The Ludic City

Exploring the Potential of Public Spaces

Quentin Stevens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134143955
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

This international and illustrated work challenges current writings focussing on the problems of urban public space to present a more nuanced and dialectical conception of urban life.

Detailed and extensive international urban case studies show how urban open spaces are used for play, which is defined and discussed using Caillois' four-part definition – competition, chance, simulation and vertigo. Stevens explores and analyzes these case studies according to locations where play has been observed: paths, intersections, thresholds, boundaries and props.

Applicable to a wide-range of countries and city forms, The Ludic City is a fascinating and stimulating read for all who are involved or interested in the design of urban spaces.

Chapter 1
Urban conditions and everyday life

Cities are typically seen as the engines of modern economic life. Cities are thus principally planned to optimize work and other practical, rational, preconceived objectives, and are designed accordingly, with even leisure space serving well-defined functions. But people do not only gather together in cities to meet their basic physiological needs; they also come to cities searching for love, esteem and self-actualization, and to experience the diversity of the world around them and to learn to understand it (Maslow 1943). Cities have a wide range of functions and they serve a wide range of aspirations (Mumford 1961, 1996). Wirth famously defined the urban condition as ‘a relatively large, dense and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals’ (Wirth 1996: 190–91). But this expression misses the heart of the matter: it is the interactions among these diverse individuals, their mixing, which really constitutes urbanity, and which gives city life its special character and possibility. Urbanism without a certain degree of cosmopolitanism is just a mass of completely unconnected, alienated strangers. It is in public open spaces that people are best able and most likely to engage with the social diversity gathered together in cities.

The complexity and breadth of reasons that people are attracted to cities becomes more obvious when focus is shifted from the outcomes of their actions to the qualities of the experience itself. In this book, analysis of the special character of life in urban public space, as a milieu for people’s experiences and actions, focuses on two main elements: the particular dynamics of urban social relations, and a phenomenological account of urban spaces as perceived by people who use them.

The exploration of this theme is guided primarily by the writings of Henri Lefebvre, Walter Benjamin and the Situationist International. These authors all develop definitions of urbanism which they link ‘upward’ to a wider critique of contemporary society, and also ‘downward’ to an analysis of the everyday behavior of individuals in urban space. Their understandings of urbanism also present a conscious critique of the mainstream philosophies that purport to explain urban life.

Both Wirth’s ‘ecological’ model of urban society and its Marxian critique through political economy share two major limitations in their characterization of urban life (Gottdiener 1985). First, they cannot explain voluntaristic actions outside their own conceptual frameworks: on the one hand, instrumentally rational choice and on the other, the social relations of production. Second, they deny that the specific perceptions and behaviors of people within material space have any real significance for their social existence; indeed, they conceive of social relations as existing independently of space. Public space and the events that happen there are epiphenomena of society, or, at worst, a delusion, a false consciousness.

Lefebvre (1991b) argues that all forms of social experience are constituted in and through space. It is in urban spaces that the scope of what people experience as ‘everyday life’ continually develops. Lefebvre identifies three distinct aspects of the experience of urban space as a social milieu, his wellknown ‘conceptual triad’. Spatial practices include all the material social interactions occurring within space to produce and reproduce a particular social formation. Put simply, these practices are what ‘actually’ occurs; they have direct physical and social consequences. Representations of space are the social codes through which people discuss and understand material space and spatial practices. These conventions include names and descriptions of places. People’s perceptions of the ‘reality’ of social life in space are filtered through what they ‘understand’, or ‘believe’, and how they come to know it. Representational spaces are spaces as lived by their inhabitants through complex symbolic association and imagery; ‘it overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects’ (Lefebvre 1991b: 39). These imaginings include real locations such as symbolic sites, as well as mental inventions of new possibilities for spatial practices: ideal, dystopian or alternative social and spatial formations. Representational spaces, whether they have material existence or not, are meanings, references to ideas about social space.

Lefebvre notes that these three aspects are always present and interrelated in any space which might be analyzed. Most critics of urban space examine spatial practices; Lefebvre’s concepts of representations of space and representational spaces extend beyond materialist analyses and emphasize the importance of the perception and constitution of meaning to the definition of what space is. However, if the aim is to understand the everyday social reality of the city, examining representations of space presents problems. Representations of space ‘tend . . . toward a system of verbal . . . signs’ (Lefebvre 1991b: 39): they are designed as a form of knowledge, distanced and abstracted from experience. They are shaped to be communicated – with clear purposes in mind – and not to be lived directly, and hence they suppress many of the contingent nuances of practices and inventions. They are also shaped as part of the broader power relations operating in society, and hence they tend to be more sharply ideological than the other aspects of space. Space as conceptualized ‘is the dominant space in any society . . . tied to the relations of production and to the “order” which those relations impose’ (Lefebvre 1991b: 38–39, 33). Such terms as ‘urban’, ‘public’ and ‘open space’ both inscribe and disguise social power relations; they do not necessarily bring closer knowledge of what life in urban space is really like.

Urban experience and social needs are more than mere conceptual abstractions; they can be understood by looking at everyday life on the streets, at its specific and diverse qualities, at the meanings it might have for those who live it, and in particular at the complex tensions which arise between different needs, different meanings and different users in spaces. Lefebvre, Benjamin and the Situationists also all identify social practices of play as key to understanding the dynamic tensions which shape everyday life in public. This chapter explores in turn the way that urban conditions shape particular dynamics of spatial behavior, sensory perception, and needs, closing with an examination of the role of leisure within everyday urban life. The idea of play constantly emerges within this discussion as a key aspect of urban experience, although different facets of its significance are revealed.

Urban spatial practices

Both Chicago School and structuralist Marxist thinking on the city focus around the idea that the organization of urban spatial patterns and practices are largely determined by economic forces. These forces aim to optimize production and consumption by different social groups through economies of scale and agglomeration or opportunities for the expropriation of profit. Lefebvre contributes to this argument an analysis of how capital markets and the state organize urban space to produce the social relations of industrial mass production (Gottdiener 1985). However, ‘There is not . . . a strict correspondence between modes of production and the spaces they constitute’ (Lefebvre 1987: 31).

At the base of Lefebvre’s own theorization is an analysis of urban space and urban life as a social fact. He argues that urbanism is not merely an induced effect of rational production. His proof is historical: cities existed in pre-capitalist times and have served a broad range of social functions in addition to enhancing production. Each city can be understood as a comprehensive, distinctive cultural artifact and a complex totality of cultural practices both old and new. These different facets are embraced by his use of the term oeuvre (Lefebvre 1996). His critique of ‘functional’ urban planning and his alternative vision can be summarized thus:

[The city] figures in planning as a cog: it becomes the material device apt to organize production, control the daily life of producers and the consumption of products . . . It did not have, it has no meaning but as an oeuvre, as an end, as a place of free enjoyment, as domain of use value.

(Lefebvre 1996: 126)

Lefebvre goes on to identify two essential ways in which cultural life and social life struggle to find their realization through urban spatial conditions (Martins 1982). The first of these is the assembly of the full diversity of the population and their activities, their focused centrality in space and simultaneity in time, and their participation in the management and development of social space:

The right to the city . . . stipulates the right to meeting and gathering; places and objects must answer to certain ‘needs’ generally misunderstood, to certain despised and moreover transfunctional ‘functions’: the ‘need’ for social life and a centre, the need and the function of play, the symbolic function of space.

(Lefebvre 1996: 195, emphasis in original)

Urban culture is not a tidy, static fact, and its practices will inevitably be multiple, contradictory and dynamic. Economies of scale in the city support specialization, which leads to further differentiation of social identities and occupations. Specialization diminishes the significance of the extended family as the locus of social life, and leads to more numerous and complex interrelations between heterogeneous individuals who have no primary ties (Wirth 1996). The processes of growth and differentiation in cities mean there is a certain amount of instability and change in urban living.

Second, ‘The Right to Difference’ means ‘not being classified within preestablished categories’ (Martins 1982: 183). While industrial mass production attempts to homogenize urban spatial activity, urban society differentiates (Lefebvre 1991b). Because of its diversity, urban social life brings about the satisfaction of a wide range of human needs. Yet it also modifies and creates new needs, and people constantly struggle to reshape social space to reflect and to serve these new needs (Lefebvre 1991a, 1991b).

These two themes of concentration and diversity are familiar from Wirth’s formulation of the urban. Lefebvre also highlights a third distinct condition, which relates to the other two, but is something new: the city frames opportunities for play (Lefebvre 1991b, 1996). While a variety of instrumental imperatives may cause people to live together in cities, dense spaces and heterogeneous populations can make a significant contribution to social development only where there are chance encounters, social mixing, exploration of the unfamiliar and risk; when there is an escape from instrumental social relations. These are the part of the social oeuvre which finds its fulfillment in the open public spaces of cities. While most productive work and social reproduction occur in carefully framed settings, play thrives on the density and diversity of people and experiences to be found in urban public space. The concept of play embraces many of the forms of urban social life which can be appreciated as having use value, as ends in themselves. Yet at the same time, play is a lived critique of instrumentally rational action, because it discovers new needs and develops new forms of social life. Lefebvre proposes that it is practices of play which best illustrate the capacities for social action and expression which the urbanization of society has made possible.

The density and diversity of people gathered together in cities give urban social life a distinctive character: it is fundamentally about encounters and interactions among people who are different, and through such interactions the discovery and realization of diverse needs. It is within public spaces that many of these contacts occur. Lefebvre describes the particular social ambience surrounding these urban encounters thus:

The form of the urban, its supreme reason, namely simultaneity and encounter, cannot disappear . . . as a place of encounters, focus of communication and information, the urban becomes what it always was: place of desire, permanent disequilibrium, seat of the dissolution of normalities and constraints, the moment of play and of the unpredictable.

(Lefebvre 1996: 129, emphasis in original)

Here Lefebvre makes several distinct points about how and why urban encounters are playful. The city is a site for multiplicitous practices of desire and not only of systematic, instrumental necessity. Many social encounters in cities are sudden, unplanned and unpredictable, and this means urban behavior is spontaneous and creative. Urban life means engaging with and developing behavior which is unfamiliar, testing the usefulness of pre-existing social rules and roles (Phillips and LeGates 1981). Thus it is that urbanization weakens the traditions, conventions, rhythms and social structures which generally guide practical action, broadening the oeuvre:

the development of cities . . . the concentration of different ethnic and/or professional groups in the same space, with in particular the overthrow of spatial and temporal frameworks, favors the confrontation of different cultural traditions, which tends to expose their arbitrariness practically, through first-hand experience, in the very heart of the routine of the everyday order, of the possibility of doing the same things differently, or, no less important, of doing something different at the same time.

(Bourdieu 1977: 233, emphasis in original)

A wide scope of activities, both practical and playful, occur in any given urban space at different times, under different conditions, and often even at the same time or under the same conditions. This dynamic social context affects the way individual acts are conducted. Bourdieu uses a spatial illustration to explain his concept habitus which helps illustrate the impact of urban space on the conduct of those who use it. He refers to the different social positions and social distances of people brought together in physical space, depicting habitus as ‘so many reminders of this distance and of the conduct required in order to “keep one’s distance” or to manipulate it strategically’ (Bourdieu 1977: 82). The proximity and chance nature of encounters in urban public space frequently disturb such expectations, and heighten tensions. As Edensor (1998: 217) argues, ‘disorganized’ urban spaces ‘challenge the physical and mental dispositions . . . by confrontation with different orders of sensory experience, social interaction, regulation and movement’. Sennett (1974: 49) similarly notes that public space is an ‘amorphous milieu . . . where no-one is really sure what appropriate standards of behavior are’, and that the strangers encountered in the city are ‘unknown quantities’. Nevertheless, many of the everyday actions people perform in the city are significantly shaped by their publicness, the extent to which they involve or are consciously directed toward strangers (Lofland 1998). The acknowledgement and mediation of the mutual impacts of people’s actions leads to the development of social graces, ‘behavior which all agree to treat arbitrarily as “proper” and believable’. This gives people ‘means to be sociable, on impersonal grounds’ (Sennett 1974: 49, 64). People must adapt their own perceptions, inclinations and abilities to suit the unexpected, unfamiliar circumstances of urban social space. And yet in the majority of the many potentially tense social situations which arise in daily urban life, people ignore or tolerate the strange behavior of others, and it is this ‘sense of freedom from judgment that many people report . . . as a major pleasure of being “out in public”’ (Lofland 1998: 32).

The processes of growth and differentiation in cities also mean there is a certain amount of instability and change in the individual’s own way of life (Sennett 1971). Mumford portrays the city as an engine of continuous social development:

In the city, the making and remaking of selves . . . is one of its principal functions . . . each urban period provides a multitude of new roles and an equal diversity of new potentialities. These bring about corresponding changes in laws, manners, moral evaluations, costume, and architecture, and finally they transform the city as a living whole.

(Mumford 1996: 116)

The city provides the opportunity for people to address their various needs by exploring new possibilities in life, by expanding their habitus, in large part through their encounters with others. Sennett (1974) points out that the accumulation of surplus wealth in the city engenders a leisure lifestyle, where social relations are released from the burden of functional necessity. In such circumstances, one is likely to encounter strangers in the city in situations where ‘you are not meeting for some functional purpose, but meeting in the context of nonfunctional socializing, of social interaction for its own sake’ (Sennett 1974: 118). The playful theatricality of roles and masks in urban encounter can thus be understood as an expression of ‘natural passions’ which ‘[transcend] work, family and civic duty’, transgressing and reshaping the rules of social engagement (Sennett 1974: 116). One’s sense of self becomes developed through the manipulation of one’s appearance in the eyes of strangers. It is primarily in urban public spaces that individuals can act publicly, communicate with the public. Some actions, such as performances of identity and political statements, need to be displayed publicly if they are to have any meaning or purpose at all (Arendt 1958). For Lefebvre play between the various parts of the social whole, unfettered, unpredictable, and above all expressive engagement among the full diversity of persons and practices, is a key purpose and outcome of the centralizing function of urban space. This playful function of society can be considered to be just as significant to the constitution of cities as rationality and productivity.

Having presented play as a basic component of use value, as a ‘function’ of cities, Lefebvre also draws upon play as an example when he looks in detail at the impact of capitalism upon urban space. There are three key features of the transformation of urban space by capitalism. It is homogenized and fragmented, so that it can be exchanged as a commodity, and put in the service of accumulation. This fragmented space is a matrix of ‘determinate locations of production and consumption’ (Lefebvre 1991b: 341) which ‘divide life into closed, isolated units’ (The Lettrist International 1996: 44). At the same time urban space is strategically hierarchized and revalorized (both concretely and symbolically) into centers and peripheries which both ‘reflect and contribute to the overall social hierarchy’ (Martins 1982: 178, emphasis in original). Free-time behavior is also subjected to spatial reorganization under capitalism, to serve goals of social domination and accumulation:

witness the predominance of ‘amenities’, which are a mechanism for the localization and ‘punctualization’ of activities, including leisure pursuits, sports and games. These are thus concentrated in specially equipped ‘spaces’ which are as clearly demarcated as factories in the world of work . . . within a space which is determined economically by capital, dominated socially by the bourgeoisie, and ruled politically by the state.

(Lefebvre 1991b: 227)

The Situationists likewise critiqued city planning’s creation of ‘reservations for “leisure” activities separated from the society’, suggesting that ‘[no] spatiotemporal zone is completely separable’ (Kotanyi and Vaneigem 1996: 117). They presented the concept of ‘unitary urbanism’ as both a critique of and a response to the capitalist city, with leisure providing the best illustration of potential freedom and of refutation:

Even if, during a transitional period, we temporarily accept a rigid division between zones of work and residence, we should at least envisage a third sphere: that of life itself (the sphere of freedom, of leisure – the truth of life). Unitary urbanism acknowledges no boundaries; it aims to form a unitary human milieu in which separations such as work/leisure or public/private will finally be dissolved.

(Debord 1996b: 81–82)

Capitalist fragmentation of the city and its social practices has a negative impact on the potentials which urban conditions provide for leisure and play. Social practices of play are stimulated by the density and diversity of urban populations and their actions, but some aspects of these practices are lost if they become tied to functionally and symbolically determined locations.

A third context within which Lefebvre evokes play is when he describes how the distinct social processes of urbanization and industrialization are linked dialectically. The social relations of urbanism reveal the contradictions of the abstract social relations of production. Lefebvre depicts the central tension in contemporary society’s use of urban space as being between the abstract space of production, structured by exchange value and defined and reified by representations of space, and ‘social space, or the space of use values produced by the complex interactions of all classes in the pursuit of everyday life’: in other words, space as lived (Gottdiener 1985: 127). In terms of social practices,

urban life . . . attempts to foil dominations, by diverting them from their goal . . . In this way the urban is more or less the oeuvre of its citizens instead of imposing itself upon them as a system, as an already closed book.

(Lefebvre 1996: 117, emphasis in original)

Lefebvre thus also presents play as an important tactic in the struggle over space where use value seeks to elude and overcome the strictures of exchange value and imagination tries to surmo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Ludic City
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Urban conditions and everyday life
• Chapter 2: Play and the urban realm
• Chapter 3: The social dimensions of urban space
• Chapter 4: Paths
• Chapter 5: Intersections
• Chapter 6: Boundaries
• Chapter 7: Thresholds
• Chapter 8: Props
• Conclusion: Fun follows form, fun follows ‘function’
• References