The authors of the Frankfurt School maintained that a radical change in society was necessary; however, they always refused to suggest any practice. The role of the thinker, as famously argued by Adorno, was not to engage with society and politics in a direct fashion, because this would imply being caught in a stream of cause and effect relations. This compromise would eventually jeopardise their subjectivity and the ability to critically consider reality. Jürgen Habermas, the last author to be associated with the Frankfurt School, shifted his object of analysis from the immediate social reality to the level of language and communication, increasingly detaching the terms of the question from his immediate historical circumstances.

Habermas’s collaborative action theory takes communication as its main object of analysis following the author’s sustained interest in the public sphere as a dimension where democracy can happen through participation. The public sphere is fundamentally a linguistic construction, created and maintained by language. The study of communication is therefore crucial to the theory in order to recognise the obstacles and the constraints that prevent individuals from participating and contributing their ideas to the debate. The theory is based on two elementary concepts. The lifeworld is the ever-changing network of connections established between individuals, which can have a communicative or normative nature. The lifeworld is continuously colonised by abstract systems. These can be described as pre-emptive networks, structures that are constructed with the purpose of staying fix, of providing some frame to the human interaction, like the economic order with the market place or the political or administrative order with the bureaucracy. They are based on instrumental rationality, and are superimposed to the lifeworld to constrain its ever-changing nature.

The core of Habermas’s theory contribution to the debate on good practice in planning is in the distinction between lifeworld and system, between planning imposed because of functional rationality and planning that emerges from and through communicative rationality. To instrumental rationality, Habermas opposes communicative rationality. From this point of view, among the many sources from which the German social theorist borrowed, Sigmund Freud is an important one. Rather than in his formulations and terminology, Habermas is simply, selectively interested in psychoanalysis as a method based on language. Conversation is used in psychoanalysis both as a method to reveal and heal disorders. Psychoanalysis, if successful, provides the patient simultaneously with emancipation and rational understanding of their issues. Similarly, Habermas with his theory wanted to provide an intriguing tool to both explain the relation between language and repression and solve it. Unbalances of power affect social structures, which in turn affect individuals. For Habermas, language is both a way to reveal and to heal them, i.e. to change the understanding of the world and to augment control of the subjects on their reality.

Reality is formed through interaction between actors and actants, a collective process that combines objective and subjective knowledge: as Judith Innes put it, ‘Information that influences is information that is socially constructed in the community where it is used.’ Another important element of the theory from this point of view is the idea that ‘social illness’ emerges from the fragmentation of symbolic contents. Again, language allows for the re-symbolisation of isolated symbolic contents, by conveying them into the public sphere. Communicative action brings people together, because it allows to rescue isolated pieces of content (a spatial distortion) through acquisition into the public domain. Issues emerge and are understood by verbalisation: this is the hermeneutic value of communication. This part of the theory was particularly important in the formulation of the practice of placemaking in urban planning and design, i.e. the process of finding a rationale to new elements of the built environment by associating them to former desires, symbols and narratives of an existing or imagined community.

Also the built environment has a twofold nature and is both a text and a medium of communication. Its basic blocks are units of information and its structure is a syntax that connects them. Communication is constantly required because of the collective dimension of the human effort to colonise and inhabit the environment. Cities and neighbourhoods come into being at the point where all forces involved reach a balance, and the planner’s aspiration is to transcribe and inscribe these processes into the built environment.

Since the nineteen-sixties, planners and urban designers have created innovative, participative approaches and methodologies to encourage stakeholders to take part to the planning process and let communities emerge through consensus-building. The Team 10 left the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM) as early as in 1953 in disagreement with the then hegemonic model of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City. The architect and planner Giancarlo De Carlo founded the  International Laboratory of Architecture and Urban Design (ILAUD) in 1976 to make extensive use of methods as public consultation and open debates in most of his projects. Today the charrette methodology is particularly popular in land use and urban planning. It consists in short, intense periods of consultation and design, to which all stakeholders are invited. Communicative rationality is a crucial element to these approaches and Habermas is often quoted by planners and scholars who report and comment on similar projects. However, what Habermas’s theory should suggest to planners who adopt these approaches is not only to set aside emotion and ownership of ideas, and most importantly to avoid consensus thinking.

‘Open form’ is a term sometimes used for flexible or polyvalent forms of creative expression, where the arrangement of the parts or sections is indeterminate or left up to interpretation. Some open artworks can appear structurally incomplete, either because meant to be representing an unfinished activity or because hinting at spaces and concepts outside their own limits. Similarly, planners who want to act as facilitators and allow for the participation of all stakeholders must include in their work aleatory, extemporary elements. It is this very openness that creates opportunity and means of critical reflection through language and premises truly collective action on the basis of the validity of propositions and lines of argument rather than established power relations.

Of course, as long as planners are involved in the process, truly open planning remains an imagined ideal, because the very opportunity and means for stakeholder participation must be designed or designated and is subsequently implicitly limited and possibly susceptible to external influences. Nevertheless, at least from a conceptual point of view, stakeholder participation allows planners to soften the boundary between the output of the planning process and its context, subsequently creating a linguistically more homogeneous system.

The charrette methodology has been in recent years very often used by proponents of ‘New Urbanism’, an alternative to traditional low-density urban sprawl. Sophie Bond and Michelle Thompson-Fawcett in 2007 wrote a detailed examination of a charrette process in a small town in New Zealand and noted how the use to a single type of participatory tool can represent a constraint in itself. Another limit to participation is the fact that professional designers and planners openly and inevitably pursue a New Urbanism agenda, despite the fact that they present themselves as facilitators. Charrettes and similar processes are hardly truly neutral and inclusive and in the worst case scenario they can easily be ‘hijacked’ used by authorities or interest groups simply to provide an aura of legitimation for their agenda. Moreover, local administration or private sector actors can dilute the power of participatory planning by creating ‘artificial’ or ‘redundant’ stakeholders in the form of partnerships or local groups. Tore Sager, on the other hand, in 2005 pointed out that the role of dialogue in communicative planning does not necessary ensure the best outcome, because ‘results are generated not only by amalgamation of preferences but also by the amalgamation of argument’. When different externalities or incomparable preferences are involved, dialogue does not easily result in a balance of all interests through communicative rationality and in accordance with democratic criteria: ‘Usually, only some of the pro-and-con arguments about a plan refer to impacts measured on comparable scales, like a monetary scale’.

The model of the planning process based on the communicative action theory, with its emphasis on components of discourse and deliberation within a group, does not take into account how individual actions are affected by rules, community and the physical environment. From this point of view, planners interested in creating theoretical models to explain and present findings, should integrate elements of theories that deal with the social construction of knowledge and the Actor-Network Theory, which largely focuses on the interaction between human and non-human actors. However, a major contribution of communicative action theory has certainly been to stimulate debate about the nature of the planning profession, giving practitioners the opportunity to think of themselves as facilitators. Alternatively, planners can reclaim their role in researching and interpreting what solution grants the most positive externalities, by identifying with the user and defining what would be desirable, usable and useful. Also this approach adjusts the top-down strategy introduced by modernist planning and brings the user to the negotiation table from which the built environment emerges. As a task it includes addressing a range of desires, physical and emotional issues that go beyond the simple functional needs summarised by the notion of instrumental rationality. Such an approach requires a great effort of identification with the user/citizen, an effort perfectly symbolised by the image of the planner exploring the territory in person rather than analysing it through maps and models.

Today we conceive urban space to have a substance of itself. Architectural proposals take part in it, and produce it to a certain extent, but I wonder if there are still areas beyond the discipline’s reach.  In this text I will use a few samples across time, starting by a comparison between two contemporary 17^th century paintings, as to exemplify the process that at the same time has shaped urban and public space, and articulated the understanding we have of them. It is my intention to show that far from being obvious, this issue has undergone a complex evolution throughout western modern history.

The first painting is Vermeer’s The Little Street, one of his two paintings – the other being View of Delft - having reached us that deals with the outdoors. In this work, Vermeer combines different elements of Delft’s cityscape – there is consensus in considering this composition an abstraction rather than an actual location – in order to describe the streets of Delft. Split almost in half, the composition juxtaposes a planar façade and a deep cityscape. Representative and functional relations between the house and the street are also shown together, on each side of the canvas’s symmetry axe. This shift between the symmetries of the objects within the painting and the painting itself, underscored by the painting’s crop, induces in the viewer an understanding of the greater order of the city’s fabric.

As the painter leans on his usual compositional schemes, he also continues his typical motifs, and thus the domestic scale is used to symbolically report the idea of the street. Vermeer’s everyday-life scenes of Dutch bourgeoisie are reflected in three instances around the painting: a maid at house-keeping chores, a couple of children playing and a woman sewing on the doorstep, so arrayed that all three of them appear somehow confined to the façade’s plane, and though having “one foot” on the street, absolutely belonging to the house.

The other painting is Martínez del Mazo’s depiction of the Alameda de Hércules, the main urban space arranged in Seville during the 16^th century. One characteristic establishes the main difference with Vermeer’s piece: the Alameda, the way it was conceived, had no formalized edges. Designed as something between a garden and an urban stroll in what used to be a floodable area hosting seasonal leisure activities, its rationale was the inception of an intrinsic order rather than an external one. This was to be granted by a combination of a perspective array, landmarks and a strong conceptual content.

Thence the pictorial representation –the first of a series of copies that repeated the same scheme- of its spatial quality is based on this kind of backbone, but it does also rely strongly on the depiction of characters hovering over space, loosely bound to this built structure. Their attires, attitude and characterization are stressed so that they can both be recognizable in themselves and qualify the space they are occupying. Urban space is revealed in simultaneity; in the coexistence of the water boy, the strolling gentlemen, the dueling ruffians… in an incoherence that Vermeer avoids in his painting. Witness of the awakening of a new social order, Vermeer’s analytical eye feels comfortable within the boundaries of the domestic realm, in which bourgeoisie first expressed itself spatially. But the streets remained a backward, hostile world, still to be apprehended by a middle class on its way to the Enlightenment, and which for the moment merely leaned out and dared to inhabit a thin border fringe. The features of the public space at reach of Vermeer’s pictorial discourse are those around it. There is no description of the street as such, but rather of how it is approached from its edges.

Proposal for a Cenotaph for Newton by E. Boullée (1784) and E.G. Asplund’s Stockholm’s City Library (1928). Two key moments in the Enlightenment’s project of the “indoor public space”.

At the beginning of the consolidation of the modern city, the actual streets took place in spaces in between edges that set boundaries and bodies than enacted similitude or difference. Then the developing urban ideal gradually conquered the space that had belonged to the indistinct crowd. If classicism had spawned an awareness regarding a necessary negotiation of those in-betweens, it was especially at the turn of the 19^th century that spaces begun to be conceived as to extend social order over the outdoors, and in turn to overlap social and private space.

Today, urban space is perceived as substantial in itself, even though its quality remains elusive to architecture. In between the signs that fill the streets of overlaying codes there is still room for deviance, and simultaneity brings about the unexpected. Can it be planned or is it only possible to grasp it by occupying it? The modern city has been able to incorporate those moments in which we just want to switch on the mirror ball and let its shine dissolve the edges and merge the bodies.

Madonna, exercising her citizen’s right to let loose, location unknown. This is the climax of the “Hung up” single’s clip (Dir. Johan Renck), which updates contents from the 70’s, especially Abba’s theme “Gimme gimme” and the movie “Saturday night fever”, into a celebration of urban life.

Contributor’s bio: Miguel Torres-Garcia is an architect based in Seville, Spain, and performs technical assistance in the fields of planning, heritage management and international aid. Following his architecture studies he worked as a specialist in development aid, obtained an MSc in Spatial Planning and is now furthering his interest in public space research.

The separation barrier sneaking by Abu Dis from the al-Quds University campus, on 8 December 2010. These Palestinian landscapes are naturally very contrasted and defined, and with their sparse vegetation they often resemble the backdrops of some Italian early Renaissance paintings.

The wall in its context is a text-book example of low entropy structure. Like an ice-cube, its structure is really orderly, but it requires a great deal of work to bring it into that state and its entropy is naturally ever increasing. Low entropy means highly organised but also highly dishomogeneous. An ice-cube at room temperature will inevitably melt and the state of matter and the temperature eventually reach a balance. Balance is homogeneous temperature and texture. This process can only be delayed by continually applying work, which in the case of the ice-cube means keeping the fridge switched on, and in the case of the wall spending energies and human lives to keep the separation neat and strict.

The university campus was barely saved when in 2003 the wall was threatening to cut right through it. The barrier in this picture hardly seems capable to withhold the urban buildup above it. The houses populate the slopes of the hills, and as they thrive and proliferate they seem on the point of overwhelming the concrete fence underneath like a wave.

Al Bayyadah is a town in Cyrenaica that was founded in 1938 and originally called D’Annunzio, after the famous Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio. These agricultural settlements were built around an architectural core formed by a church, an administrative building, and a section of the Fascist party, which functioned as space for events and public gatherings: “God, Fatherland and Family”. The image is taken from a publication called “The Twenty Thousand. Photographic Documentary of the First Mass Colonial Migration in the frame of the Intensive Demographic Colonisation Plan”: I Ventimila. Documentario fotografico della 1. Migrazione in massa di coloni in Libia per il piano di colonizzazione demografica intensiva (Tripoli: Maggi, 1938).

Art historian Elisabetta Longari on Domus decries the damage that the Italian colonial architecture in Libya suffered through the Allied bombings in the Second World War and the erratic post-colonialist fury of the dictator. I had once the chance of viewing the videos Lorenzo Pezzani shot during the first stages of his research in the after-lives of colonial buildings in Libya. It is surprising how much has been left behind, most interestingly the colonial settlements, which in their structure are surprisingly similar to the West Bank settlements of today. It is true, as Longari says, that what is still standing survived “simply because there was no will to destroy it”. She adds that true conservation of the built heritage also means “renovate, reinterpretate, rehabilitate” and calls on the Italian government and other Italian institutions to intervene to save this wealth of heritage. This is a delicate task, not only because of the risk to reiterate colonial attitudes to space, but especially because to this day an atlas of the afterlives of this as other colonial architecture is still lacking.

Alessandro Petti of Decolonizing Architecture proposed that three general approaches can be discerned in dealing with evacuated colonial architecture: destruction, re-occupation, and subversion. Destruction is often based on the desire to turn time backwards, reverse development into virgin nature, or into a tabula rasa on which all potential forms of development and land use would be possible. This is a very appealing approach, particularly given the abhorrence aroused by colonial development, although demolitions or even the forced ruralization of built-up areas may sometimes create further planning problems or environmental damage. Another strong temptation present throughout the histories of decolonization was re-occupation of colonial buildings and infrastructure and reuse them in the very same way they were used under colonial regimes. Such repossessions tended to reproduce some of the colonial power relations in space: colonial villas were inhabited by new financial elites and palaces by political ones, while the evacuated military and police installations of colonial armies, as well as their prisons, were often used by the governments that replaced them, recreating similar spatial hierarchies. Subversion, finally, aims at profanation of structures that are both symbol and instruments of spacial control, in order to restore the common use of spaces. The first stage when looking at colonial architecture in Libya should be investigating how and whether these strategies have been used and – in perspective – how they could be used on buildings and urban centres on which intervention is still possible.

The word I like in Longari’s article is “reinterpretation”. In fact, we also have to reckon with the fact that no building should be allowed the privilege to last forever. In a way, sometimes the energy spent in harnessing the space must be released to be vital again – and this is a form of reinterpretation. Sometimes monuments that crumble down are not “lost”, but “regained”.

The right the local population indeed has to be granted now is exactly the right to reinterpretate. These attacks launched today with the Odissey Dawn operation will surely claim more lives, may they be Libyans or mercenaries. The Europeans could not afford losing access to Libya’s oil, the Arab League is happy to do away with the Libyan dictator’s antics and the international public opinion could not take the news of the brave rebels being crushed any longer. A tricky alliance of intentions, most certainly. We cannot anticipate where this will lead, but in the short term anything seemed better than just seeing mercenaries slaughtering freedom fighters. In the medium term all depends on the right leadership emerging from the rebels, a leadership that is able to twist this mismatched alliance of intentions and reinterpretate it toward the best outcome for the Libyan people.

Sleeping in public, scene from film 'Outside' of Sergio Cruz.

To know more information about the artist and the Tinag screening see websites below:

Sergio Cruz: http://www.rhiz.eu/person-37213-en.html

TINAG events: http://thisisnotagateway.squarespace.com/salons-upcoming/

The Scoop at the foot of the GLA City Hall: a 'public space' that is privately owned and managed.

The dichotomy of public and private is something that has long been criticised in social theory. A common strand through Arendt (1956), Habermas (1962, 1992) and Sennett (1974) is that it is impossible, in Modern society, to speak of a clear boundary between the two. This touches on an issue common to all discussions on ‘public space’ in that there is a huge discrepancy between what the term implies and what it is used to describe. The requirements for a space to be public are as numerous as contradictory, and always contingent on a particular point of view.

DeLanda’s theory of assemblage (2006) might be of interest in this discussion because it offers a framework for describing complex and unfixed wholes at various scales. The theoretical premise is to conceive of ‘wholes whose properties emerge from the interaction between parts. (p.5)’ One example is that a particular group of individuals can simultaneously experience ‘territorialising’ and ‘de-territorialising’ forces (DeLanda’s theoretical starting point is the philosophy of Deleuze) that tend to respectively homogenise some of its identity and make some of it more heterogeneous. These forces, as opposed to being fixed aspects or categories, are variables of the group. What I suggest here is to apply similar thoughts to public space and to speak instead of social space with varying degrees of public and private.

My second thought has to do with the fact that assemblage theory, as elaborated by DeLanda, describes both human and material variables of social situations. These situations, whether an inter-personal conversation, a group of residents, a municipal government or even an urban agglomeration, are conceptualised as assemblages of persons and objects (agencements in Deleuze). The important distinction, as quoted above, is that the emphasis of study is on the relations between entities or ‘relations of exteriority’ rather than on the entities themselves. In this case it would seem assemblage theory has something valuable to offer in breaching the social/physical divide in theories of the public realm and public space.

References:
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press: 1958.
Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society, Continuum: 2006.
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, MIT Press: 1962.
—, ‘Further Reflections on the Public Sphere’, in Craig Calhoun ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere, MIT Press: 1992.
Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, Faber: 1974.

The Urban Islands Project – reviving places:
www.urbanislandsproject.net

The Urban Islands Project is part of an ongoing project SPACEPILOTS introduced in 2009 under the title of Unlocking the City, aiming to excite young people about their city, engage them with their environment, and to empower them to get involved in the actual shaping of places.

We are inviting young people aged 16-25 from all over London to participate in the research and development of design ideas for Urban Islands.

- Join us on www.urbanislandsproject.net to receive the latest news and to help us detect existing or potential urban spots, overlooked and/or ignored, and revive them into Urban Islands!

We will launch the project in form of a small pilot at this year’s London Festival of Architecture [LFA'10], 19th June – 4th July 2010, in the Borough of Southwark, South London.

dates: 19th June 2010, project start;
4th July 2010 @ The LFA 2010, finale

place: Southwark, Southbank

theme: ‘reviving places through urban interventions and architectural
actions’

method: creative, collaborative exploring, mapping, filming, making,…

Since then, there have been very few significant contributions, among them Lofland and Gehl are worth mentioning, that came to reassert once again the importance of the field of public-space sociology and to broaden its theoretical and analytical scope. But still a lot more could have been done, specially from a spatial perspective!

For those interested in or already busy with exploring the ‘sociology of public space’, please contact me. I will be very interested in discussing further since I am working in a project for an edited book and i am looking for future collaborators.

[REMEMBERANCE OF SMELLS PAST. A BBC World Service programme]

“How do smells impact on memories and emotions? Science is unraveling how a whiff of perfume or a newly mown lawn can offer us a free ticket back to our childhood.”

Sent by Stephanie Brandt:

Living Landscapes Lecture Series*

Autumn 2009

Session 1 (5 October 2009): Public space and politics

Session 2 (2 November 2009): Art and agency: art and the creative city

Session 3 (7 December 2009): Alternative/subversive urban practices

Time: 18:30 – 20:30

Location: The Building Centre, Store Street, London, WC1E 7BT, (http://www.buildingcentre.co.uk)

Free admission

*Sponsored by the AIA UK and hosted by The Building Centre

Stephanie Brandt (SPACEPILOTS) and Carol Mancke (Machina Loci and Kingston University) are investigating the idea of space as a living landscape: spaces, not simply defined by pure physical mass, but rather as repositories of accumulated action. Their project has three strands: a lecture series around the politics of public space, art and agency and subversive or alternative urban practices; student workshops in Japan, Bucharest and London; and an intervention in the public realm on Roscoe Street at White Cross Street near Old Street in London to take place on 6 September 2009.

The first of the three lectures will take place at The Building Centre on the evening of 5 October 2009 from 6:30 to 8:30 PM. The focus will be on the broad relationships between public space, politics and democracy. Speakers will be: Dr Luis Arena, Professor of Philosophy and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Zaragoza; the architect and thinker Uriel Fogué of Architecture Agency in Madrid and Dr Malcolm Miles, Professor of Cultural Theory at the University of Plymouth.