productive space

8/14/2019 Productive Space

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SPACE LABresearch laboratoryfor the contemporary city

Faculty of ArchitectureDelft University of TechnologyBerlageweg 12628 CR [email protected]

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Stephen Read

Everyday life is the integrated by form Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift 1

Hybrid world, mobile society

For a long time people concerned at the planning or design level with cities and not just cities as logistical-functional or formal-architectural (engineered or aesthetic)objects but as more or less meaningful distributions of humans and things on thesurface of an urbanised or urbanising landscape have had to negotiate a sociologywhich gave scant regard to those distributions, or to the inhabited and activephysical spaces of cities, which some of us believe are part of their very substanceand generative principle. Thinking about cities has as a result tended to neglect therole of cities themselves , in their everyday materiality and specificity and in theirsituating power, in the constitution of our social worlds seeing the city instead assomething sitting rather passively on the receiving end of a process of social oreconomic or cultural production. A moment of thought is all it usually takes torecognise that, spatially constituted and situated as the social, the economic and the

cultural necessarily are, it is hard to imagine how dynamically inhabited physicalurban spaces could not be productive of everyday societies, economies and cultures.But we are stuck still, it seems, as far as our ideological predispositions areconcerned, in an uncomfortable situation that on the one hand regards the idea of adeterministic urban space with suspicion, while on the other recognises theinadequacy of a view, in our dynamic, connected contemporary world, whichhonours with too much leverage social structures that are founded on static andcategorical orderings. These orderings into hierarchies and categories (of class forexample), and their reflection or representation in spatially bounded entities(communities, nation states etc.) ignore completely the role dynamic processes ofconnection may have in driving processes of social formation in the city.

We fail to acknowledge any socially constructive effect of the material city itself. Ourconcern is to try to find a way to conceive the city as a product of a dynamic space,and to include an understanding of the social effects of the dynamic workings of thecity itself. The question is: How do we get beyond a spatial as it is conventionallyconceived as a distribution of facilities and events over a surface that is in itselfneutral and already there and approach a spatial that has to do with a modulationof fields, with tendencies to concentration and dispersion and with the orientationsand movements with which these tendencies are coterminous? We, as makers andmanipulators of urban form, must be looking for a spatial which can begin to indicateanswers to the questions of what the city itself (its space and its form) is doing with


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respect to our social, economic, cultural and psychological lives and with howtransformations in one are connected with transformations in the other.

The power of horizontal forces of motion and connection tied to situation arebecoming more readily recognised today as being potentially productive (or for thatmatter destructive 2 ) of the orders of our social, economic and cultural worlds. Themobilities and connectivities of people, information, commodities and finance at aglobal scale, for example, are recognised as constituting an increasingly dominantglobal space, which impacts on and transforms all our local ones in many profoundways. As well; the explosion of mobilities and connectivities at the metropolitan scalehas shifted the centres of gravity of our cities in many profound ways we are stillstruggling to come to terms with, and to reincorporate into our preconceptions andunderstandings of the order and shape of the contemporary city.

We find also, in this increasingly horizontally mobile configuration, the until recentlyunproblematic division of the world into realms of social and natural suddenly notlooking quite so straightforward. We find ourselves in the middle of a world that,

while being quite clearly of our own making, is steadily increasing in dynamism andforce, and galloping away from us adding to the quotient of risk and unpredictabilitypreviously identified with a wild and untamed nature. Where does this leave thedivision between society and nature? a division designed in the first place to allowus to dominate and tame the wild and natural of the world. The problem has notbeen solved by seeing the physical as dominated and shaped by a social whichsomehow assembles itself before doing the same to our spatial and temporal worlds by seeing a structure of the social as something which automatically, orfunctionally and mechanically, reproduces and represents itself in the stuff, and thestructures, we call urban. We have to somewhere, we believe, come to terms withthe fact that many of the processes we encounter in the dizzying flux of our modernworld have effects which are somewhat contingent and accidental more or less

natural products of the material processes which underpin them, and not organicallyor mechanically and transparently products of the social, and directed as if by rightsto our human and social ends. The great artefact of the city therefore, ostensiblysocially-made, built ostensibly to our social ends, is not limited in its effects andproductions to the realisations of those social ends. There is an excess in itsproductive effects that approaches the natural in its properties of wildness andunplanned spontaneity. These products may nevertheless, and often do we believe,become absorbed and appropriated into our social existences in many diverse andunexpected and creative ways.

This shift of thinking raises an interesting possibility which we should also seriouslyconsider: How many of the processes of movement and connection we encounteredin the past in a less forcefully dynamic but still much more distributed and mobilethan we normally give it credit for) pre-modern and early modern world, in a similarway produced an excess of contingent, natural effects; ones we have alreadyabsorbed and appropriated into the patterns of our everyday social existences? Is itat least a theoretical possibility that social and social-functional structures, andforms, realised and potential, of our situated social existences, emerge out of

situation ? This would place a different emphasis on our conception of socialproduction in the first place, and would place the environment, and its built activespaces and connectivities, much more centrally into our considerations of theproduction and the ordering of the social.

The dialectical thinking then of many of the most influential social thinkers of the pasttended to cast the problem of societies as one of thought, and neglected the role of

site and of situated objects and subjects in the production of cities and of thesocialities that emerged out of urban movements, connectivities and location in a


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situating environment. And as John Urry suggests, this does not necessarily implyfalling back on the autopoeitic thinking of Luhmann or of the functionalist morpho-generationalism of Archer; the object of the city may be active and generative without at the same time being a completely integrated order or system the way we tend tothink of these things when we think them through the metaphor of organisms. 3 Mostadvanced thinking about organisms has in any event left behind any assumption ofpurposefulness, but purposefulness remains insistently as part of a strong metaphorof organism, overspecifying processes and products that need to be seen more interms of drift or tendency, and a convergence or cogredience of effects.

The fact that the world, and our cities, are becoming ever more mobile, may haveforced some of this rethinking, but it is at least possible that the world has alwaysbeen constituted this way. The neglect, even negation, of the city as a factor of socialproduction may have to do with the neglect of the matter of the production of oursociality in situation .

The view proposed here is therefore one which emphasises action over reflection, the

natural and dynamic and situated over the structural and assumed priority of thesocial as well as tropisms, cogredience and perception as form 4 over mentalmaps and cognitions and representation. 5 Attention shifts to the active part theenvironment plays in the constitution of the social; the environment encountered inmovements comes to constitute and generate at least a part of the social envelopein which people find themselves and act. To the extent that this envelope is a productof this movement and this encounter, the social world becomes something that issuspended within and supported by these movements rather than being pre-constituted and inserted into an environment in which movements just take place, asif against a neutral background and without regard to its dynamically relationalsituating substrate. The social becomes dependent on exact movement andconnectivity patterns, by its very nature therefore, something radically provisional,

and liable to change as configurations of mobility and connectivity change.

All this becomes much clearer in fact when we remove ourselves, and our intentionsand expectations (and fears), from the exact centre of the stage. When we understandand acknowledge that many or most of the things that happen around us in fact justkind of happen not quite the way they are intended or expected or structured tohappen, but still as part of the world in which we are fully and integrally involved andimmersed, and in which we deal with events as opportunities and as openings asmuch as endings and consequences. It becomes easier to see from this perspective,when we dont overdetermine the world in structures, why the world is alwaysopening out for us, why closure eludes us why the world is in fact much lessdetermined and closed than we or our governors expect it to be. It becomes easierto see why the effects of a material, not entirely tamed, continually transforming cityitself may be a part of this fabric of opening and part of the generation of creativepotentials which affect and infect and transform our unfolding lives.

Putting cities firstFor a long time therefore, we have considered cities and the ways they appear andthe way we interact with them to be a relatively trivial matter; a matter of style, imageand representation. The social was what we understood as being the active forcebehind productive processes, and the brute material of the city, what was acted upon the more or less resistant clay, formed to more or less conform, by an activeprinciple which sculpted it. The city was socially produced, and once produced,was part of the just there laid out not always very tidily on a horizontal surfaceand more or less transparently available as a more or less intelligibly structured

object to our intentionality and agency.


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The question we really want to ask is: What is the productivity of urban space? Whatdoes urban space, of its own account, produce?

Henri Lefebvre says: Each network or sequence of links and thus each space serves exchange and use in specific ways. Each is produced and serves apurpose; and each wears out or is consumed, sometimes productively, sometimesunproductively. 6 This is clearly not the end, nor even for us, really the beginning ofthe story. What about the creative productivity of this thing that is produced? Itdoesnt always wear out it may generate its own and unexpected uses andproducts, regenerate in unplanned ways, it may shift spontaneously from oneproduction or productive mode to another, and it is seldom consumed to nothing.Even in its decline we see it accommodating and becoming productive of probing,opportunistic energies of the marginal energies which even in their marginality,perhaps because of it, identify and find creatively divergent paths to the future. It isprecisely at the point where urban space itself becomes productive where theurban body begins to generate its own constructive (or destructive) effects on thesocial body that we can start to talk about a space that worthy of our attention,

and interesting for us as designers. The physiological processes of this urban bodyare the subject of our research. We act as physicians and diagnosticians on this bodyof our interest, calling it to account for the way it adds to or subtracts from its ownpotential to participate in the growth and creative transformation of the social body as well as, of course, its potential to participate in the growth and creation of theindividual and collective human body and spirit.

In order to understand how this productive capacity of urban space is activated, weneed to see the city firstly as a dynamic space, capable of generation out of its owndynamism. We need to see it in the first instance as a producer of a configurationand circulation of dynamic social material, or better material in potentially socialrelations. We need to see it not in terms of representation or reflection of social or

cultural structure, or as neutral background to individual and collective subject-centred desires, actions and identities, but rather as a gathering and patterning ofconnected material; a forming of lives and livelihoods within a circulation of materialactivated by the force of time which is the engine of becoming. This is a bit like thephysiological body, which is a configuration of materials which if it remained just thatwould be without life. A body is vitalised by dynamic process drawn together bythe force of time which drives it and sustains it in its forms and in its vitalproductivity.

The city, as a material trace on the face of the earth, is in fact made twice: firstly aswe pursue the everyday demands of daily lives, adding to the city as a materialaggregate of work and construction and energy and exchange; and then by theaggregation of produced spaces as they intermesh and turn back on us and producearound us a dynamically integrated world of social, economic and cultural interfaceand form. It is made by us on the one hand as the aggregated productivity ofindividuals and on the other by our productivity as multitudes. As individual humansubjects we enter into and inhabit a space already created by us as dynamicallysituated populations.

If the suburbs of the US and the rest of the developed world are today the pre-eminent place of the individual, relatively poor in the sustaining and integrating fabricof the population, Asian cities and cities of the o-called developing world exist asthose pre-eminently of the population. Stretched to their limits by the dynamism andmomentum of numbers, they produce copiously, social and economic energiesproliferating out of every crack and fissure. The response of the planning

establishment, when it exists, is often one of terror, and reaction against the chaosof the uncontrolled, and against the inhumanity of numbers. In fact it is precisely


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these numbers, in their situated streams which cross and overlap each other in ratherprecise patterns within complex and layered webs of connectivity, that interfaces ofexchange and interchange are formed, supporting and sustaining existing situatedsocial-spatial forms and producing new ones.

The aim of our research is to explore the socially creative potentials of the self-integrating and self-proliferating urban body as well as to acknowledge and identifythe real and sometimes dangerous stresses on this body. In the end we are not surewhat part the city itself is playing in the lives we live, and in the changes weexperience around us. The city itself and urban space may be productive of more ofthese effects and these changes than we customarily acknowledge, and we areparticularly interested in the ways the city may be opening us to, or be constrainingof change. This is a particularly important point given the speed of social and urbantransformations today and the need for city and society to continually adapt to newdemands and opportunities. We go further and try to see if the city itself is capableof being a space which actively promotes or facilitates change. The city itself mayindeed be a generator of change but not in all places, and not under all conditions.

What are the conditions and parameters of an open and creative urban space? Weneed to know also what the relations are between transformations happening in thesocial-technological sphere and those happening in the shape of urban space andthe city. We are in need of ideas about how we can profit from and intervene in thecreative processes of the city without simply strangling them with our sterile andfearful visions of order and control.

But in order to throw light on these questions, we need first to know some of thetechnical details of how socially and economically productive interfaces are formedin the dynamic of urban space about how the basics of social proximity anddistance are established within webs of connectivity. These basics are or shouldbe, we believe the most elementary building tools in an urban design practice

which considers the city as a generator of social formation and transformation, anda means to creative and sustaining openings to the future.

Building blocks of urban creation: grids, interface, centrality What I hope to illustrate here is how design and research, by focussing on thespecific and concrete object of the city can begin to show us where the pivotal pointsof urban formational (and transformational) organisation might lie. I will begin to lookat key concepts like distance and centre and make some steps towards anunderstanding of cities as dynamically relational entities not as relational entitiessimply strung together and expected to hold together by their own devices, butrather as relational entities integrated by a dynamical and stabilising spatial schemaor diagram. These ideas revise some rather taken for granted presuppositions aboutthe city. They privilege the topological over the metric with regard to space, and thedynamically relational and mobile and provisional over the solid, the compositionaland the static.

It is part of the starting hypothesis of our research on urban form and formation, thaturban-social form emerges at interfaces between horizontal infrastructural grids ofconnectivity in the overall connective fabric of the city. The first motivation for thispresumption is empirical evidence of the emergence of patterns of activity andcentrality in the movement grids of the Dutch city. This evidence comes fromresearch on the form of the Dutch city and our elaboration of ideas coming out ofthis research is illustrated here through recent research work done in Spacelab. Wehave, over the last three years, been developing and deepening a vision of how thematerial flux of the city is implicated in establishing central locations and active areas

of public space, and in locating points and areas of social and cultural vitality andcreativity in the urban surface. The extension of the basic hypothesis to the role and


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creative potentials of larger-scaled movement and ICT networks in forming andtransforming socially active space is the subject of current PhD research, but thepresent paper will limit itself to describing the most basic building blocks of a newurban design practice, at the level of neighbourhood and city-scale centralities inurban fabric.

Our research begins to see the city itself as a organising and sorting apparatus; acoordinator, sorter and regulator, in built networks, of multiple space-times, and anorganiser of the interfaces between different speeds of movement, reflecting differentspace-times, within the connective fabric of the city. It begins to see the city as adevice forming, transforming or refracting of social relations by way of its sorting ofspace-times, and of their meeting in rather precisely defined and structuredinterfaces. The medium is movement, not mobility we are not as interested in themore discussed contemporary question of mobility as in the much more fundamentalidea of movement as an underlying principle of urban organisation.

A point about organisation needs to be made before we start, and that is that the

productivity of organisations has been considered before from the point of view oftheories of systems, especially related to the organisation or self-organisation ofnatural and eco-systems. In general our conventional assumptions about organisationare dominated by static organisations and by organisations in equilibrium. In factthere are many systems in nature which exist on the so-called edge of chaos andwhose capacity for creativity is founded on the simple fact that the system as awhole topples regularly out of equilibrium, allowing the whole to reconfigure itselffrom the ground up in a new way. The productivity of the system in fact is foundednot on equilibrium but quite the contrary on disequilibrium or on the serialbreakdown of equilibrium conditions and a rebuilding in ways which may shareorganisational similarities with the original system but may also differ significantly asregards the disposition and make-up of the constituent parts. Von Bertalannfy had

pointed out already in the 1960s a slightly less radical version of this theme of barelyorganised disequilibrium, the so called steady-state system, where a steady stateis maintained, which is not an equilibrium, by the continual through-flow of matter orenergy or information or whatever. The important point is that, in both cases,productive states are dependent not on any sort of mechanical or systematic closure,but on an openness of the system to invasions and disruptions, serial or continuous,from the outside. 8

Equilibrium thinking has also played a huge role in the past in theorising about citiesand continues to dominate popular presumptions about how the city hangs togetherand works. What I will begin to elaborate here is a story of simultaneous stability andinstability where active stable layers in the connective fabric of the city produce inthe interval between layers, conditions which are capable of supporting activityforms which belong simultaneously to both layers, and are in a sense a newactualisation out of a convergence of different potentialities. It is these situations,

suspended in the interval between layers, that appear, from the empirical evidenceto hand, to produce precise actualisations of urban activity and what we call urban-social form.

The emergence of a network gridThe first point I want to address, through the research of Martine Lukkassen is oneabout the natural if one can use the word contours of the city. In order to makethis point I want to point out first two commonly assumed ways of spatialising andcontouring the city, one related to time, the other to space, which I will oppose withanother which could be called a psychogeographical perspective. 9


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A very influential view on the city today reduces it to lived time. In this view, influencedby the rapid increase in speeds and reduction of travel times, the city and itslocations are seen as an availability, to be taken and used in an unproblematic way,by way of time-budgets or space as time. Much urban research on centrality relatedto travel times assumes this view. The experiential and everyday-functional shape ofthe city is seen as something each of us puts together ourselves out of networks oflocations of everyday personal significance. This putting together is something thathappens in relation to a personal diary of appointments and movements. The citybecomes a simple geographic mapping of a temporalised (in clock-time), andotherwise despatialised, personal existence.

Another view is connected these days to the f irst, though its history is older and hasto do with the definition of neighbourhoods and areas by their boundaries. Illdescribe it in the version in which it is connected to the space as time view above:When someone lands at her destination, in the space as clock-time model describedpreviously, on time and with no cognisance given, or needing to be given, to theinterval of space between arrival time and the time of departure from the last place

to appear in her diary, she finds herself in a place perfectly centred on the locationwhere she has landed. This place has certain properties or attributes which attach toit like architectural and historical type or period, dominant programme and use,social or ethnic composition which get then used to define boundaries around thearea where these characteristics apply.

What we get are bounded, named, spatial domains islands in an archipelago ofother islands, with attributes hanging onto each like labels which are linked to eachother in another framework entirely; that of perfectly and smoothly mobile andconnected travellers in time. Connective space becomes a smooth undifferentiatedtime of movement; locational pace, an archipelago of disconnected islands, and theonly remotely interesting thing we can say about contemporary urban space from the

perspective of this model is that it is firstly turning into islands of the local and thenthat where it is not local it is becoming compressed with increasing speeds andconnectivities. Space itself in this view is not productive it is either just there inthe case of the locational and local, or it is overcome by time in the case of theconnective and non-local.

A view of urban space which attempts to deal better than this with its experientialproperties (and as we will see with its everyday functional properties) is that of theSituationists. They proposed, as an analytical technique, the drive , described byGuy Debord as a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Analysts...let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters theyfind there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: froma d rive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constantcurrents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit fromcertain zones. 10

When Martine applied the drive , in the city of Rotterdam for example, she foundindeed that the city appears to have psychogeographical contours that encourage ordiscourage entry into or exit from certain zones.

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1. Frits Palmbooms division of Rotterdam into an archipelago of island places.

If we take a well-known division of Rotterdam into islands in an archipelago as atest case for these urban ideas, 11 as soon as we start applying the drive a quitedifferent division of the city begins to suggest itself. Instead of dividing itself up byisland areas, with clear boundaries, what we find is that the city starts dividing itselfinto quite clear horizontal and distributed network-levels of consistent ambience. The

technique of the rive begins to articulate traceries of consistency unities ofspeed, character and functionality in the city which themselves map as distributedmovement networks. In plan they map as webs or grids defined by particularcharacters or atmospheres attached, I would argue, to particular speeds ofmovement. These grids tend to hold the traveller rather tightly within consistencies,discouraging exit from the grid itself. Entry into or exit from these horizontal gridsinvolves a positive shift, an effort of breaking through a threshold, demarcated by a

speed and a time produced in movement, from one experiential domain to another.

2. Patterns of activity in archipelago place the violation of the boundary.


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3. n extra-oca scae pattern o actv ty proecte t roug otter am centre.

4. e m e-sca e n rastructura gr as an armature o t s extra-oca pattern o actv ty.


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5. Depth (graded from red to blue) from themiddle-scaled infrastructural grid aninstrument used to investigate instances ofvandalism and graffiti (tagging) in the localarea.

What we find in fact is that far from the spatial fabric of Rotterdam being overcomeby time, the island-places of Rotterdam are overcome by the drive , and by theexperiential continuities of horizontal grids of constant ambience as they slicethrough island boundaries as if they were not there. The contours of the city becometurned through exactly 90 degrees. From boundaries of neighbourhood areas, theybecome lines or ridges of psychogeographical continuity which when mapped inplan form a movement network grid. These ridges attest to a continuity and aduration of movement through cities and not to a hyperspace click-on-the-destinationresistance-free transit. The research on Rotterdam revealed a dominant grid of consistency lying over the fabric of the central city precisely tying together into aunity of movement and experience what the archipelago model proposes is untied.

We call this grid of consistency, dynamically produced by the everyday spatialpractice of movement, and unifying the fabric of the central city, the supergrid 12 It isa grid that, in the experience of motion through the fabric, floats out of the moregeneral block grid structure of traditional central cities of a European type. We call italso sometimes the middle-scaled movement network because as one of thehorizontal grids of movement affordance and performance I am talking about, it sitsbetween two other distinct grids of consistency: that of the local neighbourhood gridof backstreets and slow movement on the one hand, and the regional or metropolitangrid of freeways and high-speed movement on the other the one that in theNetherlands facilitates movement for the most part between central cities.

This alternative to the archipelago model starts taking seriously, as Bruno Latour

encourages us to do, the friction of transit. It also starts articulating the actual andconcrete pathways, within a continuous local, between the scales of the neighbourhood


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and the city and the metropole and the global, again as Latour urges us to do. 13 Thedistance, in this continuous local, to the scale of the city, will be the distance to thecorner of the shopping street to where we encounter the movement grid that unifiesthe urban centre. The distance to the metropolitan, will be the distance to the freewayor to the railway station or to those places that the metropolitan has already invadedby way of these grids. The distance to the global will in todays world be rather short,given that the global has already seeped through the global networks into themetropolitan and city networks, and by way of media networks into our very homes.The scales of the neighbourhood, of the city and of the metropolitan are representedand embodied by distributed grids self-consistent horizontal webs of time-space that overlap each other. These scales come via grids of consistency to us theyare not far off areas or nodes that we have to travel all the way to. Areas or locationsbecome infected by all these scales, to different degrees depending on their exactrelationships to the respective grids and webs. There is a certain experiential andfunctional distance of the city then that has nothing to do with metric measurement.It has to do instead with moving up or down in a layering of grids embodyingscales and this is, we will see, a distance we use to make social distance and

places for everyday social lives.

In the first place, in this research on the relation between movement space andexperience in Rotterdam, it was discovered that neighbourhood centrality was linkeddirectly to the horizontally-layered structure just outlined. Neighbourhood centres,with their high-street shops and neighbourhood identity, turned out (and thisremember is within the more traditional central fabric) to be precisely the samespaces which we had noticed before as being part of a higher speed middle-scaledgrid or supergrid which unified our experience of the central city. Now, because weare looking at them in a different way, we notice that they also centre theneighbourhood grid of local streets which surround them. Whats more, the marginalin local neighbourhoods which in this research was measured by instances of

broken windows and graffiti could be located in the number of changes of directionfrom these simultaneously locally centralising and wider-scaled unifying middle-scaled spaces. Most local streets more than two changes of direction from middle-scaled streets turned out in this particular study to be problematically marginal.

A great deal of research done in other neighbourhoods in other types of fabric all overthe world, show that while there is some variety in the detailed neighbourhooddiagrams which work in different cases, the best space in which to inscribe thesediagrams is that of layered communicative grids which firstly form horizontal,experientially coherent grids of consistency, and then relate to each other in avertical step-wise or topological way.


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Social distance and proximity

In the research of Ceren Sezer which focused on two informal settlements in Istanbul,the researcher, building on the results described above, first sought out traceries ofcontinuous ambience in the open spaces of these informal settlements and theninvestigated the way these related to the life patterns of the people who lived there. 14

What became clear was that the everyday life tactics of people in these settlementsinvolved an establishment of both distance in these vertical topological termsfrom, as well as proximity in metric and horizontal terms to, the metropolitan scalewhich is clearly the necessary connection in most cases for establishing a livelihood.

There in fact seems to be a pattern in a lot of our research work in rapidly growingmetropolitan regions, of the simultaneous holding at a distance of the metropolitan

. The Gaziosmanpasa infor-mal settlement in Istanbul.

. e s tngu s ng oifferent characters (andpeeds) of public spacettached to different infra-tructural web layers.


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city (to which these people are often recent migrants) and a closeness in metricterms to this same metropolitan for its opportunities for securing a living. In Istanbulthis was thought through in terms of what Ceren called everyday resistance, whichinvolved both spatial strategies built into settlement form, and living tactics in termsof the ways this form is used for the maintenance of an economic livelihood, at thesame time it is used to support patterns of culture and community that they asimmigrants bring with them.

. pace-t me mapp ngs opeoples movements related tothe layerings the use ofthese layers to establishsocial distance and place.

. e movements o women,tructured by the layerings of

infrastructural grids.


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It is possible to trace the pathways to the metropolitan and to a livelihood conductedin informal trade as well as in formal and informal employment. These informalsettlements may become rich and supportive living environments they may ofcourse also limit possibilities for self-determination and for individual growth. In theexample considered here, many women in traditional marriages seldom leave thegrid levels most isolated by the topological step-wise distance mentioned abovefrom the metropolitan.

Another research, by Chintan Gohil, investigated the ways rural villages, swallowedup by the rapid expansion of the city of Ahmedabad, articulate and situate the livesof their inhabitants. 15 Again, it was found that the idea of topological verticaldistance is useful in understanding the processes by which people locate themselvesin and inhabit the city. The movement patterns of a number of inhabitants of oneparticular urbanised village were traced in order to understand the role of the village

10. The overlap of layers thereation of particularity in thever ap.

11. Two villages absorbed intohe expanding fabric ofhmedabad


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itself and of the differently scaled movement grids of the surrounding city in theirlives. Again, movements to the outside had to do with tactics of livelihood, but in thiscase the distance the village establishes from the metropolitan establishes also an

interior space for the production of goods like water pots which are then distributedand sold outside the village in urban and metropolitan scaled movement grids. Againlivelihoods are spatial in the way they distribute themselves topologically betweenthe metropolitan and the local. Again the village is productive of particular andresistant life patterns but here it also operates as a space of production for theoutside urban and metropolitan market.

It is interesting to note that the situations of differently mobile people in thisframework of layered communicative grids may be different even when theyoccupy the same topographic place. A tourist or university researcher, who maytemporarily drop into the local grids of inhabitation of these parochial places, fromhigher scaled grids of global and metropolitan movement and travel, is differentlysituated to local inhabitants because location seen from this ecological perspectivealways refers local place to the horizons of that persons place in the world. A persons place in the world refers to the mobile and communicative reach of thegrids they customarily occupy or have access to.

12. rac ng t e movements o a vegeta e ven or an s tuatng m n reat on to v age an metropo s


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Productive differenceHaving established some of the locating and social space defining ideas which willbe necessary for outlining an idea of productive urban space, I want to look now atthe engine-room if you like of such productivity. The important notions here are thoseof difference and of interface of the infusion or intrusion of one dynamic populationinto another and its interface with another, and of the creative, productive potentialsthereby generated for growth and change through an upsetting of the status quo ofsimilarity. 16 What makes the research of Gerhard Bruyns so clear as an example ofintrusion and of the creative potentials of difference is the simplicity one could saythe black and white nature of the problem he was tackling. 17 Apartheid South

Africa institutionalised racism spatially, not only through the establishment ofseparate areas for different races, but also, and working just as powerfully as aninstrument of segregation, through the definition of racially specific movementchannels. The breakdown of apartheid has removed the legislative underpinning ofsystematic apartheid but South Africa is still constructed as a space of segregation.Gerhards research proposes a strategy for subverting the logic of this segregationmachine by design by means of a development plan for the centre of Pretoria.

14. Physical armatures of black and white space.

Gerhard takes the existing infrastructural connections of black and white populationsrespectively, from the centre to the metropolitan region, and strategically manipulatestheir outflows into the space of the centre towards a crossing of populationtrajectories. He manipulates the machine to the end of constructing a space ofdifference of productive conflict if you like, as an armature of live centrality inthe public space of his development plan. The development plan includes a massiveregeneration plan giving an important impetus to Pretorias centre at the level of theformal economy. At the same time the movement machine of the centre promotes

the logic of the informal economy, folding these two spaces of the formal and theinformal through each other in a productively conflictual way. Black and white


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space, formal and informal economies, are woven through each other, establishing adynamic steady-state disequilibrium, and giving direction to future small-scaled

development without specifying its exact form or outcome.

Generic difference machinesHaving proposed that the meeting of difference can be a productive force in aproductive space, I need to mention a more generic dynamic urban structure andhow this has generated spatial productivity as a matter of course in historicallyevolved urban layouts. We often think of the meeting of difference in the urbansurface in terms of borders it remains a theme for example in Richard Sennettsrecent work. 18 In urban configurations however we need to think about dynamicorganisation rather than static organisation, and there is a very simple and genericeffect of the layered movement grids urban model I mentioned previously, whichfacilitates the intrusion of one space into another. Grids integrating different regions we saw earlier that the supergrid integrated the region of the urban centre ofRotterdam while the neighbourhood street and block grid integrated the neighbourhoodregion bring those different regions (city and neighbourhood) into direct contact orinterface with each other on the high-street. The effect generates a tension betweenpropiniquity and distantiation out of the simple fact that things situated locally canhave at the same time relations between themselves and relations with other thingsthat are relatively distant.

How it works is that relations of propiniquity demand their own grid of movement andcommunication for those relations to be performed and actualised. Relations ofdistantiation similarly require they seem as a matter of course in real urbanenvironments to acquire their own grid of movement and communication. The twogrids, each coherent and distinctive grids of consistency, become laid over each

other, maintaining their experiential distinctiveness, while at the same time beingentirely open to each other. This is the basic active pattern or diagram of the early

15. Subverting the apartheid machine


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modern European city up to the early part of the 20th century already outlinedhere in Martine Lukassens research work on Rotterdam. The interface of differencethat we are talking about is constructed in the superposition of these two grids, as ameeting between the local and the scale above the local in the space where thesetwo grids overlap. This is a productive order, a social micro-technology maintaininga constant and relatively steady state of creative disequilibrium, and it has beenenough to support the variety and diversity and small-scaled householders andshopkeepers social productivity of the European city for three or more centuries. Wecan speak therefore about an interface between the dynamic populations of the localand the above local, rather than about a border as the most basic common groundof difference and as the machine of productive public space as we understand itfrom the great 18th and 19th century cities of Europe.

The generic interface between the local (neighbourhood) and middle (city centre)scales in the fabric of the European central city produces as a live space theneighbourhood shopping or high street. This can be contrasted to the relativelydead streets at the local or at the middle scales where no overlap and interface

occurs.


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Designing by grids A research and design project by Guillermo Vidal for the renewal of a waterfrontdistrict in Buenos Aires used interface ideas as the principle for design. 19 Therenewal area was analysed first for what processes of metropolitanisation hadbrought in terms of changes of organisation, experience and functionality. He wasparticularly interested in the ways the connective grid brought the higher scales ofthe city differently to different places, and in the ways contingent regularities,irregularities and overlaps in grid patterns affected this.

The design became a careful rethreading of larger scale influences and flows throughthe site with a view to not only restoring the openness of the urban area to

influence from the outside but also to the generation of new activity patterns in linewith changes in mobility and lifestyle and the changing image and function of the

18. Interfacing themetropolitan with the localarea

17. The metropolitanisation ofa waterfront area


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central city. What Guillermo attempted in fact was to establish a pattern of activepotentials in the site, set up at interfaces of the local and larger scales, that couldrespond to changes in mobility and connectivity and accompanying social and urbanformative and transformative potentials. Openness is seen in this case as anopenness to the contingent meeting of difference and an openness to the contingentways to a fundamentally open future.

Another very powerful and ambitious example of the way cities can be designed asinterfaces between layered scales is that of Gonzalo Lacurcia for the redevelopmentof a degenerated area of Caracas into a new financial and business centre. 0 Theshift in development potential in Caracas is today, as it is in countless metropolitanisingcities, towards the freeway and the scale served by freeway and other regionaltransportation grids, and away from the fine-grained grid of the centre. One of thebiggest urban design challenges many cities face today is that of the rescaling of themore traditional centre to the metropolitan scale and the creation of new centres atthe metropolitan scale. The question is one of how to begin to get out of a newconflation of scales the sort of social and economic productivities that the high-street

and the boulevard offered in early modern cities. The crux of the problem lies in theresistance of the freeway to being enfolded, as an urban element, into central urbanfabric. Higher scaled and speeded transportation routes remain stubbornly linear andapart, their speeds establishing an almost insurmountable distance from the rest ofthe fabric as they resists any degree of creative re-appropriation.

19. Repairing the grid alongside the transnational motorway

Gonzalos proposal for a new financial district for Caracas spotted the opportunity torepair a break in the central urban fabric and at the same time to overlay andinterface it with the one spontaneously emerging metropolitan settlement type weknow, the so-called edge city. In this folding of the edge city into the central fabricthe opportunities were created, in much the same way as in Gerhard Bruyns

redesign of Pretoria centre, for the creation of a public space which creativelycrossed formal and informal and rich and poor into a web of mutual exchange.


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20. A new edge city business district for Caracas as a fully integrated extension of the existing centre

A fabric of productivity The productive possibilities of urban spaces lie in their potential to be the sites of acreative interface of difference. They lie in the potentials of overlap betweenpopulations inhabiting differently scaled horizontal grids of consistency and theirpotentials to be intruded into and contaminated. Clearly today there are seriousproblems with the openness of many spaces to this kind of creative productivity, andwe witness this in the many lifeless contemporary spaces we refer to as centre and

neighbourhood or community. We propose the more technical and syntacticalmovement of intrusion in order to find ways of thinking directly and instrumentallyabout a space of inclusion .

We try to deal in an urbanism founded in the first instance in space-time andmovement. We take our eye off place as a given, to find it popping up again out ofthe flux. If we can characterise the research agenda of our group it may be here that we regard the appearance and actualised reality of our cities as effects out ofrelations and movement and regard the urban connective infrastructure seen inthe most general way as fundamentally implicated in these effects. What we beginto generate by focusing on movement by moving through the city as a process ofknowledge of the urban is a practical view of issues of spatial productivity. Otherviews seem to have us skimming over the surface of the city as if it were no morethan the plane of our mental activity. Our instruments and our research begin to pointto the way the space of the city itself imposes its grip, engaging us in a choreographyof place and situated collective existence whose effects are active and sociallyformative, and which we for the most part entirely misattribute to other levels ofagency.

It is an urgent task, we feel, of the urban researcher and designer today to find orinvent and exploit opportunities for an active cogredience of differences for a spaceof co-appropriation and contamination. It is urgent that we invent strategies thatavoid closing futures into the shapes constrained by the limits of our present dayimaginations or current notions of what may or may not be possible. It is urgent alsothat we find ways of avoiding projecting our fears onto our futures and constraining

and limiting future courses of inventiveness and creative assembly and reassemblyof the urban. Our societies have for long subsisted on urban productivities and the


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everyday opportunities for livelihood, exchange and expression cities have offered.This is particularly true today of a vast urban and newly urban population whichexploits generic economic opportunities offered by an urban fabric of creativemargins and centres. It is important we maintain open fabrics if we are not associeties to fall victim to that curiously passive, unresponsive, brittle and unforgivingstuff that urban space would otherwise become.


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1 Ash Amin & Nigel Thrift (2002), Cities: Reimagining the Urban , Polity, London.p. 47

2 Transformative production is always going to appear destructive from certainperspectives. There is a substantial discourse today of loss; the loss ofcommunity, of place, of a certain integrity and wholeness of the world, which

e should be careful not to take too quickly at face value.3 See Chapter 1 of John Urry (2002), Sociology beyond Societies Routledge,

London.4 The phrase comes from Merleau-Pontys idea of a structure of behaviour. See

M. Merleau-Ponty (1983), The Structure of Behaviour , Duquesne UniversityPress, Pittsburgh Penn.

5 See Read (2005) Questions of Form; paper presented at the 5th Space SyntaxSymposium, Delft University of Technology, Delft.

6 Henri Lefebvre (1991), The Production of Space , Blackwell, Oxford. p. 4037 See: Read (2006 forthcoming) Urban Life , Techne Press, Amsterdam; Read

(working paper), The patchwork landscape and the engendineered web; Spaceand scale in the Dutch city. Available on request.

8 Von Bertalannfy (1969), General System Theory , George Braziller, New York9 Martine Lukkassen (2004), Research monograph: Transurban Situations.

Available on request.10 Guy Debord (1958), Theory of the Drive ; published in Internationale

Situationniste #2. Available at http://library.nothingness.org/ 11 Frits Palmboom (1987), Rotterdam, Verstedelijkt Landschap , 010 Publishers,

Rotterdam.12 The word is used in space syntax research and reects the origins of the idea

proposed here in space syntax research I did for my PhD completed at the TUDelft in 1996.

13 Bruno Latour (1993), We Have Never Been Modern , Harvard University Press,Cambridge, Mass.

14 Ceren Sezer (2004), Research monograph: Resistance Spaces. Available onrequest.

15 Chintan Gohil (2004), Research monograph: Urban Villages. Available onrequest.

16 There are two relevant discourses of difference. The rst is on difference and thepublic domain which has become central also in the discussion of public space.Leading exponents are Hannah Ahrendt, through Richard Sennett to people likeIris Marion Young and Chantal Mouffe. The second is in philosophy and ndsidentity not in the categories partitioning similars but in a cogredience of near-chaotic and self-proliferating difference. This is the eld of process andemergence philosophers like Whitehead, Bergson and Deleuze.

17 Gerhard Bruyns (2002), Research monograph: Ubuntu. Available on request18 See for example: Richard Sennett 2004 , The city as an open system. Paper

presented at the Leverhume International Symposium 2004 , London School ofEconomics, London.

19 Guillermo Vidal (2003), Research monograph: Edge in Transition. Available onrequest.

20 Gonzalo Lacurcia (2003), Research monograph: Urban Compressor. Availablen request.

productive space

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