Cities by Design

The Social Life of Urban Form

Fran Tonkiss

• Editorial: Polity
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780745680293
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Sociología urbana

Who makes our cities, and what part do everyday users have in the design of cities? This book powerfully shows that city-making is a social process and examines the close relationship between the social and physical shaping of urban environments.

With cities taking a growing share of the global population, urban forms and urban experience are crucial for understanding social injustice, economic inequality and environmental challenges. Current processes of urbanization too often contribute to intensifying these problems; cities, likewise, will be central to the solutions to such problems. Focusing on a range of cities in developed and developing contexts, Cities by Design highlights major aspects of contemporary urbanization: urban growth, density and sustainability; inequality, segregation and diversity; informality, environment and infrastructure.

Offering keen insights into how the shaping of our cities is shaping our lives, Cities by Design provides a critical exploration of key issues and debates that will be invaluable to students and scholars in sociology and geography, environmental and urban studies, architecture, urban design and planning.

1

Introduction: Cities by Design

The architect, the planner, the sociologist, the economist, the philosopher or the politician cannot out of nothingness create new forms and relations. More precisely, the architect is no more a miracle-worker than the sociologist. Neither can create social relations ….

(Lefebvre 1996 [1968]: 151)

City-making is a social process. This book examines the relationship between the social and physical shaping of cities, between how people use, create and live in space, and the material production of urban environments. It treats the ‘design’ of cities as a social, economic and political problem – not simply or primarily a technical or aesthetic challenge; and even less the specialist domain of any single expert as ‘miracle-worker’, as Henri Lefebvre so eloquently avers. Contemporary city design is a matter not only of iconic architecture, flagship projects or ambitious masterplans, but also of formal and informal practices that shape urban environments, produce and address urban problems, organize people as well as ordering space. If viable responses are to be developed to issues of environmental damage and energy use, economy inequality and social injustice, then cities will be crucial contexts for such solutions; but current processes of urbanization and practices of city-making too often intensify environmental problems and compound social and economic inequities.

With cities taking a majority and a growing share of the global population, and with rapidly increasing urban populations in developing contexts in particular, urban forms and urban experience are central to the study of human settlements and social arrangements. Focusing on the interplay between the social and the physical shaping of contemporary cities makes it possible to see how the material organization of urban space is crucial to the production and reproduction of social and economic arrangements, divisions and inequalities. The discussions that follow explore these issues in relation to critical aspects of contemporary urbanization: urban growth, density and sustainability; inequality, segregation and diversity; informality, urban environments and infrastructure. These are elements of urban form that mediate the physical and spatial with the social and economic. This is to define ‘urban form’ in a multi-dimensional way, composed of material structures and physical spaces, but also and perhaps more fundamentally by social, economic, legal and political modes of organization and interaction. The design of cities emerges from the complex interaction of socio-economic with spatio-technical processes and practice. The forms in which cities take shape are deeply determined by economic arrangements, social relations and divisions, legal constructions and political systems; in turn, the material forms of cities provide the conditions in which key social and economic processes are produced.

Thinking about the design of cities in this extended way is relevant to cities in developed and developing economies. It would be a mistake to differentiate cities in high- and low-income contexts around a distinction between the ‘planned’ and ‘unplanned’, or ‘designed’ and ‘organic’ urban forms – even if such a distinction has been conventional in many accounts. The text focuses on processes and effects of urbanization in developed and developing cities, not so as to do away with the distinctions between them – much less to suggest that their urban experiences are somehow equivalent – but to explore how issues of population growth and decline, densification and sprawl, segregation and division, formality and informality, play out in different urban contexts and under very different socioeconomic conditions. This in part responds to the challenge of what Ananya Roy has called ‘provincializing global urbanism’, taking seriously the character and the contexts of urbanization in different settings without unthinking recourse to categories minted in or for the cities of the global north. But it also seems important to insist on points of commonality in the conceptual repertoire of urban analysis: to underline the fact, for instance, that ‘informality’ is not a property of cities in developing economies, but a way of doing urban life pretty much everywhere; or that many poor- as well as rich-world cities are increasingly divided around the spatial secessions of affluent elites. It follows that my interest is in the connections between quite different and often distant cities – between the consumption economies of rich-world cities, for example, and the environmental vulnerabilities of the urban poor – as well as the marked divergences between them. This seeks to avoid the twin errors of subsuming various cities under a common logic of urban development, at one extreme, and, at the other, of over-stating the radical particularity of cities in ways that make broader urban theory and comparative analysis virtually pointless (see Beauregard 2010).

The challenges posed to urban thinking by the diverse conditions of urban life globally are compounded by the loose disciplinary fit of urban studies, broadly conceived. Cities and urban processes are objects of analysis for a number of social science disciplines, as well as for architecture, urban design and planning, engineering and environmental sciences. The disciplinary lens through which urban forms are viewed is an important basis for how ‘the city’ comes to be defined. The discussion that follows in this chapter takes up that problem in more detail, but throughout this text the aim is to explore key issues in current debates that cut across urban disciplines, and which mediate the social and economic with the physical designs that shape contemporary cities. This implies a critical understanding of design in terms of both ‘formal’ processes and informal (or less formal) practices, involving a range of actors from makers of law and policy, developers, planners, engineers, architects and designers, producers and consumers, and the everyday inhabitants of the city. Such a range of actors raises questions about differential rights to make decisions about and interventions in urban environments, and variable claims to use, make and inhabit city spaces. The design of cities appears less in terms of a planning model in which technical experts ‘predict and provide’, and more as a provisory field in which many different, and often conflicting, interests must ‘debate and decide’ (see Kenworthy 2006). Core themes in urban design, more conventionally understood – connectivity, permeability, accessibility, integration – are as much social objectives as they are spatial conditions, having to do with how people live together, or apart, in urban environments. Similarly, the physical forms of the city – distributions and densities of population; housing stock, public buildings and places of work and consumption; the design of transport systems and other services; the balance between public and private space; the relation of the city to its environment – are products of social, economic and political designs for the city before they become products of architects or engineers.

Questions of definition: cities by design

It may be a conventional critical move to put the basic terms of any discussion into question, but the key concepts in play here do bear some closer examination. The very notion of the city is a slippery one, considering the many guises it assumes as a territorial, legal, political or economic entity. Setting urban limits under any of these definitions can be hard, given the difficulty of spatializing cities within clear urban boundaries or coherent urban hierarchies. The mismatch between economic, political and everyday urban geographies means that cities cannot easily be secured in place: whether as objects of government, as economic systems, as units of analysis or as imaginative entities. Such an assertion is now well established in urban studies. Not only does it require urbanists to cast their nets more widely, working within an expanded spatial boundary given by the functional urban economy or extended metro-region; it also means working with a finer mesh that might catch at the complex interactions and trans-local networks – of people, capital, goods, ideas and images – through which urban lives and things are reproduced below and across the space of any single city. This may be to give up the notion of the boundary altogether. Whether understood as a site within a larger urbanized region, or as a series of points within a drawn-out space economy, it may be difficult to maintain that cities (or parts of cities) are anything more than nominal nodes within extended urban networks.

And yet. Most people, I would suggest, think they live or work in or visit specific cities, not some more or less functional cog in a regional metroplex, or more or less arbitrary way-station in an urban assemblage. To think about cities in general – and any city in particular – as distinctive, identifiable, irreducible, is not simply a matter of redundancy, nostalgia or a slightly embarrassing category error. Of course this partly has to do with all the work done by law, government and Google maps to stabilize urban boundaries and fix urban places. It is also partly about the notion of the city as conventional and, indeed, sentimental. And insofar as this understanding of being ‘in’ a city is existential or phenomenal, it is rather hard to talk about in an analytical way. Adelaide and Abidjan are both cities; Bath is a city, and so is Beijing, Dubuque as well as Dhaka, Helsinki as much as Harare. In this book I adopt a fairly nominalist approach to the concept of the city (a concept, it must be said, I happen to like, in theory as well as on the ground).The category of the ‘city’ is a useful one insofar as it gives us a handle on the organization of urban processes in space; a basis for making claims to systems of urban power; and some sociospatial match between the concepts we reflect on as critics and those we tend not to reflect on too closely as ordinary urban denizens. The challenge is to hold together an understanding of urban interconnectedness, the poor definition of ‘the city’ as a discrete spatial or functional form, the extreme variety of actually existing cities, and a more ordinary understanding of how cities are imagined and lived as real places. Eugene McCann and Kevin Ward (2010) argue for a nuanced approach to dynamics of relationality and territoriality in thinking about cities in themselves and ‘in the world’: placing the focus on how things move across splintered space-economies but also the ways they break the surface within specific urban contexts, and underlining the need to account for both flows and fixities in analysing contemporary processes of city-making.

The second term in the equation – that of design – is also open to question. If my approach to the concept of the city is a pragmatic one, however, my approach to the matter of design is more purposeful and less conventional. I take ‘design’ to refer to social practices and processes that shape spatial forms, relationships and outcomes in intentional as well as in less intended ways. It includes physical designs, but also legal and policy design, the design of organizations and processes, economic strategies and various ‘designs for living’ in the complex social environment of the city. While this definition goes beyond disciplinary conventions of urban design, it is one I take from the city planner Kevin Lynch. As a process that emerges from the ‘interrelations between urban forms and human objectives’ (Lynch and Rodwin 1958: 201), city design captures a range of activities and interventions that shape urban environments, construct and respond to urban problems, and integrate social, spatial and material forms in the city. This is in part a technical sphere, in which planners, surveyors, engineers, architects and urban designers purposively organize urban space and make urban forms. But the design of cities and urban life takes place within a much broader domain, involving legal divisions, entitlements and decisions, economic relations and distributions, political infrastructures and deliberations, social institutions and interactions, organizational forms and policy processes. These often less visible ‘designs’ create the conditions under which anything gets built, occupied and inhabited in the city. Indeed, the nominal ‘designer’ may have least of all to do with the ways in which urban spaces come to be produced, as any frustrated architect might aver.

This approach to city design engages critically with a number of concepts with which the practice is more usually associated: formality, expertise, coordination and intentionality. An emphasis on formality, as noted earlier, doesn’t capture the majority of practices of contemporary city-making, most of which occur off the plan, off the books or under the radar of official designs and development. In a material sense, moreover, urban form is not confined to fixed elements of morphology – what Lynch (1981: 47) described as ‘the spatial pattern of the large, inert, permanent physical objects in a city’. An understanding of urban form must also take in more dynamic and provisional features of city environments: patterns of mobility; inward and outward flows of people and things, whether daily, seasonally or over longer time-frames; events and interactions; interim structures and temporary patterns of settlement or occupation – such elements may be highly formative for cities even if they are neither fixed nor permanent. A concept of expertise, secondly, trains too narrow a lens on the range of actors involved in the design of urban spaces and city life. It both places too much emphasis on agents (planners, engineers, architects or designers) who may have relatively little power over how urban spaces ultimately are produced, and renders invisible other kinds of agency implicated in the making of cities (from financialized property schemes, pension funds and asset managers, to banks and international organizations, politicians, entrepreneurs and crime bosses, or stubborn and resourceful local populations). While coordination, thirdly, remains an important category for thinking about the design of cities, the instrument of coordination is not only the planning department, the architectural practice, the engineering office or the municipal government. What happens in a city happens as the result of innumerable more or less conscious designs and plans on the part of urban inhabitants: improvised or long-game, intentional or incidental, temporary or more permanent. The instruments of coordination at work in these settings may be social networks (personal and impersonal, local or distributed), neighbourhood organizations (formal or informal), families or households, or more simply that principle of urban order which is the ‘manifestation of the freedom of countless numbers of people to make and carry out countless plans’, as Jane Jacobs (1961: 391) so memorably expressed it.

The notion of intentionality or conscious urban design, fourthly, raises a number of issues of its own. Much of what occurs in real urban environments can be understood in terms of the unintended consequences of design. This is true in a very basic sense – the map, or the plan, is never the same as the territory – but it is also true in a more extended way. Modernist designs on the city, for rational, socially beneficial, clean environments, too often produced their opposites in alienating housing environments or dysfunctional, deteriorated and disconnected zonings (see Scott 1998). As Lewis Mumford (1938: 235) grumpily noted, the signal effect of intentional designs to ease congestion in the modern city has generally increased congestion – as in the contrary equation that more roads equals more cars, not less congestion. Furthermore, the work of time, even over the short term, means that urban forms tend to outgrow their designers’ intentions. There is an emphasis in contemporary urban studies on the growth of new cities, but many urbanites still live in old cities: driving cars or motor-cycles down streets made for foot traffic; living in housing designed for fewer or more inhabitants; running electrical wiring and plumbing through pre-modern buildings; working at computers in buildings designed for looms; setting up market stalls or rugs on pavements meant for movement or on dual-lane carriageways; living middle-class lives in housing built for those on low incomes, and vice versa. The intentions of those who designed industrial mills, subway interchanges and brutalist tower blocks can help us understand something of their times and their cities, but less about the way in which these forms work or fail to work now. There is, after all, no end-user for any urban design; there are only users over time. Just as in the long run we are all dead, all urban occupations are temporary. And urban contexts are given to change more quickly than urban forms. In the United States, Australia and elsewhere, suburbs are still being laid out in the face of peak oil, sub-prime and family breakdown. Intentional designs and the resulting built forms are subject to numerous subversions, not just over the longue durée but over more everyday time scales: re-tooling and derailing are also practices of design, however unfaithful these may be to original intentions. Finally, a great deal of urban form is made not on the basis of conscious design objectives, but out of our intentions to do other things: to make a living, find a space to sleep, get from A to B and on to Z according to routes and along desire paths unanticipated by the transport planners.

While it is crucial to stress the many ‘ordinary’ or minor actors who participate in the design and re-design of cities, it is equally critical to stress – against an emphasis on conscious design – the impersonal effects of human agency as this is sedimented in economic and political structures. For those interested in city-making as a social process, it is important to take seriously the figure of the middle-class gentrifier, the rural migrant, the electricity pirate or the street trader, but also to understand their agencies in the context of larger and more impersonal processes: of post-industrial restructuring, environmental crisis, urban immigration and legal exclusions. These latter processes – economic, environmental, political and legal – may appear abstract, but are not less social for being harder to individualize.

It follows, therefore, that the notion of urban form deployed in this text is necessarily a broad one. A building can be taken as the tip of the design iceberg; not least in the sense that it can help us read the larger (socio-economic, political and legal) conditions that underlie it. Architecture and urban design are ‘expressive’ in this socio-economic sense at least as much as they are expressive in a more aesthetic sense. What is formative of urban space is not only that which takes on physical shape. Cities are composed of physical structures, but also by the patterning of urban life by social actors as this reproduces the city in built and unbuilt forms, and in more or less stable morphologies. Some of this is purposeful, much of it is routine, unintentional, even accidental. The design of cities is legible in terms of programmatic, purposive or planned outcomes but equally in the making and re-making of spaces as conditions for, and effects of, doing something else: seeking shelter or solidarity, making a livelihood (or a fortune), marking out social distinction, moving from one place to another. It raises the question of what becomes visible as design in the city, and which processes – in spite of their powers of city-making – remain hiding in plain sight: property rights and economic power, social hierarchies and solidarities, informal ties and organizations, unequal shares of vulnerability and risk, mundane practices of urban life.

Ordinary urbanism

This tension between an expert language of city planning and the demotics of everyday design is caught in Rem Koolhaas’ (1995) engaging lament for urbanism from the mid-1990s. He writes of the twentieth century’s ‘losing battle with quantity’: modernist planning and design had sought to transform quantity – mass urbanization – into urban and architectural quality, but by the end of the century the expert stood among the wreckage of design’s best efforts and intentions, overwhelmed by the unruly magnitudes of the ever-expanding city. There was a peculiar pathos in the observation that ‘urbanism, as a profession, has disappeared, at the moment when urbanization [is] everywhere’ (Koolhaas 1995: 961). The failure was not only one of urbanism as a profession or project, but also one of urbanism as a quality of socio-material environments. Koolhaas (1995: 961) pointed to the ‘disconcerting and (for architects) humiliating’ fact of ‘the city’s defiant persistence and apparent vigor, in spite of the collective failure of all the agencies that act on it...