"People tend to sit where there are places to sit" . Or do they?

I've been watching this documentary by William H Whyte called The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. There was a book too.



I'm revelling in seeing New York in the late 70s. Not the New York of that time seen in films by Scorsese, for instance, or Cassavetes, but the quotidian city, the metropolis of the everyday. In the first ten minutes alone, there are tens of wonderful little moments: the child in the playground hacking up a crate on his own, the lovers dotted around the Seagrams plaza, the business-men saying goodbye to each other. Each of these little urban vignettes are so wonderfully alive!



It reminded me of something John Coyle said about "phantom rides", films made in the very first years of the twentieth century by placing cameras on the front of trams or on carts and just moving through the city. For the audiences at the time, it made them think of the space of the city in new ways, they'd never seen their daily routes depicted in this separate way: they'd never seen them through someone else's eyes before. John said that watching them now, one hundred years later, you are captivated by these people, these ordinary people. They are doing the same things (roughly) that we do; going about their business, going to lunch, to work, to school; their gestures are the same, they wave, they smile; you feel a real connection to them somehow. And then you remember that they're all dead, and it's the most beautiful thing in the world.



For the Modern Everyday course that I'm taking this spring, a key text is Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life. That book is famous for de Certeau's conception of tactics and strategies in the urban environment. Simply put, a strategy is the means by which institutional power (government, business, planning departments, transport systems) control an environment. By constructing obstacles to movement, they funnel human activity into certain routes. Or at least they attempt to. Tactics are used by individuals to re-humanise these spaces, to create mini acts of resistance to the dominance of what in the end is capital; each new route is one of these acts. Think of those parts of grass that have become mud because they have been trodden down by so many people taking shortcuts over them. Those patches of mud are tactics made manifest.



In the film (in part 2), Whyte talks about the relationship between planning and use. But what is the characteristic of the relationship between the plan, the intended use, and its actual use? Who controls what? Whyte is making suggestions for planners based on making the places more friendly to pedestrians. But is that what the businesses that own these plazas want? Are the activities that this film records in fact instances of individuals using tactics to fight the strategies of business and capital?



Are planners planning for people to sit, or are the people sitting breaking the intentions of the plans, are they rebellious? Whyte recommends that places should have "sittable space" but then shows us how "management" obstruct potential seating spots by putting stones, ruts, ledges, spikes, plants or slants in the way. Later on, in part 3, Whyte shows us the (infamous, for students of postmodernity) Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, and the wall it turns to the street. "Have you ever seen a more brutal rejection of the street?" he says, showing us a plain white-brick wall at an impossibly inhuman scale, rising hundreds of feet up from the street.



The tensions brought out by de Certeau's championing of little acts of resistance and Frederic Jameson's description of the Bonaventure as "postmodern hyperspace" are the same ones developing in my, Ben and Tom's talk in the Modern Everyday class: the potential for radical resistance to capital and the form that would take. Is de Certeau to individualistic? His tactics can be used by anyone but there's no sense of collective action. Does the legacy of postmodernity (I don't think we're postmodern anymore) mean that capital can assimilate these little tactics and that collective action is the only challenge to it?

Wayne Hemingway @ Bristol Festival of Ideas

On Tuesday at the Arnolfini in Bristol, Wayne Hemingway - fashion designer, urban planner - gave a talk on the problems of and possible solutions to housing problems in Britain.

Accompanied by slides projected onto the cinema screen behind him, Hemingway started with an article he wrote for the Independent about housing developments, those awful collections of identical houses built by Barratts, Persimmon and Wimpy. "No-one aspires to these houses," Hemingway told us, "why not?" Apparently, just a 24% of people consider buying a newly built house when they are looking for a home. His first thought was that it must be bad design, that people like old houses for their soul, their lived-in-ness. "But it can't just be that?"

It turns out it pretty much is "just that". But "just that" happens to be about far more than design - it's about quality of life, which encompasses pretty much everything and is what actual people living in actual houses talk about. Later in the talk, Hemingway noted with satisfaction that in a survey of people that lived in his housing developments, architecture as a reason for contentment was sixth, communal barbeques first.

In a previous National Housing Audit the amount of homes that were considered poor or mediocre was 80% and that 29% shouldn't have even been giving planning permission. Why was this? Showing pictures of a housing development on the outskirts of Swindon that looked more like a prison than a set of homes (he even added a high fence just to complete the allusion), Hemingway ran through the "buy to let" fad that characterised the housing boom of the early 2000s. Houses were considered money-makers, ready-made earners. You didn't have to put any work in to fixing it up, you can pack in your job, "have the gap year you never had" while the rent pays for the mortgage. Of course this was incredibly short-sighted. Hemingway used mortgage-providers offers to his kids as an example of predatory mortgage practices - young first-time buyers were given 125%, sometimes even 150% mortgages!

These housing developments, he said, and the systems in which they were bought and sold, will inevitably turn into the slums of the future. Residents have no control over their environment - they can't change anything, can't add or take away elements they like or don't like, the windows are too small, there are no trees, no greenery, no communal areas. Each family is locked up in an area too small for them and not let out. Obviously this will have psychological effects, and so it's no surprise that kids do badly in school and are disruptive, that people binge drink, that drug and alcohol consumption is high. They are trapped and lash out.

The next slide was of a house in a township in South Africa. A tall, almost mock-Tudor house, patched together with corregated iron and wood, sheets of metal. "This speaks to me of possibility," Hemingway said, switching between the Swindon prison and the township. "I began thinking, what would I want, this or this? Who's been to South Africa?" A few hands went up, opinions canvassed. People of the townships looked happy, opinion said, there was a semblance of community, people were active, with a bit of entrepreneurship there was a potential for change. This reminded me of a recent article on iMomus, in which Nick Currie looked to the improvised houses in the "Baseco compound, a shanty camp located at a shipyard on the Pasig River, near Manila's port".

Europe, particularly Scandinavia, has far less problems. Hemingway showed slides of developments in Malmo and Copenhagen to illustrate a rule that seems absent in British town planning: that you build up a community before building any houses. The Ijberg development in Amsterdam, for instance, created a beach first, and then encouraged young people to open up shops and bars along its length, creating a vibrant community ten minutes from the centre of the city. Only then did they build houses. And of course the houses weren't the identikit ones you see across Britain, each one was different.

Part of the problem is local councils. Even the best ones are in no position to understand what people actually want. In Britain, an elected council member will have to give up 2 or more days a week for very little pay. "What 30 year-old can afford to do that?" asked Hemingway. In Morecombe, the youngest member of the council is 68. She's great, according to Hemingway, but when the majority of councils are made up of people of retirement age, no-one acts as the voice of the families and young first-time-buyers that move into the developments.
In Europe, councils are made up of people aged 18 to 78. That means that housing projects are far more in touch with residents' needs. Developments are undertaken not through design competitions in which one developer is given complete control over the building of 1000 homes, but in which 15 or more housing companies build separate parts and in which designers, urban planners, community groups and residents work together to create places in which people can live happily.

And that's what it's all about really. If there was a theme that ran through the talk, it was that it's not about architecture but place, it's about making places not units. Britain continually comes low or bottom of quality of life surveys, from the Monocle Global Quality of Life Survey to Unicef's studies of child welfare. That is because British house-building is founded on the monetary value of the houses, whereas in Europe the value is in quality of life.

Steve Roden @ Postopolis

Fascinating article by Dan Hill on his City of Sound blog about a talk by sound artist Steve Roden at the recent Postopolis event in Los Angeles.