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urban wind (wînd) noun:
A strong wind generated near or around a group of high-rise buildings,
creating areas of intense air turbulence especially at street level.
(The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition 1991)
Bo Grönlund:
Urban Winds
Introduction to a Ph.D. theses on 'The Informational City and the Street as Urban Form', which is in the works. This introduction was written in the summer of 1997, and has been slightly a altered in June 1999.
Urbanity, as I have come to see it, is first of all a question of bandwidth - literally as well as culturally, i.e. the possibility of difference, information exchange and understanding in increasingly widening spheres. Today we have two opposite polar forms of urbanity: Streets and other physical public spaces on the one hand and the publicly accessible electronic networks on the other......
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. Part of the growing problems of the planning and design professions, their institutional framework, and the recruiting of students might be linked to this very basic issue of how ‘urban’ is understood.
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.
1. The first one 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.
Already 'The English Oxford Dictionary' shows directly, 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.
2. The second reason I think ‘cities’ and ‘the urban’ is difficult to talk about, 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. (Compare e.g. the dissertation of Tonboe (1993) ‘Rummets Sociologi’ , summary: The Sociology of Space p 523-35, which, after a thorough historical overview over sociological theories on space, ends in a kind of question mark.)
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 (1973 p426) and (1979 p 109) 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 now, in the 1990s are we starting 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 time 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.
And 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))
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:
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?
The sociologist Castells in "The Urban Question" doesn’t seem think so, but to me, that’s what ‘reconsidering urbanity’ is about. And maybe the Castells of the 1990s to some extent might support such an endeavour too - it might even contribute to counter a development of socially dual cities and social communication break down, which Castells are afraid will happen.
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.
The questions I think are the most important to work with are related to the following issues and statements:
- Urbanity is not generally recognised as a concept in our culture - it is to some extent invisible
- Urbanity get a new set of circumstances in the information age: a paradigm shift is coming, including a doubling of urbanity into both analogue and digital form through an understanding of urbanity as media with certain properties.
- Urbanity exists and can be conceptualised as related to difference and information exchange of certain density/frequency and uniqueness / complexity / partial randomness including both people and works - and with the duration of emotions as a possible missing link
- As a ‘setting’ in space and time, urbanity can be measured, mapped, and predicted - at least to some extent - e.g. with a combination of space syntax analyses with other techniques
- Urbanity can be promoted by urban design and planning - although there are many difficulties
- The everyday life, analogue, form of urbanity continues to be first of all a street issue
- Urbanity will remain contradictory, but by confronting urbanity as such, realistically and openly, we can possibly take better advantage of its positive sides as a social, aesthetic and ethic form
If the ‘the urban’ today is a purely ideological construction, though, it might be all in vane. On the questions of about urbanity it is therefore also necessary to confront claims that:
- the urban today is pure ideology and that any concept of the urban today is meaningless because it is everywhere or nowhere (Castells, Koolhaas)
- space is not an active social dimension, i.e. that space does not act back on society in an important way (Castells)
- maybe we should stoop looking for any kind of glue that holds cities together, as electronic media has taken over the role of urban public space, and electronic cottages the role of central place (Rem Koolhaas, Alvin Toffler and others)
- urban planning and urban design is dead and meaningless, only architecture is meaningful (Rem Koolhaas)
I, however, think Urban Winds might gain force.............
Bo Grönlund, 12.6.1999
Literature:
(to be edited)
Continue to a short update on Bo Grönlund's research interests
Continue to: 'The Urban Question' and 'The Rise of the Network Society' - Manuel Castells confronted
Continue to an overview of Rem Koolhaas' Generic City