Urban Maps

Instruments of Narrative and Interpretation in the City

Richard Brook, Nick Dunn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351876490
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book concerns the city and the 'devices' that define the urban environment by their presence, representation or interpretation. The texts offer an interdisciplinary discourse and critique of the complex systems, artifacts, interventions and evidences that can inform our understanding of urban territories; on surfaces, in the margins or within voids. The diverse media of arts practices as well as commercial branding are used to explore narratives that reveal latent characteristics of urban situations that conventional architectural inquiry is unable to do. The subjects covered are presented within a wider framework of urban theory into which are embedded case study examples that outline the practices, processes and interpretations of each theme. The chapters provide a contemporary reading of urban socio-cultural conditions using 'mapping' as a lens to explore and communicate the social phenomena and lived experiences of the dynamic and temporal city. Mapping is developed as a form of critical instrumentality to expose, record and contribute to the understanding of the singular essences of space, place and networks by thematic, cognitive and experiential modes of investigation.

1
Introduction

The City

Prior to any discussion concerning the relevance of mapping and the divergent creative practices featured in this book, it is useful to establish the context within which we are now operating. In order to provide the reader with a clear definition and understanding of this context it is necessary to define a critical position that accounts for a particular view of the contemporary urban environment, its global development and emergent characteristics. This definition has a dual function; firstly it is presented to guide readers through the rest of the book and secondly it is intended to provoke thought about the current urban condition and the role of architecture in an order that has witnessed the recession of tradition and convention. The latter point is particularly pertinent for designers who face the twenty-first century city as a mediated landscape of networks, nodes and fluctuating systems of density, programme, and urban space.

Specifically here, we are concerned with the forces or conditions of urbanism that are intrinsic to the supermodern conurbation. We view the city as a process driven landscape¹ that reveals more about itself by that which is ‘un-designed’ as opposed to that which is designed. The capitalist driven contrast between a polarized peripheral urban condition and a formally indistinct core is intriguing for its ability to subsume planning ideals. The slow but steady destruction of context as a materially and formally constrained condition can be accounted for with two distinct events that have occurred by accretion during the twentieth century: ‘the erosion of place’ and the ‘confusion of space’.

‘Erosion of place’ is a wide-ranging term that encompasses the (socio-physical) forces of modernity that have diluted, compressed, devolved and dissolved the traditional notion of a focal point for community, the physical landmark that envelops realities of community, exchange and contemplation.

A sense of place in itself enhances every human activity that occurs there and encourages the deposit of a memory trace.²

By supposing that erosion of place is a typical feature of the late twentieth century it is also suggested that the memory traces of the inhabitants of this time are somehow dissolved or diluted, perhaps more accurately, dis-apparent. The cause of displacement of memory is inherent to the erosion of place. These two events are concurrent: ‘Abstract market forces that detach people from social institutions have overpowered specific forces of attachment identified with place.’³

Place has been defined as a notion ascribed to familiar objects or scenarios that provide reference for orientation and recollection. In The Image of the City, Lynch describes the contents of city images, with reference to physical form. His classification reveals five elements: paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks.⁴ It is essentially these elements, or a combination of, that define physical place, or delineate space. Whilst Lynch’s elements were considered in the text in terms of their use as cognitive navigational aids, their compound presence may be perceived as ‘of place’. The notion of place is also a result of a social consciousness or the mental association of certain properties to a particular location by a section of the population. The ‘market’ as a physical entity perhaps best embodies Lynch’s five elements, as each of the five is intrinsic to the model of a medieval market. The historic notions of market and place are interdependent. In its original form, a market was both a literal place and a socially constructed space. Markets were inextricably connected with local communities and the church, the event predominantly occurred in the same place at the same time. The incidence of interaction and exchange provided the means for community, both materially and culturally.⁵ The market was a fixed event in space and time, wherein the nuances of a locality could be confined, and described within the matrix of small-scale commodity production. ‘The social institutions of market and place supported each other.’ Indeed, the relationship between not only market and place, but also market and urbanism is made by Henri Lefebvre. He observes:

The city in Vitruvius is conspicuous by its absence/presence; though he is speaking of nothing else, he never addresses it directly. It is as though it were merely an aggregation of “public” monuments and “private” house … Only in the sixteenth century, after the rise of the medieval town (founded on commerce, and no longer agrarian in character), and after the establishment of “urban systems” in Italy, Flanders, England, Spanish America and elsewhere did the town emerge as a unified entity-and as a subject.⁶

This statement preserved its integrity into the eighteenth century as larger towns developed, markets defined streets and districts. It was the industrial age that slowly separated market and place.⁷ The shift of production, from a home or shop based activity to factories, ultimately led to the development of factory towns. The factory town was a method of permanently attaching skilled workers to their place of work through the provision of a highly ordered social infrastructure; Port Sunlight, Bourneville and Saltaire in Britain are all examples of this approach (see Figure 1.1). The paternalistic nature of the entrepreneurial directors of these grand schemes intended, through the provision of public buildings, private housing and modern utilities, to create a tempered version of urbanism without the social promiscuity of the city. Market no longer internalized place, place began to internalize market.⁸

In contrast to the pre-eminence of markets, modern culture dilutes the idea of place. The language of modernism expresses a universal experience of movement away from place and aspires to submerge the concept into a larger whole.⁹ In the same way that the train and the camera began to alter concepts of distance, technology reinforces the notion that geographically localized communities are archaic. Electronic information exchange connects even the furthest and most uninhabitable locations, but erodes the social distance that made experiencing them so distinctive.¹⁰ As markets have globalized, place has diminished. We are conditioned to perceive place as a geographical location, we are almost equally comfortable with the idea of specific places as concentrations of a ‘type’ (person, economic activity, landscape). Place, in a wider context, is a cultural artifact of social conflict and cohesion, it expresses how a spatially connected group of people can mediate the demands of cultural identity, local authority and economic gain. Place as a descriptive for a whole city is no longer applicable. In European culture a city was once something defined by walls and gates. The gates of our modern city are the passport control of the airport or the platform of the station or the modem attached to the computer. Regulated, configured cities no longer exist; the city is a composite of invisible networks devoid of landmarks and overrun by nodes.

Speed expands time by contracting space: it negates the notion of the physical dimension.¹¹

Figure 1.1 Port Sunlight, built by Lord Lever between 1889 and 1914 in the garden suburb style

Source: Author’s own, 1999.

The built environment of the city obviously still exists but its apparent permanence disguises the facts of transience and temporality. Architecture once governed proportion, and buildings were a symbol of meaning. Today when a church can become a design studio, a warehouse, a penthouse, the permanence of meaning becomes obsolete. The grand narratives of our society, progress and the liberation of humanity are only precursors to the crisis of themselves. The boundaries of progress and liberation have no limits; there is no homogenous goal. In cyberspace and in real time we inhabit a fractured, disconfigured, deregulated world.

The morphological and physical changes that have occurred during the late twentieth century are often complex and difficult to define, the precise nature and form of these changes, even more so. Locally, variations in topography, climate, culture, economy and politics all have a bearing on the wider implications of global societal shifts. The ‘confusion of space’ is a wide-ranging term that aims to define spatial characteristics that represent and are symptomatic of the most basic ways in which the urban landscape has been transformed. The spatial fragmentation of the urban landscape is directly correlated to the social shifts associated with the erosion of place. These characteristics have confused the categorization of space in several ways: (1) by the simultaneous, paradoxical policies of decentralization and concentration, which has given rise to (2) a fragmented urban landscape full of voids. (3) By the high definition of peripheral developments, which contrast against the (4) neutrality of the spatial envelopes they contain. (5) By the chaotic mix of functions within a chaotic palette of forms, rendering the task of the urbanist, one of establishing significance and event that will justify the ostensibly indescribable urban matrix. Symptomatic of the same condition is (6) the blurring of the distinction between categories of space. Spaces that once defined themselves, expressing purism (natural/cultural), now combine social and commercial functions, sponsors and symbols. Time, that was perceived as distinctive due to the finite nature of the social experience, is now compressed; social functions and experiences have become closely combined both physically and by mental association.

It would be too simple a definition to suggest that the ‘erosion of place’ is simply correlated to any one of the conditions described above, or that the ‘erosion of place’ is the only spatial symptom of hyper-cities. Info-media communications technology, indeed technology at large, can though, be held accountable. Essentially the advances in speed of communication have altered the way we work, eat, holiday, talk, be entertained, travel; the way we are. The common factor amongst these is speed; everything is faster, thus more efficient, with far tighter margins, higher expectations and demand for profit, thus less occasion for flexibility and adaptability. This sequence not only defines the way we work but the buildings we work within. The speed and ease of movement that has spawned drive-through restaurants, conveyor-type visits to the controlled environment of the supermarket, robot-like transitions through airports, has interfered with the experiential, accidental event, landmark, district or path that once defined place. The nature of the urban environment as one of flux, is not a new or unique state, as illustrated, but one that has accelerated through time and ultimately manifested itself in a generic form, indistinguishable from its neighbour or even its distant cousin. As actual places decline in significance and particularity, the space between them increases in prominence and quality. ‘Roads no longer merely lead to places: they are places’¹² (see Figure 1.2). Whilst Brinckerhoff-Jackson’s statement here implies a violent shift, it is used in this context to reinforce an idea. It has been shown that the association between roads and place does in fact have some historical precedence.¹³

Figure 1.2 Postcard showing Charnock Richard Services on the M6

Source: © Valentine of Dundee Ltd.

The erosion of place is symptomatic of both the confusion and the polarization of space, the contrast between intensely defined space and functionally bereft space that are subservient to one another. Capitalism and the economic need for development inextricably link place and space in this context where there is no necessity for development in the first instance. The evidence of zoning and rigid programmatic demarcation manifests itself most at the periphery, the remaining bastion ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• About the Authors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Brand, Image and Identity
• 3 Networks
• 4 Films
• 5 Marks
• 6 Object
• 7 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index