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P R O G R E S S OF RESEARCH ISSUES IN URBANISM 2005 Urban Transformations and Sustainability A. van Bilsen, G.J. Bruyns...

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P R O G R E S S OF RESEARCH ISSUES IN URBANISM 2005

Urban Transformations and Sustainability A. van Bilsen, G.J. Bruyns, M.G.A.D. Harteveld, F.L. Hooimeijer, M. Mendonça, C. Mulders-Kusumo, C. Pinilla Castro, C.E. Pinzon Cortes, R. Rocco, and D. Tunas Edited by F. van der Hoeven and H.J. Rosemann

IOS Press, 2006

Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Ph.D. Papers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Ir. A. van Bilsen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Correlating graph properties of the land use network and non-graph properties in neighbourhoods G.J. Bruyns MSc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Urban Figures as hypothesis The traditional, contemporary, and fluid figures Ir. M.G.A.D. Harteveld . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Viva Las Vegas A search for the urban design task of interior public space Drs. F.L. Hooimeijer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Cities in wetlands Ir. M. Mendonça . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Relationships between contemporary local urban scale and communication networks Ir. C. Mulders-Kusumo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Spatial configuration of the area around Delft central station C. Pinilla Castro MSc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Pondering planning and emerging approaches to produce urban transformation to meet contemporary demands Ir. C.E. Pinzon Cortes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 Morphological analysis of the contemporary urban territory: Is it still a relevant approach?

R. Rocco MSc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .114 Foreign direct investment and regional growth: The role of FDI in the tertiary sector in triggering development Ir. D. Tunas MSc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .136 Conceptualising colonial space in a global city Professors Department of Urbanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .143

Peer group prof.ir. H.C. Bekkering (TU Delft) prof.dr. R. van Engelsdorp Gastelaars (University of Amsterdam) dr. M. Jacobs (TRPC) prof.dr. A.M.J. Kreukels (University of Utrecht) prof.dr. V.J. Meyer (TU Delft) prof.dipl.ing. H.J. Rosemann (TU Delft) prof.dr. W.G.M. Salet (University of Amsterdam) prof.ir. J.M. Schrijnen (TU Delft) ir. D. Sijmons (H+N+S Landscape Architects) prof. J. Worthington (University of Sheffield, Chalmers University of Technology) Editors Dr.ir. F. van der Hoeven Prof.dipl.ing. H.J Rosemann Layout Joost van Grinsven English revision Taalcentrum VU Publishing and distribution IOS Press, under the imprint Delft University Press. Keywords sustainability, ecology, water, liberalisation, metropolisation, appreciation of existing qualities, historic continuity, tradition, changes in the nature of public life, changes in the relationship between the public domain and private domains and interiors, mobility, infrastructure, networks, shift from expansions to transformations, globalisation ISBN 1-58603-603-3 Copyright 2006 by F. van der Hoeven and H.J. Rosemann All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission from the publisher. Legal notice The publisher is not responsible for the use which might be made of the following information. Printed in the Netherlands

Introduction

The conditions of urban development are currently changing radically. Technological transformations such as automation and robotisation in industrial production are leading to new operating conditions for businesses and employees. New transportation and distribution systems are changing the scale and flow patterns of the urban agglomerations. The effects of the general application of information and communication technologies in everyday life are barely to overlook. Globalisation and internationalisation as well as the processes of European unification have led to increasing competition between urban agglomerations on European and world scales. On the other hand, the social contrasts within these agglomerations are growing. World-wide environmental problems, the necessity for a more efficient use of energy and natural resources as well as a limitation of CO2 emissions mean that we have to make adaptations to our urban structures and building fabric. These developments have become a fundamental challenge for the discipline of Urbanism. New urban and regional models and new concepts of urbanisation in general need to be developed, new networks need to be established and the relation between the city and its surroundings needs to be defined anew. Existing urban structures need to be adapted, sites that have lost their function and waste sites need to be reoriented and redesigned. The changing role of the state and public private co-operation have led to new planning procedures, to new negotiation structures and to changed (and mostly longer term) planning perspectives. The shortage of ground calls for careful consideration, while at the same time economic interests have a great influence on the potential for realizing urban plans. The new challenges require new approaches, new methods and instruments, and new strategies for urban planning. The planning of the future no longer can be based on the certainty of programs and conditions. Instead the planner is confronted with changing conditions and shifting programs. In this framework, more than before, design approaches will be pivotal. Exploratory research, the reflexive exploration of spatial potentials and the integration of design methods in spatial research will become a key issue for the scientific development of the discipline. Due to the growing demands the Department of Urbanism of the Faculty of Architecture at the Delft University of Technology made great efforts during the last years to intensify and to enlarge the research in the field of urban transformation and sustainability. Special attention has been given to the development of Ph.D. research. The number of Ph.D. researchers working at the Department has been more than doubled.

To ensure the quality of the Ph.D. research the Department introduced a special procedure for periodic evaluation: after a period of nine months the potential Ph.D. candidates are asked to present their research design, theoretical framework and methodological approach to the members of the Department and to a peer group, drawn up by the professors of the Department and by external experts. Depending on the assessment of the peer group, the candidates will have the opportunity to continue their research at the Department. In the meantime the (public) review sessions developed into an important element for the scientific debate of the Department. The sessions became a meeting point for the whole Department to discuss new research issues and new methodological approaches and to develop new research collaborations. In this framework the external members of the peer group are playing an important role. Their critics form a mirror for the scientific standards of the Department as well as for the scientific (and social) relevancy of the research issues. With the publication of the series Urban Transformations and Sustainability we want to offer to a broader public the opportunity to deal with this debate. The different contributions are based on the papers the Ph.D. candidates prepared for the reviews and have been updated as a result of the remarks of the peer group and the discussion during the review sessions. As a result the contributions are reflecting the ongoing efforts to redefine the discipline of urbanism under globally changing conditions. The review sessions of the Department started in 2004. This book presents the results of the first year. In that year two sessions were organised. On 11 March 2004 four Ph.D. candidates gave their presentations (G.J. Bruyns MSc., ir. M.G.A.D. Harteveld, drs. F.L. Hooimeijer and ir. C.E. Pinzon). Participating peers were prof.ir. H.C. Bekkering (TU Delft), prof.dr. A.M.J. Kreukels (University of Utrecht), prof.dr. V.J. Meyer (TU Delft), prof.dipl.ing. H.J. Rosemann (TU Delft), prof.ir. J.M. Schrijnen (TU Delft) and ir. D. Sijmons (H+N+S Landscape Architects). On 7 Oktober 2004 the second meeting was organised, likewise with the presentations of six candidates (ir. A. van Bilsen, C. Pinilla Castro MSc., ir. M. Mendonça, ir. C. Mulders-Kusumo, R. Rocco MSc. and ir. D. Tunas MSc.). Participating peers in this case were prof.ir. H.C. Bekkering (TU Delft), prof.dr. R. van Engelsdorp Gastelaars (University of Amsterdam), dr. M. Jacobs, prof.dr. V.J. Meyer (TU Delft), prof.dipl.ing. H.J. Rosemann (TU Delft), prof.dr. W.G.M. Salet (University of Amsterdam), prof.ir. J.M. Schrijnen (TU Delft) and prof. J. Worthington (University of Sheffield, Chalmers University of Technology).

Ph.D. Papers

Ir. A. van Bilsen Evaluated 7 Oktober 2004 G.J. Bruyns MSc. Evaluated 11 March 2004 Ir. M.G.A.D. Harteveld Evaluated 11 March 2004 Drs. F.L. Hooimeijer Evaluated 11 March 2004 Ir. M. Mendonça Evaluated 7 Oktober 2004 Ir. C. Mulders-Kusumo Evaluated 7 Oktober 2004 C. Pinilla Castro MSc. Evaluated 7 Oktober 2004 Ir. C.E. Pinzon Cortes Evaluated 11 March 2004 R. Rocco MSc. Evaluated 7 Oktober 2004 Ir. D. Tunas MSc. Evaluated 7 Oktober 2004

I R . A . V A N BILSEN

Correlating graph properties of the land use network and non-graph properties in neighbourhoods Ph.D. research: Mathematical contributions to the development of a scientific body of knowledge for urban design Chair: Spatial Planning Promotor: Prof. dr. P. Drewe Supervisors: dr. I.T. Klaasen and prof.dr. N.A. Salingaros Communications to: [email protected]

ABSTRACT The purpose of my research is to identify mathematical structures in urban systems. To describe an urban area in mathematical terms, it is necessary to convert the area to a mathematical entity. In the graph approach we describe the urban area as points and lines. There are several ways to define what a point actually encompasses: it can be based on land cover or function. The lines represent relationships between the urban elements (points), such as adjacency or mutual visibility. Several test cases were investigated using this approach. In this paper eleven Rotterdam neighbourhoods were chosen for their diversity. What do the mathematical properties of their graph decompositions say about these areas? Are they safe, healthy, transparent for navigation, and pleasant to live in? How do they correlate with the social and demographic data of these neighbourhoods.

INTRODUCTION Increasing social demands and wishes about the design and planning of urban environments place a heavier burden on urban planners and designers. Added to this is the growing com-

10 Ir. A. van Bilsen

plexity of contemporary social and economic processes, which leads to design and planning errors. A more scientific approach to Urban Design and Planning is likely to help prevent errors in the future. Although a scientific approach to urban design and planning is unusual, even more unusual is a mathematical one. Nevertheless, there have been some attempts to decrease the randomness of urban plans and designs using mathematics. In 1977 mathematician and architect Christopher Alexander published his seminal book, A Pattern Language, in which he presented patterns for building and planning a human environment. A more recent attempt at using mathematics to improve urban designs and plans is Bill Hillier’s Space Syn-

tax (Hillier and Hanson, 1984), which presents a topological analysis of a city. Up to now, little scientific knowledge has been available for architecture and urban design. Although most of Alexander’s patterns were scientifically – even mathematically – grounded, some had a more subjective or emotional basis, or reflected the ideas of the time. Space Syntax is still in the early stages of development, and although it is promising, its usefulness in practical situations must still be more thoroughly evaluated. Furthermore, Space Syntax concentrates almost entirely on transport networks, yet its graphing approach could also be applied to other networks. In this paper I explore whether the graph approach is equally meaningful if applied to a different network, such as a network based on a land use map. The aim of this paper is to discover the meaning that three graph (or network1) properties of an urban area’s land use map have for the urban area itself. To discover this, we correlated the three graph properties2 with nongraph properties of eleven Rotterdam neighbourhoods. The only substantial correlation discovered was a correlation coefficient of 0.50 between the number of neighbouring land use parcels (Beta) and the surface area percentage of houses. Two further correlations were identified between Beta and companies and public safety, providing the definition of a graph property is extended to include the variety of land use types (represented by the number of colours in the graph). The possible meaning of these correlations will be described in the discussion section.

METHODS Graph definition choice A graph consists of a set of points and a set of pairs of points, often visualised as lines. In formal research graph definitions should include what a point actually encompasses and

Ir. A. van Bilsen 11

what a line between points means. Several definitions can be provided as examples, using the format of ‘point definition’ and ‘line definition’: land cover and adjacency, land use and adjacency, urban element and visibility, function and accessibility to path. With n point definitions and m compatible line definitions it is possible to form nm different graph definitions (Table 1). point definitions: line definitions

land use

land cover

road crossing

transfer station

monofunc. parcel

isovist

urban element

adjacency

√

•

•

•

•

•

•

visibility

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

accessibility

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

Table 1: Illustration of a number of different graph definitions indicated with dots. The ‘√’ marks the graph definition investigated in this paper.

Note that not all of the point and line definitions can be sensibly combined. The graph definition ‘land use and adjacency’ was selected for reasons explained in the introduction. Choice of data properties We selected the following three graph properties as graph measures because they occurred repeatedly: the Alpha, Beta, and Gamma indexes, which are defined below. The non-graph properties were selected based on their importance for policy as well as for research. All properties are listed in Table B. L-P+S Alpha =

L = total number of lines in the graph 2P-5 L

Beta =

P = total number of points in the graph P L

Gamma =

S = number of subgraphs (=1 for all graphs in this paper) 3 (P - 2)

Most of the data properties used in this paper are taken from the electronic databank of Statistics Netherlands (1999), the agency that is responsible for the official national statistics for the Netherlands. Data from every neighbourhood in the Netherlands are available from this databank (see Table A for a list of neighbourhoods used in this paper). A detailed online map


was the second source (Municipality of Rotterdam, 2002) because it reveals the municipal town planning scheme (or zoning plan) for most of the Rotterdam area. In this paper it is assumed that the parcels are used as intended by the plan, which is almost always the case, and therefore the expression ‘land use’ will be used. Finally, data on ‘public safety’ (Municipality of Rotterdam, 2004) was selected for its importance to the inhabitants and because it is a current topic in the Netherlands, especially in Rotterdam. The value of ‘public safety’ includes objective and subjective components. Algorithm Since extracting a graph from a land use map is labour intensive, a computer algorithm was chosen and programmed. The algorithm required a coloured land use map as input. Each land use type has a corresponding colour. Before applying the computer algorithm to the land use maps, the algorithm was extensively tested. In the first step of the algorithm each stain of one colour was identified as a point in the graph. Such a one-colour stain represents one group of adjacent land use parcels (GOLUP) of the same type. In the second step the

adjacency of GOLUPs is identified as a line in the graph. Adjacency is defined as having a common boundary. The result can be seen in Figure 2. With regard to the algorithm, adjacency is determined when at least one pixel from one GOLUP is orthogonally adjacent to at least one pixel from another GOLUP. When preparing the image of the map, it is possible for unwanted pixels to emerge. We addressed this by establishing a minimum for the number of pixels needed to become a point in the graph. The algorithm will thus neglect single or small groups of pixels. In addition, pixels that are all white were not included because white pixels are only used as fill for the neighbourhood image to provide the standard rectangular form demanded by the file type (bitmap, uncompressed, 256 colours, see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Land use map of the ‘Oude Noorden’

Figure 2: Graph visualisation of ‘Oude Noorden’

neighbourhood, which was used as input for the graph

based on land use and adjacency. See also Figure 1.

decomposition algorithm. Land use types include: roads, houses, mixed uses, garden/private ground, shops, green space, water, and ‘other uses’.


Correlation We correlated between the graph and non-graph properties by entering the data in an Excel™ spreadsheet. All properties were entered against all other properties in a 68 by 68 matrix, with half of the matrix being redundant. If we had restricted our correlation matrix only to the graph properties and their correlations with the non-graph properties, it would have limited our insight into indirect correlations. At each field in the matrix the correlation coefficient between two properties was calculated based on the data from the eleven neighbourhoods. The matrix was scanned for correlations between 0.50 and 1.00 and between –1.00 and –0.50. Every one of these correlations between a graph and a non-graph property was checked for correlations having a common origin.

RESULTS The focus of the results selected was on the correlations between the graph properties (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, number of different uses) and the rest of the data. We then selected from these correlations for the most extreme correlation coefficients, which were either near 1.0 or –1.0. The results in the following tables will be detailed in the discussion section below. Plots are available (Figures 3, 4, and 5) for the correlation coefficients that are followed by an asterisk (*).

correlation coefficient

Alpha

Beta

Gamma

Public safety

–0.2

–0.23

–0.2

Number of different land uses

0.28

0.35

0.27

Fraction of ‘Houses’ pixels/surface area of total

0.56

0.50*

0.56

Number of points of ‘Mixed purposes’ (% of all points)

0.59

0.64

0.59

Industry

0.67

0.66

0.67

Fraction of ‘Mixed purposes’ pixels/surface area of total

0.82

0.83

0.81

Other indicators

in range [–0.50, 0.50]

Table 2: Selected correlation coefficients of graph properties Alpha, Beta, and Gamma.

Table 2 shows the selected correlations with Alpha, Beta, and Gamma in ascending order. It must be noted that the number of pixels a GOLUP embodies is proportional to the GOLUP’s

surface area. The entries under ‘mixed purposes’ and ‘industry’ should be ignored because they are based on too few points. Only four of the eleven test neighbourhoods contained mixed purposes. We will return to this in the outlook part of the conclusions.



number of different land uses

Number of points of ‘Green space’ (% of all points)

–0.93*

Average pixel size of ‘Mixed purposes’ GOLUPs

–0.91

Fraction of ‘Green space’ pixels of total

–0.85

Public safety

–0.78

Address density

0.68

Number of points of ‘Roads’

0.76

Fraction of ‘Shops’ pixels of total

0.76

Companies

0.92*

Table 3: Selected correlation coefficients for number of different land use types.

Table 3 shows the correlations selected, along with the number of different point types (land uses), in ascending order. Again the mixed purposes category should be ignored. See Figure 3 for a plot of number of points of green space (percentage of all points) versus the number of

different land uses. See Figure 4 for a plot of companies against the number of different land uses. The ‘companies’ data category consists of companies, businesses, and establishments.


public safety

Number of different land uses

–0.78

Address density

–0.70

Number of persons of age 0–14 years

–0.68


–0.80


–0.66


0.90

Number of persons of age 65+

0.71

Table 4: Selected correlation coefficients with public safety.

Table 4 shows the correlations with public safety (municipality of Rotterdam, 2004). For more clarity the age categories have been ordered rather than the correlation coefficients. Although they are not two mathematical properties, the correlations between the age categories and public safety are intriguing.


DISCUSSION

As was noted below, for Table 2 only the first three entries are reliable. Figure 5 shows only one of these entries. Although the correlation coefficient is only 0.50, an increasing trend can clearly be observed. How can we understand that only the surface area percentage of houses stands out from the rest with respect to its correlations with Alpha, Beta, and Gamma? From the maps of the neighbourhoods it can be seen that houses are scattered throughout the neighbourhood and this scattering increases as the surface area percentage of houses increases. From preliminary analysis of the number of neighbouring GOLUPs around a GOLUP (for each land use type), it was observed that roads and houses have the highest number of neighbouring GOLUPs. Roads have even more neighbouring GOLUPs than houses. So why is there no strong correlation between Beta and roads? One reason is the difference between the amount of surface area roads and houses consume. Houses consume far more surface area than roads, and since they are also more scattered, there are more ‘house’ points in the graph decomposition, which means they contribute more to the average number of neighbours (Beta) than roads do. Table 2 also shows ‘Public safety’ and ‘Number of different land uses’. There is a negative correlation between them: –0.78 (see Table 3 or 4). This is understandable because neighbourhoods with a higher variety of land uses are usually more urban, and consequently more densely inhabited. While this argument is true on the neighbourhood level, on the subneighbourhood level the spatial distribution of unsafe events (e.g. a robbery) reveals a more complex picture; for example, it is important to take into account the number of potential witnesses of such unsafe events (Hillier, 1999; Klaasen 2004). Although the correlation of both ‘Public safety’ and ‘Number of different land uses’ with Beta is weak, the sign of the correlations is negative. This may be partly explained -by the direct relationship between the ‘average number of neighbouring GOLUPs’ (Beta) and public safety, but we suspect that the scale of the neighbourhood map is not detailed enough to account for this. The smaller scale topology and its visibility probably relates more directly to safety. The negative correlation between Beta and ‘Public safety’ (–0.23, Table 2) can be explained for the most part by ‘Address density’. The correlation between Beta and ‘Address density’ is 0.35, and the correlation between ‘Address density’ and ‘Public safety’ is –0.70. In short, more densely populated areas are less safe, and GOLUPs have on average more neighbours (higher Beta). Similarly the positive correlation between Beta and ‘Number of different land uses’ can be traced to ‘Address density’, which is proportional to population density. The number of different land use types is equivalent to the number of different colours/ points on the graph, since each land use type is represented by a colour on the graph. This variety of land use types has a strong negative correlation (–0.93, Table 3; Figure 3)


Figure 3: Two indicators

Figure 4: Two properties

Figure 5: Two properties

with a negative correlation

with a positive correlation

with a positive correlation

coefficient (–0.93) from

coefficient (0.92) from

coefficient (0.50) from Table

Table 3.

Table 3.

2. Beta equals the average number of neighbouring GOLUPs. The broken fit line is added only for comparison with Figures 3 and 4.

with the number of ‘Green space’ points as a percentage of all points. In short, when more ‘Green space’ GOLUPS are present, there is less variety of land uses. ‘Address density’, which correlates negatively (–0.75) with the number of Green space’ points and positively (0.68) with the variety of land use types, can also explain this. The ‘Companies’ data expresses the number of companies in nine categories: 0-10, 10-20, 20-50, 50-100, 100-200, 200-500, 500-1000, 1000-2000, and >2000. Note that this is almost a logarithmic scale. This variable correlates strongly (0.92, Table 3 and Figure 4) with the variety of land use types in a neighbourhood. It follows that the number of companies, c, increases exponentially with the variety of land use type, v:

v ∞ log(c)

c ∞ exp(v)

Although these expressions are very approximate, we can still say that the number of companies varies with the variety of land use types. A small increase in the variety of land use types corresponds with a relatively large increase in the number of companies. This cannot be entirely traced to ‘Address density’, which has less of a correlation (0.50) with ‘Companies’. Also, the number of points of ‘Roads’ and ‘Shops’ correlates with both the variety of land use types (respectively, 0.76 and 0.71) and companies (respectively, 0.87 and 0.84). This indicates that ‘Companies’ are sensitive to population density, roads, and shops in the neighbourhood.


CONCLUSION AND OUTLOOK

With one exception, no significant correlations (between 0.5 and 1.0, or –1.0 and –0.5) were found among the graph properties Alpha, Beta, and Gamma and the data. In general the results suggest that adjacency is not very important in the test area on this scale; more precisely, the average number of neighbouring GOLUPs does not correlate with most of the data. The exception to this is the ‘Surface area percentage of houses’ (Figure 5). The combination of a large number of houses and a large number of neighbouring GOLUPs per ‘Houses’ GOLUP explains the significant impact on the average number of neighbours (Beta). The weaker correlations among Beta and both ‘Public safety’ and ‘Number of different land use types’ is probably related to population density. Identifying population density as the common correlational origin, also helps explain the strong negative correlation between the ‘Number of different land use types’ and the ‘Number of green space points’ as a percentage of all points (see Figure 3). The ‘Number of different land use types’ correlates strongly with ‘Companies’ (0.92, Figure 4). Since ‘Companies’ varies approximately logarithmically with the number of companies, we can conclude that the number of companies increases exponentially with the variety of land use types. The sources of this correlation are traceable to population density as well as to the presence of roads and shops in the neighbourhood. The results indicate that companies are sensitive to the presence of population density, roads, and shops in the neighbourhood. The introduction to this paper describes an approach that will be used for further research, while the above conclusions point the way to future steps. We plan to do more empirical analyses in order to construct guidelines for these steps. These analysis will include:(1) increasing the number and sophistication of the graph properties, (2) increasing the number of test neighbourhoods, (3) applying the same approach with the many remaining graph decompositions of urban areas (Table 1, p. 2), (4) adding line weights (for example, to accommodate the length of the boundary between adjacent GOLUPs), and (5) researching the influence of scale on the graph and its properties.

NOTES 1

I will use the word graph instead of network from this point on.

2

Examples of non-graph properties: population density, average income per inhabitant, number of commercial services,

and so forth. For the full list see Appendix, Table B, left side.


LITERATURE • Alexander, C., Ishikawa, S., Silverstein, M., Jacobson, M., Fiksdahl–King, I. and Angel, S. (1977). A Pattern Language. Oxford University Press, New York. • Hillier, B. & Hanson, J. (1984). The Social Logic of Space. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. • Municipality of Rotterdam (2002). Bestemmingenviewer Rotterdam (Online). Available: http://bestemmingsplannen.dsv. rotterdam.nl/main/main.asp • Municipality of Rotterdam (2004). Veiligheidsindex 2004 (Online). Available: www.rotterdam.nl/veilig • Statistics Netherlands (1999). Buurt–in–Beeld (Online). Available: http://www.cbs.nl/nl/cijfers/buurt–in–beeld/ klikkaartinternet.htm

Table A: Selected neighbourhoods from Rotterdam

1

Oude Noorden

2

Nieuwe Westen

3

Middelland

4

Wittedorp

5

Oud Matenesse

6

Spangen

7

Oud Charlois

8

Wielewaal (midden)

9

Pendrecht

10

Zuidwijk

11

Lombardijen


Abbreviations

Table B: All data categories (left) and all graph properties (right) used in the correlation table

nop: number of points of type

Data categories

Graph properties

Address density

Roads

nop

Degree of urbanization

Roads

nop(%)

Total surface area

Roads

aps

Land surface area

Roads

fp(%)

Population density

Green space

nop

Houses

Green space

nop(%)

Market value of houses

Green space

aps

Inhabitants

Green space

fp(%)

Men

Houses

nop

Women

Houses

nop(%)

Persons 0-14 y.

Houses

aps

Persons 15-24 y.

Houses

fp(%)

Persons 25-44 y.

Garden/Private land

nop

Persons 45-64 y.

Garden/Private land

nop(%)

Person 65+ y.

Garden/Private land

aps

Immigrants

Garden/Private land

fp(%)

Singles

Water

nop

Families

Water

nop(%)

Families with children

Water

aps

Average family size

Water

fp(%)

Average income per inhabitant

Mixed purposes

nop

Average income per income-receiver

Mixed purposes

nop(%)

Low incomes

Mixed purposes

aps

High incomes

Mixed purposes

fp(%)

Inactive persons

Shops

nop

Companies/establishments/businesses

Shops

nop(%)

Industry

Shops

aps

Commercial services

Shops

fp(%)

Other services

Total number of different points

Public safety index (average of 2001-2003)

Total number of points

Mutation safety index (average of 2001-2003)

Total number of lines Average number of lines per point Total pixel/surface area size Average pixel size Alpha Beta Gamma

nop(%): number of points of type as percentage of total number of points aps: average pixel (surface area) size of a point (parcel) fp(%): total number of pixels of type as percentage of total number of pixels

G . J . B R U Y N S MSC.

Urban FIgures as hypothesis The traditional, contemporary, and FLuid FIgures Ph.D. research: Dispo_za_tif, the evolutionary planning of the South African city Chair: Urban Renewal and Management (Spacelab) Promotor: Prof.dipl.-ing. H.J. Rosemann Supervisor: Dr. ir. S.A. Read Communications to: [email protected]

ABSTRACT The city figure of today is becoming more uncertain. An urban entity, or what is perceived as a city, contains developing form within and beyond the framework and formal constraints of post 19th and 20th-century urbanism. Our current view of the city, or what I term the built landscape (or territory, urban field), has been shifted from a built object figure (the traditional morphological discourse) and interpretation to one that interprets and reads the environment through a spatial framework of material flow, a new operational spatial figure or morphology of movement. These new spatial figures, reveal the power of effective urbanism, as space produces the object(s) we see around us, rather than the other way round. In this framework place is a consequence of spatial layering, thus establishing a universal too for design and intervention (contextless), clarifying certain reasons for urban change, formation, and transformation of the city, metropolitan, and urban field. Differences in the becoming of the places, qua context, are drawn between European and African models. KEYWORD To disfigure: ‘To mar or spoil the appearance or shape of; deform’

22 G.J. Bruyns MSc.

POSITION OF THE CITY

‘The essence of what <professionals> insist on calling urbanism is composed / decomposed by these transfer, transit and transmission systems, these transport and transmigration networks whose immaterial configurations reiterates the cadastral organisations and the buildings of monuments.’ (Paul Virilio. Cited in Cosgrove, D., 1999, J, The Agency of Mapping) The city figure of today is becoming more uncertain. An urban entity, or what is perceived as being a city, contains developing form within the framework and formal constraints of post 19th and 20th-entury urbanism. The current view of the city, or what I term the built landscape, has extended its accumulations and productions far beyond earlier traditional boundaries. To confuse matters even further, such terminology as milieu, territory, or urban field, remains too vague to assess what the true nature of the object under scrutiny is. A new spatial context is emerging, transforming the Europe we know to an extended spatial entity stretching from north to south, east to west. The new European geographical geometry is leading to re-drawing the political and physical borders, negotiation of trade and work agreements, and expanding possibilities of establishing new economic allies. A context of vaguer national borders, relocation of capital cities, and definition of new territorial zones that include special economic corridors have all become spatial devices in the descriptions of landscape, which are very similar to an architectural spatial language of nodes, paths, or edges (Lynch). From scale variations ranging from the very high infrastructures of the multi-national or global market forces to levels that include movement of individual streets, the results are of a spatial nature. A new territorial spatial configuration, or sprawling city (Boeri, 2003), detached form historical models or constraints, opens a new landscape of possibilities as well as new architectures, processes, and mobility. This extended landscape is not a European phenomenon alone, however. Across the globe we find developments in the Pearl River Delta or in Africa comparable to the European spatial status quo, bringing possibilities that enable revising current practices in urban observations and investigation of urban formations and their global transformations. Current notions of urbanism are based on the city as a ‘thing’, or rather an urbanism constructed as an element consisting of smaller and larger parts. While this specific view of the city might be applicable to some levels of its existence, the main concern is the usefulness of these concepts as a basis for what Read terms ‘effective spatial urbanism’, which refers to an urbanism of spatiality, a process landscape that incorporates accounts of actions and effects (formal or informal), relational and topological, rather than the current framework in

G.J. Bruyns MSc. 23

which the city is seen as object, pacified, compositional, and rigid. In addition, contemporary urban commentary from discourses outside urbanism support this divergence: Virilio, Harvey, Deleuze, Guattari, Lafebvre, Amin, and Thrift urge a break with the enlightenment / modern paradigm as a rejection to a zenith viewed as fixed on the contemporary landscape, as a landscape of things rather than spaces. One prevalent general thesis that accepts the world as divided into enclaves, sectors, archipelagos, and capsules of highly regulated space, as spaces separate from activity or movements, and situated within a wider context of ‘chaos’. Although it may seem counterintuitive; I should like to propose that both urban spatial productions and spatial orders have always been a matter of (or based on) movement (Virilio). One problem is located in holding to the idea of comprehending the city as pure object. Through the notion of a thing(s), it becomes self-evident in its development as a city that ‘things’ and their ‘self-evident distribution’ within a passive space (Cartesian) are a neutral, ineffective surface on which the master planner endlessly works with the forces at his disposal. In contrast, an active urban space would have to deal with the city of effects, rather than a city of things - it would have to see the shapes, characters, and orders of the city as a consequence of being situated topologically. In this discussion we have tried briefly to re-sketch a traditional spatial framework of the city, and to suggest an alternate approach geared towards inclusion of both the physical and spatial character of the landscape, a framework freed from the constraint of the ‘a priori’, pre-established: an object versus a process landscape. We describe three hypothetical urban figures (mobility, mobility interfaces, centre formations) as a new approach or method to unravel certain chaotic activities and laws of daily life that are reflected in the landscape (Bacconi, 2003). As a theory on urbanism this would allow for greater clarity, not only in viewing the formal figure of the city, but also as a figure that refigures or disfigures through processes of intensities, concentrations, and convergences.

FIRST OUTLINE OF APPEARANCE: THE TRADITIONAL HYPOTHESIS The first step towards urban disfiguring examines our own mental constructions as first spaces for filtering and perceiving the city that will b be or not be. Gregory Bateson uses gnostic terminology to position different realities of the world we construct. The pleroma space (or the world of events seen as forces) and the creatura space

24 G.J. Bruyns MSc.

(constructions of the world as mind) are variants of individual or collective constructs for ordering, structuring, and highlighting the world we know to make it clearer. Briefly, the creatura space is one used to distinguish the pleroma space of actions and forces, establishing a mechanical role as a device to help objects emerge as we construct them to be, and making our world an approximation, rather than an objective mapping. The intent here is to examine an underlying creatura spatial framing, which is sometimes taken for granted, through which we filter all our other ideas of the city; process, shape, relationships, and boundaries. From within the creatura space, the traditional urban perception constructs a view, an isolated isomorphic object, having internal and external aspects and delimited by objective borders, or more commonly termed the ‘city- countryside’, or ‘centre-peripheral’ models. This spatial framing is also part of the assumption of place as being self-evident, based on pure location determined by Cartesian co-ordinates. This first figure as formal object: space, place, and material of the city, may be taken for granted, as certain notions of inclusion and exclusion, inside and outside, are all constructions we position on the world in our objective naming of space. In contrast, space is not an objectivity, as our research has shown (Read and Bruyns), centre-periphery is an effect rather than a naming or positioning of urban reality. It remains this figure that absorbs all sight and locks interpretive models within one system of objects, islands, bordered and isolated, and which results in designer and urbanisms having become entangled with the first figure of the city, the city of objects. The city of effects, as idea, is a balance between the pleroma and creatura spaces, and is based on isomorphism, with intensities and concentrations emerging from a world that precedes our ideas of it. The proposal here is for a new figure that goes beyond the traditional formal aspects of the city, an extension beyond boundary to a space freed from the constraints (historical or mental) of an isomorphic object, and taking account of field and vectors of intensities, concentrations, and polarities of actions. It is a city without an inside or outside, a city free form historic medieval paradigms.

BREACHING THE TRADITIONAL What we seek is a spatial device that can support ideas beyond the obvious reality of the city as ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’. At present our conceptual space organises the city, or rather the landscape, as being caught between what is within and beyond its limits. To go beyond a dialogue on limits, we could use a framework that allows us to consider local place as a second figure that includes field dynamics as urban actions and forces.

G.J. Bruyns MSc. 25

Using these landscapes of forces as a framework would deal with scales of intensities of flow, mobility dynamics, and polarities of actions, which are made possible by the first formative figure of the city, the networks. This figure becomes a new operational device to go beyond the constraints of the past by establishing direct relations between actions and effects, the activity and the city, or relationships between the town and the road. It would open the possibility for form to aggregate along network edges, around the connective elements themselves, based on frequencies and intensities of movement that would cause a polarisation and gravitational pull of matter towards certain hierarchies, establishing flows to pass though these gravitational points. This is not the network of the well-known functionobject and accessibility model. The street, the lane, the boulevard, and the highway become active as parts of extended networks, and we see the formations resulting from these extensions in the high streets of established villages and towns in the strips on car routes and in the edge cities and corridors emerging in today’s motorway networks. It is these extensions of networks that set relationships between the interior and exterior world as it moves beyond the border, neighbourhood, territory, or city limit. Access to mobility and interface(s) are made possible, producing sedimentary settlements reaching far into an open landscape, irrespective of location. No borders are defined, no edges remain, which negates the inside and outside of an ‘a priori’ urban figure. Borders that do arise would do so as part of the flux of activities, and would be based on a collection of effects, rather than the mental activity we impose on the city of objects. Within our mental frameworks we would always revert to classifying and defining activities to name territories, neighbourhoods, or places, but our framework and constructions of the city need not be affected by this construction that we impose on the physical world.

FIRST FIGURE HYPOTHESIS To understand the contemporary city we need to free ourselves from a framework that limits our view of contemporary urban conditions, and rather than beginning with acceptance of place as locally bounded or geographically situated, we should attempt to understand how local place can emerge from a continuous distribution of vectors, forces, intensities, or concentrations. It is the medieval city figure that shapes most of our pre-established ideas about what the city is and how it should operate. As alternative, it may be possible to use a framework closer to home, to our lifestyles and real-life scales as we construct them. Jane Jacobs suggested that the first large ancient human settlement camps of hunter-gatherers were established at nodes where long distance trade routes crossed. It was the traffic activities that supported urban formations, or more directly, a network composed of produc-

26 G.J. Bruyns MSc.

tive element in which many points were connected to one continental scale. Even though these connections among settlements grew incrementally to become a medieval town and its relationships with other towns, and later to 18th and 19thcentury industrial cities, and still later to 20th-century cities and commuter belts and urban corridors, and finally, the continuous urban distribution of 21st-century sprawl, the problem of how to distinguish between a city and not a city has always been present. Although the formation of a centre has always been unaffected, because it has strong identifiable places associated with it, the question remains what is supportive of a place formation or centrality. The proposed new spatial framework in its pure state can be viewed as a mobility network that spreads itself out across the landscape, web-like and borderless. Primary pre-individualised centrality is a diffuse intensity that fills the networks evenly, supporting an urbanism of flows that is radically different from the urbanism of objects and fixed places. This theory of mobility networks locates centralities in diverse geographical positions that are not necessary a product of location or situatedness, but rather complex sets of arrangements spread across the whole landscape, territory, or field, incorporating both what is within the traditional city as well as what is outside it. By re-examining territorial arrangements and urban processes in a present European ‘state’, we become more aware of a spatial process that breaches the traditional constraints of nation states and borders, leaving urban discourse not only with a task to investigate these spatial mutations, but also to reinvent a vocabulary for the processes within. These new extended activities should provide some proof that our construction of the city is a direct reflection on the prevailing scales of life and mobility patterns. Urban infrastructure development in the mid-19th century was characterised by building boulevards and avenues, creating networks geared to the increasing size of the city and the increasing mobility of its populations. Higher speed and broader networks also began to be built outside the urban fabric, and these were superseded by the freeway network in the 20th century, spreading over what in the beginning still appeared to be countryside. For the 21st century, terminology such as thickenings, concentrations, and intensification are direct reflections of the scales and interconnections we produce on a daily basis, each with its own place, locale, convergence, and centre point. It is our task to question these formations of localities of centres and their reason for being at a specific point on the network and in the world. Examples of the local in 19th and 20th century cities were direct reflections of the constraints of the movement economies within the bound figure of the city. Material flows of goods, people, and interfaces of economies, rather than the movements of significant transactions (as studied by sociologists and economists) are what is actually dealt with at an urban level. This reflects how place and placeless-ness are produced. A material flow that pro-

G.J. Bruyns MSc. 27

duces the urban scene as a dynamic affects how we experience placeless-ness today, which is a consequence of the loss. It is a loss not of the simple notions of geographical locations of place, but rather of the loss of a network place-generating effect that was a characteristic product of a 19th-century urban spatial network pattern. Spacelab Research has shown that centrality is a consequence of the layering of two components: a) the diffuse mobility grids of networks of different scalar orders (international, national, regional, middle, and local scales), and b) diverse space-timeframes (different frequencies of movement) across one another. These become constructive interface models among network orders, space-timeframes, and the individuals who inhabit them. Our problem today is not a loss of place bound to location, it is a loss if this place-generating network effect in the networks we build today.

NEXT FIGURES: REFIGURING THE LANDSCAPES It is safe to say that cities are our own constructions. They do not spontaneously appear or disappear. We make them, we order them, and even plan them. In short, the urban landscape is in some way a direct reflection of our own internal spatial arrangements, as well as a map of the way we think cities work. We are perfectly capable of constructing the city as mind, as a distribution of object (disfigure 1) with bounded areas linked by actability routes. We see such types emerging on the peripheries everywhere, from the mall, business, and industrial parks, or residential Vinex locations, all extending from highways and off ramps, but the question of how we proceed form here remains. A contemporary urbanism is still focused on producing and ordering cities on the basis of object centralities that are only linked, ineffectively, with one high-level movement grid, disconnected from all other levels of order or mobility. Our present places are ‘places’ tied to just one speed and one space-timeframe; they eliminate the possibility of a place-constructive interface with any other speed and space-timeframe. What is proposed, therefore, is a new primary city-space built on the idea of the diffusely central freeway network: grids located on different scales, ranging from the metropolitanregional to the neighbourhood streets and the very local pathways that overlap one another. These would tie in different space-time frames and movement circuits into a constructive interface. The convergence or fusing of space-timeframes and superposition of the different speeds would be the right position for effective urbanism, where the place-as effect is produced. What is proposed by the concept of disfiguring is not based on image but is suggestive of an armature, device, or even a dispositif, (in itself material and mapable in the real world) on which centred (rather than bounded) effects can emerge.

28 G.J. Bruyns MSc.

Then what is the status of the layered network image? From what we have discussed, it is a mental framework for understanding dynamic spatial processes. It is an emergent framework (or second figure in the disfiguring) of the city, an idea isomorphism with a material frame for organising vectors, forces, intensities, and concentrations. It is a framework for understanding effects we would otherwise only be able to see as isolated ‘things’. If we look at the examples of the high street as traditionally formed, we understand it at present as a local intensity, which we then immediately and almost arbitrarily delimit. The high street is actually an effect of the layered network field – the local circuits of the area around the high street meeting the circuits of the network on which the high street sits on a higher scale. What is proposed here is a simple framework capable of producing immensity in the structured variety of its emergent ‘dis-figured’ figures. What this model provides is a framework capable of delivering reasons and accounts in the formation of the city as a machine for the becoming of the urban world. When drawing the final figure, the models of the constructive, ‘separated’ logic of the city no longer help. From a situation (not so long ago) where the ideologies and operations underlying historically specific planning practices were used to define types of morphology and layout, and the city was seen as an historical construction planned in concentric layers according to the practices of the time, we have come to one where these historical categories of settlement forms and layout seem to have no clear constructive role in contemporary metropolitan urbanisation processes. We seek a way to disfigure and define urban form that goes beyond the inherent historicism of object figure to find a constructive logic figure useful for our general theories on contemporary urbanisation processes, and which figure constantly in transformations. The solution for further development is elementary. A fundamental reconditioning and realignment of preconceptions of the mental figure of the city are required to address our methods of thinking. Second, we seek instruments for intervening within a sustainable, enabling environment that has its own logic or laws within a complex of movements and continuous fluxes. Intervention rests on both a political and technical responsibility, but the suggestions made in this text, lean towards a technical approach that questions immediate possibilities before proceeding towards the next best options. By observations and questioning it is possible to revert to older formal paradigms, but we should scale the attempt to look beyond the figure of the present, for only then can we proceed to an urban figure free of our own conceptions or constraints and more attuned to the figures that still need to be drawn.

G.J. Bruyns MSc. 29

CONCLUSIVE FIGURES: AN ENFRAMING OF CONTEXT

As a final figural circumscription I return to that figure of place, and more particularly the context, because the basis for this paper still aims to establish a techne, a hypothesis separated from any geographical or contextual forces. With this I attempt to depart from the hypothesised abstract level, and deliver a realistic scenario. This serves as an abridged argument that moves from the generic to the particular. To do this, I shall use a contextual figure of difference based on South African and European (Netherlands) models. References were made to particular European examples to bring to light the different frameworks of operational geographic figures at various, radical moments in continental history. The effect of each framework was to make apparent a re-conceptualisation of the total operational outline (pre and post 2004 Europe) (this was taken from loosening up of transportation regulations and commerce agreements), which led internal operational bodies to shift to alternative models of process and renewed operational relationships. More specifically, each figure could be read separately, the political boundary being the first constructed figure. This first figure is then composed, formed, and informed by smaller parts or figures within a vastly combinational system. Each of these combinations in turn are affected by other specific forces exerting changes and effects, establishing duality between the very high and the very low scale of figures. These different figures become specific to both processes, bound to ‘combinatory regularities’ of space, place, economy, politics, etc. Deleuzes’s metaphorical use of the potential packed into the material (or in this case, the hypothesis) and its variations of becoming. This equips us with a tangible concept of the importance of the contextual. ‘The craftsman can compensate motion for differences in the qualities of his material, for he can adjust the precise strength and pattern of applications (appropriation) of his toils to the material’s local vagaries.’ Therefore, one model of deployment (urbanism as process, as movement) is a set of hypotheses applied to two vastly historically and spatially differential contexts. This might bring into question the variations of change as influenced by internal processes of economy or politics that, as effects, produce the physical reality of the city, and could be translated through morphology. For the traditional Western European condition, the global effects of internal process on the external form might produce a figure of minor difference, and thus establish the groundwork for a fifth and final hypothesis: urban changes and transformation vary as spatial-cultural context shifts. For this alone space becomes highly active, having the potential for producing and affecting

30 G.J. Bruyns MSc.

certain dynamics and finally changing urban character. In theory, processes are constantly re-shifted and re-aligned to address the fluidity of material flows. In practice, if this fluidity is altered or non-existent, then the process of material flow itself would become a creative process in which alternative sources or operational modes are appropriated to rebalance the dynamics and the livelihoods affected. South Africa is one such a scenario in which the appropriation occurs for specific livelihoods at very specific moments and conditions, appropriating space vastly different from the appropriation visible in the traditional European and Balkan regions. It is here where the level of the space of the ‘curb’ or shantytown becomes a constructive element in the urban spatial figure, as the numbers multiply and the processes are realigned. Of greater concern are the particularities of interface models / nodes (point of material exchange), where flows of materials and the effect(s) these processes produce are solidifications of the process into the sub morphological parts. It remains crucial to address all these highlighted figures as sets of hypotheses, as scenarios for territorial urban conditions. From these conditions conceptual as well as practical mechanisms can be unearthed, allowing our conditioning of the urban body and its process to be inserted in the already existent ‘mental figure’. They also point to the process of city as the dynamic of the urban body and as the figure we draw in our practice of everyday life.

LITERATURE • Bekaert, G., et al. (2002). After Sprawl: Research for the Contemporary City. Nai Publishers, Rotterdam. • Baccini, P. & Oswald, F. (2003). Netzstadt, Designing the Urban. Birkhauser, Basel. • Bateson, G. (1999). Steps to an Ecology of Mind; Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. With a Foreword by Mary Catherine Bateson. Chicago University Press, Chicago, pp. 461-2. • Boeri, S. (2001). Notes on a research project. In Mutations. Koolhaas, R. (ed). Actar, Barcelona. • Boeri, S. (ed) (2003). USE: Uncertain States of Europe. Skira, Milan. • Castells, M. (2000). The Rise of the Network Society. 2nd rev. ed., Blackwell, Oxford • Corner, J. (1999). The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention. In D. Cosgrove, Mappings. London: -Reaktion Books. P 213-252 • Delanda. M. (2001). Philosophies of Design, The Case of Modelling Software. In Boogazine; Verb. Actar, Barcelona. • Deleuze, G. (1998). New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture. Kaufman; University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota. • Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1996). A Thousand Plateaus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia, transl. from French. With foreword by Brian Massumi. Athlone Press, London. • Dictionary.com: Webiste: (online). Available fromhttp://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=disfiguring (Accessed: on 15 November 2004) • Elden, S. (2001). Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History. Continuum, London. • Graham, S & Marvin, S. (2001). Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Motilities and the Urban Condition. Routledge, London. • Harvey, D . (1996) Justice, Nature and the Geography of Dfference. Blackwell, Oxford. • Jacobs, J. (1972). Economies of Cities. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth. • Koolhaas R, & Hans-Ulrich Obrist (eds) (2001). Mutations. Actar, Barcelona.

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• Lefebvre, H. (1992). The Production of Space. Blackwell, Oxford. • Thrift, N & Amin, A. (2002). Cities: Re-imagining the Urban. Polity Publishers, Blackwell, Oxford. • Read, S.A. (2004). The Forms of the Future. Forthcoming. • Read, S.A. (2004). Situated Livelihoods. Presented at the Great Asian Street Symposium. National University of Singapore, Singapore. • Taylor, M.C. (1992). Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion. Chicago University Press, Chicago.

Figure 1: New York, Subway Hub 42nd Street by the Inter-borough Rapid Transit Company (NYC Transit Authority Architectural Staff) 1903-1913 (photo by Maurice Harteveld, April 4th 2004)

I R . M . G . A . D . HARTEVELD

Viva Las Vegas A search for the urban design task of interior public space Ph.D. research: Interior public space Chair: Urban Design Promotor: Prof. ir. H.C. Bekkering Supervisor: Prof. ir. H.C. Bekkering Communications to: [email protected]

ABSTRACT In explorations of the notions of public space, public interiors are generally seen as undemocratic and more private spaces. This notion is based on the Roman distinction between pub-

licus and privatus, making public space, as a public case, refer primarily to res publica. - On the other hand, there is a related Roman public law that deals with the common interest of urban society, and could include cases of interior public space. Most sociological research in contemporary daily life reveals these spaces as public. For urbanism, this research can be seen as the social context, because the urbanist is primarily focused on the city: the civi-

tas, and not the whole societas. More specifically, for urban designers who deal with public space, it traditionally means focusing on the outdoor space, and although this is almost always synonymous with the public domain or publicly owned space, I believe that public space can be more than this. For urbanism this means there is a need for new understanding and an extension of the design task.

INTRODUCTION The debate around public space seems to focus more and more on interior public space. Because they approach their work from different angles, designers and critics do not limit

34 Ir. M.G.A.D. Harteveld

themselves to outdoor space. This is not extraordinary since in present day Western society we see a great many exemplary interiors that are part of urban life and urban structure. Being in the city usually means that interior public space cannot be avoided. Some of these interiors are even constituent parts of the contemporary city. Millions of people use railway stations to change trains or to enter the city. Often a transfer

Figure 2: Paris, Passage du Caire by Percier and Fontaine (photo by Maurice Harteveld, February 7th 2005)

Ir. M.G.A.D. Harteveld 35

at Rotterdam Central Station is as common as a walk through your own street. In New York people wanting to go from 7th Avenue to Grand Central and 5th, can use a pedestrian tunnel and the 42nd Street Shuttle, which provide easy links between the two subway stations. In Toronto an underground and elevated walkway system link offices and shopping centres, and in Paris arcades form comfortable connections. Not only has traffic defined the usage of the urban interiors, but the length of stay has as well. Think of the mall, for example. It is quite common to meet at the mall in American suburbs. Here the enclosed mall becomes the new city centre. At the same time, in the inner city itself department stores and fashionable shops are urban meeting places, with restaurants, cafes, and lounges. These examples support the idea that private buildings can also be public space; in this case they are part of the network of public space. But what is the urban design task in this analysis?

EXPLORING PUBLIC SPACE Before looking at interior public space as an urban design task, it would be prudent to explore the notions of public space. In general, an urban design task is an assignment within urbanism, but it is also closely related to architecture (Bekkering, 1999:7). Urbanism can be defined as the discipline of planning and organising the city and forming the public domain, while architecture plans and forms the private domain: the building and its premises (Heeling, 1991:17). From this hypothesis the two disciplines meet at the boundary between public and private domains. In this definition public is defined by ownership. Thus, public domain is the territory belonging to a state or to the government (Webster’s Dictionary, 1913:443). Interior public space shows that the boundary of public space is not always sharply defined. It does not always follow the contours of the public domain. Thus, how can public space be defined except by ownership? This leads to a sociological question: What is public? In philosophy the discussion of public space is only a few decades old. Although this discussion is comparatively recent, an enormous number of publications from the social and cultural science perspectives have already been written about it. These publications develop a wide variety of arguments and redefine contemporary public space as a democratic space. Being public, it is of or pertaining to the people; belonging to the people; relating to, or affecting, a nation, state, or community. It is the opposite of private (Webster’s Dictionary, 1913:1139, 1159). As in Roman times, participation in the res publica is often a matter of ‘going along’. Today public life has become a formal obligation in which most people approach their public business in a spirit of acquiescence. From this point of view the private has become a new focus, a new commitment


and belief. This private commitment was an escape from the world at large and from the formalities of the res publica as a part of that world (Sennet, 1977:3-4). In this way certain contemporary private buildings, such as the Sony Store in Manhattan (Siegel, 1992), provide places for people to flee from daily life. Conveniently located, the store is full of the latest electronic toys, from the latest in personal audio technology to high-definition television. The atrium of the building is a well air conditioned spot to sit down and rest on a hot summer day. The Sony Wonder Technology Lab is a place for kids of all ages to learn about technology through interactive exhibits. Young visitors can experience audio technology, discover technology’s role in modern medicine by experimenting with ultrasound and endoscopy, or play the next wave of interactive video games By enclosing the public space, a similar example of new social focus can be found. Avoiding all kinds of climatological, ecological, and social influences, the urban ennui is eliminated. The West Edmonton Mall (Sunderland, 1981-1985) is the world’s largest entertainment and shopping centre. This mercantile establishment consists of a carefully landscaped complex of shops representing leading merchandisers. The size and programme of this Canadian mall define it not as a regional or super-regional mall, but as a unique international shopping attraction (Crawford, 1992:7). The complex consists of ten anchor stores, eight hundred shops, and more than one hundred restaurants, twenty-six movie theatres, a casino, and seven amusement parks. It is Alberta’s number one tourist attraction. There is even a shuttle service that runs from the airport to the mall. Although the mall is suburban, located on a convenient highway and completely enclosed, its interior public space is designed as a network of promenades, which are typologically similar to others in inner cities. Like avenues, the covered space is constructed of two rows of palm plants and grassy strips or canals between the two walkways. The mall has space for fountains, a mini golf park, and even two lakes, one for ice skating and the other for dolphin shows (with a replica of the Santa Maria). Such mega-malls are comprised of synthetic shopping streets with small facades to simulate lots in blocks. By this the designers stress the iconic idea of a traditional inner city. Nevertheless, this image does not make it a new city centre, because carts, commercial activities, demonstrations, and gatherings are restricted (Sorkin, 1992:xv). How public are these new city centres? The malls are not democratic space. Like most interior public space, the property and management are private, limiting accessibility. In the private domain ‘public’ seems a fiction. Unlike the malls, interior public spaces are public. One difference between espacios públicos and espacios colectivos seems to be the designer’s solution (De Solà Morales, 1992:LVG). Collective space is defined as being public but privately owned. By introducing this new no-


Figure 3: Edmonton, West Edmonton Mall by Maurice Sunderland, 1981 – 1985 (photo by Matthias Huijgen, July 7th, 2003)

tion, the difference in ownership remains the most important basis for defining spaces. For social science this is defined as public space. According to this reasoning, public is defined by social behaviour or by social order rather than ownership. Sociologists refer to the public realm and the public sphere. The public realm, as the sphere of action and speech, contrasts with the private realm of the household as the sphere of necessity or existence. Survival and reproduction of life are centred there (Arendt 1958:54-58). This is closely related to terms such as bürgerliche öffenlichkeit or simply öffenlichkeit, translated as public sphere (Habermas, 1962:70, 1991:xv). Using the term ‘realm’ to refer to a region suggests an association with the dominion of a king. Thus, the public realm could be defined as an area controlled by the public or the people. A different point of view sees the sphere as the circuit or range of action, knowledge, or influence. Formally defined, the sphere is a place of existence, but also a rank; an order of society or social position (Webster’s Dictionary, 1913:1384). If the space of private ownership is not always primarily private since people can also come together on private property (as a public), we should redefine ‘public’. In this way we can begin to understand interiors as part of urban network public spaces, and thus, by redefining ‘public’ , we can also formulate the urban design task for these interiors.

REDEFINING ‘PUBLIC’, FORMULATING THE URBAN DESIGN TASK Ideas of public and private derive from the Roman distinction between publicus and priva-

tus, thereby making public space refer to res publica. Yet Roman public law did not stop at


Figure 4: Las Vegas, Inside the New York New York by Neal Gaskin (Gaskin and Bezanski) and Yates Silverman, 1997 (photo by Daniel Vonburg, May 7th 2004)

Figure 5: Las Vegas, Freemont Street Experience by Jon Jerde, 1995 – 1996 (photo by Prashant Dayachand, December 20th, 2003)

the borders of the public domain. Because it was concerned with the common interest of urban society, the res publica was extended to the res extra commercium (Kichner, 1949:10, 22). Thus Roman public law is comprised of three cases; res divini iuris (involving the law of the gods or religion), res communes omnium (involving the entire society, and res publicae


(involving what is owned by the government). To redefine ‘public’ in contemporary society according to the triad of religion, society, and government is very difficult. First, the difficulty begins with the religious places in the contemporary city. Although buildings such as temples or churches can still be found, religion has become a private matter now. Yet, unlike other private domains, many countries forbid police officials and parliamentarians from entering such places during services. Second, even the government buildings have become more private. For safety reasons most government buildings are now only accessible through appointments. Security gates mark the entrances of parliament, city hall, and ministry buildings. Third and most relevant, in redefining public space the most hidden difficulty lies in what the Romans called res communes omnium - what is most vital for society. For example: water and air were included under Roman law. But what else is a vital part of contemporary society? What should be public in the contemporary city? Like the general question of what is ‘public’, this can be a sociological question. This may explain the enormous number of recent publications redefining public space by social geographers and urban sociologists. For urbanism their research can be seen as providing the social context, because the urbanist is primarily focused on the city: the civitas, and not the entire societas. For urban designers dealing with the public space traditionally means centring outdoor space. Although this is almost always synonymous with the public domain or the publicly owned space, public space can be more. If society has changed, so has the city. And if the pubic realm has changed, so has the public space. Extraordinary examples can be found in Las Vegas. In this city the buildings form the urban structure, and urban life takes place inside. Without redefining ‘public’ (res publica), we can conclude that these places are the domain of this society and are an integral part of this city. Focusing on The Strip, we find 514 square miles of interior, most of which is publicly accessible. From Sahara (Maltzmann, 1952) to Mandalay Bay and Luxor (Klai and Juba, 1993-1999), we find all kind of shops, casinos, food courts, entertainment halls, and hotel rooms. While some people watch Elton John playing the red piano at The Colosseum at Caesar’s Palace (Grossman and Harris, 1966), others visit the DKNY store and Siegfried and Roy’s white tigers between gambling at The Mirage (Bergman and Corrao, 1989). Amazing hotels, incredible light shows, unforgettable performers in a place that seems unreal. Once it depended on the car for transport, now it is configured for collective forms of movement. The public buildings of The Strip are connected with moving sidewalks, monorails, walkways, and skywalks (Obrist and Koolhaas, 2001:592-617). All these connections are covered over, which makes it, along with the public space in the buildings, one huge network of interior public space. It is a new pattern. Like Nolli’s Las Vegas, public buildings can be part of the usage of the city. The designer’s aim is to derive an understanding of this new pattern (Venturi, Brown and Izenour, 1972:24-25, 76).


Another interesting example is downtown Las Vegas. In the 1980s the old inner city was losing retail and office tenants to the suburbs, and its gaming revenues were lost to The Strip. With the design of Fremont Street Experience (Jerde, 1995-1996), the decline was not only reversed, but the design became the number one reason to visit. Today, downtown Fremont Street comes to life every evening with a show of millions of lights and half a million watts of sound. It is part futuristic mall, part urban theatre. In the design an arched glass and steel roof was introduced. The old main street is covered over so rain won’t discourage the public. Because the quality of the public space has been improved, it has attracted new investors and visitors. The design of the enormous vault turned the outdoor space into an interior public space. Both the public interiors of The Strip and the covered public space of Freemont Street ask for new understandings of urbanism. To redefine the urban design task we should focus on the contemporary use of the urban network and the real public space in the contemporary city. As the Las Vegas examples show, the usage of the city is not always defined by its outdoor space. The usage of this city is mainly within interior space. In addition, stations, hubs, skywalks, and arcades are part of the contemporary city. In most metropolises public interiors give access to shops and supermarkets. Entrances to parking garages and specialised stores can be found in department stores, and many restaurants are accessible from food courts. In general, public buildings and covered public spaces are part of the network of public space. For this a new approach to the design of public space is needed. New maps should be drawn, redefining the public space and the urban design task. This can be comparable to Nolli’s Map of Rome (Nolli, 1748). By researching interior public spaces within their spatial context, their contribution to the urban network becomes clearer. Do they contribute, is there urban usage? What is the position and composition of such space? Is it freely accessible and does it provide access to other interiors? Most important, we need to know why this is so. Every design solution had and has a different social context. How do the changes in the city affect the design task of public space? There is more than one answer. Every type of public interior has its own evolution, and because the meanings of ‘public’ have also evolved, the analyses of interior public spaces must be made over time. Research on interior public space must be more than simply research in the present. Research like this will provide insight into the changes in the contemporary and the future city. We can learn from our own disciplinary history and use our knowledge for designing public interiors. In urbanism the public space was always there, but it should not be limited to outdoor space. From the point of urban design, this research will join the many explanations and answers sociologists have already given to these changes. Against the backdrop of terms such as


‘public realm’ and ‘public sphere’ in the design of public space, the res extra commercium has not really left the theatre.

LITERATURE • Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition. The University Press, Chicago. • Bekkering, H.C. (1999). Voetlicht op het stedebouwkundig ontwerpen in het fin de siècle: naar een stedebouw van conventie. Oration (Inaugural address), Delft University Press, Delft. • Crawford, M. (1992). ‘The World in a Shopping Mall’. In: Sorkin, M., Variations on a Theme Park. The New American City and the End of Public Space. Hill and Wang, New York. • De Solà Morales, M. (1992). ‘Un Nuevo reto: Urbanizar lo Privado. Espacios públicos y espacios colectivos’. In: Sección de Cultura y Arte, La Vanguardia, Barcelona. • De Solà Morales, M. (1992). (Translation: E. Bet) ‘Openbare en collectieve ruimte. De verstedelijking van het privé-domein als nieuwe uitdaging’. In: Oase No 33, SUN, Nijmegen. • Habermas, J. (1962). Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgelichen Gesellschaft. Hermann Luchterhand Verlag GmbH, Neuwied and Berlin. • Habermas, J. (T. Burger). (1991). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, MIT Press, Cambridge. • Heeling, J. (1991). Stuurman op de wilde vaart. Oration (Inaugural address), Publikatieburo Bouwkunde, Delft. • Kichner. (1949). Beiträge zur Geschichte des Begriffs ‘öffenlich’ und ‘öffenliches Recht’. Dissertation, Universität Göttingen, Göttingen. • Obrist, H.U. and R. Koolhaas. (2001). An Interview with Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi. In: Chung, J.C., J. Inaba, R. Koolhaas, and S.T. Leong; Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping. Project on the City 2, Taschen Verlag Benedikt, Cologne. • Sennet, R. (1977). The Fall of Public Man, Knopf, New York. • Sorkin, M. (1992). Variations on a Theme Park. The New American City and the End of Public Space, Hill and Wang, New York. • Venturi, R., D.S. Brown and S. Izenour (1972). Learning from Las Vegas, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London. • Webster Dictionary (1913) Edited by Noah Porter. Online version of Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (updated on January 9, 1997). G. & C. Merriam Co., University of Chicago, Chicago.

DESIGN CASES • Bergman and Corrao (1989). The Mirage, Las Vegas, USA, • Grossman, M. and J. Harris. (1966). Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas. • Jerde, J. (1995 – 1996). Fremont Street Experience, Las Vegas. • Klai, J. and K. Juba. (1993 – 1999). Mandalay Bay and Luxor, Las Vegas. • Maltzmann, M. (1952). Sahara, Las Vegas. • Nolli, G. (1748). Map of Rome, Rome, Italy, • Siegel, G., ‘The Sony Store in Manhattan, 550 Madison Avenue, 1992’. In: Johnson, P. and J. Burgee. (1978 – 1984). The Sony Building, originally The AT&T Building, New York. • Sunderland, M. (1981 – 1985). The West Edmonton Mall, Edmonton, Canada.

Photo by Karel Tomei, June 2004

D R S . F . L . H OOIMEIJER

Cities in wetlands Ph.D. research: New Dutch Water City Chair: Urban Compositions Promotor: Prof. dr. ir. V.J. Meyer Communications to: [email protected]

ABSTRACT The dynamics of the regional water system, which includes groundwater and rainwater as well as surface water, is crucial for the development and urbanisation of the Dutch polders. The Dutch polder landscape has been built by cultivation of the natural landscape of rivers, seas, and peat marshes through civil engineering, which has also built the urban landscape. This essay describes how the physical and functional structure of the polder landscape is recognisable in the urban design, both implicitly in the land reclamation grid and explicitly as an architectural determination of lines, points, and planes.

INTRODUCTION The dynamics of the regional water system, which include groundwater and rainwater as well as surface water, is crucial for the development and urbanisation of the Dutch polders. Until the eighth century, the Dutch lowlands were uninhabitable marshes where the forces of water and wind had free reign. The Romans were not at all interested in working or living in this part of their empire . They only stayed to build fortresses and defensive works called ‘the Limes’ on the northern boundary of the empire. The first developments in the lowlands were built on higher level ground, such as dunes and riverbed sedimentary layers; later they built on constructed dikes and boroughs. People in the areas that are now Groningen and Friesland lived on mounds, while fortified towns were mainly constructed in the areas of Holland and Zeeland. Regardless of whether they were designed on higher ground or not, Dutch towns are settlements built around a river, shore, fortress, dike, or dam. These interesting and unique Dutch town types form the basis of the oldest polder settlement, the peat polder city. With the construction of drained lakes

44 Drs. F.L. Hooimeijer

and dikes, new types of polder cities were built. This essay will focus on these polder cities, probably the most typically Dutch in their creation and urban form. The Dutch polder landscape was created by cultivation of the natural landscape of rivers, seas, and peat marshes through civil engineering, which has also built the urban landscape. How the physical and functional structure of the polder landscape is recognisable in the urban design, both implicitly in the land reclamation grid and explicitly as an architectural determination of lines, points, and planes is described in this essay.

POLDER CITIES: CITIES IN WETLANDS The various polder landscapes, peat, reclamation, drained lake, and dike, form various types of cities. In this essay the concordance and differences between the spatial aspects of these three types will be discussed. First we will discuss the ‘dry core’ and dam town types, which are spatial characteristics of the peat polder city. What is characteristic of all three types of polder cities is the strict control of the city plan. Next, we describe the dynamic relationship between the polder city and polder water, which has been all but forgotten through technological progress. We conclude with a sketch of development up to the present. ‘Dry core’ and dam town The peat polder city, the oldest type, is based on the river, coast, fortress, geest (sandy soil between dunes and polder), dike, or dam towns. This basis is the first important characteristic of the peat polder city: the higher level of ‘dry core’ on which the settlement started. Prosperity and growth led to expansion of the surrounding wet soil, which was derived from peat or land already prepared for cultivation, but not yet ready to be built on (Burke 1956). A peat polder city is simply an expansion of the reclaimed land: the land from drained lakes and dikes became new towns. This shows the first difference between the peat polder city and the polder cities developed later, which were built on a drained lake or a dike against the sea: they have no ‘dry core’. Examples from the sixteenth century are Willemstad and Klundert, built as strategic fortifications in a sea polder, and new towns built in the second half of the twentieth century, such as Almere (dike) and Zoetermeer (drained lake). The most important condition for creating cities in the polders is the construction of dikes, which can protect expanding areas that have become vulnerable through settlement and subsidence from flooding. The first generation of large-scale dike rings was built in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. A dam would be built where a dike crossed the watercourse, usually where a peat bog flowed into a larger river or estuary. Apart from its damming function, the dam ensured discharge of the river water into open water by means of a

Drs. F.L. Hooimeijer 45

drainage sluice. Together with tidal movements, drainage water was used in a practical way to ensure the depth of the harbour as well as city access for sea-going vessels. The dam, including the drainage sluice that formed the city centre, was vital to the economy of transport over water to the hinterland. The drainage sluice could only support smaller ships, and goods from larger vessels had to be hauled or sold on the dam. The dam became a trading market, and the estuary outside the dikes of the peat river became a sheltered harbour. Thus, the dam town and polder become hydraulically as well as economically connected.

STRICT CONTROL Of the various dry cores on which the peat polder cities were developed, the dam town was the most significant. Dike residents, who lived alongside a peat bog and controlled the water through the dam, were conceptually ahead of those in peat polder cities. This is where the second important spatial characteristic can be seen: the need for ‘strict control’ because any expansion of the polder city needed to be realised with caution. First, the size of the expansion needed to be carefully determined: it not only needed to meet the requirements of the time, but had to serve for centuries to come. The second consideration was to develop a technical plan that would ensure water could be discharged and controlled, and that the water in city canals would stay at a constant level. In most cases the project was initiated by building an encircling canal (outer canal), which was connected through the expansion area by means of a sequence of parallel canals. The outer canal was primarily built for drainage, but also had a military or defensive function and a transport function (access to warehouses) (Burke 1956). By means of sluices and windmills, the water level of the canal system was regulated and the excess water discharged. Then the reclaimed land needed to be raised to obtain the required protection level, and it had to be consolidated and prepared for building. Mud excavated from the canals (muddle) was used for raising the level, and was supplemented by ground, which often needed to be transported from far away. Long foundation piles were driven into the ground prepared for building to stabilise the housing in the deep-set stratum of sand. The difference between the urban composition of the dry core and that of the polder city can be seen on the map of early medieval Alkmaar and its sixteenth-century expansion in the peat. The lax controls on the higher section, located on geest, are very different from the strict control employed within the polder city. The difference in height of the urban ground is also unmistakable: extending from the dry core, the streets show a slight descending course, while the water level in the canals remains the same. It is obvious that random development is absolutely out of the question in an area where land has been reclaimed, raised, drained, and protected with so much effort. In polder cit-


ies there is no ‘chance growth’, and the cost and effort involved in building reclaimed land required that this land be used optimally. This requirement was met by means of a detailed plan with an orderly, compact layout, in which there was no room for markets or wide streets (Burke 1956). The quays along the canals were the only public areas, so rows of trees were planted on each side of the canal to beautify the city. The canals functioned as promenades in the summer and skating rinks in the winter. The rows of trees were borrowed from the polder landscape, where they had been planted on either side of the polder roads and encircled farms to serve as fencing for the land and windscreens against the rain. In addition to the dry core and strict control, another spatial characteristic of the polder city was significant involvement with the organisation and design of the polder landscape. The expansion from the creation of polders, initiated by technological developments in the twentieth century, also had a fundamental spatial effect on polder cities. The space, which became available from the impoldering and ‘manufacturability’ of the territory, made the scale and shape of urban expansion possible. The polders offered space for each spatial strategy and ideal of city planning. Cities such as Zoetermeer, Almere, and Lelystad could ‘drop’ into the polder and expand almost endlessly.


PEAT POLDER CITIES AND TOWNS IN DRAINED LAKES AND DIKES

While cities in peat polders, drained lakes, and dikes have common characteristics, they also differ from one another. One crucial difference between the cities in the peat and those in the drained lakes is revealed in the expression, ‘God created the world, but the Dutch created Holland.’ Through the reclamation of peat, a natural fuel, the Dutch disrupted as much of their land as they won by creating polders (Heslinga 1985). Heavy storms made the growing water landscape more important because of the manual work involved. Several cities were lost as a result of this work, including Nieuwerkerk, which ‘drowned’ in the Haarlemmermeer in 1554. Peat polder cities are built on peat ground that remained after removing the peat. They were built on top of the agricultural pattern, often preserving the latter, while in the drained lakes of the peat bogs settlements were designed as part of the landscape. Among the dikes in the Zuiderzee it is normal to see cities and towns that were designed together with, but independent of, the agricultural landscape. This is why the geometric ratio in peat polder cities, as in peat polder allotments, is on a smaller scale than is true of the drained lakes, and also why cities on dikes show independent patterns. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the introduction of the steam-driven pumping station enabled cities to be built in drained lake beds. The ‘manufacturability’ of the drained lake and the new landscape are asserted in the concept of cities; it is also outlined in largescale consanguinity with the drained lake landscape. ‘Residences on the new land, ideally orderly arranged in a ring of solidarity, inhabited by a hard-working autonomous population, ideally monitored by state-of-the-art steam-driven systems. This was the idea that caught on in the forties after the Haarlemmermeer was further uncovered (1839-1853). Perhaps the technological triumph, this domestication of the age-old water wolf in the centre of the Netherlands was the determining factor for conceptual broadening of the impolderment. In this decade the Netherlands discovered that space, even if this space had larger dimensions or was of a complicated type, could basically be manufactured in the name of society’ (Van der Woud 1998, p. 263). The most characteristic similarity between peat polder cities and cities within the dike rings results from the strict controls: it is the absence of any idealistic expression in the Renaissance (seventeenth century). Vision and beauty have to be paid for, and the entire budget was used preparing ground for city expansion. The design of the Dutch polder and the cities in them was based on hydraulic engineering and economic considerations. It is symbolised in the ideal city designed by Simon Stevin, which is also referred to as the Dutch Renaissance (Heeling et al. 2002). It is only logical that the inhabitants of cities on sand were less interested in the ideals of the European Renaissance. Cost was not the only reason for restraint. The indi-


vidualistic citizens of the Netherlands did not see the need for an urban composition based on central authority, which did not exist as such in Dutch society (Burke 1956, p. 17). Finally, there was also a significant difference between cities in the peat polder, drained lakes, and dikes in their maintenance of the groundwater table. There are two possibilities for treating existing water in polder cities: maintaining the outlet water level or realising a polder water level. Depending on the existing water level, a city situated in peat could realise an outlet water level or polder water level; a city in a drained lake or dike has a polder water level that is determined by the lower ground. In a city with a polder water level the ground has been prepared for building by means of a slight elevation (0.5 metre) of the site to be built on and a lowering of the groundwater level. This means that water from the polder has to be pumped into the outlet waterway to discharge it into the river, lake, or sea by means of natural discharge. A drainage pumping station had to be built for this system. Furthermore, more surface water is required for water storage. A city with an outlet water level maintaining a natural discharge system uses the outlet waterway for storage and therefore requires less surface water, since the storage is transferred outside the polder. Such a method of transferring water outside the polder is a result of current water dynamics, which makes settlement of the entire area of the western part the Netherlands no longer possible. Depending on the original level, a slight elevation of the surface would be sufficient to build a city at the level of natural discharge, but sometimes a significant elevation of up to six metres is required. Financial factors, the cost of raising the elevation, will determine whether to maintain the outlet water level or lower the polder water level (Van de Ven 2004). This involves other factors as well. Cornelis van Eesteren stated in his explanation of the Algemeen Uitbreidingsplan (AUP) (1934) van Amsterdam (General Expansion Plan for Amsterdam) that ‘everything is controlled by the level of raising: the layout of the waterway system, the water storage surface, the sluice system, and pumping stations. A city laid out as an outlet waterway city must be designed differently than a polder city that lowered its groundwater table’ (Van Eesteren 1935, p. 159). This is because ‘a city expansion established as such (as a polder city that lowered its groundwater table) would also need to be set up for this pumping station, which would result in such things as the reservation of a significant surface of the town for canals and watercourses in order to obtain sufficient water storage‘ (Van Eesteren 1935, p. 25). The lower level of a polder city is to be connected to the outlet water level of the old city. Van Eesteren mainly considered the connection of the road and water system as a complex design assignment. The ongoing roads needed to be connected by means of slopes, canals needed to be connected by means of sluices, and a solution had to be found to refresh the lower level water.


CITY WATER VS. POLDER WATER

Delft is one of the oldest polder cities: it abandoned the dry core around 1400 and developed into a typical canal city. The city is named for its location at an outlet waterway, which was later turned into a canal: the word ‘Delf’ is derived from the word ‘delven’, which means ‘to dig’. The old outlet waterway, the Oude (old) Delft was presumably dug around 1100 to drain the peat bogs of the Leede and the Schie. On the elevated location where this Delf intersects the creek wall of the silted up river de Gantel, urban development started by establishing the count’s manor. In the sixteenth century Delft was connected to the boat canal network, which consisted of a fine maze of natural and excavated watercourses. As such, the city had a direct connection to rival cities such as Leiden, Haarlem, and Amsterdam. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries most of the city expansions were situated in the lower level, western part of the Netherlands, which was more prosperous because of the ease of transportation. The coincidence of urban and regional water systems meant that the ‘machinery of civil engineering works’ was getting through both systems simultaneously (De Wit 2003 p. 11).

The expansion of Alkmaar in the 16th century is an example of a polder city. From: Burke, Gerald L. The making of Dutch towns. A study in urban development from the tenth to the seventeenth centuries. London, 1956


The boat canal network is strong evidence of the regional coherence within the water system, and therefore of the Netherlands as a ‘water machine’. At the same time it also provides evidence of major economic involvement. In his book The First Modern Economy, Jan de Vries argues that the boat canal network is an example of Dutch development as a modern economic unity. With the word ‘modern’ De Vries refers to the fact that development and improvements are based on conscious intervention (De Vries 1997, p. 35). This phenomenon corresponds with the strict control in the construction of polder cities, and can be considered as typically Dutch. The drainage of the Beemster (1608-1612) and the construction of the Amsterdam ring of canals (the first section was completed in 1650 as an important junction in the boat canal network) are, apart from the boat canal network, two r significant results of the ‘machinery of civil engineering works’. The canal system for draining a new city district on peat grounds, as well as an urban traffic system, was initially designed in a very simple, pragmatic way. On many locations the hydraulic logic and structure was followed, such as in the part of Amsterdam known as the Jordaan. Here, half of the polder ditches have been expanded into a canal, and the other half is located exactly on the boundary between two lots and is used as a back path. The simplicity of the plan coincides with the minimum financial effort intended for this city development, which was ‘just’ for blue-collar workers. It contrasted sharply with the new residential and commercial areas of the regents and traders, however: the grachtengordel (the ring of three canals). From a hydraulics point of view the grachtengordel is similar to the water system in the Jordaan. The only difference is that the canals do not follow the polder pattern, but encircle the city centre with their own logic. The design represents the technological possibility to realise this ‘machinery of civil engineering works’ and the level of ambition and social status of the principals and inhabitants. The grachtengordel is an expression of from the Dutch Renaissance. It is based on a rectangular allotment in which roads, canals, buildings, and plants were included along with the different social classes. Equality of the people along the canal is illustrated by the composition of the three canals. The actual realisation of the grachten-

gordel is the acknowledgement of the involvement of private companies and the fact that it was the blueprint for seventeenth-century society. Amsterdam did not try to follow the idealistic view of a capitalist city as other European cities did, but implemented this design as a blueprint of social and economic life, making use of technological possibilities (Wagenaar 1993, pp. 912). It appeared that the grachtengordel included many of the principles of the Ideal City designed by Simon Stevin (Van der Hoeven and Louwe 1985, p. 58). In this city the market (the Dam), town hall, church, and main street were laid out in a classic pattern, using standards of measurement that date back to hydraulic conditions. These principles can also be found in the Beemster design.


After the completion of the grachtengordel (1700-1850), no further large-scale city expansions were realised in the Lage Landen (low lands) until the second half of the nineteenth century. The expansions that did occur followed a pragmatic system. The expansions of Leiden in 1659 and Haarlem in the period 1672-1690 do not seem to be modelled on the pattern of the polder ditches, with the Amsterdam district referred to as the Pijp (as of 1860) illustrating this same structure (Burke 1956). The first organised expansion of Rotterdam in the second half of the nineteenth century did attain the conceptual calibre of the grachtengordel. Like Amsterdam, Rotterdam has poor peat ground and a low level with flooding, which means that hydraulic preconditions determine the urban design. A significant difference from Amsterdam, however, was the fact that Rotterdam had no strict boundaries for the ordering of land and water. Based on the connections of the canal system through inlet sluices on the river and discharge sluices on the open outer water, Amsterdam had a system for permanently flushing the city water. The Schieland Water Board, which adjusted the inlet of water to the needs of agriculture and managed the urban hydraulics in Rotterdam, made it impossible for the municipality to flush city waters. Yet this was of major importance, since the canals were used for drinking water as well as a sewage system. In a number of cities underground sewage networks were constructed around 1850, while Rotterdam only constructed such a system in 1890. As of 1719, Rotterdam prohibited throwing waste in city canals, but the pollution of the city waters continued to increase and resulted in a number of cholera epidemics in the nineteenth century. In 1842 city architect W. N. Rose designed an urban water system that was independent of the polder water system. It was called the Water Project, and was accepted by the city council in 1854, albeit in a modified form. The project was assisted by landscape architects J. D. Zocher and L. P. Zocher. The plan served four purposes: flushing the city water, lowering the groundwater level so that the city expansion could be built, building a city walk, and the development of a residential area for wealthy citizens (Hooimeijer and Kamphuis 2001). The new polder city, which had been built between the city ramparts and the new outer canal route, was completed in a period of ten years. Rotterdam again applied this method of expansion half a century later, when the Heemraadsingel (1910) was developed. But the Water Project did not solve the problem of polluted city water. Even though the flushing was adequate, too much waste was dumped in the city water, and it was not until 1890 that a sewage system was constructed to improve conditions.

TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS The use of steam-driven pumping stations to expand the city of Rotterdam is one of the first examples of a technological approach to managing urban water, which would become much more common a hundred years later. The most important factors in this development were technological progress along with an explosive urban growth. Hygienic problems, caused by


the poor quality of the city’s water, were slowly but surely influencing the spatial effect of water management, due in part to the progressive development of the steam engine and late, the internal combustion engine. Constructing the sewage system or network and improving the drinking water supply created a division among the systems required for groundwater level control, wastewater discharge, and drinking water supply. Most of the urban water supply system was underground. From the end of the nineteenth century, traffic and transport by water was largely replaced by transport by train, tram, and motor vehicles. This led to filling in a number of canals and singels (greenbelts that include a waterway), resulting in a drastic decrease of surface water (De Vries 1996). The water structure remained important for storage and drainage, but was no longer used as an instrument of design. Although less importance is now placed on the functional aspect of water, there is correspondingly more interest in ‘nature’ in the city. Around 1900, influenced by health commissions established to protect hygiene, demand for more public green spaces increased. Alongside traffic, buildings, and water, a new element was introduced in the structure of the city: public areas. At the same time, the structures of buildings, traffic, water, and green spaces were separated. These structures coincided in traditional cities, for example, in the Amsterdam ring of canals, where a single main structure contains all elements. In the beginning of the twentieth century it appeared that water and green areas would only be guaranteed space if they were combined. Water is part of the green structure, and the green areas acquired rights as public space as exponents of water. At first, the combined structures of water and green areas were important because they formed the backbone of the city design, in combination with the structure of traffic. In Plan Zuid (1915) in Amsterdam and in Blijdorp (1931) in Rotterdam, the structure of public areas and water (which, as in Amsterdam, can be used for boat traffic) is a displaced shadow of the traffic structure (Kamphuis and Hooimeijer 1997). Then as now, the importance of motor vehicle traffic caused the urban composition to become a derivative of the traffic structure and accessibility principles. Separating the various structures illustrates the segregation between civil engineering and urban development (Van Eijk 2002). The designers of the grachtengordel and the Water Project were military engineers, a fact that was the basis for their vision of urban design. At the beginning of the twentieth century urban development became an autonomous discipline, and the tasks were separated. Civil engineers solved the water problem and offered the urban designer the possibility of designing a plan based on this model. It was graciously accepted, especially during the late post-war building boom. Technological progress, such as improved pumps and calculation methods, made the preparation of a larger site possible by using sand to raise the level. This meant that when combined with an underground drainage


system, significantly less surface water was needed. At present, water is considered a waste product, and is situated at the outskirts of districts, integrated in the infrastructure or the green space system. The water system as designed by civil engineers cannot be identified as such, since underground pipelines alternate with the surface water. Moreover, the sand layer provides urban designers with a tabula rasa on which each required urban design can be realised without concern for the water system. While up to 1940 12%-15% of the total surface of a city was comprised of water, in the post-war city expansions, this percentage was often reduced to less than 5% (Meyer 2005).

THE RENEWED IMPORTANCE OF WATER In the seventies, as a response to the technological emphasis of urban development in the fifties, water was given a special role in designing cities: designs had a more human scale and emphasised sociability. The ‘urban identity’ issue appeared on the political agenda, with water becoming an important part of their identity in the older polder cities (Meyer 2005). Beginning in the seventies various plans to re-establish previous waterways were developed and realised. For example, in Utrecht part of an old outer canal was once again excavated after it had been filled in to accommodate traffic (De Vries 1996).

Living alongside the Rotterdam waterfront in the seventies.


In contrast to the sober singels common to the reconstruction of the Netherlands, the natural character of the green belt and water were perfectly suited to the residential areas built in the seventies. Residences were built around courtyards and encircled by green structures with singels. In the water structure design and profile, the natural character of the water was well used. In this period natural banks were part of the water, which gave the singels an entirely different appearance. Many of the designs were influenced by books such as

Silent Spring (1962) by Rachel Louise Carson, causing more attention to be paid to ecology and nature. Carson describes how the use of modern herbicides resulted in overcropping and deformation of the plant world. Her book inspired designers to integrate nature and the city -rather than viewing them as two separate worlds (Steenhuis and Hooimeijer 2003). The past two decades have seen a decrease in this, but recently there has been renewed recognition of the importance of water for the city. The economic recession of the eighties drew attention away from designing public areas, which greatly influenced the use of singels as a natural element. The positioning of public areas in urban development plans and the profile of the singels were reduced to being solely functional and virtually maintenance-free. There were no financial resources to build a high-quality public area, so the design was based on minimal maintenance costs. In the nineties, the rediscovery of water as an element of urban development composition coincided with the effects of the changing climate. The most recent law, the Watertoets (2003) (Water Test), compels new expansion districts to comply with certain hydraulic conditions, reviewed by the Water Board. This is also how the regional scale of water control is organised, applying the law of communicating vessels: any changes in part of the system will influence the entire system. For this reason many municipalities have created a Water Plan that maps hydraulics in the existing city, sets guidelines, and defines future spatial issues. In polder cities the emphasis is on maintenance and storage rather than transferral of rainwater. For example, polder cities use temporary water reservoirs, or wadis, in public areas, or they build roofs that can temporarily retain water (such as grass roofs), reservoirs to collect rainwater to use for flushing toilets, lay out more gardens and ponds rather than tiled terraces, and contain fully built inner areas with more surface water in the district. The sewage and rainwater are collected in a ‘separate system’. Rainwater does not have the same level of contamination as sewage water, and therefore does not require the same purification. Moreover, the sewage system cannot process the rainwater from a heavy storm. Particularly in old cities such as Rotterdam, where a combined system exists, heavy rainfalls lead to many problems . Such systems are slowly being replaced by separate systems.


In many new development districts, surface water is given a structural role, as in former times. In IJburg water serves as a backyard, positioned as a division between private and public areas. This natural boundary makes living next to water immensely popular; not only is it a natural fence, it is often referred to as ‘real estate water’, since the water brings in money. Projects like the grachtengordel in Amsterdam and the Water Project in Rotterdam illustrate how using an older Dutch model for dealing with water can be advantageous for the design and construction of water. This model is likely to be reintroduced in the future, when this tradition is applied to new polder projects.

LITERATURE • Burke, Gerald L. (1956). The Making of Dutch Towns. A study in urban development from the tenth to the seventeenth centuries. London. • Eijk, Paul van, Water. (2002). In De stedelijke vernieuwing. Boxtel. • Heeling, J., Meyer, H., Westrik, J. (2002). Het ontwerp van de stadsplattegrond; de kern van de stedebouw in het perspectief van de eenentwintigste eeuw, deel I, Amsterdam. • Heslinga M.W., A.P. de Klerk, H. Schmal, T.Stol, A.J. Thurkow. (1985). Nederland in Kaarten. Verandering van stad en land in vier eeuwen cartografie, Ede/Antwerpen. • Hoeven, C. van der, Louwe, J. (1985). Amsterdam als Stedelijk Bouwwerk, een morfologische analyse, Amsterdam. • Hooimeijer, F.L. and M.I. Kamphuis (2001). Het Waterproject, een negentiende-eeuwse wandeling door Rotterdam, Rotterdam. • Meyer, V.J. et al. (2005). Het Ontwerp van de Openbare Ruimte, Amsterdam. • Steenhuis, Marinke, and Fransje Hooimeijer (2003), Herinnering aan twintig bewogen jaren, Landschapsarchitecten 19501970: van ‘stoffeerders’ naar volwaardige beroepsbeoefenaars, in: Blauwe Kamer 1. • Van de Ven, G.P. (ed.). (2004). Man-made Lowlands. History of water management and land reclamation in the Netherlands, Utrecht. • Van Eesteren, ir. C. van. (1934). Algemeen Uitbreidingsplan Amsterdam. • Vries, Jan de. (1976). The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500-1815, Cambridge. • Vries, Marie-Louise de. (1996). Nederland Waterland – Een nieuw leven voor gedempte grachten, vaarten, havens en beken, Zeist. • Wagenaar, C. (1993). ‘The Critical City: Lewis Mumford’s view on Amsterdam’, in: Kunstlicht, jaargang 14, nr. 3/4, , pp. 9-12. • Wit, S.I. de. (2003). Typologie van het Nederlandse Laagland, Delft. • Woud, Auke van der (1998). Het Lege Land, de ruimtelijke orde van Nederland 1798-1848, Amsterdam.

I R . M . M E N DONÇA

relationships between contemporary local urban scale and communication networks Ph.D. research: Conditions for re-conceptualising contemporary local urban scale: considering communication networks to attain conditions of space appropriation

Chair: Urban Renewal and Management (Spacelab) Promotor: Prof. dipl. -ing. H.J. Rosemann Supervisor: Dr. ir. S.A. Read Communications to: [email protected]

ABSTRACT This research looks at how local places become metropolitan and global by way of the ‘paths that lead from the local to the global, from the circumstantial to the universal’. We pay particular attention to the influence on public space of mobility on a metropolitan scale and the instantaneity of new personal communications technologies. Much of contemporary urban change seems to involve, at least in part, the application of new telecommunications infrastructures to transcend spatial barriers instantly. This, and a general increase in mobility, have brought into question accepted notions about the nature of space, time, and distance. The way in which space and time have become compressed has resulted in processes of ‘distanciation’ and ‘disembedding’, removing social relationships from local contexts and questioning the traditional concept of urban local scale. Following this, we develop new or alternative strategies for the possibilities of local places and processes today, and for the future of cities. Telecommunications and high-speed infrastructures should be seen as producing a new time dimension that has fundamentally changed urban lived spatial practices; and the contemporary local condition needs to be re-considered in its relationship to urban, metropolitan, and global spaces.

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The notions of the public domain and public space as highly localised and historicised concepts should be analysed with respect to the extreme sophistication of contemporary networks, virtual or physical. This should lead to a more general understanding of public space, and requires a careful analysis of the processes of space appropriation in today’s urban environment and the future of cities. The aim of this analysis is not simply to critique local media practices, or the realm of electronic mediation in general, but is an attempt to understand how new forms of socialising and public space can be brought about through such practices.

INTRODUCTION Much of contemporary urban change seems to involve, at least in part, the application of new telecommunications infrastructures to transcend spatial barriers instantly. This, and a general increase in mobility, have brought into question accepted notions about the nature of space, time, and distance (Harvey, 1990, The condition of Postmodernity). The way in which space and time have become compressed has resulted in processes of ‘distanciation’ and ‘disembedding’, removing social relations from local contexts and questioning the traditional concept of urban local scale (Giddens, 1991, The Consequences of Modernity). Following this, we develop new or alternative strategies for the possibilities of local places and processes for today and for the future of cities. Telecommunications and high-speed infrastructures should be seen as producing a new urban time dimension that has fundamentally changed urban spatial practices; and the contemporary local condition needs to be re-considered in its relationship to urban, metropolitan, and global spaces. Especially relevant is Castells’ statement: ‘people still live in places. But because function and power in our society are organised in the space of flows, the structure domination of its logic essentially alters the meaning and dynamic of places. Experience, by being related to places, became abstracted from power, and meaning is increasingly separated from knowledge. It follows a structural schizophrenia between two spatial logics that threaten to break down communication channels in society. The dominant tendency is toward a horizon of networked, unhistorical place of flows, aiming at imposing its logic over scattered, segment places, increasingly unrelated to each other, less and less able to share cultural codes. Unless cultural and physical bridges are deliberately built between those two forms of space, we may be heading toward life in parallel universes whose times cannot meet because they are warped into different dimensions of a social hyperspace.’ (Castells, 1996, The Rise of the Network Society).

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Thus, while the life experience of the vast majority of people is still connected to place, most power and informational networks are increasingly organised in place-less flows. How can life be divided between these two different forms of spaces? And which ‘bridges’ should be ‘deliberately‘ built between these two spaces? The notions of the public domain and public space as highly localised and historicised concepts should be analysed with respect to the extreme sophistication of contemporary networks, virtual or physical. This should lead to a more general understanding of public space, and requires a careful analysis of the processes of space appropriation in today’s urban environment and the future of cities. The aim of this analysis is not simply to critique local media practices, or the realm of electronic mediation in general, but is an attempt to understand how new forms of socialising and public space can be brought about through such practices.

TECHNOLOGIES AND PUBLIC SPACE The appearance of new technologies has been changing society and shaping urban territory for a long time now. In the nineteenth century new technologies of transport, energy, and communication had visibly produced new urban practices, urban structures, and space dynamics. By the end of the nineteenth century, electricity and gas, the tram and the telephone had all been developed. With them, it was possible to diminish horizontal distances and change the scale of existing urban centres. Changes in the urban field were then accentuated by high-rise buildings located in city centres (especially in the US) and suburban extensions on the periphery of existing cities. These types of urbanisation were not simply produced by new techniques, but were a way to escape from the enormous pressure of cities (Ascher, F., 1985, Metapolis). But city space was changed, primarily because of the prevalence of automobiles. The change from a primarily pedestrian to an automobile space was gradual. The proportions of streets were changed: they now had delimited zones, with common rules of utilisation. Parallel to this, telecommunications developments of the time required space, along with real physical connections and displacements. With the use of the telephone, the movement of people had also increased. Telecommunication made possible new relationships, causing and encouraging new dislocations. Yet, urban public space remained an essential element in the structure of society and a vital element for city cohesion.

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In this way the space of the urban public domain was shaped and reshaped, adapting to new mobility, readjusting constantly to new lifestyles. Changes were physically visible and materialised in the city. Today, with new invisible contemporary telecommunication technologies that create a new virtual environment independent of place and time –whose previous link had for ages been an essential condition for things to happen– we are participating in a new imminent problematic of uses, means, and needs for urban public space. Important here is to what extent have contemporary telecommunication technologies changed the physical structure of public space and its use. While many will say that the physical condition of the city did not change after the appearance of contemporary telecommunication technologies, although that may be true since urban public spaces as we know them have not changed, people lives have, and with that, urban public space practices have changed. Contemporary telecommunication technologies produced a process of individualisation that was set in motion by the transformation from nation-based industrial societies to a globalised post-industrial society: from societies dominated by the masses to a society defined by a multiplicity of networks. Today, and in the coming decades, individualisation will need to be dealt with, to be accommodated to cities, which still result and are conceived from collective ideas. Some of the largest problems in architecture and urbanism, such as urban sprawl, segregation, lack of social cohesion, historic centres becoming devoted to tourism and recreational uses, and uncertainties about what public space is, are immediately related to the new invisible forms of communications and conditions of individualisation of urban life. The city threatens the very nature of what we had learned to consider urban planning, which had found its legitimation in a unified, homogeneous culture, continuous space to be shared by all, at least within the same city. Individuals organise themselves very differently than they traditionally have done when their lives were limited by particular territories. Networks of media and mobility increasingly allow them to do so.

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN URBAN SPACE AND COMMUNICATION NETWORKS The fragmented sprawl created by increased mobility led to an urbanism of distant relationships and to social habits that are no longer physically contained in geographically continuous areas.- This has been spread and re-articulated artificially. The city is now a non-linear urban territory, with increasingly non-evident hierarchic systems of relationships, where new complex types of continuity, proximity, and relationships have become ‘virtual’.

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With advances in telecommunication technologies and high-speed mobility, public space may not have suffered dramatic transformations in physical space, but it did in its use and experiences – new relationships between time and space changed spatial practices. D. Harvey advances the concept of ‘time-space compression’ to signal ‘processes that so revolutionise the objective qualities of space and time that we are forced to alter, sometimes in quite radical ways, how we represent the world to ourselves’ (Harvey, 1989, The condition of Postmodernism; p. 240). Harvey points out that many of the transportation and communication technologies have had the effect of shrinking space. As distances have been overcome, time too becomes compressed. Hence, we see that telecommunications and mobility infrastructures are changing people’s everyday lives by reducing space and overlapping time. But to what extent do these transformations change social and spatial practices? To what extent do they change the parameters of the local? The variety of approaches that analyse relationships among urban places and ‘communication spaces’, especially those affected by telecommunication technology systems, differ in: (a) the technological determinism that perceives the urban as a result of technology implementations and the social as an effect of them, a consequence (Hall, 1988; Brotchie, 1991); (b) the futurist and utopian approaches in which telematics technologies are presented as solutions for social, economic, spatial, and physical urban problems: the anything, anytime, anywhere dream, the de-massified society (Toffler, 1981; Martin, 1981); (c) the approaches that view urban political economy as being fully inscribed in the political, economic, and social relationships of a capitalism that creates new solutions to the tensions inherent within it, between ‘fixity’ and the need for ‘motion’ (Harvey, 1993), the need for geographical differences, where cities cannot be seen merely as artefacts (Castells, 1989), places and social processes in which communication technology systems act and are acted upon in both directions (Gillespie and Robins, 1989); and (d) the social constructivist approach that stresses that technology does not spring from some disinterested fount of innovation, but emerges from the social, economic, and technical relationships already in place (Guthrie and Dutton, 1992). Urban places did not disappear in urban everyday life, and digital spaces have not erased the need for specific locality. ‘We live in a fundamentally urban civilisation: cities as (fixed) places still matter and will continue to matter. Urban places remain the unique arenas that bring together the webs of relations and “externalities” that sustain global capitalism. They are of fundamental importance as the terrain for social and cultural life; they house the vast majority of our population.’ (Graham and Marvin, 1996, Telecommunication and the City; p.383)

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Following from the hypothesis that telecommunication technologies and mobility infrastructure are related to urban space, we see that urban places and ‘communication spaces’ can influence and shape one another and be recursively linked. It is this recursive interaction that should define the futures of cities. Dualities such as visibility/invisibility, fixity/mobility, and real space urbanity/real time urbanity are conceptualising new notions of space, time, and the processes embedded within them.

WHAT ROLE DOES URBAN PLACE PLAY IN THE CHANGING SPACE AND TIME NETWORKS? There are two trends observable on the local scale, public space and place. On the one hand we find a nostalgic loss for the public space’s key roles of supporting communication, social, and collective everyday life space through concentration and proximity. ‘Old places’ are seen as marked by identity, social relations, and history, while ‘new places’ lack the essential characteristics that would make it possible to call them places: they are dominated by their transitory character, where people do not repose, they only pass time (Auge, 1992, Non-Lieux; Casey, 1998, The Fate of Place). On the other hand, the end of the traditional urban relationships between space and time are giving way to the ‘real-time’ city, where new and more fluid societal processes should introduce new conditions for future developments and understanding of urban spaces and place. Today, urban spaces result from a rapidly varying distribution of intensities as a set of serial ‘encounters’ that construct particular spaces and times. Cities are ‘spatially open and cross-cut by many different kind of motilities, from flows of people to commodities and information… This is not just a simple statement of multiplicity, but a recognition that urban life is the irreducible product of mixture. Further, this mixture increasingly tales place at a distance, so challenging conventional notions of place. Even face-to-face contact increasingly involves a vast penumbra of distanciated interactions.’(Amin and Thrift, 2002, Cities, Reimagining the urban, p.3). Places are seen as secondary to movement and presented as coincident points in distanciated relationships. The local can no longer be seen as an entity in its own limits but needs to be conceptualised in relation to the constitutive framework of distanciated and different relations, which are performed through it. Places also do not enfold these relationships smoothly; they transform the relationships themselves: they enrol processes of translation and transduction, becoming the productive and transformative interfaces between different scales and speeds of movements and actions, active points of relay in multiple networks. Place is the point of gathering, translation, and instantiation of the things or events we encounter in ordinary extensive space, an emergence out of intensive spaces of communication networks (as instantaneous telecommunication between

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people and, movement and flows, infrastructural high-speed networks) that produce and sustain them. The role of place in translating the effects of higher-scaled circuits to local conditions implies that place mediates between different circuits and can be seen as an ‘interface’ between those circuits. The intent is to read space not as simple physical location inhabited by city users, but as a conveyer of different, produced and lived space-times, and as a coordinator of urban life practices - particularly those of consumption, but also as the ‘production’ of contemporary everyday life theorised by Lefebvre and de Certeau. Communications technology systems may be considered as part of this idea for the way they introduce an infrastructure of instantaneity. Seen as a whole, communications systems, physical space, and spatial practices (with their respective network infrastructures) establish a framework for understanding the role of the local in establishing potentials and constraints for situated action and in establishing the qualities of local place and activity. Consequently, this hypothesis for a re-conceptualisation of the local, confronts the traditional idea of place and stresses the inertia of old concepts (still in use) on the treatment of today’s space and time relationships through linear, homogeneous, over-simplified models, which still contemplate traditional social parameters (community ideals) or modernist ‘utopian’ ideologies.

HOW CAN URBAN PLACE SUPPORT DIVERSE, MULTI-LAYERED ACTIVITY PATTERNS? WHAT ARE THE CIRCUMSTANCES UNDERLYING SPACE APPROPRIATION? As Lefebvre argues, ‘no change (in physical space) can be made without the production (through spatial practices) of an appropriate space . . . new social relationships call for a new space, and vice versa’ (1991; p.59). The principle of space appropriation is to be understood from the interwoven relationship between spatial practices and physical space, in other words, through how we think, represent, live in, and recreate space. Heidegger suggested that the crucial point in the connection between physical space and experience is not that place is properly something only encountered ‘in’ experience, but rather that place is integral to the very structure and possibility of experience. Telecommunications networks and mobility infrastructures clearly enrol experience, transforming space and time perceptions. Nevertheless, they do not directly determine physical public space transformations; rather, it is through the possibilities they offer that new spatial and geographical configurations can be elaborated. These possibilities should account

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not only for metropolitan and global scales, as they already do, but for all levels of scale. Communications systems should be read as the new urban time dimension and as a potential spatial mechanism capable of inverting socially preconceived physical relational systems and linear understanding of spatial practices. Space appropriation directed by telecommunication networks and mobility infrastructures refers to the determination of physical space as a point of relay. Stressing time and urban space as a site of localised flows and contact networks, space appropriation comes from the distinctive cross-cutting of economic, social interaction, and information, which can grow and be transformed at specific spatial urban points. This enrolment and motion will produce particular spaces and time through the ways actors in these networks relate to one another. Space appropriation processes are like moments of encounter: they are not so much fixed in space and time, as variable events or occurrences, twists and fluxes of interrelationships capable of producing spatial meaning through economic, social, and informational relationships. In this regard, space appropriation should be established as a process through three linked steps: 1. the performance of the intensive (abstract) network space itself (as abstracted movements, connectivity, and flows, visible or invisible); 2. the process of translation and transduction (energy and modal changes), where pure relationships in the network-intensive space are relayed and become actual and concrete in the ordinary extensive space; and 3. how space becomes social, how certain relationships become fixed (institutionalised) and produce social ‘meaning’ in place.

CONCLUSION Between communication networks and urban space, city life is building new perceptions of time and new notions of space. The coexistence of the physical and the virtual environments in the everyday life of cities pre-defines new conditions for space appropriation processes. These conditions should take into account the fact that today the local scale results from distanciated relationships performed in determinate spaces. This idea of the local as being an active point of relay in multiple networks – a productive and transformative interface among different scales, speeds of movements, and actions – refers to an understanding of local spatial behaviour and appropriation of space through a time-defined network, where communication networks and physical space must be co-ana-

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lysable. Here is where new spatial concepts are introduced as concepts that take into account the mutual interactions of time and space through the overall effects of acceleration, territorial expansion, and more flexible lifestyles through less synchronised daily lives.

LITERATURE • Augé, M. (1992). Non-Lieux, Introduction à une Anthropologie de la Surmodernité. Seuil, France. • Amin, A. and N. Thrift. (2002). Cities, Reimagining the Urban, Polity Press, Blackwell Publishing Ltd. • Ascher, F. (1995). Métapolis: ou l’avenir des villes, Editions Odile Jacob. • Barabasi, A-L. (2003) Linked, How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What it Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life, USA: PLUME • Casey, E. (1998) .The Fate of Place, A Philosophical History. University of California Press, California. • Castells, M. (1996). The Rise of the Network Society. Blackwell Publishers, Malden. • Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, Berkeley. • Giddens, A. (1990). The Consequences of Modernity. Polity Press, Oxford. • Graham, S. & Marvin S. (1996). Telecommunications and the City - Electronic Spaces, Urban Places. Routledge, U.K. • Graham, S. & Marvin S. (2001). Splintering Urbanism, Network Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. Routledge, U.K. • Harvey D. (1990). The Condition of Postmodernity. U.S.A. • Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Blackwell, Oxford. • Lessig, L. (2001). The Future of Ideas, The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World.Vintage, New York. • Mitchell, W. (1996). City of Bites. MIT Press, Massachusetts. • Mitchell, W. (2000). E-topia, Urban Life, Jim–but not as we know it. MIT Press, Massachusetts. • Mitchell, W. (2003). ME++ The Cyborg Self and the Networked City.-MIT Press, Massachusetts. • Roberts, M., T. Lloyd-Jones, B. Erickson, and S. Nice. (1999). ‘Place and Space in the Networked City: Conceptualising the Integrated Metropolis’. In: Journal of Urban Design, Vol. 4, No. 1.

I R . C . M U L DERS-KUSUMO

Spatial conFIguration of the area around Delft central station Ph.D. research: Station - the New Centrality: The effects of urban form on the liveability of the area around the railway station: the Metropolitan Cases

Chair: Metropolitan and Regional Design (Delta Design) Promotor: Prof. ir. J.M. Schrijnen Supervisor: Dr. ir. S.A. Read Communications to: [email protected]

ABSTRACT Railway stations have emerged as new central places in metropolitan cities. This has come about because they are easily accessible by various modes of public transport and have a strategic location in the city. It is often assumed that the internal functional dynamics of the station area as a new urban centre are determined through the concentration of large programmed units or as a place where activities tend to concentrate. Function is assumed to be an indicator of a lively centre, but functionality alone is not enough: the spatial aspect is also a crucial factor in designing the area around a station. This study investigates the kind of urban form that supports the sustainability of a lively centre around Delft’s Central Station. Existing and future plans for the area around the station were analysed by means of the Space Syntax techniques grid configuration analysis to uncover space-structural detail within the urban fabric as a field of movement and activity. The findings demonstrate that an intelligible spatial configuration of the area around the station is important for providing opportunities for a vibrant urban place within the urban fabric. Keywords: railway station, space syntax, shops

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INTRODUCTION

The redevelopment of railway station areas is often an important part of urban restructuring. In the Netherlands the densification of the area around railway stations was begun in 1986 (Bertolini, 1998). This is partly the result of city policies that stressed compactness and promoted public transport. The stations became new centres in the city. Their interior urban spaces increasingly serve various non-transport functions such as retail shops, cafes, restaurants, hotels, supermarkets, clinics, and even libraries that are packed within a multilayered environment. It is often assumed that the internal functional dynamics of a city centre are determined by the ability of concentrations of large programme units to attract more units (Dickinson, 1947; Lynch, 1981; Jacobs, 2000). This idea has been used to develop a high number of different functions in and around the station area through mixed land use or increased population density. Some researchers see the centrality of a railway station as an attractive node in networks that work on relatively large regional and metropolitan scales (Bertolini, 1998; Groenemeijer, 2001). Function and accessibility are thus taken to be determining factors for the centre. Nevertheless, how to integrate the railway station in the existing urban fabric is not yet well understood. Often the designer finds it difficult to design an integrated spatial configuration around the station to provide a self-sustaining urban place, a place that supports a living centre in the station area that is able to cope with crises and offer more possibilities for walking, bicycling, etc, a place that offers a real urban centrality. This study attempts to investigate the centrality of the spatial configuration around the railway station area, specifically around Delft’s Central Station. We used two methods to analyse Delft. The first is a grid configuration analysis employing Space Syntax techniques to uncover space-structural detail as a field of movement and activity within the urban fabric. The second variable in the analysis was to look at the dispersal of the shops and other commercial land use locations.

SPATIAL CENTRALITY The railway station area as a new central place in the city has similar requirements to a city centre. Recently, Khaisri Paksucharem (2003) argued that the key to the successful development of an urban place from a transport node is the same as the general requirement: namely, that spatial configuration is critical. But exactly what types of spatial features does the city centre have? An Australian researcher, Arnis Siksna (1997), did comparative studies of block size and form for twelve North American and Australian city centres. In his research he found that some block forms and sizes were better than others for making city centre layout more amenable to adoption, or more robust for meeting varied development

Ir. C. Mulders-Kusumo 69

needs over time. Small square blocks perform better than larger ones because they produce finer-mesh circulation patterns, more potential frontages, more coherent block fabrics, and finer-grained, continuous urban fabrics that include both low and high-rise buildings. Thus, he argued, if particular block forms have worked well, or have produced particular effects in the past, there is a reasonable expectation that they will perform similarly in other centres in the future. Hillier and his colleagues at the Space Syntax laboratory suggested a relationship between the physical form of cities and the economic processes that take place there. He argued that the live centrality is related to its spatial context; thus an urban centre is never stable, but consists of a process (Hillier, 1999). He also argued that while we may find movement and attractors (land uses that benefit greatly from movement and are capable of generating movement in themselves, such as retail shops) that are strongly related to one another, we cannot assume that such movement can be explained by attractors until we are sure that the configurational properties of the grid have not influenced both the presence of movement and the presence of attractors (Hillier, 1984). Distribution of function depends on the spatial configuration of the street network. Configuration, movement, and attractors have been recognised as three determinants of how shops are located within the urban network. First, shops are present in streets where most people move. Apparently, shops tend to become attractors for the urban movement of people. Attractors and movement may influence one another, but they do not influence the configuration of the urban grid. Yet the grid seems to influence movement and attractors (Hillier, Penn, Hanson, Grajewski and Xu 1993, p. 31). Furthermore, Hillier used Space Syntax measurements to analyse the live centres of London, York, Norwich, Hereford, Canterbury, and Winchester in the UK topologically. He found that ‘local grid condition’ as shown by the ‘2-step grid’ from a base line, is a distinctive spatial property of live centre lines. The live centre is marked by a more intensive ‘2-step grid’ than the non-centre sections. Thus, centrality is defined not as a state, but as a process having both spatial and functional aspects. The generating process of live centrality responded to the spatial properties of the urban grids, which also initiated the changes of adapting the local conditions in the entire area. The key to this process is to minimise mean trip length to generate economy of movement within the local grid. Mean trip length depends on both configurational distance and metric distance. Therefore, one aspect that characterises a live centre is a large number of streets in a short metric distance. As a settlement grows, the live centrality evolves into a structure with greater local intensification and metric integration through smaller scale blocks and becomes more trip-efficient, as suggested by Siksna (1997). Stephen Read used Space Syntax theory to study the centrality issues for Dutch cities


(Read, 1996). He argued that the configurations of cities included various scales of movement. These scales are layered, distinguished by scales of mobility, and are designed to convey different scales of movement. The hierarchy or functional layering built in the shape of the urban grid of Dutch cities includes a regional movement network that conveys movement on a scale of points or destinations within the city. It also includes a city scale movement network, a set of spaces in the grid suited by their geometry for carrying traffic over medium and longer distances. In addition, it includes a grid at the neighbourhood or local scale. The regional scales appear locally most often at a nodal node, e.g. stations, metro stops, parking garages. The city scale is more often linear and continuous, and is differentiated or ‘formed’ by its level of ‘contamination’ from the local scale. Read proposed that the interaction of the combined activities in these grids is fundamental to the intelligibility of the fabric of Dutch cities. The centrality is a product of layering of scales. It has been suggested that in order to produce that sort of real urban centrality, we need to integrate locations in the urban system on a variety of scales. This means that real urban centrality depends not only on contributions from a regional context, but also from ‘middle’ and local scales. In other words, the location needs to be systematically connected to the more traditional urban scales as well as to the new ones (Read, 2000). It is evident that in designing the centrality on a nodal node, such as a railway station, the spatial aspect is also a crucial factor. Therefore, we propose two assumptions about the characteristic of centrality in areas around a railway station. The first is that integrating different scales of movement layers, regional scale – city scale, local scale – around a railway station is important to develop a real urban centrality. The second assumption is that small block size and a large number of streets in a small metric distance are necessary for producing a finer-mesh circulation pattern and more potential frontages for economic activities. Many railway station locations are attractive for business because they are very accessible on a regional scale. Whether they are also systematically connected at the lower scale still needs to be investigated. This article concentrates not on regional accessibility and centrality, but on the other scales required to produce a sustainable urban place.

DELFT AND ITS CITY Delft is a densely populated, medium sized town (inhabitants: 97,000; area: 26.31 km2), located 15 km from The Hague, the seat of government of the Netherlands. The industrial era began in Delft with the railroad. In 1839 the Hollandse IJzeren Spoorwegmaatschappij (Dutch Iron Railway Company) planned to extend its railroad line from Haarlem to Rotterdam, the upcoming harbour city, and intended to lay the tracks through The Hague and Delft. This plan brought a radical change to Delft’s spatial layout. Ir. F.W. Conrad, a railroad


engineer, drew the first railway line about half a kilometre’s distance from the western city wall. He aimed to avoid the buildings outside the ramparts and to provide extra space for a monument district between city and station. The City Council of Delft, however, argued that it was better to have the railroad next to the western city wall, since there was no settlement outside the city wall at that time. So, in 1847 the first railway station was built a stone’s throw from the most important city gateway, St. Joris, which was also the location of the barge harbour (barges were the regional passenger transportation mode in the Netherlands before the railway system replaced them). This was next to the street named Buitenwatersloot-Binnenwatersloot, which leads to the countryside west of Delft, the ‘Westland’ (Figure 1). Over the course of time the trains became longer, so when a train stopped at the station, The Buitenwatersloot-Binnenwatersloot was blocked. Space was also needed for shunting wagons and handling trade goods (mainly coal and vegetables) between trains and ships. Thus, in 1885 the station was moved a few hundred meters to the south, which offered more space for transfer of goods and longer platforms for train passengers. In the mid twentieth century, train traffic increased even further, and the railway track, which was on ground level, became a barrier to the city’s integration. Therefore, in 1961-1963, the railway track was partly lifted in a flyover, from the northern border of Delft to the station (Figure 2). At present, the railway station in Delft plays an important role in the economic development of the city. Every day more than 20,000 passengers stop at the Delft railway station. Most

Figure 1: Map of Delft 1898, showing the original

Figure 2: Map of Delft 2004, with its important

location of the station (source: Kaartenkamer,

functions.

Faculteit Bouwkunde, TU Delft)


of these passengers are students or employees at institutions of higher education: Delft University of Technology (with its 13,000 students and 3,000 employees) and knowledge-based companies (approximately 4,650 employees) such as the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) and Geodelft (Figure 2). There are five important shopping centre areas in Delft (Gemeente Delft, 2003), three of them located in the historic inner city. Shopping centres ‘De Klis’ and ‘In de Stede’ are located in the heart of the inner city, around the market square, and have a festive tourist shopping character. ‘In de Veste’ (built in the 60s) is located at the southern edge of the inner city, easily accessible both by car and public transport, and consists mainly of chain department stores. The fourth one, ‘In de Hoven’, is an urban indoor shopping centre located in a post-war urban area where buildings are mostly high-rise and densely populated. The newest shopping area (built in 1995) is ‘Leeuwenstein’, a regional shopping centre that is accessible by automobile, which contains furniture and appliance shops. It is easily accessible from highway A13, and its car park is directly connected to the shop entrances. Its outstanding accessibility from the highway enables this shopping centre to serve not only the city of Delft, but also the smaller cities around it.

SPATIAL-FUNCTIONAL PATTERN OF DELFT AND ITS CENTRAL STATION In spite of the fact that this study focused mainly on the spatial configuration around the railway station, it was necessary to include the entire urban grid in the analysis to ensure that each line in the station area was embedded in the whole urban structure. Figure 3 shows an axial representation of the city of Delft, covering the area approximately between highway A13 in the east and the natural city boundaries in the north, south, and west, such as the farmlands and greenhouses. Figure 3a shows the global integration analysis, and as such illustrates the most global structure of Delft, with a pattern centred on main street line axes (i.e. Westlandseweg-Zuidwal, Papsouwselaan-Voorhofdreef, Martinus Nijhoflaan, Buitenwatersloot-Binnenwatersloot, and Westvest-Phoenixstraat). These are also the vehicular axes. As we can see, the location of the knowledge-based institutes and companies are on these axes, partly because of the accessibility to highway A13, suggesting that those functions not only serve the city of Delft, but also a larger region. The same is the case with the railway station. It is located near the crossing of Westlandseweg-Zuidwal and Westvest-Phoenixstraat, one of the most central locations in Delft. Figure 3b shows the local integration analysis, which highlights a more local structure, including most local linear shopping streets such as Nieuwe and Oude-Langendijk, Hugo


Figure 3a: Global integration analysis of Delft. It

Figure 3b: Local integration analysis of Delft. It is a

is a measurement of the relation of a line towards

measurement of integration calculated up top three

all other lines in the system, ranked from the most

lines away from each line in every direction.

segregated (light colour) to the most integrated (dark colour).

Figure 3c: Area integration analysis of Delft. This is a measurement designed to highlight areas in the city with a high level of local integration. It is used to further reveal the local potentials of the fabric. In general one could say that concentrations of high local integration (the darker patches in the map) reflect high integration of social interactivity.


de Grootstraat, Krakeelpolderweg, Papsouwselaan, Hypolitusbuurt, etc. It is interesting to notice that it once again highlights Buitenwatersloot-Binnenwatersloot as the dominant integrator, in spite of the narrowness and unattractiveness of its profile. This suggests that Buitenwatersloot-Binnenwatersloot functions not only as a strong integrator for the whole, but also as a strong integrator of its surrounding area. At present, this street is the busiest bicycle route in Delft, with more than 10,000 cyclists using it every day (Gemeente Delft, 2002). Binnenwatersloot, the part of the street that is within the historic inner city, is densely packed with retail shops. This street is one of the oldest streets in Delft, and connects Delft with its western countryside and provides direct access to the market square. Figure 3c shows the area integration analysis (a measure designed to highlight areas in the city with a high general level of local integration). It further reveals the local potential of the fabric. In general, local concentrations of high local integration reflect high integration and social interactivity. As can be seen, the market square area is highlighted (the darker patches in the area integration map), and it is the location where most retail shopping streets in Delft are clustered, with 192 retail shops from a total of 612 in all of Delft (Gemeente Delft, 2003). Let us focus on the spatial configuration around Delft’s central station. How far from the station should we extend our investigations? Since we deal mainly with the configuration of streets, we chose the walkable radius as the research boundary. It means that the railway station area is identified as a circular area radiating from the railway station that is considered as walkable distance. We adopted a walkable radius of 1 km (more or less equal to ten minutes walking time). Figure 4 shows a one-kilometre area around Delft’s Central Station and assigns numbers to retail shops on each line segment. It shows that retail shops are largely located along the most integrated spaces (red lines), but the station is not located in the most integrated space. As explained above, the station was moved in 1885 to accommodate the need for a larger space, but its connection and accessibility to the city was not very well considered. In fact, the choice of location was not usual for the Netherlands. Usually the station is located at the most important gate of the city, which provides good accessibility to the city, and it is connected by a street called ‘stationstraat’ (Lugt and Spangenberg, 1980), a street that integrates the regional scale (the station) with a more local traditional urban grid. Delft does not have a ‘stationstraat’, which means the station lacks the usual link with the city. The municipality of Delft was aware of this, especially when the university was moved to the south-eastern part of Delft. Therefore, in 1956 a new cut-through alley


was laid, the Barbarasteeg (Barbara Alley), a 2 meter-wide alley for pedestrians and cyclists that connects the station with the inner city and the university area. The opening of this alley improved the integration of the station slightly, making it easier to negotiate for train passengers as well as local inhabitants. Several thousand pedestrians use this alley every day to reach important places in Delft, such as the Delft University of Technology, TNO, and the inner city. It also provides an opportunity for retail shops along this route (Barbarasteeg-Breestraat). Nevertheless, the narrowness of the street and other public functions (such as museum, church, and municipal offices) do not provide an opportunity to explore this economic potential. Furthermore, in the three-step analysis shown in figure 5, the metric area covered by the three-step grid is not very compact and has few streets (49), especially compared to the Bank Station area (249) in the City of London. The plotting of land use around the station shows that public functions, such as municipal offices, occupy integrated lines, which means there is not enough space for retail shops around the station. This analysis shows that the station is well integrated for large-scale movement (regional and city-wide movements), but its integration with local scale urban fabric is rather poor, as we can see from the local integration, the area integration, and the three-step analyses. This means that the potential of the station, with more than 20,000 people passing it daily, cannot be well explored. Thus, the lack of spatial integration explains why there are no significant economic activities around the station.

Figure 4: Area integration map plotted with the

Figure 5: Three-steps analysis from Delft central

distribution of retail shops, within 1 kilometer radius

station.

if Delft central station.


Figure 6:

THE NEW MASTER PLAN

The new master plan of Delft Central station

The Dutch railway company expects train and passenger traffic to double in this station by

by Joan Busquets

2010. Therefore, they plan to increase the number of railway tracks. -The high density of

(Gemeente Delft,

buildings along the railway, however, makes it difficult to extend the existing line by ad-

2003)

ditional tracks, so the municipality of Delft proposed to build underground railway tracks. This would eliminate the existing barrier of the railway and provide new opportunity for redevelopment of the area around the existing station. We analysed the new master plan with Space Syntax techniques, which offer an instrument for investigating how to bring the effects of intervention within reach of design ideas and discussion, and to generate alternatives that might not otherwise be given serious consideration. The new master plan by Joan Busquets (Gemeente Delft, 2003) was included in the axial map of Delft (figure 6). Extending Coenderstraat to join Abtsoudseweg and adding a direct bicycle link along the Westsingel River from the station’s southern entrance towards the south (the university area), together with straightening the Abstswoudseweg itself, increase the integration of Abstswoudseweg as an important street in the city of Delft (figure 7a). It connects the western side of the Schie River to the eastern side in a more logical way.


Elimination of the railway tracks and development of denser urban blocks significantly increase the local integration value of the neighbourhoods. This factor is reflected in the area

Figure 7a (left): Global integration analysis of

integration map (figure 7b). This suggests an increase in the spatial potential for intensity

Delft with the

of activity around the station, which makes it possible to explore the potential for economic

intervention.

activities in the area immediately surrounding the station. Hillier (1984) perceived a strong relationship between the integration of the street networks/urban fabric with the pedestrian

Figure 7b (right): Area integration

movement pattern. Thus, the more integrated the space, the more pedestrian movement

analysis of

potential there is for those spaces. And the more pedestrian movement, the more potential

Delft with the

the space has for economic activities, which is one of the preconditions for mixed use and 24-hour activities.

CONCLUSION

Together, the spatial analyses maps show a remarkably true-to-life functional picture of Delft as a whole, highlighting all the main routes and major shopping streets. This study has shown that the distribution of retail shops around the existing Delft Central Station is determined by spatial configuration to a considerable extent. Even though the station is easily accessible on the regional level, it is not well connected to the more local urban grid. This

intervention.


means that Delft’s Central Station does not provide the necessary local conditions to help develop a live centre. In the new master plan, the designer tries to integrate the railway station by adding smaller blocks and provides better accessibility to the urban surrounding, especially to the inner city of Delft. Even though this intervention does not significantly affect the city scale, it does improve integration of those scales with the local one. This suggests that the area around the new station has more potential than the existing one affords for providing a sustainable centre, a living and vibrant place, which in itself can offer an area for a living urban space without being overly affected by economic or political crises. The spatial analyses and associated theories open new levels of discussion for complex urban regions, and can reveal potentials that may be latent in a complex overlay of scaled networks and movement patterns. The analysis of particular locations in these terms suggests not only ways of understanding the functional irregularities of more traditional kinds of urban fabric, but also begins to suggest the principles by which new scales can be integrated with existing functional structures. It also suggests a different perspective on the problem of designing new centres, which may direct us to ways of developing socially and economically dense and supportive environments. Elaborating these principles to projects on the ground will be a task for invention and design, but the theoretical model allows this design work to track potentially productive pathways for developing lively centres.

LITERATURE • Bertolini, L. (1998). Cities on rails: The Redevelopment of Railway Station Areas. E&FN Spon, London. • De Vries, J. (1981). Barges and Capitalism: Passenger transportation in the Dutch economy, 1632-1839. H&S Publishers, Utrecht. • Dickinson, R.E. (1947). City Region and Regionalism: A geographical contribution to human ecology. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, London. • Gemeente Delft. (2002). Number of Bicycles in Delft, November 2002 (Unpublished raw data). • Gemeente Delft. (2003). Kerncijfers. (Retrieved May 1, 2004, from http://www.delft.nl/statistiek/2003/ nederlands/). • Gemeente Delft. (2003). Masterplan spoorzone. Gemeente Delft. • Groenemeijer, L. (2001). Naar een ontwerp voor de deltametropool. ABF-Strategie, Delft. • Hanson, J., Hiller, B. (1993). ‘City of London shape and role’. Urban Design Group Quarterly, 48, 8-13. • Hess, P.M., Moudon, A.V., Snyder, M.C., Stanilov, K. (1999). Site design and pedestrian travel. (Retrieved October 1, 2003, from http:// www.enhancements.org). • Hillier, B. and Hanson, J. (1984). The Social Logic of Space. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. • Hillier, B., Penn, A., Hanson, J., Grajewski, T., & Xu, J. (1993). ‘Natural Movement: Or, configuration and attraction in urban pedestrian movement’. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 20, 29-66. • Hillier, B. (1996). ‘Cities as movement economies’. Urban Design International, 1(1), 41-60. Jacobs, M. (2000). Multinodal Urban Structures. Delft University Press, Delft. • Lugt, R. van der. and Spangeberg, F. (1980). De wereld van het station. Stichting wonen, Delft.


• Lynch, K. (1960). The Image of the City. MIT Press, Cambridge. • Nes, A. van. (2002). Road Building and Urban Change: The effect of ring roads on the dispersal of shop and retail in western European towns and cities. Wergeland Grafisk as, Oslo. • Paksukcharern, K. (2003). Node and Place: A study on the spatial process of railway terminus area redevelopment in central London (unpublished doctoral dissertation). University College London, London. • Read, S. (1996). Function of Urban Pattern, Pattern of Urban Function. Publicatieburo Bouwkunde, Delft University of Technology, Delft. • Read, S. (2000). The Patchwork Landscape and the Engendineered Web: Space and scale in the Dutch city. (Retrieved February 1, 2004, from http://www.spacelab.tudelft.nl/publications/publications.html). • Siksna, S. (1997). ‘The effects of block size and form in North American and Australian city centres’. Urban Morphology, 1, 19-33.

C . P I N I L L A CASTRO MSC.

Pondering planning and emerging approaches to produce urban transformation to meet contemporary demands Ph.D. research: Strategies for intervention in the contemporary urban field: Pondering planning and emerging approaches to meet contemporary demands

Chair: Urban Renewal and Management (Spacelab) Promotor: Prof. dipl. ing. H.J. Rosemann Supervisor: Dr. ir. S.A. Read Communications to: [email protected]

ABSTRACT The objective of this paper is to compare planned and emerging approaches to urban transformation with contemporary demands. We begin with a three-step conceptualisation. We first define planning and emerging approaches and present them as anticipation forces driving urban transformation processes. Subsequently, we introduce the field in which these forces are applied, explaining notions of space, force, and change in the dynamics of urban transformation. Finally, we discuss the demands of contemporary as a framework of surrounding conditions in which the transformation process occurs. Suggestions about how contemporary conditions require interweaving of planned and emerging approaches by producing transformation-managing flexibility, co-production, and progress evaluative practices will be presented in the final conclusions.

INTRODUCTION Contemporary society progresses rapidly. Industrialisation and information technologies introduce automated processes of production and communication, accelerating the pace

82 C. Pinilla Castro MSc.

in which society progresses. One of the consequences of this development for the spatial domain is that it ‘reduces’ distances. The ‘transmission revolution‘ 1 that is causing a dynamism in material processes has introduced new meanings for concepts of space and time, as well as new relationships between local and global identities. These developments also affect procedural issues in the planning and design disciplines, demanding implementation of new communication systems, balancing the appearance of new centralities and suburbs, managing competition, and inscribing development in varied networks of regional economies and cultures. Paradoxically, all these ‘nove‘ advances also entail high environmental costs, increase individualisation, and spread overall uncertainty. They bring into question the advantages of progress and the sustainability of urban development. All in all, it is as if society’s production must always confront its own constructions 2 . In these circumstances design and planning disciplines need to tackle issues of progress and transformation. They need to suggest a balance among control, homogeneity, and determination against uncertainty, individualisation, and continuous transformation of social values. Thus, they must bring to bear solutions to conflicts between planned and emerging approaches. This document has three parts. It deals first with issues of planned and emerging approaches in relation to transformation. Second, it describes the issues an the way they meet contemporary demands. Finally, by confronting both systems against contemporary demands, it suggests new attitudes towards urban transformation.

RE-CONCEPTUALISING TRANSFORMATION Complexity and the logic of change According to some scholars, urban planning came into being with the changes originating from the industrial revolution 3 . In their view the task was to adapt urban milieus to the new conditions of society. Leaving the issue of the origins of planning aside, the relevance of this viewpoint lies in that it visualises planning as a reaction: a response to increased complexity in the conditions of the surrounding (social and technical) environment. We now know a great deal about the increasingly complex conditions in the transformation of the contemporary city. Social order is changing, notions of scale, space, and time are changing, and consequently the disciplines involved in urban transformation are changing too. From this perspective architects and planners are part of the multiple forces and actors, hidden logic, and uncertain dynamic processes 4 . Architecture has been characterised as a ‘chaotic adventure’, with control being understood as the main pitfall of urbanism.5 To understand the planning and transformation of the contemporary city, it will be necessary to describe several ideas that relate to the essence of transformation procedure. These ideas include the recent knowledge developed in complexity and system theories, and in

C. Pinilla Castro MSc. 83

particular the issue of emergence. To begin with, complex adaptive systems are comprised of very many agents or active elements working together. Complex systems are also open: they survive and evolve by exchanging information, matter, and energy with their respective environments (Holland,1995). To study complex systems, science divides the world in two major parts: one, the object of study, the system; and two, its complement, the environment. Systems and environments perceive and affect each other through information exchange. If the environment’s uncertainty increases and influences the system’s identity, then the system responds by (a) isolation: becoming extremely resistant, (b) adaptation: increasing anticipation capacity, and (c) independence: evolving abruptly in an insurgent manner. Isolation is not an open system feature, thus it is not part of a complex system response. Adaptation is the way the system is able to withstand environmental changes, and refers to the environment’s certainty and the system’s capacity to acknowledge and handle these certainties. Independence is the way the system withstands change, and relates to the environment’s uncertainty and the system’s automatic capacity to organise autonomously. The system’s constant purpose is to sustain or endure; therefore, an increase in the uncertainty of the environment requires an increase in the complexity of the system. In this view transformation occurs by adjusting the complexity of the system and its anticipation capacity as well as through the environment’s uncertainty and its sensitivity to individual actions.6 Consider the city as the system and society as its environment: the increasing complexity of contemporary conditions challenge city transformation. Thus, city transformation occurs by continuously adapting to social demands. In this process, and paralleling the relationship between adaptation and independence, is planning (adaptation), which is the capacity for estimating required city changes in relation to known demands. Planning, therefore, refers to anticipation capacity. For this reason planning is constructive and collective. It looks for aims and projects images and procedures to achieve such aims (Miller, 1960, p. 16-18). Emergence (independence) is the capacity to transform the city – and thus adapting to it – locally or individually, without having control over all actors or using collective management. Emergence is opposed to collective construction; it is related to feedback or reaction. In emergence the forces of individual actors mix and elaborate the generate strategy of the system: the global (surviving) behaviour of the system arises from individual activity (Johnson, 2001, p. 11-19). Urban transformation always confronts actions of collective forecasting and individual interpretation. Thus, planning and emergence are simultaneously present and constantly interweave in city transformation. This explains some of the present conditions in the contemporary city: the planning of vast networks of communication and the emergence of detached


peripheries and sub-urban areas; the planning of powerful and productive centralities and the emergence of dispersed, displaced, residual, and counter-dependent areas. It also explains the increase in city competition parallel to overall homogenisation and the opposition between state oriented developments and market oriented ones, top-down and bottom-up approaches. Planning and emergence as anticipation forces In the production of transformation, planning and emergence can be considered forces to obtain desired results. Within this sphere particular properties related to the direction, control, evolution, and outcome of such forces are devised. Planned forces are applied top-down, seeking to control all agents in the transformation process by means of centralisation and hierarchy. The type of transformation expected as a consequence of the application of planned forces is linear. Thus, changes of state are intended to evolve sequentially along premeditated chains of evolution, and outcomes are certain and foreseen in advance. From this perspective a plan is supposed to define a process, determining a sequence of operations to be performed to achieve a goal.7 Emerging forces operate bottom-up. This means no external, global, or hierarchical manager mediates among the interacting parts. No overall rules dictate the actions of each participant, and control is managed locally, at the level of each actor. The evolution obtained with emerging forces is non-linear: that is, transformation of states within the system do not seem to be consequent on previous ones. Therefore, predicting future states and outcomes can only be developed probabilistically (Johnson, 2001, p. 11-19). When visualising the execution of a particular strategy, considering planning and emergence as forces to achieve aims introduces procedural difficulties relating to their function. As execution always results in feedback, reactions, and unforeseen consequences, planned forces must involve testing and evaluation processes as part their procedures. In particular, when overall goals are affected by the operation of individuals, the planning process becomes an input-test-output procedure, in which stages of transformation are evaluated before embarking on the next one.8 As a result, this method shifts hierarchical decisions to local instances, giving local knowledge power to affect the decisions at a global level, hence driving planning operations towards emerging ones. Conversely, planning of emerging phenomena is introduced when the application of emerging forces implies a conscious knowledge of the aims and objectives to be achieved. Because the accomplishment of emerging systems is the capacity to organise individual actions to adapt, improve, and evolve, the global performance of a system– knowing the global performance of a system and its possible ways to adapt in advance – implies being able to plan emergent conditions. From a purposeful perspective, ‘emergent complexity without


adaptation is like the intricate crystals formed by a snowflake: it’s a beautiful pattern but it has no function.’ Common applications in the functional vision of emergence are software applications and artificial intelligence (for instance, computational systems that ‘learn‘ to recommend books to purchase). These systems operate with clear objectives but with no sequential or fixed procedures, and their purpose is to manoeuvre in accordance with inputs and external participation. They represent what has been called a third wave in the history of emergence that is devoted to the (deliberated) creation of emerging outcomes.9 The issue at this point is: in the (purposeful) production of transformation, planning and emerging forces interweave; local behaviour is affected by modifications driven by the systems as a whole, while the whole system is transformed as a consequence of local interactions. In this sense thinking of urban design and planning as purposeful activities producing urban transformation leads to questions about the balance between individual control and freedom. To what extent are planned and emerging approaches able to be tolerated by contemporary social conditions? If both approaches are present in the transformation process, which features from each are to be used? What can they learn from one another?

STEERING URBAN TRANSFORMATION WITHIN CONTEMPORARY DEMANDS Here we intend to deal with issues of planning and emergence within contemporary conditions. Examining how forces spread in the urban field and surrounding conditions to transform them will help to see how planning and emergence are balanced against contemporary demands and how to introduce suggestions for new attitudes towards urban transformation. The Contemporary Urban Field ‘The relationships between force (energy), time, and space are problematical. For example one can neither conceive of a beginning (an origin) nor yet do without such an idea. As soon as that (albeit essential) activity which discerns and marks distinctions is removed from the picture, “the interrupted and the successive are concordant”. An energy or force can only be identified by means of its effects in space. . . .’(Lefebvre, 2000, p. 22). The dichotomy between appearance and reality has a significant role in our conception of the material world. Since science’s task is what humanity can say about nature, and not what nature really is, this places scientific enquiry between the way phenomena are visualised and the way they occur. Thus, it becomes more of an examination of its intrinsic actuality, its underlying causes and the forces and energies that motivate its happening (Kosso, 1998). Recent discussions about the conceptualisation of the contemporary city pose the problem when observing contemporary territory. A glance out of the window shows a world of ag-


glutinated objects, with no common pattern or organising structure, from which little sense can be made.10 Further enquiry will move from object-vision to process-vision, and will make sense of the processes, interactions, and structure system of communication and exchange based on the existence of multiple networks.11 Additional enquiry will try to make sense of the transformations these processes of exchange create in the built environment. This examination will search for the intrinsic singularities and forces that operate behind the transformation, placing the process in a field where a multitude of differential forces collides.12 In conceptualising the contemporary city, there are two patterns for viewing the urban field. First, there are those who are concerned with design and planning process, which are affected by collective forces. Second, there are those who are concerned with the social implications of the ‘field effect’, which considers the strength of networking and communication as the cause of individual customisation. In the first group, and commenting on the work of MVRDV, Boyer introduces the field as a type of ‘datascape’: a scenario in which the effects of information flows, in the shape of regulations, building codes, governmental guidelines, or aesthetic preferences, to affect urban transformation process (Boyer, 2003). Van Berkel and Bos talk about urban intervention as the field where many undetermined socio-political forces mix. They describe this mix as the confrontation between varied actors’ needs, along with site conditions, spatial formation, structural technologies, and mapping approaches (Berkel, 1994, p. 28-33). Allen stresses the difference between classical and modern techniques of composition, relating the latter to those that allow open fields. He points to the need to engage the complexity of the city by replacing the control of the object with the potentiality and indeterminacy of the field (Allen, 1997, p.24-31). In the second group, Haijer and Reijndorp explain how individual customisation generates an archipelago of enclaves: a cultural-geographic interpretation of the term ‘urban field’ that is only possible in the network society. In the archipelago, techniques of meeting and avoidance give way to customised centralities such as shopping malls, entertainment centres, leisure areas, etc., which organise collectiveness throughout differentiation and exclusion (Hajer, 2001, p. 21-69). Lootsma talks about a New Landscape in which mass media is the motor that drives individual customisation, shaping centralities that might coincide with the physical structure of the built environment (Koolhaas e.a., 2001, p. 460-471). Lastly, Ascher introduces the term ‘metapolis’ as the network comprised of the several urban or rural entities (farms, cities, towns, residential districts, factories, sport facilities, schools, leisure centres, green fields, etc.) that a population uses to fulfil living demands. This network, which forms a new urban reality, differs from traditional urban/rural or centre/periphery dichotomies because it is based on the interactivity of public actions among inhabitants (Asher, 1998).


Both patterns of thought assume urban transformation within a field of forces, taking into account surrounding conditions that inflict spatial and organisational changes. To make sense of the interaction of forces and to perceive how these forces are spread within the field, however, it is necessary to account for the continuous process of formation, projection, and transformation. In the Production of Space, Lefebvre writes about the physical, mental, and social spheres as constituents of a ‘theory of space’, constructing a unity between separated domains. He finds it difficult to imagine energy or force without thinking about the space where such energy is positioned, or of space without what occupies it and the way it does so: the deployment of energy in relation to place and time, and time without thinking about matters moving or changing.13 In light of Lefebvre’s observations, the CUF is presented in this study as a methodological tool to account for the complexity of interactions in the city transformation. Thus, space + force + change CUF = Time Space or the Spatial Field, is related to the built environment; it is what exists or what is given: the material and structure in which forces emerge. Force, or the Intervention Field, refers to planned and non-planned interventions; it is what transforms and what inflicts. The intervention field, therefore, accounts for social and political tendencies and encompasses the actors and entities shaping urban intervention. Change, or the Transformation Field, refers to the actualisation of the continuous built environment; it is the transformation and accounts for the outcome of interactions between spatial and intervention fields. Issues such as time, progress, decay, appropriation, deterioration, occupation, or evacuation represent this category.


New social demands Once defined, this is the (field) structure in which the forces affecting urban transformation spread. One step back in the conceptual framework deals with the surrounding conditions (driven by contemporary society) where the transformation process occurs. Viewing urban transformation as a response to the demands of contemporary society implies a need to search for conditions that indicate guiding aspects, consequences, and requirements for executing the transformation procedure. Thus, uncertainty, individualisation, and transformation of social values introduce the need for flexibility, co-production, and progressive valuation. From uncertainty to flexibility ‘There is no accidentology in science, but the discovery of chance: to invent the train is to invent derailment, to invent the car is to produce the motorway pile-up’ (Virilio, 2003, p. 23). As the cost of industrial disasters can be neither restored by economic means nor transferred to social or political realms, progress irreversibly endangers nature, society, economy, and politics. Dangers spread in local and global contexts, private and public realms and rich and poor domains. These dangers are not quantifiable and have become part of life in immediate but uncertain ways (Beck, 1993, p. 19-50). As a result, society’s ontological security decreases. On the one hand, people must rely on abstract systems such as transport or medical care. On the other, they must be attentive to the unintended disasters these systems may bring (Giddens, 1990, p. 112-121). These issues generate scepticism about scientific knowledge, progress, and therefore in long-term planning. Accordingly, the demands society requests of planning and design are beyond those disciplines. In principle, every urban action cannot be fully planned in advance, comprehensive long-term planning is hypothetically impossible. Flexibility is an alternative to uncertainty. With flexible processes actors are able to react during the implementing steps of a plan. In this scenario the components of a given strategy can be modified and actualised in accordance with contextual necessities. From individualisation to co-production ‘(Neo-institutional economics) . . . preserves “methodological individualism” (appropriated to any bottom-up perspective) but respects the idea that individuals make decisions solely according to self-interested (maximising) calculations, and instead models individuals as rule followers subjected to different types of normative and institutional constrains that apply collectively.’ (De Landa, 2000, p. 19). In the search for progress, modern rationality questions and replaces traditional certainties at a rapid pace. This makes rational knowledge valid until ‘further notice’, and judgement temporal and indeterminate. As a result, reliance on large social institutions diminishes, individualisation emerges, and traditional values fade.14


The process of individualisation comes with a new institutionalisation, however. In one way new institutions, such as fashion and entertainment, are introduced as ‘liberating’ from previous ones, such as religion or family. In another way these institutions become new parameters of dependence, making individual realisation the clash between apparent freedom of choice and institutionalised alternatives. The question in this dichotomy is: to what extent do individuals contribute to the formation of the system, and what is the extent that the system shape individual life?15 In the context of urban development, the paradox lies in the fact that while the past decades have witnessed the largest ever amount of metropolisation, there has been less control of urbanisation. Cities grow and qualities change without apparent organisation. Consequently, experts look for comprehensive explanations to understand exactly what is happening and why, while users invent ways to overcome difficulties and enhance particular conditions. Separately, each approach can produce little of value. Co-production tackles individualisation. With co-production intervention processes are carried out as the result of simultaneous sources and levels of expertise. From this perspective, knowledge operates on different scales and timeframes, allowing negotiations, interactions, and feedback among actors. The aggregation of varied forms of knowledge manages to apply a continuous ‘pre’, ‘during’, and ‘post’ self-evaluation process, which, when brought to bear on the development of the built environment, can generate a natural or self-regulating outcome. From transformation of social values to progressive valuation ‘The end of tradition doesn’t mean tradition disappears, but that it changes its form both in personal life and in larger scale institutional systems. It means that we live our lives less and less as fate.’16 Modern society produces systems of belief based on knowledge about potential risks and safety. But unintended consequences, and the fact that knowledge may be manipulated by special interests casts doubt on the idea that more knowledge assumes better control.17 To respond to uncontrolled threats, minimum standards and responsibilities are laid down in the form of regulations. Nevertheless, large chains of complex social and political interrelations make everybody and therefore, nobody responsible. As information flows back and forth, standards are violated and re-evaluated. They become managed through alarms such as economic collapse, political demands, and legal complaints. Valuation is thus shaped and reorganised as knowledge streams.18 To establish limits and regulations is necessary to control the quality of urban transformation. But how to weigh those limits and when to think about applying them belong to the realm of conciliation, possibility, and exploration. If overall values are (constantly) violated, then learning processes are necessary.


Progressive valuation processes tackle the continuous transformation of social values. From this perspective modelling, scenario-based research, and considering its respective social and urban implications generate processes of continuing evaluation that lead to managing fixed and variable components. The fixed components are supposed to control development, while the variable ones offer the possibility of individual customisation.

PLANNING AND EMERGENCE TO MEET CONTEMPORARY DEMANDS Contemporary social conditions require transformation in processes that manage flexibility, co-production, and progressive evaluation practices. Approaches utilising planned forces are hardly flexible because they require defined aims and specifications for the actions to be performed to achieve such aims. Under these conditions, central control and agreement about all aspects and participants in the process are necessary. Planning forces cannot be completely co-productive, as collective participation and ‘overall aims’ are reduced when there are multiple participants and an increased need for rapid change. Finally, as aims and procedural steps require collective concord, planning forces tend to generate collective values. Approaches that deploy emerging forces, where control is at the level of the individual, have a high level of flexibility and individual freedom. Co-production is only present sporadically as associations and coalitions occur to enhance self-achievement. Finally, because of the emphasis on individual power, emerging forces operate with low collective valuation. When planned and emerging forces are implemented in the realms of the urban field, individuals, forces, spatial constraints or advantages, rapid processes of transformation and valuation blend in constant actualisation. On the one hand, the forces of planning and emergence are clearly opposed, while on the other, there is an ambiguity in their implementation. In the course of implementation, planning forces encounter bounded rationalities and feedback.19 This alters notions of direction and control that affect the evolution of the strategy and consequently, the outcome of the transformation. Emerging forces, traditionally considered to offer freedom for individual power, face collective restraints when market and operational limits are imposed. Perhaps the two approaches are closer than imagined, and urban transformation should focus on open procedural frameworks that allow their co-presence while preparing future actualisations. Nonetheless, contemporary social demands challenge the notions of homogeneity, scale,


distance, and connectivity. These challenges, which augment uncertainties that require flexible, co-productive, and constant evaluation, call for deeper understanding of the forces and procedures behind urban transformation. Part of the challenge centres on operating in a natural, evolutionary atmosphere to convert uncertainties into productive opportunities. This is the basis for a difference-driven productivity in which (collective) limits and regulations are imparted through negotiations resulting from individual heterogeneity. The other part of the challenge centres on the inclusion of transformation within the projection process. This means it is essential to consider possible events and changes in order to improve the aims and means for implementation.

NOTES 1

Virilio has introduced the term transmission revolution in Virilio, P. Open Sky. London, Verso. 1997. In the chapter The

Third Interval, he presents the effects of this revolution affecting the way we perceive space and time by shifting from the urbanisation of real-space to the urbanisation of real-time. 2

The notion of society’s self-confrontation is introduced with the concept of reflexive modernity proposed by Beck, Gid-

dens and Lash. See Beck, U. Risk Society; Towards a New Modernity. London, Sage 1993 3

See for instance Bruton, M. J. The Spirit and Purpose of Planning. London, Hutchinson. 1974 and Ascher, F. “L’urbanisme

face à la nouvelle révolution urbaine” (Town Planning in the Wake of the New Urban Revolution) in Michaud Yves (dir.), Qu’est-ce que le social, Université de tous les savoirs, Éditions Odile Jacob, 2000 4

See Boyer, C. 2003. Playing with information in the XXI Century. (Forthcoming) The Future of the City. Ed. Routledge. She

utilises the term “hidden logic” stating, “the researcher can no longer focus on planned results but instead consider the unintended collective consequences of a multitude of human decisions”. 5

See Koolhaas, R & Mau, B. S, M, L, XL. The Monacelli Press, 1998. The book, which presents the work of one of the most

relevant practices of contemporary architecture, urban design and planning worldwide, refers to the unmanageable and sometimes irrelevant position of architects and planners within the intervention process. Refer specially to the written papers “Introduction”, Pg. xix; “What Ever Happened to Urbanism”, Pg. 959-971 and “The Generic City”, Pg. 1238-1264. 6

Wagensberg, J. Ideas Sobre la Complejidad del Mundo (Ideas on the World’s Complexity). Barcelona, Tusquets Editors

1985. Chapter 2. The essence of change. See also Stengers, I and Prigogine, I. Order out of Chaos, Man’s New Dialogue with Nature. New York, Bantam Books, 1984. Chapter 6. Order through fluctuations. 7

Ibid. Chapter 13. The Formation of plans. Pg. 177-194.

8

See Chadwick, G. A Systems View of Planning. Oxford, Pergamon Press. 1971. Chapter 2. What is planning? Chapter 4.

Planning as a conceptual system. 9

Johnson, S. Op. Cit. Pg. 20-23. Johnson refers to understanding emergent phenomena and considering emergence within

an interdisciplinary approach as the corresponding first two phases of the science. 10

See for instance Boeri’s description of the European territory according to what he calls the zenith vision: “…detached

houses, hangars, shopping centres, small flats, parking garages, office buildings; a reduced range of manufactured objects


that one comes across everywhere often thrown together incongruously…” Boeri, E. Eclectic Atlases, Four Possible Ways of Seeing the city. Daidalos 69/70, 19998/99. 11

See for example Ascher notions of the metapolis ” as the set of spaces whose inhabitants socio-economic activities are

wholly or partially integrated to the everyday life, interaction and functioning”. Ascher, F. Metapolis. Acerca do Futuro da Ciudades. Translation Alvaro Dominguez. Portugal, Celta Editora, 1998. And Zaera’s vision of the city as the material organization of advanced capitalism “the city is built around lines of displacement and connection, operating in a topological rather than a geometrical mode”. Zaera, A. (1994) Order Out of Chaos, The Material Organisation of Advanced Capitalism. The Periphery, Architectural Design Profile 108. London VCH Publishers UK. 1994 Vol. 64 N3/4. 12

A field refers to a portion of space characterised with a defined property. Field theories search for fundamental mecha-

nisms of interaction, behaviour and the spreading of forces and energies among elements in space and time. See Cao, T. Conceptual Developments of 20th Century Field Theories. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 1997. See chapters 1. Introduction and 2. The rise of classical field theory. Pg. 1-40. 13

Lefebvre, Op. Cit. Pg. 12

14

Giddens, A. Op. Cit Pg. 39-40, 48-50

15

Beck, U. Op. Cit. Pg. 127-137

16

Giddens, A. The Runaway World Debate Lecture Series at the London School of Economics. Published on http://www.lse.

ac.uk/Giddens/RWDlectures.html 17

Giddens, A. Op. Cit. Pg. 44

18

Beck, U. Op. Cit. Pg. 32, 77

19

See Forester, J. Planning in the face of Power. Berkeley, University of California Press. 1989. Forester refers to H. Simon

notions on Bounded Rationality to describe planners’ milieu as one ‘bounded’ by conditions characterised by ambiguous problems, incomplete information, limited skills, insufficient time and inadequate resources. Se Part Two. Planning in The Face of Power and The Politics of Muddling Through. Pg. 27-64. Simon also talks about (social) planning as an evolving artefact in which goals are constantly changing, resources are limiting, clients are not well defined and progress cannot be determined; (social) adaptation is consequently altered by the environment becoming evolutionary. See Simon, H. The Sciences of the Artificial. Cambridge, MIT Press. Pg. 139-167

LITERATURE • Allen, Stan. (1997). ‘From object to field.’ In AD Profile N, p. 127. Maggie Toy (ed.). • Ascher, F. (2000). ‘L’urbanisme face à la nouvelle révolution urbaine’ (Town Planning in the Wake of the New Urban Revolution). In Michaud Yves (dir.), Qu’est-ce que le social, Université de tous les savoirs, Éditions Odile Jacob. • Ascher, F. (1998). Metapolis. Acerca do Futuro da Ciudades. Translation, Alvaro Dominguez. Celta Editora, Portugal. • Beck, U. (1993). Risk Society; Towards a New Modernity. Sage, London. • Berkel, B. (1994). Mobile Forces- Kristin Feireiss (ed.). Ernst & Sohn, Berlin. • Boeri, E. (19998/99). Eclectic Atlases, Four Possible Ways of Seeing the City. Daidalos 69/70. • Boyer, C. (2003). Playing with Information in the XXI Century. Forthcoming. In The Future of the City. Ed. Routledge. • Bruton, M. J. (1974). The Spirit and Purpose of Planning. Hutchinson, London. • Cao, T. (1997). Conceptual Developments of 20th-Century Field Theories. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.


• Chadwick, G. (1971). A Systems View of Planning. Pergamon Press, Oxford. • De Landa, M. (2000). A Thousand Years of Non-linear History. Swerve Editions, New York. • Forester, J. (1989). Planning in the Face of Power. University of California Press, Berkeley. • Giddens, A. (1990). The Consequences of Modernity. Polity, Cambridge. • Hajer, M. and Reijndorp, A. (2001). In Search of New Public Domain. NAI Publishers, Rotterdam. • Holland, J. (1995). Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity. Perseus Books, New York. • Johnson, S. (2001). Emergence: The connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software. Touchstone, New York. • Koolhaas R, et al. (2001). Mutations. Ed. Actar, Barcelona. • Koolhaas, R & Mau, B. (1998). S, M, L, XL. The Monacelli Press. • Kosso, P. (1998). Appearance and Reality. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Physics. Oxford University Press, New York. • Miller, G.A. Galanter, E. and Pribram, K. (1960). Plans and the Structure of Behaviour. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York. • Stengers, I and Prigogine, I. (1984). Order Out of Chaos, Man’s New Dialogue with Nature. Bantam Books, New York. • Virilio, P. (1997.). Open Sky. Verso, London. • Virilio, P. (2003). Unknown Quantity. Thames and Hudson. London. • Wagensberg, J. (1985). Ideas Sobre la Complejidad del Mundo (Ideas on the World’s Complexity). Tusquets Editors, Barcelona.

I R . C . E . P I NZON CORTES

Morphological analysis of the contemporary urban territory: Is it still a relevant approach? Ph.D. research: Morphologies of fragmentation and continuity Chair: Urban Design Promotor: Prof. ir. H.C. Bekkering Communications to: [email protected]

ABSTRACT The tremendous expansion of the urban and the transformation of the city as we have known it into a non-homogeneous and sometimes even discontinuous urban area, have been the main subjects of debate and investigation for several disciplines during the last 50 years. In this debate there is a claim that it is impossible to understand or apprehend any order in this new urban structure. This claim would leave us without any way to approach the subject analytically and even less so with projective intentions. One of the analytical approaches that also tried to be projective is the morphological one. This investigation starts by arguing for the contemporary relevance of the morphological approach. For this purpose it recognises the various consolidated traditions of morphological analysis as well as the emergence of a group of studies on the morphology of urban regions. The consolidated traditions concentrated mainly on studying the historical city. In that sense the investigation describes the possibilities for realising this approach in order to study areas outside the traditional city.

INTRODUCTION The built landscape has experienced considerable transformation during the last half century. In the spatial and physical dimensions, these transformations involve crossing the tra-

96 Ir. C.E. Pinzon Cortes

ditional borders of the city, development of dispersed urban areas, and dispersion of different activities over what had been countryside, in relation to the infrastructure network. For the past fifty years, the discipline of urbanism has been engaged in trying to understand, describe, plan, and design for this urban structure, which exceeded previously understood concepts and borders of the city. This re-definition of the field of action and object of study implies a re-definition of the discipline itself and an evaluation of existing approaches and tools. Current research claims that we do not know how to approach this ‘new’ urban structure and that we need to develop new analytical tools to study it, because the old ones are no longer effective (Chung 2001, Boeri 2000). One of those tools is the morphological urban analysis. This approach, which became very important in the 60s as a reaction to the functionalist practices of modern urbanism, aimed at gaining an awareness of the importance of maintaining and studying the historical centres. It is now considered outdated, however. One reason for this is the fact that these types of studies concentrated mainly on historical centres. Recent studies of urban regions, however, have used morphological tools to analyse areas of dispersed urban expansion (Oswald, Baccini 2003, de Mulder 2002, Boeri 1993, Font 1999). By reviewing and evaluating the traditional morphological approach, together with its contemporary uses, this paper tries to explore the possibilities and potential for applying this type of analysis to the contemporary urban landscape so that it may offer explanations of current organisation and location patterns. To begin with, we maintain that urban morphology studies are still relevant, first on a general level, and then on the level of each of the existing lines of study. We try to pinpoint how each can provide tools to study contemporary urban landscapes. Finally, we propose an approach that combines morphological elements with ideas of connectivity, based on two opposite but complementary conditions: the condition of ‘fragmentation’ confronted by ‘continuity’, defined by all types of infrastructural as well as virtual networks. These two conditions are always present in contemporary urban landscapes and thus they constitute the starting point for analysis.

RELEVANCE OF URBAN MORPHOLOGY STUDIES OVER TIME AND TODAY The character of morphological studies, which sometimes does not fit in the accepted categories, is described by Panerai and Castex in their introduction to ‘Formes Urbaines de l’ilot a la barre’ as: ‘too historic for the theoretician, not enough mathematical to the eyes of the methodological, too empiric for the taste of the historian’ (Castex, Depaule, Panerai 1977). This makes it necessary to explain the relevance of this approach, which has always

Ir. C.E. Pinzon Cortes 97

been questioned. Opponents of the morphological approach see it as either very partial and disconnected from social, political, and economic factors, or they only see its validity in its reference to the social, political, or economic factors that influence its formation. Urban form is then observed uni-directionally, since it can only be explained by external factors. In this research urban form is observed bi-directionally: it refers to a variety of factors and forces that transform it, but it is also a force itself, it has relative autonomy. Because of this bi-lateral relationship, it is also relevant to develop studies having form and space as their starting points . The relative autonomy, or the urban form as a force itself, can be explained through the dialectic relationship between urban form and social, cultural, economic, and political processes. On one hand, the physical dimension reflects all types of processes that influence it, but on the other, the physical dimension is not neutral to these processes; it affects and influences the society that experiences that urban space. This latter influence relates to the resistance to change imposed by the physical and spatial dimensions. It is part of a different time frame of evolution and change imposed by the physicality of the constructed urban reality. Furthermore, in addition to this dialectical relationship, there are elements that belong to the physical and spatial dimensions and can only be observed there. There are elements that belong to ideas, models, and theories in the disciplines of architecture and urban design. Looking at the urban form will allow us to see what the disciplines planned and how it was implemented in the real world. Finally, studying urban morphology is useful for urban design because it involves studying and understanding the repertoire of elements, their logic and organisational structure in urban settlements. Whatever the social, economic, or political conditions, urban reality is constructed of specific elements organised in a specific way. Those elements are part of a limited repertoire that has been developed through the history of the city. Understanding the logical structure of those elements can help us in the future in interventions, evaluation of existing environments, and in re-development and transformation. These elements and their logical structure are part of the field of action; they are the tools for urban designers to transform, design, and affect that space of experience, which is the space where urban life occurs. Morphologically, the investigation of city centres or areas inside traditional cities has been extensively documented and cartographically reconstructed. Observing contemporary urban territory requires the use of adjectives and noun phrases like complex, vague, lack of structure, or lack of definition. This territory has been largely documented as data. And what has been said about the physical dimension is also true on a regional scale, as abstract models or representations on a macro-scale too aggregated to show the variation and diversity


on the intermediate scale. We see the relevance of Lefebvre’s or later social-geographers such as Edward Soja’s ideas- when they call attention to the role of space as ‘less and less neutral, more and more active, both as instrument and as goal, as means and as end’ (Lefebvre, 1991). Or Saskia Sassen (1991) , who perceived that even in an urban system that is highly dependent on telecommunications and virtual relations and networks, there is still a physicality that is relevant and that ‘results in massive tensions and congestions embedded in the spatial structure of large cities today.’ We can also agree with B. Secchi (1993) and M. de Sola Morales (1989) that there is a deep urge to describe and know what Secchi calls the ‘true domain of the ‘new’, which includes the peripheries, or the dispersed city. Through this research, I have come to believe in the necessity of description as an attempt to decipher the physical and spatial logics of an urban or affected territory. The future of dispersed areas cannot be total urbanisation or compactness. Emulating the morphology of traditional compact city centres along the dispersed areas, is no longer a sustainable solution. Today, dispersed urbanisations occupy complete regions, sometimes the size of an entire country like the Netherlands. Is the future of these areas to be a continuous urban extension, a compact country-city? How can we maintain diversity of density, occupation, and forms? To imagine some future scenario (embedded in the unavoidable responsibility that we as designers and planners must project), it is necessary to visualise it, to become aware of what exists, and to describe it in detail. It is the physical and spatial dimensions that lend concrete meaning to abstract words like ‘un-sustainability’. It is also our living in and experience of space and its form that need to be studied and documented.

THE CONTEMPORARY URBAN TERRITORY AND ITS FORM The object of observation is the contemporary urban territory, the urban agglomeration of the post metropolis that includes urban regions with various levels of dispersion and densities, internal voids, rural areas affected by urban activities, and networks that are comprised of a continuous, indefinable, and unlimited extension. The main characteristics of this contemporary urban territory are described by F. Ascher (2000) when he writes of the Metapolis, which consists of: ‘distended, discontinuous, heterogeneous and multi-polar urban territories; there is no longer a clear boundary between the city and the countryside. New kinds of places and centres have appeared in the peripheries: commercial centres, urban research centres, logistic platforms (places where almost all facilities are available); public and private spaces have been reconstituted at all levels, from the inside of the house which opens to the outside world through new communication technologies, to the external spaces which are conspicuous by their exclusive logic.’


Most of these urban agglomerations are combinations or mutations of existing urban forms in a different spatial location and hierarchical organisation. For these various existing urban forms, morphological studies have focused on what can be called traditional cities. We know a great deal about the spatial and physical configuration of medieval centres and of XIXth century expansions, but not so much about the formal logic of the modern grand ensembles, the business or industrial districts, or their transformations over the past 50 years. The dimensions of this urban expansion (as is true of dispersed extensions) has become extreme in the second half of the XXth century. In the Netherlands, ‘in 1986, the Stichting Wonen estimated that 70 percent of the built environment in Holland dates from after World War II’ (Loostma, 1999). What characterises this era is a condition of dispersion in the spatial setting of the various elements and their relation to the rest of the urban fabric. Dispersion is not a new phenomenon: it is discussed in several studies of the Belgian countryside and Belgian urban dispersion (Grosjean, B. 2004, Trisciuogli M. 2003). What is new is that those of us working in the disciplines of urbanism and architecture have not looked at it before. And it has been discussed increasingly over the past 30 years. Yet it is only recently that it has been observed and studied, precisely because it is now that dispersion has taken on an extreme dimension, and it has eliminated from the city essential characteristics that were inherent to its definition; it has transformed them in a new spatial organisation. What has changed in relation to what is called here the ‘traditional city’ is that the void, or the ‘open’, has become a structuring element rather than the built volume. That is the sense in which dispersion is understood here: although on different scales, it is always in a formal and spatial sense. On the scale of urban fabrics, it refers to the relationships between building and parcel and building and open space. Here, there is a new type of spatiality where building volumes do not confine space as streets and squares. It deals with dispersed occupations on the scale of the parcel and the island. The second type of dispersion is observable on the regional scale; it relates to the form of urban growth that is no longer contiguous with earlier developments, but spreads out in the territory in the form of fragments, neither continuous nor contiguous to the already developed urban areas. The first type of dispersion is a fact in the modern ‘grand ensembles’, where Le Corbusier’s claim against the ‘corridor street’ that ‘should be tolerated no longer’ (Le Corbusier 1925) leads to buildings that are placed in a space that flows around and sometimes even under them. Buildings are then dispersed in a continuous open field. The change from horizontality to verticality in the buildings of these modern grand ensembles contributes to this condition of dispersion at the level of the ground plan. Because the relationship between the footprints of the buildings and the space where they stand is no longer dominated by the built mass, but by the open space, it lacks structure, or at least its structure cannot be read in the same way as in the city where space is confined by volumes in the form of streets,


squares, and parks. This is also true for residential suburbia, where dispersion also leads to open space being the dominant or structuring element rather than the built space, but in this case it also refers to the low density of occupation for a large area. And it is also true for the non-residential complexes along infrastructure networks, where dispersion relates to distance and lack of contiguity to traditional centres. Here we can also observe the second type of dispersion, the fragments of urban development such as industrial or business complexes spread out in the territory in relation to the infrastructure networks. In both cases we can see the structuring role assumed by the infrastructure network in these areas, or even by other types of less visible networks that create a relative continuity in the urban.

THE DIFFERENT TRADITIONS OF URBAN MORPHOLOGICAL STUDIES AND THEIR APPLICATION TO THE CONTEMPORARY URBAN LANDSCAPE It is impossible to write about urban morphology in the context of the disciplines of architecture and urban design without referring to specific schools that have engaged in these types of studies. A.V. Moudon (1994, 1997) refers to three main schools in the study of urban morphology, or as she calls it, ‘typomorphology’. These three schools are the Italian, French, and British. I discuss these schools below, but from a very specific point of view (see Moudon for a very good review of the different schools, their basic expositions, similarities, and differences),. We will examine these schools to see how they approach certain types of urban areas and which of their assumptions are appropriate and useful for studying recent or dispersed urban developments, and their relation to design practices. Because they are important contributions to the study of recent urban developments, we will also include work beyond the three main schools, such as the American, Dutch, and studies of urban regions. Italian School The Italian school was the first, and studies of other contexts were influenced by their pioneering work, especially the studies by Muratori in Venice and Rome, Cervelatti and Scannavini in Bologna, Caniggia in Como, and the writings and design projects of a generation of Italian architects, with Rossi and Aymonino in the lead. These would spread the discussion internationally. The Italians were the first to develop detailed typo-morphological studies. These were framed as a reaction to the predicaments and forms of intervention of modernism, which, based on intervention on the scale of the master plan (a ‘tabula rasa’), opposed the logic of the way the city had been constructed over time and the traditions of previous periods. According to Muratori, ‘Modernism discarded the inherent knowledge of construction, seen as a system, and reduced architecture and urban design to simple technical matters’ (Marzot, 2002). He advocated the need to study the way the city and architecture had


been constructed through time, on all different levels (scales), in order to ‘find the laws of

Figure 1:

continuity within a transformation process’ (Marzot, 2002). Caniggia developed this idea fur-

The study of

ther in the ‘Typological Process’, which refers to a degree of continuity in that each period

Muratori for Venice is one of

in history inherits the building types and form of previous ones, but it transforms and adapts

the most known

them in contemporary ways. In this sense is important to note how, even though Muratori

and influential

and Caniggia spoke about different scales of the built environment, their observations concentrate on the building type, which is considered the basis for the formation of the urban tissue and of the city.

of the Italian School. Here the Quartiere di S. Canciano-S. Maria Nova in the VII

If we were to apply this approach to recent developments, we should remember that the

century and in the actual situation.

tradition of building construction and the break with modernism led most of these typo-

From: Muratori,

morphological studies to concentrate on historical centres of cities; they did not study

1960.

the form of the modern city. This has a special meaning for the Italian context, where, as I. Samuels (1990) explains: the weak planning system created specific conditions that impeded development of modern urbanism more than in other European countries. It also led to preservation of large areas of the historical city to a considerably greater degree than in other European contexts. Today there seems to be a contradiction for using this approach to study post-war developments. On one hand, as Tafuri (1980) explains: ‘the problem with


assessing contemporary architecture historically comes from its initial choice: presenting itself as a radically anti-historical phenomenon.’ On the other hand, time has passed, and we could say that these areas have also experienced processes of historical transformation and adaptation, and thus it should be possible to follow these transformations and a tradition of city building that may have overlapped with this pure, imposed idea. In general, what we can take from this approach is the way urban evolution generates types inherent in its contemporary conditions: today, for example, we have mobility nodes, business complexes, and shopping malls. But we can, and should, look back at their historical evolution and the origins of the different formations that are typical of contemporary urban territory, because they may not be totally new. Finally, for design practice, Muratori attempted ‘to build a theory of design based on traditional processes of city building’ (Moudon, 1994). He called his studies of Venice and Rome ‘Operative Histories’; they were supposed to derive elements operative for design. This is similar to the ‘operative criticism’ described theoretically by Tafuri (1980): ‘What is normally meant by operative criticism is an analysis of architecture that, instead of a abstract survey, has as its objective the planning of a precise poetical tendency, anticipated in its structures and derived from historical analyses programmatically distorted and finalised.’ The statements by Muratori and his followers maintain much of their validity and reinforce the idea of the need for ‘describing’ the contemporary urban condition. In a projective discipline such as architecture and urban design, knowledge of the transformations that have produced current conditions is necessary to plan and design a future situation. It also constitutes a link between the practices of analysis (research) and design. French School The adherents of this group formed around the Versailles School (LADHRAUS), but expanded to various areas in France, and includes a considerable group of scholars from several disciplines such as architecture, urbanism, sociology, history, and geography. As J.L. Cohen (1998) explains in The Italophiles at Work, the Italian discussion entered the French context, and with it, the idea of the relevance of historical typo-morphological studies. But it was influenced more by Rossi and Aymonino than Caniggia (Darin, 1998). Unlike the Italians, who concentrated on approaching it from an architectural perspective, morphological studies in France involved various disciplines. The idea of a relative autonomy of the urban form was further developed, and was supported by readings from Lefebvre (1970) and his appeal to ‘aborder le phénomène urbain par les propriétés formelles de l’espace’. The principal claim was that it was a new way to study the city, as architecture, and the urban project was to be the mechanism of intervention and for understanding both the city as architecture and architecture in relation to the city.


What is important for research about these studies is that while the Italians identify a ‘before’ and ‘after’, (albeit there was a stronger concentration on studying the ‘before’ period) the ideas of modernism in the city clearly distinguish between those types that were used in the historical city and those imposed by modernism. The French trace the evolution of different models and theories, and thus they do not distinguish between before and after. Instead, they accept that there are several ideas or ways to construct a city, which may collide, contrast, and evolve through history. They consider the evolution of an idea in patterns, types, and forms, and view modernism as being along one of the lines of this evolution.

Figure 2: From the French studies, an image of different models and variations in the central area of the Bastides. From Divorne et al. 1983.


For modernism and the new spatiality it represents, which in some cases cannot be understood by traditional morphological analysis, the study by Panerai, Castex, and Depaule on ‘l’agonie d’une organisation spatiale déterminée: l’îlot’ (Castex et al 1977) describes the evolution of the essential element of the city of the XIXth century: the island. It shows how this model transforms in modern urbanism to the vertical island, where it looses any direct relationship to the street. New elements must be incorporated in the study of the built-open space relationship, such as, for example, elements of townscape analysis. The French School incorporates townscapes to complement formal observations with the user’s or inhabitant’s perceptions. Incorporating visual and perceptive elements in pure morphological analysis in the study of the contemporary urban territory can be productive because it can incorporate important elements that are not recorded in traditional morphological analysis. One of these elements, discussed in Analyse Urbaine (Panerai et al, 1999), is mobility. Another, studied by Venturi for Las Vegas (1977), is the importance of signs or visual, non-architectonic elements in current spatial perceptions. Signs have taken on some of the roles that architecture played in the traditional city in the definition of space, and if they are linked to formal studies, they can help reveal spatial structures in today’s urban reality. Compared to the Italian studies, which concentrated on the building type, the French studies pay more attention to the study, classification, and comparison of different types of urban patterns (tissu urbain). The French studies cover various periods of urban development, including recent ones. This is visible in the new edition of Analyse Urbaine (Panerai et al, 1999), where the metropolitan scale, infrastructure networks, and studies of the periphery are included; and in Project Urbain (Manguin, Panerai 1999), where different types of tissues, traces, densities, and islands are studied and compared. Along with a concern for studying the contemporary metropolis, there is a call for re-constructing a lost continuity in the urban tissue. Finally, in their design practice, the French are interested in developing analyses of existing urban forms and areas to confront the constructed reality with the planned and designed, and with this, the ideas and theories behind specific types and forms of urban developments. They develop a type of ‘design criticism’ ‘to assess the impact of past design theories on city building’ (Moudon 1997), or as expressed in Analyse Urbain, ‘to study the idea of the elaboration and transmission of the architectural models.’ The various ideas of the city that repeatedly return or are re-interpreted produce different types of urban reality with different spatial characteristics. By studying this confrontation, the French aim to assess the realisations of various theories as well as the types of urban form and patterns, and thus to identify their characteristic elements to re-develop in new interventions.


British School The last tradition, which had its origins in the field of geography, harkens back to the German morphogenetic tradition that influenced M.R.G. Conzen. He developed a tradition of morphological urban studies for the British context beginning in the 1930s - Conzen did this by using several town plan analyses, the most important of which was for the city of Alnwick. These studies examined what Conzen called the ‘townscape’, which corresponds to a combination of the town plan, building forms, and land use. The town plan contains ‘streets and their arrangements in a street system, plots and their aggregation in street blocks, and buildings, or more precisely their block-plans’ (Conzen 1960). He defines different ‘morphological periods’ by studying the historical development of the city. It is possible to do this because ‘each period leaves its distinctive material residues in the landscape’ (Conzen 1960). Examining theconfigurations of the various elements in the town plan for different periods leads Conzen to define ‘plan units’, as a ‘unique combination of types of street patterns, buildings and lot configurations’ (Moudon 1994). Each plan unit is described, characterised, and precisely located, limited, and defined on the map.

Figure 3: From the wellknown study of Alnwik, a map showing the different fringe belts identified by Conzen in the urban evolution. (Conzen, 1960)

If this approach were to be used to study recent urban developments, the ‘morphological periods’ of Conzen could be traced in any urban development to the present. Nevertheless, most of this school’s analyses have concentrated on the city before the XXth century, espe-


cially on the analysis of medieval centres. The plan units can be very helpful for structural studies of the contemporary urban landscape, since the definition of plan units in the various morphological periods also includes areas that are not completely urban, or that are not totally homogeneous. The plan units cover the entire extension of an area, including agricultural or functions other than the residential. In this instance we refer to examples from the Alnwick study, such as the medieval suburbium, a pre-urban settlement outside the walls, or the ‘fringe belts’. Fringe belts are areas contiguous to residential expansion that begin by accommodating different functions, usually functions that require larger surfaces or are incompatible with the residential, such as industrial districts, hospitals, universities, monasteries, etc. These areas may become limits to urbanisation in a given period, but are at some point incorporated in the city, although they still maintain a particular pattern in relation to the surrounding residential patterns. Perhaps if we reflect on the descriptive terms and adjectives that have been assigned to the contemporary urban landscape, such as ‘fragmentation’ or ‘lack of structure’, the idea of the plan units (where plan units are also the fringe belts, agricultural land, or pre-urban developments) may suggest a way to tackle that fragmentation and decipher its logic: each plan unit can be seen as one of the fragments of a puzzle. This approach can also reinforce the idea that most types of urban developments that extensively cover the contemporary urban territory are not totally new. They are new ways to group and organise existing types, or expansions, into critical masses or critical dimensions. An examination of the evolution of each plan unit enables us to see its origin, or a comparison of plan units and their evolution may help us to see previous stages of areas that have already been consolidated, in actual dispersed areas, for example. Studies in other contexts: North America, The Netherlands Finally, it is important to mention some other morphological studies that, while they are related to the above schools, also make important contributions that are useful for the study of recent urban developments. The first important group of studies has its origin in the North American context. There, the spatial and formal characteristics of American urban expansions, where the large proportions of the urban landscape include extensive sprawl, have led to an emphasis on studying suburban developments. Since not all suburban developments are the same, various historic, geographic, and government contexts define different formal configurations, as can be observed in the comparative studies of M. Southworth (1993). As affirmed by A. Vernez Moudon (1998), studying contexts of suburban America through morphological analysis has been productive, informative, and useful for planners as well as actors and users, since the processes observed in historic towns are also present in such contexts. These studies of North American suburbia are illustrative for the study of dispersed urban areas in other contexts. The different scales of study: community, neigh-


bourhood, street network, blocks, streets, and intersections, as well as the individual lot and house, are very systematically studied in various studies. These studies try to quantify each of the elements in relation to the different scales, for example, by counting intersections or comparing sizes of blocks or lengths of streets to demonstrate the relevance of urban form for generating liveable urban areas. Another relevant approach has been developed in the Dutch context. It incorporates aspects that have not been addressed by other schools in the study of urban morphology that are relevant for recent urban developments. Historically, the discussions in the Dutch context are contemporary to the discussions in the rest of Europe, and they were influenced by the Italian Tendenza. The Dutch did not develop detailed typo-morphological studies, but used their message to approach design. For example, Panerai and Manguin (1999) quote Van Eyck’s project for the Jordaan in Amsterdam and Waterstraat-Bitterstraat in Zwolle as presenting characteristics of the ‘Urban Project’ because of their relationship to the existing fabric, pattern, parcel structure, and the composition of open spaces and built types. Thus, the elements that are important in the urban morphological studies from the Dutch context are not so much related to typology or classification but to an understanding of the specific spatial characteristics of a site; and they represent these characteristics with the help of abstract drawings and maps. The spatial structure of an urban area that is uncovered and represented in the Dutch context involves more than purely morphological aspects; it involves elements from townscape or perception, as well as picturesque analysis to help discover the

Figure 4: Comparative analysis of neighborhood street patterns in the San Francisco bay area. From: Southworth and Owens, 1993.


structure of an urban area in spatial terms. It deals with the representation of paths or main connection routes, combined with primary elements or monuments, as important elements in the configuration of such a structure. The Dutch studies also emphasise the identification of patterns based on studying the actual ground plan as well as from a historical perspective, but do not develop a classification system from this identification. Recognition of patterns defines homogeneous areas that share the same historical and formal configurations and that can then be decomposed geometrically and hierarchically to understand their structure. But when using morphological tools to study the modern city, they encounter difficulties. For example, in Louwe’s and van der Hoeven’s study of Amsterdam, they define different periods of evolution. The last period is the AUP plan by Van Eesteren, specifically, the Westelijke Tuinsteden. Here they found that ‘in the spatial dimension there is also not any compositional hierarchy between the different elements of the plan. The urban plan accepts various positions in the architectural elaboration. There is no linking element or structure through the whole plan, and the architecture cannot take that role’ (Hoeven, Louwe, 1995). Because of this, the type of abstractions that they used to analyse the previous periods was not suitable to study this type of city. This study shows that there is a need for re-developing or adjusting the morphological approach so that it can be used fruitfully for recent urban developments.

Figure 5: On the left, the different layers identified in the Urban structure of Rotterdam by F. Palmboom: the traffic machine, the pattern of streets, and the water structure of river and dikes. (Palmboom, 1990) On the right, reduction drawing of the urban structure of Copenhagen based in the map of around 1890 from the study of Geurtsen and Bos (1981).


Also relevant for the study of recent developments is Dutch observations of the landscape as objects of morphological research. The attention paid to the landscape or the open area between cities can be explained by the specific characteristics of the Dutch context. Landscape is the object of study because the landscape itself is a construction. The structure of the water system defines units of intervention and transformation for the territory and constitutes a grid that structures it. In addition, the Dutch system of cities is not mononuclear, but is made up of small nuclei that are interconnected. The landscape between these urban nuclei is observed as the counterpart of the system of cities and as an integral part of the total system. The studies of the landscape anticipate the process of expansion of cities by observing it as the area of future expansion, as well as the complement to the system of constructed urban areas. The landscape is the underlying layer of urban structures: the existing ones and those that are newly planned. Our last point with regard to the Dutch analysis is its separation in layers. Dissection in different layers allows an understanding of the different structures that combine in an urban area and sometimes collide. As in the study of Rotterdam by F. Palmboom (1990), where he shows how the fragmented structure of the city of Rotterdam is the product of a combination of different types of logic: the water structure, the parcels, and network of streets, and the ‘traffic machine’. If consideration is given to an urban extension beyond the limits of the traditional city, as is the case in this research, seeing the landscape as a linking element among areas of different densities and types of occupation, and dissecting it in several layers can be helpful tools for examining all the diversity of urban occupations and their organising logic. Studies in the form of the contemporary urban landscape As in the Dutch instance, landscape has become an object of study in analyses of urban areas. On a general level, the emergence of contemporary landscape studies relates to the disappearance of traditional city limits, the emergence of phenomena like dispersion, and the involvement of previously rural areas in urban or suburban dynamics. As has been explained above, in the contemporary urban territory, the void or the un-built becomes the structuring element, and thus it should also be studied as one of the components – as important as the built one. In the next paragraph we will briefly describe a group of studies that include the open areas as regional structures that involve various urban nuclei and infrastructures. One of the first problems in studying the form of the contemporary urban landscape is the impossibility of recognising the whole, including the borders or limits to urban regions. For Muratori, looking at the whole of Venice allows him to study its historical and spatial identity, and to define areas for further detailed studies. When the idea of this whole becomes non-apprehensible – for example, as is the case with the ‘blue banana: an urban corridor that stretches from Manchester, via London, the Benelux, the Ruhr area, the Rhine and Main Rivers, over Switzerland, all the way down to the Milan-Turin agglomeration’ (GUST,


1999), then selecting the scale to begin with becomes a problem, for it has become impossible to apprehend the whole, to define limits, and to represent them. There have, however, been several important attempts to map, represent, and visualise the dimension and form of these regional urban extensions, including studies by B. Secchi, which later influenced and organised studies in morphology or morphogenesis in various regions of Europe, and the study by Boeri, Lanzani, and Marini of the Milan region (1993). These studies are important because they have put aside the traditional city, exploring the complexity of what had been developed in the previous rural territories and along infrastructural networks, using a morphological approach to discover the logic that hides behind and organises dispersed urban occupations and urban regions. For example, the study of Milan identifies various systems with specific types of organising logic, densities, and characters. Here the compact nuclei are only one of the systems; they need to be complemented by the others. The different systems are not separate, but overlap, and together compose the greater Milan region. These studies also involve development of special representation techniques, sometimes combined with photographic records, to discover the logic of these contemporary urban agglomerations. Other studies outside the Italian context share this orientation. In the Spanish context, where a tradition of urban analysis also developed at the same time as the French one, spatial and formal studies of urban regions have recently come to the fore. Among the most important are the study by A. Font for the Region of Barcelona (1999) and the ‘Laboratorio de Urbanismo’ in the Cartography for the Catalan Territory (1979). In Belgium some studies have dealt with the particular dispersed urban landscape such as the Zuidelijk-West-Vlaanderen by De Meulder (2002).

CONCLUSION Even though researchers engaged in morphological studies have always had an uphill struggle to demonstrate the relevance of their work, this approach is gradually beginning to be recognised. In their bibliography that covers the last 60 years of morphological studies, Panerai and Lange (2001) point to the scope and number of morphological studies, as well as the level of internationalisation, which have made the discipline come into its own. But as I have shown, most of the studies concentrated on the historical centres, which has led many to reject the relevance of the morphological approach for understanding contemporary urban regions. Fortunately, some studies have attempted to do just this, and even if they do not go far enough, they do constitute a first step. It is clear that there has been a change in the attitude towards morphological studies from the 60s. In essence, the justification for studying urban form is still the same: that there is


Figure 6: In this strip along the Randstad we observe how the lines of infrastructure networks give coherence to what otherwise would seem as a collection of fragments spread within open spaces.

a determinism of space and form, that urban form is not neutral in the urban experience, but is an active force. Moreover, because such forms change at varying tempos, the urban experience maintains certain traditions that can be useful for future interventions. At the earlier apogee of the morphological approach modernism was dominant, representing a definite break from the way cities had historically been constructed. For this reason it was very important to study the historical city, and most of the studies concentrated on this aspect. Today, the situation has changed. Modernist developments have become part of that history, including large extensions. With the passage of time, they are being re-evaluated. Current developments in morphological studies must consider the lack of awareness, and even ignorance, of what has occurred physically in the territory. In the stress on economic, political, and social aspects of the emerging metropolis or megalopolis, the form and space of those large urban agglomerations was often forgotten. The speed and dimension of change in urban areas may cause us to lose awareness of the physical characteristics and their implications. Before we can intervene, we must be able to describe, visualise, and analyse the developments. It is still relevant to observe the physical and spatial dimensions, even in a time of virtual and telecommunications networks. Such networks have major implications for the physical environment, and people still inhabit physical space. A city that may claim to have disappeared and become virtual still has a physicality that must be taken into account, especially in a projective discipline such as urbanism or urban design. It is clear that present demands make the development of traditional cities as they existed before unthinkable. Many of the historical centres in Europe that are models for planners and designers are supported by complex peripheral infrastructures of parking areas and connection nodes; these links must also meet the increasing demands of tourism. Idealised historical centres can no longer exist as such, independent of support constructions and infrastructures, underground connections and parking areas. On a regional scale, the problem becomes a matter of size, because the dimension of what is urban today does not include the model of the compact city for the future. A com-


bination of varying densities and forms of occupation has to be the model. To develop fruitful ideas for such a model, we need to study the combination in the current territory. The logic of some of those areas is not the same as the structure of traditional city centres. The void and line as connecting infrastructure become very relevant. Therefore, we need studies that are inter-scalar, that observe the voids and consider them as important as the built structure. In addition, it is important to understand how, within those voids, connecting lines such as infrastructure networks, or even virtual ones, relativise the character of those voids. The various fragments (where void is one) that comprise the contemporary urban territory acquire meaning when the network structure is regarded as an essential element. This would generate a new degree of continuity, which although it may not be possible to observe directly from the topographical map, it gives structure to the contemporary urban territory.

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Sao Paulo, Brazil. View of Avenida Berrini with Avenida Paulista in the background. Photo by Roberto Rocco (2003).

R . R O C C O M SC.

Foreign direct investment and regional growth: The role of FDI in the tertiary sector in triggering development Ph.D.: The influence of FDI and real estate capital in transformation urban structures Chair: Urban Renewal and Management (Globalisation, Urban Form and Governance) Promotor: Prof. dipl. ing. H.J. Rosemann Supervisor: Dr. ir. M.I. Carmona Communications to: [email protected]

ABSTRACT This work investigates the spatial outcomes of increasing inflows of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) to Advanced Producer Services (APS) and other ‘command activities’ in global cities. APS are the most dynamic and sophisticated sector of the economy and are a powerful factor for urban change in an increasingly globalised economy. The increasing sophistication and complexity of business operations, and the associated need for growth and sophistication of APS, has produced a requirement for new spaces where they can operate. Cities have sought to attract these activities by making use of their comparative advantages, stirring rapid changes in urban form and function. APS are one of the ‘main connectors’ between global cities, because they are among the most globally connected activities, and they generate a vast amount of all types of exchanges (people, money, information), bringing about not only spatial transformations, but also social and cultural change. Our research centres on: How does the location of Advanced Producer Services affect urban form and function in Sao Paulo (Brazil) and in Randstad Holland (The Netherlands)? Despite their obvious differences, the choice of the case studies is justified by the opportunity to compare two ‘global regions’ located in very different economic arenas. Our main hypothesis is that APS look for very specific spatial requirements, and thus tend to agglomerate and cluster in ‘new’ specialised centralities, whereas ‘old’

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centralities retain only some of the most traditional producer services and must search for new vocations to remain vital.

THE ‘NEW ECONOMY’ AND THE RISE OF ADVANCED PRODUCER SERVICES Following publication of the Hall’s (1979) and Sassen’s work (1991), there have been many studies on the concept of globalisation and the ‘global city’. For Short (2004), they are the ‘command centres of the global economy, vital hubs in the flows of goods, people and ideas’. The ‘global economy’, from which the concept of the global city derives, is not a new idea. A ‘global economy’ has existed at least since mercantilism and the colonisation of the Americas, Africa, and Asia by European colonial powers. But the late capitalist order (or the ‘new economy’), characterised by flexible and dispersed production, has dramatically changed and increased global exchanges of all sorts. This is epitomised in the increase in trade between countries (figure 1) and the progression of foreign direct investment (FDI) (figure 2). FDI is a measure of foreign ownership of productive assets or active control in company management. The intensification of FDI is the result of the progression of trans-national corporations around the world. This progression was facilitated, and to some extent made possible by the revolution in ICT and the rise and sophistication of Advanced Producer Services. What are producer services? Advanced Producer Services (APS) are the highly skilled, specialised services provided to

Figure 1: There was a considerable acceleration of total world trade in the 1970s, but not all regions benefited from this phenomenon equally. Source: World Bank Database, 2004.

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enterprises, as opposed to services provided to individuals and households. APS are the services responsible for the organisation, management, and security of international corporations. They are also responsible for distributing, advertising, and selling their products. Banking, law, consultancy, accountancy, insurance, and advertising are generally described as the main APS (Taylor, 2002), but the list can also include other high-level services, such as ICT management and consultancy, business management, and even, for some, architectural and planning activities (see below). The development of scientific methods of production (first Taylorism, then Fordism) to organise work and production, and the rise of Business Administration Systems (BAS) accelerated the emergence of research, engineering, management, organisation consultancy, accountancy, legal advice, and other services specifically directed at firms. Later, the demand for producer services grew as firms in all sectors adopted flexible production strategies (a new approach to production also known as Toyotism 1 ), many involved outsourcing of specialised functions. Soon producer service firms themselves began to adopt strategies of flexible production; thus, the concept of ‘flexible production’ was extended beyond its original manufacturing-specific context. Advanced services have been using and producing complex, goal-oriented information at an increasing rate. They have created new modes of communication among production agents, different units of the production process, and service users.

Figure 2: During the 90s, the flows of FDI were very much concentrated in the developed economies of North America, Europe, and Japan. The increase of FDI had a deep impact on developing economies, however. In 2000 China (including Hong Kong) was the largest single recipient of FDI in developing countries (US$102,710,000 ). Brazil was third (US$32,779,000). Among developed countries, the US was the largest recipient (US$300,912,000). The Netherlands was sixth (US$52,453,000). Source: UNCTAD, 2004.

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The principal mechanism underlying their rapid expansion is the accelerated internationalisation of production and trade and the revolution in organisation and management of large manufacturing and service enterprises .The development of a ‘serviced economy’ has stimulated new and diverse interface services that strongly rely on connectivity and flexibility to deliver client-tailored services. In general, researchers agree that producer services are intermediate demand (as opposed to final demand) services that represent inputs in the production process of firms and other organisations across all sectors of economy. The literature shows, however, that the concept of ‘producer services’ has a great deal of ambiguity. For some authors the concept is synonymous with ‘business services’, a set of activities that includes computer services, accounting and bookkeeping services, advertising services, architectural services, engineering and scientific services, legal services, management consulting services, employment and executive search services, and security and investigation services. For others the concept includes business services plus FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) services: services provided by banks and other financial intermediary establishments, credit agencies, security brokers and dealers, investment and holding companies, insurance carriers, insurance and real estate agents, and real estate operators. For others still, the concept includes business and FIRE services plus other services that are regularly used by firms and organisations (e.g., transportation, storage, communication services). The terms ‘advanced producer services’ and ‘high-order services’ are often used to refer to those office-based service activities that have a high degree of information or knowledge

content. Daniels and Moulaert (1991) define Advanced Producer Services as a combination of elementary and very specialised information for complexes of organised information, resulting in procedures for the management and transformation of information, as well as the application of complex information to entrepreneurial functions. Therefore, APS are the services that make intensive use of knowledge and specialised information. This is the way we plan to use the concept throughout this research. Functions performed by TNC headquarters and main branches (including TNCs of the primary and secondary sectors) can also be included in the APS category. Although TNCs are mainly regarded as APS ‘clients’, putting them at the other end of the consumption chain, we assume here that headquarters and main offices perform many of the tasks described above internally, with intensive produc-

tion, use, and dissemination of knowledge. Moreover, TNC’s headquarters and main offices of non-service activities do sometimes provide services to other firms. In this research we regard all APS and TNC headquarters and main offices as places where ‘command functions’ or ‘command activities’ take place for their protagonist role in economic processes today.

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The importance of Advanced Producer Services for regional growth and urban development Producer services have constituted the most rapidly growing sector in the economy of developed countries in the post-World War II period (figure 3). Therefore, they have a high potential to create jobs (figure 4). They are also likely to be exported to other regions and nations and thus to promote regional and national economic growth and integration.

Figure 3: Total FDI inflows in OECD countries per sector. The

Figure 4: Structure of employment in The Netherlands (2003).

tertiary sector has been consolidated as the main target for

As in other developed countries, the Netherlands has a large

foreign direct investment in the past decade. A part of this

concentration of employment in the tertiary sector. Most of this

investment is still in the sector of final household consumption

belongs to commerce and final consumer services, but producer

services, but producer services account for an increasingly

services account for the best paid jobs (Source: CBS, 2003).

larger part of investment in the sector.

Even non-exporting producer services can be indirectly considered basic activities, because they aid local firms across all economic sectors to export and increase their productivity and competitiveness. They are also important for their role in investment, innovation, and technical change. Producer services play a strategic role in production systems, because they facilitate economic change and adaptation. These characteristics have made producer services very interesting to local governments in the last decades, and they have had a major impact on public urban policies, planning, and urban design. The location of APS and the making of a global city Cities have an essential role in the increasing flows of goods, people, and ideas around the world. They can be part of the world system as producers of global goods and services, but they are also marketplaces for global goods and services and hubs in the flows of people, remittances, finance, and ideas.

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Advanced Producer Services tend to concentrate in large metropolitan areas, leaving nonmetropolitan, and even smaller metropolitan areas, relatively disadvantaged. The factors underlying this uneven distribution are: 1. The location of the market (clients) 2. The availability of the skilled human resources that are the main aspect of production for advanced producer services 3. Agglomeration economies that operate to minimise transaction costs, including that of delivering the service to clients. Some of the largest cities in the world are also among the most globalised, and therefore have the highest presence of APS. Not all large cities are global cities, however (Taylor, 1999), and some relatively small cities can have high ‘global connectivity’ and receive a great amount of foreign direct investment because they are hubs of advanced producer services of a very specialised nature, such as, for example, Dubai, Geneva, Luxembourg, Oslo, Zurich, and Amsterdam, all with fewer than one million inhabitants (Short, 2004). Significant Foreign Direct Investment in the form of Advanced Producer Services requires a significant threshold population size, either in the urban agglomeration itself or in its immediate ‘market catch area’ (the area directly served/affected by the city’s economic activities), or, simply put, by the existence of a significant consumer market that can be reached by that city. In short, command functions of the tertiary sector tend to be established in cities that offer a significant consumer market (the ‘buyers’ of advanced producer services). The case of Amsterdam is unusual, because it is part of a ‘global region’ (Randstad Holland) that works as a network city, which is, a poli-centric urban agglomeration with intensive flows of all sorts inside the network. This ‘network city’ is the fifth ‘Euro-agglomeration’ in terms of population size (6.6 million in 2002), and is among the top locations for the establishment of top ‘command functions’ with continental and global reach (figures 5 and 6). Despite early theories that the revolution in information technologies and telecommunications would de-territorialise command functions and diminish the importance of big cities, command activities of the highest level remain concentrated in certain centres of command. Trans-national corporations need nodes of command in different economic arenas, located in cities that offer comparative advantages (e.g. connections to large consumer markets, a highly skilled labour force, and suitable infrastructure to carry out command activities). Moreover, these cities should offer proper living conditions, including cultural and environmental attractions for the individuals who control these operations (the ‘operators’ of services and

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Figure 5: The population of largest ‘Euroagglomerations’. Euroagglomerations are metropolitan regions that encompass various municipalities, but have quite different morphologic configurations, either mono or poli-centric.

Figure 6: Gross regional product (GRP) of largest ‘Euroagglomerations’.

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the emerging ‘creative class’). Furthermore, cities need to have a strong identity to stand out and be recognised as centres of command and desirable recipients of investment. Management, production, and trade activities for a single enterprise can be scattered around many cities and countries, but decision-making activities on a global or regional level remain linked to cities that offer tangible comparative advantages, with strategic nodes of command in the world economy. The global cities thus constitute a complex global network that follows a hierarchy of command. GaWC (Loughborough University, UK) has been trying to map the complexity of intra-urban relations among such centres of command, based on key world-city functions (international accountancy, advertising, banking, and legal services). According to GaWC, at the top of the hierarchy are London, Paris, New York, and Tokyo, which show high performance in all four areas. These are called ‘alpha cities’. They are followed by 10 ‘beta’ cities, with high performance in at least three of the four key world city functions. Below them are the ‘gamma’ cities, which perform well in two of the four areas (figure 7):

Figure 7: The GaWC inventory of world cities. Source: GaWC research bulletin 32. Edited and posted on the Web on September 20, 2000, updated Feb 6, 2002.

This particular study does not take all of Randstad Holland into account, which explains the relatively low rank for Amsterdam in relation to cities such as Moscow or Milan. It tells us that Amsterdam cannot be understood as a single unit for the location of command functions, but should be considered a network city, where intense flows occur throughout the network. In contrast, cities like São Paulo, whose spatial configuration and concentration of

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command activities in one (very large) poli-centric municipality, make it a single unit for the study of command functions. In this way Randstad Holland and São Paulo become ‘comparable’ as urban units where command functions choose to locate to control the productive process of much larger markets. While cities can be classified as global and even ranked according to their importance in a hierarchy of command centres, less has been said about the internal spatial outcomes of economies in rapid transformation, the increase of direct foreign investment, and the location of command activities within the cities. Sassen (1991,1997), as well as many other authors, account for the increasing social duality of global cities, but the configuration of urban spatial features that dialectically produce and are produced by globalisation ought to be further investigated. Are the spatial outcomes of globalisation essentially different in global cities in developed countries from those in developing countries?Marcuse perceived that the new spatial patterns created by the increase of FDI and other flows are built on existing spatial patterns and are as much extensions of old patterns as they are completely new ones. Segregation and ghettoisation aren’t new, nor is the tendency of the leading dynamic sectors of economy to concentrate in new spaces (or ‘new centralities’), ‘leaving behind old centralities’. According to Marcuse (1997: 312), ‘the conception that if a city is “global”, then all of it is global (as well) is wrong.’ Marcuse’s hypothesis is that since command activities of the tertiary sector amount to a very small fraction of all employment in any city, including the most global ones, their impact on spatial patterns is only one of a great variety of impacts, which are all moulded by the pre-existing fabric of the city. Our hypothesis is that there may be similarities in structural and formal outcomes both in cities located in developed and developing countries, however limited and spatially restricted these outcomes may be, because global activities look for (and in some cases create) similar spatial characteristics. The intra-urban geography of command activities needs to be better understood to create the groundwork for a better appreciation of phenomena that shape our cities today and provide new elements for decision makers to encourage development.

GLOBAL CITIES AS SERVICE HUBS Agglomeration economies An agglomeration economy is the clustering of several similar or related activities. Many sectors of activity tend to agglomerate, that is, they tend to locate very close to one another, leading to geographic concentration. For example, much of the American motion picture industry is concentrated in Los Angeles, the European fashion industry is

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concentrated in Paris and Milan, and the banking industry is concentrated in London and Frankfurt (AmosWeb, 2004). Agglomeration can result from accessibility to concentrated natural resources, knowledgebased services of a specific nature, necessary infrastructure, and the availability of a certain kind of labour force. Agglomeration of firms operating in the same sector often feeds upon itself. Firms of the same sector often enjoy lower production costs when they locate near one another because they can use the same resources and may obtain them at lower prices if they share them. Furthermore, the fact that there is agglomeration also serves as a powerful attractor for customers looking for the possibility of choice. In short, the existence of agglomeration economies implies that there is a network of activities that are mutually supportive. Once more, despite the ICT revolution, firms still need to be relatively close to one another to benefit from an optimal infrastructure, business environment, face-to-face contacts, and speed in delivering services to clients and to one another. Another crucial factor relates to the socio-economic and cultural make-up of target markets: the products of Advanced Producer Services must be ‘place-coherent’. There is a business culture, as well as local cultural aspects that must be taken into consideration by firms. For instance:

1. Legal services must be provided in the language of the buyer (client), and legal systems are still one of the strongholds of national identity. 2. Advertising products or services must comply with local preferences and tastes, although highly internationalised, advertising agencies seek to establish offices or partnerships in foreign markets to comply with the requirement of local production. 3. Accounting must be carried out according to local rules and regulations, which are extremely specific, despite the existence of large economic blocks. 4. Business management must deal with local technological and educational constraints and advantages, as well as with local ICT basic infrastructure. According to the International Location Advisory Services (ILAS, Utrecht), corporate location decisions are becoming increasingly complex because the range of options has expanded as a result of city competition and access to information technologies. ‘Choosing the right location is becoming an increasingly important part of a company’s strategy. The challenge is to choose a location that is optimally in line with the requirements of the company, both in the present and in the future’ (ILAS, 2004). ‘Location decisions have a major contribution to make in corporate restructuring processes.

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In many cases, the decision may also include refocusing of company operations around core businesses, exploiting new distribution channels, new customer groupings, new communications and logistics technology, and new sources of human capital. The identification of these drivers allows the development of a set of key location factors’ (Ernst & Young, 2004). The lessening of spatial constraints Not every important function of a company is concentrated in a single location. The progressive integration of the world economy and ICT developments are beginning to bring about a lessening of spatial constraints. More and more producer services are carried out by subdivisions at a distance from the home office or by sub-contractors. New safety requirements force large companies to store large amounts of data in remote places. Secondary operations are often carried out by sub-contractors in countries where labour is cheaper. This procedure is usually called outsourcing. Outsourcing is the process of subcontracting network operations and support to an organisation outside the company. Outsourcing may take place in different locations in the same city or in distant locations anywhere on the globe. India, China, and Brazil are examples of inexpensive locations where American, European, and Japanese firms may outsource parts

Speaking the client’s language Caliber Logistics is an important

locate close to clients in order to un-

Imation. Breda was chosen because

international logistics supplier. Its

derstand local managerial practices.

3M, Caliber’s first client, was located

European affiliate, Caliber Logistics

In general companies also consider

there.

Europe, plans to grow to ten times

it important to have an international

Caliber Logistics’ second office is in

its current size and to become recog-

staff, which is supposed to be more

Brabant, in the city of Moerdijk. It

nised as the leading logistics manage-

flexible in global contacts. Caliber’s

mainly services the Schlumberger

ment company in Europe.

management team is representative

Company. The third Brabant site

Caliber began its European market

of fourteen nationalities, giving the

is the result of a recent merger of

operations with a handful of em-

company an advantage in contacts

the European logistics activities of

ployees in Leiden, the site of the

with clients worldwide. Caliber, for

Caliber and FedEx. Caliber believes

company’s European headquarters,

instance, has clients across Europe,

that the province of North Brabant

in 1995. Since then, the company

and usually a manager who speaks

has a many advantages as a loca-

has grown to 650 employees in six

the client’s native tongue.

tion. ‘From a logistics point of view,

European countries: The Netherlands,

Although Caliber’s headquarters are

it is very suitable. You are very near

Belgium, France, Italy, Great Britain,

in Leiden, a large part of the work

Brussels, Paris, the Ruhr area, and

and Ireland.

is performed in the Dutch province

the major ports. Brabant is, in addi-

For the company, providing a service

of North Brabant, where Caliber has

tion, internationally oriented and the

to a client always begins with an

three sites. One of these sites, a Euro-

people have an impressive knowledge

analysis of the existing management

pean warehouse centre, is located

of languages.’

practices in order to improve them,

in the city of Breda. It operates as

Source: Netherlands Foreign Invest-

which points towards the tendency

the European distribution centre for

ment Agency, http://www.nfia.com/,

of producer services enterprises to

clients such as 3M, PictureTel, and

May 2001.

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of their operations to if those require a relatively low level of sophistication (e.g. data input, data processing, call services, Web related services). But some specialised outsourcing and shared operations can be only performed in places with a highly educated, specialised work force (i.e. The Netherlands). Language is also an important factor. In spite of this, top decisions are still taken in ‘top locations’, that is, the main operational and managerial body of any enterprise must still be located in close proximity and, preferably, in the same or adjoining buildings to the home office, in a place that brings together all the advantages described above. In addition such functions require an image that better suits corporate interests, which again means the home office. City competition, image, and the attraction of FDI Attracting foreign investment in the form of Advanced Producer Services has become one of the principal concerns of national and local authorities. One of the main tools deployed by local administrations to attract FDI has been large urban projects (LUPs). LUPs have had a strong impact on questions related to centrality, urban structure and infrastructure, image, local budget administration, and the creation of distinctive spaces where the forces connected to globalisation can operate. Distinctive urban locations and outstanding buildings are intimately associated with corporate image and marketing. The choice of corporate headquarters and offices plays an important role in any company’s strategy. One feature that indicates the impact of the location of APS headquarters on urban form and function is the size and architectural distinction of a global firm’s headquarters and offices; they should project an image of daring and modernity. For this purpose important

Comparative advantages in attracting APS in The Netherlands ()‘Money can’t buy everything. And

there.’() . . . A favourable jurisdiction,

Amsterdam Internet Exchange and

although low costs are attractive, it’s

highly educated labour pool and an

the Gigaport, which is a 1999 joint

hard to replace strong infrastructure

advantageous corporate tax regime

venture of the Dutch government,

and highly skilled labour, especially

is what brought New Skies Satel-

business community and academic

for certain types of industry. “Right

lite to The Hague, Netherlands.(). .

institutions to develop and test the

now, for financial business centres,

. The Netherlands has seen major

next generation of Internet technolo-

there are very few substitutes for

investments in the IT sector. Such

gies in The Netherlands. ‘The most

London, Paris, Frankfurt or Amster-

names as Cisco, Hewlett-Packard and

important aspect of The Netherlands’

dam,” (Richard) Greene (Senior

IBM have developed centres in the

success in IT and e-business is the

manager with Ernst & Young, New

country, and names like Ariba, Level

infrastructure,’ Ponfoort explains.

York) explains. “And for corporate

3 and Speed 4 have located data

‘The Internet exchange in Amsterdam

headquarters, there are still not many

warehousing operations there. The

is the largest on the continent. And

substitutes for Brussels, because it

primary reason for these investments,

you can definitely say that the Cisco

has a very high level of service sup-

says Ono Ponfoort, area director with

campus outside of Amsterdam landed

port and very productive, high-level

the Netherlands Foreign Investment

there because of the Gigaport project’

people. And the infrastructure is

Agency (NFIA at www.nfia.com), is the

(Heath, 2000).

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names in the architectural world are generally called upon to ensure architectural excellence. They tend to create emblematic places for this purpose (e.g. La Défense in Paris, Potsdamerplatz in Berlin, or the London Docklands). J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, Royal Sun Alliance, Ernst & Young, and Delta Lloyd are examples of global enterprises that have contracted and developed their own headquarters in the Netherlands in the 90s. The global headquarters of Dutch enterprises (e.g. ABN-AMRO, ING, Philips, Unilever) are also architecturally distinctive and are located in specific top locations. These top global players are less concerned with the swings of the real estate market and office space prices. They often build their own office buildings. And while real estate is very important, issues such as visibility, image, connectivity, and access to all kinds of networks play a more crucial role. Once again, these are also some of the factors that help determine real estate prices. ILAS (International Location Advisory Services of Utrecht) has developed a tool to help customers choose prospective business locations. The service includes the following location criteria as parameters for the decision-making process about where to invest: 1. Accessibility, 2. Grants and incentives, 3. Labour availability, 4. Labour costs, 5. Quality of life, 6. Real estate cost, 7. Taxation, 8. Technological infrastructure, 9. Utility costs2, and finally,10. Track record3. The criteria above can be clearly divided into: 1. Spatial configuration/connectivity and movement 2. Planning processes/ political scenario 3. Economic forces. In this study we emphasise the spatial configuration of places and infrastructural conditions in their ability to attract command functions.

THE PLACE OF THE NETHERLANDS AND SPATIAL IMPACTS ON RANDSTAD HOLLAND In recent years four major developments have influenced the nature and extent of investments in Europe: 1. Globalisation of economic activity 2. Growth and the changing nature of economic activity and technological development3. Improved transport and telecommunication infrastructure 4. European integration. In response to these changes, a substantial number of companies have established European headquarters and shared service centres in The Netherlands that assume functions previ-

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ously carried out by national subsidiaries. European-wide headquarters and shared service centres can both reduce direct costs and enable companies to perform particular tasks more effectively. The Netherlands is one of the top trading countries in the world and is ranked 13th in GNP and sixth in FDI inflows (figure 3). It combines an outward-looking culture — nearly everyone in business speaks good English — and a central business location. More than 160 million people (or over half the population of the European Union) live within a 300-mile radius of Rotterdam, which is also the world’s largest port. Accordingly, Randstad Holland should be understood in light of the following characteristics: 1. The function of the Dutch market as a springboard to the rest of Europe 2. The presence of clients, partners, and distributors in the region BEFORE establishment 3. The excellent rating of the region for quality of life, work force skills, business environment, business regulations, taxation, and other factors. (Source: West Holland Foreign Investment Agency, 2004). See boxes 1 and 2.

ADVANCED PRODUCER SERVICES IN THE RANDSTAD Requirements affecting the location of businesses in The Netherlands are almost always related to aspects of agglomeration, proximity, and accessibility, as well as work force characteristics and living conditions. To assess the spaces preferred by command functions firms to perform their activities, it was necessary to map their locations, using a significant sample. Initially, we chose from among 100 enterprises compiled by GaWC (Globalisation and World Cities Study Group and Network, Loughborough University, UK). These were advertising, accounting, insurance, financial, legal, and business management firms4. We then did a scientific survey of the location of each enterprise’s headquarters in Randstad Holland using a GIS-based programme and direct surveys. The location of headquarters is justified by the specific managerial and administrative tasks they perform, which require particular conditions of infrastructure, connectivity, workforce, and environment. In spite of the relatively small size of the sample, we were able to draw some preliminary conclusions. The results showed that most of the headquarters of selected APS are located in the city of Amsterdam and the neighbouring city of Amstelveen (figures 8, 9, and 11). Most headquarters are located around key nodes of transportation, where national and regional roads meet train stations (figure 11). There is also a large concentration of firms around the Ring of Amsterdam. These characteristics show that firms in the advanced terti-

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Figure 8: Number of APS firms per city in The Netherlands, from a sample of 96 top enterprises based on the list of ‘GaWC 100 most global enterprises’. Graphic by Roberto Rocco (2005).

Figure 9: Distribution of selected APS firms per city in The Netherlands, from a sample of 96 top enterprises based on the list of ‘GaWC 100 most global enterprises’. Map by Roberto Rocco (2005).

ary sector of the economy rely especially on good connectivity and accessibility, as well as image (the image a particular place conveys in the mind of consumers and clients) and visibility (figure 10).

130 R. Rocco MSc.

Figure 10: Global head– quarters of ING Bank, built on the side of the Southern Ring of Amsterdam (A10, Ringweg Zuid). Source: ING media kit, Institutional. (http://www.ing. com).

It is possible to identify seven clusters that contain international and national firms. They have the following spatial characteristics: 1. Amsterdam Centrum (centre): This area contains a predominance of financial services, located on streets with high local integration in a historic, highly attractive, famous setting. Image and inertia are the most important factors for location here. 2. Oud Zuid (Old South): This is the connecting area between Amsterdam Centrum and ZuidAs (a Large Urban Project), with distinctive historic and environmental features, and concentrating all types of services. 3. ZuidAs (Southern axis): The area has a high local and global integration. It is well connected to the Amsterdam Ring Road and the railway stations. Major investments have been made in all types of infrastructure. This area has a high concentration of financial institutions and law firms. 4. Amstelveen: This area has a high local integration, and it is located one topological step away from the globally integrated Ring Road of Amsterdam. It is also an extension of an axis formed by the three areas described above and near Amsterdam’s Ring Road. Here there is a strong presence of advertising, business management, and accounting firms.

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5. Slotervaart/ Overtoomse Veld (West): This area has a high local and global integration, combined with the presence of a rail connection. It also has a predominance of advertising companies. 6. Amstel Station: The main feature of this area is the presence of inter-modality (rail and subway), as well as proximity to a main feature, the River Amstel. Insurance and accounting firms predominate in the area. 7. Amsterdam Zuidoost (Southeast): It is the smallest of all the clusters, and it benefits from a high incidence of locally integrated streets and the presence of a rail connection. The area has a concentration of business management and financial firms.

Figure 11: Location of selected APS firms in the region of Amsterdam, where seven ‘business clusters’ are indicated.

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One tentative conclusion is that different types of APS look for distinct spatial features in the city. They generally tend to concentrate along locally and globally integrated streets or roads that are well served by inter-modal rail/subway transportation. They avoid the tourist places of the old centre of Amsterdam, with the exception of financial firms, which locate on the edges of this area. In all cases, spatial inter-connectivity, image, and visibility play vital roles, but, depending on their size and reach, firms choose to locate in places where visibility and global connectivity play vital roles. This is true for the global headquarters of the largest firms. Similar research was conducted in the ‘Rijnland Region’ (figure 12), a group of 24 municipalities around the cities of Katwijk, Leiden, and Alphen a/d Rijn, which constitute a slightly less developed area in the Randstad Holland region. For this research we used the CPV database (Common Procurement Vocabulary5). The sectors of activity researched were data management and consulting, research and development, financial services, and business management and marketing. Depending on the field of activity, a threshold of 20 or 30 employees was chosen, which indicates regional capacity for the firm in question. Firms with more than 100 employees (indicating national and international capacity) were highlighted.

Figure 12: Location of select command functions in the Rijnland Region and target areas, (2005). Map by Roberto Rocco (2005).

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Our main conclusion centres on the scale of nodes where firms choose to locate. In the region of Amsterdam/Amstelveen, the most visible and connected spaces were chosen around transportation nodes and the main Ring Road, the most globally integrated connector. In Rijnland, on the other hand, firms chose to agglomerate at a lower scale of connectivity, that is to say, not at the nodes along the national roads (Rijkswegen A4 and A44), but at the nodes around regional roads, notably Willem de Zwijgerlaan and the provincial road N445, which in fact are the main connectors between the national roads A4 and A44 (especially for those coming from Amsterdam and Schiphol Airport). Train stations are important nodes, but regional roads (provinciale wegen) that are located near national roads are preferred. This is true for N445, N11, N447, N449, and N208, which all show an agglomeration of APS (figure 12). This is because smaller companies tend to locate in a more urban environment, where urban amenities and services can be easily accessible to pedestrians. Moreover, firms are located along the parts of the regional roads that are well connected to the immediate vicinity and the city centre of Leiden, which contains an extremely rich urban environment. The development of the Valkenburg area with a well interconnected street network to Leiden centre may contribute to strengthening the entire urban agglomeration between Katwijk and Leiderdorp. In Rijnland, the lack of large urban projects of national/international scope (Sleutelprojecten) overlooks the strategic location of the area, its superior connectivity, and its potential to attract investment in the advanced tertiary sector (a sector of the economy particularly sensitive to modern spatial infrastructure, visibility, and corporate image provided by these projects). A new office development could be built in a new node between N445 and A44, reinforced by the development of Valkenburg as a high quality mixed area (housing and commerce) to make the region attractive for investment. Distinctive architecture would also contribute to making the new node attractive for a corporate image, and should provide the region with a focal point for investment in advanced producer services and headquarters (command functions).

CONCLUSION The proximity of stronger poles of attraction for Advanced Producer Services in northwestern Europe (i.e. London, Paris, Brussels) challenges Randstad Holland to take steps that stress its comparative advantages. The current location of large firms shows that the region can accommodate very sophisticated services and command functions, thanks to its superior connectivity, excellent business climate, skilled labour force, and the presence of hubs of knowledge, as well as other factors. The relative homogeneity of infrastructure in the Randstad gives slight local advantages to decisive features for office location and agglomeration of services. These local advantages

134 R. Rocco MSc.

must be properly exploited and advertised. Specific advantages and the existence of some large enterprises can play major roles to attract more advanced services. Strengthening the connectivity between the main poles of development of the region (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Den Haag, and Utrecht) and the new centralities that have emerged near these poles (e.g. Zuidas/Amstelveen, Capelle aan den IJssel, Prins Alexander, Rijswijk) could reinforce the

nodal characteristic of the entire region in the northwestern European context.

NOTES 1

‘Toyotism (or Toyota-ism) is the term often used, by analogy with Taylorism and Fordism, to refer to the management

culture and labour processes dominant in Japan, the US, Europe and other developed capitalist countries in the latter part of the twentieth century. Toyotism alters the relationship between buyer and seller. While demanding of its suppliers “juston-time” delivery of components, the producer tirelessly polls its market for direction about the product to be produced. Instead of producing a product and then drumming up a market, the market is found first, and then the product produced to fill the demand. Source: Encyclopaedia of Marxism’. Basgen, B. & Blunden A. (ed.) http://www.marxists.org/glossary/index.htm 2

Utility costs: Periodic housing costs for water, electricity, natural gas, heating oil, etc.

3

Track record: The references of an investment company in the form of successful flotations. It refers to the recording of

successful company performances in a given location. 4

This list was dressed based on: Published lists of largest firms of each sector; Availability of information of each firm;

Global coverage: each firm must be clearly “global” in coverage, which means offices in at least 15 cities across the world of which there must be at least 1 in each of the most relevant global arenas: North America (the Dollar area), Western Europe (the Pound/Euro area) and the Pacific Rim (the Yen area). 5

The CPV establishes a single classification system for public procurement in the European Union aimed at standardising

the references used by contracting authorities and entities. It describes the type of supplies, works or services offered by firms.

LITERATURE • AMOSWEB (2004). AmosWeb Economy Dictionary, http://www.amosweb.com/ (access 05.01.2005, 14:50h). • BOMA (2005). The Building Owners and Managers Association, http://www.boma.org/ (access 15.03.2005, 13:18h). • Daniels P. and F. Moulaert (1991). The Changing Geography of Advanced Producer Services: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives. John Wiley & Sons Inc, London. • Daniels, P. and J. Bryson (2003). Service Worlds: People, Organisations and Technologies. Taylor & Francis, London. • Daniels, P. et al. (ed.) (1993). The Geography of Services. Frank Cass Publications, London. • Ernst & Young (2004). ‘Choosing your European Business Location‘. Ernst & Young Specialised Services, . • Fernandez-Maldonado, A. M. (2004). ICT-related Transformations in Latin American Metropolises. DUP, Delft. • Figlio, D. and B. Bloningen (1999). The Effects of Direct Foreign Investment on Local Communities (working paper no. 7274). NBER, Cambridge (MA). • Hall, P. G. (1979). The World Cities. McGraw-Hill, New York.

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• Heath, T. (2000). ‘European Industry Clusters Form in 1999, Top 10’. Site Selection Magazine. September 2000, http:// www.siteselection.com/issues/2000/sep/p892/ (access 25.03.2005, 13:50h). • International Location Advisory Services, Utrecht, NL (2005). http://www.ey.nl/?pag=1316 (access 15.03.2005, 14:00h). • KNOX, P. L. (2002). In Geographies of Global Change (eds. R. J. Johnston, P. J. T., M. J. Watts). Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 328-38. • Lundberg, M. and L. Squire (2003). ‘The Simultaneous Evolution of Growth and Inequality’. Economic Journal, April 2003 (Royal Economic Society). (Original paper published by the World Bank, 1999). • Marcuse, P. and R. van Kempen (1997). ‘A new spatial order in cities?’ In American Behavioural Scientist, pp. 285-98. • Mollenkopf, J. H. and M. Castells (1993). Dual City: Restructuring New York. Russell Sage Foundation, New York. • Moulaert, F. and F. Todtling (1995). The Geography of Advanced Producer Services in Europe. Elsevier Science & Technology Books. • Moulaert, F. and P. Delladetsima, (2001). Globalisation and Integration, Area Development in European Cities (Oxford Geographical and Environmental Studies Series). Oxford University Press, Oxford. • Nota Ruimte (2004). VROM (Netherlands Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and The Environment, The Hague, August 2004 (English version). • Projectbureau Zuidas (2004). City of Amsterdam, Zuidas Information Centre, http://www.zuidas.nl, (access 06.11.2004, 20:53h). • Sassen, S. (1991). The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. PUP, Princeton (PA). • Sassen, S. (1994). Cities in a World Economy. Pine Forge/Sage, Thousand Oaks (CA). • Taylor, P. J. (2002). Amsterdam in a World City Network. Loughborough University, Loughborough (UK). • UNDP (2004). United Nations Development Programme, Serbia and Montenegro, ICT definitions, http://www.undp.org. yu/ict4d/ict_glossary.asp (access 06.11.2004, 20:53h). • Whfia. Survey of Established Companies: West Holland region 2000-2004, West-Holland Foreign Investment Agency, WHFIA, Den Haag.

Figure 1: Part of Historical Center in Jakarta, 1942. Source: de Vletter, M.E et al, Batavia/Djakarta/Jakarta Beeld van een metamorfose, Asia Maior, Purmerend, 1997.p.24

I R . D . T U N AS MSC.

Conceptualising colonial space in a global city Ph.D. research: The importance of colonial heritage in a globalised Jakartan metropolitan area Chair: Urban Renewal and Management (Globalisation, Urban Form and Governance) Promotor: Prof. dipl. -ing. H.J. Rosemann Supervisor: Dr. ir. M.I. Carmona Communications to: [email protected]

ABSTRACT This paper deals with the issue of the conceptualisation of colonial space in a global city in a developing country. It discusses the extent to which an historic centre is responding to the force of change brought about by globalisation and how it should be (re)-conceptualised in order to create a profound understanding of the current problems that it’s facing. Remembering and Recollection today have achieved new importance as the contemporary metropolis becomes a source of constant exchanges and relays of information, and represents a physical site in which images and messages seem to swirl about, devoid a sustaining context. …Our memory crisis seems to be based on our need to establish counter-memories, resisting the dominant coding of images and representations and recovering differences that official memory has erased.(C. Boyer (1994), The City of Collective Memory.)

INTRODUCTION Globalisation has influenced the trend of urban development through the changing of economic base, spatial organisation, and social structure (Sassen, 1991). This has implications for the way new urban spaces are organised and how existing spaces are used, requiring a new conceptualisation of urban spaces. This new conceptualisation is indispensable for directing new approaches to urban planning and management. In this research the emphasis

138 Ir. D. Tunas MSc.

will be on conceptualising existing urban space, particularly the colonial spaces or historic centres in developing countries that have only recently achieved independence. First, it will discuss the historic centre as it relates to the transformation of the urban system from a colonial urban machine to a global city. Second, it will discuss the relationship of the historic centre to other centralities and the changing notion of centrality in the new urban world (Castells). Third, it will relate the historic centre to the development of the local city image as a response to the collective memory crisis in an increasingly homogenous world. And finally, it will discuss the issue of global nodes as they affect the position of the historic centre in the global geography of network.

WHAT IS AN HISTORIC CENTRE? The term ‘historic centre’ refers to the site in a former colonial city that today is normally part of the various districts that exist in a metropolitan area. In developing countries that have only recently achieved their independence, these historical centres are confronted with various problems, usually related to lack of time and financial support to accommodate future city growth.

HISTORIC CENTRES IN A GLOBALISING CITY The increasing ‘tertiarisation’ of the economic base of the city has created new needs for spaces to accommodate advanced production processes and reproduction in the tertiary society. This has implications for the growing demand for office and exchange space, as well as cultural and leisure activities. It changes the way spaces are used. (Here, ‘spaces’ refer to both new and existing ones.) The new pattern of space consumption is not only governed by actual needs or demands, but even more by market forces. The historic centres, as do all the existing urban spaces, undergo this transformation in a particular way. Historic centres of former colonial cities are products of the colonial system of production, where each element was organised for maximum effectiveness of that particular production. It was like a colonial machine, an ensemble of various elements that worked together to support the process of colonial production. Each element was specific, which makes it important to investigate how it responds to and is transformed in the new urban setting. It is very likely these elements (colonial spaces) react to this challenge in different ways, depending on their compatibility to new urban needs and demands. And this includes not only the compatibility (morphology and typology) of their physical and technical infrastructure, but also the current social infrastructure. It is related to the ‘readiness’ of the society (socially, economically, and educationally) to embrace new types of activities and functions.

Ir. D. Tunas MSc. 139

The first questions are: how is the historic centre being transformed in a globalising city? How does such specific spatial organisation respond to the demands and needs in the new urban world? How and for which purposes is it used? The next question is to what extent can the historic centre answer the demands of a global city? The process of globalisation has considerably transformed the role of cities, especially in the types of functions they perform. Is the historic centre able to perform such functions?

THE HISTORIC CENTRE AND OTHER CENTRALITIES Assessment of the historic centre should be discussed with the issue of centrality. The changing notion of centrality has left a certain void in the urban landscape because the role of the urban centre has been altered. Castells (2001) wrote that the new urban centre is not a geographical concept because the centrality attributed to it is related to its functions, not its relative locality. It is affected more by the constellation of the city’s inter-communicating functions, where it serves as the inter-communicator. This makes the sociological notion more important than the form. Yet the historic centre is tied to its spatiality and location, with its constellation of built structure, monuments, rituals, history, and urban memories. It is tied to historical realities that identify and differentiate cities. Castells believes that the key to understanding the problem of the historic centre in its present context is the dialectic among the centres (both historic and new). Thus, we must also consider how the historic centres relate to other centralities. Can the historic centre accommodate the needs and demands of the new urban centre?

HISTORIC CENTRE: LOCAL IDENTITY AND THE CITY SELLING POINT According to Castells (2000), in this new urban world, urban centre and public space become critical expressions of local life as a reaction to suburban sprawl and individualised residential patterns, . These critical expressions also measure the vitality of a city. Yet, commercial pressures and artificial attempts at mimicking urban life often transform public spaces to a theme park, where symbols rather than experience create a life-sized, urban virtual reality, which is destined to become the real virtuality projected by the media. When the urban centre becomes a measurement of urban vitality, the issue of image becomes significant, and in a global city it has global references. Local and global image compete against rather than complement one another. Starbucks, which caters to people who function as isolated individuals involved in private reading or Internet chatting, drives out local cafés where people come together just to socialise. McDonalds is becoming the provid-


er of the new national lunch menu, rather than functioning like the old shop next door that offered a bowl of noodles. The new image of the city is international ‘designer’ architecture, with sleek skyscrapers and spectacular public spaces. As much as urbanites try to create a modern image for their cities, however, at the same time they are losing their city’s real local memory, for the modern image they pursue expresses a global collective identity (Aart Scholte 2000) rather than local one. This homogenisation is mainly the result of centre to periphery flow of a commoditised culture. Consequently, the coming homogenous world (of Western) culture will have more impact on the periphery, where the loss of local culture is most evident. (Hannerz, 2000). According to Sassen (1991), a global city is a locus of exchange and advanced production. If we link this with Boyer’s idea (1994), quoted at the beginning of the paper), such a city has a very intense and constant exchange and relays of information. This type of city must represent a particular image or message that is often far from its reality. Therefore, as Boyer said, in such a city an act of remembering or recollecting is significant to counteract the memory crisis. Boyer states that the memory crisis is based on the need to resist the dominant coding of representations and images that have a homogenising force and to recover the differences erased by the official memory. It becomes the quest to reveal our uniqueness, or the things that make one city different from another. It is also a quest to reveal our identity in this homogeneous world. But what, then, is the position of the historic centre in this quest? In this quest the role of history is to distinguish the elements that shaped identity. For colonial space, however, this becomes a bit more difficult. Built structures in the former colonial world are often viewed as leftovers of past colonial oppression, they should be destroyed rather than preserved and remembered. Is it possible to use historic centres as part of the quest to reveal the local image of representation and identity? Is colonial memory the kind of collective memory that should be re-enacted in order to re-identify a city? Because this issue is closely related to the ideological one and may lead to an extended or never-ending debate, the discussion of how to treat colonial built heritage should take place elsewhere, perhaps on the level of economic considerations. These heritages should be evaluated -for their potential to help the city profit, and the assessments should be oriented towards use value (adaptive re-use) and the property value of the structure. The structures should be used in the best possible way, meaning that they should be accommodated to the needs of the city and its inhabitants. Nevertheless, apart from the ideological discussion and the unwillingness of some to preserve such memory, this heritage will remain part of the identity and the history of the city. Globalisation has created competition among cities: each tries to become the most attractive locus for investment, especially for foreign investors. The image of the city is one significant selling point. This newly created image normally involves a modern CBC complex with state of the art infrastructure; not less important is the creation of architectural specta-

Ir. D. Tunas MSc. 141

cles. A series of spectacular buildings and skyscrapers designed by world famous architects is one example of this phenomenon. Can an historic centre also be part of the city selling point for the city image?

HISTORIC CENTRE AND GLOBAL NODE According to Castells (2000), the new urban world seems to be dominated by dual movements: inclusion in trans-territorial networks and exclusion by the spatial separation of places. The higher the value on people and places, the more they are connected in interactive networks. The lower their value, the less is their connection. The new geography of networks will eventually bypass the city. Marvin and Graham (2001) perceive three types of bypass processes, which are uneven in their nature. They are: the local bypass, which refers to the physical development of parallel infrastructure networks that connect valued users and places while bypassing non-valued users and places within a city,; the global bypass, which refers to the material development of a network configured to support interactions among local valued users and spaces and global circuits of infrastructural exchange; and the virtual network bypass, which refers to use of new information and communication technologies that support and facilitate distribution of competitive infrastructure services over a single physically integrated network inherited from the modern ideal. The particularity of the nodes included in the network depends on the type of network. It is the function of the network that defined the characteristic of its privileged nodes. Each network defines it sites according to the functions and hierarchy of each site and the characteristics of the product or service to be processed in the network (Castells 1996). Since the significance of a place is determined by its value and connectivity to a network, the place should have a quality worth including. Thus, the above theory prompts other questions: what is the value of the historic centre? Is it associated with the network, or is it bypassed by it? Is it valuable enough or functionally necessary to be connected with the network? Can it be empowered to be an important node?

CONCLUSION By answering the questions we posed above, we expect that historic centres may be reconceptualised to allow new approaches to an integrated revitalisation programme that not only preserves the historic or cultural value, but also empowers the site, connecting it with the new geography of network. It is important that the site be able to participate in an ac-


tive and proactive way to empower the entire city, so that it becomes a strategic global city, well linked to the global network, yet does not lose its local identity.

LITERATURE • Aart Scholte (2000). Globalisation, a critical introduction. Palgrave, NY. • BPS, Biro Pusat Statistik ((2001).). Jakarta. • Boyer, C. (1994). The City of Collective Memory. MIT Press, Cambridge. • Sassen, S. (1991). The Global City. Princeton University Press, New Jersey. • Castells, M. (2001). In Martinez, M. ‘Centros históricos en perspectiva. Observaciones sociológicas al análisis y la planificación territorial’. In Revista Catalana de Sociología, 14 (2001), pp. 87-103. • Castells, M. (2000). Urban Sociology in the 21st Century. • Graham, S. Marvin, S. (2001). Splintering Urbanism, Routledge, London. • Hannerz, Ulf (2000). ‘Scenario for Peripheral Cultures’. In Lechner, F.J., Boli, J. (eds.), The Globalisation Reader (2000), Blackwell, Oxford. • http://www.engelfriet.net/Aad/NedIndie/. • http://cippad.usc.edu/ai. • http://www.bapeda.dki.go.id/. • http://www.janovebrenden.no/.

Professors Department of Urbanism

These are the eight chairs of the Department of Urbanism of the Faculty of Architecture at Delft University of Technology: Urban Compositions Chair: Prof. dr. ir. V.J. Meyer Education: M.Sc. TU Delft; Ph.D. TU Delft Focus: Fundaments of urban design as a scientific discipline; urban compositions; design and planning of public works; the urban block communications to:[email protected] Landscape Architecture Chair: Prof. dr. ir. C.M. Steenbergen Education: M.Sc. LU Wageningen, Ph.D. TU Delft Focus: Landscape architecture communications to: [email protected] Spatial Planning Chair: Prof. dr. P. Drewe Education: M.A. and Ph.D. University of Cologne Focus: Spatial planning, urban and regional development strategies, telematics/ICTs and network urbanism communications to:[email protected] Urban Design Chair: Prof. ir. H.C. Bekkering Education: M.Sc. TU Eindhoven Focus: Urban design, tradition and meaning, multifunctional and intensive land use, public spacecommunications to:[email protected] Metropolitan and Regional Design Chair: Prof. ir. J.M. Schrijnen Education: M.Sc. TU Delft

144 Professors Department of Urbanism

Focus: Redesign of existing cities towards a new network metropolis. Design of regional perspectives composed of large urban and regional projects. communications to:[email protected] Chair: Prof. dr. ir. T.M. de Jong Education: M.Sc. TU Delft, Ph.D. TU Delft Focus: Regional Physics communications to:[email protected] Technical Ecology and Methodology Chair: Prof. dr. ir. T.M. de Jong Education: M.Sc. TU Delft, Ph.D. TU Delft Focus: Regional Physics communications to:[email protected] Environmental Design Chair: Prof. ir. C.A.J. Duijvestein Education: M.Sc. TU Delft Focus: Sustainable Building; Spatial, Ecological, Social and Economic Quality communications to:[email protected] Urban Renewal and Management Chair: Prof. dipl. ing. H.J. Rosemann Education: Architecture and Urban Planning, TU Hanover, Germany Focus: Strategies of urban renewal and transformation, globalisation and worldwide urbanisation processes, urban management, urban theories, research by design communications to:[email protected]

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Community and Ecology, Volume 10: Dynamics of Place, Sustainability, and Politics (Research in Urban Policy)

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Progress in Chaos and Complexity Research

Progress in Cardiac Arrythmia Research

Progress in Nonlinear Optics Research

Religion and Psychology: Research Progress

Progress in International Business Research, Volume 1 (Progress in International Business Research) (Progress in International Business Research) (Progress in International Business Research)

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Urban Regeneration in Europe (Real Estate Issues)

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