Bartlett Think-Tank

In recent years, in Europe and beyond, there has been a trend toward the rehabilitation and redevelopment of waterfront areas. There were several reasons why these areas, which in the past often functioned as entry point to the city, fell into neglect. Amongst these, the the beginning of mass air travel, the redrawing of trade routes and subsequent relocation of commercial harbours. Between the nineteen-seventies and nineties, however, some successful examples as the London Docklands or the Barcelona Villa Olimpica, set the standard for waterfront regeneration programmes as a fast, photogenic and clearly business-oriented way cities could re-shuffle their image and attract foreign investment.

The Waterfront Expo in Glasgow on 2-3 November 2011 was an occasion to present three on-going programmes in three of Scotland’s five cities, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dundee. It was also an occasion to compare these projects with other planned or ongoing experiences in other cities in Europe and Asia and discuss the challenges faced by the professionals working on them. At the conference the speakers representing public administrations clearly highlighted the economic and financial dimension of the projects, confidently assuming the targets stated in their plans are positively achievable and likely to bring wealth to neighbourhoods and wider urban areas. For instance, it is assumed that the Clydefront regeneration programme in Glasgow will bring about twenty thousand new jobs and an equal amount of new homes to the area, which is currently one of the neglected and deprived of the city. The Scottish Exhibition Centre, next to the actual venue where the conference took place, and the BBC Scotland Building were often cites as success stories. Interestingly, a similar enthusiasm was also shared by speakers coming from the development sector, while other private actors and representatives or the local community were more cautious in their forecast.

Amongst the most important questions that were asked was the question of accountability. With programmes projected to take place over a long time frame (ten to twenty years, much longer than the elected politicians’ terms) many asked who would be the ultimate guarantor that the original intentions and budgets. Someone raised the important issue of the fact that the introduction of proportional representation has weakened the decisional power of local councils, since every party involved in the administration of the city has to share the same vision. Other concerns generally touched on environmental issues, but also on the local economy of fishing, which would be disrupted by the programmes, with local fishermen having to relocate further away. Some of the criticisms, however, were actually endorsed by the councillors who were attending the conference. In particular, most seemed to agree that reducing the urban design intervention to the creation of small blocks of flats for young professionals interspersed by retail complexes had failed to built and consolidate a feeling of community in past interventions. The model of the mixed community, with people from different ages, professions and walks of life is more sustainable from a social and economic point of view in the long run. Also, for the same reasons, multi-functional buildings with spaces for small retail units should be preferred to residential-only structures.

The conference included extensive tours of the neighbourhoods which will be transformed by the regeneration programmes. Although connected by economical ties, the three Scottish programmes cover an extremely different range of waterfront areas, from Edinburgh were at the moment there is little connection between the city proper and the coastline, to Dundee, where the waterfront is projected to function as a new city centre. For this reason, the latter definitely seemed the most ambitious amongst the three — and also the most convincing. While in Glasgow and Edinburgh most of the effort seemed aimed at attracting foreign investment through development, in Dundee there was a clearly defined ambition to redefine the identity of the city — and in the process dramatically improve the quality of life for Dundonians. This ambition seem very likely to turn into a success, thanks to the very clever idea to invite the Victoria & Albert Museum to build a local branch and the London institution’s brave acceptance. The V&A centre will represent a much needed venue for travelling major exhibitions, which currently could not be hosted anywhere in Scotland. Also, the closeness to the University of Dundee and to Dundee Contemporary Arts centre leaves one with the impression that the emerging hub will have a true, positive impact on the identity of the city and its quality of life.

The authors of the Frankfurt School maintained that a radical change in society was necessary; however, they always refused to suggest any practice. The role of the thinker, as famously argued by Adorno, was not to engage with society and politics in a direct fashion, because this would imply being caught in a stream of cause and effect relations. This compromise would eventually jeopardise their subjectivity and the ability to critically consider reality.

Jürgen Habermas, the last author to be associated with the Frankfurt School, shifted his object of analysis from the immediate social reality to the level of language and communication, increasingly detaching the terms of the question from his immediate historical circumstances.

The authors of the Frankfurt School maintained that a radical change in society was necessary; however, they always refused to suggest any practice. The role of the thinker, as famously argued by Adorno, was not to engage with society and politics in a direct fashion, because this would imply being caught in a stream of cause and effect relations. This compromise would eventually jeopardise their subjectivity and the ability to critically consider reality. Jürgen Habermas, the last author to be associated with the Frankfurt School, shifted his object of analysis from the immediate social reality to the level of language and communication, increasingly detaching the terms of the question from his immediate historical circumstances. (more…)

By external contributor Miguel Torres-Garcia.

Today we conceive urban space to have a substance of itself. Architectural proposals take part in it, and produce it to a certain extent, but I wonder if there are still areas beyond the discipline’s reach.  In this text I will use a few samples across time, starting by a comparison between two contemporary 17^th century paintings, as to exemplify the process that at the same time has shaped urban and public space, and articulated the understanding we have of them. It is my intention to show that far from being obvious, this issue has undergone a complex evolution throughout western modern history.

The first painting is Vermeer’s The Little Street, one of his two paintings – the other being View of Delft - having reached us that deals with the outdoors. In this work, Vermeer combines different elements of Delft’s cityscape – there is consensus in considering this composition an abstraction rather than an actual location – in order to describe the streets of Delft. Split almost in half, the composition juxtaposes a planar façade and a deep cityscape. Representative and functional relations between the house and the street are also shown together, on each side of the canvas’s symmetry axe. This shift between the symmetries of the objects within the painting and the painting itself, underscored by the painting’s crop, induces in the viewer an understanding of the greater order of the city’s fabric.

As the painter leans on his usual compositional schemes, he also continues his typical motifs, and thus the domestic scale is used to symbolically report the idea of the street. Vermeer’s everyday-life scenes of Dutch bourgeoisie are reflected in three instances around the painting: a maid at house-keeping chores, a couple of children playing and a woman sewing on the doorstep, so arrayed that all three of them appear somehow confined to the façade’s plane, and though having “one foot” on the street, absolutely belonging to the house.

The other painting is Martínez del Mazo’s depiction of the Alameda de Hércules, the main urban space arranged in Seville during the 16^th century. One characteristic establishes the main difference with Vermeer’s piece: the Alameda, the way it was conceived, had no formalized edges. Designed as something between a garden and an urban stroll in what used to be a floodable area hosting seasonal leisure activities, its rationale was the inception of an intrinsic order rather than an external one. This was to be granted by a combination of a perspective array, landmarks and a strong conceptual content.

Thence the pictorial representation –the first of a series of copies that repeated the same scheme- of its spatial quality is based on this kind of backbone, but it does also rely strongly on the depiction of characters hovering over space, loosely bound to this built structure. Their attires, attitude and characterization are stressed so that they can both be recognizable in themselves and qualify the space they are occupying. Urban space is revealed in simultaneity; in the coexistence of the water boy, the strolling gentlemen, the dueling ruffians… in an incoherence that Vermeer avoids in his painting. Witness of the awakening of a new social order, Vermeer’s analytical eye feels comfortable within the boundaries of the domestic realm, in which bourgeoisie first expressed itself spatially. But the streets remained a backward, hostile world, still to be apprehended by a middle class on its way to the Enlightenment, and which for the moment merely leaned out and dared to inhabit a thin border fringe. The features of the public space at reach of Vermeer’s pictorial discourse are those around it. There is no description of the street as such, but rather of how it is approached from its edges.

Proposal for a Cenotaph for Newton by E. Boullée (1784) and E.G. Asplund’s Stockholm’s City Library (1928). Two key moments in the Enlightenment’s project of the “indoor public space”.

At the beginning of the consolidation of the modern city, the actual streets took place in spaces in between edges that set boundaries and bodies than enacted similitude or difference. Then the developing urban ideal gradually conquered the space that had belonged to the indistinct crowd. If classicism had spawned an awareness regarding a necessary negotiation of those in-betweens, it was especially at the turn of the 19^th century that spaces begun to be conceived as to extend social order over the outdoors, and in turn to overlap social and private space.

Today, urban space is perceived as substantial in itself, even though its quality remains elusive to architecture. In between the signs that fill the streets of overlaying codes there is still room for deviance, and simultaneity brings about the unexpected. Can it be planned or is it only possible to grasp it by occupying it? The modern city has been able to incorporate those moments in which we just want to switch on the mirror ball and let its shine dissolve the edges and merge the bodies.

Madonna, exercising her citizen’s right to let loose, location unknown. This is the climax of the “Hung up” single’s clip (Dir. Johan Renck), which updates contents from the 70’s, especially Abba’s theme “Gimme gimme” and the movie “Saturday night fever”, into a celebration of urban life.

Contributor’s bio: Miguel Torres-Garcia is an architect based in Seville, Spain, and performs technical assistance in the fields of planning, heritage management and international aid. Following his architecture studies he worked as a specialist in development aid, obtained an MSc in Spatial Planning and is now furthering his interest in public space research.

The separation barrier sneaking by Abu Dis from the al-Quds University campus, on 8 December 2010. These Palestinian landscapes are naturally very contrasted and defined, and with their sparse vegetation they often resemble the backdrops of some Italian early Renaissance paintings.

The wall in its context is a text-book example of low entropy structure. Like an ice-cube, its structure is really orderly, but it requires a great deal of work to bring it into that state and its entropy is naturally ever increasing. Low entropy means highly organised but also highly dishomogeneous. An ice-cube at room temperature will inevitably melt and the state of matter and the temperature eventually reach a balance. Balance is homogeneous temperature and texture. This process can only be delayed by continually applying work, which in the case of the ice-cube means keeping the fridge switched on, and in the case of the wall spending energies and human lives to keep the separation neat and strict.

The university campus was barely saved when in 2003 the wall was threatening to cut right through it. The barrier in this picture hardly seems capable to withhold the urban buildup above it. The houses populate the slopes of the hills, and as they thrive and proliferate they seem on the point of overwhelming the concrete fence underneath like a wave.

Al Bayyadah is a town in Cyrenaica that was founded in 1938 and originally called D’Annunzio, after the famous Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio. These agricultural settlements were built around an architectural core formed by a church, an administrative building, and a section of the Fascist party, which functioned as space for events and public gatherings: “God, Fatherland and Family”. The image is taken from a publication called “The Twenty Thousand. Photographic Documentary of the First Mass Colonial Migration in the frame of the Intensive Demographic Colonisation Plan”: I Ventimila. Documentario fotografico della 1. Migrazione in massa di coloni in Libia per il piano di colonizzazione demografica intensiva (Tripoli: Maggi, 1938).

Art historian Elisabetta Longari on Domus decries the damage that the Italian colonial architecture in Libya suffered through the Allied bombings in the Second World War and the erratic post-colonialist fury of the dictator. I had once the chance of viewing the videos Lorenzo Pezzani shot during the first stages of his research in the after-lives of colonial buildings in Libya. It is surprising how much has been left behind, most interestingly the colonial settlements, which in their structure are surprisingly similar to the West Bank settlements of today. It is true, as Longari says, that what is still standing survived “simply because there was no will to destroy it”. She adds that true conservation of the built heritage also means “renovate, reinterpretate, rehabilitate” and calls on the Italian government and other Italian institutions to intervene to save this wealth of heritage. This is a delicate task, not only because of the risk to reiterate colonial attitudes to space, but especially because to this day an atlas of the afterlives of this as other colonial architecture is still lacking.

Alessandro Petti of Decolonizing Architecture proposed that three general approaches can be discerned in dealing with evacuated colonial architecture: destruction, re-occupation, and subversion. Destruction is often based on the desire to turn time backwards, reverse development into virgin nature, or into a tabula rasa on which all potential forms of development and land use would be possible. This is a very appealing approach, particularly given the abhorrence aroused by colonial development, although demolitions or even the forced ruralization of built-up areas may sometimes create further planning problems or environmental damage. Another strong temptation present throughout the histories of decolonization was re-occupation of colonial buildings and infrastructure and reuse them in the very same way they were used under colonial regimes. Such repossessions tended to reproduce some of the colonial power relations in space: colonial villas were inhabited by new financial elites and palaces by political ones, while the evacuated military and police installations of colonial armies, as well as their prisons, were often used by the governments that replaced them, recreating similar spatial hierarchies. Subversion, finally, aims at profanation of structures that are both symbol and instruments of spacial control, in order to restore the common use of spaces. The first stage when looking at colonial architecture in Libya should be investigating how and whether these strategies have been used and – in perspective – how they could be used on buildings and urban centres on which intervention is still possible.

The word I like in Longari’s article is “reinterpretation”. In fact, we also have to reckon with the fact that no building should be allowed the privilege to last forever. In a way, sometimes the energy spent in harnessing the space must be released to be vital again – and this is a form of reinterpretation. Sometimes monuments that crumble down are not “lost”, but “regained”.

The right the local population indeed has to be granted now is exactly the right to reinterpretate. These attacks launched today with the Odissey Dawn operation will surely claim more lives, may they be Libyans or mercenaries. The Europeans could not afford losing access to Libya’s oil, the Arab League is happy to do away with the Libyan dictator’s antics and the international public opinion could not take the news of the brave rebels being crushed any longer. A tricky alliance of intentions, most certainly. We cannot anticipate where this will lead, but in the short term anything seemed better than just seeing mercenaries slaughtering freedom fighters. In the medium term all depends on the right leadership emerging from the rebels, a leadership that is able to twist this mismatched alliance of intentions and reinterpretate it toward the best outcome for the Libyan people.

One year ago, I wrote some notes on the urban public spaces of China (see post Reading the Urban Spaces of China). In it, I made a small reflection on the accelerating urbanization in China on the one hand and the differences in use of the public space between Western and non-Western countries on the other hand. Today I want to elaborate on the uses of public space a bit more. I want to introduce some insights brought by a short film ‘Outside’ of the Portuguese filmmaker Sergio Cruz I came across in TINAG a few weeks ago. In this film, Sergio brought a compelling portrait of Beijing public life during the preparation for hosting the Olympics in 2008, which he described as ‘a 24-hour live show full of music, dance and sports.’  This documentary film really made me think about three particular ongoing debates on public space. The first is the tolerance towards social behaviors in the public spaces of Beijing such as sleeping in public, selling in the street, and other considered deviant behaviors often not allowed in western countries. The second is the freedom Sergio had to film everywhere without ever having to ask permission and the acceptance of people to be filmed. The third is the actual intensity and diversity of Chinese public life. All these aspects show that despite China lack of freedom of speech and expression, Chinese public spaces are still very meaningful and democratic.

Sleeping in public, scene from film 'Outside' of Sergio Cruz.

To know more information about the artist and the Tinag screening see websites below:

Sergio Cruz: http://www.rhiz.eu/person-37213-en.html

TINAG events: http://thisisnotagateway.squarespace.com/salons-upcoming/

A loose reaction to this post by Patricia Simoes-Aelbrecht and thoughts on assemblage theory.

The Scoop at the foot of the GLA City Hall: a 'public space' that is privately owned and managed.

The dichotomy of public and private is something that has long been criticised in social theory. A common strand through Arendt (1956), Habermas (1962, 1992) and Sennett (1974) is that it is impossible, in Modern society, to speak of a clear boundary between the two. This touches on an issue common to all discussions on ‘public space’ in that there is a huge discrepancy between what the term implies and what it is used to describe. The requirements for a space to be public are as numerous as contradictory, and always contingent on a particular point of view.

DeLanda’s theory of assemblage (2006) might be of interest in this discussion because it offers a framework for describing complex and unfixed wholes at various scales. The theoretical premise is to conceive of ‘wholes whose properties emerge from the interaction between parts. (p.5)’ One example is that a particular group of individuals can simultaneously experience ‘territorialising’ and ‘de-territorialising’ forces (DeLanda’s theoretical starting point is the philosophy of Deleuze) that tend to respectively homogenise some of its identity and make some of it more heterogeneous. These forces, as opposed to being fixed aspects or categories, are variables of the group. What I suggest here is to apply similar thoughts to public space and to speak instead of social space with varying degrees of public and private.

My second thought has to do with the fact that assemblage theory, as elaborated by DeLanda, describes both human and material variables of social situations. These situations, whether an inter-personal conversation, a group of residents, a municipal government or even an urban agglomeration, are conceptualised as assemblages of persons and objects (agencements in Deleuze). The important distinction, as quoted above, is that the emphasis of study is on the relations between entities or ‘relations of exteriority’ rather than on the entities themselves. In this case it would seem assemblage theory has something valuable to offer in breaching the social/physical divide in theories of the public realm and public space.

References:
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press: 1958.
Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society, Continuum: 2006.
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, MIT Press: 1962.
—, ‘Further Reflections on the Public Sphere’, in Craig Calhoun ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere, MIT Press: 1992.
Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, Faber: 1974.

Sent by Stephanie Brandt:

The Urban Islands Project – reviving places:
www.urbanislandsproject.net

The Urban Islands Project is part of an ongoing project SPACEPILOTS introduced in 2009 under the title of Unlocking the City, aiming to excite young people about their city, engage them with their environment, and to empower them to get involved in the actual shaping of places.

We are inviting young people aged 16-25 from all over London to participate in the research and development of design ideas for Urban Islands.

- Join us on www.urbanislandsproject.net to receive the latest news and to help us detect existing or potential urban spots, overlooked and/or ignored, and revive them into Urban Islands!

We will launch the project in form of a small pilot at this year’s London Festival of Architecture [LFA'10], 19th June – 4th July 2010, in the Borough of Southwark, South London.

dates: 19th June 2010, project start;
4th July 2010 @ The LFA 2010, finale

place: Southwark, Southbank

theme: ‘reviving places through urban interventions and architectural
actions’

method: creative, collaborative exploring, mapping, filming, making,…

The ‘sociology of public space’ is a research area still rather unknown and unexplored. Until recently, most social sciences conventional wisdom was that the public realm was inhabited and asocial (Simmel, 1903, Wirth, 1938). Their essential argument was always that public spaces of the city were densely filled with visual and sounds stimulus overload and as a result our public realm was populated by an asocial human behaviour. In addition, there was a tendency of some scholars to grant the social character of public realm but to think of it as irrelevant and uninteresting.  It was just in the late 1950s that a group of authors came to challenge this social science’s conventional wisdom. They were Gregory Stone, Jane Jacobs, Ervin Goffman and William Whyte. Although they were not all concerned with the public realm per se, they were crucial to recognize the public realm as a social theory and to demonstrate its significance as well. Among these authors, Goffman and Whyte were the first to immerse into its study although their focus differed substantially. Goffman was the first to study it in a social-centred perspective with the focus on the organization of observable, everyday behavior, more in particular with the study of “interaction order”, the everyday social interaction among the unacquainted in urban settings. He demonstrated that what occurs between strangers passing on the street is as social as what occurs in a conversation between two lovers. Later, it was Whyte to make a study but in a spatial-centred perspective with a focus on the use of public spaces of cities, confirming not only the existence of a significant public realm social life but also how indispensable are public spaces for the vitality of the city.

Since then, there have been very few significant contributions, among them Lofland and Gehl are worth mentioning, that came to reassert once again the importance of the field of public-space sociology and to broaden its theoretical and analytical scope. But still a lot more could have been done, specially from a spatial perspective!

For those interested in or already busy with exploring the ‘sociology of public space’, please contact me. I will be very interested in discussing further since I am working in a project for an edited book and i am looking for future collaborators.

[REMEMBERANCE OF SMELLS PAST. A BBC World Service programme]

“How do smells impact on memories and emotions? Science is unraveling how a whiff of perfume or a newly mown lawn can offer us a free ticket back to our childhood.”