- strange space
- Sue-Ann Ware had nothing to say
- Gilbert Rochecouste was really tiredSo I'm going to blog it and would be keen for comments and more discussion. What i really wanted to say in the discussion was this:
That places for everyone are places for no-one.
Your Civic Beauty: Piazzas, Plazas and Placemaking for the masses
Why do we and, why have we always gathered in particular sites?
Can these sites be determine artificially or do we en masse decide where we wish to meet?
Bottom of Form
“For the masses”
I’ve always had a deep ideological problem with this term, it assumes a type of feeding process to a starving swarm of beings who can’t fend for themselves, because they have become too massive, too amorphous and abstract to care about their own selves.
I’m suspicious because it sounds like a blame game, a virtual projection of what’s happening on the ground.
Why gathering here?
When I first think of gathering in a particular site, I think of Louis Mumford’s famous duo of city seeding. Container and Magnet. 1961. We gathered IN this place to make this city because it could hold us, it was the container to store our produce and supplies, but also our families and memories. I think of the medieval walled city as a holding pen, inside is safe, outside is not. Yes; this is a romanticised idea of home that is politically problematic, but it serves as a good metaphor. The other is the Magnet. We gathered AT this place out of habit and attraction. It had good sunlight, fresh water, opportunity for survival and exchange, we made pilgrimages to the same place each year to commemorate or communicate. A simple example could be the shrine. Here we came to meditate, to think, to make an offering. I think these metaphors for gathering are useful. We still, I see, gather IN and AT places.
This ‘place’ stuff is something deeply psychological or spiritual. Territory is fundamentally part of who we are, it makes and is made by our identity. In design theory there has been a lot of talk about nomads and monads, but in the end of the day there is a certain identification that occurs where it be a spot or a route, a world is made specific, it is socialised and personalised, it is marked. From a philosophical standpoint this explains our fascination with the concept, but doesn’t quite cut it as an everyday reason.
OK, close your eyes....
Think of one of your favourite places or a particular moment in your life. It can be everyday.
My thesis is that most of you probably thought of a location in which had a personal story or stories. I think it is highly likely that placemaking in many ways is about making stories. It would seem to me that if you want a place to be more meaningful, you have to increase the opportunity for stories to be made there. I think that we like having things we can identify with around us, and as such we go to, and (go back to) places in which we have (and can make) stories IN and AT.
We are slugs, creatures that leave a trace in the world, and the more creative (enterprising) amongst us get others to pay us to do it! We make our mark in the world to identify it with us and to identify ourselves in it. Socio-spatial communion. For me this is a missing depth to be explored in the concept of ‘community’.
Perhaps under this concept of placemaking – the communion of the spatial and the social – we could see the piazza – plaza as a social mark writ large. As gathering places for many people, they are bulwarks against a tide of loss of space to leave a mark, and their size conjures a masse of empowerment that could resist the scale of systematisation and synthesis that is occurring in our mega cities. Big plazas and piazzas are bulwarks for democracy. They can contain and attract both meaningful creation, and resistance.
I think Melbourne needs more meaningful squares IN the city, especially AT the places that matter.
Planning (especially in Melbourne) has been fraught for over a decade. Residents now have neither the possibility nor inclination to meaningfully leave a mark, to participate in how the city is made. Public consultation today is relegated to objections and or advertising - placation. The American Planning Association whose catch cry is currently “making great communities happen” is a strong advocate of public participation. A key principle of a vital democracy is ‘meaningful’ participation.
Indeed, over time I see a radical disempowerment of public participation in making public space has occurred in Melbourne.
Can these sites be determined (designed) artificially?
“Docklands” anyone?
The common retort is ‘it still needs time’, but many sense that something fundamentally went awry that we are still struggling to ‘fix’ it.
Yes; I think they can, but the process in which these sites are determined needs to be fundamentally open to individuals and communities to leave a traces. If it is to be a place - a location that is meaningful - then people need to be involved in the making of stories there.
Monuments and icons do this to some extent as they imbue collective meaning or leave interpretation for it in abstraction, but I don’t think we need a city of spikey faceted things or just high level political or popular memories. What about the personal and everyday? What about the little people. What about ‘me’, I and ‘us’?
The work of Gilbert locally is a good example of the desire that still exists for places that mean something to people to be created. Developers know it. Big architects know it. Council knows it. Whether or not they are addressing a capability that exists on the ground, I’d prefer to leave that to our discussion.
If our cities are just made up of the big voices, and always others’ say, then we will one by one feel alienated by it.
---There were some good questions around places:
- Role of the artist?
- Private space / University as space of possibility?
- Comfort?
- Design intention - and Greece just claim to placesBut my sense is that the conversation didn't get much depth of interaction.AND like this, i think that it is endemic of what the problem is with placemaking today, we don't feel comfortable with any deep interaction.
Contention and argument are not welcome
and hence we have only one way of making places - the neutral, comfortable, place for everyone way - These are places that mean nothing, and hence, become meaningless.
