Against Porosity, Against the Crowd: Walking for a Spatial Complex City (original) (raw)
Related papers
Walking city streets: Spatial qualities, spatial justice, and democratising impulses
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2019
The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). 2019 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers). Walking fosters self-efficacy, empathy, and connection, and large and small democratic actions. Such capacity seems especially the case when walking is attended by certain spatial qualities that engender, for instance, physical accessibility, a capacity to socialise, a sense of safety, or a pleasing aesthetic. Sometimes, adverse spatial alternatives dominate and then-at very least-indifference seems to loom large and spatial injustices prevail. And in the worst conditions, indifference and injustice tip over into fear and danger. This paper's orientation is towards optimism, however. Our conceptual focus is on the relationship of walking to geography and philosophical pragmatism, and on small and effective antidotes to indifference and injustice. Our empirical contributions come from a qualitative research project in Wollongong, Australia, and specifically from conversations with 25 adult residents who shared with us their experiences of regular walks in the city centre. We interpret those experiences in pragmatic terms as transactions-or experiments in what to do and how-in relation to self, others, and environs. We show how participants are affected by walks and the transactional spaces created by them, and consider how they come to care for things that might not directly concern or affect them. In the process, we discern that they experience how their actions shape and can enrich life in the city-findings that have wider salience for those interested in spatial qualities, spatial justice, and democratising impulses.
THE SOCIAL FABRIC OF CITIES [now in paperback]
https://www.routledge.com/The-Social-Fabric-of-Cities/Netto/p/book/9781472470669 Ambitious in scope and bringing together ideas from the fields of sociology, economics, human geography, ethics, political and communication theory, this book deals with some key subjects in urban design: the multidimensional effects of the spatial form of cities, ways of appropriating urban space, and the different material factors involved in the emergence of social life. It puts forward an innovative conceptual framework to reconsider some fundamental features of city-making as a social process: the place of cities in encounters and communications, in the randomness of events and in the repetition of activities that characterise societies. In doing so, it provides fresh analytical tools and theoretical insights to help advance our understanding of the networks of causalities, contingencies and contexts involved in practices of citymaking.
Publics and their spaces. Renewing urbanity in city and suburb
New Urban Configurations, 2014
In Europe, the beautiful old city, with its compact morphological structure, seems to have no relation to the suburban environment sprawling outside the perimeter of recognizable urban values. For many, the inner city still serves as the dominant centre where the whole suburban area converges, a stage for community life and cultural identity. However, the liveability of old cities has been transformed during recent decades. To preserve the historical values of buildings and public spaces, municipalities have conserved, sometimes obsessively, their physical elements, freezing their function for daily life. This has turned many old cities into open-air museums, with decreasing opportunities for public and social interactions. Pedestrianised zones attract shoppers and profits, bringing chains of luxury shops that replace everyday needs with boutiques for clothing, jewellery and gifts. Museums and palaces become cultural anchors in historic centres, resembling theme parks for tourists. This process is most visible in Italian cities such as Venice, Florence and Rome. To preserve a physically coherent environment, cities expel to the periphery any function or architectural style that doesn’t fit their model of coherence. As a result, the historical European city appears to be disconnected from the development of contemporary society, leading to a decline in the social significance of its public spaces. Meanwhile, the vast land of suburbia has become a complex and multifunctional environment. Its sprawling morphology accommodates new functions and typologies in new spaces and territories, often independent of the historic centre. During a single century, fast growing suburbs in Europe have produced forms, building types, and urban patterns completely different from historic morphologies. Exurban development produces phenomena as different as gated communities, ethno burbs, lifestyle centres, shopping malls and entertainment complexes, and restructured rural towns. Far from the centre, they are singular episodes in an “in between” zone, neither city nor country. Every development constitutes a new piece of a broader puzzle, still to be completed.
Public Culture
The concept of the city as a territorial and political form has long anchored social thought. By the twentieth century, the city figured prominently as a laboratory for testing modern techniques of governance. In the twenty-first century this discourse incarnates anew in visions of future mega-and smart cities. Then, as now, cities-as signs of the modern-are the elephants in a room full of adjacent concepts such as the state, the market, citizenship, collectivity, property, and care. This issue picks up a thread from the 1996 special issue and 1998 book of prizewinning essays on Cities and Citizenship (edited by James Holston and Arjun Appadurai). The contributors focused on the role of cities in the making of modern subjects by attending to associations between urbanism and modernity and thus with imperialism, colonialism, and extraction. Now, we reconfigure that line of inquiry to consider Urbanism beyond the City while bearing projections of the future in mind. The United Nations projects that by 2050, two-thirds of the global population will live in cities or other urban centers. But this new density will be greatest in a small number of countries, none which are in the Global North (United Nations 2018). Yet even as cities take unprecedented forms without discernible limits, spatial theorizing continues to invest in a particular concept of the city and to expand that concept's reach into other areas of study, planning, and investment (Amin 2013). Spatial professions capitalize on the city's capacity for generating complex intersections of social, economic, and political forces. Theorists attribute a capacity to distinguish among divergent possibilities mingling unpredictably to the urban apparatus (Martin 2017). Even critical methods remain attached to the idea that cities-whether as infrastructures, instruments, or morphologies-anchor a very particular sense of social life. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1994: 4) noted, philosophy coincides with the "contribution of cities: the formation of societies of friends or equals but also the promotion of relationships of rivalry between and within them." We position the concept of the city by treating it as a "friend" accompanying us through the journey presented in this special issue.
This paper introduces the main ideas of an integrated approach intended to address three vital yet relatively little explored dimensions in the social and material shaping of cities. First, it looks into ‘cities as systems of encounters’ in time and space – or how we find ourselves co-present with those like us or those different from us in public and private places. Second, it introduces a view to ‘cities as systems of communication’ – or how cities become contexts that help us to produce linguistic exchanges and create massive action systems from seemingly trivial situations. Third, it looks into ‘cities as systems of material interaction’ – or why we shape and fold space into urban space in order to express interactions in complex conditions of interdependence. Finally, the paper discusses substantive and epistemological issues regarding the improbable connections between the elusiveness of actions and the perennial tangibility of their spatialities. Journal Area Development and Policy Volume 2, 2017 - Issue 2 http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/3KwbXwtjAQV5qEcPxbS5/full
Urban Formation and Collective Spaces
1990
A basic and recurring theme in architectural discourse – particularly since the advent of the modern city – is the issue of public space. The story is well known. The rise of the modern city is characterised by the disappearance of self-evident collective clusters (family, local community), which were part and parcel of more traditional and often agrarian societies. Other ‘light communities’ arise and insert themselves within the anonymous sphere of the modern city. Collective experience is transformed, though not suppressed, by the increasing importance of individuality. A new form of ‘collectivity’ arises, not defined by inevitability, but rather through self-chosen communities. Giving form to this new collective sphere is an important challenge for contemporary architecture. This OASE highlights the ‘old question’ of public space and the role of architecture within it. This is not without reason. In the past decade, remarkably negative opinions were voiced on the condition of pub...
CITY: A Vanishing ACT or A Cultural Dialogue?
Starting with a theoretical dialogue on the current "modus operandi" of the City through the prism of «new technologies», this paper discusses whether they are providing new «tropes» of social interaction and coexistence. Through the presentation of examples of socially driven operations in the Athenian Urban Grid (Hive Athens, Re-think Athens, Community based design networks), urban space is viewed as an on-going production of spatial relations, as a field of infinite transformations beyond design. The discussion focuses on the ability of new technologies to transform cities into “communication modes” incorporating issues beyond morphogenesis, identified in the decision-making process leading to it. Finally, it raises some questions on whether new technologies, as socially embedded processes, can be rendered as the backbone of the social structure; whether, they can transform the urban environment into a place of constant participatory actions, into unique civic laboratories, and thus innovate the term “hybrid city.
Spatial resistance and the right to the city in social condensers
Public sPace: Projects, concePts, exPeriences, 2024
In this study, we investigate social condensers as spaces of resistance, reflecting on their capacity to transform the urban environment and social relations. By transcending physical functionality, these spaces become arenas of discourse and contestation, exemplifying the intersection of architecture with social resistance and the right to the city. We explore how these structures, originally conceived in the context of Soviet Constructivist architecture, function as active agents of social transformation. The analysis focuses on the interaction between these condensers and civic life, underlining their influence on the dynamics of public spaces and the promotion of collective citizenship. This perspective broadens the understanding of public space as a territory of common use and collective ownership. This article, therefore, aims to deepen the understanding of social condensers, highlighting their potential in the planning of public spaces that embrace diversity, inclusion, and the right to the city.