Trafalgar pops green, again...

Last night a hedge maze appeared in Trafalgar Square, London. According to the organisers (West End Partnership) this green labyrinth aims to encourage Londoners and visitors explore West End  beyond their usual paths. The maze consists of hedges over 2 metres high with lanes within that 30 by 20-metres puzzle named after famous West End streets. Taking some time to get lost in a green labyrinth is worth an effort, however one would also expect local partnerships to take a step beyond of just creating another temporary art and advertising installation - to actually take time and study people and their behaviour  in order to create better permanent open green (?) places for rest and play (see also intervention in Trafalgar in summer 2009).

A return to the polis by Swyngedouw

"What is at stake, then, is the practice of genuine democracy, of a return to the polis, the public space for the encounter and negotiation of disagreement, where those who have no place and are not counted or named, can acquire or, better still, appropriate voice." 

Erik Swyngedouw, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2009.

Loose Space Encounters

"In urban public spaces around the world people pursue a very rich variety of activities originally not intended for these locations. Sometimes these activities occur along with the primary, intended uses. Many of the activities that generate the looseness are neither productive nor reproductive - being instead a matter of leisure, entertainment, self expression or political expression, reflection and social interaction. Loose spaces allow for the chance encounter." (Franck, Stevens 2007)

Cities variety of public space extends the right to carry out one´s desired actions while recognizing the presence and rights of others (Lynch 1981; Carr 1992). Right to the city encompasses the right to freedom, individualisation. Different groups have various perspectives on the use of public space, sometimes resulting in tension and conflict. However tension is not always conflictive or necessarily bad while it provides an opportunity for awareness of the relationship between different groups concerning public space. 

Qualities that define Public Space

I am currently reading Ali Madanipour´s new book "Whose Public Space?" (2010, Routledge). The book in general investigates the making of public space through analysing the process of urban design and development. It is argued that public spaces should be accessible and developed through inclusive processes. Public spaces need to support certain qualities such as physical access, social access, access to activities and discussions, or inter-communications; and access to information. The first and second quality are most obvious - physical access refers to physical environment which everybody is entitled to be physically present; and second quality, social access, involves the presence, suggesting who is, and is not welcome in that space. The social image and ambient of the place can make the space more welcoming, less intimidating to wider range of groups. The third quality refers to place where the activities and discussions on its (public space) development and use processes are open to all. Thus it can be said that the "public space" is the place where public authorities are responsible for guaranteeing the existence of arena where citizens can express their attitudes, assert their claims etc.Through this function the arena enables the meaning of public space to express needs, interests, negotiate and understand. And finally the fourth quality - access to information - allows us to define the the public space as the place where information regarding its development and use processes is available to all members of society.

 

Monitoring Divison of Space

"Have you ever felt the urge to look inside, when walking down a narrow street and passing in front of a door that is ajar or a window that is half-lit? Have you wondered what lies behind curtains that are drawn, gates that are shut, walls that are high? Have you thought about how objects, signs and symbols may invite you to one place and bar you from another? From inside the buildings, have you spent time standing in front of a window, watching the world go by from detached, safe distance, or wishing to go to the open spaces outside, meeting your friends in public spaces or just joining the crowd of strangers?" (Madanipour 2003)

If we monitor our individual everyday routines, one defining features of these routines is how we live in and pass through private and public spaces, feel and behave accordingly. If we monitor the spaces, we see how they are structured around a separation of public and private. One of the defining features of urban space is the movement divison and control. The way space is subdivided is a mirror of social relations between individuals and groups. In response the divison of space affects indviduals'  mental states, regulates their behaviour. Why do we subdivide the city into public and private? Why to we tend to talk about private and public in binary terms: it is either or? Or are we labelling everything that is not private (privately owned) public...

Citizens´ Privatisation of Public Space

One of the huge contrasts of the modern era has been between public and private. This contrast has become even greater in as cities grow and are transformed into metropolises. According to Lyn H Lofland, the city is a community made up of strangers, something that was not experienced in villages or towns. The individual therefore is seeking to reconcile the feeling of strangeness.* Privatisation of public space enables citizens to develop a feeling of belonging to a place within which they live.

A lively and constantly growing cities tend to define its parameters shaped by its citizens. Although local authorities attempt to impose legislation on the city, its citizens remain resistant to some regulation, developing their own tactics for taking the power open space. The informal creation of urban spaces, hybrid and continuously changing, are always full of people. 

The way that citizens in these ways take advantage of unprogrammed public spaces and live the city as they want to, raises lot of questions for architects and planners. Can something in-between, which gives the citizens the opportunity to make their own decisions about their city, be designed and applied?

* LH Lofland, A World of Strangers, 1973

Unprogrammed spaces

«When public spaces are successful […] they will increase opportunities to participate in communal activity. This fellowship in the open nurtures the growth of public life, which is stunted by the social isolation of ghettos and suburbs. In the parks, plazas, markets, waterfronts, and natural areas of our cities, people from different cultural groups can come together in a supportive context of mutual enjoyment. As these experiences are repeated, public spaces become vessels to carry positive communal meanings».(Carr, Francis, Rivlin and Stone, 1993)

A continually evolving city is like a living organism - it owes much of its vibrancy and heterogeneity to its unprogrammed spaces. These spaces create a blank canvas for citizens and their activities. If space is unprogrammed it means that a function has not yet been attributed to it, it can be transformed by its users. Unprogrammed space does not require people to come and create; it is just there waiting to be discovered and improvised. It is self-organising, unstable and variable. It is a public space that is open to being privatised by citizens themselves. The metamorphosis of unprogrammed spaces relies on their users. Whether its features are designed or not is a possibility.

Globalisation and advances in communication have all but eradicated the homogeneous metropolises of the past. City is mainly heterogeneous, both socially and economically,  due to its population high rates of immigration from various rural areas of the country. Scaled down to urban space, this heterogeneity causes multiple uses of unprogrammed spaces. It provides citizens with opportunities to meet and interact.

To wonder rather than answer

"The stupidity of people comes from having an answer to everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything... it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties." 

Milan Kundera, Interview on the Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Urban Cursor - Social interaction and play

Urban Cursor is a GPS enabled object by Sebastian Campion, designed to facilitate social interaction and play in public space.

The object, which is shaped as an oversized 3-dimensional computer cursor (pointer), was placed on a square in Figueres, Catalunya during the cultural festival Ingràvid. Here, people could touch it, move it around and sit on it as an alternative to the benches. Despite being removed from its normal screen based environment, the cursor was still in touch with the digital world. Via an embedded GPS device, the cursor transmitted its geographic coordinates to a website. At the website, the coordinates were mapped in Google Maps thereby documenting the cursor's movements in the physical world and making it possible for participants to see how they collectively helped move the object around. 

Questioning the frontier of public spaces

"My experiments are focused on the human presence in cities. How to appropriate public spaces with cheap medium and ephemeral action, questioning the frontier between public spaces and private spaces I use regularly with various techniques with tapes, sealing foil, inflatables and I  propose new shaped spaces (which are grafted onto the existing urban furnitures) that become multifunctional  by people uses, allowing passersby to take the time to sit, watch, children playing, then leave. "

Cedric Bernadotte

Cedric Bernadotte, Urban Interventions photo stream

Individual Borders

"I approached people on the street and asked them to define their own personal border around themselves, while in front of the official one. I offered them a box full of different coloured chalk with which to draw their borders on the street. Most of the 40 participants instinctively defined their personal borders in a public space as a circle around themselves." 

Iris Hoppe, Individual Borders (2003), the movie
Iris Hoppe, Interventions in Public Space

Empowering Everyday Civic Engagement

Urban Atmospheres desires to move towards an improved understanding of the emotional experience of urban life. The single main research challenge is to understand how the future fabric of digital and wireless computing will influence, disrupt, expand, and be integrated into the social patterns existent within our public urban landscapes.

Use, Comfort and Accessibility of Public Space

By thinking about where to put the money, given that it is scarce, and whom and how many people are going to get hold of it, is one of the questions public space has to face.

Hotly debated issue of the maintenance and management of the collective ensembles is in relation to the aspect of safety, but also privacy and comfort. Where these aspects are not properly attuned to one another, vandalism and crime are given a free hand.Therefore the intermediate space is a space or border area where individuals and groups are to flesh out their own relation to the larger whole. It is precisely these areas that intend to be sensitive to vandalism and neglect, intended originally for the emancipation and self-fulfillment of the modern individual.

"I believe the next challenge is public space as concerns of small and medium companies. I think the demand for design is no longer in the minimum operation of housing, but in questioning how to incorporate more resources without squandering them or spending them inappropriately." 
Luis Eduardo Bresciani, Head of the Chilean Urban Development division of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development.

Inbetween mass-housing - open spaces of identity?

In spring 2010 Archis is publishing a book on mass housing by exploring the individual places and their social, political and cultural contexts: "There is something uncanny about traveling to places that continously evoke a common, everyday landscape. Art historian Mark Crimson describes traveling between two cities in the world as a 'means to return home as you inevitably pass through airport, ring roads and similar buildings'. The experience of travel today increasingly feels this way. Modern architecture is everywhere and mass housing, epitomizing the principles of modern architecture and urbanism, has truly become a global phenomenon. The prevailing sense of uniformity among global metropolises nowadays is due in part to continously encountering these large machines for living. Mass housing gained poor reputation in the latter half of the last century. A form of collective anxiety regarding the standardized, excessive character of such large scale structures stigmatized many of the projects. Yet mass produced buildings account for a vast production of the world's housing stock."

Over a billion people today live in the pre-fabricated housing and the number is expected to rise to 6 billion people by 2040. Cities are learning how to build faster, cheaper and higher. At the same time the social structure of these massive pre-fabricated environments shouldn't be left unnoticed. The quantity, quality and variety of areas to gather, meet and socialize - the open space inbetween the mass architecture  becomes the key element for potential habitants. Not only does the open space provide place for gathering and meeting or greenery, it should also be a safe by breaking the tensions of the class system.

I am keen to digg deeper into the book next spring and find future potential for open space in the context of mass architecture by studying from existing housing examples all over the world.

Read more about Archis and its interventions...

The more people around, the less people around

It has been discussed lately that human beings in nowadays society are not considered substance anymore, but a function. Human 'role' in life has become more important than his personality. How does it affect our perceptions of (public) space - space that we share with others? And the way we tend to think and name activities, spaces, people around us?

Man-is-not a tool by Paavo Piik

Man is not a tool.
He may not be.
He is not a tool for pleasure or intimacy

or respect or lightness or boredom
tool for making your work.


He is not for making money,
filling emptiness, teaching, viewing
for self-esteem and self-defence tool.
Because man is not a function.


He has no confessor or a prostitute
or a handhold or a domestic animal
or a wallet or a clown
or a workhorse or a babysitter,
non-critical role of a critic.
At least in it's own mind.


The more people around you,
the less they resemble the people
and the more they resemble functions.


Ergo,
The more people around you,
the less people around you.

source: free translation from Paavo Piik's poetry

Fixed Feature Life?

Fixed feature space is one of the basic ways of organizing the activities of individuals and groups. It includes material manifestations as well as the hidden, internalized designs that govern behaviour of man. One common example of fixed feature space is spatially organised inside of the western house. Not only there are rooms for special functions - food, entertainment, socializing - even the artifacts associated with the activities are related to that specific space. In some standards people who live in a mess are those who fail to classify activities and artifacts according to a uniform, consistent and predictable spatial plan. The internal layout however is quite recent.

Philippe Aries points out in a book Centuries of Childhood that rooms had no fixed functions in European houses until the eighteenth century. Members of the family had no privacy as we know it today nor there were spaces that were sacred or specialized for one function only: "...strangers came at will, while beds and tables were set up and taken down according to the moods and appetites of the occupants". In the 18th century the house altered its form, rooms started to be arranged likely to street and named after its function - bedroom, living room, dining room etc.

Some aspects of the fixed-feature space however are not visible until one observes human behaviour. It is important to note that fixed feature space nowadays acts like a mold into which great deal of behaviour is cast. As Churchill has noted: "We shape our buildings and they shape us".

It has been discussed lately that people do not think of their relationships with other people by kinship or emotions any more, but they have also started to name people by functions.

Futuro house by Matti Kuusia, 1968

Proxemics of Space

In 1957 a doctor named Humphrey Osmond began observing the effects of environmental change on the interactions of patients in a mental hospital in Saskatchewan. From that research he eventually identified two major systems for patterning space. Sociofugal space (gridlike) tends to keep people apart and suppress communication while sociopetal space (radial) does just the opposite. It brings people together and stimulates interaction as routes merge and overlap. Many other researchers followed in Osmond’s footsteps, developing a body of work known as “proxemics” to describe the cultural distinctions between intimate, personal, social and public space. The Hidden Dimension by Edward T. Hall is a classic reference on the spatial aspects of human interaction.

Something is missing?

The telephone, television, video, home computers, and so forth have introduced new ways of interacting. Direct meetings in public spaces can now be replaced by indirect telecommunication. Active presence, participation, and experience can now be substituted with passive picture watching, seeing what others have experienced elsewhere. Or is that in the past already?

Abundant possibilities do exist for compensating for what has been lost. The demand for easily accessible social opportunities outside the home is growing, whether it is due to the change in family patterns, decreasing family size or great deal of free time, the spaces that are worth using, are being used. The public spaces are needed, even more now in the world of virtual communication. The city might not be a goal anymore, but a tool that will be formed by its use.

Necessary, Optional and Social?

An ordinary day on an ordinary street. Pedestrians pass on the sidewalks, children play near front doors, people sit on benches and steps, two passersby greet on the sidewalk, groups engage in conversation. This mix of outdoor activities is influenced by a number of conditions. Greatly simplified though, these activities in public spaces can be divided into three categories, each of which places very different demands on physical environment.

Necessary activities include those that are more or less compulsory and in majority can be summed up as those related to walking. These activities are necessary, their incidence is influenced only slightly by the physical framework. These take place throughout the year, under nearly all circumstances.

Optional activities are participated if there is a wish to do so... if time and place make it possible. These take place only when conditions are optimal and place invites them. When outdoors are of high quality, activities take place with approximately the same sequence. However a wide range of optional activities will occur because place and situation invites people to stop, sit, eat, play etc.

Social activities depend on the presence of others in public spaces. The most widespread of social activities is a passive contact - simply seeing and hearing the other people.These activities can also be termed as a result of the above mentioned as they evolve from activities linked to each other. Social activities occur spontaneously as direct consequence of people moving about and being in the same space. The presence of others compromises one of the most important characters of public spaces - the subject of outdoor activities therefore does not begin with a single or limited category of activities - it is finely interwoven pattern.

The Social Life of Urban Spaces

This witty and original film is about the open spaces of cities and why some of them work for people while others don't. Beginning at New York's Seagram Plaza, one of the most used open areas in the city, the film proceeds to analyze why this space is so popular and how other urban oases, both in New York and elsewhere, measure up. Based on direct observation of what people actually do, the film presents a remarkably engaging and informative tour of the urban landscape and looks at how it can be made more hospitable to those who live in it. The video was adapted from a book with the same name by William H. Whyte.