Qualifying Urban Space
André Loeckx and
Kelly Shannon
Post Graduate
Centre Human Settlements,
URBAN TRIALOGUES: Visions,
Projects, Co-productions. Localising Agenda 21
This paper is a
chapter of the book URBAN
TRIALOGUES: Visions, Projects, Co-productions – Localising Agenda 21 (to be
published in October 2004). The book is a critical reflection on the process
and outputs of a multilateral programme, Localising
Agenda 21 (LA21) initiated in 1994 by the UN-HABITAT, a Belgian Consortium coordinated
by K.U. Leuven’s Post Graduate Centre Human Settlements (PGCHS), the Belgian
Development Cooperation, and a host of local actors, including the
municipalities of the programme’s partner cities of Nakuru (Kenya), Essaouira
(Morocco), Vinh (Vietnam), and Bayamo (Cuba). Oscillating between theory and
practice, the book attempts to make use of the benefit of insight from the
process. These are simultaneously embedded in the global debate on sustainable
urban development and the realities of the four urban contexts.
The title of the book ‘Urban Trialogues’
can be interpreted in several ways, all of which refer to the discursive
interaction of separate concerns for development simultaneously engaged in a
quest for another urban future. These trialogues do not speak in emptiness, but
resonate within particular contexts, the four loci of the Localising of Agenda 21. The book deals with trialogues
between three dimensions of urban planning and development: visions, actions
and projects, and co-productions. Inspired by ‘Strategic Structure Planning,’
this approach has been adapted to the specific aims and means of the Localising
Agenda 21 (LA21) process in the four cities.
Elaborating, discussing, testing and
modifying visions for the future of each of the cities concerned is an
important aspect of this process. Visions are not vague utopias, but are based
on a critical awareness, the research and diagnosis of its problems and
potentials, and on a broad-based debate with urban actors. Visions summarize
the desired future of a city into appealing images and strong expressions
reflecting the natural setting, the built urban heritage and spatial reality,
the unique cultural and social specificity of each city. Such visions are then
elaborated and tested with proposed actions and projects of various types and
size. Small-scale actions can mobilise actors, render processes visible and
test forms of cooperation. Large scale projects translate visions into urban
interventions which a structural impact. Visions and projects require intensive
co-production involving various actors. Thus, practices of exclusiveness and
sectorial separation among different administrations, professional disciplines
and social organisations are replaced by powerful interaction and shared responsibilities
as a real engine for urban development.
Besides the interaction between the above
three planning tracks, the title also refers to two other important trialogues.
The LA21 approach stimulated discussions between local government, civil society
and the private sector – trialogues that represent the essence of the good
governance ‘triangle’. Elaborating visions, developing projects and organising
co-production is an exploration and testing of the potentials of good urban
governance.
Finally, the LA21 process supports another
remarkable trialogue: the interaction between a local urban team/local actors
embedded and engaged in each city’s daily struggle, the UN-HABITAT with its
international concern for world-wide development, and the Belgian Consortium of
scholars and professionals from planning and urban design disciplines. This
third trialogue, a unique combination of local and international experience,
creates a resonance between the immediate needs and broad development
perspectives. These trialogues have been developed as a vehicle to localise
Agenda 21 in four cities.
The book’s collection of essays targets a
varied audience including decision-makers, community developers, scholars,
designers, students and interested individuals. It not only offers the way
forward on the implementation of the Agenda 21 programme at the local level,
but perhaps most importantly it offers a critical reflection on the
relationship between sustainable visions for possible futures and strategic
urban projects, both elaborated through a co-productive process. Case studies
form the core of this book. Documented as independent chapters, each includes
an overview of the layered narratives of urban history, the contemporary
contestation of territories, the visions and strategic projects co-produced
during the LA21 process. These are further complemented by a series of
cross-reading essays that conceptualise and develop particular themes with
reference to the case study cities. Throughout the various contributions, the term
‘localising’ has been broadened to stress the importance of the ‘locus’ – urban
space and civic awareness as a frame and a resource for development. This
stance not only provides a new drive for planning and urbanism, but also adds a
crucial chapter to the Agenda 21.
A
Globalizing World
The LA21 project in
the four cities has sought not only to build local capacity in urban design and
management, but also to critically contribute to the broader knowledge base of
urbanism. It has attempted to conceptually marry a host of discourses that are
often not partners in the urban debate – including contemporary urban theory,
critical development theory and the agendas and priorities of various
governmental and non-governmental organizations. Work in the cities with local
partners was augmented by theoretical reflection – throughout the process was a
continual weaving back-and-forth between realities and rhetorics, an
oscillation between cases and abstract concepts, between visions and projects.
The cities, practices and fieldwork supported tendencies and paradigmatic
frames in the larger field of urbanism.
Contemporary discourse of the built
environment is awash with ‘globalization’ and its far-reaching effects. In the
contemporary dot.com era of space and time decentralization, there reside
well-founded fears that the late modern world is being irrevocably ‘flattened
out’ by the abstract processes of distribution, tourism and information. The
global reorganization of capitalism has brought with it hyper-mobile economic,
spatial and cultural change and produced new urban spatio-temporal experiences.
In the early 1980s, command points of the organization of the world’s economy
were located in cities such as
‘Localising’
Localising Agenda 21. From the onset, the
LA21 project sought to redefine the term ‘localising’ and clarify its potential
spatial implications. Since the 1992 Rio Summit, the term localising has been (ab)used
in order to pay lip-service to all the politically correct mantras of the
moment. The Rio Declaration and Agenda 21, the 800-page ‘bible of sustainable
development,’ recognized that current urban development, coupled with scarcity
of resources, often accelerates environmental degradation – in turn, leading to
loss of quality of urban living conditions, especially for the urban poor.
Chapter 28 of Agenda 21 shifted a large part of the communal goal and global
problems to local governments – in recognition of the fact that many of the
problems and solutions regarding sustainable development reside in local
activities and local political will.
Yet, the spatial implications of the
‘local’ have largely been left-out of the development discourse. If local
scarcity of resources is seen as a common reality, local space is not
identified as a resource in itself, except in its most basic form – as
available land. Nonetheless, in related fields, such as social and urban
geography, the local is viewed as the inexorable site of the production of
cultural meanings and localizing can lead to the creation of social movements
of reaction (Harvey, 1998) or resistance (Castells, 1989). Geography views
sites as locations where things happen, but not as agents that make things happen.
However, cities need be understood as a
dynamic crossroads of local, national and transnational place-making processes.
National and transnational practices are constituted by their interrelations
with and groundedenss within particular localities, at particular moments in
time. This stance sounds plausible, but refers to a complex and unstable
reality since the co-presence and intersection of transnational and local
processes results in places having multiple and conflicting identities; spaces
– and exceptionally urban spaces – are formed by contestation, difference and
social negotiation among differently situated (and often antagonistic) urban
actors, some of whose networks are locally bound and others who span regions (Smith,
2001). Even in modest urban settings, global/localizing processes intertwine
histories and overlap territories that cut across landscapes and produce
disorderly, unexpected and irretrievably contingent urban contexts. Maybe the
accumulative and layered, residual nature of urban space – agglomerating
histories, accidents, successes, failures, coherences and fragmentations –
explains it s absence in development discourses that prefer good sounding,
politically correct and mobilising paradigms.
The global/local duality is a false
dichotomy whereas all global impositions are unavoidably culturally coded by
the politics and realities of everyday life. The deeper nature of cities, revealed
through inhabitants’ use, is one where aggressive global patterns – ever more
aggressive – co-exist with cultural strata. Although global capital will no
doubt continue to expand and tighten its grip on the economy, the world is not
becoming culturally homogenized (Appadurai, 1996). In some contexts, localism
remains the means of survival while in others regional specificity and
multiplicity if local contexts continuously consolidate their role and confirm
that the global/local bi-polarity is not simply an opposition but component
parts of a single process in the stabilization of a new era.
Within the LA21 project, localizing has not
been interpreted as the one-way translation of ‘universal principles’ into
local conditions, but, on the contrary, the importance on the role of ‘the
locus’ – the inhabited space – has been stressed as an inherent component, a critical
instance, a modifying agent, within the paradigm of sustainable development.
The locus need not be interpreted in the conservative sense with its limited
sense of tradition and a never changing reality which tends to advocate the
mere protection the existing ‘genius loci.’ On the contrary, it need be viewed
more in Elia Zenghelis’ contemporary interpretation of uncovering and
strengthening existing logics of reality and finding the capacity of sites in a
critical process that distinguishes junk for resource, misery from
scarcity/austerity and narrow-mindedness from perspective (Zenghelis, 1993).
The locus is not a romanticized idea; contrary, it is a place full of richness,
poverty and contestation.
‘Sustainability’
The most oft quoted
definition of sustainable development is that of the so-called Brudtland
Commission (World Commission on Environment and Development) – formed in 1983
and which made its report, ‘Our Common Future,’ in 1988. It states, “Humanity
has the ability to make development sustainable – to ensure that it meets the
needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to
meet its own needs. The concept of sustainable development does imply limits –
not absolute limits but limitations imposed by the present state of technology
and social organization on environmental resources and by the ability of the
biosphere to absorb the effects of human activities. But technology and social
organization can both be managed and improved to make way for a new era of
economic growth. The Commission believes that widespread poverty is no longer
inevitable. Poverty is not only an evil in itself, but sustainable development
requires meeting the basic needs of all and extending to all the opportunity to
fulfil their aspirations for a better life. A world in which poverty is endemic
will always be prone to ecological and other catastrophes” (Brundtland, 1987:8).
However, the definition has been criticized by many for its deliberate
ambiguity of language and lack of conceptual clarity. Gilbert Rist has gone so
far as to say that it is mere ‘diplomacy by terminology’ (Rist, 1997:186).
Sustainability has entered practice through legislation more than by way of
concrete conceptual grounding.
The 1996 Habitat II Conference in
However, in most UN and development
literature, the sustainability of urban space is primarily addressed by way of
two biases. One is an emphasis upon the concept of land itself as a neutral entity – an unqualified surface to build
upon, whose qualities have been appropriated in socially disproportionate
shares – that needs to be redistributed (as a vital minimal provision for the
poor). The other is an overtly environmental
inclination (whereby universal ecological processes and concerns drive the
essential principles of future territorial evolution). In campaigns that stress
land redistribution, the object of debate is primarily idle land; the existing
(occupied and speculative) land market is rarely criticized and not part of a
discourse that avoids open conflicts with the free market economy. Meanwhile,
the environmental bias predominately focuses on the reduction of pollution and clean-up
of brownfield sites. In both biases, the qualified, man-made land and landscape
(embracing built and unbuilt territories) is largely excluded as an active
agent of sustainable spatial quality and environmental soundedness. The
development discourse finally discovered the link of development and the
environment but has yet to realize the potential of space and its management as
a primary resource regarding sustainability. As well, the monitoring/evaluation
of cities by the UN and other development agencies does not penetrate deeply
into the strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and challenges of existing
spatial structures. Instead, they tend to primarily advocate the environmental,
social and governance aspects of development. To a large extent, spatial issues
are sidelined and left to be mere consequences of more pressing concerns.
Logically speaking, however, sustainability needs to constantly address spatial
issues of location, access, density, carrying capacity and ecological
footprints. The neglection of the spatial dimension of urban development
(whereby ‘space’ stands for the urban built environment, man-made landscape and
built patrimony) entails the loss of an extremely valuable and not easily
renewable resource, spoiled by lack of awareness.
Despite the UN-HABITAT Agenda’s stated
focus on sustainable urban form and design, LA21 in the four cities is one of
the few campaigns that explicitly
address spatial issues. In its interpretation of the enigmatic term
sustainability, the LA21 project has stressed the capacity to sustain future development (as opposed
to the Brundtland’s definition of the capacity to sustain what has been
realized) and the capacity to prepare
opportunities for future generations (as opposed to the Brundtland’s
definition to preserve opportunities for future generations). More fundamental,
however, is LA21’s qualification of space.
Space is never neutral, but complex in its structuring and layering natural and
man-made settings, both historical narratives and contemporary contestory
aspects. In addition to the inherent ‘locus’ of landscape and topographical
space, the urban space of cities consists of complex, multi-layered spatial
translations of different eras and ideologies, an accumulation of patrimony.
The urban fabric consists of places of contrast and contradictions where
multiple users and interests strive to act in the city and pursue their
particular interests. In the contemporary urban sphere, mega- and
minor-players, multi-nations, non-governmental organizations and citizens all
compete on the same playing field (albeit with different power). It is the task
and power of design to unravel, clarify and negotiate contradictions of the
overly complex conditions of the contemporary urban realm.
In such a qualified space, sustainability
obviously means something other than sustaining a better status quo, polishing
the sharp edges of inequality, equally redistributing and cleaning land – but
sustaining urbanity and structuring growth. Sustainability involves actions
that not only harm the next generation, but also ones that actively create new
urban dynamics. It must work relate to appropriate ‘lifetimes’ of interventions
– from the ephemeral to the most durable – in the built and non-built
environment. It, obviously, needs to address the rational use of resources. The
existing spatial structure of both man-made and natural environments is such
resources that need first to be recognized as invaluable qualities and
subsequently protected and strengthened. Urban coherence can be won or lost
through the structuring of the built and unbuilt environment. Resources can
easily be spoiled and opportunities of adding value can be lost by not
qualifying space by disrupting coherence, inappropriate building,
misunderstanding location, hindering access, neglecting diversity, mistaking
orientation, not taking advantage of proximity, etc. For example, the seafront
of Essaouira is an incredible resource – for both the identity of the city as
well as the growing tourist industry. However, the coast is in danger of
becoming a heterotopia of gated entities, as prime sites are developed in a
piecemeal and immediate fashion by private investors who ignore the necessary
complementarity between the private domain and the public realm. During the
LA21 process, a series of fundamental agreements were brought into the debate
to attempt to maintain the spatial coherence of the seafront promenade and
contribute to the public sphere of the city. The cultural and societal costs of
restoring damage caused by inappropriate construction on valuable fabrics and
unique landscape reserves are irrecoverable; post-factum costs are exuberant.
Sustainability can thus not be
disassociated from the economic, social, environmental or spatial. Indeed, the LA21 programme has worked with all four
criteria in order to deem both visions and urban projects as strategic and
therefore sustainable. From the economic imperative, sustainability relates to
creating new opportunities for income generation – including the interaction
between formal and informal economies, especially in regards to the use of
resources and spatial opportunities afforded. The social perspective
fundamentally aims to enlargen and reinforce the public realm and guide
development to follow existing logics and daily-use tendencies; it implicitly
targets the working and living conditions of the urban poor. The environmental
aspect seeks to achieve a balance between the consumptive and productive use of
space and to improve the balance between the man-made and the natural
environment. The spatial configurations of visions and strategic urban projects
in Essaouira, Nakuru and Vinh are translations of these economic, social and
environmental components which simultaneously clarify and strengthen the
basic structure of the city.
For example, the
surroundings of the medina wall in
Essaouira, throughout its urban history, created a continuous chain of
differently programmed spaces – ranging from playing fields, to ceremonial
spaces, to informal markets, to formal spaces and shopping facades – and
thereby addressed social and economic aspects. So, the strategic project of the
surroundings first of all conceived of the area as a cohesive, public open
space – clarifying the structure of the compact city and marking a transition
zone to the lotissements. As a space of decompression,
whereby space is not merely consumed and over-built, the project for the
surroundings of the medina wall also
addressed a serious environmental concern. The Nakuru bus park area project proposed
to reorganize open spaces and infrastructure, stressing the flexibility of the
use of space (for formal and informal economic activities), creation of new
public space (formally linking the railway station and matatu park), and
decongesting a polluted node in the city (improving the environmental
ambiance). In Vinh, a proposal for the reorganization of the market not only tried
to change the perception and use of the areas buildings and open spaces, but
also that of the
Contested Territories and
Negotiation
Throughout history, built space has been as
much a site of contestation as of negotiation and mediation. From stone walls
and fences demarcating agricultural property, to property lines and building
envelopes in urban contexts, to territorial claims of waterways, space has
remained representative of real/virtual power and money and therefore an object
of contestation. Contested territories are numerous and promise to increase as
economies become more integrated into the global system. The real estate mantra
of ‘location, location, location’ accentuates the importance of financial
qualifications of space and often undermines the societal and cultural value of
territories. The city and its immediate periphery remain a battleground of
property rights and structures. Protection and expansion of the public realm is
often relinquished due to short-term economic and/or political ambitions. At
the same time, the history of urban morphologies and building types is full of
examples of mediating spaces. Fabrics mediate between the public and the
private. Suburbs mediate between the city centre and the countryside. Public
space mediates between particular interests and the common benefit.
The LA21 process has identified the
contested territories in the case study cities and stressed that these very
sites are ideal vehicles for negotiation – between the private investment and
the public realm, between the international donor community and local
governments, between global pressures and civil society. Space has the
advantage that is crosses multiple sectors and disciplines (inclusive of
architecture, landscape and urbanism) and therefore remains the most suitable
‘ground’ for negotiation. The LA21 project has borrowed from Hilde Heynen and
Loeckx (Heynen and Loeckx, 1998) the identification of built space as embodying
three different roles – all of which are essential to understand its capacity
as a vehicle for negotiation. First is space as a receptacle – a medium that represents and manifests social and
cultural values and changes. Second is space as an instrument –a spatial tool for the regulation of behaviour and
creation of new territorial and as an instigator of cultural change. Finally is
space as a stage – likened to the
theatrical interpretation as a place that is simultaneously active and passive,
active in the sense that physical forms condition the possibilities of spatial
behaviour and passive in that it is a static background for the play of
everyday life and its inherent dynamics.
Through the initiatives of LA21, contested
territories have provided the physical sites to reinterpret space as
receptacle, instrument and stage. Vision and strategic projects and actions
come from the turning of contestation into a debate. At the same time, an
underlying goal was to actively promote the enlargement of a legitimate and
spatially materialized public realm and to strengthen existing (man-made and
natural) spatial structures. For example, in Nakuru, negotiation between the
city and World Wildlife Fund (who manages the Lake/Nature Park) occurred for
the first time over discussion of the strategic urban project of the park edge.
LA21’s proposed restructuring of the park-to-city interface and the specific
redesign of the placement of the fence between the two was simultaneously able
to expand the city’s social space and protect the park from damage to its
fragile ecology. The proposed transitional space between urbanity and nature – the
linear urban park – would turn the park into a frontyard of the city (thus
discouraging its use as a backyard garbage dump) and provided a host of
recreational and social spaces for the city’s residents. In Essaouira,
negotiations LA 21 partners and ERAC, the semi-public agency Etablissement Régional d’Aménagement et de
Construction, resulted in an strategic urban project for a key area of the
medina surroundings, Bab Doukkala.
ERAC had originally intended to claim the open space site as an area for
housing. However, following the development of the city’s visions, the site was
reconfigured to at the same time to a vibrant open, public space activated by
small shops in an arcade, a formal frontage towards the medina wall and housing
(lifted above the ground-floor shops).
‘Designerly’ Research
Trilogues
Finally, it must be stressed that the
requalification of space requires new design tools in order to maximize its
potential. Through the LA21 project, a series of operative methods to
understand existing spatial structures of contexts and to eventually
strategically and intervene have been developed. It has built upon the vast
knowledge base in descriptive urbanism to effectively describe reality –
employing methods such as reading the city as a complex text, with multiple,
layered narratives; graphically analyzing cities to discover the syntax and
vocabulary of the urban text; creating morphological syntheses of cities (as
did Bruno Fortier and Christian Devillers); establishing taxonomies of urban
fabrics and naming new urban patters (as does William Jan Neutelings and
Stefano Boeri) and understanding the logics and ecologies of landscapes (as do
R.T. Foreman and Henri Bava).
‘Designerly’ research is understood not as
problem-solving, but as questioning – reformulating problems and forming
insights. Conceptual design is equated with provisional synthesis of several
factors and at multiple scales; it is also able to overcome antitheses that are
insolvable in theory. The staging of scenarios differs from that of making
forecasts and precise testing of desirable situations for which certainties are
required. Design has come into the LA21 process in a three-fold manner. First,
it has read spaces from above (the reading of eco-systems, watersheds,
geographical/topographical formations, etc.) and below (the understanding of
space form a haptic and experienced sense). Second, design is a tool for
negotiation (on the basis of sites of contestation as described above), whereby
specific solutions on strategic sites are discussed; here design has the luxury
of being both very concrete and yet open for alternatives and modifications.
Third, design offers a synthesizing frame for pacts and agreements. Unlike mere ‘talk,’ the implicit power of
images mark them uniquely placed to convince various stakeholders.
The ‘three track’ approach of LA21 in
Essaouira, Nakuru and Vinh has shuttled between ‘designerly’ investigation,
negotiation and framing of agreements in the pursuit of sustainability through
a critical interplay of visions and strategic urban projects and actions. In
many other projects, negotiation and communication occur through verbal
exchanges and agreements. In LA21, the more typical binary way of thinking
(exemplified by the verbal process) was complemented by a spatial way of
thinking (embodied in the design process) – the latter which provides room for
change and difference. As well, within a coherent frame, the design process
itself often revealed visions and possible interpretations of the future
development of territories that would have otherwise gone undiscovered. For
example, in Vinh the vision of the green city which works as a sponge could
only be deduced through the visual recognition of arcing land masses or islands
of higher land in the low flood plain. The reading of the existing landscape
from ‘above’ (from aerial photographs) was then nuanced in possible scenarios
of interlocking urban parks by fieldwork experience from ‘below.’
In conclusion, the
LA21 process of vision-building, strategic and structural planning and the
formulation of strategic urban projects stems from an understanding of the
locus – the existing logics of cities and their landscapes (including its
historical layers and ad-hoc daily appropriations). The shift away from
master-planning is grounded in the ‘strategic’ – that which can be successfully
planned and evolve through a clear set of policies – and the ‘structural’ –
that which strengthens the coherence of existing urban morphology, acts as a
support for future urban development, provides the ‘missing link’ or serves as
a trigger to spatial development and/or generates complementarity or synergy
between separated or fragmented actions or actors. Strategic and structural
planning reduces the overall scope what can be planned while, at the same time,
requires more precise planning and interventions. Fundamental to this type of
planning is the differentiation of time frames – from immediate actions to
long-term perspectives, from ephemeral to lasting spatial interventions. The
process constantly weaves back-and-forth between the abstract and the concrete,
as well as between various scale levels. The different scales and levels of
interventions must also be sustainable in relation to appropriate scales and
levels of decision making. Strategic and structural planning demands
‘designerly’ investigation, negotiation and the framing of agreements with
perpetual critical testing and revising.
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