Urban Plots, Organizing Cities

Claudio Coletta, Giovanna Sonda

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317003540
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Geografía

By focusing on the interplay between material, social and narrative dimensions of the city, this book examines urban complexity, namely the dynamic and entangled nature of urban issues, and puts forward a notion of the city as an urban texture. Taking an innovative interdisciplinary approach, it perceives the way cities are organized as a restless stratification of materials, meanings and uses, and deals with the interrelationships between actors, places, administrative rationalities and artefacts. It argues that urban fabric is 'manufactured' in this interplay between imagery and practices (of all the stake-holders, including planners, city managers and city users). Illustrated by in-depth empirical studies from across Europe and Latin America, the book explores material and symbolic aspects of the urban experience. In particular, the contributors focus on the less visible ways of organizing urban spaces, such as those enacted and embodied by local news, artefacts such as signals, maps, regulations, public acts, artistic performances, sensory experience and collective memories. The book offers an articulated discussion on these various means of spatial organisation, thereby providing insights into situations of conflict and proposing innovative ways forward for enhancing urban sociability.

Chapter 1 The Graphical Performation of a Public Space: The Subway Signs and their Scripts¹

1 This research is part of a collective project entitled ‘Ecologies and Politics of Writing’ (Département Sciences Économiques et Sociales, LTCI (UMR 5141) CNRS, Telecom ParisTech and Équipe Anthropologie de l’écriture, IIAC (UMR 8177) CNRS-EHESS) and supported by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche, Grant n°ANR-05-BLAN-0272-02. We gratefully acknowledge the people from the Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens (RATP) for their active cooperation and the time they devoted to this study. We also thank Claudio Coletta, Francesco Gabbi and Giovanna Sonda for their willingness to make this book possible and their useful remarks on a previous version of this chapter.

Jérôme Denis and David Pontille

DOI: 10.4324/9781315548746-2

Introduction

Amid the deep transformations that cities have known in the last decades, the increase of mobility practices has played a central role (Amin and Thrift 2002). As a main feature of contemporary capitalism, it notably contributes to the emergence of new forms of exchange (Kellerman 2006; Urry 2007), which strongly articulate spatial configurations and informational devices (Lash and Urry 1994). In modern urban spaces there is no distinction between, on the one hand, the ‘virtual’ world of information and the circulation of a so-called immaterial knowledge, and on the other hand, the ‘real’ world in which bodies move and material constraints are plenty. New information and communication technologies play a great part in the day-to-day organization of cities.

Actually, the articulation between places and information is not new. As Latour and Hermant (1998) showed about Paris, urban spaces are both material and informational. The city is ‘intellectual’ (Simmel 1989), it holds plenty of signs and inscriptions among which some were in place long before the emergence of the new technologies of information and communication (Petrucci 1993). The public display of signs is inherent to the organizing process of urban settings: cities are made of semiotic landscapes.

Numerous urban signs are notably a matter of way-finding. They provide a whole graphical layer for the accountability of places and the everyday organization of public settings. Street nameplates, traffic lights or signboards inform the passer-by of their own location in the city (‘this’ neighbourhood, ‘this’ street) and give indications about the suitable behaviour to adopt (‘stop here’, ‘turn left’). By marking sites, giving places a name, designating directions, these signs are what H. Garfinkel (1996) terms ‘territorial organizational things’. They produce an ordering of the city within which:

practitioners are required to read descriptive accounts alternately as instructions. They do so occupationally, and as skilled matter of course, as vulgarly competent, specifically ordinary, and unremarkable worksite-specific practices. These are chained bodily and chiasmically to places, spaces, architectures, equipment, instruments, and timing. (Garfinkel 1996: 19)

In this chapter, we will study such an ordering process from an actor-network theory (ANT) perspective. The strength of ANT is to enlarge ethnomethodology’s programme, and its definition of social order as situated accomplishments, to non-humans (Latour 2005b). Agency is always distributed between people, artefacts and other entities such as principles or rules (Cooren 2004). According to this model, collectives as nations or organizations arise from heterogeneous assemblages (Latour and Weibel 2005), and cities are not organized ‘upstream’, nor ordered by invisible forces. Urban spaces are the result of a continuous process carried out by day-to-day practices and mundane objects (Farias and Bender 2009). Performation, as Latour (2005b) puts it, is a useful notion to describe such a process. It insists on the dynamic of organizing and the necessity for collective entities to be maintained day after day. Furthermore, the notion offers a multilateral view: performation processes concern sites as well as their inhabitants whose practices and attitudes are constantly shaped by their environment. The signboards or the street nameplates can thus be seen as utter components of the performation of modern public spaces. Urban signs both order physical spaces and configure the action of their dwellers.

The role of signs in the ordering process of places has already been stressed in two kinds of settings: airports and supermarkets. For the former, Fuller showed that the standardization of displayed arrows and names produces a hybrid setting within which ‘the distinction between the building and its signs, between the text and the territory, becomes indistinct’ (Fuller 2002: 236). With the airport’s signage, travellers are no more explorers: invited to follow the directions of a ‘familiar authority’, they are transformed into navigators. Within supermarkets, Cochoy and Grandclément (2005) showed how things such as logos, price labels and nutrition facts tables are key features of consumers’ choice. Both the spatial configuration of shelves and these various signs displayed on products’ packagings have transformed the modern customers into homo œconomicus.

Airports and supermarkets are ‘non-places’ (Augé 1995): they are mainly auto-referential and their organization is focused on very specific concerns. On the contrary, urban spaces are highly heterogeneous. Their graphical ordering deals with issues that largely overflow flux management or choice improvement. In this chapter, we tackle such a complexity and try to understand the way in which urban signs confer specific positions to the dwellers in public spaces.

Subway Signs in Paris

We will focus on the case of subway signs, using the results of an ethnographical fieldwork within the Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens (RATP). In Paris, subway signs became a central issue at the beginning of the 1990s. At that time, a team of specialists (designers, cartographers and architects) was gathered to reconsider the whole organization of subway signs. Surveys, field studies and experiments were conducted that resulted in the creation of a complete wayfinding system (a ‘signage’, signalétique in French) and the redaction of a particularly ambitious policy. For the first time, the content, shape, size, colours and emplacement of subway signs have been standardized and detailed in extremely precise guidelines.

In doing so, the RATP established a real ‘writing policy’ (Foucault 1977) that deeply transformed subway spaces. Its main idea was to provide riders with as many on-the-spot instructions as they need to successfully ‘use’ the transportation network:

An electric iron, if there’s nothing written on it, if there are no instructions on it, well … one does not know how it works. Here, it is the same: there are people who are moving, there are all these different spaces, one does not see what is happening behind, so our choice was to include instructions within each station. (L.T., Responsible for Signage Normalization, RATP)

There is of course an important issue here about what riders ‘need’, and more generally about who they are. Our aim is to discover which figures of users such a project conveys, that is, to identify the kind of riders this new graphical organization of subway space supposes. To understand how signage performs in a specific public space, we will study it as a technology in which users’ representations are inscribed. Thus, we follow Woolgar (1991) when he writes that innovation processes are ‘configuring the user’ as much as the technology. Moreover, we adopt the position of Akrich (1992) who showed that the innovation process could be compared to the writing of a ‘script’ that attributes tasks and positions to people and things, and organizes relations between them. As Akrich puts it, ‘technical objects define actors, the space in which they move, and the ways in which they interact’ (p. 216). This approach is extremely useful to analyze mundane graphical devices such as way-finding systems because, for once, it allows to go backstage and surface the work carried out behind signboards. By studying the riders’ representations inscribed within signage, we can identify the behaviours supposed to take place in subway spaces, and shed the light on the ‘framework of action’ (Akrich 1992: 208) that the Parisian policy of subway signs supports.

We developed a twofold methodological approach. First, we focused on internal narratives that accompany the signage policy. We conducted thorough interviews with RATP employees from the signage design and normalization department, and we systematically gathered documents that present the signage policy: the guidelines themselves, but also information leaflets, the slides of a presentation performed within the organization to announce the new signage, and articles of internal journals. If this set of data gives us access to the vocabulary used both to describe the great principles of the policy and to detail the subway signs’ new organization, it also contains numerous assertions about the riders, their ‘needs’ and the ways they are supposed to use the new way-finding system.

Second, we tried to understand what it takes to follow the signage scripts in practical terms, that is, to adopt specific positions within subway spaces. In order to fully experience the scripts as frameworks of action, we had to reduce way-finding to the sole use of subway signs, whereas ordinary riders always mobilize heterogeneous resources to find their way (Lacoste 1997; Ingold 2000). Therefore, we elaborated a phenomenological experimentation that consisted in the accomplishment of real rides within the Parisian subway system, during which we systematically gathered a picture and our comments for each board, sticker and poster we relied on to reach our destination. Since the use and the signification of the signage components were sometimes at the centre of on-the-spot debates, we regularly confronted our own interpretations to take decisions and pursue our trip. This experiment offers two advantages. First, photographs are particularly useful to study visible materials (Wagner 2006). In the case of signage, the strict ‘shooting script’ we followed (Suchar 2007) offered a means to put all the signs mobilized during a ride on the same level and to force us, as researchers, to question each of them. Second, noting our comments and debates was a rich way to surface interpretation processes, which might have remained tacit if we conducted such experiences alone.

Thus, following the trail of their scripts, we studied the Parisian subway signs as organizational artefacts: we both gathered the narratives about the riders’ needs and attitudes that are inscribed in them, and discovered the practical tasks their situated uses require. We identified four distinct scripts that we will detail in the next sections: information, planification, problem solving and reaction. For each one of them, we will precis the riders’ definition it relies on, the type of signs that are supposed to carry it and what it really takes in the situation to follow it; that is, what one has to do to effectively become an informed rider, a planner, a problem solver or a reactive entity.

Information

In the first script we identified, the signage is conceived of as a set of tools that inform the riders. The informed rider is a familiar figure within the RATP, which has been striving for long to provide a convenient amount of information to its users. Yet, for years, the issue of information and the figure of the informed rider used to refer almost exclusively to perturbed situations. It was a crucial dimension for the service’s quality that riders had to be informed each time the normal conditions of network were disturbed. In other terms, people were supposed to become informed riders only when things went wrong in the transportation network.

With the new signage policy, the informational script has been noticeably enlarged. The figure of the rider who seeks help during perturbations has been gradually replaced with another one who needs to be continuously informed. Within the internal documents and during the interviews such an ordinary informed rider is omnipresent and the need for information appears as an essential dimension in the designers’ definitions of subway users. But information is not mobilized as an abstract notion to describe all kinds of situations and everything subway signs have to provide. It is tightly attached to the notion of control. The informed rider is a person who tries to gain more control on the mundane circumstances of her rides.

We also have to provide riders a control of time in the course of their rides, by informing them […] about waiting time according to real traffic conditions. (RATP 1993: 14)

Such a script clearly takes part in the larger historical trend of the formation of technological societies. Signage here goes with the numerous devices that transform the modes of government from surveillance to communication, where government itself ‘relies on the existence of the informed citizen’ (Barry 2001: 48). Providing information within subway spaces is a way to perform an informed rider who can fully control her displacements.

Signboards that provide information are specific ones. They are discursive, that is, they are designed to provide ‘messages’ to the riders. For example, in certain halls posters can be found that list the names of stations currently undergoing renovation works and inaccessible during a particular period. Recently, electronic real-time devices have also been put up on platforms in order to display the time remaining until the next two trains arrive. Here, signs are mainly texts. They perform a discursive ordering of riders’ environment by letting them know that ‘this station is unavailable’, ‘the next train will be here in eight minutes’.

Within subway spaces, the rider has to read in order to be informed. This sounds obvious, but is not so: the circulation of information is never a straightforward and transparent operation. To read a poster’s text is one thing; to make up a piece of information (and thus a resource for action) from what it is written is another. To become an informed user, not only has the rider to decipher the linguistic content of a signboard or a poster, but she also has to match this content with the actual situation (dates, places, and so on). For example, if a board displays the schedule of first and last trains according to weekdays, weekends and holidays, one has to align two things to really be informed: what the board reads and the current day and time.

Furthermore, because all information does not appear in a single board, to become informed, the rider generally has to forge a chain of multiple readings in the course of her ride, from one discursive sign to another. In other terms, the rider does not have to simply grasp information, as it would be ‘naturally’ displayed in the surroundings. As we did several times during our rides, she has to articulate different texts and messages with her own situation, in order to produce a comprehensive informational resource.

Planification

The second script draws the figure of a pretty different rider. Here, she is staged as a person who needs to prepare her ride: she’s a planner. The figure points to two distinctive dimensions. The first one is anticipation. As a planner, the rider is considered a strategic human being who makes rational projections for her future actions. The second dimension is calculation. In the documents or interviews which mention such a rider, she is conceived of as someone who collects different kind of facts (station names, lines number, connections, and so on) and computes all these data to produce an operative scenario. The planner transl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Editors
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword: The City Narrated, the City Organized?
• Introduction: Urban Plots, Organizing Cities
• 1 The Graphical Performation of a Public Space: The Subway Signs and their Scripts
• 2 The Wall and the Mobile Phone: Organizing, Governing, Resisting
• 3 Redefining the Right to the City: Representations of Public Space as Part of the Urban Struggles
• 4 Hybrid Cities: Narratives of Urban Development and Popular Culture, the Case of Medellín (Colombia)
• 5 Organizing Urban Space: Tools, Processes and Public Action
• 6 Public Sphere in Times of Governance: Public Action, Disputed Building and Local Cultural System in a Northern City of Italy
• 7 Transition, Memory and Narrations in the Urban Space: The Case of East German Cities
• 8 Transforming Spaces: Translation as a Practice that Reveals Changing E-Motional Structures in Space
• Bibliography
• Index