The following 'theses' form a tentative conclusion of a longer article, published as 'Place is the Moment of Signification. On the Theory of an Experiential Approach to Urban Planning'. In Isohanni, Tuula & al. (2002). Urban Adventures/ Urbaanit elämysten paikat. Helsinki: Taideteollinen korkeakoulu, pp. 33-89.
In that article I seek to develop a theoretical basis for a new, critical approach urban planning. I discuss in tandem the theory of space and place, and the human experience of them. My objective is an alternative to the prevailing way in which planners conceptualize the city and its public space as a visual object which they assume to be an entity and to be known and controlled as a whole. I claim that a city does not just be - it happens. The lived place and conflict are the main concepts of my investigation. The city is a collective work changing in time. It cannot be captured on a map but rather has to be lived.
This changing of thinking concerning the city is necessary in seeking planning that will be more sensitive, skilled and broader in scope than at present. In my view, planning should be less about generic control of certain aspects of the production of space, and more about interest in unique moments of signification. In the end, it might become an effort and practice, supporting many differing, other, and potentially conflicting lived spaces. Such planning needs new methods, which I try to summarise in 10 theses:
1. Urban planning has forgotten the social space of the city, the lived and experienced city. It is pathologically stuck in the visual and the spatial.
2. The experienced city consists of places. The place is the moment of signification, and it cannot be drawn.
3. Experiential planning means the discovery and supporting of these momentary, weak places. Planning must seek the largest possible number of ways to see an area as meaningful, seek people, both local and visitors, and to inscribe their urban experiences.
4. Each interpretation can result in a separate project. Urban planning is always in the plural, in multiplicity.
5. Interpretations and projects may clash in locations in the environment that belong to the life orbits of many people and are meaningful to many. In these loci the public nature of the city, public space is like a darkening cloud, from which the rain of significant discussion may fall at any time.
6. In the clashes of personal places, the concept and praxis of participation gain a role highly different and much greater than at present. Participation is not commenting in retrospect, but an organic part of the changing of a city. The planning of a city proceeds in conflict.
7. Images must arise from experienced realities, and not from other images. The moment when the planner places her pen on paper to draw the first line, or clicks the origin of the first vector with the computer mouse, must be postponed to as late as possible
8. Reason and emotion are not opposites; new phenomena call for new ways of seeing.. An emphasis on personal experience and signification does not mean an abandonment of reason.
9. A picture never represents a city.
10. The city happens.
In the crosscurrents of global influences there is currently a trend and a simultaneous counter-trend. Space is being converted into data at an ever-faster pace. It is now possible to collate the domiciles, lifestyle and consumer habits of people by combining official sources and credit-card data. Cameras and sensors monitor traffic, and various kinds of positioning systems are rapidly developing. Also in urban planning geographic information, efficient 3D models and traffic simulation appear to be continually adding to the means and effect of abstract spatial conceptualization in planning. But at the same time it is claimed that planners do not understand the city and do not know what its inhabitants want. Data space converted into bits grows, but it speaks only a certain language of the city, not all of the city's languages or the language of the city in all its ways. Simulation and manipulation do not extend to everything. Data space deals with unequivocal and generic signs, assumed to remain the same from one situation to another, for example economic values, area, lifestyles forced into certain classifications, locations, vistas and lines of movement. Ambiguity, poetry and song, the experience of the city, lived moments and places will all remain outside it.
The urban experience is singular. Each experience is unique, personal and private. Experience cannot be transferred to someone else or to another moment. It cannot be recorded in any other memory than one's own, as part of a personal, meaningful city that is continually being built and erased. Data space and the places of experience, conceived space and lived space exist in tandem. They are sometimes in conflict and there, in that conflict, the public opens up from the latent to become real.
Also urban planning can be spatial art - only that its materials and methods are different from those of architecture. In Deleuze's and Guattari's terms urban planning must confront the chaos of the world in its own way and cleave from it a surface specific to it on which it can erect its sensory monument (Deleuze & Guattari 1994, 197). Proceeding from the basis of lived space, experiential planning offers a progressive alternative to the spatial art of visual models that often looks back on urban forms of the past. The concepts of graphic space or metaspace point in this direction.
The problem can also be expressed differently: space in architecture is in the final analysis a personal creation. Libeskind's Jewish Museum is a unique work, and precisely as such it can express something important about time and society. Urban planning cannot take a space thus conceived as the intermediary of its art. The focus of creating space necessarily lies more with the experiencing party that with the professional author as seen in traditional terms. The city as a whole is an oeuvre, in which everyone should be able to participate. This is exactly the 'right to the city' to which Lefebvre repeatedly refers in his 1968 polemic work Le droit à la ville (Right to the City, 1996)
Instead of tried and tested models experiential urban planning produces a unique city, sensitive instead of hard, meaningful instead of empty. It will produce an urban art of space distinct from the spatial art of architecture, places that touch the viewer and open up in many directions like a complex and rich painting. It will produce places of experience, quality of life.
Deleuze, Gilles ja Guattari, Felix (1994). What Is Philosophy? London: Verso.
Lefebvre, Henri (1996). Right to the City. In Writings on Cities. Oxford ja Cambridge, MA: Blackwell (pages 61-181) (Original title Le droit à la ville, 1968; English translation by Kofman, E. ja Lebas, E.)