A Digression at the Midpoint

Hi [IN]City people,

Okay, I'm going to do one of those mid-program reflection things. Bear with me. I have, ahem, been known to be a little long-winded. It's just that with this little weekend break, in which I hope we are all relaxing and/or making various kinds of trouble, I've found that the reduction in the info barrage has given me a little bit of mental space to think about where we started in all of this and where we are now. And by “we” I guess I mean “I,” but really that's just an invitation to you all for discussion.

I came into this program with a few not-very-well-articulated questions about how to make a space for human culture and social formations within a planning practice. As time has gone on I've found myself trying to those pin down those questions using some of the terms in circulation in the program—planning v. urbanism, “the unplanned,” “particularity,” and now “informality.” There's no coherent thought that's been put together yet, but I've still found that when these cultural concerns have been raised in lecture, studio, and one-on-one conversation that something's been resonating with many of us.

And yet because we haven't had a lot of chances to do critical writing or formal small-group discussions—which isn't a complaint, because I'm loving what we're doing—I wanted to try to do my part in starting a conversation here to see where we could get. (And it helps that Ananya Roy's amazing lecture yesterday added a whole other layer of cultural theory to these proceedings. Yes, add me to the list of Ananya groupies.) If this is 0% interesting, go ahead and let it drop, but otherwise, I want to hear what you think.

To get my hypothesis out there, one I'm looking to disprove and/or complicate, from what I've read and seen in the planning field—particularly in urban design, but I think this could apply to other areas—is that methods for practically addressing sociocultural factors in a situation-based way seem to be under-theorized and underdeveloped, leaving a gap that really needs to be filled.

Part of the problem that this work tries to address what can't be entirely addressed: how the people in a particular area will use that area. One can approach it from an anthropological or sociological perspective and attempt to theorize on or describe how life in an area operates, and that seems to be helpful—I'd say necessary—in creating a successful project, design or otherwise, but one still can't have any kind of guarantee as to how people will use the fruits of that project. I'm not sure that's much of an insight, really, but it's something I want to keep reminding myself of.

But backtracking from the “you can't predict the future” idea and returning to the cultural/spatial analysis of a place, it still seems like there's a lot of productive analytical methods waiting to come to light. I'm thinking here of the Bosselmann lecture, which plenty of us found both insightful and problematic (“problematic” being the ultimate college word). In my studio section a lot of attention was paid to the entertaining bollard photo sequence. I and others took issue with the quasi-natural character of what he was saying, as if old men had some inborn inclination towards conversing outdoors while leaning on short concrete structures.

I'm playing this up, obviously, but the questions remain: Would the same thing happen if you stuck a bunch of bollards in any well-populated place? Wouldn't it be plausible that something in the class and gender dynamics of that particular society had manifested themselves in how public space is used, in who has a right to that space, those bollards? And if that's the case, wouldn't those of us who fancy ourselves progressives want to try to make those social relations more just? Obviously there's plenty here that goes beyond the realm of changes planning can directly effect, but I wonder about how this kind of analysis could inform a planning or design perspective. What I will say, though, is that regardless of the criticisms one could put to Bosselmann's analysis, the fact that he's gone all Holly Whyte and made that kind of micro-level social analysis a part of his practice is a step towards something exciting. And, well, he has to be on to something. Look what I saw downtown:

All of this, though, does just bring us back to the earlier concern of how one can't predict the future of how a space will be used, of who will occupy the space, of what meaning they'll find in it. As we all know, many well-intentioned planners throughout history have incorporated highly flawed assumptions about human behavior and society into their plans. But I guess that just makes me turn around again (sorry, a lot of back and forth questioning blah blah etc. here) to the need to take that kind of humble approach and couple it with careful, specific cultural analysis as well as diverse, direct community involvement.

I have more that I'm thinking about here, especially in light of the Roy lecture, but jumping ahead a bit in the interest of space, where this leads me is towards trying to find an analytical nexus somewhere between urban design, community development, and land use. Or, to step out of the categories we're working within in this program, a nexus between the aesthetics and form of a space, the activity and self-identities of the people who interact with and within that space, and the law and formal structure governing both of those forces and in turn being reshaped by them. How can a planning project incorporate the particularities of a place and yet recognize the constantly changing nature of people and place? How can zoning law and the design of buildings take into account cultural life, take into account the informality that will invariably be overlaid on top of any given societal structure? Not to compare apples to oranges here, but aren't things like jaywalking and so-called slums part of the same family of activity, illegal behavior or arrangements that become integral facts of society? This isn't to place the realities of “slum life” on the same level as jaywalking, because that's, frankly, insulting, but it does suggest that the “informality” (and I want to be aware of stretching that concept too far) that makes up a significant portion of human life needs to be a primary analytical object of designers and planners. That informality cannot be entirely planned for or controlled, and we can debate how much of an attempt should be made to exert control over it, but I'd argue that a recognition of informality as an ever-present social fact needs to be made an explicit part of a planner's thought and practice, and that a flexible space (physically and legally) needs to be made for the informality that will come to exist in pretty much any (?) pocket of the physical landscape.

Okay, so I've had my fun with blanket statements. Is all of this nonsense? What do you all think? And what have you read that addresses this stuff.

Thanks for letting me ramble,

MN

Credits: Image of man leaning on bollard in downtown Berkeley by Michael Nicoloff.