Rediscovering the Center … Again

Rediscovering the Center…Again

Nepal Asatthawasi and Germaine Halegoua

 

Sociologist William Whyte's late twentieth-century clarion call for a "rediscovery of the center” asked us to reconsider centralized, dense public spaces rich with unexpected encounters and “maximum choice”. His appeal still echoes, but against radically different conditions. Notions of density, the public and private realms, and the experience of urban space have been re-inscribed in the purview of networked culture — the decentralized, layered, re-publicized and de-privatized conditions of virtual cooperation, coordination, and performance. The explosion of mobile media has transformed understandings and experiences of mobility and presence for technology users and non-users alike. Our social, cognitive, industrial, geographic, and economic experiences and systems have become severed or skewed from traditional anchors and re-oriented within network culture. 

 

The anytime, anywhere connection offered through mobile, networked technologies layers our understanding of where and how we’re residing in certain spaces at certain times, complicating boundaried understandings of “private” and “public” in architecture and urban design. Contemporary architecture plays with blinkered notions of the public and private, the domestic and civic while struggling to narrate a spatiality that relies less and less on these binaries. Open-air green corridors are usurping the centralized agora. Urban renewal projects such as New York’s High Line, Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon, and Paris’s Promenade Plantée have reclaimed spaces of transit and industry to express the ontologies and experiences of network culture. Like previous urban structures, these projects embody contemporaneous understandings of the relationships between mediation and location. In order to further understand spatial relations within networked society, we need to look at the interstices between networked culture and urban design, what is shared and what’s at stake. 

 

A marked decentralization — in some cases the disintegration — of public space has coincided with the rise of networked infrastructure and networked activities. Perspectives of mobility, technologies of transportation and communication, all of which have relied heavily on the logic of networks, have continually shaped urban planning. The development of railways and telegraphs coincided with the wider dispersal of towns and cities; the highway system expanded alongside the pervasiveness of telephony and suburbanization. These processes represent a fission of what was once an urban nucleic whole, while the flows of information, services, and people between the municipal center and the suburban perimeter represent an alternate fusion.  

The market system and consumer culture conceived shopping malls partially supplant parks and arcades as spaces of public gathering and unexpected encounters. Instead of encouraging and allowing for the publicity of the private individual, these enclosed, secured spaces created a new code of public performance and understanding. The growth of these “promotional” or entertainment spaces, have been understood as predecessors to the virtual or technological spaces created through networked technology use. Though the logic of networks evidently precedes cell phones and web-based practices, these technologies in turn have further augmented the ways in which we imagine ourselves within space — the way spaces are used and the ways in which places are produced both individually and collectively.

 

There is often a “re-placing” or re-representation of the city at work via networked culture.  But this re-production of place does not barbarically demolish pre-existing formulations of self, experience, and spatiality. Although organized through SMS or web and cell phone based applications, political assembly still occurs in parks, plazas, and at public landmarks. Virtual coordination and cooperation among friends and strangers via networked technology is an everyday practice, sometimes leading face-to-face interactions. Cities are being built from the ground up with ubiquitous infrastructure and computing systems as well as public, walkable spaces. When given the opportunity, urban travelers and residents are prone to annotate maps and photos, share and publicize their personal encounters with places through networked technologies. A networked traveler can track and archive their patterns of travel (and other people’s travel and activity) through the city, marking territory and indexing socio-technical-spatial “footprints” as they go. All of these are practices seem to enrich place, not destroy it. 

 

Public space is not lost within network culture; it multiplies. Furthermore, in some cases place is unmoored and becomes “relational.” The multiplicity of place perpetuates a spatial understanding from the subjectivity of the “networked individual”, augmenting connections to people, actions, and events instead of places. Scholars have noted that there is no longer a direct correlation between physical movement and increased activity, as the “center” travels with the user, further deeming spatial experience and presence polyvalent. For example, the cell phone user may reside in three simultaneous spatial layers: the physical space of the built environment, the social space of mediated and non-mediated practice, and the technological space of the networked apparatus. Urbanists have argued that technology use in urban spaces produce detached interactions with place, highlighting Mimi Ito et. al.’s “cocooning”, or Michael Bull’s “personal bubble” (the enveloping of the user in a separate, dissociative pod of personalized media and techno-social space) to support their claims. While these activities are observed frequently, particularly in places of pause, waiting, or transit there may be a more nuanced understanding of these mediated practices (and others) once they are juxtaposed against the politics and architecture of place. 

 

The High Line, an elevated railway running along the West side of Manhattan, was reclaimed as a green corridor after decades of disuse. Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon project established a greenway cutting across the city center along the course of a formerly covered streambed. The Promenade Plantée, the model for New York’s High Line, runs almost the entire length of Paris’s 12th arrondissement. It is partially elevated; the narrow walkways of its elevated sections open up to wider planked areas at street-level intersections. In all cases, the pedestrian is privy to a distinct view and experience of the city - one that exists alongside as well as within the activities on the streets and buildings that run above, below, or surrounding these thoroughfares. These projects are representative of a larger trend in urban design. And as we’ll briefly discuss here, their success and prominence may partially rest in their overlaps with the understandings and practices of network culture. 

 

Building green space atop pre-existing infrastructure embeds the temporal as an organizing tool. Spaces that had been used for industrial or transportation purposes are layered with new purpose, and new users, designers, and intentions embrace the semblance of the past. These temporal and spatial layers coexist in the design, allowing users to drift between past and present as they do virtual and physical realms through networked technology. Despite winding through luxury hotels and letting off at intervals near popular cafes, shops and restaurants, the High Line’s bones are recognizably industrial and mechanical. Project architects Diller, Scofidio and Renfro have re-appropriated lines of track to organize the separation of pedestrian and planting space. Cheonggyecheon as well as Seoul’s more recent renewal project, Seonyudo, proudly exhibit their industrial and infrastructural past in coordination with their landscaped present. 

 

The corridor structure coincides with an imagination of space as multi-layered and composed of coexisting simultaneous spheres. More so than a central or lily-pad composition of public space, the corridor allows the pedestrian to pass in and out of realms as they please, entering, exiting, and re-entering different types of spaces and social positions as they move through the city. Instead of traveling exclusively to a central park or square, the corridor structure allows the user to travel elsewhere while experiencing the benefits of a public space. The Promenade Plantée, located in less intense urban surroundings than the High Line and Cheonggyecheon, functions more as a meditative space — a retreat from the city below — as well as an alternative thoroughfare. All of these projects iterate an evolved sense of mobility, one that involves assembly and repose within movement. The fluid connectivity enabled by mobile communications and exhibited in these urban projects allows for simultaneous opportunities of derivé, transit, coordinated activity, public gathering, and/or pause. 

 

New media technologies and their public and personal practices throw into question the reproduction of power dynamics and hierarchies. Questions concerning privileged access to networks as well as public space are necessary to attend to. Access to public spaces, although portrayed as “open,” are often limited by design just as access to networks are often restricted and tiered. Urban geographer, Stephen Graham conceptualizes how “premium network spaces” or specialized infrastructures are customized to suit the needs of powerful or “valued” users and geographies. Like networks, the construction of valued public spaces and pedestrians is not indeterminate. Some geographic areas are bypassed while others are “on the grid”. The compartmentalization of urban space in this sense resonates with new media technologies’ selective sequestrations — personalization, customization, and grouping according to interest. Cheonggyecheon’s course is divided up by several thematic groupings — culture, sport, history and others — but users’ preferences are also dictated by accessibility to entrance points and quality of space vis-à-vis recreational intention. The stream’s westernmost sections are left deliberately wild, expressed in an overgrown landscape and the retention of infrastructural elements as architectural follies. This area is much less used, raising doubts on safety despite its pleasant character and thorough surveillance systems. However, public spaces may be able to reflect or encourage diverse interactions and unexpected encounters more readily if they run continuously through the city. Instead of compartmentalizing networked spaces and network ghettoes, people according to neighborhood, or spaces with and without commons, a corridor structure like these three urban scenarios might actually be a “re-discovery of the center”. 

 

Even a brief inspection of how public space coalesces with the observed conditions of networked culture is illuminating. This perspective can help guide approaches toward design that are mindful of how individuals — as users of networked technologies, or those effected by others use — conduct their public and private selves. From one perspective, networked publics construct their own center through personalized connections to people and place. The paradigm of the walkable corridor relies on this perspective: entering and exiting at entirely different neighborhoods, presumably carrying your sense of “home” or social proprioception with you. 

The idea that information and communication technologies do not need space and do not encourage spatial organization is inaccurate. Networked infrastructure and hardware interact and rely on spaces to properly function. Although technology use doesn’t necessarily usurp the potency of vernacular knowledge and strategies, network use often augments knowledge, experience, and urban life. In some cases, networked technologies help people hone and develop tactics for urban navigation, and make the spatial relations of a city “imageable”. These technologies work with existing urban structures, not always against pre-existing urban paradigms or unrelated to them. 

 

Claims that render networked elites as disembedded entities or virtual and physical space as mutually exclusive tend to value “human organization” over spatial organization. At the heart of this suggestion is that people need to develop technological rather than spatial skills to master their environments because technology negates the need to understand spatial organization. However, if we look at current trends in the design of spaces for public use, we can see connections between conditions of networked culture and spatial design. The idea of the “center” in networked culture has been noted and incorporated as displaced, yet re-territorialized. The center is by no means dead, but it has acquired mobility and is no longer fixed.