Conversations With The Land
Child playing on historic main street. Dubrovnik, 1976.
Listen To Land By Observing Places
We can listen to the land by observing its places, whether it is a small place like a doorway, or a monumental space like a beachfront. For planners, observing places must occur before we propose changes in a community. Observing places occurs self-consciously when we conduct a so-called “windshield survey,” tour a neighborhood on foot, or review photographs and historic maps. Over time, the habit of observing and evaluating places becomes second nature. Practitioners in many professions (like law, teaching, and health care) also evaluate the world around them continuously through the unique lenses they learn over time.
Planners routinely observe the dynamic conditions and context of community places. These conditions include physical and social conditions ranging from hurricanes and floods, the way children play, the way local governments maintain sidewalks, and the way we park cars or use transit. Observing, recording, and reflecting on this wide array of places, and their associated activities, is the planner’s equivalent of active listening to the land.
Active listening and observation of places is not easy. We might say that places “voice” themselves in many languages, complex semantics, and sometimes unknowable syntax. The metaphor of “listening” to the land, as if places were a language, may seem too forced but it provides a valuable steppingstone. If we imagine the land and places as having a language that we can observe — whether by hearing or seeing or using all our senses — then we need a way to document and communicate such observations.
Often planners attempt to standardize the practice of observing places into fixed methods and procedures involving photography, mapping, drawing, and descriptive text. Sometimes the observations of places become scientific and quantifiable. Technical observational methods and procedures may be necessary, but they cannot evaluate a place well enough to make community plans. As with speech, we can measure the volume and components of sound, but these technical measurements do not communicate the meaning of the sounds. Technical and standardized measurements of places rarely provide social or cultural meaning — certainly not enough insight to learn what planners need to know about a place. Planners need ways to observe the meaning of places in addition to the measurements.
The likelihood that one place offers the same meaning as the next is highly unlikely. We can use the same methods of observation — of active listening — but we should not use predetermined templates for the content of those observations. Fitting places into predetermined models becomes highly prejudicial. Planners need to learn, generalize and find patterns but that does not imply that every existing condition can fit into a predetermined conception or that an existing condition is not relevant because it does not fit a preconception.
Planners have applied one-size-fits-all models of places for centuries. Sometimes architects advocate preconceived models they claim to be utopian places such as the “garden” city, “radiant” city, the “living” city, and the city “beautiful.” Some models avoid utopian thought and instead hypothesize overarching analytic models as axiomatic types of cities. These models include the “concentric ring” theory, the “sector” theory, “central place” theory, the “rank size rule,” the “transect,” and many others. All of these theories — whether utopian or analytic — contain some validity and should be one of the lenses (but not the dominant lens) we used to observe different aspects of cities and places.
On rare occasions these models admit a plurality of ways to view our communities. No one model, however, has all the answers. There is no shortcut to active and open-minded observation of places, city forms, their history and associated activities. Planners must be less dogmatic and use multiple lenses for evaluation and observation of places.
Everyday street facade and phone booth. Vicenza, 1976.
See Places Through Lenses
Many critics offer different ways to observe the land and its places. Most effective observational techniques use a more inductive, context-based approach to evaluating places. Observations usually begin with broad overviews of places and how they emerge over time, through a history of ideas and natural events. These models make different observations about the form of places and cities — sometimes at odds with each other. All of these approaches, however, look empirically at places and observe their underlying geometric properties and details. Models that can describe the form of places provide a useful tool. Without a description of the form, the model may be interesting and insightful, but not pragmatic.
From my view there is no best model for describing the form of places. There are many models — each is a conceptual tool that planners can use pragmatically in one case but not in another. Using the right conceptual tool is, in itself, a skill or craft that must be learned. For me, over time, the most useful conceptual models (I sometimes call them “practical theories”) include:
Camillo Sitte’s analysis of plazas and public places in City Planning According to Artistic Principles
Cultural, philosophical, and historical narratives, like Walter Benjamin’s descriptions of Paris in the Arcades Project
Civic Art by Walter Hegemann and Elbert Peets, a useful catalogue of memorable and well-designed public places
The observational lens of Jane Jacobs and her evaluation of neighborhoods and the methods we use to help (or harm) those places — as found in several books including the Death and Life of Great American Cities
The historical and critical analysis of ideology, architecture and the form of cities from Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter in Collage City and related works
The deep exploration of places and city form in Michael Dennis’s book Court and Garden
Christopher Alexander’s book Pattern Language with a carefully structured system of observations ranging from the smallest to the largest places
The critical analysis of streets from the work of Allan Jacobs and Elizabeth MacDonald in Great Streets and The Boulevard Book
The simple, everyday language used in Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City as well as his more complex model in Good City Form
Spiro Kostof’s analysis of the formal organization of cities in the City Shaped
William Whyte’s study of cultural practices in the Social Life of Small Urban Spaces
William White noted that in cities “people sit where there is a place to sit.” Also true in the Dolomites. Dolomites at sunrise, 1964.
This list came from my personal professional and academic experience. This list is far from a comprehensive review of the literature. Each professional planner acquires a different personal base of knowledge. For me, these books have at least one major attribute in common — they all explicitly look at the form of places as the underlying structure whereby we observe those places. These books, and many more, offer the lenses through which we can observe places as a basis for professional practice.
There are dozens if not hundreds more models and interpretations of places. To be useful, they all must evaluate specifically:
The form of the places to be observed
The planned forms to be implemented
The combined natural and built environments
Some evidence of the validity of the observations
Many models contain some, but not all of these characteristics. Addressing all four characteristics becomes essential if we want to have a meaningful conversation with the land.
Use Graphics For Conversations
We converse with the land using maps that depict forms. Maps have become part of the history of the land. Maps help communicate territory, military strategies, aesthetics, politics, ideologies, theories, and soil conditions. Did we have maps before language? Perhaps maps are innate to our human nature? If maps originated independently in many different cultures, then perhaps, they provide some type of common language about our communities.
Just as language seems innate to humans so too is communicating concepts in drawings and more specifically in maps. For example, visitors to places where people speak a different language can often read local maps but not local signs. An experienced user of a commuter rail system in one country can usually “read” the map of a comparable system in another country with a different language. The common use of maps to communicate concepts about land and places suggests that maps (and plans of physical forms) are more than the product of just one culture or civilization.
When we observe the land planners also observe the form of places — both the built and natural environments. We then record those thoughts using maps, photographs and other graphic tools. Maps provide an historical record of the conversation between people and the land. These maps are drawn with the use of geometry, that described the elements of a place using the simple Euclidean “language” of points, lines, and planes. For example, on many maps the use of points, lines and planes depict the following:
Points = gateways, public squares, courtyards, landmarks, civic buildings
Lines = main streets, neighborhood streets, scenic drives, rural lanes, boulevards, shorelines, rivers, freeways, railroads, and corridors of all types
Planes = parks, gardens, campus, conservancy, neighborhood, district, lake, region
The scale of the map is also critical. On one map a neighborhood might be drawn as a large “plane” and on another map with a different scale it might be a “point.” Maps with more detail are not necessarily more meaningful or useful. A map which does not summarize the information into insights about the land can become useless. Points, lines, and planes help denote ideas, overlapping characteristics, changes over time, public policies, history, cultural values, social and economic features, and so on.
Do Vancouver “boathouses” integrate the built and natural environments? Do you map them as solid forms on water? Vancouver, 2004.
Discuss Forms With Ideas And Details
When we discuss the forms of places, along with the built and natural environments, we should discuss both the ideas they embody as well as the details of their material composition. Both the ideas and the details, together, are significant to planners. When the ideas and the details become separated from each other, they both lose practical value — ideas become harder to implement and the details create unimportant distractions. At times, the detailed conditions of the natural or built environment become critical to survival. At other times, the cultural history of a natural or built form may be far more critical.
The material conditions of built and natural environments include chemical, biological, genetic, and many other components, often described under the purview of the natural, biological, or physical sciences. However, the conditions of built and natural environments also include the form of those environments – cities, buildings, roads, yards, streets, walkways, gardens, farms and parks. Moreover, these forms, built or natural, also come with critical sensory experiences, intellectual content, and occasionally spiritual meaning.
Documenting the details of these physical conditions is typically viewed as a science or at least a technical skill. Documenting the larger cultural ideas regarding the built and natural environments, however, is more often viewed as a professional discipline or art. These more intellectually derived descriptions may sound less valid because they follow a non-scientific rigor. Yet describing the idea behind the forms of our cities and communities requires a degree of wisdom, talent, and skill that often exceeds other intellectual pursuits, including science.
In any case, it is the form of these existing components — detailed measures as well as intellectual evaluations — that precedes any new functions on the land. Describing the form of places on the land requires simultaneous thinking of multiple quantitative and qualitative issues, both details and ideas. The form of places cannot be described just by technical measurements.
In practice, too much technical data can often obscure the critical issues. Many authors have offered meaningful approaches to describing urban form from multiple perspectives — social, cultural, economic, political aesthetic, historical, ideological and so forth. Yet few of these insights have been reflected in the avalanche of geographic data that infuses our daily commerce and communications.
When I began teaching (in the 1970s) I would show students figure-ground plans of cities. They complained that no one sees the city from the air, so figure-ground maps are irrelevant (even though figure-ground maps are nothing like aerials). Today, most planners and urban designers understand that figure-ground maps provide useful insights in simple and elegant form. Lenses for viewing maps have grown exponentially — we see maps in our cars, on our phones, over time, with their history, and with annotations for our convenience.
The dissemination of mapped information overwhelms us. From my perspective the problem is well summarized by this quote from T.S. Eliot’s poem The Rock: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” GIS has provided us information and some pieces of software now provide elementary knowledge, but that is as far as we have come. This observation is not a complaint but a challenge for planners.
The potential to find meaningful insights about places within the flood of online mapping became clearer to me when I prepared a lecture that referenced the Royal Crescent in Bath, England. In that lecture I referenced Collage City by Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter. The authors discussed Lewis Mumford, one of our great observers of cities and history. Mumford apparently described the front view of the Royal Crescent as “the scene” and the back view as “obscene.” This seemed like a clever way for Mumford to support a tenet of modern architecture that buildings, as objects, should ignore differentiation of fronts and backs. Rowe and Koetter disagreed. That argument persists to this day. On my visit to Bath, I took good photos of the front of the Crescent but could not access the back. To find better views of Mumford’s “obscene” part of the Royal Crescent I accessed online satellite imagery. Aerial views depicted both the front and back. The so-called “obscene” was quite scenic. Unlike the front which were designed as one unified facade, the backs were a myriad of beautiful gardens — all different, delightful, and overflowing with individuality. It seemed self-evident that differences between “front” and “back” were highly desirable. The front showed a collective identity while the back permitted individuality — both beautiful.
Any insight I might claim, however, would not have occurred without using new technologies for observing city form. The advent of satellite imaging and mapping provides an expansive way of viewing the land which, previously, was severely limited. For me, this change seems analogous to the cultural transformation to movable type which gave more of us access to the written word. We can now access pictures of places across the planet. I can find a “street view” of cafes in cities I cannot visit because of ongoing warfare. I can see both ideas and details clearly.
While geographic information systems (GIS) provide tools for measuring the places on the land with a detailed magnifying glass, it does not provide critical intellectual analysis. I am not referring to so-called artificial intelligence or big data — but to critical thinking for planning. For example, new online sites have begun to combine data which show historical changes in the form of places. These newer time-based studies seem analogous to the way archaeologists “discover” ancient texts that were just sitting in the storage rooms of museums. The archaeologists (like planners today) always had the data, but they just never looked at the data or, if they did, they may not have used an insightful lens. Thankfully, our ignorance may be declining.
Critical insights about the form of our cities should not be confused with “smart cities.” These smart cities always come accompanied by colorful maps depicting supporting, convenient information. I find smart maps very useful to know where to park, buy gas and get coffee. If we can listen to these maps to make “convenient cities” maybe we can listen to, and learn from, “intelligent land.”
Mapping land is a necessary social construct that planners find useful, but we should not confuse the map with the plan, and certainly not confuse the map with empowerment to control the land. Maps provide planners with the ability to understand what the land is telling us, but we need to do a better job of listening to the land — both the natural and built environments as one system of places.
Mixed use, multifunction, alternative energy, street friendly, no zoning. Would you explain this built form with ideas or details? How would you zone this built form? Netherlands, 1976.
Topic summary:
Listen to land by observing places
Lenses to see places
Use graphics for conversations
Discuss forms with ideas and details