Dampfærgesvej

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Introduction Public space is one of those expressions that received multiple meanings and is no longer a concise concept. For some it is the space of the public, as crowd. It relates with the urban environment and spaces of social confrontation, public domains. This definition would exclude inactive spaces, such as Dampfærgesvej, terrains vagues, or infrastructural systems. For some it is space owned by the public, as the state. It relates to property, and a beach or an inaccessible forest would be a public space. For some it is the space accessible by the public and is defined by the extension of the infrastructural systems. Discussing the capabilities of such a diverse concept rises a debate on several other concepts.

One I will focus on, and make an approximation to a definition, is urbanity.

Urbanity Urbanity is seen by many as a quality - a determined factor that spaces have or do not. Sòla-Moráles defined it as density of corners, as he sees them as the meeting point by excellence.

The importance of this is that urbanity ceases to be a quality and becomes a measure, a measure of contingency and meetings. We can then see that the forest or the industrial area have a lower degree of urbanity than the town square. However when we consider regional intermodal stations, we find a situation of the highest urbanity and one of the lowest separated by a wall.

These stations certainly do promote as many meetings and coincidences as a town square and as such they would have a similar

degree of urbanity. But a quick empirical analysis reveals a fallacy in this definition - the experience of these spaces has different inherent qualities - one can be seen as a space of movement, the other as a space of demonstration. The urban experience is so different that we really have to consider them as different urbanities. With this new premise, we can see that urbanity is neither a quality nor a measure - it can rather be seen as an hierarchic set of axioms - irreducible descriptions defined by density, social and spatial qualities. They are axioms because different combinations of social and spatial qualities generate different urbanities, different organisms. They are hierarchic because they can be organized in accordance to densities of meetings.

Urban / Rural This definition of urbanity, or urbanities, relies on Álvaro Domingues’ concept of transgenic landscapes. He uses it to explain how the dichotomy of urban and rural has lost reason to be. The process of urbanization (of giving urbanity to space) was seen as the urban fabric spreading from a centrality over the rural areas. However what we can observe today is much more a process of colonization through infrastructure. Rural spaces receive programs which are typically urban, but they don’t loose all aspects of their rurality. Like a transgenic organism, genes are mixed and propagated through the next generations. As Henrik Oxvig putted it, the territory becomes a continuous condition with different degrees of organization.

It is wrong to consider that this propagation is only happening from the city to the countryside: both the wilderness and the primary sector are present in the city. More and more we find

urban farms and places where nature was allowed to take back terrain. An obvious example is the High Line, in New York, where nature took the line, and this untamed nature was actually recreated after the renovation of the structure. What is curious in these situations is that this invasion is not the by-product of an advantage that is obtained (accessibility), but a wish in itself.

This presence of the rural in the city somehow counteracts the way rural dwellers embraced an urban life. Due to the spread of infrastructures, urban life is no longer tied to the city as a spatial entity.

Our identities are defined by the events and places we attend, not where we grew up at. We became cultural nomads. This means that living outside the city is an option of density, not lifestyle.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Field OperationsHigh Line (2009)

Accessibility This take on urbanity as a set of axioms hasn’t left clear yet on what makes something have urbanity or not. We have seen now that the urban is not the absence of the rural. What we have also seen is that the processes of urbanization are done through an increase of accessibility, the construction of infrastructures. The nowadays rare situation of having no accessibility matches quite well our notion of wilderness. Wilderness is kept as a relic - it only fits our urban lives in a perspective of leisure. We no longer depend on it economically; accessibility has rationalized all our resource gathering.

We can then deduce that accessibility is a condition for urban life and urbanity. Still, not all kinds of accessibility are directly related with our experience of the urban.

The accessibility that conditions urban life is the one that allows the control of socialization. Infrastructures distort the normal relation of space and time, and with that they make us read the city as hypertext, as a website. In an highway sign, the local and the distant appear right beside each other. Without this system of acceleration, that wouldn’t make sense. The consequence is that we no longer have awareness of what is in-between. Just like in a website, we travel from point of interest to point of interest, as that is how we generate identity now, through the places and events we attend to. In fact, the extension of our cities makes them impossible to be perceived as a whole. Then, we can perhaps already define one urbanity - urbanity as hypertext.

It is perceived as a connection of points and movements, and is spatially expressed as infrastructures.

Privatization and Public Domains The consequence of the hypertextual city is that this possibility of control has been highly valued and enhanced. Proprietors rose barriers and that rose their property value. Interactions in the city were reduced through privatization. At the same time, this possibility of moving a bit away led to processes of gentrification and the creation of ghettos. Neighborhoods became homogeneous and lost the capacity to host meetings. Aristotle said that a city is composed of different classes of men; people who are the same cannot make a city. It is indeed questionable if this neighborhoods have urbanity. For certain they have population density, but a mere storage and stacking of families does not make a city. That which has urbanity, has to enable an urban life. That can happen by facilitating the intersection of people and activities, or by allowing urban dwellers to place meanings into them.

Meanings and Symbols Man gives meaning to objects as he interprets the world that surrounds him. He expresses and crystalizes those meanings through symbols. The most evident example that meanings and symbols are essential for human interaction is language. We wouldn’t be able to relate to the world around us without a way to express it.

I think man lives to express, and there is no other reason for living.

Assuming the city as a place of relations, we can add to the issue of urbanity that the urban has to be able to receive or express meanings.

Meanings are fluid, they change all the time in a dynamic cultural environment. Symbols, on the other hand, have a more solid nature. Their meaning can change and they can lose their meaning, becoming death symbols. Still, due to the ever evolving nature of meaning, they mostly refer to something no longer existing.

Symbols are an expression of past events and values - they imprint history into objects. This quality of representation puts symbols in the scope of the artist, who interprets and represents, the scope of individual expression and re-interpretation. Meaning in itself deals with behavior of individuals and groups - its in the scope of the social scientist, the scope of human relations.

Monuments and Buildings Architects are both artists and social scientists. However, these two perspectives of the profession are not equally important in all architectural works. Colin Rowe compared architecture to literature, as a discriminatory concept of a technical medium which is public property. Architecture’s medium is building, as literature’s medium is speech. And the same way it is absurd to say that all speech should approximate to literature, it is absurd to consider that all buildings should be works of art. Architecture works as a symbol when it expresses values - it creates monuments. For symbols to be read, they need singularity. The way corners lost their monumentality with the introduction of the grid-plan, with their repetition, illustrates this. They did keep their meaning though, because meaning is a local matter. The ever more common situation of tourists looking for non touristic places is a search for this local meanings, the city that is, instead of the symbols of the city that was.

Housing Man Architecture creates meaning when it houses Man. The concept of housing is to establish a connection. The greek word for house, oikos, articulates the idea of reciprocal belonging between a place and it’s inhabitant. The latin one, casa, might have its origin in the Proto-Indo- European word kat which means to link or weave together.

A good street must house Man. As Louis Kahn said, the street is really a room by agreement. This weaving together of men and place makes the city the prime subject of urbanistic, political and sociological thinking. Building collective spaces that house Man becomes more important as identity becomes defined by the places and events where we develop our urban lives, instead of our places of origin. To do this, one should look for spaces of an ambiguous nature, more easily appropriated, as one can bring his own meanings to them.

So, urbanity can grow from ambiguity and the notion of housing reveals that meaning can be attributed as a group or individually.

This allows us to define another urbanity - urbanity as terrain vague. It happens in spaces that don’t depend on interaction, as they are experienced individually and host a personal relation with the city. They can be private or public. Phenomenological experiences are bound with non social events. This could be the parking lot where you meet to start a trip in a misty morning, or an imposing precinct in front of a religious monument.

Scale Until now we have reflected on how urbanity can happen without interaction, or in transit. It remains to be discussed that which truly gives value to a city - the social architecture of its territory.

The urban fabric manages crowds, and it does that through scale. Urban containers are populated according to a logistic function: occupancy grows until it reaches an asymptote and stabilizes. That management is done by each individual, exclusively through his perception of the capacity of the space, and the asymptote certainly varies with culture. At the same time spaces require some critical mass to function. Urban space is activated through programs, and these grow out of needs. However, actors are free to increase offer over demand - commercial activities, for example, are largely determined by individual wishes. Just

like any other economical cycle, when the productive capacity overcomes consumption, an adjustment occurs.

Adjustments are never easy, but much less in the built environment. That’s why excess of public space can be as damaging as the lack of it. Currently, cities have fewer people per square meter than before, and they don’t leave home as often. Therefore, public space has to be designed taking into consideration who it is being drawn to, and what those persons are doing, or what do they believe in. What matters is not state or position, but complex of possible actions.

Out of Scale Scale is not necessarily a metric relation. Every now and then we have a guttural feeling of wrongness, when confronted with a building particularly dissonant in size, in relation to its setting. If this dissonance is intentional, the relation of scale can transmit values: oppression, openness, exclusivity, transparency... We can then understand that we perceive scale with our bodies, not in abstraction.

Architecture becomes space not through reference to inherent formal laws but in dialogue with sentient human beings. This work of scale, the values it can transmit, can perhaps be related with the attribution of meanings to places. Scale can create the emotional set for specific events - it can promote the appropriation of a space by a certain group.

The contemporary city, with a multitude of centralities one can choose from, can no longer be explained by the platonic view, that the senses can only deceive us - maybe they do, but these deceits hold much of how we live in our cities today.

Thresholds Relations of scale are particularly clear in the thresholds between public and private space. As the reducing density of trees slowly reveals a glade, and a creek suddenly appears in the middle of the forest, so can the threshold of public / private be sudden or gradual.

The glade like buffer zone, courtyard or semi-public area, offers a shielded space which allows for permanence on public space, reducing the inconveniences of full exposure - these spaces can be arcades, patios, terraces.

The creek like threshold allows a very immediate expansion of private life into public space, but exposes it to direct interaction with urban dwellers, and strongly defines the character of the public space itself. However it allows quick retreat back into private space, just like the deer escapes from the predator.

These are two examples of a defining scale in public space - how the building touches the city.

The definition of programs, zonings, limit the diversity of these thresholds, since different programs tend to different kinds of connection with the public space. In fact, these thresholds are defined by three factors: - the programs; - the relation of the buildings with the urban space - they define a relation of scale; - the meanings and expectations on the public space around them.

So, the relation of individual buildings with the urban space around them seems to be another defining element of the concept of urbanity.

Steven Holl and Vito Acconci Art Gallery (1993)

Individuality While program, scale and attributed meanings affect urbanity, the behavior of people towards the private and the public also does.

Western societies, being fundamentally open societies, attribute an high value to individuality and personal achievements. We can verify that on popular culture. Architects and actors are idolized, rock and pop music sells more records than classical music (which is performed mostly by anonymous people in orchestras), scientific fiction movies represent evil through armies of faceless, replaceable soldiers or invading races with a collective con-

science.

Even our current concept of democracy embraces a defense for the rights of minorities, instead of a simple representation of the will of the majority. As individuals, we often cannot identify ourselves in the positions of our representatives, and one asks then if there is such a thing as the will of a society.

The philosophical current of methodological individualism, introduced by Max Weber, claims that the actions of society are supplied only by the actions of each individual.

So, for our public space to represent the behavior of a community, it has to embrace the behavior of each of its individuals. In fact, we can notice that most urban spaces that are intensively used as living spaces are viewed as a communal expansion of private space, are freely intervened by the local community and illustrate a specific relation of work and personal life.

Urban Groups The cultural remarks I have done before lead me to question Simmel’s opinion that metropolis are independent of even the most significant personalities. Individuals define spontaneous relations of leadership and subordination. A specific individual can lead to the creation of a group.

Groups are small circles closed to others which restrict the individual freedom of its members. This concept is comparable to Thomas Hobbes’ social contract, where men give away some natural rights to gain protection against continual fear and danger of violent death.

In the case of urban groups, the individual subjects himself to social control to be available for emotional relations, although he exerts an intellectual control over this cession by his power of choice on his association with groups.

Simmel affirms that the smaller the circle the bigger the social control of the group’s deeds, in order to ensure the group’s survival. This can be argued for both by claiming that a society with tighter bounds can provide a bigger degree of protection of its deeds, grounded on the social contract theory, but we can also argue that the smaller the circle the more directly relations of leadership can be exerted.

Still, it is valid to conclude that a small community will demand a much more specific kind of urban space.

Intervention on Public Space To reach this specificity, communities must be able to intervene in the public space. If we observe, for example, the group dynamics on the scout method, where young people are educated for cooperation and responsibility, the binding of the group with a specific space they care for enhances the personal relations of its members.

Besides, local communities have a direct perception of their needs and seek to express themselves in public space. A good example of this is the illegal urban interventions of the catalan architect Santiago Cirugeda, or activities like street art and graffiti.

These interventions develop a community’s identity bounding it with the place. In this case, identity is being generated by the experience of the city, but it can also be created through symbols.

In Christianhavn, the greenlander community gathers around the statue dedicated to the greenlander. Also, the films by Wim Wenders transmit a strong sense of urban life by giving us an object oriented vision of urban space. This urbanity can be explained with the individuals recognizing the meanings transmitted by the symbols in their culture. So urbanity is related not only to ambiguity, or capacity of receiving meanings, but also with transmit-

tance, with the capacity to express a culture.

Transmittance allows us to make yet another definition - urbanity as forum - places of expression of groups’ dissimilarities and confrontation of positions and beliefs. This is the kind of urbanity in which we often see political demonstrations: squares, parks.

Networking The line between bounding with place and privatization is not a thick one. Unless there is social networking and interaction of groups, bounding can quickly become enclosing. This interaction is enabled by the hypertextual city and by the transmittance of urban space. The first allows the network to exist in the first place - it is the links of our virtual social networks. In the same analogy, the transmittance of urban space is our Wall. It is what allows us to accept or reject a group by the way it dwells. A clear example is Christiania: their beliefs and way of life are expressed in the very walls that surround them. These interdependence relations are another layer in our definition of urbanity.

Inniciative An issue that comes forward with the subject of symbology is the treatment of the public as the defining form of the social.

Making civic spaces that represent a cohesive society leads to a kind of planning which is centralized and financed by the public administration. If this responsibility is shared with private developers, city planning becomes more redundant - the failure of one development doesn’t compromise the success of the city as a whole. This principle is observed in critical softwares, which control rockets or nuclear stations, where through redundancy the program is able to work even if several of its components

Christiania

fail. Private spaces contribute to creating a good city when they get absorbed into the public sphere. In that situation buildings are crucial in the definition of urban life. Without good architecture there can be no good city. A good example of shared responsibility in city making is the SAAL housing program, which ran in Portugal during the 70’s. To improve housing quality, organized residents associations would be assigned an architect which would help them project their new neighborhood. Then, the state would provide the construction materials, and the residents would build the houses themselves.

Utility of Public Space With this paradigm, collective owning describes better this relation than public or private. Although there is a question that rises: why should we accept private use of public space and public use of private space? Through Bastiat’s theory of property, one can make the argument that public space has no value. Bastiat argued that In our relations with one another, we are not owners of the utility of things, but of their value, and value is the appraisal made of reciprocal services. Utility is the usefulness of what was given to us and value is how we compare our work on reciprocal services.

Public space is created through someone’s work. He is compensated with everybody’s work, our taxes, and public space becomes collectively owned. For public space to be transferred to private, our efforts are compensated - it is them that have been sold. While the space is public, we can all make use of it - it’s usefulness is given to all of us.

We can then conclude that through welfare we consume private value to give higher utility to things. Bastiat argued that the raw materials and forces given to us by God will always be gratis.

Only our work upon them can have value. Therefore, my previous argument means that our use of public space should always be gratis, as it is an utility given to us, and it is legitimate to create value from it.

The public use of private space is easily explained when there is a situation of commerce: the owner has an expectation of obtaining profit from the users of his space. When there isn’t a situation of commerce, and the owner is not being compensated for the public use of his property, then he is voluntarily ceding his space. Generosity is one of several ways of solving the conflicts of public domains.

From Bastiat’s theory we can assume public space as a frame-

work for private intervention. A successful example of this is the market of La Boqueria, in Barcelona. It has public ownership and management but the initiatives and activities are private.

It is a public domain - it is used by conflicting groups: tourists, locals, sellers... An unsuccessful example can be found in most industrial parks, where the unifunctional character of the space suppresses the utility it could offer to other groups.

When we think of La Boqueria, we have a good example of different urban groups appropriating a place and sharing its utility. The idea that the appropriation of public space must give back to the city relies on the assumption that public space is an entity in itself, self-defined, that gives and takes from the individuals. While that may be true in the subsidized city planning, it is not when public space is taken as an utility, as a framework for private initiative. Therefore, we can notice that the behavior of citizens towards public space reveals yet another dimension of urbanity. The appropriation and bounding of a group with a place also create one more expression of the urban - urbanity as vacant space. These can be defined as places of appropriation by neighboring dwellers, which extend private space and allow public demonstration of private activities. Commercial spaces often show this kind of urbanity, like arcades or galleries, but you can also find this urbanity by looking for playing places of children in the urban environment: calm streets, patios.

Pátio do Carrasco, Alfama - Lisbon Private use of public space

Relations of Programs

I must, at last, refer to the influence of programs and the working / living relation on public space. This influence becomes easily perceived by the comparison of the japanese and scandinavian cultures. In japanese philosophy and religion (dö - the way) defines a very strong sense of specialization (senmonsei). This, added to a extremely high cost of land, makes the work/living dwelling very popular. If work and living are so tied together, and public space extends private space, one can expect continuous use of public space.

On the other hand, the Scandinavian model of three times eight: 8 hours of work, 8 hours of leisure and 8 hours of rest, leads, we can deduce, to a seasonal occupation of public space.

Focusing on work and public space, it is important to say that the producer and consumer relation, as been, in modernity, filtered by the abstract figure of the market. For us, westerns, which don’t have a concept of senmonsei, this means that since industrialization we don’t have an emotional bond between producer and consumer.

If a more efficient economic system doesn’t revert this situation, we should aim at least for a relation of communities with areas of specialization. This would create urban areas with a sense of purpose, and would allow for a community to develop a qualitative valuation of a certain activity, instead of defining it in quantitative terms.

Through globalization, the productive processes were split from our daily lives and the world system suffered a fission into serving and served societies. Industries main asset is accessibility, since they need to move their products worldwide. With this, production moved away to places with urbanities of movement. This not only breaks the producer / consumer relation, it also denies companies of the meetings that could occur in an urbanity of proximity. The city is the natural place for partnerships.

New York

Conclusion To conclude, I must say that, in order to do a good design, you have to name what you are dealing with. If you call everything green space, for example, a park, a roundabout and an intensely explored agricultural field are all reduced to nothing but chlorophyl. We have seen that urbanity can be named according to many things: accessibility, ambiguity, scale, transmittance, interdependence.

This things create a set of urbanities which can’t be two things at the same time but often overlay - the contemporary city is a palimpsest of urbanities. That is why we can look at New York, at Lisbon, at Copenhagen, and always see an intense urbanity, despite the radically different urban lives in this cities.

Urbanism today embraces a fast evolving society, which demands permanent change and adaptation, while balancing it with a need to leave traces and save resources. There is definitely something failing in the model of the hypertextual city. Urbanities are not overlaying, they are barely co-existing. The relation of work and life is not being considered at all.

We must realize that public space is the framework to our activities, to our lives. Then, we must design it as such - we need to start with people and end with buildings.

Ralph Erskine made this definition of what it takes to be a good architect: To be a good architect you must love people; architectural designs, after all, are not isolated pieces of art - they are frameworks around people’s lives, and if, deep down, you don’t really care about people, of course you can’t create good architecture.

It is our challenge today, instead of trying to regress to a city with a defined centrality, to be glad with what our cities brought to us, and try to rethink it in a more humanistic way. Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it.