Designing Disorder. Richard Sennett
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
Pablo Sendra
I first read The Uses of Disorder1 when I was twenty-five, the same age as Richard Sennett when he wrote the book. I read it at the beginning of 2009, when the crisis of capitalism and the economic recession were opening a period of uncertainty and an opportunity for social movements, as it happened in 2011 with the 15-M movement in Spain and the Occupy movement in the United States, the United Kingdom and other countries. The Uses of Disorder was published in 1970, influenced by the new left and the counterculture of the 1960s, as Richard Sennett admits in the preface of the 2008 edition.2
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.