City Image - Operational Instrument in Urban Space Management - A Romanian Sample (original) (raw)

2012, Advances in Spatial Planning

One of the fundamental realities that have marked mankind's existence on Earth is the urban reality. Throughout the ages, in all geographic regions, the fascination of the city has set in motion people, resources, ideas, generating forces of unforeseen intensity that have continuously modelled the planet's surface. Invoked in lyrics, pinned in eternity-"I know: the city will be" (Russian poet Vladimir Maiakovski, 1893-1930)-, interrogated by sciences, object, subject and support of various professions, the city continuously challenged human knowledge. Virtually, there is no science that has not attempted to unravel its mysteries, either sequentially or wholly, without leaving behind concepts which later evolved into professions or academic disciplines. Over time, a strange blend of academic disciplines and professions accompanied the evolution of knowledge regarding the city and as the study's complexity increased these professions and disciplines also prospered. Theories and concepts have succeeded, gathered, refined, but some issues remained constant throughout generations of residents or various specialists: the urban space is much too complex, too vaguely defined, too hybridised, with a stunning mix of functionalities, polysemantic, with a much too confused image in its own residents' minds, with an many interests that must be mediated and problems to be managed. Dilemmas remain in this complexity of elements: quantitative or qualitative approach? System or phenomenon? Reality or image? Are residents prisoners of the urban habitat or beneficiaries that actively take part in the urban planning and re-planning? How can we fully and sufficiently address such a complex set of issues? In the end, all these should serve one philosophy: the city must be a good place to live and work in. But how can we measure the impact the intervention in the city's quantitative dimension (elements, flows, shapes) is going to have on the residents' spatial behaviour and attitude?; how can we use the residents' perception-"the mental city"-in planning the future ways of urban space organisation? This study aims to: 1. Emphasize geography's role as a science in the integrated approach of spatial manifestation phenomenon and processes-geography is, first of all, the science of places (with all that a place's spatial reality means; the city is a place!) and 2. Identify and test the role that www.intechopen.com Advances in Spatial Planning 248 city image can play in the process or urban space organisation and in a broader scope, in the integrated process of urban planning. It is the intrinsic need of today: the integrated approach of the concepts that operate in the urban space, concepts which although make the object of study for various social sciences or their branches in areas such as economy (e.g. urban marketing and branding), town-planning (urban design), sociology (urban segregation) or urban psychology (urban behaviourism), target, above all else, processes with a spatial/territorial manifestation. In this spirit, geography's participative-constructive role becomes obvious for at least two reasons: 1. most of the processes and phenomenon that are part of the approach to city issues have a spatial character and space is one of the essential variables in socio-human systems (from economic activities to matters of sociology and psychology); 2.this science has specialised, over the course of the last decades, in microscale spatial analyses (neighbourhood, city etc.). It is thus felt the dire need of identifying an operational instrument to mediate all these urban space approaches and that would provide a link between the residents, the urban planners, the urban subspaces "producers" (economic entities etc.), specialists, theoreticians, in other words an instrument that would connect all interests... Over the course of time, the city "belonged", more or less discretionary, to one category, but never to all categories at the same time. But which would be the instrument that could provide the link between spatial reality and human will, between urban actors and their interests, between the city-system and the city-phenomenon, between function and meaning...? One possible answer: city image. And there is another thing: globalisation. Globalisation catalysed to an unprecedented intensity both the processes and their phenomenology. Today's cities are being restructured according to new rules and forces, overcoming national borders. The city of the present competes both for attracting new residents and for retaining its old ones with cities all across the planet, aiming to increase the standard of life it offers, imprinting a way of life that would distinguish it from the other cities, a way of life that is essentialised and synthesised in an image that would impress in the residents' minds. It is that city's brand, its "signature", a guarantee of quality and added value to the offered conditions of life. It is the image being sold and that can currently determine its place in the global hierarchy. It is a set of symbols in which the residents can identify themselves. We currently live a genuine image myth. Nothing sells better than image and it has some unsuspected resorts in stimulating decision... All our pieces of information are included in images, as our emotions and feelings likewise, we sell and we buy images, we are worshipers of the image cult. The aim of this study, as stated above, also substantiates the topicality of the research, even the scientific freshness, analysing the city image and integrating it into a specific conceptual context (its relation with other operational concepts from the urban sphere such as urban planning and urban design, with urban marketing and branding) individualising a complex approach from multiple perspectives-urban-sociologic-economic-, while using a geographic (integrating) thought process. From the science of places (the science of [geographic] space) to the science of planning and creating the place (space). www.intechopen.com City Image-Operational Instrument in Urban Space Management-A Romanian Sample 249 2. Urban space-Elementary operational entity in analysing regional planning Space, geographic space, urban space. Concepts, semantics, approach Starting from one of the questions of this research-what role could geography, as a science, play in organising urban space and which could be the practical valences with which a geographer could take part in a mixed team of specialists that would plan a model of organising urban space?-, we immediately have the opportunity to identify some viable answers. And these could be synthesised as such: understanding space (metabolism, phenomenology) and using an integrated approach for it. Above all else the city represents "an objective form of existence of a human community on Earth" (Neacşu, 2010a), a highly anthropic "piece" of space resulted and modelled in time by the action of all the geospheres (with a clear dominance of the anthropic or socio-sphere component). The city occupies a concrete space, precisely located, visible through its morphology and componentsurban landscape-, is the result of the corroboration and interaction of several geographic conditionsurban environment-, it acts and functions as an optimally open thermodynamic and informational system, with a dissipative structure (Ianoş, 2000)urban system-, it represents such a specific way of life that it influences attitudes, behaviours, ideas and value systems becoming a true phenomenonthe urban phenomenon-, generating through its dynamic countless new urban subspaces. Even though there are some answers, the city still remains sufficiently complex and complicated, with a larger number of unknowns than known (sort of a "grey box"), which trouble urban spaces specialists and managers, still being too difficult to answer questions such as: but, still, what is the city? How can we control it? A true methodological and semantic thicket has accompanied, over time, analytic studies of urban space, so defined and yet without definition, so clarified to the smallest of details and yet obscure from an analytic point of view, the city is in every époque, for every generation of specialists, always surprising and seeming to increasingly sediment the idea that a city is more auto-organising itself than it can be organised, managed.