The Routledge Handbook of People and Place in the 21st-Century City

Kate Bishop, Nancy Marshall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351211529
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Planificación urbana y paisajismo

Increasing urbanization and increasing urban density put enormous pressure on the relationships between people and place in cities. Built environment professionals must pay attention to the impact of people–place relationships in small- to large-scale urban initiatives. A small playground in a neighborhood pocket park is an example of a small-scale urban development; a national environmental policy that influences energy sources is an example of a large-scale initiative. All scales of decision-making have implications for the people–place relationships present in cities. This book presents new research in contemporary, interdisciplinary urban challenges, and opportunities, and aims to keep the people–place relationship debate in focus in the policies and practices of built environment professionals and city managers. Most urban planning and design decisions, even those on a small scale, will remain in the urban built form for many decades, conditioning people's experience of their city. It is important that these decisions are made using the best available knowledge.

This book contains an interdisciplinary discussion of contemporary urban movements and issues influencing the relationship between people and place in urban environments around the world which have major implications for both the processes and products of urban planning, design, and management. The main purpose of the book is to consolidate contemporary thinking among experts from a range of disciplines including anthropology, environmental psychology, cultural geography, urban design and planning, architecture and landscape architecture, and the arts, on how to conceptualize and promote healthy people and place relationships in the 21st-century city. Within each of the chapters, the authors focus on their specific areas of expertise which enable readers to understand key issues for urban environments, urban populations, and the links between them.

SECTION 1

Vibrant Cities

The tensions between the desires and the variation in views of the key players in city development in many countries are high, brought about by the rapid growth of cities, the potentially enormous profits to be made from property development, the desire for political gain, and the wish of the public to be involved in co-designing and ‘making their city’ (Innes and Booher 2015; Marshall et al. 2012). Despite the tensions between these actors, all would argue they want physically attractive, economically sustainable, and socially vibrant cities.

All city planning, design, and management is a process in which the interests of critical actors play out. Governments at all levels have politicians who are charged with overseeing the public interest and urban officials who are seen as the experts who lay down the framework for the design and boundaries of projects. In concert with the public sector, private industry usually funds and builds the desired and allowable developments. The not-for-profit sector (often seen as neo-corporate enablers or as socially minded service providers) assists in delivering city plans, projects, and human services.

Gone are the days of rational planning and meta-plans which used to be the norm of planning processes by government. Increasingly, city decisions are based on the concept and importance of place. Increasingly, the public wants to be involved in co-designing, co-managing, and ‘making their city’ into one that is vibrant, nurturing, healthy, and sustainable. But how to get such places? Sandercock (2003) argues that many contemporary cities are ‘mongrel cities’ with great challenges but also opportunities for a way to live with difference. Sandercock (2003) and Landry (2006) argue that the best ‘city-making’ (which aims for vibrant cities) is made up equally of art and science – both aim for good physical places and animated, welcoming social spaces. This is reflected in the discussions within the chapters of this section.

Place-making initiatives are, in part, an intervention attempting to create positive relationships between people and place. From an architect and urban designer’s perspective, Jon Lang states in his chapter “all cities have a design – a morphology – that is ever evolving. Shaping the city as a place, and the places within it, in particular directions, is a highly political, argumentative process.” In her chapter, Kate Shaw, an urban geographer, also discusses the making of place and the resulting tensions and power relations among the actors: “Both kinds of place-making – formal and informal – can be interpreted as positive and/or negative, their results beneficial for some but not others. The various interpretations are not just a matter of who is doing the interpreting, but of the intent of the practices themselves.” Both Shaw and Lang argue that there are intended and unintended consequences of the city-making process: some enable positive outcomes and others do not. The benefits of the process are hard fought, either way.

The authors of the other three chapters in this section discuss the capacity of the sensory qualities and experience within a place to ‘change the nature of place’ positively for people. Contemporary cities are increasingly vibrant due to the variety of value sets, belief systems, cultures, ethnicities, and tastes of their residents. The role of public life in cities needs to be respected by city-makers and provided with places to support the major contribution it makes to a vibrant city.

Michelle Duffy, a cultural geographer, explores how interactions between people and place contribute to notions of community, identity, and a sense of belonging. She states “event-full moments generate the strong, often spontaneous, feelings of connectedness that arise from participants’ responses to the sensual elements of festivals and parades.”

Rachel Cogger and Nancy Marshall, both city planners, link their work to Landry’s (2006) idea of the ‘sensory landscape’ of the city, specifically the soundscape. These authors argue that city-makers must listen to, understand, and actively manage the acoustic environment to provide sensory nourishment to city dwellers and to enrich the urban soundscape generally for the health and well-being of a city’s inhabitants. “The overall approach to environmental sound should not be about quieting places but rather, identifying ways in which the soundscape of a place can be managed to increase human enjoyment of the place.”

Finally, Marla Guppy’s chapter on the changes to Australian housing as a cultural symbol also discusses how an embodied response to art projects and homes can be part of a public (or private) life. From Guppy’s perspective as an artist and cultural planner, “The art interventions discussed in this chapter are intentionally ‘local’ yet they are part of an international focus on the role of art in empowering community and describing place.”

Together these chapters provide insight into who is making place at different scales, temporarily and permanently, and how it is done. Residents, businesses, and visitors respond well to a vibrant city with identifiable personality and uniqueness. With the increasing corporatization of development, global design paradigms, and knowledge-sharing across social media, cities are at risk of looking and ‘feeling’ the same. It is the site- and culture-specific, idiosyncratic, and local ‘making of place,’ both formal and informal, that will help cities remain distinctive and vibrant.

References

1. Innes, J.E. and D.E. Booher (2015) A turning point for planning theory? Overcoming dividing discourses. Planning Theory, 14(2) pp. 195–213.
2. Landry, C. (2006) The Art of City Making. (London, Cromwell Press).
3. Marshall, N., Steinmetz, C. and R. Zehner (2012) Community participation in planning. In Thompson and Maginn (eds) Planning Australia: An Overview of Urban and Regional Planning (Second edition). (Melbourne, Cambridge University Press) pp. 276–293.
4. Sandercock, L. (2003) Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities of the 21st Century. (New York, Continuum).

1

SELF-CONSCIOUS AND UNSELFCONSCIOUS PLACE-MAKING IN CITIES

Jon Lang

Introduction

A place is a space used and claimed by a group of people or an individual for a time. Places vary in scale – from the universe, to planet Earth, to a country, to a human settlement – and duration – from an area held by a group of people for a lengthy period, to an open spot claimed by an individual for a passing moment. Cities consist of many different places. As an ensemble, they provide the settings for the lives of their inhabitants and the ‘brand’ image that its inhabitants and outsiders have of it (Strauss 1961).

Cities as places – and the places within them – are fabricated by many hands and through many piecemeal design decisions of varying dimensions. Some places are made, largely unselfconsciously, by a city’s inhabitants based on habit; others are made self-consciously by city planners, architects, and other design professionals who follow specific design paradigms to meet defined ends. Many places have been created that are exciting; others, without intending to be so, have turned out to be dull, whether they resulted from self-conscious or unselfconscious design efforts. Indeed, some places have turned out to be so poorly fit for purpose they have been demolished to make way for another attempt to satisfy an intended objective (Garvin 1966; Lang and Marshall 2017). How best, then, to understand and examine a city and the place-making tasks within it?

The focus of this chapter is on formal settlements, not those built informally and unselfconsciously by their, often impoverished, inhabitants with whatever resources are at hand. Nevertheless, many of the observations made here apply to both types. I argue for an ecological psychology approach to the way we describe and analyze the qualities of cities and the way we design them. The chapter begins with a statement about the nature of places as behavior settings and the city as a place (a behavior setting) and a set of places (a set of behavior settings). The utility of thinking about cities in this manner is that it gets away from the tendency that designers have of considering places as built-form objects to be seen and photographed from the outside, from a specific station point at a specific time of day when the light is just right and without the presence of people spoiling the image. Along the way, the limitations of thinking of places purely as behavior settings will be pointed out. With this background in mind, it is then possible to discuss the making of places and the issues involved. The assumption is that cites are for diverse sets of people and other desired and desirable animate species.

The Nature of Places: An Ecological Psychology Approach

Places are what architects have loosely called ‘activity sites’ but what ecological psychologists call ‘behavior settings.’ A behavior setting consists of a standing, or recurrent, activity that takes place within a configuration, or pattern, of built form – a milieu – which co-exist for a time (Barker 1968; Lang and Moleski 2010: 48–50, 79–105; Schoggen 1989). The same milieu may be used for different activities at different times of the day, week, or season. The more ambiguous, or multi-valent, the milieu, the greater the multiplicity of activities that can occur within it. At the extreme, however, the milieu affords so many activities that it accommodates none well.

Two contrasting types of behavior settings are important in describing the morphology of cities: localized settings – generally regarded as places; and links – the paths that join them. Often, places contain links and links contain places. In the latter case, such as the sidewalk of a city street, the places may be ephemeral – lasting for a moment as people greet each other or stop to gaze in shop windows, or more permanent – in the form of kiosks vending newspapers, food, or goods.

The milieu that forms a place consists of surfaces that are illuminated to a greater or lesser extent. Because of gravitational forces, all human activities are related to the horizontal surfaces (or floors), natural or artificial, of the world. Other surfaces organize and are manipulated, unselfconsciously or self-consciously, to organize open spaces into specific configurations. Illumination is necessary for those people with eyesight to see, observe, and (unless color-blind) detect pigments. The different patterns of the surfaces and the materials of which they are made, and the way they are configured into the furnished milieu, afford different activities for different people.

The milieu is designed or redesigned to bound behavior settings and/or to differentiate them into zones that serve different purposes. The boundaries may be real barriers to the movement of people and/or the flow of sounds and odors, or they may be symbolic barriers. Real barriers consist of elements such as walls; symbolic barriers consist of features such as changes in floor coloring and materials and can be easily crossed depending on the predispositions of individuals.

What environmental psychologists have failed to consider is that the milieu, whether or not self-consciously designed as such, is an aesthetic display that gives a place a meaningful visual character. Its patterns contain ‘to-whom-it-may-concern’ messages that appeal to observers according to their tastes (Gans 1975). Patterns of built form contain associational messages about the history, class, and/or status of the people who inhabit or view them. Designs also carry the imprimatur of their creators, whether they are shaped unselfconsciously by the day-to-day activities of people, or self-consciously by individuals or community groups such as ‘guerilla gardeners’ who take design illegally into their own hands (Reynolds 2008), or by design professionals attempting to convey precise messages to the public through their work. If they are self-conscious professional compositions, they may well have intended meanings that only the cognoscenti – those who understand the design paradigm employed or know the genre of the creator – will understand; other observers will interpret the patterns based on their own experiences. The attitude that people have to a place thus depends on its visual appearance and the meanings that they perceive embedded in it, as well as its affordances for potential and actual activities and the people involved in them.

It is tempting to think of the milieu as having an implicit ‘invitational quality’ for specific activities and actions akin to those facing Alice in Wonderland. Designers should assume this view with caution. The pattern and nature of the surfaces of the milieu – their solidity, transparency, and textures – and the objects a space contains must be able to afford an activity for the activity to take place. Those activities will only occur if people perceive the opportunity to carry them out, are predisposed to engage in them, and are physiologically capable of doing so. The same pattern almost inevitably affords many different behaviors, and different people will avail themselves of the affordances that they recognize to fulfill their motivations, whether social or anti-social.

The garden square shown in Figure 1.1 consists of many behavior settings that enrich it as a place for its habitués, casual visitors, and the cognoscenti who patronize or pass through it or who are there as architectural tourists. The square consists of both real barriers, depending on the capabilities of a person, and symbolic barriers. As a place it is crisscrossed by well-travelled diagonal paths that are direct links to other places (Figure 1.2). The design is the work of a well-known early 20th-century architect, Jean Philippe Cret (1876–1945), although few of the habitués of the square will know that; they are also unlikely to know the modernized Beaux-Arts design paradigm within which he worked...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• The Power of Cities on People–Place Relationships
• Section 1 Vibrant Cities
• Section 2 Diverse Cities
• Section 3 Equitable Cities
• Section 4 Smart Cities
• Section 5 Resilient Cities
• Meeting the Demands for Change, Adaptation, and Innovation in 21st-Century Cities
• Index