Eva Minoura Research Framework by CommunicationsResArc

CONTENTS

PREFACE

PART I: SETTING UP THE PROBLEM 1. INTRODUCTION 2. WHAT IS THE PROBLEM? 3. THE SOCIAL AND SPATIAL CONNECTION 4. DISPOSITION AND DELIMITATION ...............................................................................................................VIGNETTE 1: AREAS INTRODUCED

PART II: DESIGNING THE RESEARCH 5. A TRIANGULATED APPROACH 6. TERRITORIALITY 7. CONCEPTS AND CONFUSION 8. MATERIAL, METHODS, MEASURES ....................................................................................................................VIGNETTE 2: AREAS ANALYZED

PART III: THE FINDINGS (P2) 9. WHAT DO RESIDENTS SAY? (SEEKING THE SPATIAL IN THE SOCIAL) 10. WHAT DO RESIDENTS DO? (SITE AUDIT) 11. MEASURES THAT MATTER 12. USE VERSUS AGENCY ....................................................................................................................VIGNETTE 3: PLANS ANALYZED

PART IV: RESEARCH IN DESIGN 13. TERRITORIALITY IN URBANISM PRACTICE (THE HOW) 14. CORRECTIVE INTENSIFICATION (THE WHERE) 15. AN EVIDENCE-BASED DESIGN (THE WHY) 16. SURFACES AND INTERFACES - FACETS OF FITNESS (THE WHO) ..................................................................................................................VIGNETTE 4: STREETS ANALYZED

APPENDIX BIBLIOGRAPHY LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

EVA MINOURA, ARKITEKT SAR/MSA

PhD Candidate KTH School of Architecture mobil 073 084 1128 | eva.minoura@arch.kth.se

AN URBAN FORM OF TERRITORY

WHY & HOW 1. PROBLEM STATEMENT

postwar modernist planning practices striving for an open society with fluid space, have created and continue to create suburban landscapes of territorial monocultures and wasted space. For socially performing territories and commons, one tends to have to look in traditional urban fabrics where public and private are distinct and legible. the research asks, what role does the urban form play in producing social behaviors such as stewardship of the street and collective action?

2. APPROACH

AS AN ARCHITECT, I AM INTERESTED IN THE SOCIAL PROCESSES UNDERLYING URBAN LIFE BUT WITH A CLEAR AIM TO USE THE RESEARCH TO FEED BACK INTO PRACTICE. TO BETTER UNDERSTAND URBAN FORM MORE THAN THE SOCIAL PROCESSES THEMSELVES IS THE AIM. THUS MY FOCUS IS THE MATERIAL ASPECTS UNDERPINNING TERRITORIALITY, ARTICULATED IN SURFACES AND INTERFACES THAT IN FRAMING ALSO SERVE UP SPACES TO THE USER. FACTORS SUCH AS DENSITY, ENCLOSURE, AND CONGESTION CAN BE MEASURED AND ANALYZED TO ASSESS THEIR ROLE IN SUPPORTING RESPONSES SUCH AS USE, OWNERSHIP AND APPROPRIATION OF SPACE. THIS HAS IMPLICATIONS FOR STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE IN URBANISM.

While the production of public and private space and the interface between them is implicit in any urban design undertaken, the consequences of certain territorial compositions are rather under-analysed. Ambiguity in the territorial solution can create confusion about who owns and who is sanctioned to use space, with consequences for maintenance practices as well as more informal stewardship (Ståhle 2007, Ostrom 1990). Territorial mechanisms are activated by more people sharing a finite space resource as well as changing societal norms with regard to ownership and privacy control. For instance, territorial markers such as fences and hedges or even furniture and plantings articulate a sense of ownership of space, of agency. When such markers begin to emerge in public space or in shared spaces (commons), one can conclude that a spatial incoherence is being addressed. Whether to understand this assertion as a form of land-grabbing or as a form of stewardship depends on the consequences. In other cases a lack of agency or stewardship can be a sign of a dysfunctional territorial composition. In the pre-modernist city, the public and private realms tend to be more or less legible and distinct, with the interface between public and private largely materialized in the building façade. With perimeter blocks, for instance, the exterior façade in some sense ‘belongs’ to the city itself, to the street-life that plays out in the public realm. The role of the interface is to mediate the interaction of residents, store-occupants and

passers-by with different needs of access and privacy control. How the interface is materialized, but also what is happening on both sides of the interface, has ramifications for how the different territories might be used. The use of building set-backs for example places distance between the public realm and the private; multi-storey apartment buildings and terrace or row-houses have quite different interfaces to the public realm depending on the amount of residents sharing the same façade (i.e. interface). In post-war modernist areas, in Stockholm referred to as suburban Stockholm (source), open compositions prevail with yards or ’shared gardens’ intentionally planned to be unenclosed, and without legible property lines to promote an open society. Suburban Stockholm was planned as a form of ruralized urbanity, which geographer Tage Wiklund attributes in part to a specifically Scandinavian reverence for nature (Wiklund 1995). Sören Olsson on freedom from social demands! Others, like Levy describe the postwar ‘freeing of the ground’ paradigm as the emergence of buildings as solitary object rather than as part of an urban fabric or composition: Constructed space no longer corresponds to the plot [and] there is no longer a clear relation between one building and another. . . [or] between buildings and streets or open spaces” (Levy 1999, 82). To study the territorial mechanisms in both the

INTRODUCTION

pre-modernist as well as in the post-war areas, we need to understand the relation between urban form and social response as is proposed in Émile Durkheim’s conception of social morphology: “the form of society determines the form of ideas held by people within it” (Collins 2003). Such an understanding of space has strong relations to what Marcus (2010) refers to as the performance of urban form, be it social, economic or environmental. Territorial performance then, refers to those aspects of the urban form which impact how spaces are appropriated and controlled either privately or collectively. The aim of this research is to support architects and planners in the territorial design of space to promote agency and stewardship. The approach taken is to view the built form as not simply backdrop to life but as having performance characteristics with consequences for human behaviour (Marcus & Koch 2005). Ambivalent territories then, in a performative sense, represent the disjunction between the physical and social space framed. If space that is accessible to outsiders is found to be more difficult for residents to appropriate and feel responsible for, then recommendations can be formulated on how urban form should be designed differently. Furthermore, if some key variables associated with intensity of use can be found, perhaps threshold measures to inform urban design praxis can be proposed, as a ‘toolbox for transformation.’ Further, understanding the relationship between urban form and social

response can be valuable when it comes to infill and densification proposals where space is a premium and confusing territorial situations today lead to underutilized or undervalued open space. In some cases, adding more built form through densification can even be an opportunity to repair existing territorial ambiguity. However, in many newly-constructed residential complexes in Sweden, the ‘freeing of the ground’ paradigm seemingly still dominates the current Swedish planning context (source). Despite the urban renaissance dominant in most European cities (source), promoting a mixeduse and dense city, in Stockholm represented in Promenadstaden – the Stockholm City Comprehensive Plan , implementation on project level is often different. Unenclosed perimeter blocks, slabs and point buildings are still commonplace (source). Current densification in the form of infill in suburban Stockholm is often presumed to be contextual if it mimics the already-present typology, leaning on for instance the categorization in the Stockholm Building Order (Fredlund et al. 1997). Thus areas characterized by slab-buildings have tended to be intensified in a similar vein, areas characterized by higher point buildings likewise. It is proposed here that an alternative contextual approach might be one in which densification incorporates the notion of territorial performance – in order to complement areas with what is missing territorially. What appears to be lacking in current planning and urban design practice are tools which en-

INTRODUCTION, continued

able a fair assessment of the territorial performance of urban design models. For this, a spatial precision is required which allows the urban form to be measured and tested in comparison with empirical findings about what people actually do in space. Such tools can then be used to evaluate plans before they are built to identify potential weaknesses in its territorial performance. To assess the factors influencing appropriation of space the inquiry should be ‘sociospatial’, including both morphological and sociological research methods without attempting to venture into the field of sociological research, but borrowing concepts and theories from this closely related field. The question thus has to do not so much with why open space such as the ‘courtyards’ emerge as social institution, but rather where such emergences take place, under which spatial conditions. Or, in other words, what spatial material ingredients need to be present and to what degree? So, the main question is to what extent does urban form by way of creating territories influence the urban life that plays out? The hypothesis is that the spatial components such as accessibility, enclosure, and size of the spaces framed (both absolute size and size relative to population) are significant determinants of territorial performance. Insofar as spatial mechanisms play out where private and public are negotiated or between Ildefonso Cerda’s “operative poles of urbanism: habitation and circulation” this question is at the very heart of what we understand

as urbanity (Choay 1997, 237). That is, entangled with the social life that emerge out of a structuring of space as ‘urban’ where not only private and public meet (in legal and social terms) but also where residents meet strangers in the street, where spaces to stay meet spaces of movement and flows, and where the permanence of domesticated space (private good) meets the transient space of circulation and roads (public good). After having answered the question of territorial performance of space, can we linger on and explore densification from a territorial perspective. The first step thus is to understand which measures are involved in territoriality. The second step concerns the study of how these territories actually provide utility for residents. The third step is to identify where transformation is desirable and possible. In so doing, the research promises relevance not only for densification processes, but even for cities with less need to densify but wishing to identify at the material scale which interventions at the interface might improve the conditions for agency and stewardship.

PART I

SETTING UP THE PROBLEM 1. INTRODUCTION

1. INTERFACE BETWEEN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE AND THE UTILITY OF OPEN SPACE 2. PRIVACY CONTROL AND STEWARDSHIP 3. POSTWAR COMMONS IN THE ‘OPEN SOCIETY’ 4. DENSIFICATION IS OPPORTUNITY 5. TERRITORIAL PERFORMANCE OF SPACE 6. HOW AND WHERE IS TRANSFORMATION POSSIBLE

2. WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?

1. UNCLEAR BOUNDARIES | Development of the urban block 2. CONSEQUENCES OF UNCLEAR BOUNDARIES FOR PRIVACY 3. UNCLEAR BOUNDARIES AND DENSIFICATION 4. CONCEPTUAL CONFUSION 5. INSTRu- MENTS ARE LACKING 6. DESIGN PROBLEM

3. THE SOCIOSPATIAL CONNECTION

1. URBAN MORPHOLOGY 2. A SOCIOSPATIAL FOUNDATION 3. SCIENCE OF SPACE

4. DISPOSITION & DELIMITATION 1. TO BE DECIDED

THEORY

PART II

PART III

PART IV

DESIGNING THE RESEARCH

THE FINDINGS

RESEARCH IN DESIGN

5. A TRIANGULATED APPROACH

9. WHAT DO RESIDENTS SAY?

13. TERRITORIALITY IN URBANISM

1. TRIANGULATION 2. SPATIAL ANALYSIS 3. QUESTIONNAIRE AND INTERSUBJECTIVITY 4. SITE AUDITS 5. LIMITATIONS

6.TERRITORIALITY

1. ANTHROPOLOGICAL CONCEPT 2. OCCUPYING SPACE 3. NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION AND LEGIBILITY 4. PERSONAL SPACE AND TERRITORY 5. REGULATING DENSITY IS COMMON TO OTHER SPECIES 6. territorial monocultures

7.CONCEPTS AND CONFUSION

1. SPATIAL CONCEPTS (BOUNDARY, DENSITY, ACCESIBILITY) 2. SOCIAL CONCEPTS (LEGIBILITY, INCLUSION/EXCLUSION, COLLECTIVE/ COMMONS VS PUBLIC, OWNERSHIP, AGENCY/ OWNERSHIP, USE, APPROPRIATION)!! 3. INSTITUTIONAL CONCEPTS (LEGAL ISSUES/PROPERTY, SEMI-PUBLIC/SEMI-PRIVATE)

8. MATERIAL, METHODS, MEASURES

1. SEEKING THE SPATIAL IN THE SOCIAL 2. QUESTIONNAIRE RESULTS AND THEIR SPATIAL COMPONENTS 3. CORRELATION ANALYSIS | STEPWISE REGRESSION 4. OWNERSHIP | USE | APPROPRIATION 5. WHAT IS A YARD?

10. WHAT DO RESIDENTS DO?

1. PERSONALIZE SPACE AS STEWARDSHIP 2. buildings define a physical space, people define a social space 3. TRACES AND APPROPRIATION

11. MEASURES THAT MATTER

1. TOWARD BETTER LEGIBILITY IN CITIES 2. KEY MEASURES IN TERRITORIAL PERFORMANCE 3. STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE IN URBANISM 4. ILLEGIBILITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE STREET INTERFACE 5. INTENSIFICATION AS INTERVENTION

12. USE VERSUS AGENCY

1. OPERATIONALIZING THE CONCEPTS 2. PILOT STUDY 3. SPATIAL ANALYSIS AND SPATIAL MEASURES 4. QUESTIONNAIRE, SITE AUDIT AND SOCIAL MEASURES

1. USE AND AGENCY ARE NOT THE SAME 2. TIME TO RETHINK URBAN TERRITORIALITY? 3. THE CONCEPT OF THE INTERFACE 4. SITE OF MATERIAL DECISIONS POINTS TO THE DESIGN TASK

THEORY

1. THE HOW 2. PUTTING PERFORMANCE IN THE ‘PERFORMANCE DIMENSION’ (LYNCH) 3. TOOLBOX FOR DESKTOP ASSESSMENT 4. ANALYSIS OF RECENT DETAIL PLANS

14. CORRECTIVE INTENSIFICATION

1. THE WHERE 2. THE PUBLIC REALM PERSPECTIVE 3. INTENSIFICATION VS. DENSIFICATION 4.

15. AN EVIDENCE-BASED DESIGN

1. THE WHY 2. LEARNING FROM TERRITORIAL ASSESSMENT 3. IMPLEMENTING RESEARCH IN DESIGN - STRATEGIES IN PRACTICE 4. TERRITORIAL DIVERSITY BY-PRODUCT OF BOUNDARIES 5. RETHINKING THE ’HYBRID ZONE’ AND COLLECTIVE SPACE AS TERRITORIAL PRODUCTS

16. SURFACES AND INTERFACES

1. THE WHO 2. RECONCEPTUALIZING THE SEMI-PRIVATE AND SEMI-PUBLIC: 3. UNDERSTANDING TERRITORIAL EMERGENCE AS A SOCIAL PRODUCT OF SPACE 4. ANONYMOUS USE VERSUS PERSONALIZED AGENCY, TWO FACETS OF FITNESS

THEORY

EVA MINOURA, ARKITEKT SAR/MSA

PhD Candidate KTH School of Architecture mobil 073 084 1128 | eva.minoura@arch.kth.se