Sunday, 21 December 2003

'Residents don’t need signs'

Can we develop a method of ‘reading neighbourhoods’? How exactly do you read the spatial and social signs when, say, someone takes you into their neighbourhood and shows you round, or when you visit a project or a community centre somewhere? Without thinking about it, we pick up information from things like the style and state of the housing, the number of people walking about, the presence of corner shops and shutters, and so on. So what if people could augment such spatial information with observations of their own, for the visitor to cull according to their needs and interests? All you may need is a mobile, or maybe not even that.

These thoughts were sparked by a conversation with Giles Lane of Urban Tapestries, when I went to see him with David Wilcox. The Urban Tapestries project is looking at how people can associate place-based information of their own, with that place, using location-based wireless technologies. The Urban Tapestries blog carries some material about their recent public trial in north central London. We talked about how different content would be authored in different kinds of locality, which brought to mind a comment in Paul Carter's absorbing book, Repressed spaces:
“Residents don’t need signs, only foreigners do… In this sense, all signs are signs of not belonging, of coming from somewhere else. Thus, logically, a city in whose streets signs cluster like bees is designed for strangers. It is constitutionally for the other.”
And it's true, when you visit a marginalised neighbourhood, with no through-traffic cos there's no way through, and just a few incursions by, say, the utilities or delivery vans - there are few signs. The fewer signs, the fewer advertisements too of course, and so on. Hence the sharp distinctions between, say, a lively urban centre and a severed outer estate that may have begun to atrophy. But if you were picking up additional information about a place from material 'left' there for you, by others (both residents and visitors) - information that could be tailored to your interests or your gender or race or age or degree of mobility - that could alter significantly the ways in which we read neighbourhoods. It could alter the ways in which we behave, in terms of territoriality. Hopefully there will be opportunities with projects like Urban Tapestries to explore such implications from the point of view of people in low-income neighbourhoods.
Reference: Carter, Paul. 2002. Repressed spaces: the poetics of agoraphobia. London: Reaktion Books.

21 Dec 2003 08:05:58 | Space and place

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Neighbourhood encounters I'm very interested in encounters, from the few words exchanged by complete strangers at a bus-stop or between dog-walkers in the park, to coincidental meetings-up of old friends. Neighbourhood encounters are of course many and varied, from the serendipitous to the routine, but I never seem to catch them when I have a camera to hand. Which is probably just as well. But I just serendipitously encountered the rather handy website of the Image Library of the Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center which includes this nice example by photographer Dan Burden. If you're attracted to the site, I draw your attention to the usage guidelines.
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Repressed spaces In my note about residents not needing signs, I mentioned Paul Carter's book Repressed spaces, so I went back to some notes I had made when I read it. It's valuable if you're interested in understanding the meanings of public space and its uses. Carter explains agoraphobia as a 'movement inhibition' and uses a wide range of cultural and historical insights to help move us all on to a more sensitive approach to planning and design - "A different design on place-making is required to transform places of gathering into meeting places." Without taking us (in my unlearned view) too deeply into pschoanalysis, Carter nudges us into thinking about when a space is a place, how issues like orientation, proximity, gathering and lingering reveal "the characteristics of sociable space." The fear of the agora, Carter suggests, "is a critical way of inhabiting the environment, one standing at a dissident angle to the orthodoxy which identifies stability (mental, political and architectural) with stasis." OK that's probably an excessive charge against orthodoxy but it certainly helps me think about what matters where people move about in public space. The task is to apply such understanding of what Carter calls "the invisible topography of relations" to the local social context. And thinking about movement reminds me to mention the CeMoRe conference on alternative mobility futures early in January. I can't recall when I've so much looked forward to a conference - I only worry that the programme is overflowing and my appetite won't match the feast. The event is organised by John Urry (with others), who gave an insightful keynote paper on 'mobility and community' at the CDF/OII conference in October - recounted by David Wilcox here. A couple of other points about Repressed spaces. Tall buildings have poked through on this blog a few times so it's curious to note that in passing, Carter suggests that "Towers form in response to agoraphobia." The tallness, he says, "is a phobic reaction to the ground disappearing under our feet..." Well. And on the next page (213) there's a note of some personal interest to me. "Agoraphobia, it seems, can be a characteristic of speaking and writing. Smoothing over discontinuities implies a dread of gaps opening up in the chain of logic, a fear perhaps of thinking and acting freely." As a novice blogger I'm pondering this quizzically, but this is not the place for further analysis.

Kevin Harris

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