Mobility and Public Spaces

Msc3_ AR3A160 _Lecture Series Research Methods December 2013 Mobility and Public Space A. Susanne Leon_4180747 Mobility and Public Space Space is getting more and more often expressed not through the “place” but through the “lows” (Castells 1996, 1998)1; the place itself is less characterized by the stability and authenticity, and more often - by the movement and lows too. For some scholars it means the end and death of the place, like for Edward Relph (1976)2 who wrote about “placeless”, about place lacking its roots and authenticity, full of people from elsewhere going to elsewhere. Mark Auge wrote in 1995 about “non-places” 3to mark the “unrooted places marked by mobility and travel”, were traditions and authenticity are not relevant. In transportation hubs, where the main aim is to get somewhere else, these non-places are most evident. Likewise, in the Complex Project Studio, our project seeks to create a strategic plan in South Works, Chicago that is able to address many scales at the same time: neighborhood-city-state-country-world understanding how they merge and divide constantly. This involves large amount of (temporal) variables that seek all to be addressed and merged into “one” common (non) place. Therefore, I aim to use the notion of the public nonplaces as a response (catalyst) to the multiplicity of uses, users and moments. Hence, represent the changing repertoire of public rituals. Given the mobile culture we live in, my position states that the representation of diversity in public spheres is most possible within the non-places. Specially in transportation nodes, characterized by movements and lows, public spheres should adopt a dialogue that ofers openness to all actors possibly involved, without mattering their period of permanence. Does it still need to be identiied as a place, a public place? Its physical existence begins to be questioned. In addition to analyzing the thoughts of architects, urbanists and sociologists on our current mobile society’s spatial representation, two exemplary existing architectural projects will be analyzed (Rotterdam Central Station and Schiphol Airport) in order to understand how current connecting “moments” are represented nowadays in the public sphere. This all will guide me through a broader understanding of the possibilities my design project could aim to, leading to a strategy that gives place to new understandings of the public space for the mobile and diverse culture we live in. 1 2 3 Castells, M. “The Rise of the Network Society, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. I” . Cambridge,UK. 1996. Relph, Edward. “Place and Placelessness”. London: Pion. 1976. Auge M. “Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity”. Verso. 1995 Mobility and Public Space “While conventionally igured places demand thoughts which relect assumed boundaries and traditions, non-places demand new mobile ways of thinking… Not only does the world appear to be more mobile but our ways of knowing the world have also become more luid. This “weak thought” or “nomad thought” is more willing to transgress the boundaries of academic disciplines, the boundaries that separate high and popular culture and the boundaries that separate academia from the everyday world outside the ivory tower. These new kinds of thinking are symptomatic of post-modernity (Cresswell, 2003, p.17). Referential Notions of Public Space in the Mobility Era The leading understanding of the public realm is commonly related to the ideals of citizens encountering in order to debate public issues, to create a free and open public discussion and to express public concern. The two most inluential social philosophers who formulated the idea of public sphere were Hannah Arendt 1(1952) and Jurgen Habermas 2 (1984, 1989) , and in their works, such deinition of public space can be found. Another approach towards the public sphere, associates the public to the “sociability” – to the potential of the encounter and communication of the strangers. In contrast, this approach points more towards a cultural than to a political concern. Names such as Richard Sennett, Ervin Gofman or anthropologist Cliford Geertz are mostly associated with such approach. However, even this “easier” or “lighter” way of understanding the public, where public space is perceived as where strangers meet, it is still implicitly assumed that societies gather in this space and stop there for a period of time. There they meet with one another and use the space as a stage to accomplish speciic social interactions. Analysing these famous deinitions, we notice that they all see the public space as that of gathering – not of “moving through”. Hannah Arendt, took into consideration the implications of Agora and Forum which by deinition were spaces of congregation of residents – for meeting and speaking, for spending leisure time, for encounters etc. In the same line, for Habermas the cofee places and tea houses where bourgeois gathered, read newspapers, talked, discussed the common interests where the very typical public spaces. In some way, the sociability approach is the most so to say “open” in this regard, given it considers the possibilities of not as much of gathering as of co-existence in the public space with the potential of interaction – but equally with the potential of the lack of it. Turning towards Richard Sennett, he deines the public realm just “as a place where strangers meet” 3 and he appears to accept and take into consideration anonymity as one basic characteristic of public spaces. He also puts much attention at the boundaries and borders and their “porosity” (2010), meaning – to the movement across the borders - . Nevertheless, when addressing issues of the public sphere, he still positions himself within the “performative” or “dramaturgical” schools. Both – theatre and performance – infer congregation and communication instead of movements done without encounter. Another important position towards the public realm is that which considers the signiicant characteristics of its opposition to the private and individual 4. Critical social philosophers had for several decades, been protecting for the sake of public issues, public space from privatization and control exercised by the private desires. Therefore, taking into consideration the notions of Hannon Zukin expressed in the book “The Cultures of Cities” 5, the three main features those public spaces consider are: - Public (not private) position - Open access - “Used by many people for common purpose” The existing concern about public spaces growingly disappearing from the cities has is grounded on the fact that the idea of congregating and the idea of public-ness – the two key characteristics of the urban public space – are disappearing, transforming, and slowly evolving towards a new, yet undeined type of public space. 1 2 3 4 5 Arendt, H. “The Human Condition”. New York. USA.1958 Habermas, J.. “The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity”. Polity Press. Oxford UK.1995 Sennet, R. “The Fall of Public Man”. W. W. Norton. 1992 Weintraub, J. “Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy”.University Of Chicago Press. 1997 Zukin , S. “The Cultures of Cities”. Wiley, 1995. On the one hand, public is endangered now not only by the privatization, but also by individualism (Bauman 2000, 2001, Elias 1991). The danger is not just that somebody is interested in appropriating public space for private interests, like private business does; but another trend is the lack of interest to public concerns among individuals. “The individual is the worst enemy of the citizen”, - said Alexis de Toquille; so the public issues are not much in demand. And as long as the space is constituted by activities fulilling it and by actors performing them, vanishing of public itself means vanishing of the public space too. On the other hand, sociologists acknowledge that space is more often articulated by its “lows” rather than its “place” 1; the place itself is less characterized by the stability and authenticity, and more often - by the movement and lows. For Edward Relph 2 , and other academics, this means the end and death of the place; He wrote about “placeless”: place lacking its roots and authenticity, about “other-directed places” which were illed with people from somewhere else going to a diferent place. On the same line, Mark Auge wrote about “non-places” pointing out the “unrooted places marked by mobility and travel” 3 , were traditions and genuineness lose relevancy. Parallel to this, other academics have mentioned the “cosmopolitan existence”. Here, the pleasure of traveling resides not only in arriving, but actually in the notion of not being in any particular place4. Zigmunt Bauman 5 characterizes the freedom and ability to move, and not to be held to any particular place as a “key notion of identity, and as the main privilege in the age of globalization”. In the same concern, Doreen Massey 6 talks about the need for understanding a place through the interactions, networks and movements it is able to ofer. Regarding the placements of movements, it is useful to look now at several existing responses given by the architecture of current transportation hubs that embrace the culture of mobility and traveling, whose main function is to house nodes of movements and lows. Hand drawn montage to show the overall monotony of the Castleield area. The image is also meant to show the overall strangeness of the area; as it is so central within Manchester city centre however it feels so disconnected. -Adam Jankowski 1 2 3 4 5 6 ’Ruhrtal’ by Andreas Gursky is a series of large photographs that deals with the motorway as a non-place of supermodernity. Castells, M. “The Rise of the Network Society, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. I” . Cambridge,UK. 1996. Relph, E. “Place and Placelessness”. London: Pion 1976. Auge M. “Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity”. Verso, 1995 Cresswell, T. “Mobilizing Place, Placing Mobility”. Editions Rodopi B.V. New York, USA. 1990 Bauman, Z. “Globalization: The Human Consequences”. Columbia University Press, 1998. Massey, D. “For Space”. SAGE Publications. USA.2005. Case Studies Rotterdam Central Station The almost inished project was designed by Benthem Crouwel architects. It was done on the one hand in order to enlarge the capacity of the station which will now be connected to a larger rail network and receive greater amount of users; on the other hand seeking to be a new landmark that refers to the interconnection and ephemeral duration of permanence. The grandiosity of its external appearance contrasts with the mono-functional behavior of its interior where the users are distributed to the diferent train platforms. Benthem Crouwel guides users to their train platforms along luminous shops and cheap fast food joints. No speciic spatial character emerges during the crossing, a singular type of space serves as commercial path and passenger distributer. Referring to its prolonged reach, the station doesn’t address any speciic quality from the surrounding and could be placed anywhere. It seeks to aim towards an unseen city center and become a city-icon. Users are not asked to stay, on the contrary, a notable lack of program and speciicity or ways of moving through and staying in the spaces, push the users to move constantly, emphasizing the aspects of our cultural situation and almost becoming a non-place. Program and movement on the ground loor of Rotterdam Central Station. Iconic entrance. Retails along the distribution hall. Schiphol Airport An airport is a space created by transfers and movements. Notions of time and place at an airport never refer to the place and time of the airport itself, but refer to the relationship the airport has with the place and time somewhere else, usually another airport. The same counts for the individuals: their formal identity is based on the relationship the individual has with a place, which he doesn’t attend. Schiphol is clearly a place of movement, it’s a complicated kind of space on which an intricate “place-ballet” of multiple movements takes place on a daily basis. It is not simply a part of the life-world of the kinetic elite, but a place of shelter and distribution. Airports appear as spaces of equivalence, places that could be anywhere, non-places. The homeless people and semi-legal taxi drivers of schiphol reveal the complex ways in which people can exercise power against the grain of the acceptable and expected. Schaberg reminds us that though the airport is ‘designed to be passed through, and in rapid fashion’ airports are nonetheless ‘enmeshed with matters of place, region, and slow time’ (Schaberg 1). This duality is, according to Marc Augé’s deinition, typical of the non-place: ‘Place and non-place are rather like opposed polarities: the irst is never completely erased, the second never totally completed; they are like palimpsests on which the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten’ (Schaberg 79). Non-places, such as the Schiphol airport, are prime examples of a physical expression of a global identity, and of a conformity which Rem Koolhaas approaches as the ‘Generic City’: “In the completeness of their facilities, airports are like quarters of the Generic City, sometimes even its very reason for existence, with the added attraction of being hermetic systems from which there is no escape — except to another airport.” 1 Arrivals and Schiphol’s Plaza Departures and Lounges 1 Rem Koolhaas, ‘Generic City’ in S,M,L,XL, 010 Publishers, Rotterdam 1997, p.1250 Schiphol’s distribution of program ofers a large variety of paths that can adapted to the user’s speciicity. The temporary being of community is represented by the constantly transforming spaces (lounges, exhibitions, etc.) that create encounter situations. Multiple programed options: spaces to play, spaces to consume, spaces to rest, spaces to meet, are all easily available for the users and allow for common needs to be diversely combined and approached. Moments lived inside this continuously changing atmosphere become anonymous. They hold value only for each traveler’s situation who is always on the go between two other diferent destinations. Market Lounge inside Schiphol Airport. Relax Lounge within Schiphol Airport. Comparison between the case studies Rotterdam Central Station and Schiphol Airport are both transportation nodes. They’re diference in scale is related to the mean of transportation they serve and their importance within our network of mobility. Their uses hold both the transforming situations of movement. They are places of movement where transformation is constantly active. However each case adopts a speciic response to this situation. Rotterdam Central shows itself clearly as a non-place due to its reduced options of permanence, encouraging the fast movement and constant “expulsion” of the users from the building, for example, the entrance lobby clearly points outwards and is kept empty in order to suggest a fast speed. On the contrary, Schiphol’s Airport ofers a large amount of possible ways of being experienced. The spatial distribution of movement (supported by the program) runs through a complex combination of permanence and transitional spaces. Given that each case addresses a diferent scale, Rotterdam Central Station should have a more direct connection with the city than Schiphol Airport. To be more clear: the station is located in a very strategic point within the city of Rotterdam, while Schiphol, because of the implications of being an airport, stays distant from any identiied context and is an entity by itself. The position taken by Rotterdam Station’s architecture, states that its main aim is to ofer a platform to move on and connect with the city, it does not invite the city as a protagonist within the process of movement happening in it, the building could be anywhere in the world, Rotterdam Station could be seen as the non-place within the place. This anonymity is diferent from that of Schiphol, where the lack of referential identity emphasizes the small-scale, temporary identities that continuously overlap in the space, becoming the place that holds the non-place. Conclusions Re-questioning the Position The question then is: how to correlate these concepts of space and place and the original notion of public space? How much of public-ness and which part of it remains in the public space in this age of mobility? Probably, we should admit that public space or place in the city is not a goal itself, but a mean – of performing public life. So public space only makes sense as a condition to be used by the “public”; and when there is no public or it is diferent (than before) – then we probably need diferent public space(s)? Probably, the gatherings of the numerous citizens for discussing public concerns in the city squares particularly designed for this purpose are out of time. Probably lash mob or one-time performances could be considered more convenient spatial forms of public gatherings in contemporary cities. Just because they potentially can take place in any site of the city, because they are more mobile and lexible – this does not make them less public though. Probably traditionally understood public places are too self-concerned, too static, too introvert. Shall we, following Doreen Massey (1997) think of the place as “events” and “processes”? Shall we, paraphrasing her, think of “progressive sense” of public place? Addressing (South Works) Chicago’s situation The lows of the diferent scales in Chicago should be brought into the site in order to combine the diferent potentials that exist in Chicago and the surroundings of the site, reaching an encountering moment that might as well be permanent or temporal. The mobility in our current global situation, and the evolving typology of spaces that hold mobility and encounters, are deining and representing the way we communicate between ourselves. With the notion of the changing public spaces, due to the changing ritual of public spheres, the updated spaces of encounter are not only an essential node in our daily life, but become focus centers of attention for further architectural research. Could then Chicagoans meet in constantly transforming spaces? Could the space emerge in speciic situations and locations only to meet the user’s speciic need and then vanish away? Or should these spaces deattach from their surrounding’s references and create a new reality, a parallel moment that inally merges the diversity of the mobile community (such as in the case of Schiphol)? If so, how could this non-space physically exist? Our site could ofer a moment of layered-encounters that suit the anonymity of the public-ness, therefore, be as plural and diverse as nature already is. A non-place where the notion of being only relates to very speciic references that are only momentarily useful for speciic rituals performed by speciic individual needs. Non-place that loses relation to the surroundings but holds tight relation with the current social situation of Chicago. Non-place as the architecture of momentary un-referential state of movement. A node of distribution. For the users, the aim is what comes after the moment, but for the non-place, the nonmoment is the aim. South Works could function as the non-moment of Chicago; this would ofer the chance to involve actors from all scales (global, national, local) and interconnect them between each other within the non-place which will (somehow) be determinedly essential to their life routines. Anonymous but interconnected. Bibliography - Auge M. “Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity”. Verso, 1995. - Massey, D. “For Space”. SAGE Publications. USA.2005. - Weintraub, J. “Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy”.University Of Chicago Press. 1997 - Zukin , S. “The Cultures of Cities”. Wiley, 1995. - Arendt, H. “The Human Condition”. New York. USA.1958. - Habermas, J.. “The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity”. Polity Press. Oxford UK.1995. - Sennet, R. “The Fall of Public Man”. W. W. Norton. 1992. - Castells, M. “The Rise of the Network Society, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. I” . Cambridge,UK. 1996. - Relph, E. “Place and Placelessness”. London: Pion 1976. - Cresswell, T. “Mobilizing Place, Placing Mobility”. Editions Rodopi B.V. New York, USA. 1990. - Bauman, Z. “Globalization: The Human Consequences”. Columbia University Press, 1998.