Urban Squares as Places, Links and Displays

Successes and Failures

Jon Lang, Nancy Marshall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138959293
• eBook ISBN: 9781317337874
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

To attract investment and tourists and to enhance the quality of life of their citizens, municipal authorities are paying considerable attention to the quality of the public domain of their cities – including their urban squares. Politicians find them good places for rallies. Children consider squares to be playgrounds, the elderly as places to catch-up with each other, and for many others squares are simply a place to pause for a moment.

Urban Squares as Places, Links and Displays: Successes and Failures discusses how people experience squares and the nature of the people who use them. It presents a 'typology of squares' based on the dimensions of ownership, the square's instrumental functions, and a series of their basic physical attributes including size, degree of enclosure, configuration and organization of the space within them and finally based on their aesthetic attributes – their meanings. Twenty case studies illustrate what works and what does not work in different cities around the world. It discusses the qualities of lively squares and quieter, more restorative places as well as what contributes to making urban squares less desirable as destinations for the general public. The book closes with the policy implications, stressing the importance and difficulties of designing good public places.

Urban Squares offers how-to guidance along with a strong theoretical framework making it ideal for architects, city planners and landscape architects working on the design and upgrade of squares.

Part I
Introduction

La Cours Honoré d’Estienne d’Orves, Marseille
Photograph by Gilles Martin-Raget.

The Prologue addressed the question, ‘Why is it important to write about urban squares?’ Part I consists of three chapters that present the way we think about squares and the people who visit them and the reasons why they visit them.

Chapter 1 presents our brief but important understanding of the processes of environmental perception and cognition. A number of competing theories of perception currently exist among psychologists. We have adopted and adapted the ecological theory of environmental perception proposed originally by James Gibson (1950, 1966, 1979) for our contemporary purposes.¹ It explains how we perceive the everyday world around us rather than the theoretical approaches that are built on research conducted in the tightly controlled environment of the research lab. Three observations drawn from the ecological theory of perception are crucial to our analysis. The first is that perception is an active process; we search the environment for information that is of use to us although some outside information impinges on our senses. The second is that perception is multi-modal, that is, we see, hear, smell and touch the world around us. This book is full of photographs that give some visual image of what squares are like; however, they are a limited representation of a world full of color, sounds, odors and tactile experiences that are partially described in words but largely have to be imagined. The third observation is that movement is fundamental to a genuine perception of our surroundings. The images in this book are all presented, however, from a single station point.

With a basic knowledge of how we perceive and understand the world around us, the question becomes, ‘How then to best consider urban squares?’ We maintain an ecological viewpoint by relying on the psychological approach of Roger Barker (1968) and his contemporaries.² In particular, the concept of behavior settings has informed our analysis. In Chapter 2, we argue that considering urban squares as places and links leads to an understanding of how they function. Squares are, however, inevitably displays that have evolved over time or been designed by architects and landscape architects. They carry explicit and implicit messages available for interpretation by the people who use or view them as recognized by environmental and social psychologists,³ a number of phenomenologists⁴ and many architects.⁵

In Chapter 3, we discuss the people who are likely to use squares and the affordances they seek. We continue with an ecological line of thought. Most cities today have highly diverse populations. Even in ethnically homogeneous societies there are considerable economic disparities. Based on different characteristics, such as age, gender, physical ability, culture or other personal attributes, people consider the affordances of squares differently. The cognoscenti, that is, those with specialist design knowledge, will examine a square in terms of a design paradigm or their knowledge of the intentions of a square’s designer as an artist. All of these differences make the task of setting design goals and the means of fulfilling them difficult and often politically charged for municipal authorities and designers alike.

The thesis that we present in this part of the book is that squares can best be considered to consist of two major components: (1) effective behavior settings as places and links; and (2) as effective displays. By effective, we mean those that are used and enjoyed. Considering squares in this manner enables an observer to understand how they function for various activities and how they function as meaningful symbols for the inhabitants and visitors of a city.

Notes

1 See also Reed and Jones (1982) and Reed (1988, 1996).

2 See Gump (1971), Le Compte (1974), Barker and Schoggen (1973), Lang (1987), Kaminski (1989), Heft (2001) and Lang and Moleski (2010).

3 Gibson (1950, 1966, 1979), Wicker (2002) and Gifford (2007), for example.

4 Relph (1976), Norburg-Schulz (1980) and Seamon (1993), for example.

5 See Lefaivre (2003), for example.

References

Barker, Roger (1968) Ecological Psychology: Concepts and Methods for Studying the Environment of Human Behavior. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Barker, Roger and Phil, Schoggen (1973) Qualities of Community Life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Gibson, James J. (1950) The Perception of the Visual World. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Gibson, James J. (1966) The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Gibson, James J. (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Gifford, Robert (2007) Environmental Psychology: Principles and Practice. Colville: Optimal Books.

Gump, Paul V. (1971) The behavior setting: A promising unit for environmental design. Landscape Architecture, 61(2): 130–134.

Heft, Harry (2001) Ecological Psychology in Context: James Gibson, Roger Barker and the Legacy of William James. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers.

Kaminski, Gerard (1989) The relevance of ecologically oriented theory building in environment and behavior research. In Advances in Environment, Behavior, and Design, vol. II, edited by Ervin H. Zube and Gary T. Moore. New York: Plenum Press, pp. 3–36.

Lang, Jon (1987) Creating Architectural Theory: The Role of the Behavioral Sciences in Environmental Design. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.

Lang, Jon and Walter, Moleski (2010) Functionalism Revisited: Architectural Theory and Practice and the Behavioral Sciences. Farnham: Ashgate.

Le Compte, William F. (1974) Behavior settings as data-gathering units for the environmental planner and architect. In Designing for Human Behavior: Architecture and the Behavioral Sciences, edited by Jon Lang, Charles Burnette, Walter Moleski and David Vachon. Stroudsburg, PA: Dowden, Hutchinson and Ross, pp. 183–193.

Lefaivre, Liane (2003) Critical regionalism: A facet of modern architecture since 1945. In Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World, edited by Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis. London: Prestel, pp. 22–55.

Norberg-Schulz, Christian (1980) Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture. New York: Rizzoli.

Reed, Edward S. (1988) James J. Gibson and the Psychology of Perception. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Reed, Edward S. (1996) Encountering the World: Toward an Ecological Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Reed, Edward S. and Rebecca, Jones (1982) Reasons for Realism: Selected Essays of James J. Gibson. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Relph, Edward (1976) Place and Placelessness. London: Pion.

Seamon, David (1993) Dwelling, Seeing and Designing: Toward a Phenomenological Ecology. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Wicker, Alan W. (2002) Ecological psychology: Historical contexts, current conception, prospective directions. In Handbook of Environmental Psychology, edited by Robert B. Bechtel and Azra Churchman. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. pp. 114–126.

Chapter 1
Experiencing Public Open Spaces¹

An understanding of how we experience the world around us provides the foundation on which an understanding of the utility and meaning of public spaces can be built. The quality of any square, for instance, depends on the individual perception of a person and his or her values. What we pay attention to in the environment around us is based on our motivations and attitudes. These motivations, in turn, are directed by our knowledge of the world and what its patterns afford us. We appear to have mental schema that can be regarded as templates that guide the process of perception.² Without understanding the processes of perception, any commentary on human activities within the built environment and/or feelings about it is limited in scope.

Environmental Perception

Perception is the active process of obtaining information from the environment (Gibson 1979). We scan the world around us for information that is of instrumental utility for us or for its own sake because it gives us pleasure. Some information, especially that which is deviant from the norm, also impinges on our awareness; it attracts our attention.

Humans possess five perceptual systems of which the most basic is our orienting system that enables us, via the vestibular organs of the inner ear, to detect the forces of gravity and acceleration. We have little control over this perceptual system but it is fundamental to actions, activities and experiences. Our other perceptual systems also provide us with information that shapes our everyday lives. The experiencing of the world around us is multi-modal as identified by all perception psychologists but heeded by only a few architects, city planners and architectural critics.³ Drawings and photographs, as in this book, draw attention to what we see.⁴ In urban design it is no easy task to characterize sounds, odors, tactile and metabolic experiences which cannot be represented in drawing form and thus have to be imagined.

Unless visually impaired, we primarily examine the environment via our visual perceptual system that consists of the eyes and our ability to turn our head and body to focus our attention on aspects of the world around us. The system enables us to understand the source of both radiant, but more particularly and importantly, ambient, reflected light. We use our auditory system for listening. It enables us to pick up the vibrations in the air that tell us about the nature and location of what we regard as sounds. Sounds bounce off walls so they can originate outside the range of our vision. Our haptic systems enable us to obtain information through the skin, joints and muscles by touching different surfaces. What we perceive tells us much about the nature of the ground on which we stand. We also use touch to understand the shapes and textures of objects and their solidity or viscosity. Through touch and our metabolic processes that inform us of the temperature around us, we feel whether we are comfortable or not. Our smell and taste systems enable us, via our noses and mouths, to understand the nature and composition of the air that we breathe and the food and drinks that we consume. Like sounds, aromas, unpleasant or pleasing, can also originate outside our line of vision. Aromas waft in the air and form part of the ambient quality of urban squares.

The Ambient Qualities of Squares

The qualities of the ambient environment are important in people’s appreciation of the world around them. Pleasant experiences are positive but we can also cope with many unpleasant qualities of the built environment that impinge on our experience. The quality of light, the sounds, smells and textures of what is around us all affect our assessments of the spaces we inhabit.

The way squares are illuminated by sunlight and/or by artificial light contributes substantially to the manner in which people experience them. The squares described in this book are located at a variety of latitudes so...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• The Concern
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Types of Urban Squares and their Design
• Part III Learning from Case Studies
• Part IV What works and what doesn't work
• Index