Planning and Place in the City

Mapping Place Identity

Marichela Sepe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135123789
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Under the influence of globalization, the centres of many cities in the industrialised world are losing their place identity, the set of cultural markers that define a city's uniqueness and make it instantly recognisable. A key task for planners and residents, working together, is to preserve that unique sense of place without making the city a parody of itself.

In Planning and Place in the City, Marichela Sepe explores the preservation, reconstruction and enhancement of cultural heritage and place identity. She outlines the history of the concept of placemaking, and sets out the range of different methods of analysis and assessment that are used to help pin down the nature of place identity. This book also uses the author's own survey-based method called PlaceMaker to detect elements that do not feature in traditional mapping and identifies appropriate planning interventions.

Case studies investigate cities in Europe, North America and Asia, which demonstrate how surveys and interviews can be used to draw up an analytical map of place identity. This investigative work is a crucial step in identifying cultural elements which will influence what planning decisions should be taken in the future. The maps aim to establish a dialogue with local residents and support planners and administrators in making sustainable changes. The case studies are amply illustrated with survey data sheets, photos, and coloured maps.

Innovative and broad-based, Planning and Place in the City lays out an approach to the identification and preservation of place and cultural heritage suitable for students, academics and professionals alike.

Part I
Definition of the field of
investigation

Section I
Place and place
identity as key
concepts

Chapter 1

The concept of Place

The relationships linking the elements that make up the phenomenological world are complex and in many cases contradictory. As Norberg-Schulz has pointed out, phenomena may incorporate others, while some phenomena constitute the environment in which others manifest themselves. One term that can be used to define the environment in which phenomena manifest themselves is ‘place’ — the space in which events occur (or ‘take place’) (Norberg-Schulz, 1980, p.6).

Place is not evident: it should be sought, identified and gained.

I would like there to exist places that are stable, unmoving, intangible, untouched and almost untouchable, unchanging, deep rooted; places that might be points of reference, of departure, of origin: My birthplace, the cradle of my family, the house where I may have been born, the tree I may have seen grow (that my father may have planted the day I was born), the attic of my childhood filled with intact memories … Such places don't exist, and it's because they don't exist that space becomes a question, ceases to be self evident, ceases to be incorporated, ceases to be appropriated. Space is a doubt: I have constantly to mark it, to designate it. It's never mine, never given to me, I have to conquer it.

(Perec, 1997, p.91)¹

Places are the element of the existential place and constitute the primary unit. Berque (1999) acknowledges the coexistence of two aspects in place, one quantitative and the other qualitative, which complement each other. Every place

necessarily possesses a part which is both material — physical and ecological — and measurable, and therefore commensurable with other sites. This qualitative dimension is akin to the Aristotelian topos² and Heidegger's Stelle: as for the container, it is the external limit of a thing in the universal space of an objectified environment. On the other hand, place is related no less necessarily to an immaterial, phenomenal and semantic — non-measurable — dimension, and thus cannot be compared to other places. This qualitative and unique dimension makes it similar to Plato's Khora³ and Heidegger's Ort⁴: it is the condition of existence of the thing within the sensitive world. These two aspects are combined trajectorively in the Ecumene⁵ reality: every place is not only a topos, but also a khora, and vice versa.⁶

Specifically regarding the quality aspect, place — as Healey (2010, pp.33–34) asserts — is also related to the meaning that people give to their surroundings and their capacity to influence them. Places are not just a set of objects positioned on a site in order to make up a part of a city or of a territory. They assume a specific meaning in the moment in which we infuse them with a value. Indeed the term place — such as meant by Healey — does not concern the objective reality and their buildings, streets, landscapes and facilities, nor is it considered as necessarily coterminous with administrative jurisdiction. ‘Things may be co-located, and relations may overlay each other in physical spaces when we feel that we have arrived somewhere, when we sense an ambiance, when we feel that we are at some kind of nodal space in the flows of our lives’ (Healey 2010, pp.33–34).

Places and people possess, according to Norberg-Schulz, a genius loci, a sort of guardian spirit which accompanies them to their death and determines their character. The genius corresponds to what a thing is or what it wants to be. ‘Since ancient times the Genius loci, or “spirit of place” has been recognized as the concrete reality man has to face and come to terms with in his daily life … and the task of the architect is to create meaningful places, whereby he helps man to dwell’ (Norberg-Schulz, 1980, p.5).

Aldo Rossi recognizes in the choice of place a strong value in the classical world both for a single building and a city.

The ‘situation’ — the site — was governed by the genius loci, the local divinity, an intermediary who presided over all that was to unfold in it. … To bring this idea into the domain of urban artifacts, we must return to the value of images, to the physical analysis of artifacts and their surroundings; and perhaps this will lead us to a pure and simple understanding of the value of the locus. For such an idea of place and time is seemingly capable of being expressed rationally, even if it embraces a series of values that are outside and beyond what we experience.

(Rossi, 1984, p.103)

All places have a character which is the world's main mode of ‘supply’ a priori.

‘Character’ is at the same time a more general and a more concrete concept than ‘space’. On the one hand it denotes a general comprehensive atmosphere, and on the other the concrete form and substance of the space-defining elements. Any presence is intimately linked with a character.

(Norberg-Schulz, 1980, pp.13–14)

In place, we can recognize the infinite characters that it consists of (Sepe, 2007). Below, we will treat the environmental, historic, symbolic, urban, perceptive, anthropological, sociological, psychological character, until we reach the virtual and that of non-place, which is useful to provide a framework for the topics in this book.

Environmental character, as Norberg-Schulz (1980) affirms, is the essence of the place. It consists in shape, in concrete things, the atmosphere in which these live. The first operation ‘to give life to a place’ is to give it a name in order to make it recognizable to the rest of the world around it, or construct it, according to our own way of thinking and vision of the world.

According to an environmental-psychological approach, individual places should be treated by positioning them in a wider system of places in which they belong. As Bonnes and Secchiaroli (1995, pp.192–194) assert, the consideration with which to start is the existence of organizational modalities with which the individual experiences the place. Places are perceived as being interconnected at the individual or collective level.

Place is historical ‘from the moment when — combining identity with relations — it is defined by a minimal stability. This is the case even though those who live in it may recognize landmarks there which do not have to be objects of knowledge’ (Augé, 1995, p.44)⁷.

Rossi (1984, p.106) refers to the study of Gallia by Eydouxon:

places that have always been considered unique, and he suggested further analysis of such places, which seem to have been predestined by history. These places are real signs of space; and as such they have a relationship both to chance and to tradition. I often think of the piazzas depicted by the Renaissance painters, where the place of architecture, the human construction, takes on a general value of place and of memory because it is so strongly fixed in a single moment.

Rossi theorizes on the historical method for the study of the city which can be analysed from two different perspectives:

In the first, the city was seen as a material artifact, a man-made object built over time and retaining the traces of time, even if in a discontinuous way. Studied from this point of view — archaeology, the history of architecture, and the histories of individual cities — the city yields very important information and documentation. Cities become historical texts; in fact, to study urban phenomena without the use of history is unimaginable, and perhaps this is the only practical method available for understanding specific urban artifacts whose historical aspect is predominant. … The second point of view sees history as the study of the actual formation and structure of urban artifacts. It is complementary to the first and directly concerns not only the real structure of the city but also the idea that the city is a synthesis of a series of values. Thus it concerns the collective imagination. Clearly the first and second approaches are intimately linked, so much so that the facts they uncover may at times be confounded with each other.

(Rossi, 1984, pp. 127–128)

Historical places can also become symbolic. Urban environments contain not just meanings and values but also symbols which are the fields of investigation of semiotics.

As Eco (1968, pp.56–57) explains, semiotics studies ‘all cultural phenomena as if they were systems of signs’. The world is replete with ‘signs’, interpreted and understood as a function of society, culture and ideology. Following Ferdinand de Saussure, the process of creating meaning is called ‘signification’: ‘signifields’ are what are referred to, signifiers are things that refer to them, and signs establish the association between them.⁸

According to Magnaghi (2005, p.37):

Place is a cultural entity speaking to its contemporaries in the long process of anthropization of the landscape, creating identity, memory, language, material culture, and symbolic and affective messages. As long as we treat places — in the wake of mass industrial culture — as beast of burden (without loading them to death, making them carry a sustainable weight), we will still have no idea of their deep riches and we will hardly be able to reverse permanently the planetary catastrophe caused through our lack of knowledge about local places and the environment.

Through the analysis of places, a more detailed and qualitative interpretation of the city is carried out. This is not circumscribed to its aesthetic essence, nor even to its physical geometry. The functional and symbolic interpretations of the elements of a place are the fundamental factors for understanding its meaning (Migliorini and Venini, 2001, p.129). ‘And as society changes, so does signification. Meanings attached to the built environment become modified as social values evolve in response to changing patterns of socio-economic organization and lifestyles’ (Knox, 1984)⁹.

Mumford (1961, pp.9–10) states that the first urban nucleus was constituted when Palaeolithic hunters began to settle in some fixed gathering places which, as they became meeting places between groups that were no longer occasional, contributed to the formation of social groupings, the basis for proto-urban settlements in the Neolithic period.

Thus even before the city is a place of fixed residence, it begins as a meeting place to which people periodically return: the magnet comes before the container, and this ability to attract non-residents to it for intercourse and spiritual stimulus no less than trade remains one of the essential criteria of the city, a witness to its inherent dynamism, as opposed to the more fixed and indrawn form of the village, hostile to the outsider. The first germ of the city, then, is in the ceremonial meeting place that serves as the goal for pilgrimage: a site to which family or clan groups are drawn back, at seasonable intervals, because it concentrates, in addition to any natural advantages it may have, certain ‘spiritual’ or supernatural powers, powers of higher potency and greater duration, of wider cosmic significance, than the ordinary processes of life.… Some of the functions and purposes of the city, accordingly, existed in such simple structures long before the complex association of the city had come into existence and re-fashioned the whole environment to give them sustenance and support.

(Mumford, 1961, pp.9–10)

The urban character of a place changes in part with the change of time: the seasons, the passing of the day and the weather conditions, resulting in different light, contribute to changing its character. This character is also:

determined by the material and formal constitution of the place. We must therefore ask: how is the ground on which we talk, how is the sky above our heads, or in general; how are the boundaries which define the place. How a boundary is depends upon its formal articulation, which is again related to the way it is ‘built’. Looking at a building from this point of view, we have to consider how it rests on the ground and how it rises towards the sky. Particular attention has to be given to its lateral boundaries, or walls, which also contribute decisively to determine the character of the urban environment.

(Norberg-Schulz, 1980, p. 14)

Halbwachs in his studies on collective memory theorizes on the interrelationship that exists between a group and the space which it occupies:

The group not only transforms the space into which it has been inserted, but also yields and adapts to its physical surroundings. It becomes enclosed within the framework it has built. The group's image of its external milieu and its stable relationships with this environment becomes paramount in the idea it forms of itself, permeating every element of its consciousness, moderating and governing its evolution. … Thus we understand why spatial images play so important a role in the collective memory. The place a group occupies is not like a blackboard, where one may write and erase figures at will. … But place and group have each received the imprint of the other. Therefore every phase of the group can be translated into spatial terms, and its residence is but the juncture of all these terms. Each aspect, each detail, of this place has a meaning intelligent only to members of the group, for each portion of its space corresponds to various and different aspects of the structure and life of their society, at least of what is most stable in it.

(Halbwachs, 1992, p.54)

Expanding Halbwachs...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction: planning the city — mapping place identity
• Part I Definition of the field of investigation
• Part II Making places for people
• Part III Case studies
• Conclusion: towards a sustainable place identity
• Notes
• References
• Index