Sprawling Places

Afterword

Afterword The particularity of any place is . . . constructed not by placing boundaries around it and defining its identity through counterposition to the other which lies beyond, but precisely (in part) through the specificity of the mix of links and interconnections to that “beyond.” Places viewed in this way are open and porous. (Massey 1994, 5) UNHAPPY WITH TODAY’S PLACES, Christian Norberg-Schulz denied that they could be real places where we could settle and dwell: “The essence of settlement consists of gathering, and gathering means that different meanings are brought together. . . . the modern world is ‘open’; a statement which in a certain sense is anti-urban. Openness cannot be gathered . Openness means departure, gathering means return” (NorbergSchulz 1984, 195). I have argued that contemporary places do just what Norberg-Schulz denied: they gather open relations of nets and links into new modes of noncentered, nonhierarchical unity. The busy, flowing city is one symbol of our times, and city air brings freedom from the intimate oppressions of small-town life. Then both the city and the small town look disparagingly at the suburbs, and all three worry about other still more dispersed and networked places—and everyone worries about theme parks. Many critics reject today’s places with a disdain that barely hides the critic’s despair. In contrast, my approach may seem like pallid reformism. Yet many of the supposedly negative qualities of today’s places do offer possibilities for new kinds of unity and complexity. (As software developers sometimes say about an unexpected behavior, “it’s not a ‘bug,’ it’s a ‘feature.’”) Today’s places wield in new ways the conditions that make all places possible. There is no magic wand that will remove all their problems, but we can use some of the features of today’s places (such as multiplicity and linkage) against others (such as simplification and commodification). afterword 191 Discussing the differences between city form in Europe and in the Arab medinas, N. John Habraken points out that European formmaking usually defines a public space within whose geometrical divisions individuals may do what they will. “Public space is predetermined. Within it, we make our spatial claim, such that we may leave one another alone.” In the other pattern, form-making tends to start with negotiations among individuals whose mutual agreement about the relations of their private spaces leads to a redefinition of the public space. This is “a social contract without predetermined form. As long as consensus is obtained, most moves are possible.” Streets get arched over or closed off, plazas encroached upon. The European model is “a form allowing play” while the Arab model is “a play that produces form” (Habraken 1998, 288–89). We need to become more involved in our own play that produces form, and understand the ways in which that process is and is not free. A more complex suburbia will not please as a balanced whole. Its unity will be more linked and episodic, reread and remade without ever coming together hierarchically. As a shared story, its narrative form will not be a heroic epic, nor a well-focused nineteenth-century novel, nor a selfcontained modernist work. It will be a joining of episodes where each has more than one focus as it moves and links in many directions at once.1 I have been arguing from a general ontological view that there is no final duality of structure and process. We should not take form for granted or as fixed, whether architectural form, city form, or place norms and social roles. Themed places provide an extreme example, with their double awareness of our immersion in the fantasy and of our complicity in its staging. But all places involve some doubled inhabitation. Our being spread out in time and space demands a level of reflective synthesis and space-time linkage, or we would not experience our places and selves in any kind of unity at all. The complexity of links and spacings in the time and space of places offers opportunities for more openness and awareness , including awareness of the aspects that are overlooked or made invisible. Today’s places are not solid structures threatened by corrosive processes . Social and architectural structures and norms exist within processes of social maintenance and reformation, and their inhabitants would be freer with a greater awareness of those processes and the linkages they work through. afterword 192 Those activities...