Revisiting public-private gradients in neighborhoods: Towards a "Space of action"

Spatial ‘gradients’ have been discussed before in space syntax. These gradients have been proposed to be significant for the actions, experience and modes of inhabitation of people. Robinson has developed a ‘territorial gradient’ of increasing privacy from the neighbourhood and street to the most intimate spaces of the private house. Read has proposed a measure of the ‘integration gradient’ from the grid of neighbourhood streets to the grid of streets that connects urban neighbourhoods through the fabric of the city. Both these concepts set up a space that notionally orients people towards (or away from) zones or spaces of increasing publicness. The concept of ‘orientation’ offers a way into thinking of these spaces in terms of an established theory of action. This paper will explore and develop these ideas in relation to neighbourhood space and the forms and ‘forms of life’ of neighbourhoods. It will prepare the ground for a comparison 10 neighbourhoods in Amsterdam for the ways gradients are set up in space and for the way people act in and use the public space of these neighbourhoods in relation to these gradients. The work is intended to clarify the terms of a ‘space of action’ of neighbourhoods (as opposed to ‘economic space’ or ‘social space’ understood as reflections of economic or social ‘structure’) and to allow us to begin to comment on the forms of neighbourhoods in terms of the ways they enable or empower people in everyday ways. A further aim will be to propose a way of looking at ‘place-value’ and its variation across city fabrics and how this may have been constructed in order to begin to understand the reasons certain areas persistently maintain value while others equally persistently don’t.UrbanismArchitecture and The Built Environmen

Technicity and Publicness: Steps towards an Urban Space

UrbanismArchitectur

Cities as Infrastructures of Diversification and Homogenisation: Constructing Multiformal Spaces in Paris and Shenzhen

Spatial Planning and Strateg

Framing questions of sustainability

Sustainability sits at the top of the policy agendas of the EU and other governmental bodies. But sustainability is complex and not one thing, it relates to different sectors and multiple systems, and also to different zones, scales, ‘levels’ those systems occupy. Theoretically and practically we are involved with different questions depending on where the question is bounded and at what scope we want to look at or deal with it. Situation, in a relational sense, matters. Without understanding this contextual, relational and framing factor we can end with inadequate or misleading answers to important questions. Questions need to be framed and framing involves complex topologies of spatial insides and outsides and functional parts and wholes. This relational and framing aspect of sustainability has been radically underconsidered and this paper will propose a method to address this deficit. The approach is ‘materialist’ but also ‘constructivist’, not in the sense of ‘social construction’. Instead it is proposed we live in a reality historically and technically constructed and that the ‘social’, the ‘economic’, the ‘cultural’ and even the ‘environmental’ are what we thus construct. This converges with a so-called ‘technoscience’ perspective, one that has been addressed through ‘actor-network theory’. But there are issues with actor-network theory that the method proposed addresses.UrbanismArchitecture and The Built Environmen

Function of urban pattern: Pattern of urban function

Architectur

History, structure and technique: A reply to Batty and another challenge to space syntax

UrbanismArchitectur

Another Form: From the ‘Informational’ to the ‘Infrastructural’ City

UrbanismArchitectur

Forms and relations in shifting territories

UrbanismArchitectur

Technology and the body public

Arakawa and Gins are concerned with the bio-tech creatures we have become – or perhaps the ones we have always been. They see us as creatures-witharchitecture, architecture being for them, and along with language, one of the most basic forms of technique. Their ‘architectural body’ is constitutive of its own existence in an ‘architectural surround’ which is itself part of that constitution. The body here is not enclosed within its own outline but is extended in time and space into its surround; it acts and makes itself – it ‘persons’ in their terms – in an active relation to the surround. Perception and action involve more than a subjective interiority, or simply a biological body, they involve the whole biotech ‘architectural body.’ Arakawa and Gins contribute to a view that human life is distributed, in the world and self-forming in constitutive and heterogeneous relations which mingle the biological and the technological. There is in this view – and pace Heidegger and Ellul – no essential conflict between technology and the human; here, technique becomes a human and anthropological issue.UrbanismArchitectur

Intensive urbanisation: Levels, networks and central places

Urbanisation is one of the defining issues of our time, shaping a fast-changing world, with our urban economies and societies and urban places produced in the process itself, along with their sustainability and enabling potentials. However the ways we conceive urbanisation leaves a lot of this process extremely unclear. Urbanisation is more than the transition of people from rural to urban modes of production and ways of life. It is an historical process in which the urban world emerges as a tightly structured path-dependant but also non-linear process. The product of this process is a humanly constructed space, or layering of human spaces, that challenges the way we think not just of the city but also of our social grounding in it. Space syntax has gone part of the way to opening a path to our understanding of this process and space through its representations of urban fabrics and their centralities at a fine grain. However, other discourses on the city and urbanisation have considered much larger scales. Here, critical interpretations of Peter Taylor’s ‘world-city network’, sociotechnical systems and space syntax are brought together in order to propose an interpretation of the different spaces, scales and layers of urbanisation, and a model of urbanisation and central place formation that crosses these scale differences. This model can, it is suggested, help us construct strategies for more layered, sustainable and socially enabling urbanisation and central place development in the future.UrbanismArchitectur