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New Urban Theory

Bo Grönlund, architect maa, associate professor

Lecture notes for the course:

New urban theory - developed by ‘non-architects’’- seen an architectural perspective

at

The Royal Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, Copenhagen

November 2005

NB! These are lecture notes in progress, not a finished presentation. The depth and structure the different sections is not yet as comprehensive as I want it to be. Hopefully they anyhow give an overview of the basic findings presented in the course.

This version of the notes is rewritten and enlarged in February 2002 and now contains 43 pages in all - with working internet links.

Links and dates updated November 27, 2005

Key words: New urban theory, architectural perspective, urbanity, Johan Asplund, William Whyte, Henri Lefebvre, Richard Sennet, Bill Hillier, space syntax analyses, Bo Grönlund, Bo Gronlund, Bo Grønlund, Kunstakademiets Arkitektskole

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CONTENT OF THESE LECTURE NOTES:

Course program

Lecture 1:

The question of workable concepts of urbanity today

- The 'Urban' in planning- and architectural theory

- The Question of Urbanity - introductory remarks

- Language ambiguity

- Invisibility of urbanity

- Global Urbanisation and the Information Age (at once)

- Is it possible to find a meaningful concept of 'the urban' today?

- Urban Theory 300 B.C. - 1945 - a short overview

- Castells and the new urban sociology, after 1968

- 'Urbanity' as expressed in motion picture titles - added dimensions

- Cinemania - lists of more urban movies - to add perspective

Lecture 2:

Johan Asplund

William Whyte

Lecture 3:

Henri Lefebvre

Richard Sennett

Lecture 4:

Bill Hillier and Space Syntax Analyses

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Kunstakademiets Arkitektskole, institute 3 ‘Planning’

New urban theory

- developed by ‘non-architects’’ - seen an architectural perspective

Course by associate prof. Bo Grönlund

The purpose of the two lecture afternoons is to introduce a cross disciplinary perspective towards the construction of a practical concept of urbanity for architects.

A deeper understanding of the phenomenon of urban architecture can takes as its starting point either the city (the concept of urbanity) or architecture (the concept of architecture).

This course starts the exploration of the phenomenon of urban architecture through a perspective of concepts of urbanity.

The question of urban theory have in the last decades been developed in a creative way by e.g. the philosopher H. Lefebvre, the cultural sociologist R. Sennett, the space analyst B. Hillier, the social psychologist J. Asplund and the writer and moviemaker W. H. Whyte.

The course will present their works on the city and also shortly introduce to the last about 100 years of urban theory from Tönnies and Simmel until today.

November 29

The question of workable concepts of urbanity today:

- contemporary city issues confronting urban planners and architects,

- a historical perspective on urban theory,

- and some basic questions on the character of urbanity in relation to architecture

November 30

Human responsivity, the social life in public spaces and the importance of chance and the unexpected as aspects of urbanity

- on the research of the Swedish social psychologist Johan Asplund and the researcher of New York street life William H. Whyte.

December 1

Urban meeting, works, and rhythms: to live with and in difference

- on the research of the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre and the New York cultural sociologist Richard Sennett

December 2

Streets, the virtual community and the question of a workable architecture of urbanity

- on the spatial theories and urban implications of the British space syntax analyses pioneer Bill Hillier

Some litterature used for the lectures:

Ali Madanipour: Design of Urban Space - an inquiry into socio-spatial process, Chichester, 1996.

Johan Asplund: Essä om Gemeinschaft och Gesellschaft, 1991

Johan Asplund: Storstäderna och det forteanska livet, 1992

Bill Hillier & Julienne Hanson: The Social Logic of Space, 1984

Bill Hillier: Space is the Machine, 1996

Henri Lefebvre: The Production of Space, Oxford 1991

Henri Lefebvre: Writings on Cities, Oxford 1996

Richard Sennett: Flesh and Stone - the body and the city in Western civilization, 1994

Richard Sennett: The Conscience of the Eye - the design and social life of cities, 1990 (på dansk: Øjets vidnesbyrd, Viborg 1996).

Richard Sennett: The Uses of Disorder - Personal Identity and City life, 1970

Richard T Le Gates and Frederic Stout (ed): The City Reader, 1996.

Rob Shields: Lefebvre - Love & Struggle - Spatial Dialectics, 1999

William Whyte: City - Rediscovering the centre, 1998

On the subject of new urban theory, also see Bo Grönlund’s homepage on the Internet

http://bo.gronlund.homepage.dk/

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Lecture 1.

The question of workable concepts of urbanity today:

- contemporary city issues confronting urban planners and architects,

- a historical perspective on urban theory,

- and some basic questions on the character of urbanity in relation to architecture

The 'Urban' in planning- and architectural theory

In everyday life and practice, we take it for granted, that we know what makes a city a city. My practice, teaching and research tells me, that urban planning and urban design most often have a rather foggy concept of the meanings of the word ‘urban’. This makes it difficult to talk about 'the urban' in a reasonably precise way and - if we take it seriously - to know what we are working with as urban planners and designers, whether our concern is urban life, urban aesthetics, or - hopefully - both.

There is not much consensus on city issues in urban planning theory or in architectural theory. The following list, although it is short and rude as presented here, is an indication of the diversity of ideas about the city in the architectural sphere:

Camillo Sitte (1888-). To him urban aesthetics had to do with a varied topological space - not geometrical: a rich visual experience and spatial variations, preferably with as few free standing monuments as possible. He had no explicit social dimensions , and - at the time - took the rather fine grained city of streets, squares, small buildings and small builders for granted.

The Garden City movement (Howard, Unwin, etc. 1898-): A compromise of town and country - inspired by medieval forms. An alternative or complement to the metropolis in the form of new medium sized towns in the countryside. Not a focus on urbanity.

The Modernists (Le Corbusier, CIAM): Technological functionalists with a radically new 'cubist' aesthetics. Not interested in urban life and urban experience - at least not as pedestrians at ground level. A moderate version focused on 'neighbourhood units' (introduced by Perry in New York in 1928). Focused on functions: housing, traffic systems, services in a rational way like machine or a factory. New building technologies and huge standardised buildings was part of the program.

Lewis Mumford, a famous urban sociologist, saw the metropolis not only as a place with poor living conditions, but also as a threat to democracy and the breeding place of fascism, as the masses of people in the big city were to easy to mislead. From the 1930-s to the 1960-s Munford contributed to a focus on a less dense and wider urban region built by smaller 'garden cities' or neighbourhood 'communities'

Cullen's Townscape and Lynch' Images of the City: About visual aspects and mental maps of the built environment - not about human interaction in urban space. Sees the need for a more varied and memorable cityspace than the one of the radical modernist program.

Jane Jacobs (North American journalist): Wrote in the 1960's 'The death and life of great American cities', a harsh critique of modernist urban planning in the US. Favours functional mix, grids with small blocks, mixed age of buildings and concentration of people. Liked Greenwich Village in Manhattan, where she lived.

Aldo Rossi (1960s), Leon and Rob Krier (1970-80's), the New Urbanism in USA (since 1990): Traditional typology of streets and squares, buildings and monuments, urban blocks, etc - classicist style. Wants to promote the urban through learning the built language if traditional cities and towns and their values to society and community. Semiotic and historicist focus - with aspects of planned neighbourhoods included. Does not grasp the essence of urbanity as experience and social phenomena.

Koolhaas: The generic city without urbanity in public space. The city have lost all traditional spatial coherence. He does not bother with the city and urban public spaces at large, as he can't control them anyhow. And the new media have taken over the role of urban public space. Wants to create complexity and contradiction within single large buildings.

(For more on Koolhaas see http://hjem.get2net.dk/gronlund/Koolhaas.html)

The young Dutch (MVRDV, etc. late 1990s-): Experiments in several directions - but no theory of urbanity besides density - to some extent a recap of modernistic manifestos in a more extreme form.

On this background, it might be constructive to widen the perspective and look for urban theory among other disciplines - e.g. the social sciences, philosophy, etc. - and see if they can contribute to a further understanding. First some general difficulties today with the concept of 'the urban' have to be mentioned though:

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The Question of Urbanity - introductory remarks

As I understand it, this problem of the ‘urban’ does not only concern the ‘Nature’-turned English. The concept of ‘urban’ is difficult in all the European languages and countries that I know of, including Scandinavian, German and French - not to talk about the understanding of the word ‘urban’ in North America. As I see it, there are probably several reasons for this unclear situation.

• Language

• Invisibility

• Global Urbanisation and the Information Age (at once)

1. The first reason is built directly into language,

as the words city, town and urban are related to a wide range of meanings, and this range of meanings have developed, in important ways changed, and become almost contradictory through time. What for instance has urbanity as elegance of manner to with the word urban in ‘urban sprawl’. The words have a common ancestry, but I have not heard anyone ever claim that there is a logic or causal relation between the two. If there is one, it is probably of an inverse kind - the more urban sprawl, the less urbanity - although any serious discussion of such a relation would have to involve other levels of argument and several ‘in-between’ steps, with a further quest for knowledge involved.

'The English Oxford Dictionary' shows, that questions about the ‘content’ of the words related to ‘cities’, ‘towns’ and ‘the urban’ takes us all the way from the Greek polis, through the Civitas and Urbs of Rome, the Christian Heavenly City, the gossip and whores of the streets, and further through central London, to the introduction of the word ‘urbanisation’ in the late 19th century, ending so far in 20th c. ‘urban renewal’ and ‘urbanism’. The questions of history, societal change, transformation and diversification of meaning make it not only difficult to talk about cities, but also to think about them. Today ‘city’ and ‘urban’ are words that can include almost everything, and therefore qualify very little.

As in English, the Danish words for the city and the urban (by, stad, købstad, urban, urbanitet, urbanisering) are not permanent through history. E.g. købstad=merchant town was based on royal privileges ca, 1200-1857 and the legal term was finally abolished in the communal reform of 1970. Statistically a Danish 'by' is minimum 200 people in houses of maximum 200 meter from each other (e.g. min. 63 people/km2 or 16.200 m2/person)

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Urbanity, City and Town - as defined i the large English Oxford Dictionary:

Urbanity (from French 13-14th c. and Latin)

1. The character or quality of being urbane: courtesy, refinement, or elegance of manner; refined or bland politeness or civility (1535, in frequent use since 1825)

†2. Conversation characteristic of well-bred townspeople; cheerful, witty or pleasant talk; polished wit or humour (1566, now obsolete)

3. The state, condition or character of a town or a city; life in a city; town-life (1549, in frequent use since 1893)

Of related interest: urban, urban district, urban drift, urban guerrilla, urban renewal, urban sprawl, urbane, urbanisation, urbanise, urbanism, urbanist, urbanite, urbanology, urbicide, urbiculture, urbs

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City (from Latin civitas : its primary sense was citizenship, the body of citizens, the community: only in later time was the word taken as = urbs, the town or place occupied by the community. The historical relation between the Roman civitas and civis was thus the reverse of that between our city and citizen, which however is that of the Greek polis and poliths.)

†1. A town or other inhabited place, e.g. as mentioned in the Bible

2. A title ranking above that of town: a) used vaguely, or of ancient or foreign places of note, as capitals, or the like; b) In England a cathedral town or large and important borough, c) in Scotland and Ireland more vaguely, also of small bishop’s seats; d) in US a town or collective body of inhabitants incorporated and governed by a mayor and aldermen, but applied in the newer states much more loosely; e) in the dominion of Canada a municipality of the highest class; f) City of refuge, in the Mosaic dispensation, a walled town set apart for the protection of those who had accidentally committed manslaughter. Holy City, Jerusalem, esp. in connection with pilgrims and crusades.

3. Often applied to Paradise or the dwelling of God and the beatified, as in Celestial city, Heavenly City, Holy City, City of God, the last being also the title of a famous work of St. Augustine describing an ideal city in the heavens

4. The community of the inhabitants of a city

5. The City, short for the City of London or b) the business part of this

6. As the equivalent of Greek polis and Latin civitas in the original sense of a self-governing city or state with its dependencies

7. Of belonging, or pertaining to a city or the City

8. City Centre

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Of related interest, e.g.: city gent, city slicker, city-scape

Town (from tun etc. in old north west European languages, a fortified, fenced or hedged place, an enclosed place, also sometimes a garden)

†1. An enclosed place or piece of ground, an enclosure; a field, garden, yard, court (now obsolete), or †b)The enclosed land surrounding or belonging to a single dwelling, farm or manor (now obsolete)

2. The house or group of houses or buildings upon this enclosed land (now especially Scottish)

3. A (small) group or cluster of dwelling or buildings; a village or hamlet with little or no local organisation (now dialect)

4. Now, in general English use, commonly designating an inhabited place larger and more regularly built than a village, and having more complete and independent local government; applied not only to a borough, i.e. a corporative town, and a city, which is a town of higher rank, but also to an urban district, i.e. a non-corporate town having an urban district council with powers of rating, paving and sanitation more extensive than those possessed by a parish council or the administrative body (where such exist) of a village. Sometimes also applied to small inhabited places below the rank of an urban district, which are not distinguishable from villages otherwise, perhaps, than by having a periodical market or fair (market town) or by being historically towns; b) in, out of, to town, to leave town, i.e. the particular town under consideration or near; c) as distinct from or contrasted with the country; d) in ballad poetry often added after the name of a town

5. a) The community of a town in its corporate capacity, the corporation; b) The inhabitants of a town, the townspeople; c) the fashionable society of London (or other leading city thought of); society (archaic); d) at Oxford and Cambridge, the civic community as distinct from the members of the university

6. US: A geographical division for local or state government

7. Something analogous to the town as being a home of many people

Of related interest, e.g.: man or woman about town, man or woman of the town, on the town, to come to town, town and country planning, town clock, town gas, town hall, town house, town trail, town-end, town-gate, town-meeting, town-plan, town-planner, town-scape, town-talk, town-woman

The underlining is mine - BG

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2. The second reason for the unclear concept of the urban has to do with the ‘invisibility’ of important aspects of ‘the urban’.

This ‘invisibility’ has both a philosophical/scientific and a cultural background. Questions of urbanity concerns space as a social dimension, which has been a problem for sociology for a long time, as well as it concerns emotions, randomness and chance, complexity and difference, existential unresolvability of important contradictions, and network thinking versus linear and hierarchical thinking.

Urbanity concerns both atoms and bits, both matter and information. It is about relations, and relations are difficult to think, because they are neither in the things that relate, nor at any point between them. Bateson e.g. says "Difference, being of the nature of relationship, is not located in time or in space".

To use a metaphor, I will say, that urbanity in many ways is like the wind. It is neither an object, nor a subject. It is itself invisible, though you can sometimes see that it affects what it touches. It develops in fields of tension between high and low pressures. It also changes over time both with the day and the season, but it is anyhow difficult to predict at a certain time and location, because it involves processes that we today call chaotic, i.e. non-linearity of causes and effects. There are both dominant winds and local winds, etc. We would not be able to live and grow strong without the wind, but we can’t live with too much of it either. The wind can give us power, but it can also destroy us.

Without exhausting the metaphorical qualities of ‘the wind’ in relation to ‘the urban’, of which more could be said, there are also important differences between ‘the wind’ and ‘the urban’.

Wind can be measured on the Beaufort Scale, and is talked about directly in the media every day, while urbanity so far can’t be measured, and is only talked about indirectly, unsystematically and in a very fragmentary way. This ‘invisibility’ of ‘the urban’, is, I think, deeply rooted in ruling paradigms of the industrial age. Philosophically and scientifically these roots can be dated at least as far back as Descartes, who contributed to the idea of an abstract space, and to the primacy of rational thinking over emotions. Emotions have been difficult to deal with intellectually. Only since the 1990s have we started to get a reasonable wide and deep understanding of emotions, compare e.g. Goleman (1995) ‘Emotional intelligence’.

‘The urban’ also becomes more invisible when streets are done away with, as has happen in modern industrial society and for several reasons, both technological (the car) and cultural (the primacy of romanticised ideas about Nature being preferable to Culture).

3. The third reason for the difficulties of ‘the urban’ might have to do with the transition into a major new technological and societal condition, at the same momemt in history, when city population is outnumbering countryside population on a planetary scale. Both happens right now, though only partly with a causal link between them.

While around the year 1800 less than 3% of the world population lived in cities, by the end the 20th century it may be close to 50% (depending on definition) - with a global population more than 7 times larger and urban population densities radically lower, at least in most industrialised countries. From being an exception, ‘the urban’ from some points of view has become general, and therefore more difficult to see as something specific. As we have come to understand it since the 19th c., urbanisation has to do with this world-wide process.

In the Western world for the last 100 years ‘urbanisation’, ‘industrialisation’ and ‘modernisation’ have also largely been used as synonyms. Though often related, but not necessarily and always, these phenomena have to be distinguished from each other in scientific studies and reasoning. Berman (1982) contribute e.g. to the confusion about ‘the urban’, by blurring these distinctions in his famous study on the experience of modernity.

Today it might also be more relevant to ask: ‘where in the city is ‘the urban’?

Right in the middle of this mess, according to many different sources, we now have the advent of The Information Age, superseding the Industrial one, and bringing lots of new questions. Concerning ‘the city’ and ‘the urban’ we may therefore need a paradigm shift, changing for the third time in history the core of meaning in the words and concepts of ‘city’ and ‘urban’. (Compare e.g. Castells ‘The Informational City’ (1989), Sassen ‘The Global City’ (1991), Mitchell ‘City of Bits’ (1995), Boyer ‘Cybercities’ (1996), and Mitchell 'e-topia' (1999))

To continue with another ‘airy’ metaphor, maybe our difficulties with the words and concepts of ‘city’ and ‘urban’, which does not want to fit, can be compared to the phlogiston trouble until 1775-77. Then it was discovered that fire has to do with oxygen, which again is the one of two major gasses in the atmosphere of mother Earth. Suddenly modern chemistry become possible. In ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’, Kuhn (1962) has shown the importance of paradigms in science and that paradigms change from time to time, turning perspectives around and giving rise to a new picture of the world. Paradigms are interrelated, major and dominant sets of concepts and theories. According to Kuhn, there also seems to be some general processes at work leading up to and through paradigm shifts, including difficulties with an existing paradigm, and a transition time for complete acceptance of a new paradigm of at least a generation.

Maybe it is now the time to centre the question of the city and the urban around the issue of information exchange in a radical and consequent way? Thinking about that, ‘wind’, strangely enough, is also a recognised metaphor for information streams, both possibly important and empty/noisy.

All these questions bring me to my major one:

Is it possible to find a meaningful concept of 'the urban' today?

• Could there be a meaningful concept of the urban today, of urban culture and urban space, or as I prefer to call it, of ‘urbanity’?

• Is it possible to find, deduct or construct such a concept of ‘urbanity’, on which it is possible to build a theory and practice of urban design and planning, that has a reasonably solid theoretic foundation useful in the years to come?

To me the contemporary complex of problems about ‘the urban’ spans from globalisation and informatics at the one end to street behaviour and street architecture at the other. It includes complicated questions about social relations, man as an experiential, creative and expressive being, the role of space, technology, economic growth, ecology and history, and it includes architects’ attempts to interpret and handle the situation as well.

Read more on the issus above at http://hjem.get2net.dk/gronlund/UrbanWinds_phd.html

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Urban Theory 300 B.C. - 1945 - a short overview

Aristotle ( Greek Philosopher 384-322 BC): 'A city is composed of different kinds of men; similar people cannot bring a city into existence' (The Politics - 'N.B.! 'city' can also be read as 'state'). Aristotle called the Greek polis the result of a synoikismos, a coming together for trade and mutual defence of households - oikoi - which had formerly been self-sufficient in the countryside. Sennett comments, that the Athenians needed others, whose beliefs they did not share, and that they did not solve matters by repressing their differences.

After Aristotle - for almost 2200 years - there was not much theory on cities. Capitalism, industrialisation and urbanisation put the urban question on the agenda in the 19^th Century though.

Ferdinand Tönnies (German sociologist 1855-1936): Came forward in 1887 with the typology

Gemeinschaft / Gesellschaft, which is concerned about the duality of life as a result of capitalism, industrialisation and urbanisation. (English translation attempt: Community / Society). Gemeinschaft is related to a value based will, tradition, close personal relations, family - like in an old village in the countryside. Gesellschaft is related to the rational will, contractual and impersonal relations, modernity and city life. Both exist at the same time, but Gesellschaft is becoming still more dominant. This can be understood as alienation and 'loss' and promote a longing for the old days that hampers the development of the urban.

George Simmel ( German-Jewish sociologist 1858-1918): Studied general social forms of interaction taking into account the immense role of money in society, the urbanisation, and the resulting growth in the number of 'strangers'. In 1903-08 he developed theories on the consequences for human individuals of the urban life in the centre of the metropolis. Simmel found new contradictions popping up in the city - also within the single human being: indifference/need of greater difference, de-individuation and de-humanisation

/individuation, etc. The contradictions are growing and the senses of the urban man becomes over stimulated. Simmel thought that he himself was more positive than negative towards the metropolis, but his analysis pointed to an irresolvable dualism of tragic dimensions.

The Chicago school (Park, Burgess, etc. - urban sociology 1915-1930's): Empirical studies of especially Chicago. The approach is called human ecology and started out from an analogy between the development in an urban society and the struggle about the natural habitat among plants and animals. It mapped the functional and social differentiation of the metropolis and found patterns in the displacement processes within and between parts of the city. The research program was ambitious, a broad study of the society, with the metropolis as an extreme case. Looking back from today, these studies were primarily about different groups, city districts, and neighbourhoods and not so much on urbanity and people in a more fundamental way, although Simmel was an inspiration also.

Louis Wirth (1897-1952, with a background in the Chicago school ) summarised urban theory in 1938 in 'Urbanism as a way of life': "For sociological purposes a city may be defined as a relatively large, dense and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals", says Wirth. He then tries to show the social implications of a combination of a large population, a dense environment and differences of individuals and groups. The large numbers promote individual difference, spatial segregation, segmented relations and anonymity, but also possibilities of emancipation. Density amplifies this further and a drama of the contrasts, differences and speed takes place in the metropolis. To Wirth this implies tolerance, rationality and secularisation, but also loneliness, acceptance of instability and cosmopolitanism.

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Comment: Urban theory until W.W.II started out from the difference of life in the countryside and in small towns vs. the life in the metropolis. The latter was often looked upon in a negative way. Large scale social and economic processes in 'Gesellschaft' are studied, while social-psychological phenomena concerning strangers in the city and the effects of space still are overlooked or difficult to grasp. The concern for group life leads to the 'neighbourhood unit' in urban planning (Perry New York 1928).

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Castells and the new urban sociology, after 1968:

Castells has influenced urban sociology maybe more than anyone else after 1968. In the English speaking world, the geographer David Harvey's 'Social Justice and the City' of 1973, broke ground in partly the same direction, though he started from the question of understanding space, while Castells started from the questions of understanding social relations. Harvey was more economical -geographical and orthodox Marxist, Castells more political-sociological and Althussarian / Poulantzas' Marxist structuralist . Castells' work 'The Urban Question, 1972/77 had two purposes: 1) to criticise earlier urban studies, and 2) to create a more solid theoretical foundation for further urban studies.

Castells' critique of earlier urban studies focused mainly on the Chicago School, Louis Wirth, urban sub-culture studies in the 1950s and 60s and Henri Lefebvre. To Castells these urban studies didn't look at the processes of society as a whole and the specificity of capitalist society, its class contradictions, and its uneven and non-continuous development. He also dismiss the questions of the city and the urban as a theoretical object, and the influence of space on social life.

Castells rejected evolutionary perspectives based on economic competition (Adam Smith) or biological determinism (Darwin), and approaches, that tried to find stages in a universal human history through the reading of spatial form - or approaches based on interdependence between individuals, the principle of central function, and society understood as community, which is localised territorially.

Rejected were also the dichotomies and dualistic typologies of country/town, rural/urban, agricultural/industrial, traditional society/modern society, community/association (i.e. Gemeinschaft/ Gesellschaft), and local/cosmopolitan. These were outdated because of their coupling of certain levels of production with systems of values and specific spatial forms. As a consequence, Wirth's definition (1938) of the urban as built on dimension of population, density, and heterogeneity was discarded as well.

Maybe most important, though, was the very secondary role, generally, of spatial forms on social relations, cultural systems, behaviour and representation, as Castells meant no causality had been proven between social and spatial variables, and that social relations couldn't be deduced from spatial ones. Space had no meaning in itself, as it was only an expression of the social.

In reality urban sociology lacked an empirical object, because the urban was everywhere. It had large difficulties in finding any empirical criterion for the definition of the urban. All you got were explanation by co-variation and normative thinking. From Castells' point of view the city was not a relevant unit any more, as capitalist production, as well as its political foundation, operates in a much larger space than the single city. A structuralist substitute - the field of study of struggle about collective consumption - was developed by Castells and other Marxists instead, but by the mid 1980s its potential was exhausted, as it not only had done away with the city and space, but also with human actors.

The critique of Lefebvre (his teacher at Nanterre) actually seemed most urgent and central to Castells in 'The Urban Question'. "Close to Wirth .(for Lefebvre) ..it is the density, the warmth of concentration that, by increasing actions and communication. encourage at one and the same time a free flowering, the unexpected, pleasure, sociability and desire", says Castells. Lefebvre answered himself: " But Castells does not understand space. He sets aside space. His is still a simplistic Marxist scheme...very reductionist".

What was missed in Castells' perspective were other aspects of the life world in the cities, than those related to 'collective consumption', like individual actors, cultural issues, politics in its complexity, race and gender - and space as concrete properties and a physical structure. He e.g. missed aspects such as individual social relations across the social stratification or to strangers, emotions, chance, play, learning, and creativity.

In the 1980s Castells started to break out of the structuralist theoretical prison. In the 90s, he is talking about the Network Society of the Information Age, including not only systemic, but also life-world questions as the self, experience and architecture. Spatial and urban questions rejected in 1972/77 are coming back..........

Read more on Castells at http://hjem.get2net.dk/gronlund/Castells.html

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What about the understanding of the city in popular culture? Maybe we can start to learn something here.

I have looked at movie titles in the movie encyclopaedia Microsoft Cinemania on CD-ROM, which cover most American movies until the early part of the 1990s. This encyclopaedia is possible to search electronically. A search on words like 'city', 'town', 'urban' and 'street' gives hundreds of movie titles....

'Urbanity' as expressed in motion picture titles:

• Women and Men: liberty, lack of inhibition, sex, love, adventure: city girl, city of joy, dream street, love in the city, scandal street, sin town, street angel

• The strange, the stranger and the different: mystery street, outcast of the city, strange lady in town, stranger in town, the hidden city

• At night, darkness, city lights, shadows: big town after dark, boulevard nights, bright lights - big city, city lights, city of shadows, city that never sleeps, dark city, dark end of the street, incident on a dark street, main street after dark, nightmare on ... street, the night the city screamed, the sleeping city, walk the dark street, while the city sleeps

• Crime: bomb in high street, city of fear, dope street, fear city, frightened city, lawless street. mob town, mug town, street killing, terror in ...town

• City jobs at the edge: cops, gamblers, pawnbrokers, robbers, strippers, taxi drivers, thieves, whores (but there are also favourite jobs like architects, stockbrokers)

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The city is shown here as a space of experience and excitement, possibility and action, where things and co-incidents can happen, that breaks the everyday routine. The titles of the movies swings back and forth between the positive and negative aspects of the city - and shows dimensions of city life and the urban environment that is mostly absent in dictionaries and encyclopaedias.

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Cinemania on Cities etc.

(On key words: Street, urban, city and town several hundred titles shows up ).

Below organised by me in some categories:

Women and Men: liberty, lack of inhibition, sex, love, adventure:

city girl

city of joy

dream street

love in the city

scandal street

street angel

the stripper

whore

a fine romance

a little sex

all I desire

Baghdad cafe

best little whorehouse in ...

body heat

breakfast at tiffany’s

bring on the girls

city heat

city without men

consenting adults

dangerous woman

desperate for love

devil is a woman

divorce

don’t take it to heart

fallen angel

fatal desire

flashdance

flesh and blood

follow your heart

forbidden

having a wild weekend

heartbreaks

her kind of man

I want you

I’m no angel

it’s a wonderful life

ladies’ man

lonely guy

long hot summer

love in the air

lovers, happy lovers

man alone

map of the human heart

Maria's lovers

meet me in ...

mr. wonderful

my girl

nine / weeks

nobody’s perfect

opposites attract

pick up on ...street

pretty woman

Sammy and Rosie get laid

scent of a woman

she couldn’t say no

silk stockings

sin town

singles

slow dancing in the big city

swing kids

the bad and the beautiful

the great adventure

the nasty girl

the playboys

the wild and the innocent

the wild one

the woman in the window

this thing called love

unfaithful

unmarried woman

wild cats

wild thing

women & men: in love there are no rules

young at heart

Men, other

street boys

gamblers

bad boys

boyz in the hood

easy rider

ever man for himself

only the strong

prayer of the roller boys

the lost boys

the strong man

urban cowboy

The strange, the stranger and the different:

mystery street

outcast of the city

strange lady in town

stranger in town

the hidden city

dance with a stranger

hide out

leaving normal

man without face

mask

mystic piazza

nomads

nothing in common

strange behavior

strangers on a train

the comfort of strangers

the crowd

the strange love of....

the stranger

the stranger returns

the stranger’s return

welcome stranger

At night, darkness, city lights, shadows:

big town after dark

boulevard nights

bright lights, big city

city lights

city of shadows

city that never sleeps

dark city

dark end of the street

incident on a dark street

main street after dark

nightmare on ... street

the night the city screamed

the sleeping city

walk the dark street

while the city sleeps

a night at the opera

after hours

all night long

bad dreams

in the heat of the night

intimate lighting

midnight cowboy

midnight run

night shift

night slaves

night strangler

nightlife

rendezvous at midnight

Crime, etc:

bomb in high street

city of fear

dope street

fear city

frightened city

lawless street

mob town

mug town

street killing

terror in ...town

cops and robbers

thieves

bad behavior

bad influence

blade runner

bureau of missing persons

crackers

defending your life

delinquents

life is cheap...but toiletpaper is expensive

menace society

missing

murder in music city

on dangerous ground

perfect witness

public eye

shoot to kill

street justice

the detective

trespass

trouble in mind

trouble in the mind

under cover

undercover blues

unlawful entry

violent Saturday

witness

City Professions:

taxi driver

the pawnbroker

candy man

music man

teachers

the dollmaker

the efficiency expert

the expert

---

Cinemania gives over 1400 hits on 'street' (here listed alphabetically) , e.g.

42nd Street

A Dangerous Woman

A Home of Our Own

A Nightmare on Elm Street

A Rage in Harlem

A Streetcar Named Desire

Almost an Angel

American Graffiti

An Unmarried Woman

Angel Heart

Appointment for love

Back Roads

Back Street

Bad Boys

Bad Influences

Beat Street

Breathless

Being There

Big Deal on Madonna Street

Big Girls Don’t Cry..They Get Even

Blade Runner

Body and Soul

Bomb in the High Street

Born to Dance

Boulevard Nights

Boyz N the Hood

Breaking in

Chameleon Street

City of Joy

Clancy Street Boys

Class Act

Clean and Sober

Combination Platter

Contract on Cherry Street

Crimes of Passion

Dance with a Stranger

Day for Night

Dead End

Defence of the Realm

Do the Right Thing

Dream Street

Face of a Stranger

Far and Away

Footlight Parade

Forbidden

Gaslight

Goodfellas

Hard Target

Haunting Fear

Heatwave

Heaven & Earth

Hero

Hey Goodlookin’

High Hopes

High Stakes

Hope and Glory

Husbands and Wifes

I Love You to Death

In the Heat of Passion

Joyless Street

Jungle Fever

Killing of Angel Street

Lawless street

Lost Angels

Main Street after Dark

Mannequin

Masquerade

Mean Streets

Menace Society

Midnight Cowboy

Miracle Mile

Miracle on 34th Street

Missing

Murder!

Murder, My Sweet

Mystery Street

New York, New York

Nighthawks

No Place Like Home

No Trees in the Street

Nomads

On the Town

One from the Heart

One-Way Street

Open City

Other People's Money

Pack of Lies

Pickup on South Street

Poetic Justice

Pretty Woman

Qulity Street

Running Scared

Saturday Night Fever

Scandal Street

Sea of Love

Seventh Heaven

Side Street

Side Walk Stories

Six Degrees of Separation

Something is Out There

Something Wild

South Central

Staying Alive

Strangers on a Train

Street Angel

Street Justice

Street Killing

Street Music

Street of Chance

Street of Dreams

Street of Shame

Street People

Street Scene

Street Smart

Street Trash

Streets of Fire

Streets of Gold

Streetwise

Sunnyside

Swing Kids

Taxi Driver

The Big Street

The Bronx War

The Burbs

The Citadel

The Clock

The Crowd

The Dark End of the Street

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The Hard Way

The Hidden

The House Across the Street

The Light Across the Street

The Lonely Guy

The Magic Box

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

The Naked Street

The Public Eye

The Shop on Main Street

The Street with No Name

The Untouchables

Tenth Avenue Angel

Tough Enough

Trading Places

Underground USA

Up Your Alley

Used Cars

Walk on the Dark Street

Wall Street

West Side Story

Where the Day Takes You

Where the Heart is

Wild Thing

Witness

Working Girl

Year of the Gun

Young Savages

---

Lecture 2:

Human responsivity, the social life in public spaces and the importance of chance and the unexpected as aspects of urbanity

- on the research of the Swedish social psychologist Johan Asplund and the researcher of New York street life William H. Whyte.

Johan Asplund, Swedish sociologist (social psychology)

Professor in social psychology in Copenhagen 1972-82, now prof. at Lund University. A sociologist and social psychologist that asks deeper and more creative questions than most. His major works are only available in Swedish.

'Time, Space, the Individual and the Collective', 1983

This book is about the transformation of human beings from the late middle ages to our time. It shows decisive changes in the way we perceive ourselves as individuals and persons - how we as humans became 'modern'. Land reforms, the splitting of farmers villages and clocks are some important steps on the road. The geography of time and human trajectories in time-space are aspects in the book, that Asplund explores further in his books on the urban issue later on.

'Elementary Social Life', 1987, 'On greeting ceremonies, micro-power and non-social talkativity', 1987, 'Rivals and Scapegoats', 1989

The concept of 'the elementary social life' solves a large sociological problem of essential importance for the development of a theory on urbanity. Human beings need not be a member of a social group to be social. But of course there are also social groups in the city - lots of them - and groups are also important. Sociology have only seen groups though, and therefore have difficulties understanding what actually goes on socially in public spaces in the city.

'Essay on Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft', 1991 and 'The Metropolis and the Fortean Life', 1992

With the question of 'elementary social life' put in place, Asplund starts to question 'the urban'. His messages is - in short - that out traditional understanding of the urban is fading because of a new situation. A new theory of 'urbanity' has to be about something else - the city as the scene for unpredictable co-incidents, that can change the life of people and the development of society.

Research methods and style:

- Short stories and great knowledge - both easy and deep

- Many essays with rich examples. His way of writing is in itself like the city: compact, dense, fragmentary, full of strange co-incidents.

- Asplund's method is to go for the extreme cases, as they often are the ones that opens up new thoughts and a change of understanding.

On Asplund's : Elementary Social Life

There is a large social dimension to explore in between the sole individual and the people as members of groups - this is essential for the understanding of urbanity, i.e. social relations between strangers. The central theses of Asplund here is, that social relations and behaviour exists, that us more elementary than the ones that sociology normally deals with. i.e. human-to-human relations independent of group relations and independent of peoples knowledge about each other in advance. It has also to do with spontaneous and often unconscious behaviour. This kind of relations have not been taken seriously and few have studied and written about them. Elementary social life is about immediate social responsivity - somewhat like the responsivity of small children - but adults have it too!

The opposite of social responsivity is non-social talkativity - the latter have to be learned, while the former comes by itself. Social responsivity changes quickly - and responsiveness to someone or something means non-responsivity to the rest - to turn to something is to turn away from something else.

Social responsivity can be seen in both peace, friendship and love - and in struggle, hostility and hatred. A stimulus is answered with a spectre of responses and vice versa. Stimuli and responses are not dependent on each other like cause and effect - they shape each other and give each other meaning. Play and games have things in common with social responsivity.

Social responsivity comes first. It is not a product of the individual or the ego. It is the individual and the ego that is a result of social responsivity. The social responsivity takes place in the outer world of human beings.

The human being is considered to be socialised (adult) only when her social responsivity have been largely limited. From the beginning social responsivity is wild and childish. Social responsivity is analogue to curiousness and interest - it also has to do with our urge to play. Games are organised social responsivity. Play is responsivity purely and simply. Play comes before games, the non-orderly before the orderly. I the play it is the responses that determine the world, not the world that determines the responses. The socially responsive person does not work - she is active. 'Puer aeternus', the eternally young, is a person that through life preserves and enriches her social responsivity. Everyday life is disciplined social responsivity.

Greetings: To greet your neighbour or not (if you age angry with him) - is a good case of social resposivity. Greeting only need to take a second, and it is very difficult not to greet someone you know.

Experiments: Bicycle races (Triplet 1898) shows that competing cyclists increase the speed with 20%, compared to bicyclists riding on their own. The Hawthorne experiment on factory lighting (1927-32) also proved the existence of elementary social life - work efficiency increased independent of better or worse lighting, because the scientists interest in the workers and social responsivity in the experiment mattered much more.

The Modern Prison: this is about being deprived of the possibility of social responsivity. The gratification is to get out of the prison and be able to be socially responsive again. To enforce discipline, you have to:

- Impose a time table

- Make space enclosed and unchangeable

- Isolate the individual

The existence of discipline can best be shown by breaking its routines and rituals.

On Asplund: Urbanity and the metropolis

Asplund thinks the elementary social life and a related elementary fellowship and empathy is characteristic for chance meetings and social meetings of short duration, while social responsivity may decline as actual groups are formed. Urbanity probably have something to do with this.

Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft is one of the most long-lived basic and generative conceptual pairs in sociology, Asplund says. But it may now be at the brink of losing its vitality. Its has no meaning in pre-modern societies and may be not in post-modern either. And by the way: this contradiction or duality remains an unsolved problem e.g. in Marxism and socialism.

But if the dualism of Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft might soon be over - what is the urban then?

'The Metropolis and the Fortean Life':

In the metropolis, by chance to meet someone you know, seems to be a strange and unlikely co-incidence - while chance meetings in small towns are considered normal. Aplund's starts to question the truth of this.

In modern societies the trajectories of people (strangers) are crossed all the time - and there is a large social 'waste' in non-noticed social possibilities. The transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft means a radical increase of the number of options per capita.

The modern 'chance' is created is by crossings trajectories and you don't know what the 'chance' are and what it might mean. This crossings creates resources that did not exist before this very moment. Afterwards the persons involved have been changed and new identities might have been developed. The unexpected resource might be positive or negative.

The crossing trajectories and co-incidence (chance, luck, etc.) creates opportunity and new resources and is a mechanism for social change, that is forgotten by sociology.

Modern life on this background can develop a lifestyle, where you don't want to commit yourself - contrary to pre-modern, traditional life, where you had to commit and do it already early in life.

In modernity 'puer aeternus' (the eternally young, that doesn't want to commit) starts to look normal and rational. The person who waits for his or her chance, cannot be goal oriented.

A measure of 'urbanity' could the degree to which the lives of people are directed by co-incidents rather than conscious and planned actions. The essence of Gesellschaft might be that life here is intermittent and accidental, while it is permanent and substantial in Gemeinschaft.

Life in Gesellschaft is built by incidents and co-incidents.

- - - - - - -

Books in Swedish by Johan Aplund (i.e. Johan Asplund, 1937, not most the rest)

http://websok.libris.kb.se/websearch/form?lang=eng search for Author: Johan Asplund, also see pages 2 to 4 here.

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johan_Asplund

Göran Soneson: Spaces Of Urbanity: From the Village Square to the Boulevard (on Asplund and others) http://www.eki.ee/km/place/pl03/Place3_Sonesson.pdf

'Doing Diversity' also has some stuff on Asplund in English (search for Asplund inside):

http://www.equalnews.com/pdf/doingdiversity.pdf

Olle Westerlund: S(t)imulating Social Psychologi (search for Asplund inside):

http://www.diva-portal.org/diva/getDocument?urn_nbn_se_uu_diva-3823-1__fulltext.pdf

Gemeinschaft, Gesellschaft /search for Asplund inside):

http://www.fu.uni-lj.si/egpa2004/html/sg8/Wolven_Vinberg.pdf

---

"The city is still the prime place.

It is so because of the likelihood of unplanned, informal encounters."

Whyte, W. 1988. City: Rediscovering the Center. New York: Doubleday.

"William H. Whyte is the 'Patron Saint of Urbanism'"

Phillip Lapote, Metropolis Magazine, December 2000 [7]

William Whyte (1918-99).

(The numbers in brackets in the text refers to the internet links at the end of the Whyte section)

Whyte's work is an extraordinary illustration of Asplund's 'elementary social life', 'urban co-incidences', and 'chance events' - even if the two don't seem to know about each other.

Background

William Whyte was educated at Princeton and an editor at 'Fortune' in the 1950-s, when he became an independent author of best-selling non-fiction books. He is not an architect or urban planner by education, but later served as a planning consultant for major urban areas and spent sixteen years studying the street life of New York and other major cities from 1971 onwards - with importance for US urban planning and urban design, e.g. the public space requirements in the master plans for New York City. Whyte helped to identify and remedy a fundamental misunderstanding of the life of cities and streets that planners of the 20th Century embedded in the zoning regulations. His work still gives hints and guidance on how to build and rebuild cities, including guidelines for vibrant public spaces. Whyte also became the intellectual mentor for the New York based consultant firm 'Project for Public Spaces' (www.pps.org). Possibly Whyte's greatest achievement have been to revise the thinking about urban density, although his findings on crowding is not as known as it deserves yet.

Some of the phenomena Whyte reacted against was the semi-cities of the suburbs in the US; the corporate exodus from the inner cities; the dullified downtowns with concourses, skyways, megastructures and blank walls; the rise and fall of incentive zoning.

The major problems behind Whyte's interest in city life had initially to do with a new work ethic in the large corporations, the standardisation of suburbia and the question of sprawl. He was concerned with the consequences for the inhabitants, a considerable part of which were Americans working for large bureaucratic corporations and had to be able quickly to move from one city to another. Through his writing about the conformist 'organisation man' in the corporations in the 1950-s and this 'man's' private life in bedroom communities with shallow social connections, Whyte started to see some severe problems of modern urban planning and its utopian ambitions - a planning that led to suburbs where too much is regulated with the purpose to keep diversity out and to avoid the creation of city streets. The result, in Whyte's view, was e.g. poor possibilities of meeting and too little stimulation in public.

"But you cannot isolate the successful elements of the city and package them in tidy communities somewhere else. . . .", Whyte said. ('The Last Landscape', 1968 [1]).

The planners and city critics had gone too far, Whyte meant, in attacking urban crowding and disorder. They had promoted a thinning out the city in a way that was bad both for people and for the ecology of nature, while what was need was a concentration of the city and useful open spaces close to where people live.

Gradually, Whyte realised, that there was a problem in the city centre too. In the late 1960's the spectre of overcrowding had then been a popular worry for so long that it affected the centre. High density had been seen as a major social ill and so had the city itself. The concern over high density was peaking just about the time it became obvious that the inner part of cities were not gaining people any more, but losing them. Too much empty space and too few people - this emerged as the problem of the centre as well - particularly in smaller cities. Whyte thought the concept of overload was a sloppy one. The problem was not over-use, but under-use. There was often too much space for too little activity, often too much length as well, and lots of redundant space. Even the new plazas in front of recessed skyscrapers in American cities, provided through incentive zoning ordinances, often turned out to work against public life. Whyte noted that something was wrong with them, as they showed up not to be good places for striking up acquaintances.

People may say that they want to get away from the city, avoid the hustle and bustle of people, and the like - but according to Whyte, they do not. Instead people like to take part in crowding.

At New York Municipal Art Society, Whyte once said: " I want you to look for what these people have in common." Feet. Shoes. Legs. Pants. Shirts. Blouses. Skirts. Arms. Purses. Briefcases. Umbrellas. Heads. Hats. Hard hats. Faces. Smiles. Smiles? Why are people on New York's Streets smiling? They are happy - in the midst of urban crisis, on the streets of a city that many think is going under. Of course, there are other people on the streets without smiles, maybe even scowling. But when we think of cities and the people in them, we are too much inclined to forget the smile altogether. There are happy people in cities. There are healthy places that people like in cities, places that contribute to happiness, places that can bring out that smile." (BG: quote from a page at www.pps.org, that is not at the net any more - the page referred to the book 'Social Life in Small Urban Spaces').

Whyte's purpose was to promote the likelihood of unplanned, informal encounters or the staging of them. His ambition was that the everyday life of the city becomes more satisfactory for its inhabitants, workers and visitors, but contrary to socialists like Sennett or Lefebvre he had no declared interest to change people or society at large. This means Whyte was more free and open to the possibilities that commercial activities can contribute - among other things - to make the city more lively. He was an optimist and to get closer to his goal, he had to give as concrete and down to earth advice as possible to architects and urban planners, but also to inform the public more generally about these issues.

Phillip Loparte concludes in his review of 'The Essential William H. Whyte, that "Whyte came across as a breezy popularizer, and consequently never got the critical/academic respect he deserved (his phenomenology of the street is every bit as original and profound as, say, Walter Benjamin's......)....... Whyte's overall career now seems much more integrated and organically connected than that of (Jane) Jacobs. ..(He) moved in a straight, ever-deepening path, from his critique of overplanned organizational life to his advocacy of open spaces and his defense of the crowded, serendipitous metropolis." (Metropolis Magazine [7])

Whyte drew on much previous research of both a theoretical and practical kind. Maybe the sociologist Ervin Goffman's studies on 'Behaviour in Public Places' and 'Relations in Public' was most important to him. In 'City' Whyte also refer to Jan Gehl's studies of 'Life Between Buildings' and the pedestrian life of the city of Copenhagen, while in the early years of their street life studies, Whyte and Gehl did not know about each other's work. Whyte's last book-list of references on city issues (in 'City') is long and well structured, especially for practical use.

Maybe it is also worth noting here, that Sennett and Whyte were both living in New York at the same time, but it seems as they did not relate to each others work, although the were both publicly known 'urbanists'. (I will come back to this later in the Sennett section).

Some books by Whyte:

- 'The Organisation Man' in 1956. (Best-seller)

- The Exploding Metropolis', 1958 with Jane Jacobs et al.

- The Last Landscape' 1968.

- The Social life in small urban spaces', 1980. He also made a 50 minute film with the same title - both a result of ''The street life project in New York City".

- City - Rediscovering the Center', 1988. This is Whyte's conclusion at age 70.

The last two books are the most essential to urban architects today. Whyte is a good storyteller - rich in information, often also humorous, but also a bit patchy and wordy. The reader have to contribute some effort to get a reasonable and comprehensive overview.

A later antology is The Essential William Whyte', 2000.

Methods of urban research

When some urban researchers struggled in their writing chambers with theoretical questions on the social role of spaces and places, Whyte showed directly in his own empirical studies, that spaces and places actually mattered. The social space that Whyte studied in the city - at least after he started to study street life in the 1970's - was a social-psychological space of a 'loose' kind, not a social space of established groups, i.e. he was studying 'elementary social life' in Apslund's sense.

Whyte's force in his study of the city was the very close observation. He used real-time and time-lapse compression 16 mm film to capture the daily reality of urban places: parks, storefronts, sidewalks. He minutely analysed what drew people, what repelled them, and how they were affected by small changes in the urban environment. It was the eye-level view, the way people see it, not the bird's-eye view favoured by grand planners, that interested Whyte. Besides a lot of film, he took very detailed notes of behaviour in public space, charting pedestrian movement on pads of graph paper. Much of his work was pure scientific ethnography/anthropology, scientific cultural studies. He logged countless hours watching street corners, public parks and plazas to see how people actually use them. Especially the documentary film techniques provided Whyte with a new kind of data, that nobody had before, data that was both temporal, spatial and rich in information. This data on film could be analysed again and again to grasp the rapid, detailed behaviour and else often unnoted interactions in real life.

Reading Whyte's books makes you want to grab the camera and hit the streets for an expedition into that most dangerous jungle, Downtown, and come back to report that it is a wonderful place to live and work and hang around. Whyte's method give you access to that somewhat 'alien' world and helps you understand how it works.

You must also go out into the street to find out if the design is correct. Spatially Whyte took his cases further to detailed discussion of physical dimensions, where quantities and scale play important roles for the quality that can be obtained in urban public places.

Concept and theory of urbanity - some key issues

To Whyte the streets and squares of the city core are the public places, the places of urbanity.

Whyte's urbanity is to a high degree about crowding and self-congestion - and the change of 'social distance' that happens in situations with a mix of many different people and where the majority are strangers to each other. The behaviour in the city have to take this into account. 'Triangulation' also plays a part. Whyte argued that density worked and that density made the city attractive. A successful street has to have a critical mass of people and activity. What attracts people most is other people.

Thanks to Whyte, we now understand that people are not repelled by crowding--up to a point--but excited by it, eager, able to adapt to it and behaving energetically. The spaces people most enjoy are the ones that are most intensely used.

With the help of Whyte, we can also see, that the design of shared spaces greatly affects the interaction of people who encounter each other in those spaces, and their resulting sense of well-being or discomfort in urban surroundings.

People don't really know what it is that they do in the public spaces og the city. Whyte shows how people imagine themselves doing one thing, only to be shown doing another in the relentless eye of the camera. He also shows that we often behave in ways that are counterintuitive and illogical, like congregating precisely in front of the busiest door on the block. He helps to foster a healthy skepticism about fabricated 'rationality' as a useful design tool.

At Whyte's death, Michael T Kaufman, repeated the message and also brought up Whyte's experience with the question of safety and 'undesirable' people in the city: "He (Whyte) said that what people wanted in the city was other people and that the inner city was as safe as suburban parking lots. He insisted that the best way to deal with undesirables was not to bring in more police officers but to make the area in question as attractive to as many other people as possible. (New York Times 13.1.1999. [16])

Whyte coined some new concepts and definitions related to crowding and interaction:

- 100 percent corner: The street corner in the city centre with most pedestrians/hour at lunch from all directions

- 100 percent location: People placed smack in the middle of the pedestrian slow

- 100 percent conversation: People meet, stop and talk in the middle of the pedestrian flow, i.e. at the 100 percent location

- Triangulation: a key factor to provide linkage between strangers - a third thing or person, that triggers two others to talk to each other - this third works best as trigger if it is unexpected, odd, and/or extraordinary.

On crowding, Whytes row of arguments can be ordered in the following way (BG's list):

- Most outdoor meetings takes places in the middle of crowded streets and squares, where most people are

- People like crowding, at least in some situations and places

- The social distance (the private zone of air around the body) is reduced in crowds, which makes another behaviour permissible.

- Crowding means more and different choices and thus freedom

- A lot of the congestion is self-congestion, and the degree of crowding that people accept is self regulating

On interaction in urban public space, Whyte the notes that:

- Large cities with crowding and a lot of strangers have a relatively larger social interaction than smaller towns, even if common sense tells the opposite

- You know less of the people in the large city (as a percentage of the large population), but the real number of the people you know is large and the statistical probability of chance meetings with some are therefore high - not the least taking the spatial conditions and the life styles in the centres of large cities into account with their concentration, cafes, bars, restaurants, public transportation, etc.

As a consequence cities ought to be built in such a way that crowding occurs some places at lunch or in the rush hour. Although much of the empirical evidence is from New York and USA, overall pedestrians in metropolitan cities act similarly, no matter the country.

*

When I (BG) think of Whyte's work on interaction in public space, and not the least his film on 'Social life in Small Urban Spaces', his material actually provides the possibility for a further systematic interpretation of four different kinds of unplanned, informal contacts in the city that in real life is not fixed categories of people, but dynamic and changing:

1) Meeting and talk with people that you know - or recognise from earlier contacts to some degree. Most talk in public space is probably of this kind, often with more remote acquaintances, that you otherwise rarely will meet, and which gives these meetings their flavour of lottery-like co-incidence and special opportunities. The degree to which the contact becomes personal depends on the kind of acquaintance, the specific situation, your mood, etc. Most of the 100 percent conversations are of this first kind.

2) Contact to persons, that you don't know, but who have an special 'function' of some kind in the space - a vendor, a guard, the driver of a bus, a street performer, etc..... These people is rather easy and safe to talk to, as their 'function' often means that you can approach them without breaking their personal barriers. The contact is per definition impersonal, or you can pretend you want it to be impersonal to get started with a contact, that might develop.... - but mostly it is short and stays rather impersonal. It anyhow can have some importance.

3) Contact that includes talk between you and a stranger (that does not have a 'service' or 'conscious entertainment' function in the space). This is where Whyte's 'triangulation' becomes especially important, i.e. an 'event' providing a special opportunity to talk, as there is something extraordinary to start talking about. The event may be experienced as positive or negative - a piece of strange art, a weird public speaker, an accident, a crime, a train that is late.....

4) 'Contact' of mostly a visual kind without exchange of words, primarily with strangers. These 'contacts' anyhow can tell you something about others, about the space, about the world an indirectly about yourself in relation to this. These contacts can also be seen as a lot of possibilities and opportunities, although not actively confronted, some could be....

These unplanned and informal meetings and contacts take place amidst people that also includes groups of twos, threes or larger, that are going out together, or who on beforehand agrees to meet in the city. During Whyte's 'Streets Project' days in the 1970-s and early 80-s, the use of telephones to set up these meeting of course was used to some extent.

Today, in cities where a large part of the population - and especially the younger - have individual mobile phones, the setting up of meetings can be done from anywhere at any time and take on a new intensity and directness. It happens quite often. The person calling can be sure that the call is only received by specific person(s) at the other end. At the same time this 'set-up' includes elements of some co-incidence ("Where are you right now? Can I see you in e.g. 10 minutes?"). SMS messages on the phones are also used, individually or by groups.

*

'City - Rediscovering the Center' - a list of some of the book's content (examples of chapter titles and section headlines):

- The social life of the street; Street People; The skilled pedestrian; The Undesirables; The Case for Gentrification;

- The Physical Street; The Sensory Street (Second Storiness; Window Shopping; The selling entrance); Return to the Agora;

- The design of spaces (Integral seating; Benches; Chairs; Relationship to the street); Carrying capacity (of urban spaces); Steps and entrances; Water, wind, trees, and light; Sun and shadow; Bounce light; The Open-Space Zoning Provision of New York City (1975); Mandanting of Retailing at Street Level in New York City/Midtown (1975/1982).

On crowding behaviour - concentrated statements from 'City - rediscovering the centre':

Since the early 1970s the year-to-year increase in daily use of key spaces has averaged about 10 percent. The city is now reasserting its most ancient function: a place where people come together, face-to-face. What attracts people most is other people - the contrary of the “oasis”, “retreat” and “escape” that is preferred in responses to questionnaires. In short people attracts more people. Much of the congestion is self-congestion. What attracts people to the street is the congestion, that the 'high' 'modern' planning standards would 'save' them from.

If not at least 1000 pedestrians/hour on each sidewalk or in a pedestrian street - there is no real centre ( it has no 'centre engine').

Social distances between people is a subtle dimension, ever changing. In 1972 New York launched a trial pedestrian mall on Madison Ave. and the number of people more than doubled from 9000 to 19000 an hour and the majority were still on the sidewalks, that got a lager degree of crowding than before. It was clear this was a matter of free choice.

Pedestrians in the great metropolitan centres cluster in the middle of the way. People stop to talk in the middle of the pedestrian traffic stream. Contrary to “common sense” expectations, the great majority of people were found to select their sites for social interaction right on or very close to the traffic lines. Here in the centre of the crowd, you have maximum choice - to break off, to switch, to continue. It is much like being in the middle of a crowded cocktail party. About 30 percent of street conversations appear to be unplanned. To bargain is also best done informally, on common meeting grounds, which the city has in abundance. The crossroads is a very good place to be.

Pedestrians are surprisingly tolerant of blockers. Sitting tendencies are heavy especially at corners of steps. If there is some congestion, it is an amiable one. Circulation and sitting are not antithetical but complementary. The front rows are the best sitting spaces. The number of sitting people is self-regulating and fairly stable. The build up of sitting people cluster, even in very high density spaces. The cluster will be at corners - up front. Even in the most crowded place there is often plenty of room. In the wastefulness lies opportunity.

On urban design - some concentrated statements from 'City - rediscovering the centre':

The genius of centre city is not high-tech. Socially the city is complex, physically comparatively simple. Good places for striking up acquaintances is very crowded streets with lots of eating and quaffing going on. The streets are the river of life of the city - its the primary place. What they need is pedestrian congestion - but there is a kind of holy war against the street - putting them everywhere except at street level.

Some of the most pleasurable streets to walk along are those that have a high degree of stimulation. E.g. people like the busy side of Lexington on Manhattan. One reason is messiness. Everywhere You seem to be on the edge of something else. There are no clear boundaries. It is highly local and a succession of service-facilities. A mishmash of activities - the kind that zoning was originally set up to prevent. It is unusually rich in sensory cues - even for the blind. Movement attracts. Light attracts. Sound attracts. Selling streets are noisy.

Tokyo's streets are consistently more interesting than American: linear progression of elements, ever repeating - coffee shops, food places, lantern signs, the profusion of neon, the many people on the street. The basic factor is mixture. The Japanese do not use zoning to enforce a rigid separation of uses. They encourage a mixture, not only side by side, but upwards. (Showrooms, shops, parlours, offices, glass-walled restaurant at the top).

The greatest urban spaces are street corners. It is at the crossroads that the chances of unplanned encounters are best. Most interesting of all are people who meet people they did not expect to. There is a high incidence of chance meetings in the centre of large cities - but it is no chance at all. With 3000 people an hour streaming past a spot, there is a large probability that someone will see a friend, an acquaintance, or the familiar stranger you can almost place but not quite.

The approach that works, is the one that best meet the city on its own terms and raises the density, rather than lower it. It concentrates, tightens up the fabric, and get the pedestrian back on the street. Downtowns have to be for pedestrians and have to have compactness, short blocks with many street corners, public transportation, and the right mix of shops. Many good downtowns are no more than 4 blocks square. Narrow streets and alleys make fine pedestrian areas. Compactness is most vital in retailing - there have to be no break in continuity or scattering of shops. Split level stores increase compactness, as do 'secondstoriness'. People love the easy access to so many facilities and specialised providers that their numbers make possible. Vacant lots have to be infilled. Even a few blocks can be a divisive distance. It is not linear distance that is critical, but continuity.

The plazas and small parks people like best are most replicable: 500-900 m2. with a high density of people and an efficient use of space. Small busy places. There are still things to learn from the Greek Agora: integration into the city street network, centrality, concentration, mixture.

Cafe-arrangements should be concentrated, bunched, with grouping of tables close together, compressing people to meet each other: striking up conversations, introducing people, saying hello and goodbye.

The city's strengths and ills are inextricably bound together. The same concentration that makes the centre efficient is the cause of the destruction of its sun, light and scale. But this careful urban design also can do something about.

Bryant Park - an example:

Whyte's ideas of planning public areas were first used to a great extent in redeveloping Bryant Park in NYC. Formally a haven for drug users, the city used his and Project for Public Spaces' findings and turned the park into one of the city's most livable and exciting public areas. The basic design ideas (the program) were to open the park's constricted entrances and removing hedges along its perimeter so that people could more easily view the interior from the sidewalk, and adding semi-commercial uses such as a food and beverage kiosks and a ticket stand. The redevelopment took place in 1982-1992 [9].

The landscaping aimed at restoring good activity to the park. The popularity of the new park confirms Whyte's findings in Street Life Project: What city people seek in public spaces are other people, comfort, and care - not seclusion and refuge. Today's Bryant Park is favorably compared with the great parks of London and Paris, and it was the 1996 winner of the Urban Land Institute Excellence Award for Public Projects. [8] (The landscape architects of Bryant Park were Hanna/Olin Ltd., and the design of the park houses were executed by the architectural firm of Hardy Holzman Pfieffer & Associates.)

*

Critique of Whyte

On Whyte's city studies, you can find at least 4 kinds of criticisms in articles about him (nr. 1 to 4 below). The first of them is a general one, that covers both 2, 3 and 4). Nr. 5 is my own. At the end of the section below, I (BG) will comment on the criticisms.

1. Whyte did not take part in the academic discussion on urban development and urban design:

"Though Whyte was quite widely informed, he did not really grapple with the pertinent scholarly literature published on the city. Many of the places he writes about are discussed in the major source on the subject, Peter Muller's Contemporary Suburban America (1981), but Whyte passes up the chance to place his own observations in the context of existing scholarship. Also lacking any perspective on others who over time have shared his enthusiasm for reform through environmental intervention, he misses the lessons garnered from the critical assessment of those." (Howard Gillette [3]).

2. Leaving out the question in which direction society is heading and its consequences for different people (globalisation, the change from fordist to flexible places of work, a new pressure on the family, etc.). Whyte also to some extent supports gentrification of inner city areas:

Today, many regions of the United States are experiencing rapid development reminiscent of the mid-1950’s when Whyte and his contemporaries first recognized "urban sprawl." If there were suburban problems in the "Exploding Metropolis" of Levittowns and Park Forests developments, the lack in today’s "Exploding Megalopolis" of shared civic amenities and services of the traditional city and suburb goes far beyond those of half a century ago. Recent growth in the US across the West, South, and around the fringes of older metro regions is increasingly private and exclusive -gated subdivisions, "edge cities," private schools and recreation retreats.

On Whyte's work in relation to this development, Phillip Lopate remarks that "Whyte seemed reluctant to address more problematic aspects, such as the transformation of today's city from industrial to service economy, and with it the degrading of unskilled labour into an impoverished underclass; the persistence of violent crime; the spread of infectious diseases." (Metropolis Magazine [7]).

Howard Gillette has comments in the same direction and add the questions of gentrification, race, and class as well as the question of whether New York (where most of Whyte's studies have taken place) is a representative case: "A related problem is Whyte's ahistoricism..... Whyte is quite insensitive to one aspect early shopping mall developers wanted to avoid, consciously or unconsciously, that is diversity in race and class. In his effort to advance street animation, Whyte (also) boosts gentrification, suggesting that displacement is not much of a problem among the poor, who have a tendency to move frequently anyway. In choosing the example of the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, he overlooks the anger and anguish which has accompanied gentrification in that area.....A chief assumption of the book is that central cities are doing much better than it would appear in their contest with surrounding suburbs. To make his point, Whyte, using New York once again as an example, surveys those Fortune 500 corporations that have left the city, finding that their profits have reached only one third the level of those that have stayed. The information is intriguing, especially when he recounts that in a high percentage of the moves, companies located near the personal residence of their chief executive officer. But such evidence is not further weighed against other corporate moves to see whether New York is typical. Nor when he cites Robert Fishman's 'Bourgeois Utopias' (1987) does he address Fishman's major premise that decentralization is irreversibly damaging to central cities, preferring to fall back instead on Fishman's belief that the suburbs have their problems too, a point Whvte makes in his own book largely on the basis of personal observation." (Howard Gillette [3])

3. Whyte overlooked the strength of historical forces undermining the art of city making.

Was Whyte too romantic or optimistic about streets and downtowns while more powerful forces were at work in the life and death (to recall Jane Jacobs) of the traditional city? Where Whyte’s efforts in vain, as they aimed at reviving the use of urban space and the importance of the everyday spaces of the city for its residents?

Lopate to some degree think so: "..having discovered the formulae for lively urban spaces, Whyte celebrated their successes but did not say enough about the historical forces undermining the art of city-making: Why has it become harder and harder, even with the best intentions, to extend the urban fabric in a casual, convincing manner? In this respect he resembles Jane Jacobs, whose delight in the choreography of the streets led to descriptions of city life that seem static or frozen in time..." (Phillip Lopate in Metropolis Magazine [7])

And Gillette continues: "While he can hardly be faulted for arguing that neighbourhoods are hurt more by disinvestment than new investment (BG: related to gentrification), he fails to point up, even in the examples he cites, how special public interventions have been necessary to retain affordable homes in areas of renovation.  He does not describe, for instance, the provisions of the Pike Place Market renovation in Seattle, which required subsidized units as part of a new housing and retail complex." (Howard Gillette [3])

4. Whyte, in the last 30 years of his life, left out the question of what to do with the suburbs. e.g. the shopping malls.

Howard Gillette thinks Whyte is not on a track, that will get many followers, as the traditional city is history: "There is too much nostalgia in Whyte, especially for the town center.... Over the past fifty years, many planners have attempted to bring back the town center; in the neighbourhood unit plan of Clarence Perry, the new town ideals of Henry Wright and Clarence Stein, or the modern-day agora promoted in the urban malls of James Rouse. While there are stunning individual examples of such ideas working, broad forces of decentralization and relocation have made the expectations on which Whyte builds increasingly anachronistic. Not only will much of the country resist being encouraged to act like his preferred New Yorkers, they will have to grapple with circumstances which are not only alien to the New York of Whyte's ideal but of the cities we have known in the past. Even as reformers rediscover the center city, they will have to adopt to the fact that urban areas will be marked not only by one such vital place but the possibility of many." And it shall not be forgotten, that "even the developers of the suburban malls for which Whyte has such contempt, attempted under the guidance of such early leaders as Victor Gruen and James Rouse, to provide points of community by striving to replicate the liveliness of the downtown street without its attendant nuisances.  Such desirable goals, however, were bounded both by economic and cultural biases which made such places quite different from the pluralistic ideal Whyte holds dear. (Howard Gillette [3])

5.Whyte's analyses are, like Jan Gehl's mainly on a single urban space at a time,

In Whyte's work, the spatial structure of the city as a network of spatial relations is not studied - contrary to especially Bill Hiller and Space Syntax Analyses. Even a mapping of many spaces in a downtown area with the Whyte method and adding them up in overview presentations is still basically single space analyses, as the relation between spaces is difficult to get at with this method.

Some comments on 1 to 5:

You can always ask for more, which can be quite unfair. The important thing is to be as precise as possible about what a contribution like Whyte's is valid for, at what it is not valid for.

Ad 1.) The strength of Whyte is his solid empirical material and his own interpretation of this. As he was a pioneer in detailed street life studies, there was not much previous academic research of his kind to discuss.

Ad 2.) In the first part of Whyte's career, he certainly did not leave out the question of where society was heading. On the contrary - his interest for the development of the cores of American cities was a direct result of a wider perspective. Urban sprawl, segregation and privatisation will grow, if the core of the city doesn't function well. The question of revitalisation of the central city and its public spaces in many cities can be answered with a 'yes': it can be done and it has happened. By the way, in general Americans are better than Europeans in being open to talk to strangers.

Whyte's view on the 'undesirables' is humane and it works (not pushing them away but making the public spaces attractive to all) and the amount of crime has fallen in the last decade both in US and European cities. US crime rates are by the way not higher than in many European countries (except for killings as a result of US gun laws).

The question of gentrification have to be considered carefully in relation to its context and applied in a balanced way - not as either/or. The city is always changing, and if it is not upgraded it will be downgraded (at least relatively).

Shopping malls have more to do with urban sprawl, cars, the concentration of real estate development and the development of chain stores and franchising than with race and class as such, while suburban development more generally, especially in its initial phases, had more to do with race and class than today. E.g. in suburban Atlanta, segregation today is decreasing, not increasing.

Sure New York is not typical. It is one of the most extreme cases in the world. If public life on city streets and in parks can do fine here, under these stressful conditions, then the crowded city has proved not only to be a nuisance but also an opportunity for social contacts. Many US cities have succeeded in improving their central cities in the last 15 years - e.g. on the West Coast this has happened many places from Seattle, through Portland, San Francisco, San Jose to San Diego. Even in L.A. there have been some improvement, although city life here still is among the most segregated. White's experiences are also clearly valid for European cities, where the centre of cities normally still is strong and getting stronger.

The question of whether 'decentralisation' hurt the central city area is not a simple one. If the suburbs get too 'thin', too dispersed, with too little public life, the central city can become relatively stronger, with intermediate centres and formerly important streets outside of the city centre decreasing in importance instead.

The question of decentralisation and privatisation, by the way, is not only about the world of streets, roads and buildings, it is also about the telephone, television, and the internet....

I think Whyte's basic findings about the central city as a important meeting place, that have to be cared for, still are valid. The question is whether this is enough - shall our interest in public life stop here?

Ad 3) On the question of the forces undermining of the art of city making, the critique of Whyte is not very specific. Whyte himself was clearly aware of the problems of megastructures, indoor shopping arcades, blank walls, etc.

If I (BG) shall try to list some of these forces, the list might be: cars and motorways and the new locations this makes available; increasing size of real estate development units; the standardisation of commodities and shops; inside oriented and privatised new developments; high rents in new developments; lack of public investment and subsidies; modernistic urban planning ideals; lack of architects qualified in the design of public spaces.

These forces are at work, but the success in turning some central cities around, shows that there are counter forces as well. These counter forces are both political, developers seeing the possibility of getting a profit in another way, people using the central city - including tourists, and some architects and planners taking the public spaces issues seriously.

Ad 4) Howard Gillette may actually not be interested in the central city. He may be one of those, who doesn't use it. Shopping malls seems to be enough for him, and he accepts that they can't be as pluralistic as Whyte's city centre. Gillette's comments on 'ahistoricity', 'nostalgia' and 'anachronisms' is touching upon an aspect though that is little understood in the modern society with its rapid change - that 'urbanity' and the process of 'urbanization' are not the same. The process of urbanisation is governed by economic, technological and political forces. 'Urbanity' is about experiences in public space and the way people relate to each other here. This might be a more long term urban dimension, although 'urbanity' takes colour from its concrete circumstances.

To Gillette the traditional city is history, it is gone. It is true that the conditions of cities have changed, but the great compressed history in the city centre is now part of its attraction. In the end Gillette says, that neither the central city, nor the attempts at creating new centres in the suburbs work (besides a few exceptions). The interesting question is why this is so and if there is anything to do about it. To understand what is going on and what to do you probably have to have a much more detailed and differentiated analyses.

Gillette touches upon urban regions being polycentric today, and this is an issue that Whyte largely left out from the 'Street Life Project' onwards. A large question is to what extent a vibrant urban life is possible outside of the traditional city centre. A related question is if it possible to 'stretch' the lively city centre to include streets and areas in its immediate surroundings. These are questions Whyte did not look very much into. He did not have a comprehensive discussion about how to 'measure' what is a city centre and what is not (i.e. how far the definition can be stretched, or how to understand where the edge is), although his key measure of 1000 pedestrians/hour might give some dimension to hold on to. Whyte's mission was the central city, and it was to show what people really do in public space there. He stays where the "edge-problem" does not show up. When he went on to comment on suburban initiatives, e.g. like the ambitious one in the central part of Bellevue outside Seattle, his optimism was too uncritical, as the location of shopping, office towers, bus terminal and park really does not have the concentration needed to create any synergy in the form of street life, at least not for many years to come.

*

Summing up

Some key words in Whyte's understanding of 'urbanity':

(a short overview based on the text above and the index in 'City - Rediscovering the center')

- a high degree of stimulation in public

- a high density of people and activities

- a high incidence of chance meetings

Other important general keywords on Whyte's 'urbanity' are (compactness, concentration, continuity, crowded situations, density, diversity, excitement, face-to-face, gestures in public, hellos and goodbyes, maximum choice, messiness, mixture, movement, narrowness, opportunity, pedestrians and pedestrian flow, people and people stopping to talk, rich sensory cues, self-congestion, sensory streets, sitting spaces, small busy places, social complexity, sound, street conversations including gestures, street people, teenagers, the extraordinary, the odd, the unexpected, the undesirables, unplanned informal encounter, walking, window shopping.

Functionally important are (in alphabetical order):: cafes and outdoor cafes, eating, food facilities and food vendors, other vendors, retail shops (street-level stores and second storiness), selling entrances, street entertainment.

On spatial and physical things, it is the streets, the street corners and the sidewalks that are most important. Some other key physical things are (in alphabetical order): benches, doorways, drinking fountains, entrances, grass as seating, ledges and ledge sitting, light and glare, mass transit, outdoor movable chairs, public art, restrooms, stairs and steps, trees, water.

Observation advice for urbanity research:

- To see the variation of people in the street: stand still

- Behaviour outside of rush hours shows peoples preferences best

- Ordinary days are the most interesting - not the very good or very bad ones

What to observe is both what people do and how the architectural setting influences the activity of people:

What is people doing and where in the spaces are they doing it? What are the walking speeds? How does contacts between people happen, how many people are there and in how large a space? How many people are talking to each other? How many other things than people are there to look at? What is the number of shops doors, shop windows and how is the continuity of this? How many benches and other sitting places and where? What other amenities are there?

(For more concrete things to observe about space and architecture, see the checklist below.)

A checklist on urban density and other design features based on Whyte (compiled by BG):

What densities and crowding is Whyte actually talking about? What are the numbers involved?

- Building-wise it is about city centres with a floor area ratio (FAR) of 15-18, sometimes more. Danish city centres have a FAR of 1 (=100%) or maximum 2 (=200%), i.e. much less

- City-wise it is mostly about cities with inhabitants in the millions, though smaller can do, e.g. Portland with 3/4 of a million.

- Most important though, are not those numbers, but that the city centre is compact and continuous - many good city centres in the US are only 240x240 to 360x360 meters.

- City activities, streets and squares shall be designed in such a way that the number of pedestrians in the rush hour on good days will be 20 pedestrians/minute for each 1 meter of street width or sidewalk width. (Jan Gehl says 10 in Copenhagen - Whyte's numbers from New York are twice as high! ). The physically possible capacity limit is 40-60 pedestrians/minute for each 1 meter of efficient walkway width (i.e. width reduced for 'obstacles')

- Across the whole width of the street there shall be minimum 30 pedestrians/minute (1800/hour), if the street shall be perceived as a central one - more than 120/minute is rare in real life (7200/hour).

- Pedestrian streets ought to be narrow. Many good ones are just 4-6 meters wide.

- Continuity of the street space: Buildings directly at the edge of the sidewalk. Shops along the facade. Doors and windows to the street. 2. floor activity, that can be seen through windows.

- Street vendors and food in the public space

- Large trees and preferably also water

- Sun, shade and preferably also bounced light - overall a good climate

- Possibilities to sit and simple amenities: benches, clocks, drinking fountains, waste baskets that work. At important meeting places also large ashtrays, phone booths, sculptures you can meet by

- Urban architecture and urban furniture that is not over-designed

- Not too much good taste - it is boring. Whyte, as stated above, means people likes a degree of messiness.

William H. Whyte on the internet - some links:

1. Rutherford H. Platt: Holly Whyte - Visionary For A Humane Metropolis

http://www.umass.edu/ecologicalcities/documents/hw_article.pdf

2. On the Social Life of Small Urban Spaces:

http://www.pps.org/Products/sociallife.htm

http://journalism.nyu.edu/portfolio/books/book2.html

City - Rediscovering the Center, reviews

3. http://www.nbm.org/blueprints/80s/fall89/page3/page3.htm

4. http://journalism.nyu.edu/portfolio/books/book6.html

Notes on City - Rediscovering the Centre:

5. http://cwx.prenhall.com/bookbind/pubbooks/popenoe/chapter2/custom1/deluxe-content.html

The Essential William H. Whyte:

6. http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0823220265/qid=1133093503/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_8_1/202-7021085-9247038

7. http://www.metropolismag.com/html/content_1200/rev.htm

On Bryant Park, New York:

8. http://www.bryantpark.org/html/history.htm

9. http://urbanparks.pps.org/greatplaces/one?public_place_id=26

The Last Landscape:

10. http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/13565.html

The Exploding Metropolis:

11. http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/1059.html

The Organisation Man:

12. http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/whyte-main.html

13. http://www.lincolnnet.net/users/lrpfhs/culture.htm

Biography:

15. http://www.pps.org/Who We Are/whoweare_whyte.html

16. http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/whyte-obit.html

17. http://www.lib.uwo.ca/business/whyte.htm

18.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_H._Whyte

Litterature, other:

The Man Who Loved Cities by Nathan Glazer, Wilson Quarterly, 1999 - good overview article

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Lecture 3:

Urban meeting, works, and rhythms: to live with and in difference

- on the research of the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre and the New York cultural sociologist Richard Sennett

Henri Lefebvre, French philosopher and sociologist (1901-1991)

Philosopher of everyday life and urbanity. Lefebvre is one of the few, that have undertaken a deep theoretical discussion of space and social relations . He is very concerned about the question of alienation and the mystification which develop in capitalist society as a consequence of combined effect of money and abstractions.

Lefebvre was a French communist intellectual,, but left PCF (the French Communist Party) in the end of the 1950's. He was enormously productive and wrote many philosophical books, e.g. on Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Sartre. Lefebvre also joined forces with experimental movements in the Arts, that wanted to move art to other scenes than museums and private settings: Dada, surrealism and the situationists. How does such a combination of interests fit together? I think Lefebvre tried to find new ways for the liberation of people by embracing several fields at once and by daring to think far and unconventionally.

Since the 1930's he was preoccupied with 'the moments of presence' and with the relationship of banality and presence, and later also with the question of 'leisure' (where Marxists traditionally were concerned with 'work'). Lefebvre even explored the relationship between desire and alienation. In short he spans the field from philosophy, politics, economy and sociology to psychoanalyses, semiotics and art. He is a French pioneer in specifying 'the dialectic materialism' and simultaneously one of the foremost criticists of structuralism. Lefebvre e.g. worked with the opposition of structure on the hand and experience on the other and he was concerned about both, where Marxists and structuralists normally avoided questions of 'experience', as something too private and individual.

From the 1960's onwards, Lefebvre was not only preoccupied with 'time' in a dialectical material perspective, i.e. the Marxist dynamic understanding of history propelled by oppositions and contradictions, changing themselves in the process, turning around and transgressing into something new. Lefebvre was also concerned with a spatialisation of dialectics, e.g. the development of an understanding of how 'spatial' oppositions and contradictions change, turn over, and becomes something 'new'. He actually had the ambition, to supplement Marxism with a deeper understanding of spatial relations, which Marx himself had not covered much besides some writing in volume 3 of 'The Capital' on land prices and how they arise out of land-rents and ground-rents of different kinds, and some writing on the deepening opposition between town and country in capitalist society.

On the city and on space, the most comprehensive writings by Lefebvre are:

- 'The Right to the City', 1968 (first published in English in 1996 as a part of 'Writing on Cities. This book is about access to the city as a human right for everyone. The gentrification of Paris and the dreadful social housing ghettos in the suburbs for the working class are part of the background for this book, but also an early ecological concern about the future of the industrialised society, where the goal cannot be ever more material things, but a liberated, playful and creative social life which best can unfold itself in the city.

- 'The Urban Revolution'1970 (first published in English in 2003), which formes an important bridge further to:

- The Production of Space, 1974 (first English edition in 1991). This book is about space as a social construction - a construction that have effects on the further development of social life. Lefebvre here attempts to write a new philosophy of space, that focus on the social perspective. Some of the important concepts in 'The Production of Space' has to 1) with the term 'lived space', which can be interpreted as human beings immediate and rather unconscious 'space'; 2) the term 'abstract space' that is the space of capitalism and industrialism - a space at once tending to be homogeneous and fragmented; and 3) the term 'differential space', which is a new space that develops out of the oppositions and contradiction of 'abstract space'.

Furthermore an new book has recently been published 'Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life' (in English 2004)

Lefebvre's concept of 'the urban' - a double concept

The double concept of 'the urban' consists of:

1) the city in relation to the development of 'the mode of production' (a key Marxist term), i.e. the city understood in its historical development process related to economics, politics, technological development and contradictions between social classes.

2) the city and city life in a more general and fundamental sense as a gathering of human culture and activity with special potentials. In 'The Right to the City' this is called 'the urban' or 'urbanity', in 'The Production of Space' it is termed 'urban centrality'.

Although in real life these to concepts of 'the urban' will always be intertwined, as 1) sets some important conditions for 2), and to some extent 2) probably also have some effects back on 1) - from a theoretical point of view, it is important to separate the two.

To me (BG) the first (1) was most interesting from the 1960's to the mid 1980's, since then the other part of the double concept, have had my major focus, as this is where a further clarification is most urgent, at least seen in an urban planning and architectural perspective.

On Lefebvre's double concept of 'the urban', I have a text from 1992 (only available in Danish):

http://hjem.get2net.dk/gronlund/Lefebvre_Nordplan_maj92.html

Lefebvre's concept of urbanity

As I (BG) read Lefebvre, his urbanity is about: Encounter (meeting); Life and Play (for its own purpose); Difference (including strangers); Works (of "art"); Possibilities and Unpredictability; Interchange; and The Use of All Senses. But the city must also contain the necessary opposition: Recognition; Stability; and Possibility of Withdrawal

In our times several factors undermine urbanity. The negative factors for the development of "the Urban" are, according to Lefebvre: Exchange Value and Profit; Modernist-Functionalist Urban Planning and Other Bureaucratic Interference; and Mental Past (Ascetic and Agrarian).

Some researchers say, that Lefebvre's concept of the city is not the same before and after 'The Production of Space'. It is true, that his theories on space in important ways are further developed here, but basically his concept of urbanity remains the same. This is evident from his texts and interviews in the 1980's as well as from his attempt at developing a 'Rhythmanalyses' in the last years of his life.

What does Lefebvre say about the city in the 1980's (p. refer to 'Writing on Cities' except the last one)

- The city - a place where different groups can meet, where they may be in conflict but also form alliances, and where they participate in a collective oeuvre. A town where every place is interesting and moving and has its religious, political and aesthetic pulsations. Singing and dancing, mural paintings, counter cultures. Fascination, pleasure and liveability. (p 207-208). Contrast (p233). The multiplicity of roles and relations (p236). Tourism (p238). Differences (p239). The city has an autonomous reality. It has a life, an existence which cannot be reduced to the distribution of land or space, the street, the square, meeting places, fêtes; (p213). The complexities and richness of urban life, especially of everyday life (p214)

- In the city, public life orders itself principally around exchanges of all kinds: material and non-material, objects and words, signs and products. Exchange and commerce are never reduced to a strictly economic and monetary aspect, but the life in the city seldom has a political objective - except in cases of revolt (p233). The city is an essential domain of liberty (p214). Liberty is also the maximum of possibilities for each citizen in the city.(p215).

- The city must be a place of waste. for one wastes space and time; everything mustn't be foreseen and functional, for spending is a feast. You can't reduce this concept, either the festival disappears and becomes a simple commercial market, or it is something that goes beyond it. There has to be a certain transgression in festival, spaces of freedom and perhaps adventure, but that is certainly not enough. I don't know how one can modernise the concept of festival, because the city has been a place for festivals; the most beautiful cities were those where festivals were not planned in advance, but there was a space where they could unfold, for example Florence, Venice...For a festival you need a rich and free society. Our era has found a space for festivals and pleasure - that's the beach. (Environment & Planning, D vol. 5, p 36).

Background for Lefebvre's urban interest - as he sees it himself:

- Our culture is mostly anti-urban, as are the different forms of socialisms that we have seen so far. There are anti-urban tendencies in Judaism, Protestantism, Marxism, the Chicago school of urban ecology, as well as in the Soviet, Chinese, Cuban and Kampuchea revolutions.

- There is another tradition of Greek origin, The City of civilisation, culture and art, maintained through Roman influence and, later, Spain.

- The concept of the urban itself is unclear (BG: in our culture, but not to Lefebvre)

- The modern city is a divided, fragmented city

- Urbanists have been catastrophic, e.g. Le Corbusier

- Technology is important. The Revolution had failed. It had not taken place. The substitute for a social and political revolution was a scientific and technological revolution (as far as we have seen..).

- Little importance is given to urban questions in the university.

- It seems there is a renewed interest in the urban (among people, etc.)

Further reading on Lefebvre in the 1980's: http://hjem.get2net.dk/gronlund/Lefebvres_urban_1980s.html

On 'The Production of Space': http://hjem.get2net.dk/gronlund/Lefebvreindlaeg_21_3_97v2.html

Lefebvre's Rhythmanalyses (1980's)

How then, did Lefebvre want to study urbanity in a concrete way? What could a method to be that wants to study the relations between human 'events' and relations in the city? On of Lefebvre's answers is an attempt to develop a new discipline: Rhythmanalyses

Lefebvre's Rhythmanlyses is - like much of his other work - a project that actually never got finished, that never became pedagogically systematised, and that never got used by himself in actual systematical studies. But he tries, in his very old age, to study street life from the window in his apartment diagonally across the street from the north-east corner of Centre Pompidou in Paris (see 'Writing on Cities')

My (BG's) attempt to summarise and systematise Lefebvre's Rhythmanalyses can be seen at: http://hjem.get2net.dk/gronlund/Lefebvre_Rhythmanaslyses.html

What follows below is a summary of my summary... - and some further thoughts.

Rhythmanalysis as a discipline:

Every social, that is collective rhythm, is determined by the forms of alliances which humane groups gives to themselves; times and spaces, the public and the private, the State-political and the intimate; moods; atmosphere; human activities; hearing; temporalities.

Lefebvre sees Rhythmanalyses as a general theory of transdisciplinary character that tries to combine the scientific and the poetic, and a method that requires attentiveness and a certain amount of time, a memory and a heart. ...It is a comparative study including descriptions of oppositions constituting an 'ensemble'.

Why is Lefebvre interested in rhythmanalysis?

It relates to his interest in everyday life and the extra-everyday, it is about the complexity of the concrete reality, it shows the appropriation of spaces in a non-political way and rhythm implies a relation of a time with a space.

Some different kinds of rhythms:

All rhythms have a past (and immediate past), a now, a near future and a hereafter and rhythms exist in many forms and types, e.g.: the cyclical and the linear; speech; internal and external rhythms, the rhythms of groups; rituals; bodies; daily rhythms; body language; movement and traffic; exchange; sounds; sudden events; festival; seasons; the weather; the rhythms of the built environment and urban functions; light and shadow, presence - absence, etc.

....and new technological possibilities of study with video:

Lefebvre does not mention it - but the movie camera (today digital video) can be an important help in the analyses. With it a time-space situation can be recorded for detailed and repeated analyses, events can be precisely mapped in space an time, the events can be played back in slow motion, normal speed or compressed as 'time-laps', etc. Maybe Lefebvre does not mention it, because he has never used it....

William Whyte's film project 'Social Life in Small Urban Spaces' is to a large extent a 'rhythmanalyses, that Lefebvre probably did not know. Bu if You combine the rhythmic approaches of Whyte and Lefebvre, maybe new aspects of urbanity cam be seen and a more detailed and deeper understanding can be developed....

There are also other new technological possibilities with 'headsets', monitoring eye-movements, computerised analyses of movements (as e.g. is done in top level sports training), etc. And there are possibilities for interactive experiments with a high degree of documentation.

Lefebvre on the Internet (other than BG's texts) - some links :

Review of 'The Production of Space':

http://www.notbored.org/space.html

http://www.anarchitektur.com/aa01-lefebvre/elden.html

http://www.gradnet.de/papers/pomo2.archives/pomo98.papers/stelden98.htm

Reading notes on 'The Production of Space' (some have illustrations):

http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary_Criticism/postmodernism/postmo_urban/lefebvre.html

http://www.adamranson.freeserve.co.uk/Lefebvre.html

On Lefebvre and the Situationists:

http://www.notbored.org/lefebvre-interview.html

http://www.notbored.org/moments.html

http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/238

http://www.notbored.org/symphony.html

Biography and bibliography:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Lefebvre

http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2191&editorial_id=9838

Rob Shields on Lefebvre:

http://http-server.carleton.ca/~rshields/lefedl.html

http://http-server.carleton.ca/~rshields/lefebvre.htm

http://www.carleton.ca/~rshields/lecture.ppt

On the politics of place and identity and the postindustrial city - articles on Foucault, Lefebvre, de Certeau and others:

http://econgeog.misc.hit-u.ac.jp/icgg/intl_mtgs/UBest.pdf

All Lefebvres books at Amazone.com

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/index=books-uk&field-author=Lefebvre, Henri/202-7021085-9247038

Books on Lefebvre

Rob Shields: Lefebvre, Love and Struggle: Spatial Dialectics, 1998

review of the above: http://www.newsandletters.org/Issues/2003/October/Lefebvre≠_Oct03.htm

Stuart Elden: Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible, 2004

Stuart Elden, Elizabeth Lebas: Henri Lefebvre - Key Writings, 2003

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Richard Sennett, cultural sociologist,

New York University / London School of Economics

A controversial urbanist: An American Jew living in Greenwich Village, New York and in London, politically on the left, but not participating in party politics (in the way Lefebvre did for many years). Sennett wants to improve democracy and human equality through the exposure of strangeness, through the exposure of difference. He says he has good advice for architects and planners. He lectured at the School of Architecture in Copenhagen in 1994, where it became clear that his urban texts at least in some ways are based on a personal interpretation and development of Lefebvre - although he does not say so in his books. At the lecture he mentioned Lefebvre 10 times. Foucault and lately Levinas also play an important role in his perspective on the city. Sennett is both easy and difficult to read. Part of the difficulty is that his thoughts about the city does not accumulate to a larger and systematic whole, but have to be extracted through careful reading across his texts.

Sennett's interest in the urban has most of all to do with ethics: In the article 'The Civitas of Seeing', 1989, he says: "A city isn't just a place to live, to shop, to go out and have kids play. It's a place that implicates how one derives one's ethics, how one develops a sense of justice, how one learns to talk with and learn from people who are unlike oneself, which is how a human being becomes human." The most important thing in the city is talk, and the most important place is the city centre, especially its streets.

Sennett's short definition of 'urbanity': The possibility for living in difference as the essence of urban culture.

Today we have difficulties with this. Urbane behaviour ('urbanity') started to disappear with the advent of Enlightenment (1750-1800). To understand this, Sennett wrote 'The Fall of Public Man' in the 1970's, which main conclusion is that we have lost important aspects of public behaviour, and now live under the tyranny of intimacy and privacy. Sennett says, that modern man turns inward and towards psychoanalyses. Sennett wants us to do the opposite - to turn outwards towards others and towards strangers in the city. He wants us to expose ourselves, better to be able to live with each other in the city and with ourselves.

A short overview of Sennett's urban writings:

After editing an anthology on Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities, in 1969 (about Simmel, Park, With, etc.), Sennett wrote his first own book on city life in 1970: The Uses of Disorder', which is about the human need for some anarchy to be able develop a rich identity - a disorder that the city can provide if there is not to much pre-planned control. This can increase the awareness of other.

Sennett continues in 1974 with The Fall of Public Man' (as mentioned above), which has the subtitle 'The Social Psychology of Capitalism'. Carl E. Schorske said about this book, that Sennett here is "developing a provocative thesis: that the public world stage has been usurped by the private psychic scene, to the detriment of both individual and society. Sennett's quest for the cause of the impoverishment of civic life in modern industrial society opens fascinating perspectives into the relationships between theatre, politics, urban life and the changing function of the family." This book is also, more or less directly, a critique of the new left in the 1970's for romanticising small collective community life in ghettos in the countryside or in cities.

In 'The Conscience of the Eye - the Design and Social Life of Cities', 1990, ( in Danish 'Øjets vidnesbyrd', 1996) Sennett takes his urban writings further through a series of examples and theoretical reflections. The book is about the modern fear of exposure, the American grid, 14th street in New York and many other things - together forming a rich fabric of urban narratives and dualisms, that may contribute to a changing perspective on the city and on urbanity. Although the title implies notions on city design, the book difficult to interpret directly as possible and positive new architectural strategies.

'Flesh and Stone - the Body and the City in Western Civilization', 1994' is a follow-up to 'The Conscience of the Eye' with a wider span of historical examples and more emphasis in the body that anchors Sennett's problematic, but with less new theoretical insights than the earlier books. The book states, that awareness in the city does not only have to do with pleasure, but also with pain (BG: a difficult concept to use in urban design - and Sennett remains vague in this regard). This is also the first of Sennett's book with pictures, but most of them are not well integrated into the text. The last chapter on New York has some interesting statements on Jane Jacobs' 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities' 30 years after. Sennett lives in the same neighbourhood as Jacobs did, when she wrote her book, and he now says: "Difference and indifference co-exist in the life of the Village (BG: Greenwich Village); the sheer fact of diversity does not prompt people to interact. In part this is because, over the last two decades, the diversities of the Village have grown more cruel, in ways 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities' did not envision." By cruel he here means drugs, crime, aids and many homeless people. This last parts opens up the question, whether and how the city has changed since the 1960's in a fundamental way. This question, will occupy him in the years to come.

Sennett's later book: 'The Corrosion of Character - the personal consequences of work in the new capitalism', 1998, is about the new flexible workplace in the new global economy. Work. also for much middleclass and educated people becomes short term and without a real foothold, which changes peoples lives and threaten the development of their identity. In this book, Sennett is almost completely silent, though, about how this new study of the workplace relates to his earlier urban ones. This issue is addressed in some of his later lectures and articles (see the Internet links at the end of the Sennett section).

The insecurities and flux of the new economy increase the indifference of people and the individuals tend to focus more on the home and the family. Sennett sees the city and local places as even more important to democracy in this situation. The change also make him focus more on 'alterity' than 'difference' - i.e. 'otherness' both of the other and of yourself. Part of the problem of the city is that the new economy also standardises the city, with offices for general use, the same shops everywhere, the standardised mass consumption - all things that makes people less different, at least on the surface. If a focus 'alterity' more than 'difference' ought to have any other consequences for urban design, than those Sennett has hinted at before, is not yet clear - it is maybe of more theoretical than practical importance so far.

'Alterity' is a key issue in the philosophy of Levinas, and also plays an important role for the post-modern sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who gave a lecture in Copenhagen at 'Byforum', in 2001, compare i.e. Bauman's 'Postmodern Ethics' and 'Postmodernity and Its Discontents'.

Sennett wants to stimulate urban behaviour through urban design: At the School of Architecture in Copenhagen in 1994 he said: "What I think of as urbanity is precisely making use of the density and differences in the city so that people find a more balanced sense of identification on the one hand with others who are like themselves but also a willingness to take risks with what is unlike, unknown.... It is this kind of experiences that make people find out something about themselves that they didn't know before. That's what urbanity is at its best....To me, how to privilege the notion of difference that is what urbanity is all about."

The social and physical settings that Sennett see as urban ( i.e. as settings of and for "urbanity") can shortly be characterised with words like 'difference', 'diversity', 'density', 'strangers', 'mixture of people', 'complexity', 'unlikeness' and 'impersonality'. They have also to do with 'discovery' through 'dissonance', 'decentering', 'dislocation', and 'displacement'. As Sennett sees it, through difference, etc., You will experience dissonance, which will force You out of Your habitual ways of looking at the world and out of Your habitual way of acting.

In short Sennett's urban understanding and urban strategy can be compressed to the following statements (BG's interpretation):

1) Spaces and sites of diversity where difference is privileged

2) The settings are dense, tight-packed

3) The settings also contain possibilities for the uncontrolled, the unpredictable and the spontaneous.

4) Urbanity then begins as bodily experience.

5) In this situation of stimulation of and through difference something surprising can happen through dissonance and decentering.

6) The result is an interactive order of urbanity where people who otherwise would be isolated from one another have interest in other people even if they don't understand them.

One of the most clear urban planning advice Sennett has given, is that cultural centres, libraries and the like, shall not be placed in the middle of each homogenous neighbourhood, but at the edge between neighbourhoods of different kind, in order to get different people to share the same space - in order that the 6 points above hopefully will happen to some extent.

Some problems in Sennett's concept of 'urbanity':

- Un unresolved relationship between difference and in-difference in the city, which his latest texts from 1998 onwards tries to modify, but only partly solves. (BG: a possible explanation might be statistical - the sheer number of strangers in the city, where one can make a difference at the same time as you necessarily have to be in-different to most of the others)

- Sennett's theories are not fully worked out - they lack structured evidence and comparative analyses

- Lack of empirical material (besides a cultural-historical 'montage')

- Relate very little to architecture and urban design approaches in our time

- Sennett's urban design advice is not very clear

- Sennett's cross disciplinary approach is demanding, if You really want to follow him, as he uses concepts and terminology from different fields, each respectively having their own contextual meaning (psychology, social-psychology, sociology, cultural studies, religion, philosophy, etc..)

For more on Sennett's 'urbanity' see: http://hjem.get2net.dk/gronlund/Sennett_ny_tekst_97kort.html

Some other links on Sennett:

New articles and lectures after 1998, where the new flexible and global economy forces him to adjust his theories about the city:

Capitalism and the City, November 2000 - most essential of Sennett's new articles on cities on the Intrernet:

http://on1.zkm.de/zkm/stories/storyReader$1513

A flexible city of strangers, LeMonde February 2001: http://mondediplo.com/2001/02/16cities

Megacities: http://www.megacities.nl/lecture_7/lecture.html and http://www.megacities.nl/lecture_7/inleidingMC.pdf and http://www.megacities.nl/lecture_7/report.html and http://www.megacities.nl/lecture_7/deel1MC.pdf and http://www.megacities.nl/lecture_7/deel2MC.pdf and http://www.megacities.nl/lecture_7/deel3MC.pdf

The Spaces of Democracy, Wallenberg Lecture, University of Michigan, 1998:

http://www.umich.edu/~urecord/9798/Mar25_98/city.htm

(This link is a short summary - also printed as a booklet, Amazone.com )

Process and Form, Work and Place, MIT, Fall 1998: http://web.mit.edu/imagingthecity/www/sessions/sennett-beinart.html

The new political economy and its culture - on democracy, growth, Smith's paradox, durable time, the coherent self and place, lecture at University of Virginia, Spring 2000: http://www.lclark.edu/~ria/Richard.Sennett.html

The Brian Lehrer Show: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/readings/sennett.html

Society of Broken Eggs: http://www.newstatesman.com/200112170026

On flexibilty: http://www.jobsletter.org.nz/jbl10210.htm and http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/~kwesthue/cnt-sen.htm

Sennett's life and work - a large overview:

Inner-city Scholar, by Melissa Benn, Saturday February 3, 2001, The Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/saturday_review/story/0,3605,432557,00.html

Short biographies and bibliographies:

http://www.nyu.edu/fas/Faculty/SennettRichard.html

http://www2.rz.hu-berlin.de/amerika/projects/newurbanism/nu_pt_sennett.html

http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/history/richard_sennett.htm

http://www.megacities.nl/lecture_7/curricula.pdf

http://web.mit.edu/sap/www/plan/plan_issues/62/Sennett/article_bottom.html

An all too negative review:

http://newcriterion.com/archive/09/may91/sennett.htm

For reviews on 'The Fall of Public Man' and 'Flesh and Stone' also see Richard Sennett at Amazone,com

Sennet Booklist at Amazone.com

New Books:

Richard Sennet: Respect: The Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality, 2004

reviews of the above

http://www.mclemee.com/id75.html

http://www.frankfuredi.com/articles/respect-20030210.shtml

http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/conferences/covar/Program/lascaris.pdf

http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i18/18a01201.htm

http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/fall03/032537.htm

Richard Sennett, Eric Klinenberg: Conversations with Richard Sennett, 2006

Richard Sennett The Culture of the New Capitalism, 2006

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Lecture 4

Streets, the virtual community and the question of a workable architecture of urbanity

- on the spatial theories and urban implications of the British space syntax analyses pioneer Bill Hillier

Bill Hillier and Space Syntax Analyses

Among university researcher of the social sciences it is today popular to talk about urbanity and the urban experience as labyrinthic. What they refer to then is most often the centre of Paris, London, New York and other large metropolises. Hillier and the space syntax research has shown, that the pre-modern city normally is not labyrinthic. It is the modern city - in the suburbs and in New Towns - that is labyrinthic, at least seen spatially (Also see the research of Batty on fractal urban regions!). The popular talk about 'labyrinth' is just a literary metaphor. Mentally - in peoples minds - the dense central city may to some extent be understood as labyrinthic as you never can get to know all about it, and as you cannot grasp it spatial structure all at once. Even normal city maps can be difficult to interpret spatially (e.g. which lines are most important) - but when you are there on the ground in the centre of traditional cities, it might actually be more easy to understand what lines are more and less important. This is just one example that shows that we need to be better able to understand and analyse space.

Hillier and the research and postgraduate department at Bartlet School of Architecture, University College, London, have developed a new and revolutionary way of analysing space. Space syntax analyses sees space as a network of interrelated nodes, that can be mapped fairly precisely and be studied with mathematical and statistical tools. For the first time, this makes analyses of complex spatial systems or 'configurations' possible in a way that is closer to 'hard' science, than to humanistic phenomenology and hermeneutics.

The two most important ways of mapping space is 'axial' and 'convex'. 'Axial lines' are straight sightlines that simultaneously are movement lines through spaces. 'Convex spaces' are space divided up into smaller parts where width and the visual perimeters of the spaces are considered. A convex spaces is delimited in such a way, that all of its perimeter is visible from anywhere within the space, e.g. a recess in a public square, which cannot be seen from everywhere in the major part of the square, is considered a convex space of its own. Both axial lines and convex spaces are mapped in such a way that the largest space is mapped first, then the second largest, etc...

With this mapping technique all spaces in cities and buildings can be mapped as both axial lines and convex spaces (all spaces have both dimensions). You can say that the old dichotomy of streets and squares in urban design have been resolved with the introduction of 'axial lines' and 'convex spaces', and that all spaces from now on, whether indoor or outdoor, have both a kind of 'street' dimension and a kind of "square" dimension (where "square" shall be understood topologically, not as Euclidian geometry).

When the city or building is mapped as axial lines and convex spaces, the relationship between spaces can be calculated. The most simple measure is 'connectivity', that count the number of connections from a single space to its neighbouring spaces. Normally the most useful measure is 'integration', that gives an overall value for each space of how it relates to many or all other spaces, i.e. not only the directly neighbouring ones. The value of 'integration' is closely related to the average number of times that you have to change movement lines (or turn around the corner) to get from each of the lines or spaces to the others (or in buildings, the number of rooms you have to pass). The integration values are computed in specially developed computer software and can be mapped as a colour pattern, where red is most integrated and blue most segregated.

The advantage of space syntax is a higher complexity in the spatial analyses than with almost any other method (and therefore today, with the help of computers, more precise). You can also say, that it frees the spatial analyses from the trap of being forced to work with space as more or less arbitrary areas (like districts in the form of 'blobs' on a map).

Space syntax analyses is basically a pure spatial analyses. At the basic level it just describes spaces and their configuration topologically and makes calculation of the spaces relation to each other - to some extent like the telephone company will map and analyse the telephone lines and their connections. It is a fairly neutral description of space as such, that initially is not loaded with any prejudice of how 'space ought to be' or what the economic, social or other importance different configurations of space might have. It has initially neither any historical explanation the development of specific spatial pattern.

The 'pure' spatial analyses can then be compared to a lot of phenomena concerning use, economics etc. and through proper statistical correlation analyses the probability of relations between space and events and things taking place in space can be tested. E.g. the number of pedestrian can be counted and tested against the purely spatial integration values of different axial lines. Or you can test the distribution of shops, land values, building height and the like vis-à-vis the spatial pattern.

Space syntax is both an experimental and theoretical science under development since the 1970-s, today with researchers many places in the world. So far, there have already been many important results, and often also surprising ones.

About cities it has e.g. been shown how the traditional European cities from before 1900 normally have deformed grid patterns, with a variation of integration values on different lines, that both create a strong pattern of integrated lines linking the centre with the external world as well as with different 'sub areas' within the city, that form 'pockets' of less integrated lines. The average integration values in these cities are rather high, and the differentiation of integration values between different lines moderate.

In cities developed according to 'modern' urban planning principles, the average integration values are lower, and the 'span' between high and low values larger. Part of the reason is a road network that branches out like trees (i.e. a network that is more fractal than a grid).

The difference between traditional and modern kinds of spatial nets have proved to have practical importance, e.g. for the distribution of pedestrians in the net. In traditional European cities, there is a high degree of correlation (ca. 0.75) between the distribution of integration values and the relative distribution of pedestrians, while this relation breaks down (correlation become much lower) in 'modern' cities. To say it in a popular way, in traditional cities there normally are more pedestrians on the 'red' lines, than elsewhere, while in modern cities you can not be sure where to find most pedestrians (and often there are very few). This way it has been proved, that traditional cities have developed its patterns based on 'movement economy'. It has also been proved, that the 'modern'

city is much more hiearchical from at spatial point of view, than the traditional on.

To Bill Hillier urbanity has to with the possibilities of chance meetings in the streets. In this way he resembles Asplund, Whyte, Lefebvre and Sennett - although he rarely comment on any of them. One of Hillier's great contributions is to show, how the specific spatial patterns of different cities effect the pedestrian flow, and therefore the possibilities of chance encounters, both in the system as a whole and in specific streets.

Hillier also shows that to keep a good spatial integration as cities grows, the lines connecting the 'hinterland' and the outlaying areas of the city to the centre, the connecting lines have to be longer (seen as straight lines).

One of the tricky things to understand and get used to with space syntax, not the least for architects, is that the spatial analyses is not metric, i.e. it is not about distances in meters or kilometres, but about spatial relations seen as 'steps' in space (the number of rooms you have to pass to get from Room A to room B, or the number of lines you have to pass through to get from one place in the city to another).

Another tricky thing to cope with, is that Space Syntax only considers a part of the architectural, urban design and planning fields, although a very important part (e.g. doors play a big role in space syntax, while windows so far have played a very little role - as they normally don't have much to do with movement). Nobody can practice as an architect based on space syntax alone, but without it you might commit major mistakes in your design.

Literature:

Bill Hillier & Julienne Hanson: The Social Logic of Space, 1984

(page 90-100, 108-109 are maybe the most important ones)

Bill Hillier: Space is the machine, Cambridge, 1996. (This book have the following chapters on cities; 4. Cities as movement economies; Can architecture cause social malaise (on 'modern'

housing estates); 6. Time as aspect of space (about spatially strange cities in urban history); 9. The fundamental city (on how cities grow to overcome their spatial paradox of internal vs. external access).

Lars Marcus: Architectural Knowledge and urban form. Dissertation. KTH. Stockholm, 2000.

Nordisk Tidskrift for Arkitekturforskning 1993 nr. 2. Theme issue on space syntax, mostly in English)

Julienne Hanson: Decoding Homes and Houses, Cambridge, 1998 (on the use of space syntax for 'indoor' analyses, especially dwelling)

There is a lot of things about Space Syntax and Bill Hillier on the internet:

On Bo Grönlund's homepage http://bo.gronlund.homepage.dk

Theory

http://hjem.get2net.dk/gronlund/3_314_Eng_v3_march2002.htm

(look at the Bill Hillier section at the bottom of the page - NB! some links are now dead)

Copenhagen axial map:

http://homepage.mac.com/bogronlund/kbhax19_24032002radn.gif

Bibliography

http://homepage.mac.com/bogronlund/3_312fall2003ref.htm

Bo Grönlund's research in 4 Scandinavian urban districts:

http://homepage.mac.com/bogronlund/posterSSS4.pdf

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Wkipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_syntax

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isovist

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visibility_graph

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_network

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_network_analysis_software

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Space Syntax at Bartlett School of Architecture, University College; London

Homepage: http://www.spacesyntax.org/

Introduction: http://www.spacesyntax.org/introduction/index.asp

Article in ArchitectureWeek:

http://www.architectureweek.com/2001/1031/tools_2-1.html

A good overview on the net of Space syntax in relation to cities:

http://www.spacesyntax.org/publications/commonlang.html

An animated presentation of space syntax as a little "movie":

http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/newvenue/localaccess.htm

Other short introduction: http://www.spacesyntax.org/publications/changingface/changingface.htm

Other central things on the net:

Space is the Machine book: http://www.spacesyntax.org/publications/spacemachine.html

Glossay of terms: http://www.arch.chalmers.se/tema/stadsbyggnad/glossary.pdf

Phenomenological introduction: Syntactic image of the city by Ruth Dalton:

http://eprints.ucl.ac.uk/archive/00001104/01/SIC.pdf.pdf

More by Hillier on the city:

http://undertow.arch.gatech.edu/homepages/3sss/papers_pdf/02_hillier_city.pdf

http://undertow.arch.gatech.edu/homepages/3sss/papers_pdf/13_hillier&netto.pdf

http://www.spacesyntax.net/symposia/SSS4/fullpapers/01HillierCitypaper.pdf

http://www.spacesyntax.net/symposia/SSS4/fullpapers/06HillierArchpaper.pdf

More stuff:

Consultancy: http://www.spacesyntax.com/

Publications list: http://www.spacesyntax.org/publications/index.asp (not updated after 1999)

Software overview: http://www.spacesyntax.org/software/index.asp

Software accessible free on the Internet (with data upload):

Webmap http://bat.vr.ucl.ac.uk/webmap/

Guide to Webmap http://bat.vr.ucl.ac.uk/webmap/help/WebmapUsersGuide.pdf

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The international network of space syntax:

http://www.spacesyntax.net/

Symposia Index: http://www.spacesyntax.net/symposia/index.htm

The 3rd Space Syntax Symposium 2001 (see the proceedings):

http://undertow.arch.gatech.edu/homepages/3sss/

http://undertow.arch.gatech.edu/homepages/3sss/Proceedings_frame.htm

The 4th Space Syntax Symposium 2003 (click on 'proceedings'):

http://www.spacesyntax.net/SSS4.htm

http://www.spacesyntax.net/symposia/SSS4/proceedings.htm

The 5th Space Syntax Symposium 2005

http://www.spacesyntax.tudelft.nl/index.html

http://www.spacesyntax.tudelft.nl/program.html

http://www.spacesyntax.tudelft.nl/information.html

On Visibility Graph Analyses: http://www.vr.ucl.ac.uk/research/vga/

On GIS (Geographical Information Systems): http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/venue/space_syntax.html

Virtual reality center for the built environment http://www.vr.ucl.ac.uk/

CASA also have interesting stuff: http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/news/index.htm

CASA publications: http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/publications/index.htm

CASA om Space Syntax bl.a. http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/working_papers/paper75.pdf

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Swedish Space Syntax:

Spatial Analyses and Design, KTH: http://www.arch.kth.se/sad/

Spacescape: http://www.spacescape.se/

Lars Marcus, dissertation, Stockholm:

http://www.umu.se/cerum/publikationer/info/publ_wp26_00.html

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