Placemaking

An Urban Design Methodology

Derek Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317300069
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

End-users provide the most valuable perspective and insights into how public social space should function. Much of the failure of urban settings can be related to over-structured urban environments which deterministically prescribe usage, constraining instead of enabling socio-spatial performance.

Planning decisions by specialists should be made with the participation of the end-user to minimise uncertainty as far as possible, creating enabling environments. Placemaking: An Urban Design Methodology presents a methodology that evaluates the preferences of urban dwellers and synthesises these with the planning specialist's expertise, better representing all views. Author Derek Thomas integrates the Sondheim Methodology with means to understanding cultural clues to create a matrix methodology that links planning primers with planning actions.

A unique new tool for community planners, this book emphasises the importance of the community while taking into account the expertise of the planner in creating public spaces.

Chapter One

10.4324/9781315648125-2

Planning tools for shaping the urban spatial character

Generally governments only deal with planning issues as they affect human rights, more particularly because human expectations are important in the formulation of social, economic and environmental policy. Participation in the planning of the urban habitat, on the other hand, is a sphere of human rights that has generally not yet attained the political stature it deserves, despite being germane to the performance of urbanised communities in terms of their productivity and quality of life. The cultural priorities of the urban dweller – such as privacy, identity, community life, work and recreational opportunity – have not been given their rightful due for the invaluable clues they provide for the planning and design of the urban dwellers’ habitat. Physical planning methodologies need to advance beyond identifying goals solely through intuition, and should provide an impartial and rational outcome.

Many methods employ environmental quality indices to measure levels of unemployment, aggregations of income and education or information about living standards but say nothing of use about spatial planning or objectives. “Environmental assessment methodologies in widespread use today can be catalogued into four major groups: the overlay mapping, matrix, index and modelling approaches” (Sondheim, 1978: 28). The overlay mapping techniques of McHarg, published in 1969, became popular since the method relied on maps already available from government surveys, but the definition of some environmental attributes may have been too limited. Often the use of indices can assist towards developing environmental indicators, such as Kreisel’s 1983 model, for describing the existing environment, for forecasting trends in environmental quality and for identifying existing environmental impacts, but they are not universally accepted as reliable units of measure. In fact, Craik and Zube (1976: 165) conclude that “few, if any, perceptions of environmental quality indices have achieved the status of standard reliable measures.” Such data are likely to be of more use to urban sociologists than designers and planners of the urban social space.

Existing and new directions

Public space, viewed mainly as a shell or container with the emphasis on morphological structure and functional use, ignores its ever-changing meaning, as well as its context and ongoing dynamics between social actors, their cultures and struggles. The key role of space in enabling opportunities for social action, the fluidity of its social meaning and the changing degree of ‘publicness’ of a space remain unexplored fields of academic enquiry and professional practice (Tornaghi and Knierbein, 2015).

Attributes of urban space are abstract and sentient by nature and need to be related to the performance of the urban space components. Researchers perceive urban space attributes to be universal and invariant across cultures encompassing, inter alia, the need for social encounter, aesthetic appeal, identity of self and community, functionality, social amenity, privacy, safety, economic opportunity, recreational options, and the enriching presence of nature.

From a more specific perspective, the relationship between public space and democracy needs to be explored. In theorising democracy as a spatial practice, Hoskyns (2014: 6) explores “the idea of participating democracy as a space practice,” and examines “more theoretical aspects of democracy and public space through political philosophy and spatial theory.”

Cultural differences tend to determine perceptions by cognitive association. These differences are important factors that should be captured meaningfully in any procedure that is focused on defining planning and design parameters. Whether canvassing specialist or lay opinion, it is important to recognise that cultural differences determine perceptions of environmental quality. Variables likely to affect priorities in socio-cultural preference modelling and the resultant design and planning directives would be influenced by: psychological, social and cultural factors that recognise life-cycle nuances; personal priorities relating to age and sex; economic and physical context factors generally; prevailing environmental attitudes, such as in the developing world; and the political mechanisms by which decisions are made with, for or on behalf of an urban population. It is rational to employ modelling procedures that enable these cultural priorities to inform the design of urban social space in a constructive and directly responsive way.

The methodology presented in this book is an adaptation of an environmental assessment method developed by Sondheim (1978) into a design and planning tool with the emphasis on psycho-social aspects of urban living, or the wellbeing of the urban dweller. The focus is therefore a creative approach that reduces the high degree of risk for the urban designer and planner as agents representing the interests of the end-users, the main stakeholders. There is a significant difference between the integrative nature of this method and other psychometric evaluation procedures, which tend to isolate the specialist from the end-user.

At the heart of the adapted Sondheim matrix methodology is the process of transforming the spatial performance goals (SPGs) into urban design and planning primers (PPs). The urban designer or planner as a principal agent would then be better placed to ensure that optimum norms, cultural traditions or conventions, ergonomics, design criteria or best opportunities are in direct response to the expectations of the urban dweller.

Socio-cultural variables and perceptions of spatial quality

It is common cause that successful urban environments rely on the criteria that govern the urban dweller’s perceptions. For the purposes of this study, the socio-cultural variables and perceptions of spatial quality are encapsulated in the following constructs.

Sense of place

From the micro- (individual building) to the macro- (city) scale, the influence – whether in style or functionality – of the urban designer or the presence of a particular piece of architecture is integral to the success of a particular urban social space.

Familiarity with a place in specific urban contexts is an important factor evoking either positive or negative responses. Most cities have their showpiece public spaces, but similarly most have their no-go areas. Before the twentieth century places that looked important were important, and places of public importance could easily be identified. In the modern context, this tends to be less so. Some urban designers link the notion of familiarity with legibility. Lynch (1981: 118) defines sense of place as: “the degree to which the settlement can be clearly perceived and mentally differentiated and structured in time and space by its residents, and the degree to which that mental structure connects with their values and concepts – the match between environment, or sensory and mental capabilities, and our cultural constructs.” In outline, important critical factors in the ‘legibility’ of public space are: the biggest open spaces should be related to the most important public facilities; and the point of a legible layout is that people are able to form clear, accurate images of it. Lynch (1981), who pioneered the topic of image maps in the 1960s, suggests that there are overlapping features among people’s images of places – namely, nodes, edges, paths, districts and landmarks. It would be wrong to assume that every area should contain all of these features. Note that it is the user rather than the designer who forms the cognitive image of a physical space.

The terms ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ spaces are sometimes used by planners. Both have a useful function and contribute to the character of place (Trancik, 1986). Hard spaces are principally bounded by architectural walls and are often intended to function as major gathering places for social activity. Accordingly, soft spaces are predominantly landscaped by the natural environment, whether inside or outside the city.

Architecture and landscape architecture should respond to and aim at strengthening the sense of place. Those who comment critically on the spatial attributes of environments for social intercourse believe that the ‘notion of place’ is largely as a result of familiar associations with a place. Part of the presence of any good place is the feeling that it embodies, of being its own kind of space with its special limits and potentials. This field implies the connections between roads and buildings, and between buildings and other buildings, trees, the seasons, decorations, events and other people in other times (Smithson and Smithson, 1967). Just as each locality should seem continuous with the recent past, so it should seem continuous with the near future (Lynch, 1981).

A place is a space that is distinctive in character. Since ancient times, the genus loci, or spirit of place, has been recognised as the concrete reality man has to face to come to terms within his daily life (Norberg-Schulz, 1971). These associations that people form make certain subliminal demands on an urban space for the experience it affords, such as a sense of timelessness. This places a particular obligation on the urban designer or planner to enable bonding of the end-user with the urban environment. A sense of place has a hard-nosed meaning where street traders set up shop. These notions place a particular obligation on the urban designer to recognise the bonding of the urban dweller with ‘place’ – a dynamic interaction which is abstract, sentient and challenging.

Observers believe that the character of a place consists of both the concrete substance of shape, texture and colour and the more intangible cultural associations – a certain patina given by human use over time (Trancik, 1986). This phenomenon arises from the need for people, as cultural beings, to have a stable system of places to depend on, thereby providing emotional attachment and identity with place. The analogy on a personal level is to one’s own home environment. The universal nature of this dependence on the qualities of a particular space places a very real onus on the urban designer. Trancik (1986: 113) observes: “People require a relatively stable system of places in which to develop themselves, their social lives, their culture. These needs give man-made space an emotional content – a presence that is more than physical.”

Place lies at the centre of geography’s interests. In a commonsense way geography is about places. But the commonsense uses of the word place belie its conceptual complexity. While the word ‘place’ has been used as long as geography has been written, it is only since the 1970s that it has been conceptualised as a particular location that has acquired a set of meanings and attachments. Place is a meaningful site that combines location, locale, and sense of place … Locale refers to the material setting for social relations – the way a place looks, including buildings, streets, parks, and other visible aspects of a place. Sense of place refers to the more nebulous meanings associated with a place, the feelings and emotions a place evokes. These meanings can be individual and based on personal biography or they can be shared.

(Cresswell, 2004: 1)

Amenity

If embodied physically and spatially in the urban environment and perceived to be so by the urban dweller, invariant cultural needs or performance criteria can reinforce the rightness of planning goals qualitatively and effectively, and offer direction in an urban design and planning brief. The invariants common to most cultures, described as spatial performance goals (SPGs), broadly encompass perceptions relating to:

• The need for social encounter made possible physically and where appropriate within the various spatial components of the urban setting.
• An environment which is pleasing aesthetically from the collective opinion of a specific culture.
• The need to identify with a place and one’s own self-identity within an urban place that provides the opportunity for kinship and social networking.
• The identity of the place, which encompasses its distinctiveness of character or the familiarity and the territorial bonding with a place.
• The ability of the urban environment to function successfully as a place or residence, to enable movement, provide social and cultural amenity, or as a productive opportunity environment.
• The degree to which privacy is made possible, where appropriate even in denser urban environments. The opportunity for privacy is regarded by many social researchers as essential for healthy and productive urban living.
• The extent to which safety aspects are ensured in terms of the physical arrangements for both the individual and community-related security and health.
• The physical arrangements necessary to conduct informal as well as formal business and ways of generating livelihoods.
• The opportunity for spontaneous and formal recreation and entertainment as enhancing factors in the urban experience.
• The degree to which access to nature through an open space system is facilitated – the extent to which the natural setting has been utilised to enhance the experience of urban life.

To demonstrate the methodology presented in this book, the above universal needs of the urban dweller will be adopted. However, in real situations, a community’s collective preference should be canvassed in ‘visioning workshops’ or similar, as promoted by UN-Habitat and other community-based organisations and expressed as the SPGs. In turn, the SPGs become catalysts suggesting familiar planning primers (PPs), as in a typical design and planning brief.

After being linked to the PPs using the Spreadsheet (Figure 3.1) in Chapter Three, the listed SPGs are defined in more detail in Chapter Four. The descriptors thus derived become the coordinates in the matrix methodology in Chapter Five. ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Frontmatter Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Polling sheet (1)
• Appendix 2: Polling sheet (2)
• Appendix 3: Environmental specifications
• Appendix 4: Online references sourced from the internet
• Index