Urban Structure

The city is changing. Planning and design have to operate in a dynamical context which produces both physical-spatial and socio-cultural change. But these aspects of change are themselves neither independent of each other nor linked by any simple functional or causal logic. They are nevertheless related by way of their incorporation into the technical and practical whole of the city which is itself at the same time physical and social, and which has a non-abstract reality and a dynamical form. City and metropolitan form is itself an outcome of practices of using, building and understanding the city over time. It is a ‘residue’ of these processes and then itself a ‘stabilization’ or ‘memory’ of ways of doing and understanding things.

The city is ‘constructed’ at more than one level; besides being planned or designed and built, it also takes form as a factor of its own ‘structuring’ in dynamical processes. The city is never simply a moment frozen in space and time; it exists always in a dynamical state which has its own spaces and times, and vectors of growth or change. These vectors are an often under-acknowledged factor in planning and design processes. The roles of movement and communication, and of the infrastructures that support them, in creating spaces of growth or ‘emergence’ is central to our approach and points to the structuring role of communications infrastructures and the ways they inform human practices of knowing and doing. This also takes us beyond simplistic ideas of access and begins to engage with the city as a surface which locates people in different places with their own particular spaces and times which differentially enable different practices and ways of life.

Our research is on the form of the metropolitan city and the activities and centralities its supports. The main interest is in describing and understanding contemporary cities as distributions of power, enablement, activity and centrality, and as surfaces produced in a ‘weave’ of movement and communication. We are then interested in finding ways the metropolitan fabrics may effectively, equitably and sustainably support and enable economic and social life and activity and strategies for steering these processes.

We want to understand the ways economic activities, social practices, land use patterns, public space activity, distribution of crime, etc. become located and distributed, and then how we can strategically intervene to support or change these factors. We develop models and protocols of description of the metropolitan surface in terms of its ‘emergent’ forms and centralities, and then strategies and procedures for planning and designing this surface. The point is to understand how urban surfaces and systems change under the generative power of their own socio-technical structures and how we can strategically direct this change. One of our particular topics of study is the emergence of polynuclearity in metropolitan regions. We also investigate and define the particular properties of centrality in particular urban places and how to maintain or change these.

We have over the last years been using some of these ideas in our MSc graduation studio to investigate the distribution of power and ‘affordance’ for practical action of real urban places, and to develop strategies for intervention that optimize societal and small-scale economic benefits. This brings us back to a society defined not in terms of general and immutable structural laws but in the socio-technical structuration of urban places and in the conditions for action people find in them.