Architecture and urban planning are rightly seen as taking a long time. The lifespan of buildings combined with the legitimate desire to preserve old or historic buildings reinforces this impression. Bringing an architectural or urban planning project to fruition is also a long process, taking 10, 20 or 30 years to complete. One might even go so far as to say that, sometimes, a certain stubbornness in making mistakes makes the time even longer.
However, the permanence that we might attribute to architecture is undermined by the many and frequent challenges it faces, not least the dissatisfaction of its inhabitants, and even that of its clients and the architects themselves. The many criticisms addressed at architecture and urban planning make architecture a figure of disappointment, which no doubt reinforces this idea of resistance to change and adaptation.
Our historical heritage, and in particular that of the modern movement, has accustomed us to considering architectural projects, as well as public spaces projects, in terms of their conformity to a functionalist order and of the certainty of their completeness and finiteness. This teleological and somewhat caricatured vision of architecture and urbanism persists to a certain extent. Despite this, post-modernism has opened up to a plural and more uncertain vision of architecture. The work of Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown or Charles Jencks, for example, has made a major contribution to this. By considering architecture as a language, they initiated an attempt to create a stronger link with the inhabitants and with the contexts. A multiplicity of points of view could then be expressed, and the legitimacy of architecture was modified. The generalized truth of the discourse has been transformed into a pluralism of justifications and forms. Even if things have partly closed down since then, this has had the merit of opening up the field of possibilities to specific local situations, and this is an important point for the subject that concerns me today.
But the conditions of our day are extremely different. Climate change, war, violence as a means of political or economic governance, and scientific or technical inventions are all contributing to the uncertainty in which we view the future. Projections of the present or the past to project a possible future prove futile in the face of this uncertainty. Architecture is a particularly interesting marker of this difficulty, since uncertainty seems so alien to the stability of the built object and the relatively long time span of architecture.
Rethinking the density of urban areas, reconsidering mobility to minimize its impact, preserving land for agriculture, integrating rising sea levels and the increasing scarcity of habitable land are all issues that need to be considered, although we cannot yet fully control all the data involved. As I said earlier, there are many human factors involved in these issues, many of which are difficult to predict. All this is profoundly changing the way in which we approach architectural projects and, of course, public space projects.
The world of architecture today is faced with a central question: can architecture still be considered a finite object when the world around it is so unstable? This uncertainty opens up the project, whether it’s a building or a public space, to the uncertainty of its finality and forces us to consider its future evolution and transformation from the outset. The indeterminacy at work in our societies today leads us to consider also the indeterminacy of architecture itself. Against certainties, we should consider the forms that build our environment in a less functionalist and closed way, and promote an open approach to a culture in the making, which is key to giving shape to the common.
I’m going to use two examples, based on a few photographs, to look at ways in which our cities can evolve and be transformed, with a particular focus on public spaces. London and Copenhagen are two very different cities in terms of their history, size and population. While they share the characteristic of being both maritime cities and of linking their development largely to the decline of port activities, the principles of transformation are very different. Despite this, a degree of complementarity can be seen in the analysis of the focus on local relationships.
Scale and discontinuity
I’ll start with these photographs taken in East London on the former docks that have been transformed into a business and residential district. Taken between the docks of Millwall and West India, on a fairly limited part of The Isle of Dogs, they show the heterogeneous character of this area.
While some critics deplore the lack of overall planning and the excessive freedom left to the private sector, the heterogeneity of scale and the multiplicity of activities that this allows is an interesting lesson in the development of the district.
A certain poetics of discontinuity emerges. This heterogeneity makes it possible to adapt to a wide variety of uses in a space where the proximity of the different elements is strong.
This brings to mind the comparison made by Jane Jacobs as long ago as the 1960s between the city and biological organisms. This comparison was not formal but was a functional analogy. Understanding the city as a biological organism leads us to think of the urban environment as a fabric whose equilibrium is constantly precarious and unstable. Social transformations and changing needs act to transform the city, each time giving it a temporary equilibrium while awaiting other changes.
Admitting discontinuities between the elements that make up the city is a response that opens up the possibility of bringing together activities with contradictory scales and ambiences. But this adaptive discontinuity also allows spaces to evolve by allowing breaks between the different elements that make up the urban space.
In a 2014 text on tactical urbanism, Saskia Sassen also sees the city as a complex system that is always incomplete and therefore always changing. Starting from the observation that there is so much diversity within the city, she asks how to give it a presence. Her answer is The Global Street. A public space where new social and political forms can be developed, insofar as the street is a space that can be occupied and remade, even temporarily.
Architecture as relationship
In his book Soft City, published in 2019, David Sim examines the evolution of Scandinavian architectural practices as they adapt to the “reality of the dense, mixed-used urban environment of the 21st century”. He places his thoughts in the tradition of the “dense-low movement”, which marked debates on architecture in the 1970s in Denmark and Scandinavia. This movement sought to “combine industrial production techniques of large-scale housing with typological details of single-family homes”. The aim of this movement was to reconcile the individual and the community in order to build neighbourhood relations.
In these images, taken at different locations in Copenhagen’s former commercial port, we can see how this approach to urban and architectural projects is reflected.
David Sim calls this “a gentle pragmatism”, which is characterized by a particular attention to the simple and ordinary things of everyday life. Focused on the human element, this attention to small scale and detail aims to develop, with a certain simplicity, an economy of means to best meet the needs of the inhabitants. But this economy of means in no way exclude a certain architectural expressiveness that sets the projects apart and contributes to user satisfaction.
This approach to architecture is reminiscent of what Nicolas Bourriaud wrote about art in Esthétique relationnelle. It’s not about announcing a future world or “forming imaginary or utopian realities”. Rather, it’s about “constituting modes of existence or models of action within an existing reality”. We need to “inhabit the circumstances … in order to transform the context”. As in other fields, architecture is dealing with the uncertainties of the contemporary world. It tries, it gropes, it experiments, it invents, as in Copenhagen, a playful city geared towards leisure. It experiments with dense spaces, where a mix of uses creates new relationships of proximity. It is reusing, rehabilitating and, above all, seeking to become more flexible and scalable in order to adapt to the challenges of the future. We also see in these examples how they bring into play interactions between different uses and between individuals. In this way, the forms we produce become elements that link people together in a dynamic way, incorporating the possibility of subsequent transformation of the forms constructed. As Nicolas Bourriaud points out, “to produce a form is to invent possible encounters”.
This encounter and exchange between users and built forms not only creates a relational system, but also produces new cultural forms that enrich past cultures. In City, Street and Citizen, ethnographer Suzanne Hall’s study of Walworth Road, south of Elephant and Castle in London, examines the way in which these everyday relationships produce culture-producing forms of stratification. The multicultural and highly diverse nature of this area led her to question what makes up the local in an urban fabric. Moving away from the idea that it is primarily a singular physical entity, the author’s hypothesis is that the local is above all a social phenomenon in the sense that it can only be understood in terms of the reciprocal exchange relationships established between individuals and between individuals and spaces. She points out that local life is defined by “a sense of familiarity that combines cultures, ways of life, forms of sociability and a collection of spaces”.
It is not a question of ‘simply maintaining tradition’, but rather of ‘socially supporting renewals that connect to the present’. This study of Walworth Road highlights the interweaving relationships between culture, sociability, activities and spaces. It also shows that the local area is a superimposition of layers that accumulate over time through successive transformations, but also through the accumulation of small individual worlds that cohabit and get to know each other through the relational proximity in which they find themselves.
These various strata constitute a mode of urban regeneration that is opposed to the logic of the clean slate. As an adaptive reuse, stratification is a process of urban renewal that adds to what already exists and dialogues with what is already there. This sheds light on the examples given here by placing them in a more global perspective and in processes of architectural and urban transformation in which the relationship between individuals and spaces is key to building the common.
In conclusion, I would say that individuals build their neighbourhood relationships by constructing links between their culture, their modes of sociability, their activities and the spaces they use. Here, space has a rather special status in that it plays a more or less active role in the other three elements of the relational system. At the very least, it acts as a sort of background, but it can also hinder or, on the contrary, encourage the development of these other elements. Space plays this modest role of catalyst and embodiment, offering possibilities.
The challenge for architecture and public spaces today is to reconcile the permanent and the ephemeral, and above all not to be thought of as finished objects. The future of architecture lies in its ability to allow the objects it produces to evolve. To achieve this, we need to accept that architecture is not an ideally fixed product, but, to use Jane Jacobs’ latest book title in 2017, an object that remains open to the Vital Little Plans of its inhabitants throughout its existence.
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York, Random House, 1961.
Vital Little Plans, The Short Works of Jane Jacobs, Samuel Zipp and Nathan Storring ed., London, Short Books Ltd, 2017.
Uneven Growth, Tactical Urbanism for Expanding Megacities, New York, MOMA, 2014
David Sim, Soft City, Building Density for Everyday Life, Washington, Covelo, London, Island Press, 2019.
Nicolas Bourriaud, Esthétique relationnelle, Dijon, Les Presses du réel, 2001. Suzanne Hall, City, Street and Citizen: the Measure of the Ordinary, London, New York, Routledge, 2
