The Paradox of Place
Postmodern transformations to the sense of place
Karl Kullmann, 1996, Proceedings of the Australasian Design Workshop (Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology) 1: 34–41
Introduction: creative destruction
The paradox of place refers to a fundamental condition of modernity. Notions of place emerged in reaction to the trajectory of modernity and its associated conscious and ecological casualties. The predicament is epitomized by the prototypical modern developer Faust, who in order to make way for future creation must accept the destruction of everything that has been—and will be—created.[1] Ultimately, despite development’s transformation of wastelands into thriving places, the process of creative destruction reconstructs the wasteland within the developer.[2] The tension between creation and destruction, progression and regression, and between global modernity and regional culture is captured by Paul Ricoeur: “there is the paradox: how to become modern and return to the sources; how to revive an old dormant civilization and take part in universal civilization.”[3] The sense of place is both a manifestation of this paradox and an attempt to resist or realign it. Through its erosion, place is a product of modernity, and yet cannot be understood by the tools of modernity.
The popularization of resistance to the manifestations of modernity is a defining threshold between modernism and postmodernism. Since the 1960s, theories of place share the ambition to reverse the modern action of continuously becoming through the annihilation of space by time. Jane Jacob’s people cities, Kevin Lynch’s quality planning, Ian McHarg’s suitability planning, Christian Norberg-Schulz’s creative participation and Kenneth Frampton’s regional resistances all privilege being through the spatialization of time. Each rubric is a reaction to the ever-advancing process of time-space compression, which appeared increasingly apocalyptic and leading ever closer to the nihilistic endpoint of rationalism that Friedrich Nietzsche predicted. The place theories that emphasized community, locality and respect for otherness, are attempts to create at least one knowable world within the infinity of possible worlds that become increasingly visible through communications and transport technology. Nonetheless, through the course of postmodernism, forces of capital convert these attempts into types that surely were never envisaged.
Postmodern contradictions
Two fundamental contradictions are inherent in postmodernism. First, postmodernism is an oppositional aesthetic movement to combat market culture and yet is commercially applied. Second, postmodernism attempts to respect local culture and yet is reproduced all over the world. In theory, postmodern culture reconciles market and place, and landscape and the vernacular. However, the more visible it becomes, the more postmodernism approaches a market orientated, decontextualized, franchise culture. Located in the space between the postmodernism of resistance and postmodernism of reaction is the ambiguity of market and place as the foci of creative destruction.[4] The protective thresholds that once tightly defined urban subcultures are broken down and absorbed into market culture. Spaces of production regress into historical vernacular and the urban landscape becomes contingent on the consumption of images.
Indeed, despite the very notion of design as an invigorated methodical application of human reason to a given problem, it is no match for the economic process of natural self-regulation, the urban process of natural growth, or the vernacular process of natural development. In combination, non-designed vernacular subsistence forms, and non-designed economic forms, constitute the vast majority of the world’s constructed ‘places’. Moreover, the economic process and associated enlightened concepts of private property and space as commodity support the tendency to construct and conceive individual projects and buildings in isolation. Property speculation enforces massive disparity between the attention expended on individual structures and the attention paid to the spaces in between. Discarding the nature and experiences of these spaces to chance undermines the wholeness of place and establishes the outside as the locus of the paradox of place.
Flexible accumulation
Economic transformation from industrial to informational society significantly impacts the organization and appearance of the globally denatured landscape. In addition to creating ghettoization through polarity, increasingly mobile capital enforces increasingly mobile urban structures. Unlike the modern city, where surplus is grounded through tangible medium/long-term building programs, the late capitalist city is determined by its capability to assimilate a rotation of surpluses. Due to the saturation and increasing volatility of the infrastructure market, few opportunities exist to safely deposit surplus capital within the timely and spatially solid confines of concrete and steel. The result is flexible accumulation, whereby over accumulation is solved through devices of spatial and temporal displacement. Flexible accumulation is advantageous in its ability to pack in more capital with more efficient responses to micro changes in conditions.
With this capital arrangement, the contemporary city exists as a complex and non-organic structure without hierarchy and linear organization. As a vector of mobility, transport infrastructure becomes the fundamental structural force, creating milieus that are no longer based on the traditional city/territory or nature/culture opposition, but on denatured non-contests. Hybrid architectural programs appear to enunciate between unstable economic flows and their manifestation as urban topographies, without the arbitration of a unitary urban structure. The binary oppositions of center/periphery, full/void, interior/exterior, free time/work time that characterize the enlightened city—and began to be assaulted within the modern city—are broken down in the late-capitalist city. Delineations of public and private realms are overturned once more.
Production of space
Revolutions in accumulation, communication, information and the technology of work combine to instigate fundamental transformations in the production of space. Clearly, new gadgets require the construction of new rooms and the destruction of old. Nevertheless, matching architectural objects (virtual or real) to the flux of continuously mutating programming, is a distant second to the turnover that has become entrenched within foundations of civilized human life. In the late capitalist city, the ongoing battle for control of the street has been exhausted. Any notion of the street as a political space is dismembered with its demotion into a transport duct for delivery trucks, electricity, sewage, and optical fiber. The street is displaced in four dimensions as it moves underground, overhead and inside, and through the timelessness of its instantaneous optical cargo, does not exist in the here-and-now.
The changes to urban politics and form suggested by Jacobs in the early 1960s as a response to the inhumane nature of the modern city are embraced and celebrated in the postmodern city. The message of Jacobsian urbanism is commandeered by capitalism and re-appropriated into gentrification.[5] The picturesque ethnic shops, street vendors and improvised landscape installations that Jacobs proposed are superficially replicated and mimicked in every gentrified market, residential street and historical precinct in every postmodern city in the world. The design disciplines are complicit in the construction of urbane disguises for economic gain as every possible attempt is made to assert connections with the urban life that it simultaneously eliminates. But as Jacobs herself reflects, the concept of converting urban life into an ongoing festival failed, because “when the fair became part of the city, it didn’t work like a city.”[6]
Local-global
Inherent to the changing perceptions of place since the enlightenment is knowledge and accessibility of the other. Changing transport and communications technology opened up previously closed horizons of space and morality. By the 20th century, romantic ideals of authenticity required that other not be severed from its place but remain part of it, and from here the travel industry burgeoned. The postmodern condition witnesses an almost frenzied pattern of mobility through tourism, to which the picturesque Grand Tour fades by comparison. A global exchange of tourists, however, is a central component of the paradox of place. That which the tourist seeks out, intrinsically becomes less authentic each time it is found, because (as mirrored in the theories of quantum physics) the observer affects the observed. Often the result is homogenization and substitution of the local landscape that initiated the tourism with the synthetic pseudo-landscapes of conventional tourist infrastructure.[7] Tourist landscapes are characterized by other-directed architecture that is purposely directed towards outsiders, passers-by, spectators, and most importantly, consumers.
Local-global is simultaneously a postmodern tool and dilemma that addresses the paradox of place. As a tool, the phrase was first developed in the 1960s as a plan for action to combat modernity’s ecological and social erosion. As indicative of the dilemma, a local-global sense of place is the stretched space of identity from its most irreducible form in the human body, to its most expansive form in the collective global population. Moreover, this sense of place is also the stretched time of identity between the mortality of the individual, and the immortality of the continuing collective memory. Attempting to traverse this divide, we exist between the world that is immediately at hand and a wider awareness of the extended world that places us within a network of billions of people.[8] For the environmental designer attempting to establish a sense of place, this portends to finding a balance between the details and the larger system. The contradiction arrives when the apparitions of the local are amplified until the local itself evolves into a new kind of global imperative.[9]
Communications technologies
Within postmodernism, television was the first technology to significantly alter social habits, and as a result, the requirements of place making. By revealing previously obscured backstage areas, television served as an instrument of demystification, and to a large extent was responsible for the breaking down of the barriers between public and private places. Furthermore, the eclectic nature of this medium fuelled growing apathy and desensitization to events, which in turn diminished eccentricity and pacified the populous.[10] The street became available to the developers and their projects of enclosure simply because it was discarded as a political place.
The late capitalist city is increasingly freed from its attachment to physical place by communications technology, which in turn makes it available to the ageographical requirements of circulating capital and its associated self-similar, hybridized, architectural programs. In the 19th century the photograph and the railroad removed the contiguity and depth of a foreground view of places despite making remote places more accessible. In the late 20th century, synchronous substitutions by electronic media link even the smallest places, but inherently destroy the social distance that made experiencing them so unique.[11] The paradox of place remains, because although global culture electronically connects all places and cultures in a continuous fusion of time and space, the counter movement coexists in the uprising of local cultures and expressions of place. The tension between expansion and contraction becomes translated into a virtual/real opposition.
Fictitious communities
Given all of the attempts to reclaim lost meaning through a sense of community and a 'sense of place', the situation as it stands today may not even require it. That is, to the majority of the first world population, there may be no problem, and certainly no desire to agglomerate into communities of any sort. Much of the populous of the developed world are only too happy to isolate themselves and have no interest in integrating with others outside an immediate circle of friends.[12] Many are entirely content to withdraw to their suburban island and to distance themselves from the responsibilities of family and community. The institutionalization of caring for the aged (nursing homes), and contributing to the wider community (charity organizations) are examples of the commodification of originally integral cultural responsibilities.
Moreover, increasingly vast numbers of people voluntarily go missing and lead contended, anonymous lives ‘lost’ within the urban milieu. As Ian Nairn observes, “people put down roots in a terribly short time,” himself claiming to “take about forty-eight hours.”[13] In this regard the notion of place-bound ‘community’ is a Romantic myth. The physical environment is a response to the situation, not a cause. The cause is the community that wishes to not be a community, and the overriding system of economics. No matter how exclusionary, attempts to reconstruct places in terms of imagined communities appear to be always porous to the universalizing power of capital.
Reactionary attempts to construct new logics from the romantic and the modern result in the aestheticization of politics and place. The 18th century separation of moral judgment from scientific knowledge exposed a void suitable for aesthetic responses. Within the time that elapsed since, this space increased to the point of dominating the agenda of postmodernism. Within modernism, the sense of place progressed beyond the unauthentic picturesque, to its popularization as authentic romanticism. Within its celebrated framework of postmodernism, however, place is mutated from its authentic origins, back into an unauthentic neo-picturesque. The ironic situation is such that much of the resistance—conceived to rage against the steamrolling power of capitalism and modernity—has been consumed and re-appropriated to fuel capitalism and the ever-evolving mutations of modernity. Because—as David Harvey pithily observes—the ultimate victory of the modern is not the elimination of all that is non-modern, but its artificial preservation and reconstruction.[14]
Designer-dweller
Whatever the role of design comes to be, and whatever place comes to mean, any project to construct a framework for dwelling must incorporate two key factors. First, is the input of the people who are affected through a relaxation of the power-complex. A viable style of life for local areas must discard Newtonian conceptions of community and region and allow people to contribute to the whole.[15] Personal involvement becomes the primary focus of a future agenda of local control that ensures public value is not incompatible with public interest.[16] In the same way, Norberg-Schulz channels user influence in design through creative participation. Involvement may range from intense locality specific programs deciphering the most desired form and function of places, through to acting on simple global requests such as Kevin Lynch’s report that children the world over—regardless of location or background—share a universal hunger for trees.
Whereas the outsider reads place through maps and models, the dweller has a more encompassing, time deepened, experience of a place and may give a more authentic, although restricted reading. Indeed, a full experience of the world requires both participation and description, fusing the creator and the critic, the designer and the dweller.[17] From this, however, emerges the dilemma of compromising design, and indeed of compromising the very foundations of the architecture and planning academy. Traditional notions of democracy and design appear mutually exclusive. Beyond a client’s brief and occasional comment, the designer is free to formulate personal strategies framed within the context of cultural rules.[18] The creative will of the designer is of egocentric origin and as such requires, with reason, a certain amount of autonomy. Furthermore, it is rare for the involved populace to have reconcilable requirements, or indeed, to even know what they want before it exists. The designer's role becomes more that of a social interpreter or diplomat.
Second, including time within environmental design is also critical. The notion of change goes far beyond a landscape design in which the vegetation grows and hence reaches the ‘preferred’ state of the artist's perspective five years after construction. Designing with time involves an acknowledgment of the ongoing memory and flux of collective life, the additive process of evolution, and the inevitability of entropic decay. In addition to allowing for the processes of change, designing with time also takes into account the process of stability, an essential component in so many theories of place. Individuals in situ are a requirement for the perpetuation of the soul of a place.[19] Joseph Grange proposes that social place contain “a protective routine shielding humans from the devastating intrusion of novelty [and] an openness that allows, encourages, freedom and its outcomes.”[20] That is, change and complexity within discernible and finite boundaries. The contradictions continue, however, because this system portends to a community ‘time bubble’ surrounded by a propaganda filter; freedom and shields are juxtaposed, because the threshold is a two-way process.
Conclusion: critical sensitivity
The reason for excavating the contradictions of even the most fundamental design criteria is to illustrate that there are no rigid rules or universal unified theories that apply consistent outcomes in all situations. The point of departure for the designer is to treat each site on its merits; the continuum of scale can be satisfied through the in situ character of the locale and the inherent global awareness of the designer. By developing a critical sensitivity, and by exercising responsibility to balance the conditions of a particular place, the designer may be able to regularly create a sense of place under anyone's definition of the term. From this launching pad, an assault on the age-old power complex and language of the zone and its associated functions and scales may be perpetuated. Environmental design can reassert and redeem itself and go some of the way towards reclaiming the role of place making.
Notes
[1] Berman, Marshall (1983) All That is Solid Melts into Air: the Experience of Modernity.
New York: Verso.
[2] Harvey, David (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity: an Enquiry into the Origins
of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
[3] Ricour, Paul (1961) History and Truth. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, p. 277.
[4] Zukin, Sharon (1991) Landscapes of Power: from Detroit to Disney World. Los Angeles:
University of California Press.
[5] Boddy, Trevor (1992) Underground and Overhead; Building the Analogous City, in
Sorkin, Michael (ed) Variations on a Theme Park: the New American City and the End of Public Space. New York: Hill and Wang.
[6] Jacobs, Jane (1961) The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: The Modern Library, p. 34.
[7] Relph, Edward (1976) Place and Placelessness. London: Pion.
[8] Harvey, David (1993). From Space to Place and Back Again: Reflections on the Condition of Postmodernity, in Bird, Jon (et al) (eds) Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change. London: Routledge, p. 15.
[9] Hayles, N. Katherine (1990) Choas Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
[10] Meyrowitz, Joshua (1985) No Sense of Place: the Impact of Electronic Media on Behaviour. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[11] Zukin, Sharon (1991) Landscapes of Power: from Detroit to Disney World. Los Angeles:
University of California Press.
[12] Sudjic, Deyan (1993) The 100 Mile City. London: Flamingo.
[13] Nairn, Ian (1965) The American Landscape. New York: Random House, p. 10.
[14] Harvey, David (1993). From Space to Place and Back Again: Reflections on the Condition of Postmodernity, in Bird, Jon (et al) (eds) Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change. London: Routledge.
[15] Buttimer, Anne (1980) Home, Reach and the Sense of Place, in Buttimer, Anne and
Seamon, David (eds) The Human Experience of Space and Place. London: Croom Helm.
[16] Zukin, Sharon (1991) Landscapes of Power: from Detroit to Disney World. Los Angeles:
University of California Press.
[17] Zohar, Danah and Marshall, lan (1994) The Quantum Society: Mind, Physics and a New
Social Vision. London: Flamingo.
[18] Bourassa, Steven C (1990) “A Paradigm for Landscape Aesthetics”. Environment and
Behaviour 22 (6).
[19] Buttimer, Anne (1980) Home, Reach and the Sense of Place, in Buttimer, Anne and
Seamon, David (eds) The Human Experience of Space and Place. London: Croom Helm.
[20] Grange, Joseph (1985) in Seamon, David and Mugerauer, Robert (eds) Dwelling, Place
and Environment: Towards a Phenomenology of Person and World. Dordrecht: Nijhoff, p. 80.
The paradox of place refers to a fundamental condition of modernity. Notions of place emerged in reaction to the trajectory of modernity and its associated conscious and ecological casualties. The predicament is epitomized by the prototypical modern developer Faust, who in order to make way for future creation must accept the destruction of everything that has been—and will be—created.[1] Ultimately, despite development’s transformation of wastelands into thriving places, the process of creative destruction reconstructs the wasteland within the developer.[2] The tension between creation and destruction, progression and regression, and between global modernity and regional culture is captured by Paul Ricoeur: “there is the paradox: how to become modern and return to the sources; how to revive an old dormant civilization and take part in universal civilization.”[3] The sense of place is both a manifestation of this paradox and an attempt to resist or realign it. Through its erosion, place is a product of modernity, and yet cannot be understood by the tools of modernity.
The popularization of resistance to the manifestations of modernity is a defining threshold between modernism and postmodernism. Since the 1960s, theories of place share the ambition to reverse the modern action of continuously becoming through the annihilation of space by time. Jane Jacob’s people cities, Kevin Lynch’s quality planning, Ian McHarg’s suitability planning, Christian Norberg-Schulz’s creative participation and Kenneth Frampton’s regional resistances all privilege being through the spatialization of time. Each rubric is a reaction to the ever-advancing process of time-space compression, which appeared increasingly apocalyptic and leading ever closer to the nihilistic endpoint of rationalism that Friedrich Nietzsche predicted. The place theories that emphasized community, locality and respect for otherness, are attempts to create at least one knowable world within the infinity of possible worlds that become increasingly visible through communications and transport technology. Nonetheless, through the course of postmodernism, forces of capital convert these attempts into types that surely were never envisaged.
Postmodern contradictions
Two fundamental contradictions are inherent in postmodernism. First, postmodernism is an oppositional aesthetic movement to combat market culture and yet is commercially applied. Second, postmodernism attempts to respect local culture and yet is reproduced all over the world. In theory, postmodern culture reconciles market and place, and landscape and the vernacular. However, the more visible it becomes, the more postmodernism approaches a market orientated, decontextualized, franchise culture. Located in the space between the postmodernism of resistance and postmodernism of reaction is the ambiguity of market and place as the foci of creative destruction.[4] The protective thresholds that once tightly defined urban subcultures are broken down and absorbed into market culture. Spaces of production regress into historical vernacular and the urban landscape becomes contingent on the consumption of images.
Indeed, despite the very notion of design as an invigorated methodical application of human reason to a given problem, it is no match for the economic process of natural self-regulation, the urban process of natural growth, or the vernacular process of natural development. In combination, non-designed vernacular subsistence forms, and non-designed economic forms, constitute the vast majority of the world’s constructed ‘places’. Moreover, the economic process and associated enlightened concepts of private property and space as commodity support the tendency to construct and conceive individual projects and buildings in isolation. Property speculation enforces massive disparity between the attention expended on individual structures and the attention paid to the spaces in between. Discarding the nature and experiences of these spaces to chance undermines the wholeness of place and establishes the outside as the locus of the paradox of place.
Flexible accumulation
Economic transformation from industrial to informational society significantly impacts the organization and appearance of the globally denatured landscape. In addition to creating ghettoization through polarity, increasingly mobile capital enforces increasingly mobile urban structures. Unlike the modern city, where surplus is grounded through tangible medium/long-term building programs, the late capitalist city is determined by its capability to assimilate a rotation of surpluses. Due to the saturation and increasing volatility of the infrastructure market, few opportunities exist to safely deposit surplus capital within the timely and spatially solid confines of concrete and steel. The result is flexible accumulation, whereby over accumulation is solved through devices of spatial and temporal displacement. Flexible accumulation is advantageous in its ability to pack in more capital with more efficient responses to micro changes in conditions.
With this capital arrangement, the contemporary city exists as a complex and non-organic structure without hierarchy and linear organization. As a vector of mobility, transport infrastructure becomes the fundamental structural force, creating milieus that are no longer based on the traditional city/territory or nature/culture opposition, but on denatured non-contests. Hybrid architectural programs appear to enunciate between unstable economic flows and their manifestation as urban topographies, without the arbitration of a unitary urban structure. The binary oppositions of center/periphery, full/void, interior/exterior, free time/work time that characterize the enlightened city—and began to be assaulted within the modern city—are broken down in the late-capitalist city. Delineations of public and private realms are overturned once more.
Production of space
Revolutions in accumulation, communication, information and the technology of work combine to instigate fundamental transformations in the production of space. Clearly, new gadgets require the construction of new rooms and the destruction of old. Nevertheless, matching architectural objects (virtual or real) to the flux of continuously mutating programming, is a distant second to the turnover that has become entrenched within foundations of civilized human life. In the late capitalist city, the ongoing battle for control of the street has been exhausted. Any notion of the street as a political space is dismembered with its demotion into a transport duct for delivery trucks, electricity, sewage, and optical fiber. The street is displaced in four dimensions as it moves underground, overhead and inside, and through the timelessness of its instantaneous optical cargo, does not exist in the here-and-now.
The changes to urban politics and form suggested by Jacobs in the early 1960s as a response to the inhumane nature of the modern city are embraced and celebrated in the postmodern city. The message of Jacobsian urbanism is commandeered by capitalism and re-appropriated into gentrification.[5] The picturesque ethnic shops, street vendors and improvised landscape installations that Jacobs proposed are superficially replicated and mimicked in every gentrified market, residential street and historical precinct in every postmodern city in the world. The design disciplines are complicit in the construction of urbane disguises for economic gain as every possible attempt is made to assert connections with the urban life that it simultaneously eliminates. But as Jacobs herself reflects, the concept of converting urban life into an ongoing festival failed, because “when the fair became part of the city, it didn’t work like a city.”[6]
Local-global
Inherent to the changing perceptions of place since the enlightenment is knowledge and accessibility of the other. Changing transport and communications technology opened up previously closed horizons of space and morality. By the 20th century, romantic ideals of authenticity required that other not be severed from its place but remain part of it, and from here the travel industry burgeoned. The postmodern condition witnesses an almost frenzied pattern of mobility through tourism, to which the picturesque Grand Tour fades by comparison. A global exchange of tourists, however, is a central component of the paradox of place. That which the tourist seeks out, intrinsically becomes less authentic each time it is found, because (as mirrored in the theories of quantum physics) the observer affects the observed. Often the result is homogenization and substitution of the local landscape that initiated the tourism with the synthetic pseudo-landscapes of conventional tourist infrastructure.[7] Tourist landscapes are characterized by other-directed architecture that is purposely directed towards outsiders, passers-by, spectators, and most importantly, consumers.
Local-global is simultaneously a postmodern tool and dilemma that addresses the paradox of place. As a tool, the phrase was first developed in the 1960s as a plan for action to combat modernity’s ecological and social erosion. As indicative of the dilemma, a local-global sense of place is the stretched space of identity from its most irreducible form in the human body, to its most expansive form in the collective global population. Moreover, this sense of place is also the stretched time of identity between the mortality of the individual, and the immortality of the continuing collective memory. Attempting to traverse this divide, we exist between the world that is immediately at hand and a wider awareness of the extended world that places us within a network of billions of people.[8] For the environmental designer attempting to establish a sense of place, this portends to finding a balance between the details and the larger system. The contradiction arrives when the apparitions of the local are amplified until the local itself evolves into a new kind of global imperative.[9]
Communications technologies
Within postmodernism, television was the first technology to significantly alter social habits, and as a result, the requirements of place making. By revealing previously obscured backstage areas, television served as an instrument of demystification, and to a large extent was responsible for the breaking down of the barriers between public and private places. Furthermore, the eclectic nature of this medium fuelled growing apathy and desensitization to events, which in turn diminished eccentricity and pacified the populous.[10] The street became available to the developers and their projects of enclosure simply because it was discarded as a political place.
The late capitalist city is increasingly freed from its attachment to physical place by communications technology, which in turn makes it available to the ageographical requirements of circulating capital and its associated self-similar, hybridized, architectural programs. In the 19th century the photograph and the railroad removed the contiguity and depth of a foreground view of places despite making remote places more accessible. In the late 20th century, synchronous substitutions by electronic media link even the smallest places, but inherently destroy the social distance that made experiencing them so unique.[11] The paradox of place remains, because although global culture electronically connects all places and cultures in a continuous fusion of time and space, the counter movement coexists in the uprising of local cultures and expressions of place. The tension between expansion and contraction becomes translated into a virtual/real opposition.
Fictitious communities
Given all of the attempts to reclaim lost meaning through a sense of community and a 'sense of place', the situation as it stands today may not even require it. That is, to the majority of the first world population, there may be no problem, and certainly no desire to agglomerate into communities of any sort. Much of the populous of the developed world are only too happy to isolate themselves and have no interest in integrating with others outside an immediate circle of friends.[12] Many are entirely content to withdraw to their suburban island and to distance themselves from the responsibilities of family and community. The institutionalization of caring for the aged (nursing homes), and contributing to the wider community (charity organizations) are examples of the commodification of originally integral cultural responsibilities.
Moreover, increasingly vast numbers of people voluntarily go missing and lead contended, anonymous lives ‘lost’ within the urban milieu. As Ian Nairn observes, “people put down roots in a terribly short time,” himself claiming to “take about forty-eight hours.”[13] In this regard the notion of place-bound ‘community’ is a Romantic myth. The physical environment is a response to the situation, not a cause. The cause is the community that wishes to not be a community, and the overriding system of economics. No matter how exclusionary, attempts to reconstruct places in terms of imagined communities appear to be always porous to the universalizing power of capital.
Reactionary attempts to construct new logics from the romantic and the modern result in the aestheticization of politics and place. The 18th century separation of moral judgment from scientific knowledge exposed a void suitable for aesthetic responses. Within the time that elapsed since, this space increased to the point of dominating the agenda of postmodernism. Within modernism, the sense of place progressed beyond the unauthentic picturesque, to its popularization as authentic romanticism. Within its celebrated framework of postmodernism, however, place is mutated from its authentic origins, back into an unauthentic neo-picturesque. The ironic situation is such that much of the resistance—conceived to rage against the steamrolling power of capitalism and modernity—has been consumed and re-appropriated to fuel capitalism and the ever-evolving mutations of modernity. Because—as David Harvey pithily observes—the ultimate victory of the modern is not the elimination of all that is non-modern, but its artificial preservation and reconstruction.[14]
Designer-dweller
Whatever the role of design comes to be, and whatever place comes to mean, any project to construct a framework for dwelling must incorporate two key factors. First, is the input of the people who are affected through a relaxation of the power-complex. A viable style of life for local areas must discard Newtonian conceptions of community and region and allow people to contribute to the whole.[15] Personal involvement becomes the primary focus of a future agenda of local control that ensures public value is not incompatible with public interest.[16] In the same way, Norberg-Schulz channels user influence in design through creative participation. Involvement may range from intense locality specific programs deciphering the most desired form and function of places, through to acting on simple global requests such as Kevin Lynch’s report that children the world over—regardless of location or background—share a universal hunger for trees.
Whereas the outsider reads place through maps and models, the dweller has a more encompassing, time deepened, experience of a place and may give a more authentic, although restricted reading. Indeed, a full experience of the world requires both participation and description, fusing the creator and the critic, the designer and the dweller.[17] From this, however, emerges the dilemma of compromising design, and indeed of compromising the very foundations of the architecture and planning academy. Traditional notions of democracy and design appear mutually exclusive. Beyond a client’s brief and occasional comment, the designer is free to formulate personal strategies framed within the context of cultural rules.[18] The creative will of the designer is of egocentric origin and as such requires, with reason, a certain amount of autonomy. Furthermore, it is rare for the involved populace to have reconcilable requirements, or indeed, to even know what they want before it exists. The designer's role becomes more that of a social interpreter or diplomat.
Second, including time within environmental design is also critical. The notion of change goes far beyond a landscape design in which the vegetation grows and hence reaches the ‘preferred’ state of the artist's perspective five years after construction. Designing with time involves an acknowledgment of the ongoing memory and flux of collective life, the additive process of evolution, and the inevitability of entropic decay. In addition to allowing for the processes of change, designing with time also takes into account the process of stability, an essential component in so many theories of place. Individuals in situ are a requirement for the perpetuation of the soul of a place.[19] Joseph Grange proposes that social place contain “a protective routine shielding humans from the devastating intrusion of novelty [and] an openness that allows, encourages, freedom and its outcomes.”[20] That is, change and complexity within discernible and finite boundaries. The contradictions continue, however, because this system portends to a community ‘time bubble’ surrounded by a propaganda filter; freedom and shields are juxtaposed, because the threshold is a two-way process.
Conclusion: critical sensitivity
The reason for excavating the contradictions of even the most fundamental design criteria is to illustrate that there are no rigid rules or universal unified theories that apply consistent outcomes in all situations. The point of departure for the designer is to treat each site on its merits; the continuum of scale can be satisfied through the in situ character of the locale and the inherent global awareness of the designer. By developing a critical sensitivity, and by exercising responsibility to balance the conditions of a particular place, the designer may be able to regularly create a sense of place under anyone's definition of the term. From this launching pad, an assault on the age-old power complex and language of the zone and its associated functions and scales may be perpetuated. Environmental design can reassert and redeem itself and go some of the way towards reclaiming the role of place making.
Notes
[1] Berman, Marshall (1983) All That is Solid Melts into Air: the Experience of Modernity.
New York: Verso.
[2] Harvey, David (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity: an Enquiry into the Origins
of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
[3] Ricour, Paul (1961) History and Truth. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, p. 277.
[4] Zukin, Sharon (1991) Landscapes of Power: from Detroit to Disney World. Los Angeles:
University of California Press.
[5] Boddy, Trevor (1992) Underground and Overhead; Building the Analogous City, in
Sorkin, Michael (ed) Variations on a Theme Park: the New American City and the End of Public Space. New York: Hill and Wang.
[6] Jacobs, Jane (1961) The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: The Modern Library, p. 34.
[7] Relph, Edward (1976) Place and Placelessness. London: Pion.
[8] Harvey, David (1993). From Space to Place and Back Again: Reflections on the Condition of Postmodernity, in Bird, Jon (et al) (eds) Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change. London: Routledge, p. 15.
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