Everyday Urbanism Research

Ambiguous City: Accepting the Indeterminacy of Planning Justin Konicek ARCH 311w

Regardless of the amount of planning put forth into the design of an urban

setting, there always exists the undeniable presence of an uncontrollable element: the people. Despite attempts to control social behavior with varying extents of planning, it is becoming more widely accepted that the city’s inhabitants are the cause and result of unpredictability. It is with informal approaches to urbanism that the citizens are able to create narratives and, therefore, their own cities. With a disregard for utopian ideals, the practice of Everyday Urbanism provides this freedom.

Anti­utopian planning

During the fourth meeting of the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture

Moderne (CIAM) in 1933, architects Le Corbusier, Sigfried Gideon, and Cornelius van Eesteren proposed the theme of the “Functional City.” By applying their modern architecture methods to the planning of cities, the CIAM attendees hoped to create a rational approach with which to solve the problems of the city. With the successful execution of this means of planning, the “Functional City” would potentially solve the existing social problems inherent to cities. As a result, urban planning would “transform an unwanted present by means of an imagined future,” (Holston, 38) as defined by the council. However, some members at the time saw this utopian process defining and solving the problems as inhumane. The CIAM’s Functional City model suggests that solving extant problems prevents future problems. It success is

hinged on the belief that the planners can, first observe every social issue and, second create solutions that do not contradict with urban life’s complex and often contradictory structure. What is not recognized (or addressed) in this planning routine is that the “number… of causes influencing any given event are always infinite” (Kahn, 1). Nevertheless, to create an ideal city for the present, the notion of the indeterminable must be cast aside. The Functional City’s paradox lies in its goal of improving the human experience within a city by rejecting the complexity that is inherent to the human experience (Holston, 46).

Twenty years after the presentation of the Functional City plan, skeptical

members of CIAM created an alternative branch of collective theorizers called Team 10. One founding member, Aldo van Eyck declared of architects and planners, “we know nothing of vast multiplicity—we cannot come to grips with it—not as architects, planners of anybody else...” (Holston, 37). This recognizes the fundamental flaw in modern planning as an abandoning of the unpredictable diversity of issues caused by the social fabric of an urban setting. The goal of Team 10 was to reverse this disregard of the end‐user as something that changes the city by declaring that utopian planning contradicts the existence of urban inhabitants.

Contrary to the motives of the CIAM Functional City model, this phenomenon of the uncontrollable has a presence in every urban setting, whether intentional or otherwise. As columnist Paul Barker explores with the idea of the Non‐Plan, and later Margaret Crawford with Everyday Urbanism, the inability to objectify the future can be used to create rich, unprecedented narratives within the realm of the planned.

The Personalized Place

Everyday Urbanism as an idea can be represented by the “human and social

meanings” (Crawford, 18) that are defined by everyday events. Because it is impossible to define and document every event of the past present and future, this approach to design accepts the “vast multiplicity” that van Eyck noted as the demise of modernist planning. Rather, Crawford views this absence of data as a “partial approach that can be used” (Crawford, 19) to actively enhance spaces by accommodating the unpredictable nature of human presence. In urban design, qualifying any event of human‐city interaction demands the question: for whom are these narratives being told?

By looking at generic examples of the Everyday Urbanism such as empty

parking lots and abandoned structures it is apparent that the human nature of individuals and groups drives the life of a city. These places serve to illustrate Crawford’s point because of their unpredictability. The difficulty of defining spaces with this approach is that ‘empty parking lots’ and ‘abandoned structures’ may seem to have “nothing special about them” (Koolhaas, 402) by nature of their description.

With the example of a movie cinema in Revere, Massachusetts, (fig. 1‐3) the context with which the parking lot is defined in completely dependent on the time of year. Empty parking lot becomes an antiques market. Antiques market becomes an empty parking lot. Empty parking lot becomes a carnival. Between cycles, the spaces may be used for any form of activity; these interstitial events are typically unplanned and apparent only to the users. Although this recursive cycle is likely

controlled by informal scheduling, the life and death of the spaces is defined by the needs of, and uses by the people. Because the invented place “retrofits already existing situations to better accommodate everyday life” (Crawford, 19), there is an informal system of apportioned use between

Fig. 1, Revere, MA parking lot. April 2007

those who need its space. This narrative is perpetuated by the knowledge that there will always be an absence of recordable data; the parking lot’s character becomes unique to the user who is creating the event and the temporary narrative.

Fig. 2, Same site, July 2008

In a theoretical sense, the application of the cinema’s parking lot (this definition of the space being the most broad) to practice can be interpreted as Everyday Urbanism’s demand for freedom. The extent of this freedom is entirely personal, based on use of the city. Therefore, if the idea of Everyday Urbanism is to reinstate a Fig. 3. Same Site, June 2010

humanist city through the freedom of personal narrative, previous attempts of controlling all aspects of use are inhumane. The source and richness of these personal freedoms is enhanced by the universal condition of “heteroglossia.” The various interpretations

and, consequently, uses of space create a “constant interaction between meanings” (Crawford, 30). By accommodating these interconnected yet confrontational events within the same space, a hybridization of place—and therefore narrative—occurs.

Urban Reclamation through Resurrection From a political and economic standpoint, spaces within the city that are no longer put to use as planned are often deemed ‘dead.’ Standard practice of objective planning suggests that these spaces should be filled with programmed elements that have definitive use and meaning. Often unnoticed, however, are the events of life and death within these spaces that occur without political intervention. The layers of creation and destruction of meaning are what make sites into “wandering, dynamic milieus that arise in the zones of change and quickly move on to a new zone of change” (Kvorning, 567). The undesirable counter to these spaces is everyday elements that have been assigned “over‐detailed prescription” (Barker, 98) as an attempt to add character to a ‘dead’ site. Instead, the modestly programmed parking lots or other elements of the city that are often seen as dead are functional sites of informal reclamation. If the definition of planning is a revival of space, then resurrection of space through informal reclamation is the means by which places are created.

By looking at examples of resurrected spaces, it is apparent that definition of place is dependent on and determined by the user or observer. In an attempt to create places within the city of Amsterdam, Aldo van Eyck designed over seven hundred playgrounds to infill urban spaces (fig. 4). His acts of reclamation do not

attempt to control the site by disregarding the feared “multiplicity.” Rather, it is with this hybridization of place and space that van Eyck (and theorists backing Everyday Urbanism) recognizes the narratives created from the overlapping places. (Willoughby, Because meaning only becomes apparent over time and an intervention must occur for change, it is through this action of reclamation that space changes to place.

Fig. 4: Public Playground by Aldo van Eyck

Since the establishment of Freetown Christiania, Denmark in 1971, the squatter settlement, turned “social experiment” has developed into a predominantly self‐regulating periphery of a major city. Despite having become a considerably integrated facet of the mother city of Copenhagen, Christiania’s beginnings can be found in the practice of urban reclamation. The physically apparent act of reclamation occurred with the seizure of an abandoned military base, a culturally dead space just outside of the city. Outwardly, this act is typically seen as socially destructive and politically undesirable—like most squatter or homeless settlements—yet inwardly, the Freetown has proven their acts to be “not destructive, but creative” (Kvorning, 562). The destruction and creation of meaning is a result of the resurrection and redefining of the once‐dead military complex.

From a cultural standpoint, the creation that occurred (is occurring, and will occur) in Christiania was one sparked by the destruction of the formal homogeneity

of the city. Originally, Copenhagen was like many other major cities; a set polarity between “affluent society…moving to be in the center of everything” (Kvorning, 565) and a periphery (yet very much present) counter culture. By establishing and forcing the government to recognize Christiania, the residents were able to create a border between the counter culture and the city. In some ways, this border is seen as “the fence,” which is somewhat of an icon of Christiania. But the border is also manifested within the whole of Copenhagen. The settlement has become an interior region that separates the unplanned from the planned.

Over the course of the first few years of Christiania’s presence, it served as the perfect example of Everyday Urbanism. The founding groups did not allow and outside professional to declare an order of their space, so the neighborhood became a fusion of various cultures (as made apparent by the clash of architectural aesthetics) and not a segregated colony of unwanted peoples. Rapid changes occurred for the sake of creating personalized places for a region that had no single definable user group. As the past ‘place’ of military complex was returned to a state of unknown ‘space’ within the city, the survival of Christiania relied on the creation of a new ‘place.’ In a sense, the act of destruction is more of a ‘defamiliarization’ of place than a physical dismemberment of the buildings. To then create, the residents applied themselves to the site in an act of ‘refamiliarization’ by applying themselves and their alternative cultures to the contrasting military culture that previously existed. Generally speaking, Everyday Urbanism strives to “domesticate urban space, making it more familiar” (Crawford, 22) through the use of blurring private and public. Ultimately, this is what has occurred in Christiania. The public is now

welcomed into an “outdoor museum for the culture of the 60’s and 70’s” (Kvorning, 562) that has defied the city’s original intentions of hiding this society. Today, the border essentially acts as a crossing between the formally planned urban setting and an “opposition to the functionalistic planning tradition” (Dirckinck‐Holmfeld, 483). It is important to note that Christiania is not used as an example of Everyday Urbanism because of the alternative lifestyles; the Everyday is not concerned with this. Instead, it is seen as a still existing (and still changing) example of how urban reclamation and creative destruction act as methods for creating personalized narratives that counter the planned narratives of typical urban settings.

Planning Building and Planning Growth In 1979, architectural columnist Paul Barker met with urban geographer Peter Hall to debate the question “could things be any worse if there were no planning at all?” (Barker, 96). Although this question defies the institution of planning as a social problem‐solving profession, it points out that the current processes might not work. As a profession, urban planning has generally accepted that “and urban plan [is] said to be fulfilled when it had only been completed” (Barker, 96). This close‐minded approach to construction suggests the rejection of learning from the unplanned or events unrelated to the planning goal. Part of the problem may be in the title of the process.

Instead of suggesting that the goal is to create the plan, Everyday Urbanism suggests that it should inform the plan. In some instances, the structured plan should be influenced by the unstructured. To ask for planners to follow this

approach is not to ask for a decisive course of action. Rather, the real goal should be to recognize the multiplicities of the city—the “conflict, ambiguity, and indeterminacy characteristic of actual social life” (Holston, 46) that an ethnographer or geographer would study. It is important to point out that the two men who posed the question of planning were neither architects nor planners. They are unsure of contemporary plans because of the overly controlling products of plans like the Functional City idea. To suggest that planning should be completely removed from society would imply that cities must grow by themselves. This, in turn, leaves what was once considered planning to the masses. Instead, a more conservative approach would allow this non‐professional means of growth to aid the professional method of building, and vise versa.

The field of advocacy and humanitarian planning must be considered with this concept of collaboration. As a practice, applying an advocacy mindset to the planning process is based around an “understanding, not only of the culture where the building [or plan] will be set, but also of the different cultures of members of the design team” (El‐Kadi, 119). For the application of Everyday Urbanism to physical and social planning to work, the design team must be consider a “design team” of professional urbanists and informal urbanists, or participatory residents. Still, other issues must be left for time, the citizens, and the city to solve through personalization and urban resurrection.

To redefine the practice is to redefine the process. Perhaps the process cannot be given appropriate definition due to the volatility of its subject. From this, we must ask if planning is the job of a planner or a geographer, or maybe a

sociologist. Possibly even an average citizen. Again, there is a cry for multiplicity.

Planning must no longer be seen as having one goal, outcome, or method. It requires the embodiment of multiple disciplines and willingness for the unknown.

This combination of social indeterminacy and professional awareness is what makes Everyday Urbanism such a powerful tool for growth.

References: Barker, Paul. "Non‐plan Revisited: or the Real Way Cities Grow. The Tenth Reyner Banham Memorial Lecture." Journal of Design History 12.2 (1999): 95‐110.

Print.

Dirckinck‐Holmfeld, Kim, and Martin Keiding. "Learning from Christiania."

Arkitektur DK 48.7 (2004): 483‐93. Print.

Holston, James. "Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship." Cities and Citizenship. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1999. 37‐55. Print.

Kahn, Andrea. "From the Ground Up: Programming the Urban Site." Harvard Architectural Review 10 (1988): 54‐71. Print.

Koolhaas, Rem, Stefano Boeri, Sanford Kwinter, Nadia Tazi, and Hans Ulrich. Obrist.

Mutations. Bordeaux: Arc En Rêve Centre D'architecture, 2001. Print.

Kvorning, Jens. "Christiania and Borders in the City." Arkitektur DK 48.7 (2004): 562‐70. Print.

Crawford, Margaret, Rahul Mehrotra, and Michael Speaks. Everyday Urbanism: Margaret Crawford vs. Michael Speaks. Ann Arbor, MI: Univ. of Michigan, Taubman College of Architecture, 2005. Print.

El‐Kadi, Hisham, and William O’Reilly. "The Need for Advocacy Architecture."

Architectural Knowledge and Cultural Diversity. Lausanne: Comportements, 1999. 119‐22. Print.

Reddersen, Jakob. "Self‐management in Christiania." Arkitektur DK 48.7 (2004): 494‐521. Print.

Willoughby, William T. Place and Occasion Mean More. Diss. ASCA West Regional Conference, 11 Oct. 2001. Print.

Images: [fig. 1‐3] Google Earth. Web. 10 Dec. 2010. <http://earth.google.com/>. [fig. 4]: Aldo van Eyck Playground. Digital image. CityKin: Eyck on Playgrounds. 28 Apr. 2009.

Web. 8 Dec. 2010. <http://www.citykin.com/2009/04/eyck‐on‐ playgrounds.html>.