Communal space of the neighbourhood
A MEANS OF DIFFERENTIATION
5.7 Displaying particular systems of symbols in public space develops a visible framework to establish patterns of similarity and difference and a
distinctive identity for an urban area (Chinatown, San Francisco, USA)
Perhaps by definition a neighbourhood is a place to which a child spontaneously gives undivided attention; that’s the unfiltered way meaning comes to children, just flowing off the surface of things. (1998:43)
The problem of authenticity may not present itself to all those who have an interest in this process of signification. When we design and develop an urban village, we are likely to reproduce an appearance of a village: a small settlement with a few shops, a village green and the possibility of leaving the car aside and just walk everywhere. This may have aesthetic and indeed environmental significance, but what about its social meaning? In what way is it different from any housing development anywhere? Even many ‘country’
villages, as distinct from ‘urban’ villages, are no longer coherent entities. They house urban populations who commute to cities and who partly see villages as a dormitory and at best a retreat, rather than a place in which they have to be actively engaged. On the surface, these may seem to be villages. In reality what appears rural is urban in many senses of the word. Urban villages reject the single use, single tenure qualities of the postwar public housing schemes and aspire to some of the qualities of a ‘real’, unplanned village. The only difference appears to be that these urban villages are instantly created rather than gradually evolved and that they are urban, planted in the middle of an urban context, as for example the Forum’s projects show: Crown Street in Glasgow and Hulme in Manchester, among others. If the traditional village was developed over a long period of time in the middle of countryside, now the urban village is to be instantly developed in the middle of an urban world. Both urban and rural villages, however, are thought to remain entities which are physically identifiable from their surroundings.
The desire to establish a sense of distinction for the neighbourhood has been a major part of urban design practice. Kevin Lynch, for example, paid much attention to the identification of districts within cities (1960), a practice which has continued ever since in enhancing character zones and the promotion of distinctive sub-areas in cities (e.g. the design guide for Birmingham: Tibbalds et al., 1990). The public spaces of the local neighbourhoods, therefore, become one of their means of identification and distinctiveness.
We can draw an interesting parallel between this desire for local differentiation in the face of undifferentiated urban space and a much larger phenomenon: the desire to assert local distinctions in the face of the global flows of resources and what some see as the drive for cultural homogenization across the world. Both are attempts to assert local distinctions in opposition to an external threat of domination and alienation. As such, both these trends can be seen as means of differentiation, asserting, as Lefebvre (1991) would say, the right to be different. Both are seeking psychological security through taking refuge in the small-scale environment of a locality (in the case of globalization) or a neighbourhood (in the case of urbanization), hoping to be safe in the middle of a potentially hostile world. At its smallest scale, urban design has sought to establish spatial enclosures in urban areas, i.e. streets and squares, which are partly expressing this need for psychological security and a refuge from the unknown large city.
The reasons for seeking such systems of local distinction, however, are not confined to psychological and cultural needs. Many cities now promote their distinctiveness in a global, competitive marketplace as a vehicle of economic development and regeneration.
In doing so, they hope to attract investment, both from employers whose white-collar workers prefer to live in well designed and well managed localities and from tourists who can potentially revive the urban economy. But this process is by no means unproblematic, as high stakes are involved in what signifies the locality and how. Furthermore, as the experience of post-Socialist countries, among others, shows, the politics of identity have serious shortcomings. Even at the neighbourhood level, violent forms of differentiation can appear, such as the gang territories and the walled and gated neighbourhoods of Los Angeles (Davis, 1992), the gang wars of the Parisian suburbs (The Guardian, 12 May 1998), which remind us of the factional strife of the medieval city neighbourhoods
(Vance, 1977).
The distinctive neighbourhoods, therefore, are a vehicle of differentiation: for individuals, to establish identity and social status, for developers, to distinguish their products from the rest, and for cities in their competition for resources in the global marketplace. The role of public space appears to be helping to establish the distinctive identity of the place and create the conditions in which the neighbourhood population can develop their relationships. This can be a process of identification for individuals, branding for commercial organizations, and image making for political authorities.
Neighbourhoods can also exacerbate social fragmentation by subdividing urban space into separate units, which have real divisive roles going beyond the questions of superficial differentiation.
CONCLUSION
In an impersonal world, the social encounter is reduced to an abstraction, where instrumental action is the main aim of the encounter. This lies at the heart of the paradigm of society as the realm of individual strangers. To confront this alienation, communities are seen as frameworks that protect the individual and the household from the impersonal world. A community, it is hoped, would establish an interpersonal level of encounter, hence preventing alienation.
Neighbourhoods, therefore, are intermediary levels of organizing space, reducing the effects of a dichotomous divide between the public and private spheres. On the one hand, they seem to semi-privatize parts of urban space, i.e. create a clearly defined area for the residents to feel in control and for the non-residents to feel outsiders. In other words, the neighbourhoods are created to extend the private sphere of individual property and intimate home to a larger part of the city. On the other hand, the neighbourhood appears to be a mechanism with which groups find supremacy over individuals, so they can intrude into the private sphere of individuals and households. By defining a separate part of the city, in which social encounters are potentially intensified among limited participants, the possibility of privacy and concealment is reduced under the gaze of the group.
We have seen that splitting the city into distinctive, small-scale neighbour-hoods inside or on the periphery has been advocated as an environmentally friendly urban form. We know that it is popular as a means of urban management and as a vehicle of market operation, in line with the organization of the development industry. People have identified with urban neighbourhoods as these have been a means of differentiation, where the collectivization of difference has taken place. Social and political theorists, in their mistrust of the emergent individualism of the Enlightenment era, have promoted holism, development of communities, which have been partly expressed in the physical shape of urban neighbourhoods and small settlements. These are substantial foundations for the notion of development by neighbourhood, or micro-urbanism. In this delineation of small parts of cities and towns, public space has played a crucial role by being the focal point, the centre of attraction, where sociability and community building can be
exercised. Without the focus on a clear centre and the demarcation of its outer boundary, the idea of neighbourhood planning loses two of its key defining characteristics.
These foundations suggest that the idea of micro-urbanism will stay with us. Each new generation seems to discover for itself the dangers and pleasures of the city, the freedoms it offers and the threat of anonymity. Each new generation throughout the last two centuries has ‘rediscovered’ the need for community building and the physical shape that this takes. The rise of the city has created a continuous fear of anonymity and atomization of individuals. The elusive theme of building bridges and forging socio-spatially identifiable communities comes back to the agenda of those concerned with understanding cities and with transforming them. There would be a return to the theme of neighbourhood building as long as some find themselves lost in the crowd and need to belong to an identifiable corner, and some need to separate themselves for establishing a status or avoid what and whom they feel should be avoided, and some are pushed to one corner to live apart from the rest, and some are fearful of the loss of control over the affairs of the city and the state; in other words, as long as there is social difference, stratification and control.
We know, however, that micro-urbanism cannot provide the only possible, or the best, answer to the questions it raises. In urban management, the more sophisticated forms of information and management mean that the need for a crude dissection of a city is no longer needed. Sustainable urban forms include small neighbourhoods but also compact and linear cities. Neighbourhoods seem to be more useful in growth management than in arresting decline. Substantial production capacity of the development industry can produce a variety of physical forms. The high rate of population mobility and social pluralism makes the process of signification and identification far more complex than ever before. The refuge from anonymity can at best be temporary and tangential, as it is no longer possible to create strong social bonds that only develop through long-term stability and common experience. Subdivision of the city into distinctive neighbourhoods may create further social fragmentation, rather than the planned social cohesion. These make the work of building communities difficult, if not impossible.
The implications of this for urban planning and design must be to become aware of all these various aspects of planning by neighbourhood and to avoid a blind faith in the impact of spatial organization. Whether promoting a communitarian agenda or democratic individualism, the relationship between individuals is only possible when a series of social frameworks are in place. Space is one of these frameworks and design of urban space provides a platform for social relationships. In societies where radical individualism has continuously been a fundamental principle, there is no doubt that social relations will be increasingly fluid. Permanence may be an unaffordable, or even unwanted, luxury. The best that a social action such as urban planning and design can do is not to pretend that it can create cohesive units, but that it can positively contribute, albeit in a limited way, to the development of social relationships rather than merely accepting the alienation of the crowds.
The role of public space in the creation of this sense of cohesion is what most forms of neighbourhood design hope to achieve. By creating lively public spaces in their centres, designers hope to put in place the necessary framework for sociability. At the same time,
we have seen that public space can also be used as an image, a selling point for the commercial firms and the political authorities, a vehicle of differentiation contributing to further social fragmentation rather than social integration.