The Territorial Future of the City (Urban and Landscape Perspectives)

The Territorial Future of the City Volume 3 Series Editor Giovanni Maciocco Editorial Board Abdul Khakee, Faculty of...

Author: Giovanni Maciocco

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The Territorial Future of the City

Volume 3

Series Editor Giovanni Maciocco

Editorial Board Abdul Khakee, Faculty of Social Sciences, Ume˚a University Norman Krumholz, Levin College of Urban Affairs, Cleveland State University, Ohio Ali Madanipour, School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University Leonie Sandercock, School of Community and Regional Planning, Vancouver Frederick Steiner, School of Architecture, University of Texas, Austin Erik Swyngedouw, School of Environment and Development, University of Manchester Rui Yang, School of Architecture, Tsinghua University, Department of Landscape Architecture, Peking

For other titles published in this series, go to http://www.springer.com/series/7906

Editorial Staff Isabelle Doucet Paola Pittaluga Silvia Serreli Project Assistants Monica Johansson Giovanna Sanna Translation Christine Tilley

Aims and Scope Urban and Landscape Perspectives is a series which aims at nurturing theoretic reflection on the city and the territory and working out and applying methods and techniques for improving our physical and social landscapes. The main issue in the series is developed around the projectual dimension, with the objective of visualising both the city and the territory from a particular viewpoint, which singles out the territorial dimension as the city’s space of communication and negotiation. The series will face emerging problems that characterise the dynamics of city development, like the new, fresh relations between urban societies and physical space, the right to the city, urban equity, the project for the physical city as a means to reveal civitas, signs of new social cohesiveness, the sense of contemporary public space and the sustainability of urban development. Concerned with advancing theories on the city, the series resolves to welcome articles that feature a pluralism of disciplinary contributions studying formal and informal practices on the project for the city and seeking conceptual and operative categories capable of understanding and facing the problems inherent in the profound transformations of contemporary urban landscapes.


Giovanni Maciocco Editor

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Editor Giovanni Maciocco Department of Architecture and Planning Faculty of Architecture, Alghero University of Sassari Palazzo del Pou Salit Piazza Duomo 6 07041 Alghero Italy [email protected]

ISBN: 978-3-540-77513-3

e-ISBN: 978-3-540-77514-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2008928691 c 2008 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

Cover Image: ‘Tenerife: la città dei nomadi’ by Maroun El-Daccache, 2006 Printed on acid-free paper 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 springer.com

In memory of Fernando Clemente

“This page left intentionally blank.”

Contributors

Kaat Boon KULeuven, Department of Architecture, Urbanism and Planning, Kasteelpark Arenberg 1 3001 Heverlee, Belgium, [email protected] Bruno De Meulder KULeuven, Department of Architecture, Urbanism and Planning, Kasteelpark Arenberg 1 3001 Heverlee, Belgium, [email protected] Isabelle Doucet Department of Architectural Theory, Faculty of Architecture, Delft University of Technology, Berlageweg 1/PO Box 5043, 2628 CR/2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands, [email protected] Nel Janssens Department of Architecture, Sint-Lucas School of Architecture, Brussels, Hogeschool voor Wetenschap & Kunst, Paleizenstraat 65, 1030 Brussels, Belgium, [email protected] Giovanni Maciocco Department of Architecture and Planning, Faculty of Architecture, Alghero, University of Sassari, Palazzo del Pou Salit, Piazza Duomo 6, 07041 Alghero, Italy, [email protected] Alfredo Mela Department of Human Settlements Science and Technology, Turin Polytechnic, Viale Mattioli 39, 10125 Torino, Italy, [email protected] Paola Pittaluga Department of Architectural and Planning, Faculty of Architecture, Alghero, University of Sassari, Palazzo del Pou Salit, Piazza Duomo 6, 07041 Alghero, Italy, [email protected] Silvia Serreli Department of Architecture and Planning, Faculty of Architecture, Alghero, University of Sassari, Palazzo del Pou Salit, Piazza Duomo 6, 07041 Alghero, Italy, [email protected] vii

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Contributors

Silvano Tagliagambe Department of Architecture and Planning, Faculty of Architecture, Alghero, University of Sassari, Palazzo del Pou Salit, Piazza Duomo 6, 07041 Alghero, Italy, [email protected] Liesl Vanautgaerden KULeuven Department of Architecture, Urbanism and Planning, Kasteelpark Arenberg 1 3001 Heverlee, Belgium, [email protected]

Contents

The Territorial Future of the City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Giovanni Maciocco

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The Dilation of the Concept of ‘Inhabit’ and the City/Territory Relationship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Silvano Tagliagambe Planning in Search of Ground: Committed Muddling Through or a Critical View from Above? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Isabelle Doucet The Polycentric City and Environmental Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 Alfredo Mela Images of Local Societies and Projects for Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Paola Pittaluga Critical Design – The Implementation of ‘Designerly’ Thinking to Explore the Futurity of Our Physical Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Nel Janssens Imagining the Re-/Co-production of a Hybrid Territory: Testing Sustainable Concepts of Landscape Development in Roeselare-West . . . . . 127 Liesl Vanautgaerden, Bruno De Meulder and Kaat Boon Derelict Places as Alternative Territories of the City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 Silvia Serreli Name Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 Subject Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163

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The Territorial Future of the City Giovanni Maciocco

1 Rediscovery of an Anchorage to the Earth The “territorial future of the city” seems first of all to bring to mind the rediscovery of an anchorage to the earth. The city rediscovering the earth can be recognised in a scene in the Wim Wenders film Lisbon Story, which has an important metaphorical meaning. Along the route leading Winter, the sound technician, to Lisbon, a series of accidents put his car out of action and it betrays him, leaving him stranded just outside the city. Abandoned by technology, he becomes conscious of his limits in adapting to unusual situations – an example is the clumsy way he loses his spare wheel, which rolls down the slope and falls into the water – and discovers, not without effort, his material existence, which reminds us of the unframeable reality of our natural condition, the fact that however immaterial or abstract the manifold relations city-dwellers mutually engage in across the planet, they are, we are, in spite of ourselves, thrown into space and forced to live there and settle there somewhere (Choay 1994, p. 33). Through Lisbon, shimmering “in the blue of an Atlantic breeze” (Tabucchi 1994, p. 10), Winter leads us to discover, as he heavily drags his leg in plaster through the alleys of Alfama, that the city demands direct experience of three-dimensionality, a whole-body investment that no simulation can replace, for the body thrown into spaces establishes “intersomaticity” (Formaggio 1976), which, in its turn, establishes urbanity. In another situation, as he analyses some aspects of the relationship between the aborigines and their land, Wenders observes that they “believed in something essential: they believed they belonged to that region and felt responsible for those places, each for a precise zone. They were actually a part of the territory. The opposite thought, i.e. that someone could possess a piece of land, was unimaginable for them. In their eyes the land was the owner of men, never vice-versa. The land

G. Maciocco Department of Architecture and Planning, Faculty of Architecture, Alghero, University of Sassari, Palazzo del Pou Salit, Piazza Duomo 6, 07041 Alghero e-mail: [email protected] G. Maciocco (ed.), The Territorial Future of the City. Urban and Landscape Perspectives 3, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-77514-0 1 C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008

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had authority”. He continues “But our civilisation has completely extinguished or removed the idea of belonging to the earth, and urban images are the proof. Cities have made the earth invisible, almost as if to hide their sense of guilt. The rock of New York or the sand of Berlin are warnings. In many cities it is no longer possible to touch the land, to feel the hardness of the stone”. Moreover, “Cities are so full of all kinds of things that they have cancelled out the essential, namely, they are empty. The desert, on the contrary, is so empty that it overflows with the essential” (Wenders 1992, p. 93). Among the essential features, one is that men are “a part of the territory”, that “the land is the owner of men”, as is the case, for example, of the small islands of La Maddalena archipelago in Sardinia, which have for some time been considered by the inhabitants as patrimony for collective fruition, territory that is a free good,1 the private destination of which, thus limiting the social dimension of fruition, is unthinkable. The territory as a free good belongs to that group of spatial concepts that are at the base of the sense of human territoriality; they have to inform the urban course in that they are structural to what Pareyson defines as the “forming form” (Pareyson 1988, p. 75) of the city. But the urban makes this very difficult; it has in a certain sense hidden the essential, cutting off temporal relations between past and future, while cities have a role in this sense, in that they create a temporal relationship for their inhabitants, and somehow place them in a “no-man’s-land between past and future” (Wenders 1992, p. 106). In this situation, to describe the city in the urban is a very rare art because – as Wenders keenly observes – cities elude description. “They can be perceived so easily by the senses, by smelling the odours, listening to the noises, with direct experience, through sight, obviously most of all through the eyes”. He adds “in a film with a historic nature it is depressing to see the city unencumbered, with antennas dismantled, everything cleared away [. . .] the idea of history on which it is based has completely filtered through. And I get the same impression when they try in a city to unearth the past with the same taste: I feel like I am watching a historic film”. Wenders observes “With these methods, instead of creating a tie with the past, the past is turned into a stereotype. It happened in Berlin, too, both in the east and the west, at the time of the city jubilee: they cleaned and adorned so many places that suddenly they no longer had any history but were just a stereotype of the past. Restoration is an exercise of balance, like tight-rope walking, and with the slightest exaggeration it is destroyed; it only needs excessive cleaning, making a façade too beautiful, and you end up with a Disneyland city” (Wenders 1992, pp. 106–107). Urban cosmetics, urbanistic make-up, indeed hide the essential, disguising the city with large shopping malls and recreation centres, which constitute the sign of our incapacity to “touch” the city. But it is perhaps our nature that is changing. According to Pierre Restany, “what we are discovering, both in Europe and the U.S.A., is a new sense of nature, of our contemporary, industrial, mechanical, commercial nature” (Restany 1994, p. 387). Ignasi de Solà-Morales draws attention to the subversion of what architects have always considered their exclusive domain, both material and for their studies, and


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which becomes more and more an “obscure object of desire”: “the form of the contemporary metropolis is, moreover, soft and malleable. It does not have a predetermined structure, but seems to model itself on the grounds of actions and reactions that different operations present it with. In other words, it is not fossilised once and for all in time, nor defined by someone, the Authorities, to use the name Le Corbusier would have used”. He maintains “The organic metaphors to describe these situations multiply and in recent years we have seen an authentic return to organic terminology and iconography for visualising these phenomena. How can what is happening in Singapore, Tokyo, Canberra, Teheran, Mexico or Atlanta be explained? The global nature of these processes no longer enables us to escape, using the alibi of regional cultures or past-inspired nostalgia”. De Solà-Morales concludes “We are again faced with phenomena, the potent, wild reality of which is beyond our knowledge. We find ourselves faced with facts that make an issue of the capacity of architects to accomplish architecture with this form of perpetually active city, expanding and unfolding blindly. The metropolis, the city of present times, rises like a new ‘dark object of desire’ for architecture and architects” (de Solà-Morales 1994, p. 401). In the picture being created, the territory emerges as a deposit of differences, in that it contains this “unlimited potential for discovery” of urban history and the future of the city. But at the same time it is exposed to the dangers of uniform “attraction” of contemporary urban flows, in the same way as the languages of small communities are subjected to the danger of acceleration in the disappearance of languages all over the earth, with the destructive hegemony of languages called “major” that owe their dynamic efficacy to planetary diffusion of mass marketing, technocracy and the media (Steiner 1975). The prodigality of the historical atlas of the territory favours innovation; it is precious material for significant urban innovation, for singling out possible worlds of space organisation. The possibility of an innovation materialising seems, that is, all the stronger the richer the history of the places producing it, which – recalling Wittgenstein – is what happens in language.2 To define the process of “recapitulation” of previous historic and social events, which is at the base of the innovation of meaning, Steiner coined the expression “dynamic traditionality”, referring as support for this thesis to some of the artistic biographies among the most innovative of the modernist movement. He enquires “Is this ‘dynamic traditionality’ so characteristic of western culture destined to last? The symptoms make us think that we now have acute awareness of this problem. We now know that the modernist movement that dominated art, music and literature in the first half of the century was, due to certain decisive moments of inspiration, a strategy for conservation and protection”. He gives the following example: “Stravinsky’s genius developed through various phases of recapitulation. He drew on Machaut, Gesualdo, Monteverdi. He imitated Tchaikowski and Gounod, Beethoven’s piano sonatas, Haydn’s symphonies, the operas of Pergolesi and Glinka. He incorporated Debussy and Webern in his own idiom. In each case it was presumed that the listener knew the source, grasped the intention to transform which left salient aspects of the original intact”.

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Steiner comments: “Those who seemed to be iconoclasts revealed themselves to be somewhat anguished custodians, intent on running round the museum of civilisation, seeking order and refuge for its treasures before closing time. In modernism, collage was the representative expedient. . .” (Steiner 1975).

2 Researching the Urban Essential The city is called upon by the territory to reflect on the meaning of man’s home, to seek the primary elements of its construction, a search for the urban essential, to be found again also in contexts of visual exaltation which tend to “normalise” all points of view. This capacity to reflect on the essential in these contexts is found emblematically in the Sardinian artist Costantino Nivola. A sculptor known in the United States, where he had systematically collaborated with Le Corbusier and had actively frequented the world of American architecture, Nivola continued to look, on American soil, for “landscapes at the lowest level of chromatic parsimony” (Nivola 1993, p. 85), taking with him a specific point of view innate from birth: the desire to listen to silence, to orient the glance to take in from the great environment–landscape spaces of the island the essence and sense of his path of research. Thinking of Nivola, we recall his capacity to maintain a point of view innate from birth when he describes the first day of sketches in New York “starting from the ground – the first level”, which makes him feel inadequate for the purpose due to the visual exaltation produced by Eighth Avenue: “Too much to see, too much to choose from” (Nivola 1993, p. 115), or when he portrays winter in the Vermont countryside, where “the snow, the trees without leaves, . . . reduce landscape polychromy to the lowest level of chromatic parsimony”, where it is possible to draw trees “with great attention and humility” (Nivola 1993, p. 85). In these words there is an attitude inherent in an interpretation of the environment– landscape of Sardinia, that is almost familiar. See a little to try to understand a lot, to gather the founding, primary elements of human settlement (Maciocco 1995b). In Berlin, where I live, notes Wenders – it is precisely the open spaces that enable men to create themselves an image of the city. Not just because they allow us to embrace in our glance entire areas (sometimes as far as the horizon, a thing in itself that is a pleasure in a city), but also because through these gaps time can be seen which, in general terms, is the element that spells out history (Wenders 1992, p. 90).

The void enables things to be seen that have remained “out” of the space we are in, but that may be just as important for the story being told, like the Tago, rather than the city, is the witness of Lisbon life, like the sand of Berlin – in the “emptiest square of the city”, like the cemetery of Tokio-ga3 : emptiness, rest and peace. For this we need to know how to describe empty space, as it means describing peace, from today on we need to know how to sing an “epos of peace”.4 “I love cities, but sometimes you have to leave them, observe them from afar to understand their value. The desert offers the best detachment for observing urban life; I know


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the American and Australian deserts, where every so often you bump into some remains of civilisation: a house, a street in ruins, an abandoned railway line, even an abandoned petrol station or motel”, whereas “in a certain sense these are opposite experiences to those we have in the city when we go into an open space. A no-man’sland inside the metropolis has, as a prerogative, the presence of urban landscape all around, and it shows us it in a different perspective, in another light. While the appearance in the desert of the remains of civilisation makes the landscape all the more empty” (Wenders 1992, p. 92). In the void there is time, history, memory and the essential. The contemporary dilation of the concept of city on the territory is the search for the void to find history, the essence . . . “. . . when the land was the owner of men . . .” to touch the earth, the hardness of the stone, and discover a thread, a story to link up with other stories, discover relations between stories to discover the relations between men, aiming each action at “opening the eyes”, the senses and the mind. The void is important material for the project for the city also on the level of controllability of urban shape, a concept effectively emphasised by Rem Koolhaas during the competition for the design of the Melun-Séart ville nouvelle: “Void. The Melun-Séart site is too beautiful for it to be possible to imagine a new city with innocence and impunity. The breadth of the landscape, the beauty of the forests and woods, the serenity of the farms, have a presence that makes one shy, initially hostile to any idea of development. A second form of innocence consists of believing, at this end of century, that urban development and the built-up area can be designed and then controlled in a reasonable manner. Too many architects’ ‘visions’ have bitten the dust for it to be possible to dream of new additions to this chimerical army. The built-up area, the fullness is now uncontrollable with all the azimuths at the mercy of political, financial and cultural forces, that immerse it in perpetual transformation. The same cannot be said of the void; it is perhaps the last subject where certainties are still plausible” (Koolhaas 1994, p. 460). And, as he goes on to describe the competition project, Koolhaas shows how these concepts can be applied: “The essential thing in this project is a system of empty spaces – of bands – inscribed on the land like a Chinese ideogram. We propose that the maximum energy indispensable for the Melun-Sénart development be consecrated to maintaining and protecting these empty spaces. Some of these are partly areas of protection of existing landscape, localised in a way as to unite maximum beauty and fragments of history. Other empty spaces accompany the tracks of fast roads making them arterial urban elements. Yet others are justified by planning: they serve to distribute the major components of the programme on the site. Our thesis is that if this system of bands is fixed, the qualities of beauty, serenity, of access and urban facilities pursued for the city of Melun-Sénart will be guaranteed, whoever the architects of the future be” (Koolhaas 1994, p. 460). And the built-up area? What will happen to the blocks in this model city? “In this proposal the bands define an archipelago of residual blocks, the ‘inter-bands’, different in size, form, position and relations with the bands. Each of these blocks may be developed in almost total independence. They will be able to create an anthology of competition projects. The ‘archipelago’ model means that their extreme

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individuality in the end strengthens the coherence of the system”. He continues “Each island will be designed with great care, because this proposal does not mean that islands are neglected but that they are left great freedom of conception depending on their scale, which gives them the chance to concentrate on their installations and their relationships with the bands and the city” (Koolhaas 1994, p. 460). In a certain sense Koolhaas’ reflections confirm the concept, which August Endell expresses in his book entitled The beauty of the big city, when he maintains that for the project for the city two possibilities exist: either to modify the style of our cities, which would be a long-term project, or to compensate each inadequacy with other pleasures, discover the beauties we have not yet discovered (Endell 1908; Wenders 1992, pp. 102–103),5 for example, in the empty urban spaces, in the free spaces of the city territory, promoting new fruition of what we already possess. This discovery of the “beautiful things we have not yet discovered” was one of Jean Nouvel’s guiding ideas for “Berlin Morgen”, the 1991 consultation on the Berlin of tomorrow (Nouvel 1994, p. 461). With the purpose of translating the overthrow of a situation long considered fatal, to express the will that such horror never again be reproduced, to ward off the existence of “no-man’s-land sous mirador”, Nouvel proposed the creation of The Meeting Line along this wound, a line crossed by all the roads that had been closed for a long time and by others still, “a snake of green, authentic green equipped with little optimistic, coloured lights, with the image of the overlapping in relief of a sweater and a tidying thread. [. . .] On Friedrichstra␤e it is clearly not a matter of painstakingly filling in the free spaces obtained. It is better to use and abuse all abnormalities and surprises – in the Endell sense, precisely – that characterise the place” (Nouvel 1994, p. 461). The abnormalities include the free land on both sides, the beginnings of squares more residual than intentional, the blind, rather sad walls . . . The surprises include the perspective down to the bottom of the roads crossing over and the appearance between two buildings of a communications tower or a dome . . . Nouvel’s programme has in this sense, as one of its key points, to make public all free land on one side and the other of the road and tidy it up in various ways so that the surface, the flat area, is strongly expressed. The attention to free spaces, the placing of the voids of the city at the centre of the city project, expresses renewed interest for differences, for the differential quality of the territory that the free spaces emblematically represent with respect to the urban flood. It is a case of selective attention, typical of the contemporary condition as a reaction to the deluge of visual flows that sweep the ways of life along in the city and banalise the perceptive worlds of the inhabitants. Selective attention in respect of city territory is a concept that has undergone significant variations in the course of time.6 In the historical maps of the late 1800s, for the cartographer the world was pervasive geography that looked equally attentively at the whole territory, while in the post-war and 1950s series the territory was represented almost as a geometric entity, with few features: the world was the city core with its links with other cities, a point of view around which a disciplinary tradition was built and has been reinforced up until recent years. Whereas in the current series,7 attention has been given again to the differential features of the


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territory, an opening of the city towards the territory: the world is a set of places to which value is strongly attributed, of “places that count”, places that are highly selective.8 It is perhaps the need for urban ethics in the new forms of settlement that urges inhabitants to relate selectively with these places that reveal to the human condition the possibility of understanding the territory of urban life, that show constancy in filling the gaps of our spatial experience.

3 Urban Potential of the Territory To imagine a “territorial future of the city” means to state that the territory has urban potential. That it is possible to assign an urban perspective to the territory is not a novelty in planning disciplinary tradition. We have authoritative precursors in the regional planning of European and North American matrices. First with Geddes, then with the development of the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), with Lewis Mumford in the front line – and in a certain sense Howard himself – the region9 is discovered as a reference unit for planning and the community is adopted as the civitas of an urbs enlarged on the territory. This is a case – as we know – of a naturalist type of conception of territory and society, which entails the tendency to conceive moral life as an expression of biological needs and instincts and thus to establish in ethics the positive method belonging to the natural sciences. Organicism10 is adopted as a pattern for order, and disciplinary codification takes place with the post-war American organicist culture. It is a critical position of rationalist mechanicism, which cultivates a social opening, an opening to (teleological, developmental and linear) history and to economics. The concept of region as the reference unit for planning was a cardinal point of the organicist conception that developed mainly in the United States, thanks to the work of the Regional Planners.11 In the background of RPAA activity, there was the weakening of conservationist environmental policy due to the effects of the First World War, the results of the 1920 Census, which registered how city inhabitants for the first time exceeded the number of inhabitants of rural areas, the collapse of Jefferson’s dream of a nation based on family farms, small widespread agricultural communities, urban concentration and metropolitan explosion, recalling the need for planned forms of growth. It was in this scenario that the RPAA proposed Thomas Adams’ well-known counter-proposal to the Regional Plan of New York and its Environs (between 1921 and 1929) which, presuming spatial impacts of the metropolis to be unavoidable, considered the growth and expansion of New York incurable. The counterproposal plan corresponded to the idea of a widespread city region that would be created after the “Fourth Migration”, the metaphor created by Mumford to fuel the operative sense of the project with an effective vision abounding in images: the hoped-for exodus from the city metropolises towards the surrounding region.12 The RPAA members intended to propose an alternative to centralised, profit-oriented metropolitan society, with a territorial one that was less centralised, more concen-

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trated on social values and grafted onto regions that were balanced in terms of their environmental profile. But the ironic and scornful use of the expression metropolitan planning that the RPAA used through their spokesman Henry Wright to fail the New York plan proposed by Thomas Adams in 1926, and the use of the term pudding attributed by Mumford in 1932 to the said plan, underpinned the general meaning of a radical alternative to the existing city and, in this sense, bore the mark of a utopia. The city that hopes to move out onto the territory is a different city, as the close relationship between the RPAA and the garden city figure shows, by projectual exploration and the practice of garden cities linked with Howard (the Garden City plan adapted to the “Fourth Migration” principles). Not by chance the comprehensive regional plan, which included many garden cities (the polycentric model of small and medium cities) and which was Mumford’s objective, could not be realised due to the lack of interest of the political class and business people. This was an issue that lead to a professional breach between Stein and Wright and which – according to Peter Hall – had repercussions on the disintegration of the RPAA. In the world of the metropolis, it does not seem possible to envisage the involvement of the existing in the construction of a new urban perspective. Two worlds, the real one and a possible one interacting with it, are not envisaged. The proposal is for a single world, radically alternative, that targets the territory as the platform for a radical utopia of the city being displaced onto it as it decentralises. Mumford is well aware of the weakness of the utopia due to its maturing outside the diversity and complexity of the environment in which men live, as he wrote in The Story of Utopias of 1922, where the concept of regional balance and interrelation appears. He advises us to see society as a whole, to understand interactions between people, space and work, to see the relations between social functions, institutions and the purposes of men, to take our utopia from inside the world of ideas and put it in contact with the real world, to put the arts and sciences in a relationship with the problems and conditions of specific regions and communities and to construct a method to put together the pieces of our fragmented world, on the basis of which to build liveable communities.

4 The Phenomenon of Extended Urban Quality The Regional Planning movement may be taken as the basic matrix for the following positions that are based on the hypothesis that “urban quality is not an exclusive attribute of the central place, but can become a phenomenon of the field” (Armen 1972). Positions on which the urban geographers who have given life to research with the concept of urban region as their reference nucleus concur, a concept that adopts the territory as the unitary space of the city. In spite of the attempts of the Regional Planners and their eponyms, reality shows itself in different forms. The dynamics of virtual and physical technical networks thus tend to replace the statics of built-up places in conditioning urban behaviour and mentality. A physical and mental reference system is becoming established, made up of material and immaterial networks as well as technical objects, the manipulation of which brings


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into play a stock of images and information that echo round a circuit encircling the relationships our societies entertain with space, time and men. This operative system is valid for, and may be developed in, any place, be it city or country, village or suburb, and may be called the urban (Choay 1994). The arrival of the urban breaks down the ancient solidarity between urbs and civitas. Interaction between individuals is now both de-multiplied and delocalised. It seems that belonging to communities with different interests is no longer founded on proximity, nor on local demographic density (ethics of proximity). Transport and telecommunications involve us in increasingly numerous and diverse relations, members of abstract collectivities or collectivities whose spatial installations no longer coincide or show stability over time. The American economist Melvin Webber succeeded in describing with a lapidary formula – “the non-place urban realm” – the delocalisation of the ancestral civitas, and in analysing in an exemplary way the possible, explorable repercussions, in particular tele-work. In 1968 he proposed the “post-city age” concept (Webber 1967), which it would be ambiguous to translate as the post-urban age, as it is better to give the name urban to the new planetary culture and its way, simultaneously unique and polymorphous, of impacting on habitable space. A study of the lexis reveals the hegemony of the urban. The expression urban region no longer has the meaning regionalism assigned to it, but “urban” is the adjective of new entities, like urban region, indeed, urban community, urban district, which say quite a lot about the eclipse of the city and the anachronistic nature of many terms that will no longer return except in history or nostalgic moments (Choay 1994). The urban is “all that is of interest”, this being a point of view around which many planning paradigms have been constructed and reinforced in recent years. The background to the Regional Planners was the geographical world shown in the historic maps of the end of the 1800s, where, as already stated, for the cartographer, the world was a pervasive form of geography that looked equally attentively at the whole territory, which precisely for this reason offered the city project the quality of its differences. But from the second half of the post-war period onwards, the territory was represented almost as a geometric entity, with few features: the world was the city core with its real and virtual links with other cities, which excludes all that may be considered waste from the “normality” of the pervasive urban machine. In the contemporary city there is no longer an inside and an outside. Even urban science fiction literature has been recording this perception of space for some time. If sociological science fiction of the 1940s–1950s was characterised by the inside–outside spatial dichotomy, from the 1980s onwards this distinction no longer appeared to work. In metropolitan post-civilisation the experience of “outside” represented by the non-urban, by nature, seems simply to disappear and leave room for urban structures which expand and swallow up all that is available of the world. The only physical experience that can be had is the experience of the city, i.e. the limits that compose it internally, the barriers. In the current imagination freedom, deviation from rules will thus no longer be a physical space, but a synthetic space – virtual reality: “There’s no place there, it was said to children, when cyberspace was explained” (Gibson 1988).

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So, how can we speak of “the territorial future of the city”? Why – to refer back to Mumford – is it still possible “to construct a method to put together the pieces of our fragmented world”, as a base on which to build liveable communities? Why can city and territory still enter into relations to constitute “our world” in forms and modalities that are different from regionalism and more consistent with postmodernity? As we have emphasised, the expression “territory” brings to mind an operative weakness recurring in the paths of tradition of the discipline, which, in glorious dreams of leaders and eponyms of regionalism, wearily sought in it the utopia of a new concept of city. “The city is of the country”, Mumford asserted, to underline the ancestral bond of the belonging of the pre-industrial European city to the country (Mumford 1938, p. 306). If, in the contemporary city, on the one hand, “the country is of the city”, the territory belongs to the city for periurbanisation processes, for setting up infrastructures and for the new technological content required by the world of flows, then, on the other, “the city is of the country” (Mumford 1938), the city belongs to the territory for the environmental interdependence characterising its relations, on which the environmental quality of urban life is founded. But, in our tradition, an alternative figure to the region is also present – be it in the sense of space of city relations, be it in that of city extended onto the territory – which enables us to consider city and territory as a pair of opposites, like space and counter-space, as a dialectal figure that renders a new concept of urbanity for contemporary societies thinkable.

5 The Territory as Counter-Space The category of counter-space refers to past time. Just as the introduction of public parks in capital cities in the nineteenth century aimed at bringing nature into the city as counter-space at the moment when the cities of the first industrial revolution were built, as an antidote to the new industrial city, so our post-industrial culture calls for spaces of freedom, undefined, unproductive, but this time not linked with the mythical notion of nature but with the experience of memory, of romantic enchantment with the absent past as a critical arm in the face of the banal productivist present (de Solà-Morales 1995; de Solà-Morales et al. 1996). The theme of counter-space is nowadays connected with disenchantment for the modern city, characterising a critical tradition always in search of alternative spaces outside or within the city, real and acceptable compared with the daily reality of aggressive, anonymous, ugly metropolises – a disenchantment inherent in the urban pessimism that characterises the tradition of disciplines dealing with the city and considers the city of the present a foretaste of a better life (Mumford 1938). We can connect this theme with the figure of the “dualised city” that Saskia Sassen adopts to explain the “grasp” the city has on globalisation processes (Sassen 2006). Global cities are more and more infrastructures inhabited by functions and specialised actors, but are also linked to territories with smaller cities, rich in


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complexity and specialisation. These situations have, on their part, produced a variety of responses, to begin with the renewed enthusiasm for aesthetisation of the city, for its conservation, for maintaining its public space aspect. The enormous dimensions of current urban systems have brought with them a reappraisal of terrain vague and more modest spaces, where people’s habits can contribute to the creation of public space, beyond the monumentalised public spaces of the State. The type of complexity that has ensued may, in its turn, involve various types of temporary public, that come to life in cities in particular spaces at particular times of the day and the night, in the sense that the city “naturally” urges people to seek public space (Hajer and Reijndorp 2001; Smith 2006; Barnett and Low 2004). The cities of today constitute the terrain on which people from all over the world cross paths with modalities not possible in any other place. In these complex cities, diversity may pass through the routine of everyday life, work, public transport and urban events such as demonstrations and festivals. In addition, as powerful global actors put forward growing requests for urban space, thus removing from it less potent users, urban space is politicised in the act of constructing itself (Sassen 2006). It is a case of a policy inserted in the physical fabric of the city. The emerging global movement for the rights of the city is one of the emblematic examples of this struggle. Contemporary public space is in a certain sense “external” to the homologated space of the contemporary city. Saskia Sassen emphasises an aspect of fundamental importance of the urban situation, both in the past and in our times: the juxtaposition of very large dimensions and interstitial spaces. The cities we are concentrating on in their emerging “intercity geographies” are spaces with impressive structures, markets and capacities. The problem, in the case in question, does not concern so much the few designers, exceptional and fortunate, who are successful on the global stage in their specific field; the attention is, if anything, directed at a more widespread urban landscape and opportunities to “do” something within urban spaces dominated by impressive structures and powerful actors. What is this landscape within which the project has to operate nowadays? Growing speeds mean that an ever greater range of urban experiences is a reality of flows rather than of things, in spite of the great quantity of materiality surrounding us (Mongin 2005; Drainville 2004). One of the objectives of research on globalisation and digitalisation is indeed that of recognising the fixedness and materiality underpinning a large part of the global and digital realms, overshadowed by the dominant conviction that all is becoming a flow (Sassen 2006). Things and materiality are fundamental for digitalisation and globalisation, and places are important for global flows. At the same time as impressive projects proliferate in these cities, they enclose, however, many under-used spaces, often characterised more by memory than by a current meaning. Spaces are part of the interior nature of the city but remain external to its spatial schemes and its organising logic based on the principle of utility. It is a case of terrain vague that enables many residents to connect with cities in rapid transformation in which they live and to subjectively bypass the impressive infrastructures which, in such a city, have ended up dominating an ever-increasing number of spaces (Van Houtum et al. 2005).

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These spaces are also the external territories of dense metropolises, the small and medium cities of low-density territories. To throw oneself onto such terrain vague to maximise property development would be a mistake from this point of view. To maintain part of this opening might have more sense in terms of capitalisation of future options at a moment in which utility logics are changing with such rapidity. It is in this perspective that the role should be considered, for example, of external territories with respect to the central European urban nebula. This pervasive “urban realm” (Choay 1994) that has affected the central band of the European area from south to north is characterised in many parts by very low environmental quality of urban life (Maciocco 1999). Notwithstanding the reassuring images of spatial economy, some numbers are pitiless: 100 billion Ecus to reclaim 200,000 ha of discarded industrial areas.13 Although an underestimation of the entity of European wastelands and of the energy necessary to recuperate contaminated lands is evident, these numbers put up a wall of impossibility against the prospect of city worlds that would be nothing more than the current ones “recuperated”. A reflection comparing the entities of the phenomena and the energy to be employed reveals that efforts for recuperation in European urban areas are actually oriented in a selective way, depending on urban marketing requisites.14 Away from the enchanted urban islands, subjected to makeup by marketing demands, the city, in effect, shows its real face deformed by excess pollution of places and ideas.15 On this urban horizon, promising perspectives for constructing possible worlds seem perhaps to open up for spaces external to the European nebula, for the vast territories of nature and history, perspectives in which the environmental quality of the city is sustained on the grounds of a much vaster context than organised life. This does not mean temporary support while waiting for “recuperation”, but rather the beginning of the construction of a new urban world that entrusts its possible perspectives to the involvement of “territories without a voice”. It is a case of a process of deep change in aesthetic sensitivity (Shepheard 1997) which will enable the world to be seen with different eyes16 and the positive ambiguity of marginality to be recognised in the differential quality of territories,17 a different territorial subjectivity, recalling continuous experience of otherness in that it is a constituent part of the city project (Guattari 1991). Possible prospects may be taking shape on European city territory for the vast territories, a new experience of their otherness in which the reasons for the territory may be experienced for the construction of possible worlds of settlement. A projectual perspective that creates a relationship between different forms and processes that vary in a range between two extremes. On the one hand, the spaces of the contemporary city, corresponding to forms and processes in intensive urban situations, the management of which has the characteristics of a form of action bound to the functioning of a consolidated urban machine, in which redevelopment actions that are still typical of urban marketing demands and do not open up important perspectives, in the short and medium term, for urban refounding in the environmental sense, attempt to orient themselves in certain key directions – towards low energy consumption mobility, towards the fight against all forms of pollution, towards waste disposal as a project for each form of deterioration to face the theme of refuse and waste in the life of men and city – which open up


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in the long term a field of possibilities for the environmental quality of spatial life. There infrastructure creation is wearily aimed at rendering, in the medium period, the technological content of cities once again superior to that of individuals, families and businesses, and single cities have difficulty in dealing with renewed attention to improving the quality of the dimensions of community life, to facilities for people, to civitas, the indivisible link of which with the urbs is a constituent part of the actual meaning of city. On the other hand, there are the counter-spaces of the European city which correspond to forms and processes in situations rich in nature and history, whose management has characteristics – of process organisation, reversibility, self-reproducibility, of opening up possibilities – that are part of a form of action placing the environment, as strategic potential of the territory, as the central nucleus of a territorial policy opening up promising perspectives to territories external to the European urban nebula; infrastructure creation will be prevalently light, economies are now marginal, but will need to progressively become structural, the generative process is built on the local capacity to internally redevelop and unfold the energy external to the metropolis in the various components of the economic, cultural and social system, trying out new citizenships, economies and cultures.

6 The Territory as Contemporary Public Space We must nevertheless acknowledge that if the contemporary city can be considered the “covering for a series of flows” (Kaijima and Tsukamoto 2006, p. 238), the territory appears in some ways subjected to processes of “ruination”. But this gives the territory itself a denotative essential nature, which is not just structural, but also pictorial, typological and symbolic (Manieri Elia 2006, p. 156), and which establishes a difference compared with the sometimes excessive connotations of the city, its representational dimensions. Mario Manieri Elia reminds us that the ruin – in its most typical and obvious form – as well as, in the Mediterranean area, its most usual – lives in the collective imagination as a familiar presence. In many cases it is part of a context within which its own meaning reverberates, making clear relations that are historic but also structural and systemic (Manieri Elia 2006, p. 156). Also in the cases where it constitutes an isolated presence, its image arouses a serene, historic relationship, strong and at the same alluding to a detachment that has intervened in the temporal sequence – a detachment that is anything but unfillable, in that it does not imply also a spatial distance, due to that particular familiarity that the ruin, precisely for what it is, arouses and confirms. If we accept this analogy as a metaphor of work, the territory, too, just like the ruin, as well as constituting a generally serene and a-conflictive presence, might, in a general sense, qualify as a transitional object, a testimony and channel referring back to something different from itself. A heterotopia, therefore, that expresses above all a “lack” that cannot be compensated, as such, precisely in that it is substantiated by a deep signifying capacity that testifies to the absence of use, the living relationship with men, participation in the world and life. It is the territory itself, for being such, that will narrate all this; and so it becomes its primary sense as well as its value, at least as “historic

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appeal”. But, as we know, there is no historic appeal that is not accompanied not only by aesthetic appeal but also by every other sort of appeal, the first among these being the semantic: attention to sense (Manieri Elia 2006, p. 156). Sense that, as has been proposed, lies in the peculiar quality of the suggestive image of a “lack”, soothed by the long temporal distance and charged with identity value for the essentiality of the message that has taken on particular denotative strength in the long process of confirmation of its contextual presence and the symbolic investment attributed to it gradually by human society. In this anatomic evidence that the territory offers us, we find a cognitive value that undoubtedly exists, but this is an aspect, the cognitive breadth of which proves reductive at the outset, compared with semantic complexity and the richness of sense that the territory offers. Cognitive attention that is only archaeological cannot but require and aim at protective purposes, at the conservation of the territory. This, however, leaves in the background that quality which can be defined as the “genetic code” of the territory, its symbolic and collective endowment. In this integrated cognitive picture, which confronts the territory “not intended as a mass of relics but as history that includes us” (Augé 2003), we can try to sound out some points of agreement. The territory cannot be understood a priori as an archaeological object, above all for its constant integration in past evolution that its ruination has not prevented nor prevents, indeed bears witness to. The territory is a “built-up entity” that, during its “becoming” so, experienced a long phase of abandonment due to a gradual weakening of its relations with men, with an obvious fall in maintenance and use, with degradation that usually took on particular gradual features. The slow loss of integritas of the relationship between city and territory marks a historical process of great cultural significance with regard to relational dynamics between men and the built-up entity. If it is true that we live in a “detemporalised” present “not equipped to access the great category of the past” (Augé 2003), this sensation derives from a confessed relationship with pre-existing entities perceived as “relics”, as residual “ruins”. But this happens due to persistent lack of acceptance of “becoming”. The territory, as a general rule, tends to put up resistance against the dynamics of the present – resistance, though, that is not devoid of sense but, if anything, “too full” of meanings, which is an integrating part of our present and comes into play in the processes of retrieval of sense. The re-insertion of the territory in the context of urban and social life, therefore, should not cancel out its polysemous quality. The event that can reawaken it has to be complex and integrated, coherent with its past development (which is our past). This event is already present and it is the low-density city, a perspective of environmental city that recuperates the historical depth and the sense of its message of a “lack” and relaunches it in current terms. This dialectic between the connotative character of the contemporary city and the denotative character of the territory alludes to two conceptual worlds. The first underpins a representational conception of the city as an “environmental image”, that has impressed on it the separability of contemplation of an urban landscape from living within it, a notion of landscape-object constructed and established by modernity, from which we feel excluded, and with which a relationship of equality


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is never established. The second refers to an eminently projectual conception, like the willingness to take on new urban meanings. Understood in this way, the territory is the place where ethos is recuperated, all that which has not been at the centre, which was not in the polis. In this perspective, the project for the territory may be imagined as a complex process towards understanding contemporary public space, a new concept of public space as a space for reflection, far from habitual circuits, to escape from the hegemony of communication flows which produce standardisation of spatial experiences, a modality of public spaces in which we can move without feeling ourselves manipulated. The project for the territory is the project for contemporary public space. In this sense, the project for the territory is the project for the city, and this is why we speak of the “territorial future of the city”. This new concept of contemporary public space reveals itself on territories in a certain sense “external” to the processes of commercialisation, privatisation and theme-parking of the contemporary city. These territories, in which the new modalities of public space may be experimented, are the counter-spaces of the metropolis. Utility logics will be of no use. We cannot help but think that artists will be a part of the answer, whichever form of art they give us: fleeting installations and public performances or more lasting types of public sculpture, site-specific art referring to the local community or nomadic sculptures that move from place to place (Sassen 2006). Urban practices of constructing public space use improbable spaces. There are a whole variety of spaces like this. An example is that of the numerous intersections of transport and communication networks, where the bare eye or engineer’s perception can discern no other form, no possibility of form, but just see pure infrastructures and their necessary use. Another example is the space in which an effort is essential to manage to make out possible architecture where now there is simply formal silence, a non-existence, a space like modest terrain vague, not a grand environment that becomes magnificent due to the vast proportions of its deterioration, as can happen in the case of an old industrial harbour no longer in use. At the present moment we are experiencing a sort of crisis of public space, deriving indeed from its commercialisation. The grand monumentalised State spaces, especially in cities that were once imperial, dominate our experience of public space. Those who use them make them public precisely on the grounds of this practice of theirs. But what can be said of the effective creation of public space in these complex cities, be it by architectural interventions or user practices? The space accessible to the public is an enormous resource and we need this space in a greater quantity. But let us not confuse the space accessible to the public with public space. The latter needs to be created by practices and subjectivity of individuals; with their practices space users end up creating various types of “public dimension” on the border of the city, in its counter-spaces. But what is the relationship between the territory and contemporary public space? The environmental dimension comes to our aid, measuring our capacity to reconstruct urban ethics even in a condition of distance from the place, outside the condition of proximity (Lagendijk and Oinas 2005). Difficulties emerge, in effect, when the spatial forms of urban alter and different ways of imagining space for settlement open up. The change is characterised

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by the dilation – above all mental – of the urban onto the territory, which causes what Massimo Cacciari (Cacciari 1990) defines as the contemporary contradiction between the need for maintaining a relationship with places, and the demand for mobility, that is indifferent to it: an “extended use of the territory” (Secchi 1994) which produces important shifts in the area of urbanistics,18 pushing towards overcoming disciplinary paradigms that have the compact city at their centre, a refusal of the current assumption that it is indeed “all that is of interest”, in a bitterly selective way. In this scenario should be placed the disciplinary tendency that looks again at these instruments and abandons a kind of holistic reductionism, where “the city is all that is of interest”, to move towards a position in a certain sense characterised by the “idea of the synecdoche” (Benvenuto 1994), in which the environment is a part from which to begin to recapitulate and reorder the whole. This extension of the “myth of the mother city to the myth of mother earth” (Choay 1991), which the environmental dimension makes present in the contemporary urban condition, is also the sign that the city is losing its conceptual unity, that it is becoming a simulacrum of a city (de Azua 2003), a theme-park, or perhaps a group of themeparks, islands without an archipelago, enclosed and self-sufficient, that are often the background to urban segregation phenomena where the public sphere is more and more absent. It is indeed the environmental dimension that, attracting a “wider use of the territory”, opens up perspectives for a new public sphere as the adoption of collective awareness of the “environmental dominants” present in the life of the men inhabiting a territory, which constitute “an idea that unites places and spatial concepts rich in nature and history” (Maciocco 1995a). Here places are not necessarily meant as physical entities, but indeed, as expressed by Massimo Cacciari, as “single, specific complexes of relations” (Cacciari 1990), single, specific “notional worlds” of communities. Their differences are tied to transformation and communication processes on different scales, which influence the sense communities grant to places and to differences. But some of these places – using the word as suggested above – with regard to processes of selection inherent in the contemporary condition, are – in that they remain – more than others, significant of space organisation; they represent the “environmental dominants” of human settlement (Maciocco 1991). This encourages us to interpret all places, understand their meanings, decode them as representative of a thread of relations that grants sense to the integrity of the urban and territorial palimpsest, so that each projectual experience at each operative scale, even the tiniest, may be converted into an action making the relevant, important sense of this thread of relations emerge. For this, facilities for creative encounters between men living on this territory need to be activated, enabling them to bring out their creativity, their perceptive worlds, since the sense of territoriality, before expressing itself by attachment to a particular place, is, first of all, the relationship between men and – as M. Roncayolo observes – “derives from the diffusion of mental images, tales, more or less abstract representations [. . .], it is mythological [. . .] The individual, rather than perceive the territory, assimilates it and creates it through his practices and beliefs of a social nature” (Roncayolo 1980, p. 225). As Françoise Choay writes, these are the places


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that differentiate the future of the European city from the “collage city” (Rowe and Koetter 1978), in that its future can never be one of juxtaposition of modern and ancient but, due to the way it has been formed and taken apart, will be an “urban realm” in which places rich in nature and history will emerge as reference to an urban path for a city to be invented (Choay 1994). These are the places where the territory reveals itself as a new modality of contemporary public space, where, as individuals, we can stay without feeling manipulated and at the same time be part of a whole.

7 The Territorial Future of the City: About this Book The reinsertion of the territory in the context of urban life is investigated in this book with contributions by architects, urbanists, sociologists and philosophers whose reflections explore low-density urban situations, an environmental city perspective that recuperates the historic depth and sense of the territory and relaunches them in current terms, hence the “territorial future of the city”. The article “The dilation of the concept of ‘inhabit’ and the city/territory relationship” by Silvano Tagliagambe begins with a theoretical analysis of the concept of space and the difference between space and “spatiality”, with the purpose of focussing on the problem of the spreading of the city onto the territory within the theoretical sphere most suitable to this specific experience. On the basis of the strong interweaving of perception, action and project, which emerges from the most significant results of recent studies on cerebral mechanisms and processes, it is emphasised that the city’s relationship with the territory surrounding it needs to be focussed on from the point of view not of spatiality generically meant, but of space whose structure refers back to the primary horizon of action and of the project underlying it, i.e. to those capacities for moving and orienting ourselves in the space surrounding us, as well as for grasping the actions and intentions of others, which contribute to constituting a habitable world. Beginning with this premise, it is proposed that the matter of the dilation of inhabiting and the spreading of the city onto the territory be placed in a suitable, appropriate space, the intermediate space between the two extremes at play, that of their boundary, adopted not as a clear, insurmountable demarcation line but as an interface, i.e. a two-sided buffer zone, one oriented towards the urban dimension and the other towards the territorial. With this aim, the ideas proposed by Pavel Florenskij in a study of his of 1919 entitled Organoproekcija (The projection of the organs) are re-examined and developed. When adapted to the problem analysed, they can be translated into the pinpointing of what might be considered the crucial challenge territorial planning has to face today: to stimulate the capacity on the part of communities to recognise themselves as a unit with respect to “notable places” with which their identity is bound and which therefore define the borders of their natural, social and cultural environment sphere, and to shift these borders, projecting themselves into

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supra-local scenarios, to build new urban solidarities and new, vaster and more complex forms of identity. In “Planning in search of ground: committed muddling through or a critical view from above?”, Isabelle Doucet explores the knowledge processes we enhance to understand our (changing) spatial environments. By means of five “experiences” from within planning and architecture – Cities without Cities (Thomas Sieverts 2003) and Switzerland: An Urban Portrait (Diener et al. 2006) – and from the borders of these disciplines – the Micronomics projects by City Mine(d), Political Typographies by Ursula Biemann, Angela Melitopoulos and Lisa Parks, and the [Negotiating Space] Interactive Mapping in 2D/3D workshop – she explores the interdisciplinary and inter-experiential grey zones, such as between the university, activism and the field. She explores the relations created by these studies between theory and practice and between conceptual innovation, fieldwork and research outcomes. The five “experiences” are explored through their functioning as “laboratories” in which knowledge is produced according to certain rules, conventions, methods and constraints. She explores the position of the researcher towards his/her object of research (e.g. the city) but also the outcome generated by the “laboratories”: a text, book, map or design. She also explores the practical consequences of extending our architectural and planning research to other, more hybrid experiences. Using the five selected “experiences” and interdisciplinary and inter-knowledge challenges, she addresses the role of ground precisely by unravelling three major components of knowledge production: the position of the researcher, the functioning of his/her laboratory and the production of output. In “The polycentric city and environmental resources”, Alfredo Mela explores one of the most important processes transforming the set-up of the territory in the current phase: the tendency towards modification in a polycentric sense of metropolitan areas. In effect, territorial organisation previously based on a tendency towards localisation of the rarer functions and services in central areas and on a clear contrast between centre and periphery now appears to be becoming old-fashioned in the metropolises of the more developed countries. It is being substituted by a much more complex structure envisaging, on the one hand, the division of the central space itself into thematic polarities and, on the other, the emergence of decentred poles in peripheral space and peri-urban crowns, especially in spots characterised by greater motor vehicle accessibility. This essay intends, first of all, to supply departure points for a description of this phenomenon and for an analysis that will enable different types of metropolitan pole to be distinguished, throwing light on the positive and negative effects this transformation entails. In order to do so, it takes a cue, in particular, from a recent paper by Harvey, which proposes a distinction between three dimensions of space (absolute, relative and relational space); on the strength of this, corresponding dimensions of metropolitan polycentrism are pinpointed. Moreover, a reflection is made on possible paths of intervention with a plan directed both at promoting the positive aspects of the phenomenon of city transformation in a polycentric sense and at neutralising at the same time the negative effects, especially as regards possible fragmentation of urban space and accentuation of the social imbalances between the


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various parts of the city. Furthermore, light is thrown on how each intervention needs to aim at inducing the reorganisation of spatial functions with a view to increasing sustainability of the territorial development model. In her paper “Images of local societies and projects for space”, Paola Pittaluga describes how the coherence between the spatial images of local societies and the images produced by knowledge is becoming a constituent requisite of the project for space organisation. Indeed, one of the reasons for the inefficacy of projectual activity may be acknowledged in the divergence between the project and the implementation of it and, as underlined, in the ever-increasing difficulty of producing and promoting a sense of belonging and rootedness towards the urban territorial contexts concerned, which translates into a principle of responsibility with respect to the future of our own space of life. This leads us to hypothesise that the gap ensuing might indeed constitute a cause of inefficacy, in the sense that when the image with which the project is represented does not contain elements deriving from the “perceptive worlds” of a settled society, created by a process of “territorial hysteresis” in which environmental dominants emerge – the significant places, the non-negotiable values, the long-lasting elements that have always been at the head of space organisation of the society and above all the relations between the latter – it may often happen that the outcome is not effective and shared, precisely because it concerns elements alienated from the local population and because it derives from exogenous models of development indifferent to the actual vocations of the context. The article “Critical Design – The implementation of ‘designerly’ thinking to explore the futurity of our physical environment” by Nel Janssens critically addresses the importance of designerly thinking in exploring the futurity of our physical environment. Acknowledging the important role of design in participation and communication processes, as occurs in urban planning projects, the author nevertheless criticises the way “research by design” is currently adopted. The concern is that design is nowadays too often reduced to its communicative, decision-facilitating and programme-tuning capacities, whereas the more critical capacities of designerly thinking get much less attention and appraisal. The alternative approach that is proposed here is to develop “research by Critical Design” in a kind of analogy and complementarity with the already existing term “critical theory”. The text then explores how utopian thinking can be considered as a breeding ground for “Critical Design” by beginning with the statement that “Critical Design” is in fact “tentative design”, a type of designerly thinking that can be characterised by the capacity of prefiguration, hence making prospective alternatives the subject of anticipative reflection. The possibilities for such “tentative design” are explored in this chapter by means of two major cases. The Unadapted City (T.O.P. Office/Luc Deleu) is not merely a radical project for the city, but a specific way of thinking about the city through design. As a second case study, “Mare Meum” is explored: a project in which the designerly approach of FLC extended (free associating designers) exemplifies how an alternative future can be conceptualised by speculating on a different – though latently present – reality, hence surpassing the given situation. These projects show that their unconventional or non-conformist thinking is essential to

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developing a critical perspective on the issues at stake and as such is intrinsically part of “Critical Design”. The last section of the article explores the specific characteristics of “Critical Design” and argues that this way of designerly thinking should be more actively developed and used in research on the physical environment. In their article “Imagining the re/co-production of a hybrid territory. Testing sustainable concepts of landscape development in Roeselare West”, Liesl Vanautgaerden, Bruno De Meulder and Kaat Boon assert that the role of design is unclear when considering the transformation of peri-urban territories. Distinctions between rural and urban have become irrelevant while space is transformed incrementally by an assortment of actors. At the same time, conventional planning tools such as Masterplans and zoning principles have lost their meaning and are being replaced by more strategic or structural ones. The spatial vision is regularly emphasised amid these as a tool for both the imagining of the desired development and the long-term framing of short-term action. The background to this article is the idea that design and vision building should go together. We therefore explore a design-based approach that substantiates the spatial vision as a tool for territorial development. The approach is based on the concept of landscape as a complex and dynamic system: an open system that functions and transforms on its own, the transformation mechanisms of which can be identified. How these mechanisms can become the object of research and a tool for design is studied by means of investigation of the Roeselare-West region. This case study relates spatial transformation to a range of actors and each actor’s logic of (re)producing space. Thus it perceives reproduction as a mechanism of shaping space. The exploration evolves somewhere in between urban design and landscape architecture, in an approach that combines a multiple reading of the existing landscape, a scenario development of what is possible and a synthesis developed through an integrated landscape vision that expresses what is desirable and feasible. This leads to a spatial vision as an imagination of space that accommodates processes, rather than as a conventional plan that configures spatial elements. It is the projection of an image of future development in which a given interplay between the various actors can be generated, activated or coordinated. This projection requires interdisciplinary work. In her paper “Derelict places as alternative territories of the city”, Silvia Serreli discusses some alternative territories of the city not directly linkable with the dense metropolis. The experiences illustrated by means of the concepts of peripherality and proximity offer interesting departure points for in-depth study of the urban perspectives for non-core areas in particular. The crisis processes involving derelict sites are not connected with their being “small” realities, but with being “isolated” places, far from the “sources of knowledge creation and transfer”. Situations in peripheral areas are also investigated, by means of the concept of re-urbanity, in which new ways of inhabiting are found which shape new spatialities. These are places where the great tension between the different urban populations, be it the long-standing residents or the neo-rural in-migrant populations, has revealed new socio-spatial dynamics which highlight significant emerging practices of the city.


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The approach towards new scenarios of territoriality is highlighted by the author through certain requisites of the project: the environment is the strategic nucleus of space organisation perspectives and growth of economies; the environmental structure guides and directs localisation and organisation of settlement systems and activities; local societies need urban motivation and environmental awareness. In particular, attention is drawn to how urban motivation may be produced in the project through the use of narratives which give voice to territorial subjectivity and put the social actors in a position to express their values and expectations. The narrative approach offers itself as one of the modalities of self-representation of a local society, as it constitutes the exploration of representations of trajectories that favour recognition of the plural dimensions of a territory.

Notes 1. On this and other specific aspects of human territoriality cfr in particular Sack 1986; Frank 1992; Mark and Frank 1991; Campari and Frank 1993. 2. In one of the most famous paragraphs of the Investigations philosophiques, in which Wittgenstein compares language to an old city: “A labyrinth of lanes and little squares, old and new houses, and houses enlarged in different periods; and all this surrounded by a number of new quarters with streets at right-angles lined with houses all the same” (Wittgenstein 1958; Soutif 1994). 3. Tokyo–ga, directed by Wim Wenders, Road Movies Filmproduktion/Berlin Wim Wenders Produktion. 4. The Sky above Berlin, directed by Wim Wenders, Road Movies, Filmproduktion/Berlin Argos Films/Paris, 1987. 5. Each day in the metropolis we pass by hundreds, thousands of people, in silence, each a stranger to the other, like the trees in a wood. Man is just a phenomenon, a microcosm whose relations do not interest us, but whose form is accessible to us as are those of the mountains and trees. Man is an element of nature. An element just as fascinating, just as attractive as any other. [. . .] There is nothing nicer than sitting in silence in the tram among strangers, not to spy on their conversations, but to experience their feelings, to enjoy observing them. [. . .] One man is enough, a point that is moving, to upset the ordered symmetry of a street. This takes on, to a certain extent, a human dimension, asymmetrical, with the free space divided up by the movement of this body, distance and size take on a new significance. [. . .] He who thinks of architecture, thinks of the consequences of the elements of construction, façades, columns, embellishments – and yet, all this is secondary. What counts first and foremost is not the single form, but its context, the space surrounding it, the void that extends rhythmically between the walls, and is delimited by them (Endell 1908; Cacciari 1973, pp. 153 and 157). 6. These reflections on selectivity are taken from Maciocco 1995a. 7. See for example the IGM Cartographic Series 1992 on the scale 1:25.000 for Sardinia. 8. This type of selectivity aimed at places that count seems to be an unusual feature of the contemporary urban condition. Artists represent it in a great variety of ways; it can be seen for example in some situationists’ works of a psychogeographical matrix, as is the case of The naked city by Guy-Ernest Debord and Constant’s Symboliese voorstelling van New Babylon. Similarly, the urge towards selectivity by condensation of the urban image in a mental map is present in a conceptual artist like Stanley Brouwn, in an emblematic way in his work This Way Brouwn. To a similar sphere of selectivity may be referred in a certain sense even the phenomenon of buskers, the musical art of the streets, the presence of which in contemporary urban landscapes seems to want to promote the statement of an idea of space as a set of selective places for social relations and cultural growth.

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9. Place of reciprocal interactions between population, activities and places. 10. Development of ideas entailing a synthesis of various functional, environmental and sociological elements. 11. On 18 April 1923 in New Jersey the RPAA was proposed, the main founders of which (according to Peter Hall “the most extraordinary creative minds who joined together in a common urbanistic objective”) were: Lewis Mumford (1895–1990), Clarence Stein (1882–1975), Henry Wright (1878–1936), Frederick Ackerman (1878–1950), Robert Kohn (1870–1953), John Bright, an architect from Philadelphia, Henry Klaber, an architect from Chicago, Charles Whitaker (1872–1964), the Director of JAIA, Benton MacKaye (1879–1975), an expert in forestry science, and Catherine Bauer (1905–1975), an expert in problems of residence. The association lasted for 10 years (1923–1933) and the number of participants did not exceed 25 units. The following were among the most important contributions: Sunnyside Gardens in Long Island, Radburn in New Jersey, the first examples of American community planning, the Report of the New York State Commission of Housing and Regional Planning of 1926, the first example of planning at a state level, the plan of which corresponded to the idea of a widespread city region as would be created after the “fourth migration”, the metaphor Mumford created to describe the operative sense of his utopia: the hoped-for exodus from the metropolis cities towards the surrounding region. 12. The expressions “Fourth Migration” (Lewis Mumford), “New Exploration” (Benton MacKaye) and “Dinosaur City” (Clarence Stein) were meant to suggest an understandable imaginative vision to assert the need for the entire nation to be involved in the process of pointing out new forms of development. “Fourth Migration” is Mumford’s interpretation of the socio-geographical theories of society worked out by Geddes in Cities in evolution of 1915. The First Migration coincided with the process of urbanisation that followed the great migrations westwards. The Second Migration coincided with the establishment of industrialisation and the greater facility of movement due to the expansion of the railway; the population flow moved towards towns and fluvial valleys. The Third Migration: after the civil war, growing technological progress produced the third migration towards large cities causing congestion in metropolitan centres. The Fourth Migration would be due to the spreading of automobiles, communications, the transmission of energy at a distance, with the retrieval of links with the non-urban environment lost in the previous migrations. 13. The Plan for European Space Development, to use the French acronym Sdec, gives these numbers in a background of contradictory arguments which on the one side places the emphasis on the endless entity of the problems and on the other envisages a field of conventional activities for impossible all-out recuperation. Cfr SSSE, Plan for European Space Development (first official draft), Meeting of Ministers for territory order in member States of the European Union, Noordwijk, 9 and 10 June 1997. 14. A position in which a business strategy is applied to the city, a strategy understood as minimisation of risk, of the loss the business city might suffer with respect to the external world, a strategy that not by chance was promoted by private organisations. 15. “Guattari is right to take offence at environmentalist reductionism. To not see that pollution is a category of modernity, to not see that there is no difference, but a close relationship between pollution of ideas, excess of information and pollution of the seas, means to accept the game with the rules imposed by the great centres of the media” (La Cecla 1991, p. 56). 16. Perhaps for this – if we think of Wenders’ research on Lisbon – in the last part of Lisbon story, Friedrich’s cine-camera eye and Winter’s microphone return together to look and listen incessantly, almost in a “feverish vigil”, to try to “see” Lisbon, finding hope again in the commitment to uninterrupted projectuality innate in the human condition, and which means that each projectual experience, even the smallest, is converted into an action that brings to light the sense of this indescribable thread of relations between space and life that is the city. Cfr for these reflections: Maciocco 1996.


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17. Rather than abandon the local situations to their apparent irrationality with regard to the “rational” logics of globalisation, almost as if they constituted interference, a noise in objective knowledge, in the sense used by the theory of information, one might think they belong to a different logic that can be studied for itself. They will therefore be evaluated as a sort of “raw material”, a “mineral”, from which it would be possible to extract essential elements of the life of humanity, especially its life of desire and creative potential. Cfr for these reflections Guattari 1997. 18. The environmental dimension that brought to light the discomfort and difficulty urbanistics shows in trying to measure itself up on new viewpoints, which it is forcing itself in vain to overcome, by shifting to the position of material domains and the study of environmental disciplines, or by trying to keep the environmental dimension within the formal stereotypes of the disciplinary tradition, or, yet again, by retreating to a decisive conception of environmental evaluation techniques belonging to the disciplinary matrices of engineering and economics, or to forms in which a sort of metropolitan neopantheism flourishes, an attitude that represents the endeavour to reconcile with nature, an impossible symbiosis, underlying a refusal, possibly unconscious, to face up to the problem of giving shape to the city in the “contemporary urban realm”. These forms of disciplinary discomfort demonstrate how the entire environment – natural and historic – still remains unpublished material for the project for the contemporary city, while at the same time disciplinary discomfort grows in the face of unusual outcomes of urban metamorphosis, a “mutation” proving to be a difficult test for the traditional instruments of urbanistics.

References Armen G (1972) A Classification of Cities and City Regions in England and Wales, 1966. Regional Studies, Vol. 6, n. 2. Augé M (2003) Le temps en ruines, Galilée, Paris. Barnett C, Low M (eds) (2004) Spaces of Democracy: Geographical Perspectives on Citizenship, Participation and Representation, Sage Publications Ltd, London. Benvenuto E (1994) contributo al Convegno “La pianificazione integrata di territorio, ambiente e paesaggio”, Genova, Facoltà di Architettura, 14 December. Cacciari M (1973) Metropolis. Saggi sulla grande città di Sombart, Endell, Scheffler e Simmel, Officina, Roma. Cacciari M (1990) Ethos e metropoli. Micromega, n. 1. Campari I, Frank A U (1993) Cultural Differences in GIS: A Basic Approach. In: J Harts, H F L Ottens, H J Scholten (eds) Proceedings of EGIS ’93 in Genova, Italy, Published by EGIS Foundation, Vol. 1. Choay F (1991) L’urbanistica disorientata. In: J Gottmann, C Muscarà La città prossima ventura, Laterza, Roma-Bari. Choay F (1994) Le règne de l’urbain et la mort de la ville. In: J Dethier, G Alain (eds) La ville. Art et architecture en Europe 1870–1993, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1994. de Azua F (2003) La necessidad y el deseo. Sileno, nn. 14–15. de Solà-Morales I (1994) La réparation des villes. In: J Dethier, G Alain (eds) La ville. Art et architecture en Europe 1870–1993, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. de Solà-Morales I (1995) Terrain Vague. In: Davidson C (ed) Anyplace, The MIT Press, Cambridge M.A., U.S.A. de Solà-Morales I et al. (1996) Presente y futuros. Arquitectura en la ciudades. Presente y Futuros, Actar, Barcelona. Diener R, Herzog J, Meili M, de Mouron P, Schmid C (2006) Switzerland: An Urban Portrait, Birkhauser, Basle, Boston, Berlin.

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Drainville A C (2004) Contesting Globalization: Space and Place. In the World Economy. Routledge/RIPE Series in Global Political Economy, London, New York. Endell A (1908) Die Schönheit der Grossstädte, Strecker & Schroder, Stuttgart. Formaggio D (1976)Arte come idea e come esperienza, Mondadori, Milano, 1976. Frank A U (1992) Spatial Reasoning – Theoretical Considerations and Practical Applications. In: J Harts et al. (eds ) Proceedings of EGIS ‘92 Third European Conference and Exhibition on Geographical Information Systems, in Munich, Germany, Published by EGIS Foundation, Vol. 1. Gibson W (1988) Mona Lisa Overdrive, Gollancz, London. Guattari F (ed) (1991) Le tre ecologie, La Sonda, Torino. Guattari F (1997) Piano sul pianeta, Ombre corte edizioni, Verona. Hajer M, Reijndorp A (2001) In search of New Public Domain, Nai Publishers, Rotterdam. Kaijima M, Tsukamoto Y, (2006) (Atelier Bow-Wow), “Tokio”. In: R Burdett (ed) Città. Architettura e società. 10. Mostra biennale internazionale di architettura di Venezia, Marsilio, Venezia. Koolhaas R (1994) Melun-Sénart. In: J Dethier, G Alain (eds) La ville. Art et architetture en Europe 1870–1993, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. La Cecla F (1991) Le tre ecologie più una: la pornoecologia. In: F Guattari Le tre ecologie, Sonda, Torino. Lagendijk A, Oinas P (2005) Proximity, Distance and Diversity, Ashgate Hampshire. Maciocco G (1991) Le dimensioni ambientali della pianificazione urbana. In: G Maciocco (ed) Le dimensioni ambientali della pianificazione urbana, FrancoAngeli, Milano. Maciocco G (1995a) Dominanti ambientali e progetto dello spazio urbano. Urbanistica, n. 104. Maciocco G (1995b) Ritorno a Ithaca. In: A Huber (ed) Territorio, sito, architettura, Lybra immagine, Milano. Maciocco G (1996) La città in ombra. In: G Maciocco, La città in ombra, FrancoAngeli, Milano. Maciocco G (1999) Il progetto ambientale dei territori esterni: una prospettiva per la pianificazione provinciale. Urbanistica 112. Manieri Elia M (2006) Il plurivalente senso del rudere. In: B Billeci, S Gizzi, S Scudino (eds) Il rudere tra conservazione e reintegrazione, Gangemi, Roma. Mark D M, Frank A U (eds) (1991) Geographic and Linguistic Aspects of Geographic Space. NATO ASI Series, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York. Mongin O (2005) La condition urbaine. La ville a` l’heure de la mondialisation, Seuil, Paris. Mumford L (1922) The Story of Utopias, Boni & Liveright, New York (reprinted in 1962 The Virgin Press, Compass Books, New York). Mumford L (1938) The Culture of Cities, Secker and Warburg, London. 1938. Nivola C (1993) Ho bussato alle porte di questa città meravigliosa, Stampa Pisano, Cagliari. Nouvel J (1994) Berlin: The Meeting Line. In: J Dethier, G Alain (eds) La ville. Art et architetture en Europe 1870–1993, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Pareyson L (1988) Estetica. Teoria della formatività, Bompiani, Milano. Restany P (1994) La ville réduite a` ses peaux et déchets? Textes choisis par S. Duplaix. In: J Dethier, G Alain (eds) La ville. Art et architecture en Europe 1870–1993, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Roncayolo M (1980) “Territorio”, Enciclopedia Einaudi, Einaudi, Torino, p. 225. Rowe C, Koetter F (1978) Collage City, The MIT Press, Cambridge, M.A., U.S.A. Sack R D (1986) Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A. Sassen S (2006) Perché le città sono importanti. In : R Burdett (ed) Città. Architettura e Società. 10 Mostra biennale internazionale di architettura di Venezia, Marsilio, Venezia. Secchi B (1994) Atlanti e morfologie insediative. National Seminar. Programma Itaten. Indagini sulle Trasformazioni degli Assetti del Territorio Nazionale, Bologna, 28 June. Shepheard P (1997) The Cultivated Wilderness: Or, What is Landscape? The MIT Press, Cambridge, M.A., U.S.A.


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Smith N (2006) The Politics of Public Spaces, Routledge, London, New York. Soutif D (1994) Topes et Tropes. Le Plan de Ville et la Référence. In: J Dethier, G Alain (eds) La ville. Art et architetture en Europe 1870–1993, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Steiner G (1975) After Babel, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Tabucchi A (1994) Sostiene Pereira, Feltrinelli, Milano. van Houtum, H J, Kramsch O T, Zierhofer, W (eds) (2005) Bordering Space, Ashgate, Aldershot. Webber M (1967) The Urban Place and the Non-place Urban Realm. In: M Webber (ed) Explorations into urban structure, Philadelphia University Press, Philadelphia. Wenders W (1992) The Urban Landscape. In: W Wenders, L’atto di vedere. The Act of Seeing, Ubulibri, Milano, 1992. Wenders W (1992) Trovatemi una città per vivere. In: W Wenders, L’atto di vedere. The Act of Seeing, Ubulibri, Milano 1992. Wittgenstein L (1958) Philosophical Investigations. In: E Anscombe, R Rhees (eds), Blackwell, Oxford, 1958. Originally published as Philosophische Untersuchungen, 1953.


The Dilation of the Concept of ‘Inhabit’ and the City/Territory Relationship Silvano Tagliagambe

1 Spatiality and Space In the face of a phenomenon that exists on a planetary scale and is deeply affecting our epoch, as does the dilation of the concept of ‘inhabit’, and the continuous, now inexorable spreading of cities into surrounding territories, we cannot be content with simply empirically acknowledging its nature and effects. We need, instead, to imagine it, and thus adopt it as a subject for theoretic reflection, which will concern first of all the concept of space, to which reference should be made in order to picture and understand it better. On this point it is useful to depart from the distinction between ‘space’ and ‘spatiality’ that Emilio Garronii suggests at the beginning of his entry ‘Spatiality’ in the Einaudi Enciclopedia. The need to differentiate between these two terms and the corresponding concepts is motivated by the author by the fact that when ‘space’ is spoken of in a theoretic sense the following is meant: the subject of any discipline, including empirical ones, a psychology of perception or the semiotics of spaces, so-called proxemics, which, for example, may involve closer and more continuous links with factual experience but be aimed at describing it in its proper unchanging aspects, though always using a systematic set of statements, with relations in this case being more constructive than formal, but which will not in any case be determined by the pure and simple recording of isolated observations of facts actually independent in every way from a theory or the research hypotheses it entails or permits. We should therefore say that not one space exists, which would suggest an actual space, regardless of who experiences it and which is already expressed in structure, but many spaces, for as many constructive points of view and definitions as are possible, simultaneously and/or respectively related with the formal possibilities available and the many descriptive requirements, constituting an occasion of motivation on which theoretical construction may be born (Garroni 1981, p. 244).

Faced with this differentiation and subdivision of the concept of space, it is natural though also legitimate to wonder S. Tagliagambe Department of Architecture and Planning, Faculty of Architecture, Alghero, University of Sassari, Palazzo del Pou Salit, Piazzo Duomo 6, 07041 Alghero, Italy e-mail: [email protected] G. Maciocco (ed.), The Territorial Future of the City. Urban and Landscape Perspectives 3, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-77514-0 2 C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008

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S. Tagliagambe whether, if as many spaces exist as there are definitions, strictly formal or not, of space, these are – so to speak – alienated from each another or whether we can or should not speak of something as a ‘space common to all definable spaces’. Where, beware, by this expression should be understood not so much the designation of a common and more generic quality of all spaces possible, as the highlighting of their condition of possibility: which is a non-na¨ıve, more adequate way of restating the problem, unavoidable though usually badly formulated, of the ‘referent’, always the premise of language, even in its most ‘abstract’ uses. In order to distinguish this ‘common space’ from the many ‘spaces however defined’, here it is agreed to call it precisely ‘spatiality’ [. . .]. That is, in the true sense ‘being space’ of space however defined, its being a more original definition or, as stated, its condition of possibility from the viewpoint of a general experience, whatever its further definitions be (Garroni 1981, pp. 244–245).

This distinction, so clearly proposed, allows us to ask a fundamental, indispensable question to correctly focus the problem of the extension of the city onto the territory: to be properly understood, should this process be placed in this common, generic space, i.e. in simple spatiality meant as something primary, or does it need further definition, namely reference to a special theoretical space, the space of a differentiated experience, the fruit and outcome of the capacity for organisation of the relationship between city and territory in a system that might constitute a specific way of manifesting spatiality? And, if the latter is the correct alternative, which space is meant?

2 The Chronotope Example To begin to answer these questions and get a clearer idea of the theoretical space to which, possibly, we will need to appeal, it is certainly useful to refer to one of the most elaborate ways of specific manifestation of spatiality: the forms of the chronotope, as proposed and developed by Bakhtin and applied by him to the analysis of the novel in its past development. The chronotope is defined by Bakhtin as ‘the substantial interconnection of time and space relations which literature has artistically appropriated’, the result, that is, of the complicated, discontinuous process ‘by which literature has taken over real, past time and space and real, past man who is manifest in it’ (Bakhtin 1979, p. 231). In the literary chronotope the blending of features of time and space takes place in a single whole, endowed with sense and concreteness. Time here is solid and compact and becomes artistically visible; space is intensified and enters into the movement of time, the plot, the story. Time features are manifest in space, to which time gives sense and measure. This intertwining of planes and blending of features characterises the artistic chronotope (Bakhtin 1979, pp. 231–232).

There is therefore no doubt that we are faced here with a specific notion of space that circulates in aesthetic thought, in particular in literature, and in the critical theorising that characterises it: that the analyses arising from it are not, however, forcibly confined to this theoretical horizon and exclusive to it, is attested by the fact, recognised by Bakhtin himself, that the reflections he developed on the subject are also the fruit of suggestions and echoes ‘of the report by A.A. Uchtomskij on

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the chronotope in biology, in which problems of aesthetics were also touched upon’, which he ‘attended in the summer of 1925’ (Bakhtin 1979, p. 231). Uchtomskij, a student and heir of Nikolaj Evgen’evic Vvedenskij (1852–1922) and a follower of the ideas of Ivan Michajlovic Secenov (1829–1905) on biological determinism and the systemic character of central nervous system activity, was, like Bakhtin himself, a noble, a descendant even of Prince Suzdal’ Vsevolod, ‘Great Nest’; his parents started him on a military career once he had completed his middle schooling with the Niznij Novgorod Cadet Corps, but he soon realised he was not cut out for the military life and against the will of his family enrolled in 1894 in the literary section of the Moscow Theological Academy where his brother, who was to become a bishop, was already studying. It was here that, in those years, the original confluence of interest in philosophy and physiology began to take shape, which would then evermore constitute the fundamental characteristic of his work and guide him in all subsequent scientific research. His philosophical and religious training led him to give central importance to the problem of interpersonal relations. In 1932 he actually noted in a notebook that ‘only real communication with others allows me to know the authentic value of my life and my thought’. And it was precisely this interest that led him to progressively increase his distance from philosophy to develop further his tangible studies of the mechanisms of the functioning of the brain. He then went on to study physiology at the University of St. Petersburg, where Vvedenskij, a student of Secenov and one of the greatest Russian physiologists, was teaching, who was particularly involved in studying the mechanisms that regulate the reactions of organic tissues to environmental stimuli and had managed, thanks to his experiments, to demonstrate that the organic system changes not only due to the effects of external stimuli, but also during the course of its own process of internal activity, and had introduced the concept of ‘time’ for the first time into physiology. Uchtomskij took up and developed his master’s research and tried, in particular, to understand the steps of the whole process by which the body acknowledges the world in order to react to it, a process he called orientirovka v globinu chronotopa (orientation towards the depths of the chronotope), precisely to underline the fact that this presupposes the processing of a system of time–space coordinates. The reconstruction of this ‘orientation towards the depths of the chronotope’ and the analysis of interconnection of time and space relations were precisely the theme of the 1925 conference which Bakhtin had the chance to attend, the text of which was not unfortunately kept. We only have a partial reconstruction on the basis of notes found by V.I. Merkulov, Uchtomskij’s disciple and biographer, in the Science Academy archive. The treatise is divided into 18 theses, some of which have a more strictly physiological character, while others are more broadly cognitive. In the first seven theses Uchtomskij analysed the development of animal sense organs, the details of their reactions on contact and at a distance, and their interaction in the process of identification of objects and events underway in the surrounding environment. Depending on the kind of signals emitted by the object observed (smell, voice, appearance), the behaviour of the animal observing is organised in the form of

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a reaction of approach to or flight from the stimulus. As far as acknowledgment of an object or a living being in man’s visual field is concerned, according to Uchtomskij, this happens in two phases, illustrated in theses 8 and 9: initially, the interval of space between the observer and object observed depends strictly on the interval of time essential for covering the distance of the object, in the sense that there is a tendency to consider a thing more or less distant from ourselves on the grounds of the speed with which it draws near; subsequently, this immediate relationship between time and space which makes them converge and almost blend into a single whole is transformed into relativity of the simultaneous nature of the events and their spatial coexistence. The time–space relations of the environment are acknowledged by the body through the processing of signals transmitted by sense organs (sight, hearing and smell), carried out in what Uchtomskij calls ‘the dominant’, conceived and presented by him as a centre of excitation of the nervous system, which determines the body’s reactions to external and internal stimuli. The dominant nerve centre (or group of nerve centres) possesses high excitability, accompanied by a notable degree of inertia, that is by the capacity to maintain this state even if the initial stimulus ceases its activating effect. Adding to itself the relatively weak excitation of the other nerve centres, the dominant uses these to strengthen itself and at the same time inhibit the other centres: in this way it guarantees coordination of the body’s efforts in a single direction and cancels any elements of disturbance. At lower levels of the nervous system the dominant is manifest as the availability of a given organ to always be ready to go into action and as a capacity for maintaining this state of alertness for a long period. Whereas, going back to higher stages, we find ourselves faced with the cortical dominant, which constitutes the physiological base of a whole series of psychic phenomena, including, for example, attention, memory, logical activity and susceptibility. The possibility of concentrating attention on particular objects and the selectivity of learning are therefore physiologically determined by the characteristics of the dominant, which is a constellation that works at a particular rhythm, optimal with certain conditions, and is able to strengthen its capacity for excitation with constant impulses. At the same time, it is able, in relation to this increment in excitability, to inhibit the other reflexes present in common nerve-life termination. In this way, by inhibiting the other centres, learning selectivity is determined; and, on the other hand, there is concentration of attention, favoured by stimuli of medium intensity. The dominant therefore begins to take shape as the fundamental structure of human behaviour; but it is also something more, in that each of us can notice, through introspection, that when it is present, the capacity to take in and observe particular aspects of reality is greatly accentuated and, at the same time, insensitivity to other features of the environment grows. In this sense the dominant may be considered not only the physiological premise of behaviour, but also the physiological premise of observation (Uchtomskij 1966, p. 126).

The inertia which, as has been said, characterises the activity of the dominant, has, in one way and up to a certain point, a role in the development and strengthening


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of systematic, rational behaviour, since it is precisely to this that the constant prevalence of one mechanism over all other possible ones is due, and the origin, strictly connected with this prolonged predominance, of an organising principle of intellectual life. But it can also, in another way, once a particular threshold has been crossed, lead to behaviour and the personality crystallising and closing up entirely in a rigid structure, to the point of preventing the individual who falls into this ‘vicious circle’ from opening up to the outside: For the very fact that I am inclined to act in a particular direction and that the work of my reflex apparatus is polarised in a particular sense, my reflexes prove to be squashed and transformed with respect to many phenomena underway to which I would have reacted in a very different way in other, more well-balanced circumstances [. . .]. At every moment of our activity enormous sectors of vivid, unrepeatable reality pass us by unobserved without leaving any trace, just because our dominants were concentrated elsewhere. In this sense they stand between ourselves and reality. The general colouring the world and people take on for us is determined to a very great extent by how our dominants are and how we ourselves are. A scientist who works quietly in his laboratory and enjoys great stability and calm, who is fully satisfied with his state of isolation, will tend to describe the world as a quiet, harmonic flow and, even better, like a crystal in its infinite stability, and he will presumably consider men an element of disturbance, whose presence jeopardises this so ardently desired quietness. A businessman, on the other hand, will see in the world and in history simply an environment purposely pre-arranged for his commercial and financial operations [. . .] The dominant is often unilateral, and to much greater an extent the more it is expressed. This is why in the history of science the so typical phenomenon occurs of different abstract theories periodically following each other, to then be followed by a return to itineraries which seemed abandoned forever [. . .] Two opposing abstractions are correlative and each recalls the other (Uchtomskij 1966, p. 90).

The remedy for this unilateral nature of the dominant cannot consist of an attempt to extract it from our physiological and psychic reality, in that ‘in a normal nervous system it is difficult to imagine a state characterised by the complete absence of any dominant’ (Uchtomskij 1966, p. 102). But the route to pursue is a different one: ‘To not be a victim of a dominant, we must manage to exert our dominion over it. What is needed is for us to be able to subordinate our own dominants as much as possible and guide them according to a clear-cut strategic plan’ (Uchtomskij 1966, p. 127). Reception modalities in the dominant nerve centre, which can vary in richness and precision, and which focus, as has been seen, on the aspects mostly ‘in tune’ with the specific characteristics of the centre, therefore affect the way the environment is perceived, in the same way that the degree of reception of the latter, in its turn, influences behaviour and conditions it. In thesis 11 Uchtomskij describes the dialectic interconnection between the character and rapidity of the acts into which the behaviour of a living body is subdivided and its possibility of immediately, adequately acknowledging time–space relations and happenings underway in the surrounding environment. In the following theses, which Merkulov unfortunately dismisses in a few lines, Uchtomskij’s attention is concentrated on the importance of Einstein’s relativity theory and Minkovskij’s conceptions on the four-dimensional continuum, in which time constitutes the fourth dimension of space, emphasising how this union of time and space into a single whole (the chronotope, indeed) was near to the way

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physiologists considered the unity of time–space relations of the structures and rhythms of single cell activity, of tissues and the entire body. He therefore indicated the route to take to establish the new representations of the time–space complex at the basis of study of the dominant as ‘behaviour organ’. Of the last thesis, the 18th, however, we give the following quotation, particularly important for the purpose of our argument: ‘We live in the chronotope. A stumbling block. The “time of psychology” and the “time of physics”. It is now physiology’s turn to blend them into a single whole. Man who builds knowledge and man who participates in history are one and the same thing. Our knowledge of the chronotope is a direct product of concrete reality, from which we derive it through signals of recognition that precede it: the truth and lies of the project – that is, of the representation of reality we make for ourselves – are then decided by concrete reality.’ Here, apart from the learned reference to the expression ‘stumbling block’, i.e. the λ´ι␪o␵ ␶o˜␷ ␲␳ó␴␬o␮␮␣␶o␵ ␬␣´ι ␲`␧␶␳␣ ␴␬␣␯␦␣λo␷ ´ from the Letter to the Romans (9,33) with which Paul, combining two quotations, refers to Jesus Christ, the interesting aspect is the idea of surpassing the subjective time of the individual psyche and the objective, abstract time of physics, to blend them into a higher, chronotopic single whole, which is the result of interaction between man and the environment and fits, therefore, into the space of relations between these latter, i.e. in an intermediate world between subjective and objective. This notion of ‘intermediate space’ had already been proposed some years before by the great philosopher, mathematician and theologist, Pavel Florenskij, in a work entitled Magicnost’ slova (The magic value of the word), written in 1920, in which he spoke of the need for man who wants to inhabit the world in an authentic manner, to manage to activate a ‘mediating’ role between the external world and the internal one and trigger a transitive capacity from one to the other. To achieve these objectives the most effective instrument man has at his disposal is the symbol, due to the fact that it presents itself as ‘an amphibian entity, which lives both in one and the other, and weaves specific relations between this and that world’ (Florenskij 2001a, p. 51).1 In the opinion of Florenskij, who has studied its nature in depth and made it the cardinal point of his philosophical and scientific reflections2 , it is a binomic unity, unity in diversity, in which concrete reality and invisible mystery, finite and infinite, signifier and signified, but also knowing subject and investigated object, find themselves synergically fused, but not muddled. As he himself had already emphasised in his essay of 1904, O simvolah beskonecnosti. Ocerk idej G. Kantora (The symbols of the infinite. Study of the ideas of G. Cantor), which might be considered the initial nucleus of his theory of the symbol, the structure of the latter is inseparable from the presence of the skacok, i.e. the intermediate zone, where conceptualisation of the mystery of the invisible should be realised. Reference to this ‘zone’ is one of the most problematic questions, as it is difficult to define with the rational instruments at our disposal. Nevertheless, we are dealing with an essential entity for interaction between the two dimensions, apparently irreconcilable, of the existence of man, the visible and the invisible, daily experience and the insuppressible leaning towards an ‘al di là’, to something ‘further’ compared with this.


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The ‘intermediate world’ idea springs from the conviction that the whole domain of experience acquires a meaning and a value that are the deeper the more the domain links up with the invisible world, drawing from it continuous strength, nutriment and stimuli. Between internal and external, subject and object, terrestrial and ultra-terrestrial, reality and illusion, there is therefore a dynamic process of continuous interaction characterised by a high level of flexibility and interactive exchange, thanks to which the game of opposites does not separate, but integrates. Roles and functions are continuously inverted and reciprocally give each other meaning. There is thus an explicit detachment from the usual way of thinking centred on substance, which is replaced by the idea that, as a primitive modality with equal value to reality, relations should be used. It then becomes possible to surpass what we call today ‘objectivising thought’ and a new idea of being comes to the fore, in which perception and knowledge and the picture of reality that takes shape through these, already irremovably contain, as clearly stated by Uchtomskij, the seeds of the project, the truth and lies of which ‘are then decided by concrete reality’.

3 The Intertwining of Perception, Action and Project The analysis of the idea of chronotope, be it in the sense Uchtomskij gave it, or in that developed by Bakhtin, with specific reference to the literary field and the theory of the novel in particular, has therefore enabled us to begin to understand what to imagine a space means and develop it from the common matrix of the ‘spatiality’ concept, basing it on the particular demands of a specific theoretical domain and ‘making it fit’ the problems this proposes. As a secondary result of this but, as we will straightaway see, anything but irrelevant, the determinant function also emerged that the idea of project takes on in perceptive and cognitive processes. This latter intuition of Uchtomskij has not only been confirmed, but promoted and enriched by some of the most significant results arising from recent studies of cerebral mechanisms and processes. The knowledge neuroscience has gained, in particular, is increasingly eroding away the credibility of the classical model perception⇒cognition⇒movement, which irremediably entered a crisis when the fact was ascertained that perception appeared to be immersed in the dynamics of action, thus proving much more articulate and composite than it had been presented in the past. This conclusion was reached thanks to research which enabled it to be shown that the motor system is in no way peripheral and isolated from the rest of cerebral activity, but consists of a complex weft of areas differentiated by locality and function, and is able to provide a decisive contribution to realising those motor-sensory transformations on which the individuation, localisation of objects and actuation of the movements required by the majority of acts and behaviour into which our daily experience is sub-divided depended. Not only: the fact that both motor and sensory information can be traced back to a common format, codified by specific parieto-frontal circuits, suggests that, apart from organisation of our motor behaviour, certain processes usually considered to be of a higher order and attributed to systems of a cognitive type, such as, for example, perception and recognition

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S. Tagliagambe of others’ acts, imitation and even forms of gestural and vocal communication, may also refer back to the motor system and find their primary neural substrate in it (Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2006, p. 22).

In this general picture extremely interesting results have been achieved by a research group at Parma University, led by Giacomo Rizzolatti, at the cutting edge of the experimental neurophysiology sector, who has conducted surveys since the 1980s focused on the F5 area of the ventral premotor cortex of the brain of the monkey, which contains motor representations of the hand and mouth that are partly superimposed. Thanks to these studies two classes of neurons present also in human subjects have been identified, which are of great importance in understanding the functional organisation of the nervous system. These are populations of multimodal neuron cells, in which properties of a sensory type are combined with properties of a motor type. The first to be discovered was a class of bimodal neurons of a visuomotor type, which become active during the performance of specific motor acts, such as grasping, holding or manipulating and which also respond to visual stimuli. They thus reveal clear congruence between their motor properties (e.g. the type of grip codified) and their visual selectivity (shape, size and orientation of the object presented), carrying out a decisive role in the process of transformation of visual information relating to an object into the motor acts necessary to interact with it. Given these features, they have been called ‘canonical neurons’, as since the 1930s the hypothesis had been put forward that the premotor cortex might be involved in visuomotor transformations. The most interesting aspect of these neurons from a functional point of view is that they are also activated in contexts which do not require any active interaction with the environment. To activate motor system reaction in exactly the same way as happens when an individual is effectively acting on an object observed, it is enough just to have visual perception of the latter. What is triggered is the motor programme the nervous system disposes of for effective interaction with the object perceived visually: the model of the whole-hand grip for large objects, that of precision-grip – e.g. grasping with thumb and forefinger – for small objects. The results of these experiments deprive of all plausibility the classical idea of sensory information processing on entry which, developing in a linear manner, ends with the production of a motor exit. The activity of this neuronal population shows that the neural model of motor response is already specified in the phase of perception of an object, so we are faced not with a sequential process, but with a motorsensory ring. By speaking of ‘ring’ we mean to highlight the fact that motor reaction is not the final outcome and the mechanics of execution of the perceptive process, but is an integral part of the latter and inseparable from the sensory stimulus, in that it is contained in it. The meaning of this passage is well illustrated by Berthoz, who in a work of his of 1997 observes that perception is not representation: it is a simulated action projected onto the world. A painting is not a set of visual stimuli: it is a perceptive action of the painter who, with his deed, has


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translated onto a binding support a code which immediately evokes not the scene represented but the scene he has perceived. Painting moves us because it reproduces in a reverse manner the miracle of the pictures painted on the walls of Lascaux. I look at the picture in the place of the painter who has projected his mental activity on it. The genius is he who guides me to perceive as he does (Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2006, p. 124).

One first, important consequence of this way of formulation is ‘that the brain is not content to undergo the set of sensory happenings in the surrounding world, but on the contrary questions the world according to its presuppositions. On this principle is founded a real physiology of action’ (Berthoz 1997, p. 90; asserts). ‘The brain’, Berthoz emphasises again, filters information given by the senses depending on its projects. The mechanisms of this selection have still to be understood; at the present only a few forms of selectivity are known. In other words, we need to turn completely upside down the way the senses are studied: we need to depart from the objective pursued by the body and understand how the brain questions receptors regulating sensitivity, combining messages, pre-specifying estimated values, for the purpose of an internal simulation of the expected consequences of the action (Berthoz 1998, p. 253).

Already these conclusions seem surprising and rich in meaning, in that they show how the cortical areas localised in the so-called dorsal-ventral route of the motor system reveal a richness of functions going beyond the simple control of movements and which prove to be connected with the various dynamics of the action. But at the beginning of the nineties, during recordings made in experimental situations where the monkey was not conditioned to do fixed tasks but could act freely, it was seen that the canonicals were not the only type of neuron to have visuomotor properties. For, with great surprise, it was noticed that there were neurons, especially in the F5 cortical convexity, that responded both when the monkey did a particular action (e.g. grasped the food) and when it watched another individual (the investigator) do a similar action. The name mirror neurons was then given to these neurons (Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2006, pp. 79–80).

The discovery by the Parma University team led by Rizzolatti (Gallese et al. 1996, pp. 593–609; Rizzolatti et al. 1996, pp. 131–141) of these neurons, whose presence was originally found in the premotor cortex of the monkey and then verified experimentally also for the human brain (Gallese 2000, pp. 325–333; Rizzolatti et al. 2001, pp. 661–670; Gallese et al. 2002, pp. 247–266), opens up horizons to psychology, the cognitive sciences and epistemology so vast and with such consequences that seem hard to hypothesise even today, though various extremely significant results can already be highlighted. They seem in particular to be able to offer important empirical support to the second cardinal element of the idea of ‘mind’ proposed by Gregory Bateson at a conference entitled Form, substance, difference, held on 9 January 1970 for the 19th Annual Korzybski Memorial, in which he gave the following answer to the question: ‘What do I mean by “my” mind?’: ‘The individual mind is immanent, but not only in the body; it is immanent also in channels and messages external to the body; and there is a vaster mind of which the individual mind is only a sub-system. [. . .] Freudian psychology expanded the concept of mind inwards, to the extent of including the whole communication

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S. Tagliagambe system inside the body (the neurovegetative component, the habit component and the wide range of unconscious processes). What I am saying expands the mind outwards’ (Bateson 1976, pp. 479–480).

It is instructive to understand why this hypothesis of projection and expansion of the mind outwards proves corroborated by the theoretical developments we are talking about. From the point of view of motor properties, mirror neurons are not distinguishable from the other F5 neurons as they are also selectively activated during specific motor acts. Whereas things change as far as visual properties are concerned. Unlike canonical neurons, mirror neurons do not respond to the simple presentation of food or generic three-dimensional objects, nor does their behaviour appear to be affected by the dimensions of the visual stimulus. Their activation is more tied to the monkey’s observation of particular acts carried out by the investigator (or by another monkey) which entail effector (hand or mouth)–object interaction. On this point it should be noted, however, that neither hand movements limited to miming the grip in the absence of the object, nor intransitive gestures (lacking, that is, in a correlate object), like raising the arms or waving the hands, even when performed with intent to threaten or excite the animal, provoke significant responses. Moreover, mirror neuron discharge proves largely independent of distance and spatial localisation of the body observed – although in some cases they appear to be modulated by the direction of movements seen or the hand (right or left) used by the investigator (Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2006, p. 80).

As already mentioned, the interesting aspects that have already arisen today from this discovery are many. The first is that a capacity exists, based on precise, neuronal mechanisms, of ‘translating’ in an immediate way the body perspective of the individual carrying out a particular action in the person watching. This means that to carry out this translation we do not need ‘dictionary’ mediation at all, made up of mental representations, as classical cognitivism would wish, which conceives the mind as a functional system, the processes of which can be described as manipulation of information symbols on the basis of a series of formal syntactic rules. From this approach springs, consequently, the idea that representations are intrinsically symbolic and that thought must be reduced to a merely computational process.3 To thoroughly clarify the difference between the two statements it might be useful to give an example. If I see someone in a bar put out his hand towards a mug of beer I immediately understand that he is going to sip the drink. The crucial point is: how do I do it? According to the classical cognitive approach, to reach this conclusion I have necessarily to translate the sensory information in respect of the gesture of the person I am observing into a series of mental representations, which share the same prepositional format with language: in the case in point these representations will concern the other person’s wish to drink the beer, his belief that the mug he is about to grasp is actually full of the drink, and his intention to lift the glass to his mouth to drink. Whereas the discovery of mirror neurons enables us to say that observation of an action leads to activation of the same nerve circuit in charge of controlling performance: observation of the action, therefore, causes automatic simulation of the same action in the observer and, through this, understanding. So to understand the meaning of the behaviour of others presupposes the possibility and capacity on the part of our brain to create models of this behaviour in the same way


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as it creates models of our own. The final result of this modelling process puts us in a position to understand and predict the consequences of others’ actions exactly in the way it enables us to understand and predict our own behaviour. The mechanism at the base of the two processes of understanding is the same. This second explanatory model is rich in important consequences. The first is that it is impossible to know other people and what they do independently from ourselves and, in particular, from reference to our body and its movements. The ‘other’s reality’ cannot be known as such, but only in strict relationship to the subject perceiving and observing it and who interacts with it. The hypothesis put forward recently by Gallese, one of the members of the Parma team, to which is owed the discovery of the mirror neurons, is interesting from this point of view when it predicts ‘the existence of somatosensory mirror neurons which might help to give us the capacity to identify different parts of others’ bodies, relating them to equivalent parts of our own body. We are currently conducting a series of experiments aimed at empirically testing this hypothesis’ (Gallese 2003, p. 39). The second consequence of this approach is the notable change in the idea of perception that arises from it. The meaning of this change of scenario becomes clear if we take up again an important notion introduced in 1979 by James J. Gibson (1979), that of affordance, or resource, coined to describe the reciprocal relationship between an animal and the environment, and which subsequently became a cardinal point of ecological psychology. According to Gibson, visual perception of an object involves immediate, automatic selection of the intrinsic properties that enable us, on each occasion, to interact with it. These ‘are not abstract, physical properties but incarnate some practical opportunities that the object, so to speak, offers the organism that is perceiving it’ (Gibson 1999, p. 206). For example, a sculptor may perceive a stone interpreting it as a shape hidden within it; a mason as an element to lay upon similar elements to build a wall; a child as an object of play, to roll along the street; a collector of stones as a valuable sample to place on a shelf beside other samples of different shapes and colours. The same thing happens with man-made goods. We may perceive a hammer as something to use to drive a nail into the wall, but also as a lever to pull off a piece of wood stuck to a shelf; or as a leveller to flatten material that is soft but difficult to model, like a sheet of tin, on a harder surface; as a weapon to strike someone who has attacked us; or as a tool suitable to break open a money-box or to clean off something that has stuck to the sole of a shoe. In a word, its function and its meaning can vary depending on the needs of the person using it, who can therefore see it in many alternative ways. Gibson therefore points out that objects, even the simplest and commonplace ones, contain more than one affordance. In the case of the common cup the visual affordances offered to our motor system concern the handle, the central body, the rim, etc. Consequently, observation of it will determine the activation of various neural populations in the higher intraparietal area, each of which will codify a particular affordance. It is probable that these ‘proposals’ for action be sent to the F5 area, triggering authentic potential motor acts. Now, the choice of how to act will not depend just on the intrinsic properties of the object in question (shape,

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S. Tagliagambe size, orientation) but also on what we intend to do with it, the functions for use we recognise in it, etc. In the case of the cup, for example, we will grasp it in different ways if we want to hold it to drink coffee, rinse it or, more simply, move it. And already in the first case the grip might be different depending on whether we fear we will get burnt or not, if there are any objects around the cup, our habits, our inclination to respect good manners, etc. (Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2006, p. 36).

We can therefore say that we are faced with a pair of tendencies and capacities, both effectual, i.e. present and active in time and space. The cup in our example makes available for whoever wishes to use it, as own resources, a whole series of possibilities of grasping which objectively exist, whether they are perceived or not, and appear characterised, exactly, by objective tendencies; on the other hand, a subjective capacity exists on the part of man, though equally real and effective, to extrapolate and process information related to shape, size and orientation of the handle, the rim, etc., which comes under the process of selection, on his part, of grasping modalities, and of activating the series of movements (beginning with those concerning prefiguration of the hand) that on each occasion are part of the act of grasping it. From the pairing of these two series of objective tendencies it arises that ‘the cup functions [. . .] as a pole of virtual acts which, due to its relational nature, defines and is in itself defined by the motor pattern which is being activated’ (Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2006, p. 47). On the other hand, i.e. on the part of the man who has the cup in front of him, there is a view that is not an end in itself but oriented to guide the hand, and therefore presents itself as ‘also, if not above all, a view with the hand, in respect of which the perceived object immediately appears codified as an established set of hypotheses of action’ (Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2006, p. 49). Perception, therefore, presents itself as implicit preparation of the body to respond and act and from which, consequently, a type of understanding springs which has an eminently pragmatic nature, which does not establish for itself any ‘semantic’ representation of the object, on the grounds of which it would, for example, be identified and recognised as a coffee cup, and not simply as something able to be grasped by hand. The F5 and the higher intraparietal area neurons only respond to certain traits of objects (shape, size, orientation, etc.), and their selectivity is the more significant the more these traits are interpreted as just as many systems of visual affordances and potential motor acts. On the contrary, the neurons populating the lower cerebral cortex areas codify profiles, colours and the weft of objects, processing the information selected in images which, once memorised, would enable them to be recognised in their visual features. But is this enough to resolve the anatomic distinction between the ventral and the dorsal routes in the functional opposition between vision-for-perception and vision-for-action? We think not – unless perception is reduced to an iconic representation of objects, to the portrayal of a thing, regardless of any where or how, and action to an intention which discriminates between how and perhaps where, but has nothing to do with the thing. Unless, that is, the perceptive process is relegated to mere identification of diagrams (ideas, in the literal sense of the word), amended by some motor meaningfulness and elevated to the rank of single possible vehicles of significance, and the sense of the action broken up into a simple succession of movements in themselves lacking in a correlate object (Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2006, pp. 49–50).


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The fact that the two series of effectual tendencies we have dwelt on, i.e. the cup’s own resources and the possibilities of grasping that they allow, on the one hand, and the capacity of man to evaluate all possible grasping modalities, to select them and activate the series of consequent movements, on the other, take on meaning and value only in their reciprocal interaction, give a precise and concrete sense to the idea, already brought up at the end of the previous paragraph, that objectivising thought, founded on a claimed autonomy and self-sufficiency of the ‘things’ that populate our environment, should be replaced by an ontology of relations, by which, precisely, the cup, more than an object in itself, proves to be, as we have seen, a pole of virtual acts, to which a spectrum just as virtual, of grasping modalities and respective movements, corresponds. Only by pairing these two ‘virtual horizons’ and from their convergence does selection arise, within each of them, of that projectual solution which transforms possibilities into reality, i.e. the hypothesis of action in a cup and the entire spectrum of grasping modalities at the effective pre-chosen movement. At this point, as Uchtomskij emphasised at the end of his report in 1925, which so struck and fascinated Bakhtin, it will be concrete reality that will decide between truth or lies in the seeds of the said project.

4 The Constitution of the Idea of Space Even more relevant for the purposes of our argument is the fact that the constitution of space follow a route tracing that of objects, characterised by visual responses connected with motor activation, and therefore by the intertwining and convergence of perception and action. This congruence of the optical and motor situations is already found, as ultrasound images show, in the maternal uterus. After the eighth week the foetus shows rich, purposeful, motor activity: for example, after the eighth week it moves its hand towards its face, while at the sixth month it is able to bring its hand up to its mouth and suck it – which demonstrates that even before the child is born, it disposes of a motor representation of space. Once born, its movements become more and more purposeful and directed at the space surrounding its body, and this constitutes good evidence in support of the idea of the existence of a peripersonal space, codified in somatic coordinates, i.e. worked out on the basis of the body and its motor possibilities, already put forward by Ernst Mach and Jules-Henri Poincaré. For, as the latter wrote, ‘it would have been impossible for us to build’ something like a space ‘if we had not had an instrument for measuring it’ – an instrument to which to ‘relate’ all things and to use ‘instinctively’, that is our body: ‘And it is in relation to our body that we situate external objects, and the only relations we can represent of these objects are relations with our own body’ (Poincaré 1989, p. 217). Peripersonal space is therefore defined by Poincaré in terms of the mutual coordination of the ‘multiple extensions’ made possible by simply holding out the arm: it is the latter that enables us to establish the difference between near (all that comes within a radius of action traced by the extended arm and therefore proves within

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reach) and far (all that is beyond this range) and therefore between peripersonal space and extrapersonal space. This distinction, however, is not defined once and for all, since the space it describes cannot be imagined in a static manner, but must be conceived in a dynamic form. In other words, the distinction between near and far cannot be reduced to a mere question of centimetres, as if our brain were calculating the distance separating our body from objects only in absolute terms. All this would not contradict just the principle of the relativity of space dear to Poincaré and decisive for the organisation of movements on the part of the body. Also the organisation of F4 neuron receptive fields and their anticipatory function with respect to cutaneous contact do not prove compatible with the idea of a peripersonal space that is rigidly and univocally fixed (Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2006, p. 71).

And, in fact, some experiments have shown that the visual receptive fields of bimodal neurons in the posterior parietal cortex in the monkey that codify movement of the hand in a similar way to F4 neurons can be modified by actions involving the use of instruments. After training some monkeys to retrieve small pieces of food using a little rake, the researchers noticed that during repeated use of the tool the visual receptive field anchored to the hand expanded to the extent of including the internal space of the hand and the rake – almost as though the image of the latter were incorporated in that of the hand. On the other hand, when the animal stopped using the tool, though still holding it in its hand, the receptive fields went back to their normal extension. Holding out the hand due to using the rake entailed a widening of the space the monkey could reach, and therefore readjustment of near and far: the neurons which are activated in the presence of objects in the peripersonal space also responded to stimuli which they previously had not codified as they were far (or outside their space), but which now, by using the rake, became near (Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2006, pp. 72–73).

We can therefore say that if objects seem, in the light of the results of the research we have referred to, more and more like poles of virtual acts, space ‘is defined by the system of relations which these acts reveal and which find in various parts of the body their own dimension’ (Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia 2006, p. 74). The edges of what we have called the ontology of relations now begin to be clearly traced and delineated: and, within this perspective, the places in space cannot be understood as positions having an autonomous meaning of their own, nor be conceived as ‘objective positions’ with respect to an equally presumed objective position of our body, but should be understood, as Merleau-Ponty teaches us, in their ‘registering around us the variable range of our intentions or our gestures’ (Merleau-Ponty 1965, p. 199; my italics). Reference to intentions shows how we cognitively manage the world surrounding us with mental operations, so that the elements of reality are no longer for us thing objects but, as has been seen, poles of possible operations that we can carry out – correlated with possible interactions between us (our body) and the world. To read the world in this way is to prefigure (almost pre-glance) all action projects we could undertake on it, to be able to combine sense of reality and sense of possibility, managing to establish that harmonic balance between these two senses of which Musil speaks in Man without quality: If the sense of reality exists, and no-one can doubt that its existence is justified, then there must also be something that we will call sense of possibility. The individual who possesses it does not say, for example: here this or that happened, will happen, must happen; but he


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imagines: here this or that thing could or should happen; and if you tell him that a thing is as it is, he thinks: well, probably it could also be different. So that the sense of possibility might also be defined as the capacity to imagine everything that could be and not give more importance to what is, than to what is not (Musil 1957, p. 12).

Seen from this viewpoint the nature of the project becomes that of the expression of a continuous bet that must obviously take into account the ties placed by reality, but must also remain open to a spectrum of possibilities, with which to play, thus avoiding falling into the trap of unilateral exaltation of the ties to the detriment of the system of opportunities that should remain available once they have been defined and established.

5 To Read the City and Imagine Its Relations with the Territory Similarly, to read the city becomes to foresee all possible projects that interactively tie us to its affordances, to use Gibson’s words, i.e. to its ‘resources’, to the architectural, spatial, functional opportunities that it offers our capacity for perception, interpretation and action. To read the city is therefore to already design it: it contains in itself, once more and irremovably, the traces of the project. In the same way, the relationship of the city with the territory surrounding it is to be read and considered and must be focused not from the viewpoint of spatiality, meant generically and not imagined, but of a space the constitution of which, as has been seen, goes back to the primary horizon of the action and the project at the base of it, i.e. to those ‘chains of motor intervention’ and, more in general, to our capacities for moving and orienting ourselves in the space surrounding us, as well as grasping the actions and intentions of others, which, as Jean-Pierre Changeux and Paul Ricoeur pointed out in a recent dialogue, ‘contribute to shaping the world as a practicable environment, studded with roads, obstacles, in short, to constituting a habitable world’ (Changeux and Ricoeur 1999, p. 162). To imagine the dilation of inhabiting and the extension of the city on the territory means, first of all, to place them in a space that is for them adequate and suitable, which is the intermediate one between the two extremes in play, that of their boundary taken not as a clear, insurmountable line of demarcation, but as an interface, i.e. a buffer zone with two sides, one facing the urban dimension, the other the territorial one. A similar way of stating the problem of the relationship between these two dimensions enables that approach, not static but dynamic, to be applied to it, which characterises the distinction and relations between near and far, once they have not been reduced to a mere matter of centimetres but have been made to be part of the question of the availability or not of instruments with which to make it fluid and adapt it to the different demands that will arise and present themselves on each occasion. In the case of the relationship between the city and the territory this instrument can only be the project. To understand what the latter should be like and in what direction it should go, the considerations proposed by Florenskij in a study of his of 1919, entitled Organoproekcija (the projection of organs) (Florenskij 1969, pp. 39–42), might prove useful. In this he defines as ‘magic’ ‘any action of the will that has an effect

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on the organs of the body’ (Florenskij 1969, p. 40) like, for example, the simple will to eat something, which triggers a chain of a whole series of concrete acts from getting the food, swallowing it, chewing it, digesting it, transforming it and putting it into circulation in the body, etc. In this sense we can define magic as ‘the art of moving the boundary of the body with respect to its habitual position’ (Florenskij 1969, p. 40; my italics). The symbol is magic precisely in this sense, as are artistic productions, scientific theories and in general the world of objective knowledge. All these products, the fruit of particular deliberate acts, are actually capable of triggering specific effects on/in reality, and therefore moving the boundary of the body: for this, they are, as we said, magic. This ‘magic’ function of the symbol is exalted when it becomes the ‘linguistic symbol’, when it is raised, that is, to the level of the word, taking on and fully interpreting the role of creator in the art of ‘moving the boundary of the body’. Thanks to this art, the body projects itself outside the space delimiting it, it surpasses its lines of demarcation, is no longer content with the elementary forms of connection with outside reality, so minimal as to be confused with mechanisms of reflex action and become one with what seems to be a process of direct extraction, with no mediation, of information from the surrounding environment, and creates, in order to converse more fully and effectively with the latter, a whole world made of products of knowledge. The word thus takes on the role of fundamental constituent element of that weft (threads of connection), thanks to which man progressively builds, between the two opposing worlds (external and internal), an intermediate space, that of culture. It is ‘the knowing subject and the object to be known, the united energies of which keep it alive’ (Florenskij 2001, p. 33) and precisely for this causes the fact to arise in an immediate manner that ‘in the act of knowledge the subject cannot be separated from the object: knowledge is at the same time the one and the other thing together; more precisely, it is the knowledge of the object through the subject, a unity in which one can be distinguished from the other only in the abstract sense, while through such a unity the object is not destroyed in the subject, nor does the subject dissolve in the object of the knowledge that exists outside it. By uniting, they do not swallow each other up, although, while they still keep their autonomy, they do not remain separate either’ (Florenskij 2001, pp. 24–25). The structure itself of the word shows this in that it is a whole, a union between phoneme and sememe: On the linguistic level this union consists of the morpheme, in that on the one hand it determines its phonemes, and on the other develops, from the original meaning of the word, which is also given by the morpheme, all the richness of the sememe store. The magic point of concentration of the word is also to be sought at the same point where we found the centre of linguistic concentration. If, through the morpheme, which represents the duplicity of primary sound and primary sense, sound and sense are united in the word, then we should suppose that in its magic sphere the morpheme of the word unites in itself the ultraphysical effect of the phoneme and the infrapsychic effect of the sememe, thus acting in both directions, or, more precisely, produces effects that are found between the purely physical sphere and the purely psychic sphere, i.e. it belongs to the hidden sphere in the direct sense of the word (Florenskij 2001, pp. 67–68).


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A project that rises to the needs posed by the shifting of boundaries between the city and the territory must be magic in Florenskij’s sense, i.e. capable not just of involving the physical and environmental dimension and the psychic, cultural and social one and of weaving and intertwining a weft of threads of connection between these two opposing worlds, but of activating a new way of imagining the space of the contemporary urban condition, which will consist of seeing that each project experience, even the tiniest, on each operational scale, be converted into an action that makes the urban and territorial palimpsest, the secret weft of the time-space of the great signs both of nature and of history and culture, emerge. The magic Florenskij speaks of, translated into the language of territorial planning, therefore means the capacity on the part of the community to recognise itself unitarily with respect to ‘notable places’, to which their identity is tied, and which therefore define the boundaries of their cultural, social and natural basic environment, and to move these boundaries, projecting themselves on super-local scenarios to build new urban solidarity and new forms, vaster and more complex, of identity. And it also means the availability of a territorial vision that combines a policy for local development, aimed at gathering indications of vitality where they exist and promoting them, with a policy of selective growth based on types of knowledge and know-how which the said communities have managed to develop even in the less fortunate areas and which represent the seed of possible economic and territorial recovery. In this picture the dilation of inhabiting and the extension of the city into the surrounding territory must mean, first of all, the projection outside the traditional boundaries of the valued urban functions, education, including that of a higher profile, research, health, infrastructural complexes for communications and transport, cultural and commercial events of a high level, tertiary centres, etc. and all related services, through capillary work on infrastructures that also fully uses all information technology, communication and network potential. The territory, including that beyond the ‘compact city’, may thus become the critical place of an organisation based on circulation, a nodal point in the networks that link between them, in an increasingly dense system of inter-relations, the various areas of economy and culture of ‘the world system’. In relation to this transformation the concept itself of ‘space’ changes within which the majority of activities of an economic and social system are carried out; it is no longer made up only of effective spatial structure, i.e. the physical form of settlements and interactions, of visible flows of people, goods and capital between the various points of the system. But this concept has, however, dilated to the point of now coinciding with the network, much thicker and more articulate, of communication flows, which wrap the operators of the system itself in a thick spider’s web and connect it to other near or far systems, of immaterial exchanges, tied to systems of transmission not only and not so much of tangible objects and products, but of knowledge and information relating to data and services. Telephone calls, fax messages, databank enquiries, commercial and financial operations intertwine along telecommunication nets, giving origin to more and more advanced transactions (transmission of fixed and moving images, teleconferences, distant operators working on research and activities together, etc.),

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as telecommunications gradually combine with informatics, making a vast field of telematic applications available. Physical space is therefore progressively overlapped by virtual space, as a network of interchange and cooperation nurtured on web-shaped organisation. The growing interdependence between these two types of space that are increasingly intertwined is giving rise to what may be considered an updated, sui generis version of the intermediate world Florenskij spoke of, that is what is more and more frequently called the ‘third space’, which cannot be identified either with physical or material space, nor with digital space, but is the result of the digital extension of physical space, and takes shape, therefore, as digital space bound endlessly to real space. It is not, then, a virtual space wanting to reproduce and substitute real space, by creating a hyper-realistic analogy, but ‘a threshold-space’, which includes, along with information and knowledge, real people, too. On this space, as the research of the Californian school of anthropology of work has shown (Lave, Wenger, Brown, Duguid), various professional communities are in fact settling the ‘communities of practice’, as they have been called by these scholars, those of industrial product designers, architects, informatics engineers, marketing experts, ‘creative’ people in general, according to the definition of Richard Florida, lecturer at the Carnegie Mellon University (Florida 2002), i.e. musicians, writers, designers, lawyers, educators, financial experts, researchers and young artists, who work and collaborate ‘at a distance’ yet in close reciprocal contact, putting into circulation through the networks, knowledge, understanding and understanding each other, and bringing to the surface the projectuality and creativity of subjects, both individual and collective. The extension, supported nowadays by wireless media, of the possibility of continuous communication for everybody with everybody, beyond the traditional one-to-one and one-to-many models, produces diffusion modalities in which the transmission of the message-of the message-of the message gives rise to a kind of social space that multiplies, that is infinite. This is a type of fractal space which represents the greatest combination of physical presence and remote communication mediated by the technologies currently available and which highlights the need, now unavoidable, of achieving a redefinition of concepts like ‘inhabit’, ‘territory’ and ‘urban system’. As architects have always influenced and extended our perception of physical space using light and sound, or the dynamic sequence of environments of different proportions, in the same way networks and interactive means and telecommunication systems, related to mobile devices and wireless media, are affecting our organisation of space more and more, causing an increase in the latter and the need, as we have said, to re-imagine it and reach new forms and modalities of theoretical framework for it. The hybridisation and fusion of the real world and its virtual enhancement, thanks to which we are able to have significant enrichment of reality with information useful for carrying out complex tasks, requires a project capable of being applied to the relationship between men and places in its globality, of confronting and involving an environment that is more and more complex and dilated and of unfolding at the various operational scales, overcoming traditional distinctions and hierarchies.


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The expansion of inhabiting and the growing ‘penetration’ of the city into the territory therefore need a constructivist and non-representational conception of the project, able to combine ‘sense of reality’ and ‘sense of possibility’, i.e. to urge communities to explore ‘possible worlds’ that can come true with the support of ‘architectures’ at different operative scales; ‘architectures’ that are not simple buildings but are to be imagined as specific single complexes of relations, acts and processes, concrete and virtual, that grant urban sense to a place. These ‘possible worlds’ express the aspirations, hopes, wishes and impulses for change in the environment and in their existence of individual and collective subjects. They affect the perception of space and favour surpassing, on the part of the ‘analytical’ disciplines, a vision concentrated completely on the analysis of a world ontologically given, to address exploration of the dynamic and advanced possibilities of reality. Obviously not everybody is successful, only those who manage to achieve and maintain an active and dynamic balance with reality itself, though this is not easy, i.e. not to remain beneath it, with resignation, and not to push so far beyond its boundaries as to take on the profile of an abstract, unrealisable utopia. The project of human settlement in all its aspects and variants, including those concerning the complex relationship between city and territory, cannot in effect but proceed from reality, within a shared background of beliefs, knowledge, objectives and values which constitutes the ‘principle of cohesion’ of the project itself and is interpreted and unveiled by the comparison of disciplinary knowledge – and the different knowledges that interact with it – with the common knowledge of the men who inhabit a territory.

Notes 1. The same essay is present, entitled The magic nature of the word, in the Italian translation by E. Treu, in D. Ferrari-Bravo, Slovo. Geometry of the word in Russian thought between ‘800 and ‘900, Edizioni ETS, Pisa, 2000, pp. 165–211. 2. To study Florenskij’s conception of the symbol and his “epistemology of the symbol” further, see Tagliagambe (2006). 3. For a criticism of cognitivism, see Tagliagambe (2002), in particular Chapter 5, pp. 93–105.

References Bakhtin M (1979) Le forme del tempo e del cronotopo nel romanzo. In: M Bakhtin (ed) Estetica e romanza, Einaudi, Torino. Bateson G (1976) Forma, struttura e differenza. In: G Bateson (ed) Verso un’ecologia della mente, Adelphi, Milano. Berthoz A (1997) Le sens du mouvement, Odile Jacobe, Paris. Berthoz A (1998) Il senso del movimento Graw-Hill, Milano. Changeux J P, Ricoeur P (1999) La natura e la regola. Alle radici del pensiero, Raffaello Cortina, Milano. Florenskij P A (1969) Organoproekcija (The projection of organs). Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR (Decorative art of the URSS), 12, pp. 39–42.

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Florenskij P A (2000) La natura magica della parola in the Italian translation by E. Treu. In: D Ferrari-Bravo (ed) Slovo. Géométrie della parola nel pensiero russo tra ‘800 e ‘900, Edizioni ETS, Pisa. Florenskij P A (2001a) Il valore magico della parola. In: P A Florenskij (ed) Il valore magico della parola, translated and edited by G. Lingua, Medusa, Milano. Florenskij P A (2001b) Imjaslavie kak filosofskaja predposylka (It. trans. La venerazione del nome come presupposto filosofico). In: P A Florenskij (ed) Il valore magico della parola, translated and edited by G. Lingua, Medusa, Milano. Florida R (2002) The rise of creative class, Basic Books, New York. Gallese V (2000) The acting subject: towards the neural basis of social cognition. In: T Metzinger (ed) Neural correlates of consciousness: empirical and conceptual questions, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Gallese V (2003) Neuroscienza delle relazioni sociali. In: F Ferretti (ed) La mented egli altri. Prospettive teoriche sull’autismo, Editori Riuniti, Roma. Gallese V, Fogassi L, Fadiga L, Rizzolatti G (1996) Action recognition in the premotor cortex. Brain, 119. Gallese V, Fogassi L, Fadiga L, Rizzolatti G (2002) Action representation and the inferior parietal lobule. In: W Prinz, B Hommel (eds) Attention and Performance, XIX, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Garroni E (1981) “Spazialità”. Enciclopedia, vol. 13, Einaudi, Torino. Gibson J J (1979) The ecological approach to visual perception, Houghton Mifflin, Boston. Gibson J J (1999) Un approccio ecologico alla percezione visiva, il Mulino, Bologna. Merleau-Ponty M (1965) (A Bonomi ed) La fenomenologia della percezione, Il Saggiatore, Milano. Musil R (1957) L’uomo senza qualità, Einaudi, Torino. Poincaré H (1989) Pensieri ultimi. In: H Poincaré (G. Boniolo ed) Opere epistemologiche, Piovan, Abano Terme, vol. 1. Rizzolatti G, Fadiga L, Gallese V, Fogassi L (1996) Premotor cortex and the recognition of motor actions. Cognitive Brain Research, 111. Rizzolatti, G, Fogassi L, Gallese V (2001) Neurophysiological mechanisms underlying the understanding and imitation of action. Nature Reviews. Neuroscience, 2, pp. 661–670. Rizzolatti G, Sinigaglia C (2006) So quel che fai. Il cervello che agisce e i neuroni specchio, Raffaello Cortina, Milano. Tagliagambe S (2002) Il sogno di Dostoevskij, Raffaello Cortina, Milano. Tagliagambe S (2006) Come leggere Florenskij, Bompiani, Milano. Uchtomskij A A (1966) Princip dominanty (The principle of the dominant). In: A A Uchtomskij (ed) Dominanta (The dominant), Nauka, Moskva-Leningrad.

Planning in Search of Ground: Committed Muddling Through or a Critical View from Above?1 Isabelle Doucet

Planning in search ground (Barcelona 2007)

1 Introduction In a letter to Carl Gustav Jung (18/6/1909), Sigmund Freud encouraged him to continue his work despite all the problems, by reminding him of Ferdinand Lasalle, who described the exploded retort in the hands of the chemist thus: ‘lightly raising I. Doucet Department of Architectural Theory Faculty of Architecture, Delft University of Technology, Berlageweg 1/PO Box 5043, 2628 CR/2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] G. Maciocco (ed.), The Territorial Future of the City. Urban and Landscape Perspectives 3, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-77514-0 3 C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008

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his eyebrows, concerning the resistance of matter, the researcher proceeds with his activities’.2 Freud continued: ‘considering the kind of matter we are dealing with, small laboratory explosions will never be avoidable [. . .]. As such we learn how much danger is hidden in the matter and our ways of managing it’ (Freud in McGuire and Sauerlaender 2000, p. 172: translated from Dutch). What is so fascinating about Freud’s remark is the stubbornness he attributes to both matter and the scientist in the production of knowledge. When moving from the science laboratory to the city-as-laboratory, our research object – the city representing Lasalle’s ‘matter’ – leads its own life, too, at times stubbornly resisting and hiding, at other moments gently cooperating or unexpectedly revealing some of its secrets to us. In our explorations of the city, we seem to trust our categories, terminologies and methodologies so strongly that we often tend to forget to listen to what the city is actually trying to tell us. Even when it occurs to us that our tools and methods are no longer appropriate for exploring the city, we simply reinvent them until we have reinforced our trust. However, such reinvented tools and methods are never neutral. As they transform reality by producing knowledge about it, one should enquire ‘what effects are generated by this construction of things?’ (Boyer 2006, p. 105). One could enquire how this applies to the new terminologies – in terms of multiplicity, heterogeneity, complexity, chaos and fractals – developed for our current research object, the city, being no longer singularly separated from the countryside but sprawling into urbanised landscapes; being no longer subdivided into functional zones, but by a variety of ever less visible boundaries such as morphological but rapidly moving social, cultural and economic lines, and being structured polycentrically and subject to global competition.3 But apart from the city – matter – Freud’s remark applies to the scientist, too: to his stubborn muddling through the city, to his methods, struggles and ‘ways of managing it’ (Freud in McGuire and Sauerlaender 2000, p. 173), as much as to his affections, intuitions and expectations with regard to his object of research, the city. This chapter questions the knowledge-building processes we enhance to understand our (changing) environments and – indirectly – the role that is allocated to the planner and architect, being the ‘executers’ of these processes.4 In order to ‘understand, explain and predict the world we live in’ (Okasha 2002, p. 1) – as part of a more general scientific attempt to the claim for ‘truth’– but especially in order to be able to claim scientific knowledge in a specific scientific field or discipline, planners and architects aim at theorising their work. In this chapter, however, I opt to bypass such mere theoretical reflections and to focus on ‘experiences’ very much in the sense of William James’ claim that ‘truth means adequacy to experience, or workability in practice’ (Anderson 2007). As Bruno Latour has emphasised (Latour 2007, pp. 7–8), too, James’ Radical Empiricism finds ‘connections between experiences in experience itself [. . .] experiences know, believe, and remember other experiences’ (Anderson 2007). In this chapter, I will concentrate on ‘experiences’ from within the planning and architecture discipline – Cities without Cities and Switzerland: An Urban Portrait – as well as more hybrid ‘experiences’ such as the Micronomics projects, Political Typographies and the architecture workshop

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[Negotiating Space] Interactive Mapping in 2D/3D.5 By means of these five ‘experiences’, I aim to explore the interdisciplinary and inter-experiential grey zones – existing between the university, activism and the ‘field’ – into which any researcher is thrown as soon as he/she aims to achieve one form or another of workability in practice. I will, moreover, explore how the extension of our architectural and planning research to other, more hybrid experiences can contribute to the innovation of the tools, methods and terminologies that planning and architecture are so keen on reinventing.

2 Architects and Urbanists in Search of Ground In a recent lecture, Christine Boyer emphasised the need for architects and planners to become more self-reflective about their work in cities rather than continuing to nervously develop new concepts and vocabularies.6 According to Boyer, this urge derives not only from rapidly changing urban conditions but also from the architects’ own fear for the image of the city, as reflected in Foucault’s ‘mirror’ (Boyer 2006, p. 98). In the same way as Foucault was concerned ‘how to keep other images and counter-discourses open to reinterpretation, inclusion and uncertainty’ (Boyer 2006, p. 95), architects fear they will find themselves ‘on the side of disciplinary control and normative order, and thus not [. . .] on the side of the insurrections of subjugated knowledge that derive their power from all that is different from what surrounds them’ (Boyer 2006, p. 98).7 Inspired by Foucault’s ‘Of Other Spaces’, Boyer searches for an ‘outer space’ for architects, from where they can theorise in order to come back with real solutions. Besides the void, as an abstract, an outer space for critical thinking – the space between thing and word – Boyer proposes an emphasis on the event and what happens after the event.8 For example, when applied to the research on megacities, this lack of attention for the event is demonstrated by the fact that architects and urbanists do not mention what is really new about these realities, namely that urbanisation takes place without industrialisation and employment creation and that smaller villages and cities urbanise, too.9 If the event for megacities is not population (demography) but the market (current neo-liberal market system), then Boyer rightly argues for a better integration of market forces in our analyses.10 Moreover, one could argue that approaching megacities from a mere theoretical, disciplinary point of view would be missing the point regarding the real functioning of such extraordinarily growing cities. In our incapability to grasp the vastness of rapidly developing slums, favelas, bidonvilles or shantytowns, we continue to enhance our own categories of what a city supposedly is and does. The very intrinsic characteristics of these slums – their particularities and internal logics – are either overlooked or idealised by a disciplinary longing for naming, categorising and organisation. Throwing away traditional planning concepts as no longer valuable for naming and researching the city is not necessarily a solution either, as is demonstrated by Koolhaas’ research on Lagos.11 In this project, ‘non-traditional’ organising principles such as appropriation, self-organisation and

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recycling are addressed – and idealised – but, so also Boyer argues, without researching the economic forces, human rights issues, corruption, etc. behind them.12 In this chapter, I will explore this idea of the event through the analysis of ‘experiences’ in spatial knowledge production rather than through theory. The selection of ‘experiences’ responds to Boyer’s suggestion for a more interdisciplinary approach, and for inserting economic, social and geographical knowledge into planning and architecture. The five ‘experiences’ selected are deliberately explored as an ‘experience’ rather than as a ‘case’. This is motivated by the fact that their analysis as a ‘case’ would delimit the analysis mainly to research outcomes, results and effects, whereas their analysis as ‘experience’ allows a more thorough exploration of their knowledge-building process – with its starting points and predecessors, its affections, intuitions and struggles as well as its outcomes. As a consequence of analysing experiences-as-such rather than cases-illustrating-a-theoretical-argument, reporting on them is lengthier while their reference to the material studied is more extensive. The five ‘experiences’ demonstrate the irrelevance of isolating large-scale ‘problems’ from small-scale ‘solutions’: taking responsibility as an architect means understanding and addressing the city as both influenced by economic grant mechanisms and being accessible through small-scale opportunities. Saskia Sassen has argued repeatedly that the ‘local’ political possibilities occurring in the residual places of cities can become part of a global network, thanks to network technologies. As such, they form ‘multiple localities yet intensely connected digitally’ (Sassen 2006, p. 20) and a ‘diversity of subversive interventions into the space of global capitalism’ (Sassen 2006, p. 22). Sassen has called such situations counter-geographies of globalisation: taking part in globalisation but not in the ‘formal apparatus or the objectives of this apparatus’ (Sassen 2006, p. 23). Following Sassen, the role of architectural practice is then ‘to navigate several forms of knowledge so as to introduce the possibility of architecture in spaces where the naked eye or the engineer’s imagination sees no shape’ (Sassen 2006, p. 18), but also to complete design that produces confirming narratives to the existing context with design that will produce ‘disruptive narratives, and make legible the local and the silenced’ (Sassen 2006, p. 23, my italics). What, however, the ‘experiences’ chosen will demonstrate is the practical challenges for realising such an interdisciplinary, inter-knowledge and inter-scale approach. It therefore makes sense to explore architecture and planning as a ‘laboratory’ that produces knowledge in a certain manner, within certain constraints, and around which disciplinary boundaries are necessarily or deliberately kept intact in order to avoid knowledge leaking out of our ‘laboratories’.13

3 The Production of Ground in Spatial Knowledge Production In order to explore the role of ground in spatial knowledge production, the five ‘experiences’ selected will be explored as ‘laboratories’, subject to a series of conditions and constraints, ideologies and beliefs, but also according to certain ways of looking at our object of research (the city). With ground, I therefore refer to


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something more than a (theoretical or ideological) foundation or justification, to a broader set of ways of ‘commitment’ and chosen ‘perspectives’. In such an interpretation, ground is, apart from being pre-defined, also produced throughout knowledge production. Therefore, in the analysis of the five ‘experiences’, ground will be connected to three major components of knowledge production: the position of the researcher/designer, the functioning of his/her laboratory and the research outcome produced. The position a researcher/designer/intellectual takes towards reality and towards his/her research object is worth particular attention. Apart from questioning whether he/she combines theory with practice and conceptual research with empirical fieldwork, it is crucial to explore the researcher’s relationship with his/her object of research. To what extent is the work of researchers influenced by their own affections and instincts towards their object of research, the city, and to what extent do they extract knowledge from their object of research – do they listen to the city at all? The urban explorers of the nineteenth- and early twentieth–century industrialising cities particularly demonstrated that urban researchers have always brought in their own sentiments when analysing the city, and that hence the researcher’s neutrality is an illusion. Suffice it to recall William James’ ‘ambivalent’ feelings about the city as both attractive and annoying, Jane Addams’ nostalgia for a pre-urban way of life and Robert Park’s use of ‘the figure of the moth drawn into the flame’ to indicate ‘his view of the city as both attractive and destructive’ (Morton and Lucia White 1962, p. 159). Likewise, the researcher’s approach towards the city can be, according to James, either ‘inhabiting reality’ or ‘hyperintellectual’, or according to Park, that of either ‘a reporter with facts’ or ‘an editorial writer thundering from the pulpit’ (see M & L White 1962). What then makes an urban intellectual ‘committed’? Are Victorian England’s early urban explorers, who consciously questioned the urban social conditions from an assumed ‘analogy between the urban poor and [foreign] “uncivilized” peoples’ (Epstein Nord 1987, p. 122), ‘committed’ in a different way from Friedrich Engels, who, more than from a mere pre-defined critique, began with curiosity to see working-class people in their own homes and everyday lives and with the wish to ‘chat with you and your condition and grievances’ and, above all, by looking for ‘more than a mere abstract knowledge’? (Marcus 1973, p. 257). Apart from the researcher, the functioning of his ‘laboratory’ – its methods, tools, theories, terminologies and interdisciplinary inputs – influences any research on the city. What are the disciplinary, budgetary and practical constraints the researcher and his ‘laboratory’ have to deal with daily? Do such constraints disturb a thorough exploration of the object of research? What knowledge does the researcher (not) take into account for fulfilling his task, and how does he motivate his selection? In other words, what is of interest is the functioning of the ‘laboratory’ as a process of knowledge building. Therefore, by ‘laboratory’, I refer to a process and to a research situation rather than to a mere physical place. How does the researcher translate his findings into a comprehensible and sensemaking outcome, language and format? In other words, what does the outcome of knowledge production in the ‘laboratory’ look like? And how flexible, rigid or definitive is the role of this outcome – a text, map or design – in further research

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developments? This question is important since, according to William James, reality is in the making: we shape and construct reality by means of what comes from our ‘laboratories’. Moreover, if a ‘bad experiment is not one that fails [because it does not offer definitive knowledge] but one from which the researcher has drawn no lesson that will help prepare the next experiment’ (Latour 2004, p. 196), then any research outcome should include a proper feedback system, a research genealogy. Indeed, as Bruno Latour reminded us that ‘the word “reference” comes from the Latin referre, “to bring back” ’ (Latour 1999, p. 32), so the scientific text denotes not only a product of research, but ‘the quality of the chain in its entirety’ (Latour 1999, p. 69). As a provisional totality, indicating traceability, the scientific text becomes itself subject to re-questioning, continuation and re-negotiation. Although each of these three components of knowledge production – researcher, laboratory and research outcome – merits meticulous individual attention, they are highlighted as mere vehicles for the exploration of the five ‘experiences’.

4 New Ways of Knowledge Production: Two ‘Experiences’ from Architecture and Planning 4.1 How to Listen to the Zwischenstadt In Cities without Cities: An Interpretation of the Zwischenstadt (Sieverts 2003), Thomas Sieverts begins with the problematic discrepancy between a stubborn ideology of the compact city and today’s urban reality, in which the city has spread into a city web or Zwischenstadt. In order to manage these fragments of limited size and political power, Sieverts aims to deal with this new reality by listening to what our object of research – the city – is trying to tell us. He argues that yet another variant of the ideology of urban growth prevention is inappropriate in the current reality of Urbanised Landscape/Landscaped City as predicted by H.G. Wells a hundred years ago.14 The innovation of Cities without Cities is hence not to be found in a search for new categories and terminologies, or in a ‘myth of the new’, but in its ‘stunningly simple argument’ and the reorganisation of ‘a mere handful of wellknown examples’ (Stadler 2007). Rather than starting from a theoretical framework, Sieverts begins with the character of his research object, the Zwischenstadt or the contemporary city’s ‘in between state [. . .]: between the old historical city centres and the open countryside, between the place as a living space and the non-places of movement, between small local economic cycles and the dependency on the world market’ (Sieverts 2003, pp. x–xi). It is the specific character of the Zwischenstadt that generates the method for analysis – namely a simultaneous analysis of the Zwischenstadt as a living space, a particular ordering system and an ideology – as well as possible strategies and design solutions – in terms of its image, identity and (e)quality and in terms of design and ideology (Sieverts 2003, pp. 12–18). Therefore, when looking beyond its disordered look and unplanned image, and by


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reformulating ‘good city’ concepts such as urban-ness, centrality, density, mixed use and ecology, Sieverts demonstrates how the Zwischenstadt presents a political and a design task (Sieverts 2003, pp. 19–47). This new design task relates, according to Sieverts, to the organisation of everyday life, to modest small grain planning and to the imagination of the Zwischenstadt. The organisation of everyday life is crucial for mediating between the Zwischenstadt as ‘a rational ‘system’ of production, of socio-cultural provision and consumption [. . .] and as an ‘agora’ perceived as a living space for face-to-face encounters, perceptual experience of reality and direct engagement’ (Sieverts 2003, p. 69). Modest small grain planning based on ‘innumerable small but necessary steps of maintenance, repair and renovation’ (Sieverts 2003, p. 81) is needed precisely to combine ‘system’ and ‘agora’. Rather than traditional planning tools such as ‘the regional plan/area development plan or city development plan/land use plan’ (Sieverts 2003, pp. 81–82), Sieverts introduces the dimension of time in the design process: a step by step, continuous conversion, rather than by pushing economic and functional objectives into the foreground (Sieverts 2003, p. 51). Moreover, to see beyond the Zwischenstadt’s disordered, non-aesthetic side, imagination is crucial, for which, according to Sieverts, an interdisciplinary approach is indispensable.15 Both everyday living experiences and creative arts should, according to Sieverts, infiltrate the design process: ‘more significantly than architecture [they] have constantly been expanding the limits of the aesthetics and have shown [. . .] how to see the beautiful in the daily and the banal’ (Sieverts 2003, p. 96). But Sieverts moves beyond a mere ‘experimental’ design by formulating proposals for a pragmatic policy and governance approach as well. Apart from a political and financial basis, a new planning culture is required, one that combines the different spatial disciplines, making the field as a whole ‘intellectually lively and creative’ again (Sieverts 2003, p. 122). Apart from elements for reform, Sieverts defines five (political) action fields and three groups of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ tools that assist in working out the action fields.16 This working guide of new elements, action fields and tools is believed to generate planning with a stronger cultural approach, more attention to time and space and a highly attractive design field. In Sieverts’ laboratory, the city as such indicates possible solutions to the planner. The task of architecture and town and regional planning is to work on the interaction between the hard (real, physical environment) and soft (perception and use) city, by ‘directly involving the inhabitants in the reorganisation’ (Sieverts 2003, p. 101) and by allowing ‘agora’ next to ‘system’. But despite Sieverts’ simultaneously pragmatic and design-wise approach to the Zwischenstadt, one could question whether the proposed elements (of reform), tools and action fields might not risk naturalising precisely the deeper concerns of the Zwischenstadt. Indeed one could question whether these elements, tools and action fields might not express an urge to over-systematise, hence reintroducing rigidity. Would the open and multiple questioning of the Zwischenstadt, so strongly emphasised by Sieverts, not conflict with such reintroduced rigidity? How can the Zwischenstadt itself, as the object of research, maintain its open character, remain dynamic and under change, and how can, both politically and design-wise, room for experiment be guaranteed?

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One could also question whether ‘best practice’ International Building Exhibition Emscher Park is appropriate for laying the ‘foundation for a new form of regional planning’ (Sieverts 2003, p. 114). Sieverts’ ‘laboratory’ work on the Zwischenstadt distinguishes itself from concurrent research on the city, by addressing centrality no longer as a mere phenomenon (city versus countryside, sprawl, polycentric structures) but as a state of mind, as a problematic way of thinking on the part of our spatial disciplines (Doucet 2008). Indeed, the design task of the Zwischenstadt, for example, is for Sieverts no longer allocated to planners only but to the creative arts, too. However, the reintroduction of elements, tools and action fields risks maintaining planning’s rational systematisation tendency, hence addressing centrality mainly as a mere phenomenon after all. If ‘what we need is the willingness of architects and town planners to develop from being service providers. . . into being protagonists, designers of the social horizon’ (Neitzke, quoted in Sieverts 2003, p. 157), one should be aware that this need risks being approached from an opportunistic, disciplinary point of view, so as to safeguard one’s role as a protagonist.17 But although Sieverts’ innovative ‘laboratory’ generated an outcome that risked diminishing freshness and might be misused, a knowledge continuum has been generated too, by means of the Zwischenstadt Series.18 That the risk for over-systematising the debate on the Zwischenstadt is nevertheless to be taken seriously is demonstrated by publications such as The Explosion of the City (Font 2004), in which the 13 most dynamic city regions of southern Europe have been explored. Not only are conclusions formulated from a mainly economic and urban point of view rather than from multiple levels and from the interplay between urban and landscape, but the study is also methodologically problematic for its conviction that ‘description, interpretation, and diagnosis are the indispensable elements of applied research and [that such an approach] can reveal all principles and processes that organize the contemporary territory’ (Font 2004, p. 15). In contrast with Sieverts’ advice to be careful with ‘derivative urban design’, this mapping exercise has led to classification systems and landscape ‘types’ and categories. Only after the cases have been classified and after the power of the map and of classification have done their work, are crucial questions in relation to culture and social configurations addressed. What remains unaddressed is what it means ‘to reproduce something: an image of the city, a model of urban processes, or a calculating machine’ (Boyer 2006, p. 105).

4.2 Switzerland: An Urban Portrait – an Interdisciplinary Reconciliation of Theory and Field Research? Switzerland: An Urban Portrait is an interdisciplinary study as it involves besides ‘star’ architects Pierre de Meuron, Roger Diener, Jacques Herzog and Marcel Meili – all teaching at the ETH Zurich – the sociologist, Christian Schmid. Schmid developed the theoretical and methodological basis for An Urban Portrait by departing from the social theory of Henri Lefebvre: The Production of Space.19 Within the context of this chapter, I would like to explore if and how this method leads to a better understanding of our environment.20


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Like Sieverts’ Zwischenstadt, An Urban Portrait begins by establishing that ‘the process of urbanization has changed fundamentally in recent years’ (Schmid 2006a, p. 164) and that this is leading to new urban configurations, related to changing forms of centrality. Nevertheless, and despite studies such as Sieverts’ Zwischenstadt (2002) and Garreau’s Edge City (1991), Schmid argues that ‘the complex processes involved in restructuring urban regions have not yet received adequate theoretical attention’ (Schmid 2006a, p. 165, my italics). Therefore, Schmid begins with the work of Lefebvre ‘because it integrates the categories of “city” and “space” systematically into an overarching social theory, thus making it possible to reflect and analyse spatial processes and phenomena on any scale, from the private to the global’ (Schmid 2006a, p.165). Because a city is created by the quality of everyday processes, much more than by size, density or heterogeneity, a ‘new theoretical framework for practical analysis’ (Schmid 2006a, p. 165) was developed based on three guiding concepts: networks, borders and differences. Because ‘the combination of [these] three criteria [. . .] enables us to define different forms of the urban’ (Schmid 2006a, p. 173), they formed the basis for analysing Switzerland. However, whereas networks and borders seem evident categories to define the urban – and certainly so in Switzerland21 – the category of difference is not as straightforward and should hence have been worked out more carefully in An Urban Portrait.22 Although the theoretical framework in An Urban Portrait generates a research tool for exploring urbanisation processes in general, the specificity of the object of research, Switzerland, is not underestimated either. This is demonstrated by the thorough historical overview of Switzerland’s urbanisation process and by a research outcome addressing Switzerland in particular.23 An Urban Portrait shows that ‘Switzerland is more urban than it thinks’ (Schmid 2006b, p. 218), that this urban space is ‘by no means uniform and homogeneous’ (Schmid 2006b, p. 218) and that the potential hence lies in differences rather than in a traditional equality approach. By means of the three categories extracted from Lefebvre’s theory – networks, borders and differences – the Swiss landscape was explored. The three categories were adapted and re-interpreted throughout the research. Their application was hence not a mere practical testing of a theory, but a mutual exchange between fieldwork and theoretical reflection. As a result, five ‘typologies’ or ‘urbanisation types’ were identified, ranking from most to least urbanised: metropolitan regions, networks of cities, quiet zones, alpine resorts and alpine fallow lands. Rather than being ‘imposed, invented or superimposed by an external force’ (Diener et al. 2006, p. 18), these five typologies derive from the research object itself: from ‘an obsessive reading of the existing situation, they merely reinforce economic, social, topographical, and architectural potentials that are already recognisable as latent forces’ (Herzog in Herzog and Meili 2006, p. 154).24 The empirical method leading towards this new typology was based on ‘Journeys of curiosity, or drillings’ (Diener et al. 2006, p. 480) in the territory, and by sketches and try-outs of parts of the territory and of Switzerland as a whole.25 This field research was carried out by students, by means of ‘on-site observations, in-

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terviews, photographs, and films’ (Diener et al. 2006, p. 480). The concept of the ‘probe’ – of randomness – and the non-prejudiced look of inexperienced students carrying out the fieldwork significantly contributed to the intended open approach and non-acceptance of pre-given notions.26 The material was collected in books ‘as a montage of scholarly material, sources, interviews, photo reportage, and descriptions’ (Diener et al. 2006, p. 481). The organisation of this information in maps and diagrams generated a particular visual language. This laboratory work with room for experiment, error and intuition resulted in a portrait of urban Switzerland, a mere ‘snapshot of a specific moment in time [. . .][to be understood as] an essayistic combination of analysis and design [. . .] the result of research guided by theory [. . .][in which maps] were the most important tools in analysis’ (Schmid 2006b, p. 193). By analysing the degree of urbanisation, maps radically break with existing categories such as urban and rural, while at the same time their persuasion lies not in ‘statistical precision but by way of the imagination’ (Schmid 2006b, p. 198). The maps were highlighted as tools for knowledge production rather than as definitive research outcomes or illustrations of known facts. The present version of the portrait is provisional and uncertain: it is only ‘the beginning of a sketch’ (Diener et al. 2006, p. 481), enhancing research outcomes not as final results but as input for further research. Since its strategy ‘to reinforce differences rather than smooth them out [. . .] can only be implemented through public debate’ (Schmid 2006b, p. 218), An Urban Portrait has ‘deliberately foresworn any concrete proposals or packages of measures, which would immediately be ground to dust in political nitpicking; it is a portrait, a potential image of a diverse urban Switzerland. No more and no less’ (Schmid 2006b, p. 218). An Urban Portrait’s experimental approach and deliberately uncertain outcome show an important new way for displaying and claiming knowledge about our spatial environments, but does such an approach not also risk being used as traditional research outcome, as a final proposal for Switzerland? Bruno Latour has argued for the need of a retraceable ‘learning curve’ for guaranteeing an effective and appropriate enhancement of experimental, risky knowledgebuilding processes that are no longer based on a modern obsession with time and progress, and the construction of rational ‘facts’ as opposed to subjective ‘values’ (Latour 2004). In An Urban Portrait, such a ‘learning curve’ is represented by means of a series of maps displaying an intimate and intuitive analysis.27 But, as Arie Graafland has also argued (Graafland 2006), both theory and the stories collected have slipped out of these maps: they hence do not permit tracing of the subjective, intuitive data.28 The experimental scientific approach, based on a subjective research method and theoretical ground, has not been radically maintained throughout the mapmaking. This has to do with the ‘instrument’ used for empirical research – the random ‘drills’ – being not the most appropriate way to show a ‘developed picture of social difference’ (Graafland 2006, p. 41). But it also has to do with the lack of a clearly retraceable learning curve. Only a small percentage of the material collected is displayed in the book, while precisely the displaying of all steps in the experiment is crucial for retracing the learning curve: not only for the researcher involved, but also for all future users of the material. The new images produced of an urbanised


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Switzerland will be presented to ‘politicians, to business leaders, and especially to so-called average citizens – and we will entice them’ (Herzog in Herzog and Meili 2006, p. 154). But, due to a lack of traceability, the risk exists that what is meant to be a mere observation, a snapshot on a long path of experiments, will be understood and used as a project proposal for Switzerland. Moreover, it is precisely the intimacy and subjectivity – so precious to this research – that has disappeared throughout knowledge translation from the empirical ‘drills’ into maps and diagrams. One can understand that the use of ‘images, maps, plans and diagrams rather than texts is presumably connected to the profession of the participants’ (Diener et al. 2006, p. 481), but would the real challenge not have been precisely to break with such disciplinary and representational conventions, by exploring more appropriate storytelling tools than mapping? How can one, moreover, explain that the very basis of the project, Lefebvre’s theory as worked out by Schmid, is overshadowed by the maps and typologies? What started as an interdisciplinary take-off ended up as an architectural journey after all, once more imprisoned in its proper representational and disciplinary constraints. The experimental, ‘intimate, slow-paced work on the city’ (Herzog in Herzog and Meili 2006, p. 137) is in the end reduced to a set of ‘best’ outcomes, rather than a display of the ‘learning curve’ constructed. Both ‘experiences’ demonstrate that, notwithstanding their innovativeness, they still struggle with disciplinary constraints related to their functioning as a ‘laboratory’. The researcher in Sieverts’ Zwischenstadt ‘laboratory’ clearly no longer applies a view from above, but begins with the characteristics of his object of research. In the case of An Urban Portrait, this research attitude is extended to the functioning of the ‘laboratory’, emphasising experimental, even intuitive fieldwork. What in both cases proved particularly challenging was to maintain such an experimental mood in the research outcome, too.

5 Knowledge Production in Architecture and Planning Border Cases In order to surpass the architectural disciplinary constraints that seem to block innovative, practice-oriented research, I will explore three ‘experiences’ concerning interdisciplinary grey zones. The aim is to understand how, where and when such reactionary and experimental initiatives can infiltrate the rational knowledge processes of planning and architecture. If this chapter has, up to now, addressed Christine Boyer’s question whether architects fear being put on the side of ‘disciplinary control and normative order’ (Boyer 2006, p. 98), it is now time to address Boyer’s footnote to this statement: ‘Then why do they [architects] insist on controlling the discourse and managing the entrances and exits of those allowed to speak, determining whose voice is important, and what comments and criticism acceptable?’ (Boyer 2006, p. 99). I will therefore explore two such border cases – Micronomics and Political Typographies – and the [Negotiating Space] Interactive Mapping in 2D/3D workshop, which links up architectural education with professional practice.

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5.1 Micronomics: An Emancipated Product from City Mine(d)’s Learning ‘Laboratory’? City Mine(d)’s Micronomics project departs from the contemporary urban economic paradoxes, with Brussels as a major case.29 It addresses the rickety state of the economy, not by mere reflection but by actively enhancing Brussels as an ideal (economic) ‘laboratory’ to test inclusive participatory development and by developing a vocabulary for economy – as exists for urbanism. As part of City Mine(d)’s wider concern, about the impact of urban interventions on more inclusive development of cities, Micronomics’ central question is whether ‘urban interventions in “krax” can reshuffle the paradoxical situation in economy’.30 The Micronomics ‘laboratory’ should be understood within the context of its creator’s history – City Mine(d) – and its ‘methodological predecessor’ – the MAPRAC project. Launched in 1997, City Mine(d) was one of a series of spin-offs of an urban social movement that was active in Brussels during the 1990s, criticising ‘the “fuzzy” policy of Brussels’ (Moyersoen and Van Campenhout 2006, p. 4). Meanwhile, City Mine(d) has offices in Brussels, Barcelona and London, allowing it to cover a variety of urban issues and political contexts. The basic concepts of City Mine(d)’s projects are networking – amongst communities, and between users/inhabitants and authorities – and channelling possibilities by bringing the different players together by means of both offering a ‘frame’ and taking the role of ‘negotiator’. As such, by letting ‘the city operate as a common instrument for both groups’ (Moyersoen and Van Campenhout 2006, p. 5), City Mine(d) counters planning’s traditional bottomup versus top-down divide. The MAPRAC project was set up in 2003, as a collaboration between several Brussels organisations including City Mine(d), to generate debate around the RAC Site (Rijks Administratief Centrum). This gigantic office complex, owned by the Belgian State, was not only out of use, hence in search of a destination, it was also a victim of wild speculation and questionably resold to private owners ‘without any municipal debate [notwithstanding] 2/3 of its surface is registered as public area’ (Moyersoen and Van Campenhout 2006, p. 6). Throughout the process, the research method shifted from the production of a single map displaying the different stakeholders to a debate resulting in a series of maps. A three-day brainstorm was set up in 2004, involving a variety of ‘experts’ such as architects, urban developers, historians, sociologists, geographers, residents and artists, and divided into thematic workshops on architecture, procedures, mobility, urbanism and sociology. This setup, together with its aim to develop both an inventory and a vision, generated a balance between theory and practice, academics and practitioners, and experts and inhabitants. Where the approach and functioning of this laboratory proved successful, MAPRAC’s continuum seemed more problematic. The laboratory’s outcome was made public in the shape of a website (www.maprac.org) and a newspaperstyle publication. Actions were taken to occupy the site with activities such as film screenings, workshops and installations. Nevertheless, few residents responded to the open call for projects, and the government was not too impressed about the


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know-how collected. Moreover, ‘the results of the [collective] project appeared to be used in an opportunistic manner by [certain] individuals’ (Moyersoen and Van Campenhout 2006, p. 8). One can conclude that, in order to make such a collective event truly operational, the competences involved and required should be pinpointed more accurately: it is more difficult for policy makers to wipe the floor with workshop proposals when they are faced with ‘the collective weight of specifically and carefully mentioned experts’ (Marc Godts in Moyersoen and Van Campenhout 2006, p. 14). With the MAPRAC continuum problems in mind, the Micronomics project has adapted its working method at subtle but crucial points (the laboratory) and has defined its short- and long-term objectives (research outcome) more concretely. In an initial explorative phase, in 2006, the Brussels’ economic situation was ‘scanned’ by interviews with people in ‘krax’ places, while workshops were organised around alternative economies. Both actions resulted in concrete research outcome: the publication Generalized empowerment and the DVD Micronomics Scanning. The formalised outcome and scholarly contributions – including Saskia Sassen and Ana Betancour – of Generalized Empowerment have demonstrated that City Mine(d) has become more careful in sharing its ‘laboratory’ work with the world out there. The DVD publication of the Micronomics Scanning work-in-progress has, however, demonstrated that this protection mechanism has not grown into an obsession.31 As such City Mine(d) seems to have found a balance between ‘na¨ıve activism’ and ‘downright seriousness’: it has acknowledged the importance of managing one’s proper ‘learning curve’ as a crucial part of experimental knowledge production. Its intermediate conclusions that ‘economy is a set of strategies to achieve a higher level of well-being’ and that those who do not have the power to reach such levels might find the required creativity in the urban in-between space, convinced City Mine(d) to carry out explorations precisely in these grey zones.32 Therefore, further research on specific Brussels quarters and concrete actions, such as a micro-market, belong to future plans.33 From MAPRAC to Micronomics, an emancipation process took place, not so much with regard to the working method as in the organisation and protection of the City Mine(d) ‘laboratory’ and the regulation of its outcome. The Generalized Empowerment publication demonstrates that the outcome has gained in weight and seriousness. However, the importance of generating further debate and of allowing insight into the Micronomics’ working process is demonstrated by the publication of ‘work-in-progress’ (the Micronomics Scanning DVD) and by the ‘story board’ in the Generalized Empowerment publication, retracing the entire start-up phase of the Micronomics project.34 By displaying, apart from the results, also the efforts and struggles, the ‘making of’ Micronomics, its ‘black box’ of knowledge production is opened up. There is no doubt that architecture and planning could learn from such ‘laboratory’ organisation – more experimental and confronting theoretical concepts with urban interventions – from such outcome regulation – protected work-in-progress – as well as from the inclusion of economic aspects in the study of space. But what is more difficult for architecture and planning is to begin a dialogue with associations

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such as City Mine(d). How can two ‘collectives’ with their own disciplinary specificities begin a dialogue with mutual respect for each other’s knowledge claims?35 According to Bruno Latour, the unity and fixed borders around ‘collectives’ are not to be accepted too quickly; instead, for such different ‘collectives’ as the architecture discipline and urban activists/artists to meet, without giving up their own identity, diplomacy is required.36 In reality, such negotiations amongst collectives nevertheless remain complicated due to differences in working conditions and formats. This became particularly clear after attending City Mine(d)’s ‘Krax’ meeting in Barcelona, in April 2006. Like the architecture and planning discipline collectives, City Mine(d) also organises meetings, but in a very different format. Whereas academic conferences take place in academic environments with their typical conference dispositifs – welcome desk, name badge, programme, proceedings – the City Mine(d) meeting attained a remarkable balance between ambition, seriousness and a nevertheless informal mise-en-scène: not too formal the organisation, no welcome desk or badges but instead a nice plastic bag holding the programme, maps, pencils, stickers and even candies! About 80 people coming from Seville, London, Caracas, Mostar, Buenos Aires, Tokyo. . . were expected to share their experiences related to urban transformation processes. Coming as a visitor means somehow becoming part of the group. The fact that visitors showed a genuine openness to assist in translating activities or in setting things up, demonstrates that commitment is what brings these people together, as well as the belief that dealing with the city is both a theoretical and a practical act. Is it realistic to expect that scholars would consider participation in such events serious enough to be worth the trouble (youth hostels, late night activities, chaotic organisation, etc.)? Another crucial difference is the way the meeting was organised. Presentations alternated with workshops around specific themes, and guided tours. Such a format allowed in-depth discussions around specific themes, in contrast with academic conferences where packed parallel sessions allow only fragmented, superficial debates. Moreover, the open character of the ‘Krax’ event permitted a mix of local researchers, social workers, students, urban scholars, residents and activists. As such, the themes addressed, such as citizen empowerment and individual and social creativity, were discussed amongst a variety of ‘experts’. The importance of hands-on knowledge-sharing was confirmed by guided tours in three Barcelona quarters with a particular urban renewal problematique (Barceloneta, Plaça Lesseps and Raval). These site visits, guided by social workers, ‘committed’ architects and action groups, intermingled facts with personal stories, hence giving a concrete, raw face to all-too-familiar notions like ‘gentrification’ and ‘segregation’. The old fishermen’s quarter ‘Barceloneta’ showed the reverse side of what urban renewal strategies tend to call the improvement of the quality of life of the inhabitant. It showed how such strategies disrupt quarters by generating local conflicts and polarising its population in pros and cons. The heterogeneous, popular, but gentrifying Raval quarter showed concretely the side effects of this dynamisation – speculation, expropriation, price increases, disappearance of popular public spaces – as well as the ‘cleaning’ operations it has suffered since 1986, including the


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encouragement to make people move: power cuts, floods, rat infestations, psychological pressure and endless judicial procedures. It also showed concretely the modest but often powerless protest against the City Council: local discussion groups giving rise to collective memories, proposals for the neighbourhood, petitions, popular meals and traditional celebrations. Only such direct contact with neighbourhoods shows the concrete face of urban strategies and conflicts. For example, Plaça Lesseps (close to Parc Güell) is a busy traffic roundabout just outside Barcelona’s city core. In 2002 the City Council presented a remodelling Plan for Plaça Lesseps, which generated protest amongst the local population, leading to the platform ‘another Plaça Lesseps is possible’. This platform managed to convince the City Council to remove the Remodelling Plan and replace its architect by one chosen by the inhabitants, as well as to set up ‘Mixed Commissions’ involving besides the City Council also local residents, independent technicians and other interest groups. As such, the Plaça Lesseps case is often considered a ‘best practice’ of local empowerment. Nevertheless, only after ‘live’ discussions with a Committee founding member, did the hidden success factors come to the surface: an educated, middle-class neighbourhood and a consensus model that at some point seemed to have replaced the initial conflict model. Who made the consensus, based on what, remained unclear.37 One can conclude that no matter how vast our scholarly knowledge of Barcelona’s tradition as an enthusiastic urban renewer, its particular post-Franco politics, citybranding and gentrification, such ‘localised knowledge tours’ are crucial to concretely fill in the gaps in these often abstract notions and categories. Moreover, the analysis of City Mine(d)’s functioning as a ‘laboratory’, sharing but protecting its outcome and allocating a specific role to the researcher, has demonstrated both the added value and the difficulty of fully negotiating such a collective with our disciplinary ones.

5.2 Political Typographies: Twisting Conventional Visual and Knowledge Frames ‘Political Typographies. Visual Essays on the Margins of Europe’ (Biemann et al. 2007) is, as a publication, accompanying the exhibition B-Zone: On the Margins of Europe,38 an intermediate report of the Transcultural Geographies research project, begun in 2003 by Ursula Biemann, Angela Melitopoulos and Lisa Parks. Earlier research results had been shown in the form of an exhibition at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, accompanied by the publication B-Zone Becoming Europe and Beyond (Franke 2006). The three core projects – Black Sea Files by Biemann, Timescape by Melitopoulos and Postwar Footprints by Parks – address the need ‘to think in a different, more complex and nuanced manner about the conflicts subjected upon the liminal spaces of the great regions of Europe’ (Enguita Mayo 2007, p. 10). The research focuses on the territory stretching from the Balkans to Turkey and the Caucasus, on the edges of the European Union – Europe’s B-Zone: ‘a space of transit, transition and experimentation for the A-zone, the United Europe’

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(Enguita Mayo 2007, p. 10). This publication constitutes an ‘update’ of the earlier ‘laboratory’ results in terms of visual research (Biemann), analysis and conceptual revisions (Melitopoulos) or an enlarged research (Parks). Apart from reporting on research outcomes, the publication includes critical comments on the research ‘laboratory’: its methodology and representational techniques (the documentary image). It is particularly in these critical essays that the role of the researcher as scholar/artist/activist and his/her experimental ‘laboratory’ is addressed. Carles Guerra has addressed the representational role of the works exhibited, creating a balance between artistic, informational and critical documentary. These works criticise the State departments’ ‘narrative intelligence’ (Guerra 2007, p. 163): ‘rather than merely narrating events they generate critical knowledge about them in which information and opinion deliberately overlap’ (Guerra 2007, p. 160). The ‘laboratory’ work on the basis of these video essays, in fact ‘aesthetic practices that have an empirical relation with reality’ (Guerra 2007, p. 163), is confronted with two crucial challenges: one related to geographical scale and access of events, and the other as a managerial task – ‘how to extract meaning from the multiple and diverse nature of data’ (Guerra 2007, p. 163). It is about documenting as much as about organising and representing the data, about what as much as about how. As Melitopoulos and Biemann’s work creates a balance between academic research and artistic production, their research method, combining documentary practice with pedagogic functions, enables the generation of critical knowledge. The ‘laboratory’ working processes behind Political Typographies reconfigure the cartography of our environment, or, in an analogy with architecture: ‘the cartography of the city, the diagram and the plan [. . .] – by a sense of making or producing reality instead of being condemned to passive reception’ (Boyer 2006, p. 108). As a researcher, Biemann is poised between the role of professional interviewer (journalist) and amateur (home video) in order to get access to data and events.39 Nevertheless, rather than abusing such ‘first-hand access to an event’ (Guerra 2007, p. 168) and ‘knowledge [. . .] produced at great risk’ (Biemann and Szeman 2007, p. 41) as supposedly more accurate knowledge, it is acknowledged that ‘what generates new knowledge [about an event] are unusual relations between known information’ (Guerra 2007, p. 168, my italics). This information is gathered through straightforwardly observable events, corporate and official secrets and interviews, as well as facts and figures. It is precisely the organisation of these different knowledge types, according to specific visual languages and by avoiding ‘the easy adoption of an organising narrative, even a counter-narrative’ (Biemann and Szeman 2007, p. 39), that the researchers are allowed to engage both politically and artistically. It is the representation of the multiplicity of narratives and the fragmentation of visual and political knowledge, in a relational way rather than as either a whole or as a counter-narrative, that forms the critical linking of theory with field research and artistic practice. In contrast to An Urban Portrait’s loyalty to disciplinary representational conventions, the work of Biemann and Melitopoulos enhances but twists the conventional frame of the documentary film (see Rehm 2007, pp.177–193).


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Another project, Migmap, confirms the idea of representation as a production of knowledge, as reality-shaping. As part of the Transitmigration project,40 Migmap has mapped the EU policies on migration, not so much by objective selection as by input based on the personal preferences and knowledge of the researchers involved. What is particularly interesting in this study is the display of the ‘fall-out’ data. In contrast to most mapping techniques, especially in architectural production, this map displays the network of events that generate, support or take part in discourses on migration, as well as those events without any link in this network. These network-alien events are nevertheless included as of possible future importance. In contrast to An Urban Portrait, in which ‘ninety percent of what [was] found by “drilling” into the exciting material, [does] not appear in the book’ (Herzog and Meili 2006, p. 138), Migmap creates no doubt about the vastness of data and the intermediate, in-progress character of each research stage displayed. Political Typographies’ and Migmap’s functioning as a ‘laboratory’, the role they allocate to the researcher, as well as the experimental and provisional character maintained by the research outcome, can be of inspiration to our research on cities, to our search for more work-in-progress and more provisional knowledge statements, as well as to the growing need for less conventional representation techniques.

5.3 [Negotiating Space] Interactive Mapping in 2D/3D: From Experimental to Professional Expertise In February 2006, Anderlecht, one of the 19 municipalities of the Brussels Capital Region, assigned a workshop for architecture students and professionals to develop ideas for an interactive map to be placed in the central meeting space of ‘Participation House’ in Anderlecht, under construction at the time of the workshop.41 The experimental and at times conflictive character of this workshop – involving professionals from varied backgrounds and architecture students struggling against their ‘urge to build’ – contributed positively to its outcome. Room for experiment permitted thorough exploration of what participation in mapping actually means. It was agreed upon that there is more required than the mere representation of geographical landscapes, more than the unravelling of possible hidden mechanisms at play, such as political visions, preferences, future visions, exclusions, etc. What is required is interactive mapping in which the map exchanges, collects and translates data, while allowing feedback and evaluation. If ‘one of the most important aspects of making things public is having a means of visualizing what is political’ (Amin et al. 2005, p. 810), then this map could no longer be merely informative for the citizens. Instead, the workshop was challenged to define the conditions for a map as a true ‘space of democracy’. First of all, the map had to be part of a larger communication strategy, involving a series of physical mediators – such as traditional flyers, idea boxes and ‘Participation House’s’ architectural shape – and digital media – website and digital map – without one competing against the other. Secondly, to create a map that allows the many and

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diverse types of citizen to express opinions through the map, those many faces had to be identified, even when disguised as the socially or racially Other or as those excluded from the electronic era. Thirdly, participation had to be freed from being misused as purely informational or for legitimisation. Therefore, a feedback system had to be developed, by which, once one is convinced to give one’s opinion, this opinion is integrated and reacted upon. The map is hence preferably a double-sided interface, a true actor in negotiation, putting things in the middle. The workshop explored how this middle-space could be shaped in order to become a ‘spatial model for constructing the political and the citizen’ (Amin et al. 2005, p. 810). In most proposals developed, the ‘middle-space’ was shaped as a combined physical and digital space (in fact a digital strategy on a physical support). However, one proposal strove for more active spatial experimentation. Inspired by the virtual cities created by the Danish collective Superflex, a new place for participation was created, called Virtual Anderlecht.42 In Virtual Anderlecht, one can, by means of an avatar, enter a virtual world in which one can fulfil the basic needs of the citizen, such as getting information and contact addresses of official services, upcoming events, cinema programmes, citizen group meetings and all sorts of neighbourhood activities. Interactivity only comes in as soon as avatars start to meet other avatars in this virtual space: they can organise meetings in virtual space or, as an extension, also in the real world. Is this participation? Not yet. Participation is generated only when opinions and feedback are gathered around municipal and citizen proposals or issues. In an extended public sphere like Virtual Anderlecht, the virtual freedom of speech allows disagreement and conflict. Not being a space of consensus, ‘new mechanisms of arbitration’ (Amin et al. 2005, p. 812) have to be developed in order to manage this virtual but equally social, cultural and political place: ‘ground’ is needed in Cyberspace – a social product, too – as much as in the physical, social space. Therefore, to guarantee access to Virtual Anderlecht for all, an administrator is appointed at ‘Participation House’, helping users over the IT-threshold. After all, it was the negotiation and shaping of the complex transitions taking place between the virtual and physical worlds that proved to be the hardest challenge – a challenge that has been passed on to another student group, specifically focusing on representation issues, and, later, on to a professional ‘map-maker’, who is currently working out a concrete, technical design proposal. It is this knowledge translation from experimental to professional design and from a political and social to a designerly concern that will generate a vivid, even contested, democratic space once activated in Anderlecht’s Participation House. But to maximise the added value of student work to professional expertise, it is crucial that the entire knowledge translation process remains retraceable and accessible throughout the process. In order to reconcile conceptual work with practice, experimental research with realistic implementation, the current stage of professional ‘map-making’ is at regular moments confronted with the original student projects. As the last of the five ‘experiences’, the [Negotiating Space] Interactive Mapping in 2D/3D workshop demonstrated the importance but also the difficulty of extending the architectural research ‘laboratory’ to the profession in reality (in this


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case: of mapping). It demonstrated the struggle for the researcher to produce ground throughout knowledge production – especially when physical space is completed with cyberspace – as well as the intensity of a knowledge production process alternating knowledge outcomes with further experimentation.

6 Conclusions With this chapter, I have aimed to explore the grey zones of interdisciplinary and inter-experiential research on our spatial environment. I have aimed to investigate what ‘ground’ is like and how it can be constructed in these grey zones. To do so, I have explored some recent laboratories within but also outside the architecture and planning disciplines. By so doing, I hoped to generate greater clarity about the possible opening up of these disciplines to other fields, experiences and approaches. A first conclusion seemed disappointing: attempts towards an integration of theory and practice, of several disciplines and of aesthetic/artistic production and critical thought, exist – Cities without Cities and An Urban Portrait – but the outcome of this research does not seem to guarantee consequent implementation. Cities without Cities and An Urban Portrait give proof of the existence of research ‘laboratories’ with an increased tendency to listen to our object of research, rather than to implement abstract strategies, terminologies and categories from above. As such, they moreover emphasise both a design and a political task. Nevertheless, they give proof of the difficulty of guaranteeing an experimental, open and flexible approach throughout the entire research process. Their ‘laboratory’ outcome seems, moreover, to reintroduce precisely the rigidity and systematisation that it had been fighting against. The definition of the research outcome as uncertain and provisional seems only true in theory, not in practice. Its systematisation in categories, tools and typologies risks it being enhanced – for example by governments or planners – as a model or solution rather than as a mere suggestion, inspiration or ‘snapshot’. In the case of An Urban Portrait, the initial interdisciplinary approach ended up as an architectural mapping exercise, gradually absorbing and rationalising the subjective knowledge building from fieldwork. One can conclude that both ‘experiences’ are victims of a (disciplinary) tendency to systematise and rationalise experimental knowledge production too hastily – a tendency that proved additionally complicated by the lack of a transparent, retraceable ‘learning curve’ that includes failures together with achievements. From the border zones of our spatial disciplines, Micronomics and Political Typographies demonstrated the usefulness of opening up our ‘laboratories’ to alternative, more ‘risky’ – read: less objective and ‘scientific’ – knowledge accounts, but they also demonstrated the struggles in doing so in practice. The Micronomics project demonstrated some of the practical and organisational difficulties in integrating scholarly research with activism, but it also demonstrated the necessity for any true experimental ‘collective’ to realise a retraceable ‘learning curve’. Political Typographies displayed, in contrast to the still conventional

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mapping in An Urban Portrait, a radical break with representational conventions as a means to combine artistic with critical production. Both ‘experiences’ confront theory with practice, fieldwork with scholarly research and aesthetic with critical production. Additionally, the [Negotiating Space] Interactive Mapping in 2D/3D workshop showed how a confrontation between architectural education and professional practice can take place. It demonstrated content-wise the need for ground in cyberspace too, and the need to revise notions like ‘interactivity’ and ‘participation’. But it also demonstrated organisation-wise a possible way to integrate the experimental character of architectural education with the seriousness of the profession. In order to do so, once more, the importance of the ‘learning curve’ was emphasised. The importance of exploring ‘learning curves’ can be seen as a crucial outcome of the analysis of all five ‘experiences’. Where I started exploring the ‘laboratories’ in terms of their knowledge-building processes, I unwillingly referred to the prospective character of architectural knowledge building – leading through a series of translation processes to a design outcome. In the planning and architecture disciplines, the importance of such knowledge-building processes is generally acknowledged as crucial for more open and experimental research on the city. However, the analysis of these five ‘laboratories’ demonstrated the importance of constructing a retraceable ‘learning curve’, too, allowing the unravelling and reconsidering of research steps already taken or provisionally excluded from the ‘laboratory’, as well as the inclusion of future consequences of the research outcome. In other words, a ‘learning curve’ – much more than knowledge-building processes – indicates both a proper feedback system and a perspective towards practice and the performance of design. The explorations of ‘laboratories’ by means of their ‘learning curves’ hence enable a more meticulous analysis than possible through their knowledge production alone. All five ‘experiences’ express a desire to bridge disciplinary gaps, to confront theory with practice, observation with design and visual techniques with critical thought. Whereas they obviously demonstrate the conceptual motivations for doing so, only a closer analysis unravels the practical constraints. Through the five ‘experiences’, some of those constraints have been identified. At the same time, some openings came to the surface through which our disciplinary ‘laboratories’ could open up for other theories, practices and disciplines. My aim indeed has been to explore such possibilities by means of exploring five diverse ‘laboratories’: their methods and characteristics, their researchers and their outcomes. Rather than distilling guidelines, methods or tools from this analysis, I opted to generate a proper learning curve myself – including qualities, opportunities, struggles and fears – that will allow further explorations in those grey zones between disciplines and fields. It is by means of the clarification of a small part of the long chain of interdisciplinary and inter-experiential learning that I hope to have brightened up some of its obscure points. It is by throwing light on part of this learning process that I hope to generate future experiments, future learning, not only within the architectural and planning ‘laboratories’, but just as much on their disciplinary sidewalks. Therefore, instead of prioritising committed muddling through or a critical view from above,


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planning and architecture can learn either way to produce, question and redefine ground throughout its knowledge production. Planning, in search of ground, will find such ground not as a result but as an intrinsic part of its search.

Notes 1. Since 2004, the author has received financial support from the Brussels Capital Region, IWOIB, within the framework of Prospective Research for Brussels. She is linked with W&K Sint-Lucas Architectuur Brussels as well as the TU Delft, where she is carrying out doctoral research under the supervision of Prof. A. Graafland. The issues of the role of the researcher, research outcome and laboratory have been indirectly nurtured by a series of discussions in which the author was involved during the writing stage of this chapter, at the Free University Brussels (Cosmopolis), involving M. Kolly, N. Prignot, M. Stroobants, N. Trussart and B. Zitouni. The author would also like to thank Nel Janssens (W&K) for her insightful feedback during the writing of this chapter. 2. Lasalle in: ‘Die Wissenschaft und die arbeiter’ 16 January 1863, quoted and translated from McGuire and Sauerlaender (2000, p. 173). 3. For a more thorough exploration of new forms of centralities, I refer to Doucet (2008). 4. Some of the new and possibly new roles for the planner and architect have been critically addressed elsewhere (Doucet 2007a). 5. Cities without Cities (Sieverts 2003); Switzerland: An Urban Portrait (Diener et al. 2006); Micronomics (City Mine(d) 2006); Political Typographies (Biemann et al. 2007). 6. Christine Boyer From Squatter Settlements in the 1960’s to Mega-Slums in the 21st Century. Lecture at the ‘Cities, Mapping and Contemporary Theories Conference’, TU Delft, DSD 2/11/2006. 7. The mirror is a space of comparison between the virtual image and the image of the self, a process of normalisation (see Foucault’s lecture ‘Of Other Spaces’ and Boyer 2006). 8. Christine Boyer Lagos; A Birds-Eye Perspective or an Engaged View. Lecture at the ‘Cities, Mapping and Contemporary Theories Conference’, TU Delft, DSD 3/11/2006. 9. Boyer Lagos lecture. 10. Boyer Lagos lecture. Robert Beauregard, too, has emphasised the importance of an empiricist approach, such as Homer Hoyt’s city growth model based on sectors, besides the more scholarly ‘Burgess’ centre-periphery growth model (see Beauregard’s lecture, CMS 3rd Annual Conference ‘Time/Space Dynamics in Urban Settings’ TU Berlin, CMS, 24/05/2007; and Beauregard, 2007). 11. Rem Koolhaas and Harvard Project on the City. See Koolhaas and Van De Haak (2006). 12. Boyer Lagos lecture. 13. Inspired by the example of the Bilbao Guggenheim cladding influencing costs and environmental issues due to its travelling around the world, Anthony Vidler has argued for more ‘empirical evidence’ in architectural production – including design, construction and performance (Vidler, lecture at the ‘DSD Colloquium with Anthony Vidler and Michael Hays’ TU Delft, DSD 7/11/2006). 14. Sieverts argues that the ideal of urban growth prevention with clear boundaries towards the countryside – as in Ebenezer Howard’s popular ideology of the city – has influenced urban planners up to the present, although Wells’ unpopular prediction of the Probable Diffusion of Cities has become reality (Sieverts 2003, pp. viii–ix). 15. Sieverts suggests alternative approaches (para-aesthetics) and ordering systems (from modern literature or music) (Sieverts 2003, pp. 95–98). He builds on the notion of para-aesthetics as ‘an aesthetic turned against itself, or pushed beyond or beside itself, a faulty, irregular, disordered, improper aesthetics’ (David Carrol in Sieverts 2003, p. 92). 16. Elements of reform refers to regional administrative reform, acceptance of suburban forms of living, protection and development of important landscapes, and core cities opening up

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

I. Doucet to competition (Sieverts 2003, pp. 126–139). The five action fields are transport and communication; protection, care and development; transformation and expansion; orientation and information and culture and sport (Sieverts 2003, pp. 140–142). Three groups of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ tools assist in working out these action fields: regionally significant infrastructures and public spaces, buildings and areas, as well as information, communication and participation. This safeguarding of one’s role as a planning professional is addressed in Doucet (2007a). Series editor: Thomas Sieverts, Mueller & Busmann Publishers (Wuppertal, Germany). See Schmid 2006a. The theoretical and methodological part is worked out in Switzerland: An Urban Portrait: Volume 1 “Introduction” pp. 1–231. For a specific analysis ‘whether the “critical” study gives us a better and more insightful picture’, see Graafland 2006, pp. 28–43. In Switzerland, where each commune, with its complete individual set of planning zones, has always been the core administrative unit, an increasing number of administrative fusions have taken place. Graafland has argued that the manifestation of what is crucial for difference as a social category is insufficiently worked out (see Graafland 2006). Because of Switzerland’s specific urbanisation process, a separate volume is dedicated to the historical overview of this process: Diener et al. (2006) Switzerland: An Urban Portrait. Volume 2 “Borders, Communes – A Brief History of the Territory” pp. 232–465. ‘Sketches’ of the five typologies are displayed in An Urban Portrait: Volume 1, pp. 117–127. The naming of the fifth typology, the least urban type, as ‘Alpine fallow lands’, signalled ‘a problematic situation but also a potential’ (Schmid 2006b, p. 216). The empirical work and analysis is shown in a separate volume: Diener et al. (2006) Switzerland: An Urban Portrait: Volume 3 ‘Materials’ pp. 466–1015. pp. 482–483 show a map and inventory of the ‘Drill Holes’ for empirical research by the ETH Studio Basel 1999–2003. See lecture and seminar by Christian Schmid, TU Delft DSD, 24/03/2006. Volume 3 ‘Materials’ sketches an individual portrait of each of the five typologies. Graafland argues that ‘Lefebvre’s philosophy is disappearing into urban mapping techniques’ and that ‘Schmid’s introduction [. . .] does not translate into the ETH Project’ (Graafland 2006, p. 32 and p. 41). Information about Micronomics can be found in Generalized Empowerment (City Mined 2006, pp. 60–102); http://www.citymined.org/micronomics and Micronomics Scanning (City Mined 2006, DVD). The word ‘krax’ derives from ‘cracks’ in the city: urban in-between spaces in which urban transformation processes conflict with local residents’ social and cultural needs. ‘KRAX’ also refers to City Mine(d) Barcelona’s project investigating social creativity in local urban planning conflicts. All information from City Mine(d) leaflets. Confrontation with the wider public took place during the Micronomics Festival in November 2006, at which both conclusions were made, test-actions carried out and new questions formulated. City Mine(d)’s network role is confirmed by the Micronomics online documentation centre ‘Cargo’, collecting experiences and best practices. Information taken from several Micronomics leaflets. This Boundary Market is part of the ‘Rainbow Economy’ project (De Overmolen and Beursschouwburg), linking newcomers with micro-entrepreneurship. ‘Micronomics: A Point of view’ by Jérome Puigros-Puigener. ‘Collectives’ in the sense of Bruno Latour in ‘Politics of Nature’ (2004) and in ‘Re-Assembling the Social’ (2005). For a link with architecture and planning, see Doucet 2007b. Latour has worked out the notion of diplomacy in ‘Politics of Nature’ (Latour 2004, pp. 209–220): diplomacy thinks in terms of requirements – what cannot be lost, what is essential – and expressions – what can be given up, what is superfluous (Latour 2004, p. 214). For the relationship with planning, see also Doucet 2007a. This paragraph is based on the Barcelona guided tours and their tour leaflets. B-Zone: On the Margins of Europe, exhibition from 10/03 to 01/05/2007, Fondació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona.


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39. For example, to enable a more open conversation with prostitutes, she presented herself as an amateur filmmaker rather than as a journalist. 40. http://www.transitmigration.org/migmap/. Within the frame of the Transitmigration project, an official German research project, field research is combined with critical mapmaking (see Dirk Schmidt’s lecture at the KVS ‘Euromaps’ event organised by City Mined and Constant VZW, 6/7/2007). 41. The workshop took place from 13 to 17 February 2006 at W&K, St Lucas Architecture Brussels, coordinated by I. Doucet. Tutors/professionals involved were: Katharina Richter (Weimar Bauhaus University), Agnieszka Sowa (Bialystok), Eric Monin (Ecole d’Architecture de Lille) and Patricia Vermaut (Participation House, Anderlecht). See also Doucet I (2006). 42. Superflex created digital copies of the cities of Karlskrona (Sweden) and Wolfsburg (Germany) (see http://www.superflex.dk). Virtual Anderlecht was an idea of the student group including Matthias Rothenbacher (Stuttgart), Malgorzata Suchocka (Bialystok), Radosaw Suchocki (Bialystok) and Katarzyna Sobolewska (Warsaw).

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The Polycentric City and Environmental Resources Alfredo Mela

1 Polycentric Reorganisation of Metropolitan Territory In these early years of the 21st century metropolitan areas are the protagonists of radical transformation processes, both from the economic and social point of view and as regards the changes in their urbanistic and architectural organisation. Some aspects of these processes are also at the centre of a debate in the media and influence the agendas of politicians and administrators on different territorial scales (from the local up to the national and European). This is the case, particularly, of transformations resulting from migratory processes and from the formation of ethnically distinct quarters; phenomena of this kind evoke problems with strong symbolic and ethico-political relevance and are therefore apt to give rise to contrasting position-taking on the part of public opinion and the political forces. Other aspects have a less ‘popular’ nature and are apt above all to fuel the discussion between scholars of disciplines that deal with the territory; thus, for example, the accentuation of spatial imbalance between the different parts of the metropolis for reasons different from ethno-cultural ones (e.g. due to social causes or to the effect of property market dynamics) has nowadays, generally speaking, less public visibility, unless these are brought into the limelight by the explosion of striking forms of conflict (as happened, for example, in the banlieues of many French cities in the autumn of 2005). Similarly, in many urban contexts the media have devoted great attention to architectural and urbanistic reorganisation processes which have changed the face of many central quarters or ex-industrial areas, the subject of spectacular interventions often created by the most prestigious representatives of the international architectural star system. In these cases it can be observed in actual fact that to attract the attention of the media is one of the explicit objectives of these interventions, their purpose being, indeed, to increase world visibility of the city and its capacity to attract investments and visitors.1 Vice-versa, much more modest attention is A. Mela Department of Human Settlements Science and Technology, Turin Polytechnic, Viale Mattioli 39, 10125 Torino, Italy e-mail: [email protected] G. Maciocco (ed.), The Territorial Future of the City. Urban and Landscape Perspectives 3, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-77514-0 4 C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008

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devoted – generally speaking – to other less obvious phenomena that modify the spatial structure of more marginal parts of metropolitan territory; we are alluding here, for example, to the identity crisis of large peripheral zones abandoned by manufacturing functions, or to rapid urbanisation of extensive sectors of periurban space in spatially widespread forms (with high consumption of land). However, the phenomena referred to here and many others that could equally be quoted – both those in the limelight and those that show themselves in a less apparent form – should not be considered processes totally independent from each other; they actually fit into a scenario of evolution of the social and spatial structure that, though admitting a plurality of causes affecting specific elements of the whole, nevertheless presents some unifying traits. Among these traits, one will be examined in depth in the present chapter: that representing the evolution of metropolitan territory in a polycentric sense. This expression is used with the intention to allude not so much to a univocal phenomenon, as to a family of processes which tend to redistribute the space of contemporary urban systems in a form no longer interpretable by the traditional centre-suburbs dialectic; what becomes clear, rather, is the emergence of a plurality of poles characterised by the presence of central functions. These poles have a different worth and different capacity for structuring urban space; however, they are not set out in an easily identifiable hierarchy – such as that envisaged by the famous Christallerian model of central localities – and, above all, they do not define basins of geometrically organised gravitation around each polarity. In fact, this type of polycentrism in many ways constitutes a challenge for traditional models interpreting territorial structure. In the following pages we do not by any means claim to propose a new analytical model as an alternative to the more consolidated ones. The aim of the analysis here is much more limited. For on the one hand, we intend to describe some aspects of this tendency to organise urban space, throwing light on the opportunities and risks it shows. On the other, it is intended to throw light on the challenge that the multipolar evolution of metropolises constitutes for territorial planning. More precisely, in paragraph 2 the concept of ‘urban polarity’ will be discussed and a theoretical pattern introduced which will offer a course for subsequent reflection; in the third, coherent with the pattern, three different dimensions of the process of evolution towards metropolitan polycentrism will be examined. In the fourth paragraph, a possible classification of the poles present in a metropolitan context will be proposed; in the last, finally, some considerations will be made on courses of intervention to be hoped for in order to reorganise polarities.

2 Features of Urban Polarities A point to be faced prior to any further analysis concerns the meaning itself of the expression ‘urban polarities’. What, then, do we mean to allude to by using this term? Mostly, in urban sociology language, as in those of other disciplines concerning the city, polarity is more or less implicitly considered in Christallerian

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terms: it is thus a concentration of service activities possessing relative rarity, which is placed in the centre – with respect to a system of accessibility – of a gravitational area where the users of these activities are localised. In some cases, this use of the word is extended to also include functions in the analysis which have productive features, rather than being a service, or which constitute a service, the users of which are economic activities rather than the final consumers. The meaning we intend to attribute to the concept of ‘urban polarity’ in the pages that follow is the same as the one emerging from this second, wider use; moreover, this also seems useful considering the ever-growing difficulty of clearly distinguishing activities producing goods and those delivering services within the framework of postfordist socio-economical systems. Apart from this clarification, however, the idea of polarity is presented here in even wider terms, especially as far as the relationship existing between the concentration of functions and the whole of metropolitan space is concerned, which here will not be understood solely as a division into gravitational basins relating to those functions. The basic idea is, in effect, that the polarities recognisable in a metropolitan area should correspond not only to concentrations of activities but, simultaneously, also to fundamental nodes of the city’s social and economic relations system, as well as to particular configurations of built-up space and technological configurations fit to support the execution of specific functions. The relations these polarities establish with the territory are undoubtedly defined by their capacity to supply services to users (who, moreover, access them through numerous means of transport and different telecommunication systems); at the same time, though, we also need to take into account the modality by which each pole links up with others, so as to form networks at various levels, as well as its potential for representing (or not) a propulsive factor for a course of local development from which an entire part of the urban territory and the large number of subjects who work in this context may gain benefit, regardless of the fact whether they are direct users of the facilities concentrated in the pole itself. To develop the ideas rapidly dealt with above an analytical scheme fit to throw light on the different forms of relations between polarities and metropolitan space may be useful. In particular, reference will be made here to a recent contribution by David Harvey (2006), who – on the other hand – takes up again and develops an idea already stated in Social Justice and the City (Harvey 1973): the distinction between three different ways of understanding and representing space. – In the first way, space is conceived as absolute space. It corresponds to an image of space as a fixed entity, within the frame of which elements can be picked out or events planned. It is interpreted as a ‘thing in itself’; it is the Newtonian space that enables measurements to be recorded and distances to be calculated based on Euclidean geometry. In social terms, it is defined by property rights and limits which create distinct territorial objects within borders (e.g. municipalities, regions, states). – The second is, vice-versa, a relative space, which concerns representations typical of non-Euclidean geometry and Einstein’s theories. It closely combines time and space dimensions and, moreover, brings into play the point of view of

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the observer: thus ‘the spatial frame depends crucially upon what it is that is being relativised and by whom’ (Harvey 2006, p. 122). It is basically a space of flows (money, people, energy, data, etc.); distance in this space – and the friction it causes on the flows – is related to the points of view from which these are considered (e.g. in terms of time, costs, energy consumption, etc.). – The third is relational space. This is meant by Harvey not as something within which processes take place, but rather as an evolving situation, defined by the processes themselves as they are carried out. And, along this course, each point in the space cannot be understood solely for its specific characteristics, but also as incorporating within it what is around it: ‘A wide variety of disparate influences swirling over space in the past, present and future concentrate and congeal at a certain point . . . to define the nature of that point’ (Harvey 2006, p. 124). So in this way each point in relative space is marked also by the social relations founded on it and the symbolic stratification incorporated in the built-up environment. It should be pointed out that these three dimensions of space, though able to give rise to interpretative conflicts, do not impose a final choice between alternative possibilities of representation; actually they often need to be kept in mind simultaneously, though maintaining a reciprocal dialectic tension; it is, however, possible that in the given circumstances only one of the three dimensions be taken as decisive for understanding the phenomena examined. Let us try, then, to use the distinction just introduced to focus on the different features of urban polarities. The idea of an absolute space serves to highlight above all the aspects which appear in the more traditional definitions of polarities: that is, the physical concentration of functions in a limited space (at worst representable as a point on the metropolitan territory) and the presence of a gravitational basin, understood as a sphere of user localisation, bearing in mind a given accessibility structure. It is this concentration that defines polarities as specific areas of the city, localised in certain ambits (e.g. in the historic centre, or in a barycentric position with respect to peripheral quarters); the basin takes shape as a contiguous space that has a given polarity in its centre and the borders of which are represented by lines of equivalence of different polarities’ capacity of attraction. Gravitational basins are of different sizes in proportion to the rarity of the functions present in the polarity; in any case they are of relatively limited dimensions (though variable depending on variations in the transport means considered) in that a material transfer of users towards the polar place is taken for granted. Vice-versa, consideration of relative space enables the role of polarity to be realised in a space of flows, which are not necessarily the movement of social subjects between their homes and the place where they use the services; for the flows to consider are of a different kind, e.g. supplying goods, finance, energy, data, etc. The channels along which these flows run are also of different kinds; in any case, here the role of distance means of communication is much more important than when considering absolute space. The image of the city or metropolitan area deriving


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from it is also different: in the case of absolute space this is basically a hierarchical structure made up of areas nested one within the other, whereas here each polarity (and, possibly, each function) is in a direct relationship with a varied space of flows and almost free from ‘natural’ limits (Amin and Thrift 2002). To some extent, then, each polarity has its own positional value; the city and relative user basins are only one of the variables of the flow it confronts. Being plural, the criterion by which the relationship between each polarity and the space of flows should be evaluated, and the importance or hierarchical role of each concentration, can only be measured by referring to specific points of view; there will therefore no longer be absolute metropolitan centrality, but many centralities, that are so in relation to a given reference point, such as capacity to intercept population flows, maximisation of logistic efficiency, possibility to promote property income, visibility and international prestige and so on. If the dimension of relational space is then introduced into the analysis, the representation that ensues is again different. For in this light polarity is not so simply because of the concentration of the functions it accommodates, nor just for its capacity to link up with a network of flows; it draws its value also from the context in which it has settled and the potential relations it establishes with it. We might rather say that it takes on a role in that it has relations with its environment, provided we give this term a wide meaning and do not refer solely to the physical/biological dimension of the term.2 A polarity, then, is such in relation to a complex of environmental resources – in a stratified form – accumulated on the territory through a wide variety of processes, from those of natural evolution to the spatial effects of subsequent processes of territorialisation and deterritorialisation (Raffestin 1984, Turco 1988), reaching forms of accumulation of immaterial factors, such as social capital (Field 2003) or institutional capital (Healey 1997). It can also be added that the relationship between the polarity and its environment has a multi-scalar character; on each occasion it can have relations just as well with the typical resources of the precise context as with the widespread resources of the urban or metropolitan environment, or at an even higher level. Moreover, this relationship has a biunivocal form: a polarity incorporates environmental features but at the same time develops and reproduces them, or, rather, consumes them, contributing each time to the sustainability or unsustainability of the development model it fits into. Depending on the varying type of space considered, therefore, polarity shows itself as something different, though it is difficult just the same to imagine being able to completely do without one of the three dimensions studied. Above all, the relationship between polarity and city or metropolitan area seems very different for each of the three cases. In the case of absolute space, this relationship is substantial: the urban system is only conceivable as a system of polar places; in relative space the city is put, so to speak, in second place: it is none other than a juxtaposition of related poles with flows whose size greatly surpasses the metropolitan dimension. Finally, in relational space we could say that city and polarity develop in a process of co-evolution with their environment; without taking into account this process neither one nor the other proves comprehensible.3

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3 The Dimensions of Polycentrism Bearing in mind the dimensions of space just dealt with, what meanings can be attributed to the evolution of metropolitan areas in a polycentric sense? If attention is concentrated on the absolute space dimension alone, the phenomenon that emerges in the foreground is that of an increase in the number of polarities and, above all, the collapse of an organisation grounded on a simple hierarchy enabling polarities to be classified at levels based solely on the rarity of the functions present in them. As is known, according to interpretative models of Christallerian derivation, a single polarity tends to exist at a higher level, fully equipped with a complete range of service facilities, from the rarest (equipped also with a wide gravitational basin) to the most commonplace, passing through a series of intermediate degrees of rarity. This kind of polarity possesses the maximum degree of centrality and is also geographically located in the centre of the metropolitan system. The polarities at the level immediately below are more numerous and characterised by the absence of extremely rare functions, though otherwise fully equipped; as we gradually come down the hierarchical scale, the number of polarities corresponding to each level increases and their equipment in terms of functions is poorer. The processes that can actually be observed in the transformation of postfordist metropolitan areas subvert, at least partially, this pattern. For the principal phenomenon we see – on a parallel with the transition towards an economy dominated by the central role of services and activities with a high rate of knowledge – is the multiplication of specialised poles, marked by the presence of rare activities but not equipped with all functions. These poles, often located in highly accessible spatial ambits (especially as concerns accessibility by car or with respect to long-haul transport systems) but far from the traditional central areas of the city, are greatly differentiated, but cannot be classified in a simple hierarchical order, in that they address in each case a widened potential user basin, of metropolitan, and sometimes inter-metropolitan importance. This does not mean that, as we will see in the next paragraph, beside this type of polarity, concentrations of functions at a lower level destined to support the users of specific residential areas are not also recognisable. However, the tendency that can be acknowledged is that of an increase in independence among these two types of polarity and the different relationship that each sets up with the city; while the circuit of highly specialised poles takes shape as a network of nodes fundamentally detached from residential spheres, the sub-poles that are smaller in size maintain close ties with the characteristics of the quarters where they have become established and, in fact, tend to reproduce the differential features of them; for example, in the presence of population concentrations belonging to particular ethnic groups, the respective polarities of services are also ‘ethnicised’. Thus, while in many ways polarities of a larger size tend to be characterised by a logic dominated by globalisation and model standardisation, polarities of a more reduced scale may also be differentiated on the grounds of local influence; if, on the one hand, this phenomenon shows the capacity of this type of pole for


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adapting to the context, on the other it underlines the detachment between global and local logics, favouring socio-cultural fragmentation of metropolitan spaces. The processes described synthetically above may, moreover, be understood better if, apart from considering absolute space, the relative and relational space dimensions are also examined. In particular, if the accent is placed on flow analysis – following the approach Harvey refers to for relative space – the fact emerges more clearly that this new organisation of polarities is simultaneously dependent on the existing structure of flows of various kinds and generator of multi-directional flows, possessing much lower predictability than the traditional hierarchical structures had.4 Dependence clearly emerges if we observe the localisation of many types of pole that have developed in recent times, such as, for example, the great commercial concentrations that have arisen in periurban areas, or those that have arisen from the radical ‘refunctionalisation’ that interchange nodes in long-haul transport systems have undergone, like airports, railway stations (especially those on high-speed train circuits), the port zones of tourist importance; a transformation that has turned these, too, into concentrations of commercial activities and leisure, as well as service facilities for the international economy. This localisation, instead of depending essentially on the spatial organisation of the homes of potential users (as established by the Christallerian model), seems basically aimed at intercepting flows of subjects who are moving around for the most varied reasons, as well as explicitly directed at using the services offered by single polarities. And it is often a question of subjects making long journeys, be it by car, train, plane or ship. Moreover, in localising these polarities, factors tied to different types of flow also count substantially, such as the system of supplying goods or the distribution of images and information; the latter aspect is fundamental, for example, for polarities for which visibility in the media is decisive, as is the case of structures attracting international tourism. On the other hand, whatever the preponderant factors be in localisation choices, the great concentrations of functions, in their turn, are generators of movement; they thus produce a mix between ‘intercepted’ and ‘generated’ flows, which contributes to giving transfers their chaotic, ‘zigzagging’ character that has been highlighted many times in recent literature.5 There is, however, a limit to the fluidity of transfers (at least as regards flows of material entities like people and goods): they need to be carried out by specific means of transport and communication, requiring unusual infrastructures that enable transfers to be implemented only by particular channels.6 This limit is particularly evident for concentrations of activities located outside metropolitan areas: thus, for example, a large shopping mall making use of a motorway network attracts and mixes a great variety of flows, provided, however, that transfers are carried out by car, for the centre is almost unreachable on foot or by bicycle, or by public transport. This means that, as already hinted earlier, specialised polarities of a higher level tend to establish reciprocal relations, rather than establish relationships with the surrounding space or with the polarities serving residents. For many aspects, in fact, it could be said that the network of polarities of this type, though constituting a distinctive function of the metropolitan nature of an area, is to some extent set apart from the reality of each particular metropolis.

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Interconnection between poles of a higher level does not, in effect, respect any type of administrative boundary and sometimes creates complementarity, even at a great distance: think of what was said before about transport system nodes. Thus, in describing the structure of these interconnections, authors often have recourse nowadays to metaphors less of an areal nature and more of an axial one; instead of speaking – as in the past – of ‘urban armature’ of a given territory (referring to the image of urban polarities as an element of structure fit to solidify a territory understood as a continuous, delimited entity), we speak of ‘arteries’ or ‘corridors’, etc. (Florida 2007). Terms like this suggest a connection that surpasses single urban areas, to directly define an inter-metropolitan level, open to global flows; at the same time they refer to a structure which, though not respecting hierarchical scales, does not have an ubiquitous nature; a ‘corridor’, of course, links a plurality of territorial ambits but, inevitably, leaves aside others, touching them at a tangent without involving them and, so doing, increasing their marginality. This last aspect may, on the other hand, be further interpreted by bringing into play the third dimension: that of relational space. This places particular interest on the relationship between polarities and their environment, in all the complexity and stratifications it presents. As has just been highlighted, it is undeniable that nowadays a strong tendency exists to form polarities that take shape as entities alienated from their immediate territorial context: to specify their nature the ‘capsule’ metaphor (Mela 2005) has sometimes been used, in that it is a case of complexes with an architectural and urbanistic configuration that pay tribute to narrow-mindedness and introversion. In effect, these poles are often made up of a set of closed containers with specialised functions and are complementary to each other, separated from external space by technical infrastructures (road arteries, parking areas, spaces occupied by warehouses, thermal plant, etc.) and equipped with strong internal controls for safety purposes (private police, closed-circuit TV, devices for channelling and regulating visitor flows). Looking closer, however, this alienation of the environment is only one aspect of reality; actually, these polarities do not by any means have a neutral role, either with regard to built-up environment or with reference to the more general ecosystem balance. On the contrary, by maximising internal functionality and economic profitability, they often produce negative effects on the surrounding environment in many ways, e.g. by radically changing landscape features, increasing pollution by causing intensification of road traffic, contributing to rarefying the commercial and services network in surrounding quarters or favouring further effects of residential sprawl. In these cases, then, rather than indifference of the capsules towards the environment, we could speak of parasitism with respect to it, since they take from the context only the elements directly useful for their activities (the benefits), while they discard elements that are not of interest, constituting costs for the collectivity in environmental, social and economic terms. In this largely problematic picture, however, some tendencies in a positive direction exist as regards relations between polarity and environment, or which at least present ambivalence, departing from which interesting possibilities open up for territorial planning intervention. Examples of these tendencies can be found above all


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in the transformation of spatial organisation of central functions tied in the past to urban centres, like those linked with higher education, research, cultural and leisure activities, tourism, etc. Concerning these activities, too, a process is underway which is leading to the formation of specialised polarities, equipped with the essential technological support and linked with the international flows. This process is leading to a phenomenon of reorganisation of central areas of large cities (think, in particular, of the historic centres of European cities) into thematic ‘districts’; for example, with the formation of university, museum, tourist/commercial poles, situated next to the already consolidated financial/economic and public administration poles. A tendency of this kind certainly presents ambivalent aspects. For on the one hand, it entails that each polarity, with the purpose also of equipping itself to sustain competition with other similar centres in other urban areas, be able to mobilise in its favour not only the environmental resources but also human and symbolic ones, stratified over time in its context: unusual past aspects, sedimented images, competences and attitudes linked with the aura of the city. On the other hand, however, as these centres belong to a global network of flows, this appeal for environmental rooting may co-exist with processes of standardisation of the supply, which in some way bring this type of polarity near to those previously considered ‘capsular’. A paradoxical effect may therefore arise: the method by which a museum district or a tourist one emphasises the uniqueness that binds it to the symbolic stratification of the context, follows scenario logics and languages that are global, risking transformation of the district into a format, in which ‘typicalness’ is enacted in impoverished, though universally comprehensible, forms. In spite of these risks, the development of rooted urban polarities in the context opens up the opposite perspective from that of capsularisation for them; these poles actually benefit from an opening towards the city and are led to establish complementarity between different levels of fruition; thus, for example, even a museum pole at an international level may gain advantage from being frequented by residents, or a highly qualified research pole may be interested in opening up to the local economy. Moreover, environmental quality is a factor of definite importance for these urban districts: this may lead the way to research on sustainable planning and management models in all senses of the term: capable of limiting the use of energy, ready to increment means of transport with less impact, careful about conserving historic/cultural specificity, etc.

4 A Classification of Poles As has been seen, if reorganisation processes of metropolitan polarities are analysed by examining different space dimensions, they appear in all their complexity and ambivalence, bringing to light an articulate picture of risks and opportunities. It will be useful to return briefly to this picture in the conclusions, but first, it might be interesting to attempt to use some of the variables considered in the previous paragraph to try to produce an albeit schematic classification of polarities, at which we have only hinted up to now in the form of examples.

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On the basis of which criteria, then, can the various types of pole that take shape on metropolitan territory be distinguished? In this chapter, we intend to propose a classification based on four variables, to which recourse has partially been made in the analyses developed up to now. The first (which, as has been seen, refers to the absolute space dimension) is the rarity of functions: here we intend to specify that recognition of this feature implies only the presence in the pole of one or more highly rare function and it is therefore highly specialised; whereas it is not supposed that completeness of supply exists there at various hierarchical levels, although in some types of polarity, as will be seen, it is presumed that activities exist to directly serve the surrounding residents. The second variable (relative space) consists of potential generation of flows of users on the part of the polarity itself: this serves to distinguish basically between concentrations of functions that involve a strong influx of users and others that are directed only at highly selective bands of users. The third and fourth variables refer, finally, to the relational space dimension. In particular, the variable ‘generation of public space’ concerns the presence or not, in the sphere of spatial concentration of functions, of spaces for collective use open to public use and, therefore, territorial spheres that may also be frequented regardless of fruition of specific services. This factor may therefore be considered an indicator of the participation of a given polarity in the creation of proper urban spheres, equipped with potential for social aggregation and fit to mix the different populations of the city. The variable ‘relations with the context’ concerns, on the other hand, what might be defined as the degree of permeability of the pole with regard to the (environmental, social, economic, symbolic) characteristics of the spatial context it belongs to. This serves to distinguish polarities with a low degree of permeability from others which, vice-versa, draw unusual elements from their environment and work on them, giving back a high level of local identity. In Table 1, on the basis of these variables, a limited number of polarity types are obtained. To achieve this simplification, recourse has been made to a simple dichotomisation of the values that can be taken on by each variable (high-low). As is obvious, the scheme could be further enriched using more complex scales or making use of different measures for each of the variables. Thus, for example, with regard to functions and their rareness, there could be a complex description of the functional mix present in a pole, while, with regard to flow generation, quantitative measurements could be resorted to. Assessment of public space generation and relations with the context, on the other hand, would lend themselves better to working out qualitative, more or less articulate types. In any case, by limiting ourselves to a simple dichotomous evaluation, it is possible to recognise the following six types of polarity. By ‘technical pole’ is meant a concentration of highly rare functions which, however, do not generate flows nor public space, maintaining poor permeability with respect to their own spatial context. Its importance for the economic and cultural development of an urban area lies in the specialised nature and technological qualification of the functions (as happens, for example, in the case of research


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Table 1. A classification of metropolitan polarities Rareness Generation Generation of Relations with Type of of functions of flows public space the context polarity High

Low

Low

Low

High High

High High

Low High

Low Low

High

High

High

High

Low Low

High High

High High

Low High

Examples

Technical pole

Highly specialised research laboratories Specialist pole Hospital zone Capsular pole Commercial and Leisure Centre Higher urban pole Multifunctional Metropolitan Centre Capsular sub-pole Hypermarket Urbansub-pole Multifunctional Centre in local quarter

laboratories); nevertheless, the pole does not directly interact with the vast majority of the population and its localisation therefore obeys above all functional demands of the activities it accommodates and, if anything, complementarity criteria with other specialised structures (e.g. university teaching or with businesses involved in applying the results of research). A ‘specialised pole’ is similar to the preceding type, but different from it because it implies a high generation of flows. A hospital pole could be an example of this type: its relations with the city are thus much stronger and more direct in that, though maintaining relatively low relations with the urban context (even though it may actually influence the localisation of complementary activities, like the marketing of pharmaceutical products or health equipment), it generates strong flows, destined to affect the whole structure of metropolitan polarities. A ‘capsular pole’ corresponds, on the other hand, to the type of specialised centre of a high level discussed in paragraph 3. Shopping and leisure centres of large dimensions, theme parks and, generally speaking, zones of tourist attraction, for example, that do not promote specifically local resources, belong to this category. Apart from generating flows, they produce a space of collective use in some ways similar to urban public space, even though they do not entirely possess its features (for example, they are mostly private property and subject to fruition restrictions, etc.).7 Nevertheless, their permeability to the context remains limited: they try, so to speak, to artificially reproduce the forms of the city within themselves, but have no dialogue with the elements of the ‘real’ urban fabric that surrounds them. This last aspect belongs, on the contrary, to those here defined ‘high urban poles’ par excellence. Although they have highly rare, specialised activities within themselves, they not only produce flows and public space, but are also able to enter into relations with their immediate environment. This property is typical of poles of great metropolitan importance, the activities of which are diversified and based on

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spatial spheres with strong stratification of meanings (for example, series of roads and squares of historic centres or also in more external but widely consolidated spaces). The remaining two types belong to polarities at a lower level than the previous, whose activities therefore do not reach the same degree of rareness. They consequently have a more limited user basin, involving the zone or city quarter. Both are able to generate flows and public space, even if the importance of both these elements is in proportion to the importance of the pole itself. However, in this case, too (as we have just seen for poles of a higher level), the two types are distinguished by the degree of relations with the context. If the latter is low, as happens, for example, for a hypermarket serving a complex of urban zones, the capsularity phenomenon will be reproduced on a lower scale; if, on the other hand, it is high, like in the centre with a multifunctional nature in a quarter, urban polarity rooted in its own environment will be the result.

5 Polycentrism and Sustainability It has already been said that the tendencies towards polycentrism underway in the principal metropolitan areas define a clear picture of risks entailing accentuation of the unsustainability features of the metropolitan development model, though at the same time also make clear certain opportunities that planning interventions should make use of. We will now specify better some aspects of this scenario, developing some ideas on the policies that could be activated to reduce risks and grasp opportunities in the direction of a more sustainable model. One consideration of a general sort refers once more to the three dimensions of space, according to Harvey’s analyses; in effect, this scheme, used up to now for analytical purposes, could be taken up again also to reflect on the direction planning should take. And from this viewpoint, the fundamental idea concerns the need to adopt an integrated, non-sectorial perspective that will take into account together all three dimensions indicated, avoiding attributing an exclusive role to any one of them. The absolute space dimension, in itself, proposes that the problems of metropolitan areas be considered by focusing attention on specific parts, e.g. historic centres, the suburbs, the area of periurban expansion. This type of approach is the one most frequently practised: the political agenda of public decision-makers is often conditioned by problems emerging in specific parts of the city and from pressures subsequently exerted by local stakeholders and political parties interested in solving the problems relating to particular territorial spheres, which on each occasion appear particularly urgent. Thus, for example, the need to increase international competitiveness of cities leads to emphasising the problems connected with the principal polarities of the metropolitan area, trying to reinforce them and increase their visibility; the subsequent explosion of conflicts in peripheral zones may then shift the


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attention to the need to create significant sub-polarities in those zones, to supply local services and stimulate the sense of identification of residents with their own quarter. However, this spatial sectoriality of interventions often risks planning routes being decided upon that proceed in parallel lines, without there being a total, strategic vision of the objectives planners wish to achieve as far as reorganisation of the centralities system is concerned. Especially in our country this fragmented, sectorial policy runs the risk of proving inefficient in opposing certain dangerous tendencies, which we have spoken about above: for example, that of a more and more radical division between the network of polarities of a high order (with a radius that is now inter-metropolitan) and that of local centres, supporting residential spheres that are more and more marginalised. For the latter a policy contrasting exclusion with soft interventions that consolidate local poles (perhaps making use of integrated and participated planning instruments) is not enough if, at the same time, the larger share of resources is destined for hard policies sustaining polarities of a high level, without managing to limit their tendency towards capsular form of organisation. By this we do not intend asserting that a reorganisation strategy for networks of urban poles should not also be divided into distinct objectives by area. Indeed, it should be said that an areal perspective is essential, both in that it enables a map of needs and objectives for each part of the city to be depicted, and also because it allows limits and thresholds to be defined in land use and in recourse to local environmental resources. In effect, in this sense it should be pointed out that in view of an intervention on urban polarities, a policy fit to favour the accumulation of activities should be accompanied by a equally fundamental policy aimed at favouring rarefaction of the residential fabric, to leave space for green areas, zones for periurban agriculture, areas of conservation of natural patrimony and historic memories (Mela and Preto 2003). Nevertheless, regarding both concentrations and rarefactions, it is important that the areal perspective be inserted in a wider representation of the phenomenon, to also include the relative space dimension and that of relational space. A policy that aims at regulating flows has a primary role in view of sustainability of the system. And, once more, it should be remembered that we are dealing with various kinds of flow: not just people and goods, but also refuse, energy, biotic and abiotic factors which have an effect on ecosystem balance. The forms by which the globalisation of flows within and between metropolitan areas is being realised fundamentally contribute to the unsustainability of the development model. This reflection does not mean that we should aim at hindering globalisation and at recreating barriers to circulation; if anything, it opens the way to the idea of definition of a ‘policy of flows’ of an integrated nature, which will aim at intervening in a joint manner – with material and immaterial interventions – on a plurality of factors which nowadays lean towards forms of unnecessary mobility, favoured by an unbalanced localising structure, by almost exclusive recourse to private means of transport imposed by the structure and favoured by models of behaviour unaware of the environmental impact generated.8 As far as the aspects most relevant to this context are concerned, one of the cornerstones of such a policy would need to be

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to discourage the creation of capsular polarities which rest solely on networks of motorway routes and, vice-versa, to encourage aggregations of functions at points accessible by public transport means, rail transport in particular. Similarly, the creation of sub-poles should be favoured, with a presence of social and commercial services at barycentric points with respect to areas of widespread urbanisation, in order to limit the extent of movement on the part of the population of these areas. The creation should also be promoted, as concerns the mobility of goods, of short chains between producers and consumers for important consumer goods like fruit and vegetable products, and also for some construction materials, to avoid resorting to equivalent products requiring long transfers. The latter remark reminds us of the theme of relations between the metropolitan polarities and their context. On this matter, the general objective of a policy for the reorganisation of metropolitan polarities should be that of favouring diversification of the nodal centres of the territorial system that will originate from a reading or shared interpretation of the resources of the context, as much in its biophysical as in its socio-economic and cultural dimensions. A reading able to include the ecological divisions of the territory, the landscape structures, fruit of slow sedimentation (including those of the urban landscape), the potential of the urban milieu, the knowledge, the know-how and the widespread attitudes, the different forms of social capital and the willingness to participate of the different subjects. And, above all, a reading that will be a prelude to shared plans of action favouring the development of polarities adequate for the resources and ties of each part of the territory and able to produce ‘added territorial value’ (Dematteis 2001), not just on a metropolitan scale, but also on that of the spatial surroundings of a more limited dimension. It is obvious that an orientation of territorial policies like the one indicated here can only be proposed as a trend to inspire strategic planning, which then needs, in order to become effective, a plurality of operative instruments fit for the variety of contexts and organisation of the specific problems. Discussion regarding such instruments goes beyond the aim of these notes: here it was intended above all to give prominence to the need for an integrated policy (i.e. not fragmented on the grounds of sectorial logics or purely dictated by the urgency of problems linked with parts of the territory) for governing urban polarities; a policy in which the objective of sustainability of the development model is not in its turn conceived as a sort of sectorial tie (in which councillors or ministers of the environment are interested, in perennial opposition to those interested in economic development or infrastructures), but is a guideline giving a positive direction to all policies and coherence to the whole series of interventions.

Notes 1. Among the policies aimed at increasing the visibility of cities, particular importance has been taken on during the last 20 years by competition to attract ‘great events’ to cities (such as the Olympics and sports competitions, international fairs and events, etc.). On this subject, see Essex and Chalkley (1998).


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2. See Davico et al. (2000) and Osti and Pelizzoni (2003) for the debate in this sense in the field of sociology of the environment. See, also, the distinction between ‘partial ecology’ and ‘full ecology’, spoken of in Bonnes et al. (2006). 3. On the concept of co-evolution, see, among others, Norgaard (1997) and Woodgate and Redclift (1998). 4. I refer to Urry and the distinction between flows in networks and liquid flows that exploit porosity of the territory. 5. It should be added to what has been said in the text that deeper study of the reasons for this chaotic condition of transfers should include other factors of a social nature, particularly with regard to the organisation of social times and the changes this has undergone in passing from the Fordist city to the Postfordist (see, on this subject, Nuvolati, 2003). 6. As to technological support for flows, Urry (2000) speaks of ‘landscapes’: the latter are made up of machines, technologies, organising complexes, roles, tests, etc. and their function is to reshape space-time. Once a ‘landscape’ has been set up, the individual and collective actors will try to link up with it and will become established as nodes. 7. For this reason some authors prefer to use distinctive expressions to refer to them, speaking of ‘almost-public’ places (Morandi 1996). 8. As to the necessary combination of structural policies, forms of economic stimulation, and intervention aimed at causing environmentally-aware attitudes to develop, see Bonnes et al. (2006), in particular Chapter 4.

References Amin A, Thrift N (2002) Cities. Reimagining the Urban, Polity Press, Cambridge. Bonnes M, Carrus G, Passafaro P (2006) Psicologia ambientale, sostenibilità e comportamenti ecologici, Carocci, Roma. Dematteis G (2001) Per una geografia della territorialità attiva e dei valori territoriali, in P Bonora (ed) SloT quaderno 1, Baskerville, Bologna, pp. 11–30. Essex S, Chalkley B (1998) Olympic Games: Catalyst of Urban Change. Leisure Studies, 3, pp. 187–206. Field J (2003) Social Capital, Routledge, London-New York. Florida R (2007) The New Megalopolis. Our focus on cities is wrong. Growth and innovation come from new urban corridors. Newsweek. International Edition. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13528839/site/newsweek/ Harvey D (1973) Social Justice and the City, Arnold, London. Harvey D (2006) Spaces of Global Capitalism: Toward a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development,Verso, London-New York. Healey P (1997), Collaborative Planning. Shaping Places in Fragmented Societies, Palgrave, Houndmills. Mela A, Belloni M C, Davico L (1998) Sociologia dell’ambiente, Carocci, Roma. Mela A (2005) La città contemporanea e i cittadini fruitori. In: M Marcelloni (ed) Questioni della città contemporanea, FrancoAngeli, Milano, pp. 179–196. Mela A, Preto G (2003) Processi di organizzazione spaziale e politiche di sostenibilità. In: C S Bertuglia, A Stanghellini, L Staricco (eds) La diffusione urbana: tendenze attuali, scenari futuri, FrancoAngeli, Milano. Moranti M (1996) La città vissuta. Significati e valori dello spazio urbano, Alinea Firenze. Norgaard R (1997) A coevolutionary environmental sociology. In: M Redclift, G Woodgate (eds) The International Handbook of Environmental Sociology, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, pp. 158–168. Osti G, Pellizzoni L (2003) Sociologia dell’ambiente, Il Mulino, Bologna.

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Raffestin C (1984) Territorializzazione, deterritorializzazione, riterritorializzazione e informazione. In: A Turco (ed) Regione e regionalizzazione, FrancoAngeli, Milano, pp. 69–82. Turco A (1988) Verso una teoria geografica della complessità, Unicopoli, Milano. Urry J (2000) Sociology Beyond Societies, Routledge, London, New York. Woodgate G, Redclift M (1998) From a “sociology of nature” to environmental sociology: Beyond social constructionism. Environmental Values, 7, 1, pp. 3–24.

Images of Local Societies and Projects for Space Paola Pittaluga

1 Introduction The disciplinary debate (Amendola 2000; Amin and Thrift 2001; Marcuse and Van Kempen 2000; Mello 2002)1 on the current urban condition, on how it can be interpreted and decoded, above all on which are the elements and features that provide urbanity, reveals unease towards the traditional instruments with which we venture to take hold of the city and transform it. But the city continues to evade, almost as if any attempt to give it a definition were to make it lose its essence and favour its disappearance. Moreover, society, represented in the past by a hierarchical model corresponding to the city, has moved rapidly, due to the effects of ratifying and ratified processes of globalisation and those of deterritorialisation, on a horizontal plane, cancelling out place and producing a sense of bewilderment (Bonomi 1993; Callari-Galli 1995; Lombardi Satriani 1996; Villani 1993), present in deviance, loneliness, non-places2 of transition and exchange, crossroads of exodus itineraries and of cultural nomadism (Lévy 1994). The concept of community in the Tönniesian sense therefore seems ‘precarious’ (Bonomi 1993), but it is so because there is a social emptiness to be filled. City and territory no longer succeed in being a place, in the sense of a space of relations, a melting-pot of urbanity, in which processes of production of identity and recognition between individuals are favoured.3 Attempts have been made to state that this change is part of the normal evolution accompanying things of the world; the ‘different figures of time and space’ (Maciocco 1995a) that emphasise indifference towards place, western culture and pervasive ratification in the name of the ‘principle of rationality’, which tends to cancel out otherness, differences and specificities, which might be neglected and seconded if it were not for the fact that they prove more and more obviously to

P. Pittaluga Department of Architecture and Planning, Faculty of Architecture, Alghero, University of Sassari, Palazzo del Pou Salit, Piazza Duomo 6, 07041 Alghero, Italy e-mail: [email protected] G. Maciocco (ed.), The Territorial Future of the City. Urban and Landscape Perspectives 3, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-77514-0 5 C Springer Science+Business Media, B.V. 2008

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be opposing phenomena that might conventionally be considered ‘regressions’ or ‘involutions’ Among these are included the intensification of nationalist movements, forms of radical extremism, rampant racism, more inclined towards a tribal vision of society than multiethnic, the expression of a desire to feel part of a group that can now no longer be restrained.4 However much we are nowadays in the presence of an individualistic and selfreferential trend, our being can only develop completely in relationships with others, indeed thanks to this alone can our diversity and subjectivity be manifest. The ‘groupist’ (Barcellona 1996) dimension therefore seems to be fundamental for the social growth of the individual. This need for community, society and place does not, however, in the present situation, manage to find its time–space equivalent: for city and territory no longer succeed in keeping urbs and civitas together. Nowadays the concept of identity claims a different social body from the traditionally determined one (Maciocco 1999; Maciocco and Pittaluga 1999) to represent it: a socio-territorial figure that weaves strategies enabling common elements to be defined in which we can recognise ourselves, to be revealed following an approach founded on communication and sharing of the same interpretative criteria. In this case it is no longer a question of referring just to a society that recognises itself in a common space, common historic/cultural heritage and common knowledge, but also to what, due to deterritorialisation,5 happens to inhabit the same space – though not the original one – and recognises itself in a linguisticcommunicative model in attributing meaning: it acknowledges its rules and ties, which do not have a restrictive nature, rather they bring out potential as they are understood in the sense of an occasion, an opportunity (Prigogine and Stengers 1981). For these reasons in recent years various approaches to space organisation have been questioned by cultural diversity, and criticism has been brought against them by the deconstructivity of postmodernism, by antifundamentalist and pluralist tendencies (Filion 1996; McGuirk 2001; Sandercock 1998). The latter favour practices in which interaction, cooperation and dialogue between different subjects play a central role. The project increasingly takes on an interactive connotation based on direct relations with populations and places, seeking meanings that are shared and coherent between the spatial images of local societies and the images produced by expert knowledge – by continuous interaction between technical knowledge and common knowledge. This connotation requires ‘immersion’ in the context, removal of the epistemological barrier of an ‘excluding nature’ that characterises traditional models (Lane 2000), to include forms of plural and contextualised rationalities which promote collective learning and the empowerment of local societies (Beard 2003; Friedmann 1992, 2000; Lane 2000; Weissberg 1999; Singh and Titi 1995) following their own modalities of form of governance that conceives the city as a collective actor and as a local society (Bagnasco and Le Galès 2001; Dekker and van Kempen 2004; Le Galès 2003; Salet et al. 2003).

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But coherence between the spatial images of local societies becomes a constituent requisite of the project for space organisation in a strictly technical sense, too. Indeed, one of the reasons for the inefficacy of projectual activity may be acknowledged in the divergence between the plan and implementation of it and, as underlined, in the ever-increasing difficulty of producing and promoting a sense of belonging and rootedness towards the urban territorial contexts concerned, which translates into a principle of responsibility with respect to the future of our own space of life. This sort of schizophrenia, which also shows itself in other aspects of the discipline, is evident above all among the spatial images individuals may have of their own territorial sphere and those produced by the technical knowledge with which the project is traditionally represented. This leads us to hypothesise that the gap ensuing might indeed constitute a cause of inefficacy, in the sense that when the image with which the plan is represented does not contain elements coming down from the ‘perceptive worlds’ of a settled society, created by a process of ‘territorial hysteresis’ in which environmental dominants emerge, the significant places, the unnegotiable values, the long-lasting elements that have always been at the head of space organisation of the society (Maciocco 1995b; Maciocco and Tagliagambe 1997), and above all the relations between the latter, it may often happen that the outcome is not effective and shared, precisely because it concerns elements alienated from the local population and because it comes down from exogenous models of development indifferent to the actual vocations of the context (Pittaluga 2001). For each society resident on a territory shared maps exist on which the places of our vital space are shown, the relations between them, their organisation, the use made of them, maps that are experientially variable. To reconstruct symbolic spaces, the threads of relations, the system of ‘places’, i.e. to reach the perceptive worlds of a society, its spatial images, means to be able to begin a dialogue with it, through modalities fit for its own dynamics and its own common knowledge (Lelli et al. 2005). In effect, it is evident that knowledge for the project is substantially technical; this is accompanied, following the reflections triggered by the crisis that upset projectual disciplines, by common or contextual knowledge as a form of own knowledge of the material cultures of the populations resident on a territory. The survey of the territory as ‘human condition’, the exploration of the perceptive, notional, cultural worlds of the society, the construction of a geography of intentions (Bailly and Béguin 1982) which takes into account behaviours, aspirations, desires and fears of the inhabitants of a territory, becomes significant material with which to resolve some of the nuclear aspects of the relationship between knowledge and action, between the project and its implementation. Forms of knowledge – expert knowledge, knowledge derived from experience, knowledge produced by action – prove to be combined in various ways and all have value for action. But the interactive knowledge that nurtures the projectual process, by the very fact that it is produced during action (Crosta 1998), is fundamentally

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strategic, being adaptable to the interactive context that is a property of the city project. In such a process not just problems directly connected with the physical transformation of urban and territorial space are dealt with, but also those concerning the action of collective agents that construct their own environment through shared organisation of the territorial space. To deal with this type of problem knowledge is needed aimed as much as possible at facing complex planning contexts, deriving from the presence of various subjects involved in decisional processes, and the corresponding diverse concepts of collective patrimony, desires, priorities and diversified hopes. In these planning fields models of communication and conflict management can be experimented that reject patterns based on the win/lose pair to operate in an intermediate space. The idea of an intermediate space concerns a more extensive system that contains and works with single or individual contributions with their ties and interrelations, which generates trajectories departing from a set of already existing possibilities, creates other fresh ones and allows participants to have recourse to them in a systematic way (Schnitman and Schnitman 2000). Intermediate spaces require dialogue models that promote the collaborative creation of new meanings in dialogue and explore conversation itself as a generative system. In this conception the conflict becomes a resource6 in that it allows different points of view and a variety of interpretations of reality and visions of the world to arise; it represents an instrument for building new relations and identity, for implementing practices and opening up possibilities, for helping people to become ‘active co-constructors of their own reality’. Within these same horizons interaction between expert knowledge and common knowledge occurs, marking an inevitable open, cooperative dimension of the territory project. This conception requires planning styles to be abandoned that reject any form of direct contact, of involvement, including personal, with the context of action (Borri 2000); it favours planning environments from which new collective forms of management of city and territory will arise. In this perspective, research trends with psychological, sociological and geographical matrixes, their objectives concerned, on the one hand, with understanding the modalities by which individuals acquire, store, recall and decode environmental and spatial information, and, on the other, with pinpointing cared-for places belonging to spaces lived in by a society – highlighting the value and significance, the relations linking them, the symbolic projections of which they are the subject – and hopes, aspirations and anxiety of the populations inhabiting a territory, provide a valid contribution for approaches to urban and territorial space organisation oriented towards interaction between ‘technical’ and ‘contextual’ knowledge departing from the construction of spatial images of the society involved in the projectual process.


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2 Space and Social Representations In order to clarify the spatial images inhabitants have of city and territory, it is important to emphasise that an individual’s representation of space is derived from psychological and cultural processes, life and daily experience, and reveals a distance from the image obtained by traditional urban and territorial analysis.7 Representations change as the perception of them varies, affected by the hopes and expectations of local societies: a change that may be considered partly external, involving objects, as the object of perception changes, and partly internal, in the sense that it is the result of a substantial shift of the point of observation of perception (Maciocco and Tagliagambe 1997). Thus, cultural representations prove important, as do those that local societies create for themselves relating to the spaces they live in and, for these to be clarified and used, an ontological change in the space project is required, so as to be able to understand its variability depending on the relationship between perception and ‘experienced worlds’ of a society. When collective meanings are attributed to a given space, this becomes a place on which groups of individuals construct social representations.8 Social representation is, according to Moscovici (1961, 1981, 1984), the creation of a cognitive-type framework of information relating to a specific object regarding practices and visions of the world of the group concerned, by the subject creating the framework. The latter may be considered a guide for action and an interpretative pattern of reality. Representations are defined in particular as a form of knowledge socially built up and shared, which has practical importance and concurs in the construction of the common reality of a social group (Jodelet 1991), and at the same time incorporates the past and future of the subjects expressing them (Pittolo 1996). Two fundamental components of the representation are recognised: the central system and the peripheral system, their tasks being, respectively, to store ‘collective memory’, having therefore a consensual function since it is the shared, stabilising background, coherent and persistent, and to guarantee openness to the outside, having therefore a dynamic, flexible role: a sort of adaptive mechanism (Abric 1993; Flament 1965, 1968). By insisting on the aspect of sharing, an alternative to the individualistic approach is delineated (Nenci 1997): attention for the social representations of a place leads us to pinpoint environmental unities, above all on an urban scale, more important in collective experience, since people perceive each other and develop not only with regard to others, but also with regard to the spaces of daily life. It is acknowledged that the theory of social representations (Führer 1990) has heuristic potential for the capacity these have of promoting understanding of the settings of ideas and beliefs that act as mechanisms for socio-regulation of social and interpersonal behaviour, or, on the contrary, of group mechanisms which lead to reworking and contextualisation of the said ideas, social norms and beliefs (Breakwell 1993; Vela 1992).

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Moscovici recognises three types of social representation: hegemonic, in that they are more widespread compared with others; emancipated, when they are the outcome of exchanges and hybridisation between different collective sub-groups; polemic, since they derive from situations of conflict and antagonism (Moscovici 1988). Cognitive mapping also (Downs and Stea 1973; Downs 1981; Duncan 1987; Duncan and Ley 1993; Ittelson 1973; Jameson 1991; Soja 1989), the cultural referents of which can be found in the social psychology of the 1930s, has as its objective the clarification of space representations, but in contrast with the theory of social representations, these are not collective but individual. The environment is considered a producer of stimuli to which individuals are sensitive. Through these stimuli man and environment exchange information on space that the individual then organises in maps which are subsequently translated into guidelines by which to experience the external world. The role the environment plays in this process is only apparently passive: its features can help or hinder the cognitive and representational process. Cognitive mapping originated as an instrument for understanding the modalities by which individuals acquire, store, recall and decode environmental and spatial information (Kitchin 1997; Kitchin and Fotheringham 1997, 1998). The objective is therefore that of formulating mindmaps in a systematic manner, pinpointing their recurring characteristics and the selective criteria underlying them. A relevant contribution to clarifying and interpreting representations, or rather cognitive maps, is provided by Lynch’s work on the definition of a basic taxonomy for the analysis of urban forms deriving from spatial images that individuals construct for themselves in respect of the urban context concerned: routes, margins, areas, nodes and reference points in territorial space (Lynch 1960). Numerous fields of application have been developed departing from Lynch’s analysis: exploration and learning about space in children and the disabled; the design of signposts and spaces in large facilities to reduce environmental stress; the analysis of motivation linked with residential choices. The procedures used are constructed according to the type of knowledge underlying the cognitive processes regarding the perception of space we wish to acquire: declarative knowledge, which represents basic information and can be imagined as being organised like a database (Golledge 1993); procedural knowledge, which uses declarative knowledge to guide action; configurational knowledge, which is that mobilised to recognise spatial models and relationships between places (distances, angles, etc.) (Golledge et al. 1987). In order to clarify each form of knowledge, different tests are proposed: draw a diagram of a territorial area, pick out certain places on a skeleton map, assess distances and angles between places, reconstruct routes, verbally describe a space, construct models to scale in a geographical sphere. The choice of one test rather than another is not a trivial matter: it has actually been observed that results may vary depending on this choice and it is not yet clear whether this is due to intrinsic differences in subjects, the level of intellectual capacity or the reasoning strategies used to solve the tests (Golledge et al. 1987).


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Most of these are of the phenomenological type in that the people involved are asked to reflect on actions carried out and logic adopted in completing the task assigned, explaining their work to an assistant who accompanies them (Newell and Simon 1972). Although cognitive maps do not satisfy the rules of traditional cartographic construction, they possess and transmit the same informative content and can be considered the outcome of a screening operation through a series of filters proceeding from inputs not only visual but also sensorial and cultural: touch, smell, affection, movement, memory, experience, media, or other ‘second hand’ sources (Gould and White 1986). It is, however, clear that responses and reactions to the environment exist that are not mappable or communicable through any medium (Pocock 1979).

3 Space and Behaviour Situationism, the most important exponents of which are Constant and Debord, was born in Western Europe, mainly Paris, France, as a political and radical artistic movement at the end of the 1950s and had its origins in the Lettrist International, but was strongly influenced by Dadaism and Surrealism. Situationism was also closely tied to cognitive mapping theories with regard to the development of a psychogeographic theory to produce new representations and representation techniques by the study of the specific effects of the geographic environment, whether consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals (SI 1981). The movement’s approach to urban questions was closely tied to that of Lefebvre (1971, 1991), who had tried to study in a similar way the changing conditions of daily life and the urban landscape, in France in particular, during the same period. Among the initial hypotheses two needs play a fundamental role: the first concerns the will to study urban spaces from the spatial behaviour of its inhabitants – attention is therefore focused on the perceptive aspects of spatial appropriation shown; the second is the consequent need to find techniques of representation capable of expressing this behaviour. Debord (1981a) supplies the first formal definition of psychogeography and establishes some purposes and concepts. Psychogeographic studies aim at examining how subjective perception and sensations, individual desires and worries are affected by urban environmental geography and at the same time, how these elements affect and give shape to this geography (Sadler 1998). Psychogeography is therefore an exploration of the relations existing between social and mental space, the modalities with which they interact and intertwine and the possibilities of intervening, by acting on relations, in the processes of urban transformation. Psychogeographic analysis enables changes in atmosphere to be gathered9 and in landscape perception, which may occur in apparently homogeneous contiguous spaces (also within a distance of a few metres) or in the spaces themselves with the passing of time; in this way what are defined as ‘units of atmosphere’ are pinpointed,

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which sometimes take shape as discontinuity and breaks between adjacent parts of the city. The main practice for perceptively exploring urban spaces is the ‘derive’ (Debord 1981b), a type of free, but critical, route over urban land, later defined as a way of experimental behaviour tied to the conditions of urban society and a technique for passing through various environments (SI 1981). As for space representation, the détournement procedure is used, a tactical method developed by the Situationists to decontextualise and deconstruct objects and images, to be reconstructed later – deliberately and not casually – to create new meanings and effects. This is an attempt to destroy existing representations and communicate different visions of the city that in some way express the discontinuous, complex, fragmentary nature of perception of the city by its users, in opposition to the homogeneous, continuous space of geometry (SI 1981). Zenithal, totalising observation of the city is substituted by a partial, fragmentary portrait of its spaces, the rhetoric of neutrality of the declared will to manipulate, select and codify. Psychogeographic maps are not presented in a disembodied, desocialised, rigorously static form of geography, but suggest a sort of mobility through subjective, psychological social dimensions. Espace vécu10 is the name used to identify a research trend in French geography, the origin of which can be traced back to the beginning of the 1970s. The approach features the importance taken on by the lived dimension of space, observed regardless of human perception at different levels (urban, periurban, territorial, rural, etc.). One or more socio-spatial categories are associated with each daily environment, characterised by lifestyles, behaviours (that can be considered the forms of space in time) and social representations which fluctuate between an individual and a universal level. Space can be defined in relation to the human beings that use it, benefit from it, move within it, cross it, dominate it. In this sense the most satisfactory definition is the one that considers space a resource. Space is observed in its incarnate and discarnate dimensions, as a set of material, symbolic elements: use, frequentation, appropriation, denomination, attribution of sense and value (Frémont 1978), by a sociological approach aimed at understanding the actions of local societies in an environment. The term lived takes on a vague meaning which on different occasions may be associated with others such as participation, motivation, animation, struggle, uncertainty, but undoubtedly involves the affective sphere, significantly accentuating the distance taken from a deterministic type of geographic regionalism to leave space for informative content that expresses indeed sentiments, passions, anxiety and fears. Knowledge does not derive exclusively from the observation of reality as something exterior but as something interior, placing in the foreground the socio-spatial actors, intentional structures and cognitive experiences (Frémont 1976). The territory or place lived in are spaces ‘tidied up’ in the semiotic sense by a process of social organisation of territorial signs on different scales that Raffestin defines as ‘territorial ecogenesis’ (Raffestin 1986).


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In places of lived space the time–space convergence of collective and individual practices materialises. Analysis of these processes which define a ‘peaceful geography of daily life’ (Di Méo 1999) shows how the endless, inexorable social construction of territories (or places) cannot but be the result of continuous interaction between objective structures in space (works of society) and cognitive structures (translated into different images, representations and ideologies) that are individual but simultaneously collective (Di Méo 1999). A kind of geography consequently emerges that abandons traditional spatial categories (like that of region) to single out perceptive lived spaces, those of daily life, made up of systems of places, the sense and meaning of which come down from being components of structures representing socio-spatial ambits and elements capable of influencing collective behaviours. Space is adopted as cultural organisation resulting from interactions between collective representations on the one hand and value systems of the territory on the other. The concept of place allows the relationship between man and environment to be studied as the space of mediation between subjectivity and objectivity; in this perspective questions of scale, distance, extension and limit lose their pertinence as preliminary concepts to the analysis of the territory (Berdoulay and Entrikin 1998), in the same way as social groups and territory cannot be considered a priori existing entities (Goffman 1974). It is thus possible to surpass the classical regionalist approach: limits of the definition of territorial ambits have been observed based on traditional criteria that lead to pinpointing ‘regions’, which do not correspond to those normally experienced and felt by local societies because they do not rest on systems of places recognised as significant. Place therefore calls up the idea of an active subject who must without respite weave the complex ties that give it identity, establishing a relationship with the environment that Berque (1990, 1995) defines as médiance, in a systemic vision of place and context. The neologism médiance is the result of a combination of the term milieu and the term mediation; the suffix ‘ance’ is a way of turning the present participle into a noun, thus making the concept more active. So attention to lived space is not given exclusively to spaces materially experienced but also to virtual ones, as it is through these that the dilation of the concept of inhabiting unfolds towards symbolic places, holders of collective identity, giving structure to the spatial images of local societies. This passage between the material and immaterial elements of space introduces, into the study of lived spaces, reflections on the temporal dimension of space which varies per society and culture and therefore on forms in time,11 in a continuous opposition between being/identity and becoming/identification. The codification of forms in time links up with the recognition of collective behaviours and leads us to let the attention of the survey linger, once more, on civitas and urbs, postulating that social ties confront forms in space (urbs) and that, reciprocally, these are necessary for social ties (civitas).

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4 Space and Identity The epistemological shift from space experienced to space as the seat of values and meanings converges towards the formulation of some theories12 in which the concept of place becomes the central one. Place-identity, introduced by Proshansky et al. (1983), marks an important turning-point in research on the value and the relational significance of places: the identity of places is considered an important component of the personality of the individual, a sub-structure both cognitive and affective of the identity of the self. The construction of the identity of a place is produced by combining different social and symbolic/cultural dimensions: in this case environmental perception points out the set of processes by which individuals attribute meaning to their own sociophysical environment. Place-identity is, therefore, no more than an active personal construction, coming down from direct experience of the physical environment in daily life, obtained by mediation between subjective semantic content and social regulations and characterised by the working out of hierarchically organised and structured concatenations with regard to the physical/social settings experienced. In place-identity two fundamental elements of the psychology of the individual are involved: space understood as an emotively described ambit, socially significant from the rational, contextual and functional point of view, in that it is the origin of opportunity to reach and achieve individual needs and purposes, and time understood as the dimension intervening in the process of hysteresis of past experiences, as regards the places and socio-environmental spaces that each of us has reason to frequent or experience cognitively or emotively in our lives. Time and place therefore represent two fundamental dimensions that organise and structure place-identity. In the formation of the temporal perspective and in determining ways of facing time, elements of a cognitive and affective type deriving from subjective experience within socio-cultural and geographic reference-points are combined. The theoretical perspective basically explores three fields: the social, coinciding with the paradigm of ‘social representations’, which recognises for each environment a set of shared symbolic, cultural pictures and simultaneously represents the context in which these pictures are produced; the interpersonal, which defines the theory of social identity as an approach to the study of modalities by which subjects perceive the environment according to norms and cultural values of their own reference groups or groups they belong to; the individual, on the basis of which the identity of self develops in proportion to the cognitive-emotive experiences lived with respect to relations with physical, natural and social reality. Growing interest for affective relations the subject is capable of engaging in with places leads us to introduce the concept of place-attachment (Altman and Low 1992). Usually evoked in studies on the district or habitat, attachment is defined as a complex phenomenon comprising multiple components which proves to basically be connected with the feeling of well-being deriving from the fact of living in a place and, on the contrary, a sense of loss when one is obliged to leave it.


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Modalities of attachment, as research on the subject shows (Giuliani 1991, 1995), unfold as a function of certain recurring dimensions: existence, continuity, intensity, emotional quality, duration, awareness of sentiment, capability to establish and reconstruct an affective relationship. The variables most commonly used to assess virtual quality of the representation of a place are coherence, legibility,13 imaginability or complexity and mystery (Baroni 1998; Nenci 1997). Coherence is meant as the property of organisation of the elements of a city or territory enabling integration into a single coherent whole, legibility is linked with the ease of exploration and understanding of the environment, while imaginability or complexity is the capacity a place possesses to provoke sentiments and emotions and, finally, mystery stimulates curiosity and the desire to discover. Coherence and legibility therefore relate to immediate cognitive processes of interpretation and understanding of space, while imaginability and mystery belong to the inferential processes associated with the exploration and discovery of space (Kaplan 1987; Kaplan et al. 1989).

5 Images of Local Societies and Projects for Space Research with an environmental-psychological matrix, in particular that based on transactional orientation (Altman and Rogoff 1987; Saegart and Winkel 1990), such as place-identity and place-attachment, and geographical research, above all cultural and behavioural, such as psychogeography and espace vécu, but also the theory of social representations and, with some caution (Pittaluga 2001), also cognitive mapping, offer a relevant contribution for activating projectual practice oriented towards the research of coherence and interaction between the spatial images of local societies and spatial images of technical knowledge. A superficial reading of these contributions, and a certain type of use, might lead to results that replicate those of the deterritorialisation and globalisation processes – from which we departed to highlight some of the problems connected with the project for city and territory in contemporary reality – at the moment in which we seek to obtain a single collective representation (of a place, a territory, a city or a district, etc.) in contexts where great cultural, ethnic and social diversity is present (Sandercock 1998). The danger is of obtaining representations of space which, though descending from non-expert knowledge, may prove homologated and homologating, monotonous, impoverished of that perceptive, symbolic, useful richness that diversity and biodiversity produce.14 But we should not just consider spatial contexts in which a stable and fixed type of diversity exists, for we no longer live forever in one place. We may simultaneously inhabit, with variable times and rhythms, the many places in which we pass parts of our life, of the year, the week, the day. In any case to inhabit means to establish a deep relationship with places, that is repetitive, even if with variable

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rhythms, emotive, since it is empathic and non-rational, and caring, since our actions are motivated also by affection and not just utility (Besio 2005). To inhabit also means to belong to a common citizenship that is not necessarily tied to a single place: the moment draws ever nearer when individual citizenship will no longer be dependent on exclusive belonging to a single urban context or state. Forms of active citizenship are more and more evident, detached from the actual territorial context concerned (Friedmann 2002). Within a social reality which is rapidly moving towards a situation in which the rights of citizenship of individuals will no longer concern a single state, it will be increasingly important to promote processes of insurgent citizenship by active participation in temporary, non-territorial political communities, inspired by a principle of solidarity in realising a common commitment: the expansion of the spaces of democracy and hence coherent design for space (Rasmunssen 2002). The construction of identity and citizenship in modern organisations, of new relational ties able to create alternative social forms which take care of city and territory, not necessarily bound to physical proximity and traditional residence and citizenship, requires the combination of collective interests so that the new social forms have the capacity to act and react on the grounds of changes, of economic, technological and political externalities (Rasmunssen 2002). This perspective invites us also to ask ourselves what the new social demand for urbanity might be in the future and how the consequent supply should be built up in order to construct urban places that take into account the proactive nature of the human relationship with the environment surrounding it, above all with respect to the urban populations arising with particular demands and characteristics – ‘technology, talent and tolerance’ – connected with the world of creativity and innovation,15 and to the emerging forms of citizenship (Borja 2000). The spreading of these forms of citizenship, of informal practices of organisation and management of urban space, together with institutional programmes and projects, invites us to reflect, on the one hand, on the modalities of construction of new knowledge to integrate expert knowledge and common sense knowledge in projects for inhabiting and, on the other, on the difficulties of dealing with the city, of understanding and interpreting it, even defining it. In this case different points of view need to be found to look at the city with a new spirit.16 Forms of representation will therefore change, too.17 A projectual style corresponds to the shift in observation point that is an alternative to those belonging to instrumental rationality which still dominate practice (Huxley 2000): listening, the word, respect (Dryzek 1990) for all those who are different and for the diverse forms of knowledge produced, become capability and values, playing a fundamental role in practice oriented towards a continuous dialogue between technical knowledge and common knowledge and seeking coherence between the respective images of space organisation. Thus ‘insurgent spaces’ emerge in which practices and behaviours are realised that interfere with the consolidated ones of urban reality, and are the first elements for constructing spaces, places, territories favourable for the coexistence and co-


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evolution of differences, images and use of space that correspond to them (Amin and Thrift 2001). In these contexts projectual commitment is transformed into willingness, capacity for drawing up studies and projects, technical support as an important instrument of empowerment and the construction of urban and territorial spaces which are more inclusive (Amin et al. 2000) and more respectful of differences; in facing different forms of rationality, knowledge and value systems, activity is oriented towards the exploration of conditions promoting cooperative forms of action between subjects bearing various forms of otherness, to construct scenarios transforming the life space that are as adequate as possible for the demands, expectations and desires that everyone should be allowed to express.

Notes 1. Cf. among also “Plural City” Plurimondi, N. 5, 2001. 2. Also in the “hyper-places where there is an unfolding of tension at the simultaneous and conflictive representation of too many identities” – cf. Desideri (1990, 1997) – or in the heterotope as a real place in which the glocal is situated, cf. Bonomi (1996a, b). 3. “The crisis of the city also seems to be a crisis of imagining the city” (Amendola 1997). 4. Identity can be a blind alley when “it becomes the fundamental, determining, obsessive need. It is probable that this occurs in contexts or moments of “destruction”, when more or less silent “pacts” are broken, when more or less shared forms of humanity disintegrate, when different and alternative styles are no longer credible and mutually acceptable” (Remotti 1996). 5. “The global society and world-scale economy which is its other characterising face, depotentiate the social past. The relationship is lost between the past evolution of being together and the formation of social models, of societies, due to the changes, the long drifts of history, characterised by “local” specificities, which took shape in the identities of peoples and nations in territorialisation processes. Depotentiation of the social past places deterritorialisation as the distinctive trait of our times, with its accompaniment of bewilderment and uprootedness of the subject. To lose your own shadow, the capacity to project yourself, is a risk that subjects, and also social bodies, run in periods of accelerated, tumultuous transition. The desire for lightness takes hold of the being at moments when he is called to discontinuity, missing out epochs, habits, rootedness. Nowadays the jump concerns the passage from local to global, socially, and discontinuity, economically, lies in the transition from producing to “producing to compete on a world-scale”. What is lost is the space where the subject and social bodies projected their shadow, projected themselves: the place” (Bonomi 1996a). 6. “From the relations of projectual and conflictive adaptation that contexts enable and at the same time bind, learning development possibilities move ahead and involve knowledge practices in a continuous, irremovable relationship with the care of what is possible and, therefore, power” (Weber 1997, Cf. also Borri 2002). 7. The following works on this theme are interesting: Lardon et al. (2001) and Lardon and Debarbieux (2003). 8. Morin observes that culture, a characteristic of human society, is organised/ organises through the cognitive vehicle represented by language, departing from the collective cognitive capital of acquired knowledge, learnt know-how, life experienced, past memories and mythical beliefs of a society. Thus, “collective representations”, “collective conscience” and “collective imagination” are manifest (Morin 1991). 9. “The subdivision of a city into zones with distinct psychic atmospheres” is clear and “the character certain places have to charm or disgust” (Debord 1981a).

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10. The following is a useful review of the concept of espace vécu and daily life: André (1989); Bourdieu (1980); Buttimer (1979); Buttimer and Seamond (1980); Buttimer and Racine (1982); de Certeau (1984); Di Méo (1996, 1998a, b); Frémont (1974, 1976, 1982); Lefebvre (1972); Holloway and Hubbard (2001); Sansot (1986) and Tuan (1977). 11. On the forms of time, Berque’s study is interesting in terms of monumentality via a comparison between the thermal baths of Cluny in Paris and the Temple of Ise in Tokyo. The thermal baths, though now in ruins, are authentic and in this lies their value of past memory; the material is the original in a linear time-span. Whereas the Temple of Ise is reconstructed every 20 years, maintaining its form unchanged, past memory is represented by the rite (form in codified time) that is perpetuated in cycles (Berque 1993, 1994). 12. Theories formulated by some environmental psychology trends, deriving more from social psychology than psychology of perception-cognition. Usually defined as the discipline that studies interactions and reactions between individuals and their environment, it conceives space and place as elements able to activate three types of mental process in an individual: the cognitive representations associated with these, the affective reactions it provokes, the behaviours it induces or hinders. On the evolution of environmental psychology over the last 20 years, cf. Baroni (1998); Bechtel and Churchman (2002); Bonnes and Secchiaroli (1992); Gifford (1987); Kitchin et al. (1997); Proshansky (1987) and Stokols and Altman (1987). 13. On this matter Damisch observes that the question of visibility of the city, or – as is said nowadays – of its “legibility”, if not its “figurability”, began to be posed only when the image of the city itself was jeopardised not just by the increasingly evident divorce between form and functions which were considered to belong to it, but also by the dissolution of traditional community links in the heart of the mass (Damisch 2001). 14. As is known, biodiversity is “responsible” for the possibilities of evolution of any living system. Without it the system would cease to exist as time passes. 15. In this sense the city favours the formation of environments for creativity: the new “creative class” produces urban quality and some cities that are more vital and favourable than others attract designers and innovators. Cf. Florida (2002, 2003, 2005) and Florida and Tingali (2004). 16. On the possibility of imagining the city in a different way, cf. Amin and Thrift (2001). 17. The latest theories on cognition, the crisis of the scientific method, indeed the difficulty in interpreting and decoding current urban transformations, have had the consequence of triggering a vast debate on the forms of representation, a phenomenon that Gregory (1994) has nicknamed “cartographic anxiety”, which has led on the one hand to a total rejection of survey methods and conventional representation methods and on the other to their subversion. Cf. Harley (1992), Huggan (1989), Monmonier (1995), Pinder (1996) and Wood (1993).

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Critical Design – The Implementation of ‘Designerly’ Thinking to Explore the Futurity of Our Physical Environment Nel Janssens

The following text elaborates on the importance of ‘Critical Design’, a particular implementation of designerly thinking to study problem-setting for the worldwide urbanisation process and the effects this has on our physical environment. The introduction gives a ‘State of the Territory’ which summarises some facts that are well-known nowadays and problematic issues of the urbanisation process. This chapter concludes with some questions that are considered especially relevant to investigation by means of (critical) design. The second sectionbriefly presents two design projects that show the strongly imaginative approach so typical of the so-called conceptual design practice. This focus on imagination and thinking beyond daily reality and common practices is often related to Utopian thinking. The nexttwo sections show that this unconventional or non-conformist thinking is essential to developing a critical perspective on the issues at stake and as such is intrinsically part of ‘Critical Design’. The last sectiongives the specific characteristics of ‘Critical Design’ and argues that this way of designerly thinking should be more actively developed and used in research on the futurity of our physical environment.

1 Introduction State of the Territory Urbanisation nowadays is everywhere, driven by revolutionary technological development and huge population growth, gaining almost explosive speed, N. Janssens Department of Architecture, Sint-Lucas Brussels, Belgium and Chalmers School of Architecture, Göteborg, Sweden N. Janssens is an architect-urban planner, currently conducting doctoral research on the topic of ‘Critical Design in Urbanism’ at the Department of Architecture, Sint-Lucas Brussels, Belgium G. Maciocco (ed.), The Territorial Future of the City. Urban and Landscape Perspectives 3, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-77514-0 6 C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008

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escaping more and more from the designer’s control, landscaping the territory of the earth, in fact . . . defining the quality of our living environment itself. In 1800,only 2% of the world population was urbanised. In 1950, only 30% of the world population was urban. In 2000, 47% of the world population was urban. More than half of the world population will be living in urban areas by 2008. By 2030, it is expected that 60% of the world population will live in urban areas. Almost 180,000 people are added to the urban population each day (Habitat 2001, p. 1). The future of most of humanity now lies, for the first time in history, in urbanizing areas. The qualities of urban living in the twenty-first century will define the qualities of civilization itself (Harvey 2000, p. 40).

Worldwide the territory is being consumed by fast growing settlements of different kinds: city districts, outskirts, infrastructures, gated communities, paradise islands, slums, . . . an almost monstrous growth fed by seemingly uncontrollable urban consumption of energy, raw materials and space, causing equally uncontrollable sociological and ecological transformations of the life environment in every remote corner of the earth. Collection and analysis of data on these phenomena is now a never-ending activity, rigorous studies on the effects of the urbanisation process are abundant, ‘technically’ or ‘theoretically’ speaking there is even a solution to present for each of the many problems at hand. Yet. . . multi-levelled, multi-scaled and highly dynamic as it is, the issue of urbanisation of the territory seems a messy, confused, turbid, ill-structured problem and therefore in the end always manages to escape the many acts of technical problem-solving. It is not by technical problem solving that we convert problematic situations to well-formed problems; rather, it is through naming and framing that technical problem solving becomes possible (Schön 1986, p. 5).

So, perhaps we need to ‘reset’ the problem . . . We need to invest in training our intellectual skills to re-name and re-frame hard-to-grasp situations. Therefore, and if we agree that

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the worldwide process of urbanisation is one of the major challenges of the immediate future, we need a review of the common concepts, categories, paradigms, . . . in short, of the ‘language’1 of urban planning. Urban planning still struggles with a language that is deeply rooted in dualistic thinking: the urban/city versus nature/the landscape, urbanisation versus ecology, builtup versus open, urban = unhealthy and dangerous versus rural = healthy and safe, public versus private, . . . the relevance of maintaining these dichotomies is questioned however and in an attempt to overcome this oppositional thinking categories are merged: the urban landscape, urban ecology, sprawl, rurban, public–private partner ships. . .

The dichotomies of ‘humanity and nature’, ‘technology and nature’, ‘mind and matter’, ‘self and world’ are not real per se. They are the result of metadesign. These dichotomies result from the use of a dualistic, rationalistic, materialistic epistemology – modernity’s most common mode of perception and conception – the analytical and classificatory consciousness that separates subject and object, the observer and the observed, into dualistic categories. Most people are unaware of how profoundly their experience, values and aspirations, their entire worldview, are still affected by metadesign impulses that go back to Descartes and even Plato (Wahl 2006, p. 1).

The doubting of dichotomies fits into a more profound shift of consciousness, from dualistic thinking to more holistic thinking, but the merged terms still seem more descriptive than imaginative. We lack appropriate, critical and, above all, inspirational language to conceptualise the future territory How can we create the poetry of our urban future? How can we create imaginative conceptions and notions, powerful visions and concepts? How can we develop a mental frame that creates a view on an open space of? possibilities? How can we enforce the ability to name and frame problematic situations in such a way that a direction is set for action and technical problem-solving These questions press somewhat for more active involvement of conceptualisation and imagination, instead of, or besides, yet more analysis. These questions therefore appeal for enhanced designerly thinking.

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2 Imagine a Landscape The two design projects described below start from this imaginative point of view and originate from a designerly way of thinking. In that respect they are particularly relevant to illustrate the argument being developed in the course of this text. Another reason for choosing them is that the author collaborated, as a designer, on these projects. The project ‘The Unadapted City’ was born within a design practice that dedicates an important role and responsibility to the development of theoretical, conceptual and visionary organisational models of space, without denying the necessity of daily, pragmatic and problem-solving urban design. The starting point of T.O.P. office2 and its founder, Luc Deleu, is that a conceptual design practice, by means of its examples, design methods and strategies on the formal, spatial, structural and programmatic level, is able to produce a stimulating frame for daily practice. The M.U.D project (Fig. 1) was developed by FLC extended,3 designers in free association. Typical of FLC extended is the coming together of individual backgrounds, motivations and practices from different designers. This, almost naturally, made FLC projects evolve around crucial points where everything meets, no matter what scale or medium. FLC emphasises in each job, commission or project, the opportunity of conflicts acting as positive energy, introducing the imagination of future conflicts over which space can be negotiated. THE UNADAPTED CITY – the development of spatial models with a special focus on public space/public (infra)structure A series of ‘Unité d’habitation’-like buildings, one placed after the other in a kind of rhythmic arrangement. They are all laced together by a multideck bridge. A linear structure, a linear city that stretches itself out over the landscape. The ground is only touched by the pilotis that support the buildings. At first glance this project may be (wrongly) interpreted as a kind of

Fig. 1 M.U.D – artist impression – photo FLC extended (2005)

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neo-modernistic design exercise. This project states that the housing should be left to the inhabitants to develop and that urban planning should instead be primarily concerned with the design of the ‘interstitial tissue’, the so-called ‘public space’ and ‘infrastructure’, in order to generate a spatially and socially interesting living environment. Therefore the design of the basic structural form of ‘The Unadapted City’ sought to bring the urban amenities, infrastructure and living into interaction with each other so that a new form of public space was generated – a form of public space that was dense enough to create an intense and vibrant public sphere. This resulted in a basic concept for an urban-architectonic structure that was developed into a pragmatically rather indeterminate but formally quite strong architecture. The structure spatially consists of three main components: first there is a pedestal. This pedestal contains a car tunnel that borders on and gives a view over several peripheral, car-orientated, urban facilities. The pedestal is a ‘car-city’. Above the pedestal a tram is floating attached to a monorail underneath the multi-level bridge. The bridge is packed with urban amenities that are situated next to bicycle and walking tracks. The bridge functions as a meeting place for the district and offers a wide panorama of the landscape. On the promenade decks there are sports facilities, little parks and kiosks. Along the way, the promenade is sometimes inside, then again outdoors, covered or completely in the open air. This multi-level bridge (Fig. 4) is a three-dimensional, spatial promenade axis that floats high above ground level. A public transport system and other infrastructures are attached to it. The bridge connects and penetrates the apartment blocks and other very diverse buildings that are ‘plugged-in’ along the way. This (mega)structure becomes more and more refined so that free and organic filling-in becomes possible and evident. Thereby the following programmatic principles are employed: the ground level is left as much as possible as it is. Housing accommodation is paired with general urban comfort and the utmost care is given to a calculated but unadapted mixture of urban amenities. Car traffic is underground and public transport is above ground. Public transport is the main infrastructure support, the backbone of this new city and is as such visualised and symbolised, high in the sky. The designing principle used investigates how, starting from a calculation of the amenities needed, an ensemble of spaces that is as varied as possible can be offered. The design methodology that was developed consists mainly of separating function and form. The functions are only used to design a diversity of spaces. These spaces can be used freely by all urban actors, great and small. To achieve this, indispensable manipulation takes place when going from calculations through functions and programme to spatial design: the dissociation of function and form. The separation of mathematically defined programme and the resulting more or less articulated but functionally indeterminate space is fundamental.

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This principle underpins the separation between urban structure and filling-in, between architecture and use, between building and life, between order and chaos. What is designed is an ‘a-functional architecture’ that can be used. This is the basic concept and primordial design strategy throughout ‘The Unadapted City’.* The above-mentioned only reflects a part of a much more elaborate and complex design project. ‘The Unadapted City’ investigates – as the name says – the city, or rather, the organisation of urban life (living). It is at the same time a design and research project that builds up knowledge and develops a vision of urbanisation. Furthermore this design project frames within the overarching concept of ‘Orbanism’4 , ideas developed by Luc Deleu

Fig. 2 D.O.S. XXI: VIPCITY #7 revisited – photo T.O.P.office/Luc Deleu (2002)

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and T.O.P. office, which basically investigate the preconditions and adequate models for an urbanisation process (Fig. 2) that is socially and ecologically fair. * This description of ‘The Unadapted City’ is based on parts (pp. 21–37) of Deleu’s text ‘Urbi et Orbi (D.O.S. XXI)’ in Deleu, L (2002), Urbi et Orbi, Ludion, GentAmsterdam

M . U. D – the intentional rupture of the Belgian coast to induce the age of Multi-User Dimension Sixty-seven kilometer of Belgian coastline presented in a manipulated satellite image, the prefiguration of a New Age, M.U.D (Fig. 1). M.U.D standing both for mud (a hybrid state between land and water and air), for multi-user domains (a collection of desiring machines, aggregates of subjective desire, architectures of articulated longing) and for multi-user dimensions (the ability to respond to simultaneous and even controversy needs, there are no laws, only agreements: a test bed for futurity). M.U.D reflects upon the spatial and social entity of the Belgian coast with the sea as main actor. M.U.D is the era of the hybrid. Lines that were fixed boundaries between land, water and air, between use and development, from now on will have to be negotiated with a probability of 2 times a day (low and high tide) to 1 time every 10,000 years (major, tsunami-like storms and floods). Coastal defence will evolve from an absolute, static boundary between land and sea to a more relative, dynamic zone of transition. A landscape is created that is called the ‘Future Conflict’ zone and is designed as a controlled flooding area – a kind of artificial flood – wherein a minimum scenario (damage control and risk management), as well as a maximum scenario (hyper defence), can be applied. This means that locally, depending on the opportunities and the specific context, the dike will get new proportions – ‘the porous dike’ – and the land will be de-poldered. Re-definition of the dike equally redefines and specifies the development of the coastal settlements. Some carefully selected cities are turned into capsular entities, made to be guaranteed waterproof, like islands protected against the surrounding water/mud landscape. The previous land-dependent production is now replaced by a hypereconomic grid system on the sea (Fig. 3). This new kind of sea-exploitation becomes a new economic driving force and political instrument. The grid takes the shape of a flexible structure that rolls on the waves and evolves along with the dynamics of the sea. As a new technological grid of references and coordinates, this structure has the capacity to scan and probe, and only here and there crystallises into a physical installation: an eco-

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Fig. 3 M.U.D – hyper economy de-poldering, mental grid – photo FLC extended

energetic floating field as an alternative for nuclear power stations, a drilling platform, a floating university, . . . M.U.D displays the deliberate rupture of the coastal membrane against the possibility of flooding, capsularity5 or hyper economy. M.U.D dissolves the coastal urban network into emergent swarms of changes surrounding the nodal points in the dynamics of current flows and future conflicts, vast flows of undifferentiated data, patterns of information. M.U.D is entirely process; infinitely more than the combined sum of its various selves; platforms sink beneath it, one after another, as M.U.D grows denser, more complex...its only reality the realm of ongoing serial creation.*

M.U.D is a project created on the occasion of the 2nd International Architecture Biennial in Rotterdam (2005). The Biennial, called ‘The Flood’6 , was dedicated to ‘water’ and more specifically, rising sea levels. The Flemish Architecture Institute (VAi) chose two Belgian teams to take part in the exhibition. Their lines of approach were considered to be fundamentally different but, as mode of research, complementary. One team, Gaufre – Maritime Institute of the University of Ghent, did scientific research on different aspects of the Belgian sea and presented an ‘Atlas of the sea’. The other team, FLC extended (designers in free association),

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developed a speculative and more radical view on the issue and simulated a spatial scenario, called M.U.D, for the coastal landscape between Calais and the Schelde estuary. * This description of the M.U.D project is based on different (unpublished) text material that was produced by FLC extended during the design process.

The two design projects pictured above are not so much concerned with or based upon ‘engineering’, but focus rather on ‘imagineering’.7 They explicitly do not present designs that are intended to be implemented as masterplans for developing a site or region. Instead they scrutinously look for another – formal and conceptual – vocabularium for further thought about the futurity of our physical environment. These designs generate ‘models’ that concern the organisation, the arrangement of space. They also explore and make explicit certain notions and opinions on principles that (should) underpin the development of the physical environment. In that respect they contribute to the development of knowledge and vision involving the organisation and design of space. The models developed here do not represent a search for variations, in the sense of perfection of existing or common accepted forms of urbanisation. Instead, they question the conventional approaches by developing alternative forms of urbanisation/landscaping. A search for alternatives involves criticism of, or dissatisfaction with, the existing and commonly accepted way of looking at the situation. This dissatisfaction originates from the feeling that some ways of designing a solution are no longer satisfactory and the problem should therefore be reassessed and reconstructed. Thecore of designprojects like these is the redefining/redesigning of the (problematic) situation so that the answer goes far beyond the problem in the way it was presented/perceived. It is an exercise in reframing thinking, in ‘naming and framing’8 instead of technical problem-solving. Therefore the emphasis is put on imagination since this is considered a central pillar and driving force of ‘naming and framing’. Although ‘The Unadapted City’ and M.U.D are designs that could technically be realisable and at an implementation level in a way only radicalise and make explicit some possibilities that already exist, these designs are not intended to be ‘built’. Their main purpose is to further thinking and trigger new approaches to certain issues, and by doing so, to stimulate ‘anticipatory’ criticism. ‘The Unadapted City’ and M.U.D reach the public mainly through exhibitions (Figs. 4 and 5) and publications, often in an artistic environment. The main reaction then of the public to design projects like ‘The Unadapted City’ and M.U.D is that they are ‘Utopian’ projects. This is often meant as a kind of mild critique, meaning: ‘Very nice, but not realisable and thus not to be taken seriously. We however have some urgent problems to deal with, so now stop dreaming and let’s get back to reality.’

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Fig. 4 VIP City, The seamile, maquette in the show ‘TALKING CITIES 26.08 – 3.12.2006’, Zeche Zollverein, Essen, Germany – photo T.O.P. office/Luc Deleu

Fig. 5 Image of Mare Meum carpet in the university library of Gent (06.12.2006 – 13.01.06) – photo Roeland Dudal 2006

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We should indeed invest in a reality check, or rather in developing the capacity to question this so-called ‘reality’ because there are many different (conflicting) realities. Investigatinghow to construct and perceive this reality is a critical aspect of ‘naming and framing’ or, let us say, ‘redesigning’ the problem. If we, as designers, have to deal with reality, we have to check the existing/perceived reality against the possible/desired reality. It is at this moment that the ‘Utopia’ comes into play. Utopian thinking is often reproached that it only results in unrealistic and static, ‘closed’ projects. The argument made in this chapter is that Utopian thinking offers in contrast a strong intellectual means to develop dynamic, ‘open’ frames against which reality can be checked, perceived differently and consequently ‘reconstructed’.

3 Revisiting Reality: The Utopian Moment Revisiting reality means to challenge our understanding of reality, to question the principle of ‘ruling reality’, the ‘there’s-no-alternative-syndrome’ that threatens to dominate all our personal and social relations. In this revisit of reality appears the Utopian moment. Since Utopian thinking is in fact a provocation for the ruling reality principle, for the dominant ideology. Utopian thinking is critical in terms of reality as it is commonly presented/ perceived. This does not mean that it is unrealistic or irrational thinking. Utopian thinking uses a different understanding of reality, a Utopian reality instead of an ideological reality (the reality that is presented by the currently dominant reality), and a different rationality, namely an encompassing rationality (Van Houten 1974). Using this different rationality and understanding of reality, Utopian thinking can exceed the closed, ideological reality and free imagination beyond the limiting conditions of the present. Utopian thinking must not be interpreted as ‘reflections estranged from reality’. Utopian thinking is actually reality-transforming thinking. Utopian thinking tries to reveal the hidden possibilities that are latent in reality in order to make them visible, imaginable and most of all debatable. Utopian thinking gives priority to what is desired without losing sight of what is possible. It is a way of thinking that is focused on structural changes and therefore is most suitable for the development of alternatives. The Utopian consciousness in this sense is a critical consciousness: a consciousness that, departing from uneasiness with the existing, accepted reality, is focussed on real change. But focus on change means that one has to have a global image of directions for change. It is not enough to deny or reject what exists. An alternative image of a desired, future society has to be developed. That alternative image is produced in ‘Utopia’. ‘Utopia’ also refers strongly to what Dahlbom, in his description of ‘Artificial Science’, calls ‘the space of possibilities’. Dahlbom states that the artificial sciences will make explicit the important role played by fiction in our search for knowledge.

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According to him much design fiction is produced in order to examine what is possible. Design, then, will introduce fiction as a major product of science (Dahlbom et al. 2002). ‘Utopia’ operates in this wider space of possibilities and by doing so, does not seem to fit daily reality. In fact, it is precisely this critical, anticipatory ‘thinking beyond’ that gives reality the fuel it needs by highlighting the latent aspects of that same reality. In our society, today, ‘Utopia’ is not a particularly favourite slogan. All sorts of vague and less vague but mostly negative connotations are attached to it. Things that are given the ‘Utopian’ label are unfeasible, unrealistic and so they do not need to be taken into account. Nevertheless, there are signs that the climate towards Utopian thinking is changing. The current issues that affect our physical environment demand solutions that do not seem to be possible in the existing situation or reality. In other words, there is a need for reality to be transformed. The problems of society are so deep that reconsideration of the entire society seems more necessary than ever. That is why we cannot speak of a management problem (as is the current tone) but indeed of a ‘civilisation problem’. The conviction grows that many issues (for example water management due to climate change) cannot be solved any more by ‘curing symptoms’. The spatio-temporal scale, interdependency and the ‘enormousness’ of the problems at stake are such that curing symptoms becomes just as never-ending as the analysis and collecting of data on the problems is. This means that we have, in a way, to change our view (perspective) of reality and change our way of ‘mapping reality’. Also intrinsically connected with ‘Utopia’ is – no doubt – social criticism. This implies that an ethical stance is linked with the critique and the formulated alternative. In that sense, it offers more than what Harvey calls an ‘optimism of the intellect’ (Harvey 2000). As ‘Possibility’ the Utopian alternative places before us a responsibility: from this moment on an alternative becomes imaginable, a (real) option comes into being. . . Or as Harvey states: ‘To repeat Unger’s formulation, “if society is imagined and made then it can be re-imagined and re-made”. And it is here that the case for a non-miraculous dialectical Utopianism becomes compelling, not as a total solution but as a moment in which we gather our intellectual, critical and imaginative powers together to give possibility a much grander press than currently exists’ (Harvey 2000, p. 81). Both social criticism and imagining (spatial) alternatives reach their optimised form in ‘Utopia’ as the representation of an ideal society or ideal settlement, in short, of ‘urbanism’. Utopian thinking has intrinsic qualities that show some essential overlapping with critical theory but there is also a strong design aspect in Utopian thinking, where spatial models are developed as ideal settlements. ‘Utopia’ has, however, always been somewhat denied, somewhat intriguing within the design disciplines. This ever-fascinating way of conceptualising a better living place can play an inspiring role in the currently evolving debates on the

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development of new conceptual frameworks and models for inhabiting our physical environment. Utopian thinking and designing, ranging from the literary work of Thomas More to spatial models like, for example, Le Corbusier’s ‘Ville Radieuse’, deliver strong social and spatial concepts that seem to surpass what is thought possible. This high quality level of conceptualising and imagining is of great importance for architecture and urbanism. If we agree that a fundamental and thorough rethinking and re-conceptualisation of urbanism, as one of the main conditions of living in a globalising world in the near future, is necessary, then a certain Utopian mentality is required, for two reasons: – firstly, because it concerns fundamental rethinking which means that it goes further than reviewing and adapting what is already existing or common; – secondly, utopias, seen through history, often have the urban or cities as a central metaphor. This strong link with the city, with urban thinking, makes ‘Utopia’ especially relevant from the perspective of architecture and urbanism as a very critical and authentic form of urban planning. Therefore we should consider it fundamental to the discipline of urbanism. Essentially Utopian thinking is about critical and anticipatory thinking (for example by means of spatial models). It is not about ‘Utopia’ in the sense of the unrealistic and unfeasible; on the contrary, Utopian thinking gives a necessarily fresh input to reality. Therefore Utopian thinking should be considered a vehicle of knowledge-building instead of purely a matter of artistic mythicising. Utopian thinking is a particular mentality that is able to free imagination so as to make possible the formulation of alternatives. This condition enables critical designers to speculate on a different future reality and conceptualise prospective alternatives, as shown, for example, in the ‘The Unadapted City’ and M.U.D design projects. These designs are in fact a means to develop critical reflections. They are not intended to become reality themselves but their role is to stimulate patterns for renewal and change. The models are not made to solve problems (as if they were a blueprint for the future) but to enable the redefining/redesigning of the problem because at that point new possibilities appear. Their role is to make the other, Utopian reality and the related possibilities and prerogatives explicit.

4 The Renewed Intentionality of Design: Developing the Critical Perspective Utopian consciousness is in essence a critical consciousness, here oriented towards urbanisation and civilisation. In that respect this way of thinking seems particularly relevant when investigating the worldwide urbanisation process.

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The challenges our physical environment faces cannot be handled by mere problem-solving or ‘curing symptoms’. As said earlier the process of urbanisation and all the effects it has on our living environment cannot be dealt with as a management problem but should be considered as a cultural challenge and a ‘civilisation problem’. This implies that the emphasis should be put on the redefinition/redesign of problems appealing to creativity rather than pure rationality or (scientific) analysis, which is more oriented towards technical problem-solving. Departing from this standpoint the role of design and designers should be reassessed. The profound, multi-level and rapid changes that occur in our globalised world should urge urban planners and designers to look for renewed visions and more adequate models for sustainable, humane development of the physical environment. Moreover, the specific role and capacity of designerly thinking to enhance transformation should be critically assessed. Design or designerly thinking has the capacity to imagine and express what does not (yet) exist but could (should) be. In that respect it is oriented towards change and has a transformative power. The way design is able to influence our world and our view of the world is not to be underestimated. Since design is not only or merely the expression of an idea but also the generator of organising ideas, designerly thinking engaged in research can develop a critical perspective on specific issues. The two projects ‘The Unadapted City’ and M.U.D are both concerned with certain issues on the spatial level but also on the social, economic and ecological level. They develop a critical perspective on these issues through designing. For instance in ‘The Unadapted City’ two major themes are critically assessed. Firstly the design(ers) state(s) that every act in space is not simply situated somewhere on earth but that the area that is organised or designed is part of a greater all-embracing system. A good design, from that point of view does not, therefore, only search for coherence and dialogue with the local context but also for coherence and dialogue with the whole of the globe. In other words, the local urbanisation process has to relate itself to the global urbanisation process. This is one of the basis premises of ‘Orbanism’, an ethical-theoretical context of thinking and designing developed by T.O.P. office which underpins all their design work. We can find an exercise in connecting the local to the global scale in ‘VIP City’ (Fig. 2), a part of ‘The Unadapted City’. At a certain point in the design process the question arose how to define the size of a suburban lot? It could be done on the basis of the desired building typology, the intended public/buyers, the size of the allotment, the desired profit from sales, the ideal form . . .? In ‘The Unadapted City’ the idea arose that, from an orbanist approach, the size of a lot, initially, simply had to be determined by the amount of space available on earth for each inhabitant. ‘So the maximum size of a lot was fixed by the still globally available inhabitable space per human being or, in other words, it was fixed in an orbanist way. At first the total land surface, 149.664.000 km2 , was divided by 6.093.888.813, the population on earth as found on the world-wide-web at that time. This gives the available land surface per capita of 2,456 ha.’ (Deleu 2002, pp. 72–73). Apart from the undoubtedly multiple methodological objections and the relevance (depending on the specifics of the local context) of other criteria, this starting point is conceptually quite clear in every way. The strength of the starting point is to be found in the way the size, in itself meaningless, of the globe, the abstract level of the whole, by means of

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very rudimentary reasoning based on the principle of solidarity, suddenly appears very concretely as the size of the individual lot. Private living space in this way becomes embedded and integrated in universal living space and shows a feeling for scale and measurement, a feeling of connection with the whole. The idea is interesting for relating the concrete local situation to the more abstract, global and indicates that appropriate importance has to be devoted to the link between local urbanisation and global urbanisation.

Secondly, ‘The Unadapted City’ develops spatial models that have a special focus on ‘public space’, because the key to a socially fair and more human urbanisation process lies in the opinion of the public character of space. Therefore, thinking of public space as bringing about a more social, human urbanisation process is a central concern in this project. So, important questions are: How to generate concepts for more socially shaped public spaces? How to cope with the pressure that private companies exert more and more on public space? How to create differentiated, multiple public space? ‘The Unadapted City’ searches for new distinctions between diverse forms of public space and new ways of creating public places in the city by means of research by design. A design methodology is developed that, starting from figures (calculations of the necessary infrastructures, facilities and living space in a city), tries to create an ensemble of spaces as diversified as possible. The urban amenities, infrastructures, all ‘private’ spaces are spatially and formally arranged and connected to each other so that they give the public space maximal surplus value. We could say that in the most ideal case and with more socially fair urbanism in view, the research tends to place all ‘capital’ at stake in the most optimal way to realise the one thing that is not on the agenda of the private investors, namely public space as a truly open and unrestricted space. ‘The Unadapted City’ tries to generate an urbanism that results in spatial and social overlapping and interweaving. To achieve this, a lot of attention is being paid to the arrangement, distribution, concentration, combination and clustering of urban amenities. The design process that led to the conception of the FLC extended M.U.D project departed from the detection (or selection) of three phenomena that are evolving in contemporary society and that influence developments along the (Belgian) coastal area. These three phenomena were named ‘Flood’, ‘Capsular Society’ and ‘Hypereconomy’. They formed three different angles from which to look from the existing, omni-present reality to a possible, latent, present reality. ‘Flooding’ and the problem of the rising sea-level as a phenomenon was not interpreted as an issue of danger of flooding but was approached rather as the interaction between land and water and the redefinition of the border area between both. So this ‘flood problem’ was redefined as a matter of installing a ‘Future Conflict’ zone wherein the place and status of the borderline (ranging from hyper-defence to disaster management) between land and sea should be (continuously) re-negotiated. ‘Capsular Society’ refers to the phenomena in the network society where non-places are dominant and capsules are developed in an attempt to make ‘real’ places. These capsules simulate a dream, a hyper-reality where experiences are highly interiorised and efficiently organised. Capsules stand for protection, defence and control. They are a spatial translation

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of exclusivity. In the ‘Future Conflict’ zone some cities develop as such worlds within worlds, capsules, tourist resorts as holiday dreams with ‘a sea view’, where one can stay for a while, safe, in an isolated, mono-functional, comfortable zone. ‘Hyper-economy’ stands for a fast-shifting, changing economy, such as, for example, currently the economy of experiences (as a further evolution of the economy based on resources), where the actual products are only of marginal importance. What is offered for consumption is the idea, the design, the experience. The product seems ever less tangible, ever less material, ever less tied to the land, ever more volatile. In hyper-economy the economic focus shifts from agricultural products to data-related products. Since it is no longer tied to the land, it can as well be placed on sea (unpublished text FLC extended 2005).

The ‘designerly’ inquiry into these phenomena resulted in a proposal for a deliberate rupture of the coastal membrane against the possibility of flooding, capsularity or hyper-economy and the inducement of a New Age, M.U.D. M.U.D displays an interactive coast with its inner loops, catastrophes and peculiarities. A landscape is created where every place (spot) oscillates between damage control, risk management and hyper-defence and where every point in space can be tuned or upgraded economically, culturally and socially. Based on these characteristics the designers defined M.U.D as the era of the hybrid. M.U.D became, however, more than a name for a project, it developed – through design – into a frame that encompasses different phenomena and from where other proposals can be developed. Through this design theoretical and conceptual stakes as well as ethical and methodological stakes are developed. The two design projects ‘The Unadapted City’ and M.U.D look upon problematic situations from a critical perspective and use ‘unconventional’ research methods. In doing so the design liberates imagination and enables the redefining/redesigning of the problem. This results in conceptual frames like M.U.D and ‘Orbanism’ that go beyond the particular, concrete design project and in that sense can be considered research output. The production of ‘conceptions’, ‘notions’ and ‘names & frames’ is the typical result of so-called ‘research by design’. Research by design is nowadays increasingly acknowledged as an important mode of research, especially in design disciplines like architecture and urban design. In architecture and urbanism ‘research by design’ has become a commonly used and misused term. In these disciplines, especially in urbanism, ‘research by design’ is predominantly presented as an almost physical instrument to explore a given situation and develop scenarios for solving the problems at hand. Particularly in participation processes, such as occur in urban planning or regional (landscape) projects, this understanding and use of ‘research by design’ has become hype (‘workshops by design’, ‘communication by design’, ‘negotiation by design’, ‘action by design’, . . .). It goes without saying that design has an important role in participation and communication processes. But this is certainly not the only role design has to play and perhaps not even the most essential. All the more if, as stated earlier, we have to act and reflect beyond mere problem-solving regarding the present-day phenomena of worldwide urbanisation.

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Design nowadays is too often reduced to its communicative, decision-facilitating, scenario-developing and program-tuning capacities. This focus on design as an instrument rather than a knowledge-producer neutralises design power. Design is mostly used ‘at the service of’ external agendas (clients) and does not seem to develop an agenda – and consequently, ethics – of its own. To quote Tony Fry: ‘[. . .], design is once more positioned as a handmaiden of uncritical instrumentalism (design for . . .). The adoption of this service relationship (be it broadly or narrowly defined), [. . .], leaves design in a condition of dependence upon the ethics of that which it serves. Design leadership cannot occur without a rupture from this sensibility of subordination’ (Fry 2005, p. 1). Design should not be reduced to the polishing of existing situations or to an uncritical instrument for problem-solving. Developing scenarios, for example, often becomes a kind of multiple choice problem-solving, a range of solutions for one problem or a collection of solutions for a collection of problems. The more important and somewhat underestimated intrinsic capacity of designerly thinking is, however, to develop projections9 as a kind of prospective alternative10 (restructured or let us say ‘redesigned’ problem). That is to say, to consider and make explicit possibilities beyond what is known, possibilities that challenge the ruling principles of daily practice. It is about the reading and design of the implicit, of possibilities that are latently present but have not yet come to the foreground of reality. This way of designerly thinking is typical of the more ‘conceptual’ design practice and can be found, for example – as illustrated earlier – most significantly in Utopian thinking. This capacity of design to redefine/redesign problems (instead of solving them) by reading the implicit possibilities and consequently creating true alternative projections that in a way surpass the given, explicit situation, often remains barely used and underestimated. It is precisely this capacity that is needed if design wants to take up a role on a more critical level as the generator of renewed preconditions and more critical models for a sustainable and humane development of the physical environment. Therefore, in an attempt to define a type of so-called ‘research by design’, that puts a focus on the ability of design to develop criticism by formulating alternatives, I wish to introduce ‘Critical Design’ here, as a tentative term. ‘Critical Design’ aims to develop the ability to investigate possibilities beyond what is known, the ability to question and reveal other possibilities, based on an enhanced, liberated imagination. By doing so it generates knowledge on latent reality, a reality that is implicitly present but not explicitly acknowledged. The term ‘Critical Design’11 in this context is chosen by assumed analogy and complementarity with the already existing term ‘Critical Theory’.

5 Critical Design In ‘Critical Design’ a premium is put on imagination as the capacity to think about what is absent or does not (yet) exist. ‘It is imagination, the capacity to see the world as it is not but as it could be, that makes it possible for us to change the world.

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Imagination gives us alternatives and makes us see the lack in the world as it is’ (Dahlbom et al. 2002, p. 31). This is precisely what ‘Utopia’ envisions. The ‘critical’ aspect, as we said earlier, opens up reality and frees imagination. The ‘design’ aspect introduces ‘imagineering’ – i.e. the production of visions, images and representations of the city and its future. So, ‘Critical Design’ is about the development of an enhanced ability to imagine, rather than to analyse or study ‘the space of possibilities’. ‘Research by Critical Design’ is meant to explore ‘the space of possibilities’ in the context of generating knowledge on latent, and thus possible future, reality. We could say that ‘Critical Design’ unmasks the alleged ‘impossibilities’ when investigating ‘the space of possibilities’ and formulating a possible alternative. The critical perspective enables imagination to develop unconventional standpoints and can be an antidote to what Harvey describes as ‘[. . .] the sclerosis that often reigns in planners’ heads’, and that hinders to ‘[. . .] effectively check the possibilities of evolving a different urbanisation process. The dead weight of conventional spatio-temporal thinking and actual spatio-temporal forms weighs like a practical nightmare on the thoughts and material possibilities of the living.’ (Harvey 2000, p. 30). In order to prevent this sclerosis and formulate prospective alternatives, ‘Critical Design’ stands for an attitude, a particular mentality, a way of reflecting and designing that needs to be consciously trained and cultivated. ‘Critical Design’ is meant to be a specific form of critical designerly thinking and an intellectual tool for a specific form of research. Research (by Critical Design) is oriented towards the re-enforcement of the capacity to imagine and conceptualise, which is intrinsically different from the ability to analyse and synthesise. ‘Critical Design’ concerns the analysis of the imaginative – i.e. ‘the space of possibilities’, what does not yet exist – instead of the analysis of reality. This produces a specific kind of knowledge that is needed to develop the ability to conceptualise. The main purpose of research by ‘Critical Design’ is to redefine/redesign problems by using capacities that are of specific importance for architecture and urbanism; namely: conceptualisation, imagineering, speculation, projection, proposing, . . . connected with an ethical stance. ‘Critical Design’ is in fact a type of designerly thinking that can be characterised by the capacity of prefiguration. ‘Critical Design’ makes prospective alternatives subject to discussion and anticipative reflection. The aim is not to create a ‘futuristic’ reality but to prefigure a possible (future) reality by bringing to the foreground the latent aspects of reality that are hidden behind manifest reality as it is commonly perceived. The combination of anticipative and figurative concepts is particularly intrinsic to designerly thinking. Furthermore, designerly thinking specifically has the capacity to build up thoughts in a syncretic way. This particular ‘ensemble’ of cognitive functions generates knowledge otherwise unattainable. In-depth study of the ‘characteristics’ and ‘mechanisms’ of Utopian thinking might offer some clues for developing ‘Critical Design’ further. Maybe ‘Utopia’ works for design like the hypothesis does in science, or sublimation in art?

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Re-evaluating Utopian thinking means starting from that specific mentality that frees imagination in such a way that the formulation and representation (design) of alternatives becomes possible. The growing uncertainty that characterises our society is fed by the growing unpredictability of the future. Utopian thought nevertheless helps to form an image, a vision of the future. Growing Utopian consciousness is critical consciousness aimed at change: but change supposes the possibility of representation of that change and producing researchable questions so that mental shifts are achieved. There lies the great relevance of a Critical Design practice. In this perspective visionary spatial models should be taken seriously, in the sense that such a design practice does more than create an image to communicate a certain idea. Donald Schön states that ‘Through complementary acts of naming and framing, the practitioner selects things for attention and organizes them, guided by an appreciation of the situation that gives it coherence and sets a direction for action. So problem setting is an ontological process – in Nelson Goodman’s (1978) memorable word, a form of worldmaking’ (Schön 1986, p. 4). ‘Critical Design’ is a way of thinking that uses criticism, imagination and designerly thinking to formulate prospective alternatives. And these are qualities we should cherish and stimulate since a society like ours, that faces fundamental challenges, needs transformative, prospective thinking. In a broader research perspective, however, the development of ‘Research by Critical Design’ wishes to empower design as a genuine knowledge-producer, on the level of conceptualisation, and as an explorer of latent realities, on the level of imagination. Situated on this level ‘Critical Design’ can, from within the design disciplines like architecture and urbanism, contribute to the debates on the worldwide urbanisation process and the studies on the futurity of our physical environment. As critical designers we can take up the plea of, amongst many others, Harvey, who says that If the rhetoric about handing on a decent living environment to future generations is to have even one iota of meaning, we owe it to subsequent generations to invest now in a collective and very public search for some way to understand the possibilities of achieving a just and ecologically sensitive urbanization process under contemporary conditions. That discussion cannot trust in dead dreams resurrected from the past. It has to construct its own language – its own poetry – with which to discuss possible futures in a rapidly urbanizing world of uneven geographical development. Only in that way can the possibilities for a civilising mode of urbanization be grasped (Harvey 2000, p. 52).

Notes 1. ‘Language’ in this context meaning: ‘the whole of signs and rules combined in meaningful elements used by mankind to articulate thoughts, to order the world and to communicate’, Van Dale Groot woordenboek van de NederlandseTaal (2005). 2. More information on T.O.P. office can be found on the website www.topoffice.to, in Deleu L (2001) La Ville Inadaptée/TOPoffice, Editions Ecocart, Centre d’Art Contemporain de Brétigny and in the publication mentioned in the bibliography.

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3. More information on FLC extended can be found on the website www.flcextended.be, in: Brunetta V, Patteeuw, V (eds) (2003) FLC Future Conflicts, young architects in Flanders. VAI/A16, Antwerp and in Goossens C (2007) M.U.D. Achtergrond 03, Architect/Ontwerper /Onderzoeker? Casus Mare Meum: een oefening op de zee, Vai, Antwerp. 4. For more information on ‘Orbanism’, see: Janssens N (2003) Orbanisme, naar een socioecologisch ‘fair’ urbanisatie project, graduate thesis, K.U.Leuven and www.topoffice.to. 5. Term borrowed from Lieven De Cauter in De Cauter L (2005) De Capsulaire Samenleving, Over de stad in het tijdperk van de angst.’ Reflect#3, NAI publishers, Rotterdam. 6. The ‘Flood’ was the theme of the 2nd International Rotterdam Architecture Biennial which took place in 2005. Curator of the Biennial was the Dutch landscape architect Adriaan Geuze. The Biennial wished to demonstrate how the design activity of architects, urban planners and landscape architects, coupled with the skills of hydraulic engineers, can be used to tackle the interventions that water exacts without it being a burden, but rather a unique opportunity to realize new landscapes, new cities and new buildings. One of the four major exhibitions of the Biennial was called ‘Mare Nostrum’. In this exhibition, guest curators and designers from various countries demonstrated the significance – and strengths – that the wholesale colonisation of coastal areas can have. The international orientation of the Biennial made it possible to present the task of creating new cities and landscapes that are geared to a future with water to designers, many of whom came from outside the Netherlands. M.U.D, the intentional rupture of the Belgian coast to induce the age of Multi User Dimension, the project of FLC, was located at this exhibition. www.biennalerotterdam.nl 7. Term borrowed from Moyersoen J, Segers J (eds) Urban Interventions and Generalized Empowerment, Booklet of the Generalized Empowerment Urban Forum, London, 18 June 2006, pp. 4–9. 8. Term borrowed from Donald Schön in Schön D (1986) Educating the Reflective Practitioner, Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco. 9. Projections here understood as the planning, designing, imagining, prefiguring of alternative possibilities or futures. 10. Alternatives here are not to be understood as different solutions for a problem, as is often meant with ‘scenarios’ but indeed as projections that do not intend to ‘solve’ a problem; on the contrary projections surpass a problem by acting from within a different reality. 11. ‘Critical Design’ is a term that already is established in art, product design and object design. The term was popularized by the designers Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby who uses designed artifacts as an embodied critique or commentary on consumer culture. Both the designed artifact (and subsequent use) and the process of designing such an artifact causes reflection on existing values, mores and practices in a culture. Although there are some similarities with what I intent to develop with the term ‘Critical Design’ in the context of urbanism, the accent and origin is different (relating to Utopian thinking and the analogy with Critical Theory).

References Dahlbom B, Beckman S, Nilson G (2002) Artifacts and Artificial Science, Authors and Almqvist & Wiksell International, Stockholm, pp. 9–49. Deleu L (2002) Urbi et Orbi, Ludion, Gent-Amsterdam. FLC extended (2003) The flc presentation, www.flcextended.be FLC extended (2005) MARE MEUM, www.flcextended.be Fry T (2005) Design, Development & Questions of Direction, Design Philosophy Papers Issue 4, www.desphilosophy.com (accessed February 2006). Harvey D (2000) Megacities Lecture 4, Twynstra Gudde Management Consultants, Amersfoort (retrieved from http://www.megacities.nl/lecture harvey report.htm, accessed 2002).

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Moyersoen J & Segers J (2006) Urban Interventions and Generalized Empowerment. Booklet of the Generalized Empowerment Urban Forum, 18 June 2006, London. Schön D (1986) Educating the Reflective Practitioner, Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco. United Nations Centre for Human Settlements, Istanbul+5 (2001) Habitat, Backgrounder, Urbanisation: facts and figures, http://ww2.unhabitat.org/istanbul+5/back11.doc (accessed March 2007). Van Houten D (1974) Toekomstplanning, planning als veranderingsstrategie in de welvaart, Boom Meppel. Wahl D (2006) A Cyborg’s Choice. Design Philosophy Papers, Issue 3, www.desphilosophy. com (accessed October 2006).


Imagining the Re-/Co-production of a Hybrid Territory: Testing Sustainable Concepts of Landscape Development in Roeselare-West Liesl Vanautgaerden, Bruno De Meulder and Kaat Boon

1 Introduction Spaces that are neither urban nor rural have become ordinary. The Flemish territory, and certainly the former countryside of the Flemish Diamond (Antwerp–Ghent– Brussels–Leuven), is emblematic of this hybrid spatial condition. Its spaces are characterised by multiple shapes in which agriculture, recreation, dispersed living and production, and commercial and working environments of all kinds coexist simultaneously. Given this diversity, the identification of the various functional zones no longer reflects the way the territory truly operates. The territory has been gradually yet fundamentally transformed by a range of users leaving functions which have in part fragmented, in part exploded. The various functions thus rarely concord with normative zoning principles, but rather overlap, interact or contradict one another. As Marot (2003) describes it, this dispersed or rather hybrid condition of ‘peri-urbanity’ or ‘sub-urbanity’ has become self-standing and therefore requires a development approach in its own right. At stake is a better way of handling conflicts and contradictions. A clearer view of the specific characteristics, qualities and possibilities that are hidden in hybrid space is a first step towards the development approach mentioned. New development perspectives are explored by anticipating the transformations that constantly take place on the level of everyday life. Viganò’s (2001) work on the Italian countryside, or the mapping of the southern part of the West-Flanders territory in De Meulder’s and Dehaene’s atlases (first issue 2001), contains attempts at using ongoing micro-transformations to generate structural changes in time. Both these endeavours exemplify the suggestions of Sieverts’ design perspectives on the ‘Zwischenstadt’ (Sieverts 2003). Sieverts argues the necessity of ‘a new perspective to understand and implement small-scale day-to-day tasks of planning as components of a long-term restructuring strategy’ and explicitly inserts L. Vanautgaerden KULeuven Department of Architecture, Urbanism and Planning Kasteelpark Arenberg 1 3001 Heverlee, Belgium [email protected] Images: Liesl Vanautgaerden, Els Vervloesem, NGI. G. Maciocco (ed.), The Territorial Future of the City. Urban and Landscape Perspectives 3, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-77514-0 7 C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008

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the time dimension in that perspective (Sieverts 2003, p. 82). Development within this perspective is more like an open-ended story of existing territories that gradually transform over time since the peri-urban space cannot be unequivocally defined or determined. For Sieverts, the guiding principle in this restructuring is the projection of an activating image: a spatial vision that can steer territorial dynamics by uncovering possibilities but at the same time allows for openings, adjustments or temporary solutions. The imagination of the development that is at stake therefore plays a crucial part. However, while conventional development plans are generally driven by a single major objective and take the form of a blueprint, this imagination is challenged by the need to plan for concurrent objectives. It needs to take into account the legitimate aggregating activities and claims which characterise hybrid territories, at the same time. In this chapter we argue that the role of design in this context is especially to be found in creating such an aggregated vision. We therefore attempt to contribute to a design-based approach to the development task mentioned.1 Urban and landscape designs have been up to the present rather poorly equipped for dealing with the limited degree of predictability inherent in hybrid territorial transformation. To increase this capacity, we bring into play the concept of landscape as a complex evolutionary system. This chapter intends to substantiate the concept, how it specifies our approach and the results, by describing the imagination of the development of the region west of the city of Roeselare (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1 The suburban hinterland west of the city of Roeselare. A reality of a completely domesticated territory, intensely used, fragmented and marked by private ownership

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2 A Landscape System Called Roeselare-West The Flemish context forms an almost completely domesticated territory that is extremely intensely used, fragmented and marked by splintered private ownership. In this context, the landscape not only differs from a purely natural environment, but also has little significance when looked at as nice scenery or an open empty whole. Roeselare-West is emblematic of the metamorphosis of open space in Flanders (Fig. 2). Spatial transformations are generated by a forceful agricultural dynamic of specialisation and intensification in an area that, at the same time, is densely inhabited and interwoven with commercial and other economic activities. The vicinity of the Roeselare economic and urban node stimulates consumption of open space for dwelling and recreation. The European landscape convention describes the concept of landscape as ‘an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors’ (quoted in Thompson & Herlin 2004, p. 47). A glance at the landscape of Roeselare-West reveals a colourful variety of fields, patterns of greenhouse agriculture, pig farming and agro-industry, corridors, residential nodes, grids, patches and ribbons of suburban dwelling. This mixed landscape spreads out widely without showing significant changes in the types of landscape elements forming it. Without adapting to its new context, it crosses borders: administrative and natural borders, ownership and spatial structures, etc. Its large scale indeed turns the landscape into a metaphor for inclusive plurality. Various contradictory social and spatial practices, policy ambitions, ecological processes, programmatic claims of actors and consequently also approaches formulated by different disciplines, take place simultaneously and produce, aware or unawares, the whole. One can interpret the landscape of Roeselare-West as the sum of its many parts, elements and patterns. But when one takes a closer look, it becomes clear that the factor ‘change’ is critical for understanding it. Roeselare-West is characterised and enriched by centuries of accumulated change and modification. Underneath

Fig. 2 Landscape elements. Roeselare-West receives strong inputs from various fields of forces, which results in a complex whole of heterogeneous elements

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large-scale elements of intensive agriculture and large patches of sub-urbanism, a dense territorial mosaic is still readable (Fig. 3). The small plot sizes and the large amount of small-scale farms refer to a traditional cultural landscape on fertile soil. This dense mosaic of parcels and network of farm buildings still determine the contemporary landscape. The dense network of established farms made agricultural land scarce in a period of agricultural intensification, and because of the limited size of the plots, alongside local tradition, the transition to livestock breeding was dominated by pig farms rather than by cattle breeding, which required large amounts of grazing land. Similarly, the limited scope for expanding farm land, which was aggravated more by land consumption for suburbanisation, led to arable farmers nowadays cultivating soils unfavourable for intensive or large-scale exploitation. In this way the original fine granular mosaic landscape of Roeselare-West is showing continuity in the contemporary landscape: in its dense morphology, constructions of pig farms and scars of erosion.

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In design, the following quotation from Freud (quoted in Ornstein 1992, p. 181) about the functioning of memory as regards the physical environment helps us understand how the territory is a stage for time: ‘Our psychic mechanism has come into being by a process of stratification; the material present, in the form of memory, traces being subjected from time to time to a rearrangement . . . – to a retranscription . . . memory is present not once but several times over’. Roeselare-West is a layered landscape and its stratification is not an accumulation of independent layers. Every spatial intervention builds a new layer upon already present layers and every changing habit inscribes itself into or overwrites the existing structure. In this transformation process, the landscape has rather the characteristics of a palimpsest where traces of former writing interact with new words (Corboz & Marot 2001). Behind every change in the landscape, there are social and economic processes, and the way these develop, interfere and transform space is in turn influenced by the structure of the existing landscape. The landscape of Roeselare-West is the complex whole of many patterns but at the same time an intrinsically evolving system. This role of change in the landscape becomes more important as the waves of transformation intensify in speed, amplitude and range and take on more varied shapes. This goes for hybrid territories where multiple activities define the transformations. Moreover, actors often adapt their use of space: the farmer specialises or diversifies; the recreational user desires new programmes (riding school, etc.); the entrepreneur has expansion plans and the shopkeeper wants to follow his/her suburbanised clientele, etc. The interplay of different actors produces a territory that is in a constant state of transformation while its trail is barely predictable or definable. Therefore the focus in our approach shifts to the transformation mechanisms behind the spatial elements and patterns that steer this mors immortalis. We share this type of focus on dynamic landscape qualities with other disciplines. From an ecological perspective, Roy Haines-Young (2000, p. 10) points out: ‘sustainability should be measured or assessed by the change processes active in the landscape – not by the state the landscape is in at any time.’ Therefore, while drawing the lines for a spatial vision of future development, we look for an understanding of the modes of transformation, the logics that steer the transformation of the Roeselare-West landscape system. How do existing landscape structures and social processes interact and give form to spatial transformations? In other words, what are the modes of transformation? Once these are discovered, they become underlying design principles for the urban/landscape designer, the landscape urbanist: the grammar and vocabulary with which a process of imagining the future can be generated. Because of this complexity, we work out a threefold ‘imagining’ process: ‘an iterative and dialectic process in which allied operations alternate: imagination as reflection, the construction of a mirror, imagination as test, the construction of a hypothesis (. . .), imagination as a projection or speculation of what is not yet, but could be’ (De Meulder & Dehaene 2004, p. 60). In short, what we explore is a design-based approach that combines a multiple reading of the existing landscape, a scenario development of what is possible and a synthesis developed through an integrated landscape vision that expresses what is desirable and feasible.

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3 A Reading of the Existing The factual physical space and actual transformation mechanisms of Roeselare-West do not easily allow penetration. They are composed of highly heterogeneous parts such as the pig farm, greenhouse, field, agro-industry, houses, forest, etc. Moreover, the ad hoc way in which these components are put together means that the functional relations or the logics behind them are no longer readable as a whole. We therefore attempt to understand the landscape system in a series of partial ways. Landscape ecologists say that it is precisely the self-repeating cluster of spatial elements that is characteristic of a landscape (Forman 1995). Likewise, we focus on landscape in its most explicit form: as a spatial interplay of elements and structures in which repeating patterns are of importance. This determines the scale of our approach to Roeselare-West. A detailed reading of the territory investigates where repetition in the landscape is also, and perhaps primarily, produced: on the scale of its users, the farmer, the resident, the recreational user, the ecologist, the entrepreneur, etc. However, on this scale we distinguish two kinds of elements, each with a specific structuring capacity. Elements exist that bring structure to the territory by bringing about dissimilarity. They are often larger scale (infra)structures such as hill ridges or highways that create a condition of exception to the surrounding landscape. The other kinds of element have structuring capacity through the way they repeat themselves in the landscape in recurrent patterns. Examples of this kind of element are the landscape’s trees and hedges, its parcels and paths, its creeks and ponds, its single family houses and farmsteads, etc. In order to explicitly register possible recurrent patterns on the small human scale, a reference frame of 3–6 km is used (Fig. 4). This frame reveals the characteristic spatial elements of Roeselare-West. On the one

Fig. 4 Reference frame. To explicitly include the screening of small-scale patterns in the scaled set of readings, a reference frame of 3–6 km is used: a level gauged to the tightly structured morphology of the Flemish landscape


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hand, it shows large-scale landscape elements such as the villages Westrozebeke and Oostnieuwkerke, the slaughterhouse, a deep-freeze company and the local, recreational forest. On the other hand, it incorporates the spatial patterns of intensive greenhouse agriculture, pig farming, mixed crop farming and suburbanisation. In order to render the spatial patterns intelligible, the landscape is deconstructed in layers using a map analysis: maps are divided into layers of elements and the patterns in which they occur to construct both a diachronic and a synchronic atlas. The point of departure is each physical element present in the landscape. On the one hand, historical maps (Ferraris 1770; Vandermaelen 1845) are laid out to investigate the changes in patterns. Complementary to this historical – diachronic – atlas, we practise a synchronic reading by applying a layer analysis to the NGI’s topographical map on a scale of 1/20.000. The layers distinguish the amalgamation of elements and patterns that now characterise Roeselare-West. A screening of the various contemporary uses is central to this process. For every actor active in the landscape, characteristic patterns are registered and related to a certain amount of thematic maps such as topography, soil conditions or soil suitability for different types of agricultural crops. Since every actor contributes to the production of landscape by creating specific elements and patterns, these patterns represent his/her logic of land use. Both the atlases (diachronic and synchronic) are considered as mirrors that bring the existing spatial structure to light or reflect it in a selective/filtered way. They start from the point of the physically perceptible. By combining historical layers with contemporary, topographical layers, with thematic layers, connections are made and the state of spatial coherence is unravelled. Together, the two atlases indicate which elements in the landscape have structural importance and which elements are merely anecdotes. In addition, to thoroughly analyse the (re)production of the landscape and understand the interaction between the different layers, the spatial deconstruction in the atlases is complemented with literature (agronomy, landscape, history, etc.), fieldwork (observation, documentation, interviews, expert consultation, etc.) and an analysis of surveys (socio-economic, agro-economic, etc.) carried out by our research partners. This multilayered, multifaceted analysis allows unravelling of the logics behind landscape transformations. We thus look at space from different perspectives: from a bird’s-eye view of maps and aerial photographs, from a labyrinthic perspective while doing fieldwork and from the perspective of several other knowledge areas. In this sense we inscribe ourselves in the tradition of eclectic atlases (Boeri et al. 2003). An initial cursory glance at the landscape of Roeselare-West has revealed its extremely ad hoc and fragmented nature. On the one hand, our more in depth reading of the existing space underpins this impression. The development of the region is by and large happening randomly and going along with the disintegration of the landscape on many different levels. Together with pig farms and greenhouses, a boundless industrial supply of machine manufacturing, freight transport, building material for sheds, hangars, heating installations, storage bins and containers, etc. has evolved historically out of or near former farmsteads that were scattered in the open landscape. Flax converted to chipboard, vegetable cultivation to the

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deep-freeze industry. This kind of agro-industrial transformation driven by the interplay of individual decisions, policy measures and economic opportunities has given rise to the emergence of problems that transcend the scale of the plot. Since change in one location often has consequences for another location, problems emerged such as ecological fragmentation and drastic overexploitation of groundwater and congested road networks. Yet, on the other hand, in contrast with the narrative of random development, multiple reading indicates some quite systematic mechanisms at work behind the (re-)production of the landscape. One part of the synchronic atlas of Roeselare-West screens for example the logic underlying the increase in pig farms in the landscape (Fig. 5). This increase has previously been traced to the fact that pig farming was a profitable form of agriculture not depending on large land surfaces. In addition, this type of farming now finds itself stimulated by a regional network of mutually supporting specialised entities. In the course of agricultural intensification, pig farming has specialised and activities were split up. Today, piglet breeding, pig rearing, the pig-feed industry and the slaughter and meat-packing industry still strongly interrelate with one another and depend on spatial proximity. Moreover, whereas pig farms have always been emblematic of an ‘unsettled’ agriculture, their specific locations within this network largely depend on access to groundwater and the need for buffer zones separating them from other activities. This has led to a specific location pattern of pig farms that interweaves within the less developed zones of the existing settlement pattern, colonising the least valuable agricultural land.

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Fig. 6 Greenhouse farming in the landscape. It appears that the compactness of the soil structure plays a decisive role in the location of greenhouses and ponds for domestic horticulture. However, the general absence of greenhouses with the ‘most effective surface’ of 1 ha2 brings into perspective the logic of economic efficiency as a driving force

Similarly, horticulture manifests itself in the landscape in a less arbitrary way than it might seem (Fig. 6). Driven by economic reality and stimulated by agrarian centralities such as the regional vegetable auction, farmers gradually shift from arable farming to extensive vegetable cultivation, to intensive vegetable cultivation and finally to greenhouse farming. As far as morphology is concerned, the greenhouse generally relates to one farm and stands close to it, is accompanied by pond and hangar and does not have the ‘most effective surface’ which was calculated to be a square form of 1 ha for domestic agriculture. Even if mainly ground cultivations take place in the region, fieldwork interviews have indicated that this type of horticulture develops regardless of soil characteristics since the interior conditions in a greenhouse are one hundred per cent man-made. However, layer analysis reveals that greenhouse and pond consequently gather along lines of shifting soil constitution. Apparently, the greenhouses are preferably not located on heavy soils, whereas the accompanying ponds for collecting rainwater are most easily facilitated on the heavy (and wet) grounds. The presence of a brook or access to the un-deep groundwater level is also an additional location factor that is drawn from.

4 Legitimising the Possible The question of the elaboration of a spatial vision on Roeselare-West remains: How to mesh the various transformation mechanisms so that the multiplication of incremental transformations generates a more coherent landscape? Hence, the question becomes to what degree spatial coherence is possible. In other words, we test the

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capacity of the specific space to function as a bearing surface and aligner for the various uses of space. A double hypothesis examines future workable combinations of structure and use. The first hypothesis investigates coherence as a long-term spatial structure onto which dynamics of use can be grafted and can interact. The second hypothesis is based on the processes that steer landscape formation. It investigates how a given actor can contribute to landscape coherence through his/her use of space: the possible spatial coherence generated via repetitive incremental actions of a certain type and with a short-term interval. The first hypothesis examines a structural figure that is already latent in the existing landscape. It is a figure that can function as a bearing surface by aligning transformations without disregarding their interaction or the larger whole. So we postulate that the articulation of a physical landscape feature can serve as a tool to generate coherence in a landscape throughout future development. This figure is a morphological frame. It allows perception of a logical whole regardless of the complexity of the parts, to keep an overview, regardless of the number of transformations that occur. In our search for this figure, all natural and spatial configurations that actors produce, and have produced up to this day, are taken into account. The layered analysis of the existing (see Fig. 1) has made the specificity of the landscape structure intelligible. In the case of Roeselare-West the actual structure turns out to be a dispersed amalgamation of various spatial patterns. The latent figure that could be articulated through the process of spatial restructuring is a collage: a blow-up version of the landscape mosaic with the mesh as the structuring element. The detected latent collage that can be articulated has no prioritising spatial hierarchy, it expresses the existing diversity, but at the same time generates spatial entities by grouping (see Fig. 8). In a second hypothesis various scenarios measure the bearing capacity of the actual space from the specific perspective of one actor.2 These scenarios anticipate a specific land use need and test the landscape’s capacity to bear this dynamic. They imagine in spatial terms the possibly coherent development of one specific transformation mechanism affecting agriculture, industry, nature or dwelling. They do this by highlighting and extending to the extreme a particular use or transformation parameter in an otherwise static landscape. This happens in accordance with qualitative criteria based on ‘legitimacy’. The legitimacy of a certain type of use is based on topography, hydrology, existing soil suitability maps for the various agricultural practices, present users and accompanying spatial patterns, the existing opening up of a space, the (remaining) ecological value, landscape value, etc. As such, the various scenarios test possible coherent development in the light of the actual spatial characteristics. For the Roeselare-West case study, two ecological development scenarios were developed (see Fig. 7). Both follow the line of least resistance. The first makes use of existing and valuable nature fragments for which possible ecological network extensions and creations are tested through the use of corridors and stepping stones. This resulted in the identification of plots with the least suitable soil for agricultural production and areas with valuable landscape relics. In addition, water network improvements and increases in the water surface were tested using the existing creek system and – still open – wetlands.


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least suitable soil for agricultural production lot with ecological value existing agricultural lots landscape with historical value

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Fig. 7 Scenarios depicting legitimate space for future developments in Roeselare-West. The first two scenarios examine how nature development can contribute to landscape coherence through the development of an ecological system and an improved water network. The third figure represents a scenario that enables more coherent development of pig farming in relation to a legitimate freight traffic network

As well as these nature development scenarios, the various dynamics present in the agricultural sector were extrapolated in a number of agricultural landscape scenarios. The points of departure were the existing agricultural plots, onto which

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qualitative filters were successively applied so that only a selection of plots qualified for specific development. Where pig farming is concerned, the least suitable plots for crop farming were selected and qualified in a different manner, using the distance between the farm and residential concentrations as criterion. A dendritic network is seen as a legitimate freight traffic network and replaces the grid road network. This set of scenarios is developed as a way of unfolding the landscape as a number of parallel landscapes: a set of different landscapes each addressing a specific land use need and thus landscapes that are simultaneously aimed for.3 As ideal sectoral models – solo games of selected actors – they illustrate the open development process applied to the territory. However, they are not used as alternative ideas of the future but rather to question the superimposition of the landscape. Placed on top of one another, the various scenarios reveal similarities and contradictions caused by the simultaneous presence of various actors. Together with the landscape characteristic of hypothesis 1, they enable us to move towards the imagination of the desirable. At this point a spatial synthesis of various selective scenarios is turned into an aggregated and coherent vision of the area.

5 A Synthesis of the Desirable After de-construction of the territory comes re-construction. After an unfolding of the landscape, a spatial vision enhances the existing and projects a desired territorial future. The landscape vision/imagination seeks to create synergies between the various fragments of structure and changing modes of use to ensure that a qualitative space exists throughout subsequent transformations. The aim is not to have found ‘the’ solution, but to imagine a desirable territorial evolution. This means that the vision of the future interprets the hidden possibilities within complex hybrid territories such as Roeselare-West. These latent possibilities are particularly evident in the organisation of a landscape that is re- and co-produced by various actors. A landscape of consonance is put forward: a ‘polyphonic landscape’ in which agriculture produces a qualitative space together with other users, a space that accommodates and stimulates a sustainable use of space. To manipulate this co-production process that forms the landscape, we elaborated a vision that serves as an action frame. The vision frames, coordinates and activates the interplay of various actors. We therefore imagine the landscape as a space that accommodates certain processes. Above and beyond mere enhancement of the landscape’s existing dynamics, the spatial vision attempts to reinterpret layers of production and consumption in a new projective design sense. The case study indicates three crucial principles of scales and modes in which to operate: the intermediate scale, multifunctional use of space and micro-landscapes. Although related to and referring to one another, each accentuates specific aspects of the co-produced design. The intermediate scale handles the incremental transformation process which is often induced at the scale of plots. The vision introduces a spatial


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structure that mediates between the scale of the plot and that of the landscape as a whole. This structure is drawn on a scale that can be used for the orientation of uncountable individual actions. The extent of this intermediate scale depends on the degree of landscape ‘erosion’. The density and heterogeneity of patterns, the grain of the landscape and the presence of exceptional, spatial (infra)structures are important factors. A second principle is to attain minimal rationalisation and maximum optimisation of the various uses of space. These are preconditions for an efficient use of space (and economical livability) in intensely used landscapes. To match these conditions, Brandt and Vejre (2004), among others, depict multifunctionality as a spatial strategy. They distinguish three different types: multifunctionality as the juxtaposition of various uses, multifunctionality through the subdivision of use in time and multifunctionality as the integration of various functions at the same location and at the same time. With decreasing scales of observation, the multifunctional character of the first type disappears while it remains for the last type. The case study employs all three types of multifunctional space use. Spatial strategies focus on functional and social integration in the organisation of the landscape through co-production. At the same time however, the strategies are open-ended enough to accommodate local tendencies of private scale expansion, specialisation, etc. The third principle introduces the concept of the landscape being composed of multiple micro-landscapes. Micro-landscapes react to the fact that the existing interplay of transformation mechanisms differs for every location. Sometimes greenhouse agriculture, local eco-systems and recreation determine the transformations of a given location. Other times pig farming and landscape management might. The goal is to reinterpret and articulate the meaning of specific locations. Based on local landscape features, actual dynamics and relations between actors, every micro-landscape is developed as a specific, coherent system. Microlandscapes often represent a typical spatial form of multifunctional use. The strategy for micro-landscapes brings together a selection of actors and stimulates specific transformations. The case study of Roeselare-West develops the concepts of, for instance, ‘surface landscape’, ‘imprint landscape’ and ‘mosaic landscape’ as types of new landscapes where agrarian production, nature and suburban dwelling are brought together in a new synthesis (see Fig. 8).4 In the ‘surface landscape’, a synergy between greenhouse farming and housing is stimulated through the exchange of energy and the mutual use of water reservoirs: a functional element for production, and a recreational landscape element for the housing. The ‘imprint landscape’ is a concept for an open agricultural landscape that coherently incorporates concentrated activity imprints. The maximum size of the imprint and the minimal distance between imprints are defined, while the activity in the imprint can vary: communal living in combination with a farm, a pig farmer or simply a housing cluster. The ‘mosaic landscape’ places ecological value and small-scale texture in its centre while also allowing agricultural and other types of activities to take place. Various types and grades of transformation are thus specifically encouraged or discouraged. As a whole, the configuration of micro-landscapes represents a differentiated field of

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imprint landscape surface landscape mosaic landscape chamber landscape

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Fig. 8 Collage as an interpretation of micro-landscapes. The arbitrary mixing of various logics or patterns originating in Roeselare-West is selectively pulled apart in the spatial restructuring of


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preconditions for further development. Conceptually, micro-landscapes reveal how generative rules can be applied in an area-oriented manner and call for a diversified rural policy that appropriately reacts to local characteristics. Depending on the area under consideration, this can result in differentiated rules and instruments for landscape development.

6 Discussion 1. The point of departure of our approach was the concept of landscape as a complex evolving system. It emphasises the fact that landscape has characteristics of an open system that functions and transforms on its own. We have understood the territory as a machine of landscape production that once started, constantly reshapes itself to accommodate contemporary needs and demands. In this way, our approach emphasises the rather spontaneous and individual actions that change the landscape in an incremental way: the kind of transformations that are generated by the users of the landscape. 2. At the same time, the concept of landscape as a complex evolving system postulates that landscape production happens in a systematic way, following mechanisms that can be identified. Behind every change in the landscape there are a wide range of processes. These processes drive the activities of landscape users. The way in which these processes interact with the existing landscape structure by way of land use indicates a mechanism of transformation. 3. Consequentially, the role of the designer is not to be found in a tabula rasa or a nostalgic search for what was before, but is to identify, understand and enhance the existing transformation mechanisms. Amongst others, Alan Berger’s landscape reclamation projects develop along this principle (Berger 2002). Designing is then about entering into the logics of the machinery of landscape (re)production in order to be able to intervene in its development and create opportunities. More specifically, in our approach to the development of peri-urban space, we relate the transformation mechanisms to the range of users and strive to understand their logic of (re)producing space and specific spatial patterns. 4. Since, in principle, the development of highly complex systems cannot be predicted, the approach we developed to intervene in the process of landscape (re)production and generate micro-landscapes is by manipulating the transformation mechanisms. On the one hand, this can be done by strategic projects that change the existing landscape structure with a large gesture and as such bring into motion a different kind of interaction between space and society.

Fig. 8 (continued) the area using the collage figure. Each fragment of the collage represents a micro-landscape that strives for a specific multifunctional use of space, with agricultural production often playing a dominant role. Spatial structures such as road and water networks represent connection or infiltration interfaces

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References

On the other hand, one can steer landscape transformation by creating rules that frame the activities of the landscape users in an area-oriented way. These rules can encourage specific transformation mechanisms to take place whilst they can discourage others. Thus, instead of imposing geometrical configurations of spatial elements and patterns, the approach we advocate is based on creating an action framework that coordinates how spatial patterns are produced by others. The design imagines space as a medium to accommodate various processes. It is the projection of an image of future development in which a given interplay between the various players can be generated, activated or coordinated. 5. If the existing logics of the territory are understood and this is translated into in a spatial vision, strategic project or rule, then one is able to minimise the resource input for manipulating or activating a more sustainable transformation process of the landscape system. Since, in hybrid territories, the landscape is co-produced by multiple users each with their individual mode of thinking and acting, a thorough understanding and adequate translation require interdisciplinary work. At stake is the imagination of space that accommodates complex processes of co/re-production. Moreover, in order to make this idea of a self-organising system of co-production operational in times when one is more likely to compete than to cooperate, ingenious tools and project formats are needed.

Notes 1. The research was funded by the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office within the framework of the scientific support plan for a sustainable development policy (SPSD 2, Part I: ‘Sustainable production and consumption patterns’). It was part of a two-year network project entitled ‘Preconditions for sustainable land use by agriculture in urbanising network society’, in which the Research Group of Urbanity and Architecture OSA (authors of the chapter) were involved alongside the Centre for Mobility and Spatial Planning, the Department of Agricultural Economics at the University of Ghent and the Institute for Social and Economic Geography of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. 2. In our research, spatial scenarios are elaborated following the ‘What if scenarios’ as introduced by Bernardo Secchi (2004): ‘If, in an overly-determined field of phenomena, such as territorial transformations, some aspects are isolated and we ask what would happen if these phenomena reached their extreme or probable consequences, we obtain images from the future – scenarios – that are partially incompatible. And it is just their partial antagonism that makes them interesting’. 3. The scenarios are presented as spatial images of legitimate future developments that address a specific land use need. However, to generate accurate images, these should necessarily be refined through dialogue with experts and consultations with local players. This was beyond the scope of the research. 4. Both international literature and results of local design studios have been a source of inspiration in the elaboration of spatial concepts for landscapes of co-production. Especially worth mentioning in the context of the study of Roeselare-West are the design experiments of the Dutch office la4sale (see http://www.la4sale.nl/).

Imagining the Re/Co-production of a Hybrid Territory

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References Berger A (2002) Reclaiming the American West, Princeton Architectural Press, New York. Boeri S et al (eds) (2003) USE Uncertain States of Europe, Skira Editore, Milano. Brandt J, Vejre H (2004) Multifunctional Landscapes – Motives, Concepts and Perspectives. In: J Brandt, H Vejre (eds) Multifunctional Landscapes. Volume 1. Theory, Values and History, Wit Press, Southampton, UK, pp. 1–35. Corboz A, Marot S (2001) Le Territoire comme palimpseste et autres essays, Editions de l’Imprimeur, Besançon. De Ferraris J (1777) Map Oostnieuwkercke, scale 1/11.520. National Geografisch Instituut, Brussels. De Meulder B, Dehaene M (2001) Atlas Zuidelijk West-Vlaanderen, Fascikel 1, Kortrijk, Year 2002. De Meulder B, Dehaene M (2004) Ars renovandi/mutandi. Proeve van een verbeelding van de Vlaamse territoriumstad. In: E Frijters et al (eds) Tussenland NAI uitgevers, Rotterdam, pp. 59–60. Forman R T T (1995) Land Mosaics. The Ecology of Landscapes and Regions, University Press, Cambridge. Haines-Young RH (2000) Sustainable Development and Sustainable Landscapes: Defining a New Paradigm for Landscape Ecology. Fennia 178(1), pp. 7–14. Marot S (2003) Sub-Urbanism and the Art of Memory. AA Publications, London. Ornstein R (1992) The Evolution of Consciousness. The Origins of the Way We Think, Simon & Schuster, New York. Secchi B (2004) Diary of a Planner. http://www.planum.net/topics/secchi-diary.html. Sieverts T (2003) Cities Without Cities. An Interpretation of the Zwischenstadt, Spon Press, London (first published 1997 by Vieweg). Thompson, C W, Herlin I S (2004) The European Landscape Convention. Topos 47, pp. 44–53. Vandermaelen, Ph. (1850) Map Oostnieuwkercke, scale 1/20.000. National Geografisch Instituut, Brussels. Viganò P (ed) (2001) Territories of a New Modernity, Electa, Napoli.


Derelict Places as Alternative Territories of the City Silvia Serreli

1 Urban Perspectives of Derelict Sites Contemporary territories not directly linkable with the dense metropolis – which is highly involved in urban transformations both in compact spatial forms and in sprawl forms (Sassen 2004; Scott 2001; Robinson et al. 2005) – pose some important questions for the project for the future of the city (Dubinsky and Garrett-Pett 2002). What has the city become and what are the new forms of emergent city? Do alternatives exist for the city characterised by high density? What meaning does the territory take on in the urban life of men? The territories external to the principal metropolitan areas (Maciocco 2007) can be divided into two territorial situations. a. Fragile situations of depopulation. This concerns deterritorialised spaces (La Cecla 1989), spaces of exclusion, that show the effects and fragility of functional and territorial specialisations. Derelict sites (Wyly and Hammel 2004) are vast territories distinguished by the decline of small centres, whose slight demographics determine the closure of basic public services. They are often the result of excessive dependence on mono-productive activities, as arises in places historically involved in agro-pastoral activities to be seen in vast areas of territory in Portugal and Greece (Lagendijk and Lorentzen 2007; Kalantaridis 1997), but also in small Italian realities like Sardinia.1 b. Situations where new modalities of inhabiting are to be found, new emerging dynamics in ambits external to the compact city which shape new spatialities. This is a case of areas under transition, territories that are not at the height of technological development, but where sociospatial dynamics emerge that emphasise some perspectives for regeneration. In these areas, the low-density disadvantages are compensated by the environmental quality of the contexts, by a creative sense of places, which implies great tension between different urban populations, be it the long-standing residents or the new in-migrant populations (Lacor and Puissant 2007). These situations seem to offer interesting departure points for in-depth study of the urban perspectives for non-core areas in S. Serreli Department of Architecture and Planning, Faculty of Architecture, Alghero, University of Sassari, Palazzo del Pou Salit, Piazza Duomo 6, 07041 Alghero, Italy e-mail: [email protected] G. Maciocco (ed.), The Territorial Future of the City. Urban and Landscape Perspectives 3, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-77514-0 8 C Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008

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particular. They usually concern territories where the low density refers not just to the demographic dimension, but are more likely contexts presenting low density at certain important urban dimensions: institutional, due to the low number of territorial subjects with responsibilities and competences in relation to development at a local level; relational, due to the scarcity or absence of possibilities for interaction between inhabitants and institutions; and economic, due to the shortage of opportunities for promoting local resources (Lacor and Puissant 2007). Some territories have positively assimilated the structural changes that enable development of the economic and cultural models that generated them. Other territories, because they are still anchored to traditional models in a conservative manner, remain peripheral, a situation that we explore by means of two concepts: peripherality and proximity (Dinis 2006; Lagendijk and Lorentzen 2007). Peripherality is understood as a distance to sources of knowledge creation and transfer, but also as a lack of critical mass to support the development of specialised services (healthcare, transportation, technological support on-site), infrastructures but, above all, of professionalism with the necessary aptitude to operate and manage the transformations (Dinis 2006). If, on the one hand, the vision of peripherality of these territories nurtures the inhabitants’ incapacity to glimpse an idea of a different future and constitutes a hindrance to building new perspectives, on the other, the success of certain rural economies is founded precisely on the advantages of small urban realities. For example, the problem of the small rural societies in this sense is not linked with being “small”, of low density, but with being “isolated”. These areas often suffer inconveniences caused by the lack of technological innovation, learning infrastructures and the lack of awareness of the opportunities offered by advanced technologies. For this reason, there are frequent situations where lower business densities and slow urban regeneration processes are generated. The second situation is dealt with by means of the concept of re-urbanity (Lacor and Puissant 2007), used to investigate the new emerging spatialities of the city territory.

Fig. 1 Derelict sites as fragile situations of depopulation

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In recent years attention to small- and medium-sized urban realities has revealed new socio-spatial dynamics which throw light on new emerging city practices combining elements, structures and values both of rural and urban dimensions. Two French economists have studied these practices in depth and used the term re-urbanity to define any possible conceptualisation of the new dynamics they create in the statement “urbanising the rural and ruralising the urban” (Lacor and Puissant 2007). Great tension persists in particular between the urban and the rural: on the one hand, a strong aspiration to endow these rural areas with urban facilities and structures typical of the large city; and on the other, the need to protect these spaces and maintain their features of sense of belonging to places, solidarity, community spirit and spirit of identity.

2 Peripherality and Proximity in Non-core Areas The new forms of centrality of the city are not structured with reference to traditional schemes (Keil and Ronneberger 1994; Taylor 2006), but are to be seen in the suburban areas, peripheral spaces, both in compact cities and in small centres. The project pursuing the objective of constructing a possible future in these realities will not solve local situations tied to the physical context of proximity alone, but will aim at building relations and cooperative networks between different subjects (individuals and organisations) that operate on the same territory and are projected onto it at different scales. Two important questions arise. First, it is important to understand how territorial subjects can build and maintain structured links between peripheral rural ambits and “core areas”, and to define the role of personal and organisational networks in the urban space project. The second question concerns the type of internal dynamics that can nurture the divulgation and learning of knowledge. It is especially important to explore the typologies of institution that can sustain transformations, and the forms of (virtual, physical) interaction that can contribute to maintaining these dynamics. One critical question concerns, moreover, the ways in which internal dynamics can become anchored to the external channels of distributed knowledge (Florida 1995). Rural territories constitute one of the peripheral situations of the city that currently experience a state of marginality compared with the dominant dynamics of the city. In this sense before exploring the relations between the concepts of peripherality and proximity, this chapter points out some significant categories able to interpret the “rural” dimension of the city in its most recent meaning. Rural areas present a variety of different features and their contexts are very different from each other, “rural also means different things to different people” (Dinis 2006). Some definitions may be traced back to three categories that dominate different fields of knowledge. The behavioural definition marks the distinction between urban and rural in terms of different population density. In this definition the term rural is tied to the values of tradition and the practices of conservation. Nevertheless, the transformations operated by information technology have obscured the dichotomy between rural and urban, in many cases subtracting small communities

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from isolation and peripherality. The functional definition deals with rural places in relation to the economic and occupational features of these areas, traditionally associated with agriculture and exploiting natural resources. Actually, a mono-functional model no longer exists and “there is an increasing trend to pluriactivity among rural populations”. The ecological definition emphasises the environmental worth of these areas, the prevalence of natural components and open landscapes compared with the urban ambits of small communities. This definition incorporates the social and cultural quality dimension and also emphasises the possibilities these territories have of founding their future development on their patrimony of natural and historic resources (Dubinsky and Garrett-Pett 2002). The latter definition seems to be the most relevant for exploring some socioterritorial categories of the territories that have taken shape as “creative constructers of new order”, becoming promoters of innovation and therefore creatively developing local entrepreneurship based on the environmental dimension and above all the uniqueness of the resources (Nijkamp 2003). In this perspective “innovation” is understood as organisational processes, founding this new order on development models based on rural society values, such as relational capacity, the sense of belonging to places, urban solidarity and a flexible level of specialisation. These qualities generate the capacity of the internal resources to relate constructively with the external demand of the environment, a form of synergy that feeds competitiveness and a superior economic performance of territories. Some authors have developed interesting research programmes based on the concept of milieux innovateurs (Aydalot 1986; Maillat 1998; Peyrache-Gadeau 2007) and learning regions (Florida 1995; Morgan 1997). The features of these privileged places, which surpass the hierarchical model of urban organisation, can be traced back to certain requisites: “close relationships between small and medium-sized enterprises which structure the local productive system, flexible production, local initiative (endogenous entrepreneurship), some ways of access and treatment of information, entrepreneurial patterns of learning and innovation”. The milieux innovateurs and the learning regions achieve competitive advantages in the global economy, not so much focalising on the capacity to attract external resources, as on the capacity to internally generate the conditions of transformation of the productive structure of a territory. Studies of local systems of production (including industrial districts, milieux innovateurs and learning regions) also make clear that local initiatives depend on territorial development or, to put it another way, the existence of a supportive environment. In other words, “territory” is now seen as the place where, besides allocating generic resources, specific assets can be generated from localised learning and coordination between firms. These studies highlight the concept of social capital as source of innovation, and social innovation, as part of that supportive environment. They also highlight the importance of (social and spatial) proximity which generate external economies of agglomeration that result in a greater capacity to innovate and to compete in a global economy (Lagendijk and Lorentzen 2007, p. 465).

In the processes of development of peripheral areas the concept of proximity has great significance (Torre and Gilly 2000; Torre and Rallet 2005). But what type of proximity facilitates access to knowledge resources? Some French researchers,


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Table 1 Geographical and organisational proximity

Strong

Weak

Geographical Proximity

Organisational proximity

Strong (1a) Local systems of innovation/ production (clusters, agglomerations) (1b) Temporary co-localisation (projects, meetings) (2) Non localised interaction (e.g. translocal organisations, value chains, etc.)

Weak (3) Co-location without (direct) interaction (agglomeration, corridor, with indirect effects in the form of urbanisation economies) (4) Activities in isolation, e.g. in rural-peripheral areas

Source: Lagendijk and Lorentzen (2007, p. 461).

in particular Torre and Rallet, highlight geographical and organisational proximity amongst the various types of proximity see Table 1. This important separation of the two terms underlines the need to overcome the tendency of some innovation theories towards the acritical assumption that considers the transfer of knowledge as exclusively dependent on physical proximity. An interesting study of these concepts is made possible by Torre and Rallet’s (2005) scheme, reinterpreted by the researchers Arnoud Lagendijk and Anne Lorentzen. These observations point at a new scope for regional innovation policy in non-core areas. Such a policy should be focused on addressing problems of isolation that are characteristic of more peripheral locations. Yet, the way to achieve this is not by attempting to nurture local and regional knowledge networks (Fig. 2, cell 1), but by providing resources and fostering local entrepreneurship and learning in the context of global knowledge networks. Nurturing local talent and providing good infrastructures (Fig. 2, cell 3), as well as stimulating global knowledge searching and benchmarking (Fig. 2, cell 2) is what regional growth policy should be about (Lagendijk and Lorentzen 2007, p. 465).

In the research of Lagendijk and Lorentzen “geographical proximity denotes the way distances can be, and are bridged, in terms of actual mobility. The logic of belonging – social proximity – and the ‘logic of similarity’ – institutional proximity – constitute two main reasons for organisational proximity” (Torre and Rallet 2005). Geographical mobility is not put on the same plane as physical or spatial proximity and, therefore, with the concept of nearness. It is more a question of a dynamic concept intimately associated with the notion of spatial structuration (Lagendijk and Lorentzen 2007) that highlights how the new communication technologies have generated new spatial configurations, without altering the fundamentally multiple character of space. On the one hand, geographical proximity is a product of the historically accumulated construction of transport infrastructures and of meeting places, both in a more material and virtual sense, as well as, we would like to add, the shaping of territorially bounded spaces – along social, institutional, political and economic dimensions. On the other hand, geographical proximity has causal effects. Differences in proximity change the relative position of places, and the actors located within them, in space. From the perspective of places and actors, geographical proximity underpins their connectivity and positionality, both in a more objective (what is easy and affordable to reach) and subjective sense (what feels near) (Lagendijk and Lorentzen 2007, p. 460).

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(a)

(b)

Fig. 2 Low-density territories: places attracting new in-migrant populations

The case study on peripheral territories in Portugal (Dinis 2006) deals with some of the concepts illustrated, focalising on the meaning of innovation, on organisational proximity and on the ways in which “local” societies can be competitive on the global market. Some strategies are highlighted in particular that are founded on “market niches” which imply a strategic vision of the territory and its resources. The creation of this strategic vision is a social responsibility of the individuals and the collectivity, so that territories can become competitive and, above all, offer


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various kinds of population conditions of urban quality (Nuvolati 2002, 2006; Ciaffi and Mela 2008; Cecchini 2008). To implement these strategies the project is oriented towards the definition of new economies departing from the environment, in order to oppose loss of identity in contexts currently registering a strong crisis due to the absence of a society caring for this. Some experiences in peripheral places show how innovation is tied to the success of particular forms of local entrepreneurship, linked with the introduction onto the global market of the resources of the traditional culture. These examples highlight the applicability of the niche marketing strategy, to which a concept of innovation (Dinis 2006) that takes different dimensions into account is associated. On the one hand, product innovation is the result of the association of traditional techniques with innovative designs, but also the development of new applications for traditional products. On the other, marketing innovation entails the development of new marketing techniques, a specific approach to new types of customers and the change in perception and promotion of the image of local products. Organisational innovation constitutes a third dimension that involves the foundation of new agreements and ties between local actors, based on factors that are not only economic but also social and cultural, and on the creation of new links between actors and institutions at a national and international level. The rural periphery contexts in Portugal are tied to low-density areas of the internal territory, Portugal being one of the extreme cases in Europe where an excessive concentration of the population exists in the two principal coastal cities, Lisbon and Porto. The case studies illustrated by Anabela Dinis on some rural localities in the most peripheral areas – Martinlongo and Cachopo, located in the extreme southeast, and Montemuro, in the northwest – show some regeneration perspectives of local economies based on agriculture, cattle farming and modest commercial activities. Through some local initiative projects linked with the training and creation of new professional roles – supported in the first experience by the General Direction for Adult Education and in the second by the Institute for Cultural Affairs initiative – the bases were established for creating business companies that have given rise to small activities in fields complementary to the textile sector. At Martinlongo and Cachopo, the success of a partnership between local businesses is linked with the setting up of an international market for niche products in respect of the production of local traditional costumes. At Montemuro, too, the production of activities connected with the textile sector, making use of techniques, design and natural materials and tradition (wool and linen), has caused the great potential of the local economy to emerge and established the bases for regeneration of traditional activities and forms of cooperation between different professional spheres and has, above all, contributed to building up network production able to respond to the demands of the international market. The creative energy of the local people in both situations has generated an interesting “niche marketing strategy”. By creating its own model and promoting modalities for exporting it, these people have built up an idea of future for their urban space, strongly tied to their territory but not bound to it.

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3 Re-urbanity Processes and the New Emergent City The creation of (confirmed and refounded) centralities on edge territories (Fialovà 1996; van Houtum and Ernste 2002; Cupers and Miessen 2002) and of diversities (increased and expanded with regard to possibilities of cooperation between territories) may be guided by the project by means of an interpretation of urban externalities and re-updating of agglomeration economies (Sudjic 1992; Calthorpe and Fulton 2001; Burfitt et al. 2003). The purpose of these economies is to achieve crucial objectives that contribute to reinventing and regenerating the city, such as the protection of the natural spaces of the city and the derelict sites. Another objective requires that the intellectual, cultural and leisure activities develop without upsetting structured, recognisable identities. A third objective involves the development of common, interdependent projects that offer the necessary critical mass and encourage the mobilisation of actors supporting socio-spatial integration. According to the hypotheses put forward by urban economy and in particular by theories on models of attraction, external territories have a lot of potential for drawing the urban towards them. This potential is expressed, as has been made clear in the case of the Portuguese rural areas, in the creation of market niches, in the capacity for occupational and services supply but also in the supply of specific functions enabling external populations to be attracted and new competences that enrich the social context (Lacor and Puissant 2007). Urban behaviours, values and representations that are part of the new spatial dynamics between the urban and the external territories have been identified by some research programmes under the term emergent city. The selection of these places aims at revealing situations and behaviours that are “exceptions” or that may be described as avant-garde, in that they are the expression of a break or change, which the project should encourage or limit. Acknowledgement of the non-core areas and the low-density territories as a new possible urban horizon is given in particular by some types of urban population, also defined as neo-urban populations. It is a case of new inhabitants whose interest is not simply connected with fruition of these spaces in terms of leisure, but with building up forms of loyalty-making and new forms of long-term residency. For this reason some researchers (Bell and Jayne 2004) consider that “vibrant atmospheres” – consisting of situations strongly rooted in the environmental dimension of places – correspond to the concept of re-urbanity. An example is the case of the French region of Aquitaine, a place that embodies the localising preferences of some English inhabitants who choose to live in a low-density region with its attractiveness being connected with the multiplicity of landscapes linked with natural and historical resources (Gervais 2003).2 The revitalisation of marginal areas is thus linked with the arrival of external populations who prevent its decline, contributing to a profound renovation in demographic and social terms. These new inhabitants make up a diversified population and are not representative of a specific social class.


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Various experiences throw light on the fact that they become all the more selective the farther the marginal areas are from urban influence. For example, the small urban centres in rural areas are often attractive places for social classes of a high level; their arrival, presence and lifestyles create rural gentrification phenomena (Lees 2000). The new populations, in fact, substitute the local people who, by offering their patrimony of resources, voluntarily and involuntarily contribute to the substitution of the socio-economic and cultural values of their territory. It should be emphasised that the features of these phenomena are linked with some stereotypes that depend on the charm exerted by nature, the different lifestyle compared with the city, identification with the past and the sense of belonging to the village as part of an elite community. And it is precisely the elites that recreate a centrality, considering these territories in relation to the consumption of facilities. These emerging forms of urbanity, that actually shape new centralities, do not have the ambition of becoming poles of economy and usually draw their advantages from urban strengths: infrastructures of an economic type, a good location linked with proximity of motorways, job markets, etc. In these places we find coexisting a high level of services, for example regarding the quality of the farming sector and agrofood, and activities connected with high technology and the leisure industry (Hannigan 1998). But the attractiveness of these areas is often linked with the fact that they affirm an identity based on quality rooted in time and a positive perception of the destination. Some case studies quoted by the two economists Claude Lacor and Sylvette Puissant are an example. The first refers to the territory of Luberon in southeast France, a rural situation where a high level of urbanity is recorded. The process of rural gentrification originated as a consequence of the shifting of the local inhabitants from their own rural ambits, because of the increase in land income deriving from regeneration processes of traditional villages and, above all, transformations induced by the presence of a population that may be defined as neorural, characterised by ultra-urban values. These territories experience two kinds of tension: on the one hand, the restrictions of conservative taxes of the Regional Natural Reserve regulations and, on the other, the demands of the new inhabitants requiring a high degree of provision of services typical of the city. Another example concerns the region of Périgord in southwest France, an area distinguished as “an extreme neo-ruralist territory” that has lost its rural nature in the traditional sense and turned into an attractive place for new forms of urbanity: “there are British local press, British networks of real-estate agents and British low-cost airlines”. Re-urbanity situations draw attention to the fact that the city and the rural spaces are both in a period of transition and rebirth. These experiences show how the city can exist outside the walls, that centrality can be sought outside the centre, that creativity may exist in the suburbs, that a village may be very attractive both for rural natives and for community-oriented people.

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Nevertheless, the peripheral dimensions of the city still produce situations subjected to forces of repulsion, in which the weakness of the economic contexts, the loss of perspectives for development, seasonality of work, ageing of the population, lack of services and isolation and distance from the city act as repulsive attributes. In these ambits, in what have been defined as derelict sites, the project is endowed with greater responsibility. The new forms of urbanity thus oppose disarrangement of the city and the various forms of urban segregation; they relate to objectives like the redefinition of a critical mass, cooperation between communities and the articulation of networks between large-sized cities and external territories. To design projects for contexts where the city does not seem to cross the vast territories of decay, depopulation and neglect requires a creative capacity that will enable some places to survive or be drawn out of peripherality.

4 In Search of the Trajectories of Places: A Narrative Approach The reterritorialisation processes of these areas are tied to re-orientation actions that oppose physical and social decline, a process that obscures, sometimes in irreversible forms, the territories and the richness of their histories. However, these areas produce, in survival conditions, a strong will and energy to not disappear or be crushed, to build self-organisational urban strategies acknowleding their role as alternative territories within the dynamics of globalisation (Dubinsky and Garrett-Pett 2002). But what are the requisites for building the cultural future of these small urban realities? Environmental orientation of the project (Maciocco 2007), as has become apparent from the experiences quoted, opens up new scenarios of territoriality that throw light on certain requisites: the environment is a strategic nucleus of the space organisation perspectives and the growth of economies; the environmental structure guides and directs localisation and organisation of settlement systems and activities; and local societies need urban motivation and environmental awareness (Serreli 2004). Some empirical examples illustrated by two English sociologists, Emma Uprichard and David Byrne, show that the construction of urban motivation may be achieved by means of the use of narratives that give voice to territorial subjectivity and put the social actors in a position to express their system of values and expectations. But how can the perceptive worlds of inhabitants and their way of imagining the future of a territory be involved in the project? How do inhabitants experience the complexity of the urban? How is it possible to understand this complexity through the narratives of inhabitants? “We can learn about the complexity of the urban through people’s narratives in much the same way as narratives are used to explore the ways in which people experience agency, structure and culture in everyday life precisely because their everyday life is embedded in the systems which shape it” (Uprichard and Byrne 2006, p. 675).


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The narrative approach offers itself as one of the modalities of self-representation of a society, as it constitutes the exploration of representations of trajectories. Narratives project us into the past repertories of the “biographies” of a territory favouring the representation of future-oriented trajectories. But how is the capacity of the social actors for understanding the past in relation to the project for the future of their territory represented? The inhabitants of a territory construct their own narratives of the future as a contextual guide for their own present and future actions; social actions are created by means of numerous non-linear interactions at numerous, interdependent levels. The task of the project is therefore to create a dialogue between retrodictive narrative of the past and expected trajectory, surpassing research methods based exclusively on causal mechanisms or quantitative methods that have a limited capacity for capturing generative dynamics of urban space. If individual and collective narratives are descriptions of trajectories, the absence of narratives is basically the absence of meanings of a place. They describe not single worlds but complex systems of relations. The inhabitants never tell their life story, they do not represent themselves as single individuals – “all lives are embedded in the social; there is no personal without the social” (Uprichard and Byrne 2006). For exploring derelict places, besides the research on rural situations, research on the future of the mining industry sites of northeast England seem interesting and, in particular, on the way the mining culture – which developed for over 200 years – continues to nurture local specificities, the inclinations of the inhabitants, meanings and future intentions. This is the case of medium-sized centres, industrial and port cities that in the 1990s underwent the process of casting off coal-mining activities (activities that had their greatest development from the end of the eighteenth century). Currently these places are involved in transformation actions that have built up weak perspectives born as a consequence of attempts at reconversion based on leisure and tourism. The research is interested in investigating the ways the inhabitants perceive their past and how understanding of the past can guide them towards new projectual horizons that include the potential of their patrimony of resources. Even though the examples conducted by the researchers Byrne and Doyle (2004)3 deal with microambit situations, they permit exploration of the contribution the narrative approach provides for understanding the complexity of these marginal urban systems. The different narratives nurture the evolutive possibilities of these external territories which are progressively undergoing a process of great crisis, revealing the large number of points of view of the inhabitants, their different aspirations and, consequently, the possibilities a project for space reorganisation has of legitimisation in guiding the future in some possible direction. The comparison between different subjects has been explored by means of focus groups, privileged witnesses and some belonging to active social organisations of the city. Even though the strong rootedness to places emerges as a fundamental element of the various actors’ perception, the physical structures of the territory have opposite meanings: the older people, on the one hand, represent their places

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Fig. 3 Derelict sites in abandoned mining villages

as symbols of a landscape lived in and to be conserved, while the younger people, on the other, describe them as places to reject, due to the lack of possible alternatives. This lack of perspectives renders a negative representation of the past, not retraceable to new opportunities; the past is therefore something to cancel out, to remove from the present both in terms of physical and cultural landscape. These different narratives – of which common examples are found in various experiences in the European sphere – separate two distinct worlds, that find themselves having to interact in the same life space, in an attempt to build a future for urban space. Using narratives the project does not just have the task of describing the transformations and the ways in which the inhabitants describe them, but to favour the capacity of local contexts to make the plurality of the dimensions of their territories emerge. The project therefore renders visibility to weak signals, detects signs and favours self-representation processes. It is essential to investigate how the inhabitants want their world to change, and the type of future they imagine for their territory, being a constituent part of it. The project thus has the responsibility of building, by means of narratives, new representations of these worlds with reference to how they may evolve, including, and causing to interact, the different perceptions of their inhabitants. As Uprichard and Byrne emphasise, narratives allow us to capture links between the local micro-, meso-, and macro-levels of social interaction. They maintain that it is not only important to know which levels connect with one another, “we also need to understand how they connect, how the mechanics of the


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articulations between the multiple levels are experienced in everyday life, in order to understand better the dynamics of change generally across time and space, and specifically within a set time and space” (Uprichard and Byrne 2006, p. 674). A new culture of the project takes on the dimension of the environment and the involvement of contextual knowledge as a central element of action, recognising certain requisites: a. the project as a form of action by which territorial subjectivity is reconstituted, which stimulates the context to establish new correspondences between spatial figures and figures of collective sociality; b. the territory as a subject, which emerges as a background that is not just physical, but a “witness”, narrating the continuous evolution of the uniqueness of the relationship between the inhabitants and their territory, in which social behaviours, expectations, aspirations, wishes and perceptive worlds converge; c. the comparison with the exterior, as a means of interaction between the self-organising capacities of local societies and external organising models. In this direction projectual actions are opposed in which a “release” of phenomena from conditioning by space is created, an increase in the degrees of localising freedom of the actors and activities, that generate a sort of “break in mechanisms” presiding spatial organisation of societies in their basic contexts. The transition of the project towards an environmental orientation is set against the background of a change that does not just concern the local scale but decisional processes in general, the “styles of government” that structure the field of collective decisions and territorial conflicts (Palermo et al. 2002).4 The project therefore inquires into the capacity of actively exploring space by narratives and orientation movements. Orientation is the capacity to “see”. As Alain Berthoz (1997) observes, to perceive is always to design: the project is the constituent element of visual perception – perception without design does not exist. In the first place in the etymological sense, to design is always to project oneself outside, to project outside one’s own image, and then to design also means to select departing from a point of view. It is therefore possible to imagine that the city may reveal itself, as well as in metropolitan agglomerations, in alternative low-density territories, where diversity is produced by the indomitable multiplicity of stories, memories of times, rhythms and evolutive trajectories.

Notes 1. Cfr the case study in: Casu A, Marrocu M, Serreli S 1997 Planning in Marginal Areas: Local Communities Network-Systems in Central-Eastern Sardinia. Papers of the European Regional Science Association International Conference – Thirty-Seventh European CongressRome. 2. Quoted by Lacour and Puissant 2007. 3. Quoted by Uprichard and Byrne 2006. 4. The openness of these territories towards other rules and events occurring at a great distance delineates a concept of globalisation that Antony Giddens expresses as the capacity to “model local events (. . .). We may define globalisation as the intensification of world social relations that link together distant localities so that local events are modelled by the events happening

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thousands of kilometres away and vice-versa” Giddens A 1991 The Consequences of Modernity, Polity Press, Cambridge, MA. It. trans. Le conseguenze della modernità, Il Mulino, Bologna, 1994.

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Name Index

A Adams, Thomas, 7, 8 Amin, Ash, 63, 64 B Bakhtin, Michail, 28, 29 Bateson, Gregory, 35, 36 Berger, Alan, 141 Berque, Jacques, 95, 100 Berthoz, Alain, 34, 35, 157 Biemann, Ursula, 18, 61, 62 Boeri, Stefano, 133 Boyer, Christine, 48, 49, 50, 54, 57, 62, 67 Brandt, Jesper, 139 Byrne, David, 154, 155, 156, 157 C Cacciari, Massimo, 16, 21 Choay, Françoise, 1, 9, 12, 16, 17 Constant, Nieuwenhuys, 21, 69, 93 Corboz, André, 131 D Dahlbom, Bo, 115, 116, 122 De Meulder, Bruno, 20, 127, 131 de Solà-Morales, Ignasi, 2, 10 Debord, Ernst, 21, 93, 94 Dehaene, Michiel, 127, 131 Deleu, Luc, 19, 108, 110, 111, 114, 118, 123 Dematteis, Giuseppe, 84 Diener, Roger, 18, 54, 55, 56, 57 Dinis, Anabela, 146, 147, 150, 151 E Endell, August, 6, 21 F Florenskij, Pavel, 17, 32, 41, 43 Florida, Richard, 44, 78, 100, 147, 148

Forman, Richard, 132 Fry, Tony, 121 G Garroni, Emilio, 27, 28 Geddes, Patrick, 7, 22 Gibson, James J., 9, 37 H Haines-Young, Ray, 131 Hall, Peter, 8, 22 Harvey, David, 77, 106, 116, 122 Herzog, Jacques, 54, 55, 57, 63 Howard, Ebenezer, 7, 8 J James, William, 37, 48, 51, 52 K Koolhaas, Rem, 5, 6, 49 L Lacor, Claude, 146, 147, 152, 153 Lagendijk, Arnoud, 15, 145, 146, 148, 149 Latour, Bruno, 48, 52, 56, 60 Le Corbusier, 3, 4 Lefebvre, Henri, 54, 55, 93 Lorentzen, Anne, 145, 146, 148, 149 Lynch, Kevin, 92 M Marot, Sebastien, 127 Melitopoulos, Angela, 18, 61, 62 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 40 Moscovici, Serge, 91, 92 Mumford, Lewis, 7, 8

161

162 N Nivola, Costantino, 4 Nouvel, Jean, 6 P Park, Robert, 51, 54 Poincaré, Jules-Henri, 39, 40 Preto, Giorgio, 83 Proshansky, Harold, 96, 100 Puissant, Sylvette, 146, 147, 152, 153 R Raffestin, Claude, 75, 94 Rallet, Alain, 149 Rizzolatti, Giacomo, 34, 35, 36, 38, 40 Roncayolo, Marcel, 16 S Sassen, Saskia, 10, 11, 15, 50, 59, 145 Schmid, Christian, 54, 55, 56, 57 Schön, Donald, 123, 124 Secchi, Bernardo, 16, 142 Sieverts, Thomas, 18, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 67, 127, 128

Name Index T Thrift, David, 75, 87, 99 Torre, André, 149 Turco, Angelo, 75 U Uchtomskij, Aleksej Alekseevic, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 39 Uprichard, Emma, 154, 155, 156, 157 Urry, John, 85 V Van Houten, Douwe, 115 Vejre, Henrik, 139 Viganò, Paola, 127 W Wahl, Daniel, 107 Webber, Melvin, 9 Wenders, Wim, 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 21 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 3, 21

Subject Index

A Absolute space, 73–77, 80, 82 Affordance, 37–38, 41 C Capsularisation, 79 Capsular Society, 119 Chronotope, 28–33 Cities without Cities, 18, 48, 52, 65 Citizen empowerment, 60 City Mine(d), 18, 58–61, 68–69 City territory, 6, 12, 17, 27–45, 146 Civitas, 7, 9, 13, 88, 95 Co-evolution, 75, 85 Cognitive mapping, 92–93, 97 Common knowledge, 45, 88–90, 98 Communities of practice, 44 Connotative character, 14 Contemporary metropolis, 3 Counter-space, 10–13, 15 Critical Design, 19–20, 105–124 D Denotative character, 14 Derelict sites, 20, 145–147, 152, 154, 156 Designerly thinking, 19, 20, 105–124 Détournement, 94 Diachronic atlas, 133 Differential quality of the territory, 6 Dilation of the concept of city, 5 Dualised city, 10 E Edge territories, 152 Empowerment, 88, 99 Environmental dominants, 16, 19, 89 Era of the hybrid, 111, 120 Espace vécu, 94, 97, 100 Ethics of proximity, 9

Ethos, 15 External territories, 12, 152, 154–155 Extrapersonal space, 40 F FLC extended, 19, 108, 112–113, 119–120, 124 Fourth Migration, 7, 8, 22 Free spaces, 6 G Garden city, 8 Geographical proximity, 149 Geography of intentions, 89 H Heterotopia, 13 Hyper-economy, 120 I Incremental transformation, 135, 138–139 Insurgent spaces, 98 Interactive coast, 120 mapping, 18, 49, 57, 63–65, 66 Interdisciplinary approach, 50, 53, 65 work, 20, 142 Intermediate scale, 138–139 world, 32, 33, 44 K Knowledge building processes, 48, 50, 66 L Landscapes of co-production, 142 Latent reality, 121

163

164 Learning curve, 56–57, 59, 65–66 regions, 148 Low-density territories, 12, 150, 152, 157 M Megacities, 49 Metropolis, 3, 5, 7–8, 10, 12–13, 15, 18, 20, 21–22, 71–72, 77, 145 Micronomics, 18, 58–61, 65 Milieu, 84, 95, 148 Mirror neurons, 35–37 M.U.D, 108, 111–113, 117–120 Multifunctionality, 139 Multimodal neuron cells, 34 N Naming and framing, 106, 113, 115, 123 Narrative approach, 21, 154–157 Neo-urban populations, 152 No-man’s-land, 2, 6 O Ontology of relations, 39, 40 Orbanism, 110, 118, 120, 124 Organisational proximity, 149, 150 P Perceptive worlds, 6, 16, 19, 89, 154, 157 Peripersonal space, 39–40 Peripherality, 20, 146, 147–151, 154 Peri-urban space, 128, 141 Place -attachment, 96–97 -identity, 96–97 Pole of virtual acts, 38–39 Polis, 15 Political Typographies, 18, 48, 57, 61–63, 65 Polycentrism, 18, 72, 76–79, 82–85 Problem -setting, 105, 123 -solving, 106–108, 113, 118, 120–121 Projects for space, 19, 87–100 Proximity, 9, 15, 147–151 Psychogeography, 93, 97 Public parks, 10 space, 11, 13–17, 60, 80–82, 108–111, 119 R Radical Empiricism, 48 Region, 7, 10 Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), 7

Subject Index Relational space, 18, 74–75, 77, 78, 80, 83 Relative space, 73–75, 77, 80, 83 Representational conception, 14 Research by design, 19, 119–121 Re-urbanity, 20, 147, 152–154 Rural gentrification, 153 S Situationism, 93 Situations of depopulation, 145, 146 Social representations, 91–93, 94, 96–97 Somatosensory mirror neurons, 37 Spatial concepts, 2 images of local societies, 97 scenario, 142 vision, 131 Spatiality, 27–28 Sprawl, 54, 78 Sustainability, 82–85 Symbol as an amphibian entity, 32 Synchronic atlas, 133–134 T Technical knowledge, 88–89, 97–98 Terrain vague, 11, 15 Territorial future of the city, 7, 10 Territorialisation, 75, 87–88, 97, 99, 154 Territory, 11 as a deposit of differences, 3 is a free good, 2 without a voice, 12 Theme-parking, 15 Threshold-space, 44 Time dimension, 128 T.O.P. office, 108, 110, 111, 114, 118, 123 U Unadapted City, 19, 108–111, 113, 117–120 Urban cosmetics, 2 essential, 4–7 ethics, 7 innovation, 3 landscape, 5, 11, 14, 21, 84, 93–94, 107, 131 region, 8, 9, 55, 147 segregation, 16, 154

Subject Index Urbanisation processes, 55 Urbanised Landscape/Landscaped City, 48, 52 Urbanistic make-up, 2 Urbs, 7, 13, 95 Utopia, 8, 22, 45, 115–117, 122 Utopian thinking, 19, 121, 122, 123

165 V Valued urban functions, 43 Virtual enhancement of the real world, 44 Visual Essay, 61 W Wastelands, 12

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