facts still help to substantiate the perception that the New Towns have problems in common that distinguish them from other types of settlement, and that are encompassed in their disproportionate social problems. A House of Commons enquiry into the New Towns pointed to a fundamental problem with the design and planning of these places, specifically, their ‘dispersed nature’, ‘low density’, heavy reliance on cars, and most specifically the separation of cars and pedestrians as well as the lack of natural surveillance on dwellings (House of Commons 2002). The report emphasised that the design of the New Towns is inappropriate for the twenty-first century, their infrastructure is deteriorating, and all have social and economic problems. It specifically refers to the failure of residential areas in New Towns to provide natural surveillance due to their Neighbourhood Unit and Radburn layout concepts.

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Howard’s ideas were subsequently taken up in the US and indirectly informed one of the most influential concepts of the twentieth century – the ‘Neighbourhood Unit’ (Perry 1929). In parallel the UK ‘homes fit for heroes’ programme was focused on creating the first significant phase of municipal housing following the Tudor Walters Report (Swenarton 1981). The importation of the Garden City via the Neighbourhood Unit back to the UK, and realised in the form of the New Towns, can be seen as part of the cultural interplay between US and UK architects throughout the twentieth century (Fraser and Kerr 2007). Abercrombie’s Plan for London (1944) – with its proposal to move about 1.5 million people from London to new and expanded towns – and similar plans for the Clyde Valley in Glasgow and elsewhere, reflected the strong will of the time to confine the uncontrolled sprawl of large cities (Abercrombie 1943). History shows that for the first generation of settlers the move was generally a positive one, providing not only better housing, but also better education and improvements to working and living conditions. However, social problems emerged in some of the first New Towns, where construction was often rushed and inhabitants were generally plucked out of their established communities with little ceremony. The first generation towns reached their initial growth targets in the 1970s and the development corporations used to set them up were dissolved and their assets disposed of. The rented housing was transferred to the local authority, and other assets went to the Commission for the New Towns in England, or similar organisations in Wales and Scotland. From 1979 on, politicians saw the New Towns as a socialist experiment to be discontinued, and by 1990 all the development corporations had been dissolved. By the end of the twentieth century it became apparent that the New Town solution was failing almost everywhere with problems of unemployment and social deprivation at the fore. With a few exceptions, New Towns are still not regarded as favourable places to live; perceptions that are not helped by their underused, poorly integrated public spaces

Figure 22.1 The walk from the main train station to the centre of Harlow New Town shows that the lack of provision for walking has forced people to create their own pathways to the town centre. There, the character of the streets has been reduced to only vehicular or cycle routes, and there is no frontage to the streets. The town centre is well hidden from both motorists and pedestrians and has been treated only as a destination

A follow-up enquiry (House of Commons 2008) concluded that New Towns have special problems and criticised the UK Government for neglecting their particular regeneration requirements. This second report recognised the urgent

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and on-going need for research into new Towns and urged everyone to learn from the past: ‘It would be an act of folly not to spend a small sum on trying to learn the lessons of history in order to prevent the past mistakes’.

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ANALYSING THE NEW TOWNS In order to quantify the apparent distinctiveness of the New Towns, a broad comparison between a set of New Towns and a similar set of older towns can be made. Previous studies have shown that successful, historically evolved towns tend to share a number of common spatial characteristics (Karimi 1998). These characteristics are important to understand, since the age of some older towns relates to their ability to prevail through times of change and adapt to different circumstances. In this study a sample of New Towns and older settlements were selected for broadly similar characteristics to do with railway and road access to the wider regional centres. Analysis

focused on the urban structure of old and New Towns: spatial structure, land use distribution, population density, urban block size, centrality, and movement patterns; which collectively define a town’s physical, social, economic and environmental characteristics. In most historic towns the highly accessible spaces (shown in dark red in the spatial accessibility analysis), correspond to the busiest streets in the area (Figure 22.2). They are the ‘urban streets’ that accommodate all varieties of functions and the majority of pedestrian, cyclist and vehicular movement. The global and local accessibility patterns closely correspond, creating an ‘intelligible’ structure for movement and wayfinding where visitors and locals are located in the same 265

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Figure 22.2 The central areas of three historically grown towns (top) compared with three New Towns (bottom)

Figure 22.3 A comparison between the streets of historically evolved towns (top) and New Towns (bottom)

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The land use patterns in historically evolved towns closely follow the patterns of spatial accessibility. Here, land uses that relate to the most intense human activities, such as retail, catering and commerce are distributed in close correspondence to the spatial structure of the town. In most cases, the most intensively-used shopping streets are also the most spatially accessible. All high streets in the old towns continue their historical role as the commercial heart of the city. Moreover, commercial streets are more extensive and contain a wider mix of activities. By contrast, in the sample of New Towns, zoning has led in some extreme cases, such as Skelmersdale, to a town centre that is reduced to a single, covered shopping centre (Figure 22.4). Unlike the older towns, with their spectrum of land uses, in New Towns only patches of single land uses can be found. Previous research has shown that in historically grown towns, the shape of the urban grain optimises itself to increase the proximity between activities and people. Thus, following the distribution of population densities, block sizes become smaller in town centres where a higher degree of urban activity is required, and larger in residential areas where fewer activities take place (Siksna 1998). In central areas, the higher permeability of the urban blocks facilitates the browsing and navigation needed for a mixed use area, whilst, in residential areas, the movement flows are channelled into a small number of streets, which become reasonably well-used and adequately safe. The opposite is the case in most New Towns studied. Whereas urban blocks in the town centres are not small enough to facilitate navigation and browsing, urban blocks in the residential zones are disproportionately large and space is so fragmented that the relatively low movement levels generated by residential uses are distributed across many more streets. This dilution of movement leads to very low levels of co-presence between pedestrians and thus to a perception of a lack of safety in residential areas. Patterns of observed pedestrian movement flows also demonstrate significant differences between these two urban

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streets. There is commonly a spatial accessibility core, where smaller urban blocks and mixed land-uses create a suitable environment for people to move around easily on their daily business and interact with each other. This accessibility core is usually well connected to the region and to main activity centres and important functions extend from the town centre to other areas along the main arteries. This type of connected centre supports a mix of transport modes. The New Towns present a stark contrast (Figure 22.2). The most accessible urban spaces are high-speed vehicular roads without any pedestrian provision. In most cases, there is a distinct mismatch between the location of the most accessible spaces and the location of centres of activity. In cases such as Bracknell, the most accessible streets are on the outskirts of the town centre, where major traffic routes intersect. In some cases, such as Skelmersdale, the planned centre of activity is as spatially segregated as the quiet residential streets. Whilst the New Towns were intended to be ‘balanced and self-contained communities for working and living’ (Aldridge 1979: 48), the outcome has been an extreme version of this aim, with polarised and segmented communities. Typically the town centre does not overlap with the spatial accessibility core, resulting in a mismatch between where the people are and where core activities are located. Streets with high accessibility values are used mostly for private vehicular traffic. As a consequence the urban network creates an environment hostile to pedestrians, in which it is difficult to get around and to interact with others. Unlike the older residential areas, which usually have a clear pattern or street network related to the bigger structure of the city, the residential areas of New Towns are fragmented, inward-looking urban ‘islands’, which relate with the other areas only through a vehicular super-grid. The attempts to create a parallel pedestrian network have failed in many cases, and the separation between the various modes of movement has led to underused and unsafe pedestrian spaces (Figure 22.3).

Figure 22.4 Land use patterns in the centre of Skelmersdale New Town. The large red area is a covered shopping centre. The town …‡–”‡Žƒ†—•‡•ƒ”‡Ž‹‹–‡†–‘–Š‹••Š‘’’‹‰…‡–”‡ǡ•‘‡‹•‘Žƒ–‡†’—„Ž‹…„—‹Ž†‹‰•ƒ†‘ƥ…‡•ȋ•Š‘™‹›‡ŽŽ‘™Ȍǡƒ†ƒ‡™ supermarket (to the north). The dominant features of the town centre are the parking areas, shown in green

types. In historic towns, pedestrian movement patterns follow the hierarchy of the spatial network, with a high number of pedestrians using the routes within the core of spatial accessibility. Moving away from the city centre, lower levels of pedestrian movement reduce steadily to the lowest levels within residential areas that are away from main roads and retail locations. The zoning approach used in New Towns 268

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typically leads to very high levels of pedestrian movement being concentrated in a small section of the designated town centres. Movement flows drop sharply from the town centre onwards and are uniformly low in the rest of the town (Figure 22.5). This movement pattern is the consequence of extreme spatial and functional segregation and in many cases is also caused by the segregation of modes of transport and the

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An International Perspective related low availability of pedestrian walkways. This results in a dramatic reduction of pedestrian flows in other parts of the urban realm and to the consequential perception of a lack of safety already mentioned.

Lu has articulated in great detail how the neighbourhood unit became the ‘global urban form’ of the twentieth century, with variations on a theme as widespread as Canberra, Brasilia and even Le Corbusier’s plans for Chandigarh. It is worthwhile considering one of these cases: the Israeli realisation of 269

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‹‰—”‡͢͢Ǥͥ‡†‡•–”‹ƒ‘˜‡‡–ƪ‘™•‘„•‡”˜‡†‹–Š‡‡™‘™‘ˆ‡Ž‡”•†ƒŽ‡ǤŠ‡ƒ””‘™•‹†‹…ƒ–‡ƒ˜‡”ƒ‰‡Š‘—”Ž›ƪ‘™•‘ƒ –›’‹…ƒŽ™‡‡†ƒ›ǤŠ‡Š‹‰Š’‡†‡•–”‹ƒƪ‘™•ƒ”‡…‘…‡–”ƒ–‡†‘Ž›‹–Š‡•Š‘’’‹‰…‡–”‡ǤŠ‡ƪ‘™•†”‘’–‘–Š‡Ž‘™‡•–Ž‡˜‡Ž•‘—–•‹†‡ the shopping centre without creating any pattern or hierarchy

34 towns in 20 years (Aravot and Militanu 2000). Efrat (2004: 83) describes how centralised planning was used to resolve the housing needs of the massive number of Jewish refugees who arrived in the new state after WWII and how Israeli planners drew inspiration from British New Towns to decant overcrowded and war-damaged communities to dispersed new settlements (the latter, he claims, influenced by Soviet planning). Efrat also shows direct links to Perry’s principles with the creation of ‘ideally’ sized self-contained neighbourhoods, with separated pedestrian and vehicular traffic. He describes how the low density of population, coupled with the spatial isolation of the immigrants and the lack of sufficient job opportunities, had a devastating impact on the already disadvantaged residents. As in the UK, the impact continues to this day (Aharon-Gutman 2009). The unintentional influence of the New Town movement on the development of contemporary urbanism can be found almost everywhere in the rapidly-growing cities of the developing world. Indeed, many of the concepts that were used in the design of the English New Towns, such as neighbourhood units, separation of cars and pedestrians, extension of nature into the heart of the towns (with ‘green fingers’), confined town centres and land use zoning, were frequently used in the design of new cities and developments around the world, often with minimal attempts to analyse the implications of their implementation. More significantly, in some cases, these concepts, which had been originally developed for relatively small settlements, are applied to very large urban systems, which are intended to accommodate millions of people. Lu has shown how in China the influence has been profound – starting with Changchun in North-East China, set up as the capital by colonial Japan (Lu 2006: 24–5). Thus recent development plans for Changchun (with a current population of 7.6 million people) continue to be influenced by the experimental solutions of the New Towns. There, massive new extensions, similar to neighbourhood units, but designed for hundreds of thousands of residents, are 270

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appearing around the city. Green fingers, used in New Towns such as Skelmersdale to link the countryside to the heart of the city, cover very large green zones, which break the continuity of the urban form and divide the new urban extensions from each other. There is also a misconception about how the city centre’s relationship with the whole system should work, with proposals showing the existing centre of the city contained within a confined area, and acting in competition with a new centre of the same size to the south. This is in contrast with the structural reality of the city where a very large centre already exists and needs to remain as a dominant element of the city in future. In other cases where designers consciously attempt to create different design paradigms, untested design decisions and spatial structures have led to a different set of problems. One such example is the city of Masdar in AbuDhabi, widely promoted as a sustainable and low-carbon development (Heap 2010). In fact, analysis of the initial design proposals showed a poorly structured layout as well as deficiencies such as: lack of a spatially accessible city centre, poor way-finding and pedestrian navigation caused by the lack of a strong correspondence between the global and local accessibility structures, isolation of the residential neighbourhoods from each other and the city centre, and disparity between the spatial structure and distribution of land-uses and densities (Figure 22.6). Although these deficiencies are not identical to those found in the study of New Towns described in this chapter, they are similar enough to suggest that the spatial problems that led to the socio-economic decline of the New Towns would have been repeated there if the initial plans had been implemented. Following an evidence-based review of the scheme in 2009, most of the spatial problems have been remedied in the final scheme for Masdar. However, the point remains that even the most progressive approaches to designing cities in the twenty-first century are likely to fall in the traps that the design of New Towns in England experienced in the second half of the twentieth century.

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THE FUTURE OF THE NEW-NEW TOWN The ‘New–New Towns’ conference held in London in 2008 demonstrated that community creation is still top of the policy agenda, both in the UK and elsewhere. Despite this, it is evident that insufficient attention is given to lessons from the past social analysis of new settlements, nor is there sufficient understanding of the impact of urban structure on social and economic performance, as shown here. Whilst society has changed dramatically since the earliest New Towns, it is more

urgent than ever to find ways to further the success of some places and remedy the devastating failure of others. Previous research has suggested that one of the most fundamental problems with the Neighbourhood Unit concept is that it presumes that spatial layout will reflect and reinforce the social relations it contains. As pointed out by Hanson and Hillier (1987) whilst this might work in homogenous societies, in modern complex societies, space has a different role to play than a straightforward correspondence with the society which it contains. The attempt to design local areas 271

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Figure 22.6 Spatial accessibility analysis of the initial layout for the City of Masdar: (i) global spatial accessibility and (ii) local spatial accessibility

Figure 22.7 Space syntax analysis of Harlow New Town

without maintaining their coherence at the wider scale, creates hierarchy without order: local streets are disconnected from the city-wide structure, resulting in a dislocation between locals and visitors; inhabitants and strangers; movement to and through an area. Despite seminal studies on the subject (Durant 1939; Jeffreys 1964) which highlighted the interrelationship between social structure and spatial context,

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the power of community theories continues to reign. This is particularly the case in the USA where it is often seen as a given that heterogeneous areas are the exception to the norm, and that social groups incline towards exclusive territorial areas defined by colour, ethnicity, social class and economic status. In the UK the desire to plan communities continues to lack a scientific understanding of the complexity of the subject.

This chapter has shown that the failure of the New Towns in the UK is a product of (amongst other factors) flaws in their design and planning, accompanied by the socio-economic consequences to these problems. These flaws are complex by nature, but can be identified through an objective investigation of urban structure and its relationship with other urban issues. Solutions and mitigation measures for these problems are complex and strongly dependent on how we identify and understand the problems. Past experience in implementing the evidence-based re-design of New Towns such as Skelmersdale and Harlow shows that the effort to positively transform these towns is not futile as long as they are based on a thorough understanding of the fundamental problems and the use of specific methods and tools that can help to evaluate and assess the impact of the changes. At its heart the approach requires a detailed analysis of the existing spatial structure and an iterative testing of design propositions to ensure that any new development relates to the way in which all elements of the town will be regenerated. In 2004 an ‘Enquiry by Design’ (charrette) took place in Harlow (http: //www.princes-foundation.org/). The event brought together a large number of experts to initiate the visioning for an urban extension – North Harlow – to Harlow New Town. Based on outcomes from the workshop and subsequent

are fragmented, separated by vehicular roads that carry no activity or frontages; no strong sense of route hierarchy; a core of spatial accessibility found to the east of the town rather than in the town centre; and no clear pedestrian link between the town centre and the main railway station.

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team efforts, development plans for Harlow North have been drawn and debated almost continuously ever since. The analysis of the town using space syntax methods showed that Harlow shares the range of design problems that characterise New Towns (Figure 22.7), with residential neighbourhoods that

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Figure 22.8 Evidence-based design process applied to design an urban extension to ƒ”Ž‘™‡™‘™ǣ–Š‡’”‘’‘•‡†—‹Ƥ‡†•›•–‡–Šƒ–™‘—Ž†‡…‘—”ƒ‰‡–Š‡–‘™–‘™‘” as a whole

In the first phase of the study the space syntax analysis established that if the development to the north did not have a strong relationship with Harlow as a whole, it might have a negative impact on an already struggling structure and become a competitor, instead of an integrator. From this finding, a major principle of the design was conjectured: North Harlow had to be designed in a manner that would deliver a successful new urban development and resolve the problems of the existing Harlow New Town at the same time. A series of preliminary design ideas, tested by space syntax analysis, demonstrated that the link to the town centre across the flood plain was crucial, as long as multiple extra links between the north and south were provided. The analysis was used to optimise the location and alignment of these new links (Figure 22.8). Through several iterations of the design it was established that the centre for Harlow North had to be as close as possible to Harlow town centre in order to create a larger, unified centre for the whole of Harlow. This principle has been achieved by putting the centre at the immediate northern end of the main bridge. The centre was also intensified by creating a network of local routes that radiated from this location. The design was further finetuned until a balanced shape for the whole of the town was achieved.

The evidence-based design proposition stated that the new spatial structure of Harlow had to be accompanied by an increase in the density of the built form within the centre, further investment in improving the character and design of the streets and public realm, more work on reshaping the isolated neighbourhoods, and a whole package of socioeconomic remedies that the town desperately needs. The success of these solutions, however, remains dependent on how the fundamental issues of city building are understood and addressed. The lessons learnt from the study of New Towns in England such as Harlow can provide a powerful way of re-thinking the entire approach to new settlement design, whether designed from scratch or reshaped in order to resolve their multiple flaws and inherent problems. This approach is relevant to all parts of the world where building new settlements is an important means of urban development, especially those places where the huge rush to build cities and the sheer magnitude of urban development, leave little room for contemplation; otherwise they will be condemned to repeat the failures of the past.

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TIPS FOR RESEARCHERS: Ȉ Designing New Towns, or any urban development from scratch, is a complex challenge. It is critical to learn from past errors in order to avoid repeating them in the future. Ȉ Do not rely solely on an intuitive understanding of urban systems, use evidence! Ȉ Evidence-informed research, integrated with the design and planning process, enhances design outputs and minimises the risk of failure. Ȉ Strong evidence is produced through rigorous methods and analytical processes. Ȉ A good urban methodology needs to be based on a robust urban theory that can deal with space, society and the relationship between the two.

Part V

Performance enquiries

Examining through direct and indirect anthropological investigation, stakeholder enquiry, and historical study, how places perform through use and time

In this final part of the book we turn to a range of performance related enquires. Through direct and indirect anthropological investigation, stakeholder enquiry, and historical study, these investigations examine how places perform through use and time. Five chapters are included. Chapter 23, from Quentin Stevens, focuses on an important body of research in urban design; that concerned with environment-behaviour relations. In doing so it offers valuable insights into the conduct of the sorts of observational studies that have become the mainstay of much important urban design research; ultimately it is the manner in which we occupy space that testifies to its success or failure as a piece of city. These techniques are also touched upon in my own chapter (27) which outlines four fundamental ways in which we can assess whether urban design has been successful (or not) through the ‘value’ it adds to its users and producers. In identifying and illustrating these types of evidence – econometric, structural, experiential and process-related – the argument is made that we need to make better use of such evidence to more effectively make the case for urban design In different ways, the remaining chapters deal with history, either as a method and subject of research, or through a concern for city heritage. Elisabete Cidre in Chapter 26 takes us on a review of some of the key concepts and problematics in heritage research, linking the subject to the allied field of urban design through a focus on the historical public realm. In doing so she makes the case for an expansive research agenda in this field, one that, it can be argued, encompasses almost every method and much of the discrete subject-matter covered elsewhere in the book. In Chapter 24, Michael Hebbert focuses on historical method in urban design research, using his own history of research projects to illustrate the range and potential of such study. For him, however, historic method should not stop there, but instead should cross seamlessly into practice where, through the simple device of historic figure ground, it provides a powerful stepping-off point for much urban design. This chapter contrasts well with the following chapter 276

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(25) from Adrian Lahoud who focuses on a single (now historic) experimental proposition that, whilst never entirely completed, still exists today as an abandoned vision of a particular time and place, a decaying monument ripe with potential for speculation and conjecture; in Adrian’s case, on the subject of scale. This he uses as a way-in to explore the alternate rationalities for city building, reminding us that historic urban typologies are not the be all and end all in urban design, but subjective, explorative and challenging forms also have a place; the study of which also offers a window onto the political contexts through which they were forged. Looking across the contributions in Part V there is little obvious commonality in terms of the three fundamental characteristics of research introduced in Chapter 1. Collectively, however, they illustrate the great diversity of research that potentially falls within this category. It is appropriate that the subject matter in this part of the book comes last as the chapters variously focus on the final product of urban design – places and spaces for use – and how, through their use, they add (or detract) from the economic, social and environmental functioning of urban areas. This is a vital area of urban design enquiry, and one that is also strongly reflected in all the others – philosophical, process, physical and propositional. Matthew Carmona

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Public space as lived Quentin Stevens

This chapter focuses on exploring how people use urban open spaces, and the design features, policies, and regimes of control that govern their use, as a means to understand how public space might best be designed and managed. In doing so the chapter outlines concepts and methods useful for analysing people’s behaviour and examines environmentbehaviour relations across a variety of scales and conceptual frames, from the affordances that physical details provide for specific body postures, to the emotional resonance of spaces, to broad questions about needs and purposes for public space. In doing so the discussion focuses in particular on unanticipated uses. Varied disciplinary methods can be used to explore these issues, and those discussed include discreet behavioural observation, mapping and recording, participant observation, ‘netnography’, discourse analysis, and analysis of physical characteristics of built form, both directly and through images; all methods which are contrasted to interviewing. The chapter suggests several frameworks and questions that might shape data collection and analysis, including spatial orientations, different sensory perceptions, varied user abilities, particular practices of moving through space, small-scale loose ‘props’, and critiquing risk and crime minimisation strategies. Finally future directions are explored for conceptualising the dynamic relationships between spaces and their users.

INTRODUCTION Designing public spaces is not as simple as understanding the ergonomics of how particular physical elements fit a pre-defined programme of uses. There are many competing claims that shape urban design outcomes and thereby constrain public use. Clients, designers and regulators of urban space have aesthetic preferences and representational objectives which may limit the usefulness of spaces. Legal accountabilities and security concerns lead to risk management strategies that err on the side of restricting use. Commercial imperatives tend to promote only uses that encourage paid consumption. Some functional ‘needs’, particularly facilitating traffic, advertising, and maintenance, tend to dominate those of pedestrian users. The difficulty of serving the use of urban space through design is compounded by the fact that the current and potential users and uses of a given public space are extremely diverse and often relatively unknown. In addition, not all users of public space have equal political and financial power to pursue their interests. This range of points are noted as an encouragement to researchers to put down this book and go out and get a real, direct feel for public spaces and how they are used. To guide such work, the chapter suggests a range of conceptual and practical tools and models for examining how public

space is lived, and illustrates how public uses of open spaces provide an informative critique of urban design practice and policymaking.

The Problem of Public Space For urban designers, research questions about people’s behaviour in public space can range from specific functionality issues related to individual built elements such as benches or public artworks, to relations between the perception and use of the urban fabric, all the way up to broad questions about the very purpose of providing public space, and whose needs it serves (Stevens 2006b, 2007, 2009b). Indeed, research that links these factors has the best prospects for making a contribution to urban design knowledge, by connecting the ‘how’ to the ‘why’ of public space and its use. In the widest perspective, it is important to recognise that unlike other urban land uses, public space is not ‘functional’ and ‘productive’ in the normal, narrow sense of those terms. Urban design often pursues clear-cut instrumental goals such as comfort, efficiency and order. But the scope of everyday life in urban spaces extends well beyond the achievement of predefined, ostensibly rational objectives, such as wayfinding, maximising commercial gain, or minimising contact with people who are different. Much of my own research has focused on the wide variety of neglected and sometimes actively suppressed uses of public spaces which are spontaneous, irrational, or risky, and which are often unanticipated by designers, managers and other users. Research that explores the broad liveliness and liveability of public space has the potential to cut across the many normative critiques that encourage tighter regulation of its form and use (Carmona 2010, Stevens 2009b). The ‘looseness’ of a public space, or the ways its design and management render it available and suitable for a variety of unanticipated appropriations and uses, is perhaps one of the best indicators of its quality (Franck and Stevens 2007). Whether designers and planners intend it or not, almost every urban public 278

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space offers a richness of experiences and possibilities for action. Activities in public space that appear to be unplanned, impractical or irrational are thus particularly important for understanding what the special purpose of public space might be. Two particular concepts are helpful in articulating the potential scope of the use and usefulness of urban public spaces. The first is the idea that people’s needs exist in a hierarchy (Maslow 1943, Carr et al. 1992, Francis 2003). Much is already known about people’s ‘lower-order’ needs for physical safety and comfort, which are reasonably consistent across individuals, readily quantifiable, and have direct relation to the design of the physical environment. Once fundamental needs are met, other ‘higher’ needs – for relaxation, passive engagement, active engagement, discovery, and fun – progressively come to prominence. These needs are more subjective, more varied, and involve increasing levels of bodily, intellectual and social stimulation and activity. Playful, exploratory uses of open space are less well understood empirically than other uses because of their sheer diversity, and also because such behaviour is itself exploratory and indefinite. Relatively little is known about how the built environment can satisfy these needs. The second useful concept is Gibson’s (1979) theory of affordances. Gibson found that an animal perceives the physical environment in terms of how well it serves the actions that animal is trying to perform. The same thinking can be extended to examine the opportunities that the physical environment might provide for a range of human perceptions and actions which are not narrowly practical. Many insights about how spatial conditions frame people’s actions and interactions and people’s various sensory perceptions can be drawn from detailed empirical research in sociology (Goffman 1971, 1980, Cavan 1966), environmental psychology (Sommer 1969), anthropology (Hall 1966) and geography (Tuan 1977, Rodaway 1994). While this knowledge base can be applied to many kinds of environments at a variety of scales, what is distinctive about the social experience of urban public

spaces is that the majority of other people encountered there are strangers (Lofland 1998, 1973). Public spaces are thus settings where people necessarily experiment and improvise with social roles, actions and meanings (Sennett 1971). The distinctive contribution of urban design is to emphasise and understand the material spatial conditions that frame such experiences.

Both Whyte and Gehl’s studies examined then-recent public space improvements that had resulted from policy changes (New York’s incentive zoning that produced many ‘bonus plazas’, Copenhagen’s incremental pedestrianisation of downtown streets). I have myself often used observation of public behaviour to examine open space designs that are very new and different (Stevens 2012, 2009a, 2009c, 2006a).

Capturing Everyday Life OBSERVING THE SOCIAL LIFE OF URBAN SPACES

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For urban design, the traditional knowledge base regarding people’s everyday uses of public spaces comes from Whyte (1980) and Gehl (1987). These pioneering studies disavowed claims that open space designers and managers made about how sites are used, and involved extensive empirical observation of public spaces to see what actually occurred in them. Whyte’s innovative approach is particularly ‘spacecentred’: he installed time lapse cameras in Manhattan to document people’s use of individual public spaces. His findings sometimes differ from what designers and users themselves believe; for example, people tend to have their conversations right in the middle of busy footpaths, and they will sit on uncomfortable ledges if these offer the best views of passing pedestrians. The findings also illustrate conventional wisdom which designers and project clients sometimes ignore, such as that people prefer to be in the sun in cool weather, and to sit on chairs that they can move. The one-hour film of Whyte’s study remains the most persuasive example of using empirical observation of the life of public spaces to inform urban design. Project for Public Spaces in New York (www.pps.org) continue Whyte’s legacy, but given ongoing improvements in the quality, affordability, portability and flexibility of video recording, and in the capacities of software for analysing qualitative data, it is surprising more researchers have not furthered Whyte’s methods.

The core method for studying everyday life in public spaces is direct (yet discreet) observation of behaviour, with a particular focus on how it relates to spatial features. Built spaces themselves transform only slowly, and can be examined at leisure. The social life of public space, however, is both complex and constantly changing. The design of a particular investigation needs to identify what would constitute a useful, adequately representative sample of behaviour in public space, and how that sample will be captured and subsequently analysed. Taking written or audio notes about activities on site is valuable for its rich, direct engagement, but cannot always record events with the necessary speed and detail. Mapping patterns of movements and stationary activities can be a useful way of aggregating information about use. But in most cases such quantitative and distributive summaries can only support what are fundamentally qualitative studies. The most common method of capturing observations for later analysis is recording with a still or video camera (see Laurier and Philo 2006). Contemporary equipment can capture a limitless stream of still and video images and this can make storage, organisation and analysis of data unmanageable. Prudent sampling of observational data is in itself already a step toward a carefully-structured analysis of the uses of urban space. For my PhD, my sample of images was fortunately constrained by the cost and delay of slide film processing, often with only one image per observed activity.

Modern equipment, however, enables experimentation with new potentials for photographic sampling, including adjustment of the duration and interval of time lapse shooting, and motion-responsive cameras. The empiricist, synoptic approach of examining everything that happens within a given space can be complemented by other, more opportunistic methods which seek to maximise a sample of particular activities, actors or experiential circumstances, by actively pursuing those phenomena. This is particularly important when studying uses and users that are uncommon and unsanctioned. We can learn from the Situationist International’s experimental practice of ‘dérive’, an unstructured, distracted, but nonetheless critical wandering through city neighbourhoods, where they would ‘abandon themselves to the attractions of the terrain and the encounters proper to it’, in order to develop in-depth knowledge of the sensory, social and emotional ambience of urban spaces (Debord 1996: 22). Because my research interest centres on unprogrammed activities in public spaces, my own adaptation of the dérive has been to circulate through spaces where such activities seem most likely, and to remain open to the possibility of lingering or retracing a route or detouring onto side paths when prompted by events or conditions (Stevens 2007). Capturing the life of public space requires balanced attention to people’s behaviour, the setting, and their relationships. For designers, the purpose of behavioural observation is ultimately not to understand the actions themselves, but to gain insight into the role and performance of the built environment through the lens of those actions. For this reason, images of activity need to be accompanied by a record of their spatial context. Additional photographs with varied zoom and angle may be necessary, and fieldnotes can help capture the spatial and temporal mechanics of fleeting behaviours. Not all behaviour in public space can be observed directly, however, and much information about past actions can be inferred from traces left behind (Zeisel 1984: 89–110). A folding chair dragged into a sunny corner, piles of cigarette 280

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butts, and wax scrapings on stairs and railings all tell us a lot about how people act in public and what roles the built environment can serve.

Analysing Behaviour and Space Key to the analysis of people’s use of public spaces is identifying links between observed actions and the physical conditions where they occur. The collection of data should always be informed by particular hypotheses or interests regarding how and why people behave a certain way in a certain setting. These hypotheses must be expressed, tested and explored by describing and explaining the where and how of the public use of urban spaces. One starting point is to examine the detailed spatial mechanics of people’s movements and social interactions: measuring and describing the scale, direction and relative orientation of their actions in relation to their own bodies, their perceptual capabilities (for example, what they can see), and to each other and the setting (Figure 23.1). Such analysis is prepositional, describing who goes up, down, on, under, through, against, inside, far from, or behind what. The relative frequencies of actions at particular sites or under particular circumstances might also be of interest, or how actions change over time at a given site, or how behaviour changes as the space itself is modified. Single activities can be considered in isolation, but in some cases sequences of actions might be important, or their translation between sites. One rapidly-developing area of research in cognate disciplines such as geography centres around the analysis of specific bodily practices, such as skateboarding (Borden 2001 – see Chapter 2), cycling (Spinney 2009), and parkour (Ameel and Tani 2012, Brunner 2011), exploring how users perceive, interpret, navigate and reshape urban space through such actions. Another distinctive focus that starts from the body is studying how human experience of the urban environment is conditioned through the various senses, either singly or

Figure 23.1 Studying people’s uses of public space requires analysing their proximity, orientation and posture in relation to buildings, street furnishings, movement spaces, and each other. Swanston Walk, Melbourne

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spaces. It suggests the need to employ other, more immersive methods, including participant observation (drawing on the researcher’s own experience), ‘go-along’ interviews where people are providing feedback on their own experience while they are engaged in it (Kusenbach 2003, Jones et al. 2008), or thematically-focused ‘sensewalks’ and ‘sensetalks’, for studying the multisensory cognition of spaces (Delas 2009). The second fundamental starting point for analysis is the spatial structure and materials of the physical setting. Such analysis has to occur across a range of scales of human perception and action. Of particular importance are the small-scale, often loose elements or ‘props’ distributed within urban spaces which can be engaged with closely by users. This includes varied kinds of intended and informal seating opportunities, but also prosaic street furnishings, water, plants, and public artworks. For me, new and unusual design features provide ideal experimental starting points for exploring possible uses of public space: a swimming pool floating in a river, a row of unadorned concrete blocks which is labelled a memorial, or a steel angle attached to a ledge intended to prevent skateboarding. Questions to be

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in combination (Zardini 2006). My research explores the sense of touch as a way of comprehending, acting within, and designing urban public space, which provides a critique of the relative limitations of vision (Figure 23.2) (Stevens 2009c, 2006b). Studying touch directs the researcher’s attention to the materiality of the environment and the immediacy of bodily contact with it, in contrast to people’s distant contemplation of the compositional aesthetics or representational meanings of spaces. Touch is a richly spatial sense, registering the body’s own movement and orientation in space (kinaesthesia and proprioception) and haptic awareness of the closeness of objects, as well as the direct experience of pressure and weight, which includes the use of touch to modify the environment. In short: touch focuses on doing, rather than watching (Paterson 2011, Latham 1999). Recent policy discourses advancing the ‘liveability’ and management of public space have tended to stifle the liveliness of touch in the name of visual order (Stevens 2009b). The embodied, sensory line of inquiry has implications for the feasibility of relying on vicarious observation alone as the basis for studying how people use and experience public

Figure 23.2 (i), (ii) Close bodily engagements with the urban landscape. Visitors at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin

explored in relation to such elements include their scalar and orientational relations to the postures and movements of the human body (bearing in mind that people vary in size, capacities for perception and action, and openness to risk, and that they also have varied interests), built elements’ weight and fixity, and the hardness, smoothness, warmth and malleability of their materials. A useful analytical step is to temporarily ignore the conventional name and use of objects under study, and concentrate only upon their physical, performative characteristics as ‘stuff’. Urban designers also need to recognise and utilise their distinctive skill in spatial analysis, their ability to read and interpolate information 282

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from site plans, sections, elevations and site photographs. They need to draw upon their understanding of how different design elements and layouts shape visibility and the transmission of other sensory stimuli, and what potentials various design elements offer for various kinds of actions. A third, indirect approach to examining the relations between public behaviour and urban space is to analyse written guidance, policies and regulations for the design, management and use of public spaces, particularly in relation to risk management (CABE 2007) and Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) (Clarke 1983, Flusty 1997). Such documents express normative beliefs, intentions

Figure 23.3 Regulatory signs which indicate the scope of how people would like to use public spaces: (i) Antigua de Guatemala

(ii) Berlin

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(iii) Hong Kong

and proscriptions regarding the uses of public space, and their relationship to the physical setting. Some of these relationships are strongly causal: for example, absence of handrails increases accidents, people sleeping in public make other people nervous, ‘target hardening’ will reduce vandalism. These agendas often also constrain many not-risky, not-criminal activities, and their assumptions are often tested and confronted by the scope of actual uses of sites. In particular, researchers can anticipate that regulatory signs in a space (Figure 23.3) usually list and prohibit activities that people in fact want and seek to undertake there (Stevens 2012). Design techniques also do not inevitably prevent unwanted uses: activities are instead sometimes dialectically displaced to other sites, or transformed in response to controls (Stevens and Dovey 2004). More non-positivist research is needed into

the actual consequences that proscriptive design policies have for the life of public spaces.

Reliable Observation The value of observation and its potential to offer new insights rests on its thoroughness; its focus on particular actions, sites, design elements, and theoretical questions; and the disciplinary expertise (in our case, about the design characteristics of space) which is brought to bear on its analysis. The value of such studies also depends on the reliability and generalisability of findings. The breadth and validation of observational findings can be enhanced by repeated observation of a site or an activity at different times of the day, week and year (ideally in a systematic pattern and not just opportunistically), by using multiple, independent observers, and by capturing a record of the observed behaviours, so that events can be ‘replayed’ and reinterpreted later, potentially by other researchers. Sampling tourists’ images of public places from photo-sharing websites such as Flickr, Panoramio and GoogleEarth, a form of ‘netnography’, can supplement and corroborate first-hand observation. Researchers can also undertake ‘auto-observation’ (Adler and Adler 1994), reporting introspectively on their own sensory, bodily and emotional actions and reactions toward the built environment and its other users, whilst for public spaces, variations in weather need to be considered in planning, carrying out and analysing observations, because of their significant impact on the use of public space (Figure 23.4). Researchers often suggest that the easiest way to find out about how the public uses space is to ask them; as if this method were inevitably simple, effective and reliable. Surveys and interviews also have their drawbacks, including ‘subjects’ whimsical shifts in opinion, self-evaluation, selfdeception, manipulation of self-presentation, embarrassment, and outright dishonesty’ (Adler and Adler 1994: 389). In addition, the general public are mostly unaware of their built surroundings and usually cannot describe them 284

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Figure 23.4 A family escapes a sudden rain shower on an ƒ”–‹Ƥ…‹ƒŽ„‡ƒ…Š‹•–ƒŽŽ‡††—”‹‰•—‡”‘–Š‡ƒ‹•“—ƒ”‡ of Vaihingen an der Enz, Germany. Both research and design practice needs to consider the use of public space under variable weather conditions

accurately, and many of the most interesting spatial aspects of people’s behaviour are unconscious. Put simply, people do not necessarily realise that they acted a particular way in a particular place, do not know why, or will not tell you. The role of observation is to complement other methods that are better suited to other areas of enquiry: for example, to compare people’s stated beliefs and preferences against what they actually do in spaces.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS Theoretical insights from other disciplines continue to suggest new horizons for urban design research into how people ‘experience’ and ‘use’ public space, and ways we might describe and analyse the relationships between people’s intentions, perceptions and actions and the material conditions of urban spaces. Chemero (2003, following Gibson 1979) emphasises that the various affordances of an environment can only be understood and evaluated in relation to specific abilities

Figure 23.5 A reinterpretation of public space: Reclaim the Streets, Melbourne

elements, create a condition of ‘tentativeness – an unfreezing of habitual modes of perceiving, conceiving, and acting’. In such places, Baron argues, environmental design can ‘reeducate’ the perceiving and acting body, enrich its functionality, and stimulate playfulness. These new ways of conceptualising actors, abilities, spatial conditions and their relationships all underscore the particular importance of researching behaviours, physical settings, ambiences and regulatory regimes that are different and new. There is much yet to discover about how we live in our public spaces, and now a rich methodological tradition from which to draw.

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beach built is built on the top level of a parking garage (Stevens 2007, 2010). All three cases are performative imaginings where a variety of actors constitute a new kind of ‘public space’ where none previously existed. As Goffman (1980, 1959) noted, people’s behaviour in public is conditioned by their understandings of appropriate social ‘situations’, which depend on dynamic negotiation and confirmation. This emphasises the need to examine the social psychology of actions in public, alongside their mechanics. Looking at the role of design, Baron (2008: 331) explores how the tacticallydesigned, disturbing environments of Arakawa and Madeline Gins, which involve asymmetry, sloping surfaces, and re-scaling of conventional

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and aims of animals that are present to exploit them. This suggests a need to combine observation of spaces and behaviours with attention to people’s varied capacities and motivations to ‘use’ the environment. Thrift’s (1997) account of non-representational theory, emphasises the potential of public behaviour as a ‘performative experiment’ where the expressive, affective and perceptual powers of bodies and the dynamic contingencies of people’s spatial encounters continuously define social possibility, thereby overcoming social rigidities, including the physical environment. Zierhofer (2002) goes further, proposing that observation and critique should not start from a normative view of spaces as ‘things’ with fixed and transcendental physical forms and properties. He suggests instead that we should consider all spaces as relational, discursive ‘schemes of interpretation’ through which some actors, living or inanimate (for example, clients, designers, site managers, pieces of infrastructure), express intentions for the actions of others, and which those ‘users’, through their actions, then accept, dispute, ignore, or interpret differently. Concrete examples of such ‘discursive’ behaviours include Reclaim the Streets (Figure 23.5), for example where crowds hold stationary parties on traffic routes; a wedding party climbs into a streetfront window frame to pose for formal photographs; or a temporary

TIPS FOR RESEARCHERS: Ȉ Go outside; keep your eyes open and your camera ready, and make notes on site. Ȉ Aim to formulate and test specific hypotheses about the relation between human actions and particular aspects of their physical settings. Ȉ Question the causes of differences between programmed, possible, and observed uses of urban spaces. Ȉ Be prudent and discreet in planning how to sample user behaviour in a setting. Ȉ Always seek to triangulate observations with other sources of data that can confirm your interpretations of environment-behaviour relationships.

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Historical exploration/explanation in urban design Michael Hebbert

To introduce a person, a topic or a place we usually tell a bit of history – where they came from, how it used to look, what she did before. We ‘present’ the past. Most urban design research involves some retrospective element, maybe just a superficial nod, but at best much more. This chapter looks at historical methods and sources in the urban design field, arguing for their importance in the mix of research ingredients and illustrating the insights they can offer.

HISTORY AND MODERNISM – A PARADOX The topic springs from the origins of urban design within the Modern Movement. Mid-century modernism had denied history, seeking an urban canvas as empty as the all-white ground of a Piet Mondrian abstract. In real life the canvas was never empty – places were going concerns, with substantial economic value embodied in their property structures, and social and cultural capital too. The case had to be argued for overriding these legacies, making Modernism as much a critique of the past as a manifesto of the future. So the Modern Project engaged closely with history in order to negate it. Eliel Saarinen’s (1943) The City: Its Growth – Its Decay – Its Future follows the organic growth of cities from the dawn of civilisation until their twentieth-century affliction by ‘Urban disease’; before ‘Toward the future’ prescribes the cure: purging and rebuilding on modern

principles of traffic organisation and hygiene. Arthur Korn’s (1953) History Builds the Town follows the same structure, applying the Marxian method of dialectical materialism to post-war London: three-quarters of the text is historical, the final section sets out the ‘correct theory’ of design for the collective future. History builds the town in the sense that its laws confirm the inexorable necessity of transformation. Similarly with Erwin Gutkind, a Berliner who emigrated to the UK in 1933 and to the USA in 1956, becoming Professor in the Graduate School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. His International History of City Development – published in eight volumes and more than 4,000 pages between 1964 and 1972 – celebrated the historical diversity of towns only to affirm that they were a thing of the past (Gutkind 1962: 56). In future, dense urban populations must be dispersed, and nature allowed to grow where streets and buildings once stood: ‘the original conception of a city – a conception that has lasted for 5000 years with only minor modifications – is now approaching its end’ (Gutkind 1964: 6). As history was past, the future had to be new: ‘It is our task, at once inspiring and terrifying, to begin a new chapter in the history of human settlement’. No contradiction was perceived between meticulous study of historic types and their utter negation (Gutkind 1962: 1). Big-canvas narrative gave the Modern Project its sense of mission and its appealing boldness, but it also encouraged ideological arrogance and colossal collective misjudgement.

In 1957 Karl Popper published a critique of the ‘inexorable laws of historical destiny’, The Poverty of Historicism. It was dedicated to the victims of Fascist and Communist ideology and didn’t discuss architecture and planning theory, but the poverty of historicism was equally apparent in the built environment, and as urban highway construction, slum clearance and urban renewal gathered pace, the protests of its victims began to be heard in community action and through the ballot box. The seminal importance of Jane Jacobs (1961) was that Death and Life of Great American Cities, more than any other book, called the bluff on the assumption that cleansweep renewal was inexorable destiny.

URBAN DESIGN – RETHINKING THE PAST Urban design emerged as a distinct specialism at just the same moment, and from the outset, historical method was at the heart of its theory and practice. The original urban design conference was organised by Seigfreid Geidion and José Luis Sert at Harvard University in April 1956. They had already collaborated at the eighth CIAM Congress at Doorn on the theme of ‘the heart of the city’, the heart missing from the Charter of Athens theory of the city as an apparatus based on the functions of dwelling, recreation, work and transportation. Heart was good but the idea of ‘urban design’ implied more, adding soul and memory too. Mumford (2009) traces the various strands of thought involved: the idea of townscape and the sensory experience of enclosure in traditional urban space; interest in the picturesque functionalism of Victorian engineering infrastructure; aesthetic appreciation of the tactile qualities of textures, type-faces, paving materials, and street furniture; the influence of post-war reconstruction of ruined towns; the ethnographic interests of younger CIAM members, chafing against CIAM rationalism, who would soon break away to form Team 10; the philosophical influence of personalism, emphasising the role of human association

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in individual identity; the emerging influence of Jane Jacobs, prophet of the post-war ‘street generation’ and a speaker at that first urban design conference in the spring of 1956. Historical culture became a defining feature of urban design as a field of practice. Instead of the previous emphasis on discontinuity with earlier traditions of place-making, practitioners such as Francis Tibbalds, Jonathan Barnett and Allan Jacobs went back to precedent for lessons. Texts such as Allan Jacobs’ (2002) Boulevard Book and Spiro Kostof’s (1992a, b) monumental City Shaped and City Assembled brought a diachronic perspective to problem-solving. The urban design scene developed a distinctively wide historical culture. Tours and study visits became an essential part of the job with Britain’s Urban Design Group, for example, starting the annual excursions (Figure 24.1) which remain one of its prime membership benefits. In the US, Peter Rowe’s (1997) Civic Realism, based on his courses at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, put intelligent tourism at the heart of urban design practice. It is through the coupling of historical understanding and direct sensory experience of urban spaces that the designer learns his or her craft. So as the urban design movement took shape in the second half of the twentieth century it brought a different perspective to history, encouraging the designer to look at the city not as dead matter but as living tissue with its own vital principles. The shift could be seen most obviously in relation to historic patrimony, where the scope of conservation protection widened from isolated monuments – the special cases envisaged as sole survivors under the Charter of Athens – to include their settings and entire historic quarters. Conservation planners developed techniques of area character analysis that would provide a robust basis for regulation. Most ambitious were the typo-morphological techniques pioneered in Italy, which reached beyond architectural history into the deep structure of street and plot patterns (morphology) and characteristic repetition in building form (typology) (Moudon 1994, Panerai et al. 2004).

Paris villes nouvelles Bastide towns of south-west France Italian hill towns including San Gimignano, Volterra, Montepulciano, Perugia, Urbina Mediaeval towns of southern Germany including Heidelberg, Dinkelsbühl, Nördlingen, Rothenberg Towns of the Spanish meseta: Segovia, Avila, Toledo, Salamanca Prague, Telc and German settlements of Southern Bohemia Hanseatic towns on the Baltic, including Lübeck, Stralsund, Gdansk Towns of Puglia, Calabria, Basilicata Historic towns of Holland Towns of the Harz mountains Galicia and Northern Portugal Budapest and the towns of the Danube Bend Po Valley and the Cities of the Plain - Pavia, Parma, Mantua, Verona, Padua, Sabbioneta, Montagnana Germanic mediaeval planned towns of Silesia and Slovakia The Moorish legacy in Andalucia Mediaeval planned towns of the Zähringer dukes, Freiburg and Strasbourg Turin, Asti, Alba, bastides of Piedmont and hill-towns of Liguria Transylvania Baltic states Sicily Towns around Lake Constance Moscow and the Golden Ring Berlin and Croatia Cittaslow towns of Tuscany Bordeaux, Nancy, Karlsruhe Conquistador towns of Spain

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1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1989 1990 1991 1993 1994 1995 1996 1998 1999 2000 2001 2003 2004 2005 2006 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

History and Community Action But cultural policy – in the guise of historic building conservation – was only one factor in the historical turn. Equally significant, as Nan Ellin (1999) shows, were the links to urban activism and community politics. The urban design movement took shape in episodes like the battle for La Marolle in Brussels, the mass squatting along the metro line in Amsterdam, the community-based renewal of the historic centre of Bologna, and the anti-freeway coalition of squatters, immigrants and environmentalists who saved

the Luisenstadt quarter of Berlin and caused the 1987 International Building Exhibition to make a clean break from conventional modern town planning in favour of a ‘critical reconstruction’ of the city of streets, blocks and courtyards. The issue was not the cultural status of these streets but their publicness and solidarity – the role of the street as locus of collective memory (Hebbert 2005a). The radical generation of French architects who took the lead first in the 1968 student riots and then in the urban design revolution pioneered a new type of centre, using historical displays to mobilise community participation.

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In Paris the Pavillon de l’Arsenal was converted in 1988 from a municipal archive store into a permanent exhibit for community involvement in planning, combining deep resources on the city’s 2,000-year history with a context for debate around current schemes and future planning. At its centre were a plaster model of the city at 1:2,000, and larger-scale maquettes of streets and neighbourhoods. The Arsenale’s concept of a history-based design centre remains widely influential, though grassroots radicalism has lost its edge in a gentrified Paris and the central model has been replaced by a giant digital table linked to Google Earth and created in sponsorship with JC Decaux. Other centres that try to link collective memory, urban history and participation are Amsterdam’s Zuiderkerk, the red Info-Boxes of Berlin, the machi-zukuri houses of Japan, the Hackney Exploratory, and the Glasgow Lighthouse. Many of the techniques of participatory design are based on memory. Some charrettes and design workshops begin with three large rolls of paper, one for marking up the timeline of world events, one for personal memories, and the third for a history of the local community (Wates 2013: 76). Other approaches use oral history, visual prompts, archive 290

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photographs, historic maps, or participatory fieldwork in which local residents survey their area and make their own assessment of its character strengths and weaknesses. But the most significant technique is counter-intuitive and deserves a section of its own.

Figure-Ground, Revealing History Early on in the urban design revival, practitioners discovered the power of silhouettes. The book Collage City by Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter (1978) was influential (see also Chapter 22). Inspired by the legendary 1748 map of Rome by Guiseppe Nolli and by the steel-engraved city plans in Baedeker guidebooks, the method offered a radically reductive graphic of three-dimensional form (in black) and voids (in white). It had a double appeal. Firstly, it set clear blue water between architecture and urban design. In Colin Rowe’s phrase it taught designers to ‘forget architecture’ and focus on urban space, ‘Stadtraum’, the outdoor rooms and corridors of the city. Secondly, a figure-ground was a historical X-ray plate, capable of revealing the growth of a settlement and its morphological shifts from age to age. In these diagrams the

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disintegrating effects of twentieth-century change showed up with stark clarity, whilst comparison over time highlighted the effects of surface car-parking, gap sites, ‘amenity’ landscapes, the floor-plates of retailing and industry, modern highway geometry and what the townscape school called SLOAP – space left over after planning. The figure-ground revealed cultural as well as technological shifts, reflecting modernist aesthetics and the multiplication of free-standing architecture, as objectbuildings in open ground broke up the urban ‘Gestalt’ in which streets, squares, courtyards, parks and other voids are

legible as figures framed by continuous three-dimensional built form. Figure-ground mapping was also an effective remedial tool for the urban design movement. It became the base-line technique of practices who specialised in urban regeneration and repair. Interns and trainees with the Koetter Kim practice would work with tracing paper over Ordnance Survey sheets, adding to the mighty image of the city that adorned the walls of the London office (Figure 24.2). With encouragement from Anne Vernez Moudon (1997) and Francis Tibbalds (2001), urban design reports often 291

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featured figure-ground triptychs of urban tissue as it had been, now was, and could be in future. A famous example was exhibited by the City of Berlin at the Venice Biennale in October 2000 under the title Stadtwende or ‘city change’, showing the urban tissue prior to the Second World War; as it was after war damage, political partition, and post-war development; and as it might be repaired in a reunified city following principles of critical reconstruction. Detailed drawings showed new building proposals in orange and the existing figure-ground in grey. Late in 2012 the same colour technique was used by David Rudlin of the Manchester-based URBED design cooperative when he worked with architecture students to ‘build a city in a day’ in plasticine on a figure-ground of Manchester (Figure 24.3). His base-map originated in the Sustainable Urban Neighbourhoods (SUN) project funded by the Joseph Rowntree Trust, for which he hand-drew a remarkable sequence of Manchester figure-grounds for 1774, 1824, 1924, 1981 and 2006. Publicly exhibited and frequently reproduced in slides and illustrations, they provided an iconic summary of the coming of the industrial revolution to eighteenth-century Manchester, the city’s explosive growth at the heart of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism, the impact of twentieth-century economic decline and planning intervention, and the twenty-first century tasks of post-industrial recovery and repair (Figure 24.4). Despite 292

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the simplicity with which figure-ground graphics can be generated digitally from web-based map resources, Rudlin’s public participation exercises continue to involve local residents hand-drawing individual building footprints on tracing paper overlays. It’s a pernickety, laborious process but it has a revelatory effect as the familiar gestalt-pattern of streets and urban spaces emerges from the mass of detail.

USING HISTORY IN PRACTICE In this section let’s stay with David Rudlin and the URBED practice to see how they use historical research in the urban design process. In a personal communication, Rudlin explains the practice philosophy as ‘based on the three Rs – “rediscovery” of what used to be there, “repair” of damaged urban fabric, and “renewal”. The last refers to our intervention which is supposed to be of its time. So that in the future people will be able to see our distinctive layer of history’. Some brief glimpses of ‘3R’ thinking applied in Brighton, Grimsby, Chesterfield and Brentford show how historical method proves its worth in real-world problem-solving.2 The Brighton New England Quarter Design Statement (URBED 2001) was a plan produced for the New England Consortium, a partnership including Network Rail and Sainsbury’s. It addressed the city’s largest brownfield site,

The alignment of the ‘Crooked Laine’ helped to generate a road layout and block structure for URBED’s master plan, which was approved in 2002 and realised in 2004–08. The urban design includes careful discussion of street cross-sections the height-to-width (or ‘enclosure’) ratios in different parts of historic Brighton, all of which came in handy some years later when the Beetham Organization tried to convert outline consent for a five storey hotel

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a sloping area of almost nine hectares just to the east of Brighton Station, a steam locomotive works and goods yard until the 1960s, and object of an unsuccessful planning application for a conventional superstore in the 1990s. The analysis started from historical maps and images of the seaside town, showing how its Victorian street pattern reflected a 1,000-year-old layout of Saxon communal fields (the ‘laines’) and their access paths (the ‘leekways’).

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in the New England Quarter into a 42-storey tower. It was refused planning permission, a decision upheld on appeal. Chesterfield Town Centre Masterplan (URBED 2009) was produced for Chesterfield Borough Council by a team that included DTZ, Arup, Urban Space Management and Sauce Architecture. The plan sends out a powerful message about the town’s unwelcoming trafficdominated aspect and its failure to communicate a rich heritage. Its preparation included a round-table workshop in November 2008, a day-long event in the spring centred around URBED’s own Routemaster bus in New Square, and then an exhibition in the Tourist Information Centre. URBED’s report and exhibits revealed the town’s 2,000year evolution since the founding of a Roman fort on the headland between the Hipper and the Rother, traced the location of the Church of St Mary and St Michael, with its famous crooked steeple, and the 800-year-old market, still one of the largest in England, and illustrated the ‘astonishingly crass’ 1961 comprehensive development plan by J.S. Allen that would have obliterated all traces of the mediaeval market. The plan describes the grid morphology of the town centre, with its ancient eastwest ‘contour streets’ along the ridge crossed by the narrower north-south lanes or shambles. Figure-grounds and axonometrics demonstrate how the broken tissue of voids and car-parks

can be mended by infill development. The chronological approach reveals the significance of topography and landscape setting (Figure 24.5). So the foundation is laid for a contextually responsive design. The St James’ House and St James’ Square report for North East Lincolnshire Council (URBED 2010) was developed with the Manchester public realm designers, Landscape Projects, and shows the application of historic method in the context of an ancient setting, the churchyard of Grimsby’s minster church of St James. The church dates from 1114 and stands at the edge of the town centre, peripheralised by 1960s redevelopment and the inner ring road. St James’s House is a diocesan development dating from the early 1970s, flatroofed and faced in rustic red brick over a ground-level open arcade in gravel-clad concrete. Its designers’ attempts at contextualism were nullified by poor spatial relationships, ground-floor car-parking and lack of active use, reinforcing the feel of the churchyard as a backwater and zone of ‘antisocial behaviour’. Grimsby’s 2009 master plan made it a priority to redevelop the setting of the St James and bring in cultural activities to promote footfall and safety. URBED’s historical analysis briefly plots the changing town plan from the twelfth century to the development of the port, the nineteenth-century arrival of the railway, and the severance of twentieth-century highways. Site-level analysis shows how the building line around the edge of the churchyard has shifted over time whilst the modern open space, with its under-used public realm, is shown to be significantly larger than it historically was. This analysis pre-empts the a priori objection to any loss of current green-space for building, and it sets the scene for a valuable typological analysis of churchyards and closes in British cities showing the many different configurations of public realm, urban setting and ecclesiastical architecture. The research gave the design team a basis on which to work up four distinct options, which URBED took to consultation with stakeholders and with the general public at a day event inside its ‘consultation bubble’ beside the Minster in August 2009. 294

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Finally the Brentford Lock West – Design and Access Statement (2010) was URBED’s contribution within a project team that included Tovatt Architects, Colin Buchanan (transport), Camlins (landscape) and Tibbalds (planning). The client was ISIS Waterfront Regeneration, a joint venture set up by British Waterways to unlock the development potential of its canal-side sites. Having been refused permission for an earlier scheme submitted in 2004, ISIS wanted to ensure that the design had a strong basis in public participation and sustainability principles. URBED was tasked with generating an urban design concept through a two-day ‘design for change’ event and, as usual, historical research formed the basis of the ‘3R’ approach they adopted. The site stands by the Roman road from London to Bath at the point where it crosses the River Brent – the original Brent ford. But this is also the final north-western meander of the Thames within Middlesex, already important as a waterside town before the arrival of the Grand Union canal in 1805 and Brunel’s Great West Railway in 1838. In the 1850s Brunel joined all these elements together with a branch line to a transhipment port on the peninsula where the canal enters the tidal Thames. The ISIS site was a mid-twentieth century extension of this intermodal centre, created in the last days of canal freight traffic. London-wide figure-grounds for 1813, 1897, 1950 and 2010 reinforce the appreciation of Brentford’s pivotal position within the metropolitan topography whilst comparison of figure-grounds for 1874 and 2010 brings out the principal relations between the site, waterways and Brentford High Street (Figure 24.6). Here, the key lesson for the community was that the high street had declined because of the limited number of people living within walking distance and the removal of through traffic. So, having set the scene through historical research and in the process caused local people to reconsider their opposition to new housing on the edge of the centre, a community design workshop followed, in which local residents were issued with chunky fibre-tip pens to physically draw the figure-ground as it exists today. Those tracing

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From the research activities of an urban design practice, let me turn to the activity of an academic scholar in the field. This section is personal and surprising. At the editor’s request 295

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HISTORICAL METHOD IN RESEARCH

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sheets then formed the basis for an imaginative construction of the potential contribution of the ISIS site towards regeneration of the urban fabric, and particularly of Brentford High Street as ‘a vibrant district centre that celebrates the town’s heritage and waterside location’. Brentford, Chesterfield, Grimsby and Brighton each posed very different urban design challenges, but in each case the ‘rediscovery-repair-renewal’ method yielded incisive recommendations. But, by building on the history of the site and repairing its damaged urban fabric, the team was free to take a contemporary approach to the new additions to the plan. The approach refutes the notion that urban design means pastiche and is intrinsically anti-modern but instead builds a contemporary response to a site out of its history. It is therefore historical rather than historicist in nature.

I looked through my own back catalogue of urban design research for examples of historical method. They are more numerous and various than I had ever appreciated, and together illustrate the varied utility of historic method, and some sense of how to approach it. The first project concerned an aspect of pedestrianism in the financial business district of the City of London – the apparently perverse preference of City workers to crowd onto pavements and jay-walk congested streets, rather than use the upper-level walkways and bridges expensively provided for them. As well as mapping and photographing the overhead network, I researched its genesis in the Guildhall archives and interviewed its designers, most of them now dead. The history of the City of London vertical segregation experiment proved vital to understanding their current performance. Walkways had suddenly been adopted as policy in the 1960s and as suddenly abandoned in the 1980s. That in turn explained the fragmentary character of the network and its operational failure (Hebbert 1993). Recently the film-maker Chris Lee has brought this research to life with fascinating archival footage in a documentary entitled The Pedway – Elevating London, well worth an online search. Around 1990 I was following London design debates under the extraordinary circumstances when Big Bang development pressures coincided with GLC abolition. My template for this research was the most famous of all texts on urban design in the capital, Steen Eiler Rasmussen’s The Unique City (1937). His history explained London’s early twentieth-century expansion through a narrative that sprang from the mediaeval nexus between City and Crown. Mine rolled the chronicle forward to explain post-war containment, the failure of the urban motorway box, and the gentrification of inner residential neighbourhoods, and the eastward turn towards redevelopment of the Docklands (Hebbert 1998). A separate piece of work examined the historical interplay between institutional and design factors in the changing distribution of London’s town halls and shopping centres (Hebbert 1991). My most recent London research has used 296

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figure-ground mapping to analyse the insertion of Crossrail stations into the urban tissue framed by the main-line terminals (Hebbert 2012), and that story is currently being amplified with historical research into all the previous unsuccessful attempts to build cross-London rail links since the 1890s. Much of this research has been pursued in dialogue with professional London historians. For example, the Centre for Metropolitan History (CMH) has hosted several conferences that bear on current issues, and the London Journal has provided a forum for perspectives that link past and present – one example being our CMH-inspired special issue on tall buildings in the London landscape (Hebbert and McKellar 2008). Moving to Manchester in 1994, I needed to make sense of the overt political interest in urban design as remedy for the abrupt contrasts, so different to London, between the dynamic centre and its adjacent ring of ultra-low density and abandonment. Long-run history held the clue, of course, with Friedrich Engels’s analysis of Manchester’s slums and suburbs in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1846) as the still-indispensable baseline. But you also needed to understand the immediate preceding history of an internal putsch that had brought to power a New Labour élite under a leader, Graham Stringer, who took Barcelona as the benchmark for Manchester’s aspiration to regain its nineteenth-century place in the galaxy of great European cities. The city leadership’s love of built-upness and aversion towards conventional ‘amenity landscapes’ held the key to its urban design strategy (Hebbert 2009). Following this thread, I began to work on New Urbanism and its relation to earlier theories of urban space. The image of a recently-planted, freshly-uprooted tree in East Manchester became the symbol of a general narrative concerning the place of greenery within pre-Modern, Modernist and post-Modernist urbanism (Hebbert 2008). I followed a similar historical dialectic when researching the public health dimension of urban design (Hebbert 1999) and used it again when researching current trends in highway engineering and their implications for

TIPS FOR RESEARCHERS:

urbanism (Hebbert 2005b). The most fruitful application of this history-of-ideas approach has proved to be ‘Climate Science and Urban Design’, a recently-completed ESRCfunded investigation into the application of climatology by urban designers. Not only had the topic been neglected and unresearched, giving piquancy to our archival work and oral history interviews, but the newly-recovered history has an urgent policy relevance, as we argue directly in the Urban Studies paper ‘Cities and climate change – the precedents and why they matter’ (Hebbert and Jankovic 2013).

CONCLUSION

ENDNOTES 1 2

Source: Stones (2003) and personal communication. ŽŽ–Š‡’Žƒ•ǡƒ•™‡ŽŽƒ•–Š‡ƒ…Š‡•–‡”Ƥ‰—”‡Ǧ‰”‘—†•ǡ…ƒ„‡ found on URBED’s website, www.urbed.coop/.

3

™”‹–‹‰–Š‹•…Šƒ’–‡” ‘ơ‡”™ƒ”–Šƒ•–‘ƒ››‡ƒ”•‘ˆ—dergraduate and Masters’ students in the design studios at the University of Manchester, and to David Rudlin. As a teacher he helped restore the studio ethos, and as a practitioner his URBED projects provide an excellent illustration of the argument of this chapter.

24. Historical exploration/explanation in urban design

This chapter has tried to demonstrate the rich potential of historical method in urban design research and practice. I haven’t discussed detailed sources – archival, oral, visual, secondary – because these depend so much on context. What’s sure is that digitisation and web-archiving have made information much easier to find and work with. Most local history libraries now have an online presence, some very good, and place-specific materials are supported in the UK (as increasingly elsewhere) by an impressive array of national resources – Historic Digimap, English Heritage’s aerial photograph collection, and the Heritage Gateway archaeology database to name but three. Historical exploration is popular with the general public, it has never been easier to deliver, it is policy relevant, and it yields effective arguments and design ideas. In urban design we should never again attempt to deliberately forget the past. Instead, these methods should be written into many more project briefs, both for research and in practice.3

Ȉ The field-trip tip: do urban design research through the soles of your feet. Ȉ Black on white, the figure-ground sequence is a simple yet effective tool to reveal urban history. Ȉ Collective memory can be found as much in the street plan as in its landmarks. Ȉ Visit archives, touch the files. Ȉ Time moves on, interview those late twentieth century practitioners before it’s too late.

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25 The problem of scale Adrian Lahoud

By revisiting a forgotten masterpiece of high-modern architecture in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli by the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, this chapter sets out to demonstrate the inherent formal plasticity of the various scalar problems that inform the urban project, using its seeming unity to suggest a contradictory and often paradoxical set of design rationalities that seem to co-exist within the project. These scalar problems are understood as fully historical forms of reasoning that came into being during a period of nation building in the 1950s and 1960s in Lebanon, before being radically transformed by the evisceration of a nascent welfare state, its replacement by a laissez faire economy, and then finally by the eventual impact of the civil war.

INTRODUCTION The research presented in this chapter emerged from a project titled ‘Post-traumatic Urbanism’ that explored the city through the frame of conflict. It took conflict as its entry point in order to foreground the urban as an arena of political struggle. For biographical as well as academic reasons, this project focused on the Middle East especially the city of Beirut, which experienced 15 years of civil war between 1975 and 1990. My interest was to look through the rubble and beyond the images of sacrifice and destruction to see if it was

possible to discern more subtle reconfigurations of the city as a result of the conflict. What, for example, happened to the organisation and size of the neighbourhood unit, and how did patterns of movement change in response to the continual interruption of battle and the persistent threat of danger? Increasingly, it seemed to me that many of the categories we take to be natural within urban design, such as the neighbourhood unit, inevitably reveal a more plastic structure that transforms in order to accommodate the stress of conflict or the perception of harm. Though the research that followed the Posttraumatic Urbanism project moved away from a specific concern with conflict and morphed instead into an attempt to deal, in theoretical terms, with the problem of scale and its plasticity; a theme that had emerged from the preceding research. This became the subject of my PhD, and now of this chapter.

THE IDEA OF SCALE The idea of scale has not attracted significant scholarly attention in architecture since the 1950s; perhaps the last time when proportioning systems were thought to encapsulate value systems and before the problem of proportion became a purely technical rather than social or political matter. Despite this lack of scholarly attention the term scale must

be one of the most ubiquitous words in architectural and urban discourse, deployed almost as often as space, form and function. However, whilst all of these other terms have attracted significant amounts of attention, conjecture and dispute, today scale remains under-theorised. Part of the reason for this is the habit of understanding scale as a ratio or measure in an era where the meaning of both has been irrevocably changed within architecture. There would, for example, be little point in merely re-asserting the value of specific proportions, harmonies or intervals in the context of innovations such as digital production or digital fabrication, since both of these transform the relation between the specific and the general in so far as the general comes to supplant the specific as the locus of value within parametric descriptions of form. In common usage, however, there are two other ways in which the term scale is used, firstly as a synonym for size (large scale, small scale), and second as something that points to a unique set of supposedly self-evident spatial problems (neighbourhood scale, block scale, urban scale). The discussion below begins from the last of these and proposes a definition of scale as essentially problematic in character, scale is a problem first and only assumes the status of a convention later once repetitive forms of knowledge have emerged in order to frame the problem properly. Scale should not be understood as an a-historical idea, or be spoken of in the singular. First, scalar problems have a genesis, a life and a death, which is to say they are fully historical; second, every scale always exists as a multiplicity, which binds small and large together. There are different agendas in this proposition, the first is to critique the simplistic attribution of success or failure in urban design, whereby either becomes a kind of absolute measure grounded in the purported unity of the project, and also to underscore the historically contingent field that each problem must draw its sense from. The consequence of this is to treat design projects as composites in which contradictory and often-paradoxical forms of rationality sit side-by-side, 300

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and also to suggest that within urban design, attention to one problem usually sets off another. Perhaps a final result of this proposition is to re-organise the part-whole relation into a part-part relationship in order to move away from a unified and totalised conception of ‘the project’.

The Dangers of Interpretation In order to ground this definition of scale as a problem the research focused on a project by the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer in the Northern Lebanese city of Tripoli from the early 1960s. The ambition behind this case study was to challenge the simplistic objections that Niemeyer’s urban plan failed, either in Tripoli or in his other project for Brasilia. This should not imply the automatic adoption of the contrary position that he succeeded since the aim here is neither to bury or exonerate the architect’s legacy or that of the project, rather it is to problematise the very idea of success or failure by showing it to be wholly contingent on scale and history. For this to happen, the Tripoli project will not be treated as a single work with a single name and coherent ambition, instead the aim is to show how such a project is always composite; to demonstrate that in some way different histories and traditions course through its various parts. This analysis operates according to a strict method in which scales are first given ontologically as problems out there in the world. Designers come to know and comprehend these problems through a specific structure of knowledge, an epistemic frame. The problem is always the genetic moment of any scalar individuation, it subsequently exists for us architects and is made available for design in as far as we construct it, assemble its parts, and assign them specific meanings. Knowledge acts like a lens that refracts the problem; by changing the lens designers change their approach path, every lens eventually guiding the rationality of the project in a different direction. What is important ultimately is this correlation between the ontological and epistemic individuation since this will

who take to its stage. What appears to be a chasm between the ‘microhistoria’ of individual events so loved by Ginzburg and the ‘longue durée’ of deep repetitions so loved by Braudel is more a product of scalar habits within historical writing itself than a concrete distinction in the world. In any case, all that is interesting must imbricate both. If all this seems a little abstracted from the world it can be given more concrete form by referring directly to the case study at hand.

RACHID KARAME FAIR AND EXPOSITION PROJECT, TRIPOLI, LEBANON

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Measuring over 600,000 m2, Niemeyer’s Rachid Karame Fair and Exposition site was conceived of as more than just a recreational or commercial space for the city of Tripoli.1 Intended to present a new idea of the city, the project was intended to kindle a synthesis of work, life and culture functioning together in an open civic landscape. With construction interrupted by the Lebanese civil war, all the primary structures were completed yet none were fitted out. Therefore, what remains is a bare unadorned yet almost complete representation of all the main elements of the original Niemeyer plan. Looking at Tripoli from the air today the elliptical area of the park recalls a petri dish (Figure 25.1). Stamped into the urban tissue, a 1.1 km long ellipse is filled with prototypical architectural forms, such as parabolic arches (Figure 25.2), faceted cones, and a vast plane of concrete seemingly afloat in its landscape. Intended programmes for the buildings were to include an exhibition hall, national pavilion, outdoor concert stage and a helipad, whilst the sense that this project constituted a type of urban laboratory is far from metaphorical.2 Niemeyer envisioned these parts growing, becoming populated and informing the surrounding city. Indeed, the original plan indicates rows of collective housing around the western perimeter of the site; an initial proposition for

25.

determine which aspects of the problem the frame captures. Though this much might be obvious, there is one difficult catch: often when designers pose a problem according to a specific epistemic model, they don’t actually know they are doing it, it is simply the way ‘one does things’ where the use of the impersonal pronoun always points to the unconscious deployment of a convention or something that appears under the category of ‘common sense’. Now why should this be a difficulty? Well to begin with, it makes research difficult because it means that design always carries a kind of secret payload or undeclared intent that is obscure even to its authors. The consequence is that it is not enough to take what designers say about their work at face value since their own intentions become less reliable as indicators of meaning. In any case people – including architects – rarely feel the need to state what is commonly agreed upon; to recall Foucault’s dictum: ‘what does it matter who is speaking?’ The historiographical implication is to direct attention away from the voice to the background noise behind a project, to tune in and detect the often subtle implicit presuppositions in the work, those smells that can’t be detected because you have grown so used to them. The method is archaeological, to make visible and render perceptible the undeclared payload in a work. The always-present risk in this endeavour is to appear to be ventriloquising the architect, to make them say things they never intended to, or to contradict their own statements about their work. The only response to this concern is to say that all speech is to some extent a matter of ventriloquy in that social norms speak through and condition in advance, what can and can’t be said. Moreover, fidelity to intentions is a complex matter and ultimately less interesting than the potential for productive misinterpretation. A more legitimate risk is to fall prey to some form of over-determined structuralism in which everything is pre-conditioned by invisible environmental, social and political forces and where the only thing that is granted any agency are the deep currents of history itself, not the actions of the individuals

Figure 25.1 Tripoli, Lebanon, showing the site of the Tripoli Fair and Exposition

a new residential district in Tripoli, in the expectation of a burgeoning urban hub. The project forms part of a broader, well documented history of high modernist work in Africa and Asia, including Le Corbusier’s work in Chandigarh, India, Kahn’s work in Bangladesh, and Niemeyer’s later campus project in North Africa (Botey 1996). Unlike the former examples, little is known about the project in Lebanon. Niemeyer’s 302

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own references to the project are scant: a two-page report in the journal Modulo3 that he established to document Brazilian architecture, and a passing reference to it in his autobiographical notes (Niemeyer 1962). In comparison to the work Niemeyer completed during his years of exile from Brazil, such as the University of Constantine project in Algeria, the Rachid Karame Exposition project forms a missing but important part of this architect’s canon. Drawings exist in the

The Problem of Scale

Figure 25.2 Tripoli Fair and Exposition, parabolic arch

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Niemeyer archive but all other documentation, including the drawings of the site’s structural engineering, have since been lost. In other words the project is something of a forgotten relic, abandoned to time and ignored by critics (Figure 25.3).

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Figure 25.3 Tripoli Fair and Exposition, national hall and satellite

As already argued, scale is a problem first and only a convention later. This problem animates a field of activity and spurs it to assemble knowledge so that the problem can be acted upon. The problem in this case is understood as a motor that sets history into motion around it. In Tripoli, the first scale is a geopolitical one. The question that arises from this has to do with the formation of the state: how to construct a new nation in the period immediately following independence from French colonial rule? This problem is refracted through a historical period when nations in Africa, Asia and the Middle East pursued a modern and emancipatory program in architecture and urbanism. Though there are key differences in this period and between the different sites of experimentation, they are united by a conviction that the built environment would be instrumental in composing and holding together a nascent national imaginary. The commissioning of Niemeyer – a Brazilian not a European – cannot be understood without this burgeoning post-colonial consensus on the value of modern architecture. The second scale is territorial and the question that forms here is how to intensify national economic productivity. This problem is posed in terms of the fundamental tenets of modern urban planning in which infrastructure is used to secure the free and efficient circulation of goods. In the arcing highway that surrounds the Rachid Karame Fair and Exposition project in Tripoli there is an ambition to link a new commercial hub to the capital in Beirut while simultaneously opening up a new site of productivity in its sister city to the north, much like its predecessor in Brazil. This ambition is wholly consistent with the desire for speed and its translation into economic efficiency that is characteristic not only of this period but also of infrastructure in general in which complex scalar compromises around the distribution of social goods must always be made. Alongside these geopolitical and territorial strategies, a number of subsequent strategies can be found in the project.

Figure 25.4 Tripoli Fair and Exposition, concert shell

At an urban scale the question that forms is how to shape a new political subject in which the exposition type is used as an exemplary instrument of transformation. The exposition is a ‘technology of nationhood’ (Uslenghi 2005), an institution in a suite of complimentary institutions like schools that attempts to break down familial or communitarian belonging and construct citizens whose fidelity is to an idea of the nation. Within the exposition in Tripoli visitors would see a range of artefacts gathered from different parts of the world and in doing so they would be able to comprehend the uniqueness of their own national identity. More importantly however, the visitors would see themselves as part of a large anonymous crowd where the architecture worked to form a sense of mass ‘as spectacle’; a second voyeuristic display to reinforce the goods and artefacts housed in the various 304

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stands. This is clearly manifested in the choreography of movement in the vertical axis with Niemeyer constructing a number of ramps and elevated vantage points in which one might gaze back down on the crowd. Finally, at the scale of the discreet architectural element it is possible to locate a further scalar problem: how to constitute a secular social body? This problem is encapsulated in Niemeyer’s treatment of the dome for experimental theatre and music (Figure 25.4). Within the local Arab context of Niemeyer’s project in Tripoli and within the history of architecture within Europe, the dome is clearly defined as a sacred typology expressed in the form of the mosque or most emblematically in the centrally planned churches of the Renaissance described by Wittkower and Wolfflin. In deploying this form for a space of cultural production within

this context, Niemeyer enacts a typological displacement in which what is sacred is no longer religious belief but cultural production.

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Though all of these scales deal in some way with the question of nationhood, each problem unfolds according to a separate rationality. The geopolitical, the territorial, the urban and the architectural problems do not need to be flattened into a unity since they only materialise in specific elements of the project, its commission, infrastructure, programme, choreography and architecture. More specifically with regards to the question of success or failure within the project, each one of these problems begins against one historical background before concluding against another, in each case the idea of success or failure is contingent on the historical conditions of the scale’s genesis and subsequent transformation. In the case of the ambition to produce a new and coherent nation in an antagonised region of the world, the idea of a modern welfare state (the background against which the commission for Tripoli must be understood) is replaced by a rabid free market economy in which the state no longer sees itself as the sponsor of large public works. As with Brasilia, what this project embodies is a specific scalar diagram in which a strongly interventionist state is coupled with a bureaucratic and technocratic form of rationality. The stability of this diagram guarantees the spatiality of the urban plan; it does so by continually reserving the right and the means to intervene in national space at geopolitical scale. In this regard, this specific manifestation of the geopolitical scale can be understood as a phenomenon that emerges with, belongs to, and finally depends upon a particular kind of state apparatus, one that conceives of the national space and its geopolitical context as plastic, one ready to identify itself as the architect of this plasticity, one able to redistribute social goods and aggressively intervene in the spatial articulation of the national imaginary. When

this condition changed, when the nascent ambition for one model of statehood was aborted in the name of an even more aggressive return to laissez-faire, what takes place is not just a shift in political orientation, but also the death of a specific scale of intervention within the territory. In this regard, the geopolitical scale that the Niemeyer project embodies was born with this state form and wholly contingent on it for support. When the civil war began and this life-support apparatus was removed, this scale and the kind of projects that it enabled were abandoned. Further, in the attempt to increase productivity through infrastructure the project proposed a scale of operation that is distinctly non-local in many ways, ignoring as it does much of the urban fabric around the site. Though Niemeyer was unhappy with the procurement process for the project and requested more detailed analysis of the existing urban conditions, this material may still not have led to a fine grained and nuanced interaction with the existing context since in many ways the very idea of local context, as it would come to be posed by critics such as Jane Jacobs, had yet to occur, or at least to be widely accepted. Thus whilst the problem of circulation was immanent to the rise of modern planning, the problem of street life was similarly immanent to its critique. ‘Street life’ as a concern did not exist at the time of the Tripoli project in the sense it is understood today, and did not until the modernist tower threatened to take it away. It became visible at precisely the moment of its disappearance so that today it is one of the primary motors for urban design, along with all the other concepts that belong to it such as ‘active frontage’ and so forth. The important point to make here is quite simple; both problems evolve in response to different perceptions of the city, the squalor of the nineteenthcentury city in one case, the sterilisation of the twentiethcentury city in the other. Further, both problems are posed at different kinds of scales, the nation state on one hand and the neighbourhood on the other. Each orientation of the historical field lends an entirely different sense to the problem, as demonstrated by the

Figure 25.5 Tripoli Fair and Exposition, aerial view

brutal move away from nascent secularisation of the state and a return to sectarian bonds embodied much of the 15year conflict that would soon engulf the country. In each case the idea of success or failure of any one of these scales in the project was contingent upon a set of meanings, references and supports outside of the work itself. Though the project emerges in response to one set of problems, relatively soon

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these problems are replaced by others. The elements of the project can only make sense by reading them against this shifting implicit historical background, extracting from this historical context and assessing them according to contemporary questions eviscerates the project of meaning and misses the unexhausted potential of its former instrumentality.

TOTAL DESIGN VS. BRICOLAGE In conclusion, it is worth comparing the question of scale, as it has been presented here, with a canonical critical text on modern architecture and its proposition of bricolage as a strategy of creating difference within the city and of resisting the homogenisation of modernism since it forms the implicit presupposition behind much contemporary urban thought.

Collage City

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In Collage City Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter (1978) critique what they perceive to be the homogenising excess in the modern movement and its idea of the city, seeing in the utopian impulse a hubristic desire to suppress history, eliminate contingency and annihilate difference. Looking back on this critique, in light of continued reassessment of modernism, Collage City reads more like a critique of modern rhetoric than a critique of modern building. Contingency, history and difference care as little for architectural rhetoric as they do for building. They have, and always will, make their claims on architecture and urbanism, whether modern or otherwise. Taking the idea of contingency seriously, neither success nor failure can be secured in the face of it, regardless of style, form or ideological commitment, as the Tripoli project demonstrates (Figure 25.5). Rowe and Koetter begin by claiming that utopia can never be conclusive. With this truism out of the way they inaugurate a critique of ‘total design’ beginning with a comparative discussion of Villa Hadriana and Versailles. The text signals a departure from modern architecture that proceeds via a critique of its apparent unity, its totality. But as this conclusion will demonstrate, both Rowe and Koetter formulate the problem of unity, and by implication modern architecture, on the wrong terms, connecting the question of difference to a series of bourgeoisie values such as taste and discernment.

The action of scale in Collage City is implicit in the title with its references to multiplicities and difference, but scale here is overburdened by nostalgia existing primarily within a semantic and picturesque register. The effect of Rowe and Koetter’s claim is twofold. First, to neutralise history, which now appears as simultaneity; a repertoire of available forms to be drawn upon. Second, to neutralise politics, reduced to the ironic play of differences. The question to pose in conclusion is as follows: can the implicit scalar argument in Rowe and Koetter be detached from any necessary relation to picturesque values and be made operative in another way? Describing the palace at Versailles, Rowe and Koetter note: ‘The moral is declared to the world and the advertisement can scarcely be refused. This is total control and the glaring illumination of it. It is the triumph of generality, the prevalence of the overwhelming idea, the suppression of exception’ (Rowe and Koetter 1978). Versailles is a paragon for everything the authors set out to negate, they will counterpose it to another project which will come to exemplify everything they will try to assert, the Villa Adriana at Tivoli: ‘The one of the them is all unity and convergence: the other all disparity and divergence: the one supposes itself to be an organism, entire and complete: the other presents itself as an animated dialectic of parts’ (Rowe and Koetter 1978). The rhetoric here is quite clear, on one side the reductive simplification of totalising architecture, on the other the conflicting, dialectical complexity of Hadriana. The authors set up a series of clear oppositions: abstraction vs. reality, large-scale ambition vs. small set piece, unity vs. conflict, general vs. specific, homogeneity vs. heterogeneity. Railing against total design and arguing that it is the ‘psychological sub-stratum’ of urban thought they argue that rational, systematic methods will always run aground on the contingent shore of the city.4 There is much to agree with here. Gesturing to an idea of the city as resistant to unified expression, the authors hold a deep conviction about the role of difference. However, the conclusions they draw from this premise should be challenged.

Rowe and Koetter champion the idea of ‘bricolage’ as a counter strategy to the purported totalising impulse of modernism. Through bricolage, different historical forms are allowed to co-exist, related to each other in ‘set pieces’. The theatrical or cinematic analogy should not be passed over too quickly; the city is literally a staging of different, sometimes conflicting meanings. There is a strange self-reflexivity at work here, where difference is no longer something that occurs as a consequence of the plurality of actors and their different political rationalities, instead difference should be consciously deployed as a marker by those actors in the service of an ‘idea of the city as heterogeneous’. Heterogeneity appears therefore, but it appears as a sign. Rowe and Koetter move from an existing condition, the historical city, to its image, the collage city, bypassing the operational moment of rationality that occupies the gap. This hasty leap from a catalogue of pre-existing forms to their eventual staged redeployment misses the moment of individuation, ignoring the creative space and time of architecture’s reasoning. If there is a creative act within their concept of the collage city, it only emerges out of the arrangement of pre-existing elements. The heterogeneity that both Rowe and Koetter focus on is primarily compositional, working as an illustration to stage difference and stimulate the interest of the passers-by.

geopolitical scale of the Tripoli project was in turn tied to a specific formation of the state willing to conceive of this scale in plastic terms. As long as the state apparatus adopted this composition, it was able to marshall together and hold in place the necessary forces required to maintain this scale of operation, and by implication the project. In this regard, there is a specific problem being posed: how is an emerging nation given shape? How is it understood through a specific epistemic model (the Brasilia model), and the discursive background that lends its elements meaning which was always going to have to be a stable social welfare model of the state? The various elements of the Niemeyer plan in Tripoli, its commission and location, its infrastructural umbilical, its use of the exposition type and its displacement of the dome are evidence of difference despite the apparent unity of their formal expression; what is distinct here is not the shape of the element as such but the rationality that guides the element into being. Rowe and Koetter on the other hand abdicate any instrumentality for architecture beyond the curatorial arrangement of pleasing artifacts. The conception of urban design as found in Rowe and Koetter’s text resembles nothing more than a sensibility guiding the cultivated arrangement of conversation pieces in a Bourgeois household.

Bricolage and Scale

CONCLUSION

By treating difference and conflict as signs able to be transplanted from their context and re-organised according to will, they denude architectural elements of their intensity, disconnecting them from the background conditions that lend them sense. Here it is worth returning to the different scales within the case study so that the difference between bricolage and scale can be made more precisely. In the genesis of the geopolitical scale a typological idea, borrowed from Niemeyer’s earlier work in Brasilia, was drawn upon in order to give shape to a newly emerging state.5 The

There is a simple point being made here: what appears to be different may be produced by a common rationality, what appears to be the common might be produced by different rationalities. If there is to be a fight over the importance of difference in the city, this difference cannot be reduced to mere appearances since difference must be understood in terms of alternate rationalities rather than a mere diversity of forms since diversity of form often conceals a common set of political rationalities, as todays cities often bear out. Understanding scale as a problem, which is always immanent

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to contingent historical condition allows architecture to reframe its terms of engagement with the city. In one sense it is an expansion of ambition within urban practice in that it calls for new forms of reasoning that dares to refuse the implicit pre-suppositions present or ‘common sense’ in urban design today. There is probably something perverse in using an architect like Niemeyer to make this kind of point. It is unlikely after all that he would have been conscious of the various instrumentalities being claimed for the project here, this was an architect after all who typically described his buildings in analogy with the female form. In many ways, however, this is precisely the point; in drawing on and transforming many of the ready to hand conventions within modern architecture and planning, Niemeyer deploys elements and concepts riddled with latent socio-political effects, effects that are often undeclared, even to the architect themself.

ENDNOTES 1

Originally named the Tripoli International Fair and Exposition project, it was later changed in honour of the Lebanese Prime Minister, Rachid Karame, who originated from Tripoli and in many ways was the patron of the project.

2

For a critical discussion on the ‘laboratory’ as a colonial model for spatial experimentation in the developing world see Avermaete et al. 2010.

3

‘Modulo was released quarterly and published continuously until 1965, when it was closed down by members of the military dictatorship for its presumed opposition to the government. It returned to circulation in 1975, when censorship laws began to relax, and ceased publication in 1989’ (Le Blanc 2012).

4

Ǯ ‘”ǡ‹ˆ’Žƒ‹‰…ƒ„ƒ”‡Ž›„‡‘”‡•…‹‡–‹Ƥ…–Šƒ–Š‡’‘Ž‹–‹…ƒŽ society of which it forms and agency, in the case of neither politics ‘”’Žƒ‹‰…ƒ–Š‡”‡„‡•—ƥ…‹‡–‹ˆ‘”ƒ–‹‘ƒ…“—‹”‡†„‡ˆ‘”‡ action becomes necessary. In neither case can performance await

TIPS FOR RESEARCHERS: Ȉ Think about scale as a set of problems first and a proportion/ratio/measure later. Ȉ Look into the historical conditions that lead to the formation of this scale. Ȉ Discover the way these problems materialise in the project through close reading. Ȉ Determine the extent to which these problems form a coherent set of ambitions. Ȉ Use scale as an arena of creative possibility and not only as a convention.

an ideal future formulation of the problem as it may, at last, be resolved; and if this is because the very possibility of that future where such formulation might be made depends on imperfect action now, then this is only once more to intimate the role of bricolage which politics so much resembles and city planning surely should’ (Rowe and Koetter 1978: 283). 5

What is typological thought except an attempt to reason spatially with regards to the solicitation of a problem? Type is a good example of a sign enmeshed with its social and historical background. Whether in the arguments of Quatremere in which type takes the form of an intellection, or Durand in which an economic and repeatable typological model emerges, or later retroactive method of analysis, what binds them all together is a political information is seen to have accumulated like sediment in the material of architecture.

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The problem of scale

diagrammatic projective and retroactive tension in which socio-

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in the work of G.C. Argan in which type is understood as a

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Urban design as a tool in urban conservation, and urban conservation as a tool in urban design research Elisabete Cidre

To examine urban design as a tool in urban conservation, this chapter starts by exploring the scope and value of urban conservation. In planning for heritage conservation, heritage is defined as a cultural resource and public space as an object of urban culture where symbolic attributes and community engagement shape mechanisms for public space management. Urban design is therefore a key means to achieve urban conservation ends, but conservation is also a key objective of urban design. By positioning the public realm as the interface where heritage meets urban design, it is possible to envisage a research agenda that will advance these closely related, yet also strongly independent, disciplines.

EVOLVING URBAN CONSERVATION Our cities are full of history and historical legacy, revealing the influences of the political, cultural, and socio-economic agendas that have shaped place and that in turn have been shaped by the moral and ethical frameworks within which they exist. For their part, practices of heritage conservation relate variously to the critical concepts of ‘quality’, ‘significance’ and ‘authenticity’, which in turn help to define another major heritage concept, that of place ‘character’. These seminal concerns interweave the design of evaluative frameworks for the assessment of heritage quality, not least in the area of public realm, a focus on which is a recurrent theme in the

heritage literature. This, of course, also relates strongly to the urban design agenda as the ‘context and the outcome of the urban design process’ (Madanipour 1996: 215). Although both history and heritage conceive of and use the past in similar ways, it is important to be clear about the differences. Heritage today encompasses a contemporary product shaped from history, a resource that responds to the specific needs of present generations and that is influenced by all agents involved in the development process. The scope of heritage activity has increased to include the vernacular, the representative and the typical, as has the appreciation of where meaning lies in heritage sites. Where once the major goal of conservation might have been to restore objects, structures and sites to their original appearance in order to recapture symbolic or design coherence, nowadays it is common to ascribe value to the contributions and changes made by all users (and producers) of sites through history. Heritage monuments, sites and historic centres ensure a continuity between a ‘past’ and a ‘future’ via our individual and collective present-day experiences of places. Nevertheless, the idea of heritage as a ‘process’ has recently been advanced by several authors (Ashworth and Tunbridge 1996, Hobson 2004, Whitney and Strange 2003, etc.). Key to this is that the dynamics of conservation are in constant flux, as are the methods and theories for its study. Thus as the focus has shifted from property to people and places, so has conservation policy changed to encompass an emphasis

Figure 26.1 Copenhagen, where sustainable heritage and urban design combine to enhance quality of life for visitors and tourists alike

on sustainability that seeks to maintain the urban built environment, together with the cultural and social practices inherent in its production and use.

The Scope of Urban Conservation Urban conservation has traditionally been linked with architectural restoration and subsequently was often related to processes of urban renewal, where urban transformation occurs whilst the existing urban fabric adapts to new requirements. The different types of interventions used in urban

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renewal (and heritage conservation) reflect the evolution of increasingly more sophisticated approaches to tackling urban decline, from redevelopment to revitalisation to regeneration. The redevelopment of a site or an area involves the demolition of part (or all) of the existing structure and the construction of new buildings adapted to modern demands. Revitalisation is a process involving measures that will upgrade existing structures through the rehabilitation and preservation of buildings and the general improvement of the area. A programme of urban regeneration goes beyond revitalisation and rehabilitation to include a much broader

The Value of Urban Conservation

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Recently, the value of heritage to a renewed sense of urban culture has assumed growing importance (Whitney and Strange 2001: 1). Throughout the history of urban conservation the main objective has typically been to maintain the historical integrity (authenticity) of the conceptual and material production of urban structures, but with the widening of the conservation approach and the encompassing of the existing social / life-style system, conservation is now associated with the maintenance of the historical integrity of cultures within a given urban structure (Zancheti and Jokilehto 1997: 39). This structure is a ‘resource capable of attributing new values to new things through the creation of new processes’ (Whitney and Strange 2001: 47). Authenticity can therefore be defined as a ‘self-explanatory justification and criterion for selection and interpretation’ (Ashworth and Tunbridge 1996: 10); the quality of authenticity being the characteristic that endows the object or site with value. Moreover, the value endorsed is not a natural attribute but a social one that endows the object or site with a precise quality. The significance of the historic built environment and justification for conserving it are, in this context, clear. Historical continuity must be preserved in the environment if we are to maintain or create surroundings that enable individuals to find their identity and feel secure despite rapid social change. As a by-product the unique character of an ‘authentic antiquity’ has become a highly marketable cultural commodity, although of concern is that the nature of the heritage product is not determined by a market-driven model, namely the requirements of the consumer, but instead by the intrinsic value of the resources. As Rypkema (2001) points out, ‘tourism is inherently a volatile industry, but heritage based tourism means that local assets are preserved for local citizens even in the down cycles of visitation … as heritage

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process of transformation, encompassing the economic, social and sustainable dimensions at play. Heritage has become an important component in the regeneration arsenal, but for heritage conservation to remain relevant, it also needs to address these dimensions. In parallel to this journey, from the 1960s onwards a wider understanding of the historic urban fabric in its entirety as ‘historical’ emerged, shifting the emphasis of conservation away from the selection of landmarks for protection. This more all-encompassing notion of the historic city led to a call to develop appropriate planning tools for the management of such fabric. In the 1980s with the spread and gradual acceptance of the notion of sustainability, the ‘historical value’ of places started to be embraced as part of the mix. This combination recognised the ‘need to identify and strike a balance between the values related to historic ensembles and those related to current needs while guaranteeing a “sustainable” human and environmental development of communities’ (Jokilehto 1998: 49). Today sustainability sits comfortably at the heart of heritage conservation which can in itself be considered as an environmentally sustainable strategy by reducing the need for new construction, reducing urban dispersal and residential displacement, and, economically, underpinning heritage tourism (Figure 26.1). Whilst not without inherent conflicts, this can help to conserve local culture and enhance quality of life and economic self-sufficiency (Karadimitriou, Doak and Cidre 2010: 275). Over time, therefore, urban conservation has switched the object of study from the ‘identification of picturesque views and vistas and protection of particularly important architectural elements and street elevations’ (Zancheti and Jokilehto 1997: 40) to the protection and rehabilitation of the historic urban fabric as support to the social, economic and environmental structure of the city.

Figure 26.2 Porto, the ultimate value of high quality public realm. A place for people

property can become self-financing in the short or the long term because of the rise in value accumulating from the high demand for such attractive property’ (2001: 3). Heritage is also a vehicle of legitimacy for local authorities, symbolising their commitment to, and the effectiveness of, their processes of urban regeneration (Madanipour 1999). In such a context the production of heritage becomes a matter for deliberate goal-directed choice about what uses are made 314

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of the past and for what contemporary purposes (Cidre 2004: 287). Ultimately, however, image and spatial quality will have a large role to play in making people feel comfortable or uncomfortable in a particular place, and heritage will play a significant role in shaping these experiences. As much research has shown, high quality places are also the sorts of spaces where people will want to stay, contemplate and engage (Figure 26.2), and this, in turn, will have its own social and economic value.

PLANNING FOR HERITAGE CONSERVATION THROUGH URBAN DESIGN Positively, a more effective approach to cultural regeneration may involve making urban design central to the process of urban regeneration in historic areas (Wansborough and Mageean 2000: 181). Thus, of the eight key principles of urban conservation established by ICCROM1 (1991), first is ‘the need to identify the particular qualities that give historic urban sites importance and to ensure that these form the basis for developing appropriate means of protection and enhancement’. Eighth is the ‘need to recognize each conservation problem as unique, requiring treatments tailored to the special values and circumstances of particular sites’. This requires the notion of urban design to be firmly derived from an understanding of place and culture where heritage is a cultural resource. It necessitates that more than just the physical remnants of heritage are prioritised, but also intangible ideas and feelings (i.e. fantasy, nostalgia, collective memory, pride, values and beliefs) which are communicated through the interpretation of the physical elements (Ashworth and Tunbridge 1996).

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As part of this mix, public space is a critical object of urban culture with local symbolic and political meaning, whilst also reflecting universal values inherent in the city as shared ‘public’ place. Public spaces express and transmit messages through codes (Choay 1986) but such coding systems are neither universal nor stable as each individual possesses their own personal interpretation which is in constant and rapid flux. In this process different groups or individuals give different meanings to space; and public spaces become multi-layered places, rather than simply physical spaces, each a reflection of how it is socially constructed (Knox and Taylor 1995).

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Place-Making and Public Space

Conservation embraces stewardship of both the social use and historic built fabric of public spaces and to do so has often become a partner in the mainstream urban design pursuit of ‘place-making’ (see also Chapter 7). In continental Europe, the neo-rationalists’2 historical and morphological contributions to urban design indicate place-making as an alternative to the much criticised Modernism (KMD 1998, Krier 1979, Rossi 1982), whilst the English and American neo-rationalist approaches presupposed a contribution to community life by trying to create a sense of place through, amongst other things, cultivating public urban space. Placemaking is conceptually apolitical although in practice has been used politically in the service of government objectives or of an international ‘heritage’ agenda through which ‘meanings’ can be both safeguarded and (occasionally) exploited (Harvey 1989b). Evidence, insight and research (Boddy 1992, Massey 1994) concerning ‘sense of place’ as a basic human need and its connections to the material, three-dimensional attributes of space has underpinned processes of place-making through design practices and helped to give them an economic and social rationale. As part of this, a focus on public realm concerned with the creation of safe, comfortable and attractive public and semi-public spaces is being interpreted in the contemporary multicultural city as requiring public spaces that are both flexible and inclusive, allowing for socio-cultural variation in a manner that can lead to different heritage interpretations. The alternative is differentiation in society which can be reflected in a fragmentation of space, what Carmona (2010: 129) terms ‘parochial’ space with social segregation resulting in clustering and ‘fear, suspicion, tension and conflict between different social groups’, undermining in the process collective identity and civic pride. However, as Ashworth and Tunbridge (1996: 21) argue, the attempted creation of a universal interpretation of place, one that provides something for everyone, may be equally illogical. Perhaps a middle way is the key as places such as Camden Town in London demonstrate (Figure 26.3).

Figure 26.3 Camden Town is a historic district of London, but one that has been allowed to be incrementally re-shaped over time to appeal to two particular communities of users (the young and tourists). In doing so it also provides a ready spectacle for everyone else

Townshend and Pendlebury (1999) reinforce this point in their argument about residents’ perceptions of living or working within a designated conservation area, and how this might affect their lives. More recently, Pendlebury et al. (2004) have considered the link between conservation and social inclusion, focusing upon regeneration areas and the cultural built heritage, concluding that there is a recognised 316

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need for a more pluralistic definition of heritage due to the socially diverse, multicultural world in which we now live.

Managing the Historic Public Realm In developing conservation strategies it is possible to identify a number of key themes and urban design concepts which

at the heart of such efforts, it is also the key interface between heritage and urban design, whilst urban design is also the key, albeit too often neglected tool, in on-going efforts to positively conserve the public built environment.

CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES IN URBAN CONSERVATION RESEARCH

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As the discussion above might imply, the interface between conservation and urban design is ripe for investigation. Just like urban design, conservation studies have at their disposal a broad range of theoretical and methodological approaches with roots in a range of disciplinary approaches (see Chapter 1). As such, interdisciplinary study may be most appropriate with a combination of approaches enabling an integrated analysis of practices that have tended to be explored from a single angle in the existing clustered literature. By contrast, using multiple methods may encourage a more critical and richer assessment of complex places with a multitude of histories and users, and that have been subject to different design interventions and planning objectives through time (Forsyth et al. 2010). My own research (Cidre 2010) has conceptualised heritage conservation as a twofold phenomenon of discourse and practice allowing me to understand in a more comprehensive manner the nature of heritage conservation, its rationale(s) and institutional frameworks and the networks of actors involved, directly and indirectly, in the decision-making process. This research looked at the practice of conservation in three historic (World Heritage) cities over an extended period of 15 years through the use of an interdisciplinary approach encompassing a combination of methodological frameworks and methods. Of particular importance was the use of a ‘historic discursive methodology’ to unveil the process of heritage planning through the way in which it is produced and how its discourse defines its practice. The ‘close reading’ method advocated by Rydin (2003) was

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focus on the processes by which the built environment is created and which relate strongly to heritage concerns. The importance of community participation and the involvement of end users in consultation processes is one of these that is repeatedly referred to in the heritage literature (e.g. Townshend and Pendlebury). Carter and Grimwade (1996), in particular, focus upon the management of cultural heritage and how best to balance use and preservation, in the process discussing the best tools for public space management and raising the importance of inclusion of local knowledge. This, Whitney and Strange (2001) argue, will create a more transparent management system which, as a consequence, will be more perceptive and sympathetic to the diverse needs of the local population. Both within and beyond heritage concerns there is a general consensus that issues facing the management of public space are diverse and complex (Carmona et al. 2008), ranging from a lack of investment, to fragmented management systems, to crude regulation, to name but a few. In conservation areas, there is the added preoccupation with the maintenance of character and identity, whilst simultaneously attempting their ‘enhancement’ (an often ignored requirement of legislation in the UK, for example). According to ICOMOS3 (1967), to enhance the value of a historic site means to deliver environmental conditions that, without detracting from its essential nature, emphasise its key characteristics and permit its optimum use. The enhancement should contribute to the economic development of the city, and, far from undermining its historic or artistic significance, raise it from the exclusive domain of erudite minorities to the awareness and enjoyment of the general public. In other words, strategies should be inclusive in their effect. Enhancement of the usability and value of public space reflects favourably upon its urban surroundings and ultimately increases the ‘public value’ of such sites. Enhancement is typically achieved through environmental improvement, maintenance and management of the public realm (Punter and Carmona 1997: 65). As the public realm is

particularly useful to understand how policy discourse gives a rationale for the local strategies and methods and to explain the strengths and weaknesses of the conservation process and its implementation. The research was also informed by a wide range of semistructured interviews and through the use of a range of preexisting urban design inventories and assessment tools for measuring the qualities of place (i.e. Nasar 1998, Stokols 1993, Bechtel 1997). These methods vary in their detail and level of complexity and in the nature of the assessments they help to conduct, but collectively identify and articulate a wide range of visual and place character elements, both prospective (before an environment is built or modified) and retrospective (post-hoc) (see for example Forsyth et al. 2010). The wealth and complexity of data gathered across three multi-dimensional case studies represented the next challenge, although once interpreted and compared, it also enabled a better understanding of heritage conservation processes from which to generalise findings and generate recommendations. In this case, the resulting research has argued for a shift in focus from the renewal of public spaces as a by-product of urban regeneration process (Hubbard 1996) to an explicit focus on public realm quality in heritage areas as a key (but too often missing) component of heritage planning (Stewart 2002 and 2005). In doing so it has contributed to a better understanding of the role of the urban designer in establishing the urban conservation agenda and, within this, to the importance of developing specific long-term objectives for the quality of public realm in historic areas, in which the regeneration of the historic public realm is treated as a context-specific exercise underpinned by an overarching ‘urban design-led’ approach to conservation.

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TIPS FOR RESEARCHERS: Ȉ Heritage conservation can be beneficially conceptualised as a twofold phenomenon of discourse (through the regulatory framework with its associated networks of aims, actors, and instruments for action); and practice (through planned actions in the public spaces of historic cities). Ȉ Urban conservation research can benefit from an interdisciplinary approach to research, informed by theoretical and methodological frameworks from a diversity of fields. Ȉ The interface between urban design and conservation is a neglected area of scholarship and is therefore ripe for further study.

ENDNOTES 1

The International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property.

2

Neo-rationalism dates from the 1960s and Aldo Rossi’s theories. It ‘does not propose the replication of historical urban fabrics „—– –Š‡ —•‡ ‘ˆ –Š‡ ’ƒ•– ƒ• ƒ ƤŽ–‡” –Š”‘—‰Š ™Š‹…Š –Š‡ ˆ—–—”‡ ‹• conceived’, for example, the focus is on the physical form and its associational meanings, achieved by incremental action, assuming that urban form is best drawn from timeless patterns (Attoe and Logan 1992: 14).

3

International Council of Monuments and Sites.

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Does urban design add value? Matthew Carmona

Research in urban design can have many purposes: to address particular design / urban / practice problematics, to advance theory and / or practice, to remember something we have long forgotten, to critique particular development approaches, or simply to further knowledge in a particular sub-area of the discipline. Another important potential of urban design research is to advance the case for urban design itself by demonstrating the value it adds to society and the economy, and the harms to the environment it can help avoid. Much research touches on these issues, even if it does not explicitly focus on value. This chapter identifies four fundamental types of evidence – econometric, structural, experiential and process-related – that can help to make the case for the value added by urban design. Using one of my own research projects to illustrate each, I argue in this final substantive chapter that there is much scope for further investigation in each of these complex research arenas. Through generating this type of knowledge, researchers in urban design have an unashamedly important role to play in supporting and promoting the value of urban design.

INTRODUCTION For the majority of readers of this book, the automatic answer to the question, ‘Does urban design add value?’ will be a resounding ‘YES’. Just as the editorial leaning of newspapers,

websites, or (in some countries) TV stations largely determines who reads or views them, each receiving daily confirmation of their worldview, likewise, if we didn’t believe that urban design was a worthwhile activity, most likely we wouldn’t have taken the time to pick up, let alone read, this book. To that extent, those who have published in these pages are in large part preaching to the already converted, whilst many others with an important influence on how our built environment is shaped will take a more sceptical view or will have no view at all. They are unlikely to read the urban design literature and will take a good deal more convincing.

The English Case: First, the Bad News In this regard, across the world we often fail to adequately make the case for urban design. In part this is because urban design is still a relatively small discipline when compared to the larger and dominant professions with which it is surrounded and in which it should be embedded: architecture, planning, engineering, landscape, and the property professions. This is clear in the treatment of urban design by national and local government in England. Despite a surfeit of warm words in policy, for example in the Government’s National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) (DCLG 2012: 14–16), actions speak louder than words. They suggest that the answer to the question posed in the title of this chapter would be ‘hmmm, maybe’, or even, ‘no’. Thus whilst the pre-

austerity years (prior to the financial crisis of 2008) had seen a gradual but relentless rise of urban design up the political and professional consciousness across the UK, even in those halcyon days for the discipline: Ȉ There was never a formal and systemised place for urban design in the various systems of urban governance; only design as part of the larger and separate systems of town and country planning and highways design and management. Ȉ Urban design remains almost entirely discretionary, and many local authorities and developers hardly ‘do’ it at all. Ȉ Following from the previous point, urban design is often highly marginalised; still seen as a luxury that is nice to have if things are not too tight, but can otherwise be dispensed with. These factors are not uncommon around the world where urban design, or urbanism, is typically generated as a consequence of activities labelled with other professional titles in which the preoccupations of urban design are rarely paramount. Public responsibility for such concerns is also split across a range of often unrelated ‘systems’ designed to shape and manage cities. Thus, systems of urban planning, zoning, environmental protection, highways engineering, street management, conservation / preservation, and so forth, all have wider or narrower foci, and rarely have a holistic notion of the urban environment as their primary goal (or necessarily design as a focus at all). In the UK the downsizing or closing of urban design sections in local authorities following the 2008 crisis and the subsequent squeeze on public funding represents a case-inpoint. Surveying the urban design and conservation capacity of London’s Boroughs at the end of 2010 revealed just 69 urban design posts across London (and a further 75 conservation posts) to deal with the outputs of a construction industry

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worth some £8 billion (on top of London’s 1,000 conservation areas, 40,000 listed buildings and 150 registered parks and gardens). This represents £120 million worth of development for each ‘public’ urban designer, or an investment by the public sector of around 0.03 per cent of the output of this industry in achieving wider urban quality. National Government does even worse. Thus, even at its height, the Government’s agency for the promotion of high quality design in the built environment – the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) – cost just 0.02 per cent of the output of the construction sector across England (around £11 million), a figure dramatically cut after 2010, resulting in the sacking of 90 per cent of CABE’s staff, and the removal of public funding all together from 2013.1 The situation, over the same period, for private sector urban design consultants was not much better. Whilst large international and signature firms continued to do well in the austerity years, for small practices focused on urban design (i.e. not part of a larger property, engineering, planning or architecture business), as the public sector withdrew from commissioning urban design work, the trading environment became increasingly more challenging. As Simon Eden (2013: 12) the Chief Executive of Winchester City Council commented: Too often politicians – national or local – will see design as an add-on: ‘of course design is important, but it’s a luxury ™‡ …ƒǯ– ƒơ‘”† ‹ –‹‡• ‘ˆ ƒ—•–‡”‹–›ǯ •ƒ› –Š‘•‡ ™Š‘ ‘…‡ knew better. Developers will capitalise upon this arguing about viability, the impact of ‘expensive’ design on the funds ƒ˜ƒ‹Žƒ„Ž‡ˆ‘”ƒơ‘”†ƒ„Ž‡Š‘—•‹‰‘”Š‹‰Š™ƒ›•‹’”‘˜‡‡–•Ǥ Arguably, if an irrefutable case for urban design had been made in the previous 15 years (pre-austerity), a period in which urban design had moved high up the political / policy agenda, then even in tough times delivering high quality urban design would have remained a high priority.

Now the Good News

So how can we convince the sceptics so that urban design is prioritised, whatever the context? To somewhat distort

a famous and well-worn phrase: ‘It’s the evidence stupid!’ Whilst urban design practice has increasingly produced the goods (successful urbanism), sometimes in the face of great adversity, it (and academia) has been less good at producing the evidence to back up the claims made about the value added by such work. Perhaps the value seems self-evident, or perhaps in the good times we are all too busy ‘doing’ urban design to sit back and reflect much. Whatever the case, when urban design is still seen as a luxury, instead of a necessity, for those who believe in its value, something has gone wrong. Arguably we need more and better evidence, and in generating this researchers need to work alongside practitioners to help fill the gaps. Four types of evidence will be key: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Econometric; Structural; Experiential; Process related.

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CONVINCING THE SCEPTICS

Figure 27.1 The new General Gordon Square in Woolwich, London has transformed a derelict degraded space into a vibrant hub of multicultural life

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But despite the sometimes precarious position of urban design, it’s not all bad news! Whilst we may have failed to adequately make the case for design in England, the idea of contemporary urban design as ‘place-making’ clearly has not failed. This is in sharp contrast to the period in the 1960s and 1970s when the grand civic designs of the era ensured, for a time, that those who created them shone brightly, until, that is, the shaky foundations on which so much Modernist architecture and planning had been built were revealed to be so unfit for purpose. For a long time after, the notion that cities could be positively ‘designed’ for the better was treated with much scepticism, as were city builders of all persuasions. By contrast, over the last 20 years we have witnessed a generation when urban design has achieved a huge amount and has much to shout about. This is apparent around the world, but, again, taking England as an example, since the mid1990s we have seen suburban exemplars including Newhall (Harlow), Upton (Northampton), Greenwich Millennium Village, and Accordia (Cambridge); the renaissance of city centres across the country, including Birmingham, Sheffield, Liverpool, Nottingham and large parts of London (see below); the delivery of one-off exemplar projects, including the rebuilding of Manchester City Centre, the Newcastle / Gateshead waterfront, Canary Wharf, the Olympic Park, and Kings Cross in London; and a multitude of smaller projects, some high profile, such as the transformation of Trafalgar Square, but many others far more discrete although making a huge contribution to transforming the quality and liveability of local places (Figure 27.1).

Figure 27.2 Places such as Bloomsbury in London show how an investment in good urban design can produce both enduring use values for residents and passers-by and lasting streams of ’”‘Ƥ–•ǡ”‡–•ƒ†…ƒ’‹–ƒŽ˜ƒŽ—‡‰”‘™–Šˆ‘”‘™‡”•

In the remainder of this chapter, these are briefly illustrated using four of my own research projects spanning the last decade or so.

Econometric Evidence The first, econometric, is to some extent the Holy Grail. If one can prove beyond a doubt that there is a direct link between better quality urban design and higher economic value, then developers (arguably) will be clamouring for more and better urban design. In other fields, the fact that design adds value goes without saying. Why have Apple been so good at outshining their rivals, or Dyson been able to grab a good share of the very well established vacuum cleaner market: ‘It’s the design stupid!’. Equally, why do houses in historic urban areas consistently command higher real estate values than those in neighbouring less historic areas: ‘It’s the urban design stupid!’.

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My own research for CABE published in The Value of Urban Design (Carmona et al. 2001) – the commissioning of which was almost the first thing CABE ever did – attempted to start the process of placing an empirical evidence base on this relationship (see also Carmona et al. 2002a, 2002b). The research, which largely used qualitative techniques (supplemented with economic data) compared the performance of three pairs of office-led developments (good and bad in three geographic locations), and tentatively confirmed the intuitive sense of many urban designers that better urban design (judged in the research to be schemes that complied with the then national guidance on urban design – DETR and CABE 2000) had a premium (Figure 27.2). As well as in tangible social and environmental benefits, this premium was traceable through, amongst other things, the delivery of higher capital and rental returns on investment, more lettable area, reduced energy and management costs, and, in occupiers reporting a more productive and contented workforce; all directly measurable in pounds and pence, as was the fact that better urban design did not necessarily cost more to deliver. Whilst CABE funded further small scale econometric studies over the years (e.g. CABE and ODPM 2003, CABE 2007), until their demise as a publically funded body, they were never able (or willing) to devote the sort of resources to such studies that more definitive evidence in this area requires, for example for large scale hedonic modelling. Such aggregate quantitative studies have been carried out in connection with a variety of built environment qualities (often quite specific – see Carmona et al. 2001: Annex A, Henneberry et al. 2011, Nase et al. 2012, Nase et al. 2013) but are limited by the need for large data sets that can be closely defined and are clearly measureable. This is particularly challenging in the case of urban design where context and interpretation remains key. Thus whilst The Value of Urban Design is, internationally, amongst the most quoted of studies in this area (Henneberry et al. 2011: 221), it was only a pilot study that carried a health warning of the type applicable to all such small scale studies;

that the evidence base was limited, in that case just six office developments in three local markets, and relied heavily on qualitative data as financial data was limited and not always directly comparable (Carmona et al. 2001: 81). There is clearly scope for much more research in this area, both qualitative and quantitative (and combinations of the two), in order to more definitively track and understand the interactions between design and property development and to contribute to an evidence base that explores if, when and how better urban design adds economic value.

Structural Evidence

Ȉ London’s local high streets support more employment than the Central Activities Zone; Ȉ Half of London’s brownfield land is on or within 200m of a high street; Ȉ Two thirds of Londoners (five million people) live within a five minute walk of a local high street.

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Thus London’s local high streets account for just 3.6 per cent of the city’s road network, but represent some of the most important spaces in the city, with significant strategic growth potential and critical local significance. At the same time, they are also some of the most neglected, congested, polluted and, in terms of patterns of ownerships and responsibility, complex spaces in the city. Yet, it is this very complexity that is also their key strength, with diverse layers of uses, external and internal spaces, and building typologies, that extend vertically from floor to roof and horizontally from pavement to hinterland and in a unbroken crust along many of London’s historic urban routes; giving them a robust adaptability and richness (in both senses of the word – Figure 27.4). Nevertheless, whilst we typically fail to understand (even less measure) the multi-dimensional value and sunk

27.

As well as seeking hard econometric performance data, a second source of value evidence can be found in the structural properties of the urban environment. For example, how many jobs might one form of physical built environment support over another, or what types of urban form offer the greatest potential for adaptation and future development? This sort of evidence is relatively easy to come by in an age when so much spatial data is available: on employment, land uses, patterns of movement, traffic, density, pollution, local taxes, rents and property values, and on a whole slew of social information. Yet, surprisingly, there are few systematic attempts to relate such data to the physical morphological forms in which these uses, activities and exchanges are accommodated. One such attempt to do this was based on an observation that regeneration funds in London during the noughties seemed to get spent on large ‘easy’ to develop but isolated brownfield sites, whilst existing centres of life, such as London’s high (main) streets, were ignored. To address this my recent research for Design for London2 attempted to develop a better understanding and insight into the functioning of London’s high streets, in order to identify their potential to support more sustainable patterns of growth and development. A mixed methods approach was used to conduct the research encompassing: historical and contemporary 2 and 3D morphological analysis of London’s street network as a

means to understand the growth of the city’s high streets and to identify their characteristic ‘types’ and ‘qualities’; GIS-based mapping of existing high street data to obtain a London-wide picture of the present role and future potential of London’s high streets covering uses (Figure 27.3), development potential, employment, transport accessibility, resident population, access to healthcare, and pollution; and on-site case study analysis of six high streets carefully chosen to reflect the diversity of socio-economic, physical and geographical criteria that characterise London’s high streets. In a context of a general decline in many of London’s local high streets, the research (Carmona et al. 2010) revealed some surprising headline findings that have been changing perceptions about these traditional (often historic) spaces of the city. Most notably:

‹‰—”‡ͧ͢Ǥͣ‡˜‡ƒŽ‹‰‘†‘ǯ•‹š‡†ǮŠ‹‰Š•–”‡‡–ǯ…‘””‹†‘”•–Š”‘—‰Šƒ’’‹‰”‡–ƒ‹Žƒ†‘ƥ…‡—•‡ȋ†ƒ–ƒˆ”‘–Š‡Cities Revealed Landuse Dataset)

324

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in places over considerable periods of time (such as in London’s historic high streets); many are not transmitted into direct benefits (e.g. profits or rents) but are indirect, such as the liveability, health and environmental benefits that communities enjoy from, for example, the accommodation of jobs and facilities locally; and different stakeholders have different expectations of value and will seek to measure such concerns in very different ways. 325

Does urban design add value?

investment already made in such places, high streets continue to languish in the ‘too difficult to handle’ category or are simply ignored in favour of the large easy to develop sites. Consequently, there is clearly scope to do more to understand the value of the established built fabric of cities, whilst focusing a little less on the building anew. All this shows that value remains a particularly slippery concept. Some benefits are clearly cumulative, accumulating

27.

Figure 27.4 A typical London high street: a thin crust and invisible hinterland (Fiona Scott)

Figure 27.5 Densities of activity across the day in 13 London public spaces

Experiential Evidence Despite the complexities of understanding how local built environments transmit value to varied stakeholders, there is one constant and reliably measurable value dimension: user experience. Chapters 2, 6, 14 and 23 discussed, in varying ways, the use of observational techniques in urban 326

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design research, which, since the pioneering work of William Whyte in New York, Jan Gehl in Copenhagen, and Bill Hillier and others in London, have become a mainstay of urban design analysis and investigation. But if such techniques can tell us much about what users of space do, they tell us less about what they think. For that we need to ask them.

surveys, interviews, or informal engagement, and/or indirectly via observational techniques; experiential evidence is a vital element in understanding the value added by the public built environment in all sorts of ways: social, cultural, environmental, in terms of health and happiness effects, or ultimately in simply determining what works and what does not. Through such methods the research discussed above revealed that what marks out a large city such as London is the sheer diversity of spaces, and that large cities can afford spaces of difference and diversity that don’t all attempt to cater for every member of society. In this regard people clearly value different types of experiences, and therefore different types of places, and, because of this, there can be no one-size-fitsall normative prescription for public space (or urban design). What works and what does not will vary hugely from place to place and great care should be taken when attempting to generalise experiences more widely. Today, much research is focusing on aspects of experience in the built environment and (in allied fields) these methods have developed a high degree of sophistication and systemisation, for example the processes of Rapid Ethnographic Assessment (REA) used by anthropologists (e.g. Low et al. 2005: 183–93). The Capital Spaces research nevertheless suggested that the empirical evidence base in this area still needs developing, not least to test, and, where necessary, challenge the sorts of ideologically driven critiques of urban design and contemporary public space that are themselves challenging the very notion and value of the discipline, often on the basis of remarkably thin evidence.

If econometric, structural and experiential evidence relates mainly to the outcomes from urbanisation, it is also possible to point to particular urban design processes that add value over and above others. Much of this will relate to what George (1997) has termed ‘second order’ design, namely how the decision-making environment is shaped by the range of 327

Does urban design add value?

Process-Related Evidence

27.

Again, the urban design pioneers have much to tell us here; the mental mapping exercises of Kevin Lynch or the casual engagement in the very life of a community that so typified Jane Jacobs’ early work, each reveal much about the social value of the public realm and what that implies for perceptions of the city. A recent strand of my own research has also explored user perspectives, practices and preferences in a more formal way, in this case as they relate to the design, delivery and management of London’s public spaces (see Chapter 7 for a more in-depth discussion of the work). This research was underpinned by extensive studies of spaces in use to gauge user experiences. In particular 13 spaces across London were observed using classic time-lapse photography techniques, with patterns of movement and ‘situated behaviours’ mapped across the day (Figure 27.5). These processes of mapping actual use were then followed up by a programme of one to one structured interviews with actual users of the spaces to gauge perceptions of use and preferences, and to understand which spaces worked, and which did not when compared with some of the dominant critiques of contemporary public spaces; for example whether spaces are exclusionary, over- or under-managed, too commercialised, and so on. The work, published in the book Capital Spaces (Carmona and Wunderlich 2012) concluded that whilst public space designers, developers and managers sometimes get it wrong, sometimes quite disastrously, and much public space remains physically neglected, invaded by traffic, unintentionally exclusionary (e.g. uncomfortable for the elderly), sometimes scary (when insufficiently animated), and in need of upgrading; in the main, the sorts of public spaces that are being created and recreated in contemporary London are finding a ready and enthusiastic constituency of users. Moreover, users, on the whole, greatly value the new and regenerated spaces of the city whose social life has been greatly enriched as a result. Whilst gauging user experiences and preferences takes considerable time and resources, whether directly through

regulations, frameworks, plans, incentives and strategies within which ‘first order’ designing (that concerned with the design of actual product – buildings, spaces, layouts, etc.) operates. Ultimately these tools impact on outcomes, and, as well as researching the processes themselves and what value is added there (for example whether the development process is faster, more cost-effective, or more consensual in nature), to explore the value added by good process it will also be necessary to explore the impact of process on outcomes. Typically much of this sort of work involves analysis of single or small numbers of cases, for example Bell’s (2005) analysis of the value potential of masterplanning processes, which explored two cases. Whilst small numbers of in-depth cases can give great insights into particular contexts and circumstances, inevitably the ability to generalise from such work will be impaired. Equally, doing justice to large numbers of case studies will be difficult without significant resources. A project of the latter type, relatively unrestrained by resources, was the national Design Codes Pilot Programme funded by the Department for Communities and Local Government in England. My own role in this involved monitoring and evaluating the programme (Carmona and Dann 2006a) and writing the subsequent national guidance on the subject: Preparing Design Codes – A Practice Manual (Carmona and Dann 2006b) which ultimately informed policy, including that promoting the use of design codes in the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF). The launch of the national pilot programme was initially met with much scorn and derision in the architectural press about the potential of design codes, largely based on fundamental misunderstandings that, first, codes are regulatory rather than design tools and, second, that they are directed at delivering ‘traditional’ rather than simply ‘better’ urbanism (Carmona 2009). However, the hard evidence from 19 case studies, many of which were followed over an 18-month period as they evolved through processes of discussion, testing and negotiation, confirmed that in appropriate circumstances3 codes are valuable tools to 328

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Figure 27.6 Newhall, Harlow, a carefully coded development combining a traditional street and block framework with varied contemporary architectural design

deliver a range of more sustainable processes and outcomes from development. Moreover, many of the most interesting residential developments in England over the last 20 years have used codes of one sort or another (Figure 27.6). Following up the original research some six years later, more recent analysis on this subject (Carmona and Giordano 2013) reveals a remarkable take up of design coding across the country. Thus in 2012, 42 per cent of local authorities

in England had requested or produced design codes for schemes (compared with a handful before 2006), 93 per cent of those who have used design codes would do so again, and the reasons for their use remain largely the same as revealed by the original research: that they helped to deliver better outcomes through a more coordinated and consensual design / development process. This project is not alone in revealing that the very process of urban design, as well as the outcomes, can add value (see, for example, Chapter 7), and that making the case for urban design is as much about good process as it is about good places. Yet, despite this, Banerjee and Loukaitou-Sideris (2011: 275) observe ‘Not much literature has focused on the process of urban design and its relationship to the final design outcome’. This is clearly an area in which much scope still exists for further investigation.

have’. It is why we need more evidence about the value urban design adds, economically, socially and environmentally, and why we need urban designers armed with the sorts of econometric, structural, experiential and process-related evidence to convincingly make that case.

TIPS FOR RESEARCHERS: Ȉ Much urban design research will have a ‘value’ dimension, revealing something about the effectiveness of urban design processes and impacts, even if that is not the explicit focus of the work. Ȉ Value is not solely an economic concept, but is instead a statement about the multifarious benefits that ensue from some outcome to some combination of individuals, organisations, groups or society. Ȉ In any assessment of the value added by design, the question of what is ‘good design’ will rear its ugly head. Rather than reinventing the wheel adopt (and if necessary amend) a ready-made conceptualisation of urban design.

THE POWER OF KNOWLEDGE

ENDNOTES 1

CABE has since merged with The Design Council, and the resulting Design Council CABE operates on a business model, charging for its design review services (see http://www.design council.org.uk/our-work/cabe/). Design for London was the design arm of the London Development Agency (LDA) when the research was conducted and subsequently moved to the Greater London Authority (GLA). They have since been disbanded as a free-standing unit..

3

Appropriate circumstances are limited to large sites likely –‘ „‡ „—‹Ž– ‘—– ‘˜‡” –‹‡ ‹ ƒ •‡”‹‡• ‘ˆ ’Šƒ•‡• ‘” „› †‹ơ‡”‡– developers.

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2

27.

All this is leading to an argument about the power of knowledge, an implicit theme throughout the book. Jon Lang has said ‘The power of design professionals comes from their own expertise. The more empirically based their knowledge … the more powerful their arguments’ (1994). Arguably this is why transportation planners are often so powerful because non-specialists (including other built environment professionals) find it particularly hard to challenge their seemingly scientific and technical arguments. Perhaps it is also why (by comparison) urban designers seem to lack power, as their arguments are often more intangible, and the evidence they cite to make their case is more qualitative, less empirically grounded, and more open to interpretation, alternatives and challenge. It is why governments, local municipalities, and developers alike are able to get away without taking the quality of the built environment seriously, and why urban design is still too often seen as a luxury instead of a ‘must

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com

28

A personal postscript Matthew Carmona

In this final brief chapter of the book I return to where the book began and to the reasons for writing it. In doing so the essentially ‘mongrel’ nature of the discipline is reaffirmed, along with the value of a discipline with porous boundaries where a diversity of contributions, both theoretical and practical, are welcomed and celebrated. That is urban design, and its on-going exploration – however conducted – is critically important for humanity.

WHERE IT ALL BEGAN The journey towards completing this book began through frustration, frustration that despite 15 years working at The Bartlett, UCL, I still had little idea what colleagues located elsewhere in the Faculty were doing, despite many also being engaged in teaching and researching urban design. In one sense this was entirely my own fault. Having been so focused on my own teaching and research, and for eight years of that period on running The Bartlett School of Planning, it was easy enough to justify to myself that I had little time to investigate what was happening beyond my own School. Yet there was also structural problem. Urban design degree programmes of one sort or another were taught in four of the Schools of The Bartlett, although there was no relationship between any of them and very little communication between the colleagues responsible for their delivery.

Administrative Models for Urban Design In this respect The Bartlett is not unique. Having, over the years, visited many universities across the world in which urban design is taught and researched, it is obvious to me that the positioning of the subject within built environment (and other) faculties often seems compromised. I have observed five models: Ȉ The multiple poles model; similar to that already described, where urban design is located separately and independently in the various academic units of a faculty, e.g. architecture, planning, engineering, landscape, or real estate; Ȉ The isolated model; where urban design is isolated in one unit or another, with few connections to other academic units that would seem to have an equal claim on the knowledge field; Ȉ The fiction model; where on paper a collaborative unit exits that draws expertise from across allied disciplinary units, although on closer inspection is typically either almost entirely dominated by one of these units, or is itself another silo within the range of disciplinary units; Ȉ The immersed model; where urban design is not recognised as a separate discipline, but is instead part and parcel of a larger discipline – typically architecture

– in which design at the urban scale is sometimes addressed; Ȉ The marginal model; the least desirable of the models, where little urban design teaching or research seems to happen at all, and the subject is simply off the radar even of related disciplines. A sixth, fully integrated model, is of course possible, and there may be shining examples out there of where urban design sits as an intellectually separate yet also cross-cutting and integrative field within the larger constellation of disciplines. But I have yet to discover such a place. So why is this? My suspicion is that more often than not urban design is where it is for no good reason at all, except administrative convenience. This is because administrative units (departments) within universities are in effect in a competition for resources, both with rival institutions and even with other units within the same university, whilst the currency of that competition is students: with students come resources, and with resources come staff, and academic staff are what makes universities, so if you can attract more students to your unit you have a greater potential to succeed and grow. In such a model, collaboration is not necessarily encouraged (competition is) and because our built environment has traditionally structured itself through its disciplinary professions, these, over time, have become the basis for how we structure our built environment education and compete. For urban design, whose scope spans the built environment professions, more often than not the subject develops as an adjunct to one (or more) of these silos, and once created becomes difficult to shift. An interesting side-effect of this is that as urban design develops within the confines of one or other disciplinary home, it also takes on the flavour of that home territory, drawing from the same intellectual traditions, methods and preoccupations of the majority of staff. The result is that the nature of urban design, as taught and researched within an architecture school, is likely to be 332

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very different to that taught and researched within planning, or landscape, or indeed in any other of its cognate disciplines.

Back to The Bartlett Returning then to The Bartlett and to the evolution of this book, because we are lucky enough to be situated in a global university – UCL – in a global city – London – over time the space and demand have existed for four very distinct traditions of urban design to develop in different parts of the Faculty. First, in the Architecture School where the tradition has been a strongly experimental design one. Second, in the Planning School, where the social sciences, development and governance processes have flavoured the subject. Third, in the Development Planning Unit, where engagement with the challenges of the Global South bring their own flavour to urban design; and finally, in The School of Graduate Studies, where Space Syntax strongly informs a highly analytical approach to teaching and research in urban design. Having stepped down from being Head of The Bartlett School of Planning in 2011, I resolved to make it my business to find out more about these very different traditions that had developed quite independently within the same faculty, and to see if we could work more together. In the series of meetings that followed, what became quickly apparent was a similar frustration elsewhere to that I had felt, but also a profound sense of the richness and legitimacy of each of the traditions that had quite independently taken root in The Bartlett, and an awareness that, far from being in competition, they were actually quite compatible and complementary in their different perspectives on the city, and on the subject of urban design. Thus whilst we were clearly multiple independent poles, we were also concerned with many of the same sorts of urban problems and challenges, although tended to draw from different knowledge fields and practices to address them (even, sometimes, seeming to speak different languages to describe them).

AND SO TO CONCLUDE

333

A personal postscript

Whilst this was the inspiration for the book, for me the process of actually putting the book together has been a journey in two quite different senses. The first, like all such projects, has been the long and sometimes challenging journey of the editor: encouraging, cajoling, and working with the chapter authors (all of whom have a thousand and one other pressures on their time), in order to deliver something that is more than the sum of its parts. Whilst finally hugely satisfying as the book comes together, this journey is simply one of hard graft. The second, more personal journey has been one of individual revelation as, initially, I was awestruck by the sheer quantity and quality of research in urban design that was going on in just one, albeit large, faculty – The Bartlett – diversity that would of course be multiplied many times over if I had had the space to expand the list of contributors to other universities in the UK, Europe, and worldwide. Ultimately, whilst engaging with the material collected in this book, my eyes have been opened regarding the substantive and methodological possibilities open to me as an active researcher in the field. I can only conclude that contrary to some influential opinion discussed in Chapter 1, the world of urban design as an academic and intellectual discipline is in rude health. But also that urban design is, and is always likely to remain, a mongrel discipline, something to which the sheer range of theories, methodologies, practices and problematics addressed in this book testifies. Rather than being something that should worry us, this open, accepting, un-blinkered and curious nature of urban design seems to me to be something to celebrate. Sometimes, as we have been doing at UCL, we need to stand back a little in order to see something properly. Hopefully, in helping to stimulate its vital research base, this book will help us all to see the discipline of urban design, and its great strengths in depth, a little more clearly.

28.

The outcome was a series of initiatives that, whilst maintaining our core identities and the disciplinary traditions that inform them (the legitimacy of which the exercise strongly confirmed), have attempted to find overarching ways to make connections and better reveal both the differences and commonalities. Some have been prosaic, such as a website to better explain to us, and to others, the different urban design poles at The Bartlett (http://www. bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/cross-faculty-initiatives/urban-design); others have been explorative and simply fun, such as an investigation of contrasting urban methodologies in Beirut (http://joss.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/journal/index.php/joss/ issue/view/7/showToc) from where the incidental images sprinkled throughout this book derive (see pp. xxvi, xxiv, 110, 134, 168, 218, 248, 260, 298, 310 and 360). A more profound initiative has been a new cross-cutting research Master’s in interdisciplinary urban design that, for the first time, allows students to cut across the different Schools at The Bartlett (and to other faculties) in order to shape their own syllabus from the diversity of urban design elements, wherever they are located (http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/planning/ programmes/postgraduate/mresInter-disciplinary-urbandesign). This book stemmed from the same set of discussions. In particular from a sense that research in urban design, as well as teaching, could benefit from an awareness of the potential range of methods open to researchers, at whatever level they were operating (undergraduate dissertations to PhD studies and beyond). Also, and hopefully, that in seeing them laid out together in one place, and related through a common analytical structure, that the book might inspire new combinations of these methods to be used together in a manner that will offer new insights and new directions of enquiry for the discipline.

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Bibliography

359

Index

References to illustrations are in bold. Abbott, Edwin A., ‘Flatland’ 213 Ackroyd, Peter, on London 148–9, 211 actor-network theory approach 102 enrolment 102–3 interessement 102, 107 mobilisation 103 problematisation 102, 104 stabilisation 103 coevolution examples 103–4 and urban design 101–9 and urban water-cycle, London 105–9, 106, 108 emergence 102 Agamben, Giorgio, on exception as the rule 31 Agenda21, sustainable development 140 airports, shopping opportunities 18, 18 Alexander, Christopher, New Theory of Urban Design 232 architect, as narrator 211–13 architecture and art 219 Bohigas on 250 as narrative, examples 209, 211 planning, difference 148 art, and architecture 219 Athens Charter 288 Le Corbusier 105

Ball, Philip 148 Bangkok, community design charrette 253 documenting of 252 Banksy, mural, urban space 129 Barcelona Ensanche Cerda, FSI/GSI 196, 199, 200 neural model network 175 RIBA Gold Medal (1999) 249 spatial properties, growth iterations 173, 174 Barthes, Roland ‘The Death of the Author’ 210 Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives 209 on narrative 209–10 The Bartlett, University College London 2, 9, 331 Building and Urban Design in Development (BUDD) 25, 32, 33, 250 connectivity initiatives 333 creative writing 225 School of Planning 182, 332 BEDZED, London 137, 138 Berlin, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, visitors 282 Bluewater shopping mall 17, 17 Bohigas, Oriol ͡͠‘‹–•ˆ‘”ƒ”„ƒ‡–Š‘†‘Ž‘‰› 249–50 on architecture 250 Bonaparte, Marie 224

Brentford, figure-ground maps (1874 and 2010) 294, 295 bricolage and scale 308 vs total design 307–8 Brighton, design master plan 292–3 Brotherus, Elina, Spring 221 Brundtland Commission, Our Common Future 135 Brunel, Isambard Kingdom, tunnelling system 153 Burroughs, William 210 Butt, Gavin 227 Callon, Michel 102 Calvino, Italo, Invisible Cities 211 Carmona, M. and F. Wunderlich, Capital Spaces 327 and J. Dann, Preparing Design Codes, Practice Manual 328 The Value of Urban Design 322 case studies, explanatory power of 79–80 Caygill, Howard 226 Chesterfield, urban design history 293–4, 293 Chicago, Franklin Park, FSI/GSI 197, 198, 201, 201 CIAM 102, 105, 288 cities as complex systems 170 and conflict 299 in film and literature 211 garden 263 Jacobs on 170 narrative histories 287–8 simulation models 170 citizen science see crowd sourcing Coley, Nathan, Black Tent 225–6, 226 Colomina, Beatriz, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media 210 Connecthings system 130, 130 Copenhagen, street scene, heritage tourism 312 creativity 169 Cross, Nigel 232 362

Explorations in Urban Design

crowdsourcing 131 examples 131–2, 131 Cullen, Gordon 1 Cuthbert, A., Understanding Cities: Method in Urban Design 25 cycling, in public spaces 280 Darwin, Charles, Origin of Species, quotation 147 data big collection of 125–6 generation of 124 providers 126, 128 public 126 streaming, and urban design 128 de Certeau, Michael 220 design as politics, Rancière on 31–2 as research 231–2, 242, 247, 256 total, vs bricolage 307–8 and transformation 32 see also urban design Dick, Philip K., Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 132 eco-towns 136 high cost 137 emotions, and urban space 132–3 Engels, Friedrich, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 296 environmental masterplans 135 charrette process 140–41 design of 139 issues 139 objectives 140 rating issues 140 steering group 140 sustainability strategies 141, 141, 142, 143 EU ‘ARTISTS’ project 89–90, 92 exception, as the rule, Agamben on 31

Farrell, Terry, Shaping London 151 book cover 148 Fitzroy Square and flow concept 64 mapping soundscape 67 urban place-rhythms 67 place-rhythms diaries 68–9 mapping 67 photographic albums 69, 70 place-scores 69, 72 spectral diagrams 69, 71 surface patterns, diagrams 69 qualitative analysis 65, 67 and sense of time 63–4, 63 soundscape 64 temporal aesthetic attributes 65, 65 Floor Space Index see under urban morphology flow concept and Fitzroy Square 64 and sense of time 64 and urban space 64 Foucault, Michel on space, and power 30 The Order of Things 221 Freud, Anna 224

Hanoi, Red River Project 27 happiness and spatial indicators 132 and weather conditions 132 Harlow New Town Harlow North, development plans 272–3, 273 images 264 Newhall, coded development 328, 328 space syntax analysis 272–3, 273 Hillier, B., and Hanson, J., The Social Logic of Space 158, 161, 162, 163, 166 Hong Kong International Concept Plan 242 mega-projects 242–6 Taikoo Shing, FSI/GSI 196, 198, 200, 200 Walled City, Kowloon, FSI 201 West Kowloon Cultural District project academic reflections on 244–5 canopy structure 244 clear urban structure 244, 245 cost concerns 244 cultural/entertainment facilities 244, 246 Gross Floor Area 243–4 international competition, winning scheme 243 hooks, bell 252 Howard, Ebenezer 102, 105, 262 Human Settlements, paradigm, urban design 250–51

Gibson, J., theory of affordances, and public space 278 Greater London Authority (GLA) 126 Grimsby, design master plan 294 Ground Space Index (GSI) see under urban morphology Gutkind, Erwin, International History of City Development 287 Gysin, Brion 210

International Ambiences Network 61 The Internet of Things 128

Karbala design scenarios

Index

Handler, Sophie The Fluid Pavement 225 The Twilight Zone 225

Jacobs, Allan, Boulevard Book 288 Jacobs, Jane 1, 104–5 on cities 170 Death and Life of Great American Cities 80, 161, 288

363

Compact City 234, 236 Hybrid Plan 240, 241, 242 Linear City 234, 237, 240 Orchard City 234, 239, 240 Radial City 240 Renaissance City 240 Ring City 234, 235 Satellite Towns 234, 238 future studies, research method 233–4 housing 233 mega-plans 232–42 old city and shrines 233 pilgrim visitors 233 population 233 Kivland, Sharon Hysteria 224 She is walking about in a town which she does not know 224 Koolhaas, Rem, Project on the City studios 50 Korn, Arthur, History Builds the Town 287 Kostof, Spiro City Assembled 288 City Shaped 288 Krier, Rob 104 Latour, Bruno 102 Law, John 102 Le Corbusier 102 Athens Charter 105 Leach, Neil, The Anaesthetics of Architecture 212 Lee, Chris, The Pedway - Elevating London 296 Lefebvre, Henri 15, 16, 18, 61, 220 The Production of Space 29, 30 Leonard, Lucy, The Textile Reading Room 222, 222 Libeskind, Daniel, Manchester Imperial War Museum 211 London Abercrombie Plan (1944) 263 Ackroyd on 148–9, 211 air transport 151–2 364

Explorations in Urban Design

BEDZED 137, 138 Bloomsbury 322 Camden Town, street scene 316 Canary Wharf, Canada Square 78 Centre for Metropolitan History 296 CityDashboard iPad City Wall 128 online interface 127, 128 Covent Garden, regeneration 155–6 Crossrail stations, figure-ground mapping 296 cycling in 152 Docklands development 152, 152 evolution 149, 151 figure-ground map 290 high streets example, hinterland 325 uses 323, 324 infrastructure 151 layers 148, 151, 154, 154, 155 patterns 149 ‘Mappiness’ project 132 power patterns of 154 triangle 155, 155 public space research 80 character assessment 81 data analysis 81 locales 80–81 methodology, preparatory phase 80 mixed methods approach 81 popular debate/analysis 81 stakeholder narratives 81 substantive phase 80–81 time-lapse observation 81 user assessment 81 public spaces design and development strategies 85 examples 84

heritage 83 influences on 87–8 power relationships 86–7 shaping through management 86 shaping through use 85–6 state role 83 value of 327 public squares, densities of activity 326, 327 shaping of 151 as social creation 156 symbols, iconic 150–51 Trafalgar Square, time shaping 88 Twitterscape 124 languages 125, 126 underground rail network 151, 153 urban villages 149–50, 150 Woolwich, General Gordon Square 321 London Data Store 126 London Short Stories 209, 213, 215–17 images 214–16 Los Angeles, Orange, FSI/GSI 197, 198, 201

365

Index

Macau China, handover to 35 deterritorialisation 36, 37 Ferreira do Amaral Square, statue 43, 44 housing 42 Chinese 43 identities Chinese 36 Portuguese 35, 36, 41–4 territorial, and urban design 38–41 and urban space 38 key events, chronology 36 Leal Senado Square 43 (1915) 39 (1960s) 41

armillary sphere 45 statues, Coronel Vicente de Mesquita 40, 41, 43 Luso-Chinese Friendship and Commercial Treaty (1887) 37 peninsula diagram outline (1889) 40 (1927) 42 (1980) 42 map (1889) 40 population, ethnic mix 41–2 reterritorialisation 36, 37 Sino-Portuguese Joint Declaration (1987) 36, 37 Special Administrative Region (SAR) 36 territorialisation 35, 36, 37, 39 urban space 35 erosion of 44–5 polysemic 41, 44, 45 urban transformation, chronology 39 World Heritage status 36 Malta Development Control Policy and Design Guidance 115 category analysis 118, 119 content analysis 117, 121 data analysis 119–20 document refinement 118–19, 120, 121 qualitative analysis 120–21 Development Planning Act 115 Malta Environment and Planning Authority 115 Structure Plan for the Maltese Islands 115 urban design planning criticisms of 115, 116 reforms 115, 117 Manchester, figure-ground maps historical 292 modern 291 Masdar development, UAE 137 global/local spatial accessibility 270, 271

Maslow, A., hierarchy of needs, and public space 278 Melbourne public space, behaviour analysis 281 ‘Reclaim the Streets’ 285 Milton Keynes 263 modernism, and urban design 287 Moore, Gordon 123 Moscow, Ulitsa Butlerova, FSI/GSI 197, 198, 200, 201 Mumbai Dharavi slum, alternative developments 257–8 informal settlements 250 Mumbai Metropolitan Region 50 narrative architecture as 209, 211 Barthes on 209–10 sequential, dismantling of 210 narrator, architect as 211–13 National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) 319, 328 neighbourhood unit concept 263, 299 Israel 269–70 problems with 271–2 NetStoat simulation tool 181, 182–3 elaborations 185 features 183 input variables 183 key test parameters 185 statistics output 185 street network growth 184, 185 complexity of 190 emergent patterns 188–9, 189–90 figure ground format 188 length of roads 188 number of junctions 188 patterns 187 testing of 185–6 unpredictability of 190 structuring program, resultant pattern, relationship 183 366

Explorations in Urban Design

neuroheadset 132 New Towns Act (1946), purpose 262 Commission for 263 deprivation, comparison 263 failure 271–2 Harlow, images 264 House of Commons enquiry 263–4 influence in China 270 in Israel 270 Milton Keynes 263 ‘New’, conference on 271 older towns, comparison 265, 265, 266, 267, 268 Skelmersdale 268–9 social problems 263 and space syntax 262 and urbanism, influence on 270 see also Harlow New Town New York East Side, Manhattan, FSI/GSI 196, 199, 199, 200 Project for Public Spaces 279 Niemeyer, Oscar 300, 301, 302, 303, 305, 308, 309 Oxford University, Biochemistry building, spatial configuration 228 Paris Le Grand Paris project 50–51, 52–3, 53–4, 58 Pavillon de l’Arsenal, conversion 290 parkour, in public spaces 280 Pearl River Delta Region, Mega City-Region 36 Perec, George, Life: A User’s Manual 211 Pile, Steve 224 place-making 37, 288 and public space 315–16 place-rhythmanalysis, and place-temporality 65, 71

reinterpretation, ‘Reclaim the Streets’, Melbourne 285 skateboarding 280 see also London, public spaces; urban space Rancière, Jacques, on design as politics 31–2 Rapid Ethnographic Assessment (REA) 327 Rasmussen, Steen Eiler, The Unique City 296 regionalism 49–50 see also urbanism, regional Rendell, Jane An Embellishment: Purdah 226, 226 Art and Architecture 219, 220 Black Tent 226 Les Mots et Les Choses 221 Site Writing 220 To Miss the Desert 225 research, as design, Karbala mega-plans 232–42 rhythmicity of everyday life 161 and place-temporality 13 of urban space 62 urban space 64–5 Roberts, David, Beth Haim 227, 228 Rotterdam, Schouwburgplein 21–2, 22 Rowe, Colin, and Fred Koetter, Collage City 290 scale problem 307 Rowe, Peter, Civic Realism 288 Rudlin, David 292 Ruttman, Walter, Berlin: Symphony of a Great City 211 Saarinen, Eliel, The City: Its Growth – Its Decay – Its Future 287 Said, Edward 30–31 São Paolo, Jurubatuba 26 scale and bricolage 308 meaning of 300 problem of 299–300 in Collage City 307 367

Index

place-rhythms Fitzroy Square diaries 68–9 mapping 67 photographic albums 69, 70 place-scores 69, 72 spectral diagrams 69, 71 surface patterns diagrams 69 taxonomy aesthetic temporal attributes 67 dominant spatial attributes 66 temporal attributes 66 place-temporality and place-rhythmanalysis 65, 71 as quality aesthetic experience 65 and rhythmicity 13 planning architecture, difference 148 and urban design, separation 148 Popper, Karl, The Poverty of Historicism 288 Porto, high quality space, café scene 314 potentitality, existing 31 public space cycling 280 and Gibson’s theory of affordances 278 London, value of 327 and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs 278 parkour 280 and place-making 315–16 problem of 278–9 and public behaviour 280, 281 discursive 285 observation of 279–80, 284 performativity of 285 and ‘props’ 281–2 and regulatory notices 282–3, 283 and touch 281, 282 and weather conditions 284, 284

Tripoli (Lebanon), Fair and Exposition 303–5 Seattle region 50 Sheffield, Rockingham St, angular segment analysis 166 Sheppard, Fiona, The Stolen Kiss 223–4, 223 Shonfield, Kath 220 shopping malls 17 cities as 18 criticism of 18 shopping opportunities, airports 18, 18 site-writing examples 221–9 pedagogical framework for 222 use 220 skateboarding photographs 19 play spaces 19–20 public benefits of 20 in public spaces 280 risks 20 study, sources 16 Skelmersdale New Town land use patterns 268 pedestrian movement flows 269 smart city 123 iCity 126 and social networks 133 social ideas, and space 159 social networks and the smart city 133 see also Twitter social science research mixed/multimethod approaches 78 drawbacks 79 rationale 79 SOLUTIONS project 182 soundscape Fitzroy Square 64 mapping 67 368

Explorations in Urban Design

urban space 64 space political nature of 32 and power, Foucault on 30 production of 29–30 social 58 and social ideas 159 see also urban space space syntax and accessibility 262 analysis, Harlow New Town 272–3, 273 angular segment analysis 164 Sheffield, Rockingham St 166 axial map 162–4, 162 Depthmap software 157 application 173 distance concepts 165 Durkheimian basis of 158–9 and English New Towns 262 and Harlow New Town 272 integration measures 164 misunderstandings 165 and movement economy 160 and natural movement 160 network analysis, Barnsbury, London 157, 158 observational techniques 161–2, 161 as pedagogy 158, 165 scepticism about 157 space determinism, accusations of 170 and urban design 157, 160, 167 urban grid analysis 162 spaces, of exception 31 street network growth see under NetStoat simulation tool sustainability environmental 136 and urban conservation 313 see also environmental masterplans; sustainable development

sustainable development Agenda21 140 conflicts 138 defining 138, 139–40 indicators 138, 140 search for 143 Sweden, Hammarby Sjöstad development 136, 137, 138 Tales of Things API 129–30 use 129 TALISMAN project 128 time place-specificity of 63 sense of 63 and flow concept 64 Tripoli (Lebanon), Fair and Exposition aerial view 306 concert shell 304 national hall and satellite 303 parabolic arch 303 scale problem 303–6 site 301–2, 302 Twitter, data mining 124–5 Twitterscape, London 124 languages 125, 126

369

Index

UAE Masdar development 137 global/local spatial accessibility 270, 271 Unwin, Raymond 262 urban, meaning 49 urban conservation key principles 315 as process 311 purpose 311 research 317–18 scope 312–13

and sustainability 313 and urban design 315–17 and urban regeneration 312–13 value of 313–14 urban design achievements 321 and actor-network theory see actor-network theory added value 319–20 econometric evidence 322–3 experiential evidence 326–7 process-related evidence 327–9 structural evidence 323, 324, 325, 325 administrative models fiction model 331 immersed model 331–2 isolated model 331 marginal model 332 multiple poles model 331 and climatology 297 concerns perceptual 104 social 104–5 utopian 105 contexts 83 critique of 2, 2–3, 25–6 curiosity concept 252 and data streaming 128 definition 1, 38 design codes, use of 328–9 in the developing world 250 dissensus concept 32, 252–3 divergency 252 experiment 3D characteristics of form-function responses 177, 179 3D variations on target estimated volumetric outcome 178, 179 Artificial Neural Networks model 175, 176 correlations, binning data 174

form attributes 175 functional attributes 175 generated structures 172, 174 growth iterations 173, 174–5 growth patterns 172, 173 knowledge-based system 179 pixel-mapper 174, 175, 176 spatial measures 176 figure-ground mapping 290–91, 290, 291 foundational texts 4 in global south 13, 26 informality 27 recalibration 26–7, 28, 29 slum as theory 28 worldling concept 28 historical perspectives 288, 292–5 personal account 296–7 Human Settlements paradigm 250–51 as hybrid discipline 2 inclusiveness 251–2 innovation 252 as integrative discipline 2 knowledge about 3, 4 linearity 210 and maps, criticism of 53 and modernism 287 moments framework 254–5, 255 activation 254 description 254 possibility 254 retrospection 254 nature of 59 operational modes 255 critiquing 255 enquiring 255 refraining 255 resisting 256 origins 1, 288 370

Explorations in Urban Design

participation 253–4, 253 and planning, separation 148 policy analysis 111–22 comparison of similar phenomena 113, 113 qualitative data analysis 114–15 quantitative data analysis 113–14 textual analysis 111–12, 112, 113 posts, limited number of 320 prioritised structure model 169, 171, 171 design filters 171, 172 experiment 172–9 processes 87 projects, post-occupancy review 77 refusal concept 252 rescaling, ability to 58 researchers, tips for 24, 33, 46, 58, 73, 88, 100, 109, 122, 133, 143, 156, 167, 180, 192, 205, 217, 229, 247, 259, 274, 286, 297, 309, 318, 329 risk 13, 17–24 allowing for 20 benefits 22–3 and difference 22–3 and knowledge 23–4 and scale issues 33, 34 and space syntax 157, 160, 167 status 319–20, 331–2, 333 temporal perspectives 62 traditions 332 trans-disciplinary ethos 252 UK, reporting of 77 and urban activism 289–90 conservation 315–17 renewal 312 in urban studies 13, 47, 48, 49, 54, 58 Urban Design Group, study tours (1983–2013), list 289 urban design quality, methodological framework 112–13 criteria 112–13

Ground Space Index (GSI) 194 urban regeneration, and urban conservation 312–13 urban space Banksy mural 129 city of civilisation 21 raucous music 21 civilisation model 20–21 and cultural identity, Macau 38 and emotions 132–3 and flow concept 64 questions about 16 rhythmicity of 62, 64–5 sense of time examples 63 Fitzroy Square 63–4, 63 as social phenomenon 18 soundscape 64 and urban design theory 60 see also public space urban streets ancillary roles 91 design group 98 design kit 98, 99 diverse functions 89 Link/Place approach benefits 97, 99 classification matrix 92–4, 92 design solutions 95 functions 89, 91–4, 91 Hounslow Borough, part 93, 94, 97 and professional groups 96 public involvement 97–9 and streetspace allocation 95, 95, 96 Transport for London Road Network 96–7 workshops on 97 people movement turn 90 plans 92

Index

urban design research audio-visual material 16 complexity of 5 fundamental research characteristics 7–8, 7 importance of 5–6 interdisciplinary 5 multidisciplinary 5 performance enquiries 10 philosophical approaches 10 photographs, examples 17 physical explorations 10 and practice, divide 169 process investigations 10 propositional experiments 10 research methods 6–8 design 7 humanities 6–7 scientific 6 social science 6 use and users of 8–9 varieties of 2 urban design theory aesthetic dimension 59 characteristics 59–60 criticism of 60–61 model 81, 82, 83 and practice 59 and sensorial urbanism 61 and urban space 60 urban morphology approaches 193–4 Floor Space Index (FSI) Broadacre City model 202 cities 195, 196–7, 198–201, 199–200, 202–4 elements 194 examples 194–5, 195 number of storeys, relationship 202–3 origins 194

371

traffic movement bias 89, 90, 99 urban studies constraints on 48–9 reemergence of 48 urban design in 13, 47, 48, 49, 58 urbanism challenges 261 comparative 54, 55–7 contested, framework 29, 29 influence of New Towns 270 Modernist/post-Modernist 296 new 136, 137, 296 recombinant 54, 58

372

Explorations in Urban Design

regional 48, 50–54, 51, 52–3 sensorial 61 sustainable 135–6 varieties of 77 see also smart city urbiculturalism 156 Weaver, Warren 161 Wright, Frank Lloyd 102 Broadacre City model, FSI 202 writing as spatial practice 220 see also site-writing