Sprawling Places

Notes

Notes CHAPTER ONE. PLACES TODAY 1. “It is ironic, at the end of a century characterized by the most dizzying urban transformation in human history, that academic readings . . . and projects of the city . . . remain haunted by the irrelevant ghost of the historically outdated European city center. . . . The hegemony of the pedestrian, the plaza, the street, and the perimeter block must be challenged not because the values they embody are no longer valid, but because they are suffused with a set of fundamental misconceptions about the nature of contemporary civilization” (Lerup 2000, 180n7). Lerup’s critique of this “positivity” moves in a different direction than my discussion, but we agree that the older archetypes mislead about the nature of today’s places. 2. I wrote much of this book while associating with architects and planners, and it takes up issues from architectural and urban theory as well as from philosophical studies of place. I have written elsewhere about architecture—see the articles listed in the bibliography and my earlier book Postmodern Sophistications (Kolb 1990)—but this current book concerns places and not buildings. Even if designing a building is very much about articulating a place, the two are not identical. The unity of a building is not the unity of a place, and the function of a building is not the same as the social norms and expectations for a place. Also, this study concerns the place-nature of places rather than their aesthetic qualities. The two are not fully separable, but too much discussion of places today focuses on the ugliness or the bland boredom of many new places, without looking into their new kinds of connection and social norms. 3. At the time of writing, it appears that Measure 37, which mandates restitution for property value lost through regulation, could have profound effects on the Oregon system of land planning and regulation, and the state is struggling to decide whether or not to limit those effects. 4. Bureaucracy prefers concentric and hierarchical identities and places because these avoid jurisdictional disputes and keep things neatly accessible. It would be a mistake, however, to assert with some postmodern optimists that nonconcentric or nonhierarchical identities and places automatically offer resistance to those exercising control. A database does not need hierarchy. People and places can have many keywords associated with their designations; to keep tabs on them it is not necessary that they be located in one unique file notes to chapter one 194 drawer. As long as a keyword is findable, that portion of my or a place’s identity becomes available to the controller or the advertiser. Indeed, if my identity fragments into a list of keywords without central unity, I may be all the more open to manipulation. 5. In the Sprawling Places Web site I suggest that this travel-telecom assemblage may itself form a new kind of spatially discontinuous but socially unified place. 6. The weakening of hierarchy and center does not mean that all places are now on the same level or equally available. The new spatiality resembles the way Web sites relate to one another. Their links do not produce a flat collection of evenly empowered nodes. Instead of measuring centrality by degree of elevation in a hierarchy, the Web develops traffic patterns. The most frequently visited sites become centers, and as their rankings are published (by ranking agencies that are themselves ranked) the rich get richer as more links are made to them. Similarly, today’s nonhierarchical spatiality does not mean that all places get leveled out into a bland availability. In the nonhierarchical, nonconcentric world, linkage differentiates and distances as well as connects. There is a danger in the resultant celebrity since substantively significant sites may be ignored in the process, but that is not much different from the way significant texts have been ignored by publishers, or significant places by transport systems. No topology of connection will by itself avoid the need for discernment and judgment. 7. In 1960, Kevin Lynch had said that “the hierarchical system, while congenial to some of our habits of abstract thinking, would seem to be a denial of the freedom and complexity of linkages in a metropolis” (Lynch 1960, 113). 8. In the Thinkbelt “there were to be three major ‘transfer points,’ where various types of mobile, prefabricated housing and classroom units could be transferred to and from the rail lines as needed. Some of these units included selfpropelled seminar coaches, with scheduled service of class length...