Public Space and Relational Perspectives

New Challenges for Architecture and Planning

Chiara Tornaghi, Sabine Knierbein, Chiara Tornaghi, Sabine Knierbein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415821575
• eBook ISBN: 9781317613008
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Traditional approaches to understand space tend to view public space mainly as a shell or container, focussing on its morphological structures and functional uses. That way, its ever-changing meanings, contested or challenged uses have been largely ignored, as well as the contextual and on-going dynamics between social actors, their cultures, and struggles. The key role of space in enabling spatial opportunities for social action, the fluidity of its social meaning and the changing degree of "publicness" of a space remain unexplored fields of academic inquiry and professional practice.

Public Space and Relational Perspectives offers a different understanding of public spaces in the city. The aim of the book is to (re)introduce the lived experiences in public life into the teaching curricula of those academic disciplines which deal with public space and the built environment, such as architecture, planning and urban design, as well as the social sciences.

The book presents conceptual, practical and research challenges and brings together findings from activists, practitioners and theorists. The editors provide eight educational challenges that educators can endorse when training future practitioners and researchers to accept and to engage with the social relations that unfold in and through public space.

Cover image: KARO*

1 Relational public space

New challenges for architecture and planning education

Sabine Knierbein and Chiara Tornaghi

Introduction

This book discusses relational perspectives on public space in order to present a way forward in dealing with new challenges in architecture and planning education. Developing a pedagogical approach based on urban life and difference in public space is a crucial and a much needed challenge in an increasingly complex and accelerated urbanised world. Considering the ramifications of spatial practice and strategic interventions on urban everyday life, this is a key task for the education of urban professionals. Alternative (relational) ways of envisioning space are particularly needed in architecture and planning schools in order to reflect critically on the crucial role of academics and to amend historical patterns in the production of space.

These relational enquiries into public space have the potential to address ethical and knowledge-related concerns in those disciplines that are particularly oriented towards shaping the material urban environment. We call these ‘conceptual challenges’ as they bring new ways of conceptualising public space and how to research it. We will show, for example, that theory can be informed by embodied social practice. Urban collectives, in gaining spatial momentum, start to form critical counter publics; this might lead to a continuous reconfiguration of what can be considered as public space. The changing nature of social relations and political claims can be revealed and analysed in public space if they are understood as socio-historical processes.

While urban collectives and urban movements might not always reach the point of becoming ‘critical counter publics’ (Fraser 1990), there are many ways in which theory and practice can be informed by the effervescence of daily life, and by the way people both engage with and signify space. These are ‘practical challenges’: we have engaged with a number of media instruments and interactive tools that can best reach people – for example, pupils, adolescents or the elderly. These have great potential for the training of future professionals and enhancing technology-based design and planning. But change can also be instigated by influencing the institutions that mediate and frame public space design and planning processes. Transforming institutional action can be achieved by provoking change in the training of young professionals who are likely to hold relevant positions in those institutions that will frame and shape public space and related policy instruments. In this respect, studies from within academia, which are situated at the interface of theory, practice and policy, raise new research challenges.

A perspective transversing these three angles – conceptual, practical and research challenges – is the educational mission that lies at the heart of this book. Its core message is that there is the need and potential to further develop educational approaches that will enable a reading of public space as lived space and facilitate a nuanced understanding of the micro-scale of everyday life, with its rhythms and fluidity of meanings, as a fertile base for a deeper theoretical abstraction and generation of knowledge in and about cities. Therefore, in this book we develop specific relational perspectives on public space which are of relevance to those scientists and practitioners who base their educational work on cross- and trans-disciplinary principles.

Relational perspectives on public space enable links to be created between the dynamics of civil society (including conflicts between individuals, groups and different social spheres), political decision-making, and planning and design practice. An explicit transdisciplinary approach is adopted, reflecting a dialogue between academics and practitioners, with the aim of:

• elaborating on the ontological, ethical and epistemological dimensions of relational public space;

• providing playful approaches that foster innovative education and practice in and for public space;

• addressing opportunities for learning about difference in, about and from public space.

This transdisciplinary perspective (connecting theory and practice) is embedded in a cross-disciplinary framework (involving various knowledge fields). Starting from the premise that public space can be considered as an epistemic arena where different fields of knowledge and expertise can meet equally, this book tackles educational challenges in architecture and planning triggered by cross-pollination from other disciplines, including digital arts and media, social sciences, educational planning, political science, ethnography (and others). Conversely, contributing authors have also been asked to fathom the extent to which expertise on public space within architecture and planning can inspire educational curricula in other disciplines. Above and beyond such disciplinary attainments, public space facilitates the inter-weaving of many different bodies of knowledge, from the everyday to practical expertise, bureaucratic proficiency, inter-generational knowledge and professional insights – to name but a few. However, as social difference and cultural heterogeneity are both displayed, and lived, in public space, we also claim that learning from such space requires reflection upon the structures of learning themselves.

To some extent current debates on public space are aware of multiple emerging social dynamics that spontaneously evoke new patterns of public life or challenge existing ones. Contributions such as Loose Space (Franck and Stevens 2006) or Insurgent Public Spaces (Hou 2010) are just two examples that stress the power and innovation emerging from grassroots practices. Madanipour (2010) also feels that ‘the complexity of the urban design, development and management processes (…), and of the configuration of urban societies in which they are located, makes it impossible to find simple answers’ (p. 237). In Public Space and the Challenges of Urban Transformation in Europe, Madanipour, Knierbein and Degros stress the challenges faced by municipalities and urban populations in different European cities in terms of policies and programmes, and analyse the multiple roles of public space as a catalyst for urban change (Madanipour, Knierbein and Degros 2014). An entire section is dedicated to public space in everyday urban life, revealing its multifarious potential for accommodating the changing patterns of everyday urban routines. This can be linked to Stevens’ (2007) view:

urban experience and social needs are more than mere conceptual abstractions; they can be understood by looking at everyday life on the streets, at its specific and diverse qualities, (…) and in particular at the complex tensions which arise between different needs, different meanings and different users in spaces.

(p. 7)

Our basic motivation for writing this book began by looking at everyday life as an incentive for rethinking academic curricula. Public space is understood as those places where public life unfolds (Madanipour 2010). Public life relates to the (dis)enchantments of urban encounters, in which there are many and diverse ways of ‘how people rub along, or don’t, in the public spaces of a city’ (Watson 2006: 2). However, the built arrangements (that is, their physical shape) of public space can only be interpreted as a snapshot of complex socio-historic processes of space production.

Philosophers, social scientists and other professionals have long tried to understand the workings of the relationships between society and urban space (see Schmid 2005: 194 for an introduction to absolute and relational space, and its philosophical history). In the course of these debates, so-called positivist conceptions of space have been challenged by relational conceptions of space. The resulting philosophical controversies started in the early eighteenth century between Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Samuel Clarke, the first a fierce critic of Isaac Newton’s conception of absolute space, the latter a proponent thereof. This debate indirectly influenced a later relativity turn in the natural sciences initiated by Einstein’s relativity theory. Leibniz’s early thoughts were perceived as increasingly relevant in both the natural and social sciences. This early interpretation of the conception of relational space considered space as the ideal – almost divine – order of things and phenomena, yet also offered the opportunity to put them in relation to each other and to reflect on social and environmental influences (cf. Schmid 2005: 196, referring to Leibniz; Harvey 2004). In the twentieth century this debate was revisited by Henri Lefebvre and by David Harvey both dedicated to fostering research on complex social space in general, and urban space in particular. Lefebvre criticised absolute conceptions of space as well as the early relational accounts as a spiritualist or idealist ‘illusion, which reduces both matter and space to a mere representation’ (Lefebvre 2009b: 162). Meanwhile, although appreciating Leibniz’ dual conception of both the abstract and concrete qualities of relational space, he finally sought to surmount its ideal and spiritual nature by grounding his own relational approach to space – inspired by Marx’s work – on social praxis, and thus not just on objects or their mental representation: ‘It is pure illusion to suppose that thought can reach, grasp or define what is in space on the propositions about space (…)’ (Lefebvre 2009b: 162). For him, the focus necessarily rests on humans who act in order to make their living and reproduce their living conditions and basic needs day-to-day (Lefebvre 2009b: 171 and 190ff). While paying tribute to Leibniz’ contribution, Harvey emphasises that within this relational view of space, ‘there is no such thing as space outside of the processes that define it. Processes do not occur in space but define their own spatial frame. The concept of space is embedded in or internal to process’ (Harvey 2004: 4).

These theoretical reflections sound difficult and need further explication: the first group of positivist approaches tend to consider space as existing more or less independently of human existence. Absolute conceptions of space are criticised as ‘bedrock’ concepts because they ‘shift only slightly and move only slowly, despite increasing criticism of their usefulness and appropriateness’ (Graham and Healey 1999: 625, citing King 1996). The second group, concerning relational conceptions of space, tries to grasp the built space we perceive and touch as something that has grown over time and is constantly changing, as an outcome of the specific mutual relations between people and places, and their contexts. Here, we consider the material quality of the city as one aspect of such socio-historic processes. We look at space, firstly, as constantly generated by people – individuals or social groups – and, secondly, as indirectly affecting the everyday life of people, and in turn being transformed by changing everyday life patterns and thus by social dynamics. To put it simply, relational space approaches involve concepts that define ‘lived spaces’ as phenomena that can only be explained by their social, political and cultural context and by the relations between people and objects, both at a given moment in time and in the course of history.

Why is such an exploration necessary within architecture and planning? The modernist approach in these disciplines tended to view public space mainly as a shell or container, focusing on its physical and material structures, and functions. It ignored its ever-changing meaning, contested uses, social conflicts, and more generally the fact that public space is an outcome of contextual and on-going dynamics between social actors, their cultures and power relations. Today, absolute space concepts are still prevalent (as in the aforementioned bedrock concepts) in theory and practice, and tend to reduce public space to a container (without life and human experience). Such narrow concepts of space are influenced by perceived geometries that can be quantified by measuring and counting. The criticism directed at their proponents emphasises that architects, planners and colleagues from related fields of spatial art implicitly or explicitly disregard social circumstances, political alternatives and cultural values when intervening in public space. Such a positivist, technocratic, understanding of public space does not help in the search for a broadly accepted social path of urban change; indeed it contributes to the tightening of structural conflicts.

Since 1974, this contradictory situation has been explained as partly caused by the segmented and segmenting approaches to analysis and conceptualisation of modernist space among (and within) academic disciplines, but particularly in architecture and planning (Lefebvre 2009b; Stanek 2008). The challenge is to find ways of dealing with the neglected human aspects in those disciplines that cast spatial visions into steel and stone, and provide the associated instruments for implementation. It promises a stimulating contest at the interface of theory and practice in cities, where interests in designing material change usually collide and confront interests wishing to produce scientific insights. These collisions and confrontations are immanent in capitalist urban planning and design, which treats space as an abstract two- or three-dimensional object to be sliced into workable pieces (Stanek 2008). These pieces are then tailored by specialised disciplines, that is, by transport planners, landscape architects, light and urban furniture designers, regional planners, urban designers, architects, and the like.

This division of labour in shaping space leads to the alienation and marginalisation of citizens and critical scholars in ordinary practices: place is ripped out of its social and cultural meaning and origin. Since professionals in these specialised spatial arts’ disciplines have been taught to understand themselves as neutral technical experts rather than as agents responsible for the spatial aspects of social change (a wider perspective in engaging with space), they hardly touch on the political or epistemological ramifications of their actions (a narrow perspective in engaging with space). These segmented and compartmentalised conceptions of space are constantly (re)produced and prevent a necessary understanding of spatial complexity and the political consequences and social impacts of strategic spatial interventions for urban societies. Above all, they led to the incapacitation of local dwellers with everyday knowledge and experience of the values and symbolism inscribed within historically grown public space. Today, four decades after Lefebvre’s critique, these discrepancies are still prevalent. As Lehtovuori (2010) states, ‘space is conceived of as something separate both from the meaning people give to it and the actual uses and practices taking place in space’ (p. 4, original emphasis). He considers this to be ‘the main problem in architecture and planning’s space-conception’. Academic division of labour and life-worldly alienation separate both politics and science from more accurate accounts of the complex nature of socially produced public space. The key role of public space in determining the structures of opportunity for social action, the fluidity of its social meaning and its changing public nature remain neglected fields in the academic education of future planners and architects.

Despite recent and less recent contributions that have provided conceptual tools to counter this trend, for example the latest evolutions of structure-agency debates, in the form of strategic relational approaches (Jessop 2001; Jessop, Brenner and Jones 2008), relational understanding of space and place (Graham and Healey 1999; Tonkiss 2005; Healey 2006) and, more recently, neo-structuralist epistemologies of space quality (Moulaert et al. 2013), their degree of abstraction, and lack of relationship to the specific settings of everyday life and spatial practice often prevent them from being of use to a wider group of academics. This applies even more to practitioners who shape the built environment and design the institutional architectures that could enhance social processes. This ‘rich texture of relational-space-theorising’ does not (yet) lead to substantial change in planning and architectural practice as ‘practitioners understand public …space predominantly as a visual … stage-set, not as a socially rich entity or realm, even less a process’ (Lehtovuori 2010: 4f).

A way needs to be paved to frame space simultaneously by its built and social qualities, and the relationships between them. In applying relational conceptions of space to planning and design education, there must be a strong emphasis on spatial practice to serve as a trans-disciplinary catalyst for sustaining social change in spatial terms. Simply put, relational conceptions of space help the unde...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Relational public space: new challenges for architecture and planning education
• PART I Conceptual challenges: re-addressing public space in a relational perspective
• PART II Practical challenges: exploring innovative tools in teaching architecture and planning
• PART III Research challenges: innovating curricula by learning from lived space
• Bibliography
• Index