horizon, at the periphery, at the border, differences stand out since one is aware one is crossing out of one territory into another.
Incomplete Form
This discussion of walls and borders leads logically to a second systemic characteristic of the open city: incomplete form. Incompleteness may seem the enemy of structure, but this is not the case. The designer needs to create physical forms of a particular sort that are ‘incomplete’ in a distinctive way.
When we design a street, for instance, so that buildings are set back from a street wall, the space left open in front is not truly public space; instead, the building has been withdrawn from the street. We know the practical consequences – people walking on a street tend to avoid these recessed spaces. It’s better planning if the building is brought forward, into an interplay with other buildings; though the building will become part of the urban fabric, some of its volumetric elements will now be incompletely disclosed. There is an incompleteness in the perception of the object.
Incompleteness of form extends to the very context of buildings themselves. In classical Rome, Hadrian’s Pantheon coexisted with the less distinguished buildings which surrounded it in the urban fabric, though Hadrian’s architects conceived the Pantheon as a self-referential object. We find the same coexistence in many other architectural monuments: St. Paul’s in London, the Rockefeller Center in New York, the Institut du monde arabe in Paris – all great works of architecture which stimulate building around them. It’s that stimulation, rather than the fact that the surrounding buildings are of lesser quality, which counts in urban terms: the existence of one building is sited in such a way that it encourages the growth of other development around it. And now the buildings acquire their specifically urban value by their relationship to each other – they become, in time, incomplete forms if considered alone, by themselves.
Incomplete form is most of all a kind of creative credo. In the plastic arts it is conveyed in sculpture purposely left unfinished; in poetry it is conveyed in, to use Wallace Steven’s phrase, the ‘engineering of the fragment’. Architect Peter Eisenman has sought to evoke something of the same credo in the term ‘light architecture’, meaning an architecture planned so that it can be added to or, more importantly, revised internally over time as the needs of habitation change.
This credo opposes the simple replacement of form which characterises the Brittle City, but it is a demanding opposition – a tension seen, for instance, when we try to convert office blocks to residential use.
Nonlinear Narratives
Cities do not build linearly over time: their shapes twist and turn as historical events alter the ways people live in them. But all too often, the ville is planned as though particular projects can be developed in a sequential fashion, moving from conception to completion with a minimum of alteration along the way. It’s certainly necessary to reduce costs for material and labour by calculations made at the start, and you cannot build an airport or a sewage system by trial and error. But these are vast constructions. At the level of the house, the school, the office or the store, smaller scale allows for the structures to shift in form as uses or users change.
Incomplete forms enable this alteration to occur physically. Massed together in an assemblage, these incomplete forms allow nonlinear development of the cité to occur. For example, in London, this massing of mutable buildings occurred in the Spitalfields neighbourhood in the East End, as weaving and weavers brought to London by French Huguenots in the seventeenth century gave way to tailoring and Jewish tailors, who moved from Eastern Europe to London in the late nineteenth century; in the early twentieth, construction workers from the West Indies began to arrive and in the mid-twentieth, it was Bangladeshi and Indian small businessmen. The assemblage of flexible building forms allowed the different groups to make their way in the same space. Until the gentrification of Spitalfields drove out most of these immigrants, they contrived informal ways of coexisting which matched the adaptive uses of the physical forms.
No one planned this history; Spitalfields never put out a sign saying ‘immigrants are welcome here’. Nonetheless, planners can learn from such spontaneous growth. In our small projects, we can work reflexively. That means focusing on the stages in which a particular project unfolds. Specifically, we must try to understand what elements should happen first, and the consequences of this initial move. Rather than a lockstep march toward achieving a single end, we should look at the different and conflicting possibilities which each stage of the design process might entail. Keeping these possibilities intact, leaving conflictual elements in play, opens up the design system.
If a novelist were to announce at the beginning of a story ‘here’s what will happen’ – what the characters will become and what the story means – we would immediately close the book. All good narrative has the property of exploring the unforeseen, of discovery; the novelist’s art is to shape the process of that exploration. Likewise with the urban designer’s art.
In sum, we can define an open system as one in which growth admits conflict and dissonance. This definition is at the heart of Darwin’s understanding of evolution; rather than the survival of the fittest (or the most beautiful), he emphasised the process of growth as a continual struggle between equilibrium and disequilibrium; an environment rigid in form, static in programme, is doomed in time; biodiversity instead gives the natural world the resources to provision change.
That ecological vision makes equal sense for human settlements, but it is not the vision which guided twentieth-century state planning. Neither state capitalism nor state socialism embraced growth in the sense Darwin understood it in the natural world, in environments which permitted interaction among organisms with different functions, endowed with different powers.
I’d like to conclude by making a connection between the systematics of the open city and the politics of democracy. In what sense could the forms I’ve described contribute to the practice of democracy?
Democratic Space
When the city operates as an open system – incorporating the principles of porosity of territory, incomplete form, and nonlinear development – it becomes democratic not in the legal sense, but as a tactile experience.
In the past, thinking about democracy focused on issues of formal governance; today, it focuses on citizenship and issues of participation. Participation is an issue which has everything to do with the physical city and its design. For example, in the ancient polis, Athenians put the semicircular theatre to political use; this architectural form provided good acoustics and a clear view of speakers in debate; moreover, it made possible the perception of other people’s responses during debates.
In modern times, we have no similar model of democratic space – and certainly no clear image of an urban democratic space. John Locke defined democracy in terms of a body of laws which could be practised anywhere. Democracy in the eyes of Thomas Jefferson was inimical to life in cities; he thought the spaces it required could be no larger than a village. His view has persisted. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, champions of democratic practices have identified them with small, local communities and face-to-face relationships.
Today’s city, which is big, is filled with migrants and ethnic diversity, a city in which people belong to many different communities at the same time – through their work, families, consumption habits and leisure pursuits. For global cities like London and New York, a key issue with citizen participation is how people can feel both physically and socially connected to others whom, necessarily, they cannot know. Democratic space means creating a forum for these strangers to interact.
PART II: INFRASTRUCTURESFOR DISORDER
