architecture and dispersal.pdf

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Many agree that the notion of the urban and public are

intertwined: that is, we cannot conceive of the urban without

a conception of public space. Yet in the current reality of

urban environments at low densities, the interdependence of

urbanity and public space as we know it can be questioned.

The concept of public space enables the architecturalprofession to go beyond the sole service of the private sector,

beyond the whims and particular desires of the individual

client, and directly engage in giving shape to public life.

Architects here become ‘interpreters’ of the public ‘good’ –

their client being the ‘public’ itself, they act on behalf of the

collective interest.

Can urbanity exist without the production of public space

or vice versa? And, in parallel, can architecture as a

profession give up the role of designing for the public?

Stan Allen: I think to start with we need to be sceptical of this vague notion of ‘public space’. Public space is a concept that is

on the one hand hardly ever defined with any degree of

specificity, and on the other never questioned as to its value.

That’s a dangerous combination. We think of the traditional

city as the locus of public space, but what do we mean? It is

worthwhile to look at the traditional city, historically, and ask

what was the notion of public space, what and where are

these public spaces, squares, markets, etc, and how are they

used? We would find that each one has a very specific and

often very different pattern. If we look specifically at the

American city, as Robert Venturi pointed out, the romantic

notion of the European piazza (as the emblematic public

urban space) is something that never really existed in the

American city. So, with full awareness that I am treading on a

sacred icon (public space is like motherhood or apple pie, it

can’t be criticised), I would start by signalling my scepticismabout the concept as it is usually evoked – especially in the

American context. In my view it’s more important to think

first about publics, in all their specificity and multiplicity, and

then look at their spatial practices.

This notion of spatial practice derives from Michel de

Certeau’s, who also elaborates a distinction between space

and place. Space is an abstract notion that acquires specificity

in relation to specific practices. ‘Place,’ writes de Certeau, ‘is

practiced space.’ So you would almost have to ask the

question: What are the spatial practices that could activate

this abstract notion of public space? We can talk about those

spatial practices that create the potential for public places. Inthe larger sense, another interesting thing about de Certeau’s

views is that he has a faith in the collective creativity of

subjects, in their tendency to invent ways to use the spaces

that are given to them. You could argue that the traditional

notion of public space is a kind of top-down argument

whereby public space is ‘given’ to the public. I would turn that

equation around to say: How does the collective create public

space with the spaces that are given/found?

This means that the role of the architect is to make a space

for that public – to create the conditions where the public can

Discussion

Paola Viganò, Landscapes of Water, Veneto, Italy, 2006 Architekt Daniel Libeskind AG, Westside, Berne, Switzerland, due for completion 2008

Architecture and Dispersal Architecture and DispersalTo close the issue, guest-editors Rafi Segal and Els Verbakel curated a discussion withStan Allen, Margaret Crawford, Marcel Smets and Sarah Whiting, and put some provocative

questions to them: What constitutes public space in the contemporary city? Can the publicsphere still exist in the urban context? Should public space be fought for by architects andurban designers? Or, as Allen proposes, is it the landscape architects alone who have beenquick to realise the potential of the empty spaces in our cities as a ripe terrain for change?


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freely exercise its collective creativity. It’s for this reason that

I’ve always been suspicious of the attempt to overscript the

use of public space. For me, a successful public space is

precisely a space where something unanticipated happens. So

the job of the architect becomes calibrating the right mix

between specificity, imagining and projecting potential uses

into the space, creating the right measure, understanding

flow and access, while always leaving some noise in the

system, a degree of ‘play’, that allows for the unexpected. The

architect’s job is to create spaces with potential. That

potential is in turn activated by the way in which the space is

put to use – put into play – by the public itself. There is an

important paradox that has been articulated by Michel

Foucault, who has pointed out that there are architectures

that constrain freedom and free expression, but there are no

specifically ‘liberating’ architectures. ‘Freedom,’ writes

Foucault, ‘is a practice.’ In this sense it can be given space, but

it cannot, by definition, be dictated from above. I don’t see

this as a problem for architects, but rather quite the reverse –it means that our job is not to script spatial practices, but

rather to create the precise architectural conditions where

those practices have the best chance of survival.

Marcel Smets: The classic answer would be that the church

square no longer works, since people no longer go to church.

Public space has become a ‘telanovela’, an individual yet shared

experience. In each type of urbanity, places that are shared

can be considered public spaces. Whether this is necessarily a

highly concentrated space can be questioned. Even in high

densities we see a tendency for isolation. In a certain way, we

are talking about places where we frequently spend time,spaces that touch and connect people with other people, from

cemeteries to recreation places, sports fields, transport

locations, etc. ‘Public’ space does not disappear but multiply,

it loses its hierarchy and has become more temporary, for

example in the form of events and festivals.

Cities are now concentration points in urban nebulae.

Places of gathering that used to be associated with city centres

are splintering. In Flanders, this has created a new type of city

centre where recreation is the only urban activity left. In

many Flemish towns, even civic services such as post offices

and administrative centres are moving away from the centre

based on a false idea of efficiency. The main square that used

to host political demonstrations is now only a place for

entertainment and tourism. The flocking together of

programmes such as sports, education, etc causes urbanity to

disappear. Collective space gets to be pre-coded if not privatised

Sarah Whiting: Lament-drenched, post-lapsarian narratives

about a lost public sphere that needs to be ‘recovered’ appear

to have wormed their way even into AD. These sentiments

invariably feed futile ‘retrieve and recover’ missions that

share success/failure rates with other contemporary missions

based on myths. The public sphere in the US has, from its

inception, been tied as much, if not more, to business than to

its presumptive origin in government or some variant of

public organisation. As much as we may want to believe in the

altruistic alignments of public space and public agency, now

more than ever the public sphere invariably finds easier

alliances in private partnerships than it does in public policy.Bottom Line Public Spaces (BLPS) dot the entirety of American

urbanism and are very likely the only hope for public space

that we will see in the near future. The American urban

landscape, beginning with Daniel Burnham’s Chicago

Exposition of 1893, the Washington DC MacMillan Plan of

1902 (also designed by Burnham), or beginning even earlier

with the nation’s land surveys and acquisition policies, has

long been directed primarily by monetary concerns. While

colonial cities such as Savannah were organised so as to

create miniature cities within a city, each centred on a public

green, the incentive for cities planned after independence has

arisen from the private sector, illustrating John Locke’sobservation of 1690 that: ‘The great and chief end, therefore,

of men’s uniting into commonwealths, and putting

themselves under government, is the preservation of their

property.’ In short, the space of the American urban landscape

– urban, suburban, dense, or not – utilises the delineation of

property ownership as its base map. This fact simply cannot

be avoided when discussing public space.

The privatisation of public space finds a willing

accomplice in programming – in the definition,

organisation and construction of what happens in that space.

Manuel Vicente, Carlotta Bruni and Rui Leão, Nam Van Square, Macau, China, 2007 Manuel de Solá-Morales, Ville-Port, Saint-Nazaire, France, 1998


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But as the programming of contemporary life accelerates, the

programming of contemporary public space cannot keep pace.

Unlike Burnham’s Grant Park of 1909, a green and sandy strip

between the city and the lake, Chicago’s recent Millennium

Park is fully programmed with music, art, wildflower paths,

skating and eating. It was easier to believe that we had a

public sphere when we felt that we had time for it; now, without that time, we’re seeing how small that sphere may

be. Accompanied by constant headlines such as ‘Is your child

too busy? Make sure to schedule family fun time too,’ we are

fast becoming a culture with no time or space, let alone

public. The Center for Economic Policy Research, based in

Washington DC, points out that the US is the only advanced

economy in the world that does not guarantee its workers

paid vacations, and that 61 per cent of workers in the US take

less than 15 days vacation a year. If we drop the false

narrative of an original, ‘pure’, wholly public sphere and

accept that, at least in the American context, the public

sphere is always very much intertwined with the private oneand is being squeezed out of existence because of a lack of

space and time to perceive it, the ensuing questions need to be

retooled. How do we, as architects, foster new possibilities in

the public sphere, particularly in the dispersed environments

that are the focus of this issue of AD? Lamenting an absent

idealised public sphere is futile. Starting from the status quo

doesn’t mean selling out: given the public sphere that we’ve

inherited – the American BLPS – here is what we need to do:

BOTTOM LINES: Give public space a bottom line. Let it make a

profit.

MASS MARKET : Multiply, multiply, multiply. Like Ladybird

Johnson’s wildflower campaign, the small aggregates to

create the large. And the large is just fine.

STACK THE DECK: If lawns and asphalt are irresponsible,

discover the new horizontal.

MAKE A PITCH : Sell the public to the public. Let them speak,

and give them a space to say it in.

KNOW YOUR MEDIUM : To know your image is to know your

public (even when it looks funny).

LOVE YOUR SKIN : Revel in surfaces. Colours, textures, patterns

… these are the plinths, frames and tones of public space.

The fleeing of the public from the city, as described in this

issue of AD by Bruce Robbins’ reading of Thomas Pynchon on

the one hand, and Albert Pope’s analysis of changes in the

organisation of settlements from grid to cul-de-sac on the

other, raises questions about the relevance of previous forms

and expressions of public space to contemporary culture and

settlement patterns. Alex Wall seems to suggest that in Southeast Asia, the

lifestyle shopping centre has the potential to become a model

of a new type of public space. More and more we see the

emerging of a wide range of collective spaces produced by a

highly advanced private market. Their design and

organisation is based on mechanisms of high profit, limited

access and high security environments.

How can architects develop new models for public space

within dispersed urbanities? Can self-contained spaces with

limited access be considered public?

Margaret Crawford: There are many opportunities for

producing public spaces within existing suburban landscapes.

But, in general, architects know almost nothing about

suburban life. Trying to understand how people live, work and

interact in dispersed areas should be their first priority. They

also need to acknowledge the enormous variety of dispersed

urban conditions. In the US, suburbs can be rich or poor, close

or far from a city, with or without a centre, to name just a few

distinctions. To discuss, say, Montecito, a wealthy suburb of

Santa Barbara, California, and working-class Medford,

Massachusetts, outside of Boston as equivalent examples of

dispersed urbanism does justice to neither. Although the

diversity of suburban lives and circumstances demands

specific strategies, still, there are several obvious types of sites

that cry out for a little more public-ness. One is the ubiquitous

strip mall. Home to virtually every suburban commercial

function, from grocery stores to restaurants to local boutiques,

the strip mall’s current form is a bar of programme

surrounded by a sea of parking. Yet with a little tweaking it

could become a public place. Add a piazza or town green,

include some public functions (library, vehicle registration

department, city offices), a coffee shop or café, close the bar

arquitectura 911sc, New Caracol, Ecatepec, Mexico City, 2007 MUTOPIA, Mikado Plaza, Ørestad Nord, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2005


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with two wings, and rearrange the parking. Voila! a new

public/private place that would satisfy most urbanists. And

without disturbing the mall’s necessary commercial functions.

A beautifully designed strip mall? Why not?

Other suburban sites whose public-ness could easily be

amped up include schools (by adding functions, introducing

after-hours uses or even commercial activities), existing butfaded main streets (where, often, everyday commercial

activities like supermarkets can enliven street life), or even

monofunctional civic centres (whose lives can be extended

beyond working hours with new public and private

programmes such as theatres, sports complexes and parks).

All of these transformations should acknowledge the realities

of dispersed urbanism, such as the primacy of the automobile,

by providing sufficient parking. But at the same time

residents should also be offered alternative means of access by

creating bicycle and pedestrian paths, and even well-designed

bus stops. In dispersed areas, architects will have to give up

their dream of fixed rail transit as a generator of publicspaces. Buses are cheaper, more flexible, and with new forms

of electronic scheduling can nearly reproduce the door-to-door

capacities of private automobiles.

Marcel Smets: To turn this question around, the government

could play a more active role in increasing accessibility to

public spaces. As architect to the Flemish government, I

myself make an effort to raise awareness about making

collective spaces more accessible. On the other hand, the

Roman forum or the Greek agora were also never fully

accessible and we should be careful not to fall for a myth.

The space of infrastructure is usually accessible for all,

although not always equally. After all, the space that does

not belong to anyone is potentially the most public. The

street, the anonymous main street, rather than the

neighbourhood street, can be seen as public, where beggars

and homeless walk side by side with inhabitants and visitors.

Although there are many mechanisms that make claimed

spaces such as supermarkets more multivalent, unclaimed

space seems to offer more possibilities. In Brussels’ 19th-

century belt we can find examples of unclaimed space,

where a more layered collectivity can take place, not only

shared by equally minded users. This is the kind of urbanity

we should strive for, rather than the increasing cocooning of

privatised public space, a pseudo-urbanity that has been

fixed ahead of time. For example, walking in Manhattan it is

surprising how the New York University compound has

become so much more predictable than it used to be. All the

ingredients of a university campus have been provided, themenu of a ‘nice neighbourhood’.

To a certain extent, design is always running behind the

fact, but it can also be a confrontation. Not everybody finds

the current developments that interesting; they can be

comforting yet not challenging, and in parallel there exist

microworlds that are more interesting. As designers we have

the responsibility to make people imagine and realise that

beauty can lie in very small things. The scene in the movie

American Beauty, where the camera follows a plastic bag flying

in the air, is extremely fascinating yet also very depressing.

Our perceptions have become private experiences, while the

public sphere requires the sharing of experience. As designers we can draw attention to small, shared experiences of beauty,

unexpected, multilayered, accessible. We can work with

micro-interventions and lost spaces that function as implants,

teasing and provoking the current state of terrifying banality.

How else to operate than in the margin? Large projects are

today managed by developers who work according to the

stereotypical representations and expectancy patterns of their

users. Nevertheless, architects can challenge these

expectations and strive for a surprise effect. In the current

boredom of banality, this kind of approach is very much needed

In several projects presented in the issue, we can identify

attempts of the urban plan to employ landscape as an active

urban force that can give meaning to otherwise loose,

neglected voids within the larger low-density environment

(for example, in projects such as the Philadelphia Urban

Voids competition, Bonheiden, Belgium, and El Caracol in

Mexico City). Research projects such as the work of Paola

Viganò and Bruno De Meulder suggest that whole geographic

regions and landscapes be read as one continuous space

layered with different systems/networks. Other projects

(such as KMar and Mikado) incorporate the landscape feature

Els Verbakel, Elie Derman and Ward Verbakel, Image Quality Plan, Bonheiden, Belgium, 2005 Claudia Faraone and Andrea Sarti, Waiting Spaces/Intermittent Cities, Veneto, Italy, 2004


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as an integral part of the urban thinking, and experiment

with the non-built as a generative element.

Temporality and transience, traditionally attributed to

nature and ecology, have now become an important aspect of

designing public spaces in dispersed environments. Several

projects propose a non-permanent approach to design,

working with users and inhabitants (for example those by MUTOPIA and Claudia Faraone) or provide options for future

changes (Timescape and the Urban Voids competition).

Can strategies of landscape design offer new approaches

for designing public space in environments of urban

dispersal? Is this an indispensable compromise of the

dispersed city? Can public space only exist temporarily

and then again disappear?

Marcel Smets: Both landscape and infrastructure are in the

process of acquiring new roles within the contemporary

urban condition. The flocking together of similar programmesand activities creates a highly developed system of

connections that can receive a new meaning as public space.

Landscape, on the other hand, becomes very much related to

the question of identity. Much of the built space starts to look

similar, which makes landscape into a place of identity. At the

same time, landscape has become a place of escaping the

predefined. For example, the festival emerged as an attempt

to break out of the theatre into the landscape. A promise of

continuous change can now be found in the landscape.

Landscape offers an ‘unclaimed’ territory, and therefore

possibly a new type of public space.

Margaret Crawford: Landscape architects, used to dealing

with open spaces, are clearly more adept than architects

who are obsessed with filling space, in working with

dispersed urban conditions. Landscape architects can design

parks, parking lots, subdivisions and roadsides, all staples of

the dispersed landscape. In fact, trees, gardens and green

spaces of all kinds are among the suburbs’ primary

attractions. This suggests that we are urgently in need of a

new discourse of ‘landscape suburbanism’.

Time as much as space should be a key component of this

new discourse. As Robert Fishman has argued, life in the new

dispersed city depends on time as much as space. Thus,

adding a temporal dimension to design in the suburbs should

not be viewed as a compromise, but as an amplification of

possibilities. In the suburbs, public experiences, rather than

existing as fixed points in spaces, accumulate over the courseof the day and night, week and weekend, winter and summer.

The challenge for designers is to weave more of these public

moments into the built and unbuilt fabric of dispersed

urbanism. Again, this would require them to acquire a deeper

knowledge of the circuits and cycles that constitute suburban

lives. But I am convinced that paying close attention to the

successive events of suburban life can produce new and

unexpected ways to experience public life.

Stan Allen: Landscape architecture – or what has come to be

called ‘landscape urbanism’ – is an absolutely key term to

bring up when you talk about dispersed cities. The attractionof landscape urbanism is that it offers a new set of tools to

be deployed in the design of the void spaces, the so-called

empty spaces, between buildings, roadways, infrastructure

and what has been traditionally called landscape, but is

today something beyond the mere design of gardens and

parks. These tools – new ways of thinking and working – are

ideally suited to this emerging dispersed field. As a

discipline, in part because of its ‘minor’ status and lack of

history, landscape architecture has the potential to become a

kind of synthetic discipline that incorporates the insights of

ecology, infrastructure and urbanism – landscape

architecture is situated at the point of intersection between

regional ecologies, infrastructure, open space design,

architecture and urbanism.

So landscape urbanism has already emerged as a serious

field of study: it has a 10-year history, a number of

recognised practitioners, a catalogue of projects, and its own

literature (at least two well-conceived collections have

appeared recently, for example). This is a very promising

development, and it opens up a lot of interesting territory. It

doesn’t seem accidental that the rise of landscape urbanism

Vito Acconci, Mur Island, Graz, Austria, 2003 Martha Rosler, Oleanna/Utopia Station, Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2003


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parallels the emergence of the city as a dispersed field

condition in the late 20th century.

Recognising that attraction, I just want to point out three

areas that, for me, constitute both the areas of greatest

promise, but, paradoxically, the potential pitfalls of the

landscape urbanism approach. It is possible to identify three

key terms that have to do with the overlap and intersection between the discourses of landscape and architecture:

Connectivity: It’s no accident that there is a parallel

fascination in architecture and landscape for the

surface. Surface is the territory of landscape, and there

is an idea that the warped surface promises total

connectivity, doing away with architecture’s vertical

dimension, which has become associated with

partitioned space. This is of course attractive but naive.

It becomes easy to fall into a false utopia of total

connectivity, continuous flows, etc. This suggests closer

attention to breaks, discontinuities and separations –and their social/programmatic value – in both landscape

and architecture.

Indeterminate programme or multi-use: Here, too, there

is this attractive idea that on an open field anything can

happen – sports, festivals, demonstrations, concerts,

picnics, etc. To my mind, it is something of an

abdication of responsibility, a kind of loose thinking

where it is possible to say, ‘Don’t worry about

programme, there is no need for the architect to

determine anything, because programme take care of

itself.’ This approach can be seen analogous to the

notion of 1960s universal space – a space, in theory,

where anything can happen, yet where, as was often the

case, nothing happens. The architect’s obligation to

specificity and design remains.

Emergence: In both architecture and landscape there

has been a fascination with self-organisation and

emergence, the notion that the architect supplies a kind

of infrastructure and then you just let things happen

over time. This is based on a loose appeal to ideas of

ecological succession. The idea that self-organisation and

emergence are associated with lack of specificity and

lack of design is itself a misunderstanding. What an

ecologist will tell you, on the contrary, is that

emergence does not happen all by itself, in a vacuum.

It’s triggered by differences and imbalances in the initialconditions. In the urban or landscape realm, where we

are talking about artificial ecologies, you don’t get

emergence without very carefully designed initial

conditions. The architect’s obligation to design those

initial conditions with a high degree of precision and

specificity remains.

So for me, landscape urbanism is an important emerging

field. What is interesting is that each of these areas has both

an enormous potential and some room for error. It’s a young

field where things are still in flux, ideas are still being worked

out. That’s what makes it exciting. It has the potential tochange our notion of urban design by making available a new

set of tools and, above all, by foregrounding the question of

time and the question of process. To my mind these are the

real contributions of landscape urbanism. On the other hand,

it is possible to look somewhat critically on the actual

practices of landscape urbanism: most practitioners have

been doing large-scale urban parks, they haven’t actually

been doing urbanism. In part this is because the

institutional realm – those who commission large-scale

projects – have yet to catch up. Landscape urbanism is

enormously promising, but we haven’t yet seen the full

impact in practice. We are still waiting for projects that show

a real synthesis of landscape and urbanism. 4

Text © 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 102(l) © Paolo Viganò; p 102(r

© Architekt Daniel Libeskind AG; p 103(l) © Rui Leão, Carlotta Bruni and

Manuel Vicente, photo Carlotta Bruni; p 103(r) © Dominique Macel, Service du

Communication de Saint Nazaire; p 104(l) © Jose Castillo Ólea, arquitectura

911sc; p 104(r) © MUTOPIA ApS; p 105(l) © Els Verbakel, Elie Derman of

Derman Verbakel Architecture and Ward Verbakel Architect; p 105(r) © Claudia

Faraone and Andrea Sarti; p 106(tl) © Acconci Studio; p 106(tr) © Martha

Rosler; p 106 (bl&br) © © URBAN VOIDS: grounds for change City Parks

Association of Philadelphia; p 107(l) © Rafi Segal; p 107(r) © Zvi Hecker

Rafi Segal, Archipelago of the Negev Desert, Beer Sheva, Israel, 2007 Zvi Hecker, KMar, Schiphol International Airport, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2007

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