4 September 2009
Place and Place-Making in Cities: A Global Perspective
Dedicated to Jane Jacobs in memoriam (1919-2006)
The literature on the city is filled with references to desolate placelessness and a yearning for place, for some solid connection to the earth, to the palpable physicality of cities, and to people. As sprawling suburbs move steadily outwards towards the horizon, the very concept of “city” has become vague and diluted. Sujic (1992), a journalist, named the urban regions of the late 20th century “The 100-mile City,” providing a pictorial record from around the world. In a recent essay on the future of cities, I decided to abandon the term city altogether, which seemed too much of a discrete entity, referring to this formless form of the human habitat as simply “the urban” (Friedmann 2002, xi). For those of us who live in the urban, it is a labyrinthine network of power and dis/empowerment.[1] In that same essay I called the forces of contemporary life that steadily eat away at our sense of being anywhere at all, erasing our sense of place, “entropic.” (op. cit.,13).[2] I argued that applied to the human habitat, entropy can be read as a measure of disorder. Unless countervailing flows of negentropic energy—human energy, the product of mind and body—can overcome the constant dissipation of energy which is everywhere around us, random events will become increasingly common, life forms will cease to flourish (Schroedinger 1992 [1945]).
Recently, I came across a collection of short stories by the French Nobel Prize winner J.-M. G. Le Clézio (2002). “Ariadne” is a story of a brutal gang rape by the members of a motorcycle gang in one of the desolate working class housing projects that are often found on the edge of large French cities, in this case probably Marseille. His opening description of this quartier captures the forsaken atmosphere of one of those large-scale projects at dusk, that that do little more than warehouse people who are marginal to the society and captures the meaninglessness of human existence in such surroundings and encourages the acts of random violence committed by young people who, surplus to their society, prowl the streets and corridors of these projects in search of anything that will blot out the oppressive numbness of spirit that overwhelms them, if only for a fleeting moment.
On the banks of the dry riverbed stands the high-rise project. It is a city in its own right, with scores of apartment buildings—great gray concrete cliffs standing upright on the level asphalt grounds, surrounded by a sweeping landscape of rubble hills, highways, bridges, the river’s dusty shingle bed, and the incinerator plant trailing its acrid heavy cloud over the valley. Here, it’s quite a distance to the sea, quite a distance to the town, quite a distance to freedom, quite a distance from simple fresh air on account of the smoke from the incinerator plant, and quite a distance from human contact, for the project looks like an abandoned town. Perhaps there really is no one here—no one in the tall gray buildings with thousands of rectangular windows, no one in the stairwells, in the elevators, and still no one in the great parking lots where the cars are parked. Perhaps all the doors and windows have been bricked up, blinded, and no one can escape from within the walls, the apartments, the basements. And yet aren’t the people moving around between the great gray walls—the men, the women, the children, even the dogs occasionally—rather like shadowless ghosts, disembodied, intangible, blank-eyed beings lost in lifeless space? And they can never meet one another. As if they had no names.
From time to time, a shadow slips by, fleeing between the white walls. Sometimes one can get a glimpse of the sky, despite the haze, despite the heavy cloud drifting down from the chimney of the incinerator plant in the west. You see airplanes too, having torn free of the clouds for an instant, drawing long cottony filaments behind their shimmering wings.
But there are no birds here, no flies, no grasshoppers. Now and then one finds a stray ladybug on one of the big cement parking lots. It walks along the ground, then tries to escape, flying heavily over in the direction of the planters filled with parched earth, where a scorched geranium stands. (p. 67)
You will argue that “Ariadne” is an extreme case, that there are many urban habitats where such outbreaks of random violence are unlikely, where life conforms by and large to the customary rules of civility, etc., and that extremes should not be taken as an accurate depiction of urban life as we know it. But from a global perspective, this story illustrates where we seem to be headed, as in many parts of the world ever larger numbers of young people are, in effect, declared a surplus population whose hopes of finding work to sustain them and their families are dwindling, and so they succumb to the yawning marginality of their lives, seeking by whatever means on offer—the drug trade, physical violence, criminality, terrorism, genocidal rage—to drown out awareness of their actual condition of life. It is a general malaise caused by the ceaseless entropic forces that are at work in many of the world’s large cities.
My answer to this problem—and here I speak as a planner—is to reclaim the bits of the human habitat that are given us as residents in the urban, and to reconnect our lives with the lives of others in ways that are inherently meaningful. I began with the horror of placelessness and what it forebodes, and I will try to show how the recovery of places, specifically the small spaces of the urban we inhabit, can begin to set in motion constructive energies of negative entropy, of taking back what societal forces geared to maximizing profits and narrowly defined efficiencies have taken from us. I believe that we can re-humanize the urban by focusing on and reviving urban neighborhoods or places.
A first approach: what is a place?
It is difficult to take a word such as place, which is in everyday use and applied in all sorts of ways, and turn it into a concept with a specific, precise meaning. But the academic literature on place (and the related idea of place-making) is growing rapidly across a widening spectrum of the human sciences and the professions, including geography, social anthropology, landscape architecture, architecture, environmental psychology, planning, and philosophy.[3] Much of this literature as well as many items not included in this foreshortened bibliography are critically examined in Tim Cresswell’s Place: A Short Introduction (2004). Cresswell is a geographer, and his view of places is, so to speak, from the outside in, it is an outside observer’s gaze on places, hierarchically arranged, from single room to planet Earth.
In contradistinction to the multiple scales of the geography, the scale I propose to adopt in this paper is exclusively the local, and the perspective on place will be from the inside out, that is, as place is experienced and sometimes transformed by those who dwell in the small spaces of the urban. Before offering a more formal definition, however, I would like to provide a sketch of such an intimate place of social encounter in order to make the idea of place more palpable and real. Here is a word painting of a temple ground on the periphery of Taipei, Taiwan’s capital city.
This is a story about Shan-Hsia, a country town located in what some would call the peri-urban area of Greater Taipei where city folk meet country folk. Actually, Shan-Hsia is only about 25 km from the center of the capital city. We could also say, of course, that there is no longer any “peri-urban” in Taiwan, since urban growth sprawls uninterruptedly from north to south along the west coast of this island nation, backed by a chain of mountains some of which rise to over 2000 meters.
I visited Shan-Hsia on a Saturday morning in the Spring of 2006. As we approached, we passed a number of massive apartment complexes which anywhere else would have been an architect’s nightmare but here were loudly hawked to customers eager to experience what they imagined to be the heaven of modern living.
Arriving, we parked our car, no small feat in itself in a street choked with vehicles and people. Hundreds of motor scooters, like frenzied mosquitos, darted in and out of the traffic. You had to be nimble to avoid being knocked over.
It was market day in Shan-Hsia, and as we wended our way to Tsu-Sze Temple, which was our goal, we walked past dozens of market stands crowding the sidewalk, with eager customers jostling each other to buy fresh fish, meats, vegetables, and fruits spread out before them in splendid profusion.
Tsu-Sze Temple is famous throughout the region. Originally constructed in 1769, it was destroyed and rebuilt three times. The latest rebuilding started in 1947 and is still incomplete. The temple is dedicated to Chen Tsao-Yin, a native of Henan Province on the mainland who, together with some of his people, had migrated to a place called Chuan Chu in Fujian Province on the coast. His image was enshrined in the temple, and the local folks in Chuan Chu showed respect for his exploits and regarded him as their patron saint. When the original settlers from the district arrived from the mainland in the 18th century, they built the temple in memory of their saint.
Today, it is wedged into a small corner of the town, fronting a broad but shallow river. A small irregularly shaped square containing some shade trees was bustling with people. Children raced each other playing tag, the ubiquitous mosquito scooters had temporarily slowed to participate in the scene, a smell of incense was in the air, and adults in small groups were chatting with each other while a sound truck hovered in a corner of the square, encouraging people to vote for a Mr. Wu, the local candidate for city council.
Looking around me, I thought for a moment I was magically transposed from 21st century
into a scene of the famous scroll painting, “Spring on the River,” depicting a Northern Song Dynasty cityscape alive with people going about their daily affairs. Here life washed in and out of the temple, as worshippers sent their silent prayers to the saints on incense smoke, including a female divinity and her heavenly entourage, pleading for health or money or a husband or a good grade on the next exam, in a fusion of the secular and sacred. People gawked and talked, bowed down and prayed, wandered about (as we did), admiring the intricate, delicate carvings with which every square inch of the temple, including its 122 columns, was adorned.
A pedestrian bridge spanned the river. We ascended by some steps to get a better view. The bridge was lined on both sides with booths, most of which sold some sort of food: freshly fried pancakes prepared under the watchful eyes of waiting customers, a variety of aromatic soups, delicious noodles and dumplings, iced fruit and vegetable juices, and sinful sweets. Nine out of ten stands were cookeries with mostly middle-aged ladies stirring, ladling, cutting, frying, and selling their handiwork for ridiculously low prices to hungry customers. On the far end of the bridge, a stage had been set up, and people were beginning to sit down for a show. Meanwhile, a loudspeaker blared what I took to be a Taiwanese version of hard rock. I decided a rural festival was under way, because a long table had been cordoned off on which dozens of competing trays laden with the pride of local farmers, a large but to me unfamiliar root vegetable used in making soup stock, were on display. Presumably, the winning tray would receive a blue ribbon prize. (Friedmann 2007, 357-8)
This story is, of course, still a view from the outside, but it draws attention to a center of neighborhood life whose participants, most but not all of whom are neighbors, are drawn from a larger area with which this temple ground and its immediate surrounds stands in a close, reciprocal relation, thus constituting a distinctive neighborhood, the heart of a territorial place. Cresswell’s observations are apposite here:
The work of Seamon, Pred, Thrift, deCerteau and others show us how place is
constituted through reiterative social practice—place is made and remade on a daily basis. Place provides a template for practice—an unstable stage for performance. Thinking of place as performed and practiced can help us think of place in radically open and non-essentialized ways where place is constantly struggled over and reimagined in practical ways.… Place provides the conditions of possibility for creative social practice. Place in this sense becomes an event rather than a secure ontological place rooted in notions of the authentic. Place as an event is marked by openness and change rather than boundedness and permanence” (Cresswell 2004, 39).
Urban places, according to Cresswell, are embedded in the built environment but come into being through “reiterative social practices,” such as the activities recorded in the neighborhood centered on Tsu-Sze Temple in the town or village of Shan-Hsia, Taiwan. Some of them are daily, such as prayer and worship, others obey an annual calendar of festivities. The temple and its grounds must be maintained—a responsibility of the community of the faithful. The county fair is held in the same place on a seasonal basis. Political elections for local office are held whenever they are due, and candidates vie for votes wherever potential voters are gathered. The nearby farmers’ market is held on weekends. All these activities occur in the tight space of a few hundred meters from the temple itself. Indeed, one could say, with Cresswell, that the temple grounds are a sort of “stage of performance.” It is also an open, inclusive place, so that those who wish to do so can join in the festivities, whether for worship, business, politics, or just being social. And so, to repeat once more with Cresswell, Tsu-Sze Temple could be described as an event whose precise spatial configuration and rhythms are dynamic even though its pattern of social interaction has remained fairly constant over time: recall that since its founding in 1769, the temple was destroyed and rebuilt three times and is currently still under construction.
We are now in a position to define place in more formal terms, with reference to places not only on the periphery of Taipei but wherever they may be found. In this view, a place of the kind we are discussing here can be defined as a small, three-dimensional urban space that is cherished by the people who inhabit it. To the characteristics of urban places identified by Cresswell above—reiterative social practices, inclusiveness, performativity, dynamic quality—we can now add three more: the place must be small, inhabited, and come to be cherished or valued by its resident population for all that it represents or means to them.[4]
In this definition, the question of scale is left indeterminate; my inclination is to argue for a pedestrian scale, which allows people to interact in a variety of mostly unplanned ways, on the street or in business establishments among other spaces of habitual encounter. In this perspective, neighborhoods are defined from the inside out as the area that neighbors acknowledge as their home or, as sociologists would say, as their primary space of social reproduction. This criterion tells us nothing, however, about the intensity of the interaction in question: some forms may be quite superficial, such as being recognized by name on the street or in a store, or simply by a smile or greeting as neighbors go about their daily errands.
The second criterion of inhabiting is obviously a necessary condition of living in a neighborhood, and therefore excludes certain non-places, such as large hotels, department stores, shopping malls, banks, airports, bus terminals, and office buildings among others that have no soul (Augé 1995, Kunstler 1993). By being lived in, the actual physical and social spaces of an urban neighborhood come to be modified and possibly even transformed. This happens naturally through the simple fact of being lived in and the spatial patterns of social interaction that are formed over time, as newcomers arrive, old residents depart. It may also be a result of specific joint actions undertaken by neighbors.[5] External circumstances and forces impinge on the neighborhood as well, contributing to its changing character. In the course of these several actions and changes, the neighborhood acquires particular meanings for its inhabitants, though not all of them may be shared; it thereby becomes a distinctive place and may even acquire a name.
Finally, there is the matter of attachment to place, which is included here as constitutive of place. Attachment is a subjective, invisible attribute—invisible, that is, under normal circumstances. It may occasionally become visible when a neighborhood is threatened with demolition and organizes (or not) to fight for its survival, or when its social composition changes rapidly, and the integration of newcomers becomes stressful and problematic, the way neighbors respond to newcomers, or when groups of neighbors decide to join up in an effort to improve the physical conditions of neighborhood life. The number and variety of local organizations that depend primarily on local volunteering can perhaps provide an additional, if indirect, measure of place attachment.